MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by naasking | 2025-08-12 15:53:58+00:00
> We're normally data-limited.

This is a common sentiment but is probably not entirely true. A great example is cosmology. Yes, more data would make some work easier, but astrophysicists and cosmologists have shown that you can gather and combine existing data and look at it in novel new ways to produce unexpected results, like place bounds that can include/exclude various theories.

I think a philosophy that encourages more analysis rather than sitting back on our laurels with an excuse that we need more data is good, as long as it's done transparently and honestly.
Show HN: Coordinize – Open-source async-first communication for global teams
by Rajdeepds626 | 2025-08-12 15:54:37+00:00
I built Coordinize as an open-source, async-first communication platform for distributed teams.

Most tools (Slack, Discord) are built for real-time chat. That creates pressure to stay online and reply instantly, which doesn’t work for global teams across timezones.

Coordinize focuses on async-first workflows, so communication happens without notification chaos.

GitHub: https://github.com/RajdeepDs/coordinize Try it: https://www.coordinize.tech

This is our v1. Feedback welcome!
by jewel | 2025-08-12 15:55:15+00:00
I used to work at a place that had a second copy of all the git repositories on a server, available over ssh. We could push there and then, at deploy time, instruct the servers to pull from that repo instead of bitbucket.

If I were to set up the same thing again today, I'd add some automation to automatically keep it in sync with github as well as automate the servers so that they'd attempt to pull from both on every deploy.

I share this as an idea for those who need an emergency or backup deploy mechanism.
by mgaunard | 2025-08-12 15:55:19+00:00
The funny part is that all of these things are easy to achieve as libraries/paradigms.

Methods in C, just have function pointers as members. Common in many codebases.

Guaranteed tail calls, all the compilers guarantee that function calls that are a return expression are tail calls.

Tagged union in C++, it's trivial as a library, see std::variant for a bad example of it, and all the various monadic/pattern-matching variants (pun intended) people have written. C is at a disadvantage here due to lack of lambdas, but I'm sure people have built stuff using some GCC extensions.
by aldous | 2025-08-12 15:55:21+00:00
Nine new reservoirs are planned by 2050 apparently. But as general point reservoirs are...

a) only part of the solution (water reuse schemes can be much cheaper and more effective) b) really difficult to build! Finding an appropriate location (google the Tryweryn reservoir in Wales for an example of the consequences of building one in a problematic location), planning constraints, environmental impact and subsequent pushback from locals and environment groups etc etc.

I don't disagree the UK needs more of reservoirs but they ain't trivial things to build. A good overview in this news article here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2k147dkgx8o
by keiferski | 2025-08-12 15:55:43+00:00
Is there a reason why Apple's iPhone spellcheck is often really poor, significantly worse than both LLMs and just...human eyes?

I often find myself butchering the spelling of a word in a way where the correct answer is obvious to human eyes (probably because of "typoglycemia" [1]) and an AI LLM immediately understands what I meant to say, but Apple's spellcheck has "No Guesses Found."

Does anyone else have this experience?

1. https://www.dictionary.com/e/typoglycemia/
by lucb1e | 2025-08-12 15:55:48+00:00
We also started having customers since a few years that declare GitHub fully trusted, as in, it is simply not worth considering what the impact would be if that vendor gets compromised. I can't name names, but this includes a vendor that aims to prevent supply chain attacks (technically language-agnostic; in practice aiming to be the solution chosen by one of the biggest programming language's package manager)

> can't even push code hotfixes to production without it. It's a terrible SPOF

GitHub's availability impact is the least of my concerns these days. It'll be a really tough year for society worldwide if we need to rebuild loads of infrastructure after some threat actor got into github and managed to change key pieces of code without being detected a couple of years. Having seen how hospitals handle updates, they might get lucky and be old enough to not be affected yet, or have a really tough time recovering due to understaffed IT

No clue how to even begin solving this since our OSes are likely all pulling dependencies from GitHub without verification of the developer's PGP key, if the project even has that and applies it correctly. I guess I can only recommend being aware of the problem and doing what you can in your own organization to reduce the impact
by tomatocracy | 2025-08-12 15:56:11+00:00
> Fix a leaking toilet – leaky loos can waste 200-400 litres a day.

I suspect this one dwarfs the others. It's why some water companies have campaigned to ban new dual flush toilets in the UK (there's a common failure mode for dual flush toilets which results in the tap to the cistern not properly switching off once it's full).
by rglover | 2025-08-12 15:56:11+00:00
I came to comments first. Thank you for sharing this quote. Gave me a solid chuckle.

I think people are going nuts because we've drifted from the dock of a stable civilization. Institutions are a mess. Economy is a mess. Combine all of that together with the advent of social media making the creation of echo chambers (and the inevitable narcissism of "leaders" in those echo chambers) effortless and ~15 years later, we have this.
by mrangle | 2025-08-12 15:56:14+00:00
>There is no undermining, as everyone living in the cities realizes.

I remember that "Defund the Police" is the general mantra of one side of the isle.

You aren't paying attention. I stated that I was born and raised in a (major) city, and I still live in an area that many on HN and virtually all bourgeoise urban-bubble people would not live.

And so who are you trying to gaslight, exactly?

I don't assert that Seattle is perfect, but Seattle is a cakewalk. One of the nicest and per-capita wealthiest cities in the country. But with a sizeable population of bored grown toddlers. A subgroup of whom are professional terrorists, while living in a priveleged city on the World scale. Spare me your faux "urbanite on a walk" homily.

The nine months of rioting in 2020 were nine months of partisan terrorism purposefully leading exactly up to an election. Funny that, in the context of those so concerned with democracy.

We were terrorized, absolutely. It caused me to think twice about voting at all, out of fear. During one weekend in which police were hamstrung by the mayor in favor of rioters, we had two large bombs go off in my neighborhood. While the power happened to be off for 72 hours. Have you ever felt the deep vibration from a close domestic terrorist bomb in the dark? Twice? How about during election season?

Would you like to go into my personal experiences with urban crime? How many gun barrels have you stared down? How many times have you been punched in public by a stranger, while just standing there? How many times did that lead to a full blown street fight, out of self-defense? How many times have you been robbed on the sidewalk? How many friends of yours have been targeted and murdered on the sidewalk? How about while in grade school? Yes, I'm Caucasian. I'm overeducated, including graduating on a full-ride from a school that existed a long time before the United States did. That makes no difference.

You deserve a string of derogatory names, but decorum prevents.
by tgv | 2025-08-12 15:56:21+00:00
For checking? Just a lookup on disk (no db, just a large list with a custom index, then binary search in the retrieved block). Decoding anything was slow, and in-core was basically out of the question [1]. Caching was important, though, since just a handful of words make up 50% of the text.

I once built a spell checker plus corrector which had to run in 32kB under a DOS hotkey, interacting with some word processor. On top of that, it had to run from CD ROM, and respond within a second. I could do 4 lookups, in blocks of 8kB, which gave me the option to look up the word in normal order, in reverse order, and a phonetic transcription in both directions. Each 8kB block contained quite a few words, can't remember how many. Then counting the similarities, and returning them as a sorted list. It wasn't perfect, but worked reasonably well.

[1] Adding that for professional spell checking you'd need at least 100k lemmata plus all inflections plus information per word if you have to accept compounds/agglutination.
by qcnguy | 2025-08-12 15:56:31+00:00
Every party says they want to reduce immigration. Labour says they will "stop the boats" etc. Neither have done so, of course, it's all lies.

The Conservatives don't want to reduce spending on benefits. They always defended the triple lock that makes their pensioner base so happy, of course. They are merely slightly more willing to admit that huge cuts are inevitable than Labour is. Labour also tried a tiny reduction in benefits - there's not much difference between them really - but their MPs are in total denial of the scale of the problem and blocked it.

UK benefits are going to evaporate, it doesn't matter who is in power. Tweaking eligibility criteria is rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic at this point. It's become a financial inevitability post-COVID, just look at the charts. The austerity that's coming will show the 2010s era as the weak sauce it truly was.
by handoflixue | 2025-08-12 15:57:11+00:00
Rationalists, in this case, refers specifically to the community clustered around LessWrong, which explicitly and repeatedly emphasizes points like "you can't claim to have a well grounded belief if you don't actually have empirical evidence for it" (https://www.lesswrong.com/w/evidence for a quick overview of some of the basic posts on that topic)

To quote one of the core foundational articles: "Before you try mapping an unseen territory, pour some water into a cup at room temperature and wait until it spontaneously freezes before proceeding. That way you can be sure the general trick—ignoring infinitesimally tiny probabilities of success—is working properly." (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eY45uCCX7DdwJ4Jha/no-one-can...)

One can argue how well the community absorbs the lesson, but this certainly seems to be a much higher standard than average.
by throwanem | 2025-08-12 15:57:27+00:00
I understand your concerns about the factual reliability of language models trained with a focus on warmth and empathy, and the apparent negative correlation between these traits. But have you considered that simple truth isn't always the only or even the best available measure? For example, we have the expression, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all." Can I help you with something else today? :smile:
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-08-12 15:57:28+00:00
That's pretty much it. The beliefs are just a cover story.

Outside of those, the cult dynamics are cut-paste, and always involve an entitled narcissistic cult leader acquiring as much attention/praise, sex, money, and power as possible from the abuse and exploitation of followers.

Most religion works like this. Most alternative spirituality works like this Most finance works like this. Most corporate culture works like this. Most politics works like this.

Most science works like this. (It shouldn't, but the number of abused and exploited PhD students and post-docs is very much not zero.)

The only variables are the differing proportions of attention/praise, sex, money, and power available to leaders, and the amount of abuse that can be delivered to those lower down and/or outside the hierarchy.

The hierarchy and the realities of exploitation and abuse are a constant.

If you removed this dynamic from contemporary culture there wouldn't be a lot left.

Fortunately quite a lot of good things happen in spite of it. But a lot more would happen if it wasn't foundational.
by Nevermark | 2025-08-12 15:58:02+00:00
> the actual publicized investment plans are barely any different

On the contrary.

> The base of the glass plaque was made of 24 karat gold

My recollection, which may be way off, is Biden preferred fine grade silver dinner ware and free Uber passes...

It is amazing how quickly centralized power can not just become deeply and openly corrupt, but operate free of credible challenge. The centralization in this case being years of tightened coordination within one party, acting on all three branches. The internal leverage created by such processes provides a natural habitat for final consolidation by an opportunistic individual.

And suddenly the standards of governance are unrecognizable. The unsurprising result of successfully centralized power.

It has long occurred to me that by not having limits on party power (seat limits? term limits? Cross state limits? Cross branch limits?), the US Constitution left a huge power coordination loop hole, free of checks and balances.

That loophole holds up an eternal carrot of legal one party rule. Temporary one party rule in theory, but the constant drive for that grinds down bipartisanship and respect for any shared power.

No one party should ever have a dominant majority of congress, much less dominate all three branches.

At that point, in-party incentives overwhelmingly push party solidarity above any other issue.

(Another great side effect of party seat/term limits would be the breakup up of the party duopoly which even when "working" lowered the bar for each party to the floor, i.e. neither party needed to do much but not be the latest disappointing incumbent. And a duopoly is incapable of providing choices reflecting a complex reality. They are reduced to competing via team identification/shibboleths.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-12 15:58:31+00:00
Agreed, it's definitely the network cohesion that keeps GH together. Especially for FLOSS. For advanced features, there are some niceties that say Azure DevOps offers that GH Enterprise still lacks, though it feels like there's some convergence on the backend.

I like GH Actions myself, though sometimes it can get a little cumbersome with self-hosted workers on private/enterprise projects. I'm a big fan of automation and like to keep related bits closer together. As opposed to alternatives that have completely detached workflows/deployments.
by olejorgenb | 2025-08-12 15:58:41+00:00
I'm not sure if this is the definition of "active" the have used, but:

<quote> Over time, these existing URLs saw less and less traffic as the years went on - in fact more than 99% of them had no activity in the last month.</quote>

I'm sure it's correct that the wast majority of links would never be used again, but to gauge which links this is I'd say you should measure at LEAST a year.
by biophysboy | 2025-08-12 15:59:01+00:00
> “There’s this belief [among rationalists],” she said, “that society has these really bad behaviors, like developing self-improving AI, or that mainstream epistemology is really bad–not just religion, but also normal ‘trust-the-experts’ science. That can lead to the idea that we should figure it out ourselves. And what can show up is that some people aren't actually smart enough to form very good conclusions once they start thinking for themselves.”

I see this arrogant attitude all the time on HN: reflexive distrust of the "mainstream media" and "scientific experts". Critical thinking is a very healthy idea, but its dangerous when people use it as a license to categorically reject sources. Its even worse when extremely powerful people do this; they can reduce an enormous sub-network of thought into a single node for many many people.

So, my answer for "Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults?" is the same reason all cults exist: humans like to feel like they're in on the secret. We like to be in secret clubs.
by rglover | 2025-08-12 15:59:08+00:00
> Came to ask a similar question, but also has it always been like this?

Crazy people have always existed (especially cults), but I'd argue recruitment numbers are through the roof thanks to technology and a failing economic environment (instability makes people rationalize crazy behavior).

It's not that those groups didn't have visibility before, it's just easier for the people who share the same...interests...to cloister together on an international scale.
by gkoberger | 2025-08-12 15:59:36+00:00
I'm against link rot and I hate how Google doesn't maintain old projects. But this is one shutdown I 100% agree with.

Having an official Google domain that anyone can hijack is dangerous, given that many people's main internet identity is GMail (aka their Google account). I know anyone can create an offshoot (goooogle.org, etc), but Google was using goo.gl too.

It was easy to redirect a goo.gl to a Google login page (which is on a real Google domain), and trick people into authorizing access to their account.

I consider myself savvy, and I got a pretty convincing one recently. The email looked legit, and the link was a goo.gl link that ultimately landed me on a legitimate Google login page. It didn't trick me, but it did take me a few minutes to figure out how it wasn't legit.

NOTE: This article is kinda misleading. They already stopped letting people add new links in 2019. And now, they're only removing "inactive" links, AKA links that had no activity since 2024. If you visit a link right now, it will be kept. Here's more info: https://blog.google/technology/developers/googl-link-shorten...
by neilv | 2025-08-12 16:00:04+00:00
I like what I've used of Forgejo (Git, Issues+Board, Wiki), and have hosted it on servers and localhost easily. I haven't tried its CI features yet.

Codeberg is a cloud site for open source projects that runs Forgejo.

Forgejo is a fork of Gitea, which is another option, especially if you want commercial support, but I haven't tried it yet.

I also kinda like GitLab, both the cloud one and the enterprise on-prem version. And their issue label features work more easily with the board than Forgejo's (automatically moving issues between columns based on scoped labels). Though their pricing tiers have been unfortunate at times (I don't know latest).
by xp84 | 2025-08-12 16:00:17+00:00
100%. The mindset is everything. 100 years ago, if you picked the happiest 18-year-old woman in town, someone from a great family who was cared for, and never victimized by anyone, and asked her “are you sure you would like to sacrifice your opportunity to spend 4 years in a very expensive school and go get a job and work 5 days a week for the next 40 years, in order to bear a few children?” She would look at you like you were from Mars.

Today, both sexes are, for good reason, afraid of sacrificing any “work years” just to have kids, largely since costs have now become so high that doing so on one income is punishing. Even if you make $250k, which would be enough to live a great lifestyle as a single person, if you have a family and only one parent working, you have to live a lifestyle that much more resembles someone who makes $90k. (Divide those numbers in half for non-high-cost areas, result is the same) It’s probably worse if you are truly saving up the absurd amount of money that college is going to cost in the future (I’m not).
by porridgeraisin | 2025-08-12 16:00:37+00:00
My attempt:

https://images2.imgbox.com/16/79/Tz7rMe2c_o.png

colorscheme paper highlight Normal guibg=#f7f5f0 guifg=#000000 gui=NONE highlight CursorLine guibg=#f0efea gui=NONE highlight CursorColumn guibg=#f0efea gui=NONE highlight Comment guifg=#777777 gui=italic highlight Constant guifg=#333333 gui=underline highlight String guifg=#333333 gui=italic highlight Character guifg=#333333 gui=italic highlight Number guifg=#333333 gui=underline highlight Boolean guifg=#333333 gui=underline highlight Float guifg=#333333 gui=underline highlight Identifier guifg=#000000 gui=NONE highlight Function guifg=#000000 gui=bold highlight Statement guifg=#000000 gui=bold highlight Conditional guifg=#000000 gui=bold,underline highlight Repeat guifg=#000000 gui=bold highlight Label guifg=#000000 gui=bold highlight Operator guifg=#000000 gui=NONE highlight Keyword guifg=#000000 gui=bold highlight PreProc guifg=#333333 highlight Include guifg=#333333 gui=underline highlight Define guifg=#333333 gui=underline highlight Macro guifg=#333333 gui=underline highlight PreCondit guifg=#333333 gui=underline highlight Type guifg=#000000 gui=bold,italic highlight StorageClass guifg=#000000 gui=bold highlight Structure guifg=#000000 gui=bold highlight Typedef guifg=#000000 gui=bold highlight Special guifg=#333333 gui=italic highlight SpecialChar guifg=#333333 gui=italic highlight Tag guifg=#333333 gui=italic highlight Delimiter guifg=#000000 gui=NONE highlight SpecialComment guifg=#777777 gui=italic highlight Debug guifg=#333333 gui=italic highlight Underlined guifg=#000000 gui=underline highlight Error guifg=#000000 gui=bold,underline highlight Todo guifg=#000000 gui=bold,italic highlight Visual guibg=#d0d0d0 guifg=#000000 gui=NONE highlight IncSearch guibg=#d0d0d0 guifg=#000000 gui=NONE
by vorpalhex | 2025-08-12 16:00:54+00:00
That statement is still incorrect. China censors directly and heavily, eg "pooh bear"

In the US you are still very much free to insult the president, etc but if you post things deemed to be pro-terrorist or against what the Government wants to promote on social media, it won't go anywhere. Firearms or vaping content during the Biden admin as an example.

The current admin has heavily gutted the federal funding and workforce that backed these efforts and issued bulletins to private industry, but I suspect there is still pressure from pseudo-government "advocates".
by the_third_wave | 2025-08-12 16:01:04+00:00
Gott ist tot! Gott bleibt tot! Und wir haben ihn getötet! Wie trösten wir uns, die Mörder aller Mörder? Das Heiligste und Mächtigste, was die Welt bisher besaß, es ist unter unseren Messern verblutet.

The average teenager who reads Nietzsches proclamation on the death of God thinks of this as an accomplishment, finally we got rid of those thousands of years old and thereby severely outdated ideas and rules. Somewhere along the march to maturity they may start to wonder whether that which has replaced those old rules and ideas were good replacements but most of them never come to the realisation that there were rebellious teenagers during all those centuries when the idea of a supreme being to which or whom even the mightiest were to answer to still held sway. Nietzsche saw the peril in letting go off that cultural safety valve and warned for what might come next.

We are currently living in the world he warned us about and for that I, atheist as I am, am partly responsible. The question to be answered here is whether it is possible to regain the benefits of the old order without getting back the obvious excesses, the abuse, the sanctimoniousness and all the other abuses of power and privilege which were responsible for turning people away from that path.
by andix | 2025-08-12 16:01:14+00:00
The very limited software support would probably stop me from buying one.

Even if there are builds or container images for riscv64, they are probably often not tested at all. Sometimes different architectures have weird quirks (unexpected performance issues for some code, unexpected crashes). I guess only very few maintainers will investigate and fix those.

It took quite some time until all software worked perfectly on arm/arm64. When the first Raspberry Pi was released, this was quite a different experience.
by ryandrake | 2025-08-12 16:01:17+00:00
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/366635-there-are-two-novels...