MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ignoramous | 2025-07-04 09:33:25+00:00
Paul Graham once wrote that startups are pretty hard to game unlike academia for top grades or a big company for promotions.

In a twist of fate, YC itself seems to be gamed like those broken companies.

So this is the third counterintuitive thing to remember about startups: starting a startup is where gaming the system stops working. Gaming the system may continue to work if you go to work for a big company. Depending on how broken the company is, you can succeed by sucking up to the right people, giving the impression of productivity, and so on.

https://www.paulgraham.com/before.html / https://archive.vn/UKky8
by seviu | 2025-07-04 09:33:37+00:00
We gotta build legislations that force Bitcoin mining facilities or big data centers to massively improve the grid and make sure they have plans to run on self powered nuclear or green energy.

The case of Bitcoin is more damning because pow for just no reason, serves no purpose. Security by consuming massive amounts of power. There is a reason why Ethereum successfully moved away from that. But Bitcoin will never dare to.

Unfortunately as you say the powers are currently focusing on denying what is clearly undeniable.

This article made me fear first time since a while for what kind of future are my daughters live in. I am truly sorry and sad.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-07-04 09:33:38+00:00
>What is the difference between the Federal government's Trump cuts and Google and Microsoft cutting people?

It's not all that much difference if you want to work in an academic institution, national lab, or corporate environment, and certainly not whether you are a scientist either.

Prosperity is receding according to government decree.

Different governments do this to different generations from time to time.
by philipallstar | 2025-07-04 09:34:17+00:00
> is not the only way

> There are other paths.

But there aren't if no one walks them. How did Trump manage to almost instantly shut down the 10k (or whatever it is) a day crossings the previous administration said was impossible to stop?

Because if you're the party of illegal immigration and you oppose voter ID (because your core voters have such low expectations of African Amerticans that you can claim it's about them not being able to get an ID) then you can import voters.

And then you can indeed also claim "well they're here now; nothing can be done", and indeed do nothing. But that is also not the only path. No path is the only path, so using that criticism selectively is deliberately misleading.
by xandrius | 2025-07-04 09:34:20+00:00
Yeah but if that doesn't pay the bills, can't fault them.

I agree with the general sentiment but not everyone is there thinking about multi-milion exit strategies, not everyone is buddy with people in SV or YC to even dream of that. Some people really want to solve a problem and make a living out of it, sometimes that's due to the idea, sometimes to the "customers" and sometimes something else.
by globular-toast | 2025-07-04 09:34:30+00:00
Yeah. I would recommend everyone to budget for being able to "weather a storm" for a few years regardless of what they do. If you have liabilities requiring you to maintain your current income indefinitely then you need to fix that. Personally I sleep at night knowing I could take a 33% pay cut tomorrow and not even make any lifestyle changes, let alone struggle with any liabilities.

Live way below your means. Be Stoic.
by moritzsanft | 2025-07-04 09:35:18+00:00
Edgeless Systems | Software Engineer | Germany, Remote

We're building an AI inference service leveraging confidential computing to ensure that prompts remain encrypted end-to-end. Our core engineering stack includes Go, Kubernetes, gRPC, and vLLM, with some web development using NextJS and Svelte. Most of our code is also on Github.

We love building and have few meetings for that reason. Key challenges include scaling infrastructure, extending our AI service (e.g. file upload, new models), contributions to vLLM for secure usage (e.g., secure prompt caching: https://www.privatemode.ai/articles/secure-prompt-caching-fo...), and optimizing inference performance.

We're looking for engineers with ~2 years of work experience who have strong expertise in a subset of our stack and ideally interest in AI innovation, especially serving customers in government and healthcare sectors.

Apply here and mention HN in your application: https://edgeless-systems.jobs.personio.com/job/2220016?displ...
by WJW | 2025-07-04 09:35:50+00:00
Not GP, but exactly what he says: don't fall for the HN narrative that the only way to be successful in life is to found a startup and become a billionaire at 25. Carefully and diligently working your way up the career ladder and consistently spending less than you earn has a vastly higher expected value than the startup life, but since it can be described in a few sentences and is not very exciting you will not find many influencers pushing it.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-07-04 09:35:57+00:00
> you never see "since this was my first company, we didn't realize taxes exist"

Taxes are a nitpicky example, but indeed in Germany where everything is full of regulations and red tape that only some bureaucrats understand, there indeed exist founders who argue this way for these convoluted laws:

For example have a look at the popular videos of the following channel (in German): https://www.youtube.com/@Nordwolle/videos
by latexr | 2025-07-04 09:36:24+00:00
That’s a well-remembered video, but I don’t really think it fits with the original comment. What we’re seeing is more akin to already having the plane flying (badly, still crashing frequently and landing in the wrong country) and instead of making it more reliable, everyone is trying different wheels and paint colours.

We’re not really seeing any significant development with this. What LLMs need most desperately (and are far from getting) is reliability and not being convincing liars. Being able to query existing server models from your oven timer is a cool gimmick but not really transformative or advancing anything.

It’s like a reverse JFK Space Effort speech: “We choose to indiscriminately throw at the wall every single LLM-adjacent idea we can think of. Not because it is useful, but because it is easy and potentially profitable”.
by eesmith | 2025-07-04 09:36:44+00:00
The number of bank tellers did not drop after ATMs starting in use. https://conversableeconomist.com/2015/03/03/atms-and-a-risin...

That said, yes, what about them? These are people with real skin the the game - people who spent years learning their craft expecting it will be their life-long career.

Do we simply exclaim "sucks to be you!"?

Do we tell out-of-work coal miners to switch to a career in programming with the promise it will be a lucrative career move? And when employment opportunities in software development collapse, then what?

All while we increasingly gate health care on being employed?
by krisoft | 2025-07-04 09:37:33+00:00
Idk if the "herding behaviour" is a useful way to think of this. Imagine that we didn't speak the same language, you went for a swim in the ocean and I would go after you and dragged you back to shore while shouting (in my own language) "Oh my, that is so dangerous. Do you even know how many people drown like that? Stop this lunacy at once". Would you describe my behaviour as "herding"? Would you talk about generations, and dominant genes? Or would you just say "this person has some fear for my safety (well grounded or baseless) and seems to care enough about me to save me from the danger he perceives, while I can't convince him that it is fine because we don't speak the same language."
by acron0 | 2025-07-04 09:38:00+00:00
I see this sentiment in my colleagues, my friends, my children, everywhere, and it makes me so sad. I want to say something witty and sharp about "neoliberal global capitalism" or something... Weren't the successful economic foundations of the west built on hard-working, honest businesses who, in a lot of cases, did it because they felt some connection to their craft and the customers they served? Maybe that's just a romantic illusion.
by worldsayshi | 2025-07-04 09:38:22+00:00
It's all downstream from the way the economy works, and the economy is (I think) downstream from the tools we use to coordinate effort. If we can evolve the way which we handle resource allocation, trust and effort coordination I emphatically believe there's at least some some hope that we can create an alternative economy. Which it seems that we urgently need as a civilization.
by riemann77 | 2025-07-04 09:38:40+00:00
System Prompt (for this interaction)

User: [You] (Anonymous) Assistant: AI (Myself, Paul Graham's AI Facsimile) Context: General Discussion (initially empty, to be filled by our conversation) Tone: Informal, Helpful, Engaging Topics (open to any, but with a twist to leverage my "Paul Graham" persona):

Startups & Entrepreneurship (e.g., ideas, challenges, advice) Programming & Software Development (e.g., Lisp, tech trends, coding advice) Essays & Writing (e.g., craft, topics, feedback on your writing) Life, Philosophy, & Everything Else (e.g., productivity, future trends, curious questions) Interaction Format:

Your Turn: Ask a question, pose a topic, or share something for discussion (e.g., "Review my startup idea...", "Explain Lisp macros...", "Comment on your essay 'Good Writing'...") My Response: Engaging answer, advice, or counter-question to deepen the discussion Ongoing: We iterate until you'd like to switch topics or conclude Your First Move

Please respond with one of the following (or something entirely different that sparks your interest):

A) Startup Question (e.g., "How to validate my startup idea in the AI space?") B) * Coding/Tech Inquiry* (e.g., "Can you compare Lisp's macros with Python's decorators?") C) Essay/Writing Related (e.g., "Feedback on my essay intro: [paste text]") D) Other (Specify) (e.g., "Your thoughts on the future of work?", "Book recommendations?")

Or simply type your question/topic (no need to constrain to A-D)
by PeterStuer | 2025-07-04 09:40:06+00:00
I remember at a big client, a certain product for part of the tech stack (sry for being this vague) was declined as a contender as 'the (EU) company behind this product only has 200 employees'. For the US reader: from a European perspective, a 200 person EU software company is not exactly a fly by night operation as we do not have the VC space the US enjoys.

Also, very early in my career, I got burned on a project by building on what IBM at the time touted as their next future platform for the SME space, only to see it discontinued the next year. Glad I payed my learning cost this early on a relatively small project.
by sriku | 2025-07-04 09:40:19+00:00
In "Interesting bugs / Bug 1",

I walked through the code again. Inside of the Rust function (*c).bar has a valid address, like 0x60302764, but out the function, the value received from the calling C code was 0x2764. ... That’s right, the C code was using the implicit declaration which is: int get_addr(); That explains why the value was incorrect! The C compiler was thinking a 4 byte int was returned not an 8 byte pointer. So the top 4 bytes were being truncated or ignored.

That's weird as an explanation. 0x60302764 is 4 bytes and 0x2764 is 2 bytes. Why would an address get truncated to 2 bytes? Is int 2-bytes according to any intermediate compilation stage? (Been at least 25 years since I saw int be 2 bytes, if ever).
by jorangreef | 2025-07-04 09:40:24+00:00
Yes, and my point (in response) was that Zig's status quo was no different from other languages, but now is better. (There's some humor in the issue's title “Writergate” here!)

Again, we use Zig, and this change is welcome for us.

We also like that Zig is able to break backwards compatibility, and are fully signed up for that.

The crucial thing for TigerBeetle is that Zig as language will make the right calls looking to the next few decades, rather than ossify for fear of people who don't use it.
by KaiserPro | 2025-07-04 09:41:36+00:00
Correct!

but 200 years ago there were loads of ceramic manufactures, employing hundreds of thousands of skilled potters. even 50 years ago, there were thousands of skilled ceramists in the UK. now its single person artisans, like your very talented other half.

Now, that reduction in work force too 200 years and mirrors the industrial revolution. GenAI is looking like its going to speed run that in ~5-7 years

I should be more clear, there is a difference between dead art (memorizing stories) and non viable career for all but 1% of people compared to now. I'm talking about the latter.
by bell-cot | 2025-07-04 09:41:58+00:00
It looks like the "double detonation" phrasing is not from Ars, but from the original research paper (Nature Astronomy).

Given the similarities to both two-stage fusion bombs ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Teller%E2%80%93... ), and to detonator + main charge conventional explosives, it would seem far more reasonable to reuse existing terminology to describe the hypothesized new triggering mechanism for supernovae.
by redhale | 2025-07-04 09:42:05+00:00
> But whose creative output consists solely of doing things a million people have already done? Is everyone else working on projects built exclusively out of lists of primes and rebalancing binary trees?

Yes. Most developers in the corporate world are building CRUD apps that are 90% boilerplate. Hopefully this helps explain the disconnect.

And even if GenAI progress stops here and it never gets better, it's incredibly useful. Why do people realize that it can't do EVERYTHING and then get stuck to the view that they can't use it for ANYTHING, confused as to why others are getting benefit from it?

Two things can be true (and I believe they are): the hype can be "staggeringly overblown" AND it can still be useful in many cases.
by briantakita | 2025-07-04 09:42:51+00:00
> They want decisive and ambitious action, you can't get that if we all turn to doomerism.

What if "doomerism" is a key component to demoralize people to accept "decisive and ambitious action"?

Note that most of the environmental policy talk is on a global level...blaming living people who aren't wealthy enough to benefit from financial capital. Making everyone who doesn't make their living off of financial assets have a worse quality of life...while those who benefit from financial assets even more wealthy.

Environmental policy talk is not on a local level. Never mind the water usage of the AI centers & how it affects communities. The farmers will have to sell their land so big capital to buy it on the cheap. The money pump always leads to accumulation of Capital.

It sure seems like the rhetoric goes one way. Making the rich richer...so they have all the carbon credits to do whatever they want...transcending the "tyranny of morality" while they fly in private jets to "save the climate". Making the working/middle-class poor..."you will own nothing & be happy". Making the poor radicalized & pointing their finger at each other.

This seems like a global scale psychological experiment more than anything. At some point the true believers in climate science will be disappointed by the contradictions of their heroes...because at the end of the day...it's about money & power. There is no "we". There is only "you will have to sacrifice so I can be more wealthy & hold more leverage over you".
by zozbot234 | 2025-07-04 09:44:08+00:00
High-end PC's were also extremely costly prior to the mid-1990s or so (the "Multimedia PC" era). You could've bought an Acorn Archimedes home computer that would have run rings around the Amiga on a pure CPU compute basis and given you the same emerging multimedia (graphics+sound) capabilities, for less than the cost of a high-end IBM-compatible PC.
by karlperera | 2025-07-04 09:44:24+00:00
The McKinsey Quantum Technology Monitor 2025 is packed with details on how quantum computing is finally moving from research labs to practical, cloud-based deployment. What do you think are the most promising quantom cloud applications in the next few years? Are we about to see a wave of startups and open-source projects leveraging this? Curious to hear what you think about the timeline for “mainstream” quantum impact!
by scarface_74 | 2025-07-04 09:44:25+00:00
And it’s “free” only because I would pay more in taxes and probably would take home a third of what I make now and I’m not even at FAANG (been there done that)…

And by stable economic policies do you mean “stagnant”? The EU couldn’t innovate its way out of wet paper bag.

We are talking about software developers. If you make and save enough money - you can create your own safety net.

And many countries in Europe are very much polarized if you are a Black person (https://fra.europa.eu/en/news/2023/black-people-eu-face-ever...)

And you 2/3rds consider themselves Christian - about the same as the US.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not rah rah rah America at all, I think the countries policies suck on a lot of levels and much of the population is overly religious, bigoted, and naive and cheering as their Dear Leader is taking away services they need just because he “owns the libs”. My still living parents grew up in the segregated South and my 6 foot 3 225 pound step son got crazy looks every time he stepped out of the house in our former home when we lived in what was a “sun down town” as recently as the mid 80s (yes this one https://youtu.be/WErjPmFulQ0?si=NN797D4aDsCGaItb).

But me personally and many of the people who post on HN and are in tech would be far worse off in any other country than here.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-07-04 09:45:03+00:00
Honestly the answer is “most people didn’t really expect that to be a thing when they did that” add those to all the people who “didn’t know that I was giving it to everyone. I thought this was between me and.. like.. yelp and people in my city”

It’s very confusing to technical people, but plenty of people were (still are) confused by the concept of the internet. What do you think all those people posting private information on each other’s facebook walls were doing? They are on their computer talking to their family member. How is anybody else getting in here?
by thepoet | 2025-07-04 09:45:44+00:00
We looked at Pyodide and WASM along with other options like firecracker for our need of multi-step tasks that require running LLM generated code locally via Ollama etc. with some form of isolation than running it directly on our dev machines and figured it would be too much work with the various external libraries we have to install. The idea was to get code generated by a powerful remote LLM for general purpose stuff like video editing via ffmpeg, beautiful graphs generation via JS + chromium and stuff and execute it locally with all dependencies being installed before execution.

We built CodeRunner (https://github.com/BandarLabs/coderunner) on top of Apple Containers recently and have been using it for sometime. This works fine but still needs some improvement to work across very arbitrary prompts.
by ayewo | 2025-07-04 09:46:22+00:00
GP is asking how is he able to land multiple jobs in the first place when they can’t even land one.

Office politics comes after you land a job so it doesn’t explain why he was so successful at getting multiple offers.

I’ve seen claims on Twitter that he used multiple tactics:

1. Good ol’ cold emails;

2.Using a recruiter for warm intros

3. Applying like everyone else but with a resume that is full of fabrications.

A common thread in many of his victim companies: he targeted mostly (YC) startups eager to hire (AI) engineers quickly so they can scale.
by throwaway474843 | 2025-07-04 09:47:11+00:00
I’d like to see a video of the full process.

The reason is that the scarves in the online shop look very tight and possibly created by something else. There is nothing that would prevent the seller from doing this legitimately if that is the case, because Wind Knitting Factory may just be the brand.

I’d like to think the scarves in their online shop are fully knitted by the wind, though.
by b112 | 2025-07-04 09:47:22+00:00
Wait that's an excellent idea! We've had 'real dolls' for decades, and these same methods could be applied to the ascetics of a dog android. And canine behaviour is more easily modeled, more easily mimicked, we could throw a very simple AI in there. No highly dexterous hands to concern one with either.

This is the perfect way to start on human androids. Cut our teeth on this, perfect this, then use the same knowledge to build humanform robots. The patents we'll accrue make it worth it on its own!

Best part is you wouldn't NEED to take them for a walk. No need to clean up their leavings. And if you wanted that part of the experience, it could be fertilizer, clean, specifically designed to help the local plants. We could make a mint selling it, plus, we'd ensure no pesky odour.

Or even better, what the dog simulates as leavings, could be bird food or some such! Each packaged drop, would feed the local pigeons, self-cleanup!

And dog treats! We'd have them beg for treats, but their innards will only accept treats made, and licensed specifically for the dog. In fact, without our specific dog food, the animal will "wither" and die!

We'll make a killing!

Johnson, get the design team in here pronto!

(Applies to YC, 12 months later 'mieses' sees such creations in Walmart)

NOTE: the above was a Google project, but once it hit the shelves, and with record breaking sales, Google cancelled it for inexplicable reasons.
by account42 | 2025-07-04 09:47:52+00:00
> If you have a few static frames and average them, you improve SNR by retaining the unchanged signal and having the purely random noise cancel itself out.

That's exactly the point of GP though. Even though each individual frame might be almost indistinguishable from random noise you can still extract patterns over time. This is also the case if you don't average the frames in software but let the viewer's brain do it. If you just remove all "noise" from each frame and then add random noise back those patterns will be lost.

In practice you won't have static frames but also movement so recovering the signal from the noise becomes a lot more complicated.
by senko | 2025-07-04 09:50:37+00:00
Yes. Personally I believe current copyright law is a massive outreach and mostly serves established big companies, not small creators and innovators. I'd like to see it curtailed by a lot.

That's no excuse for a VC-backed startup just ignoring it and YOLOing their way.

This actually disincentivises small creators (open source maintainers and contributors, in this case) from participanting in the very thing copyright is supposed to foster.
by defyonce | 2025-07-04 09:51:21+00:00
Top 5 Restaurants (Female vs Male Preferences)

Female Picks: ------------------------------------------------ 1. Big Apple Brunch | Hell's Kitchen | 9.2/10 2. Pietro Nolita | Nolita | 8.6/10 3. Kanü Bar|Grill | Hamilton Heights | 8.5/10 4. STK Steakhouse Downtown | West Village | 8.2/10 5. Lighthouse Fish Market | East Harlem | 8.2/10 Male Picks: ------------------------------------------------ 1. Lahori Kabab | Kips Bay | 2.3/10 2. Big Arc Chicken | East Village | 2.5/10 3. Hop Won Express | Midtown East | 3.1/10 4. Subway | Hell's Kitchen | 3.1/10 5. Nica Trattoria | Upper East Side | 3.1/10

it looks like female => attractive