MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ang_cire | 2025-04-15 16:38:04+00:00
> while leftwingers are not only disgusted by success but consider it heretical

The entire left wing rhetoric against billionaires is that they are not in fact successful on the merits of work that everyone else is doing, they are successful in cheating the system and exploiting others. We love success that happens within the same rules that we average people all operate in.

This is like saying that CoD players who are against aimbotters are "disgusted by success" when they point out that no one will legitimately have a 100/4/0 KDA (a more appropriate ratio for billionaire vs average person would be 1000000/4/0, but that would almost be too outlandish, which is why there are so many infographics showing just how conceptually confounding a billion dollars really is).
by whilenot-dev | 2025-04-15 16:38:05+00:00
> I seek to maximize the prominence, usability and general success of my project, and as such I want it to have a presence everywhere it can have one

SourceHut is doing exactly how I expect them to act, and that's a good thing.

What did you expect from SourceHut, and why didn't you take this mindset off to GitHub in the first place?
by q3k | 2025-04-15 16:38:28+00:00
> ?ing Errors and never actually handling them is just a terrible practice.

I agree, but that's kind of my point - that's all these Rust praise articles are ever showing :).

> But it is meaningless to talk about this without doing comparisons.

Not comparing to other languages/approaches however allows a discussion to stay about Rust and how to make things better instead of yet another fruitless discussion about which language or approach is better in a vacuum. I'm not interested in demonstrating that Rust is better than C++ or vice versa, I'm interested in Rust being good on its own merits.
by dartharva | 2025-04-15 16:39:15+00:00
Another way how India does layoffs is by holding back multiple months' salaries "due to cash flow difficulties", suddenly sending them a mail of "you're fired" overnight and never paying them their dues, ever, leaving them destitute and crippling their employability. A lot of companies have done this, because they know they can, because practical legal recourses for salaried individuals are virtually non-existent in the country and its crippled judicial system.
Ask HN: Is there an OCR that might be able to handle field datasheets?
by clamlady | 2025-04-15 16:39:26+00:00
I am an ecologist looking for OCR that can take .pdf scans of my Rite-in-the-Rain field notebooks (which are sometimes quite dirty) with length measurements and extract them. I've tried tesseract in R, but it doesn't handle them well. I plan on using this as an additional QC step after I enter them by hand. Thanks in advance!
by andrecarini | 2025-04-15 16:39:53+00:00
Notion has been great for me since I started using it back in 2021. Hope they get all the success they deserve.

That being said, I'm honestly disappointed with their overall direction. The main product has not improved much since 2021, except for features I assume are catering to their big enterprise customers.

It's slow, the mobile app has bad UX, the Windows app is a memory hog and I run into issues whenever I build something more complex with it. It's still a great product, but as time passes I look more into alternatives...
by ac29 | 2025-04-15 16:40:06+00:00
That's what sourcehut is using.

As an aside, I saw this for the first time on a kernel.org website a few days ago and actually thought it might have been hacked since I briefly saw something about kH/s (which screams cryptominer to me).

A screenshot for anyone who hasnt seen it: https://i.imgur.com/dHOmHtn.png

(this screen appears only very briefly, so while it is clear what it is from a static screenshot, its very hard to tell in real time)
by endominus | 2025-04-15 16:40:16+00:00
You realize that examples can extend to other topics?

"I am 60% confident that recursion is the best method for this algorithm." "Having had more time to study potential options, I am now 75% confident."

"I am sure that I parked my car here." "Oh, you're right, we were on the east side, not the west."

"I am predicting that I will enjoy the movie tonight." "Given the expressions of people leaving the cinema ahead of me, I am rapidly reconsidering my prediction."

Your objection seems to primarily come from a difference in definition for "changing one's mind" - the way you describe it sounds to me like a fundamental shift in an axiomatic belief, whereas I, and many others, use it simply to indicate that we are updating a probabilistic map.
by dani__german | 2025-04-15 16:40:19+00:00
As far as the "left", one need only consider the ideological rigidity around the topic of transvestites to see that specific, thoughtful, deep, data driven, and evidence based rhetoric is abandoned in favor of not hurting the feelings of a group of people prone to threaten harm to themselves for political and social gain.

Don't ever forget that the left cant clearly articulate what a woman is without resorting to circular reasoning.
by SparkyMcUnicorn | 2025-04-15 16:41:59+00:00
I had the same thought, although voyage is 32k vs 128k for cohere 4.

Anecdotal evidence points to benchmarks correlating with result quality for data I've dealt with. I haven't spent a lot of time comparing results between models, because we were happy with the results after trying a few and tuning some settings.

Unless my dataset lines up really well with a benchmark's dataset, creating my own benchmark is probably the only way to know which model is "best".
by kylecazar | 2025-04-15 16:42:12+00:00
It would indeed be nice to have a recipient/consumer-side API!

I don't think it'll ever happen. Really the only valid use-case would be for people to hack together something for themselves (like we are discussing)... They don't want to allow developers to create applications on top of this as a 3rd party, as informed delivery itself has to carefully navigate privacy laws and it could be disastrous.
by SubiculumCode | 2025-04-15 16:43:01+00:00
Sure, but what has that to do with the administration's attack on funding and independence? As someone whose lost a grant award under the current administration's attack on science, I can tell you with assurance that this is more about political power and revenge than it is about improving scientific rigor. If we continue on this path, we will only get worse at science as a nation.

There are reforms that should be pursued: restructuring grants away from endless and arduous begging for money through the tedious grant process of today towards something more like block grants
by HelloMcFly | 2025-04-15 16:43:03+00:00
> On the definition of disappearance, I don’t think so.

Ha, well OK then! Well then we can make it one way: I understand what you're saying, I understand how a reasonable person might arrive at your conclusion, but I disagree. Whether you can do the same for me says less about me than you.

To me, your heels in the sand here feels like college-level semantic literalism and absolutism. Debates like this that focus on historical definitions rather than a discussion that considers the larger whole in evolving societies and changing contexts (technological, administratively, and others).

Yes, someone getting black bagged and executed in silence is clearly worse. It is the worst form of disappearance. But I don't think that's where the bar is for being "disappeared" - for me, that is when you are denied due process, prevented from receiving it, and all knowledge about you is now entirely reliant on the bad faith captors. This doesn't feel unreasonable or unfair to me, especially as it relates to everyday civilian discussions such as this one.

Will due process win out in the end, and I'm here wringing my hands like an idiot? Maybe so, we'll see how the next four years ago.

At any rate, I think we're clearly at impasse. Final shots are yours.
by feoren | 2025-04-15 16:43:12+00:00
> not all viewpoints are presented anymore. Universities used to be billed as a "marketplace of ideas".

That's true. Universities no longer present the viewpoint that black people are inferior to whites and deserve to be slaves. They no longer present the viewpoint that human health comes from the balance of the four humours. They no longer present the viewpoint that women are the property of their fathers/husbands. They no longer present the viewpoint that nature is fundamentally made up of earth, aire, fire, and water. How dare they abandon these ideas and still call themselves a "marketplace of ideas"! Hypocrisy!
by nonethewiser | 2025-04-15 16:43:16+00:00
Kamala Harris's voting record is extremely progressive. Nevermind the subjective approximation of her policy positions as the Democrat nominee, which was watered down as she tried to garner broader support compared to her 2020 primary run.

>The Voteview project (now based at UCLA) has, since the 1980s, employed the roll-call votes cast in Congress to locate all senators and representatives on a liberal-conservative ideological map. These data and methods have been utilized by academics in thousands of peer-reviewed books, book chapters and journal articles. Although no method is perfect, there is a general consensus within the academic community that the NOMINATE methodology employed by the Voteview project and its close cousins represent the gold standard.

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4816859-kamala-harris-i...

You can look at the data yourself: https://voteview.com/data

And its not shocking right? She represented California, which is obviously one of, if not the most, liberal state in the country.
by Delphiza | 2025-04-15 16:43:36+00:00
Moving the low-cost jobs offshore was fine until automation filled a lot of those jobs. Now the high skilled automation skills and infrastructure (production lines and robots) are also offshore. I have done my fair share of western factory tours and the number of people on the factory floor is soberingly low... they are simply not needed, as they line runs like a vast, complicated machine.
by dale_glass | 2025-04-15 16:44:02+00:00
What attribution are you talking about? Here's what I mean:

You can go to ChatGPT and ask it: "please write a Python script that prints "Hello world" in red". And that works.

And you can also go to ChatGPT and ask it: "Please write an Overte script that makes an object red when it's clicked".

And I really like that this works. I certainly don't want it to stop working because Sourcehut has something against LLMs.
by dani__german | 2025-04-15 16:44:13+00:00
and yet when fields with a dearth of White Men offer recruiting events tailored to them, the "other side" is up in arms about it. Its clear that no part of DEI wants to include Whites, Men, or the doubly dreaded White & Men combo.

https://journals.rcni.com/nursing-standard/comment/a-focus-o...
by marojejian | 2025-04-15 16:44:14+00:00
A recent post inspired me to post this.

This is the best description of entropy and information I've read.

Most of all, it highlights the subjective / relative foundations of these concepts.

Entropy and Information only exist relative to a decision about the set of state an observer cares to distinguish.

It also caused me to change my informal definition of entropy from a negative ("disorder)" to a more positive one ("the number of things I might care to know")

The Second Law now tells me that the number of interesting things I don't know about is always increasing!
by recursive | 2025-04-15 16:44:18+00:00
In a very direct way, humans need calories to live. You can just opt out of movies entirely without much impact, so I don't think they're symmetrical.

A "picky" movie watcher isn't really the same thing as a "picky" eater. The eater is doomed to be locked in a cycle of working around their preferences for as long as they live.
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-04-15 16:44:21+00:00
Major companies like that become infected with large hierarchies of scum sucking middle management that eat revenue with bonuses.

Of course they are obsessed with shrinking labor costs and resisting all downsizing until it reaches comical levels.

Take a company like health insurance that can't show a large dividend because it would be a public relations disaster. Filled to the gills with vice presidents to suck up extra earnings. Or medical devices.

Software is also very difficult for these hierarchies of overpaid management, because you need to pay labor well to get good software, and the only raison d'etre of these guys is wage suppression.

Leadership is hard for these managers because the primary thing rewarded is middle management machiavellianism, turf wars, and domain building, and any visionary leadership or inspiration is quashed.

It almost fascinates me that large company organizations basically are like Soviet style communism, Even though there are opportunities for internal competition. Like data centers and hosting and it groups. They always need to be centralized for" efficiency".

Meanwhile, they are like 20 data centers and if you had each of them compete for the company's internal business, they'd all run more efficiently.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-04-15 16:44:33+00:00
You may have had a point fifteen years go, but the right has recently leapfrogged the left in all of the dimensions you're concerned about.

This cultural uniformity of the left you speak of. What's it like? I mean, the right drives big trucks and puts American flags on everything and eats a lot of meat and is really enamored of loyalty and the military and the atomic family.

So what's it like for the left? Because as far as I can tell, the only element of uniformity among the left is that they agree that they shouldn't enable things that are a threat to their safety. The argument towards wokeness is pretty strong: if you're not aware of a threat, it might hurt you, so you should stay vigilant. That's not cultural uniformity, that's survival. Sure, many have run with it in a variety of weird directions, but there's no agreement on the left that those directions are good ones. It's precisely because the left isn't a monoculture that those elements are allowed to persist.

For further evidence that the left permits dissent among their ranks, note that they kind of suck at getting anything done because they're always debating each other about how it ought to be done and not doing it. Meanwhile it's the right that falls uniformly in line and goes off to do something that was poorly thought out (but hey at least they did something).

And taking this back to the article, it's precisely because the right can't tolerate disagreement that it wants to cancel academia and create a safe space where it doesn't have hear the truth about the consequences of its terrible policies. This is literally a letter about the Right cancelling something to enforce ideological uniformity.
by cryptopian | 2025-04-15 16:44:33+00:00
It's why I found platforms like Twitter tended to have such volatility because the platform structure itself takes every opportunity to remove that charitibility.

If you come across an argument, people are writing in a limited space, you're presented with the most engaged with replies first (i.e. either towing the party line best or the most inflammatory opposition), accounts are pseudonymous, and your performance is numerically displayed below the post.
by mushufasa | 2025-04-15 16:44:33+00:00
I looked through the documentation and I've come across a couple sites using this already.

Genuine question: why not leverage the proof-of-work challenge literally into mining that generates some revenue for a website? Not a new idea, but when I looked at the docs it didn't seem like this challenge was tied to any monetary coin value.

This is coming from someone who is NOT a big crypto person, but it strikes me that this would be a much better way to monetize organic high quality content in this day and age. Basically the idea that Brave browser started with, meeting it's moment.

I'm sure Xe has already considered this. Do they have a blog post about this anywhere?
by dkarl | 2025-04-15 16:44:54+00:00
> Toddlers (which includes defensive bureaucrats, bullies, flat earthers, folks committed to a specific agenda and radio talk show hosts)

I think people are unfair to bureaucrats. Bureaucrats have a job to do: they carry out policy determined by other people and encoded via a dizzying array of rules that combine specificity and vagueness in unexpected ways, many of which have a history of harm, exploitation, and public debate behind them that ordinary people have no patience to learn.

People are only interested in their own situation, and they are convinced that their situation is different. Sometimes it is. Sometimes they're suffering from an entirely natural partiality towards themselves. So they want the bureaucrat to be creative. They justify it by saying that the rules can be bent just for this circumstance, just for them, it doesn't have to apply to any other circumstance. Why can't the bureaucrat relax their rigid bureaucratic brain enough to realize that every circumstance is unique and the rules were written for other circumstances, not this one?

But that's exactly what the bureaucrat is not supposed to do. The public, their elected representatives, their interest groups, and other policy stakeholders expend incredible quantities of time in campaigns, pubic debate, open meetings, closed meetings, collection and collation of feedback, et cetera ad infinitum. It's not the bureaucrat's place to second-guess the results of that process or innovate outside the bounds decided on during that process.

In the gray areas within those boundaries, yes, the bureaucrat is happy to listen to arguments and make decisions based on reason and evidence. That's their job. Gray areas where bureaucrats get to apply judgment are inevitable, often even intentional, but the gray areas aren't always where you want or expect them to be. Bureaucrats don't have latitude to decide that a rule that went through two rounds of public feedback, got debated until 11pm at a public meeting, went through multiple rounds of drafting and review by the staff of an elected official, and was finally signed off on and announced as a shiny new policy in the media, should be changed for you because the way it applies to your situation doesn't make sense to you. They can't invent a gray area where the political process provided a bright line.

You can argue that a lot of rules were hastily dashed out by a junior aide and made it through the rest of the policy-making process without any further scrutiny. That's true. But it's not like when you become a bureaucrat they give you a special pair of glasses that show you which rules were just one person's ill-informed guess and which rules emerged from decades of painful history or hours of public debate and compromise. That would be nice to know, and sometimes bureaucrats know that information because they were around and paying attention when the rules were made. Sometimes they can bend a rule because they know that this particular rule is not important to anybody. But just because they won't bend a rule in your case doesn't mean they're narrow-minded, stubborn, or petty.
by Tech_Nomad | 2025-04-15 16:45:05+00:00
Hi HN,

I built PromptQuick (https://promptquick.ai) because I was personally wasting too much time fighting with prompts for ChatGPT, Claude, etc. The constant trial-and-error to get decent, consistent output felt really inefficient.

My solution was to make a simple rulebook: just concise, categorized, copy-paste rules for common problems like vague answers, bad formatting, wrong tone. Stuff you can use right away, not a long course.

This is an MVP. The main goal right now is just validation – seeing if this structured, rule-based way of prompting is actually useful to other people using these AI tools a lot.

To figure that out, the site offers a *free sample chapter* covering rules for improving output quality and formatting. You give an email, you get the PDF. Simple.

I'd appreciate any feedback on the idea itself, the landing page, or the sample rules if you check them out. Does this actually solve a pain point you have?

Tech stack is Next.js, Tailwind, Supabase, Resend, Vercel Blob, hosted on Vercel.

Happy to answer any questions.
by marojejian | 2025-04-15 16:45:32+00:00
This is the best description of entropy and information I've read: https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.06176

Most of all, it highlights the subjective / relative foundations of these concepts.

Entropy and Information only exist relative to a decision about the set of state an observer cares to distinguish.

It also caused me to change my informal definition of entropy from a negative ("disorder)" to a more positive one ("the number of things I might care to know")

The Second Law now tells me that the number of interesting things I don't know about is always increasing!

This thread inspired me to post it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43695358
by kelseyfrog | 2025-04-15 16:46:07+00:00
To add a little nuance and a bit of a detour from the original topic, some Rationalists (I'm thinking Scott Alexander) tend to spend a lot of brainpower on negative aspects of AI too - think the alignment problem.

The category of events having near infinite positive or negative outcomes with zero to few examples where it's difficult to establish a base-rate[prior] appears to attract them the most. Conversely, an imagined demonic relationship with a yet to be realized unaligned AI results in a particular existential paranoia that permeates other enclaves of Rationalist discourse.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-04-15 16:46:12+00:00
> which of the two validation is supposed to refer to

In this context, it's the former. If I say, "It's dumb that you feel that way but here's you're stupid gloves," to a toddler, I solved their problem but I also likely made them feel like their problem is somehow not a "valid" one. Especially when this happens repeatedly to children is when they grow up with particularly anti-social behaviors, for fear of others abusing them similarly.
by nicolas_t | 2025-04-15 16:46:26+00:00
Cult indoctrination could be explained by this but could also be explained by the fact that a certain number of formerly gifted kids, who have been ostracised during their childhood and have low social skills tend, to gravitate around the rationalist community. I do believe that those people are more likely to be indoctrinated.

From my readings of the Zizian, they also don't seem to easily change their mind, they instead have had a tendency towards very radical opinions that progressively become more extreme.
by 9rx | 2025-04-15 16:46:39+00:00
> I feel like we broadly agree

I am not sure I am in a proper place to agree or disagree. I'm still in argument mode, which means I don't understand the topic well enough to be in a state where I could agree or disagree. I do hope to get there someday, but when I do get there you aren't to hear more from me on the subject! I'll have grown bored of it and will be on to the next. Such is the human condition.
by pomarie | 2025-04-15 16:46:58+00:00
Great question!

We've heard from users who've tried both that our AI reviewer tends to catch more meaningful issues with less noise, that's really something you should try for yourself and find out! (The great thing is that it's really easy to start using)

Beyond the AI agent itself (which is somewhat similar to Copilot), our biggest differentiation comes from the human review experience we've built. Our goal was to create a Linear-like review workflow designed to help human reviewers understand and merge code faster.
by peterldowns | 2025-04-15 16:47:17+00:00
And for anyone who hasn't gone through the certification process before, SOC 2 Type I means that they were able to demonstrate a set of controls and evidence that their implementation passes those controls — just once. Type 2 is continuously evaluated. Notion being SOC 2 Type 2 and Notion Email only being Type 1 is a red flag that they're doing something weird or not re-using policies and infrastructure.