MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by impossiblefork | 2025-05-11 11:36:59+00:00
I think there is, but it would screw over large capital owners and would be practically impossible in the US political system. The policies I believe could too it are also too radical to realistically be implemented in Europe.

We know that massive investment in early education with tutoring etc. could easily give the average US child the equivalent of today's top 2% level academic performance. This would be expensive, but essentially unproblematic it will never happen. Similarly, university education could be made publicly funded, and also cheaper. Here in Sweden it's cheaper per head than highschool education.

We know that physician labour in the US cost more than it should due to a shortage due to too few residencies. It could be solved tomorrow, and all US medical system problems could be solved over 15-20 years.

You could ensure that there's investment capital and no inflation, sidestepping the simultaneous inflation and need for investment caused by supply shocks due to war and technology change, by making everybody save a certain inflation-dependent fraction of their income from wages.

When a company is doing weird legal stuff to prevent their competitor from opening a warehouse in a certain, crush them-- impose criminal penalties, throw the planners and everyone who knew about the idea in jail.

15 years of this and you'd be in another world, one in which China might not be such a competitor after all. The only reason you aren't moving towards this world is because 'you' in the sense of the donors and the political leadership don't want to do it. There's even people who don't want publicly funded school lunches. With this attitude one makes oneself irrelevant.
by abanana | 2025-05-11 11:37:20+00:00
A line early on in the article caught my eye:

> they serve the same functional goal — input numbers

Well, yes and no. Same as how, when it comes to data types, it often has to be pointed out to inexperienced developers that a phone "number" isn't a number in the mathematical sense - you can't add or multiply 2 of them together to get anything meaningful. It's an identifying string, that happens to use only digit characters. "123" in a telephone number is three individual unrelated digits, whereas "123" in a calculator represents the number one hundred and twenty-three.

So the functional goal isn't exactly the same. One is entering individual characters, but on the other you're more likely to be thinking "one hundred and twenty-three" as you type its digits.

It may or may not be related to the actual reason for the inversion of layout, but the subtle difference felt like a (possibly minor) error in the initial premise.
by fluidcruft | 2025-05-11 11:38:10+00:00
Three things about that chart:

1. In terms of US monopoly status, the USA chart would be more relevant than worldwide (also tangential but is Baidu really that weak in China or is there just no data?)

2. Google certainly has a stranglehold on mobile search (unsurprising given that both Apple and Android use Google search). In USA desktops Bing still isn't that strong, but it is 10% and not very low single digits. It makes sense to me that search volume has moved to mobile. It's super convenient to search quick things on phones wherever you happen to be vs finding a computer. But if for example a remedy was to essentially ban Google from Apple's mobile devices then it would really move the chart quickly given Apple's dominance in US mobile marketshare.

3. The biggest issue is those are percentages and not volumes. If search becomes irrelevant because people switch to other modalities it's not going to appear as a decline in these charts.
Ask HN: What will tech employment look like in 10 years?
by ipnon | 2025-05-11 11:38:54+00:00
What jobs will become prevalent? Which will become scarce?

I do not predict the elimination of the humble coder, but the covid hiring wave has come and gone, and Big Tech for the most part successfully minimized the workforces of those who were hired in the covid wave: frontend, backend and fullstack engineers. The patterns of code required for these positions have been successfully recognized by the LLMs I think, and for many cases a single staff engineer with experience and a trusty LLM is similarly productive as a team of 2-4 junior engineers led by a senior engineer was only a short 5 years ago. I do not expect much expansion in this "traditional" web development (these positions have really only existed in modern form for about 20 years, roughly when Rails was first released).

Many such as Amjad Masad and Beff Jezos are of the opinion that for those who would have taken these positions before, the options are to either drill down the stack towards the bare metal, by reason of relative difficulty of embedded engineering, and that one struggles to imagine high-stakes software such as in a SpaceX rocket, Boeing airplane, or Anduril drone relying primarily on vibe-coded slop hastily LGTM'd into production. So the kind of software that requires large amounts of formal, simulated, or physical verification seems to still be necessary, but this is much more difficult to write than a webpage. Expansions in the labor market for those writing C, C++, Rust in the context of operating systems, embedded systems, microcontrollers, drivers, and so forth seems likely.

The other option seems to be to leave the stack entirely, and leverage small teams to create niche and targeted applications for small segments of users. There has been some success in this area as well, but requires a much broader skillset than simply being an expert programmer and understanding some computer science.

The options seem to be either to start reading Bjarne Stroustrup or Peter Thiel. But the skill ceiling for either path is fairly high, and for the short term I predict a sustained contraction in the software engineering labor market, while people adapt their educations and long-term career goals. Headcounts at FAANG I don't see recovering soon if ever. This has broader implications for a traditional startup route where one earned their stripes at FAANG before launching their own venture, but I digress ...
by credit_guy | 2025-05-11 11:39:07+00:00
Still, this does not sound right. You are hinting towards some predator-prey-type of cycle: trees grow (and absorb CO2), lianas infest them (and by the way, they appear to absorb even more CO2), but then trees die, and lianas die with them. But then won't trees grow again, and the cycle would repeat? Maybe overall, this cycle would reduce some CO2 absorption, but by 95%?
by Nevermark | 2025-05-11 11:40:36+00:00
Well, by 2038 the chatbots will have long since fixed all the time format problems, all our problems, and will be working away at problems of which we cannot concieve.

So, ahem, your “early retirement” is assured?

A year is a lot longer than it used to be. And quickly getting longer. Measured in change.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-05-11 11:42:08+00:00
The only relevant part I can find from that article is:

> One criticism we've seen of the FreePascal project in general concerns its documentation, although there is quite a lot of it: eight FPC manuals, and lengthy Lazarus docs in multiple languages. There is a paid-for tutorial e-book available, too.

The criticism is that there is too much documentation available? And they're long, and dare even to be available in multiple languages?
Show HN: TheorIA – An Open Curated Physics Dataset (Equations,Explanations,JSON)
by ManuelSH | 2025-05-11 11:43:56+00:00
We’re building TheorIA— an open, high quality dataset of theoretical physics results: equations, derivations, definitions, and explanations — all in structured, machine- and human-readable JSON.

Why? Physics is rich with beautiful, formal results — but most of them are trapped in PDFs, LaTeX, or lecture notes. That makes it hard to:

- train symbolic/physics-aware ML models,

- build derivation-checking tools,

- or even just teach physics interactively.

THEORIA fills that gap. Each entry includes:

A result name (e.g., Lorentz transformations)

Clean equations (AsciiMath)

Straightforward step-by-step derivation with reasoning

Symbol definitions & assumptions

Programmatic validation using sympy

References, arXiv-style domain tags, and contributor metadata

Everything is in open, self-contained JSON files. No scraping, no PDFs, just clear structured data for physics learners, teachers, and ML devs.

Contributors Wanted: We’re tiny right now and trying to grow. If you’re into physics or symbolic ML:

Add an entry (any result you love)

Review others' derivations

Build tools on top of the dataset

GitHub https://github.com/theoria-dataset/theoria-dataset/

Licensed under CC-BY 4.0, and we welcome educators, students, ML people, or just anyone who thinks physics deserves better data.
by aprilnya | 2025-05-11 11:43:57+00:00
For one, when I visit the site on my phone, the bottom 25% of my viewport is taken up by their recommendation algorithm, the top 30% is usually but not always taken up by an autoplaying video completely unrelated to the topic or wiki I’m visiting, and so I’m left with a tiny piece in the middle of my screen actually containing the contents of the wiki page I’m trying to read.

They also hold wikis hostage by not allowing them to move to another platform and redirect/get rid of their Fandom wiki. This means that if any wiki tries to move to be independent, the Fandom wiki will keep existing, and usually will still be the first result on Google for a long while, maybe forever, because of Fandom’s SEO. Of course the entire community of editors will have moved on, so this heavily outdated Fandom wiki full of ads and other elements trying to catch your attention and keep you on the site, will rank above the independent ad-free and active wiki with up-to-date information on Google search.
by piterrro | 2025-05-11 11:44:41+00:00
Are you asking how to deal with offboarding or the overall "fill the shoes" problem after CTO leaves? If it's the former, it looks like Hephaestus wanted to leave a "way back" to the org by not having his account deactivated. Who is the CTO now, you or Koalemos?

> Koalemos has done what he was allegedly instructed to _not_ do Instructed by a person that is leaving the company? I'm not surprised Koalemos did it their way. Unless there was a really strong reason about not doing it, why that person cannot do the job their way?

>redirected all of Hephaestus's emails to his own inbox What's bad about it? It's actually god that somebody will be receiving the emails after Hephaestus's departure from the company, its a standard practice when a vital member of the team is leaving.
by UncleMeat | 2025-05-11 11:44:49+00:00
I've seen a lot of high level engineers at Google leave over the past couple of years. There's vastly more pressure from management and much less trust. And a bunch of L7+ folks have been expected to shift to working on AI stuff to have "enough impact." The increased pressure has created a lot of turf wars among these folks, as it isn't enough to be a trusted steward but now you need your name at the top of the relevant docs (and not the names of your peers).

Prior to 2023 I pretty much only ever saw the L7s and L8s that I work with leave Google because there was an exciting new opportunity or because they were retiring. Now most of the people I see leave at this level are leaving because they are fed up with Google. It's a mess.
by bilsbie | 2025-05-11 11:44:53+00:00
Like I said I’m on your team and extremely pro environment. I just see media alarmism in this issue and think there are more important things to focus on. but I’m willing to ask:

what’s your data on how water is being used improperly on these data centers? And what is the documented harm? Are plants and animals downstream of a data center dying from lack of water?

Also keep in mind the funny thing about water alarmism is that even after water is used it stays in earths water cycle. Watering crops returns to aquifers. Evaporated water rains down somewhere else. It’a not like oil we used once and it’s gone.
by Avamander | 2025-05-11 11:47:17+00:00
No, HackerOne gets paid by the companies, so they're heavily incentivized to work for their benefit.

I've had three really bad experiences with unskilled H1 triagers that the next vuln I find from a company that uses H1 will go instantly public. I'm never going to spend that much effort again, to get a triager that would actually bother to triage.
by keybored | 2025-05-11 11:48:07+00:00
The gains have never been distributed equally. For a time wages for Western workers kept up with productivity (but inequality was still a thing). Then the neoliberal turn happened in the 1970’s. (Which was started by a military coup in Chile.) Since then wages in the West have been stagnant.

In that same time period wages also rose for the third/second world workers. In no small part due to China’s one billion people (which is not neoliberal).

We’re still in the neoliberal phase, the backlash against the New Deal and other reforms of post-WWII. Then we now have within this order the AI boom/hype.

> Improvements in AI may eventually improve quality of life for the majority of people, but we may go through a phase where a few people reap huge rewards while most suffer a decrease in their quality of life.

Here’s the difference between the perspective that “progress” is inevitable and we will (out of our generosity) try/hope for reducing the inevitable suffering of those (other) people. Another perspective is that progress that doesn’t serve people is not progress.

The root problem is the inequality that never was fixed.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-05-11 11:48:15+00:00
It is virtually the same size[1] as the era equivalent S23.

I don't think a headphone jack which you can get via a super cheap USB-C adaptor, makes the justification for a 1000 Euro paperweight.

[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/size-compare-3d.php3?idPhone1=12380...
Show HN: MBCompass – A minimalist, offline Android compass app (FOSS)
by nativeforks | 2025-05-11 11:49:02+00:00
Hey HN,

I built MBCompass, a lightweight, privacy-friendly compass app for Android. It works fully offline, doesn’t ask for unnecessary permissions (no GPS, no internet), and is open source.

Most compass apps out there are bloated or ad-heavy. I wanted something clean, fast, and featurish. So I made this!

It’s only ~1.7 in size and uses a low-pass filter to smooth sensor readings.

I’d love feedback or thoughts – especially from others building simple, privacy-first apps!
by Daniel_sk | 2025-05-11 11:51:12+00:00
Exactly. The compression level of DNA is magnitudes better than anything we can even come close to. DNA usually doesn't even contain specific counts (like 5 fingers on hand) or sizes of organs and so on - these are given by the processes that run in parallel and cause the cells to hit spatial / chemical / electrical or other limits. It's like putting lots of house builders on specific places where the house should be and each one would just keep building a wall until the he hits another one. There is no compressed house plan, it's a compressed "engine" that builds the result.
by ang_cire | 2025-05-11 11:52:21+00:00
A better analogy would be if you see a bunch of people walking around in faulty stab vests, and you tell them that the vests are faulty before they are recalled and replaced by the company. In which case, telling everyone those vests are actually not going to stop a knife, is a very good thing to do.

> I did not make the argument that obscurity is security... But that doesn't mean non-obscurity automatically improves security.

... egad. Yes, having information doesn't mean people will do the right thing with it, but you're not everyone's mommy/god/guardian. People should have the choice themselves about what actions they want to take, and what's in their own best interests.

And obscuring the information that they need to make that choice, in the name of not making them less secure, is, ipso facto, asserting that the obscuring is keeping them more secure than they otherwise might be.

So yes, you absolutely are arguing for obscurity as security.
by keybored | 2025-05-11 11:53:45+00:00
No, because it’s built on the false premise that the inequality following the industrial revolution ever stopped.[1]

It’s easy for us to be optimists and shrug nonchalantly about the short-term (?) suffering when we don’t face the worst or even median pain that these changes bring. Very strong “you will suffer but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make” vibes.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43953142
by rvnx | 2025-05-11 11:54:42+00:00
Let’s imagine you found how to steal funds from a bank, best is to let them know that you are concerned (as a customer) for the safety of your own funds.

If they do nothing after a reasonable amount of time, escalate to regulators or change bank. Then once they release information that some processes are changed: “thanks to XXX working at YYY for helping us during it”. You win, they win, clients win, everybody wins.

Unwanted public disclosure directly leads to public exploitation, there is nothing good at all about it.

For example, there is a RCE in Discord (totally statistically certain due to the rendering engine, just not public yet), and this is going to be exploited only if someone shares the technical details.

If you don’t disclose it, it’s not like someone else will discover it tomorrow. It’s possible, but not more likely than it was yesterday. If you disclose it, you make sure that everybody with malicious intent knows about it.
by conartist6 | 2025-05-11 11:55:02+00:00
Man I wish I could get insurance like that. "Accountability insurance"

You were responsibile for something, say, child care, and you just decided to go for beer and leave the child with an AI. The house burns down, but because you had insurance you are not responsible. You just head along to your next child care job and don't too much worry about it.
by morsecodist | 2025-05-11 11:55:49+00:00
I feel that people are so weirdly negative about Google's products. I have some concerns about Google but I need to admit their products are good. I think a lot of people on here don't like them as a business and it clouds their views of the products.

> Gmail

Gmail is the best email provider of all time by a huge amount and has been since it's inception. I use proton mail as well and it's worse, a lot worse. It's slower, has fewer features and is not as good looking. From what I've seen of apple Mail and outlook they are worse still.

> Android

Personally, I prefer Android. There are a lot of things I'd miss going to iPhone. Like custom launchers, having a different browser, an app drawer, the way widgets work, ect...

> Chrome

I am concerned about the chromium engine creating a browser monoculture so I use Firefox. I have used Firefox every day for years and I have to say it's worse. Whenever I use chrome for a small thing I need I realize that its better. It's faster, better looking, things just work on it (I know part of this is because of its dominance but that's irrelevant when evaluating product quality). I don't use it but I'm not going to pretend that it's worse.
by turtlebro | 2025-05-11 11:56:21+00:00
It reminds me of how psychedelics can sometimes put you in a hyper observant, heightened state of awareness. Maybe some here have experienced this, it can be very mind blowing. People are open books and communicate much much more then we think we are. Motions, gestures, tiny subtle reactions, the way someone walks, it can give you a direct glance into someones soul. Some people are probably naturally very skilled at being observant, the author being a painter only make sense.
by fastball | 2025-05-11 11:58:44+00:00
Sure, we can run with your analogy. So you make everyone aware that the stab vests are faulty. One of the people you make aware of this fact is a thief with a knife, who previously wasn't gonna take the risk on robbing anyone, since he only had a knife (not a gun) and everyone was wearing stab proof vests. But now he knows, so he goes for it and stabs someone. You are partially responsible for this outcome in this hypothetical scenario, as the thief didn't know beforehand about the defect and the only reason he ended up stabbing someone was due to this knowledge. Again, you not knowing whether or not the thief already knows does not excuse you if he did not and now does through your actions.

I'm arguing that unveiling the obscurity can lead to attacks that wouldn't have happened otherwise, and you are partially to blame for those if they happen (which is true). I am not saying it was "more secure" before the disclosure. Just that, in the world afterwards, you must take responsibility for everyone knowing, including people who did not know before and abuse that knowledge.
by justindownes | 2025-05-11 11:58:59+00:00
With our absolute depence on portable electronic devices, the tedious ritual of charging batteries could soon become obsolete. Researchers at the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) in South Korea have developed a revolutionary energy-harvesting device that converts ordinary body movements into electricity—with an efficiency 280 times greater than existing technologies.
by NikolaNovak | 2025-05-11 12:01:05+00:00
I think lawyers will decide whether they are dishonoring obligations or not.

The real tragedy to me is the loss of access for non massive customers. Vmware was smart to build a slope of adoption, from individual techies with curiosity and home labs, to small shops with simple needs, all the way through massive governmental or multinational behemoths. That ramp-up is being dismantled. They can ride current crop of enterprise customers for a long time -- but where is next batch going to come from? Which techies in which company in 10 years,who don't already have pervasive vmware footprint, will even begin to consider it?
by jbeninger | 2025-05-11 12:01:28+00:00
Demonstrate? Or just scaremonger?

Y2K showed that you don't need details beyond vague threats of "medication administered at the wrong time" and "planes falling out of the air" to get organizations and the public to care. No idea how that's going to tie into the conspiracy-heavy media landscape we inhabit now.

(Note I do think this is a serious issue that needs to be addressed. And I'd love to see specific examples. I'm just pushing back against the idea that examples would make much difference to advocacy efforts)
by halflings | 2025-05-11 12:01:57+00:00
I would also add that search has already moved elsewhere.

Less and less people are using search engines to shop, ex:Amazon makes >$57B a year from search ads, but also look at Temu and Shein which are mostly glorified product search platforms.

No one is searching for "funny videos" when you can just open Instagram and Tiktok.

The only real unique thing that search engines can do is queries that are not directly commercial (e.g. education, information seeking, etc.) and competition is insanely intense (w/ ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc) there.
by Macha | 2025-05-11 12:03:09+00:00
Fandom would rather I do anything other than what I came to the site to do.

- Autoplaying barely related videos at the top as someone told them video content has better CPM

- "Have you tried looking at this page on another wiki?"

- So many ads

- Others like you viewed

- Would you like to join the discord?

- Fan Central?