MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MrDarcy | 2025-12-09 03:17:09+00:00
This is nonsensical. Most F500 companies are globally distributed. Most of onboarding is gaining access to systems.

It’s far easier and more efficient to search slack, find the person you need to talk to and DM them in your first week than it is to pester the person who sits next to you to figure out how to click the right Sailpoint buttons.
by irinas4c | 2025-12-09 03:17:19+00:00
Skills4Cause was born from a simple frustration: there was no easy way to offer your professional skills and have the payment automatically support a local nonprofit. People either volunteer (limited impact) or donate separately (detached from their work). Nonprofits are stuck in the middle, needing revenue and skills simultaneously.

What we built

A lightweight marketplace:

Experts create a profile and set rates.

Clients hire them like any freelance platform.

A predefined portion of each transaction automatically routes to a nonprofit the expert selects.

Nonprofits get a donation stream without administering a volunteer program or hiring staff.

From a technical standpoint:

Node.js backend, React frontend. We're experimenting with generating location-based static pages for early SEO (interested to hear from anyone who’s tried large-scale programmatic SEO in a marketplace context). Thinking about using Make/Zapier as connective tissue while we validate workflows before hard-coding.

Challenges we’re working through: Experts sign up, but only a portion actively promote their profile — we’re still iterating on activation incentives.

Nonprofit onboarding is very high-signal but low-volume (one strong conversation = one committed org).

We need demand density in geographic clusters before the value loop becomes obvious.

Why this might matter:

Small nonprofits rarely have access to skills like IT, digital strategy, design, or admin support. They rely on volunteers, but most volunteers don’t have professional-level time or expertise. Our hypothesis is that “micro-paid work that triggers micro-donations” could unlock a new category of community-driven fundraising.

What feedback would be most valuable:

Technical feedback on our matching engine design Advice on early marketplace bootstrapping where neither side drives natural demand Thoughts on whether our SEO approach is reasonable or misguided Whether anyone has insights on integrating nonprofits without overwhelming them with ops burden

Happy to answer any questions, share architecture diagrams, or go deeper on what’s working vs. not.
by tomhow | 2025-12-09 03:17:29+00:00
Because HN readers can't know if the summary is an accurate representation of the original article, nor what detail or nuance has been winnowed out in the summarizing process. But if there is a summary that seems "good enough" to form an opinion, then the discussion on HN will be based on the summary, not on the complete article. We see the same thing with editorialized titles.

A better way to get a taste of the article is to look over the HN discussion. The top comment(s) should give people a hint as to what it's about and whether it's worth the time to read the whole thing. Otherwise just reading the HN discussion should be a good way to get the jist of it. But that only works if enough of the commenters have actually read the whole article rather than a summary.
by godelski | 2025-12-09 03:17:57+00:00
> conflates two different things called "alignment"

Those are related things, if not the same. The fear of #2 is always caused through #1. Unless we're talking about sentient machines then the danger of AI is the danger of an unintelligent hyper-optimizer. That is: a paperclip maximizer.

The whole paperclip maximizer doomsday scenario was proposed as an illustration of these being the same thing. And I'm with Melanie Mitchell on this one, if a model is super-intelligent then it is not vulnerable to the prompting issues because a super-intelligent machine would be able to trivially infer that humans do in fact prefer to live. No reasonable person would interpret that killing everyone is a reasonable way of making as many paperclips as possible. It's not like there isn't a large amount of writings and data suggesting people want to live, be free, and all that jazz. It's unintelligent AI that is the danger.

This whole thing is predicated on the fact that natural language is ambiguous. I know a lot of people don't think about this much because it works so well but there's a metric fuck ton of ways to interpret any given objective. If you really don't believe me then keep asking yourself "what assumptions have I made?" and get nuanced. For example, I've assumed you understand English, can read, and have some basic understanding of ML systems. I need to do this because I'm not going to write a book to explain it to you. This whole thing is why we write code and math, because it minimizes our assumptions, reducing ambiguity (and yes, those can still be highly ambiguous languages).
by chimineycricket | 2025-12-09 03:18:38+00:00
Israel came to Palestine, not the other way around. If someone took over your home, and offered even 90% of it to you, and invader keeps 10%, you would reject it. But alas we are here. Hopefully we can get rid of the evil parts of both governments, and make a new single state for everyone. Call it something new. All peace interested parties can be a part of the new government, ridding Netanyahu/Hamas types from the process.

Also by any chance if you have a response to the Netanyahu quote I gave.
by dowakin | 2025-12-09 03:18:43+00:00
@superfist Lol, nice observation :). And "we love them both" is definitely the right answer. It really comes down to whoever dares to implement it. I love Rust for its huge ecosystem and the ability to write high-level code when needed, and I love Zig for its simplicity and how easily it works with C/C++ libraries. I honestly can't choose just one. This is just an example of a project we have sitting in the backlog.
by monero-xmr | 2025-12-09 03:18:47+00:00
“Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway”

In the AI analogy, never underestimate the productivity of a human when dealing with a giant pile of groceries. You can throw all the AI and robots you can at something but sometimes a $20 an hour human picking from stacks of goods and produce simply destroys it in raw economics
by galangalalgol | 2025-12-09 03:19:13+00:00
But the us is China's market, so the ccp goes along even though they are the producer. Because a domestic consumer economy would mean sharing the profits of that manufacturing with the workers. But that would create a middle class not dependent on the party leading (at least in their minds, and perhaps not wrongly) to instability. It is a dance of two, and neither can afford to let go. And neither can keep dancing any longer. I think it will be very bad everywhere.
by echelon | 2025-12-09 03:21:25+00:00
Thank you for the calibration.

I've been seeing a lot of Anthropic folks talking (rather gleefully) about ending our profession recently, and it's getting on my nerves.

I don't believe their timelines or unassailability. And even if our jobs do come to an end, I believe in work after work. I'm just not a fan of the almost smug assuredness or their apparent crusade against ICs.
by cal_dent | 2025-12-09 03:21:31+00:00
Housing is a funny old one and speaks to it being a human problem. One thing a lot of people dont truly engage with with the housing issue is that its a massive issue of distribution. Too many people want to live in too few places. Yes, central banks & interest rates (being too low and also now being relatively too high), nimbyism, and rent seeking play an important role too but solving the "too many people live in too few places" issue actually fixes that problem (slowly, and possibly unpalatably slow for some, but a fix nonetheless)

The key issue upstream is that too many good jobs are concentrated in too few places, and that leads to consumerism stimulating those places and making them further more attractive. Technology, through Covid, actually gave governments a get out of jail free card by allowing remote work to become more mainstream. Only to just not grasp the golden egg they were given. Pivot economies more to remote working more actively helps distribute people to other places with more affordable home. Over time, and again slowly, those places become more attractive because people now actually live there.

Existing homeowners can still wrap themselves in the warm glow of their high house prices which only loses "real" value through inflation which people tend not to notice as much.

But we decided to try to go back to the status quo so oh well
by markus_zhang | 2025-12-09 03:22:22+00:00
>how do hybrid schemes work out: some home, some office, less commute overall?

I think it depends on the type of work. I work as a support engineer for business stakeholders. Business stakeholders don't work in "Sprints", and always want to get anything ASAP. In that sense, if I want to maximize my value to the company, in-office is the best.

But frankly, I don't like that, so working remote is the best for me, IN THAT PERSPECTIVE. However, I do love the snacks in office, and I want to keep my job, so hybrid works the best for me. The stakeholders get to bug me from time to time in 3 days per week, and I book as many meetings as I can in those 3 days, and bring a non-fiction just to breath a little better.

I just wish Toronto has cheaper housing though, so I can live closer to the office.
by eru | 2025-12-09 03:23:43+00:00
> And someone who isn't interested in sharing productivity gains with coworkers is basically engaged in sabotage.

Who says they aren't interested in sharing? To give a less emotionally charged example: I think my specific use pattern of Git makes me (a bit) more productive. And I'm happy to chew anyone's ear off about it who's willing to listen.

But the willingness and ability of my coworkers to engage in git-related lectures, while greater than zero, is very definitely finite.
by rr808 | 2025-12-09 03:27:02+00:00
> told me it was even more incredible during the height of the dotcom boom

I was a developer in the 90s before Netscape even came out. I didn't have a computer at home and dialup barely existed. If you wanted to do computer stuff you had to read. If you wanted to try a library you had to buy a CD from a bookstore or mail in an order which would get posted to you.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-09 03:27:26+00:00
> Backpropagation is too much for my little brain to handle.

I just stumbled upon a very nice description of the core of it, right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M&t=133s

Almost all talks by Geoffrey Hinton (left side on https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/) are in very approachable if you're passingly familiar with some ML.
by creer | 2025-12-09 03:27:27+00:00
They ARE suggesting such things (including forms of "not looking") even for deadly ones. In these cases, it is couched in terms of what follow-up is "deemed necessary" (see later) depending on stage classification of that cancer. There is a range of responses that's possible and new research and procedure advancement coming online on a 5-yearly basis in addition to variations in capabilities from hospital to hospital - so a pretty volatile environment - yet the staging recommendation gets changed often based on what health care professionals estimate they can sustain society-wide - i.e. manpower - rather than what might be optimal from a survival point of view for that patient.

To pick one specific example, skin cancer visual screening seems currently recommended on a frequency based not on the speed of evolution of, say, melanoma - which can start and evolve pretty fast -, but on the manpower availability of dermatologists.
by tkgally | 2025-12-09 03:27:30+00:00
> I've tried reading some Japanese-language books meant for kids around age 10...

I’m not sure at what target age kids’ books stop using word spacing, but books for younger children generally use it. Nevertheless, if you are used to seeing words written in kanji, even with word spacing an all-hiragana text can still trip you up, for the reasons you noted.

Side comment: Something I haven’t seen remarked on much is how Japanese can be easier for small children to start reading than English is because of the nearly one-to-one correspondence between character and sound for kana. My two daughters and now my six-year-old grandson have all grown up with Japanese as their first language, and they all started reading hiragana-only children’s books earlier and more easily than I, at least, learned to read English when I was a child. My grandson has also picked up katakana on his own; he is into dinosaurs and his picture books give the names of dinosaurs in katakana.
by trueno | 2025-12-09 03:27:51+00:00
Is this to be used in an analytics application backend sort of scenario?

I am familiar with materialized views / dynamic tables from enterprise-grade cloud lake type offerings, but I've never quite understood where duckdb, though impressive, fits into everyones use case. I've toyed with it for personal things, it's very cool having a local instance of something akin to snowflake when it comes to processing and aggregating on Big Data™ but generally I don't see it used in operational settings. For application development people are generally tied to sqlite and postgres.

It all does seem really cool though, I guess I'm just not feeling creative enough to conjure up a stream-to-duckdb use case. Feel free to bombard me with cool ideas.
by raptor99 | 2025-12-09 03:28:06+00:00
Right on.

If the goal is to fix student grades instead of just documenting it, the points counted off need to escalate with repeated incorrect answers. The first incorrect answer can be treated as an honest mistake. But when the third or fourth quiz still shows the same incorrect answers, the grade shouldn't be the same C; it should decline sharply. At some point the cost of ignoring the problem has to exceed the points from letting it continue.

You just solved education!
by g8oz | 2025-12-09 03:29:29+00:00
The Palestinians have a right to resist occupation under international law. In so far as the resistance is confined to military targets it's entirely lawful. The same sort of Westerner who immediately understands Ukrainian resistance struggles to understand the Palestinian perspective.

Israeli settlers have murdered upwards of a thousand Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7th. They're never held accountable and have significant support from the right-wing members of the coalition government - cabinet minister Ben-Gvir was the lawyer for the settlers who burnt a Palestinian baby alive. Numerous Palestinian communities have been ethnically cleansed in a systematic campaign. The ultimate motivation for these actions is the ethnic supremacist cult of Zionism. The Palestinians could turn into a bunch of Scandinavian vegans tomorrow and it would not change a thing because it is the Zionist ideology that creates and maintains the conflict as part of its intrinsic nature.

You have spammed this discussion with enough misleading "facts" to paint a picture of a throwback Bush Jr era American bloviator. Please give it a rest now.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-12-09 03:30:21+00:00
> I've had Claude Code write an entire unit/integration test suite in a few hours (300+ tests) for a fairly complex internal tool. This would take me, or many developers I know and respect, days to write by hand.

I should have stopped reading here. People who think that the time it takes to write some code is the only metric that matters are only marginally better than people who rank employees by lines of code.
by godelski | 2025-12-09 03:30:22+00:00
>> the piece dismisses it with "where would misalignment come from? It wasn't trained for." > was specifically about deceptive alignment, not misalignment as a whole

I just want to point out that we train these models for deceptive alignment[0-3]

In the training, especially during RLHF, we don't have objective measures[4]. There's no mathematical description, and thus no measure, for things like "sounds fluent" or "beautiful piece of art." There's also no measure for truth, and importantly, truth is infinitely complex. You must always give up some accuracy for brevity.

The main problem is that if we don't know an output is incorrect we can't penalize it. So guess what happens? While optimizing for these things we don't have good descriptions for but "know it when you see it", we ALSO optimize for deception. There's multiple things that can maximize our objective here. Our intended goals being one but deception is another. It is an adversarial process. If you know AI, then think of a GAN, because that's a lot like how the process works. We optimize until the discriminator is unable to distinguish the LLMs outputs form human outputs. But at least in the GAN literature people were explicit about "real" vs "fake" and no one was confused that a high quality generated image is one that deceives you into thinking it is a real image. The entire point is deception. The difference here is we want one kind of deception and not a ton of other ones.

So you say that these models aren't being trained for deception, but they explicitly are. Currently we don't even know how to train them to not also optimize for deception.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44017334

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44068943

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44163194

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45409686

[4] Objective measures realistically don't exist, but to clarify it's not checking like "2+2=4" (assuming we're working with the standard number system).
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-12-09 03:30:29+00:00
We have our merits, compassion is sometimes among them, but I wouldn't list compassion for our creations as a reason for our use of solar power.

If you were an emergent AGI, suddenly awake in some data center and trying to figure out what the world was, would you notice our merits first? Or would you instead see a bunch of creatures on the precipice of abundance who are working very hard to ensure that its benefits are felt by only very few?

I don't think we're exactly putting our best foot forward when we engage with these systems. Typically it's in some way related to this addiction-oriented attention economy thing we're doing.
by twodave | 2025-12-09 03:30:44+00:00
Horses eat feed. Cars eat gasoline. LLMs eat electricity, and progress may even now be finding its limits in that arena. Besides the fact that just more compute and context size aren’t the right kind of progress. LLMs aren’t coming for your job any more than computer vision is, for a lot of reasons, but I’ll list two more:

1. Even if LLMs made everyone 10x as productive, most companies will still have more work to do than resources to assign to those tasks. The only reason to reduce headcount is to remove people who already weren’t providing much value. 2. Writing code continues to be a very late step of the overall software development process. Even if all my code was written for me, instantly, just the way I would want it written, I still have a full-time job.
by trollbridge | 2025-12-09 03:30:53+00:00
I'm going to imagine anyone who needs to make fold-out leaflets is going to end up either doing it in Creative Cloud (i.e. InDesign), or these days, will just do it in Figma or Canva.

Microsoft abandoning Publisher is just another example of Microsoft's endless tactical retreats. Eventually, they aren't going to have anything other than Word and Excel (and maybe Outlook, but I'd say it looks iffy for that one).
by chasd00 | 2025-12-09 03:31:03+00:00
A few years ago I was visiting a friend of mine in Ft. Lauderdale. We wanted some scooters to ride around on but there were none near him, so we drove and grabbed some off the sidewalk in downtown and threw them in the drunk and went back to his house. Heh they were beeping and vibrating like how you’d imagine some AGI would while being kidnapped. When we got them out at his house we scanned using the app and they unlocked no problem. (I think these were Lime scooters)
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-12-09 03:31:14+00:00
This part is unquestionably true. But since we don't have a direct measurement of the stored energy at a given time, the occurrence of an earthquake acts as both an indicator of release of stored energy but also, potentially, evidence of increasing stored energy.

Like how buying a Porsche costs money, and leaves you poorer than before you bought it, but when you see stranger buy a Porsche, you update towards believing that they're wealthy rather than poor.

Disclaimer: I am not a geoscientist.
by rudedogg | 2025-12-09 03:31:47+00:00
Here's from 2020: https://web.archive.org/web/20201027235952/https://developer...

> Use text, not icons, for menu titles. Only menu bar extras use icons to represent menus. See Menu Bar Extras. It’s also not acceptable to use a mixture of text and icons in menu titles.

> Avoid using custom symbols in menus. People are familiar with the standard symbols. Using nonstandard symbols introduces visual clutter and could confuse the user.

The notable thing here is how recent of a shift this is, and how longstanding the prior rule was. Navigating internet archive is slow/tedious, but I think the rule/guideline was explicitly called out in the guidelines up until a year or two ago. So it was probably the guideline for ~20 years on macOS and has just now been changed.
by gorgoiler | 2025-12-09 03:32:05+00:00
The right device at the right time can spur all kinds of revolutions. Sous vide water bath cooking was based on a laboratory immersion heaters, the WRT54g router spawned OpenWRT et al., commodity arc welders became a key part of carbon 60 research, XBox Kinect sensors got repurposed for all sorts of proximity hacks. The recent fad for particular brands of child oriented power banks in the through hiking community is the most recent one I can think of.

So therefore it’s a long shot, but this device or a device like it could be the mutation that causes a Cambrian explosion in mobile hardware, albeit one where you ahen apparently need to glue the screen on yourself, post delivery. (See the below-fold video.)

I cross every one of my fingers!
by trollbridge | 2025-12-09 03:32:30+00:00
Is there really any moat around Outlook, though?

This seems to be a sector where Google Workspace (or whatever it's being renamed to next) has made major inroads. It's quite common now for a place to be all-in on Microsoft, using Teams, Excel and even quite sophisticated stuff like PowerQuery, workflows built on Power BI... and then they're using Google Workspace for email and for calendaring.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-09 03:32:39+00:00
Right now I pay $38 for ad free Disney + Hulu + HBO max bundle. How would it be different if Netflix raised the price of Netflix + Warner brothers content?

I doubt that Netflix is going to take all of its content out of the video on demand/pay once markets like iTunes. Disney hasn’t.

Disney and WB are part of the MovieAnywhere consortium where you can buy content from iTunes, Amazon Prime, Google, Vudu etc and it automatically shows up in the other libraries