MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by teddyh | 2025-11-09 19:07:51+00:00
> Most licenses require that forks change the name

I was under the impression that the opposite was the case; that requiring a name change was extremely rare, but some historically important free software packages had it (one such being LaTeX, IIRC), so it was, somewhat grudgingly, considered acceptable. But no normal licenses (like BSD, GPL, Apache, etc.) requires name changes today, AFAIK.
by beej71 | 2025-11-09 19:08:36+00:00
As an instructor, I think you should have your stuff private while you're a student in a particular class. Just share the repo with the instructor. The reasoning is that if someone steals your stuff, it's often hard for an instructor to tell who stole from whom. And that's just trouble you don't need. Yes, you can argue commit histories and all that, but why bother?

Once you're out of the class, there's no reason to keep it private in my humble opinion. The answers to everything every instructor gives in school is out there somewhere. And AI can solve most of them.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-11-09 19:08:43+00:00
Well, HN isn’t a part of the system I refer to, the system is the constitutional republic under the bill of rights. And you’ll notice as forced alignment is attempted in our system it gets litigated and often fails. The policy system is generally deliberative requiring input and consideration at minimum. Everything is reviewed by many layers of judicial review for fairness, and every six years the entire executive and legislative branch could undergo a total revolution. What i think is false is considered but isn’t by mandate so, no matter who I am - president, senator, HN poster. What is considered true today can be repudiated tomorrow.
by jrochkind1 | 2025-11-09 19:09:43+00:00
I'm in favor of everyone having fun however they want, and you have piqued my interest a bit that it might be fun.

But if even the proponents of the language say that ("needless to say"!) most programmers will be incapable of the challenge of writing good code in it... definitely doesn't sound like anything I'd want in anything I wanted to be maintainable or long-lasting. If this is the outcome you desire, then your, uh, anti-evangelism is working!
by PaulKeeble | 2025-11-09 19:10:07+00:00
In the age of AI it will at the very least be laundered through various commercial interests into commercial for profit tools. Depending on the license you intended to release the code under (and you should read into the various licenses and what they intend to achieve and protect and what they don't) that may or may not matter to you, but it is happening.

Fundamentally most code goes no where, no one shows much interest unless you release a hit project. It can however be really impactful in interviews and recruitment, if your code is readable and well tested and such then it can be quite a positive for the right types of organisations. So at some point you may very well want to make it public for this purpose.
by manquer | 2025-11-09 19:10:15+00:00
A lot of IT work that gets done in India is low skill things that could be automated even before AI codegen tools. These jobs are particularly vulnerable to AI productivity gains .

The thesis here is that current gen tools should enable 2 people do the work of 10 and LLM models get paid the budget of 2-3 devs.

The outsourcing org comes out ahead with spending only 70% as before (salary of remaining devs will naturally increase)

——

India is by far the largest market for this. 1yr free is for same reason any VC funded company discounts their product or gives it free first, or Microsoft famously rather have you use their software pirated than not at all.

This is only to get adoption, if your workers only know how to code with Claude or Codex then you are going to buy those tools as a company

Nobody is going back once you get them to change. OpenAI et al hope to capture 30% value of the IT outsourcing sector while making to cheaper by 30%. There is no free lunch.

——

The number of CS “grads” are not a useful metric for India.

The industry shifted to hiring other engineering streams to any grads with aptitude to learn a long while back.

The vast majority of them don’t have any programming skills, don’t have critical thinking skills, are poor at communication.

They are unemployable. Don’t take it from me, NASSCOM says this too.

The degrees are largely from mills that charge up to $80k-$100k (med degrees go even higher) promising jobs but don’t teach much.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-09 19:10:38+00:00
> Oh simple. Remove the glass and I pick the lock of the front door to your home and walk in at night while you, your wife and your kids are fast asleep and I scan the book that I want with a portable scanner. Not just one book. Many book across many nights. No damage done right? Once your wife and you find out that that’s all I’m doing you guys are totally ok with this.

So now you want to replace the things that aren't happening in the digital case with some other things that aren't happening in the digital case?

Your analogy is barely even an analogy. It's pretty obvious what the physical equivalent would be. You'd make a copy of the paperback as a hardcover, yourself in your own place with your own materials. Which doesn't seem nearly as objectionable as breaking into a bookstore or a house or stealing a physical object with a unit cost, because it isn't.

> What causes people to not steal other than good will? What causes people to not kill other than altruism. The government and society has several methods for this. Jail time? Locks? Etc. It’s just hard to do the same for piracy.

Which is why it would make a lot of sense for the companies selling this stuff to care about and do everything they can to retain that good will, right?

> The topic is about the less obvious thing and why people like you go to elaborate lengths to side step admitting that you’re a fucking thief.

Were the people saying they were returning to piracy not admitting they were returning to piracy, or were they just explaining what it would take to make them not?
by zzyzxd | 2025-11-09 19:10:54+00:00
This idea has been around since at least a decade ago. The truth is, only a fraction of customers care about ads or privacy, and only a fraction of technical people in that group are capable of doing network filtering (VLAN, MITM, DNS blocklist, whatever). The absolute numbers are so small, as long as manufacturers can extract enough value from the remaining 99% of customers, they just don't care.

I have had a lot of friends amazed by the fact that when they connect to my home Wi-Fi they stop seeing ads. Zero of them interested in implementing something similar in their home.
by lanstin | 2025-11-09 19:11:22+00:00
If you do work with folks in India a lot, it is a really good boost to your group productivity to go visit them in India, as an IC programmer. It is a safe place, people are very good at hospitality, and you can forge much stronger bonds of connection and of shared technical vision when people are people not just arbitrary strings in Slack (video conferencing can sustain connections but it is hard to make them over laggy video at inconvenient times of day).

I have been working from home to various degrees since 1997 or so and I go in more when I need more work to do and work from home more when I am super busy with coding stuff or similar that can be done better and faster from home.

But yeah going to office to sit in meetings with of people in other offices is silly.
by ac29 | 2025-11-09 19:11:37+00:00
> In 2015, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26551272/ showed that medicating all of the way to normal works out better than medicating down to stage 1 hypertension

Thanks for posting this. While I would generally advise a healthy dose of skepticism for any individual study, this one was very large and seems to be both well designed and executed. While there was a (statistically) significant increase in side effects with more intensive treatments, only about 1% more patients had adverse effects versus the standard treatment group, which seems like a very reasonable risk given the improved outcomes.

I've been trying to get my blood pressure under control recently and was thinking getting down to 12x/8x was good enough, but this has me rethinking that.
by Marshferm | 2025-11-09 19:13:27+00:00
Anecdotal antivax propaganda.

“during the study period April 2019-March 2022 [before and after Covid vax rollout], 2,242 people experienced OHCA; the authors noted no variation in median monthly rates during the three time periods. Within 30 days of their COVID-19 vaccination (type not documented), 38 people died and were referred for forensic assessment: “No differences were seen in underlying causes of death compared with previously published age-matched data” (Paratz et al., 2023).
by leipert | 2025-11-09 19:13:45+00:00
I recently wanted to introduce someone to our internal recruiters to a person with a long, uniqueish name. The recruiter was like: they did respond with „I’m not interested“. But the person was like: I’ve never got a mail.

Turned out the whatever tool our recruiter used spit out „first.lastname@gmail.com“ even though the person in question doesn’t own that email.
by throwaway94275 | 2025-11-09 19:14:08+00:00
I think it might benefit you to take a more serious approach to considering the normalization of mass manufacturing/factory work, rather than as an idealist position. Once you start to break down into an activity someone has to do on a daily basis to get money to do the most mundane things, like paying rent, you come to appreciate just how both lacking and dangerous it is as something to encourage for young people as a viable career option.

If maufacturing is your hobby, then please go ahead and be free, do whatever you want. If 8 to 12 hours of repetitive motions is suggested as means to earn a living, then society can do better. The human brain is not so trivial that its labor should be reduced to something a machine or even a robot can do. I want human flourishing, not human debasement.
by grogenaut | 2025-11-09 19:14:48+00:00
My m2 max flew too close to the sun with its design. It's a amazing laptop. Drives 4 monitors with ease. Rarely turns on the fan. But the USB ports keep frying if they take power because this thing is a beast. The right one goes first. Then the front left then the back left eventually. Problem is I just can't always power it from that back left one depending on which dock I plug into. I try and run off the maglock. Been in for depot replace of board 2x now. After second repair right USB died in 2 hours after it was pulling power off of that port and not the dock or mag.

Still a great computer but $7500 for something that kills itself 3 times in 3.5 years sucks. Luckily it's a company computer and they're giving me a m4 max
by matthewdgreen | 2025-11-09 19:14:50+00:00
I started a company during COVID and we hired: one engineer in SF, one in NY, three in different areas of Israel, plus co-Founders in Boston and Baltimore. There’s no way we could have hired all this specialized talent in any one city at a price we could afford. I also missed the in-person dynamics, but I can’t imagine how you’d build this kind of team without remote work.
by silisili | 2025-11-09 19:14:57+00:00
Eero used to be pretty close. Years ago, I used to stalk the subreddit despite never owning an Eero just because the (US based) devs would often drop knowledge bombs. AFAIK they wrote the entire software stack in house.

I have no idea if that's still the case, especially post AMZ, but worth looking into if so.
by btown | 2025-11-09 19:15:40+00:00
There's an interesting case to be made that MCP, as a protocol, is the right abstraction because of code execution tool definitions... but that most people aren't using it correctly.

With MCP, you do get things like persistent connections (say, to a running browser instance that's being automated).

But the entire idea that the way that an agent would handle MCP outputs is by sending all output as tokens through the LLM is almost absurd. Having standalone tools (even if they connect to some background proxy that handles persistent connections) and being able to sample and code around their output is far superior.

The cool thing, though, is that you could glue this approach into any agent system using an intermediary MCP: one that allows enumeration of skills, writing of skill code (which itself can access the intermediary's upstream MCP connections), and running skill code that saves its output into a session variable.

All of a sudden, you get all the benefits of this approach, and all the interoperability of MCP, with no more context requirements than you're currently using to tell the LLM where skills are. Best of all worlds!
Show HN: A platform that creates AI Agents using 'job descriptions'
by RealzDLegend | 2025-11-09 19:16:39+00:00
Hi HN, I've been working on something that started as personal frustration and turned into what I think might be a different way of thinking about AI agents. The problem: Repetitive work is unavoidable if you want to grow at anything. Building an audience, managing research, shipping products, etc. they all require those soul-crushing repetitive tasks. The 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration thing is real.

I tried n8n, Make, Zapier. They work, don’t get me wrong, but the setup time doesn't make it worth the output once you're automating multiple workflows. They're deterministic but brittle and not adaptive. The tight coupling means one change breaks everything. The Agent-based ones were more like interns than employees: they won’t work if you don’t prompt (and in a particular way or style), couldn't generalize, and didn't fit how real teams actually work.

So I started asking; what if you could onboard an AI agent the way you onboard a human? What if it could pursue long-term goals autonomously, without you prompting it every step? What if it could be deterministic without being brittle? You know? Better output with a more seamless input. That's why we built Compose AI. Instead of you prompting the agent, the agent prompts you. Each agent has a job description (like you'd write for a human hire) that defines expectations and outcomes. You onboard them on your data - apps, drive, APIs, databases, documents - and they build a knowledge graph to understand relationships across your organization without explicit “tight-coupling".

Key differences: - Autonomous goal pursuit: Tell an agent what to accomplish, not how to do it. It creates its own task list and executes. - Human-like onboarding: Create agents using regular job descriptions containing your workflow and expectations. - Multi-channel interaction: Email, voice, soon phone and Teams. You're not locked into a UI. - Local browser automation: For tasks requiring a browser, agents can connect to your local computer browser. They work on a separate workspace on your computer - your browsing data stays local. Cloud browsing is also possible. - Stack integration: Works across Google Docs, Notion, CRMs, whatever you're already using. You don't need to be technical or be an expert at prompt engineering.

You just need a clear job description, which includes your workflow and expectations. The system handles the rest.

We have some pre-configured digital employees you can activate immediately (with job descriptions defined by us), or you can create your own. I see this as inverting the current paradigm - instead of humans adapting to how AI wants to be prompted, AI adapts to how humans already organize work. Maybe it's a glimpse into how human-machine collaboration evolves. Maybe it's just a better way to stop doing repetitive tasks. Either way, I'd love for you to try it and tell me what breaks.

Try it here: https://composeai.io

Looking forward to your feedback - especially the brutally honest kind.
by voidfunc | 2025-11-09 19:16:46+00:00
Older programmer: Nobody gives a shit about your code and nobody thinks about you as much you think they do :)

Practically it may be worth keeping code for a particular class private for the duration of the term, semester whatever so you dont get into a sticky situation where a classmate copies it and now youre defending against plagiarism and have to prove to the professor you wrote it first.

But really beyond that, nobody cares.
by miki123211 | 2025-11-09 19:17:00+00:00
> In the hands of a tyrant all laws can be arbitrary/ignored because that is a key part of what makes them a tyrant.

But that is not how tyrants actually operate, at least most of the time.

The most tyrannical country possible would be a "free democratic union of independent people's republics". Democracy has been so successful that most tyrannies operate under its veneer. This is in stark contrast to how monarchies have operated historically.

The trick isn't to ignore laws, but to make them so broad, meaningless and impossible to follow that you have to commit crimes to survive. You can then be selective in which of these crimes you choose to prosecute.

You don't charge the human rights activist for the human rights activism. You charge them with engaging in illegal speculation for the food they bought on the black market, even though that was the only way to avoid starvation, and everybody else did it too. In the worst case scenario, you charge them with "endangering national peace", "spreading misinformation" or "delivering correspondence without possessing a government license to do so" (for giving out pamflets).

"must be limited to those demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest" is exactly the shenanigans tyrants love. You can get away with absolutely anything with a law like that.
by vejeta | 2025-11-09 19:17:44+00:00
LOL, part of the charm of those games is what you mention, the plots behind the movements with the messages between the nations, the double games to make the other thing you were allied with someone, when in every turn maybe...you were sending troops by boat from another direction. People could enter deep into the roleplaying on those messages and that could be really fun. That was my experience with conquer :P

PS: I am the author of the article, and although I reached the university when the modems were being phased out (1994 or so), we played a lot to it while we were in the computer labs, instead of studying.
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-11-09 19:19:31+00:00
Does anyone know what their chips are doing? Do you, really?

Until we have desk side silicon fabrication/placement, with accompanying tunnelling microscope features, we simply cannot trust our silicon in any way other than through utterly peaceful means, which is to say, through systems of human trustworthiness.

Technology never allows us humans to advance sufficiently well to do without it .. unless it is evenly distributed.

Right now we are all at the mercy of the masters of silicon. This is no joke!
by luckylion | 2025-11-09 19:19:47+00:00
This is the same on a lot of larger staffing agencies that promise to have all the people you need and can either do entire projects for you, or get you developers, designers, QA, project managers etc on short notice.

They have a few very competent developers who are primarily in the secondary sales in my experience. First sales contact is between non-technical management and their front-line sales (usually very attractive women). In the second sales contact, technical staff from the potential client is involved and they bring along their real developers. But those are not the ones you'll get on the project. They'll give you interviews with the developers you can get, and they're coached for the interviews and sound fine. But then in reality they are people who can't touch type and develop purely by trial and error without forming a mental model.

If hiring locally wasn't such a mess, nobody would talk to them. At some point even a junior developer is better than not having a developer at all. I assume AI will change that and they'll get replaced first.
by LaserToy | 2025-11-09 19:19:56+00:00
100%, and we have all of those things. Canary acts as the last line of defence, and honestly, when Canary detects and rolls back, it is already an incident that is being auto-mitigated with a limited blast radius.

To reduce the potential blast radius, we are working on a cohort-based canary, which will allow us to validate against a minimal, stable subset of traffic with the desired properties.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-11-09 19:19:58+00:00
In turn, this makes your own research or problem-solving skills less sharp.

That's one way to think about it, but on the other hand, where's the "skill" in knowing a particular CLI invocation for a particular tool or installation task? Next year there will be a Better Way to Do It. (Witness how many trendy package installers / venv managers the Python community has gone through.)

An LLM's job is to translate what I want to do into instructions or commands that actually do it. Real skill involves defining and directing the process; the implementation details are just temporary artifacts. Memorized command lines, mastery of specific tools, and conflation of rote procedures with "skills" are what keeps languages like C around for 50 years, long after the point where they begin to impede progress.
by osigurdson | 2025-11-09 19:19:59+00:00
I'd say the biggest problem is AI complacency, something like: "in the future our revenues will be the same but won't need any people". So, in order to prepare for this future the obvious course of action to do some layoffs and just chill for a while. The problem is, we don't really know when this future will happen. If it is soon, maybe companies are making the right bet, if not it is more like a deliberate choice to slow down. That's fine if one or a few companies choose this path as competition will correct the error. However, if they essentially all move in unison competition won't fix the problem and we'll have a self-inflicted economic contraction for no reason.

The other factor is, will revenues really stay the same for companies once we have AGI / super intelligence? It seems value will not accrue to the companies that are in chill mode.
by kace91 | 2025-11-09 19:20:35+00:00
I knew an Indian woman named Divya, perhaps my mind thought it looked similar in print?

I don’t think it was ever a conscious decision. It’s similar to how I always pictured Jane Austen as a sarcastic woman in her forties while reading her books, but she wrote her most famous works being borderline a teenager. Your mind just fills things up I guess.