MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by quacked | 2025-11-03 18:55:35+00:00
One thing I noticed while I was reading NASA engineer Allan MacDonald's book about the Challenger accident he tried and failed to prevent was that every time he came into contact with a member of the news media, there was a sense of skilled elitism about the practice of their craft. I started looking back on other nonfiction depictions of the times before the 1990s, and I was struck not only by the amount of elitism displayed by people working in the creative industries, but by how many "sellout creatives" (that were making a living selling advertisements or hosting news segments or whatever) had huge exposure to and experience in past creative culture. It's like every media/art worker at that time had had a goal as a young person to create the next Great Work, and over time they flamed out and settled for sticking niche literary references in the Simpsons or taking pictures for development companies or writing sports magazine articles or teaching or some other lesser-than creative career than being the next Dostoevsky.

By contrast, I don't get that sense at all from people working in "culture" today, neither by the people still staffing "legacy media" or in their influencer replacements.
by btilly | 2025-11-03 18:55:36+00:00
I absolutely love this take. Then again it matches what I've been saying for decades, so I would.

Generalizing briefly, the same phenomena of identity underlies a lot of our religious wars. Be it language, braces, indentation, or a variety of other programming choices. What's fundamentally going on is that programming expertise is fragile. (I think I first saw that idea in Code Complete?) A new language / style / technology / whatever very often will leave us less competent. Ideally we would respond with, "I guess I need to get back on that learning curve." But often it is easy to instead blame the external factor. "I'm a good programmer. I tried it. The result didn't work well. It must be bad."

Among the many attempts to try to fix the problem, I can recommend https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-ten-commandments-of-egoles.... To the extent that you manage to apply its advice, you really will do better.

Of course your improvement won't directly help those around you...
by prmph | 2025-11-03 18:55:49+00:00
There are many aspects to this that people like yourself miss, but I think we need satisfactory answers to them (or at least rigorous explorations of them) before we can make headway in these sorts of discussion.

Imagine we assume that A.I. could be conscious. What would be the identity/scope of that consciousness. To understand what I'm driving at, let's make an analogy to humans. Our consciousness is scoped to our bodies. We see through sense organ, and our brain, which process these signals, is located in a specific point in space. But we still do not know how consciousness arises in the brain and is bound to the body.

If you equate computation of sufficient complexity to consciousness, then the question arises: what exactly about computation would prodcuce consciousness? If we perform the same computation on a different substrate, would that then be the same consciousness, or a copy of the original? If it would not be the same consciousness, then just what give consciousness its identity?

I believe you would find it ridiculous to say that just because we are performing the computation on this chip, therefore the identity of the resulting consciousness is scoped to this chip.
by obiefernandez | 2025-11-03 18:55:57+00:00
Location: Mexico City (US Citizen)

Remote: Yes (Remote Only)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Ruby on Rails, AI

Resume/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/obiefernandez/

Email: obiefernandez@gmail.com

Hello, I'm one of the original evangelists for Ruby on Rails and the author of The Rails Way as well as Patterns of Application Development Using AI. Over the past three decades, I’ve led teams and built products at every scale — from early-stage startups to global platforms — combining deep technical expertise with a creative, forward-looking approach to software craftsmanship.

I bring 30 years of hands-on engineering experience, including senior leadership in architecture, AI integration, and product strategy. Whether working as an individual contributor or guiding organizations through transformation, I focus on delivering clarity, velocity, and sustainable innovation. My last gig was leading AI strategy related to Developer Experience at Shopify.

Currently evaluating consulting and permanent opportunities with preference for executive leadership position at a larger company, although will consider consulting and fractional CTO type roles for startups and smaller ventures if the project and team are interesting enough.
by Mistletoe | 2025-11-03 18:55:59+00:00
I don't even think it mattered WHAT we watched. The A-Team and Dallas were pretty awful, but at least we were watching the same things and had some common ground, could see the humanity in the people we see every day. Now it's just "I hate everyone, no one even likes my niche anime about feet and fungi". I mean someone does, but it's some tiny group on the internet and then the tribalism and us against the world starts. The feeling of loneliness just gets worse and worse because you need to see people in your real life that you enjoy.
by tripflag | 2025-11-03 18:56:24+00:00
Combining copyparty with Syncthing is not something I have tested extensively, but I know people are doing this, and I have yet to hear about any related issues. It's also a usecase I want to support, so if you /do/ hit any issues, please give word! I've briefly checked how Syncthing handles the symlink-based file deduplication, and it seemed to work just fine.

The only precaution I can think of is that copyparty's .hist folder should probably not be synced between devices. So if you intend to share an entire copyparty volume, or a folder which contains a copyparty volume, then you could use the `--hist` global-option or `hist` volflag to put it somewhere else.

As for high CPU usage, this would arise from copyparty deciding to reindex a file when it detects that the file has been modified. This shouldn't be a concern unless you point it at a folder which has continuously modifying files, such as a file that is currently being downloaded or otherwise slowly written to.
by jamesbrady | 2025-11-03 18:56:44+00:00
Elicit | San Francisco + remote (US timezones) | https://elicit.com/careers

Elicit is building AI for science. We scaled to >$7MM annual revenue and 450k MAU fast. We're hiring for multiple roles and are primarily interested in people with early-stage company experience, who are comfortable in high-agency, fast-paced teams.

Reasons you might want to join Elicit:

1. We have been thinking about how to apply AI for high-stakes knowledge work since even before GPT-1. Elicit was spun-out from Ought (https://ought.org/) which was an applied research lab.

2. If you're concerned about the potential downsides and risks of super-powerful AI: so are we! Happy to explain more of this story on a call, or you can also check e.g. https://ought.org/updates/2022-04-06-process for a primer.

3. We like spending time with each other, and have get-togethers every 6 weeks, but we're flexible on location.

Reasons you might not want to join Elicit:

1. We've found a level of product market fit (as evidenced by metrics) but we've not proven everything out yet. If you want predictability, Elicit is not for you.

2. We aim to hire people who thrive in low-bureaucracy environments, and let them loose. If you need structure, lots of support, close mentorship, or tightly-defined work assignments, Elicit is not for you.

A selection of open roles—more on the site:

• ML engineer: https://elicit.com/careers/913a03d5-bd26-4c64-8346-21a029f34...

• Founding data engineer: https://elicit.com/careers/8cc10be7-30ca-469a-a567-dfcdb271f...

• Senior software engineer: https://elicit.com/careers/aa99e2e9-5b15-4cd3-ac9d-9c9177ff6...
by supersour | 2025-11-03 18:57:21+00:00
If this article resonates with you in even the smallest way, I urge you to read Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business".

I am currently re-reading this book and am amazed by the apparent accuracy of his analysis, which is that the mediums in which we communicate or express information (print vs. TV vs. TikTok) have a massively understated role in the quality and type of communication we participate in. That is, as print lends itself naturally to logical argument and less to emotional knee-jerk reactions, the type of conversations taken place in long-form print will by nature be more logical and intellectual. Compare this to TV or short term videos, which captivate us using more primal forms of distraction (bright lights with moving images, fast talking, "Gotcha" type rhetoric, cool dances, sexual/romantic behaviour, or background subway surfers), and it is obvious that the nature of what we see is inherently less based around logic and reason.

And as a consequence, if we are what we consume, it is only natural to surmise that the quality of the mind follows the quality (and qualia) of our media.
by bill_duckduckgo | 2025-11-03 18:57:57+00:00
DuckDuckGo | Multiple Roles | Remote | Full-time | $178,500 - $320,000 USD + equity

We are looking for candidates that are excited to join us on a mission to raise the standard of trust online. All of our roles are fully-remote, except where specific locations are noted.

Most of the software engineering positions have been repeating here for years because we've been continually hiring for them, scaling our whole team to now over 300 people—many of those hires have come through Hacker News. We've been improving our hiring process over time, and we know some good candidates may have fallen through the cracks. Some people who tried in the past have had success going through it again, and we still pay for hiring projects.

Senior Backend Engineer - $178,500 USD + equity https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/duck-duck-go/abb953ee-5bb7-4637-9f6...

Senior Site Reliability Engineer - $178,500 USD + equity — https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/duck-duck-go/9f845ea5-4bdd-432a-826...

Senior Software Engineer, Windows Desktop App - $178,500 USD + equity — https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/duck-duck-go/47e569c6-f995-4955-a89...

Engineering Director, Browser Platform - $243,800 USD + equity https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/duck-duck-go/0541f1f3-4302-4b76-93a...

VP, Business Development - $320,000 USD + equity https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/duck-duck-go/276ae352-55b5-4fb2-9b9...

Director, Product Management - - $243,800 USD + equity https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/duck-duck-go/2a379a3e-ee10-45d2-927...

https://duckduckgo.com/careers
by boredtofears | 2025-11-03 18:57:59+00:00
I have to spend 3 days working on someone else's "narratives that are more fun to apply their creativity to" all the time, even when my intuition and experience tells me it isn't a good idea. Sometimes my intuition is wrong. I've yet to meet a product manager that isn't doing this even when they claim to have all the data in the world to support their narrative.

Personally I don't think there's anything wrong with scratching that itch, especially if its going to make you/your team more comfortable long term. 3 days is probably not make-or-break.
by whstl | 2025-11-03 18:58:14+00:00
I wonder if we can even call what happens here with politics "censorship". Apart from things that get flagged, political articles, or anything that causes flamewars, are still there if people want to keep posting/replying... they just get dropped out of the homepage. So it's really anti-doomscrolling. And the exact opposite of what Facebook/Twitter/Instagram do!

> Still, there's that mix of "A Modest Proposal" style faux-intellectualism that I still tend to get sniped by.

Hah, same, this also grinds my gears!
by analog8374 | 2025-11-03 18:58:22+00:00
Before the internet we mostly talked to friends. With the internet we mostly talk to strangers.

We used to have conversations. Now we have fights.

I was very idealistic when I first came to social media. Very kind. Since then I have picked up some bad habits.

It's something I'm passing through. I see an end.

This is probably a familiar story.
by FloorEgg | 2025-11-03 18:58:29+00:00
The good: The internet enabled access to a wider diversity of cultures.

The bad (I think?): Culture decoupled from geography, which makes it harder to connect with local community.

The ugly: The attention economy optimizes for what is novel and upsetting, with a second order consequence of biasing culture to perceive everything in upsetting ways, even when it doesn't need to or benefit from that perspective. So culture as a whole has been biased towards pessimistic rituals and values.
by dingnuts | 2025-11-03 18:58:31+00:00
> The 20th century, apparently, was the last time we had great art, literature, or music.

this is totally absurd. I'm in middle age and the golden era of music for me is the late aughts, mostly bedroom recordings that never would have seen the light of day in the age of MTV.

I might agree with the thesis of the piece overall but it's hard to continue after such an obviously asinine statement
by thomastjeffery | 2025-11-03 18:58:39+00:00
I think the most descriptive title I could give an LLM is "bias". An LLM is not "biased", it is bias; or at the very least, it's a good imitation of the system of human thinking/perception that we call bias.

An LLM is a noise generator. It generates tokens without logic, arithmetic, or any "reason" whatsoever. The noise that an LLM generates is not truly random. Instead, the LLM is biased to generate familiar noise. The LLM itself is nothing more than a model of token familiarity. Nothing about that model can tell you why some tokens are more familiar with others, just like an accounting spreadsheet can't tell you why it contains a list of charges and a summation next to the word "total". It could just as easily contain the same kind of data with an entirely different purpose.

What an LLM models is written human text. Should we really expect to not be surprised by the power and versatility of human-written text?

---

It's clear that these statistical models are very good at thoughtless tasks, like perception and hallucination. It's also clear that they are very bad at thoughtful tasks like logic and arithmetic - the things that traditional software is made of. What no one has really managed to figure out is how to bridge that gap.
by andrewmutz | 2025-11-03 18:58:41+00:00
Culture isn't getting worse, it's getting further and further towards what the masses want. Throughout history very few people got a voice about what culture was created or offered.

In the 1700s, the culture that was created targeted the people who could pay for it: the aristocracy and the very richest of wealthy merchants (people who could afford to be patrons). Culture targeted them.

In the early 1900s, the people who paid for culture were the upper middle class, because they were the people that advertisers wanted to reach. Culture targeted them and appealed to people with college educations (the types who enjoy cultural criticism).

Today, the culture that gets clicks and views is the culture that appeals to the broad masses. The broad masses do not appreciate the cultural criticism of the (college educated) upper middle class. If you want to know what they enjoy, go browse reddit's /r/all. It's not the village voice.
by fandorin | 2025-11-03 18:59:30+00:00
Thanks for your detailed response. I agree with what you wrote. But the key part is: "We sell to business not consumers." --> My product is not business-oriented. Probably there is a small % of businesses that use it but it's definitely not a majority (at least not right now). If I had a B2B product I would just do a subscription without thinking too much.
by treis | 2025-11-03 18:59:35+00:00
OpenAI is positioned to be something like Adwords is/was. Think free LLM for your app/website/store or as the backend for products like character.ai. That will let them vacuum up a ton of user data.

Plus like Google search they have a ton of organic traffic. Chatgpt has replaced Google search as my starting point to investigate anything. Lots of that is related to things where I will eventually spend money
by anon291 | 2025-11-03 19:00:22+00:00
Unproveable superstitious rubbish. Irrational numbers exist as ideas, but there is no physical evidence that they are found in nature. We have processes that in their ideal limit will converge to numbers known to be irrational, and the law of large numbers certainly makes them appear to be such, but there is no physical quantity that is measured irrational. In fact we know that at some point we cannot measure much anymore so even the illusion of infinity is null.
by cortesoft | 2025-11-03 19:00:44+00:00
It won't recover unless I do something... sometimes just quitting the iPhone app and then toggling enabling backups works, but not always. I had to completely delete and reinstall the app once to get it to work, and had to resync all 45000 images/videos I had.

I have had the server itself fail in strange ways where I had to restart it. I had to do a full fresh install once when it got hopelessly confused and I was getting database errors saying records either existed when they shouldn't or didn't exist when they should.

I think I am a pretty skilled sysadmin for these types of things, having both designed and administered very large distributed systems for two decades now, but maybe I am doing things wrong, but I think there are just some gotchas still with the project.
by AndrewDucker | 2025-11-03 19:00:44+00:00
When the world was smaller, it was harder for people to get together with their common interests. There wasn't anyone around the coffee pot or water cooler who I could talk to about the shows or music I liked.

Thankfully, nowadays I can find people from all around the world who listen and watch the same things as me.

The net effect is...Such a relief.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-11-03 19:00:49+00:00
Walmart Pauses Job Offers to Candidates Needing H-1B Visas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45659955 - October 2025

Four big companies have now stopped sponsoring H-1B visas. Here is the full list - https://www.financialexpress.com/business/investing-abroad-f... - October 23rd, 2025 (Cognizant, Intuitive Surgical, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Walmart)

> The $100,000 H-1B visa application fee officially took effect on September 21. According to USCIS, applicants must submit the payment through pay.gov before applying for the visa.

> The agency also reported that it has already received enough petitions to reach both the regular 65,000 cap for H-1B visas and the 20,000 cap for US advanced degree exemptions for the 2026 fiscal year, which runs until April next year.
by postflopclarity | 2025-11-03 19:00:53+00:00
the Hortman murder was the first assassination of a sitting legislator at the state or federal level in my lifetime, which feels pretty significant.

I'm looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinated_American_... and I stand by my "subjective perspective" as remaining pretty reasonable. let me know what specifically you wanted me to plot
by teddyh | 2025-11-03 19:00:59+00:00
> GPL usage has collapsed from 72% in 2009 to just 15% in 2024—a 57 percentage point freefall. Meanwhile, permissive licenses (MIT, Apache, BSD) that enable corporate appropriation without reciprocal obligations have surged from 28% to 85% over the same period.

No source is given for these questionable statistics. It makes me suspect that the entire point of the article is to make people unquestionably accept the statement that GPL usage “has collapsed”. It also speaks about Stallman exclusively in the past tense.
by prmph | 2025-11-03 19:01:11+00:00
> If you simulated a human brain by the atom,

That is what we don't know is possible. You don't even know what physics or particles are as yet undiscovered. And from what we even know currently, atoms are too coarse to form the basis of such "cloning"

And, my viewpoint is that, even if this were possible, just because you simulated a brain atom by atom, does not mean you have a consciousness. If it is the arrangement of matter that gives rise to consciousness, then would that new consciousness be the same person or not?

If you have a basis for answering that question, let's hear it.
by mxuribe | 2025-11-03 19:01:24+00:00
I know this post is more about nextcloud...but can i just say this one feature from Vikunja "...export task summaries and comments..." sounds great!!! One of the features i seek out when i look for a task, project management software is the ability to easily and comprehensivelt provide for nice exports, and that said exports *include comments*!!

Either apps lack such an export, or its very minimal, or it includes lots of things, except comments...Sometimes an app might have a REST api, and I'd need to build something non-trivial to start pulling out the comments, etc. I feel like its silly in this day and age.

My desire for comments to be included in exports is for local search...but also because i use comments for sort of thinking aloud, sort of like an inline task journaling...and when comments are lacking, it sucks!

In fact, when i hear folks suggest to simply stop using such apps and merely embrace the text file todo approach, they cite their having full access to comments as a feature...and, i can't dispute their claim! But barely any non-text-based apps highlight the inclusion of comments. So, i have to ask: is it just me (who doesn't use a text-based todo workflow), and then all other folks who *do use* a text-based tdo flow, who actually care about access to comments!?!

<rant over>
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-03 19:01:26+00:00
> But what it has turned into now

For me it's been the same as always, I'm able to connected with others that have the same niche interests as me, wherever they are in the world, and I'm eternally grateful for it existing.

Everything new always end up being "less useful" or "actively harmful" to some people once it's exposed to the real world, but that doesn't mean there is a large part of us that benefit from it many ways it regardless. I grew up in a rural place where no one cared about the same things as me, and once we got the internet for the first time, it was like a whole new world opened up. I still feel like this today.

But even so, others get pulled into it, or spit out of it, and they get harmed. And it sucks, ideally nothing should harm others. But it seems unavoidable that it does, even the bestest of tools with the bestest intentions will be misused by people, to harm themselves or to harm others. Maybe human nature just sucks.
by anon291 | 2025-11-03 19:01:30+00:00
Linear and exponential growth look the same in short term horizons depending on the exponent. However, exponential growth is strictly superior as some things can grow very fast if the exponent is high enough. We saw that with covid. The exponential assumption is correct. For the situations you are discussing, where the exponent is low, the exponential pattern correctly captures that.