MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dvdgdn | 2025-08-05 22:23:18+00:00
What's beyond majority rule? I'm glad new options and variations are being discussed. Sortition addresses some of the challenges mentioned in the earlier posts, but I think the real million dollar question is, how do we create that 'whole greater than the sum of its parts' effect in group decision making? I.e. how can a group of people choose as wisely or more wisely than its wisest members - rather than being at the mercy of its lowest common denominators? Shameless self-plug: I've been creating a system that defines the concept of merit formally, from the bottom up, so that we can objectively compare the merit of group members and weight accordingly.

promise-keeping.com/whitepaper
by em-bee | 2025-08-05 22:23:55+00:00
Developers of open source could always ask for a fee to add features

or ask for a donation. i am maintaining this in my free time. unfortunately i also need to work for a living. if you can contribute something then i'll have more time to work on this. if you need an invoice, i can provide you with one.

i am actually working on a project right now where i want to do this.
by dragontamer | 2025-08-05 22:24:37+00:00
Steam is on the record that Mastercard literally never interacted with Steam on this entire controversy.

The entire discussion is between Steam and it's payment processors. And Steam, for whatever reason, hasn't publicly shamed (or discussed) who those payment processors are who were pushing these rules.

-------

For now, we can rest assured that Itch.io case is being well discussed. We see it is Stripe and Paypal for Itch.io and unless conflicting news comes out, I'll assume the same for Steam.
by EasyMark | 2025-08-05 22:24:55+00:00
Definitely "documentation beyond "how to use this" is going to cost you more" is a policy I do for side business outside my day job. That said I do try to spend a bit of extra time to make the API easy to understand, well named, and expose only those things they need. But I just consider those good coding and time well spent when I have to revisit it. What lies beneath is not always be so pretty, depending on what the customer is paying.
by krapp | 2025-08-05 22:25:19+00:00
It would be an odd reference to make since it's usually applied to Mussolini, falsely (it's propaganda, he did not actually make the trains run on time[0].) I suspect in this case it just generally refers to some archetype of efficient modern German infrastructure and engineering.

[0]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-15/stop-sayi...
by exiguus | 2025-08-05 22:25:42+00:00
I think it's the same in Europe (with a few exceptions) – people don't want nuclear power anymore (because of the high construction and maintenance costs and the waste). In addition to renewable energies, gas turbine power plants are also being used (because of their low construction costs, they can be ramped up quickly, and they can be converted to hydrogen later).

In my opinion, AI companies should be required to generate a sufficient percentage of their energy themselves from renewable sources.
by xp84 | 2025-08-05 22:25:44+00:00
> This has never happened, is not happening now, and has not been proposed by any current political party. Open borders is a falsehood

In the UK, the governments of both parties allow anyone who comes on a boat to remain, and they put them up in hotels until their claims of asylum are adjudicated, which takes years. How is that not open borders? Anyone with access to a dinghy can show up without any ID and not only be allowed to walk free, but to get 100% taxpayer-funded housing, when a ton of their citizens can't afford proper housing.

How is that not open borders? That's a no-questions-asked policy. And while it's "temporary" (A) they're on the honor system to show up to court in several years and (B) the citizens impacted by the crime, the draining of public funds, and the downward pressure on wages don't care, even if each migrant did peacefully walk right out 4 years later upon losing an asylum case. Although there are a ton of ways to guarantee a win, such as having a child during your stay, who would be a UK citizen. The ECHR says you have to let them stay, even if they've also shown themselves to be a criminal. https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1j3zu29/depo...

In America, meanwhile, the orthodox Left viewpoint is that "no one is illegal" and that it's fascist to arrest and deport people for overstaying visas or working in the US without legal status. Does the American Left think we should have the rules saying "the border is not open," yet no enforcement? Because that's how it sounds if you're not willing to actually deport anyone. Personally, I supported DACA (and voted for Obama twice) but I think it's insane to just do what we're doing, which like the UK, is to accept "asylum seekers," releasing them into the US and asking them to promise to show up for their hearings in a few years. Of course, we don't give them hotels, but arguably the impact of a ton of homeless "asylum seekers" every year isn't pretty either. I know Trump has made some changes to the US policies above, but the Left clearly doesn't want to tighten border control, and I'm not making up some strawman here.

> immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than American-born citizens

Even if that's true (I won't be foolish enough to pretend I know better so let's assume they are) we'd be better off with 0 immigrants and 0 crimes than 10,000,000 immigrants and "slightly fewer crimes than 10,000,000 extra native-born citizens would have committed." And the second-order effects of importing as many impoverished people as we can to compete for available housing and jobs is still bad news for the least-wealthy of those already here, which can lead to more crime in that group of people.

Unselective immigration and zero enforcement policies are a major thumb in the eye of poor and working class Americans, but the issue has basically zero negative impact on the elites -- the highly-educated and wealthy people who make up most of the present-day Democratic Party. Hence it's pretty easy for them to overlook the issues. This is why they lost, even to a deeply flawed, corrupt candidate like Trump.
by captainregex | 2025-08-05 22:25:45+00:00
I am all for the privacy angle and while I think there’s certainly a group of us, myself included, who care deeply about it I don’t think most people or enterprises will. I think most of those will go for the easy button and then wring their hands about privacy and security as they have always done while continuing to let the big companies do pretty much whatever they want. I would be so happy to be wrong but aren’t we already seeing it? Middle of the night price changes, leaks of data, private things that turned out to not be…and yet!
by mrtksn | 2025-08-05 22:25:46+00:00
I know right? AI is in the uncanny valley still. But every now and then I stumble upon something made with AI.

I have no proof but I'm convinced that the song here is AI made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL1Fg1QnDig

I liked it but it still feels like AI to me.
by dcreater | 2025-08-05 22:26:03+00:00
But Ollama is a toy, it's meaningful for hobbyists and individuals to use locally like myself. Why would it be the right choice for anything more? AWS, vLLM, SGLang etc would be the solutions for enterprise

I knew a startup that deployed ollama on a customers premises and when I asked them why, they had absolutely no good reason. Likely they did it because it was easy. That's not the "easy to use" case you want to solve for.
by McAlpine5892 | 2025-08-05 22:26:28+00:00
Is there any evidence that LLMs are safe to deploy as practitioners in healthcare settings? Until there is significant evidence, we shouldn't allow them.

---

My original ramble below:

This is a Very HN Comment. The problem with healthcare in the US isn't that we don't let Sam Altman administer healthcare via souped-up text prediction machines. It's a disaster precisely because we let these greedy ghouls run the system under the guise of "saving money". In the end it costs significantly more money to insure a portion of the population than the big, inefficient, bureaucratic government providing baseline insurance for everyone.

The least bad healthcare systems in the world take out a significant amount of the profit motive. Not all regulation is good, but the US refuses to let go of the idea that all regulation is bad.

If LLMs are to be used in healthcare they should have an incredibly high bar of evidence to pass. Right now, there's no evidence that I'm aware of. Just as doctors need to prove themselves before being certified. Even then, we get bad doctors. What happens when an LLM advises a patient to kill themselves? Probably nothing. Corporations go unpunished in this country. At least bad practitioners are responsible for their actions.
by DemocracyFTW2 | 2025-08-05 22:26:50+00:00
The way neoliberalism dealt with the public sector including rail service and infrastructure and then come up with "COVID killed Deutsche Bahn" is like saying that poor old sucker who was pushed down the staircase succumbed to his running nose. The problems run much deeper and were already visible in the 70s and 80s, but because it's only the public sector and rail traffic, not about more highways and more cars and then even more cars it never got fixed. Because who needs rails and trains, right.
by nativeit | 2025-08-05 22:28:08+00:00
I’m ostensibly a proponent of this, certainly of its aims. That said, I’ve never been comfortable with registries. I think they are quite vulnerable to being misused, and frequently tend to become facades to cover a broader lack of more significant actions to address root causes. Institutions, bureaucracies, and most large human enterprises are more than happy to throw an individual (or dozens of them) under the bus to keep the franchise going. Especially if it means they can avoid more meaningful reforms that threaten the status quo.
by mchiang | 2025-08-05 22:28:14+00:00
hmm, how so? Ollama is open and the pricing is completely optional for users who want additional GPUs.

Is it bad to fairly charge money for selling GPUs that cost us money too, and use that money to grow the core open-source project?

At one point, it just has to be reasonable. I'd like to believe by having a conscientious, we can create something great.
by giovaniguizzo | 2025-08-05 22:28:41+00:00
Well, Sidequest comes with a comprehensive built-in dashboard that provides real-time monitoring, job management, and performance analytics, so there's that.

You can probably deploy Sidequest a job processor for all your 20+ services. Each service can enqueue the jobs and you can run as many machines as you want with Sidequest just to run the jobs. You maintain the 12-factor principle - your services remain stateless and delegate scheduled work to Sidequest.

The only requirement here is that the scripts to be executed must be in the same path in all machines. As long as you follow that, you can deploy it and run your jobs :)
by captainregex | 2025-08-05 22:29:15+00:00
Aren’t there HIPPA compliant clouds? I thought Azure had an offer to that effect and I imagine that’s the type of place they’re doing a lot of things now. I’ve landed roughly where you have though- text stuff is fine but don’t ask it to interact with files/data you can’t copy paste into the box. If a user doesn’t care to go through the trouble to preserve privacy, and I think it’s fair to say a lot of people claim to care but their behavior doesn’t change, then I just don’t see it being a thing people bother with. Maybe something to use offline while on a plane? but even then I guess United will have Starlink soon so plane connectivity is gonna get better
by perching_aix | 2025-08-05 22:29:34+00:00
I guess I fully deserve this as some sort of karmic retribution, because I'm usually the person in the room who's frustrated about people poking things they don't fully understand, about folks continuing to spitball rather than looking a layer deeper, and the one who over-obsesses over details. It took me a very long time to accept that sometimes ignorance is not only acceptable, but optimal, and it continues to challenge me to this day.

You mention "being hackerly". Imagine you were reverse engineering some gnarly 100 MB obfuscated x86 binary. Surely you can appreciate that especially if you have a specific goal, it is overwhelmingly preferable to guess, experiment, and poke than to kick off some heroic RE effort that will take tens of people years, just so that you can supposedly "fully understand" what's happening. Attention is precious - not everything is worth equal attention. And it is absolutely possible to correctly guess things from limited information, and is even essential to be able to.

You find base64 encoding interesting enough that you were able to either recall detailed facts about its operation from memory here, or looked it up quickly to break it down. How is the author, or me, not doing so is any evidence for you we're:

- ignorant about how base64 works and always have been

- don't care about (CS) things at depth in general

These are such immensely strong claims to make. Surely you can appreciate that some people just have different interests sometimes? That they might focus on different things? That they can learn things and then forget about them? That to some level everything is connected, so appealing to that is not exactly some grand revelation of missing a "key piece"?

Few years, or I guess more than just a few years ago, in college, I met up with a former classmate from primary school. He was studying history and shared some great (historical) stories that I really enjoyed. But then another thought formulated in my mind: if I had to actively study this, rather than just catch a story or two, I'd definitely be dropping out. And that's when I realized that there can be value to things, they can be interesting, yet at the same time it's OK for me not to be interested by them or pursue them deeper. Just like how I think it is perfectly OK to be interested in this pattern, but not care for the underlying mapping mechanism, as it is essentially irrelevant. The fun was in the fact, not in the mechanism (in my view for the author anyways).
by scblock | 2025-08-05 22:29:59+00:00
This post/example/thing completely misses the point of Markdown. Yes it's clever in stringing together edge cases to try to claim it can identify specific parsers. But it's also pointless.

Markdown is for writers.

Markdown was designed up front to mimic common conventions in text-based communication, particularly email.

It was designed to be easy enough to read and edit as plain text, while also being easy to convert into basic HTML.

It was primarily designed for prose.

It always supported an escape to bare HTML where direct handling of how things are represented is needed.

It's not a programming language. It's not an object encoding language. I see no expectation that two different parsers would deterministically return the same thing when the language is based on common convention with a lot of flexibility built in, rather than a strict specification.

In my opinion it has gained widespread adoption well beyond it's original design as a parser for blogging precisely because it's imprecise.
by jamesponddotco | 2025-08-05 22:30:05+00:00
I open source pretty much everything I work on that is close to finished or finished. Never regretted doing it, but never got anything out of doing it either, aside from the feeling of paying forward.

I guess it really depends on how popular your project gets. I have no idea if my stuff is used or not[1], so regretting is maybe kinda hard?

I’ll keep doing it, though. Might regret it at some point, but I get so much value out of open source, it feels wrong not to.

[1]: Judging by the lack of patches I’d guess my work isn’t used, though.
by mccoyb | 2025-08-05 22:30:24+00:00
Force the LLM to write property-based tests (depends on the language you use whether or not good libraries are available -- but if they are available 100% make use of them). Iterate with the LLM on the invariants.

Forcing the discussion of invariants, and property-based testing -- seems to improve on the issues you're mentioning (when using e.g. Opus 4), especially when combined with the "use the public API" or interface abstractions.
by riazrizvi | 2025-08-05 22:30:27+00:00
The GPL he wrote is the basis of the reciprocity agreement that drove the open source movement, it is the legal mechanism that prevents commercial actors from taking over shared works, and locking other creators out of continued participation in their collective creations.

Stallman explicitly warned about working on proprietary software for an employer:

> “If I sign a nondisclosure agreement to work on a proprietary program, I am agreeing not to help you. I am agreeing to withhold information from you, and to refuse to give you a copy so you can learn from it.” This isn’t just about ethics toward the public — it’s about how such arrangements strip a developer of the ability to show, reuse, or build on their own work.

GNU Manifesto (1985).
by slg | 2025-08-05 22:30:43+00:00
The full AI summary from DuckDuckGo for "How do tariffs work?"

>Tariffs are taxes imposed by a government on imported goods, making them more expensive to encourage consumers to buy domestic products instead. The costs of these tariffs are typically passed on to consumers, resulting in higher prices for imported items.

I don't see any "college level vocabulary words" and it directly says that it makes goods more expensive and the costs are passed on to consumers. Maybe Google's complicated answer is part of the "media environment" being criticized.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-08-05 22:31:06+00:00
So there's a NASA/Lockheed report on this.

> https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19810045017

As 95% of the carbon fiber market is T300, and as T300 hasn't changed in the years since, I think it holds up.

Long story short, raw carbon fiber has a high compressive strength, but it's still just ~40% of its tensile strength. Carbon fiber composite single-plies or tapes have a reduced, but still reasonably high, compressive strength. When you get to multi-ply 0/90° or 0/45/90° composite laminates, "allowable" A-Basis (<1% likelihood of failure) compressive strength is very low -- around 400MPa -- well under the compressive strength of good steel.

And that's under ideal conditions. You've got to apply knock-downs for ply angle, moisture, through-thickness shear, impact damage, and manufacturing defects.

...Hence the Titan sub failed at a compressive load of something like 200MPa.

I'm not accusing you of this, but one of the issues with carbon fiber is that people see on a specsheet that it has, e.g., a "tensile strength = 4000MPa" and they assume that composite parts will exhibit a practical tensile strength of 4000MPa. The properties of CFRP -- CF composites with epoxy or PEEK or whatever -- are always way reduced, and sometimes quite difficult to pin down.

That said, the tensile strength of CF is always high, as a rule of thumb. Its compressive strength really isn't.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-08-05 22:31:19+00:00
Interesting. I understand that, but I don't know to what degree.

I mean the training, while expensive, is done once. The inference … besides being done by perhaps millions of clients, is done for, well, the life of the model anyway. Surely that adds up.

It's hard to know, but I assume the user taking up the burden of the inference is perhaps doing so more efficiently? I mean, when I run a local model, it is plodding along — not as quick as the online model. So, slow and therefore I assume necessarily more power efficient.
by jaggederest | 2025-08-05 22:31:47+00:00
It almost feels like sealioning. People say nobody shares their workflow, so I share it. They say well that's not production code, so I point to PRs in active projects I'm using, and they say well that doesn't demonstrate your interactive flow. I point out the design documents and prompts and they say yes but what kind of setup do you do, which MCP servers are you running, and I point them at my MCP repo.

At some point you have to accept that no amount of proof will convince someone that refuses to be swayed. It's very frustrating because, while these are wonderful tools already, its clear that the biggest thing that makes a positive difference is people using and improving them. They're still in relative infancy.

I want to have the kind of conversations we had back at the beginning of web development, when people were delighted at what was possible despite everything being relatively awful.
by bamboozled | 2025-08-05 22:31:59+00:00
When have they ran on time sorry ?

The last time I caught a train in Germany I remember having to wait on a freezing platform for ~ 3 hours until they gave up on the train and got us a coach and drove us to Hamburg...that was ~ 9 years ago.

I don't remember having the same issue in Netherlands though.

On the other hand I've been in Japan for a long time, I honestly don't remember a single train being late in all that time.
by mc32 | 2025-08-05 22:32:01+00:00
While I’m not and would not propose the drastic measures that Singapore or Japan take, but there is much less drug use in those two places among others and they prove that enforcement, if you’re willing to address the problem, can greatly reduce use of illegal drugs.

Meth is very addictive and debilitating. It’s worse than crack. It takes people down. They are no longer able to be productive citizens. They become a burden for families and for society.
by commandersaki | 2025-08-05 22:32:45+00:00
I've not written a crawler before, but did something similar. I needed to mirror websites ala `wget -r` and there doesn't seem to be a tool or library that aside from wget that does it, so I translated the wget -r algorithm by reading the source, as best as I could, in Go. It's not parallelised or anything as that looked complicated, but was handy when integrating it into a backend project that needed that functionality. Was a fun learning experience and I found it a bit of a complex project due to interpreting the links in HTML, so I imagine doing a crawler is even more difficult. Also found Go HTML parser not that great.
by pedalpete | 2025-08-05 22:32:52+00:00
We were working towards this years ago with Doarama/Ayvri, and I remember fondly in 2018 an investor literally yelling at me that I didn't know what I was talking about and AI would never be able to do this. Less than a decade later, here we are.

Our product was a virtual 3d world made up of satellite data. Think of a very quick, higher-res version of google earth, but the most important bit was that you uploaded a GPS track and it re-created the world around that space. The camera was always focused on the target, so it wasn't a first person point of view, which, for the most part, our brains aren't very good at understanding over an extended period of time.

For those curious about the use case, our product was used by every paraglider in the world, commercial drone operations, transportation infrastructure sales/planning, out-door events promotions (specifically bike and ultramarathon races).

Though I suspect we will see a new form of media come from this. I don't pretend to suggest exactly what this media will be, but mixing this with your photos we can see the potential for an infinitely re-framable and zoomable type of photo media.

Creating any "watchable" content will be challenging if the camera is not target focused, and it makes it difficult to create a storyline if you can't dictate where the viewer is pointed.