MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by christianqchung | 2025-08-14 14:19:12+00:00
> Our main problems involve under the table unreported to the public military expenditures.

This is a common claim but I don't think it's supported. Defense spending is about 3.3% of GDP [0]. 15 years ago it was 4.9%, 40 years ago it was 6.45%, and it hit almost 10% in 1967 during peak spending in the Vietnam war. World War 2 made it around 35%. Also, what does unreported mean? Are you claiming that there is a significant amount of money being spent that isn't part of the reported military budget? How much? Defense spending was about 13% of the government budget in 2024 [1].

> If you look at a map of our military bases, we have many bordering China. I think our total number is close to 900.

How much do those cost? I understand the claim is a lot, but how much? If you don't know, why pick this as an example?

> Those costs are a bleeding hemorage to the middle class tax payer who aren’t getting a cut of military profiteering because they don’t own ‘defense’ stocks.

Defense stocks have not performed better relative to the Dow Jones. Raytheon stock has increased 5-fold since 1985 while the Dow has increased 33-fold over the same period. If defense was easy money, you'd see hedge funds loading up on it year on year. These companies aren't valued that much. Raytheon is valued at 208B [2], which is less than McDonalds, Nestle, T-Mobile, AMD, Home Depot, and Costco individually.

> Eventually countries that don't spend most of their treasure on their military will win. There has to be a balance between true defense spending and healthy spending like feeding and educating children, infrastructure, R&D that helps society, etc.

I agree with this, but given that America only spends 13% of the budget on the department of defense, your own claim is claiming an American win. In 2021 the American Rescue Plan induced a giant amount of domestic welfare spending plans such as almost doubling the child tax credit. This was a tremendously expensive plan that cut child poverty in half, but people didn't feel strongly enough to successfully pressure politicians to keep it, which does seem pretty frustrating to me.

Also, I see you're using AI for sources below. Feed your comment into GPT 5 thinking and ask for an opinion, because it apparently thinks your inflation claim is completely reversed.

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...

[1] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

[2] https://companiesmarketcap.com/
by jack_h | 2025-08-14 14:20:12+00:00
If you're truly curious I would say the best way to start is to get a basic understanding of economics and how our current system actually operates. It's also important to look up the data as it actually exists rather than consuming conclusions from commentators without investigating further.

For instance your initial post seems to imply that we aren't balancing our defense vs social spending and are spending way too much on the former. However, that doesn't align with our current outlays. If you check out the latest US Treasury report the outlays for the current fiscal year shows $1314bn for Social Security, $841bn for interest payments on the debt, $823bn for medicare, $805bn for health, and $758bn for defense. The primary driver of debt in the future will be the entitlement programs and interest.

Of course the unfortunate reality is that most people do not have the time to learn about everything and do their own research so we will always rely on others to some extent for our information. The danger is when your world view fills in the gaps of knowledge you lack combined with the facts you believe you know taken from someone else who may be mistaken, misleading, or outright lying.
by gtirloni | 2025-08-14 14:20:18+00:00
That's an interesting question but the "AI wrappers" aren't going away because the LLMs 1) aren't totally deterministic and 2) feeding them the correct prompts and context is still very valuable. In other words, one-shotting doesn't work for every use case (which is essentially what your saying when you say they are "self-contained", right? Unfortunately, they aren't/can't be).

Regarding the physical world, that's a deeper question. You have people that say LLM's "understand", that they are "intelligent" and that this is an "emergent behavior" of all their weights. You also have people that say they are nothing more than a stochastic parrot or auto-complete on steroids.

I'm in neither camp but let's do a thought exercise. Multi-modal LLM's are training on text, video, and sound. They can know what a chair looks like, what sound it make if you drag it over a wooden floor, and what it would look like when you do that (from this mysterious PoV somewhere). Now take that "knowledge" and ask it to give you 3D coordinates to move a chair right now in the room you're standing in: it simply can't. It's lacking a lot of information about the actual measurements of the room, its own movement capabilities (or those of the human to carry out the task), etc.

There are AI that can do this, but they aren't good for text. We have self-driving cars and factory robots doing things constrained to those domains.

If you say "meld" as in "let's combine a bunch of different AI technologies together with each one doing what it does best", I'm sure people are working on this already. But LLM's are but a small part of solving that problem.

EDIT: if you still can, please add "Ask HN: " to your title here.
by 9rx | 2025-08-14 14:20:36+00:00
People didn't need to go to college because nobody cared. Employers were able to look at qualities of the actual person, not some outside attribute bolted onto the side. What changed was Griggs vs. Duke, which outlawed effectively all filtering mechanisms except a college degree, forcing the hand of employers.

That still didn't mean the workers had to comply, though. What do you think would happen, with respect to employment, if nobody attained a college degree? Not much. "Welp, no more college graduates. I guess we'd better shut our business down." would be said by nobody. Hiring would carry on as usual (aside from the lines possibly being longer, there being no legal mechanism to cull applicants early). But colleges certainly took the opportunity to present that idea and the people bought it hook, line, and sinker.
by giantg2 | 2025-08-14 14:20:41+00:00
US vs Europe inflation https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2006/05/art3full.pdf

"balance between true defense spending and healthy spending like feeding and educating children, infrastructure, R&D that helps society, etc."

Spending does not equal outcomes. There doesn't need to be a spending balance, but there should be an outcomes balance. We can see this with school funding. There are some schools that are underfunded and underperform, but there are also schools with adequate funding that underperform lower funded schools. The implication that you are making is that we could fix things just by cutting back military spending. However, we are also leaders in some of the areas you mention already, such as R&D. The Pentagon fails their audits frequently and should be trimmed down in areas that it makes sense. However, just shifting that money to education isn't going to make that much of an impact.
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-08-14 14:20:42+00:00
The hard part is that anything designed to be breakable in a week is only ~150x away in strength from being broken in an hour. That means you need to be incredibly confident about how strong your algorithm is. It's much easier to eat a little bit of cost such that you think it's invulnerable for thousands of years because that way you don't need to worry about a factor of 2 here and there.
by jwally | 2025-08-14 14:20:43+00:00
Is the Bible still ok???

--------------------

Genesis 16:4 – “And he went in unto Hagar, and she conceived…” (Abram and Hagar)

Genesis 29:23 – “…and he went in unto her.” (Jacob and Leah)

Genesis 30:4 – “…and Jacob went in unto her.” (Jacob and Bilhah)

Ruth 4:13 – “…and he went in unto her, and the LORD gave her conception…” (Boaz and Ruth)

Variants & related euphemisms

Genesis 38:16 – “…he turned unto her by the way, and said, Go to, I pray thee, let me come in unto thee…” (Judah and Tamar)

2 Samuel 11:4 – “And David sent messengers, and took her; and she came in unto him, and he lay with her…” (David and Bathsheba)

Leviticus 18:6+ – “uncover nakedness” is repeated as a sexual euphemism.

Genesis 38:9 – “…when he went in unto his brother’s wife, that he spilled it on the ground…” (Onan; explicit ejaculation reference).
by sfmz | 2025-08-14 14:20:57+00:00
"The Limiting Factor" had an interesting take: Elon Musk's ability to deploy resources gives Grok a competitive advantage. YT vid goes over the challenges in getting Colossus up (200k GPU) and their deployment of Colossus 2, a 3-gigawatt facility with one million GPUs.

The Limiting Factor: xAI's Plans to Crush OpenAI, Meta, and Google in the AI Race (32m) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoaMveDtCxI

"Wars are won with logisitics" tweet by Elon Musk
by mlyle | 2025-08-14 14:21:22+00:00
> You can do that manually.

Absolutely. You can spend time on figuring out what to do next, and how, and how to do spaced repetition for the material and test yourself effectively. There are aspects you'll do better than a set curriculum because you understand yourself, and there are mistakes you'll make because misunderstandings and errors.

Or you can pay an expert to do that for you, and just use the time on learning.
by Hilift | 2025-08-14 14:22:15+00:00
Never happen. Defining and measuring poverty is a sensitive topic with juked stats in every country. The UK for example, has a poverty rate of 46% for families with three or more children. The poverty rate for Pakistani households is 47%. Around 7% of the UK is considered destitute. This data is rarely discussed because it is too unpleasant, and no-one wants to connect the inability to fund the national budget with the lack of money. The US does the same with occasional outlandish claims of "lifting nn% people out of poverty" by spending on programs that usually don't last.
by woodruffw | 2025-08-14 14:23:02+00:00
There was a period when the error was a stack trace. But that was pretty brief, and happened before PyPI moved more "officially" towards not supporting the search API.

I think part of the confusion here (which is reasonable IMO) is that pip has a huge version tail, and so people report error messages and behaviors that have been fixed for years. This is one of the challenges that I think gets under-appreciated about pip's maintenance.
by dpoloncsak | 2025-08-14 14:23:14+00:00
> Knowing that ChatGPT output good tokens last tuesday but Sonnet didn't does not help us know much about the future of the tools on general.

Isnt that exactly what is going to help us understand the value these tools bring to end-users, and how to optimize these tools for better future use? None of these models are copy+pastes, they tend to be doing things slightly differently under the hood. How those differences affect results seems like the exact data we would want here
by mlyle | 2025-08-14 14:23:19+00:00
> that learning is a linear process where you master one topic and move on to the next.

It's closer to true in mathematics than most other places, but not very close to true.

It's amazing the "layer cake model" of mathematics learning is such a strong idea even among many mathematics teachers.

On the other hand, sometimes a missing concept like cancellation in fractions or just poor proficiency in arithmetic rears its head and makes doing later stuff very hard. Once a student gets used to being and staying confused, it's often game over.
by potatolicious | 2025-08-14 14:25:14+00:00
And yet just about any intro-to-programming tutorial gets something running on your local machine, and local machine development continues to be the default for most people, even though devving on a cloud machine is eminently reasonable.

"Pull out credit card, sign up for some thing and pay a bit of money" is a non-trivial bit of friction! Extremely non-trivial!

Especially in a corporate context - you have to get the expense approved. It's not clear if you can put company data onto the machine. Whereas generally running local things on corporate laptops is far less controversial.

"Download this tool and run it." is still an extremely powerful pitch. Pretty much the only thing that beats it is "go to this website which you can use without any signup or payment".
by infecto | 2025-08-14 14:25:17+00:00
Hmmm let’s clear this up because the way you write is extremely click baity. I believe those higher numbers are less a military base and better thought of as a facility. They could be a small housing facility, radio station etc. it’s a valid number but I think base is probably not the right way to describe.

When you say China that is incredibly disingenuous. If we said Asia yeah sure and that is effectively Japan and Korea.

Now let’s think about it more in terms of major bases/complexes. We are looking at maybe 25 in and around Japan and 10 for Korea. Still not a small number but I think a very different mental picture than 900 bases mostly around China. Also worth nothing that’s probably around 80k people deployed in those two countries.
by gosub100 | 2025-08-14 14:26:10+00:00
A 1970 court case doesn't explain why my childhood friends' parents could afford to own 3 bedroom houses and have 1-2 kids while working at chain restaurants, distribution centers, and hospitality. This was in the 1990s. People cannot have this life now with the same jobs. Even with college degrees, it's barely attainable. People are doing the same amount of work but what would have been their wages are being diverted to the rich. To the point that they can barely afford to survive.
by chasil | 2025-08-14 14:26:11+00:00
More modern x86 comes with significant problems.

The minimum is now eight cores on a die for both AMD and Intel, so running a quad core system means staying on 14nm. You may loudly criticize holding back on a quad core system, but you aren't paying $47,500 per core to license Oracle Enterprise database.

The eight core minimum is a huge detriment for commercial software that is licensed by core.

This, and this alone, shatters your argument. Any other questions?
by btilly | 2025-08-14 14:26:45+00:00
And yet, to an amazing extent, they aren't.

If you look back in 200 years, poor people starving to death was simply an accepted fact of life. Today, poor people get fat. Do their lives suck? Absolutely! Just look at the craziness around housing. But in terms of resources per person available to the poor? Very few of us realize how good we've got it.

The extreme poverty line has remained essentially the same (adjusted for inflation) for a few decades. Projecting backwards in time, most people in every country used to be in extreme poverty. We are on track to eliminating extreme poverty within our lifetimes. They've adjusted the poverty line upwards. But just watch, life keeps on improving.
by Darkskiez | 2025-08-14 14:27:09+00:00
That system was what fed into the one I touched, which was an offline batch pipeline, so I wasn't tooinvolved with the Gmail internals that you're talking about. I know about 10 years ago many Googlers had the same sort of problems as you describe, I assume it's a tiny bit better these days, most of the backend has been replaced over that time. Expensive operations are often slow to ensure there is reasonable isolation between users, so you don't hurt someone elses experience when you do these things. They aren't frequent operations/CUJs so they aren't optimized either.
by troad | 2025-08-14 14:27:14+00:00
This is almost entirely backwards.

European liberalism is the wellspring of American liberalism, but Europe has - for obvious, historical reasons - much better organised reactionary elites. The equilibrium between the European publics and elites does indeed wax and wane.

In the 1990s a whole bunch of elite shibboleths were encoded into supranational law (so that no elected government is able to repeal them) as incredibly vaguely defined "human rights", which in turn have given rise to a vast bureaucratic apparatus to administer them (often staffed by the children of elite families). This apparatus is used as a cudgel to chip away at basic liberties - abstract, ill-defined communitarian rights (eg "safety") are used to sweep aside actual, tangible individual rights (eg speech, privacy).

(As an aside, the Soviet Union did effectively the same thing with their emphasis on "social rights" - such as those in the ICESCR - as opposed to "bourgeois" individual rights - such as those in the ICCPR. Didn't work out great for Soviet citizens.)

Since the 1990s, as a result of misgovernance by its chronically incompetent elites, Europe has been in decline by almost every metric. In the past ten years or so, the European publics have been in increasingly open revolt about this. A bunch of populist opportunists have seized on this revolt to offer various alleged alternatives, but been unable to deliver any sort of tangible change. (There is no reason to believe any change will come from this group, since they are basically just the second-rate members of the existing elite who have bet on populism as their ticket to the top.)

Europe tells itself stories about being a "human rights superpower" as an adaptive mechanism for its clear decline in prosperity, freedom, and relevance.

IMHO, Europeans deserve much better than this sad, managed decline. But given the deep structural barriers to protect the elites and prevent change, I just cannot see how this gets better.

Will the last European please turn out the lights?
by graemep | 2025-08-14 14:28:01+00:00
Not sure how that helps answer my question.

A list of contact addresses is not a list of all locations, or all employees or all a contractors or all shareholders or all financial interests.

The one thing the site tells me is that it is operated by two separate companies - Flo Inc and Flo health UK. The directors of Flo Health Limited live in the UK and Cypress, two are Belarusian nationals and one Russian.
by the_af | 2025-08-14 14:28:14+00:00
That's just lack of familiarity.

For this family of languages, it's very uncomplicated and easy to parse (and they all "sort of look the same" if you squint). Consider this: if you knew nothing of Java or C, their syntax would be weird mumbo-jumbo to you too. Even a language which is considered relatively simple, like Python, can trip you up in unexpected ways if you're unfamiliar with it.

Fortunately, getting familiar with the syntax is easy. Doubly so if you actually tackle a project with it.

Coming from a Java/C/Python/JS background, it's hard to casually read OCaml snippets before first getting acquainted with its syntax, because it belongs to a different family of programming languages.
by simonw | 2025-08-14 14:28:35+00:00
Sure, Qwen-3-4B - a 4GB download - is nowhere near as capable as Claude Sonnet 4.

But it is massively more capable than the 4GB models we had last year.

Meanwhile recent models that are within the same ballpark of capabilities as Claude Sonnet 4 - like GLM 4.5 and Kimi K2 and the largest of the Qwen 3 models - can just about fit on a $10,000 512GB of RAM Mac Studio. That's a very notable trend.
by vel0city | 2025-08-14 14:28:50+00:00
> The real, objective reality of people living their lives is not the Truth.

People usually aren't objective though even when looking around at their own lives. When evaluating inflation in groceries they'll point to a few things that have had some pretty massive spikes (beef, eggs, soda) and ignore a lot of the other things in their shopping cart that hasn't had anywhere near as much inflation (grains, pastas, lunchmeats, pork, lots of vegetables, potatoes, lots of fresh fruit, etc).

It can be pretty difficult for most people to actually be objective when looking at the world. Tons of people let emotions dominate what they see.

I'm not arguing the BLS price index numbers are entirely perfect measures of reality, but the number of times I've had people tell me things like eating out is 10x more expensive than it was a few years ago is quite high. Is that an objective reality?
by Buttons840 | 2025-08-14 14:29:08+00:00
When I was about 20 I started listening to Sean Hannity, and while I no longer agree with anything he says, I do appreciate the glimpse I got into his way of thinking. I mention this because...

I can't tell you how many times I've heard the idea that success in free market capitalism comes from offering goods and services to customers with the right balance between quality and price, and that good quality and price is assured because of competition in the market.

But now I see that the true path to success is to first gain favor from those who already have wealth and power, and then use their wealth and power to reduce or eliminate competition.
by 9rx | 2025-08-14 14:29:27+00:00
> We keep hearing about coding tests given to applicants in high tech, and those are still legal.

I was referring to pre-engagement. Those coding tests are generally only given after an applicant has shown enough potential to give them the time of day.

Whereas employers with tens of thousands of resumes on their desk look for a way, as to not overwhelm the process, to throw most of them out before opening lines of communication with the person. That was "No degree, garbage it goes". But yes, now that everyone and their brother has a degree, this doesn't work so well nowadays, which is why employers are quickly moving back to not caring about degrees — as you observed with said coding tests trying to stand in as a replacement. But there was that time in even more recent history...

I also said "effectively". There are technically other ways, yes, but they aren't all that practical at scale which is why a degree was settled on as the de facto solution, at least during the time it was effective.
by danielvaughn | 2025-08-14 14:29:48+00:00
This could’ve been written by me, it so closely matches my own experience. I know too well the “hit with a bag of bricks” realization that much of your professional life has been more or less you winging it. Math has that tendency of shining a bright ugly light on your real capability. It’s deeply humbling.

I’ve been using MathAcademy, trying to do at least one lesson each night after the kid is asleep. But instead of rote memorization, I sit with each problem until I truly and deeply understand it.

It’s going to be a long time before I’m mathematically competent, but there’s nowhere to go but up.
by abtinf | 2025-08-14 14:29:50+00:00
> If you look at a map of our military bases, we have many bordering China. I think our total number is close to 900.

I would grant them the benefit of the doubt if English wasn’t their native language, but they’d identified as a US citizen elsewhere in the thread and their name strongly implies native speakership.

In the US, this conversational construction in this context is most reasonably interpreted as the second sentence completing the thought in the first.

If a manager asks an employee “how many dents are on the bumber?” A response of “I think the total number is close to 900”, that would be in reference to just the dents on the bumper, not all over the car.

Also, elsewhere in the thread, they’ve acknowledged they simply made the number up (by just repeating what a GPT said).