MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ACow_Adonis | 2025-11-03 20:01:41+00:00
I think it depends on how one interacts with it. As far as I know it doesn't have a personalised feed and I'm seeing the same front page as everyone else. So I mainly use it to scan once or twice a day to pick out if there's anything going on in the world I need to know about.

Then for one or two threads I'll perouse the comments to see what our particular class of HN-esque people think about a topic. About once a month or a fortnight I might even post a comment. But it all has to be taken in context. Half of the time I'll close out the comments section immediately because it's clear the whole thing has gone down a tangent in not interested in hearing about. Another risk is when talking about topics that the HN crowd knows nothing about, which in my case is primarily economics where some of the takes are borderline delusional/ignorant and backed by a kind of tech worker/startup ideology.

The anti-politics thing is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand it's one of the last sites on the internet where there is comparatively little vitriol and thankfully, comparatively little populism. On the other hand, it means defacto support for a dominant ideology and compressive censorship of anything that threatens that ideology, and obviously that ideology is the one that supports tech workers, startups and venture capitalists.

I think taking all those things into account you can still get value out of it but know what you're engaging with. But like the other forms of social media since the death of forums, it's not made for serious engagement or deep thinking on a subject, and discussion can't really be anything more than temporally ephemeral.

At the very least it's borderline whereas the other forms of social media can basically be judged to be explicit write offs in my opinion.
by ahd985 | 2025-11-03 20:01:48+00:00
Location: Central Coast, California, USA

Remote: Yes (preferred)

Willing to relocate: No

Résumé/Portfolio: https://macduvy.com

Email: alex@macduvy.com

Availability: ~10–20 hours/week (contract or fractional)

Technologies: Python (FastAPI, Django, data/AI pipelines), TypeScript/React, PostgreSQL, AWS (ECS, Lambda, RDS), Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, ElasticSearch, LangChain, Pydantic AI, Pinecone, and many more

I’m a software engineer that splits my time between building production systems for clients and incubating internal AI-driven products. My background spans nuclear engineering, healthcare tech, fintech, IoT, and sustainability. Recent work includes development of LLM-assisted professional & engineering workflow services.

Looking for: Hands-on development of AI-driven solutions in professional & engineering services space
by altox7 | 2025-11-03 20:02:11+00:00
Location: Dubai

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Node.js, TypeScript, JS

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/narek-abovyan-25347418b/

Email: xeroxaltox@gmail.com

GitHub: https://github.com/naltox

I have experience building:

Web apps (React + TS)

Mobile apps (Swift / React Native)

Servers (Node.JS / Go)
by maples37 | 2025-11-03 20:02:46+00:00
In my case, I want file/photo syncing, calendar syncing, and contact syncing.

Nextcloud provides all 3 in a package that pretty much just works, in my experience (despite being kinda slow).

The Notes app is a pretty nice wrapper around a specific folder full of markdown files, I mostly use it on my phone, and on my desktop I just use my favorite editor to poke at the .md files directly.

Oh, and when a friend group wanted a better way to figure out which day to get together, I just installed the Polls app with a few clicks and we use that now.

I am a bit disappointed in the performance, but I've been running this setup for years and it "just works" for me. I understand how it works, I know how to back it up (and, more importantly restore from that backup!)

If there's another open-source, self-hosted project that has WebDAV, CalDAV, and CardDAV all in one package, then I might consider switching, but for now Nextcloud is "good enough" for me.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-03 20:02:47+00:00
> if Wikipedia was based off rules and if fundamental articles were dependencies to more complex downstream articles I think people would have more respect the site

These structured sources of truth have been tried. They don’t work. Natural language allows for ambiguity where necessary in a way code does not.

> If a Wikipedia model first defined rules for a genocide article

It would be worthless. Also, futile. You think when the world’s governments can’t agree on what genocide is, a random editorial decision at Wikipedia will control?

> the goal for Wikipedia is to avoid inconsistency

It’s a goal, but certainly not the goal. Truth isn’t a mathematical schema, particularly when it comes to social constructs like genocide.
by roommin | 2025-11-03 20:02:57+00:00
The tendency to attribute consciousness to the quantum is one I find very grating. What makes the human brain any less mechanical if quantum mechanics dictate the firing of neurons rather than electrodynamics? Why does the wave nature of subatomic systems mean that an artificial tongue would suddenly be able to subjectively experience taste? It always reads to me as very wooy, and any amount of drilling leads to even more questions that seem to take the ideas further from reality.

I think the largest case for consciousness being a mechanical system is the fact that we can interface with it mechanically. We can introduce electricity, magnetic fields, chemicals, and scalpels to change the nature of peoples experience and consciousness. Why is the incredible complexity of our brains an insufficient answer and that a secret qbit microtube in each neuron is a more sound one?
by myrmidon | 2025-11-03 20:03:09+00:00
> they assume consciousness emerges through purely mechanical means.

From my view, all the evidence points in exactly that direction though? Our consciousness can be suspended and affected by purely mechanical means, so clearly much of it has to reside in the physical realm.

Quantum consciousness to me sounds too much like overcomplicating human exceptionalism that we have always been prone to, just like geocentrism or our self-image as the apex of creation in the past.
by BurningFrog | 2025-11-03 20:03:17+00:00
The colonization of the new world was largely an immunological accident.

When meeting Europeans, 90% of the Americans would catch some European disease and die. This was widely seen as the will of god(s) by both sides. Often the disease spread faster than the Europeans, so when they got to an area most people were already dead.

The following conquest is seen as barbaric and unjust by us modern people. But for the people of the time, it was just how the world worked. The Aztecs would have been overjoyed to conquer Spain the same way.
by mariocesar | 2025-11-03 20:03:41+00:00
Location: Santa Cruz, Bolivia (UTC-4)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Python, Django, FastAPI, Postgres, Svelte/Vue/React, Docker, AWS, Terraform, Zapier (Platform/CLI), ETL

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariocesar/ ask me a PDF by mail.

Email: mariocesar "at" humanzilla.com

Senior full-stack engineer (10+ yrs). Python + Django are my main tools. Comfortable across backend, frontend, and infra. I build MVPs that turn into products. I also modernize legacy code and keep it running so many times. Deep on integrations & data flows (Zapier, ERPs, billing, CRM). Ex-integrations @ Zapier/Tesorio.

Links: GitHub https://github.com/mariocesar · Site https://mariocesar.xyz/
by alecco | 2025-11-03 20:03:59+00:00
Microsoft announces US $3bn investment over two years in India https://news.microsoft.com/en-in/microsoft-announces-us-3bn-... (Jan 2025)

Google announces $15B investment in AI hub in India https://apnews.com/article/google-artificial-intelligence-vi... (3 weeks ago)

[Indian] ex-Accenture CTO named Google Cloud’s Chief Product https://www.hindustantimes.com/trending/us/who-is-karthik-na... (last week) (a lot of people speculate they named an Indian Accenture guy to move as much as possible to India)

Big Tech giants defy US-India trade tensions, record strongest 12-month headcount growth in India in 3 years https://www.moneycontrol.com/technology/big-tech-giants-defy... (September)

https://www.reuters.com/world/india/openai-launch-first-indi...

https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanding-global-operations-t...

...
by dmje | 2025-11-03 20:04:24+00:00
It’s an addictive site, yes. But IMO it’s not social media.

For me one of the primary factors in determining the social media that I really want to avoid / does the most harm - is the primacy of the individual profile. It’s always seemed to me that the most toxic and appallingly addictive sites (X, Fb, Insta, any of the X-clones etc) are all about views, likes, re-posting, and have a user right at the centre of this.

Whereas for me, HN is about the topic, and not the individual. You are interested in a topic, you read it, you vote it up. Yes there are people profiles but they’re significantly unimportant - there’s karma but I’m not sure anyone really looks at that. People aren’t “followed”.

Controversially I sort of apply the same thinking to Reddit. Yes there are individuals and yes the profile side is a bit more visible but you generally (or at least, this is the way I use it) are interested in the topics and not the people.

Broadly, my take is that the less narcissistic something is, the better.
by cmiles8 | 2025-11-03 20:04:28+00:00
I don’t think the OP is saying $1.4 trillion cash is needed “right now.” The point being made is simply that with all the circular deals and financing for this to make sense OpenAI does need to generate $1.4 trillion in cash that can eventually work its way through the economy to pay for all of this. Hype and inflated valuations can be built on numbers on paper but real business are built on cash flow. The OP is simply calling out the lack of cash flow.

Even under the most bullish cases for AI the real $ requires here looks iffy at best.

I think we all know that a big part of the angle here is to keep the hype going until there’s a liquidity event, folks will cash out and then at the like they won’t care what happens.
by seneca | 2025-11-03 20:04:45+00:00
This is really the heart of it:

> Don't get me wrong - to an extent, some languages (especially more niche ones) drive hiring and what kind of employee you get

In my experience, the community around a given language is going to significantly influence the sort of typical applicant you get for a job working in that language. Those profile vary a surprising amount, especially for, as you say, niche languages, but also for "beginner" languages.

I have seen businesses significantly harmed because they hired what I would term language specific technicians instead of engineers. That's a failure of leader, certainly, but that failure is a lot more likely for certain languages.
by chaosprint | 2025-11-03 20:04:48+00:00
https://founderboat.com/interviews/2025-11-01-openai-sam-sat...

> A central theme of the discussion was the staggering demand for computational power. Gerstner highlighted OpenAI’s reported commitment of $1.4 trillion for compute over the next five years, questioning how a company with reported revenues of $13 billion could manage such an outlay.

> Altman pushed back forcefully. “First of all, we’re doing well more revenue than that. Second of all, Brad, if you want to sell your shares, I’ll find you a buyer,” he quipped. He expressed profound confidence in the company’s trajectory. “We do plan for revenue to grow steeply. Revenue is growing steeply. We are taking a forward bet that it’s going to continue to grow.”

This seems to be just the tip of the iceberg; what about the rest?
by jerf | 2025-11-03 20:04:56+00:00
"I cannot agree that programming language choice is a primary driver in a product's success or failure"

I've seen it. There are definitely incorrect language choices for certain projects.

It would be fair to say that these cases are themselves often exceptions. Many projects can be equally well accomplished by teams skilled in any language. But there is definitely a set of problems for which you can make incorrect language decisions.

I'm going to exaggerate to make the point in an attempt to avoid too much argument about whether or the language would be suitable, but: You do not sit down to write an industry-leading, high-performance database whose top-level implementation language is Python. If your project spec involves running code provided at runtime by users, Go is a fairly poor choice. You can make things a lot harder for yourself trying to be too insistent about what language you'll do your mobile development in, rather than just accepting that there's a very dominant choice in those spaces.

I've also seen projects I couldn't prove to you beyond a shadow of a doubt failed due to language selection, but I am fairly certain the project I saw that chose Scala failed primarily for the choice of Scala where it was a bad fit, both technically and for the skillsets of the engineers involved.

I've also seen projects nearly fail because they chose databases incorrectly, which I would submit is a fairly similar thing. Mostly because of choosing a NoSQL database "because fast" when they should have used a relational DB. The projects in question didn't fail because they were able to switch in time, but it was a close thing.

Part of "the composition of the employees of a project" being responsible for its success is that good engineers pick at least a decent solution to a problem from day one. The aforementioned DB problem, for instance, should have been obvious from the very beginning that it was not the correct choice in their case. There are absolutely wrong choices, that can crash projects both quickly and slowly.
by omnicognate | 2025-11-03 20:04:57+00:00
> "If what LLMs do today isn't actual thinking, what is something that only an actually thinking entity can do that LLMs can't?"

Independent frontier maths research, i.e. coming up with and proving (preferably numerous) significant new theorems without human guidance.

I say that not because I think the task is special among human behaviours. I think the mental faculties that mathematicians use to do such research are qualitatively the same ones all humans use in a wide range of behaviours that AI struggles to emulate.

I say it because it's both achievable (in principle, if LLMs can indeed think like humans) and verifiable. Achievable because it can be viewed as a pure text generation task and verifiable because we have well-established, robust ways of establishing the veracity, novelty and significance of mathematical claims.

It needs to be frontier research maths because that requires genuinely novel insights. I don't consider tasks like IMO questions a substitute as they involve extremely well trodden areas of maths so the possibility of an answer being reachable without new insight (by interpolating/recombining from vast training data) can't be excluded.

If this happens I will change my view on whether LLMs think like humans. Currently I don't think they do.
by Egidius | 2025-11-03 20:05:01+00:00
Location: Italy, Tuscany region Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: TypeScript, React, Xstate, Effect, Rust, etc. (see resume website for more) Résumé/CV: https://www.terwiel.io Email: lqepxukmlp1xrqm4@hidemail.app Experience: 18+ years Nationality: Dutch Languages: English, Dutch

Hi HN, I'm just about to get started with my job hunt. I'm available from 01 Jan 2026 on out. I'm looking for a full-time position.
by triclops200 | 2025-11-03 20:05:13+00:00
As a researcher in these fields: this reasoning is tired, overblown, and just wrong. We have a lot of understanding of how the brain works overall. You don't. Go read the active inference book by Friston et. al. for some of the epistemological and behavioral mechanics (Yes, this applies to llms as well, they easily satisfy the requirements to be considered the mathematical object described as a markov blanket).

And, yes, if you could somehow freeze a human's current physical configuration at some time, you would absolutely, in principle, given what we know about the universe, be able to concretely map input to into actions. You cannot separate a human's representative configuration from their environment in this way, so, behavior appears much more non-deterministic.

Another paper by Friston et al (Path Integrals, particular kinds, and strange things) describes systems much like modern modeling and absolutely falls under the same action minimization requirements for the math to work given the kinds of data acquisition, loss functions, and training/post-training we're doing as a research society with these models.

I also recommend https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.04035, but, in short, transformer models have functions and emergent structures provably similar both empirically and mathematically to how we abstract and consider things. Along with https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.10077, these 4 sources, alone, together strongly rebuke any idea that they are somehow not capable of learning to act like and think like us, though there's many more.
by biasafe_belm | 2025-11-03 20:05:14+00:00
BIASafe AI | Front-end Engineer (React) | Full-Time | ONSITE (Montréal)

We're building a B2B digital quantitative portfolio manager platform for family offices and hedge funds. Our platform allows portfolio managers to create, backtest, test and execute systematic quantitative trading strategies. We are currently closing our seed round.

We are looking for a front-end developer to join us IN PERSON at our brand new offices in downtown Montréal's FinTech Station. The ideal candidate will have 3+ years of experience in React as well as a strong sense and ability for design. Good general software engineering knowledge is also a must. The candidate will work in a small team and own the front-end development, mocking, CI/CD, support and maintenance. We have a very highly detailed Figma model and we are looking for the right talent to bring it to life.

Interested applicants should contact me at mabelanger + hn at biasafe dot ai. Please put our exact company name in the subject line. Please send a CV along with a short introduction and I will do my best to get back to you ASAP!
by leshokunin | 2025-11-03 20:05:46+00:00
I’m all for criticizing web3 and performative open source. But this misses the mark.

“This is the Stallman Paradox: the growing chasm between our intellectual reverence for genuine free software principles and our practical convergence on venture capital-optimized extraction models that merely cosplay as "open source."”

…ok?

What does RMS have to do with this? What does the GPL have to do with this?

Such a letdown.
by gf000 | 2025-11-03 20:06:37+00:00
Consciousness has no agreed upon definition to begin with, but I like to think of it as to what a whirlwind is to a bunch of air molecules (that is, an example of emergent behavior)

So your question is, are two whirlwinds with identical properties (same speed, same direction, shape etc) the same in one box of air, vs another identical box?
by marttt | 2025-11-03 20:06:44+00:00
Ha, I just recently had uBlock Origin remove all HTML elements on news sites that 1) link to comments (in my country this is usually in the form of comment count right after the headline - and typically the comments are printed in red, ugh), and 2) allow me to comment (usually a button at the end of the article).

News comments in my country have really become almost completely pointless. It's ridiculous or even incredible - honestly, you have something like 1 sensible comment out of 30 or 40. Things started to go noticeably downhill during Covid, and it got worse with the war in Ukraine (we are battling Russian trolls over here). In this light, the uBock Origin solution has really worked wonders for me. Having also removed some other "cruft" like content marketing stories etc, I can read news in a calm, peaceful atmosphere again. Not thinking about commenters (dubbed "commentariat" by a witty local intellectual - scornfully hinting to "proletariat", obviously) or commenting at all.
by punjabikura | 2025-11-03 20:06:45+00:00
some more:

* Staff Machine Learning Scientist, Risk: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/creditgenie/594bb5a7-8d0f-4b84-a0a8...

* Staff Data Scientist, Risk: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/creditgenie/b1bac0f3-98dc-4023-b82e...
by jw_cook | 2025-11-03 20:07:12+00:00
Yeah, I hear you. I almost started using a purely text-based todo workflow for those same reasons, but it was hard to give up some web UI features, like easily switching between list and kanban-style views.

My use case looks roughly like this: for a given project (as in hobby/DIY/learning, not professional work), I typically have general planning/reference notes in a markdown file synced across my devices via Nextcloud. Separately, for some individual tasks I might have comments about the initial problem, stuff I researched along the way, and the solution I ended up with. Or just thinking out loud, like you mentioned. Sometimes I'll take the effort to edit that info into my main project doc, but for the way I think, it's sometimes more convenient for me to have that kind of info associated with a specific task. When referring to it later, though, it's really handy to be able to use ripgrep (or other search tools) to search everything at once.

To clarify, though, Vikunja doesn't have a built-in feature that exports all task info including comments, just a REST API. It did take a little work to pull all that info together using multiple endpoints (in this case: projects, tasks, views, comments, labels). Here's a small tool I made for that, although it's fairly specific to my own workflow: https://github.com/JWCook/scripts/tree/main/vikunja-export
by lotsofpulp | 2025-11-03 20:07:25+00:00
First of all, some or much of your premium is a wealth transfer (from young and healthy to old and sick). So consider that portion a tax (it literally is, just not collected by the government directly):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45800973

https://www.cms.gov/marketplace/private-health-insurance/mar...

https://www.healthcare.gov/how-plans-set-your-premiums/

>what exactly did they contribute to the transaction

Obviously this varies based on personal experience, but the biggest benefit is usually covering the big expenses beyond the out of pocket maximum, such as premature babies, bypass surgeries, cancer treatments, hemophilia treatments, etc stuff that costs hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars.

Second would be negotiated pricing with healthcare providers. If you think you can do a better job negotiating, you are welcome to not pay the health insurance company (better referred to as managed care organizations), and see what kind of deals you can get.

Third would be services as an agent that knows something about healthcare to be able to discern necessary and unnecessary care, since most buyers are unable to discern that information. This is, of course, highly subjective based on personal experience and the lack of government audits here leaves much to be desired.

>how much should I want to pay

When you have 7 publicly listed managed care organizations along with numerous non profits such as the various BCBS and Providence and Kaiser Permanente all selling insurance at roughly the same price, it's sufficient to conclude prices are about as low as they can get in this business environment.

>A measly 2-3% for adding no value and creating friction, egregious, we must get the profits higher!

This sentiment really doesn't make sense, unless the goal is to just be outraged for the sake of being outraged, because it has been clearly shown that there aren't much profits to be had in the first place. It's such a shitty business that one will end up with more money by investing in SP500.