skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Concierge AI – local and modular RAG framework
It would be extremely poor form for founders to intentionally leave their startup at this stage to take another job. In all likelihood they were pushed out by the board.

My guess is that the founders were all in on Pi, their conversational language model, and investors lost confidence in their ability to build a sustainable venture-scale company on the ~4th best AI chatbot.
The biggest problems in modern finance are not about banks running out of liquidity. It hasn’t been since the Great Depression. The recurring problem has been non-banks being bank-like.
Does getting acquhired by MS imply your company sucked?

There are things I like about where I’m at but if MS really wanted to they could send enough dump trucks full of cash to ruin the local traffic situation. Is it worth staying at a place if you can’t even get out of the driveway to get to your favorite little cafe?
I believe this is misinformation and probably should be flagged.
Excuse me for interjecting some facts here:

software development did not start in the late 90s. The group of people who were building software when it was very much an art were super sharp and analytical. It is beyond arrogance (it is ignorance) to think that we are subjecting ourselves to unreasonable "mathematical rigor" while the earlier generations were apparently clueless cavemen of IT. Utter nonsense. Go see what IBM -- just one example -- did in its heyday and just who were the people who were making and writing software for those machines.

Joel is being Joel -- self satisfied -- and according himself the position of leading light of an entire industry's recruitment dilemma and direction after the internet (doh) exploded demand for software developers. The internet also caused another problem (technical blogs): all of a sudden people who would normally never even cross paths with the elites of their industry (because they were and are not in the same caliber to be quite frank) were reading their whitepaper tealeaves and writing blogs on how everyone had to do x, y and z. Recruitment is just one item. Can we discuss stack and architecture and team structure and methodology as well.

So Joel is right. Blowhards with blogs are quite responsible for the mess that is the profession of software development today.
He obviously means from the viewpoint of the photon.
If you read carefully you might see that I'm criticizing rationalizing a bizarre mistake as something that is completely fine.

Also if someone wants to put their first CS project on the internet, then label it that way and not as some sort of blog post about them doing something unique.
Linkable features https://openjdk.org/projects/jdk/22/

For me personally the most interesting one is JEP461 (Stream Gatherers) https://openjdk.org/jeps/461

This will allow addition of interesting stream operations.
Absolutely.

Pi (their chat bot) is pretty nice to talk to. It’s really good with the whole para-social aspect of chatting without being weird. Is that useful? Maybe for research, probably less so for a direct product.Microsoft can probably get something useful from that.

More importantly though, Microsoft is now hosting a whole suite of LLMs on Azure. This is the lesson they learned after OpenAI had that acute leadership crisis. This is another hedge against OpenAI. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Microsoft start distancing themselves from OpenAI in the future.
> my understanding is its current incarnation of Glitch is just your typical mid-sized tech co

Glitch was acquired by Fastly, so it's not a fully independent mid-sized tech co, but it does seem to be doing well and seems reasonably independent still.
That sounds pretty cheap (unless you really meant 2x16GB ;)). Got a link to the products?
Apple updates are a joke. I have a script in my dotfiles to recognize when an apple update overwrites `/etc/zshrc` to run, among other things, a utility that rewrites your path in a nonstandard way (I don't remember the details, I think it was something related to config file load order?)

Nothing I've done so far to stop the overwrite in the first place has worked.
Tesla has a VERY bad reputation on that front, as does SpaceX.
Who? Also, this was a debate competition-- hardly the forum for settling a scientific question.
It could be AT&T wireline/fiber only or something.
> It’s a theme he returned to in his fireside chat, sharing a concern that the number of women participating in programming has decreased over the last 10 or 20 years. “There’s definitely something wrong there, and it’s definitely something that really can’t be explained just by personal preference or anything like that.”

Ugh, this is a really painfully uninformative platitude.

First, how do we actually know it's not just personal preference? Obviously other factors are likely to contribute. But with no suggestions as to what those factors are or evidence demonstrating they are likely causes, this claim has no information content.

And then second, what are the concrete steps for change? Is it the internship process he describes? Maybe it's clearer in the full talk than in the quotes pulled for this article.
Blame it on Shadcn/ui

Everyone is using it and they all look the same
At the very least, we have https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2386:_Ten_Years
Japan has had three decades of deflation. So it does seem that when cash holds its value, people don't need to speculate on real estate. In the '80s, when it had high inflation, it grew a real estate bubble well beyond the 2008 US bubble (despite plenty of construction). China has rampant overconstruction and a plummeting birth rate, and yet it has built a real estate bubble perhaps even beyond '80s Japan, because its population saw real estate as a safe place to store and grow their wealth.
with capital investments required to keep them afloat, it may be not enough.
> but also an ineffective firing one.

I don’t believe this is “also”. I think it is most of it. Software companies hate rejecting people who are in their club so much that they put all their energy in keeping them out in the first place.

Then there are also the people who believe interns are a waste of time. Theres a very high overlap between these people and the ones that some of us complain about at lunch as being a difficult coworker. If you can’t learn by teaching, then I have some serious doubts about whether you understand “teamwork”.
> it'd be convenient for me to have a way of telling if the real price of a sandwich has gone up without needing to do any calculations and look up statistical data

This is the core problem of economics. If we solve it, we solve, well, the economy. Nobody would need to buy anything; we could just produce and send everyone what we know they want. No need to consider unpredictable variations in individual choice and discretion.

Of course when you include that pesky individualism, this model breaks down. Because it becomes impossible to structure production today to perfectly meet demand tomorrow. Making currency transformations across eons breaks down because it doesn’t make sense to ask how many talents of silver Caesar would have paid for an iPhone.

> talked to several people who are convinced the economy would collapse if that sort of constant pricing was normal practice

No? Are you confusing what you described—which is the aim of price-level targeting—with fixed-price policy?
Given the culture of frequent job-hopping in tech...

Do you do the internships with the assumption that most won't produce value worth the energy put into mentoring them, before they leave?

Then make great offers to the ones who stand out as most promising, before they leave?
It comes out as bit flips in memory and noise on communication lines. There are many mitigations. State machines that recover from "impossible" to reach paths, redundancies like calculating the same thing more than once, checksumming/error correcting codes, repeatedly setting a state that "should" not need to be changed.

But also lots of things don't matter. Like if your ESC hiccups for a millisecond or gives a blip too much power no one cares because there are no long term consequences. Like the extra noise in the video feed, ok it's there but of no actual consequence.

The important parts are long term stored variables and ensuring that state is maintained or can recover.

The surface area of things that really matter which are vulnerable to radiation is really quite small, the rest has either 0 effect or manifests as very survivable noise.

Source: ran the flight computer team on a student satellite competition long ago.
How do you explain the almost complete absence of

How do you explain the almost complete absence of consumer software written in java where performance matters? Web browsers, databases, video codecs, high end games, all written in C++. According to you they should all be written in java for maximum performance.
https://archive.is/YKTe0
I've also seen GC reliant concurrent algorithms that would require a lot more synchronization to keep track of when to actually free an object. GCed languages can just forget about the object and rely on the GC later to figure out what threads have access to valid objects. C and C++ need to figure out if it's safe to free.
It is in a way. I couldn't jump into the startup world because I had financial commitments that necessitated an income. Several of my friends who didn't have that burden started companies.
No, it's like arguing that all people who are no longer in their prime need walk-on ramps or lifts in addition to stairs.

Which they do.

And accessibility-oriented architecture already knows that, and has been operating on that principle for decades. So in the exact same way: because half the planet needs glasses, no matter for how "trivial to correct" or actually bad their eyes are, your UI needs controls that allow people with any level of visual disability to compensate beyond what their glasses might correct for, if the medium your UI is presented in does not offer (adequate, because that's not a given) controls already.
It's not specified in the press release, but studies like this are generally on the order of $10M.

Terrestrial railroad infrastructure would cost trillions to replace. Stealing $10M from NASA is not going to move the needle.
As long as Paul Graham doesn't tell the truth that most if not all school kids won't ever make the next Google, then I'm okay with influencers (like Paul Graham, for instance) lying about the possibility of enormous opportunities being available to people.
Average Rust code uses a fair number of lambdas, you won't convince me that C++ has a readable / ergonomic syntax for lambdas.
Another example for how preventing users from doing rollbacks is a terrible practice. Even if it's not your application's fault, users may have very good reasons to revert an update, if only temporarily.

This also bothers me on Android. Sometimes, an app update may break something and prevent me from using it. But Google doesn't allow me to reinstall a previously published version from the Play Store. If I don't have to (or can't easily) do without that application until a fix might be released, my only option is to find an older release on some shady mirror site.
Congrats on your launch and good luck building it, I agree with other comments that dashboards and views are pretty important.

Small bug report: when editing the dropdown, current entries have "API Name" disabled (this is normal), but the value is changend automatically when editing the "Display name". The page errors out (400 error for UpdateObject).

When using devtools and editing "API Name" to stay the same, everything works.
Is it? The world only needs a handful of physics every year. However the world needs a large number of people who are trained in the things you need to be good at complex tasks - they type of training you get when working on string theory.
{
"error": [
"Your account has been locked for security reasons. Please reset your password."
]
}

And that's what I can see in network inspector, while the UI just does nothing after clicking on "Login" button.
Mars After Midnight – Lucas Pope's new gloriously weird "happy dad" game
I find most of his posts over the last few years to be an exercise in ignoring privilege. It's a very long time since I read one that felt grounded.
Install NixOS with disko disk partitioning
A budget-friendly text-to-video API service
All-in-one API Hub for AI Generated Video
I think it's really, really clear that the majority of the data used to train all of these things was used without permission.
His dad wasn't "just" a computer scientist, he was a professor for computer science and artificial intelligence at Michigan State. Sergey Brin's father was equally a professor in mathematics at the University of Maryland.

> It's obvious in retrospect that this was a great idea for a startup. It wasn't obvious at the time.

It may not have been obvious, but the decision was damn well near as engineered with data as it could be. They also were _insanely_ well connected through their and their parents academic career. Both Sergey and Larry had obtained their PhD prior to starting the company. I can also remember reading that they obtained significant amounts of funding through connections Larry's dad had into the industry.

You can ignore the rest of my comment, what follows is just my take.

Their success story is imo one of the most blatant examples on how privilege really does give you a boost in life. I am not arguing that anyone could have done it, but I do wonder how the world would look like if we were all kids of academics with a successful career, with a relatively safe, secure and stable childhood home and a family background that really incentivizes learning and academic success over succumbing to the pressure of, you know, having an income at some point.
Why? If you use only 1.1 features on a 2.0 platform it would work just like on 1.1 but faster. If you're on a USB1.1 platform and want to use a 2.0 feature you could just use a 2.0 platform without any changes to the existing code
Well, look who the cat dragged in ;)
The overwhelming influential factor of people who start successful businesses is that they have a tremendous amount of resources relative to the average person. I would guess that easily over half of all successful medium to large size businesses started with someone who had a big leg-up.
This is great, thanks for the suggestion! We've just updated our docs and code with this change: https://github.com/sweepai/sweep/pull/3332
It worked great for me. I had long wanted to rewrite a Python lib in Kotlin, since the Python part of the lib is slow, and it does not support multi-threading.

But the ugliness of JNI stopped me. Then I tried FFI in Java 21, with jextract it was amazing.

I wasn't aware of FFI at first, but the finalized version of virtual threads made me check the Java release notes.
I think you are absolutely correct in your assessment and I think there is absolutely nothing that can be done about it.
Yeah, sorry: should have added some kind of irony flag.

[Edit] Or maybe not; as I understand it, a photon doesn't "experience" time. It can't distinguish zero time from extended time. Everything's "zero time".
This sounds like the standard under which C is safe because I, personally, don’t make mistakes.

If foo<string> is fine but foo<string_view> compiles successfully, generates no warnings, but is nonetheless UB and accesses a dangling pointer that merely usually still contains the expected value, then the overall programming environment is not safe.

C++, as it exists today, makes it very very difficult to build a safe system while still using most of the features that make C++ worth using. Every other language I have as an example has an ecosystem in which one can pass values around such that the semantics are actually defined for any remotely reasonable program that can be executed. The GC and automated-reference-counted languages keep values alive (although Python does struggle to make it clear whether one has captured an immutable value or a remotely mutable reference). The languages that don’t really have references (e.g. bash) copy values as needed. Rust says “you have full control as to how you instantiate things, but you must prove to the compiler that you did it right, and I will steer you toward patterns that make this relatively painless.” C++ has none of this.
High rate of success generalizing learnings to inputs which are well outside the training space.
I'm confused why YC funded this.

This is the lowest engagement I've seen for a launch HN. It's because most people are too kind to give you the honest feedback that this seems extremely undifferentiated. It made me think of a CS-class project.

Every significant CRM has custom objects, in-place editing UI, and custom fields. Most have email integrations. Look at Monday CRM for example - it has a very powerful no-code automation engine, and you can upload custom react components. The biggest competitor to Salesforce CRM is HubSpot.

I really, truly hate to be negative but I think someone has misled you about the state of this particular market.

I went back and forwards on this because I don't want to discourage you. Sorry if this seems harsh or unhelpful.

Did any user tell you that they have the problem you are solving?
Getting the exact calories for a food that doesn't have a nutrition label/barcode (so basically any homemade dish) has been the bane of my repeated attempts to track calories. So this could be great for me. However, I'm not a fan of talking into my phone and granting those permissions. Any chance to try it out by typing my foods?

Can we export our data at all? Also, do you have a privacy policy? Edit: found the privacy policy at https://calorio.xyz/privacy through the About page
I'm someone who once aspired to be a physicist but who dropped out when I couldn't figure it out. Most string theory always seemed kind of dumb. It started out fairly sensibly modeling the nuclear forces that keep protons from fly apart as them being connected by something string like. We now think gluons basically do that job. But having not got anywhere there it took on a life of it's own trying to be a theory of everything or something like that. Say you try to explain everything as strings and your bit of universe contains two electrons a mile apart. We know they repel. How does that work with strings? Do they ping billions of strings at each other trying to hit each other. It just doesn't seem to really work for anything other than grant applications.

Maybe I'm too dumb to get it but I kind of suspect the theory is just wrong.
Very interesting to hear your thoughts and experience.

I wonder if we really shouldn't make a bit more out of the fact that there are different types of startups: those that pick off low-hanging fruit really well, those that combine novel technology with novel problems (for instance, the recent YC LLM meeting note-taking / transcription service), those that are scientific-discovery based (see, for example the NSF Small Business Innovation Research program), etc. I am not experienced enough to create an ontology of startup ideas, but I think it'd be an interesting exercise.
> Japan has had three decades of deflation

It’s had three decades of flirting with deflation. Its price levels have been rising for at least the last decade [1]. (Albeit, not steadily.)

[1] https://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/cpi/158c.html
To me, Rack and AR are scoped to a specific domain. HTTP request handling and database-backed models are naturally going to involve some internal noise since I don’t want to write a web server or a database interface layer. I want the things I don’t want to write to be called.

Here, this is closer to general purpose flow control. There isn’t really a library I wouldn’t want to write myself here. You show a lot of examples of things that could be accomplished by objects and messaging passing (“plain Ruby”) which might be preferable for some.

All in all though, it’s a really interesting idea! I still really like the Ruby community’s love of bending ruby to their will. (Even if I do think it can cause issues sometimes)
"High IQ" != "able to do certain simple things faster than everyone else".

What you're really looking for is "able to do really hard things at all".
SlashScreen/ricket: An experimental WASM runtime for Plan 9
Yep

> ‘Mere determination and resourcefulness’

... is actually really a test of class position. Your motivation to pursue and pass those artificial goalposts is in most cases going to be directly co-related to the values and expectations that the people who surround you have. Mommy and daddy and their friends at the country club expect it.

CS education is good all over the place, not just Stanford or MIT. And CS education pulled out of books and through self-reading is also great. But knowing that said person went to Stanford is a signifier to the VCs that said person is acculturated into the class and culture of capitalist administration.

More mind boggling is seeing them admitting to the "cargo cultism" (which I'd just call "class bias") instead of the usual ideological cover of entrepreneurialism and the "American dream."
Using md5 for this seems like an odd choice.

Sha1 is a better choice even for non-cryptographic use cases, it's quite a bit faster than md5. Even better would be something like xxhash!

According to a quick bash script I wrote to benchmark the popular hash functions, md5 comes out last compared to sha1, sha256, sha512, and blake2, and by a decent margin!

A good rule of thumb is to never use md5 at all. Not even for non-cryptographic use cases. It's not only broken, but also very slow!
> those features are very nice to have

Definitely. I think one good way to think about it is as a matter of engineering excellence. Yes, there are moral and legal cases for accessibility features, but it's also a dimension of making software that is great to use and demonstrates attention to important details. It's part of the fit and finish and general UX.

Accessibility features are absolutely vital for some users, but for other users they are still nice to have. And to everyone, they are signals of quality, care, and maturity.
> totally fine

this is not true. It's just that most people are powerless to fight against the dark pattern onslaught.
In "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America" Barbara Ehrenreich poses that universities are (in my words) merely a fictional moat, "invented" by the new class that became rich through education and work, rather then before through ownership and capital.

"Education" nor "work" can be passed through generations. If I am a very gifted lawyer, this is not something I can pass on to my daughters or suns (but a castle or land can be). Yet you can employ your network and power to get your daughter or suns into "highly selective" universities. Where, once they are in, being smart (e.g being a gifted lawyer) matters less than "being in".

So, indeed, "cargo cultism" and privilege.

And, I would add, a problem and cause of why the startup world is so shortsighted, monoculture (non-diverse) and dogpiling on similar problems, yet ignoring others entirely. (disclaimer: I too, however, am the typical priviliged bearded white male that "does computers" since late eighties though)
merely as anectdata, I'm on 14.4 (m2) and none of the JetBrains products are doing anything weird for me. But nor am I getting any of the whatever other bad outcomes the blogosphere is whining about 14.4 so there's obviously some nuance to the errors

also, lol, "the obvious reaction here is to switch to VSCode" doesn't even deserve a response
Inworld: The leading AI engine for games
Guess because I thought that Australia would not put a huge up-front cost on starting a taxi service (and I'm now numb to Australian prices and numbers looking nonsensical from America. If the rents are in the $1000/wk, plane tickets are $5000, start losing track of "reasonable". It's Australia, multiply the normal price 5x-10x).