MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by araes | 2026-01-05 21:14:50+00:00
At least one way to look at this is from generally agreed upon "world issues" [1], since the subject is "make the world a better place." Survey among the 8,000,000,000, and a large percent would agree that many are issues.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_global_issues

Of those, ones that I personally think are actually meaningful, and less subject to opinion, tend to be mostly "Maslow's hierarchy of needs" [2] as a starting point for evaluation.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

Basic needs that must be met for survival, and which significant portions of the population in many areas have difficulties with.

- air, water, food, heat, clothes, shelter, and sleep

Security needs to not be in a constant state of suffering and worry

- health security, personal security, emotional security, financial security

Of those listed on the article for "global issues" that then speak to many of those.

- poverty alleviation, malnutrition and lack of food / water access, waste (consumer waste, food waste, waste disposal, landfills, recycling, water pollution, air pollution), human rights (exploitation, abuse, enslavement, torture).

Of the climate change stuff, there's a lot that's unfortunately too easy to argue about. However, there's a few that maybe meet standards where large numbers would agree.

- desertification, ecosystem collapses, large scale biome losses / deforestation

Of a lot of the rest, unfortunately (also personal opinion) many are just too easy to argue about, and heavily dependent on where you're from, perspective, and relation to a group or area.

- terrorism, migration, democracy, big data (?), carbon, inclusiveness

Quite a few of the rest, I agree they're issues, just whether they reach the level of global critical / catastrophic issues? Many also seem to be issues that have recently gotten everybody's attention, yet there is suspiciously little mention of things like "lack of shelter / clothing access", "lack of heat sources", "sleep deprivation", "basic needs health care access"

Used to work in the government, and they had a Likelihood / Consequence Risk Matrix [3] for evaluating some of the flight and mission hazards. Most of the stuff listed personally rates somewhere up on the (Moderate, High, Very High) Likelihood / (Moderate, High, Very High) Consequence. Stuff that would almost always be Yellow to Red, and require mitigation actions or attempts. Many of the ones that don't meet my criteria tend to be too easy to fight about the Likelihood or the Consequence results. "Is 'Big Data for Sustainable Development' a near term Moderate+ likelihood / consequence?" Seems too easy to argue about to be on the United Nation's critical list of global issues.

[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41526-023-00305-z/figures/2

Anyways, best attempt at providing advice on "make the world a better place." Frankly, think most people's work on Earth probably does not meet the criteria.
by nickjj | 2026-01-05 21:15:02+00:00
> Isn't your website responsive?

It is but the max width is at a point where most folks on a tablet and desktop will see that width so I optimize for that. Mobile always looks ok in the end, but I don't think about how sentences wrap there.

> I guess you're more of a perfectionist than I am.

I try not to get hung up but seeing live previews doesn't take much extra time. The same with asset digesting, once it's set up it happens automatically without thinking.

There's also the mental tax of knowing you're using something semi-annoying all the time, that bugs me if I know it can be improved.
by mywittyname | 2026-01-05 21:15:16+00:00
> - Above means that many of the kids most likely to excel at trades (i.e. the hard workers) go to college, because if you work hard at HS you will both get the credentials needed to get into college and be told it's the right path for you

Well, also that working in trades are long days that are hard on your body in a feast or famine industry. Vs being an engineer is easy on the body, barely 8 hours of work most days, and you get paid vacation, good health insurance, etc.

My dad is a career electrician who discouraged me from getting into the trades by hiring me as a teenager. He'd often point out that the engineers on job sites were paid more than both of us put together and they got to chill out in the A/C most of the time, and they came to the site later and left earlier than we did.

I do genuinely enjoy designing/building/fixing things. But the reality is, I'm much better off using my brain for work, and tinkering in the garage for fun. Anyone smart enough to be a great tradesperson is smart enough to do that calculus.
by michaelcx | 2026-01-05 21:15:28+00:00
Civic Roundtable | Growth Marketer | Full-time | Remote (US)
Civic Roundtable is building the government operations platform. We're software startup backed by General Catalyst and trusted by public servants at over 1,500 agencies in all 50 states.
Growth Marketer job description: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Civic%20Roundtable/f74105bd-57bc-4e...
by searls | 2026-01-05 21:15:32+00:00
FWIW, "write markdown, publish to my static site, and cross-post to social media" is exactly what I built POSSE Party to do. All your site needs is an Atom feed to read from https://github.com/searlsco/posse_party/blob/main/docs/feed....

https://justin.searls.co/atom.xml gets flung to 8 social accounts
by cmhernandez | 2026-01-05 21:15:42+00:00
Location: Reno, Nevada

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: TypeScript, React, Ruby, Python, PostgreSQL, AWS, Kafka

Resume: Available on request

Email: cmhernandezdev@gmail.com

I'm a software developer with 3+ years of experience in full-stack development, data pipelines, cloud infrastructure, and applied AI. I recently created Tumbleweed (https://tumbleweed-cdc.github.io/), a framework that uses Change Data Capture for real-time data sync across microservices. Lets chat!
Show HN: Logos of Aether – Rebuilding Physics Without Zero or Empty Space
by chrisnchips | 2026-01-05 21:15:50+00:00
Background: I’ve spent the last few years writing Logos of Aether (500+ pages, open source), which attempts to derive the Standard Model using a monadic, cellular-automata approach rather than standard continuous calculus.

The Core Idea: Modern physics breaks down at singularities because our math allows for infinite density (division by zero). I replaced standard addition with "Plenum Addition" (⊕), a saturating operation similar to velocity addition in Special Relativity, but applied to information density.

The Math: Instead of linear addition (1+1=2), distinctions add via: x ⊕ y = (x + y) / (1 + xy/π²)

This forces a hard ceiling on information density (π), naturally eliminating black hole singularities and "infinite energy" bugs in QFT without needing renormalization.

Why I'm posting: I have the theoretical derivation (including a geometric derivation of the Electron Mass as an 11th harmonic resonance), but I am moving from "Paper" to "Engine." I am looking for contributors interested in Cellular Automata and Python/JAX to help build the reference simulation ("The Rattle") to test these interactions in a grid.

The book is Public Domain. I’m not selling anything. Just trying to see if this codebase runs universe-v1.0 correctly.

AMA about the "Teeter-Totter Principle" or the derivation logic.
by gloryjulio | 2026-01-05 21:15:52+00:00
> 1. Promotions are not a reward for past performance. Instead, they are a bet that you will contribute more towards those goals with a promotion than without one.

Actually, you operate on the next level for certain amount of the time. You work with your manager to file for your promotion case. That's how the typical big corps work with promotions.

So technically, it is using your past experience to prove that you are operating at the next level
by IAmGraydon | 2026-01-05 21:15:56+00:00
>It’s interesting to see how Americans assume Venezuelans aren’t happy about this. People are so clueless. I’m in South America right now and everyone is happy for the Venezuelans.

It doesn't matter at all. Venezuelans may be over the moon about this, but the fact remains that Trump broke international law and committed an act of war without the authorization of Congress. You don't see the problem with that? This is the slippery slope of authoritarianism. They start by doing illegal things that seem like they're good things, but which break down the rule of law. Once they've normalized this, they start doing it with less popular things.

Humans are so stupid with their ideas of "my team won so it's OK!". It's not ok. This is how the system begins to implode, and it's by design.
by quantum_bit | 2026-01-05 21:16:17+00:00
My results similar with M4 Pro (12 cores, 16 cores GPU), 24 GB RAM macOS 26.2 (the same benchmarks, I guess, https://browserbench.org/JetStream2.0/):

Firefox: 298.136

Safari: 425.762

Just the last test in this test suite:

> 3d-cube-SP
> 3D cube rotation benchmark by Simon Speich. The original can be found on Simon's web page. Tests arrays and floating-point math in relatively short-running code.

gives the following results:

Firefox: 305.197

200 First 338.983 Worst 419.309 Average

Safari: 818.449

238.095 First 176.471 Worst 1957.237 Average

which shows that in this particular test, Safari is 2.5 times faster.
by Stargirl1 | 2026-01-05 21:16:18+00:00
I just found your website, and I am fascinated by the discussion. Most who comment are rational and serious about literature. Such a plus these days. Anyway, it caught my eye because I'm writing, well trying to write, about Gatsby. I have mixed feelings about the book, but I have mixed feelings about most things. I don't think Fitzgerald necessarily set out to write a commentary on the 1920's. Like most writers he just set out to write the story in his head, and the story in his head turned out to be relatable to the culture in many ways. And he didn't even know that "...sometimes a great notion."
by lynndotpy | 2026-01-05 21:16:29+00:00
This is a heated topic and I share your anger. But you have completely misunderstood me.

We mostly agree, so let me clarify.

Grok is being used to make very much revenge porn, including CSAM revenge porn, and people _are using X because it's the CSAM app_. I think this is all bad. We agree here.

"For lack of knowing the magnitude" is me stating that I do not know the number of people using X to generate CSAM. I don't know if it is a thousand, a million, a hundred million, etc. So, I used the word "myriad" instead of "thousands", "millions", etc.

I am arguing that this is worse because the scale is so much more. I am arguing against the argument equivocating this with photoshop.

> If any other person was doing this they would have been threatened with company ending action by now.

Yes, I agree. X is still available on both app stores. This means CSAM is just being made more and more normal. I think this is very bad.
by conartist6 | 2026-01-05 21:16:34+00:00
If everyone could live a life of leisure, the logical end result would be roving gangs engaging in street warfare for funsies. If money is no object for anyone, what else is there to do but to seek fame, even infamy?

Each gang member could be running their AI value-miners at home, but of course since they're the only kind of value in the new AI-communist society they'll be the obvious target for the other leisure gangs. So after enough rounds of violence each leisure gang will run a fortified, paramilitary "intelligence mining" operation, and oh by the way indie software dev is punishable by death in these territories.

Is this scenario, like, 9 kinds of insane? Sure! But so is the idea that we'll all be at the beach doing Idunno what, fucking? All this to say yeah, I'm with you that anyone who describes that AI will make a future defined by a lack of productive work is describing a depressing future...
by jajuuka | 2026-01-05 21:16:39+00:00
Context matters. In this case we're talking about Grok on X. It's not a philosophical debate if open or closed models are good. It's a debate (even though it shouldn't be) about Grok producing CSAM on X. If this was about what users do with their own models on their local machines then things would be different since that's not openly accessible or part of one of the biggest sites on the net. I think most people would argue that public facing LLM's have some responsibility to the public. As would any IP owner.
by biophysboy | 2026-01-05 21:17:04+00:00
Ah, I misinterpreted - apologies. The current ruling party is not a monolith. The tech faction has been more or less getting its way at the expense of the tradionalist natcon faction. The former has no interest in removing section 230 protections, while a few in the latter camp say they do.

But beyond the legality or obvious immorality, this is a huge long-term mistake for X. 1 in 3 users of X are women - that fraction will get smaller and smaller. The total userbase will also get smaller and smaller, and the platform will become a degenerate hellhole like 4chan.
by morshu9001 | 2026-01-05 21:17:15+00:00
Why does history have to start in 2010 for a 2014 war? You're picking a Russia-backed presidency that was getting ousted before Russia attacked. There's no way they were going to stay nonaligned. That 2010 law was just a law, signed by the president, undoable by the next (and it was undone).
by cyberax | 2026-01-05 21:17:21+00:00
I like everything about Pebble Round 2, except that it's round. I _HATE_ round watches with a passion, it's just form over function for electronic watches. Coincidentally, that's also why I still have an iWatch even though my phone is Android. There are _no_ good rectangular Android watches.

Are you planning something like this but with a rectangular screen? I have Time 2 on pre-order, but I'd love to buy a water-resistant watch.
Show HN: Memory Graph – Interactive Python execution and memory visualizer
by bterwijn | 2026-01-05 21:17:34+00:00
Hello everybody,

I built Memory Graph to help students (and myself) build a correct mental model of Python references, mutability, and copying, and to make debugging data structures less “print-driven”. It’s inspired by Python Tutor, but focuses on clearer graphs and on running locally in many different environments and debuggers. The Memory Graph Web Debugger quickly turns your web browser into a Python debugger where the whole program state is visualized in each step, clearly showing aliasing and the structure of the data, giving insight that is hard to get with just printing.

Some interesting examples:

- Recursion, decimal to binary conversion:
https://memory-graph.com/#codeurl=https://raw.githubusercont...

- Binary Tree data structure:
https://memory-graph.com/#codeurl=https://raw.githubusercont...

- Cocktail Shaker Sort:
https://memory-graph.com/#codeurl=https://raw.githubusercont...

Here you can find some difficult Python Data Model exercises for use in education where Memory Graph helps explain the correct answer:

https://github.com/bterwijn/memory_graph_videos/blob/main/exercises/exercises.md
by neilv | 2026-01-05 21:17:42+00:00
A related but slightly different impression of early YC that I mentioned the other day, touching on the "disingenous and exploitative finance" aspect this article alludes to:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46437148

> This reminds me of when YC seemed to be a response to the dotcom boom environment, a bit "by hackers, for hackers", to help hackers start Internet businesses. Rather than mostly only the non-hackers starting dotcoms (such as with affluent family angel investors and connections). Or rather than hackers having to spend their energy jumping through a lot of hoops, while dealing with disingenuous and exploitative finance bro types.
by Izkata | 2026-01-05 21:17:45+00:00
> I wish the double colon syntax didn't exist and we'd just use single colons, but as you say, it is what it is

Single-colon is a pseudo-class, for targeting elements based on some external state. I learned these as "pseudo-selectors" but it seems that's not the right name.

Double-colon is a pseudo-element, for targeting inner parts of an element that themselves aren't actually an element in the document.
by antonvs | 2026-01-05 21:17:45+00:00
> No idea what "vibes" are.

If your English is weak, there are dictionaries, translation programs, and LLMs that can help. The first meaning at https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vibe is “a distinctive feeling or quality capable of being sensed,” which is the relevant one here.

The OP article refers to “outputs that sexualized real people without consent.” If any of those real people are minors, that qualifies as CSAM. It’s not complicated.
by munksbeer | 2026-01-05 21:17:54+00:00
I don't agree. I've recently started using claude more than dabbling and I'm getting good use out of it.

Not every task will be suitable at the moment, but many are. Give claude lots of direction (I've been creating instructions.txt files) and iterate on those. Ask claude to generate a plan and write it out to a file. Read the file, correct what needs correcting, then get it to implement. It works pretty well, you'll probably be surprised. I'm still doing a lot of thought work, but claude is writing a lot of the actual code.
by josefresco | 2026-01-05 21:18:12+00:00
I should clarify this is for clients who host their website, AND email with us (we simply change their pw). There's no way in hell I'm taking down someone's email if they host with a 3rd party even if they are past due. Sure I have that "control" but for me it's crossing the line. We suspend only the services we host and it turns out people respond almost immediately when their email is offline.
by ahmadyan | 2026-01-05 21:18:44+00:00
few reasons:

* Agents take a while to get the job done, so you give a prompt and you have to wait anywhere between 10mins-2hours or longer for it to finish. So it make sense to have parallel agents working on different features of the codebase. for example recently Boris, creator of Claude Code, posted about this setup where he is running 4-5 parallel agents in different tabs. https://x.com/bcherny/status/2007179833990885678
I personally have 30-40 agents running in parallel locally, and at the bottle-neck is the memory on my local machine.

* Even for the same prompt, the way i use the agent is run multiple agents with the same prompt, and review and pick the best output (Essentially pass@k for coding agents). This is specially useful for harder tasks, where I give the same prompt to both CC, Codex, Droid, and my own coding agent. Each model/scafold has its own distribution, and they work better when they are in distribution. So by sampling more, we increase the chance of success. (I know this is wasteful, but we currently live in the world of abundance cheap tokens; so put those $200 subs to good use)

So if we push this to the limit, i think we can improve the generation problem by shifting the complexity toward the verification. i.e. if you have 4-candidate solutions to your problem that all pass the the tests, how do you review and pick the best. This is where the code-review comes in.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-01-05 21:18:45+00:00
The reason it hit a nerve is that you're just being extraordinarily credulous about xAI's lies. There are solid industry standards, and we can just tell them to stop; we know this because Grok has a number of competitors which don't generate CSAM. Indeed, they've already implemented the industry standards which prevent CSAM generation; they just added a flag called "spicy mode" to turn them off, because those standards also prevent the generation of pornographic images.
by michaelt | 2026-01-05 21:18:59+00:00
> But one, it is on the site, and two, how can the moderation team reasonably stop bad actors from downvoting it?

In 2020, Dang said [1]

> Voting ring detection has been one of HN's priorities for over 12 years: [...]

> I've personally spent hundreds of hours working on this, as well as tracking down voting rings of every imaginable sort. I'd never claim that our software catches everything, but I can tell you that it catches so much that I often go through the lists to find examples of good projects that people were trying ineptly to promote, and invite them to do it again in a way that is more likely to gain community interest.

Of course this sort of thing is inherently heuristic; presumably bots throw up a smokescreen of benign activity, and sophisticated bots could present a very realistic, human-like smokescreen.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22761897
by jjkaczor | 2026-01-05 21:19:32+00:00
Hahahahahahaha... "Back-in-the-day" we used to joke internally that Office (it's specific applications) would become things like; "SharePoint Documents", "SharePoint Spreadsheets", "SharePoint Presentations" - because when that was the "all-new-hotness", Microsoft was always trying to stuff the name into EVERYTHING...
by bpt3 | 2026-01-05 21:20:32+00:00
The key part of your statement is that you're paying for a family.

Individuals do not cost $10k per year under any normal circumstances, and if you're paying almost $2k a month for a family bronze plan, you either have a lot of kids, you have some unusual needs, or you are getting ripped off. Even more so if you're waiting for a PCP appointment, because that is unusual as well.