MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by josefresco | 2025-07-21 18:11:01+00:00
> “There’s periods of time when TikTok is disproportionately amplifying pro-Palestine content, and there’s times when it’s disproportionately amplifying pro-Israel content,” Edelson says. “When you sum up everything over the entire study period, they amplify those two things equally, but it changes over time, initially.”

So equal. That doesn't align with claims TikTok is amplifying predominately Pro-Palestinian content.

> Pro-Palestinian content, on the other hand, jumps significantly in the second week and continues to grow steadily. But things begin to change on Oct. 27 when the number page views on pro-Israel posts skyrockets — 2,555 views per post compared to 336 views per post previously.

This look suspicious right? One type of content growing steadily and the other spiking?
by tracker1 | 2025-07-21 18:11:01+00:00
Considering I'm working as a contractor for a local govt, working on a system that probably should be deployed to linux/containers, but I'm stuck on a locked down copy of windows with deployments going to Windows Servers. I can't even use WSL/Docker on my issued laptop.

The transparent proxy for all http(s) requests has been fun for some cli tools as well.
by lostlogin | 2025-07-21 18:11:20+00:00
They can be quenched (as you note), but there was that one time that GE didn’t connect the quench button to prevent accidental/expensive usage and n India, and someone died.

Surprise! It turns out there is a reason it should be connected.

https://www.diagnosticimaging.com/view/everything-you-need-k...
by arevno | 2025-07-21 18:11:37+00:00
I don't know to what extent naval dominance will be useful. Even with EOR and TOR, Ghawar continues to decline, along with most of ME and Russian fields.

Global conventional peaked a long time ago, and EOR/TOR will only keep the game going another decade or so. Renewables and nuclear are the only long-term options. There's also coal, of which we have at least a hundred years in the PRB alone, if we're willing to match China in the "fuck the environment" game.
by andrewla | 2025-07-21 18:11:41+00:00
There are lots of legal carveouts for when you can't sue the government but that is not relevant to this particular discussion. Yes, there are a handful of recent examples of ICE detentions of American citizens suspected of being illegal aliens (although the only deportations I'm aware of are minor natural born citizens deported by request of their birth mother). The majority for obstruction but a handful pending deportation proceedings and held even after documentation of citizenship was produced. You've heard about them for two reasons.

1) There are very few compared to the scale of deportations currently being processed, so each case is exceptional against an incredibly low base rate. And these stories have been happening since 9/11 but journalists didn't give a shit until there was a salient political point to be scored

2) They are all suing the everlasting shit out of the government or have already settled
by scarface_74 | 2025-07-21 18:12:23+00:00
I agree that no one needs Facebook and if it disappeared off of the face of the earth, nothing of value would be lost.

And even a simplified version of AWS shouldn’t be impossible to build that’s “good enough” [1] or another search engine that’s good enough (Google) and Google search sucks these days anyway.

But Europe is not going to be able to replicate the ecosystem of Android like China did and definitely not Apple on the high end or MS for operating systems.

[1] before anyone replies that I don’t understand the complexity of AWS, I have been working with AWS technologies exclusively for over 7 years including a former 3+ year stint at AWS.
by cptskippy | 2025-07-21 18:12:51+00:00
> It's just unusable in what we have now.

I really hate all of the defense of nuclear based on hypotheticals that realistically will never become reality by conveniently ignoring externalities like capitalism.

Our regulatory and governance environment is so unstable and can change significantly every 4 years. Companies play the long game and delay or resist change to outlast administrations.

This prevents any meaningful advance of the technology preventing it from becoming a viable solution.
by vilanye | 2025-07-21 18:13:12+00:00
This is why I don't use AWS or any "cloud" provider. That is not 100% true. I have 110 GB or so of personal data backed up on Glacier. The bill is 6 cents a month, and they obviously don't charge my card.

It may take longer to start, but owning all your servers is cheaper in the long run.

At the very least, don't lock yourself into one provider. Spread out any services you use.

More than one company has screwed itself over permanently by tying itself to a single service. At the end of the day, it is the extremely poor decision to follow the trend of locking oneself into a single company that dooms it.

You would think people would have learned the lesson to avoid lock-in by now. It is absolutely Darwinian at this point.
by colechristensen | 2025-07-21 18:13:14+00:00
If your immune system was "boosted" and worked significantly better tomorrow than it does today, would there be large measurable outcomes? No, probably not. Unless you've got something wrong with you, day to day, it would be hard to detect a distinct improvement in an already working system. Getting a good signal-to-noise ratio for a healthy person getting slightly healthier is hard. The bias for not publishing negative results and various sorts of intentional and unintentional p-hacking means that small-effect-size research that showed say "1 gram of vitamin C per day improved x by 5% in healthy adults" wouldn't be that reliable anyway. "dramatic improvement" of ICU sepsis patients isn't something that suffers from p-hacking.

Someone dying of sepsis in an ICU though, there's a whole bunch of very clear signals whether something is meaningfully effective or not. What that result tells you is that megadoses of vitamin C are likely not bullshit and should continued to be studied in more and more difficult to detect cases.

What this tells me is that 1) because I know it's likely rather safe for me and 2) there's enough evidence to convince me it might help, I'll keep taking lots of vitamin C if I feel like I'm getting sick.
by diatone | 2025-07-21 18:13:18+00:00
Deep fakes have always been horrible. The idea that someone - anyone - can take your image and represent you in ways that can ruin your reputation, is appalling. For example, revenge porn.

Having your likeness used to express an opinion that is the opposite of your own is nasty too. You can produce the kind of thing that has no courtesy, no grace, no kindness or care for the people around you.

The mass extraction and substitution of art has also caused a lot of unnecessary grief. Instead of AI enabling us to pursue creative work… it’s producing slop and making it harder for newbies to develop their craft. And making a lot of people anxious, fearful, and angry.

And finally of course astroturfing, phishing, that kind of thing has in principle become a lot more sophisticated.

It unnerves me that people can pull this capital lever against each other in ways that don’t obviously advance the common good.
by bookofjoe | 2025-07-21 18:13:28+00:00
Deaths in the OR like cardiac arrests, fatal hemorrhage from burst aneurysms, etc. are always reported within the hospital. Whether others outside learn about such things is often a matter of persistent family and relatives demanding to see the actual death report and contemporaneous notes.

Fatal mistakes usually stay within hospital departments and are discussed at length in regular confidential Morbidity and Mortality conferences.
by badsectoracula | 2025-07-21 18:13:40+00:00
This is a Python, Rust and Go issue, not a Linux issue. With "Linux" i meant the Linux kernel which does not break backwards compatibility.

Sadly, the userland does not have the same mindset as very few libraries and languages care about backwards compatibility.

However at least on Linux it is possible to do that if you care by choosing languages and libraries that do not break compatibility without worrying that the OS will break things. On OpenBSD you may write your program in C (which has strong backwards compatibility as a language) and use only libraries such as curl, cairo, opengl, openal and x11 that in general do not break backwards compatibility and yet have the OS throw all that effort out of the window.
by polski-g | 2025-07-21 18:14:18+00:00
Yes its a very easy problem to solve, would take about 3 states to pass a law mandating "must-process" payments rather than the current framework of "may-process" (under threat of revocation of money transfer authority). Then the only method for them to not process a payment is those prohibited under existing law (ie: terrorist financing).

I could see CA and FL easily passing such a law given the right push from constituents.
by Havoc | 2025-07-21 18:14:28+00:00
Remember that test where you ask a LLM whether 9.11 or 9.9 is the bigger number? [Just checked gpt-4o still gets it wrong]

I don't think you'll find many sane CFOs willing to send the resulting numbers to the IRS based on that. That's just asking to get nailed for tax fraud.

It is coming for the very bottom end of bookkeeping work quite soon though, especially for first draft. There are a lot of people doing stuff like expense classification. And if you give an LLM an invoice it can likely figure out whether it's stationary or rent with high accuracy. OCR and text classification is easier for LLMs than numbers. Things like concur can basically do this already.
by helloplanets | 2025-07-21 18:14:34+00:00
Are you using a tool other than ChatGPT? If so, check the full prompt that's being sent. It can sometimes kneecap the model.

Tools having slightly unsuitable built in prompts/context sometimes lead to the models saying weird stuff out of the blue, instead of it actually being a 'baked in' behavior of the model itself. Seen this happen for both Gemini 2.5 Pro and o3.
by chrismorgan | 2025-07-21 18:14:34+00:00
I’m Australian by heritage, but have spent plenty of time in India and have more recently married and moved to India. The intense focus on getting government jobs (far beyond the point of irrationality, in my opinion, completely wasting years on a remote possibility), I can attest, from experience in West Bengal and Hyderabad, among lower- and middle-class Christians. But I wouldn’t say it need be about corruption: in fact, for many types of government jobs there’s not much opportunity for corruption (e.g. most of nursing). The biggest reason I’ve heard is the stability and certainty of a government job. My wife was once such a seeker for this reason.

As a private employee, you can be let go easily, whereas as a government employee, even dying may not lose you your job. I know a case where a man had a job in the post office, and died, and his widow was expected to inherit the job, and has done for five or ten years, although she is grossly incompetent at it (they would literally have done better to pay her twice as much to stay away).
by sershe | 2025-07-21 18:14:48+00:00
See what we could achieve if we unionized software industry? Come on people, get on board, this fantasy of being exempt from worker solidarity is such an American "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" thing that is not serving anyone.

We can all agree that the code written by one person is clearly unsafe, we need 100% pair programming by law and at least 15 people and 2 scrum matsres per scrum to ensure proper working conditions.
by bigyabai | 2025-07-21 18:15:09+00:00
It's not extraordinary at all. Ron Wyden, a US Senator subject to special briefings, basically repeated the same thing when asked about federal backdoors:

"As with all of the other information these companies store for or about their users, because Apple and Google deliver push notification data, they can be secretly compelled by governments to hand over this information," Wyden wrote.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
by Jtsummers | 2025-07-21 18:15:24+00:00
If I wrote "a square is a rectangle" would you also waste time shouting that rectangles aren't squares? I didn't write that all rectangles are squares. Nor did I write that all caching is memoization.

Even your quote doesn't support your quibbling. It says that memoization is distinct from other forms of caching. Which does not mean that it is not a form of caching.

EDIT: Removed a particularly rude bit.
by gavinhoward | 2025-07-21 18:15:26+00:00
I hope that FOSS work is never a burden, but that's too idealistic. For some, FOSS work is a burden on them and their loved ones.

To those for whom it is, please don't feel obligated to continue. I haven't, and I made this public so that others will be able to discard their feelings of obligation.

Let's get paid to hold up the sky.
by xwowsersx | 2025-07-21 18:15:51+00:00
I mean, yes many policymakers still struggle with the nuances of modern tech, but claiming that "the needle hasn't moved" in 25 years is an exaggeration. In the late 90s/early 2000s, encryption debates featured lawmakers who barely understood email. Since then, there are committees focused specifically on tech policy, even some lawmakers with backgrounds in CS or cybersecurity... and far more nuanced public debates about encryption, surveillance, and privacy.

I recently listened to some clips from a hearing with questions about zero-knowledge proofs, algorithmic transparency, etc...this was pretty unthinkable two decades ago. Some agencies and legislative bodies also now have technical staffers and some advisory boards with technologists. So, yeah it it slow and sometimes frustrating, but it's not static.
by acdha | 2025-07-21 18:15:53+00:00
Every alternative was massively better for two key reasons: the first is that it happened on the server where you knew about it and could control what happened[1], and because you only had one kind of server to monitor whereas client side errors had to be tested in a wide range of client OS and browser combinations, much larger than today where automatic updates are just taken for granted.

There was a third way in which PHP was often better: continuing after errors has drawbacks from a security and correctness perspective but as a user it was often the case that you could read what you wanted on a partially functioning page. I think we’ve largely matured out of the point where that’s good, but people often did benefit at the time.

1. remember, this was before things like Sentry happened for front end error collection, and XML-related issues still can’t be handled by JavaScript even now.
Show HN: Lotas – Cursor for RStudio
by jorgeoguerra | 2025-07-21 18:16:10+00:00
Hey HN! We’re Jorge and Will from Lotas (https://www.lotas.ai/), and we’ve built an AI coding assistant into RStudio (think Cursor for RStudio).

RStudio is used by about 2 million data scientists and academics, but they currently lack a coding assistant within their IDE. Developers in other environments benefit from tools like Cursor and Windsurf, but R users don’t have any equivalent tools to speed up their workflow. Since ~80% of R programmers prefer to use RStudio over other IDEs like VSCode to write R code, we figured a tool like this one could be quite useful.

Both of us were PhD students at Harvard. Jorge was in the biophysics program and Will was in the biostatistics program where most people used RStudio every day. We saw how integrated code assistants were taking off in other IDEs, but we noticed that the RStudio integrations were still lagging far behind. Many R users were copying and pasting code from ChatGPT to build their workflows, and this was clearly slow and fragile.

To bring the Cursor-like experience to RStudio users, we built Rao (https://www.lotas.ai/): a fork of RStudio with an embedded AI assistant that is aware of the user’s local context (both files and variable environment), can read and write files, can run code or commands, and can interpret textual or visual output. It works with any of the file formats already in RStudio (R, notebooks including RMDs and QMDs, Python, Stan, etc.), allowing R programmers to iteratively perform entire data analyses inside their preferred IDE.

Other AI data science tools are either (1) built on the web or in environments people don’t already use, (2) are completely focused on python notebooks, or (3) are weak package-based assistants with limited functionality. Rao is exactly like the RStudio IDE that millions of data scientists already use, but it incorporates a powerful AI assistant and works with all the standard file types.

You can download Rao at https://www.lotas.ai/download, watch our demo on the homepage (https://www.lotas.ai/), and work through some example use cases on our GitHub (https://github.com/lotas-ai/rao/tree/main/demos). We have a one-week free trial (no card required) and provide 500 queries/month for $20/month after that. We’d love to hear feedback from the HN community to make Rao as useful as possible! You can reach us at founders@lotas.ai.

P.S. We have zero data retention (ZDR) agreements with OpenAI and Anthropic, but we currently recommend users do not input sensitive or regulated data like PHI into Rao until we sign BAAs with both model providers. For more information on our security practices, please visit the security page on our website https://www.lotas.ai/security.
by tetha | 2025-07-21 18:16:25+00:00
W7x has a pellet injection system now.

This is shared in the better article here: https://www.ipp.mpg.de/5532945/w7x

> During the record-setting experiment, about 90 frozen hydrogen pellets, each about a millimeter in size, were injected over 43 seconds, while powerful microwaves simultaneously heated the plasma. Precise coordination between heating and pellet injection was crucial to achieve the optimal balance between heating power and fuel supply.
by freedomben | 2025-07-21 18:16:41+00:00
I think the hard thing with this though is that you can ask them to do things you'd never expect of an intern, and they can sometimes be super helpful. For example, I have a synchronous audit log in an app on a table that is just getting way too big and it's causing performance issues on writes. For kicks I tried working through Claude Code to see if it could find the issue on it's own, then with some hinting, and what solutions it would come up with. Some of it's solutions were indeed intern-level suggestions (like make the call async and do a sleep in tons of other areas to avoid race conditions, despite me telling it that the request needed to fail if it couldn't be logged properly), but in other ways it came up with possible solutions that were interesting and I hadn't considered before. In other words, it acted like a Sr engineer at some points with thought partnering, while in other places it acted like an over-eager but underqualified intern.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-07-21 18:16:56+00:00
From the article:

Remember the year: 2025 was when it all changed. When socials transformed from self-expression to entrapment.

I have to disagree with the 2025 part of this. While this admin has made the 100mi Constitution Free Zone even more hostile, practices like leveraging SM accounts against us have been ramping up for most of a decade.

refs: https://www.techdirt.com/2017/02/09/dhs-secretary-says-agenc...

https://www.techdirt.com/2018/01/02/dhs-documents-show-haras...

https://www.techdirt.com/2018/12/17/report-cbps-border-devic...
by codyb | 2025-07-21 18:17:31+00:00
I read a NYT's article that said heat stroke's much more common in the start of summer than the end, so I made a conscious effort to get out walking a ton during this years first heat dome... and I'm pretty sure it works pretty well?

Even on humid, hot days with feels like 100 I can get out and bike pretty dang far at this point (non-electric 45 lb Citi Bikes here in NYC)

The downside is that I start sweating absolutely profusely basically the moment I step outside now :sob:

For context here though, much prefer the cold, and have never been a fan of the hot, humid, heat really unless I'm at the beach. But this year's been decent!
by fragmede | 2025-07-21 18:18:08+00:00
Interesting. My thoughts are from the other direction. As someone who's been programming for a while, if we presume novices (with money) are using LLMs to write programs but that the LLMs are getting stuck, and they just need some (human) help fixing their code, then I'm happy to help them untangle their mess, if they pay me for my time.
by blindstitch | 2025-07-21 18:18:10+00:00
My life is given meaning by my relationships with my partner and family, pursuing my passions and hobbies, semi yearly bicycle trips, petting my cat etc. Its meaning is chipped away at when I hear about random grandparents black bagged at the home depot; the idea that immense and pointless suffering is being meted out an underclass supposedly for my benefit, without any significant way to protest or stop it without focusing those dark forces upon myself.
by tshadley | 2025-07-21 18:18:23+00:00
Yes, OpenAI:

https://x.com/alexwei_/status/1946477754372985146

> 6/N In our evaluation, the model solved 5 of the 6 problems on the 2025 IMO. For each problem, three former IMO medalists independently graded the model’s submitted proof, with scores finalized after unanimous consensus. The model earned 35/42 points in total, enough for gold!

That means Google Deepmind is the first OFFICIAL IMO Gold.

https://x.com/demishassabis/status/1947337620226240803

> We've now been given permission to share our results and are pleased to have been part of the inaugural cohort to have our model results officially graded and certified by IMO coordinators and experts, receiving the first official gold-level performance grading for an AI system!
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-07-21 18:18:52+00:00
Many people prefer a cold glass of water compared to the cool to room-temperature water that comes out of the tap (Hence the refrigerator for cooling). Filtering at the individual level is typically done for flavor, because depending on where you live, while the water is probably safe to drink (assuming HN readership demographics), it may or may not be particularly pleasant. Even here in the Bay Area, where we have that sweet, sweet Hetch-Hetchy water, I know people who live in buildings with pipes bad enough that they filter their water.
by emthrowaway123 | 2025-07-21 18:19:03+00:00
This seems cool and mostly aligns with how I think about developer processes around AI.

However, there are so many god damn colors on the page that I have no idea what I'm looking at. I want to see important things highlighted by color so I know what your thing does, but you have absolutely everything highlighted and with so many different colors, it's just a frustrating experience. I'd suggest getting a UX review, focusing the information you're presenting to 1-3 things, and making it easier to grok.