MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ElevenLathe | 2025-05-06 19:43:59+00:00
I agree that this attitude shift has taken place, but I would theorize (can't prove it, because history isn't an experimental science) that this is a symptom of the larger revolution in our global political economy in the last several decades.

In a world of job-for-life employers and defined benefit employer pensions, it makes sense to optimize for craft to a greater extent (because you can build a reputation at your company as a maverick whatever-you-are and therefore get assigned to the most fun projects) and there is little incentive for resume padding. Also, if your management is from the older operations-focused school, they may have some genuine interest in the quality (or, at minimum, the efficiency) with which you do your work.

With increased velocity of employer-hopping and financialized retirement savings (401ks instead of pensions), it now makes little sense to try and build a reputation in your company. Even if you stay for decades, your colleagues will rotate around you and its therefore almost impossible to build a reputation as a craftsman. Also, without a defined-benefit pension, you are increasingly incentivized to over-save for your retirement (even if you would only like to target a modest amount of retirement income, the only way to achieve this for sure is to have an enormous amount of savings). Finally, your management now has no interest in operations at all. Instead, they are all in on the "theory of the firm" which among other things is meant to justify a make-the-stock-go-up-no-matter-what strategy.
Ask HN: Jaded with AI – Alternatives?
by career_question | 2025-05-06 19:44:35+00:00
Hello HN,

Since a young age, I've been interested in machine and deep learning. I’m currently in the second year of my Computer Science BSc (Toronto, Canada) and already have almost 2 years of experience in industry (computer vision + NLP) and over a year in academia doing AI research (both full time). Additionally, I have quite a few open-source projects (all DL-related) that have garnered over 1,000 stars in total, and some are very well-known in their respective niches. Lately though, I'm getting the impression that the field is over-saturated, with new research being published on a daily basis, and I identify as nothing but a cog in the machine as an AI developer. I understand that all domains are affected by this phenomenon to some degree, but in AI in particular, my work doesn’t feel personal at all, and to myself, I ironically seem like a robot that trains a vision transformer to do classification, fine-tunes an LLM for certain types of documents, makes architectural changes for a tiny improvement in performance, etc.

What are alternative branches in CS that you suggest I consider? I have two chief priorities:

* Creativity: I'm not seeking a typical software development job such as full-stack developer. Instead, I'm interested in opportunities that require creativity, almost like puzzle solving, and don’t become “routine” after a while. * Industry: My goal is to work in industry, not academia. This is not because I don’t enjoy research (in fact, I prefer it to applied work), but as reluctant as I am to admit it, salary does play a role in my decision making, and I’m aiming for six figures.

To give you a concrete example: I love work in logic, programming language research, theoretical computer science, and so on because they satisfy my first criterion, but it sadly appears that employment opportunities are mostly confined to academia?

I really appreciate your thoughts and feedback.
by NickC25 | 2025-05-06 19:44:37+00:00
Exactly.

A good PM should effectively get out in front of the sales team to make sure customers/users feel heard and understood, and also to communicate to the customers/users what is and isn't possible within a given period of time.

A good PM should also know how to communicate a "no" to anyone in the business cycle from anyone else in the business cycle. Their job is effectively to be the firewall/filter from one team to another.

No, customers don't want Feature XYZ even though engineering wants to build it No, engineering can't build Feature ABC even if a customer wants it No, sales cannot promise Feature 123 to customer, especially without checking with engineering first. No, executives can't force engineering to focus on the CMO's pet project, or force sales to hit numbers if the product sucks or isn't what the market wants

And so on
by charcircuit | 2025-05-06 19:44:43+00:00
I'm not shouting.

>sudo more resilient prevents a whole class of possible bugs

Good, but this doesn't fix the easiest way to escalate privileges as an attacker through sudo. Memory safety doesn't help people who run "curl | sudo bash" to install a random program from the internet.

>It is not going away.

But if work is done it could become very niche and eventually stop getting new usage over time.
by ksec | 2025-05-06 19:44:50+00:00
I dont expect it to be 100% accurate. Software aren't bug free, human aren't perfect. But may be 99.99%? At least given enough time and resources human could fact check it ourselves. And precisely because we know we are not perfect, in accounting and court cases we have due diligence.

And it is also not just about the %. It is also about the type of error. Will we reach a point we change our perception and say these are expected non-human error?

Or could we have a specific LLM that only checks for these types of error?
by soulofmischief | 2025-05-06 19:45:10+00:00
Location: Southern US

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: JavaScript/Web, Python, C, Rust, Full-stack, AI/ML

Email: hello @ bad-software dot com

GitHub: https://github.com/soulofmischief

Full-stack JavaScript-focused engineer/entrepreneur with lots of experience in building scalable single page apps, web3, multiplayer web games, building transformers and other networks, all sorts of things. Product-oriented, executive and leadership experience, comfortable in both autonomous and collaborative settings, capable Linux sysadmin.

I've focused for several years now on agentic and generative work such as simulating networked LLM-augmented embodied agents, interface research, too much to list here but always happy to talk more over email. While the rest of the industry is just starting to latch onto agentic systems, I can offer years of experience and product insight.

Available for consulting, projects, anything web or agentic.
by pdntspa | 2025-05-06 19:45:37+00:00
I don't know about that, my own adventures with Gemini Pro 2.5 in Roo Code has it outputting code in a style that is very close to my own

While far from perfect for large projects, controlling the scope of individual requests (with orchestrator/boomerang mode, for example) seems to do wonders

Given the sheer, uh, variety of code I see day to day in an enterprise setting, maybe the problem isn't with Gemini?
by lytedev | 2025-05-06 19:45:59+00:00
The core of this argument taken to its extreme kind of makes the whole discussion pointless, right? All the languages can do all the things, so why bother differentiating them?

To entertain the argument, though, it may not be a language issue, but it certainly is a selling point for the language (which to me indicates a "language issue") to me if the language takes care of this "library" (or good defaults as I might call them) for you with no additional effort -- including tight compiler and tooling integration. That's not to say Rust always has good defaults, but I think the author's point is that if you compare them apples-to-oranges, it does highlight the different focuses and feature sets.

I'm not a C++ expert by any stretch, so it's certainly a possibility that such a library exists that makes Rust's type system obsolete in this discussion around correctness, but I'm not aware of it. And I would be incredibly surprised if it held its ground in comparison to Rust in every respect!
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-05-06 19:46:19+00:00
> The problem is that the behavior becomes so complex and so much is pushed to runtime that there's no way to know what the code is actually doing. There's paths that are only going to be executed once a year, but you don't know which ones those are. Eventually, editing the code becomes very risky.

It's clear you've worked on a really bad codebase, but this is totally different from what you were originally suggesting, which was null being a bigger problem in JS than C++.

What you're describing is frontend development with JQuery, not the capabilities of JS. Now, I don't like NextJS for a lot of reasons, but code organization is not one of them. Everything you're complaining about is dead simple in NextJS. Functions are localized, tracking localized state is easy, and even the older React state libraries have lots of support for tracking and visualizing the more global state changes.

I will die on the hill that JQuery, outside of very small interactivity, is fucking bad. People use JQuery terribly and it creates spaghetti code where you can't tell what the execution path is. People don't document QA testing. And JQuery makes you target html attributes to make changes. That's fun if you have to do it once, it's terrible if all of your app interactivity relies on it.

But that's not due to "undefined", and it would be 100x worse in C++. I am assuming the C++ codebase you compared it to was not a DOM manipulating app?

I don't like NextJS for performance and market reasons, but the codebases I've worked on have been very clean.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-05-06 19:46:24+00:00
Near mid-air collisions (NMAC) as they are known, are ~1000x more rare than runway incursions - only 30 total at Reagan going back to 1987, compared to 1,330 RI's in 2023 alone - and are also decreasing. https://www.bts.gov/content/number-pilot-reported-near-midai...
by IAmBroom | 2025-05-06 19:47:33+00:00
All of which is extraneous to the question, "Did armies use volleys of arrows?".

If the French-speaking English commanders at Agincourt told their archer captains to "Laissez-y" instead of "Fire!", what difference does that make?

(For context, King Henry V of Agincourt fame is considered to probably have been the first English monarch who spoke English as a mother tongue, and may have been the first who was remotely proficient in it.)
by AndriyKunitsyn | 2025-05-06 19:47:36+00:00
Exclusive mode is a feature, not a bug. If the user needs the bits coming out of the user's DAW to reach the speakers as pristine as possible, then the user probably doesn't want these bits mixed with any other application. If the user needs to switch between the DAW and a Youtube tutorial, then there's probably no need for exclusive mode.

Latency is a valid concern, but is it really bad? PCs are fast now.
by franze | 2025-05-06 19:48:13+00:00
I like it. I threw some random concepts at it (Neon, LSD, Falling, Elite, Shooter, Escher + Mobile Game + SPA) at it and this is what it came up with after a few (5x) roundtrips.

https://show.franzai.com/a/star-zero-huge?nobuttons
Show HN: Kevin-32B – how to do multi-turn RL on writing CUDA kernels
by silasalberti | 2025-05-06 19:48:20+00:00
Hey – we just published a blog post about Kevin-32B = K(ernel D)evin.

It's to our knowledge the first open-source model that's RL-trained on CUDA kernels. Our goal was to demonstrate multi-turn RL using GRPO. We used 180 Python->CUDA conversion tasks from the KernelBench dataset.

The results were surprisingly strong! We were able to outperform top reasoning model like o3 & o4-mini.

We're sharing our training setup and learnings in the blogpost. Also the model is on HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/cognition-ai/Kevin-32B
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-05-06 19:49:00+00:00
The C++ code implements the intended goal, not the problem TFA is trying to illustrate.

Changing between:

for (auto i : vec)

and

for (auto & i : vec)

has essentially no bearing on what the author is trying to show. If they were focused on how move semantics are always important, they would not use an integer type.
by soulofmischief | 2025-05-06 19:49:13+00:00
> They asked me to come back in a week to double check, and by then my symptoms were gone and the tests no longer indicated gout.

Ha. Do you still have symptoms? If not, yea just a bad initial diagnosis. If you do still have symptoms sometimes though, it should be noted that gout is hard to test for when you're actively experiencing aggravated symptoms, as the uric acid crystals are lodged into your tissue and not freely available in the blood stream / urine. This exacerbated everything quite a lot, as when I was much younger I definitely got uric acid tests done when my symptoms were at their worst.
by vunderba | 2025-05-06 19:49:17+00:00
I built a dual snake game where you simultaneously control two snakes a while back, perhaps I should do a Show HN about it at some point.

https://specularrealms.itch.io/the-twins-of-caduceus

Fair warning: It's a game made for people who excel at ambidextrous tasks like patting one's head and rubbing one's tummy, or juggling Rubik's cubes that you are also solving.
by MonkeyClub | 2025-05-06 19:49:37+00:00
Pulling out of NATO or just not honoring Art. 5 wouldn't be unthinkable for Trump, and your comment is relevant to GP's and to the thread; I don't know why you're getting downvoted.

Downvotes are supposedly for culling irrelevant comments, not to express dislike, or am I confusing things?
by tauoverpi | 2025-05-06 19:49:39+00:00
Comptime is a gateway to partial evaluation, precomputing tables, and data layout optimization using the same language zig that you're familiar with when you need it and just a convenient way to handle generics when you don't.

As an example from my unfinished project, I use it to select the encoding to use [1] when resolving pointers to components [2] to reduce code size [3] as much as possible while keeping a high-level interface [4] where you don't need to care about any of it, just "map" a system over every matching entry within the database and it computes the "best" traversal for a single-thread. This is something that's generally difficult to both keep simple enough to work with and for it to generate good enough code to be worth it while retaining type safety.

Comptime enables such without much cognitive overhead as you're working in the same language as before just with lazy evaluation [5] and slightly more lenient rules around memory management making it easier to focus on working towards the desired the data model.

[1]: https://codeberg.org/tauoverpi/game/src/commit/77ec827ec93bc...

[2]: https://codeberg.org/tauoverpi/game/src/commit/77ec827ec93bc...

[3]: https://codeberg.org/tauoverpi/game/src/commit/77ec827ec93bc...

[4]: https://codeberg.org/tauoverpi/game/src/commit/77ec827ec93bc...

[5]: https://godbolt.org/z/P64Ezcrb7
by andai | 2025-05-06 19:51:11+00:00
That was my experience with OpenAI's Codex auto-coder thing (running o4-mini). It took 5 minutes and like 200 commands to do what Gemini 2.5 Flash (not even Pro!) did in about 30 seconds.

I see LLMs trying to do stuff that doesn't work in every AI coding thing I've tried, despite 20 pages of system prompts! (Or perhaps because of it.)
by florbnit | 2025-05-06 19:51:13+00:00
It has nothing to do with the definition of math. If you put people in an MRI and give them random problems then you’ll notice a distribution in the patterns of brain activity that are distinct. Some of these groupings we’ll call “math like” because the problems are more like mathematics than linguistics. And in the other distribution we’ll call them “word like” because the problems fall into the category we associate with word problems.

The fact that we see separate patterns of brain activity is the interesting part not any semantic argument about what you or mathematicians feel should be defined as being math or not.
by lytedev | 2025-05-06 19:51:17+00:00
I think this is true initially and Rust didn't "click" for me for a long time.

But once you are _maintaining_ applications, man it really does feel like absolute magic. It's amazing how worry-free it feels in many respects.

Plus, once you do embrace it, become familiar, and start forward-thinking about these things, especially in areas that aren't every-nanosecond-counts performance-wise and can simply `Arc<>` and `.clone()` where you need to, it is really quite lovely and you do dramatically less fighting.

Rust is still missing a lot of features that other more-modern languages have, no doubt, but it's been a great ride in my experience.
by abletonlive | 2025-05-06 19:51:20+00:00
I feel like there are two realities right now where half the people say LLM doesn't do anything well and there is another half that's just using LLM to the max. Can everybody preface what stack they are using or what exactly they are doing so we can better determine why it's not working for you? Maybe even include what your expectations are? Maybe even tell us what models you're using? How are you prompting the models exactly?

I find for 90% of the things I'm doing LLM removes 90% of the starting friction and let me get to the part that I'm actually interested in. Of course I also develop professionally in a python stack and LLMs are 1 shotting a ton of stuff. My work is standard data pipelines and web apps.

I'm a tech lead at faang adjacent w/ 11YOE and the systems I work with are responsible for about half a billion dollars a year in transactions directly and growing. You could argue maybe my standards are lower than yours but I think if I was making deadly mistakes the company would have been on my ass by now or my peers would have caught them.

Everybody that I work with is getting valuable output from LLMs. We are using all the latest openAI models and have a business relationship with openAI. I don't think I'm even that good at prompting and mostly rely on "vibes". Half of the time I'm pointing the model to an example and telling it "in the style of X do X for me".

I feel like comments like these almost seem gaslight-y or maybe there's just a major expectation mismatch between people. Are you expecting LLMs to just do exactly what you say and your entire job is to sit back prompt the LLM? Maybe I'm just use to shit code but I've looked at many code bases and there is a huge variance in quality and the average is pretty poor. The average code that AI pumps out is much better.
by ziddoap | 2025-05-06 19:51:28+00:00
>My point, where is the proof of that "religious element" beyond memes? Is it in the article? Is it in the links? Where can we see this religious fervor in action?

You can argue with fossuser about the validity of what they said.

I'll offer my opinion, which is not some proof from god or anything that you seem to be seeking, which is that I find significantly more annoying comments from Rust users, about how something should be rewritten in Rust to fix everything, than any other language. But, again, this is not proof from god. I'm just a guy making an observation based on my lived experience. You have a different lived experience. Glad we could clear that up.
by zahlman | 2025-05-06 19:51:48+00:00
> Politics is just everything.

The point is that they seem to have conflated opinions about what policies are correct for general real-world issues, with those that are specific to the task of programming.

> "No politics" usually means

No; "no politics" usually means "please do not attempt to bring up topics that relate to decisions made by governments, and instead stay focused on topics directly related to the project at hand".

> or at best the small-C conservative idea that the status quo has existed forever and so whatever happens to presently be the case is just how things should be.

I have never understood how this argument makes sense to anyone. Obviously, "changing the status quo" is a policy position in a way that "not changing the status quo" isn't. The argument is effectively that it's impossible to just not care about something, for any given thing. I refute this by noting that an effectively unlimited number of policies can be proposed, yet I am not constantly thinking about politics.

> but that's a matter of politics, doubtless you have different ideas about what "best" would be than I do, and I appreciate that perhaps you've never considered that anybody other than you could be right, but you might want to take a moment to think again.

Again, I can't fathom how this line of argument makes sense to anyone. "Politics" is, quite simply, understood by the overwhelming majority of people in such a way that determining "best outcome" for a computer program not used in any government capacity is obviously not a political matter.

Or else: in your view, what does "should `sudo` do X in Y situation?" have in common with "should country X go to war with country Y?" ?
by volkk | 2025-05-06 19:51:58+00:00
i'm not sure if this post was written with humor as intent, but i found it hilarious. ive never heard someone talk about clippy with such disdain.

> I'd rather be hunted by a Boston Dynamics robot than have to face Clippy on my screen every day.

this is something else. i dealt with clippy when i was younger but i only have fond memories. it was useless, but it brought personality to an otherwise fairly mundane product.
by retornam | 2025-05-06 19:52:22+00:00
I'm skeptical about this VSCode fork commanding a $3 billion valuation when it depends on API services it doesn't own. What's their moat here?

For comparison, JetBrains generates over $400 million in annual revenue and is valued around $7 billion. They've built proprietary technology and deep expertise in that market over decades.

If AI (terminology aside) replaces many professional software engineers and programmers like some of its fierce advocates say it would, wouldn't their potential customer base shrink?

Professionals typically drive enterprise revenue, while hobbyists—who might become the primary users—generally don't support the same business model or spending levels.

What am I missing here?
by anon7000 | 2025-05-06 19:52:35+00:00
Eh, is this worse than Windows? You develop UWP or WPF or whatever the current flavor is with Visual Studio, and use C# APIs that only exist on their platform.

On Mac, I can use bash/zsh mostly how I would on linux. The main compatibility issues come from BSD tools vs GNU, which are very simple to replace if you want. On Windows, they use PowerShell, which is totally proprietary.

On Mac, web & infra development can use completely open source tooling which can be shared with Linux.

You can still use VS Code to edit Swift (or C#), but the more "proprietary dev environments" (Xcode or Visual Studio) are probably more powerful with system level integrations.

Heck, you can use PyQT on mac if you don't like Swift or Xcode.
by xhrpost | 2025-05-06 19:52:47+00:00
> The authors say that the 570 megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam) may be useful for follow-up observations.

I was curious what kind of resolution you'd have at this distance but not sure I did the math right. The camera has a resolution of 0.27"/pixel[1] which is 0.000075 degrees. Then to get size at 500AU -> tan((pi/180) * 0.000075)(500 149597870700) ~98megameters, which is like 8 earth diameters. Is this right?

[1]: https://www.darkenergysurvey.org/the-des-project/instrument/...
by bityard | 2025-05-06 19:53:19+00:00
IME, the vast majority of those horror stories end up being from people who stay in the "trial" tier and don't sign up for pay-as-you-go (one extra, easy step) and Oracle's ToS make it clear that trial accounts an resources can and do get terminated at any time. And at least some of those people admitted, with some prodding, that they were also trying to do torrents or VPNs to get around geographical restrictions.

But yes, you should always have good backups and a plan B with any hosting/cloud provider you choose.