MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JustExAWS | 2025-08-03 23:54:42+00:00
I am well aware of anti poaching agreements between partners or consulting agencies and clients. I am currently working for a consulting company (full time) and in the past I was an employee at AWS ProServe.

The contract states you can’t solicit employees under that arrangement. But either side’s employees are free to proactively outreach.

I’m not referring to “consulting companies” that are basically doing staff augmentation.

Neither is the case here
by supplied_demand | 2025-08-03 23:54:43+00:00
== the country had to import those adults from some other country whose people did have children==

Those people chose to come the US for the opportunity as they have throughout history, even when birth rates were high.

== Protecting and promoting families as a national policy is the right solution in my opinion==

So you agree that we don’t need to wait for more people to have kids to pay for the policy because we could just adjust our spending priorities. Glad we are on the same page.
by stephen_g | 2025-08-03 23:55:12+00:00
Yes, but it's kind of insulting when they make a song and dance of fake 'evidence-based policy' and community consultation, with a whole inquiry and inviting experts to testify in front of legislators and tell them that the bills are flawed and unworkable, and that the policy is flawed from the beginning, and they sit there asking questions and nodding and looking concerned, and then it's just roundly ignored...

This process also got thousands of public submissions, many of which would have been in opposition, but they didn't have time to go through them all so they only published a dozen or so...

It just makes a mockery of the whole thing.
by metalman | 2025-08-03 23:56:02+00:00
I cant imagine that light is a good proxy for growth, unless there were very good baseline maps that have been properly calibrated for the significant changes in the types of lights used and how they are bieng used......"dictators" lying should be a simple presumption....... which historicaly was confirmed by basic spycraft, in that least sexy of industrial chemicals ,hydrochloric acid, is still a very good indicator of total industrial capacity as it is used for all primary industrial production, and is the most used chemical world wide, but is now bulk shipped, instead of bieng produced localy. Back to light as a proxy and an indicator, the flip side would be to restrict light, and hide industrial locations, as is common in war zones....so....back to spycraft 2025 as to China....they realy REALY are building out there electrical grid , road and rail networks, and no one can doubt that they are not producing massive amounts of everything, andwhile they have an incetive to exagerate there growth, there wester adverseraries have an incentive to lie about the same thing..... the basic truth is that the world is definitly heading towards manufacturing overcapacity for everything, but that this is perversly bieng treated as a bad thing.....
by Dylan16807 | 2025-08-03 23:56:47+00:00
Worrying if you want to leave it unpowered. I made that an explicit part of the tradeoff. I don't value that feature very much, and I don't think many other people value it much either.

It's important to make people aware of that problem, but they can solve it in other ways.

I'd pay an extra $20 to upgrade a 0.25TB flash drive to SLC and get unlimited retention. For a drive in my computer, I don't need it and it would cost far more.

Edit: I could even get an extra hard drive just to act as a backup, and TLC+HDD would still be half the price of SLC.
by ofalkaed | 2025-08-03 23:58:00+00:00
Any chance you can elaborate on your use case? Part of why I submitted this is because I am not completely sure on when it is wise to use, I can see situations where it is clearly useful but things get fuzzy rather quickly.

Are you the monetus who used to post on the pd forums? If so, thanks, I have found some of my answers in threads which you contributed too and probably provided the solution too.
by Spivak | 2025-08-03 23:58:05+00:00
Required watching to put things into perspective of how powerful gerrymandering can be https://youtube.com/watch?v=Lq-Y7crQo44

There was a proposed (and failed) ballot initiative in Ohio that tried to address this in the only way you actually can. The tl;dr is that there is no such thing as a fair map and so the state would be required to gerrymander the districts to match the state-wide election results. Basically proportional representation with extra steps, but brings the "secret metric" in map making to the forefront and requires it be a specific value so you can't tune it to your favor.
by toast0 | 2025-08-03 23:58:31+00:00
How much ocean shipping of troops do we expect, though?

I think there are lots of real concerns about fleet construction, and fleet construction capacity [1]; but if the troop carriers we have work well enough, and we generally airship troops, I don't think we need to be building new ocean going troop carriers with any urgency. As these age out, it may not make sense to replace them.

[1] In WWII, existing shipyards retooled to make warships (as well as replacement cargo ships), and new shipyards were built. In 2025, there are few shipyards in the US and building new shipyards would be challenging... most of the suitable coastal properties are developed.
by 15155 | 2025-08-03 23:59:12+00:00
> Recent wargames predict the US will exhaust regional supplies of antiship missiles within days to weeks and those missiles have a lead time of years to build and the US only has a capacity of a few dozen a year.

We don't need to sink their warships, just their freighters leaving Brazil - which they cannot quickly replace.

An immediate lack of calories will sort out any military problem out remotely.

Sprinkle in ten thousand naval mines and things look very different.
by const_cast | 2025-08-04 00:00:07+00:00
> No, I’d call them innovative if that’s what the market was looking for.

Well you wouldn't call them anything because you'd be dead. But it's nice that even in death, you're still considering shareholder value above all else.

> Would you have said the same thing about a medieval blacksmith cresting a new type of sword?

I mean yeah, probably, if it's uniquely bad and uniquely dangerous.

Yes building evil things is evil. To me, that isn't controversial. If I build the torment nexus I'm probably an evil person.

Obviously, there's levels here, and I think appealing to... sigh... knives is pretty disingenuous.

Everything is a matter of scale. What's the difference between a nuclear bomb and a knife? I mean, besides plutonium. Scale. One can harvest the lives of millions in the blink of an eye, and one is a knife.

That's why I don't cut my bread with a nuclear warhead.
by rendall | 2025-08-04 00:01:08+00:00
Cities like Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, and New York all have high-density living, yet they do not exhibit the same divergence between satellite-observed light and reported GDP. If urban density were the primary cause of the mismatch, it would appear across both democratic and authoritarian countries.

Similarly, gains in energy efficiency, such as widespread LED adoption, are global and not limited to any regime type. The same applies to economic transitions from heavy industry to services and behavioral shifts toward indoor or screen-based activity; these are common across modern economies. However, the study finds that the light/GDP mismatch emerges selectively in authoritarian regimes once they pass the income threshold for certain types of foreign aid.

This pattern suggests that the divergence is not driven by modernization effects alone, but rather by systematic incentives to inflate economic data.
by slt2021 | 2025-08-04 00:01:43+00:00
the problem is CVs are screened by non-tech HR/recruiters, who lack the capacity to screen candidates. Because it is much easier to apply online with one click, each position is spammed with millions of CVs.

in response, for HR it is much easier to filter out CV if it lacks style, not substance. Therefore they look at bullet points like "Done X by Y%".

The proper way should be to limit the intake funnel: accept only a few applications per job, so that they can be screened properly by HRs by calling them, and talking to them and properly screening (old school style), instead of tossing their resume to the bin after 15 sec quick review
by _heimdall | 2025-08-04 00:01:52+00:00
I always try to throw schema validation of some kind in API calls for any codebase I really need to be reliable.

For prototypes I'll sometimes reach for tRPC. I don't like the level of magic it adds for a production app, but it is really quick to prototype with and we all just use RPC calls anyway.

For procudtion I'm most comfortable with zod, but there are quite a few good options. I'll have a fetchApi or similar wrapper call that takes in the schema + fetch() params and validates the response.
by milkkarten | 2025-08-04 00:02:07+00:00
We simulate large-scale agent societies where heterogeneous personas work, adapt, and vote—governed by an in-context planner optimizing social welfare.

The system models decentralized governance, dynamic tax policy, and institutional evolution—entirely via in-context reinforcement learning, no fine-tuning required.

Full paper (arXiv): https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15815
by andai | 2025-08-04 00:02:10+00:00
This kind of blew my mind when I realized that if you buy second hand and resell, you can own a product (often for years) for net zero dollars.

I was also delighted when I realized that instead of going through the hassle and cost of moving everything across the country, I could just sell it and buy roughly the same thing in the new place... again for net zero dollars! Teleportation!
by UglyToad | 2025-08-04 00:03:17+00:00
You're right, this was a fairly common failure state seen in the sample set. The previous reference or one in the reference chain would point to offset of 0 or outside the bounds of the file, or just be plain wrong.

What prompted this post was trying to rewrite the initial parse logic for my project PdfPig[0]. I had originally ported the Java PDFBox code but felt like it should be 'simple' to rewrite more performantly. The new logic falls back to a brute-force scan of the entire file if a single xref table or stream is missed and just relies on those offsets in the recovery path.

However it is considerably slower than the code before it and it's hard to have confidence in the changes. I'm currently running through a 10,000 file test-set trying to identify edge-cases.

[0]: https://github.com/UglyToad/PdfPig/pull/1102
by sivers | 2025-08-04 00:03:22+00:00
Wow. Last year I hired Peter Bex - a lead Chicken Scheme dev - to help me do the same thing! (Sinatra in Chicken Scheme.)

It passed the tests but I didn't put it on my Github because I realized I wasn't going to continue using it.

If anyone's interested, I could add it on Github I guess. sive.rs/contact
by mritterhoff | 2025-08-04 00:05:23+00:00
Sounds like "time banking", which has myriad flaws.

One of them is that your time is cheap when you're young and unskilled, and grows valuable as you grow old and become skilled (and have less time left). Each <unit of time> isn't equal for the same person, much less between them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_currency
by hungmung | 2025-08-04 00:05:40+00:00
There's a similar situation in Crater Lake National Park, possibly managed by the same people (they manage hospitality at quite a few NP's):

https://www.opb.org/article/2024/02/18/crater-lake-hospitali...

https://www.opb.org/article/2024/02/23/national-parks-servic...

They got terminated due to numerous fuel leaks, consistent food safety issues and a significant number of visitor complaints. Employee living conditions were described as filthy and disgusting. And they manage a bunch of parks, including Yosemite, Grand Canyon and Olympic NP's.
by supplied_demand | 2025-08-04 00:05:41+00:00
== But they don’t know how to reconcile “can save a few” with “can’t literally bring all poor people here without destroying our country.”==

It’s also possible that they hold a fundamentally different view than you and aren’t just naive idiots.

The phrase “destroying our country” is very charged and completely unsubstantiated in your comment. It’s almost like you are falling victim to the same type of emotional reaction you accuse others of holding.
by anonymousiam | 2025-08-04 00:05:41+00:00
Before TSA, I could arrive half an hour before my flight. Even though I've got TSA-PRE and Global Entry, I must still go through the theatrical screening processes. It's nonsense, and it has been responsible for massive economic losses, both from the TSA funding itself, and the burden placed on the traveling public.

I'm going to start flying JSX Airlines whenever possible to avoid this crap.

https://www.jsx.com
by throwaway422432 | 2025-08-04 00:05:59+00:00
This may be true of organisations that are funded by USAid, etc; so they essentially allow the Government of the day to execute policies while attempting to avoid responsibility when the "my tax money pays for what" questions arise.

A lot of NGOs/charities/foundations are simply vehicles for tax avoidance/reduction or nepotistic job creation. There are very few that are truly altruistic, or maybe once were but eventually become indistinguishable from a corporation in how they are run, and what they pay their executives.
by strcat | 2025-08-04 00:06:11+00:00
Posted a reply at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44780766.

> remembering the sequences of past events

The post is presenting fabricated stories directly from Kiwi Farms. I know what has happened and have a lot of it saved.

> and indeed might be accusing others of harassment without much basis

I'm not doing that. The person who posted the blog post is quite clearly engaging in harassment, as were the 2 people who posted the videos they posted. It's the same style of stalking, fabrications, bullying and directing people to harass someone as Kiwi Farms itself. They were doing it before Kiwi Farms was involved.

> However, the harassment towards Micay seems real. There's an active thread on KiwiFarms about Micay, and a random ass there frequently posts about his obsessions and makes all kinds of heavy accusations with sociopathic and narcissistic overtones.

The post itself and the 2 videos it links are a clear demonstration of harassment. The person who made the post is quite clearly a Kiwi Farms user, and Rossmann openly has an identity verified account there seeking approval from the person you're talking about and others like them.

> KiwiFarms has a history of transferring their harassment from online text to offline violence.

This was all happening long before Kiwi Farms was involved by Rossmann. There were multiple severe swatting attacks aimed at having me killed by law enforcement and other real world attacks. It's not limited to online and the online attempts at harming my reputation with fabricated stories and baseless claims that I'm insane. There's also a massive effort to justify the libel, bullying and harassment based on itself by claiming that it's justified because I've defended myself from it with posts like these. That's what the linked post is doing and what both videos it links are doing. Both people who made those videos were engaging in public bullying and libel towards me prior to posting those. Rossmann posted his video because I was upset with him in private after being swatted repeatedly and he couldn't tolerate that. He very clearly wasn't scared of me and continued using GrapheneOS. He wasn't scared that us posting a reply to him would harm him either. He chose to make it public and expose himself as being involved in the harassment by very publicly engaging in it. He chooses to have a Kiwi Farms account (larossmann) where he seeks their respect/approval and involves them in his conflicts as his personal army by bringing those up in his videos or Kiwi Farms itself.
by const_cast | 2025-08-04 00:06:14+00:00
> Anything can be used for good and bad reasons.

Yes, and that's why we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a 1935 Buick Century.

These "anything can be anything (if you try hard enough)" arguments are so tired and elementary.

Yes, you're technically right. But don't go bragging yet. That "if you try hard enough" tidbit is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Effort isn't free, nor is it infinite. Everything is a matter of scale.

That's why I can own a kitchen knife, and even a gun, but not a minigun. That's why even if I was granted a minigun, I surely wouldn't be granted a nuclear warhead. Would you trust Americans with a nuclear warhead? Second Amendment 2.5: everyone has the right to bear legs, and by legs we mean nuclear warheads. Sounds great.

There's a difference between doing something small, and doing something big. Doing something small and bad is bad, but it's less bad than doing something big and bad. If that sounds like goo goo ga ga level logic, that's because it is. I think children learn this pretty quickly.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-08-04 00:06:22+00:00
The premise of the study is that light is a flawed but easily obtainable metric that correlates with GDP growth. There are no doubt lots of other metrics that go into estimating economic growth when self-reported numbers can't be trusted. But those take money and expertise to collect, and are probably mainly available to intelligence agencies.

I agree with your skepticism of the method and it's good to explicitly list these things. But I think the authors of the research would also probably also agree that the method is far from perfect.

> when people move in to dense modern housing and shift to white collar work the model breaks down....more modern lighting is more efficient

These should apply equally to dictatorships and democracies right? Or at least it shouldn't correlate with the dishonesty of the regime so the model can factor it out.

> people increasingly socialize through phones

You still need light for most forms of economic development. I've been to a few places where it's almost completely dark at night and people communicate on phones. But the economic centers, for example where people congregate for night life, have lights on.
by jzb | 2025-08-04 00:06:46+00:00
You've added two conditions not present in the original comment.

Some people may "abuse" such things, but I'd say most people legit have days when they're under the weather and feel fine the next day.

Also, if you have kids in daycare or something? A cold twice a month is pretty much the norm as I understand it. I love my nieces, but there's a 50/50 chance each time I see them I'm going to wind up with a minor cold. Toddlers are awfully efficient at spreading disease...
by reilly3000 | 2025-08-04 00:07:38+00:00
I’m really liking the experience of using Cline with OpenRouter. You get detailed token count and context size for every Task as it goes, along with the actual price in realtime. That combined with the ability to use virtually any model with a single key makes it easier to determine what work to give to what model, and if it’s worth it to you. Use the best models for the most important work, cheap/free ones for the rest, and do the rest yourself. That way you drive your model, not when the model decides enough is enough.
by jaredklewis | 2025-08-04 00:08:19+00:00
Do you have some specific examples of this phenomenon you would be willing to share? You seem to feel that academics have a lot of influence in the world, but I am extremely skeptical of this hypothesis. IME academics are generally ignored except when they are saying something we like. Or the corollary: we go find the academic that is saying the thing we like and ignore all the other ones.

If we take specifically the field of economics for a moment (since I know a bit about this one), what are examples of "middle managers" sticking to the recommendations of economists?

Because it's not hard to make a list of ideas that economists generally love and pretty much everyone else hates: paying organ donors, carbon taxes, land value taxes, charging for public parking, getting rid of minimum parking requirements, allowing surge pricing of various kinds, unilateral free trade, cash transfers instead of in-kind benefits, and abolishing the mortgage interest deduction. Honorable mention to congestion pricing, which economists of course love, but is interesting because support for it actually went up in NYC after implementation; support was pretty low before implementation.
by UglyToad | 2025-08-04 00:08:40+00:00
If you don't have a known set of PDF producers this is really the only way to safely consume PDF content. Type 3 fonts alone make pulling text content out unreliable or impossible, before even getting to PDFs containing images of scans.

I expect the current LLMs significantly improve upon the previous ways of doing this, e.g. Tesseract, when given an image input? Is there any test you're aware of for model capabilities when it comes to ingesting PDFs?
by brucehoult | 2025-08-04 00:08:40+00:00
> this branch has been taken 15/16 of the last times we've hit it

That is kind of how it worked more than 30 years ago (pre 1995), but not since, at least in OoO CPUs.

In fact it was found that having more than a 2-bit saturating counter doesn't help, because when the situation changes it takes too many bad predictions in a row to get to predictions that, actually, this branch is not being taken any more.

What both the Pentium Pro and PowerPC 604 (the first OoO designs in each family) had was a global history of how you GOT TO the current branch. The Pentium Pro had 4 bits of taken/not taken history for the last four conditional branches and this was used to decide which 2-bit counter to use for a given branch instruction. The PowerPC 604 used 6 bits of history. The Pentium Pro algorithm for combing the branch address with the history (XOR them!) is called "gshare". The PPC604 did something a little bit different but I'm not sure what. By the PPC750 Motorola was using basically the same gshare algorithm as Intel.

There are newer and better algorithms today -- exactly what is somewhat secret in leading edge CPUs -- but gshare is simple and is common in low end in-order and small OoO CPUs to this day. The Berkeley BOOM core uses a 13 bit branch history. I think early SiFive in-order cores such as the E31 and U54 used 10 bits.
by trhway | 2025-08-04 00:09:11+00:00
It isn't about poaching. It is about how vigorously you'd be protecting the interests of your company A in a deal with company B when simultaneously negotiating your personal offer with the company B, especially if it is [even if just implicitly] packaged together i.e. "the offer happens only if the deal happens." You don't see a conflict of interests here?
by digitaltrees | 2025-08-04 00:09:49+00:00
With the exception of yahoo (which is still a large company I should note), None of those examples were killed by a start up competitor. They were killed by foundational technology shifts that were orthogonal to the industry. Yahoo, is the closest example with google, but kind of proves Kahns point in that a competitor they tried to buy—-google—- refused to be acquired and then innovated them out of the market. Imagine how much worse the world would have been if yahoo bought google and mothballed it. Blackberry and Kodak were both put out of business by apple which was a computer and software company not a phone or camera company. Sears was bought buy Edward Lampert, an private equity bro that fancied himself the next Warren Buffet but in the end gutted it by selling it for parts to keep the cash for himself
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-08-04 00:10:00+00:00
> “If you look at the models before they are fine-tuned on human preferences, they’re surprisingly well calibrated. So if you ask the model for its confidence to an answer—that confidence correlates really well with whether or not the model is telling the truth—we then train them on human preferences and undo this.

Now that is really interesting! I didn't realize RLHF did that.