MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do I found OSS project that don't commerical backing?
by mattfrommars | 2025-10-09 02:15:43+00:00
Lately, I've been thinking that a great way to upskill would to find an OSS project that I find interesting and jump in. However, I am not sure what to feel to contribute to project that already have commercial backing.

Do people contribute to project that already have full time employee to build them? I honestly don't know how this is suppose to work.

For instance, I kind of want to know how these AI assistant VS code extension work, for example, Cline, Roo Coder, Kilo, etc. Yes, their source code is available but I believe for me to fully grasp the system, I will need to make an attempt to code. However, these project seem to have commercial backing.

Does it make sense to contribute to them vs project built by someone in his free time for fun? For example, this comes to my mind

https://github.com/unknownskl/greenlight
by reissbaker | 2025-10-09 02:16:04+00:00
Not sure I follow the first part of what you're saying.

For the part where you're describing what's possible or not in TypeScript/JS, though, you're incorrect:

You can't do something like title("hi") vs title({attr:123}, "hi")

Yes, you can. In JS it's trivial; in TypeScript, you can even do it while preserving type safety. Here's the function in TypeScript:

// First define which signatures are allowed function title(content: string): string; function title(attrs: Record<string, any>, content: string): string; // Then, implement the function, handling the two possible cases: function(contentOrAttrs: string | Record<string, any>, maybeContent?: string) { const content = typeof contentOrAttrs === "string" ? contentOrAttrs : maybeContent!; const attrs = typeof contentOrAttrs === "string" ? {} : contentOrAttrs; // now use content and attrs as you please }

This will be typechecked by the compiler so that if you call title("hi"), it'll know there are no more arguments, and if you call title({ attr: 123 }, "hi"), it'll validate that the first argument is a Record<string, any> and the second argument is a string.
by tombert | 2025-10-09 02:16:37+00:00
I used to work at a very large fruit company. I won't say the name because I don't want you to Think Different about them (and because I don't want as much correlation data about me on this account).

On the first day, one of the first things they had me do was set up email filters with an elaborate home-built email filtering system. The reason for this was because I would get thousands upon thousands of emails per day (not hyperbole), most of which were irrelevant to me, and if you didn't have fairly fine-grained and elaborate filtering your important emails would certainly be lost, often within minutes.

The solution to this problem, of course, would be to stop sending so many emails, or have better control over who was getting the emails, but instead the onus was put on everyone downstream to figure out which emails were spam (and to get yelled at if we didn't respond to an email because an important one got caught in the mix).

I complained about this a few times, and people's responses would always respond about how filters could solve this problem, and it always annoyed me. If someone is dumping a metric ton of trash in my backyard every day on top of my Amazon packages, the solution is not to figure out an optimal way to categorize and sort the trash to best differentiate it from my packages, the solution is to get that person to stop dumping garbage on me.

They were unimpressed by this reasoning.
by throwaway8902 | 2025-10-09 02:17:07+00:00
Wow, very surprised to see someone mention ewk on HN of all places. So surprised in fact that I created an account to respond to you! I’ve been following him on the zen subreddit for over 10 years now, off and on. He really is an absolute sight to behold. And I’m sure there is a name for it.
by jdlshore | 2025-10-09 02:17:12+00:00
I’ve not read the paper, but it appears to be suffering the same fallacy that AI boosters tend to suffer: the mighty “if.”

Yes, if AI is godlike, then the first company to leverage the machine god will be rewarded.

But it’s not. The “benefits of AI” are a combination of placebo, automation of mediocre work, and few modest points of leverage.
by malfist | 2025-10-09 02:17:27+00:00
> RE: CODESMITH. For starters as an example, Codesmith's website, email, and entire AWS account was down for 3 weeks because they got locked out from not updating their credit card and then losing the root password and their 2-factor was a phone number. This is unacceptable.

Everything I can find online, including your post on reddit about the outage, says the outage was for 4 days. Not 3 weeks.

I'll also note that your post on reddit about the outage was phrased as if you were a student impacted by the outage, going so far as to say it was your "final straw" even though you don't have skin in the game other than as a competitor.
by CyberDildonics | 2025-10-09 02:17:51+00:00
It's tricky to decode all this but there are a lot of misconceptions.

First, amdahl's law just says that the non parallel parts of a program become more of a bottleneck as the parallel parts are split up more. It's trivial and obvious, it has nothing to do with being able to scale to more cores because it has nothing to do with how much can be parallelized.

Second in your other comment, there is nothing special about "rust having the semantics" for NUMA. People have been programming NUMA machines since they existed (obviously). NUMA just means that some memory addresses are local and some are not local. If you want things to be fast you need to use the addresses that are local as much as possible.
by bobbiechen | 2025-10-09 02:17:59+00:00
Agreed. Every now and then I search the name of my employer on Reddit, which pulls up a bunch of plausible looking comments that recommend a variety of tools. Then if you look at the comment closely, it doesn't make any sense. And if you look at the account, they only makes comments that mention an assortment of companies + one specific one that they're really shilling.

There's a variety of these marketing spambots on Reddit, and I'm sure like the toupee effect, there are more subtle ones that I'm not noticing. I think this is existential in the long run for Reddit as a platform, but maybe the owners/employees are happy to milk all the value out and walk away from the husk.
by N70Phone | 2025-10-09 02:18:02+00:00
Part of what's concerning here is that the deals are conditional. OpenAI must meet XYZ conditions before cash/stock/etc is transferred, and the conditions are pretty hard to meet.

The money between OpenAI, Nvidia, Oracle, AMD is not circulating. There is no cashflow, only future commitments that may (and quite likely will) collapse. Yet the stock market & media react as if it's a sure thing. Even in the criticisms of these deals, the hype is affirmed.

This is the same problem as Enron's accounting, minus the fraud. (No need for fraudulent accounting when people simply don't read the fine print.)
by randycupertino | 2025-10-09 02:19:02+00:00
Two other recent examples:

1. The singer D4vd is sole mod of his fan subdeddit and deletes every post about the the dead body recently found in the trunk of his Tesla:

https://www.tvfandomlounge.com/singer-d4vd-apparently-deleti...

2. Influencer Paige Lorenze is a mod of nycinfluencer snark and she prolifically deletes all unflattering threads and specifically all photos of her from before her numerous plastic surgeries:

https://www.reddit.com/r/nycinfluencersnarking/comments/1e63...
by zippyman55 | 2025-10-09 02:19:04+00:00
In my group, I had an over confident employee that was at times very smart. But, I could not ever really trust him as his confidence prevented him changing his mind based on the facts. He could lead you over a cliff. the LLMs are similar. They can spit out great content for coding, but you always had to have a careful eye on output, the design, the scalability, and the ability to support.
by jychang | 2025-10-09 02:19:07+00:00
It's obviously about latency. How do you not see the latency aspect of it?

Latency is directly bound by the speed of light. A computer the size of the earth's orbit will be bound by latency of 8 minutes. A computer the size of 2x of earth's orbit will be bound by a latency of 16 minutes, but have 4x the maximum information storage capacity.

The size of the book is directly proportional to the speed of light. Ever heard of ping? Does the universe you live in have infinite speed of light, and therefore you don't see how R contributes to latency?
by jrflowers | 2025-10-09 02:19:28+00:00
I don’t know what to tell you guy, but when people see money moving in a circle in a deal there is a good chance that “circular deal” might pop into their heads. Because it’s a deal that is shaped like a circle.

> Is that circular?

Doesn’t really seem so because at the end of the day the money goes from me to them. I don’t get my money back, I get a car in exchange for my money.

Also this deal didn’t begin with the manufacturer purchasing shares of me before offering me debt to buy a car from them.

>But that is exactly what happens most of the time when people buy a car.

Your car manufacturer leases your car back from you? And you use that revenue to raise debt to buy more cars from them? What manufacturer are you doing this with? What do you end up driving?
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-10-09 02:19:38+00:00
But it leads to something more important.

"If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing."
by vunderba | 2025-10-09 02:19:52+00:00
You can have Lovable do the design and then sync it to a GitHub repo. Then you can pull it down locally and further refine with Cursor.

Just be aware that under the hood Lovable is strictly react (or at least it was the last time I checked it) so that might be a important variable to consider since I saw that you were using Laravel.
by Braxton1980 | 2025-10-09 02:20:17+00:00
>Mods can ban anyone for any reason

Yes, they can and that's how it's set up. Each community makes their own rules and can choose who participates.

It's not Reddit. It's the sub that made the decision and I'm not sure how it would be possible for Reddit the company to deal with sub level rule complaints and appeals.
by orthozato | 2025-10-09 02:20:24+00:00
I 100% get where you are coming from; however, in the ER setting, multiple non life threatening conditions could cause these symptoms (I assume paramedics don't get as much experience in in-hospital settings, please correct me if I am wrong as I am not from the US!)

That said, there was a cascade of errors that ultimately led to this very very unfortunate outcome (that maybe could have been prevented, or maybe not)

Had the chest x-ray been ordered perhaps his enlarged heart could have been noticed in due time.

I do not mean to be pretentious in any way. I hope my english does not interfere with this.
by diab0lic | 2025-10-09 02:21:54+00:00
When people buy a car they sometimes get a loan from the auto manufacturer’s financial services arm. What they don’t usually get are warrants struck at a penny for 10% of the manufacturer.

You sound like you know what you’re talking about. I only think I know what I’m talking about. Help me understand: What am I missing in the OpenAI / AMD deal that makes it non circular?
by treesknees | 2025-10-09 02:22:04+00:00
There is an open source server that implements the protocols used by AIM including TOC and Oscar. You can run TiK like it’s 2001 again.

https://github.com/mk6i/retro-aim-server/

https://github.com/mk6i/retro-aim-server/blob/main/docs/CLIE...
by _carbyau_ | 2025-10-09 02:22:30+00:00
Early date with the now-wife, we ride a little way out of town and watch the sunset.

Then I realise in my consideration for the lady to guide her off the bike, I hadn't actually turned the ignition key off and the headlight had drained the battery.

Now a 2006 GSXR1000 idles in first gear at about 20km/hr (~12-14mph?). And a 100m quick-waddle found 1st no good for bump starting due to compression lockup...

Thankfully we'd stopped on a ridgeline and only another 300m away was the descent which allowed me to get to 40kmhr for a second gear bump start.

2nd gear lesson learned about this bike.

Date saved.
by array_key_first | 2025-10-09 02:22:43+00:00
> personally agree with the so-called common dipshit libertarian 17-year-old response.

The reason it's a common dipshit libertarian 17-year-old is that the premise is we should just be okay with everything, because everything is inevitable, and if X doesn't do it then Y will, and that's how the world works.

Not only is it a horribly cynical view on the world, bordering on Emo (hence the 17 year old part), it's also just obviously not true or desirable.

No, not everything is inevitable. No, actually, we can at least try to discourage stuff. We do it all the time. Like, guns are a thing that exists. But I can't shoot you in the face, that's still illegal.

Obviously legality is not the end-all be-all. But we don't need perfect solutions, that's a programmer's fantasy. Every abstraction is leaky, down to the cellular level. Welcome to Earth. But we can, and do, employ mitigations!

Also, regarding the desirable part: even if you like AI, there's plenty of stuff you don't like. You wouldn't accept "well that's the way it is and we've tried nothing and we're all out of solutions so tough shit", would you?

I mean, maybe you would, but again - that's cynical! And it just sucks too. I don't want to live in that world. I think, actually, nobody does. Anywhere. If they do, it's out of a bizarre desire for self-destruction. Which... okay, fair, but get therapy or something.
by chroot333 | 2025-10-09 02:22:47+00:00
I remember people on HN arguing with me years ago that digital was better than analog/vinyl.

I lived through the 70s and 80s and nothing is the same as CRTs and actual vector graphics the way they were meant to be: shooting electrons at your head, making your eyes red, probably increasing cancer rates, and looking fucking awesome. Nothing beats them. I miss TV snow and I miss real vector graphics.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-10-09 02:24:18+00:00
These sorts of outlooks are notoriously hard to predict.

Paul Tudor Jones (one of the most successful investors of our time) is of the mindset that if anything we are about to see equity appreciation far in excess of what we have seen for decades.

https://fortune.com/2025/10/07/paul-tudor-jones-hedge-fund-b...

If that's the case, right when you're looking to rebalance your portfolio, you're going to be looking at a much more difficult decision, having already missed out on price appreciation that would be quite useful in padding downside risk...

Perhaps just step away from market cap weighted index funds as a long term adjustment. That's something that with a proper basic framework is advisable as a general portfolio management approach as well. (I have some SMLF - Smallcap Quality/Value, Berkshire, generic Global Equity exposure, not for outright returns, but to lower exposure to the concentrated passive market cap weighted indexes and diversify risk exposures).

Trend Following exposure is a great add as well, since it is negatively correlated with risk assets in many macro/market regimes.

Probably healthier to address your very real concern with modifying the long-term portfolio design rather than take a short-term market timing approach which is more of a negative expected value.
by elephanlemon | 2025-10-09 02:24:29+00:00
I think it would be better if Reddit took more ownership. In other words, instead of hosting a platform where anyone can claim a subreddit as their little domain, and then it’s theirs forever, Reddit could say that the subreddits belong to the people that use them. For example, perhaps they could institute some sort of system where members of a subreddit could vote out moderators who abuse their power.
by manlymuppet | 2025-10-09 02:24:33+00:00
All of these formerly technical terms have become re-used to the point of no return. I don't know if these are actually all the technical terms for intellectual disability, but it's an interesting evolution of language nonetheless.

Further reading on the "euphemism treadmill" - a term for this kind of thing. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/euphemism_treadmill
by sarchertech | 2025-10-09 02:24:41+00:00
Those are some obvious potential superstitious incantations. They might not be superstitions though. They might actually work. It’s entirely feasible that bribes produce higher quality code. Unfortunately it’s not as easy as avoiding things that sound ridiculous.

The black box, random, chaotic nature of LLMs virtually ensures that you will pick up superstitions even if they aren’t as obvious as the above. Numbered lists work better than bullets. Prompts work better if they are concise and you remove superfluous words. You should reset your context as soon as the agent starts doing x.

All of those things may be true. They may have been true for one model, but not others. They may have never been generally true for any model, but randomness led someone to believe they were.
by SilverElfin | 2025-10-09 02:24:43+00:00
I think the reason it feels offensive is that subreddits of common names feel like they should be more democratically managed or held to a high standard. Instead it’s a bunch of fiefdoms and if you create an alternate subreddit with a poor name it just won’t get readers. Codebootcamp2 or whatever is doomed from the start because of the importance of names.
by throw0101a | 2025-10-09 02:25:23+00:00
> I don't know about the violent overthrow stuff […]

Do you mean besides January 6? (You know, all those people that were convicted but were pardoned when Trump return to office. Also: have you noticed that the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers have stopped marching ever since the ICE raids started?)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capito...

Or perhaps the fake electors?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
by blueblisters | 2025-10-09 02:26:59+00:00
Ben’s original take about 1% of users being creators might end up being right eventually

Consider the Studio Ghibli phenomenon. It was fun to create and share photos of your loved ones in Ghibli aesthetics until that novelty wore off

Video models arguably have a lot more novelty to juice. But they will eventually get boring once you have explored the usually finite latent space of interesting content
by squirtle24 | 2025-10-09 02:27:40+00:00
The military gliders made sense because they were landing in hostile territory, usually nowhere near a runway for a return trip. Those gliders were pretty much a one-way, one-time-use vehicle. I guess the Waco glider could be used to argue that towing is technically feasible, but it was intended for a totally different use case. I don't see how it can be argued that it's more economical to run, especially considering the safety issues others have pointed out.

I'm no aerospace engineer but it seems like it would be more efficient to fly one single bigger plane than to tow a second one behind it. I suppose this might appeal to certain groups where they already own a plane, and want to increase capacity without buying a whole new plane. But the idea that it's 65% more efficient just seems pretty sketch. I could totally imagine some drug cartels using these though...
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-10-09 02:28:48+00:00
Everyday business isn’t based on hype.

The AI startup valuation largely is. I feel it quickly becomes circular because people make projections purely on other projections since the world is too impatient to wait and find out.

A single hamburger store is never going to be projected to have a billion dollars of revenue because people understand the total addressable market. Doesn’t matter how good the burger is.

The AI stuff is too new that people don’t have a firm grasp on the costs and profit opportunities. They don’t really even know how to define the TAM. Too many unknowns. Entire classes of labor could be replaced by AI —- or perhaps not.

With little grounding, it quickly becomes a circle of hype.
by elevation | 2025-10-09 02:29:42+00:00
By 7, children should already be practicing some personal disciplines in basic self care (teeth brushing) and managing their personal spaces.

10 years old is a good time to expand self care with additional hygiene (deodorant) ahead of adolescence, but it's also ideal to incorporate a few daily pushups or other calesthenics so this practice will be there during the years when their growth hormone levels will be the highest. And even 2 minutes of musical instrument practice daily can also be transformational.

A modest daily routine at a young age can be life changing.
by liquidgecka | 2025-10-09 02:29:47+00:00
My former company would send out rewards as a thank you to employees. It was basically a “click here to receive your free gift!” email. I kept telling the security team that this was a TERRIBLE president but it continued none the less. The first time I got one I didn’t open it for ages, even after confirming the company was real. It was only after like the 5th nagging email that I asked security about it and they confirmed that it was in fact a real thing the company was using. I got a roomba, a nice outdoor chair, and some sweet headphones. =)
by jychang | 2025-10-09 02:31:20+00:00
I mean, if you want to talk about our actual tech, it's bound by lithography of silicon chips, which are largely n^2, on printed circuit boards, which are n^2, on the surface area of the earth, which is n^2.

This has been observed since at least 2014: https://www.ilikebigbits.com/2014_04_21_myth_of_ram_1/3_fit....

Pretty much every physical metric pegs memory access as O(n^1/2).
by Merad | 2025-10-09 02:32:08+00:00
I built a memory tool about 6 months while playing with MCP, it was based on a SQLite db. My experience then was that Claude wasn't very good at using the tools. Even with instructions to be proactive about searching memory and saving new memories it would rarely do so. Once you did press it to be sure to save memories it would go overboard, basically saving every message in the conversation as a memory. Are seeing more success in getting natural and seamless usage of the memory tools?

IIRC at the time I was testing with Sonnet 3.7, I haven't tried it on the newer models.

Repo here: https://github.com/mbcrawfo/KnowledgeBaseServer
by Stratoscope | 2025-10-09 02:32:29+00:00
Thanks for asking. Kate developed severe asthma, to the point where she was taking prednisone every day and started carrying a portable breathing machine. Eventually she succumbed to her illness.

Her many friends, including myself, miss her dearly, but her memory lives on in all of us.

(Usually I would not share this kind of personal medical information in public, but Kate passed on nearly 50 years ago, and I didn't reveal her last name, so I think it's OK.)
by naveen99 | 2025-10-09 02:33:33+00:00
It’s just AMD levering up on its on stock. Similar to MSTR. AMD is taking a loan against its own shares to build gpu’s hoping to rent them out via OpenAI in the future. No point in betting against it, because it can’t get margin called until OpenAI goes bankrupt. Which isn’t happening until OpenAI is worth $10 trillion first.

From the OpenAI side, it’s an amazing deal. $35B profit in one day… at a pe of 30, it’s already worth a trillion if it can repeat similar deals every year.
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-10-09 02:33:40+00:00
It’s more like, “the executives with lots of shares can’t see how to make the company grow, so they’ll just use profits to pump up the share price for their gain”.

I deeply feel buybacks shouldn’t be illegal but treated shamefully.

Instead of using profits to build up long term savings or fund R&D, they basically choose to do as little as possible.

There is no vision.