MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by beambot | 2025-07-11 00:37:44+00:00
Equity: Walking away, your stake should be whatever you've veseted -- this is why you have vesting. If you purchased your shares (I hope!), then there's nothing more to do. If they were options, ask for conversion from ISO to NQO (IRS-mandated) and an extension (10yr) on the exercise period. If the post-pivot company wants, they can keep you on as an advisor for a period at some reduced equity vest (e.g. 1/20th your founder vest). This is a nice way to transition and can be worthwhile in some scenarios.

Cash: You should expect none. If you all documented the unpaid work in the form of contractual deferred compensation (unlikely), then you can insist this be paid out as a requirement of labor laws. If it wasn't documented, then it's a sunk cost. Cash is the company's life blood, so they cannot waste it on employees that are departing or terminated. You shouldn't expect an exit package.

Realistically... If you own 10% in a "new" company (post-pivot), this is a great position for you. Their alternatives are (1) to nuke the cap table in a reset and pivot without you; it's not really worthwhile for anyone to duke it out this way; (2) if they're itching to buy you out (unlikely), you can consider whatever offer they put forward but you have no legal obligation to accept; or (3) everyone just accepts the current state of affairs as sunk costs and parts amicably. (3) is best for everyone involved -- it's mutually non-ideal.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-07-11 00:38:02+00:00
Wow, 3 wrong statements in one sentence!

- the carbon intensity of pretty much every country's grid has dropped dramatically in the last 25 years. First by replacing coal with natgas, then by adding renewables.

- nuclear cost France $2/W in 1982 dollars ($6.50 today). solar+batteries cost California $4/W in 2023 dollars.

- the late 70s was a lot more than 30 years ago. (I was born in the 70's, I wish I was still in my 30's).
by homebrewer | 2025-07-11 00:39:56+00:00
It's ungodly slow on large projects. I've been using `deno fmt` lately (despite not having any other use for deno), it reformat/checks thousands of files per second, and supports YAML too.

This says YAML support is behind an unstable flag, but I haven't been passing any flags. Works fine anyway.

https://docs.deno.com/runtime/reference/cli/fmt/
by apparent | 2025-07-11 00:39:57+00:00
You don't mention how much cash the company raised, or how much cash is left. These are key questions if you want to know how much of a buyout is appropriate.

If there's not a ton of cash, they are going to be very hesitant to give much of it to a departing founder.

At the same time, you should be hesitant to just hang onto your equity on the promise that it will be bought out later. If the company isn't successful, you'll get nothing. And if the company is successful, future investors will convince your founder that you don't deserve anything and that they should do shady stuff that will dilute your shares to nothing.
by postpawl | 2025-07-11 00:40:09+00:00
Why frame it as ideological though? That doesn't explain which agencies get protected and which get cut. The NTSB stays funded because rich people fly on planes too. But Medicaid gets cut because wealthy people don't need it.

Look at weather service cuts. They're gutting the National Weather Service while Trump's appointees have ties to companies like AccuWeather and Satellogic that would profit from privatizing weather data.

It's about class interests. Agencies that serve everyone or that rich people depend on stay funded. Programs that only help poor people get cut, or get privatized to benefit specific wealthy interests. Make the wealthy better off through tax cuts and new business opportunities, make poor people worse off through service cuts.
by xantronix | 2025-07-11 00:40:51+00:00
Jesus fucking Christ. I am so sorry to his friends, family and colleagues at Shadowcat. I don't know that I or so many other people in and around the Perl community would have the life experiences we had without being "voluntold" to do something to, say, take a small part in making a conference happen, or to submit a talk I wouldn't have otherwise done.

His oratory and presentation style is inimitable and he truly brought everyone up who worked with him, and even did his best to smooth over difficult personality conflicts on the p5p mailing list. He was instrumental in establishing a Standard of Conduct for contributing to Perl, as well. He was a staunch ally for the many he befriended and worked to bash through obstacles whether it had anything to do with his immediate obligations or no.

Fucking hell man. This hurts. Love you Matt.
by kannanvijayan | 2025-07-11 00:40:55+00:00
I've been hacking on some somewhat systemsy rust code, and I've used LLMs from a while back (early co-pilot about a year ago) on a bunch of C++ systems code.

In both of these cases, I found that just the smart auto-complete is a massive time-saver. In fact, it's more valuable to me than the interactive or agentic features.

Here's a snippet of some code that's in one of my recent buffers:

// The instruction should be skipped if all of its named // outputs have been coalesced away. if ! self.should_keep_instr(instr) { return; } // Non-dropped should have a choice. let instr_choice = choices.maybe_instr_choice(instr_ref) .expect("No choice for instruction"); self.pick_map.set_instr_choice( instr_ref, instr_choice.clone(), ); // Incref all named def inputs to the PIR choice. instr_choice.visit_input_defs(|input_def| { self.def_incref(input_def); }); // Decref all named def inputs to the SIR instr. instr.visit_inputs( |input_def| self.def_decref(input_def, sir_graph) );

The actual code _I_ wrote were the comments. The savings in not having to type out the syntax is pretty big. About 80% of the time in manual coding would have been that. Little typos, little adjustments to get the formatting right.

The other nice benefit is that I don't have to trust the LLM. I can evaluate each snippet right there and typically the machine does a good job of picking out syntactic style and semantics from the rest of the codebase and file and applying it to the completion.

The snippet, if it's not obvious, is from a bit of compiler backend code I'm working on. I would never have even _attempted_ to write a compiler backend in my spare time without this assistance.

For experienced devs, autocomplete is good enough for massive efficiency gains in dev speed.

I still haven't warmed to the agentic interfaces because I inherently don't trust the LLMs to produce correct code reliably, so I always end up reviewing it, and reviewing greenfield code is often more work than just writing it (esp now that autocomplete is so much more useful at making that writing faster).
by epistasis | 2025-07-11 00:41:19+00:00
That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. ChatGPT is an innumerate as contemporary nuclear advocates.

I regularly run the numbers for the US, and using old NREL numbers it's $120/MWh.

The US has great solar resources. Germany has some of the worst.

But in any case most of the cost is in the battery, not the panels, which are cheap. So bump that up and it doesn't change the cost much.

I'm any case, unless you are Finland or similar, nuclear is not on the table.
by TkTech | 2025-07-11 00:42:38+00:00
With that experience behind you, would you have feedback for Chancy[1]? It aims to be a batteries-included offering for postgres+python, aiming for hundreds of millions of jobs a day, not massive horizontal worker scaling.

It both polls (configurable per queue) and supports listen/notify simply to inform workers that it can wake up early to trigger polling, and this can be turned off globally with a notifications=false flag.

[1]: https://github.com/tktech/chancy
by mbastos | 2025-07-11 00:43:45+00:00
I just published a deep‑dive on how a GitHub Actions workflow can cut, tag, and publish a fresh release every single week, no matter whether you’re running on Python, Go, React, or a poly‑glot monorepo.

Here’s the gist of what the post covers:

Cron‑driven cadence – A simple cron: '0 0 * * 0' keeps your release train on schedule (every Sunday at 00:00 UTC). Language‑agnostic workflow – Uses actions/github-script to create a tag like 2025‑07‑13 and generate release notes automatically. Zero manual toil – If there are no new commits since the last cut, the job exits gracefully; otherwise it publishes in seconds. Easy to extend – Add build matrices, package publishing (PyPI, npm, Docker), or artifacts with one extra step. Benefits – Faster feedback loops, predictable delivery, smaller diffs, and an always‑up‑to‑date changelog. Read the article for the step‑by‑step implementation, copy‑paste YAML, and best‑practice tips.

Why does this matter?

Automating release duty eliminates the “Who’s on deck?” scramble and frees engineers to focus on value, not version bumps. Your consumers get predictable updates, and your team gets a healthier shipping rhythm.

Already using something similar? Drop your experience, or questions, in the comments. Let’s compare notes on continuous delivery without the overhead.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-07-11 00:43:47+00:00
ARC-AGI isn't question- or knowledge-based, though, but "Infer the pattern and apply it to a new example you haven't seen before." The problems are meant to be easy for humans but hard for ML models, like a next-level CAPTCHA.

They have walked back the initial notion that success on the test requires, or demonstrates, the emergence of AGI. But the general idea remains, which is that no amount of pretraining on the publicly-available problems will help solve the specific problems in the (theoretically-undisclosed) test set unless the model is exhibiting genuine human-like intelligence.

Getting almost 16% on ARC-AGI-2 is pretty interesting. I wish somebody else had done it, though.
by ertian | 2025-07-11 00:44:07+00:00
I guess 1919 is a bit late for rose colored glasses--though there's a shocking number of people who are still nostalgic for Bolshevism after _everything_.

You get my point, though. It's one thing to propose an idyllic society. It's another thing to try to implement it. In all cases where there's been a serious attempt at implementation on any scale above local and short-lived, we view the results with horror.
by nomel | 2025-07-11 00:44:47+00:00
> "I'm an artist"

This is actually what I'm most excited about: in the reasonably near future, productivity will be related to who is most creative and who has the most interesting problems rather than who's spent the most hours behind a specific toolchain/compiler/language. Solutions to practical problems won't be required to go through a layer of software engineer. It's going to be amazing, and I'm going to be without a job.
by resfirestar | 2025-07-11 00:44:54+00:00
I think the person you replied to was just mad their opinion was unpopular, but your comment really does seem excessively negative. All the new tech sucks? We just got tech that can write an email, code a simple program, and potentially more. We got laptops with battery life measured in days that generate almost no heat or noise. We’ve had some awesome advances in memory safe programming languages. All sorts of hacker friendly gadgets like 3D printers and Framework devices are available in more varieties and at lower prices than ever. Apple and Google are starting to ease up on some of their worst policies and give developers more options for revenue. You can criticize things you don’t like but saying it’s all or even mostly bad just seems completely wrong. I think one of the things that makes Reddit (and HN, and X, and some Discords and corners of YouTube) unappealing these days is the extreme toxic negativity about everything.
by triceratops | 2025-07-11 00:45:11+00:00
> We stopped being a republic after the civil war removed state rights to secession

A republic is a government where elected representatives make laws. The right of sub-national units to secede isn't a part of the equation, as far as I know.

I mean a republic could have a constitution where states have the right to secede. Wikipedia tells me the USSR is one such republic. But that's not part of the definition.
by browningstreet | 2025-07-11 00:45:52+00:00
Honest question: I find email to be almost useless now. I get a hundred emails across 3-4 personal accounts and I read almost none of them. I do scan them.. noise is high and signal is low, but not entirely possible to ignore completely.

I wanted to like hey.com for some of their enhanced email management tools but I didn’t like the platform in general.

I can’t believe no one lets me set “keep 30 days of this newsletter but delete the rest”. Setting filter rules per email in Gmail feels silly. With newsletters, value is inversely proportional to receive date.

What I’m getting at is.. best email provider and options for someone who is kinda, but not entirely, done with email..? Most email platforms still treat email as a first class communication platform, but for me, it definitely isn’t.
by codedokode | 2025-07-11 00:46:12+00:00
I don't know if you were joking about the hammer or referring to a Russian assembly worker who used a hammer to install accelerometers in a rocket into a wrong position which caused it to attempt to fly downwards (no people were injured) [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton-M#Notable_launch_failur...
by labrador | 2025-07-11 00:46:50+00:00
Musk has a good understanding of what people expect from AI from a science, tech and engineering perspective, but it seems to me he has little understanding of what people expect from AI from a social, cultural, political or personal perspective. He seems to have trouble with empathy, which is necessary to understand the feelings of other people.

If he did have a sense of what people expect, he would know nobody wants Grok to give his personal opinion on issues. They want Grok to explain the emotional landscape of controversial issues, explaining the passion people feel on both sides and the reasons for their feelings. Asked to pick a side with one word, the expected response is "As an AI, I don't have an opinion on the matter."

He may be tuning Grok based on a specific ideological framework that prioritizes contrarian or ‘anti-woke’ narratives to instruct Grok's tuning. That's turning out to be disastrous. He needs someone like Amanda Askell at Anthropic to help guide the tuning.
by xracy | 2025-07-11 00:47:06+00:00
certainly feels like we're just trying to slowly turn up the temperature until everything is still okay.

There are plenty examples of things done by gov't officials today that would've ben disqualifying 20 years ago. And I'm sure there are things viewed as 'crossing the line' today, that will be fine in 4 years. And that definitely scares me.
by alfalfasprout | 2025-07-11 00:47:22+00:00
I'm not sure if this post is ragebait or not but I'll bite...

If anything, HN is in general very much on the LLM hype train. The contrarian takes tend to be from more experienced folks working on difficult problems that very much see the fundamental flaws in how we're talking about AI.

> Many will argue that it's all fake, that it's all artificial hype to prop of VC evaluations, etc. They literally will see the billions in revenue as not real

That's not what people are saying. They're noting that revenue is meaningless in the absence of looking at cost. And it's true, investor money is propping up extremely costly ventures in AI. These services operate at a substantial loss. The only way they can hope to survive is through promising future pricing power by promising they can one day (the proverbial next week) replace human labor.

> same with all the real people upskilled via LLM's in ways that are entirely unique to the utility of AI.

Again, no one really denies that LLMs can be useful in learning.

This all feels like a strawman-- it's important to approach these topics with nuance.
by gjm11 | 2025-07-11 00:48:09+00:00
Using a monospaced typeface for that purpose isn't only convention; it reflects the fact that when those commands are typed literally, it will be in a terminal which almost certainly itself uses a monospaced typeface. I think I'd say that setting literal command text in a monospaced face is a best practice.

[EDITED to add:] I agree with the general point about distinguishing best practices from conventions, though. (But there are also intermediate possibilities. "Best practice for us because it fits with conventions we've become used to". "Best practice for us because of some peculiarity of us or our work, even though for other groups it might not be so good".)
by gmueckl | 2025-07-11 00:48:23+00:00
Building projection optics is a bench top experiment that we did in 7th grade in school. Electric circuitry isn't exactly rocket science, either. Things like LCD panels for projecting arbitrary images and CCD chips for cameras become harder to understand.

But the point is to make users understand the system enough to instill the confidence to change things and explore further. This is important because the true power of computer systems comes from their flexibility and malleability.

You can never build that level of confidence with LLMs.
by throwpoaster | 2025-07-11 00:48:43+00:00
Very similar situation.

You can think of your equity in terms of buckets: you get some for having the courage to start, some for the grind, and some for future returns. You're giving back the future returns bucket, not the other two. The vesting mechanism imperfectly maps to this.

Keep the equity. It's not "dead" in any real sense (though people will describe it that way to talk the value down). Dilution will hit it anyway. Again: you are already relinquishing the future value when you stop vesting.

If you have a board seat, consider staying in that capacity. Then at the next round perhaps sell the seat and equity to an incoming investor. Early on, board seats are more valuable than stock and selling that package, perhaps at a discount to the incoming valuation, is fairly compelling. Your exit then fits the playbook for exiting early angels -- it's not weird.

Taking cash is a bad signal in a couple of ways: it signals that you don't believe in the new direction and it signals the remaining founder is making poor financial decisions. Unless the framing is that you took a low buyout to walk, which isn't a great look for anyone.

Message it as what's best for the business, and be firm when they ask you to relinquish the equity. You said it very well in your post: "this is a great idea, but I'm not the right fit. I'll stay on in an advisory and governance capacity, but my last day as an officer and employee will be end of next month." Give the company lots of time and help to move on.

Help the company by setting it up to be so valuable that an incoming investor will want to remediate the situation by sweeping you off the cap table (again, like an early angel).

Depending on your counterparties it might not be possible to preserve relationships. Make sure you can afford litigation. Depending on your financial position this means get a new job or start a new business. When someone says, "relinquish or I'll sue" then you generally want to answer "my counsel will accept service at this address: xyz".
by godelski | 2025-07-11 00:49:50+00:00
> UNLESS YOU CAN VERIFY ITS FIXED

Ummm...

Yes?

Aren't we saying the same thing then?

We must be talking past one another. I'm (and others) are assuming they can't reproduce the bug. Assuming they aren't lying when they say so and assuming they've tried.

I mean let's take the trivial case. Assume user is dumb, deleted the files, made a bug report. Devs will never be able to reproduce unless user tells them they deleted everything 'on purpose'. That ends up with a permanently opened bug report no matter how much time you spend trying to fix the issue and no matter how many safety features you build in, right?
by Davidzheng | 2025-07-11 00:49:56+00:00
Phrasing as a question bc I don't know, but it seems like the update allowed grok 3 answers to tweets to be affected in some way by its responses to other tweets? Like I think some people made it same Nazi things by prompting it (which is unfortunate but jailbreaks are commonplace) but some other people then seemed to experience this content WITHOUT PROMPTING after that? Is this a correct statement? [I know it's complicated by the fact that there were some new techniques for hiding jailbreaks being used around same time]
by consumer451 | 2025-07-11 00:51:18+00:00
> I mean it has to, for something rigorously proven, right?

I have been thinking about this recently. What are the most rigorous "software actual engineering" fields, or projects?

Autopilot systems in airliners came to mind. Not just autopilot, but FADEC, and other flight control systems. Medical devices? ... Or, are all those teams just winging it as well?
by Lerc | 2025-07-11 00:51:48+00:00
>It's hard to think of any other major tech product where it's acceptable to shift so much blame on the user.

Is that perhaps because of the nature of the category of 'tech peoduct'. In other domains, this certainly isn't the case. Especially if the goal is to get the best result instead of the optimum output/effort balance.

Musical instruments are a clear case where the best results are down to the user. Most crafts are similar. There is the proverb "A bad craftsman blames his tools" that highlights that there are entire fields where the skill of the user is considered to be the most important thing.

When a product is aimed at as many people as the marketers can find, that focus on individual ability is lost and the product targets the lowest common denominator.

They are easier to use, but less capable at their peak. I think of the state of LLMs analogous to home computing at a stage of development somewhere around Altair to TRS-80 level. These are the first ones on the scene, people are exploring what they are good for, how they work, and sometimes putting them to effective use in new and interesting ways. It's not unreasonable to expect a degree of expertise at this stage.

The LLM equivalent of a Mac will come, plenty of people will attempt to make one before it's ready. There will be a few Apple Newtons along the way that will lead people to say the entire notion was foolhardy. Then someone will make it work. That's when you can expect to use something without expertise. We're not there yet.
by russellbeattie | 2025-07-11 00:52:10+00:00
It's surprisingly not that hard to find if you put it in quotes. I just looked now to take a trip down memory lane. I even found images of the original disk!

Ready for this: A full-powered desktop publishing system for the IIe which included a custom Mac-like GUI: 140KB.

Unbelievable. Additional disks had fonts, clip art and printer drivers. But the main app was insanely small. It really was brilliant.