MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by joshdata | 2025-06-06 18:00:09+00:00
Hi. I run GovTrack.

OP may have been unlucky on the timing. The site isn't usually down. Here's the link to the text of H.R. 1 on GovTrack: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/119/hr1/text

We automatically add links to U.S. Code and other citations. In this case Congress.gov is missing rich formatting which we have (I'm not sure why they are missing it for this bill, normally they have it). GovTrack also allows making diff-like comparisons between bill versions and between bills (for example, you can see the last-minute changes made ahead of the vote on this bill).

Source code is available on GitHub if anyone wants to try making GovTrack better, although it's quite complicated because Congressional information is complicated and there's no real money behind this: https://github.com/govtrack/govtrack.us-web/

If anyone has particular thoughts on what would be helpful when viewing bill text --- within the realm of the information that is actually freely available --- I am all ears.
by camgunz | 2025-06-06 18:00:12+00:00
It's truly bewildering how people on HN can have powerfully strong beliefs that are dispelled by the simplest of Google searches.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258979182...

https://www.afro.who.int/news/implications-social-media-misi...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10578995/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10122563/

etc etc etc etc
by ajuc | 2025-06-06 18:01:19+00:00
> We don't have to use YouTube and there's nothing stopping competitors from entering the market.

There is - network effect.

> If people cared that YouTube was a monopoly, or if people cared enough about the moderation policies, they would go elsewhere.

They would not, because of network effects. Coordination effort required to jump ship from a billion user website is impossible to overcome. You could have all of Americans stop using youtube, and it would still have more content than whatever competitor they turn towards.

> The reason we have to specifically be protected from government censorship is because we don't realistically have that option.

There's more examples of people overthrowing a government than people succesfully boycotting a social media platform once it gets big enough.
by gruez | 2025-06-06 18:01:35+00:00
>The paywall news sites want to have their cake and eat it to -- they want web crawlers, like Google, to read the full contents of the article but hide it from site visitors.

There's nothing contradictory about this? Plenty of companies give free access to journalist/reviewers/influencers, with the hope that they'd draw in paying customers. Wanting to only give free access to certain people isn't "want to have their cake and eat it to". It's standard business practice and well within the rights of publishers/rights holders to do.
by bitwize | 2025-06-06 18:01:45+00:00
It's abandonware. None of the grown-ups in the Linux graphics space are interested in maintaining it beyond the minimum necessary. I suppose new features could be added to Xorg, but anyone who actually knows something about the graphics pipeline is 100% committed to Wayland, so it won't be done.

And Enrico's code was apparently so shitty and disruptive he's earned himself a ban from Freedesktop.org. Or is that because he associated himself with Lunduke?
by whalesalad | 2025-06-06 18:02:09+00:00
It's remarkably easy to integrate. We have a tests/db module with a single conftest.py file that does everything. Every test suite run spins up a fresh container (no state), runs all migrations against it to prepare it for duty, and then the test suite continues. You could do this on a per-test basis for ultra isolation, but this works for us. That change would simply be to modify the `scope` value.

Also a convenient `conn` fixture at the end which allows any test in the module to get a new db connection.

linky: https://gist.github.com/whalesalad/6ecd284460ac3836a6c2b9ca8...
by yorwba | 2025-06-06 18:02:15+00:00
I'm confused why you would think so. Did you mix up your links? The paper you link to replaces the quick-and-dirty 3D-to-2D approximation used in Gaussian splatting with more physically accurate rendering using Monte Carlo path tracing. FreeTimeGS uses Gaussian splatting for 3D scenes with movement.

Both descend from (and cite) 3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04079 but take it into entirely different directions.
by BlandDuck | 2025-06-06 18:02:33+00:00
Exactly, if it had been obvious at the time that "the market" would deliver a better return, for certain, then nobody would have bought bonds at those prices.

Then bond prices would have declined (and their expected returns or interest rate would have increased) until, in equilibrium, the anticipation was that the stocks and bonds would deliver comparable expected risk-adjusted returns.
by mjburgess | 2025-06-06 18:02:34+00:00
Well each of these institutions are targeting people in power, it may only be a matter of "one more wrong move" and there's a critical mass of the political elite willing to tear it down. I think DOGE was never actually a cost saving exercise, that was just a disguise for an attempt to destroy the counter-political power of the administrative state -- it isnt so hard to imagine a political party trying again, this time, competently. And so on with each of these instituions. There's quite a lot of bipartisan support now for breaking up monopolies, dramatic restricts on the power of executive police forces, and the like. For different reasons, either side, but the targets are the same.
by nosianu | 2025-06-06 18:02:49+00:00
> This isn't useful or correct

The formulas do not help you at all with the knowing. or not knowing, with being able to "predict" the past vs. being able to predict the future! They make assumptions.

I would make the claim my statement is useful for what I said, which was for somebody looking back at a decision of the long ago past with hindsight knowledge.

The post was not about somebody evaluating different investments either.

Oh and thanks, I guess, for completely disregarding that my comment was much more generalized? You threw away the vast majority of it.
by tjwebbnorfolk | 2025-06-06 18:02:49+00:00
"Risk-free" is a popular shorthand for "The US government won't default". But default is far from the only risk inherent in bond ownership.

Risk is the chance something bad happens to you.

Held for 30 years, bonds are eaten alive by inflation. That's a bad thing that happens to you if you hold bonds for a long time.
by sowbug | 2025-06-06 18:02:52+00:00
The interpretation aspect isn't solvable in code, but it's representable. That's what I was getting at with the Boolean comment. A branch point might be "bool answerUnanswerableQuestion()" and the unit tests would mock it as true and then false. Even if the question isn't deterministically answerable in real life, at least the code can show what happens when it is answered.
by MrDrDr | 2025-06-06 18:03:28+00:00
I found the following paper helpful in understanding the evolutionary pressures on a species (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abg5391). It's possible for two different genetic ancestries to arrive at the same phenotype independently where there environment is virtually identical. The example here, cichlid fish in lakes like Tanganyika and Victoria, evolved similar traits independently from different genetic lineages.

One could imagine (climate change not withstanding) that different geographic human populations would always tend to evolve to the same phenotype over time.
by dachris | 2025-06-06 18:03:37+00:00
It's a nice graph, I think the most well known one is in "Stocks for the long run" [0]

I'm more concerned how it will grow over the next n (lets say 50) years.

Somehow, it doesn't really fit into my head that there will be another 7 doublings of money invested stock market over the coming 50 years (as others have commented, 10% annually is doubling every 7 years).

Reality is complex of course, there's inflation, there's taxes, dividends don't grow the stock market cap.

Still, I would assume less growth due to several factors. The last few decades have seen several tailwinds that can't repeat in the same way:

- falling corporate tax rates globally [1]

- falling interest rates [2] (since 1980, until 2020)

- rising P/E ratios (partly in response to falling interest rates) [3]

- demographic expansion [4]

- improvements in diversification (index funds, theoretically you need a lower risk premium than when investing in individual stocks)

And I'm not sure that headwinds coming from environmental degradation of many types are already priced in.

I still think that stocks will do better than bonds (there's a risk premium [5], those are real assets, there's innovation and growth), just be cautious about assuming that the future will mirror the past.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stocks_for_the_Long_Run

[1] https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/global/corporate-tax-rate...

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DGS10 (choose max in the time scale)

[3] https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-pe-ratio

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

[5] https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/ ERP currently at about 4.4%
by margalabargala | 2025-06-06 18:04:02+00:00
> blindness caused by drinking improperly distilled alcohol.

This isn't actually a thing. You will die of normal ethanol poisoning well before consuming enough methanol to cause blindness when drinking alcohol you made from distilling something you fermented.

The blindness thing is some nicely placed Prohibition-era propaganda combined with the addition of methanol to alcohol-containing products that managed to make its way into the public psyche.
by SecretDreams | 2025-06-06 18:04:10+00:00
The TYPICAL behaviour when you hit "share" on any platform is not to immediately share. It TYPICALLY gives you options to share to a variety of other sources, both public and private. It also generates a link if you want to grab the link and specifically share that.

That is the TYPICAL share behaviour. If what META is doing with their new app is obscuring this typical behaviour and a "share" click directly going to the public, that would violate the defacto behaviour users are accustomed to when using the share button.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-06-06 18:04:57+00:00
> I think no video is better than one that starts with ad. At least for long term mental health

That's vague. I think most people would disagree, and the commenter is right that people put up with ads for a certain degree of quality. We used to have 4 minute ad breaks on TV. The only reason people moved to streaming is because the quality was the same.

I can't imagine ads are doing much more damage to our mental health than the content we consume in the first place. Likely less.
by pesus | 2025-06-06 18:05:06+00:00
This is blatant misinformation. There is ample evidence that ADHD exists and is detrimental to all aspects of life. It is not some quirky different way of thinking, it's a disability. My life was made significantly harder without medication, and it's the only thing that allows me to function on a day to day basis. Your kids may end up resenting you down the road for preventing them from accessing one of the only proven treatments that can help with this nuerodevelopmental disorder.
by tokyolights2 | 2025-06-06 18:05:25+00:00
Sandia National Labs is one of the few places in the country (on the planet?) doing blue-sky research. My first thought was similar to yours--If it doesn't have storage, what can I realistically even do with it!?

But sometimes you just have to let the academics cook for a few decades and then something fantastical pops out the other end. If we ever make something that is truely AGI, its architecture is probably going to look more like this SpiNNaker machine than anything we are currently using.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-06-06 18:05:38+00:00
Transformer models are good at translation, given appropriate training data (i.e., "this text but in multiple languages") – though you still have to watch out for them translating "English" as "Deutsch", "Français", etc. Asking them to do repeated next token prediction isn't asking them to translate, though, especially not after the RLHF passes that OpenAI does to their ChatGPT models. When you test it, you get exactly the failure modes you'd expect: translations that start off okay, but go off on tangents; translations that "correct" the original text, so the translations aren't faithful; attempts (usually successful) to cover up a gap in "knowledge" that prevents the model from translating correctly.

When considering these failure modes, which have come up every single time I've seen ChatGPT used for translation, it's clear that the simplistic system I described would work better. It'll output gibberish often (just as LibreTranslate does when given decontextualised Chinese and asked to translate to English), but that's better than a GPT model, which will just confabulate something in the same circumstance. The goal isn't "maximise the amount of successful translatedness": it's "reduce the language barrier as much as possible", something the benchmarks don't test.
by jeroenhd | 2025-06-06 18:06:08+00:00
I think there's something ironic about combining UNIX's "everything is a file" philosophy with a rule like "every process has a maximum amount of open files". Feels a bit like Windows programming back when GDI handles were a limited resource.

Nowadays Windows seems to have capped the max amount of file handles per process to 2^16 (or 8096 if you're using raw C rather than Windows APIs). However, as on Windows not everything is a file, the amount of open handles is limited "only by memory", so Windows programs can do a lot of things UNIX programs can't do anymore when the file handle limit has been reached.
by johnklos | 2025-06-06 18:07:01+00:00
One of the biggest problems with CPUs is legacy. Tie yourself to any legacy, and now you're spending millions of transistors to make sure some way that made sense ages ago still works.

Just as a thought experiment, consider the fact that the i80486 has 1.2 million transistors. An eight core Ryzen 9700X has around 12 billion. The difference in clock speed is roughly 80 times, and the difference in number of transistors is 1,250 times.

These are wild generalizations, but let's ask ourselves: If a Ryzen takes 1,250 times the transistor for one core, does one core run 1,250 times (even taking hyperthreading in to account) faster than an i80486 at the same clock? 500 times? 100 times?

It doesn't, because massive amounts of those transistors go to keeping things in sync, dealing with changes in execution, folding instructions, decoding a horrible instruction set, et cetera.

So what might we be able to do if we didn't need to worry about figuring out how long our instructions are? Didn't need to deal with Spectre and Meltdown issues? If we made out-of-order work in ways where much more could be in flight and the compilers / assemblers would know how to avoid stalls based on dependencies, or how to schedule dependencies? What if we took expensive operations, like semaphores / locks, and built solutions in to the chip?

Would we get to 1,250 times faster for 1,250 times the number of transistors? No. Would we get a lot more performance than we get out of a contemporary x86 CPU? Absolutely.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-06-06 18:07:21+00:00
The cool thing about about something with a consistently high return and a long-horizon (going back 100 years) - you're still getting a high return.

It's about ~6% CAGR vs ~8% if you picked the absolute best vs absolute worst time around the Great Depression.

If you include re-investing dividends, it's about ~8% vs ~10%. You're not getting anywhere near that with gold over any sufficiently long non-cherry picked time horizon.

The even better thing about the S&P is it has relatively low volatility. You're really unlikely to put all your eggs in the S&P at the absolute worst timing. Sure, it's possible. Not likely.
by ryandrake | 2025-06-06 18:07:27+00:00
> On the timescale of 30 years for gov bonds vs diversified US stocks, this is almost meaningless statement. The longer a risky asset is held, the less chance of loss you’ll have. Short-horizon returns are extremely volatile, but that volatility "mean-reverts" over time.

This is only true if you look back 30 years. What will happen in the next 30 years? Do you know for sure?
by cgh | 2025-06-06 18:08:21+00:00
Yes, NHL blackouts are a great example. You want to watch your home team? Great, you have to subscribe to what they refer to as your “RSN” (regional sports network, usually a regular tv channel).

But the RSN doesn’t show all the games across the league, nor will it show playoff hockey. So you need to also subscribe to a big streaming service like Sportsnet.

It gets worse: your RSN may not offer a streaming service. So you need an old-fashioned cable package to get it. The cost becomes ridiculous, just to watch hockey.
by sowbug | 2025-06-06 18:08:54+00:00
You're conflating determination of factual and legal questions (out of scope) with modeling the decision tree (in scope and useful).

The function you ask about would be "getDeductiblePercentage()," and the unit tests would return various hard coded numbers. Actually determining that value for a real taxpayer is still hard.

Being able to show how information flows through the US tax code would be useful, even if it doesn't solve all the problems that arise from its intricacy.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-06-06 18:09:00+00:00
I think that is the central question: Can you exert control while avoiding representational responsibility, and how much?

Nation states influence each other all the time. They threaten, sanction, and impose restrictions, especially when in conflict without invoking responsibility.

Now I agree that isnt a very accurate characterization of this situation. It is much more of an occupation. I still dont think that invokes a responsibility of enfranchisement, but it certain invokes some responsibility for the occupier. The US occupied Japan following WWII, but that doesnt mean Japanese became US citizens, but there are moral obligations.

I model the Palestinian situation as a failed occupation where there is no progress towards end of occupation criteria. Neither party want integration, nor are they ready for peaceful coexistence.

I dont think Israel has a responsibility to enfranchise or integrate, but it does have a obligation to provide and maintain an option for coexistence, and perpetually put real effort towards achieving it. That means giving 2nd, 3rd, or 100th chances.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-06-06 18:09:46+00:00
The VPN provider could obviously just accept cryptocurrency from users in France, so is the theory that France is going to threaten Visa with not accepting Visa anywhere in France if Visa doesn't block foreign VPN providers in foreign countries from accepting Visa from foreign users? How would even that be effective, since you would only need one VPN service to choose "stop accepting Visa"?
by arolihas | 2025-06-06 18:10:02+00:00
Literally everyone can complain about problems. You can see in the post she has different ideas of how things should be done, how she should be working on different things, how she should be allowed to go to Japan, how they shouldn't use air purifiers, how people should act when a layoff is about to happen, how temp workers should be treated and on and on. I'm not even saying all of these ideas she had are all wrong or bad. But she clearly has solutions and a vision of how Google should operate.
by ty6853 | 2025-06-06 18:10:17+00:00
Indeed. There's always the story of finding stacks of bills in the wall of granddaddies house despite the fact creditors and the bank were up his ass to the bitter end for medical bills.

Given the ever increasing number of people bankrupted by medical bills, divorce, child support, lawsuits, etc we're quickly moving into a world where it might be foolish to expect assets accessible to a brokerage or bank will still be there by the time you need them.
by zozbot234 | 2025-06-06 18:10:32+00:00
MIPS has a few weird features such as delay slots, that RISC-V sensibly dispenses with. There's been also quite a bit of convergent evolution in the meantime, such that AArch64 is significantly closer to MIPS and RISC-V compared to ARM32. Though it's still using condition codes where MIPS and RISC-V just have conditional branch instructions.
by trod1234 | 2025-06-06 18:10:53+00:00
I think the same could be said of anyone who has successfully traded regularly over several years.

To do that kind of business you have to have mastered yourself or set up systems where the emotional rollercoaster ride doesn't change your choices.

> I wanted to buy during this year's dip...

The Stock market hasn't had a real crash in quite a long time as evidenced by a number of things including the PE values and stock buybacks, lack of general price discoverability towards chaotic whipsaws and the indexes topping all time highs.

People are going to lose the shirts off their backs when it does come, and it will come suddenly without warning. Best to keep that in mind when greed might try to lead you astray. Greed is both a friend and a trader's worst enemy.

Printing money enrolls participants in boom bust cycles. We've had a boom for the last 10+ years nearly straight. The stock market is way overdue for a crash. Its an avalanche prone area with a massive snowpack built up. There's always some chaotic trigger that gets everything moving again.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-06 18:11:31+00:00
> It would have to be like the French Revolution

The elites after the French Revolution were not only mostly the same as before, they escaped with so much money and wealth that it’s actually debated if they increased their wealth share through the chaos [1].

If America started teetering towards a meltdown-type revolution, the first folks to move in would be foreign powers.

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/650023
by ahmeneeroe-v2 | 2025-06-06 18:11:42+00:00
>and move on to something more interesting (and worthy of indexing).

I have had an ADHD diagnosis in the past and I am 100% on board with this. Maybe the things I can't pay attention to aren't worth paying attention to and I should be working on something else.

>Taking medication to "address" this active attention mechanism

I also noticed that when taking medication I became really good at boring, non-creative work, but I struggled with deep or innovative thinking. I decided I'd rather be good at deep/innovative things, even if it costs me my ability to do some mundane things for hours at a time.
by MentatOnMelange | 2025-06-06 18:11:44+00:00
I'm not a big sports fan but I know several people who are. I don't think there's another industry on earth whose customers are so willing and eager to spend money as fans watching their teams. And there's probably no industry on earth that tries as hard to prevent people from buying their services.

The link between piracy and hypothetical profits has never been hard science, but when it comes to televized/streaming sports, a lot of this pirating seems to happen because people aren't allowed to watch it legally in their area.

This is a self-inflicted problem.
by redundantly | 2025-06-06 18:12:06+00:00
This goes well beyond just an affordability issue. They’re price gouging, forcing customers into one-off subscription services that are deliberately hard to cancel and make it difficult to get a refund, even when one is clearly warranted.

They want people to pay to watch, and that’s fair. But if they make it too difficult, too expensive, or outright exploitative, they should fully expect that people will find ways to watch without paying them directly.