MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by onecommentman | 2025-05-29 01:57:01+00:00
Phys.org may have the better summary for this audience.

https://phys.org/news/2025-05-groundwater-rapidly-declining-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44116717

“The losses are being driven largely by heavy pumping to supply agriculture, he said. At the same time, prolonged drought and rising temperatures have sapped river flows and decreased the amount of water percolating underground and recharging aquifers.”

“Groundwater is a crucial buffer … but it is rapidly disappearing due to excessive extraction."

“The researchers found that most of the depletion of groundwater (about three-fourths of the total) is occurring in the river's lower basin, largely in Arizona, where the bulk of the water is pumped from desert aquifers to irrigate farms.“

“Famiglietti noted that in large portions of the Colorado River Basin, groundwater pumping remains unregulated and unmanaged”

Why choose this phys.org summary? Because it is appropriately focused on the actionable root cause, groundwater mismanagement…really no management, especially in Arizona and agriculture.

The first two words in the Wiley article, on the other hand, is “climate change”. Interesting that the professional-level abstract for the article focuses on complex interactions with no “climate change” branding. The popular-level abstract mentions “climate change” explicitly.

But the population needs to understand what concrete actions taken today are needed to prevent future shortages, and those actions involve reducing groundwater pumping, in particular for agriculture uses. Mentioning climate change in this case is an actual distraction from making the hard political choices regarding groundwater management, which is why I suspect the “real” abstract doesn’t mention it.
by TheAlchemist | 2025-05-29 01:57:10+00:00
What a softball article. It's mind blowing to me (living outside US) how journalism in the US is soft with people in power.

This was supposed to be the biggest (+ all the other great adjectives one can think of) change in US government history, hence the unprecedented and mostly illegal powers that were given to DOGE.

6 months later the results are :

- first DOGE pillar (Vivek) quit the job before even starting

- second DOGE pillar (Musk) quit the job just now

- Musk installed a lot of his loyalist at very influential government jobs

- 20 years old or something, with very questionable past, were given close to root access to pretty much most of government data. Nobody knows what they were able to extract and give to Musk

- Countless people working for US agencies (like USAID) were fired without notice

- Courts are busy trying to restore order and block most of what was done, but in many cases it's too late

- estimated "savings" are maybe 1% of what it was supposed to be, and that's being generous

- and lastly, not a single person was convinced of fraud !

WOW.
by growlNark | 2025-05-29 01:58:05+00:00
> There's an Amendment process for updating the Constitution. It's been used many times, most recently in 1992.

Ok? Why would we go through that when we could just chuck that bitch off a cliff and start fresh? Are you trapped in 1779 and surrounded by rich, white, landed assholes? Why would you think this document represents the values of anyone you know or love? What precise language would make you think this?

We could emphasize the actual values of the people who live here—diversity, individualism, community, education, shelter, growth, appreciation of nature, appreciation for both idk diners and jazz.

Rather than fucking property, a cancer on humanity that has not yet extracted its full harm.
by ajross | 2025-05-29 01:58:24+00:00
> I don't think it requires the courts to agree

This is misunderstanding civics. Laws are not algorithms. All laws must be interpreted. The government organ responsible for interpreting laws is the judiciary, definitionally.

It's not like there's a condition in a law saying "get the courts to agree". It's that there is a disagreement (among parties with standing) about what the law means. And so they fight about it in court, which is why we have courts.
by rswail | 2025-05-29 01:58:31+00:00
The Constitution said that the appointment required the advice and consent of the Senate.

It had nothing to do with him "trying" or being too "weak", it is called following the law. Trump doesn't do that, and the court rulings are showing that his power to rule via EO is not going to be allowed.

The Senate deliberately did not go into recess to avoid Obama having the power to appoint Garland via a recess appointment.

McConnell is more to blame for the dysfunction of Congress and the misuse of the Senate than anyone else.
Show HN: Code_puppy – a CLI vibe coder that I vibe coded using a vide coder
by glitch253 | 2025-05-29 01:58:33+00:00
Hi HN! I've never posted anything on here before, but this project was too fun to pass up. I've been learning a lot about agents lately, and wanted to see if I could replicate some of the results of Windsurf and Cursor. Generally I love these tools, but when you're stuck behind an "enterprise" firewall, they don't work as well. This sad state of affairs motivated me to understand SWE agents more.

Does it work? Yes. Is it as good as Cursor and Windsurf? Not quite, but it's pretty darn close, depending on the model you use. I'm lacking a few features like semantic indexing, MCP support, but I'll add them soon.

Is it redundant with codex? Yeah, probably, but it was a super fun to build, and since I wrote it I have full control over any aspect of it to adapt to weird silly corporate environment network goofiness. Also, Codex doesn't give you a puppy emoji nor does it have "Always obey the Zen of Python, even when you're not writing Python." hardcoded into the prompt.

Cute / nifty fun fact:

At a certain point while I was building code_puppy, I swapped from Windsurf to using code_puppy to build code_puppy. The agent realized that it was working on itself, and made note of it while invoking the "thinking" tool.

The puppy is unleashed!!!!
by ojbyrne | 2025-05-29 01:58:57+00:00
Also not a lawyer, but I think that there are legislated laws that superseded that, and since its legislated, you can't just go back and choose to enforce one law without the others.

In particular, Wikipedia tells me that the Reciprocal Tariff Act of 1934 had a part makes it harder to go back:

"Another key feature of the RTAA was that if Congress wanted to repeal a tariff reduction, it would take a two-thirds supermajority. That means that the tariff would have to be especially onerous, and the Congress would have to be especially protectionist. Once enacted, tariff reductions tended to stick.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocal_Tariff_Act#Reciproc...
by mike_d | 2025-05-29 01:59:16+00:00
I will word this carefully since I previously worked on crypto de-anonymization attacks, but nothing in this "analysis" seems to be grounded in more than the blockchain developers echo chamber of self congratulation.

Amusingly, assume the CIA has figured out a clever trick for opening up Acme Secure Envelopes in transit. If they publish a report detailing at length how amazing and tamper proof Acme products are, the world would take note and sales would plummet overnight. If, however, you publish the same report on a blog about how to mail documents securely...
by pixl97 | 2025-05-29 02:00:52+00:00
You're touching on why I don't think AI in the future will look at human intelligence. Or a better way to put it is "human intelligence looks like human intelligence because of limitations of the human body".

For example we currently spend a lot of time making AI output human writing, output human sounds, see the world as we hear it, see the world as we see it, hell even look like us. And this is great when working with and around humans. Maybe it will help it align with us, or maybe the opposite.

But if you imagined a large factory that requested input on one side and dumped out products on the other with no humans inside why would it need human hearing and speech at all? You'd expect everything to communicate on some kind of wireless protocol with a possible LIFI backup. None of the loud yelling people have to do. Most of the things working would have their intelligence minimized to lower power and cooling requirements. Depending on the machine vision requirements it could be very dark inside again reducing power usage. There would likely be a layer of management AI and guardian AI to make sure things weren't going astray and keep running smoothly. And all the data from that would run back to a cooled and well powered data center with what effectively is a hive mind from all the different sensors it's tracking.
by llm_nerd | 2025-05-29 02:01:56+00:00
>Who actually wants the tariffs?

Trump and Peter Navarro (along with his advisor "Ron Vara") really think tariffs are a windfall of government funding. They *really* want them.

Sneak in a massive regressive tax hike and just use bombast and cult-like rhetoric to pretend that if any of it hits consumers -- and 100% of it will -- it's really just evil Walmarts and other nefarious vendors who caused that.

The US federal balance sheet is a spectacular disaster, and Trump's Big Massive Deficit Bill is going to make it much worse. Americans need to settle in for the reality that higher taxes are going to be a near term reality.
by skissane | 2025-05-29 02:02:07+00:00
> Back in the ’70s, one relational database did everything. Transactions (OLTP) during the day and reports after hours (OLAP). Databases like Oracle V2 and IBM DB2 ran OLTP and OLAP on the same system; largely because data sets still fit on a few disks and compute was costly.

The timeline is a bit off - Oracle V2 was released in second half of 1979, so although it technically came out at the very end of the 1970s, it isn’t really representative of 1970s databases. Oracle V1 was never released commercially, it was used as an internal name while under development starting circa 1977, inside SDL (which renamed itself RSI in 1979, and then Oracle in 1983). Plus Larry Ellison wanted the first release to be version 2 because some people are hesitant to buy version 1 software. Oracle was named after a database project Ellison worked on for the CIA while employed at Ampex, although I’m not sure anyone can really know exactly how much the abandoned CIA database system had in common with Oracle V1/V2, definitely taking some ideas from the CIA project but I’m not sure if it took any of the actual code.

The original DB2 for MVS (later OS/390 and now z/OS) was released in 1983. The first IBM RDBMS to ship as a generally available commercial product was SQL/DS in 1981 (for VM/CMS), which this century was renamed DB2 for VM/VSE. I believe DB2/400 (now renamed DB2 for IBM i) came out with the AS/400 and OS/400 in 1988, although possibly there was already some SQL support in S/38 in the preceding years. The DB2 most people nowadays would encounter is the Linux/AIX/Windows edition (DB2 LUW) is a descendant of OS/2 EE Database Manager, which I think came out in 1987. Anyway, my point - the various editions of DB2 all saw their initial releases in the 1980s, not the 1970s.

While relational technology was invented as a research concept in the 1970s (including the SQL query language, and several now largely forgotten competitors), in that decade its use was largely limited to research, along with a handful of commercial pilots. General commercial adoption of RDBMS technology didn’t happen until the 1980s.

The most common database technologies in the 1970s were flat file databases (such as ISAM and VSAM databases on IBM mainframes), hierarchical databases (such as IBM IMS), the CODASYL network model (e.g. IDS, IDMS), MUMPS (a key-value store with hierarchical keys), early versions of PICK, inverted list databases (ADABAS, Model 204, Datacom)-I think many (or even all) of these were more popular in the 1970s than any RDBMS. The first release of dBase came out in 1978 (albeit then called Vulcan, it wasn’t named dBase until 1980)-but like Oracle, it falls into the category “technically released in late 1970s but didn’t become popular until the 1980s”
by sebag1507 | 2025-05-29 02:02:44+00:00
* I work at Firebase and I have not reviewed the code itself*

Very impressive, congrats, and thank you for being a Firebase user!

Let us know what we should add to our MCP server.

You can reach out to me on X at sgnagnarella@ or post in our UserVoice forum:

https://firebase.uservoice.com/forums/948424-general

Cheers
by refset | 2025-05-29 02:03:50+00:00
The HTAP vision was essentially built on the traditional notion that a database is a single 'place' where both transactions happen and complex queries run.

Rich Hickey argued [0] that place-orientation is bad and that a database should actually just be an immutable value which can be passed around freely. That's fairly in line with the conclusions of the post, although I think much more simplification of the disaggregated stack is possible.

[0] https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Deconstructing-Database/
by forgotoldacc | 2025-05-29 02:04:08+00:00
A lot of people really seem to think this is the end of everything.

But there are two options here. One is that some other irrelevant and obscure law from 200 years ago is dug up and used to justify the tariffs and another long court battle begins. The other is that the ruling is simply ignored, just like many others, and half the country will cry that the courts are being ignored and justice will rain down soon, and the other half will say hell yeah, ignore those woke courts.

Every single judgement has gone this way for the past 9 years. I'm always amazed when people keep expecting different. It's like being surprised about the events in a 10 season long reality TV show. It's the same script everyday.
by rchaud | 2025-05-29 02:04:23+00:00
Reaganism set the wheels in motion but those wheels didn't actually come off until events like the dotcom boom normalized billion dollar valuations for half baked MVPs, creating a generation of future nutters like Thiel, Bezos, Zuck and Musk. Things accelerated even further with zero interest rate policy post-2008, making capital free for this "job creator" class while working people were charged "market rates" for home and education loans.
by drewcoo | 2025-05-29 02:04:38+00:00
And it started as simply rebranded Romneycare (the 2006 MA state plan), so Rs should have found it palatable. And for the first half of Obama's first term, Ds could vote in anything they wanted but we still got a terrible version of a R health care plan.

FWIW, Nixoncare, totally blocked by Ted Kennedy because the dems didn't want Nixon's name on anything else that was nice (the Clean Air Act President kept claiming he'd end Johnson's war in Vietnam and then he had the gall to open relations with China!), was more like the single-payer health care Obama ran on but could not produce.

Also: Disclaimer, I'm absolutely not a conservative. I just don't like the liberal rewrites of actual history.
by bawolff | 2025-05-29 02:06:40+00:00
The shoes are probably the most valuable of the items mentioned.

The rest of the list was things like used leggings, used pillow cases, used slippers, used bath mat, used pyjama bottoms. Those are worth basically nothing and the author was valuing them at what it would cost to buy new.

Literally nobody is buying a used bath mat. That is worth $0 not $22

Literally nobody is going to spend $128 on a pair of used leggings. Maybe you could sell them, but not for $128.

$96 for a 2 used pillow shams is also crazy.

The author's valuation of these items is literally insane.
by Kloyelia | 2025-05-29 02:07:06+00:00
Join Founder Institute for University Night, a special panel featuring startup founders from Columbia, Cornell Tech, and NYU who are building real traction through bootstrapping or modest seed funding. The discussion will be moderated by Jeremy Kagan ’99 of Textbook Ventures.

Date: Tuesday, June 10 Time: 6:30 - 8:30 pm Place: Savills - Citibank Building at 399 Park Ave, 11th Fl, NYC
by UncleOxidant | 2025-05-29 02:08:26+00:00
> and half the country will cry that the courts are being ignored and justice will rain down soon, and the other half will say hell yeah, ignore those woke courts.

Thing is, I think support for these tariffs is way less than 1/2 of the country. Even parts of MAGA have been expressing doubt about the tariffs (or at least the hamfisted way they've been implemented).
by bcoates | 2025-05-29 02:10:11+00:00
Oh God people are still using Mongo in production? Why?

Kafka exists but is deeply obsolete and mostly marginalized outside of things with dependencies on the weird way it works (Debezium, etc)

I've always liked Redis but choosing it as a core tech on a new product in the last, say, 6 years is basically malpractice? 10 if you're uncharitable.

The thing these all have in common is having their economics and ergonomics absolutely shattered by SSDs and cluster-virtualization-by-default (i.e. cloud and on-prem pseudo-cloud). They're just artifacts of a very narrow window of history where a rack of big-ram servers was a reasonable way of pairing storage IOPS to network bandwidth.

Dynamo is and always was niche. Thriving in its niche, but a specialized tool for specialized jobs.
by foobarchu | 2025-05-29 02:10:37+00:00
The courts are one of the primary avenues when the other two branches don't fully ignore them. Trump has clearly demonstrated that he doesn't care what courts say unless it supports him, both in criminal court and when they rule against his executive actions (see: deporting citizens illegally despite it neing explicitly ruled he can't do that). That is the big reason so many fear that the American democracy is giving its last breaths.
Ask HN: Did YC stop accepting non-profits?
by cypherpunks01 | 2025-05-29 02:11:53+00:00
YC first funded a nonprofit in W2013 [1] and accepted 43 nonprofits between then and W2022, but I don't see any since W2022 listed in the Startup Directory [1].

What happened? Did they quietly stop accepting nonprofit applications, or were just zero selected in the past 3 years?

[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/nonprofits/

[2] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?nonprofit=true
by b00ty4breakfast | 2025-05-29 02:12:10+00:00
there seems to be an implicit assumption here that smarter == more gooder but I don't know that that is necessarily always true. It's understandable to think that way, since we do have pretty impressive brains, but it might be a bit of a bias. I'm not saying that I think being dumber, as a species, is something to aim for but maybe this obsession with intelligence, artificial or otherwise, is maybe a bit misplaced wrt it's potential for solving all of our problems. One could argue that, in fact, most of our problems are the direct result of that same intellect and maybe we would be better served in figuring out how to responsibly use the thinkwots we've already got before we go rushing off in search of the proverbial Big Brain Elixir.

A guy that drives a minivan like a lunatic shouldn't be trying to buy a monster truck, is my point
by graycat | 2025-05-29 02:12:29+00:00
> What does “Undecidable” mean, anyway

A big and relatively recent example is to take (1) the axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory and (2) the axiom of choice and ask if (1) can be used to prove or disprove (2). The surprising answer is "No", i.e., (1) cannot be used either to prove or disprove (2). So, can work with (1) and, whenever convenient, assume (2), continue on, and never encounter a problem.

So, given (1), (2) is undecidable.

The work was by Paul J. Cohen as at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Cohen

The field of research about what is undecidable also goes back to Kurt Gödel as at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_G%C3%B6del

Another example, starting with (1), of an undecidable statement is the continuum hypothesis:

There is no set whose cardinality is strictly between that of the integers and the real numbers.

In simple terms, "cardinality" means that there is no set X that is too large to be put into 1-1 correspondence with the set of integers and too small to be put into 1-1 correspondence with the set of real numbers.
by mdaniel | 2025-05-29 02:12:30+00:00
Depending on where your "Internet" boundary starts, you can clone the repo and run its install.sh although I think it's for really lazy people since it just downloads the GitHub release artifact anyway https://github.com/SeaQL/FireDBG.for.Rust/blob/1.81.0/instal...

I don't see that VSCode is required, they have a section dedicated to CLI usage https://github.com/SeaQL/FireDBG.for.Rust#firedbg-command-li... and even the "firedbg open" seems to just be a convenience method for file globbing https://github.com/SeaQL/FireDBG.for.Rust/blob/1.81.0/comman...

I'm a little with you that it is sus that they don't seem to have any .ts nor package.json file in that repo which would allow one to (a) see what the extension does (b) build the .vsix themselves
by gchamonlive | 2025-05-29 02:12:45+00:00
The body also has memory and instinct. It's non-hierarchical, although we like to think that the mind dominates or governs the body. It's not that it's more or less than predicting, it's a different activity. Humans also think with all their senses. It'd be more or less like having a modal-less or all-modal LLM. Not sure this is even possible with the current way we model these networks.
by subpixel | 2025-05-29 02:13:23+00:00
Also, there was palpable excitement in the media and everyone wanted to be a part of the big story.

I was in the offices of WNET/Channel 13 in Manhattan the day the news began moving among insiders that an invasion of Iraq was imminent. All these middle aged producers were stoked. If that was PBS you can only imagine what the vibe was like everywhere else.

Of course within a week people like this and their reporters were basically competing to get “embedded” with invading troops and tell an approved story. Wild times.
by Tor3 | 2025-05-29 02:13:42+00:00
Where I am there's now only some music at 17:00, ideally that should announce that it's time to leave work and go home, ffs.. but as this is Japan, it doesn't seem to serve a purpose - people don't go home. That music used to be a siren until a few years ago. I like the melody better.

We do get the aforementioned trucks driving around all day announcing loudly that they'll take your trash, for payment.. but it's very rare now. And the pole sellers seem to have disappeared entirely. I could use a new pole though.. for drying clothes. There has fortunately never been any political speech trucks around here. The town is too small I assume.
by mdaniel | 2025-05-29 02:14:46+00:00
Their install.sh specifically mentions Darwin https://github.com/SeaQL/FireDBG.for.Rust/blob/1.81.0/instal... and they ship pre-compiled for both aarch64 and x86_64 https://github.com/SeaQL/FireDBG.for.Rust/releases/1.81.0
by kibibu | 2025-05-29 02:15:40+00:00
Acerola on YouTube also has a pretty nice (if hectic) series about grass rendering:

- https://youtu.be/Y0Ko0kvwfgA?si=RGihxnz8i1RoC1jf

- https://youtu.be/jw00MbIJcrk?si=czh3dfdneMEVuJXI

- https://youtu.be/PNvlqsXdQic?si=Oa_v8ypWvxm3PLhp