MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by untolabs | 2025-05-01 17:52:48+00:00
Unto Labs | Systems Engineer | San Francisco, CA | ONSITE (Hybrid OK), REMOTE (US) | Full-Time | https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/unto-labs/13df6bea-b253-4c80-ae05-5...

We recently announced $14.4 million in funding to make blockchains & digital assets useful for the world. Founded by Jump Crypto alumni and core contributors to the Solana protocol and the Firedancer client (https://github.com/firedancer-io/firedancer), we’re tackling fundamental scalability, performance, and usability challenges in distributed ledgers. Our runtime conforms to the RISC-V specification—moving away from domain-specific VMs and bespoke compiler toolchains that limit developer and institutional adoption. Components are developed in C for maximal control over performance and resource usage.

Interesting problems you’ll tackle:

- Building and testing high-performance subsystems in C (cryptographic routines, consensus primitives, networking protocols)

- Designing robust process isolation on modern CPU architectures and tile-based multi-core layouts

- Optimizing memory hierarchies, cache utilization, and low-level I/O for commodity servers

You:

- 5+ years of systems programming in C/C++, Rust, or similar

- Deep expertise in CPU microarchitecture, memory subsystems, and low-level performance tuning

- Strong understanding of distributed systems design and consensus protocols

- Experience with high-performance networking and protocol design in real-time environments

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/unto-labs/13df6bea-b253-4c80-ae05-5...
by pdfernhout | 2025-05-01 17:53:00+00:00
Something I wrote related to this in 2001: "An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society" https://pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors... "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."

Glad to see better policy happening -- even if all too slowly and only in some areas.
by bsrkf | 2025-05-01 17:53:01+00:00
Thanks for the answer, very nice of you to take the time even hours after.

Guess it makes sense; I'm self taught myself, but thought academically taught developers should have a leg up in theory and mathematics, at the same time though, at one point I considered further formal education for myself (in at least paid courses and such), I realized that I don't think there's much I can't teach myself with the resources available (which includes high quality university lectures which are available for free).

Thanks for your perspective.
by okanat | 2025-05-01 17:53:05+00:00
For the type of software that Redis is intended for, integration over network is a must. Hence "just using it" isn't a viable option. AGPL isn't LGPL, it infects anything that uses it over a network. If Redis was AGPL when it was released, nobody would touch it.

Most of the readers of HN make their living from closed source software. You know well enough that non-hostile open source is just a market entry strategy and the type of copyright-driven maximally selfish capitalist markets just force open source to be not viable for a single company to thrive. Projects like Linux kernel are exceptional infrastructure projects that external companies support not build businesses just to ship.
by Zambyte | 2025-05-01 17:53:23+00:00
You don't need a VM for a "write once run anywhere" environment at all. That's the whole point of high level programming languages like C and Fortran. The innovation of having a VM to run everything in is to be able to compile once and run anywhere, which is only valuable to people wishing to hide the source code from the people running their software (malware authors).
by TZubiri | 2025-05-01 17:53:43+00:00
Just how much control can they have? it's a company with what 100, 1000 employees?Against a text corpus controlled by thousands of companies and independents with millions of employees.

The very ambitiousness of the project means that it necessarily must cede control, you can't have it both ways in answering all of the questions of the world and having tight control over the answers.
by Chyzwar | 2025-05-01 17:53:51+00:00
> The communication intent is often to distract from the content of a topic (red herring). The goal may also be to question the justification for criticism and the legitimacy, integrity, and fairness of the critic, which can take on the character of discrediting the criticism, which may or may not be justified. Common accusations include double standards, and hypocrisy, but it can also be used to relativize criticism of one's own viewpoints or behaviors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

Both Clintons private email server, Pete signal chats and Trump documents stash in Mar-a-lago are equally bad. Lack of consequences signal erosion of “Law and order” in the US. It seems that US is now not different from third rate countries where last minute exceptions, insider trading, open bribery, secret police(ICE) and targeted prosecution is a new norm.
by ilrwbwrkhv | 2025-05-01 17:54:06+00:00
This is actually a great characterization and one of the reasons why for example YC has not had a success in the last 10 years.

This has caused tech to look more and more like a ponzi scheme with greater and greater promises and yet the actual output is very feeble.

Even large companies like Apple have got caught in all this. Imagine what they promised and what they haven't been able to deliver.

We need a grand reset but that needs to come from the young ones.

Stop doing leetcode. Go back to original engineering. Stop using JavaScript. Build software like Winamp.
by pessimizer | 2025-05-01 17:54:18+00:00
It's weird how the first sentence promises that we'll learn the answer to why successful tech people blame DEI for something, and then never mentions DEI again.

Being anti-"DEI" is a trendy hobby for most, a serious concern for others, but for "Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, and James Damore" it's literally the default, because DEI is a patchwork of inconsistent restrictions of various and often dubious authority placed on people who hire. It's against them, of course they're against it. They're against workers and labor rights in general, just like most owners.

You might as well say that oil companies are against environmental policies because the world has changed and they can no longer do what they used to do, and maybe they just got lucky anyway... or instead assume that most people are against regulations that restrict them from doing things that they might want to do.

edit: I suspect this might be a covert explanation about why this particular technologist is less enamored by the future possibilities of their chosen career than they were when they started it, just (for some reason) projected onto celebrities who have already been massively successful.
by dttze | 2025-05-01 17:54:21+00:00
Formal language to formal language provides a level of determinism. I know what kind of code gcc will generate for a loop, generally. But if I care about vectorization or whatever, I will need to inspect the assembly to ensure it is generating it correctly (or write it myself).

Natural language to formal language does not provide that. How the hell would I debug or operate a system by just looking at a prompt? I can't intuit which way the LLM generated anything. I will always have to be able to read the output.

AFAICT, the only people who say you can remove code are people who don't code. I never hear this from actual devs, even if they are bullish on AI.
by arnaudsm | 2025-05-01 17:54:28+00:00
I partly disagree, software still sucks and it's a great time to build.

The #1 OS is slow and crashes all the time. The #1 email client takes 10s to load on my mother's laptop. Most popular products are slow, buggy, filled with spam, & filled with dark patterns. Enshittification won. FAANGs are the new IBM. Let's build better stuff.
by drivingmenuts | 2025-05-01 17:54:42+00:00
Is each Claude instance a separate individual or is a shared AI? Because I'm not sure I would want an AI that learned about my confidential business information sharing that with anyone else, without my express permission.

This does not sound like it would be learning general information helpful across an industry, but specific, actionable information.

If not available now, is that something that AI vendors are working toward? If so, what is to keep them from using that knowledge to benefit themselves or others of their choosing, rather than the people they are learning from?

While people understand ethics, morals and legality (and ignore them), that does not seem like something that an AI understands in a way that might give them pause before doing an action.
by horsawlarway | 2025-05-01 17:54:46+00:00
A computer is a tool - learn to use it like a tool. People spend far more time learning to drive than they do learning to use computers these days, but I'd wager the computer matters more.

But too many companies have discovered that a docile "user" who's fed constant dopamine hits and has no actionable way to use a device other than open their wallet and fork over cash to watch more cats dance, or shop on more stores is exactly what they want.

Why don't you just click here and pay for Onedrive. Or just click there and accept Apple's new ridiculous terms.

If you just want to watch cats dance... you do you. I'll just keep doing me over here.
by simonw | 2025-05-01 17:55:00+00:00
Lots of cynical takes in this thread - and I get it, there isn't a guarantee they won't relicense again in the future (they have a CLA that would let them) and people feel betrayed by the last license change.

I think we should celebrate this anyway. It's a smart decision, it's what the community wanted to happen and it would be great if other companies with janky licenses could see "Redis relicensed to open source and had a great boost out of it", not 'Redis relicensed to open source and it didn't help them at all".

I'm delighted. Thank you, team Redis.
by rdtsc | 2025-05-01 17:55:00+00:00
> Your attachment to reality seems a little weak > you make up my motivations

I simply asked you why you thought your guess were better. I was expecting, say link with statistics about "well these are the top factor contributing to the pilot error..."

> The way we intelligently distinguish fantasy from reality is evidence.

Sure, that's why my guess was something that can be validated. Your guesses are "cognitive overload" or "distractions in the cockpit". How do we prove those in this case.

> I thought you might have some evidence.

This is not a court case or scientific work, it's a discussion forum. You're fully allowed to guess, have "what if" scenarios, "wonder", complement people, talk about the weather, or the what you feel and like. That's perfectly ok. If you don't like what someone is saying or don't agree, it's best to offer an alternative, which you did but then when asked further you accused me of losing ties with reality. If you're not feeling ok, you simply don't have to reply. That's fine too.
by eru | 2025-05-01 17:55:03+00:00
Why illegal? The more open models (or at least open-weight models) should allow using their outputs. Details depend on license.

But yes, 'first generation' models would be trained on human text almost by definition. My comment was only to contradict the claim that 'all LLMs' are trained from stolen text, by noting that some LLMs aren't trained (directly) on human text at all.
by cortesoft | 2025-05-01 17:55:11+00:00
> all but guaranteed short of the US absolutely collapsing. And if that happens, then we’d all have bigger fish to fry.

I mostly agree with your assessment, but lots of governments have collapsed, and that doesn't mean that everyone loses EVERYTHING. Some people are able to retain some assets, if they have them in the right form.

I do think some of the hedges people take don't make sense, though... if your hedge is to keep a bunch of cash around, you aren't hedging against your risk because your risks are correlated - the event that will cause all your stocks to go to zero will also cause the dollar to go to zero.

If you are truly hedging against the collapse of the US, you would try to get assets that would survive that... lots of possibilities, and some of them make more sense than others, but all of them have their own risks, and some of those risks are way more correlated than people realize.
by xp84 | 2025-05-01 17:55:20+00:00
This is the best way to sum it up. The diehard Apple fans still defend it, with handwaved promises that the future will bring a cheaper one, but in this economy I don't think Apple can do it. The price people will bear is proportional to the current usefulness, and the usefulness is proportional to third-party dev interest. The irony is that of all companies, Apple would be the most capable financially of loss-leadering it into existence with their cash hoard, but they're so stingy that the idea of a loss leader offends them to the core.

But imagine for a moment an alternate reality where they at least moderately tried to keep the cost down, and then further subsidized it, selling the headsets for $599 and made developer terms wildly attractive (like, your first 20 million in revenue having a 5% fee instead of 30%). It would cost Apple billions, but they pissed away more on the car idea with nothing to show for it. This could have launched a category, instead I predict a future more like Apple TV hardware where it's niche due to being 4x the price of what most people want to pay for the category.
by bumby | 2025-05-01 17:55:33+00:00
I was simply asking you to put a finer framework on how individuals should decide. Like I said multiple times, IMO it comes down to what is needed to get the job done, but I’m open to other thoughts. Saying it’s up to the individual isn’t really saying much, other than a veiled version of “I don’t know but I feel the compulsion to comment anyway.”
by saulthompson92 | 2025-05-01 17:55:57+00:00
Location: Seattle, WA Remote: Preferred

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Full stack and Infra. Frontend - TypeScript, React etc; Backend - Python (Flask, Django), Node.js, Ruby; Infrastructure - AWS, Terraform, GitHub Actions; AI - Hugging Face, Colab

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saul-thompson-71a58b17a/overlay/...

Email saulthomp (at) outlook dot com
by ifyoubuildit | 2025-05-01 17:56:03+00:00
> I am excited to announce that one of my first actions as NIH Director is pushing the accelerator on policies to make NIH research findings freely and quickly available to the public. The 2024 Public Access Policy, originally slated to go into effect on December 31, 2025, will now be effective as of July 1, 2025.

Even if it originated with the previous admin, Jay Bhattacharya has decided to accelerate it. Seems like a good policy that both administrations agree on.
by tough | 2025-05-01 17:56:07+00:00
I've read at least several stories from this era like AppGet's https://medium.com/@keivan/the-day-appget-died-e9a5c96c8b22

I wouldn't trust Microsoft near my open source code base in 3 centuries

They can extinguish it by just stealing all the code, and using their bigger marketplace advantage to become the defacto standard.
by mritchie712 | 2025-05-01 17:56:20+00:00
I'd guess a little north of $500 million.

- Census last raised $60M Series B at a $630M valuation (upper bound)

- Census’s estimated annual revenue is $31.6 million with ~200 employees.

- Median private-SaaS EV/ARR multiple is 7× (7 * 31 = 217 = lower bound)

- Hightouch raises $80M on a $1.2B valuation(at ~60× ARR)

- Twilio completes $3.2B acquisition of Segment at ~21× ARR (upper multiple bound)
by fsckboy | 2025-05-01 17:56:52+00:00
you let your fingers hit the keyboard before thinking at all.

in english, we have laws that sanction the selling of street drugs, and other laws that sanction funding for women's sports. in the first case, sanction means "forbid", and in the second case it means "encourage". although these usages are opposite in meaning, the words are used on a daily basis and nobody gets confused because context is everything.

Robię Ci łaskę could mean "badass" and robię ci laskę could mean "bad ass": if you read "robie ci laske" in ASCII (hey, i'm thinking that rhymes) nobody (except you) would be confused by that, it's not how functioning brains work.

i provided enough evidence in my original comment that you should have been able to realize that i was already talking about the issue you are pointing out so to rebut what i suggest you need to account for what i said and not argue against a strawman's tabula rasa
by bluGill | 2025-05-01 17:57:02+00:00
10 years ago all interviews were in person. With the pandemic they all went 100% remote. We proved that 100% remote positions can work and so there is temptation to continue doing 100% remote interviews for people that will be working remote anyway.

Though we have been burned by someone we believe (but cannot prove) was 100% remote and working two jobs at the same time (they were laid off in a recent downsizing before we could get enough evidence, but they didn't seem as productive as we would expect). So I expect even if you apply for a 100% remote position you will need to do one round of interviews onsite. (though who knows if this will protect us)
by zoogeny | 2025-05-01 17:57:17+00:00
I'm curious what kind of research people are doing that takes 45 minutes of LLM time. Is this a poke at the McKinsey consultant domain?

Perhaps I am just frivolous with my own time, but I tend to use LLMs in a more iterative way for research. I get partial answers, probe for more information, direct the attention of the LLM away from areas I am familiar and towards areas I am less familiar. I feel if I just let it loose for 45 minutes it would spend too much time on areas I do not find valuable.

This seems more like a play for "replacement" rather than "augmentation". Although, I suppose if I had infinite wealth, I could kick of 10+ research agents each taking 45 minutes and then review their output as it became available, then kick off round 2, etc. That is, I could do my process but instead of interactively I could do it asynchronously.
by dns_snek | 2025-05-01 17:57:28+00:00
From the court document, I don't know how many ended up actually adopting it, but it's about what you'd expect:

> As of the May 2024 hearing, only 34 developers out of the approximately 136,000 total developers on the App Store applied for the program, and seventeen of those developers had not offered in-app purchases in the first place. In May 2024, Apple argued that it would take more time for developers to take advantage of the Link Entitlement and that the adoption rates could not be known. Apple attempted here to mislead.

> Given the revelations of the February 2025 hearing, Apple modeled the lack of adoption. That Apple adduced no testimony or evidence indicating developer adoption of the program is no surprise. As shown above, Apple knew it was choosing a course which would fail to stimulate any meaningful competition to Apple’s IAP and thereby maintain its revenue stream

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...
by skadamat | 2025-05-01 17:57:32+00:00
The challenge of syncing from stubborn SaaS tools to your data warehouse / database I suspect is different than syncing data from your data warehouse / database back to SaaS tools. Specifically, reverse ETL has to incorporate more context from the business I guess so the data that lands in the 3rd party tools is actually solid.

Once you have customers and a good network of integrations with a large number of tools, I suspect it's easier to just buy that company than build it all yourself?
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-05-01 17:57:39+00:00
Couldn't agree more. While I might not be as harsh against the blog post author, they made it seem like they were doing some high-level reconnaissance work, and at the end of the day the thing that made the NK candidate "unravel" was questions like "tell me about some restaurants in your town".

All this goes to show is that, for many companies, their hiring process for offshore employees is so sad that basic human interactions that would easily uncover blatant attempts like this are skipped.
by ksec | 2025-05-01 17:57:54+00:00
2025, this marks 11+ years I have been saying that App Store is not sustainable.

They should have made a separate Game Store and continue to collect those 30% from games, which protect 75% to 80% of their current App Store revenue.

Then 5 - 6% for all subscription based services like Netflix and Spotify. If you include the Credit Card Processing and other tax / VAT report this is a fair amount I think most company would be on board.

And 10% for everything else. Including Tipping and other IAP etc.

Apple would have protected most of their App Store revenue, generate lots of good will and continue their walled garden path.

But for whatever reason over the years every time I mentioned it I get downvoted.

Now it may be too late. The damage to developer relationship, to many business and to its brand.
by tlogan | 2025-05-01 17:58:05+00:00
My interpretation of the above fact is this:

Be cautious when you hear people loudly proclaiming “we’re for the working class” (Republicans) or “down with the oligarchs.” (Democrats)

This shows us that bad guys have used pro-worker language to gain public support, only to later strip away freedoms and centralize the power.

In short when a guy like Soros or Trump says they are for working class do not trust them.
by rozab | 2025-05-01 17:58:13+00:00
This is a fascinating contrast to Raymond Chen's recent blog post about adding seconds to the taskbar clock[0]. Apparently there is some energy efficiency team at Microsoft which in some cases is so strict it blocked this feature for decades. But at the same time... things like this are allowed to happen. Something about Conway's law perhaps?

[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250421-00/?p=11...