MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Treegarden | 2025-04-27 15:17:03+00:00
Who decides what is moral? For which moral causes are our contributions beyond a drop in the ocean? I can go work in a soup kitchen, but thats not gonna help thousands or millions of people in need. There is a structural reason why a certain fraction of society becomes in need of a soup kitchen. Can this not be applied to anything? War, famine, natural disasters, poor people that need a lawyer. All these are the result of structural reasons. Can these structural reasons be solved or are they part of the human condition, even part of nature? Manually helping 1+n people in this would not address the root cause. Try to do a scalable solution, but those are hard and I guess most that would wok have been tried. In my childhood I would have needed a tutor, my teachers where terrible. Yet it was not the tutors that would help me now, it was chatGPT. Should I now become a tutor, should I build a openAI competitor, or should I build tutuorAI? If I do marketing at tutorAI will this be a bullshit job? When I build an app, sooner or later I have to solve abstract array puzzles, solving these will make the app work. Work often becomes abstract. Does it mean its now bullshit? If everyone worked at the soup kitchen, would homelessness be solved?
by echelon | 2025-04-27 15:17:06+00:00
This argument is Peter Zeihan's thesis too, and I'm not sure it'll be what actually comes to pass.

China still has an enormous population, and if they convert their society from production to domestic consumption and ride the value-add wave, they'll follow the American growth equation. And with more people to bolster that economy, to boot. You can already see this in their dominance of electronics, drones, EVs, and green tech. They're doing advanced, bleeding edge work in all of the industries that matter.

BYD, DJI, Eufy/Anker (vs iRobot), Lenovo, Alibaba, ... China is a formidable powerhouse in advanced products and value-add. These companies absolutely rival the best of what America and the West have to offer. And if your argument is one of demographics, these companies are staffed with young educated workers from a huge and healthy pipeline of STEM grads.

I think of all the predictions about the future of China - from the incredibly bearish ones like Zeihan's "death of China", to the bullish ones that declare this the "Chinese century" - I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

I don't see how China doesn't become a larger version of Japan or Germany or the US. Despite some demographic and economic headwinds, they've got an incredible head start.

If America aims to compete and remain in the top, it needs to stop doing things that look like Brexit that lead to degrowth and isolation. China isn't magically going to get weaker and provide free opportunity to the United States. On the contrary, it's fantastic peer-level competition that the US should use as motivation to work harder.

China is an incredible growth and innovation story, and a bar that all countries should hold themselves to. It's no time to slouch. Competition fosters the best innovation anyway.
by rxliuli | 2025-04-27 15:17:56+00:00
As the title says, today I tried using deepwiki to generate links for one of my small tools. The architecture diagrams/flowcharts look particularly good, and the documentation also appears neat and well-organized. I wonder if placing this link on the GitHub repository homepage would be helpful for people using this project, or do you think that content generated by such LLMs cannot guarantee accuracy and only causes confusion?
by moritzwarhier | 2025-04-27 15:18:42+00:00
Many people here decry Wikipedia as biased, impossible to edit and other bad things.

But none of the comments point out the actual article that they wanted to edit.

Ironically, presumably to remain anonymous. Anonymity and pseudonymity are directly attacked in the letter this article is about.

Wikipedia sure isn't perfect, but so far, when commenters attack it with fundamental vitriol, I've always found these people to have a political agenda.
by rvz | 2025-04-27 15:19:20+00:00
> Making 10k a month on your own is really not that hard, and with 6-9 months of work, can be achieved. Office jobs will be looked back on as slavery 2.0

This. Don't want to hear anymore excuses. It can be done.

Now with AI, there will be even less jobs over time and likely a 10% increase in global unemployment in the next few decades or so.

Have some ambition and make 10k a month on your own without sending CVs to AI recruiters.
by apothegm | 2025-04-27 15:19:35+00:00
I use all of those virtually never (LinkedIn is the only one I view regularly, and that only when job searching or hiring). When I do visit them it’s via desktop browser. I refuse to give their apps any access to my phone whatsoever, and have zero interest in being advertised at or flooded with notifications for posturing and bullshit and drama that I really could not possibly care less about.
by hyperbrainer | 2025-04-27 15:19:35+00:00
Okay this is really funny because I was messing about with generics relating to the Write trait just yesterday, leading to much frustration.

> you find yourself propagating a generic bound up an entire hierarchy of data structures and functions using those structures

And I did exactly that. I did eventually get around to using dyn Write, but that still gave me headaches because of how I cannot use impl Write as a result type in closures, which I need to do if I want to use tracing_subscriber::fmt::with_writer() and pass in these trait objects.

Despite being this close to the solution, I somehow again wound up propagating generics back at least four functions.

I ended up not writing any generic-based stuff and resigned to just manually writing each type's implementation out, but I am going to tinker with this again today. Hopefully, I can use your advice.

Thank you so much for taking the time to write this. Means a lot!

> there was something satisfying about C in the old DOS days, where you could make a pointer to video memory and scribble on it

Exactly.
by boh | 2025-04-27 15:19:45+00:00
Power people have power because of power is more of a movie trope than the actual mechanics of the world you live in. Wealth is exclusively abstract legal constructs in the modern world. You might be surprised to know that even Putin's wealth is tied to legal ownership structures, (regardless if they're maintained by bogus shell companies, he has effective rights to the property). Whatever niche counter-example comes after doesn't influence how global inequality is administered or experienced by the majority of people.
by zdragnar | 2025-04-27 15:19:49+00:00
Then you get to join the 99% of the rest of humanity that views work as something necessary to enable the things they enjoy and find purpose in when they're not working.

Finding purpose, fulfillment or joy in your work is nice, but as you grow as a human, or as the field you're in changes, or as the work dries up... well, you're left thoroughly adrift.
by paddw | 2025-04-27 15:19:54+00:00
> Now, you might be thinking: that’s all well and good, but I’ve got a full-time job, two kids and a mortgage. I’m happy to recycle and eat some tofu now and then, but a “fundamental transformation”? No thanks.

In that case, moral ambition may not be for you. I mean, once you have a labradoodle, a set of cheese knives or a robot mower, there’s generally no going back
by account-5 | 2025-04-27 15:20:15+00:00
Personally I think related monetary wealth is inevitable, it's built into the system.

Monetarily I'm at the poor end of wealth, but I am content and want for little. This is also why I probably don't get the house size metric used here. My current, humble, abode is big enough for my needs. Given more money I don't see me upgrading.

What solutions will be worth exploring to solve current inequalities if we know it's not inevitable, given our current situation?
by martin-t | 2025-04-27 15:20:23+00:00
I've read this too but it doesn't disprove what US was thinking at the time.

People think others think like them. US being a democratic country and considering the value of a life to be high, I have no trouble believing that the US government did think the Japanese government would consider the cost of continued fighting to be too high.

> The "prompt and utter destruction" clause has been interpreted as a veiled warning about American possession of the atomic bomb[1]

We now largely know strategic bombing does not work [2] but it still doesn't stop some from trying now, it certainly did not back then.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potsdam_Declaration

[2]: https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower...
by Loughla | 2025-04-27 15:21:04+00:00
I work in education, a field famous for attracting people based on their own willingness to do good work for good reasons.

And at the end of the day, a job is a job. I do it because it allows me to live a lifestyle close to what I want, while not being soul crushingly boring most of the time.

I came to terms with the fact that I'm not going to change the world. The best I can do is not fuck it up anymore than when I got here. That's about as good as most of us can expect, since most of us are average in many aspects. Without stunning amounts of genius or resources, I think that hoping just to fade into obscurity is the best you can do, really.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-04-27 15:22:03+00:00
The greatest force in human endeavor is self preservation. The next greatest force is self interest. The final force is altruism and moral ambition it is by far the weakest force.

All three forces have different magnitudes and exist in all of us.

Capitalism is a system that exploits the second force to the greatest extent and is responsible for economic changes in society that have far exceeded anything produced by altruism alone. Have there been societies and economies that exploit moral ambition? I don’t think here have been examples.

To truly do good in this world we have to face our own nature. I’d rather be alive and rich before I do any favors for the world. So if you want me to change the world… first tell me what that gives me.
by bn-l | 2025-04-27 15:22:24+00:00
> This is why we established centralized AI ethics governance through an AI ethics board at IBM.

Later on in the article it starts talking about legislation.

To me this is about A: building some bias into the model (which people either don’t perceive as bias because it’s their opinion or because they know it’s more PR friendly), and B: competing not by being the best but by being big enough to self hinder with these arbitrary rules and then lobby for legislation.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-04-27 15:23:44+00:00
I think people here lack reading skills.

The term mentally deranged I used was at those committing acts of vandalism and terrorism against innocent people's private property, not against someone in the comments here. This is clear to anyone who can read at 8th grade level.

Am I wrong that such vandals are not mentally 100? Am I breaking HN rules with this assessment?
by thyristan | 2025-04-27 15:23:56+00:00
Licensing concerns that prevent distros from using ZFS will sooner or later also have adverse effects on end users. Actually those effects are already there: The constant need to adapt a large patchset to the current kernel, meaning updates are a hassle. The lack of packaging in distributions, meaning updates are a hassle. And the lack of integration and related tooling, meaning many features can not be used (like a/b boots from snapshots after updates) easily, and installers won't know about ZFS so you have to install manually.

None of this is a worry about being sued as an end user. But all of those are worries that you life will be harder with ZFS, and a lot harder as soon as the first lawsuits hit anyone, because all the current (small) efforts to keep it working will cease immediately.
by lexokoh | 2025-04-27 15:24:57+00:00
I've been building enterprise tools for some time now, and it was shocking to see that nothing properly helps you license self-hosted tools. So you have to build something, maybe internally, to help you with this, but this quickly gets complicated with the volume of things, and you then need to have a team manage this fully.

I've had to build a version of this before for an on-prem version of our software at some companies I've worked with.

There's a bunch of bullshit you have to go through with each company's procurement/security team. Setting allow lists for IP addresses, ports, update frequencies, whether or not they want automatic updates, and the allowed telemetry.

I don't know, and maybe it's just me who's a bit frustrated by this. So, how do you license your on-prem, open-source, or self-hosted version of your software to enterprise teams or teams in general? Are there any tools you use? What are your best practices?

Due to my personal frustration, I decided to attempt building something seamless that fits what I need. Paywall - License - Deploy. THE END

I called it Kage (https://kagehq.com). I would love your thoughts and feedback. I genuinely want to learn what people are doing or using.
by tonymet | 2025-04-27 15:24:59+00:00
There are a couple of legitimate reasons. Raising the issue internally only brings ire and attention by admins and shadow groups. I tried doing this via the WMF village pump , technical pumps, admin pages and only drew more attacks.

Raising the issues externally comes off as petty, because the “evidence” consists of 50+ pages of inane bickering on talk pages, community post , etc with no clear narrative or verdict. It’s a unique community that leans heavily on hyper-bureaucratic and bespoke debates.

I could share > 5 severe cases that required weeks of effort to “resolve” . It would require nearly as much effort for anyone to draw conclusions from.

There are some index pages of some of the more notable conflicts & debates. If you can indicate that digging that up would be worth my time to help you understand more, I may be willing to help you out.
by _rpxpx | 2025-04-27 15:25:00+00:00
Went through the entire article expecting imminently to get to the paragraph where the author perceives that Crap Towns was a mistake because it makes fun of the poor, and that the reason it couldn't be published now is that poverty in the UK is far worse than it was 20 years ago. But, no, "identity politics". Good riddance.
Show HN: A crowd-data collection Project about Indoor Air Quality (CO2)
by aurelwu | 2025-04-27 15:25:39+00:00
I built IndoorCo2map.com and the accompanying (open source, MIT licensed) App with the goal to create a large free dataset about CO2 levels in public accessible Buildings and public transport using portable CO2-Monitors.

We spent about 90% of our lives in doors, yet there is barely any data about the air quality in enclosed areas. CO2 is in most locations a very good proxy for the amount of exhaled air in a room which correlates with infection risks. High CO2 levels also can increase the aerostability of viruses so high levels are there is also a direct effect of CO2 as well. Aside from infection risks, high CO2 levels also can decrease cognitive abilities (during exposure, not permanently) and cause dizziness and headaches etc.

Most existing studies are small size and focus on homes, hospitals or schools. During the beta test the community already took more than 10000 measurements (each between 5 and 120 minutes long), which to my knowledge already makes it the largest dataset of its kind. Currently most users are from german speaking regions which is a result of me being german and my social graph being mostly german.

The App does not require any user registration and works with most of the common portable CO2-Monitors (Aranet4, Airvalent, Inkbird-IAM-T1, Airspot Health). For some of them I had to reverse engineer the Bluetooth messages and to make things worse the Airvalent’s data isn’t byte aligned.

The App is built using C# MAUI and cross-compiles to both android and Apple. I use it because C# is the Language I am most comfortable in but also because it can be deployed to local iPhones without having to own a Mac. The Backend is using a queue server, serverless functions (also C#) and a postgresql Database, all hosted on AWS. The website is using maplibre, deck.gl and chart.js - I have no clue about websites so just tried to keep things simple. Expanding to other Indoor Air Quality indicators like PM2.5 would be trivial but currently the amount of people having mobile sensors is too small to be worth the effort.
by Marsymars | 2025-04-27 15:26:35+00:00
This truck is compact/low-cost enough that you could commute to a city job, and its competitors for that are basically the Leaf, Bolt, Fiat 500e, Kia Niro and Hyundai Kona.

The bed is pointless for commuting, but so are the back seats in any of those other cars.

I commute in a Fiesta, and it’s been years since anybody has sat in the back seats.
by brookst | 2025-04-27 15:26:38+00:00
It’s a fair point, and we should be sensitive to ill effects on the less privileged, but at some point it’s unreasonable to decry tech than is neutral or beneficial to the vast majority of people because it could possibly harm a small number of people.

The majority of people clutching pearls over the “privacy” implications of photo geolocation are at least as privileged as me, and have even less concept of what e.g. stalking victims go through than I do.

It’s just “think of the children” all over again; “I am uncomfortable with random people knowing my general vicinity” sounds weird, and “I am deeply concerned for the vulnerable people this could harm” sounds noble.

The reality is that those with serious privacy concerns aren’t posting random photos to the internet. I mean, jesus, there’s EXIF data. Hand wringing over AI is entirely performative here.
by bsnnkv | 2025-04-27 15:26:53+00:00
> Even if they're not paid, you have to be careful what you post if you're building a life in China.

This is the case in most western countries now, especially if you post anything related to Palestine. Besides the US, the situation in France, Germany and the UK is quite concerning these days.

As an immigrant to the US I now have to fear being abducted on the street by ICE "officers" who present no identification and conceal their identities, being arbitrarily detailed and tortured at airports[1], being held incommunicado without due process, and being shipped off to CECOT for the rest of my life.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/18/germany-inve...
by vacuity | 2025-04-27 15:27:28+00:00
How's your Electron app's performance?

It's very concerning when software developers neglect that their tools (abstractions) have tradeoffs.

"If civil engineers built bridges the way software engineers build applications, the bridges would all fall down in a month".

And similar sentiments. Granted, most things aren't mission-critical, but then just because my house won't collapse doesn't mean I want to waste money on poor insulation and broken appliances.
by gambiting | 2025-04-27 15:28:01+00:00
It's just incredible how the entirety of the American public got brainwashed into believing that it's their responsibility for subsidising restaurant staff instead of the company that hires them and ultimately reaps the reward of their work. It's so pervasive it's impossible to even have any kind of reasonable argument about it, at best it just ends with "well it is what it is".
by quicheshore | 2025-04-27 15:28:35+00:00
Great read! I didn’t know about Clarkson at all. I know the article talks about all the evils in the world to choose to battle, I will say though as 21 year old it’s easier to be outraged rather than do something. The third category he mentions is what most of the world has become. One thing I did take away is belief in the power to change things is the basic requirement behind moral ambition. Something I intend to work on myself.
Show HN: SemHash – Semantic Text Deduplication, Outlier Filtering and Sampling
by Tananon | 2025-04-27 15:29:18+00:00
We’ve just released SemHash v0.3.0, a major rework of our open-source text pre-processing library. We’ve added two new functionalities: outlier filtering & representative sampling. The core API has been reworked to make sure all of these features can be used together in an intuitive way. Our new features use the existing approximate nearest neighbors index that we already used for semantic deduplication, so they can be ran very quickly after building the index on your dataset. The core package can now be used for:

- Semantic Deduplication: Remove semantic duplicates from your dataset. This can prevent train/test set overlap in classification tasks, or prevent duplicate samples in RAG/semantic search.

- Outlier Filtering: Surface and filter the most anomalous samples from your dataset. This can help with automated removal of low quality data, or data that should not be in your dataset.

- Representative Sampling: Select the most central and diverse examples using Maximal Marginal Relevance. This can help you quickly explore and understand a dataset, or even build a small, diverse, high quality dataset, for example for LLM finetuning.

We’ve designed these features in the same way as our semantic deduplication: CPU friendly, lightweight, and explainable.

We hope these features help you create cleaner datasets, or simply understand your data better. We’re curious to hear your feedback, and whether there are any other features you think would improve SemHash further!
by rchaud | 2025-04-27 15:29:22+00:00
Farces occur in the US because it has a 2-party system where the winner takes all, and there is no limit to political funding. In parliamentary systems common in the rest of the West, there is at least a pretence of inter-party cooperations, e.g. forming coalitions to contain the power of the party with the plurality (but not majority) of votes.
by webdoodle | 2025-04-27 15:29:57+00:00
I worked IT for over 25 years, and thanks to anti-social media, I now hate most internet technology because of the shitty rich people who use it to abuse the rest of us. I now only work when I have too, and devote the rest of my time to sharing what I've learned about Operation Mockingbird 2.0 and how it's being used to subjugate us all.

If you really want to change the world, come protest with me at the Sun Valley Conference, AKA the Billionaires SummerCamp on July 6th. This event is where the parasitic rich coordinate the years propaganda, further consolidate there stranglehold on the industry, and train the new round of corporate newspapermen on what information needs to be throttled, distorted, derailed or deleted so that those same rich parasites can stay in power.
by Marsymars | 2025-04-27 15:30:49+00:00
That jives pretty well with the total cost of ownership of a vehicle. There are plenty of reasons why one would want to buy, but unless one of those reasons is specifically “to be a frugal driver with a Civic/Prius/Corolla”, Uber at least seems cost-competitive for in-city use.

I’m a two-car household with my partner, but I’ve assumed that if one car is out of commission, we’d be fine with Uber+one car for at least several months while we take the time to thoroughly research/negotiate/etc. options.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-04-27 15:31:17+00:00
> I find that most BSD users don't really care about such legalese and most people I know that run FreeBSD are running ZFS on root.

I don't think it's that they don't care, it's that the CDDL and BSD-ish licenses are generally believed to just not have the conflict that CDDL and GPL might. (IANAL, make your own conclusions about whether either of those are true)
by AvAn12 | 2025-04-27 15:31:37+00:00
It’s fine for you if you like it. The problem is that ubiquitous ads pollute the attention of those of us who don’t like it.

Would have been a much different (and better) world if the early web established micro-payments as a way of funding content and platforms. For example I’m happy to pay for YouTube premium to avoid the bloody ads, though I respect the preferences of those who enjoy the ads…