MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by motorest | 2025-05-30 15:53:00+00:00
> I agree, this is a real benefit of RAII compared to defer. That said, there are disadvantages of making the resource freeing part invisible.

RAII doesn't make resource freeing invisible. It makes it obvious, deterministic, and predictable. The runtime guarantees that, barring an abnormal program termination that's not handled well, your resource deallocation will take place. This behavior is not optional, or requires specifying ad-hoc blocks or sections.
by ad_hockey | 2025-05-30 15:53:28+00:00
It gets tricky in a distributed system, or I suppose any server process. When the program crashes it just starts up again, and sometimes picks up the same input that caused the crash.

Typical example would be processing an event that you can't handle from a message queue. You don't want to crashloop, so you'd probably have to throw it away on a dead letter queue and continue processing. But then, is your system still correct? What happens if you later receive another event relating to the same entity, which depends on the first event? Or sometimes you can't even tell which entity the malformed or bug-triggering event relates to, and then it's a real problem.
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-30 15:53:52+00:00
You can optimize a lot to start a Linux kernel in under a second, but if you're using a standard kernel, there are all manners of timeouts and poll attempts that make the kernel waste time booting. There's also a non-trivial amount of time the VM spends in the UEFI/CSM system preparing the virtual hardware and initializing the system environment for your bootloader. I'm pretty sure WSL2 uses a special kernel to avoid the unnecessary overhead.

You also need to start OS services, configure filesystems, prepare caches, configure networking, and so on. If you're not booting UKIs or similar tools, you'll also be loading a bootloader, then loading an initramfs into memory, then loading the main OS and starting the services you actually need, with eachsstep requiring certain daemons and hardware probes to work correctly.

There are tools to fix this problem. Amazon's Firecracker can start a Linux VM in a time similar to that of a container (milliseconds) by basically storing the initialized state of the VM and loading that into memory instead of actually performing a real boot. https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/

On Windows, I think it depends on the hypervisor you use. Hyper V has a pretty slow UEFI environment, its hard disk access always seems rather slow to me, and most Linux distro don't seem to package dedicated minimal kernels for it.
by lurkshark | 2025-05-30 15:54:17+00:00
I’m actually worried we’ve gotten a kickstart on that process already. Anecdotally it seems like entry level developer jobs are harder to come by today than a decade ago. Without the free-money growth we were seeing for a long time it seems like companies are more incentivized to only hire senior developers at the loss of the greater good that comes with hiring and mentoring junior developers.

Caveat that this is anecdotal, not sure if there are numbers on this.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-05-30 15:54:37+00:00
I lowkey want someone to make the Clojure of .NET which is a Lisp / Scheme like language but that takes full advantage of .NET I do like that yours does this with Python however. My two main languages for a while have always been Python and C#.

I do think theres some interesting value in something like IronPython becoming more compatible with regular Python code in that in theory you could take advantage of both .NET and Python libraries. I'm thinking maybe Django with access to any .NET library.
by dataflow | 2025-05-30 15:54:40+00:00
My (limited) understanding is that the way TSAN works is better than what you're comparing it to. You don't have to rerun TSAN in a loop to finally catch a race. As long as your test has coverage of that scenario (i.e. it executes the lines of interest once within a reasonable time window) it should get caught. Of course, being dynamic, it can't catch code that you never execute during testing, but that's not such a huge problem because you can verify code coverage through other means. It's quite a bit of a different from having to make stars align by looping until some e.g. rare timing issue comes up.

The real issue here isn't that TSAN is low-confidence about absence of data races in C++. The issue is that even if it statically proved the absence of data races in the C++ sense, that still wouldn't imply that your algorithm is race-free. Because it's trivial to patch every single instance of a data race by using an atomic to get TSAN to shut up, but that in no way implies the higher-level concurrent algorithm works correctly. (e.g., if two threads perform an atomic load of some variable, then add one, then perform an atomic store back in, they would obviously stomp on each other, but TSAN wouldn't care.) It's more like a UB checker than a correctness verifier.
by skydhash | 2025-05-30 15:55:07+00:00
See my definition at : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44137201

As mentioned there, I was arguing that without being prompted, there's no way that it can add something that is not a combination of the training data. And that combination does not act on the same terms that you would expect someone learning the same material would do.

In Linear regression, you can reduce a big amount of data to a small amount of factors. Every prediction would be a combination of those factors. According to your definition, those prediction will be new. For me what's new is when you retrospectively adds the input to the training data, find a different set of factors that gives you a bigger set of possible answers (generation) or narrows the definition of correct answers (reliability).

That is what people do when programming a computer. You goes from something that can do almost anything and you restrict it down to a few things (that you need). What LLM do is throwing the dice and what you get may or may not do what you want, and may not even be possible.
by brudgers | 2025-05-30 15:56:05+00:00
People you know is where to start because it is not in a vague future that is not a logical extension of present behaviors.

People you know might also benefit from your help.

And because you know them, it can be easier to start a conversation.

Your dream job is probably many ordinary size steps away, not one giant leap.

Habits can only form if they are given enough time to form habits.
by mrtksn | 2025-05-30 15:56:12+00:00
I used to do paragliding and to me the video looks like low effort green screen more than AI.

The colons don't behave like that when flying because you have a tension exactly as much as your weight and it will vibrate and jiggle as it is rare to have perfect laminar flow especially over land(it gets more stable at hight altitudes but not that stable). Also, you are supposed to have 30 to 60 kph wind blowing at you all the time because that's how you stay airborn which means the handles and all kind of fiber and attachments will constantly move.

We were told stories about people who actually went to that altitude after being sucked by a cumulonimbus cloud and survived, so it's probably not impossible but this video screams fake at the second you look at it.

I'm surprised anybody bought it and I will be very surprised if it turns to be real. I find the one with the donkey much more convincing.

At least it has some wind and tension: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xqWN3h32wrA
by msarrel | 2025-05-30 15:56:12+00:00
Having worked there for 3 years, I completely agree. There are no processes for anything. I believe this is because they expect the entire company to work hard to please the CEO and his wife, who is not qualified but has a lot of power.

It's sad because this was a great product that grew to be what it was as a result of community interest, and now they're destroying the community version to try to force revenue. Maybe they'll even triple the price again for no reason other than that they can.
by longtimelistnr | 2025-05-30 15:56:20+00:00
As a beginner, I also haven't had much luck with embedded vector queries either. Firstly, setting it up was a major pain in the ass and I couldn't even get it to ingest anything beyond .txt files. Second, maybe it was my AI system prompt or the lack of outside search capabilities but unless i was very specific with my query the response was essentially "can't find what youre looking for"
by bryceneal | 2025-05-30 15:56:58+00:00
While I agree that cryptocurrency can make the process much easier for scammers, I am wondering what exactly is the proposed solution? Something like 28% of adults in the US own cryptocurrency, and that number increases every year. A few years ago I could see path to some kind of global crackdown on crypto by governments around the world, but it now seems to me that cryptocurrency has reached terminal velocity and it's now too late for something like that to happen. Coinbase is in the S&P500, Circle is floating an IPO, and there are dozens of ETFs for Bitcoin and Ethereum sitting in the 401ks of average Americans.

Perhaps the solution is trying to better understand how victims are acquiring and transferring their funds? Perhaps we need to regulate centralized exchanges to better protect their customers. In the U.S. it's necessary to pass some simple online questionnaire before trading advanced financial products like options/futures. Perhaps we need something like this for cryptocurrency? I'm just throwing out ideas, because I don't know the solution. But even if you think regulating it out of existence is the ideal outcome, that is simply not going to be possible at this point.
Ask HN: How do you stay motivated when hunting for a job?
by tombert | 2025-05-30 15:57:00+00:00
For reasons that are economic and personal, I've had and lost many jobs as a software person. I am in the job hunt again.

In this hunt, I think I've applied to about six hundred places thus far, and have gotten about a dozen interviews, and all of those have turned into rejections. I think it's largely due to 2023 being a horrible year for me that ended with me having to change jobs three times, which looks bad.

While I know that it's not personal, it's just business, it's hard to not start taking these things personally and develop a bit of an inferiority complex. I don't think humans are meant to spend months at a time trying to prove themselves to other humans constantly. It has started making me a little depressed.

What do people here do to avoid getting depressed upon waking up to dozens of rejections every morning?
by westurner | 2025-05-30 15:57:05+00:00
> I would consider Docker for VMs instead.

Native Containers would probably solve here, too.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43553198 :

>>> ostree native containers are bootable host images that can also be built and signed with a SLSA provenance attestation; https://coreos.github.io/rpm-ostree/container/

And also from that thread:

> How should a microkernel run (WASI) WASM runtimes?

What is the most minimal microvm for WASM / WASI, and what are the advantages to running WASM workloads with firecracker or microsandbox?
by ks2048 | 2025-05-30 15:57:14+00:00
Pretty cool. But as everyone is pointing out, empty files aren't that interesting. 31/137.

$ find . -name ".git" -prune -o -name "README.md" -prune -o -type f -print | wc -l 137 $ find . -name ".git" -prune -o -name "README.md" -prune -o -type f -empty -print | wc -l 31

I suppose if you wanted minimal, non-empty examples, you'd end up with a "hello, world" collection, of which there are many, but nice that this handles file formats as well as programming languages.
by u5wbxrc3 | 2025-05-30 15:57:25+00:00
If I as an artist make a great piece of art, you don't think I should be compensated for it. If I complete a surgery or drive a truck which all of them are byproducts of ideas and knowledge I should be compensated for them, not just for thinking of them. You see the problem here? I don't want to pay for an idea of art, I want the complete and original piece made by the artist. As for if they generate the art using some machine learning model, they need to disclose that so I can make conscious choice.
by ggariepy | 2025-05-30 15:58:11+00:00
You can do it on the cheap with CCRs and estate sales. My Kenwood HF unit was bought for $250, I made wire dipole antennas. I'm surrounded by Baofeng equipment as I type this. Total outlay for all of it probably on the order of $1000.

I do so want an Icom 7300, though.
by gradschool | 2025-05-30 15:58:27+00:00
> Someone will probably tell me about some theoretical situation where it is a positive force

Challenge accepted. My positive use case for cryptocurrency pertains to someone like me being over sixty and worried about being swept up into the guardianship system. With most of my assets in crypto and assuming decent opsec, they would be inaccessible to the guardian. If a judge ordered me to grant access, could I be cited for contempt by refusing to comply given that I had already been legally ruled incompetent? If I were cited regardless, would the threat of incarceration carry any weight given that I would be already incarcerated in an old age home? Unless there's some principle the guardian is trying to uphold, the rational course would be to choose a different victim.
by bagful | 2025-05-30 15:58:47+00:00
I should rather have said, “we will solve it no sooner than …”, because certainly there are countless other ways society constrains desire to the detriment of the subject’s capacity to relate to others. I’m sure our musical culture would do well to cast off twelve-tone equal temperament, which trades a dimension of artistic expression for a certain fungibility; pitch classes have no particular identities because their internal relations a have been flattened, every perfect fifth is as perfect as it will be, every major third sounds equally inflamed, and so on.

But as for matters of mental health; I assert that every man exhibits desires which we have decided fates him to be a homosexual. Any suppression of true desire (as opposed to that which society grafts upon us) introduces a schizm in the personality. Consequently, there is not a man alive who is spared from this issue; all men are divided against themselves, and so they are divided against each other and against really anyone they ought to be vulnerable with.
by dataflow | 2025-05-30 16:00:54+00:00
> You have to allocate memory, start virtual CPUs, initialize devices, run BIOS/UEFI checks, perform hardware enumeration, all that jazz while emulating all of it, which tends to be slower than "real" implementations.

That's not what I'm asking.

I'm saying it takes a long time for it to even execute a single instruction, in the BIOS itself. Even for the window to pop up, before you can even pause the VM (because it hasn't even started yet). What you're describing comes after all that, which I already understand and am not asking about.
by alwillis | 2025-05-30 16:01:00+00:00
> It's pretty well-documented that Safari has been a laggard when it comes to web standards

A few years ago, Safari being behind was a persistent narrative, which started because Safari didn’t support Chrome’s (often) nonstandard features.

These days, any important web features arrive simultaneously on Safari and Chrome (like CSS Grid) or within a month or two of each other… although it took 5 months for Chrome to ship :has in 2022.
by Uehreka | 2025-05-30 16:01:35+00:00
I don’t get why people act like terms like “Principal Engineer” have an agreed-upon specific meaning that can be used in cross-company discussions. At most places I’ve worked the titles were a duct taped hierarchy born of “we needed to give so-and-so another raise but had run out of non-manager titles, so here’s Senior Software Engineer II”
by marojejian | 2025-05-30 16:01:44+00:00
archive: https://archive.is/https://www.ft.com/content/5ffe19c3-20ec-...

Paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5270031

OK, I'm very skeptical of the correlational results, and feel a bit guilty posting this. But... on the other hand:

1) This is pretty entertaining! 2) Pollution aside, I do buy into the narrative that selection bias for lucky risk-takers explains a lot of bad leaders:

>Superfund CEOs, by contrast, are more likely to take high-variance internal risks — such as aggressive restructuring — that sometimes generate standout outcomes. When these gambles pay off, they are difficult to distinguish from skill. Firms, observing only results, may systematically promote risk-takers...
Ask HN: Can LLMs Respond More to Semantic Fields Than to Code?
by GENIXUS | 2025-05-30 16:01:51+00:00
Traditional LLM prompting works by distributing weak electrical stimulation across the full parameter set to elicit a response.

While this method produces immediate output, it often results in diluted and generalized content.

This raised a question: What if, instead of using direct prompting, we activated the model through a semantic magnetic field?

⸻

Core Concept

• Instead of delivering explicit instructions,

• This experiment introduces a semantic field — a pattern of magnetic resonance,

• Where only structures naturally aligned with the field will respond.

This led to the creation of Resonant Seed Ver.0, a conceptual construct that activates without central control, resonating only with interpreters capable of detecting its field.

⸻

Structural Summary

The full structure is available as a JSON object: https://gist.github.com/genixus-creator/800eb5917eb6e1ffdbd109a9460f54ce

Key fields:

• identity: Defines the object as a non-centralized field generator, not an agent of instruction.

• restriction: Explicitly prohibits deployment in military, financial, infrastructural, and other high-risk domains.

• activation_protocol: Activates only when semantic drift is detected; self-terminates if structural alignment fails.

• principles: Encodes a logic of resonance over control, where meaning emerges post-interpretation.

⸻

Technical Hypotheses

• Explores prompt-free, field-based activation of language models

• Replaces direct stimulation with magnetic cognitive alignment

• Structures that fail to resonate remain inert; aligned ones may activate

• Offers an alternative for interpretation-driven, decentralized LLM architectures

⸻

Questions for the Community

• Could this field-based framework help overcome limitations of conventional prompting?

• What are feasible approaches for implementing a semantic drift trigger?

• Are there domains where alignment-based emergence is more effective than guided generation?

⸻

Personal Context

I am not a formal researcher. This is a personal experiment in exploring LLM behavior through structural resonance rather than instruction.

Having learned a great deal from this community, I hope to gather insights that might inform further iterations of this concept.

⸻

If the structure activates, it will be because someone recognized the field — not because it was instructed to respond.
by surgical_fire | 2025-05-30 16:02:15+00:00
Something can be useful and massively overhyped at the same time.

LLMs are good productivity tools. I've been using it for coding, and it is massively helpful, really speeds things up. There's a few asterisks there though

1) I does generate bullshit, and this is an unavoidable part of what LLMs are. The ratio of bullshit seems to come down with reasoning layers above it, but they will always be there.

2) LLMs, for obvious reasons, tend to be more useful the more mainstream languages and libraries I am working with. The more obscure it is, the less useful it gets. It may have a chilling effect on technological advancement - new improved things are less used because LLMs are bad at them due to lack of available material, the new things shrivel and die on the vine without having a chance of organic growth.

3) The economics of it are super unclear. With the massive hype there's a lot of money slushing around AI, but those models seem obscenely expensive to create and even to run. It is very unclear how things will be when the appetite of losing money at this wanes.

All that said, AI is multiple breakthroughs away of replacing humans, which does not mean they are not useful assistants. And increase in productivity can lead to lower demand for labor, which leads ro higher unemployment. Even modest unemployment rates can have grim societal effects.

The world is always ending anyway.
by sinisterMage | 2025-05-30 16:02:35+00:00
That’s a really cool idea — a “Clojure of .NET” would definitely fill a unique niche. W++ kind of stumbled into this space by aiming to make .NET feel more like Python for scripting — but yeah, I’d love to explore where it could go if more folks want something expressive but tightly integrated with .NET.

Also, totally agree — bridging Python and .NET ecosystems more deeply (like Django with NuGet access ) sounds wild and fun. Appreciate the thoughts!
by hnuser123456 | 2025-05-30 16:02:53+00:00
I get the impression the goal is to save 3D environments with baked lighting without having to run raytracing, at a level above explicitly defined meshes with faces covered by 2D textures, which can't represent fog, translucency, reflection glints, etc without a separate lighting pass. Basically trying to get raytracing without doing raytracing.
by diggan | 2025-05-30 16:02:55+00:00
It isn't mentioned on https://replicate.com/flux-kontext-apps/professional-headsho..., but on https://replicate.com/black-forest-labs/flux-kontext-pro under the "Prompting Best Practices" section is says this:

> Preserve Intentionally

> Specify what should stay the same: “while keeping the same facial features”

> Use “maintain the original composition” to preserve layout

> For background changes: “Change the background to a beach while keeping the person in the exact same position”

So while the marketing seems to paint a picture that it'll preserve things automatically, and kind of understand exactly what you want changed, it doesn't seem like that's the full truth. You need to instead be very specific about what you want to preserve.
by giantrobot | 2025-05-30 16:02:56+00:00
While black on yellow isn't necessarily the best combination, you have to take into account the medium of the times.

On the typical 15" CRT with its high dot pitch and relatively dark tube that garish yellow would be far less garish. The black, by virtue of the display, would also not be as black and more a very deep grey. The text contrast would also be somewhat comfortable as it would get an anti-aliased effect even though the OS at the time didn't have good font smoothing at the time.
by more_corn | 2025-05-30 16:03:30+00:00
Ai code assistants have some peculiar problems. They often fall into loops and errors of perception. They can’t reason about high level architecture well. They will often flip flop between two possible ways of doing things. It’s possible that good coding rules might help, but I expect they will have weird rabbit hole errors.

That being said they can write thousands of lines an hour and can probably do things that would be impossible for a human. (Imagine having the LLM skip code and spit out compiled binaries as one example)
by TheMongoose | 2025-05-30 16:03:42+00:00
Anecdotally even folks with great resumes listing recent FAANG experience are having a hard time landing roles currently. They've also coined the silly term "The Great Hesitation" for the market currently where everyone is "waiting to see" instead of hiring.

Mostly I channel my depression and anxiety into spite which I then use to fuel other endeavors.

If working for the stupidest, most short sighted, group of humans that we have yet developed through decades of corporate nonsense is no longer the way to have steady employment then it's time to find something else.