MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by benreesman | 2025-07-31 15:05:55+00:00
I'm saying when you compare the resources that have gone in vs. the results that have come out the other side?

Putting these two teams up against one another isn't even fair: its like pushing baby chicks into a pond full of Piranhha fish.

It's not just a package manager: uv and ruff and tye are rapidly becoming an ecosystem. You think they don't have plans for Jupyter?

Google was a tiny company without a monetization strategy. Yahoo being gigantic and "divetsified" just made them a tastier meal for a different breed of competition.
by piva00 | 2025-07-31 15:06:00+00:00
Why wouldn't they persuade no one? Just because we know how their history ended doesn't mean their beginnings can't be repeated, cycles of the same bullshit appear in history and they often rhyme with one another.

Do you think Stalin and Hitler as we know were the same Stalin and Hitler as experienced in the 1920s-1930s? If you shed the baggage, can't parallels be drawn to the modern era?

Authoritarianism of the 2020s looks quite different from the 1920s, the 2020s have the Competitive Authoritarianism flavour of it, it's different, it will attack institutions in different ways than simply shutting them down and imprisoning members, it's more subtle, more disperse, but still has the same underlying traits. Comparisons are apt, even if just as a reminder of how things historically evolved from the pre-authoritarian phase into a full-blown one, remembering to trace that is as convincing now as it was in the 1950s...
by VonGuard | 2025-07-31 15:06:41+00:00
My favorite PE story is about a certain company created by the government that first went public, the PE.

After the PE acquisition, an exec stands up in front of the entire company and says, and I am not kidding:

"This was a telecom company. Telecom companies grow at 10 to 15% a year. This is now a data services company. Data services companies grow at 20 to 25% a year. Get to work."

PE changed nothing else at that time. They simply decided the company was in another category, and thus, this would yield more money. I have always marveled how some business people can simply move things around on a spreadsheet and think that reality will follow.
by zahlman | 2025-07-31 15:06:54+00:00
The common understanding (disregarding ideologues) of "discrimination" is still not a pedantic dictionary definition (which applies broadly to situations that don't even involve human interaction) is as given on Wikipedia (they do sometimes get politically charged ideas correct):

> Discrimination is the process of making unfair or prejudicial distinctions between people based on the groups, classes, or other categories to which they belong or are perceived to belong,[1] such as race, gender, age, class, religion, or sexual orientation.[2] Discrimination typically leads to groups being unfairly treated on the basis of perceived statuses based on ethnic, racial, gender or religious categories.[2][3] It involves depriving members of one group of opportunities or privileges that are available to members of another group.[4]

The point is that we are interested in the cases deemed unfair.

The problem is that people have wildly different ideas of what is fair.
by atoav | 2025-07-31 15:07:36+00:00
Ok let's say you're a UK vendor and you developed and published an adding algorithm for 2+2 that returns the correct result: 4

How does that publicised adding algorithm get corrupted, if the UK government decides they want that 2+2=5?

The answer is that matrix being based in the UK isn't ideal, but since they published the whole protocol, it can't just be made unsafe on request without people noticing. If the math maths it still maths when the government doesn't want it to math.

What could happen is that the UK could force specific servers of the UK based entity to surveil targets etc. But you don't have to use their servers (in fact, their goal is probably that you run your own).

As someone who would be in the position to decide for or against matrix/wire usage in my org, I have to say this kind of pratise didn't particularily strengthen my trust in wire.
by underlines | 2025-07-31 15:08:11+00:00
Heads up, there’s a fair bit of pushback (justified or not) on r/LocalLLaMA about Ollama’s tactics:

Vendor lock-in: AFAIK it now uses a proprietary llama.cpp fork and builts its own registry on ollama.com in a kind of docker way (I heard docker ppl are actually behind ollama) and it's a bit difficult to reuse model binaries with other inference engines due to their use of hashed filenames on disk etc. Closed-source tweaks: Many llama.cpp improvements haven’t been upstreamed or credited, raising GPL concerns. They since switched to their own inference backend. Mixed performance: Same models often run slower or give worse outputs than plain llama.cpp. Tradeoff for convenience - I know. Opaque model naming: Rebrands or filters community models without transparency, biggest fail was calling the smaller Deepseek-R1 distills just "Deepseek-R1" adding to a massive confusion on social media and from "AI Content Creators", that you can run "THE" DeepSeek-R1 on any potato. Difficult to change Context Window default: Using Ollama as a backend, it is difficult to change default context window size on the fly, leading to hallucinations and endless circles on output, especially for Agents / Thinking models.

---

If you want better, (in some cases more open) alternatives:

llama.cpp: Battle-tested C++ engine with minimal deps and faster with many optimizations ik_llama.cpp: High-perf fork, even faster than default llama.cpp llama-swap: YAML-driven model swapping for your endpoint. LM Studio: GUI for any GGUF model—no proprietary formats with all llama.cpp optimizations available in a GUI Open WebUI: Front-end that plugs into llama.cpp, ollama, MPT, etc.
by steveBK123 | 2025-07-31 15:08:40+00:00
It's a good point but I'll add the problem is also the system/incentives of whatever org you are in.

Some shops its easy enough to manage someone out and bring in a new team member who will contribute more. This is a health environment and generally free of the boom-bust hire/fire cycle.

Other shops have very top down hire/fire cycles where if you fire someone now you have no ability to replace them, and worse yet.. when you HAVE to fire someone, you want the low performer around to hit your metrics..

So a lot of shops carry around a lot of dead weight for different reasons, as long as the person is not a net negative contributor.

Aside from that, yeah, how to deal with poor performers is as much an art as a science. I often find, aside from exceptional cases, most of them actually have some part of the job they prefer & are good at, so modifying the task allocation can go a long way.
by theptip | 2025-07-31 15:08:52+00:00
> The entire distinction here is that as a website operator you wish to serve me ads

While this is sometimes the case, it’s not always so.

For example Fediverse nodes and self-hosted sites frequently block crawlers. This isn’t due to ads, rather because it costs real money to serve the site and crawlers are often considered parasitic.

Another example would be where a commerce site doesn’t want competitors bulk-scraping their catalog.

In all these cases you can for sure make reasonable “information wants to be free” arguments as to why these hopes can’t be realized, but do be clear that it’s a separate argument from ad revenue.

I think it’s interesting to split revenue into marginal distribution/serving costs, and up-front content creation costs. The former can easily be federated in an API-centric model, but figuring out how to compensate content creators is much harder; it’s an unsolved problem currently, and this will only get harder as training on content becomes more valuable (yet still fair use).
by mvieira38 | 2025-07-31 15:09:37+00:00
This cope is officially dead now, not even Proton is believing Switzerland anymore. The pressure has gotten enough that they had to freeze all Swiss investment and start the process of moving key infrastructure to another country (I don't remember which, but it's the one Mullvad is at).

Truth is, Euros don't care about privacy. The endgame will probably be to host this stuff in the third world or something, like pirates do
by daxfohl | 2025-07-31 15:09:42+00:00
The surprising thing to me was that tactics are all written in "user-level" code, outside the proof kernel. This makes sense in the sense that you want a small, thoroughly tested kernel that doesn't change. But it also implies that if you use tactics in your proof, then your proof can go from correct to failing if one of the tactics you use gets modified between releases. Is that a problem in real world use?
by thinkingtoilet | 2025-07-31 15:09:48+00:00
It also can be very awkward when you're chosen for a promotion over someone who has been there longer for you. Suddenly you're managing and giving reviews to someone who was sitting next to you for years. I went through this but was extremely lucky that I had a wonderful mentor. It wasn't a big deal, but the first performance review, while it went well, definitely felt strange.
by JTbane | 2025-07-31 15:10:23+00:00
This was an uncomfortable read, I'm quite frankly shocked at the amount of brainpower and other resources that went into attempting to weed out gay men from the Canadian civil service, into the 90s no less! To what end was this done? Is a gay man a worse cop or bureaucrat?

Then I remembered what happened to Turing in the 50s.
by zahlman | 2025-07-31 15:10:39+00:00
The premise here is not that men would "pretend to be women" (and sooner or later, a trans activist will decide that this charge has been levied at the wrong target) as part of a "premeditated assault plan".

The premise is that men would do it either in order to protest the policy, or in order to retain access to business that they had before.
by h2zizzle | 2025-07-31 15:11:03+00:00
I think you misunderstand. My ideals (and what I suppose to be the closest model to reality) are closer to what you are calling the classical view. Your mistake here is in conflating capital with capitalists. Capital is a tool, capitalists are people who use (some would say abuse) that tool in line with what you are calling liberalism. Labor (the group, not the action; perhaps better termed laborers) can, should, and does use capital, but labor and capitalists in their most elemental forms will always be at odds, because the goal of labor is to do enough work to live a fulfilled and dignified life, and the goal of capitalists is to exploit capital and labor as efficiently as possible in order to acquire more capital.

Circling back, redistribution is necessary because, under Capitalism, capital accrues to itself at a higher rate of return than does labor (Piketty). Without the socioeconomic infrastructure to redistribute regularly in smaller and more palatable amounts, a major redistribution event is necessary to break the positive feedback loop of capital's higher rate of return. This is not pitting labor against capital, it is forcing capital back into the hands of labor so that it can be used towards their ends rather than that of capitalists. Note that collective use is valid in this hypothetical; the difference is whether capital is being deployed for monetary gain or social needs (the "common good").
by incomingpain | 2025-07-31 15:11:27+00:00
>I like Claude Code for what it is, but I want an agentic coding setup that provides much stronger security and privacy guarantees.

Very fair. These big ai arent earning billions off $25/month subs that mostly lose them $.

>What is the state of the art right now regarding running local LLMS and connecting local agents to them?

Best of the best as far as Im aware is Qwen3 coder run in your choice of agentic coder. Up there with cloud strength in coding.

BUT it's 480B. Q4_K_M is 290 GB. You're talking $50,000, rackmount, 30amp electrical going into that beast. 10x 32GB cuda cards is yikes.

Here's what literally just released hours ago:

https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct

I'm currently downloading the unsloth IQ4_NL version which should run well.

This will run on a 24GB card with good context size and good speed. If you have 1x 32GB card even better.

What I've been using lately.

https://mistral.ai/news/devstral

On a 24GB card this is great. Just look at the benchmarks and it's absolutely completely usable.

Meant to be used in openhands. This absolutely is completely functioning once you get the settings correct like a low temperature and such.
Show HN: Legal–Markdown-JS, Git-friendly legal docs with Markdown and helpers
by dmarinoc | 2025-07-31 15:11:33+00:00
Hi HN! I'm sharing legal-markdown-js, a TypeScript port of an abandoned 2011 Ruby gem that solves a surprisingly complex problem: writing legal documents that don't break when you edit them.

The Problem: Legal documents have intricate numbering schemes (1.1.1, (a)(i), etc.) and cross-references. Change one section and you might need to renumber 50+ references manually. Plus there's tons of repetitive boilerplate clauses scattered across documents. Lawyers often avoid restructuring documents because it's too error-prone.

The Solution: Write contracts in Markdown with tons of helper functions: auto-numbering, variables, conditional blocks, cross-references, and imports.

Example

--- party1: "ACME Corp" party2: "{{client_name}}" jurisdiction: "California" --- # Software License Agreement l. This Agreement is between {{party1}} and {{party2}}. l. License Grant ll. Restrictions lll. No reverse engineering lll. See section @[License Grant] for details {{#if enterprise}} l. Enterprise Features ll. Priority support included {{/if}} @import "clauses/standard_termination.md"

The l. markers become proper legal numbering, variables expand ({{client_name}}), conditional blocks show/hide content ({{#if enterprise}}), cross-references update automatically (@[License Grant]), and imports (@import) let you reuse boilerplate clauses.

Why I Built This

I stopped programming to build startups, became a corporate PM, and now I'm starting a fund. I wanted control over the legal documents we share with LPs and portfolio companies – tired of paying lawyers for simple template changes, but most importantly frustrated with losing version history in Word docs.

Scratching this itch became my late-night learning vehicle for modern development practices. What started as "I'll just port this Ruby gem" turned into a deep dive into TypeScript, testing frameworks, and the entire modern JS ecosystem.

Technical Details

- Full TypeScript with strict typing - Extensive test coverage - ESM-first with CommonJS fallback - Remark/Unified integration for extensibility - CLI + programmatic API - Full processing pipeline with multiple format outputs including PDF with highlights

The original Ruby gem was solid but abandoned. The JavaScript ecosystem deserved a maintained version, especially with legal tech growing rapidly.

Who This Helps

- Humans and legal professionals tired of Word's auto-numbering disasters - Legal tech companies building document automation - Anyone generating contracts programmatically - Developers who need to template complex documents

GitHub: https://github.com/petalo/legal-markdown-js/

Playground: https://petalo.github.io/legal-markdown-js/

Original Ruby Project: https://github.com/compleatang/legal-markdown
by armchairhacker | 2025-07-31 15:11:50+00:00
Lightweight UI for Github? (If that doesn't already exist).

e.g. client requests https://github.mx/llvm/llvm-project, your server fetches the data from https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project (using an API or scraping the site), and renders it in a cleaner UI with less HTML and JavaScript.

It would be useful for slow/outdated devices and places with low internet bandwidth. The URL concept is similar to https://github.dev/llvm/llvm-project, which opens the project in a web-hosted VSCode (vaguely the opposite since VSCode is more UI but also more features).
by atoav | 2025-07-31 15:13:48+00:00
There is a German Verein called digitalcourage who lobbies for this: https://digitalcourage.de/en

You can toss some money to the European Digital Rights initiative (EDRi) as well: https://edri.org/

All of those are doing good work in the digital rights space

(Edit: there is probably more but those are the ones that came to mind)
by LexiMax | 2025-07-31 15:14:03+00:00
I'm not sure why you're being dismissive. I have no doubt that these sorts of restrictions are coming for something they actually use and care about.

And speaking more broadly, teenagers are in the process of growing into adults. With that comes the forging of their own identity, and part of that journey is trying things and discovering who they are - in no small part outside of your watchful gaze.
by sugarpimpdorsey | 2025-07-31 15:14:05+00:00
Apple's power management isn't as great as everyone claims.

I've an older MacBook Air with a severe battery drain problem.

The battery will last maybe a day or two when SHUT DOWN (not sleep) before being fully drained and refuses to power on.

It's done this since day one.

I tried resetting everything possible which could be reset and nothing helped.

Allegedly the problem is related to a Bluetooth radio which does not shut down properly but as usual Apple is tight-lipped, and the cult members that moderate their community forum try to gaslight you into believing the computers are perfect and you're doing something wrong.

Eventually I just gave up and lugged the power adapter everywhere.
by ltbarcly3 | 2025-07-31 15:14:28+00:00
They extract value in a nonsustainable way, probabalistically, while creating a moral hazard.

Lets look at Vetinarians. They are buying up huge numbers of vet clinics. The owners retire and they bring in H1B or other lower cost vets, and increase prices 3x. My dog got sick and it cost $7k for then to figure out she had Addison's disease. The POC was some business person trained to extract money from you using guilt. They would give cost estimates and thrn ask for triple that every 24 hours. "she is such a sweet dog, I know its a lot of money but it costs so much to run a pet urgent care, we could just put her to sleep" was a paraphrase of every conversation. In the end it cost 2 cents to give her a pill that is the first thing they should have tried and she recovered. More than $7k for a dog to be at the vet for 3 days.

This is not sustainable. I will never take another pet to a facility like this, its impossible to afford it. In the meantime they have several years of burning customers and fantastic financials, plenty to get a massive loan for a second PE firm to buy the business, that PE firm gambling they can extract enough management fees to make back the small % of equity they actually had to pay themselves before it goes bankrupt.

If you made PE firms responsible for even a fraction of the debt of the businesses they operate they would disappear inside of 3 months. They are purely a hack on our laws around corporate debt and too much dumb money flooding the market due to privatization of retirement accounts.
by xp84 | 2025-07-31 15:14:41+00:00
It sounds to me like your team is not super important (right now?) to the higher-ups in the company. Obviously I don't know the details, but they're very intentionally attritioning (? Attriting?) the team by any reasonable definition.

Without any other detail, from my experience (10 years doing Eng Manager/Senior Eng Manager roles) I'd advise you to start interviewing. Not necessarily because you're in jeopardy, you'd know that better than me anyway. But think of what you want out of your job: One thing should be professional growth -- going from a new EM to a great EM and being set up for future promotions. You won't get that here without a major mindshift from your boss (and probably up the reporting chain from them too).

Interview and when asked why you're leaving when you just became an EM, say "I love my new role and the team, but XYZ Co seems to be deprioritizing or phasing out the ABC team and I find myself without the resources we need to be successful."
by patrakov | 2025-07-31 15:14:46+00:00
I am a Wire user. I am not happy that, if their server goes down, all the text and images that I shared with other users will become unavailable to me. As a special case, I am not able to look at my own old messages while using my laptop on the airplane, as the Linux client is just a webview. On the phone, it works.

Backups half-way solve the issue with text messages - I would still need to contact someone with sufficient development skills to decrypt the backup and extract the text in a readable form, but the information is there.

But with images, there is no recovery. And they apparently already lost some of my photos (the placeholder for some of them never gets replaced with the actual photo when I scroll up to year 2023).

Add to that the incompatible backup formats between the desktop and mobile apps.

So this is definitely not the claimed data sovereignty.
Show HN: Haven – Selfhost a private blog instead of using Facebook
by mawise | 2025-07-31 15:15:44+00:00
Hi everyone,

This project started as a way for me to share pictures of my then-newborn kid with close friends and family. I've always been privacy conscious and didn't really want to use Facebook or Instagram. The more I've worked on it, the more it feels like it could be a healthier way for people to interact on the internet--avoiding the polarizing, engagement-optimized algorithms that generate modern news feeds.

I shared this project a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26013715

Since then (in addition to a lot of small things) I added a built-in feed reader. Haven already published private RSS feeds, now you can subscribe to those feeds along with any other RSS/Atom feed right in Haven.

I'd love any feedback, thanks for taking a look!
by whstl | 2025-07-31 15:16:11+00:00
I agree with you and upvoted you but:

IMO the problem from a management perspective isn't really the bad performer staying too long.

Also, dealing with HR as a manager is mostly fine. They actually respect you.

And just having someone that sucks on your team for one extra year is not really much of a burden. Sure you have to do extra paperwork, adjust morale, but that's just the job.

The problem IME is when this is used against you. When timelines are tight and the C-Level complain that "you already have N reports", but you can't fire or transfer the person who's disruptive, doesn't delivery or is clearly doing a second job instead, and the C-Level is too lazy to check what's going on.
by ewoodrich | 2025-07-31 15:16:24+00:00
I have a .roorules file with only about four instructions, one of which is an (unintentional) binary canary of very simple rule following at the end of a task. And another rule that’s a fuzzier canary as it is not always applicable but usually occurs a few times in a task so helps me confirm the rules are being parsed at all in case Roo has a bug.

All the models I’ve used (yes, including all the biggest, newest, smartest ones) follow the binary rule about 75% of the time at the very most. Usually closer to 50% on average, with odds significantly decreasing the longer the context increases as it occurs at the end of a task but other than that seems to have no predictable pattern.

The fuzzier rule is slightly better, I’m guessing because it applies earlier in the context window, at around 80% compliance and uses lots of caps and emphasis. This one has a more predictable failure mode of the ratio of reading code vs thinking/troubleshooting/time the model is “in its own head”. When mostly reading code or my instructions compliance is very high, when doing extended troubleshooting or anything that starts to veer away from the project itself into training data it is much lower.

So it’s hit and miss and does help but definitely not something I’d rely on as a hard guardrail, like not executing commands, which Roo has a non-LLM tool config to control. So over time I hope agentic runners add more detetministic config outside the model itself, because instructions still aren't as reliable as they should be and don't seem to be getting substantially better in real use.