MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by troad | 2025-08-21 01:45:03+00:00
> How are non-profits "accountable" to the poor?

They're not, in any effective way. Re-read my post. All attempts to make non-profits accountable to someone else - government, donors - are an attempt to work around the fact that the only real stakeholders in a soup kitchen are completely powerless, and wouldn't it be nice if someone powerful could exert accountability? It would! And yet it doesn't seem to work in practice, perhaps because the homeless' interest is in soup, and the donor's interest is in plaques with their names on them, and the two aren't the same thing. It's often donor pressures that reduce non-profit effectiveness.

> And yeah one can argue that feeding poor people is of little value; that's the whole idea behind the parable of teaching a man to fish. Translated into modern terms, the right thing to do in terms of value creation is make poor people richer, not give them free food. Then they can feed themselves and much more. It's of course a harder problem but much more valuable to solve.

It is obvious to the point of complete absurdity that making poor people richer would alleviate poverty. Meanwhile, while you work on the small, pesky matter of solving poverty, people are hungry right now. Are you proposing we shut down soup kitchens until your plucky effort to solve all poverty succeeds? Because if you're not, we're back to where we started.

Posts are like these are precisely why HN isn't solving poverty. "Wouldn't it be nice if the poor weren't poor? Maybe we should teach them how not to be poor? That's surely never been tried before."
by tern | 2025-08-21 01:45:35+00:00
If you're really curious about this, there's a place where people discuss these problems annually: https://internetidentityworkshop.com/

Various things you're not thinking of:

- "The person at the keyboard, is the same person as that ID identifies" is a high expectation, and can probably be avoided—you just need verifiable credentials and you gotta trust they're not spoofed

- Many official government IDs are digital now

- Most architectures for solving this problem involve bundling multiple identity "attestations," so proof of personhood would ultimately be a gradient. (This does, admittedly, seem complicated though ... but World is already doing it, and there are many examples of services where providing additional information confers additional trust. Blue checkmarks to name the most obvious one.)

As for what it might look like to start from the ground up and solve this problem, https://urbit.org/, for all its flaws, is the only serious attempt I know of and proves it's possible in principle, though perhaps not in practice
by armchairhacker | 2025-08-21 01:46:04+00:00
I think development environments are an undervalued field (perhaps because people hate writing UI). Tiny open-source IDEs are a great learning tool and can be starters for research IDEs (whereas VSCode, while more practical for production IDEs, has complexity that gets in the way of experimentation).

Another tiny open-source IDE (for Java) is https://github.com/bobbylight/RText
by xlbuttplug2 | 2025-08-21 01:47:59+00:00
IDs would have to be reissued with a public/private key model you can use to sign your requests.

> the person at the keyboard, is the same person as that ID identifies

This won't be possible to verify - you could lend your ID out to bots but that would come at the risk of being detected and blanket banned from the internet.
by seba_dos1 | 2025-08-21 01:48:10+00:00
> Reviewing code another person wrote also takes longer than code I wrote.

Yes, and water is wet, but that's not exactly relevant. If you have an LLM generate slop at you that you have to review and adjust, you need to compare the time this whole process took you rather than just the "generating slop" step to the time needed to write the code by yourself.

It may still save you time, but it won't be anywhere close to 2 minutes anymore for anything but the most trivial stuff.
by chasil | 2025-08-21 01:49:55+00:00
The Bliss launcher in /e/OS does not support widgets conventionally, and the best thing to do is immediately replace it. I used Lawnchair, and it did improve things.

It did encourage me to provide my Google account credentials, which I refrained to do, which made the appstore essentially equivalent to F-droid.

I can't really get excited about it.
by austinshea | 2025-08-21 01:49:58+00:00
Thanks for this article. It feels like a huge problem to discuss the nuance described here.

There will be people who will carelessly create unmaintainable software, and they might do it to bamboozle someone who is paying for the work that experienced people can deliver.

Others might fire the sorts of people who would do that sort of work, and try to survive without paying the going rate.

These things are objectively bad.

It is not bad to use these tools, or any others, to do the best work you can provide.
by bamboozled | 2025-08-21 01:50:17+00:00
Sometimes I feel the curse of technology is how fast it moves. As soon as you start to enjoy something, it’s gone and yes I can go back to using a flip phone but then you’re not really “competitive” or “compatible” with the modern world.

I guess this will only become More true with “AI” maybe humans won’t be able to keep up at all ?
by daft_pink | 2025-08-21 01:50:18+00:00
I will say that when I used to go to the theaters, which was before the pandemic and I started a family I used metacritic.

I found that any time I went to something that was red, I absolutley regretted it and it was terrible. Yellow was more hit or miss and top green scores were pretty good.

Exceptions were comedy where a lower score could still mean a good film, and politics oriented films, where a bad film with a media approved message could get a really good score even if it sucked.

It’s sad to not get a reliable indicator of that and someone should just resurrect the old score and call it Bad Apples. Since the actual score seems transparent, why not develop a competitor.
by samdoesnothing | 2025-08-21 01:50:50+00:00
It's only a moral blunder if you either decide everyone is guilty of indirect association with "bad" people, or if you selectively chose who is guilty or not based on some third factor (generally ingroup/outgroup). The former doesn't result in making Github threads, and the latter is a kind of behaviour that ironically leads to the sins underpinning this whole issue.
by seba_dos1 | 2025-08-21 01:51:09+00:00
Did you accidentally reply to a wrong comment? (not trying to be snarky, just confused)

The only "justification" there would be is that it keeps the server online that struggled under load before deploying it. That's the whole reason why major FLOSS projects and code forges have deployed Anubis. Nobody cares about bots downloading FLOSS code or kernel mailing lists archives; they care about keeping their infrastructure running and whether it's being DDoSed or not.
by bamboozled | 2025-08-21 01:52:00+00:00
So much nostalgia,I use to love the drop from various rave and hardcore hits at the time, it just felt so tech. Alphazone Flashback for example: https://youtu.be/EWP3DC9utk0?si=rxI7nop6oqaHKtQQ&t=225

I felt like these song as rings tones went well with the optimism around technology at that time which I feel has just been crushed by internet giants and the rise of surveillance capitalism and social media.

There was something great about early phone based digital photography and it being offline, so convenient yet completely "yours" (for example).

Definitely don't feel as if it's all bad, but that optimism doesn't exist anymore in my opinion.
by beedeebeedee | 2025-08-21 01:52:14+00:00
Ha, they're creating an explanatory model for why income inequality drives crimes.

That was literally the first article that came up on Google, and you clearly did not read it or go through its references, so here is the second article that came up: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/073401689301800...

There is a huge wealth of research on this topic, even if you want to reject it. Do you need a third, fourth, hundredth paper? Try reading past the abstract (and comprehending it)
by keyle | 2025-08-21 01:52:22+00:00
IntelliJ lost the plot at the inception of CLion etc.

I was a customer for so many years. "One IDE to rule them all" and then they started cashing on more.

Progress was down to a crawl, performance down the shitter and bug reports go unnoticed for 2+ years.

VSCode poops on IntelliJ these days for everything but the UX; but with enough modding, it can be very close.
by Paradigm2020 | 2025-08-21 01:52:48+00:00
Except for the highlight the text (think people on mobile, people with disabilities etc) it sounds like a good plan.

Than other random "judges" would be asked if the reason given by the "accuser" are correct. There would have to be some "cost" in karma to flag a post (or limit of X flags / day for X karma status or smth) and some reward in karma for being chosen as a judge/jury.

Also the need to have a minimum flagging weight and a minimum of judging weight and to reconcile conflicting votes.

Anyway would love to talk about it more but tbh it's probably not gonna happen also because most people don't like jury duty... Maybe when ai gets over the "hallucinations" but well at that point we can also get our individual ai's to read everything and judge for us
by codebje | 2025-08-21 01:53:45+00:00
You're basically right, with one teensy caveat: you can't prove the kernel is correct. No model can prove that it is itself consistent, and if you use a more powerful model to prove consistency you're just shifting the goalposts - an inconsistent powerful model can show any model to be consistent.

The kernels are kept small so that we can reasonably convince ourselves that they're consistent.

The expression of FLT in Lean isn't complicated, because FLT isn't complicated; the kernel language of Lean isn't all that far from the surface language; and the expression "∀ a b c n : ℕ, n ≥ 3 → a ≠ 0 → b ≠ 0 → c ≠ 0 → a^n + b^n ≠ c^n" only needs the infix operators converted to lambda applications (though "only" does a lot of lifting here!)
by kingkilr | 2025-08-21 01:54:19+00:00
(pyca/cryptography dev here)

As Steve notes, Rust does support s390x. Even prior to shipping Rust code, we never tested or claimed to support s390x.

If there's genuine interest in more people supporting s390x in the open source world, folks will need to do the work to make it possible to build, test, and run CI on it. IBM recently contributed official PPC64le support to pyca/cryptography (by way of Github Actions runners so we could test and build in CI), and they've been responsive on weird platform issues we've hit (e.g., absl not support ppc64le on musl: https://github.com/pyca/infra/pull/710#issuecomment-31789057...). That level of commitment is what's really required to make a platform practical, treating "well, it's in C and every platform has a C compiler" as the sum total of support wasn't realistic.
by dboon | 2025-08-21 01:54:46+00:00
First, thanks for doing everything you do! I, and I’m sure countless others, genuinely benefit from you.

How would you recommend someone with a strong background in undergraduate level traditional ML get into deep learning? I use that as a broad term to encompass all the knowledge needed to understand how these models work, starting from the deep learning models of a decade ago, plus the practical ability to collect data or build RL gyms and fine tune them.

I understand ML math well enough that I’m confident I could follow a modern white paper after a lot of effort and research. But there are so many pieces — quantizations, flash attention, Mode, batch sizes, layer sizes, model sparsity. I feel very overwhelmed trying to piece together how all of the pieces arose, and even more overwhelmed trying to figure out how one even goes about fine tuning one. I (like most people here) am extremely technical, and it’s not often I feel this way about a field.

Thanks again! Best of luck on your work
by tomhow | 2025-08-21 01:55:15+00:00
We've killed all the accounts that had little/no prior activity on HN other than upvoting/boost-commenting this post, or the similar one last year. The comment complaining about the tiered pricing is particularly bad. Some people really underestimate how obvious and bad this looks to the rest of the community. The thing is that it's completely unnecessary. We want to help people get exposure for good projects via Show HN, and all anyone needs to do is email us and we can help them get their project and post into good shape.
by troad | 2025-08-21 01:55:33+00:00
> In SF non profits actively make the problems they’re attempting (in theory) to solve worse, while enriching themselves at (often gratuitous) cost to the tax payer.

Yes, that's why FAANG keeps losing employees to soup kitchens. The fabulous pay.

> This is anecdotal, but what I’ve seen of friends that work at these places is wild. People stealing money, extreme entitlement, stupid policy, enormous waste, no accountability. It’s bad.

Real issues. I don't think I ever said that non-profits work well; they don't. My problem is with the idea that there's some simple alternative that we could whip up in VS Code, some clever business structure that somehow makes the organisation immune from basic incentives.

Non-profits become bloated and ineffective in exactly the same way as monopolies, and for exactly the same reason - their 'customers' are powerless against them. This is a fundamental issue of power relations, not something someone designed to work this way because they thought starting a soup kitchen is a great get-rich-quick scheme (in the Bay Area, no less. No other way to get rich quick there!).

There's an incredible amount of naïveté in tech criticism of non-profits, and people who end up hurt by that are people in need.
by joe_the_user | 2025-08-21 01:56:12+00:00
Any attention on Moravec's paradox is good imo because it is important.

That said, the article starts with several problems.

1) Claims that it isn't a paradox, which is just silly. A paradox is a counter-intuitive result. The result is generally counter-intuitive whatever explanation you give. Zeno's paradox remains a paradox despite calculus essentially explaining it, etc.

2) Calls the article "Understanding Moravec's Paradox" when it should be called "My Explanation of Moravec's Paradox".

3) The author's final explanation seems kind of simplistic; "Human activities just have a large search space". IDK. Human activity sometimes does still in things that aren't walking also. I mean, "not enough data" is an explanation why neural networks can't do a bunch of things. But not all programs are neural networks. One of the things humans are really good at is learning things from a few examples. A serious explanation of Moravec's Paradox would have to explain this as well imo.
by manishmshiva | 2025-08-21 01:56:43+00:00
The AI models we rave about today didn’t start with transformers or neural nets. They started with something almost embarrassingly simple: counting words.

The Bag of Words model ignored meaning, context, and grammar — yet it was the spark that made computers understand language at all.

Here’s how this tiny idea became the foundation for everything from spam filters to ChatGPT.
by cheema33 | 2025-08-21 01:57:03+00:00
You have obviously not compared it to how fast a Mac connects to an iphone. There is no need to turn on the hotspot. You can leave that on on the iphone. Just open your MacBook and it quickly connects to your iphone if it does not find a standard wifi.

I am very familiar with the Android hotspot feature. I used it for years. It works OK. But, it is not as fast as the Mac/iphone combo. Not even close. I am speaking from extensive experience.
by hollerith | 2025-08-21 01:59:35+00:00
The point is that Zed's developers have chosen to include prettier, which probably transitively includes many other NPM packages.

Node and these NPM packages represent a large increase in attack surface for a relatively small benefit (namely, prettier is included in Zed so that Zed's settings.json is easier to read and edit) which makes me wonder whether Zed's devs care about security at all.
by sunshowers | 2025-08-21 02:00:11+00:00
I think as the B2B customer you ought to do right by your users. But as the B2B vendor you have a responsibility to guide your customers towards making better choices. If your SSO plan costs $1000 a month and that's the "true" cost, your non-SSO plan should cost $900 a month to make it unviable for your customers to try and make the bad choice.

This is all normative.
by ksec | 2025-08-21 02:00:23+00:00
It is a combination of many things.

Number 1 being moving between two system is difficult. The biggest obstacle is WhatsApp. And Meta / Facebook / Zuck is making it hard for people to switch. While it is not yet a thing in US, WhatsApp has 2B user world wide. And their life lives on WhatsApp. Less of an issue if you are on Line, KaKaoTalk and WeChat.

Number 2 is choice of phones. Android is basically Google Pixel, Samsung Galaxy and Chinese Brands. I don't even think Pixel has double digit market share and Google Pixel isn't available everywhere. Their distribution channel is still appalling 10 years later. Making it pretty much the choice of Samsung or Chinese Brands.

These two obstacles are there before user could even make a choice and compare.

At one point I really thought Microsoft could get back into the game of Mobile. But after many years of waiting it doesn't seems that is a direction they want to go to.

I think the iPhone 17 coming later next month won' wobble. So that is one problem solved.

In the long game it seems we can better count on "Apple can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.”
by noosphr | 2025-08-21 02:00:31+00:00
I'm starting to appreciate not having digitised notes.

When you can sit down and write out 1,000 words in 30 minites making indexes which you update weekly becomes just another form of revision. This works well for both study and business planning. Less so for emails and instant messages, but each medium for its intended purpose.

It is amazing how much of our education system requires being able to write text by the wheelbarrow when no one today can write more than a thimbleful without hand cramps and wrist pain. Imagine how much people would want to use Facebook or reddit if every like and upvote came with an electric shock. Our education system does that to everyone from age 8 and up when it comes to writing anything down.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-08-21 02:01:47+00:00
Yeah, all of those things need to happen. And they all require massive investment. They also have a better chance of success if we significantly reduce fossil fuel usage in the meantime and extend the runway a bit.

The debate matters because we don't have consensus as a society that climate change is occurring. The scientific consensus has been consistently and aggressively countered in the public sphere. The interests that have pushed the counter narrative do not push for action regardless of cause. They push for inaction, because action costs them money.

If there was a societal consensus that global warming is a massive problem and we were pouring tons of cash into geoengineering, I'd be on board with your position. But we're not, we're still arguing about whether it's happening at all or whether it's enough to really be a problem or whether it's worth doing anything at all.

The debate matters, and causality matters for establishing the facts in the debate.
by galaxyLogic | 2025-08-21 02:02:34+00:00
I think the solution to captcha-rot is micro-payments. It does consume resources to serve a web-page so whose gonna pay for that?

If you want to do advertisement then don't require a payment, and be happy that crawlers will spread your ad to the users of AI-bots.

If you are a non-profit-site then it's great to get a micro-payment to help you maintain and run the site.
by jonahbenton | 2025-08-21 02:04:15+00:00
I'm using phi4 for writing, one of the qwen3s for coding and a small mistral for classification and other small tasks. Have a framework desktop showing up soon, will put a 70b/80b multimodal on it for image and pdf processing.

I have used ollama, lmstudio, jan and vllm at different times, am readying for a wholesale transition to llamacpp.
by mxxx | 2025-08-21 02:06:28+00:00
Regardless of the introduction of sycophantic reviewers, the 3/5 = fresh thing has always been a pretty half-ass threshold imo, and that a fact that a film can be "100% fresh" on RT on the basis of every single reviewer saying "yeah it's nothing special but it's fine, 3 stars" is fairly easy to misinterpret.
by cedric-hsu | 2025-08-21 02:06:47+00:00
The Problem: Search Engine Tunnel Vision While building a multilingual content research pipeline for our team, I hit a frustrating bottleneck. Our workflow required cross-referencing information across different search engines - Google for general queries, Baidu for Chinese market insights, Yandex for Eastern European data, and specialized academic databases. The constant tab-switching and manual URL modifications were killing productivity.

The Search for a Solution I evaluated several multi-search extensions, but most were either bloated with unnecessary features or lacked intelligent engine recommendations. What I needed was something that could:

Automatically suggest relevant engines based on query language

Provide one-click access without context switching

Support customizable workflows for different research scenarios

Discovery: EverySearch Architecture Found EverySearch (https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/everysearch/gcgdbdk...) through a colleague’s recommendation. What caught my attention wasn’t just the feature set, but the technical approach:

Smart Engine Recommendations: Uses language detection algorithms to suggest contextually relevant search engines. Query in Chinese? It prioritizes Baidu, Sogou, and Bing CN.

Efficient Context Menu Integration: Right-click functionality with minimal DOM manipulation overhead - no performance impact on host pages.

Drag-and-Drop Customization: Clean interface allowing engine reordering without requiring settings page navigation.

Technical Impact After 3 weeks of usage across our 5-person research team:

40% reduction in research time per query session

60% fewer manual tab operations

Seamless multilingual workflow switching (8 supported languages)

Zero performance impact on browser startup time

The v1.8 “Smart Search Diversity Reminder” feature is particularly clever - it nudges users away from Google-only searches, promoting better information diversity.

For teams doing cross-platform research or multilingual content work, this extension solves a real workflow problem with solid technical execution.