MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nostrademons | 2025-07-28 18:03:44+00:00
Tao is talking about systems, which are self-sustaining dynamic networks that function independently of who the individual actors and organizations within the system are. You can break up the monopoly at the heart of the blue team system (as the U.S. did with Standard Oil and AT&T) and it will just reform through mergers over generations (as it largely has with Exxon Mobil and Verizon). You can fire or kill all the people involved and they will just be replaced by other people filling the same roles. The details may change, but the overall dynamics remain the same.

In this case, all the companies who are doing what you describe are themselves the red team. They are the unreliable, additive, distributed players in an ecosystem where the companies themselves are disposable. The blue team is the blue team by virtue of incentives: they are the organization where proper functioning of their role requires that all the parts are reliable and work well together, and if the individual people fulfilling those roles do not have those qualities, they will fail and be replaced by people who do.
by kstrauser | 2025-07-28 18:03:47+00:00
Asking here instead of searching, for conversational purposes:

In the 90s, some STD training I took said it was highly unlikely for otherwise healthy bio women to contract HIV from a man (ie compared to sex trafficked women in poor health), with the claim that vaginal sex is less susceptible to micro tearing that allows easy transmission than anal sex is.

I didn’t really question this at the time because it seemed plausible and I believed the people who were telling us this. (Note: this was in a medical context, not someone trying to scare us.) Is there any credibility to that idea now that we have more data, and hopefully leased biased science than we had in the 80s?
by thatcherc | 2025-07-28 18:03:51+00:00
> The analog ones are easy to play with. You just need a DAC to drive their VCO and then can sample the I/Q pins with an ADC

Do you have any reference or notes on how to access the IQ pins on one of these devices (ideally one of the FMCW ones)? I've been wanting to play around with one of these 24 GHz or 60 GHz units for coherent radar but it seems like most of the boards only report on distances over serial links. If there's an easy way to tap into the analog IF signal after down conversion I'd love to see how to do that!
by bee_rider | 2025-07-28 18:04:19+00:00
Ya know, maybe you are right. At least ideally. Actually, I jumped in with the best intentions and now I’m having second thoughts about what I wrote, haha.

I dunno. People end up with aspects of their identity that they have trouble contending with, in any case. I neither want to downplay that nor make it seem like a bigger deal than it ought to be. If the researcher is reporting that people are having trouble coming to terms with it (the genetic information specifically and in isolation), then it is a real problem, but I think I agree that it shouldn’t be. And also, it is a short quote by the researcher and not super detailed, so maybe it is actually the case that people are taking a while to come to terms with the medical meaning anyway.
by bell-cot | 2025-07-28 18:04:30+00:00
> Does raising the alarm about...

No - but after a few decades of endless "raising the alarm" (so pretty much everybody who might possibly care has lost track of how often they've heard that message), the impression which it gives is a mixture of:

- Sports cheerleading. The kids in school-colors uniforms, bouncing around with pom-poms and chanting "Our Team Will Win!", are not there to inform anyone. Let alone change their minds. It's an in-group feel-good exercise, for the benefit of folks who already are fans of that team.

- A person suffering from dementia, who repeats the same phrase or sentence over and over and over. Their words may reflect an important truth - "nurse, I need help to the bathroom". But the broken-record behavior pattern also guarantees that almost no one will believe the person to be a mentally competent adult.

(It's usually the start of the Dangerous Mad Scientist's monologue where he outlines what he has decided is Wrong With the World. Regardless of what other people think. It's usually a bit later in his monologue where he talks about how he plans to Fix The Problem, without regard for the consent of anyone else. That later stuff is where the danger music gets the loudest. And where these scientists seemed all-to-eager to go.)
by geekymartian | 2025-07-28 18:04:41+00:00
I'm wary of these "I don't use an IDE anymore, just chat with claude-code".

It's like playing a game of blindfold navigation and you need to direct somebody to get somewhere by shouting commands "go left, no, no go right, my right".

I do use claude-code, but you can't ditch the code editor because you got to tweak things here and there. It gets very time consuming if you rely on claude for small stuff also. Merely the roundtrip to apply some small changes through Claude can take longer than just go and edit the file.
by specproc | 2025-07-28 18:04:43+00:00
Not sure why this was downvoted, maybe the use of "foreigners" is a bit loaded, but this is basically it.

Every inch of our economy is now owned by some faceless fund. All serious capital generated in the country is extracted out into the pockets of fund managers and Californian pensioners.

We're screwed until we can stem the outflow. I always thought taxing money leaving the country might be interesting way to approach the problem.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-07-28 18:04:54+00:00
> They don't have the insane amounts of capital that arose in Silicon Valley as a result of the Bretton Woods system.

Why would you say all personal finance advisors from Europ advise their clients to invest at least 50% in the US? The aggressive ones suggest 70-90%. 53% of The Norwegian sovereign fund is invested in the US, 24% in Europe and 23% the rest of the world. Their biggest investments are in Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Google, Amazon, Meta, Tesla, Broadcom, etc, as one would expect.

Why don't European investors move their investments from US index and into European companies and businesses? Norway alone has ~1 trillion Euros invested in the US. Surely they can move it to invest in European tech, no? that can make a couple of European AWSs.
by smeej | 2025-07-28 18:04:56+00:00
With all the data companies certainly have about traffic flow, it boggles my mind that there isn't a company out there selling city-wide "traffic light optimization" where they come in, analyze the data, and set the traffic lights to optimize traffic flow. Heck, sell it as a subscription where the analysis continues running and factors in things like major events or road closures automatically.

Noise and air pollution would go down. Time waiting in traffic would go down. Crashes would go down.

Of all the things that have been optimized in the worod today by algorithmic analysis of data, it just surprises me that this hasn't been one of them.
by philipkglass | 2025-07-28 18:05:23+00:00
It was developed by Gilead Sciences, Inc. The way they can afford to make it cheap for people who can't pay is by charging high prices for insured Americans. You can see this with their earlier developed treatment for hepatitis C:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilead_Sciences#Pricing

Gilead came under intense criticism for its high pricing of its patented drug sofosbuvir (sold under the brand name Sovaldi), used to treat hepatitis C. In the US, for instance, it was launched at $1,000 per pill or $84,000 for the standard 84-day course, but it was drastically cheaper in the developing world; in India, it dropped as low as $4.29 per pill.

Low priced HIV drugs for the poor is part PR and part pragmatism. Poor people can't pay the sorts of drug prices that insured Americans do, and poor countries aren't going to enforce drug patents purely for the benefit of American corporations, e.g.:

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

Gilead looks gracious by preemptively embracing the situation that was going to occur anyway (poor patients aren't going to pay high prices).
by flumpcakes | 2025-07-28 18:05:34+00:00
This is the exact system I suggested to a friend. I don't mind having to 'prove' my age, but I do not really want a third party to have my identifiable information nor do I really want the Government knowing what fetishes I may or may not have.

For a digital only solution, I think the best system would be some form of public-private key attestation:

The government advertises their public keys for 18+ verification.

A website generates a unique token - this token is then taken by the user and submitted to the government receiving a signed attestation. This can then be given back to the website to prove the user is 18. It only has to be done once per profile and no information is shared between the Government and the website on who is who.

Unless of course the token is saved by both the website and government in some forever database and then a lookup is done.

Another solution could be a timed/signed token produced by the government that has no input from the website. But this still has the downside that this could just be saved by both parties and in future you could identified if both sides compare data.
by brailsafe | 2025-07-28 18:05:43+00:00
Cool to know about, but I'm starting to get the impression that watching an LLM spit out hundreds of lines of rudimentary css is like the new buying a car to drive to the grocery store. When we look back on how we've trained ourselves to forget how to tolerate walking or design neighborhoods for livability, will we be happy we sacrificed the insects and air quality to do so?

Not intended to be dismissive though, I do it, it's just getting kind of icky to me.
by haswell | 2025-07-28 18:05:56+00:00
> I truly believe that if any company can be morally good, Gilead qualifies.

The primary reason Gilead exists in my memory is the headline years back about their exorbitantly high prices for a life saving hepatitis C drug and the resulting questions this was raising in congress ($84K for a 12 week supply) [0].

While it may be admirable that they are providing these drugs freely to countries in need, I’d be more hesitant to accept at face value the claim that US prices in particular are somehow reasonable on that basis. I also question the framing that those high prices are necessarily high. I’m less familiar with how they’ve priced things in recent years.

- [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7529435
by prmoustache | 2025-07-28 18:06:20+00:00
the original statement was that drivers do it all the time, wether the traffic light might pass green or not.

Many cyclists slow down when they see a traffic light being red with a lane of stopped car in front. Because cyclists understand physics and drivers are generally bad at anticipating events.. Almost universally a driver try a quick pass to brake check the cyclists and stop in front of the cyclist while it would be more efficient for both of them to gently slow down instead of stopping so they still have speed when the light go green.
by Eisenstein | 2025-07-28 18:06:29+00:00
You said 'but we wouldn't have a lot of improvement without telemetry'. I am saying that we could have a lot of improvement in a lot of things if we wanted. We could have breakthroughs in medicine if we allowed human experimentation. The question is, where is that that line? Your argument doesn't address that, it just tries to justify something that people think it morally wrong by stating that we get use from it.
by robenkleene | 2025-07-28 18:07:25+00:00
I think this point trends into HCI (e.g., https://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDes...) but I think the overarching phenomena you're describing is that custom interfaces are usually superior to adaptions to the mouse/keyboard.

There are many areas where custom hardware interfaces are popular used in conjunction with software:

- MIDI controllers (note both for the piano keys, and for the knobs/sliders, and even foot pedals)

- Jog wheels for NLEs

- Time-coded vinyl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinyl_emulation

- WACOM Tablets

All of these custom hardware interfaces accomplish the same thing: They make using the software more tactile and less abstract. Meaning you replace abstract-symbol lookup (e.g., remembering a shortcut or menu item) with muscle memory (e.g., playing a chord on a piano).

So TLDR, the reason that we don't have what you're looking for is that we don't have a good way to simulate clay and wood as hardware that interfaces nicely with software.

Note there's a larger point here, which I think is more what you were getting at. I think people sometimes expect (and I expected this when I was younger), that computers could invent new better interfaces to tasks (e.g., freed from the confinements of physics). Now I think this is totally the opposite, that the interfaces are usually better from the physical world (which makes sense if you think about it, often what were talking about are things that human beings have refined over thousands of years), and that enforcing the laws of physics usually actually makes things easier (e.g., we've been dealing with them since the moment we were born, we have a lot of practice).

Finally also note that custom hardware interfaces only tend to help across one axes (e.g., a MIDI controller only helps enter notes/control data). The software still ends up being complex because people also want all the things computers are good at that real world materials aren't, like redo/undo, combining back together things that have been broken apart, zooming in/out, seeing the same thing from several perspectives at once, etc...

PS I don't even know if the Holodeck or mind-link up would really help here, it's possible, but it's also possible it just difficult for our brains to describe what we want in a lot of cases. E.g., take just adjusting the exposure, you can turn it down, oh but wait I lost the violet highlight that I liked, how can I light this scene and keep that highlight and make it look natural. I don't know maybe this stuff does map to Holodeck/mind-link, but it's also possible that just having tons of options for every light really is the best solution to that.
by lynndotpy | 2025-07-28 18:08:56+00:00
I am personally surprised this isn't [flagged] [dead] already, I would have anticipated that too. Political topics tend to be flagged immediately, even when the politics had clear and immediate implication for the tech community.

Maybe this is a sign that consensus is shifting. It seems now that it's more politically risky to deny Israel's committing warcrimes than it is to acknowledge it.

While I agree with much of what this blogpost says, I am surprised it's still up, especially since there doesn't seem to be much implication for the tech community, or discussion about what it means. (It is significant that one of the countries most central to the worldwide tech community is committing genocide and is increasingly seen as a pariah state, but even then, that is not what's being discussed here.)

EDIT: I spoke to soon, this was [flagged] just as I posted my comment.
by qcnguy | 2025-07-28 18:09:30+00:00
No you aren't understanding correctly, at all.

Both of those men used the Nazi symbol as a warning: "this policy seems bad in a totalitarian way, like what those very bad people did in the 1930s, so we shouldn't be doing that". They didn't wear these symbols, nor present them as a representation of their own beliefs, nor glorify them in any way. They used them as a compact representation of where they feared the slippery slope can lead.

Discussing history, learning from it and avoiding a repeat of it is a foundational justification for political speech. If Germans cannot point to their own past to warn about the present - and under the current German government they clearly can't because people who do keep getting prosecuted - then they cannot learn from it and might well repeat it.

All of this is obvious. The last two paragraphs were already very clear in my previous post. There was no way to interpret them the way you did, so I don't believe you are arguing in good faith. At his trial, CJ Hopkins pointed out that mainstream German media routinely printed the swastika on their front page in relation to the AfD, yet they weren't prosecuted under the same legal theory he was being prosecuted under. The symbols aren't really banned. The judgement, when finally read out, didn't make any mention of the defense arguments at all. It was a show trial and everyone knew it, including independent journalists:

https://www.velazquez.press/p/scandalous-verdict-us-author-c...
by throwup238 | 2025-07-28 18:09:35+00:00
For the dryer think even simpler: get a Esp32 with a SW-420 vibration sensor, stick it on top of the machine somewhere, and look for vibrations. Since most dryers don’t have cycles, it’s really easy to detect if they’re running or not. There’s even a potentiometer on the SW-420 so you can adjust the sensitivity without reprogramming the ESP32.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-07-28 18:10:48+00:00
> should

that's doing a lot of heavy lifting. i don't mean to single this specific instance out, but i think therein lies a key component of the "controversy" - human beings allow themselves to believe that there is an implied or intentional order (God, "science" or something else guiding things). this may be the case, or it really may just be the eventual result of evolution over a long-enough time period.

personally... if there is a god/s worthy of worship, i can't fathom trying to interpret their will or intent of what "should" be, and i believe anybody who claims to know is either suffering from grandiosity, or a liar. that's why i don't treat arguments of "should" that come from an implied knowledge of the meaning of life very seriously. the only "should" i really think matters is that we "should" treat each other with respect and stop trying to box people into neat categories based on our disdain of their outward expression of their own lived experience.
by card_zero | 2025-07-28 18:10:49+00:00
I notice sometimes that there's a feedback loop where children like things that look like toys. Sometimes they say it out loud - look, it's for kids! - and they like these objects because of a sense of automatic ownership. So the whole brightly-colored-sparkly-smiley-plastic aesthetic might have only slight inherent interest for them, and more interest as a signal saying "this is yours, you have permission to play with it". Being covered in writing is the opposite signal.

It's a feedback loop because then of course toys are designed to look more and more like toys.
by 0xShadowRoot | 2025-07-28 18:10:58+00:00
[ Successful Hack ]

Executor: 0xShadowRoot Website: www.sec.gov Date: 2025-07-28 - 03:17 UTC Status: Full Server Access Level: Tier 1 Government Target

The SEC (United States Securities and Exchange Commission) website infrastructure has been successfully hacked. Financial listing databases, executive files, and unpublished market reports have been accessed. User privileges have been elevated and the internal control panel has been accessed.

We don't sell data, we send a message:

"Even the most powerful systems are compromised when basic principles are forgotten."

No ransom demand, no sabotage — just a reminder that security isn't all talk.

#ShadowLeaks #SEC_breached #cyberwarfare #Hacktivism2025
by JoshTriplett | 2025-07-28 18:11:07+00:00
> I struggle with the child tax credits. If I'm childless and move from 99,999 to 100,000 it doesn't change my situation at all. I don't think we can view that in the same light - it's a tax credit benefit, but it's not just a matter of earnings. The goal is to support lower income families, so the line has to be drawn somewhere, and whether it's gradual or not someone is still going to complain about it going away.

Having it go away is less of a problem than having it go away all at once. If it was phased out over a range of incomes such that every marginal dollar of gross is still a marginal increase in net, that'd solve the problem mentioned in this thread. Key property of a tax system: the function from gross income to net income should always be monotonically increasing.
by nrds | 2025-07-28 18:11:10+00:00
> ambiguities

It's important to note that ambiguities are something which exist in service of parser generators and the restricted formal grammars that drive them. They do not actually exist in the language to be parsed (unless that language is not well-specified, but then all bets are off and it is meaningless to speak of parsing), because they can be eliminated by side-conditions.

For example, one famous ambiguity is the dangling 'else' problem in C. But this isn't an actual ambiguity in the C language: the language has a side-condition which says that 'else' matches to the closest unmatched 'if'. This is completely unambiguous and so a recursive descent parser for C simply doesn't encounter this problem. It is only because parser generators, at least in their most academic form, lack a way to specify this side-condition that their proponents have to come up with a whole theory of "ambiguities". (Shockingly, Wikipedia gets this exactly right in the article on dangling else which I just thought to look up: "The dangling else is a problem in programming of parser generators".)

Likewise goes the problem of left-recursion. Opponents of recursive descent always present left-recursion as a gotcha which requires some special handling. Meanwhile actual programmers writing actual recursive descent parsers don't have any idea what these academics are talking about because the language that they're parsing (as it exists in their mind) doesn't feature left-recursion, but instead iteration. Left-recursion is only introduced in service of restricted formal grammars in which recursion is the only available primitive and iteration either doesn't exist or is syntactic sugar for recursion. For the recursive descent user, iteration is a perfectly acceptable primitive. The reason for the discrepancy goes back to side-conditions: iteration requires a side-condition stating how to build the parse tree; parser generators call this "resolving the ambiguity" because they can't express this in their restricted grammar, not because the language was ambiguous.
by linsomniac | 2025-07-28 18:11:32+00:00
I'm traveling for the next couple weeks and don't want to take my home or work laptop, so I'm setting up a nice, old Chromebook with NixOS. I've dabbled with NixOS before. But this time I have been using Claude Code to set it up, and it's really good at it. Makes it painless, even without being very experienced with NixOS.