MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nmz | 2025-05-16 15:27:37+00:00
I do think you're better off using ruby, but if you insist.

Lots of default functionality missing so you MUST have these packages: inspect, luaposix, lrexlib-pcre, lrexlib-posix, lpeg, luastd/stdlib, luasocket, luahttp, luasec, luacheck, penlight

* luajit is unnecessary in almost all cases, you don't need the speed.

* use lsp or luacheck whenever you write something, entr -c luacheck file on everything.

* patterns are not regex which means they do not support lookups, backtracking or |, so you must install lrexlib-pcre or lrexlib-posix (frankly I never need pcre so I stick to lrexlib-gnu or lrexlib-posix).

* overload _ENV so it auto requires unknown things, I have a lua wrapper that does this and it makes it a joy not having all of my scripts with a bunch of require"posix" on all of them

* install inspect to inspect tables

* os.execute and io.popen only accepts strings as parameters which means you should overload it and make a function that accepts tables as well.

* 5.4 is still lacking support for many libraries, 5.3 has most of the libraries.

* assignments default to the global environment so you have to use local keyword or set _ENV to error on assignment (or better yet, don't care, just local _ENV = mymodule)

Overall, Lua is just a mixture of C with a pascal syntax and garbage collection (and also tables which is a weird data structure)
by mytailorisrich | 2025-05-16 15:27:41+00:00
Guidelines:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Show HN: Inspirt Labs hyper-personalized digital replicas of the people you miss
by suraj1234567890 | 2025-05-16 15:28:02+00:00
Inspirt Labs — hyper-personalized digital replicas of the people you miss

Hey HN,

I’m Suraj, founder of Inspirt Labs. After losing someone close, I wanted more than photos and voice notes—I wanted real conversation. So I built a service that turns the fragments we already have (pics, voice clips, text threads, quirks, life stories) into a living, conversational replica you can speak with anytime.

Personalized AF – every model is fine-tuned on the exact memories you provide, so it sounds and responds like your person, not a generic chatbot.

Multimodal – voice, text, and an optional photoreal avatar.

Ethically grounded – we require consent from legal next-of-kin, keep replicas private by default, and allow permanent deletion with one click.

Built in a week – OpenAI + a thin orchestration layer + ElevenLabs for voice. MVP is live today.

Demo: https://inspirtlabs.com (upload a short sample set and chat in under 2 min) Tech notes: repo + infra costs + fine-tuning pipeline in the README. Looking for feedback: latency, uncanny-valley moments, and pricing model ideas. Rip it apart!

Thanks for reading—feel free to ask me anything.
by hungryhobbit | 2025-05-16 15:28:56+00:00
Everyone is blaming AI, and it's undoubtedly a factor.

But also, the culture of Stack Overflow has changed significantly over the years. It used to be a place where anyone could ask a question and get help with a problem ... and it was amazing.

Today, you're far more likely to have your question downvoted, flagged as a duplicate (of an unrelated question), or attacked in the comments by overzealous responders (and once that happens, good luck on actually getting help). Your odds of actually getting help on the site are only a fraction of what they once were.

And I'm not just saying this as some SO newbie: I've been using the site since beta! As someone who has used it that long, the change in quality is undeniable.
by nxobject | 2025-05-16 15:29:16+00:00
> The elephant in the room is of course ZGC, which has been delivering great improvements in lowering the Stop-the-world GC pauses. I've seen it consistently deliver sub-millisecond pauses whereas other algorithms would usually do 40-60 msec.

As someone who's always been interested in gamedev, I genuinely wonder whether that would be good enough to implement cutting-edge combo modern acceleration structures/streaming systems (e.g. UE5's Nanite level-of-detail system.)

I have the ability to understand these modern systems abstractly, and I have the ability to write some high-intensity nearly stutter-free gamedev code that balances memory collection and allocation for predicable latency, but not both, at least without mistakes.
by rocqua | 2025-05-16 15:29:33+00:00
Fair point, but there is an interesting question posed.

Software doesn't rot, it remains constant. But the context around it changes, which means it loses usefulness slowly as time passes.

What is the name for this? You could say 'software becomes anachronistic'. But is there a good verb for that? It certainly seems like something that a lot more than just software experiences. Plenty of real world things that have been perfectly preserved are now much less useful because the context changed. Consider an Oxen-yoke, typewriters, horse-drawn carriages, envelopes, phone switchboards, etc.

It really feels like this concept should have a verb.
by al_borland | 2025-05-16 15:29:52+00:00
A lot of people I know who work from home feel the need to prove they are just as productive (or more) at home, so they can keep doing it and keep their job while being out of sight. They also take fewer breaks, because it feels like they aren’t working, or getting away with something. Those in the office take liberal breaks and just chat a lot, while still feeling like they are working, because they are at work.
by nunez | 2025-05-16 15:30:01+00:00
I felt this one personally.

The four to six hours of 30/45/60 minute meetings (that always seem to go over by some unknown amount) slays me regardless of whether I'm actively participating or not.

It's easier if you're a morning person, since you can do all of your "life stuff" before work. However, I'm not (and not for lack of trying), so it feels like I'm confined to my very nice office chair and desk for hours on end. (Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of pressure to work nights and weekends to catch up. This is much easier to do when work is life and life is work. I refuse to do this, even if it means I stay perpetually behind.)

(I could do walking meetings, and I do that sometimes when I know I'll be a passive participant. However, what often happens is this: I finish a meeting, then spend the "free" time between meetings doing follow up from the previous meeting, then I join the next meeting, etc. ad nauseum.)

Meanwhile, I have no problems being in all-day meetings when I'm at customer sites. It feels much, much easier.

For me, a big part of it is environment. When I'm home, I want to do "home" stuff: go to the gym, clean up around the house, walk to a coffee shop or brewery, etc. Being glued to a chair inhibits all of that, and having to talk at your screen for hours at a time is extremely draining (for me). However, when I'm in an "office", I'm in work mode. I'm locked in. It's much easier for me to focus on work things this way.
by Detrytus | 2025-05-16 15:30:04+00:00
Does being "busted" by Customs (i.e. carrying some items that should be declared, but going, and being pulled of from "Nothing to declare" lane) affects admission to the US at all?

I was let go with just a warning for my "offense", but still the customs officer took my passport and make some note in the system. Should I expect secondary inspection next time I cross the border?
by sega_sai | 2025-05-16 15:30:42+00:00
After months of using a hammer, I'm back to using my hands.

LLM is a tool. I think we still need to learn how to use it, and in different areas it can do either more or less stuff for you. Personally I don't it for most of everyday coding, but if I have something tedious to write, the LLM is the first place I go for a code draft. That works for me and for the LLM I use.
by blackhaj7 | 2025-05-16 15:30:43+00:00
Thanks for this Peter!

I am on an L1-B and part way through the green card process via PERM Labour Cert (application was submitted in Jan)

What are my options if I was laid off/company went under/perm cert rejected?

How long are the Perm labor cert applications you are doing taking (from start till the green card being issued)?
by alabastervlog | 2025-05-16 15:30:43+00:00
That one and The Last Wave are the ones from his remaining ~7 movies I've not seen, that I fully expect to be good. I know less of the reputation of the other five, but even if all of them are bad that'll leave him with an excellent batting average.

[EDIT] To expand on my late-discovered love of the guy's work, the key figures in my slowly drifting toward being a bit of an actual film fan were all people I knew by name: Spielberg (Empire of the Sun, plus all his usual biggies), Don Bluth (Learning so young that a movie can hurt... and that can be a really good thing!), and George Lucas (first by hooking me on Star Wars, which got me into making-ofs and the craft of film-making and editing, the idea of the pastiche film which sent me chasing down influences, and then with the prequels with wanting, owing to my prior high levels of engagement with the franchise, to dig deeper into "... but why, exactly, are they so bad?" which was its own kind of education); but then, some time in the back half of my 30s, I discovered that a bunch of other films that'd been key on that journey were all by this one other dude whose name had previously failed to register. He was this fourth major figure in the early and middle parts of this journey, for me, and I didn't even know it!
by isignal | 2025-05-16 15:30:45+00:00
Processes can die independently so the state of a concurrent shared memory data structure when a process dies while modifying this under a lock can be difficult to manage. Postgres which uses shared memory data structures can sometimes need to kill all its backend processes because it cannot fully recover from such a state.

In contrast, no one thinks about what happens if a thread dies independently because the failure mode is joint.
by skydhash | 2025-05-16 15:31:05+00:00
My best experience with job-related software was a data entry program (I forgot the name). It had a windows classic UI (on windows 8) and fully keyboard driven. After a few days, I could just look at the paper form and enter the data without looking at the screen. Very usable on a 11inch screen.

These days, I mostly reverted to a Emacs/TUI workflow. Padding and animations makes everything less usable.
by jbverschoor | 2025-05-16 15:31:08+00:00
Oh yeah. I still don’t understand why we even moved away from the original JEE model, including the different roles (app dev, deployed, etc).

The whole spec was great with the exception of entitybeans.

It provided things that are still not available it anything else.. why do we store configuration/credentials in git (encrypted, but still).

And the context were easy to configure/enter.

Caucho’s resin, highly underrated app server. Maybe not underrated, but at least not very well known
by polotics | 2025-05-16 15:31:45+00:00
Compassionate meditation has been tested pretty well: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2944261/ ...so: Praying for yourself is indeed useless to you, so prayer is useless to the selfish. Praying for others, sincerely, will help you. Ain't that grand!
by prhn | 2025-05-16 15:32:03+00:00
Is anyone using any of these tools to write non boilerplate code?

I'm very interested.

In my experience ChatGPT and Gemini are absolutely terrible at these types of things. They are constantly wrong. I know I'm not saying anything new, but I'm waiting to personally experience an LLM that does something useful with any of the code I give it.

These tools aren't useless. They're great as search engines and pointing me in the right direction. They write dumb bash scripts that save me time here and there. That's it.

And it's hilarious to me how these people present these tools. It generates a bunch of code, and then you spend all your time auditing and fixing what is expected to be wrong.

That's not the type of code I'm putting in my company's code base, and I could probably write the damn code more correctly in less time than it takes to review for expected errors.

What am I missing?
by _fat_santa | 2025-05-16 15:32:30+00:00
I look at it as trading one evil for another (lesser one). I would say that I definitely work more hours now that I'm fully remote but at the same time I wouldn't want to back to the office even if it meant working less hours.

If anything remote work gave me flexibility. There might be some days I'm cranking code for close to 8 hours straight and others where I work maybe 3-4 hours because I have other things on my plate.
by proberts | 2025-05-16 15:32:30+00:00
For me, I have about 15 30-minute calls each day with existing and potential clients during which we discuss their chances of getting temporary work visas or green cards and issues around international travel. The rest of the time, I'm reviewing applications and responding to emails from staff and clients. It sounds pretty mundane but despite the stresses of the job and the challenges associated with the new administration, I still really enjoy what I do because I have a wonderful team and I get to interact with really smart people doing super interesting things and help them realize their dream of living and working in the U.S.
by kstrauser | 2025-05-16 15:32:50+00:00
It’s not just EEE, though. They have a history of getting devs all in on a thing and then killing it with corporate-grade ADHD. They bought Visual FoxPro, got bored with it, and told everyone to rewrite into Visual Basic (which they then killed). Then the future was Silverlight, until it wasn’t. There are a thousand of these things that weren’t deliberately evil in the EEE, but defined the word rugpull before we called it that.

So even without EEE, I think it’s supremely risky to hitch your wagon to their tech or services (unless you’re writing primarily for Windows, which is what they’d love to help you migrate to). And I can’t be convinced the GitHub acquisition wasn’t some combination of these dark patterns.

Step 1: Get a plurality of the world’s FOSS into one place.

Step 2: Feed it into a LLM and then embed it in a popular free editor so that everyone can use GPL code without actually having to abide the license.

Step 3: Make it increasingly hard to use for FOSS development by starting to add barriers a little at a time. <= we are here

As a developer, they’ve done nothing substantial to earn my trust. I think a lot of Microsoft employees are good people who don’t subscribe to all this and who want to do the right thing, but corporate culture just won’t let that be.
by yesfitz | 2025-05-16 15:34:11+00:00
Great question. I think it's informed by what happened to Keiko, the whale from Free Willy, who was never really "free"[1], even after his release.

Another risk could be if Wikie and Keijo managed to successfully with a wild pod, they could steer that pod towards contact with humans.

Still, I agree they should be released. Humans need to deal with the consequences of our actions, not put the burden on these creatures.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiko_(orca)#Evaluation_of_the...
by panzagl | 2025-05-16 15:34:28+00:00
'semi-governmental company'

If they're using it in prod then there are plenty of regulations that should force them to establish a real support relationship.

Sometimes this type of stuff happens for a prototype that an org is trying to get funded, but not for 10 years. I'd collect all of the org email addresses they used for the initial d/ls and contact them first- maybe one of the ones from ten years ago has gotten promoted to a point where they can establish a paid relationship or approve use of the open source version.
by tekacs | 2025-05-16 15:35:01+00:00
So -- that client-side thing is _technically_ called `codex-cli` (in the parent 'codex' repo, which looks like a monorepo?).

Still super confusing, though!

I feel like companies working with and shipping LLMs would do well to remember that it's not just humans who get confused by this, but LLMs themselves... it makes for a painful time, sending off a request and noting that a third of the way into its reasoning that the model has gotten tow things with almost-identical names confused.
by aabajian | 2025-05-16 15:35:05+00:00
Max nostalgia. When I was ~12 years old I had an 386 PC we got for $5 from the thrift store across from the dump (a bargain for sure even at that time). I had to self-teach myself about DOS, BASIC, Win 3.1, etc. I somehow broke the Win 3.1 installation and all I could find was Win 3.0 on floppy disc. I got the thing reinstalled, but found that the sound drivers didn't work, random programs wouldn't open, and it kept crashing.

I learned years later that there are a huge number of changes between 3.1 and 3.0. The biggest being support for more memory and multimedia extensions. The latter was the first time I learned what a dynamic link library (DLL) was and that took me down the rabbit hole of C++.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-05-16 15:35:13+00:00
Thanks - this does help contextualize the $3B acquisition. When the story first broke all they seemed to be paying for was a coding agent (of which there are sooo many out there) and the large windsurf user base (but with no moat). So a lot of us were rather skeptical. The valuation is still kinda insane, I think, but Windsurf’s ability to train a frontier model - and with a much smaller team than the big AI shops - is the key differentiator from the Clines, Cursors, Aiders etc.

It is a bit of a shame that we’ll never get to see what they could do on their own. But I hope their clearly very talented employees do very well out of this.
by wapeoifjaweofji | 2025-05-16 15:35:24+00:00
I'll generally excuse things like laziness and incompetence, because I understand that not everyone is good at their jobs.

But this:

> You have to do extra work to fuck it up!

resonates so hard. I get so angry at people who take extra time out of their day to put so much effort into making things worse. So many things on the internet are fine, but people spend so much on making them worse. Who is this good for? Not me, and likely not the person who wasted their time ruining functional things.
by simonbarker87 | 2025-05-16 15:35:41+00:00
The rest is history podcast have a three parter on the battle of Trafalgar, they cover a lot of the lead up and essentially it sounds like the Royal Navy professionalised in a way that the the French and Spanish didn’t. Portsmouth was very industrialised to constantly develop and churn out naval assets and improvements. Coupled with the kings use of new financial methods and that 25% of the country’s GDP was spent on the navy you had basically an unbeatable force by the time Trafalgar happened.
by SoftTalker | 2025-05-16 15:36:05+00:00
Any license that isn't a word-for-word match to one of the "approved" licenses can potentially trigger a need for legal review, depending on the enterprise. Lawyers are expensive so quirky licenses can be a deal-killer for any customers who take licenses seriously.

If you want to be funny, put an easter egg in your code, don't mess with your license.
by TuringNYC | 2025-05-16 15:36:18+00:00
>> You cannot bill for a resident's work, without an attending signing off on it.

Isnt that the case for almost every industry? I was a management consultant and our Partner signed off on the work before billing clients. Architects bill clients, but only when the lead architect signs off on the plans. Same for civil engineers. Same for magazines where the editor signs off on most major pieces.
by ElevenLathe | 2025-05-16 15:37:24+00:00
If you're a mid-level employee at a company on heard of (this describes me too) then I find it difficult to believe that the company stock performance is meaningfully related to your performance. I know for sure that our stock price would not suffer a penny if I dropped dead tomorrow, even if nobody noticed for years and my paychecks kept piling up in my bank account).
Show HN: Rv, a Package Manager for R
by Keats | 2025-05-16 15:37:30+00:00
We have been building a package manager for R inspired by Cargo in Rust. The main idea behind rv is to be explicit about the R version in use as well as declaring which dependencies are used in a rproject.toml file for a given project. There's no renv::snapshot equivalent, everything needs to be declared up front, the config file (and resulting lockfile) is the source of truth. This avoids issue where renv might miss information about the installation and is also easy to tweak some packages, eg install one from source and install suggests from another.

If you have used Cargo/npm/any Python package manager/etc, it will be very familiar.
by bayindirh | 2025-05-16 15:37:36+00:00
It's a matter of perspective, I guess...

When you look from the program's perspective, the context changes and becomes unrecognizable, IOW, it rots.

When you look from the context's perspective, the program changes by not evolving and keeping up with the context, IOW, it rots.

Maybe we anthropomorphize both and say "they grow apart". :)
by hwayne | 2025-05-16 15:37:54+00:00
I taught a lot of people TLA+ and while there's definitely essential complexity, a nontrivial amount is just syntactic friction. Consider

\A x \in set: x.id /= 1 /\ ~x.active

vs

all x in set: x.id != 1 && !x.active

The latter has the same semantics but is much easier to read for the average developer, and more importantly is easier to type without syntax errors.
by truthseeker006 | 2025-05-16 15:38:02+00:00
Hi Peter! Thank you for this!! A while back, ~10 months, I was rejected from a B1 visa in the US. However, I have now secured admission from Stanford and would need to apply for an F1 visa. What can I do to make my case strong and ensure that the previous visa application does not affect my current F1 process?
by phasmantistes | 2025-05-16 15:38:11+00:00
That's not leverage that a CA can use. If half the internet suddenly displays TLS warning interstitials, it doesn't make people mad at the CA, and it doesn't make people mad at their browser: it just _trains them to ignore such warnings_. That's a bad outcome all around, and one that a CA whose core purpose is improving security for end-users cannot condone.
by biorach | 2025-05-16 15:38:44+00:00
> I think it’s supremely risky to hitch your wagon to their tech or services

OK, finally, yes, this is very true, for specific parts of their tech.

But banging on about EEE just distracts from this, more important message.

> Make it increasingly hard to use for FOSS development by starting to add barriers a little at a time. <= we are here

....and now you've lost me again
by proberts | 2025-05-16 15:38:46+00:00
Unfortunately, if you get laid off while in L-1B status before you are able to file an I-485 application, which is the last step in the green card process, you would need get no benefit from the PERM/green card process and would need to take an action within 60 days of the end of your employment to be able to remain in the U.S., by filing some type of application with USCIS. PERM processing is still really slow, over a year, but I'm seeing some indications that this might improve.