MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ClayShentrup | 2025-11-06 18:43:13+00:00
i had a chance to visit arrow at his palo alto condo circa 2014. his theorem is nice and all, but it only makes sense to apply it to social welfare functions, not voting methods. yes, the correct social welfare function is just the utilitarian sum of all voters' individual utilities.

https://www.rangevoting.org/UtilFoundns

once you know that, that's the function you use in your VSE metrics. then the performance of the voting method is measurable without having to think about any specific criteria.

https://www.rangevoting.org/PropDiatribe
by infakelife | 2025-11-06 18:43:27+00:00
No equivalent as far as I know but would love to see one. The function it served has been scattered across Youtube, X, Substack, Hacker News, etc. but scale makes it hard to curate exclusively for such a specific audience with such a specific aesthetic.

Kevin Kelly is still writing through The Technium [0], which might scratch some of the itch but is more an island than a colony like Whole Earth was.

Time for a hippie futurist revival?

[0] https://kk.org/thetechnium/
by conditionnumber | 2025-11-06 18:43:29+00:00
I've been in a similar slump for a while now (lectures + paper skims >> books + coding), so this is advice I'm telling myself right now. Put a stack of good books in a place where you see them several times a day. There's a good chance their presence will taunt you into reading them. Maybe charge your phone on the stack. Don't feel guilty about skipping around between books. Do feel guilty about neglecting them. I'm going to null route HN and YouTube for the remainder of November. Thanks for the question.
by frotaur | 2025-11-06 18:43:31+00:00
Genuine question : When companies are bailed out by the taxpayer, why can't we then give ownership of the company to the taxpayer? Effectively 'buying' the company to save it, instead of just gifting it money for it to survive.

Is there a reason not to make the taxpayer (or government) the main shareholder after the bailout?
by Razengan | 2025-11-06 18:43:42+00:00
So just to fantasize for a bit,

Suppose fusion power becomes a thing, and after handwaiving some issues let's assume it can power everything indefinitely.

Does that make things like heating, cooling, travel, ocean desalination, bandwidth, AI, Bitcoin mining, permanently free?

Shouldn't all of humanity be homing in on that holy grail?

I read here and there that geothermal could be the next best thing. Maybe HN can say more on that.

(P.S. terrestrial fusion may also explain why nobody bothers to build Dyson spheres out there)
by wlesieutre | 2025-11-06 18:44:07+00:00
There were three major server side Swift projects, and Vapor is the surviving one from that era

Dead projects are

- Kitura https://github.com/Kitura/Kitura

- Perfect https://github.com/PerfectlySoft/Perfect

Don't know of large organizations using it in production, the vibe I get is that it's useful for an iOS developer who wants to deploy a small server for their product without learning Python or Javascript.

You could certainly use it at larger scale, but you have to justify giving up the big ecosystems of its competitors.
by caubin | 2025-11-06 18:45:02+00:00
Hei hei,

I'm working for the XWiki and CryptPad projects, which are integrated in openDesk. Here are a couple links / infos that can be interesting to understand the context of openDesk.

The openDesk project comes initially from an initiative of the Ministry of Interior of Germany in 2021, to build the alternative to Office 365. The project was progressively transferred in 2025 to a state-owned organization, the ZenDis (https://zendis.de), which oversees the global development of openDesk.

The source code is mainly available on https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk, where you will find mirrors of every project which is bundled into openDesk (Nextcloud, Collabora, Element, Univention, XWiki, Jitsi, OpenXchange, CryptPad, OpenProject, …)

There was also a couple public presentations about openDesk at FOSDEM during the past years :

* In 2024 : https://archive.fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3...

* In 2025 : https://archive.fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5...
by LaurensBER | 2025-11-06 18:45:07+00:00
Requirements intended for initial evaluation deployment (not production usage!):

- 12 cores

- 32 GB ram

- Kubernetes cluster

Finally a use cases for all those awesome overpowered homelabs I see on Reddit.

For the rest of the world this seems excessive. Even for a small company these are pretty unreasonable requirements. I wonder what their design considerations were?
by pstuart | 2025-11-06 18:45:30+00:00
We created the damn cartels in the first place with our insatiable demand for their products.

The current model is designed to create crime from end to end. And it was never about safety (FFS, look at how people who are busted for using drugs are treated).

Humans like having altered states and there will always be a market for that. There are risks and dangers in that but they can be mitigated. I'll trot out the classic counterpoint to the current madness: alcohol and tobacco are legal and sanctioned but we know they're dangerous and kill over half a million US citizens per year.

Again, if you think it's about safety you are mistaken: it's about oppression and control and it's ruining this country as well as our neighbors to the south.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-11-06 18:45:42+00:00
> Genuine question : When companies are bailed out by the taxpayer, why can't we then give ownership of the company to the taxpayer?

tHaT'S sOcIAlIsM

Though ironically for the first time ever, the people shouting that would actually be correct. Kind of.

If you mean in a broad "is this possible" sense though, sure, absolutely. Entities owned in part or in whole by the state are not uncommon, but anytime such things are proposed in the US, the right loses it's fucking mind.

Edit: hit the comment rate wall.

> I see! But still, I don't get in what sense it is more socialist that just having people actually buy the company to save it (instead of just saving it 'for free'). If anything it makes it more capitalist if the taxpayers invest in the bailout, instead of just giving it away!

Because socialism isn't an economic system in American politics, it's a scary word that the Russians and CHYNA are. It's also completely interoperable with communism because our conservative party here has long since abandoned anything resembling reality, and even when they were here with us, they didn't know the difference between the two.

Doing it this way is capitalist because it's American. Doing it the other way is evil because it's socialist/communist, like the Russians/Chinese/North Koreans do with the lot of this rhetoric absolutely drowning in racism and nationalism. Mind you, all those countries have issues, absolutely. I'm just saying a conservative with a gun to their head couldn't actually explain those issues, they're just evil because they're not American. [ insert eagle screech here ]

Honestly the best distillation is: It's Freedom when private citizens run things, and it's Communism when the government does. The fact that the government sometimes has to give rich private citizens a shit ton of money to keep things afloat is not reflected upon.

If you try and analyze it through a lens of what these words actually mean, yeah it makes no goddamn sense at all.
Show HN: OpenHealth – AI health platform with RAG over 38M medical papers
by heliosinc | 2025-11-06 18:46:01+00:00
Hi HN,

I've been concerned about the lack of safety and efficacy data for most supplements on the market. While the supplement industry is booming, it's largely unregulated, and it's difficult to get reliable, evidence-based information. General-purpose LLMs often give generic advice and don't deeply engage with the medical literature.

That's why I built OpenHealth: https://www.my-openhealth.com/

It's an AI-powered platform designed to provide high-quality, personalized health information, with a strong focus on supplement safety. I recently wrote a blog post about the specific safety concerns that motivated me to build this project: https://www.my-openhealth.com/blog/supplement-safety-is-why-...

I wanted to share some of the technical details with the HN community, as I'd love your feedback on the approach.

The Tech Stack

At its core, OpenHealth uses a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system that draws from over 38 million medical abstracts from PubMed and other scientific journals. Here's a breakdown of the key components:

• RAG and Paper Quality Ranking: We don't just retrieve information; we have a system to rank the quality of the papers. This helps us prioritize information from higher-quality studies and avoid relying on weaker evidence.

• Neural Search Across All Literature: Beyond our embedding database, we can access all the literature including preprints via neural search, which works pretty well. This gives us comprehensive coverage of the latest research.

• Fine-Tuned Models & Optimized Prompts: We use fine-tuned language models that are specialized for the medical domain. The prompts are crafted and optimized by a team of clinicians and scientists to ensure that the generated responses are medically sound and relevant.

• Context Engineering for Medical Data: We've put a lot of effort into context engineering to accurately extract and analyze medical data. This is crucial for understanding the nuances of medical literature.

• Drug and Supplement Interaction Database: We've engineered a comprehensive database for predicting interactions between drugs, supplements, and even lifestyle factors. This is a key feature for ensuring safety.

Between the prompt engineering and the grounding in extensive API semantic search, we get really good health responses. We've tested with clinics who prefer it to ChatGPT for medical queries.

The Goal

The ultimate vision is to build a "health superintelligence" – a system that can provide state-of-the-art guidance on medical, wellness, and longevity protocols, all grounded in scientific evidence. We're accomplishing this through SFT/RL on large biomedical RL envs. More to report on this in the future!

I'm launching this project and would be grateful for this community's feedback on the technical approach, the quality of the information provided, the UI/UX, and any other thoughts you might have.

Thanks for your support!
by bryanlarsen | 2025-11-06 18:46:22+00:00
> There is no such thing as purity or correctness in language

There certainly is, in the case of French and other languages that have a central authority defining what is pure and correct.

Defining something as pure by fiat seems nonsensical, but the world is strange that way.

Especially if it applies outside the jurisdiction. Why should the Parisian government get to declare that Quebecois is impure?
by arxanas | 2025-11-06 18:46:59+00:00
Ah, yes, but I think Ascent also doesn't index ADTs. In this case, based on some other information, it seems like Soufflé _can_ plan the queries better if it has profiling data. It seems like Ascent just happened to pick a better query plan in my case without the profiling data.

Thanks for the link to the paper!
by Nevermark | 2025-11-06 18:47:04+00:00
Agreed.

--

As a side rant:

"Specious accusations are often confessions."

I understand the psychology and casual use of absolutely worded reactions, and that their extreme expression is not taken literally, but as emphasis. But I still prefer balanced wording.

A surprisingly large number of people tragically clash and talk past each other over charged non-issues, that normal undramatic language would render moot.

I.e. "We must believe all X", vs. "We should listen to all X", ... and many more.

"Black Lives Matter Too", isn't as pithy. Nor should the last word be necessary for anyone to understand the three word version. But the fourth word, nodding to the wider context, pre-counters a lot of ridiculous responses to the original line. Not actually suggesting a sea change in a well recognized movement banner line. But it is a widely observed example of how any lack of pedantic clarity is seized upon by motivated reactionaries, to achieve politically significant impact via obtuse reinterpretation.

A little verbal pedantry is an effective speed bump against the siren song of motivated or inadvertent polarization.
by vineyardmike | 2025-11-06 18:47:30+00:00
Well that’s just the bare-minimum to run it. They said they were targeting like 150k users across the German government, so this is a lot closer to a Google Docs alternative than a home lab use case.

It’s also BYO-database so there is certainly other requirements above and beyond just the stated above when you include running the database clusters.
by hdivider | 2025-11-06 18:48:41+00:00
In short: yes. It can be done. Clean, almost limitless energy, funded in a way to provide effectively free electricity for ordinary people. Restrictions would have to be in place to prevent true excess, but regulations already handle such matters in other areas.

The ambient vibe of our time, and here on HN, is often really pessimistic. I don't believe such pessimism is realistic. Commercial grade fusion power will come, and we should push very hard to make it happen. It will change the equations at the core of the economy and open up whole new paths for technology -- far beyond the pure digital.
by thisislife2 | 2025-11-06 18:48:45+00:00
And both the products I mentioned also support online collaboration and storage. See LibreOffice Online ( https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ ), OnlyOffice Workspace ( https://www.onlyoffice.com/workspace ) and OnlyOffice Enterprise ( https://www.onlyoffice.com/docs-enterprise ). I can't comment how feature compatible these are but alternatives do exist and that's good new for us. (Note that openDesk is based on a fork of LibreOffice Online, which is a commercial variant for those who don't want to bother implementing everything themselves).
by gusmally | 2025-11-06 18:48:54+00:00
Yes! They are extremely susceptible to user influence, based on what I have read and experienced in personal use. If your initial message contains a seed, e.g., "Should I break up with my boyfriend? He doesn't listen to me," the LLM will stick with the seed of negativity and not make an objective analysis of the situation or take initiative to challenge your/its original perspective.
by frotaur | 2025-11-06 18:48:55+00:00
But not really right? It could happen in the market, company A chooses to bailout company B by buying it and investing money to keep it afloat.

Except company A in this case is the government. No? Why is it that when it is the government doing this action, it has to gift the money instead of potentially profiting from it?

Edit : just saw the edit. I see! But still, I don't get in what sense it is more socialist, instead of just saving the companing 'for free', people actually buy (forcefully invest?) in the company to save it. If anything it makes it more capitalist if the taxpayers invest in the bailout, instead of just giving it away!
by vitaly-pavlenko | 2025-11-06 18:48:57+00:00
So here I stand with dilettantes :)

Being a jazz college dropout, I stopped building around standard notation when after two years of training - and I started learning piano at 25 - I still didn't get any fluency in instantly seeing harmonic structure in the scores.

I don't care that much about articulation. I can hear articulation anyways. What I care about is the elusive layer of harmony which is so hard to reason about without the right tools.

That's why people do Roman numerals, figured bass, all sorts of annotation: https://github.com/vpavlenko/study-music/blob/main/parts/cla...

And that's what I was chasing. Something that gives me, a guy who didn't spent formative years of K-12 by sight-reading at the piano, a way to build mental models of how Western harmony works.

And here, I believe, I'm with the majority of people.
by toast0 | 2025-11-06 18:49:20+00:00
Fair enough, I didn't go through the math. I don't think many NATs are realistically likely to let a single client run 64k sessions.

ISPs are increasingly putting customers behind CGNAT, so wireguard at home doesn't imply control over NAT policies. Especially new entrants and fixed wireless ISPs don't tend to have the resources to get an IP (v4) for every customer, and some of them don't offer v6 either, so having some form of hope would be nice.
by LordDragonfang | 2025-11-06 18:49:30+00:00
I mean, I like (gen)AI, and spend a lot of time defending it from the "haters". I think it's a useful tool, interesting philosophical topic, and generally fun to play with. I'm even willing to entertain the idea that it might be truly intelligent, sentient, or possibly even self-aware in a meaningful way.

I still get an "ick" feeling when reading some of the most 4o-toned text that it puts out. It's just unsettling in an uncanny valley way.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-11-06 18:50:20+00:00
Yeah - the whole business model of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, at least at the moment, seems to be that the models are so big that you need to run them in the cloud with metered access. Maybe that could change in the future to sale or annual licence business model if running locally became possible.

I think scale helps for general tasks where the breadth of capability may be needed, but it's not so clear that this needed for narrow verticals, especially something like coding (knowing how to fix car engines, or distinguish 100 breeds of dog is not of much use!).
by archon810 | 2025-11-06 18:50:24+00:00
Thank you for the mention of Boka. This sent me down a rabbit hole of research, both the positives compared to other toothpaste, like not containing SLS, parabens, or titanium dioxide, but also the findings of trace amounts of lead, arsenic, and mercury in it. The trace amounts are much lower than the standards considered okay by the FDA and the European regulators, but not EWG, which doesn't accept pretty much any trace amounts.

I decided to try it after all.
by unleaded | 2025-11-06 18:50:30+00:00
what do you mean by "heavily structured output"? i find it generates the most natural-sounding output of any of the LLMs—cuts straight to the answer with natural sounding prose (except when sometimes it decides to use chat-gpt style output with its emoji headings for no reason). I've only used it on kimi.com though, wondering what you're seeing.
by techtalksweekly | 2025-11-06 18:50:52+00:00
I'm collecting every new software engineering conference talk and podcast each week so you don’t have to scroll through YouTube/RSS feeds[1]

Every week, an endless number of new podcasts and talks are published. Most get buried before anyone sees them. My newsletter called "Tech Talks Weekly" is a free email that lists all the new talks and podcasts published in the past 7 days across hundreds of conferences (KubeCon, QCon, PyCon, Devoxx, etc.) and podcasts with a few must-watch ones highlighted and briefly summarized.[2]

Also doing yearly “most-watched” compilations (e.g. 100 Most Watched Software Engineering Talks Of 2024 that made it to HN front page) which have been fun to put together.

Started it as a side project to stop missing good talks, but now 7,200+ devs read it every week.

[1] https://techtalksweekly.io [2] https://www.techtalksweekly.io/p/what-is-tech-talks-weekly
by jjcm | 2025-11-06 18:50:54+00:00
I took a job with Atlassian out there and got my citizenship.

Best 5 years of my life. I'm back in the US now temporarily, but there's zero doubt in my mind I will end up back in Aus. I've lived in 8 cities now(1), and Sydney was the highest quality of life I've had out of any of them. Great infrastructure, great work-life balance, great culture, and fantastic weather. Only downsides are the distance and the lack of ozone layer (do not fuck around with the sun in Australia - there's a reason why they have over 10x the global average of melanoma). Happy to answer any questions about it or the process for getting citizenship.

(1) Cities lived for comparison: San Diego, LA, Honolulu, San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Sydney
by nine_k | 2025-11-06 18:51:02+00:00
French was forcibly thrust on the population in 1066, but of course the conquerors were the elite, and the defeated, their servants. So if you tend a cow, you call it with the Germanic word: cow, not vache. But if you consume its expensive meat, you name it in French: boef / beef, not rind(fleisch).
by sfn42 | 2025-11-06 18:51:34+00:00
> There is some nuance here that you fail to notice or you pretend you don't see it :D

I could say the same for you:

> I can't copy-paste a computer program and resell it without a license. I can't say "Oh I've just read the bits, learned from it and based on this knowledge I created my own computer program that looks exactly the same except the author name is different in the »About...« section"

Nobody uses LLMs to copy others' code. Nobody wants a carbon-copy of someone else's software, if that's what they wanted they would have used those people's software. I mean maybe someone does but that's not the point of LLMs and it's not why people use them.

I use LLMs to write code for me some times. I am quite sure that nobody in history has ever written that code. It's not copied from anyone, it's written specifically to solve the given task. I'm sure it's similar to a lot of code out there, I mean it's not often we write truly novel stuff. But there's nothing wrong with that. Most websites are pretty similar. Most apps are pretty similar. Developers all over the world write the same-ish code every day.

And if you don't want anyone to copy your precious code then don't publish it. That's the most ironic thing about all this - you put your code on the internet for everyone to see and then you make a big deal about the possibility of an LLM copying it as a response to a prompt?

Bro if I wanted your code I could go to your public github repo and actually copy it, I don't need an LLM to do that for me. Don't publish it if you're so worried about being copied.
by JuniperMesos | 2025-11-06 18:51:41+00:00
The last Discord I joined was for a local math and formal methods meetup group in my area. The one before that was the official chat space for an open source project.

I disapprove of both these groups choosing Discord to run their official chat on. Nonetheless, it's what they picked, so I need to use some kind of software to send messages to Discord's backend to communicate with these groups if I want to participate in them at all.
by renwoshin | 2025-11-06 18:52:02+00:00
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We empower our people to do their best work and grow to their fullest potential. We value impact above all else. We offer highly competitive salaries and top-of-market equity. We plan on hiring fewer than 10 engineers for the lifetime of the company. If this sounds exciting to you, please apply!

Stack: React, Typescript, TailwindCSS, and Google Cloud

Email me with your resume to apply: jon @ domain

Full job description: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R3JZYV8yVMjgspVDDYHwkTZk...