MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by try_the_bass | 2025-04-18 03:29:38+00:00
> The fraud issues you mention are real and pressing... They're also completely disconnected from blanket cuts to NIH funding. There seems to be some kind of grasping for a positive in heavy cuts to essential research here. Put another way, there is zero selective pressure for 'less fraudulent' research to be cut. If anything, this applies selective pressure on publish or perish, false positive, press release style research. Harsh cuts in funding always penalise blue sky research, controversial work and anything that isn't guaranteed to bring press to the funding institution

I don't think your sweeping statements are true though, either? Every social endeavor, when allowed to grow without adequate pressure, becomes bloated, slow, and full of waste. This is almost universally true, and the exceptions tend to be things where there is heavy pressure to be lean. This pressure is more effective when it comes from within, but external pressure works, too.

If you want a process to remain efficient over time, it either needs to start that way and not change, or be aggressively pruned from time to time.

Academia should be pruning the waste and fraud itself, but is clearly not doing so aggressively enough.

I agree that the cuts, if naively applied, will cut both good research and bad. On the other hand, I think if academic research institutions are doing things naively, they're doing it wrong.

> This is absurdly reductive, and doesn't connect with the genuine issues at play incentivising good research and detecting fraud.

Of course it is! But the fact that academia seems to be utterly failing at performing even the most basic checks against fraud routinely. Of course a reductive approach is insufficient, but it would be better than the current status quo, which is to implicitly support the fraud by refusing to even look for it in the first place.

And it's honestly not any more reductive or incorrect than this:

> Harsh cuts in funding always penalise blue sky research, controversial work and anything that isn't guaranteed to bring press to the funding institution.
by fsckboy | 2025-04-18 03:29:54+00:00
i did it by hand till 15 years ago. created a spreadsheet, with only the items I needed.

the next year, pretty much the same spreadsheet with whatever minor tax changes had been made for that year.

the 15 hours is mostly spent getting your shit together which you have to do for an online solution too.

I did a better job than my accountants do, they often forget little details that I would keep track of. ("no, I did not owe a penalty, the estimated payments and refund carried forward meant there was enough money on my tab...")
by neilv | 2025-04-18 03:30:03+00:00
Your mileage may vary. I did taxes by hand for a few years, probably 20+ hours each year, every hour stressful.

For example, at some point, I'm fatigued and surprised how much work it was thus far, but I think I can see the finish line on the horizon, but then one line in a form triggers a cascade of additional schedules and many more hours.

Then, finally, the federal forms are done, and it's a stack... And the state forms are somehow not just a 1-pager of quickly copying key numbers from federal 1040, but seem (subjectively) to more than double the work, and produce a second stack.

The last 2 tax years, I decided it was a really unhealthy amount of stress, so I've bought TurboTax Home & Business. I run it in a KVM instance that gets airgapped, on principle, so my data doesn't get sent to corporate surveillance capitalism HQ.

Though I don't assume that TurboTax in airgapped VM will keep working every year. But, hopefully, before they inevitably break it some year, and I'd have to do taxes by hand again, I will be killed by a crocodile.
by MrDrMcCoy | 2025-04-18 03:31:06+00:00
Tailscale, ZeroTier, Tinc, Hamachi, and the like are all very, stupidly easy mesh VPN solutions that anyone can use. If you feel like owning a domain, Cloudflare Tunnel makes it similarly easy to expose your service to the wider Internet on a home connection and not have to worry about proxies and certs. The barrier to self hosting has never been lower, and it keeps falling. Heck, Cockpit's Podman management means you almost never need to look at a terminal, and aren't locked in to a bespoke platform that's rainbows and glitter until it stops getting maintained or gets enshittified. Get a little SBC with as much RAM as you can find and you'll be amazed at the capability:effort ratio.
by buildsjets | 2025-04-18 03:31:29+00:00
Perhaps this gent needs to buy a Rasperry Pi or an Arduino starter kit and project book. That pretty much checks all his boxes for an inexpensive, technically documented, understandable, hardware-exposed, text-mode, resource-limited, off-line capable computer.

It has all the fun hackable qualities of the Apple //e of my youth, except you can buy one for less than $50 instead of the month an a half worth of salary that Dad paid for the //e. $2000 at the time, close to $6000 today, but a worthy investment!
by phil21 | 2025-04-18 03:32:21+00:00
Pretty often for savvy consumers of certain product groups. It all comes from China anyways, so if you know what you're doing you can easily save 50% or more buying direct from the source vs. a reseller on Amazon. Even better if you were participating in group buys of certain items.

Cutting out the middleman is a good thing for consumers which is going away.
by bsder | 2025-04-18 03:33:37+00:00
Quote of TFA:

> I asked the Shepherd how a login goes from being captured to being shown on the Wall of Sheep. Their reply doomed our fun: “I’d type it in.” Oh no. That’s not good. “Isn’t it automatic?”, I asked. The Shepherd paused to rub the bridge of their nose. “Well,” they sighed, “it was until people started sending a bunch of vile usernames and passwords and kind of ruined it2, so now we have to moderate the process.”
by try_the_bass | 2025-04-18 03:35:04+00:00
While I agree with your statement, it's also true that many industries have faced such cuts, engaged in ample hand-wringing and talk of "shocks" and "long-term consequences", and then gone on to make simple adjustments and be perfectly fine in the long run.

It's worth keeping in mind that the loudest complainers are often the ones with the most to lose; and those with the most to lose are often the ones taking advantage of waste and bloat.

To take a trivial example, look what happens any time there's a ban wave in a popular online game: people come out of the woodwork complaining about how they were unfairly banned, were a false positive, etc... and then you ultimately find out that yes, they were indeed cheating and were caught.

Complaining loudly when caught cheating or threatened with enforcement is basically human nature. The fact that people complain loudly when the gravy train runs off the rails isn't much different, and the complaints should honestly be taken with a grain of salt.
by someothherguyy | 2025-04-18 03:36:03+00:00
At what level do you experience euphoria? Say on a scale of a low dose of codeine to a standard dose of heroin? Or is it more like the euphoria you get from running? Or the euphoria you get from tripping? Or the euphoria associated with some strains of cannabis? Or the euphoria associated with amphetamines? Or the euphoria associated with ethanol consumption?
by hedora | 2025-04-18 03:36:07+00:00
If you can get through turbotax in under an hour (and are able to use their $50 version!) you probably can do it by hand in under two. Hint: If nothing changed year-to-year, just look at last year’s tax return. It is probably a 1040-EZ, and all you have to do is copy this year’s numbers from whatever documents turbotax copied them from last year. Then, read the directions for the form and do the arithmetic.

At some point in a few years, this will stop working, and you’ll probably overpay by thousands.

Anyway, it took me well over three hours to use turbotax this year, which is faster than most. An hour of that was reverse-engineering their calculation error which made my refund too high, and certainly would have triggered a sternly worded demand for more money and a fine (or worse) from the IRS. I know this because they made another error a few years ago, and it cost me 16 hours on hold with the IRS and thousands of dollars.

Having said that, I’d have overpaid a few thousand this year and spent at least 8 hours doing it by hand.

On the bright side, if Trump succeeds in burning the federal government down, maybe a simpler tax code (like the rest of the first world has) will emerge from the ashes of the IRS. If not, then he won’t be president any more.

So, at least it’s not 100% bad.

Edit: I just noticed you’re using auto-import! If that’s saving you time, you’re making a big mistake. Intuit doesn’t reliably save all the documents you’ll need when the IRS sends you a nasty letter. Go manually download as many of them as you can, and file them for 7 years.
by mikewarot | 2025-04-18 03:36:31+00:00
Start with an FPGA, they're optimized for performance, but too optimized, and very hard to program.

Rip out all the special purpose bits that make it non-uniform, and thus hard to route.

Rip out all of the long lines and switching fabric that optimizes for delays, and replace it all with only short lines to the neighboring cells. This greatly reduces switching energy.

Also have the data needed for every compute step already loaded into the cells, eliminating the memory/compute bottleneck.

Then add a latch on every cell, so that you can eliminate race conditions, and the need to worry about timing down to the picosecond.

This results in a uniform grid of Look Up Tables (LUTS) that get clocked in 2 phases, like the colors of the chessboard. Each cell thus has stable inputs, as they all come from the other phase, which is latched.

I call it BitGrid.

I'd give it a 50/50 chance of working out in the real world. If it does, it'll mean cheap PetaFlops for everyone.
by dblohm7 | 2025-04-18 03:36:38+00:00
> The 2 implies an older API, its predecessor QueueUserAPC has been around since the XP days.

I wasn’t implying that APCs were new, I was implying that the ability to enqueue special (as opposed to normal) APCs from user-mode is new. And of course, that has always been possible from kernel-mode with NT.
by kayodelycaon | 2025-04-18 03:37:00+00:00
I think that’s the author’s problem. Anyone can get one and set it up. And I mean that quite literally. I run home assistant on a raspberry pi. I just imaged an SD card and plugged in a few wires. Home Assistant is another good example because you don’t need to know yaml now.

There are images for everything that make stuff easy to learn without putting in a lot of hard work.

> Computers were more fun when they weren't for everyone
by armada651 | 2025-04-18 03:37:07+00:00
> Consumerist convenience, walled gardens, corporate risk-adversity and shallow aesthetical homogenization have replaced the sprawling hobbyist collective that once made up the bulk of personal computers and their users.

They should definitely go to a Chaos Computer Club event like CCC, because the "sprawling hobbyist collective" is still very much alive.

If you want the kind of experience he's waxing lyrical about then go join your nearest hackerspace. Make sure it's an actual hackerspace though and not just a rebranded co-working space.
by crabmusket | 2025-04-18 03:38:24+00:00
> This is my roman empire

Haven't heard this said before, but is this a reference to how often men think about Rome? That's very amusing.

RDF is my Roman empire. It's the original and best Web 3: open-world knowledge graphs. It feels like if the ecosystem around that developed better, it would provide a way to interchange data without having to do Big Standards Up Front.

Any org could publish data under their own schemas, communities could start to converge on the most helpful ones, provide translations between terms, and gradually things would evolve, without having to all agree first. RDF provides a baseline for interop, on top of which specific worlds of knowledge can evolve.

I work in solar software too and every day I am sad that manufacturers provide their datasheets as PDFs. Not even Excel files.

> I'm genuinely shocked that the electrical grid works. And the more I learn about how it works, the more shocked I become.

Amen to that.
by defrost | 2025-04-18 03:38:27+00:00
As an abstract geometric problem the greatest width of an abstract polygon in a Euclidean 2D plane is found be looking at the greatest distance between all pairs of parallel lines that have been pulled together to clamp the polygon. The maximal diameter as opposed to the minimal waist.

Some might then say that "crossing" that polygon is to travel that longest line across the greatest width.

This simplistically avoids the question of concave polygons, complex polgons with exclusions (the Vatican state is removed from the Italian contry bounds), polgon collections (the nation of Fiji has many islands and can be tricky to traverse on foot .. not forgetting that perhaps the longest diameter might be from one island to another with no other islands between).

There's also the challenge of parallel lines on a 2D 'spherical' manifold, the almost spherical abstract ellipsoid of earth (or very non ellipsoidal Geoid if we take a constant gravitation value as the surface). On such manifolds lines are Great Circles (more or less) and always intersect.

Still, lets just say you're looking for the longest walkable(?) great circle path across a country that might go outside that country and perhaps is best travelled by a crop duster at 80m ground clearance to avoid getting feet wet.

The challenge itself takes some posing.

Meanwhile, less abstractly, I do like a jolly that "crosses a country" in a manner accepted by a (Wo)Man on a Clapham omnibus.

eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robyn_Davidson only went "half way", but that was accepted as an epic crossing. https://thelongridersguild.com/stories/stef-gebbie.htm "only" crossed most of the E-W distance across the lower portion of the country, while https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-03/french-woman-conquers... travelled North - South, the long bit, but not quite coast to coast ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicentennial_National_Trail ).
by atrettel | 2025-04-18 03:39:37+00:00
I don't have a particularly complicated return, to be honest. I just take my time and don't stress myself out about it. The time includes everything, not just the time I spent putting in numbers.

You may find it insane, but I'm OK with it. I'm not going to knock somebody for doing something different, but I do think it is important to know how to do it yourself when push comes to shove.
by try_the_bass | 2025-04-18 03:39:45+00:00
To make a counterpoint: never underestimate people's ability to make a convincing hypothetical case to connect their livelihood to "the wider ecosystem", even when that livelihood involves committing fraud.

I take a lot of these arguments with a grain of salt. As a society, we've gotten way too used to substituting plausible hypotheticals for concrete data.
by tptacek | 2025-04-18 03:39:49+00:00
I don't understand how there can be 94 comments on this thread and not one of them is from someone who attempted (or succeeded) in mailing someone a potato. I am a homeowner. I have a address. I will receive a potato, or send one to whomever wants one. What's important about this story is "is is true?". Who's going to test it with me?
by o1o1o1 | 2025-04-18 03:39:57+00:00
> It's simple, but controversial: Computers were more fun when they weren't for everyone. There, I said it.

Yes, it is controversial for people who do not immediately see what is wrong with it.

This is a very efficient way of letting the reader know that the person has problems, without saying so directly. Sure, it is honest, but it reflects very badly on the character, and that is why it is "controversial" (not really, if you have a balanced personality you immediately know that it is just an ego problem).

Sorry but I had to stop reading there.
by beej71 | 2025-04-18 03:40:16+00:00
Oregon made its own turbo tax competitor and it's great, and getting better every year. I was really looking forward to Direct File. (I used an accountant this year so I didn't get my chance.) Back to filing my own returns by hand next year.

Thank you, DOGE brainiacs who decided I had to keep doing it the inefficient way.
by jasonriddle | 2025-04-18 03:41:31+00:00
Just so that you are aware, TaxHawk (which owns and operates FreeTaxUSA) may choose to sell your information in the event of a "business transition" (bankruptcy, merger, etc)

From https://www.freetaxusa.com/privacy

>> Business transitions

> In the event TaxHawk evaluates or conducts a business transition whether as a going concern or as part of bankruptcy, liquidation, or similar proceeding, such as a merger, being acquired by another company, or selling a portion of its assets, the personal information of users will, in most instances, be part of the assets transferred. Users will be notified, via email and/or through a prominent notice on the FreeTaxUSA.com website, 30 days prior to a change of ownership or control of their personal information.
by Teever | 2025-04-18 03:41:35+00:00
Not at all. Planned Parenthood was founded by eugenicists like Margret Sanger[0] and the services that it provides like birth control and abortion were done so for eugenics purposes.

Eugenics historically encompasses all of the things I listed, and the things that you have listed as well.

They are grouped into two terms -- positive eugenics and negative eugenics.

Positive eugenics is about encouraging the people to reproduce in the best way possible while negative eugenics is about discouraging or outright denying people to breed because of sometimes subjective judgment ascribed to their reproductive fitness.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to rehabilitate the term eugenics or defend the kind of odious stuff that the article is talking about , I just think that in this discussion it's important for people to acknowledge that 'modern reproductive healthcare' is eugenics.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Sanger
by dayvigo | 2025-04-18 03:42:47+00:00
I study cognitive neuroscience. Meditation is extremely evidence-based. It is literally one of the most evidence-based things there is in terms of actions you can take to improve mood, executive function, focus, general cognition, etc., it's almost as backed as physical exercise. Of course, there is also a lot of woo-woo spiritual stuff around it, but you can just ignore that side and use it effectively. Not sure about breathwork, I'm moderately skeptical of many the claims made about it, but I haven't looked super far into it comparatively.
by dreamcompiler | 2025-04-18 03:43:06+00:00
Midwest Tungsten sells a 1.5" cube (1 kg) for $200. I have one, as well as a magnesium cube of the same size. They look identical but the Mg cube weighs 1/10 as much. It's fun to let someone hold the W cube to feel the weight and then toss them the Mg cube with "Here, catch!"

https://shop.tungsten.com/tungsten-cube/
by lolinder | 2025-04-18 03:43:15+00:00
The piece resonated with me a lot—the idea that things were better back before computers became mainstream—right up until they identified the key date where things fell apart as 1995. At that point I had to take a step back and reevaluate the whole thing, because for me the equivalent date was 2014, 20 years later.

I missed the very early years of computing, but for me the heyday was the Flash years. I got a copy of Flash and I felt like I could do anything—all the cool games were built by the same tool that I had installed on my computer, and my budding programming skills were like black magic to my friends and family. It was a superpower. Meanwhile, the internet in those days was small and populated mostly by smart and interesting people gathered in small-to-medium sized phpBB servers. The rise of Facebook and smartphones spelled the end of that era, and everything since then has been shallow and hollow by comparison as the internet began catering for the lowest common denominator.

That said, now I'm stuck reevaluating my perspective on all that. For this author, my own golden age was after the fall of theirs. I was part of the wave of users who had it too easy—the upstarts who intruded on the good thing they had going.

There are two broad explanations I can think of for this:

1. Computing has been declining since the 90s and my golden age was genuinely less good than the author's.

2. Each generation gets cranky and nostalgic with age, and this is just another case of "back in my day".

The modern internet feels so genuinely terrible that I can't help but think it must be #1, but #2 is such a common cognitive bias that I can't really dismiss it either.
by TheNewAndy | 2025-04-18 03:43:46+00:00
The game was 2d, and I just used the stuff in SDL_render.h for doing the graphics.

SDL2 has input stuff built in, so that is easy.

I didn't need networking for my game, so I didn't have it, but networking is not particularly difficult to do cross platform (I'm assuming iOS lets you just use the "normal" sockets API?)

I also used SDL2 for the sound stuff, which was mostly playing back prerecorded things, but also a little bit of stuff synthesized on the fly.
by xphos | 2025-04-18 03:44:01+00:00
I don't think the problem is that young people are finding porn on the internet. There is a problem, though, and it has to deal with psychological warfare on attention

Formats like shorts or news feeds to you algorithmically with zero lag are the problem. It makes for the zombification of decision making. Endless content breaks people down precisely because it's endless. I think if you add age verification but don't root out the endless nature, you will not really help any young person or adult.

When you look at people with unhealthy content addiction, it is always a case of excess and not necessarily type of content. There are pedophiles but honestly, we have had that throughout all time, with and without the internet. But the endless feeding of the next video robs people of the ability to stop by mentally addiciting them to see just one more. And because content is not really infinite, endless feeds invariably will feed people with porn, eating disorders, and other "crap" in quantities that slowly erode people.
by glumreaper | 2025-04-18 03:44:58+00:00
The 50GHz or 20ps figure is actually the limit of the gear the scientists had available - from the paper at https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6463/ad9284/...

"the signal state transitions were established at less than 20 ps, which is comparable to the bandwidth limit of the oscilloscope utilized at 50 GHz. [...] the initial rise time constant may be shorter than the measurement limits of the oscilloscope."
by s1artibartfast | 2025-04-18 03:45:21+00:00
As a Neuroscientist and breathwork facilitator, do you think there is any harm in intentional apnea (e.g. free diving, static holds, ect)?

At what point does cell damage (not necessarily death), kick in? As someone involved in these sports, I operate under the assumption that any damage would kick in after loss of consciousness. For example, if I hold my breath, even for 4 or 5 minutes but dont pass out, that is an indication I am still in the range of safe practice. Anecdotally, I know many people who have spent their lives doing breathholds, and they dont seem any worse for wear.

Are there any high quality studies that look at potential brain damage prior to loss of consciousness?
by IG_Semmelweiss | 2025-04-18 03:45:49+00:00
theres antitrust for that .

unfortunately, founders never envisioned a congress of career politicians, who would shy away from their duty to actually draft complete laws and enforce them , because politicians want to be friends with everyone.

Lack of term limits, lack of randomness, lack of income caps in government (and post government!), have eroded a sense of duty in our congressional leaders , and have gotten us a congress that is solely in it for its enrichment at the expense of the voters