MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by baxtr | 2025-11-30 08:49:13+00:00
You need to have the money, the energy, and patience to experiment until you get it right.

Money: do it while you’re young and don’t need a lot. Or get first rich. Or collect enough money on a dream.

Energy: again being young helps. Having 2 smalls kids and old parents doesn’t.

Patience: that’s the more esoterical part. It’s hard to know when to keep on grinding and when to quit.
by viccis | 2025-11-30 08:53:01+00:00
Many private colleges like Rice cover 100% of costs for all students with parents under a fairly high salary. Almost 40% of MIT students have financial aid that's equal or greater than their tuition. This is starting to get more and more common for elite colleges and universities.

I got a full ride plus stipend to a pretty good but not great school, but one of the things I wish my parents pushed me on harder was applying to schools like MIT where I didn't bother applying because I didn't want to be saddled with debt. This was a couple decades back, and it's so much easier to get a full ride now if you can make it in (admittedly much harder now).

My point isn't to write off community college. It's that a talented and accomplished high schooler should set their sights higher because the old idea that all these elite colleges are unaffordable is rapidly changing.

Also, I am not sure if you know people taking CC courses recently, but they are often taught in a way that gives you what you paid for at $0. Prerecorded canned lectures, infuriating and curiosity crushing online worksheets, etc. I know multiple people who were excited to do free CC when it was made free for older (30+) students whose academic aims were immediately stamped out within one semester because there was no college instruction. Just endless online worksheets. These things exist in other higher ed paths too, but truly not to the extent that I've witnessed.
by menaerus | 2025-11-30 08:53:04+00:00
Mixed mode is about the same function compiled with different evaluation semantics in different TUs, and it is legit. The only case they are wondering about is how deal with inlined functions and they suggest ABI extensions to support it during the link-time. None of what you said is an issue.

> The possibility to have a have a well-formed program in which the same function was compiled with different evaluation semantics in different translation units (colloquially called “mixed mode”) raises the question of which evaluation semantic will apply when that function is inline but is not actually inlined by the compiler and is then invoked. The answer is simply that we will get one of the evaluation semantics with which we compiled.

> For use cases where users require strong guarantees about the evaluation semantics that will apply to inline functions, compiler vendors can add the appropriate information about the evaluation semantic as an ABI extension so that link-time scripts can select a preferred inline definition of the function based on the configuration of those definitions.
by josephg | 2025-11-30 08:53:28+00:00
> The ergonomics of C are excellent

That is a matter of opinion.

Personally when I write C, I miss memory safety. And thread safety. I miss non-nullable types. I miss having a good way to return results. And generics. And tuples. And real enums (sum types). I miss having a sane build system. I miss having IDEs that just work with my projects. I miss having a well designed standard library. I miss being able to hit build and have it more or less work on every OS. I miss having a good package manager. And a sane macro language. I wish I didn't need to write header files. And I wish my header files didn't need to be parsed MxN times. I miss fixed integer types just being built into the language - like u8/u16/u32/... And real strings. And on and on.

C compilers are fast and mature, so that's a plus. And C binaries are tiny. I mean, C has aged surprisingly well given the language is 53 years old. But its a really old language. And it shows. I would never use it for a new project, because it seems worse in every way compared to languages like Zig, Odin and Rust.

> and the performance seems to be more like Java or C# than Python.

Alright, I was exaggerating. But I still don't want my linux workstation to feel like a big java program.

> The point is that you don't have to rewrite anything, so even the ergonomics of C don't matter.

As I said in another comment, I really agree with this. Fil-C makes a lot of sense to me if the goal is to simply take existing legacy software and recompile it in a more memory safe way. But I don't think that's how the developers see it. I think they want fil-C so rust developers shut up, and they can go back to writing C code forever and ever and ever.
by kiba | 2025-11-30 08:53:58+00:00
I don't know what AI native folks will look like. To me, it looks like just replacing skilled labors with unskilled labors as opposed to giving humans new skills.

AI to me will be valuable when it's helping humans learn and think more strategically and when they're actually teaching humans or helping humans spot contradiction and vetting for reliable information. Fact checking is extremely labor intensive work after all.

Or otherwise if AI is so good, just replace humans.

Right now, the most legible use of AI is AI slop and misinformation.
by 1659447091 | 2025-11-30 08:54:18+00:00
While not a tech company founder, Oprah Winfrey created a media empire. She was born to a teenage mother in rural Mississippi (and poverty).

If someone wants a story about overcoming one's lot in life through grit, hard work and making the most of situations/opportunities her story is one you'll want; maybe not as relatable as the Bezos, Dell, Jobs, Musk etc but a story that poverty->billionaire entrepreneur can happen. There is also a reason she is the only one I can think of that fits description.
by maxglute | 2025-11-30 08:55:52+00:00
> in terms of raw productivity

In terms of dubious financialized metrics of productivity, i.e. debt + fx driven growth. Which is valid indicator, but also the same inflated indicator that suggests 2025 tertiary that cost 200% 1980 tertiary (income/inflation adjusted) is somehow more productive and not parasitic. The entire problem is spreadsheet doing gangbusters is dependenant on increasingly inequitable CoL extraction to prop up GDP flows. US economy would appear much less powerhouse if not for all the disproportionate financiailization/rent extraction from inelastic sectors (rent/education/health etc) aggregated over past 40 years over functionally comparable value goods/services.
Show HN: I cross-compiled llama.cpp to run on Windows XP
by dandinu | 2025-11-30 08:56:28+00:00
Had a dumb thought: what if someone in 2003 could run a local LLM on their machine? XP desktop, rolling hills wallpaper, maybe Winamp in the corner—and you just chat with an AI locally.

I saw there were some attempts on Reddit, so I tried it myself.

Cross-compiled llama.cpp from macOS targeting Windows XP 64-bit. Main hurdles: downgrading cpp-httplib to v0.15.3 (newer versions explicitly block pre-Win8), replacing SRWLOCK/CONDITION_VARIABLE with XP-compatible threading primitives, and the usual DLL hell.

Qwen 2.5-0.5B runs at ~2-8 tokens/sec on period-appropriate hardware. Not fast, but it works.

Video demoand build instructions in the write-up.

Claude helped with most of the debugging on the build system. I just provided the questionable life choices.
by paulbjensen | 2025-11-30 08:56:31+00:00
In theory you can change the licence and hope that those that use the software respect the licence terms, but that depends on trusting others.

I think of the case of the Russian programmer who was arrested and jailed for stealing proprietary code from Goldman Sachs. During the trial it was revealed that Goldman Sachs would use open source software and replace the software licence with their own:

"Open source was an idea that depended on collaboration and sharing, and Serge had a long history of contributing to it. He didn’t fully understand how Goldman could think it was O.K. to benefit so greatly from the work of others and then behave so selfishly toward them. “You don’t create intellectual property,” he said. “You create a program that does something.” But from then on, on instructions from Schlesinger, he treated everything on Goldman Sachs’s servers, even if it had just been transferred there from open source, as Goldman Sachs’s property. (At Serge’s trial Kevin Marino, his lawyer, flashed two pages of computer code: the original, with its open-source license on top, and a replica, with the open-source license stripped off and replaced by the Goldman Sachs license.)"

From: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldma...
by vga42 | 2025-11-30 08:57:09+00:00
At this point, I have almost 30 years of daily driving Linux desktop experience, and several decades of professional Linux experience. I have tried and kind of liked NixOS and although I prefer the simplicity of Arch Linux, I see how it would be useful in a professional scenario with lots of servers to upkeep.

But Fedora Atomic confuses the hell out of me. To recommend it to potential Linux newbies and as the great next thing feels bizarre to me.
by throw_a_grenade | 2025-11-30 08:59:06+00:00
No, this is backwards. Fun is trying new things (I think it's evolutionary mechanism that ensure kids are learning by default), and once the thing has been tried, it's not new anymore, so won't be tried again. Best thing we can actually do is to channel that, as OP proposed.

If only we had cheap, multi-use inflatable exit ramps that deflate, fold and stow themselves after use. Which is not a thing, apparently.
by charlie-83 | 2025-11-30 08:59:51+00:00
I'm fascinated by people like this. Why would you give up the ability to have uninterrupted interactions with family and friends in exchange for running Walmart? I know the answer is money but I would assume that, at a certain point, you have more than enough money to do literally anything you want in the little bit of time you leave yourself to not be working.

I would understand if she was running a huge charity; she would feel that interrupting family time is a sacrifice she makes to improve the world. But, Walmart is just a mechanism to extract value from customers.
by jongjong | 2025-11-30 09:02:05+00:00
I solved this problem by not making my project open source. Instead I launched a limited-supply cryptocurrency for it and made it a rule that anyone who owns at least x tokens is entitled to a copy of the code with full rights to use, read and modify... Because there are a limited number of tokens, it means that there are a limited number of licenses and token price would go up with demand.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-11-30 09:03:08+00:00
If those ships chose to not fly a flag, they'd even have justification to do so. And if they did choose to fly a flag, then that country would have the responsibility to police them, and is the US complained to that country, that country might just withdraw protection anyway. Data center ships just want to loiter where convenient, they're not cigarette boats flying along at 100mph... no way to evade a navy that wants to blow them out of the water.
by yoz-y | 2025-11-30 09:03:15+00:00
Most attempts fail and if you get into debt you don’t get to try again.

I agree that it takes a special kind of person to try and try again, but it clearly is not for everyone.

A lot has to come together, you need to be alone, have a very supportive partner or be a sociopath (willing to drag your family down with you). You need to be in the right place (or have the means to move there). This usually works when you are young, so definitely having starting capital from somewhere works. This was much easier in the marking moments of technology where any simple tool or game could be transformed into cash. Nowadays you really need to luck out.

Europe has generally better safety net and much less entrepreneurship spirit for example. So it pushes both ways.

I guess one last thing is this weird thing in the US where investors somehow like people who previously failed. Like Elizabeth Holmes who reportedly went from prison right back into the game. With that environment of course it makes sense to just try again.
by kopirgan | 2025-11-30 09:04:29+00:00
IIRC Mark Andreessen once said colleges esp ivy league ones, simplify the job of recruiters by acting as filters. Saves them the bother. So they attached lots of value.

I guess that's true even now but in a perverse sort of way. As markers of indoctrination and unsuitability for productive corporate roles.

Employers probably decided to avoid them.

That's not fair to a large number of students but the old system of colleges being markers of intelligence, suitability etc was not fair to large number of others either..
by soulofmischief | 2025-11-30 09:04:49+00:00
The book has been extremely transformative for me at multiple points in my life as I've aged. If I could only recommend a single piece of fiction, it would probably be The Little Prince.

I also highly recommend the 2015 animated film adaptation. It has a rock-solid cast, and presents the classic story within entirely new layers of interpretation that speak to multiple generations at once. It's a real tearjerker that only gets more potent with age.

I'm also not sure why so many commenters here seem confused or negative towards The Little Prince. It is a timeless, culture-invariant treatise on the most precious and important facets of human existence.
by seec | 2025-11-30 09:04:55+00:00
This can only be true if the society gets richer over timer from this process. Considering that EU has actually become poorer and the gap is becoming larger every year passing, your theory of benefits from a well-educated populace is not well funded.

In the EU, the risk has been loaded onto everyone but the benefits are meager at best, and inexistent in practice. This is the typical problem of socialist system where everyone bear the cost but the benefits are only distributed to those in power or those who could manipulate the system for their own benefits.

If that wasn't true, France wouldn't be in the political turmoil and economic disaster that it is today. Unsurprisingly, France has been dominated by marxist adjacent ideologies, co-opted by the "resistants", the real winners of WW2. The US won on the ground but largely lost the ideological battle, we are now seeing the result of that invisible battleground.
by pu_pe | 2025-11-30 09:05:21+00:00
It's not slightly better margins, we are talking about huge cost reductions on the main expense which is compute. In a context where companies are making trillion dollar investments, it matters a lot.

Also, performance and user choice are definitely impacted by compute. If they ever find a way to replace a job with LLMs, those who can throw more compute at it for a lower price point will win.
by Arisaka1 | 2025-11-30 09:05:36+00:00
>Interesting how many people in a hacker forum

I learned to accept the fact that HN reached a critical mass point that made it fill up with people who market themselves as "product-oriented engineers", which is a way to say "I only build things when they lead to products".

People commiting to the hacker ethos that consists of, among many other things, resistance to the established tools, embracing knowledge and code sharing, and exploration for its own sake are the minority.

The fact that there are many commenters who will claim that they finally build something they weren't able to build before and it's all thanks to LLM's is evidence that we already sacrificed the pursuit of personal competence, softly reframing it as "LLM competence", without caring about the implications.

Because obviously, every kid that dreamt of becoming a software engineer thought about orchestrating multiple agentic models that talk to each other and was excited about reviewing their output over and over again while editing markdown files.

The hackers are dead. Long live the hackers.
by overfeed | 2025-11-30 09:06:03+00:00
> The inheritors and descendants of those that directly created the problem are screaming at the colleges as the problem

Not to mention rank-and-file American conservatives who see universities as bastions of liberal thought/power, and create threadbare, post-hoc arguments as to why universities have to be dismantled or politically reeducated when partisanship has to be disguised.
by jpalawaga | 2025-11-30 09:06:23+00:00
I will give you an upvote to offset the negative expressions. I've heard of at least one instance at a very well known Bay Area university in such a class.

From what was described to me, and I trust this person to not misrepresent their experience, was that they were essentially told 'hi, cis white male, sit down and don't say a damn thing, this isn't your place to talk'. And then go on to essentially present a curriculum that was essentially a myriad of thinly-veiled misandry, compounded by extremely clear classroom rules/culture where any opposition was decidedly unwanted by the lecturers.

I'm the first to champion equal rights and equal opportunity, but that that sort of thing was going on in higher ed left a bad taste in my mouth.
by gregjor | 2025-11-30 09:06:33+00:00
As you note, the software industry lacks meaningful definitions of "productivity." We talk about it as if we agree on what it means, but can't measure it or compare it across teams, projects, or business domains.

Studies I've seen thrown around come from companies such as Microsoft and OpenAI and Anthropic, all of which have deep vested interests in pushing the AI productivity narrative, so I hesitate to trust them. Digging in, their data seems either anecdotal or based on the kinds of mostly-useless metrics you listed above.

We won't know for years, maybe decades, whether AI tools benefit or hinder software development. Probably some combination. I think the most serious follow-on effect of AI in software development will come from the short-sighted decision to hire fewer junior programmers, which will lead to a shortage of experienced senior programmers. Executives and investors won't feel that pain for a while, they can cash in their shares and options today. Supply and demand will raise salaries for senior programmers, and the shortage will impose delays and opportunity costs. Those costs may outweigh whatever short-term and I think superficial gains AI tools may offer now.
by DocIsInDaHouse | 2025-11-30 09:07:10+00:00
yep, in fact, I did use LLMs to formulate the text (I used several one, t'il I got the result that I wanted) and tweak some parts of it manually - Here are the prompts that I used:

"it's always the process, stupid!

In the context of business IT, it is always and only about BPO, nothing else. so if you want to be successful implementing AI in the enterprise context, you have to handle it like every other software tool: look at your processes and find out how AI, agentic or not, can help optimize the process or help build a better process. Like every technology, AI dont make more intelligent, it only makes faster

write me a blog post to express this ideas"

and i added this in a second step

"i need to integrate another idea:

AI is very good at handling unstructured data, in fact, it's the first tool that is very useful for that. But most processes that uses unstructured data are not documented, as they are also often unstructured. So to implement AI in processes, we must improve our process design"

Fact: when you know what you want to achieve, AI can be very useful, especially for lazy people like me ;)
by input_sh | 2025-11-30 09:08:10+00:00
The pocket emerald story that comes before that "we were very wealthy" line is even more telling. It's missing from that Independent article, but that article's based on this Business Insider interview: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musks-dad-tells-bi-abou...

> Elon, by his father’s recollection then probably 16 years old, and his brother Kimbal, decided to sell emeralds to Tiffany & Co. on Fifth Avenue in New York – one of the world's most famous jewelers – as his father lay sleeping. "They just walked into Tiffany’s and said, ‘Do you want to buy some emeralds?’" Errol recalled in an interview with Business Insider South Africa. "And they sold two emeralds, one was for $800 and I think the other one was for $1,200."

> A few days later the family returned to the store to find that Tiffany was selling the $800 emerald, now set in a ring, for $24,000 -- a markup of 30 times the price Elon had received for the gem.

> Errol has used the story as on object lesson in how retail works ever since. He was surprised but not concerned by the incident, Errol says, because money was plentiful.

> “We were very wealthy,” says Errol. “We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe.”

So, selling-emeralds-to-Tiffany's-at-16 rich.
by imtringued | 2025-11-30 09:08:34+00:00
>It also underscored for me how women, especially women with certain bodies, can't escape being sexualized no matter what they do or wear.

You also can't escape being ugly and receiving the opposite reaction as a man.

There are so many things that you can't escape that it seems pretty suspect to focus on this one in particular. The most obvious aspect of being alive is that your body is mortal. You will never be able to escape that fact. You also cannot escape chronic diseases that negatively impact your life every single day.

The idea that men and women pair up to produce new life together is one of the more wholesome aspects of life. There are plenty of insects where one of the partners dies in the process and many species that don't care for the young.
by nosianu | 2025-11-30 09:09:16+00:00
Man made stuff does not self-repair and self-replicate.

So, no. You are not thinking far enough, only the next step. But it is a complex vast network, and every single thing in it except the humans has that man-made item deficiency of decay without renewal.

You miss even repairs of the tiniest item - which in turn requires repairing he repairers, everything eventually stops.

Humans have to intervene fixing unforeseen problems all the time! It is humans that hold all those systems together.

Even if you had AGI, human brains are far from perfect too so that would not change anything in the end, we have biology to the rescue (of us in general, not necessarily the individual ofc) when we miss stuff.
by sabjut | 2025-11-30 09:09:19+00:00
Luckily we have made plenty of advertising laws in the pre-AI era ensuring that things have to be disclosed quite clearly.

However I'd still bet that OpenAI is gonna be hit with a multi-billion dollar fine from the EU within 5 years of rolling out this feature. And they will pay and move along. Just how big tech works these days.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-11-30 09:09:48+00:00
"Bad guys can't use it" is per definition incompatible with free software.

For this author's definition of "bad guys" (megacorps), AGPL is probably the easiest poison pill. As with all poison pills, this will also make many (most?) "good" users unable to use it.

This project is no curl or database engine, it seems to be a slightly easier way to set HTTP response headers. I bet most of the uses are transitive (someone using something that uses something that uses a framework that uses something that uses this project).

In particular, this project is something small enough that nobody will pay for it, not because it's not worth it, but because the friction of paying for it is higher than rewriting it from scratch. And "the bad guys" are unlikely to use it directly in their major products due to the pure nature of it.

In most cases, but especially this one IMO, you just get to choose wheter to contribute to the commons, the actual commons, for everyone, including "the bad guys" - or not.