MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sparkie | 2025-09-06 14:07:07+00:00
It's not ill intent. The CLA clearly states what the intent is. It says "You give the company permission to relicense your work". The intent is there from the beginning - they want to be able to monetize the work. If you dislike such intent, then you wouldn't sign the CLA.

The concern is if they stop dual-licensing, and future releases don't come under a free license, but they only work on their proprietary relicensed version. You have the option to fork, under the same free license that it was originally under - you just won't get further updates from the company involved. I don't see the problem here: You aren't entitled to those updates just because you made some contributions.
Ask HN: What share of your daily dev tools/libraries are from Microsoft?
by dataviz1000 | 2025-09-06 14:07:59+00:00
I'm falling into a silo using Github, TypeScript, VSCode, Github Copilot, Playwright, and several other open source Microsoft controlled libraries. Probably the only big thing not Microsoft is my MacBook Pro.

Everything is free, however, I'm becoming a little worried my dependency on Microsoft comes with some hidden costs.
by zzzeek | 2025-09-06 14:08:59+00:00
can someone explain to me if this is real? I run many high profile OSS projects that are all hosted on Github. I've yet to see any issues or PRs generated by AI, when PRs come in, I've never seen an AI code review pop in. I've seen maybe one or two people trying to answer discussion questions where they obviously used an LLM but that wasn't copilot, it was just individual people trying to be clever. Why am I not seeing this happen on my repos?

it's just the copilot popups that are hardcoded in vscode right now despite no extension being installed, that are very annoying and I'd like those to go away.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-09-06 14:09:18+00:00
Engineering reliability is primarily achieved through redundancy.

There is none with Musk's "vision only" approach. Vision can fail for a multitude of reasons --- sunlight, rain, darkness, bad road markers, even glare from a dirty windshield. And when it fails, there is no backup plan -- the car is effectively driving blind.

Driving is a dynamic activity that involves a lot more than just vision. Safe automated driving can use all the help it can get.
by sandworm101 | 2025-09-06 14:09:46+00:00
Too reflective, like a flat mirror, will send the light off in a random direction rather than back as the detector. Worse yet, things like double reflections can result in timing errors as some of the signal follows a longer path. You want a target that is nicely reflective but not so shiny that you get any double reflections. The ideal is a matte surface painted the same color as the laser.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-09-06 14:10:09+00:00
> I hope you see it's getting complicated, and it's clear why non-native speaker would have issues here.

As a native English speaker, I recognized intrinsic complexity in the language early on during my learning journey. Perhaps this is why I do not judge non-native speakers harshly, preferring instead to appreciate their effort.

> Also, your explanation regarding Germany is wrong, because it falls apart when you apply it to "the Netherlands" or "the United States".

Both are plurals nouns, thus commonly requiring use of the definite article "the". Another example is the band "the Cars".
by zahlman | 2025-09-06 14:10:56+00:00
It appears that the "softmax" is found (as I hypothesized by looking at the results, before clicking the link) by exponentiating each value and normalizing to a sum of 1. It would be worthwhile to be explicit. The exponential function is also "high-school maths", and an explanation like that is much easier to follow than the Wikipedia article (since not a lot of rigour is required here).
by gettingoverit | 2025-09-06 14:10:57+00:00
If there are errors in implementation of general constructs, they tend to be visible at their every use, and get rapidly fixed.

Some general constructs are better than the others, because they have an algebraic theory behind them, and sometimes that theory was already researched for a few hundred years.

For example, product/coproduct types mentioned in the article are quite close to addition and multiplication that we've all learned in school, and obey the same laws.

So there are several levels where the choice of ad-hoc constructs is wrong, and in the end the only valid reason to choose them is time constraints.

If they had 24 years to figure out how to do it properly, but they didn't, the technology is just dead.
by evantbyrne | 2025-09-06 14:12:51+00:00
It's not possible to rug pull an open-source project by just switching new work to a different license. The real issue with open-source is that we don't live in a utopia where you can publish all of your work for free and still live a quality of life comparable to working at an average developer job, and yet so many non-maintainers somehow feel they are owed future labor. Maintainers come and go. Without sponsorship, the half life on maintainers is going to be relatively short, and more developers are going to be pushed to publishing less permissively.
by stavros | 2025-09-06 14:13:06+00:00
People will respond to incentives. They had an incentive to host their code in a place that easily let them do things that were extremely high friction before.

People aren't morally reprehensible because they prefer convenience over hardship. People like using easy things, and they like making money. This means that people will make easy things so other people will give them money. If you don't like it, make easy things that work the way you like them, run them ethically, and don't sell them to anyone.
by rossdavidh | 2025-09-06 14:13:26+00:00
All true, but the argument for AI is that it makes you far more productive as an individual, which if true should be an easy sell. In fact, some developers are quite committed to it, with a fervor I've not seen since the "I'm never going back to the office" fervor a few years ago. Version control is more of a "short term pain for long term gain" kind of concept; it is not surprising some people were hard to convince. But "AI" promises increased productivity as an individual, in the here and now. It should not be a hard sell if people found it to work as advertised.
by diggan | 2025-09-06 14:13:28+00:00
> I understand their was hope that GitHub would be open sourced, but I don't think there was any reason to believe it would happen.

Yeah, I don't think me myself had good reasons beyond "They seem like the good guys who won't sell out", but I was also way younger and more naive at that point (it was like 15 years ago after all).

I think I mostly just drank the cool-aid of what you mentioned as "if you weren't on GitHub, your open source software would not find contributors". There was a lot of "We love Open Source and Open Source loves us" from GitHub that I guess was confusing to a young formative mind who wanted it to become like the projects they wanted to host. This hope was especially fueled when they started open sourcing parts of GitHub, like the Gollum stuff for rendering the wikis.
by impossiblefork | 2025-09-06 14:14:06+00:00
No, it absolutely doesn't.

The government doesn't proscribe organizations or make decisions about what is a terrorist organization. That is entirely up to the courts.

Who SÄPO consults with has no legal significance. I'm sure they even talk to the Turks.

What you link to relates to the Swedish government's ability to institute sanctions against foreign states and persons. That has nothing to do with what is a terrorist organization in Swedish law. Whether an organization is sanctioned does not affect whether the definition applies.
by instig007 | 2025-09-06 14:14:25+00:00
> Real-world practice has also shown that quite often, fields that originally seemed to be "required" turn out to be optional over time

how often? as practiced by who, and where?

> 2. You actually do not want a oneof field to be repeated!

> How do you make this change without breaking compatibility? Now you wish that you had defined your array as an array of messages, each containing a oneof, so that you could add a new field to that message. But because you didn't, you're probably stuck creating a parallel array to store your new field. That sucks.

Nice, "explain to me how you're going to implement a backward-compatible SUM in the spec-parser that doesn't have the notions needed. Ha! You can't! Told you so!"

> But because you didn't, you're probably stuck creating a parallel array to store your new field. That sucks.

Not really, `oneoff token` is isomorphic to `oneoff (token unit)` and going from the former to the latter doesn't require binary encoding change at all, if the encoding is optimal. Getting from `oneoff (token unit)` to `oneoff (token { linepos })`, depending on the binary encoding format you design, doesn't require you making changes to the parser's runtime, as long as the parser takes into account that `unit` is isomorphic to the zero-arity-product `{}`, and since both `{}` and `{ linepos }` can be presented with a fixed positional addressing, you get your values in a backward-compatible way, but under a specific condition: the parser library API provides `repeated (oneoff <A>)` as a non-materialised stream of values <A>, so that the exact interpretation of <A> happens at a user's calling site, according to the existing stated protocol spec: if it says `<A> = token`, then `list (repeated (oneoff (token { linepos })))` is isomorphic to `list (repeated (oneoff token))` in the deployed version of the protocol that knows nothing about the line positions, so my endpoints can send you either of:

* Version 0: [len][oneoff_bincode][token_arr] * Version 1: [len][oneoff_bincode_sum][token_arr][unit] * Version 2: [len][oneoff_bincode_sumprod][token_arr][prod_arr] * Version 3: [len][oneoff_bincode_sumprod_sparse][token_arr][presence_arr][prod_arr]
by aaronmdjones | 2025-09-06 14:14:36+00:00
If it were only one data block in one stripe I'd be confident re-adding the same drive (and have done so); this is overwhelmingly likely to be a transient error (e.g. bit rot on the drive or a RAM bit flip while writing; either in the drive itself or the machine's main memory) that won't recur.

The MD "check" action can confirm this (it will iterate every stripe and report all parity/data mismatches, so if it only reports one ...) and some distributions ship a cronjob that automatically does this on a monthly basis.

If it were a corrupt parity block in a stripe (i.e. a filesystem with strong error detection reports no errors but the MD check action still reports a data/parity mismatch), this is usually more indicative of a lost write during a re-write operation (e.g. the machine was powered off in the middle of updating the contents of a stripe), as the parity is written last -- i.e. the parity would be for the old data in that stripe, not the data as it is now.

The MD "repair" action (if you are ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that it is the parity that is bad) will automatically correct this problem, which you should do, as the failure of a disk containing a data block within that stripe will then leave you with incorrectly calculated data that will then start showing up as filesystem errors (if you're fortunate enough to be using such a filesystem).

Of course all of the usual caveats about checking SMART statistics apply in determining whether a drive is still suitable for continued use. If the same drive kept showing up with the same problems, I'd retire it; if the drive starts reporting an increase in reallocated sector count, I'd retire it; and so on.
by chubot | 2025-09-06 14:14:51+00:00
Also, I think Hacker News mostly believed the hype about self-driving cars, with relatively little pushback. Many people were influenced by what the CEOs/investors said, and of course the prospect of jobs and "cool tech"

e.g. in 2018, over 7 years ago, I was simply pointing out that people like Chris Urmson (who had WORKED ON self-driving for decades) and Bill Gurley said self-driving would take 25+ years to deploy (which seems totally accurate now)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16353541

And I got significant pushback

Actually I remember some in-person conversations with MUCH MORE push back than that, including from some close friends.

They believed things because they were told by the media it would happen

People told me in 2018 that their 16 year old would not need to learn how to drive, etc. (In 2025, self-driving is not available in even ONE of their end points for a trip, let alone two end points)

Likewise, at least some people are convinced now that "coding as a job is going away" -- some people are even deathly depressed about it
by j_bum | 2025-09-06 14:15:30+00:00
When I was getting my Ph.D., my advisor jokingly told me that his lab has three 8 hour shifts per day, and I could pick two to work.

This was never literally practiced.

But excessive hours were the norm. And I loved it. It helped me launch into a successful career.

But it hurt my relationship with my partner (now wife), and it burned me out.

I miss those days, but I don’t miss what they did to my health.
by superphil0 | 2025-09-06 14:15:36+00:00
3 years ago just when we started sequel.co we built a tool for founders to improve their pitch decks

Today we are releasing a 50 page white paper, with the largest quantitative analysis of startup pitch decks 250.000 slides from 121 countries

It Includes

Median ARR of funded pre-seed, seed and Series A startups

Founder traits that raise the most money

Which nationalities create the best decks

Why traction is king

If you have any questions I will be more than happy to try and answer them
by ModernMech | 2025-09-06 14:15:42+00:00
You know what used to be expensive? Cameras. Then people started manufacturing them for mass market and cost when down.

You know what else used to be expensive? Structured light sensors. They cost $$$$ in 2009. Then Microsoft started manufacturing the Kinect for a mass market, and in 2010 price went down to $150.

You know what's happened to LIDAR in the past decade? You guessed it, costs have come massively down because car manufacturers started buying more, and costs will continue to come down as they reach mass market adoption.

The prohibitive cost for LIDAR coming down was always just a matter of time. A "visionary" like Musk should have been able to see that. Instead he thought he could outsmart everyone by using a technology that was not suited for the job, but he made the wrong bet.
by weitendorf | 2025-09-06 14:15:43+00:00
Reading between the lines, it looks like the story behind the story here is that this security researcher followed responsible disclosure policies and confirmed that the vulnerabilities were fixed before making this post, but never heard back anything from the company (and thus didn’t get paid, although that’s only a fair expectation if they’ve formally set expectations for paying out on stuff like this ahead of time).

I’m curious about the legal/reputational implications of this.

I personally found some embarrassing security vulnerabilities in a very high profile tech startup and followed responsible disclosure to their security team, but once I got invited to their HackerOne I saw they had only done a handful of payouts ever and they were all like $2k. I was able to do some pretty serious stuff with what I found and figured it was probably more like a $10k-$50k vuln, and I was pretty busy at the time so I just never did all the formal write up stuff they presumably wanted me to do (I had already sent them several highly detailed emails) because it wouldn’t be worth a measly $2k. Does that mean I can make a post like this?
by jasoneckert | 2025-09-06 14:16:20+00:00
A note of caution: everything is relative, and details are important.

If you love what you do (artist, self-employed, etc.) a 996 culture can be considered a good thing as a certain amount of "good" stress allows us to feel self-actualized.

As is a 996 culture that provides for work-life balance. For example, working from home with flex time for 12 hours where you get to take long breaks whenever you feel like it to run, walk the dog, eat, get coffee, etc., is quite enjoyable as well. Who cares if you're still replying to emails at 7pm if you can do this, right?

Added note: I find it very interesting that this was immediately downvoted. I'm interested in understanding why for those who wish to share their rationale and perspective.
by DavidWishengrad | 2025-09-06 14:16:27+00:00
I see this post was downvoted and hidden without a single legitimate rebuttal being stated. Both claims were factually disproved as contradiction.

The additions of viruses and the talk of other things that are important in life and to not lose sight of has nothing at all to do with factual claim of the Truth that is the cure and prevention of all needless and preventable suffering and death.

I request the entire staff at HN to address this comment directly and to share, affirm, and anchor.

"Abstract We present and defend the canonical truth: “Life is Most Important in Life is The Most Important Truth in Life.” We prove that this truth uniquely satisfies tests of necessity, universality, irrefutability, moral imperative, and cross-domain consistency. Beyond logic, we demonstrate that this truth defines who each of us is: our value, our identity, and our shared importance are grounded in the primacy of life. Furthermore, we prove that this truth is the cure and prevention of all needless and preventable suƯering and death. Any system that fails to aƯirm it may rationalize harm in service of other goals, and is therefore unsafe by definition. We conclude that this truth must anchor alignment in artificial intelligence, governance, ethics, and daily human life."

Thank you,

David
by wavemode | 2025-09-06 14:16:39+00:00
> Is there any knowledge of "correct vs incorrect" inside you?

There is a sort of knowledge humans possess that LLMs don't (and in fact can't, without a fundamental architectural change), which is knowledge of how certain one is about something.

If you ask a human a question about how something works in biology, they will be able to give you an answer as well as a sort of "epistemic" citation (i.e. the difference between "I don't remember where exactly I originally read that, but I'm a research biologist and am quite certain that's how it works" versus "I don't remember where I read that - it's probably just something we learned about in biology class in high school. Take it with a grain of salt, as I could be misremembering.")

LLMs don't have this reflexive sense of their own knowledge - there's a fundamental divide between training data (their "knowledge") and context (their "memory") which causes them to not really be capable of understanding how they know what they know (or, indeed, whether they truly know it at all). If a model could be created where the context and training data were unified, like in a brain, I could see a more realistic path to general intelligence than what we have now.
by fern_ | 2025-09-06 14:17:09+00:00
Location: MD, USA Remote: Yes, open to hybrid/in-person for the right opportunity Willing to relocate: Yep Technologies: ML stack tech – PyTorch, Python, some Docker, Transformers, ConvNets, LLMs, etc Résumé/CV: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/tysam-code/a7c49dcb72416b9cf62c399f882ae7b5/raw/6931376658adaf545c20f928247e8fe6851f3f14/fern_resume.txt (curlable, originally made for 80 px terminal. basic tech filter) Email: hi [.dot.] re [.dot.] tysam [atsymbol] gmail [.dot.] com

Hi! I’m fern. I’m an experienced ML researcher and developer (almost 10 years total!) with a wide arena of experience including computer vision and language modeling. I have an excellent intuition for research directions and am good at building codebases that allow for rapid research iteration. In the open source world, I’ve set the world records for several benchmarks, nearly tripling the speed of a longstanding CIFAR10 world record (~17.1s -> 6.3s, https://github.com/tysam-code/hlb-CIFAR10, recognized by Karpathy: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1620103412686942208), setting a modded-nanogpt speed record and helping with several others (5.03m -> 4.66m, https://github.com/KellerJordan/modded-nanogpt/blob/master/r... ), improving the relative loss of DiLoCo speedrunning on modded-nanogpt by over 40% (https://x.com/hi_tysam/status/1928561266533990587), and miscellaneous other misadventures throughout the years.

I’m looking to be challenged in a strong technical environment with other people who I can learn from, and I’m open to work on most interesting problems that I think are neutral or bring something positive to the world. I’m very hard-problem oriented, and am quite skilled at distilling complex, slow, brittle training procedures down to simple, performant, and hackable ones. The kinds of problems that engage me the most are ones where I can always be growing and learning, and that’s the kind of environment that I’ll thrive in. Learning new subdomains (molecular, etc) is something that keeps me driven, I love the process of expanding out my toolkit. I also very much enjoy working on problems well within my domain of expertise.

My focus is on data/architecture/training dynamics and debugging for training efficiency more than raw low-level kernel creation, though the two go hand-in-hand. I enjoy mentoring people quite a bit! I am looking to learn working with larger-scale distributed runs, scale is something that I’d like to work with a bit more.

If you think this may align with what you’re doing – say hi! I’d love to chat.
by stego-tech | 2025-09-06 14:17:18+00:00
These times really do feel like those once-in-a-century redefinitions of work and labor, similar to how we got Child Labor Laws and 40-hour work weeks from the labor movement early last century. Intrinsically, more people are realizing that the former social contract was long ago fed into a shredder, and that the lack of a formal contract will have consequences. Technology broke down the 40-hour work week by enabling more work to be done both outside the office and after traditional working hours, drastically increasing productivity and profit while wages stagnated for decades in the face of skyrocketing costs. Now we’re racing ahead towards a breaking point between Capital cheering shit like 996 and AI job-replacement, while more humans can’t afford rent, or food, let alone education or healthcare on their burrito taxi wages.

Something will eventually have to give, if we aren’t proactive in addressing the crises before us. Last time, it took two World Wars, the military bombing miners, law enforcement assassinating union organizers, and companies stockpiling chemical weapons and machine guns before the political class finally realized things must change or all hell would break loose; I only hope we come to our senses far, far sooner this time around.
by nunobrito | 2025-09-06 14:17:32+00:00
Programming language is a tool. Java developers value stability and ease of understanding for the code. I've seen the nice features you complain that don't get used, reality is that nobody wants to waste time knowing them unless they are intuitive to use. Especially when are forcing to use newer JDKs.

There is no value in solving a challenge in a way that only you understand or make others lose time trying to understand the logic.

Java 8 was the peak of development age for the JDK. Everything that came after isn't really memorable nor helpful, especially lambdas. You mention "var", why would we ever want in Java to hold a variable that you can't read immediately what is the type? That is a source of bugs and time waste to track down what object is being used.

I don't mind you are happy with all these changes, just remember that we absolutely don't care about them nor will make much of an effort because in the end of the day we don't want to follow the same route of other programming languages unable to handle gigantic and complex platform systems.

This isn't a competition to showoff who can apply new tricks, we absolutely don't care about functional programming. Java code must be simple and easy for anyone to read, that's it.