MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Hilift | 2025-06-07 16:51:13+00:00
This grossly understates the current 2025 financial impact of the problem, and is directly linked to the ~$36 trillion debt.

There is a target to reduce Medicaid recipients by 4.8 million by 2033, by requiring them to attend school or volunteer 80 hours per month. That's a lot.

https://www.nola.com/news/politics/impact-on-louisiana-of-me...

In the next four years, nearly every state that has huge Medicaid obligations will be forced to restrict and reduce access simply due to budget constraints.

For example, California has 6.6 million enrolled in Medicaid and requires a staggering $85 billion federal assistance annual infusion for Medicaid. "People with disabilities composed 8% of Medi-Cal enrollees and accounted for 31% of spending".

California has 49% of the population on employer-provided health insurance. Only 5% purchase private insurance (Affordable Care Act). However, 22% of Californians are covered by Medicaid. That number is unsustainable, and Governor Newsom is already enacting measures to reduce enrollment and eligibility.

https://calmatters.org/health/2025/05/medicaid-work-requirem...

https://www.chcf.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/MediCalFacts...

https://calmatters.org/health/2025/05/medi-cal-assets-newsom...
by starkparker | 2025-06-07 16:52:11+00:00
Wasn't this the goal of the Director AI in Left 4 Dead?[1] Monitoring player progress (or lack of it) and tailoring how zombies and items spawned outside of script events, and in L4D2 how the map, pathing, and weather worked in order to maximize tension or encourage progress?

1: https://left4dead.fandom.com/wiki/The_Director
by dhosek | 2025-06-07 16:52:56+00:00
He may not have advocated for genocide, but he did a lot to create a polarized political environment where anyone to his left was at best ridiculed and more often demonized. His general rhetorical strategy was to find some extreme example of something on the left, exaggerate it and then attribute his distorted version to everyone to his left. It made him a lot of money and led the way to Fox News which took it to even greater extremes.
Show HN: BestPhotoAI – AI photo studio that began from 4x4070ti S in my basement
by mesmertech | 2025-06-07 16:53:21+00:00
Hey HN,

Been a full-stack dev for a while and got deep into the generative AI image rabbit hole. Wanted to share my newest project, BestPhotoAI.

It’s an AI photo studio that lets you train a model on your face and then generate hundreds of pictures of yourself in different styles headshots, Tinder profiles, that kind of stuff. There's also a bunch of free single-shot(vibe coded mostly in last 2 days) tools (over 40 of them) for things like changing hair color, removing objects, or turning yourself into an anime character and animating images into videos.

This whole thing started because I was running another AI site with just 4x 4070tis which grew to 5k/mo rev.(AIEasyPic) but then I got a bit tired of my current tech stack, the bad SEO I got by scraping and reposting civitai models and the fact that if you are using 2 diff. lang. for backend and frontend cursor feels like a drag. So I did the only logical thing and just vibecoded a clone of my own product in less than a week before going on a holiday for 2 months which was probably a bad idea.

The tech stack is simpler now, basically all Next.js(with trpc) so cursor can basically one-shot an entire page with functionality in a single prompt. Making the pipeline itself on runpod was the hardest part, but thats basically a solved problem with my exp. with previous AI images product. Outside of HeadshotPro which has probably if-elsed out a lot of the edge cases(eye color changes, niche "races" getting whiter or darker, etc probably solved by VLM-ing the images first), I can say it truly is the BEST site for training a model of yourself and trying out a lot of the newest AI image/video models that are released.

Also I figured the HN crowd might get a kick out of the free stuff. No signup, no BS, just upload a photo and mess around with like 40+ tools I've vibecoded in the last 2 days:

You can try the free tools here: https://bestphoto.ai/tools/all (make sure to select the ones that say "Free-to-try")

Happy to answer any questions about the tech, the struggles of an EU-based AI startup, or difficulties with running a (mostly) self-hosted AI startup or ask me if I regret starting and getting way too into AI image gen side instead of making an AI text product(yes I do and a lot). Any feedback is gold.

Let me know what you think.
by NotAnOtter | 2025-06-07 16:53:21+00:00
Exactly. The specific properties that make plastic useful in industry are the exact same properties that make it an ecological problem. You cannot realistically replace plastic without first accepting an inferior product, trying to make an equally good product will lead you to a new ecologically problematic product.

People think plastic is bad because it comes from oil, that's not the case. Plastic and the oil it comes from is a biproduct of the primary reason we drill for oil - which is energy. The generation of plastic isn't the problem per se, it's the existence of it from then on. So if you find some new zero emission way of making a plastic substitute that has all the same problems of plastic, you haven't really done anything.

The solution to plastic is a change in consumer spending, probably facilitated by national regulation. So... good luck.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-06-07 16:54:14+00:00
Yeah, it was to me the most interesting part of the piece; and I tend to agree with it.

When I was younger I may have been amused by the technological speculation — perhaps giving him a score (sorry, no hovercraft for everyday cars, and my Makita is in fact not powered by radioisotopes, but we'll grant you the experimental fusion power plants). We've seen that there are just so many unforeseeables that it is little more than just guessing ... multiplied by how keyed in you are on the what the current state of research is.

To have predicted Maps on the phone you would have had to predict the ubiquity of GPS or some other means of location, predicted small portable displays in order to show a map, predicted a global data network, miniaturization of electronics, the computer revolution.... It's no wonder even William Gibson missed it writing two decades after Asimov.

Was there some odd sort of car with a "moving map" depicted in the 1960's? Or was I victim to some sort of viral image fakery? What did Bond have in Goldfinger — some kind of printed, scrolling map with a moving light (cursor) behind it? Or am I misremembering. Hilarious though to try to do something with 60's tech — perhaps using dead reckoning rather than GPS to guess the car's location (steering plus speed).
by bloak | 2025-06-07 16:54:18+00:00
That's an interesting theory, but isn't it a different set of people consuming the audiovisual material? So, roughly speaking, in the past, an educated minority read The Times, while most of the population took no interest in politics and foreign affairs. Nowadays public opinion matters so various powers (often foreign powers not controlled by the local establishment) generate material designed to influence the general population, which isn't exactly literate, as you'll know if you've ever had to do jury service. Meanwhile, the educated minority continues to read The Economist or whatever (The Times is rubbish nowadays).
by soulofmischief | 2025-06-07 16:54:32+00:00
Think about it some more. I'm talking about the incremental increases in power coupled with unpredictable administration changes, and how each new increase in federal power creates multiple branches for slightly increasing power even more, until without realizing it, we've let our government slowly move the Overton window right where it needs to be for an authoritarian power grab and restriction of freedoms. We have to be extremely careful about the powers we give our governments, because they do not give them back without a fight, and they're always looking to expand their reach.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-06-07 16:54:55+00:00
But what’s different is the lack of security review, clearance, oversight, monitoring, and review. It’s actually less about age and more about accountability and oversight of access, with transparency to all use and access to every oversight function now and in the future. The fact they’re young correlates well with poor judgement, but that’s irrelevant. Everyone can demonstrate poor judgement, or malicious action. The demand their activity be unrecorded and unreviewable creates the perception of malicious intent and the fact of their youth makes their judgement impeachable without review.
by soraminazuki | 2025-06-07 16:54:56+00:00
This should be pretty obvious, but Google isn't merely tracking its own usage. Its sole purpose is to digitally surveil you 24/7 and use the obtained information to manipulate you. By subscribing to Premium, you make that job easier for them than when you browse the web without signing in to YouTube, and by extension, Google.

> And whatever VPNs, crypto and scams the content creators peddle is up to the viewer. I barely get VPNs, and no crypto and no scams.

Come on, let's not resort to baseless shaming and blame shifting. The whole point of Premium is supposed to be about getting rid of ads. It demonstrably doesn't do that, making Premium a charity for the richest company in the world. It's 100% on Google for failing to provide any value with Premium.
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-07 16:55:10+00:00
Marshall McLuhan thought that Adolf Hitler played really well on the radio but would not have played well on television, people would have seen his face turn red.

It's hard to tease apart the differences between modalities. On Youtube today there are many "videos" that are good to play in the background, be it Technology Connections, Pod Save America, or Asmongold's show. Part of the experience of reading is that an individual can find things that are rare, obscure, that it doesn't have to be massy at all [1] -- in the past economics required television and radio to be massy but podcasts, in principle, are really cheap and could service obscure tastes. Another fraction is that reading itself is a filter: even in the core a lot of people like Asmongold are functionally illiterate, in a place like Rwanda you just can't reach most people through writing.

[1] read https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Their-Impact-Med..., read https://www.amazon.com/Dispersing-Population-America-Learn-E...
by jimbob45 | 2025-06-07 16:55:27+00:00
It’s smart to be using a VPN for any sort of adult internet use these days anyway. Vixen Media Group is extorting people by threatening to leak their identity if they don’t pay up[0]. And not by a 3rd-party collections company either - it’s their own parent company making the demands.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vixen_Media_Group#Legal_action

https://www.reddit.com/r/VPNTorrents/comments/1d3wfiz/my_exp...
by lyu07282 | 2025-06-07 16:55:36+00:00
The problem is that this doesn't let you configure X detail about the NIC, most users don't need to ever configure that so they don't have that option in their updated control panel. The problem is that sometimes people do need to configure X, Microsoft can't just say to people you can no longer configure X, if it's a necessity for some use-cases. Their solution is to just leave the old legacy control panel software laying around forever for those situations. And that's bad UX/UI and bad for security, to leave this ancient unmaintained code on everyone's system.

Just because of incompetent modern design department "simplifying" everything to a point of unusability. Is windows supposed to be used for serious applications or is it just a consumer product for tech-illiterates? Microsoft doesn't seem to know. Why can I even buy a "enterprise" or "professional" version, this is clearly not intended to be used by me.
by robomartin | 2025-06-07 16:56:23+00:00
I think people are misinformed about how to deal with 174. That said, yes, a repeal would be a good idea. Hopefully that happens through BBB in the next month or two.

You do not have to amortize 100% of your engineering costs. Not even close.

Here's the key:

Development costs incurred to remove uncertainty are amortized. All other costs are deductible during the tax year where they are incurred.

How does this work?

You are going to design a new robot arm.

In January, you spend $100K to "remove uncertainty". In rough strokes, this means discovering all the things you don't know and need to know for this robot arm to become a product. This amount will be amortized over five years under 174.

Now, with uncertainty removed, you spend an additional $1.1MM from January until December for engineering implementation. No uncertainty being removed. Just building a product. This is 100% deductible that tax year.

Analogy: You want to build a new brick wall with specific properties. You spend $100K to develop a new type of brick and $1.1MM to build the wall using that brick. The $100K is amortized, the $1.1MM is deductible in one shot.

BTW, at year 6 the amortization schedule reaches steady-state and you are amortizing the full $100K every year. In other words, the impact of 174, if treated intelligently, is the time value of money until steady state is reached for the engineering costs incurred to remove uncertainty.

That said, I hope the BBB repeals this.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/26/1.174-2
by const_cast | 2025-06-07 16:57:11+00:00
Sure, but in comparison, they're running laps around red states. Which have significantly higher levels of poverty and are overall just less developed. I mean, if you look at just about any metric from income to education, the disparities cannot be ignored.

And, it should be very clear why. When you, say, de-prioritize or are even actively hostile to public education then of course your education is going to suffer. Which, in turn, makes your economy suffer, because most people who are working are now uneducated and therefore poor. So you get a lot of brain drain.

There's some notable exceptions, like Texas. But, it's definitely a trend that red states just have worse outcomes across the board. It seems to me people in those states just don't care much, which... whatever. If they're fine with it then I guess it's fine.
by vntok | 2025-06-07 16:57:29+00:00
> Do you know it's actually easy to treat the database as an ephemeral, versioned object? Nobody I've talked to does. You just back up the logical database, and rename the database name in the backup to a unique string (including a version, or datestamp, etc). Now you have versioned, uniquely-named database, so you can do immutable infrastructure. Load this backup into a database server (even the "live" database server, as it won't conflict with the old db name). Start a new WordPress container and pass env vars pointing to the new database name. Now you can pair a snapshot of the code with a snapshot of the database. Upgrade or downgrade in seconds, with confidence. (that is, after you've done all the manual work to upgrade, test, and fix in an ephemeral environment)

There is a good reason why nobody does that: it makes very little sense on any sort of web platform more complex than a static website. Indeed, as the WordPress database schema is quite normalized especially around metadata and taxonomies, there are many INSERT/UPDATE queries running/queued basically all the time on a busy website.

For example, 1ms after you've snapshot your DB and "versioned it" (renamed it rather) locally, it's already obsolete because 2 users have just logged in and their last logon timestamp got updated as metadata stored in the _usermeta table. Switch to the versioned snapshot in the meantime and you lost that information. This is Bad(r).

Even then, say 30s after making the snapshot and before you've "deployed" the code upgrade, a cronjob has triggered an image optimizer plugin, inserting various optimized copies of the image objects in the main _posts table (it also updated the metadata of all those images). Rollback the DB because your deployment caused a crash and you've lost images. Again, a big no-no.

The simplest WordPress-safe upgrade path in case of code changes impacting the database is for the code to support rollup/rolldown migration queries on the database: rename a meta_key when upgrading and rename it back when downgrading.

Use WP abstraction functions to interact with the database, and generally treat the database itself as a blind storage medium, to be restored only in extreme cases.
by kuboble | 2025-06-07 16:57:40+00:00
I was thinking about it a lot.

I think the programmers in most environments aren't judged based on some hard metrics that could say someone procrastinated half of the time and could have done twice as much.

Most judgement comes from remembering whether anything has been done at all, and if yes then whether it was sunbathing of quality. People (I at least) will rate higher someone who worked less but contributed higher quality code. Also good contributions to discussion, mentoring juniors is something a procrastinator might not even think is work but is valued highly.

And even while procrastinating some part of your brain often thinks about problem so the time isn't completely lost.

All in all procrastinators aren't as bad as it sounds unless we get into some deep pathology.
by WillAdams | 2025-06-07 16:57:42+00:00
Some notable stories from Folklore.org:

https://www.folklore.org/Joining_Apple_Computer.html

https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html --- something to bring up whenever lines of code as a metric is put forward

https://www.folklore.org/Rosings_Rascals.html --- story of how the Macintosh Finder came to be

https://www.folklore.org/I_Still_Remember_Regions.html --- surviving a car accident
by dustbunny | 2025-06-07 16:57:51+00:00
What interests me most by zig is the ease of the build system, cross compilation, and the goal of high iteration speed. I'm a gamedev, so I have performance requirements but I think most languages have sufficient performance for most of my requirements so it's not the #1 consideration for language choice for me.

I feel like I can write powerful code in any language, but the goal is to write code for a framework that is most future proof, so that you can maintain modular stuff for decades.

C/C++ has been the default answer for its omnipresent support. It feels like zig will be able to match that.
by smilliken | 2025-06-07 16:58:00+00:00
The reason someone changes a dependency at all is because they expect a difference in behavior. No one would feel the motivation to go update a dependency if they aren't getting something out of it, that's a waste of effort and an unnecessary risk.

Each person doesn't have to perform the build on their own. A build server will evaluate it and others will pull it from the cache.

The greater waste that nix eliminates is the waste of human time spent troubleshooting something that broke in production because of what should have been an innocent change, and the lost business value from the decreased production. When you trust your dependencies are what you asked for, it frees the mind of doubt and lets you focus on troubleshooting more efficiently towards a problem.

Aside, I spent over a decade on Debian derived distros. I never once had one of these distros complete an upgrade successfully between major versions, despite about 10 attempts spread over those years, though thankfully always on the first sacrificial server attempted. They always failed with interesting issues, sometimes before they really got started, sometimes borking the system and needing a fresh install. With NixOS, the upgrades are so reliable they can be done casually during the workday in production without bothering to check that they were successful. I think that wouldn't be possible if we wanted the false efficiency of substituting similar but different packages to save the build server from building the exact specification. Anything short of this doesn't get us away from the "works on my machine" problem.
by Duhan | 2025-06-07 16:59:12+00:00
Hey if you looking for passive income take your time to read.

We’re a small team based in France and just launched Styly.io — an AI tool that lets people upload room photos and test interior changes (paint, furniture, staging, etc).

We offer 30% commission for affiliates, and a few folks in Germany and the Middle East are already making around €1000/month with organic content. It has a free trial and starts at $9, so it’s easy to promote.

Happy to share more if you’re curious!
by throe83949449 | 2025-06-07 16:59:37+00:00
Lovely, people would go to prison, just to see some porn!

> engaging in illegal activities while using a VPN remains prohibited under French law.

https://medium.com/@green21/is-vpn-legal-in-france-exploring...

France has very stupid and strict laws, that apply accross borders! For example paternity test gets you two years, even when physically done in another country!
by londons_explore | 2025-06-07 17:00:00+00:00
Congrats to the author - a few decades ago I attempted the same, with very little success (using data tracks, not audio, which might have been my mistake).

The challenge (as I saw it) was that the drive has the option to toggle the state of the laser every sector, effectively letting it invert all your data if it wants to. To have control of the laser state, you need to be able to do perfect predictions if the drive will toggle or not.

Any unpredicted bit leads to the laser state toggling and the image being ruined.
by caminante | 2025-06-07 17:00:46+00:00
> Come Friday, no message [...] tanked my motivation to continue

I see the bookends, but notice the root cause

> That really kicked me into gear [...] I was very motivated and productive

You don't have intrinsic motivation for these tasks and the job. This is the thread to pull on. Keep asking "why?"

In the least, I recommend a pro-active note, letting him know you're done and ready for his feedback on the assignment or new priorities. Figure out why he didn't (or persistently doesn't) follow-up.
by lesuorac | 2025-06-07 17:01:44+00:00
The article makes it clear it's a subsidy.

> Originally enacted in 1954, Sec. 174 has historically allowed taxpayers to deduct SRE expenditures in the year incurred. Its original aim was to level the playing field for small businesses, those without dedicated research teams, that may be unable to deduct product development expenses under Sec. 162 because the costs were not ordinary and necessary expenses paid or incurred in carrying on a trade or business

Straight-up, any deviation in the tax code for a special group is always a subsidy.
by dehrmann | 2025-06-07 17:02:03+00:00
> Flights that depart from a gate only leave their gate once

I went on a vacation to New Zealand just before new visa requirements took effect, so while I entered legally, at some point, I couldn't reenter. As I was going through passport control to exit, I asked what would happen if the plane had a mechanical issue and I had to spend the ~night, but couldn't reenter. The border agent said they can undo an exit.
by roryirvine | 2025-06-07 17:02:29+00:00
This sort of question works well for assessing senior / lead skills.

For example, when asked how to go about replacing PostgreSQL with MongoDB, it'd be okay for someone fairly junior to either give a straightforward answer or to turn their nose up and say "eww, no" - but you'd expect someone with more seniority to instead flag that it was an unusual scenario and ask for more detail.

Prepare a vaguely-plausible reason (eg. "we're storing JSON documents and the team are more comfortable with Mongo's tooling"), and this can form the basis for a productive discussion which you can drive in whichever social or technical direction you feel is most appropriate.