MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mlsu | 2025-07-21 19:12:21+00:00
> Our family once bought a Nordic chess set my then-seven-year-old son was excited to use. He asked me whether we could play it together, and I said, “Sure!” He then asked me to put it on my calendar, and watched until I had done so. This was a devastating moment of sudden realization for me.

> Only you can answer whether the sacrifices are worth it.

Nah, not only you.

I think a good appendix to this article would be an interview with the 7 year old. If this was my dad, I'd probably strangle him.
by Animats | 2025-07-21 19:12:41+00:00
The CIA used to be in charge of the US intelligence community, at least on paper. But since 2004, there's the Director of National Intelligence, who heads an organization with about 1700 people. They supervise CIA, NSA, NRO, and the armed services intelligence agencies, and control the flow of information to the President. They create the President's Daily Brief, which the CIA used to generate. (Not to be confused with someone's podcast of the same name.) Tulsi Gabbard is the current DNI.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-07-21 19:12:42+00:00
"After launching 37 different products over the last few years, I've had one go viral and almost all the others struggle to get any traction at all."

Imagine if these "products" were subject to the laws of product liability in the United States like real products sold there.

Why do software developers call websites or apps "products". Why not just call them "websites", "apps" or just "software".

For example,

"After creating 37 different websites and apps over the last few years, I've had one go viral and almost all the others struggle to get any traction at all."

Is "products" more descriptive. Is it some sort of signalling. Do developers want there software to be treated like tangible products.
by sershe | 2025-07-21 19:13:32+00:00
I complained the same way about Speed 40, my 2011 one is more intact than 2018 one and I use it more even after buying the newer one. According to people in the outdoor industry the materials are noticeably more flimsy cause everyone wants ultralight ultralight ultralight ultralight. Nobody wants sturdy. Just look at carbon poles .. these things have no reason to exist unless you are setting a winter record on PCT. But they all but replaced much sturdier aluminum poles. Interestingly a few years ago this brand was suggested to me as one of those bucking the trend, but I guess that didn't last.
by oceanplexian | 2025-07-21 19:13:34+00:00
The electric company isn't "entitled" to their subscribers either.

My city recently enacted a tax on solar called a generation fee or something like that. That is, if you put up solar panels, generate all your own power, and export ZERO back to the grid you need to pay them "fee" for every kWh generated because they are making less back in distribution costs to their subscribers since you stopped buying their power.

Sounds to me like their broken business model is their problem. After doing the math in some places it make sense to disconnect completely, avoid the interconnect fees, and run a standby generator for the edge cases where solar doesn't work. I've heard this is becoming popular in places like Australia and California more recently (Of course, then the government tries to make living off grid illegal to protect electric company profits)
by gtowey | 2025-07-21 19:13:52+00:00
From the article he sounds like just another rich guy with a god complex.

He says existence is the most important thing in the world, but also says he supports RFK Jr's attempt to burn down the whole medical & health industry because it will cause innovation as people to scramble to fill the voids -- while ignoring the inevitable death and suffering that will result.

He says money doesn't matter much to him, but becomes irate when the journalist asks him about his ex-fiancee who he claims tried to extort money from him. And he sympathizes with people who had their illustrious careers destroyed by the me too movement when allegations of sexual abuse surfaced about them.

And then there's subtle hints that reveal more than he realizes about his thinking:

> Most people today spend every waking moment pursuing wealth; and the time they’re not spending pursuing wealth, they’re pursuing some sort of status or prestige.

I don't agree -- most people in his circle of rich guys do this. It's revelatory because it shows his understanding of the world is quite myopic. It's the dreaded main-character syndrome inherent to so many of these rich assholes.
by epistasis | 2025-07-21 19:14:55+00:00
I love Steven Salzburg, but he's missing the main point here:

23andMe could have been sold to someone that is not based in California which would result in a loss of many protections currently there, such as being able to have the data be deleted.

Sure, the data is not that valuable. Nobody really cares that is doing serious decision making based on good science or following the law.

I think he also ignores a new risk that's developing: bad tests. Current polygenic risk scores are all the rage, but they are very close to junk science, and if not created and applied very very carefully, far more carefully than most machine learning models, they will be junk.

So even if there's nothing in your DNA that could be used to discriminate against you, bad application of the technology could harm (or benefit) you, completely randomly. All because some pointy haired boss demanded that a bad model gets built and applied, whether or not the engineers knew what they were doing or gave proper warning to management.

This isn't just health care, it could be admissions to a private school, or the application for an apartment or NYC housing co-op, or whatever.

That's a serious risk, that some junk company uses the data in completely inappropriate ways, once the data is out in the wild.

Why not delete? There's zero benefit to the consumer to keep the data in 23andMe, at least for this consumer. Others that want to connect with 5th cousins might think differently of course.

But the point is that it's a personal decision and we all have different values and wants.
by JamesSwift | 2025-07-21 19:15:14+00:00
In many ways, images are a big reason why things naturally become inefficient. We are up to a 3x scale factor now and so just by virtue of the higher resolution display we are at 3x the pixels for a given image at a given display size.

And apps are much more image heavy now with network/cpu speeds improving to support real time image loading/decoding.
by bityard | 2025-07-21 19:15:31+00:00
> Putting tariffs on solar equipment imports is an insane self-defeat. We should be importing as much cheap solar and battery gear as we can get our hands on.

The tariffs are going to impact me heavily because I had planned on buying a shitload of solar in the next 3-5 years. If the price on solar triples in that timeframe (as the price on other things has in the last few years), I will not be "going solar" after all except for a few small hobby projects.

That being said, we should not lose sight of the fact that the REASON solar is cheap right now is because it manufactured almost exclusively in the far east, at cost, subsidized by a communist state, to stifle worldwide competition. I don't think that is good for the world either. There is likely (hopefully) a middle ground here somewhere.
by johnisgood | 2025-07-21 19:15:49+00:00
It is responsible for the difficulty of buying and selling to make use of it, however, which I assumed is what he meant. As for BTC transaction time, well, there are many different, widely used cryptocoins (e.g. Ethereum) out there. Anyways, it can be pretty much instant, it depends on the fee you are willing to spend. The costs and the satoshis required are also not static. Today you may need only 1 sat / vB to have your transaction confirmed in 5-10 minutes, and 10 sat / vB a week from now. If you have issues with taking a long ass time to get it confirmed, increase the fee. You may have it confirmed instantly just for 0.5 EUR. Judging by the stats, BTC seems chill these days, so it shouldn't cost too much, and it should get confirmed relatively quickly.
by cryptonector | 2025-07-21 19:15:52+00:00
> The peak and decline of US oil production...

The peak and decline of global oil production -not just U.S.- has been predicated for longer than I am alive. It's still in the future, and reserves have grown significantly. And the U.S. has natural gas reserves that are enormous, so at least the energy side is covered (though not non-fuel things like plastics and lubricants).

As for U.S. ship building... that could probably be fixed, though it will take years, but not so many that the USN's current advantages dissipate completely.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-07-21 19:15:56+00:00
It's a completely different ballgame

Houses don't tend to have consistent electricity usage. Think of the electricity usage for a suburb. Chances are it's almost 0 most days. People get home and turn on the stove, the washer, the TV, etc. Big demand spikes at certain times of day, low demand for the rest

Commercial usage goes the opposite direction. Higher during the day when stores and offices are open, lower overnight

Industrial usages tend to be more consistent, but constant. Factories don't shut down overnight, but they have high constant requirements

But as a power company you are supplying all of this. You have to supply a consistent load that satisfies all of these usecases. It's all one grid after all, outside of some very unusual cases

And if you oversupply too much you break the grid. If you undersupply then stuff that relies on you shuts down and breaks

It's very much a goldilocks problem, which is non-trivial to optimize or automate
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-21 19:16:29+00:00
This is not the same thing. They trust themselves to track and monitor us, but not commercial parties.

I of course trust neither, but I do have to say they are doing good stuff limiting bad actors like Google and Microsoft. I just wish they would do more (e.g. ban third party cookies and tracking outright rather than forcing us to choose every time).
by hombre_fatal | 2025-07-21 19:17:10+00:00
If you're stagnating in an entry level job and barely making ends meet, your wife might want you to put your head down or escalate into better job opportunities, and that's a sensible decision.

If you're an engineer at Meta and your wife/kid want you to work even more, then they probably prefer to spend time with your wife's boyfriend, and you deserve some reckoning.
by loteck | 2025-07-21 19:17:13+00:00
This commentary attempts to reassure people about staying with 23 and me, but ultimately ends up concluding that there's virtually nothing useful to be gleaned from the data created from the 23 and me process.

Author dismissed privacy concerns in the same way we see others downplay it: you already are giving up your privacy in other parts of your life, why not give it up here, too? Total nonsense, IMO.

The conclusion I came to from this, that I don't believe the author intended, is that you should delete your data from this company because it is pointless.
by BuildTheRobots | 2025-07-21 19:18:18+00:00
Sorry, I completely misunderstood what they said. My mental picture was the equipment being _in_ the room attached to the patient (and safe to be so), but the person being stuck outside unable to easily intervene. My experience with MRIs is always being alone in a room which backed that up.

I'm not even thinking of this incident. My base query is why MRI patients seem to always be alone in the room. Ignore all the anaesthetics too; I've seen them refuse to let a nervous patients family member stand in the room during the scan even though it could completely calm the patient... that's what seems odd to me. This is based on UK hospital experiences; I'm not sure if it's universal.

The incident in question is sad and seems avoidable, but I hadn't even got that far yet; I got stuck on the top(ish) comment of "(Once the patient was anesthetized and the heavy door to the MRI machine room was closed and locked,) - I could only monitor my unconscious patient through a darkened heavy glass window". My thinking went "surely being in the room would be better" -> "they never seem to let anyone in the room" -> "why not?" - and then I confused you and we ended up here :)
by acct-litter-al | 2025-07-21 19:18:43+00:00
I once put some aluminum duct tape completely over the touch pad of an old laptop to see what would happen. Turns out it induced enough "eddy currents" to make the mouse move around the screen without me touching it--in a way, visualizing the currents!

I connected the foil to ground using a small strip of the tape to the ground metal of a USB port on the side and it disabled the touch pad.
by hn92726819 | 2025-07-21 19:18:52+00:00
> It's very arcane and difficult to follow unless you live and breathe the thing

I used to think this before I actually read how it worked. If you know shell, jq is extremely easy to pick up. It acts the exact same way, but pipes JSON entities instead of bytes ("text") like shell does.

Like the Unix philosophy, every filter does exactly one thing very well. Like shell, you write it incrementally, one filter at a time.

Genuinely, I do not blame you for thinking it's complex. I have never seen a concise, correct explanation of how jq works that builds an intuitive understanding. I have a near-complete one, and it's on my todo list to eventually publish it.

Anyway, I don't mean to say more lines is always worse, but that it is worse about half the time. Python is certainly more readable, but I'd rather spend 60 seconds making a long pipeline than 10 minutes making it work in python.

Want to count lines in a file? wc -l. Compress a directory? tar -zcf. Send that compressed file somewhere? Pipe it to ssh. Each of those is an ordeal in python and it's around 10 keystrokes in shell.
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-21 19:19:23+00:00
You only require AWS if you build something to run on AWS. That's the thing. You can easily run it on something else, just build it for that specifically. Now, AWS-style services have become somewhat of an industry standard (e.g. S3 offered by countless operators). But still, I think offering AWS style services is a weakness because you can never become better than the original.

And cloud is only really cost-effective when it comes to startups that have not much cash flow but expect/hope to explode rapidly by going viral. Cloud gives them that kind of infinite scaling and the ability to pay as they go (the uptick in clients will pay for the increased hosting when they do make it).

In Europe this kind of business model is very rare though. We don't just spin stuff up like a weather balloon and hope it floats.
by tayo42 | 2025-07-21 19:19:30+00:00
No but maybe 4 years? Plus growth in savings and investments from the rest of a software engineers highly paid career? 10 years without staff level income has me at around a million already. Pay off a house and do what ever you want with another million.Plus you can use that money to pay down high interest loans like mortgages and save more

Edit: never work again doesn't have to be the goal, 2-3mil in the bank, everything paid off. I can get a job writing low stress Haskell and rust or something pointless and still make Sr eng money, like a measly 200k lol
by mlsu | 2025-07-21 19:19:32+00:00
I lean reflexively libertarian on housing (mostly just my psychological NIMBY backlash). Therefore my take is that the market would naturally accomplish the scheme you've described, no need for policy, if we simply remove constraints on supply. Basically, the "stop hitting yourself" policy of housing :)

Unfortunately it doesn't work that way and never will, not just because of NIMBY but because of the reasons I outlined above.
by colechristensen | 2025-07-21 19:20:22+00:00
>Looks like it's about 12 cents (in USD) more expensive on average per kwh in Germany than Cali

What is? Consumer energy prices?

Apples-to-apples consumer energy prices are difficult between the US and EU, Germany has historically had particularly high energy prices for various reasons, taxation is significantly different. Also they were a heavy importer of Russian gas and foolishly dismantled their entire nuclear generation capacity, so there are other reasons why their energy prices are high. The peaking energy costs caused by the Ukraine/Russia war have gone down.
by crazygringo | 2025-07-21 19:21:35+00:00
> I have multiple times seen an "Out for Delivery" package switch to "Delivered" or "Delivery Attempted" at 10pm

Exactly this, it's infuriating.

And you can usually tell because a) it's marked as delivered at a time rounded to a perfect hour, like 2:00 pm or 9:00 pm (not 8:34 pm), and b) there's no delivery photo, when there always is otherwise.

But yeah, it's the driver not being able to make all deliveries (probably not their fault), but needing to fake the metrics. Usually they drop it off the next day or two days later, but other times it just gets lost, and it's harder to get a refund from the seller because it says delivered. So e.g. eBay will side with the seller in a dispute.
by vonneumannstan | 2025-07-21 19:22:00+00:00
Im sorry but how does this possibly jive with what you literally just said?

> In the MRI suite, no one could hear my silent screams if I got in trouble nor were there knowledgeable extra hands to, for example, squeeze the breathing bag if I needed to prepare for an emergency intubation.

Presumably the patient just dies in that scenario that you are supposedly qualified and prepared for?
by jkmcf | 2025-07-21 19:22:09+00:00
I quit using 1password around 3 years ago

I haven't checked recently, but 1P may still the best option for WE vs I.

1password has a very similar model to lastpass, that had 16bln creds leaked.

Except that 1P has been very security conscious since day 1 (which is a freaking long time ago!). Maybe an insider could give us some dirt...
by karaterobot | 2025-07-21 19:22:14+00:00
I didn't find it to be defending the CIA's failures in any way.

The CIA didn't call Trump its adversary, the reviewer of the book did. They also said that Trump was the Agency's adversary, not the other way around. It is also possible to be adversarial against an individual while doing a good job working for them (see for example everyone with a boss they don't like).

I wouldn't read too much about the intentions of the intelligence community into that provocative sentence by an unaffiliated book reviewer.
by ilamont | 2025-07-21 19:22:14+00:00
It's a start. The world needs a better way to handle bookkeeping, and the existing tools sure aren't cutting it.

Bookkeeping for my small business runs into the tens of thousands of dollars every year, and the amount of human error associated with processing assorted ecommerce and other transactions is astounding, even after extensive planning and SOPs.

The other pain point is Quickbooks. The tool is so sprawling and complex that half the time support agents can't figure out what's wrong. The fact that Intuit jacks up the price every year for this POS is very irritating. They get away with it because they are practically a monopoly, with most small business CPAs locked into their ecosystem.

Hope your team can work out the performance issues. Alternatives to the current bookkeeping options are sorely needed.
by wcoenen | 2025-07-21 19:22:21+00:00
I once got an email about the funeral arrangements for somebody's mother. I know this person very well, because he uses my email address for everything. I know what internet subscription he has. I know where he bought his e-bike. Where he goes on holiday. Etc.

And he's actually not the only person doing this! As far as I can tell, the only unusual thing about my Gmail is that it's relatively short and has no numbers. I suspect people just forget to add the digits at the end of their own address.
by throwaway7783 | 2025-07-21 19:22:22+00:00
Yeah. Warring people always say that if their side wins the outcome will be better, of course. Look at Israle/Hamas

I was responding to gp, maybe wrong part of the thread. << "Colonialism was great. It literally took continents out of pre history and brought them to the civilized world". If this is not justification for war, I don't know what is.

And how do they know in the absence of colonialism, but just trade, these countries couldn't/wouldn't become advanced? I can equally say colonialism is what has left many of these countries in poverty and border disputes.
by theamk | 2025-07-21 19:22:28+00:00
> But mainly, the SCP project is a community of real human people. I'm interested in what they have to say. I'm much less interested in what a machine has to say. I don't think it's unreasonable for a swimming club to reject members who show up in motorised watercraft, regardless of how well these watercraft can "swim".

That, so much that. It's amazingly sad how many AI proponents don't understand you don't bring jetski to a swim competition.
by jajko | 2025-07-21 19:22:39+00:00
If you live to work, all the power to you. Just don't get kids, the world has enough broken folks who are struggling their whole lives to overcome their childhood and their father figure (or the lack of it). They carry the traumas right into their own relationships, often repeating same mistakes. Listen to people a bit since its easy to notice if you know what to look for, its proper pandemic under the hood in all directions.

The ones I've met in this category, always a stellar career, but what was at home, if anything, was less then stellar and the link to corresponding personality traits was pretty obvious. Now I don't think its exclusively either/or situation for everybody, but for most of us it is and certainly would be for me.

I prefer putting down the foot from throttle after some hard-earned leaps in life, and enjoy family time and me time. Right now planning final touches for a 2 week solo adventure vacation in remote Indonesian islands (Togian). Thats after spending 4 weeks of vacations this year with family, and planning another 4-5 together till end of year. While getting paid top 1% of European software dev salaries. Don't need more work wise, there is literally nothing positive that career progression can bring to my life.

Company has rather flat salary structure once you put in enough years, so even moving 2 positions up wouldn't bring much more cash. Work would be much less creative and stress and politics would rise significantly. Good place for some high functioning sociopaths, not so much for more sane folks. Literally would get paid worse per some imaginary mental energy unit put in. No, thank you I am fine.
by smsm42 | 2025-07-21 19:22:40+00:00
"Dismantling" is very far from what is happening. "Slightly reducing" would be more accurate - even if we concentrate on the discretionary budget, i.e. start with ignoring 3/4 of the whole federal spending - the projected 2025 spending is around $1.6 trln, where 2024 was at $1.8 trln. It is a cut of about 12%, which is substantial, as federal budgets go, but nowhere near "dismantling". If we dig further down and ignore defense and security spending (which is the whole point of this post, but let's go wild!) then it's projected that 2025 figure would be about $710 bln, down from $910 bln in 2024. Thats about 22% reduction (Trump's cuts, unsurprisingly, mostly go to nondefense budget parts) - again, a substantial reduction, but nowhere near "dismantling".

In fact, the government, spending 7 trillion dollars per year, does not look "dismantled" to me, dwarfing the GDP of every country on Earth excluding USA and China. And this is not likely to change much in the rest of Trump's term, more likely these are the biggest cuts we will see and some of them may even be quietly rolled back later in the term.