MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throw0101d | 2025-08-02 01:03:31+00:00
An April 2025 episode from Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast, "Some of America's Most Important Economic Data Is Decaying":

> Gathering official economic data is a huge process in the best of times. But a bunch of different things have now combined to make that process even harder. People aren't responding to surveys like they used to. Survey responses have also become a lot more divided along political lines. And at the same time, the Trump administration wants to cut back on government spending, and the worry is that fewer official resources will make tracking the US economy even harder for statistical departments that were already stretched. Bill Beach was commissioner of labor statistics and head of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics during Trump's first presidency and also during President Biden's. On this episode, we talk to him about the importance of official data and why the rails for economic data are deteriorating so quickly.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfgpqVixeIw

* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-of-americas-most-...

* https://archive.is/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2...

William ("Bill") Beach was the head of the BLS of the before the just-fired head; he was Trump-appointed and Heritage Foundation fellow, and not a fan of the firing:

> The totally groundless firing of Dr. Erika McEntarfer, my successor as Commissioner of Labor Statistics at BLS, sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the Bureau. For a full statement opposing this move, read: https://www.friendsofbls.org/updates/2025/8/1/statement-on-c...

* https://twitter.com/BeachWW453/status/1951376029060055506#m

Also, from 2023, "Houston, We Have a Data Problem":

> The concerns are laid bare in a recently published report from the National Academy of Sciences. It includes a table showing that response rates to household surveys for basic information such as the current population survey (CPS) undertaken by the Census Bureau and the housing portion of CPI (a crucial input for overall inflation) have drifted down dramatically in recent years. The housing survey, for instance, used to get responses from about two-thirds of those surveyed. It now gets just half.

* https://archive.is/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletter...
by getnormality | 2025-08-02 01:03:38+00:00
The woman is not being "made" to do anything. She's already world-class at math and wants to maximize the impact of her specialized talents, so she's going straight to PhD.

I don't think we need to nanny people who break the mold with extraordinary talents to conform to some generic correct educational sequence. They've proven they know how to make something of themselves and their own ideas should count for more.
by like_any_other | 2025-08-02 01:03:44+00:00
Is it really notable that a work of fiction would flatter its author's ideology?

I wonder how different the movie would have been, if instead of one Kryptonian, it was two million, per year, and instead of saving people in danger, they made songs like I heard you want your country back, Uh-uh, you can't have that [1]

I didn't care much for the article conflating "conservatives" with Israel either.

[1] https://genius.com/Bob-vylan-i-heard-you-want-your-country-b...
by jvanderbot | 2025-08-02 01:04:24+00:00
Yeah, we're shouting into the wind here. I have had people tell me directly that my ideas from old school state estimation were irrelevant in the era of deep learning. They may produce (in this case) worse results, but the long game I'm assured is superior.

The specific scenario was estimating the orientation of a stationary semi trailer. An objectively measurable number and it was consistently off by 30 deg, yet I was the jerk for suggesting we move from end to end DL to trad Bar Shalom techniques.

That scene isn't for me anymore.
by dang | 2025-08-02 01:04:31+00:00
Looks like we put it in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it got a random placement on HN's front page a couple days later...where it happily resides for the time being.

If anyone is confused by the relativized timestamps, there are explanations here: About the timestamps, there are past explanations here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
by bsder | 2025-08-02 01:04:34+00:00
> at least acknowledge that the norm has been shifting for a while now.

Sure. I agree it has been shifting, but mostly out of people simply not paying attention.

However, it's pretty easy to get it to switch. I have converted probably about 20% of my friends to doing cash tips simply by pointing out a single time that credit card tips have a significant chance of not making it to the server.

I haven't even pulled out the "credit card tips are a scam to increase the rake" angle, yet.
by narrator | 2025-08-02 01:06:27+00:00
The supreme court has ruled on punitive damage awards going back to the 1990s and limited the excesses. You can't for example get $4 million in punitive damages on $4000 in actual damages. The general rule from the looks of the article is 5x actual damages.

https://corporate.findlaw.com/litigation-disputes/punitive-d...
by hinkley | 2025-08-02 01:07:28+00:00
Recency bias is how nuclear reactors go bad and people slip past security. There just hasn't been an incident in so long that we become complacent.

I thought Netflix was nuts for Chaos Monkey, but having read several more treatises on human cognition and particularly cognitive biases, I now see they are crazy like a fox. Guaranteeing something breaks every week keeps things at the mental forefront.
by arp242 | 2025-08-02 01:09:15+00:00
They have more than 30 apps, not just a flashlight. It's mentioned right there in the post.

Do you really thing these people are complete idiots who can't increment a number? Obviously it's more than that. And the "wHy CaN I TrUSt yOu wITh mY prIvACy" shade throwing is just outright bizarre.
by esseph | 2025-08-02 01:09:25+00:00
You're misunderstanding in several ways.

MANY of the H1-Bs in the US workforce are not super talented. What they are is cheap and won't say no to mistreatment. The system is being massively abused, and has been for a very long time.

Second, you think I'm talking about app infrastructure. For like one app.

I'm talking about infrastructure changes that risk bank transactions. That shut down shipping ports, or prevent cross-country train movement. I'm talking about infrastructure management that when it goes sideways, billions of dollars of goods are stuck in port and the stock market starts getting worried. I'm talking about infrastructure changes for oceanic network equipment. Most people aren't dealing with that, but many are.

Also if you don't think inter-industry competition includes labor cost and efficiency, then I don't even know why we're having this discussion.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-08-02 01:09:28+00:00
McCarthiesm and Vietnam and Japanese interment camps and slavery. Women and minorities didn't have rights. Native Americans weren't citizens. Companies owned towns and operated militaries against civilian labor. Life has been much worse and much more authoritarian in the American past, let alone the past in general.

The pendulum swings.

This might get worse before it gets better. Germany and Japan grew after Nazism. China, despite its flaws, has seen their people grow happier and is leading the charge in many domains.

The future is scary and the administration is doing harm. We may lose our advantages as a nation, we may struggle economically or scientifically. But a collapse of economy - let alone society - in just 10 years is astronomically unlikely outside of a nuclear or biological war.

Even if we plummeted to Russia's level of economy and corruption, Russia still exists after a hundred years of it all, with some of the largest scale genocides & repression campaigns in human history.

But that's not really happening. Despite it all, the US is largely doing fine? The markets seem to believe they can bear the worst of it until the pendulum swings again.
by hinkley | 2025-08-02 01:10:14+00:00
I was a Java user when Java 5 came out. Java 5 had a new hashtable implementation, and that implementation was also used for the reflection API.

That was an era where lots of testing code barely worked, and what we found over and over again is that we had tests that were dependent on each other and the tests only passed because they ran in a particular order.

And now Java 5 changed the order in which the test functions were being enumerated in the test files. Oops.
by tsowell | 2025-08-02 01:13:16+00:00
Fellow VT420 user here! The problem with tmux is that it disables flow control, but you can fix that with this:

diff --git a/tty.c b/tty.c index 359dc13..f98c9c4 100644 --- a/tty.c +++ b/tty.c @@ -319,8 +319,8 @@ tty_start_tty(struct tty *tty) event_add(&tty->event_in, NULL); memcpy(&tio, &tty->tio, sizeof tio); - tio.c_iflag &= ~(IXON|IXOFF|ICRNL|INLCR|IGNCR|IMAXBEL|ISTRIP); - tio.c_iflag |= IGNBRK; + tio.c_iflag &= ~(IXOFF|ICRNL|INLCR|IGNCR|IMAXBEL|ISTRIP); + tio.c_iflag |= IXON|IGNBRK; tio.c_oflag &= ~(OPOST|ONLCR|OCRNL|ONLRET); tio.c_lflag &= ~(IEXTEN|ICANON|ECHO|ECHOE|ECHONL|ECHOCTL|ECHOPRT| ECHOKE|ISIG);

Then you'll want to run this before starting tmux:

stty -iutf8 ixon export LANG=en_US

I also recommend using a dedicated tmux socket with the VT to avoid accidentally connecting to an unpatched tmux server that helpfully re-disables flow control. That happened to me while I was testing the patch, and it was infuriating.

I've also hacked up support for storing tmux window contents in different pages of VT memory, so you can switch windows instantly without waiting for full screen redraws. It's a bit rough around the edges (doesn't handle split windows very well, for example), but it's enough of a quality-of-life improvement that I use it anyway. It's a bit long for a comment, but I can post it somewhere if you're interested.

Feel free to email me if you want more information about my setup.
by pphysch | 2025-08-02 01:14:14+00:00
Enron was a literal energy company, and also vaguely "the next big thing", "America's Most Innovative Company". There's a lot of parallels with how OpenAI is being hyped up and whether it actually merits a 12-13 figure valuation. See also WeWork, et al.

Given what we know about the CEO, it would not come as a shock if in a couple years we learn there was some good old accounting fraud involved.
by maxwellg | 2025-08-02 01:14:15+00:00
I _love_ JWTs for API authentication - one of the nicest APIs I ever consumed was essentially JSON RPC over JWTs. Unfortunately they represent a huge usability hit over API Keys for the average joe. Involving cryptography to sign a JWT per request makes an API significantly harder to consume with tools like Postman or CURL. You can no longer have nice click-to-copy snippets in your public docs. You either have an SDK ready to go in your customer's language or ecosystem of choice, or you're asking them to write a bunch of scary security-adjacent code just to get to their first successful request. No, I don't have a JWT library recommendation for Erlang, sorry.

Not that an API couldn't support both API Keys and JWT based authentication, but one is a very established and well understood pattern and one is not. Lowest common denominator API designs are hard to shake.
by Spivak | 2025-08-02 01:14:15+00:00
I can appreciate that scientists in the field are fighting the good fight and picking it apart but it seems that this is just PhD nerd sniping. Designed specifically to get the world to waste their time going um actually… to a bad faith publication that the people publishing it and the people who will ultimately cite it to justify what they were going to do anyway didn't even believe in the first place. Preying on the, if we're honest left tendency, to believe that truth and facts prevail over power structures and if we just prove that they're wrong they'll be forced to… something. It's a great trick creating a simulacrum of scientific inquiry—literal hopium being provided to their opponents to give the illusion of Doing Something instead of working on challenging the power structures that are the real driving force.
by ack_complete | 2025-08-02 01:14:20+00:00
You have to go pretty far back, it was in the Visual C++ 6.0 EULA, for instance (for lack of a better link):

https://proact.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Visual-Basic-En...

It wasn't a blanket prohibition, but a restriction on some parts of the documentation and redistributable components. Definitely was weird to see that in the EULA for a toolchain. This was removed later on, though I forget if it's because they changed their mind or removed the components.
by msgodel | 2025-08-02 01:14:22+00:00
I think it collapsed at least ten years ago and we're all just going through the motions because acknowledging it is too unpleasant.

In all seriousness societal collapse is extremely slow and not particularly eventful. Look at South Africa if you want to see what that actually looks like in real life. It's not like how Hollywood shows it.

I think it's also important to remember society is not the economy. It's more of a spiritual/social thing that the economy exists within. That's why I can say it's already gone and people just haven't fully acknowledged it.
by hinkley | 2025-08-02 01:14:48+00:00
In the reverse situation, I've worked at places where the IP lawyers basically made it impossible to submit PRs to open source code.

But sometimes explaining the exact inputs and the line number where you know the problem is can grease the wheels enough that you can convince someone else to write the fix for you. I didn't technically give you any code. But I did give you free QA.
by ankit219 | 2025-08-02 01:14:58+00:00
The article does not say anything substantial, but just some opposite viewpoints.

1/ Openai's technical staff were using Claude Code (API and not the max plans).

2/ Anthropic's spokesperson says API access for benchmarking and evals will be available to Openai.

3/ Openai said it's using the APIs for benchmarking.

I guess model benchmarking is fine, but tool benchmarking is not. Either openai were trying to see their product works better than Claude code (each with their own proprietary models) on certain benchmarks and that is something Anthropic revoked. How they caught it is far more remarkable. It's one thing to use sonnet 4 to solve a problem on Livebench, its slightly different to do it via the harness where Anthropic never published any results themselves. Not saying this is a right stance, but this seems to be the stance.
by sandywaffles | 2025-08-02 01:15:02+00:00
> If it takes them 7 interviews to decide on a candidate don't bother with that company.

I don't think I share that opinion. The best jobs I've had were after 7+ rounds of actual interviews: code challenge, several peer panels, systems design, hiring manager, Senior manager, Cutler fit, etc.

That of course doesn't mean there aren't companies out there abusing the system or who have less than genuine tactics. But my point is mere number of rounds isn't a good indicator of anything in isolation. I've also worked at places with less than 3 rounds that were absolutely terrible.
by 48terry | 2025-08-02 01:15:18+00:00
I've read this comment twice and I genuinely can't understand it.

Uh, so your own attempt at a similar project didn't work and was a terrible experience and the fundamentals of the system are specific and still require babysitting. But it's inevitable (???) that it'll get better... and this improvement only MIGHT make things better for people, only some of the time?

I'm not alone in being unimpressed by this, right? Nothing about what was written here sounds... good? Even the most optimistic part is "well, maybe it might be good, sometimes". Like, this sucks. This is a bad system that doesn't work and makes things worse.
by strken | 2025-08-02 01:15:29+00:00
Australia's debt is in the form of HECS/HELP. It's indexed to inflation, and integrated into the tax system such that it's only repaid on income over a minimum threshold. The first threshold is 1% of income above $56k. The last threshold is 10% of income above $166k.

My understanding is that US student loans accrue interest at rates above inflation. They do have repayment plans based on income, but because the interest rate is higher than wage growth, the debt just keeps growing if you're on these plans. They also don't have progressive thresholds like we do and the repayments tend to be higher.

Australia has a similar but less severe problem. Inflation and wage growth are closer together but they aren't the same. Still, the situation in the US seems worse.
by jaredrhine | 2025-08-02 01:16:28+00:00
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Swayable measures how content changes people's opinions. We apply a variety of sophisticated machine learning classification, regression, causal AI, and GenAI-based analyses to survey-based data we collect. Customers receive high-level, actionable data about different group's responses through an ever-expanding portfolio of web-based visualizations, reports, and natural language interfaces.

All positions support remote US work or SF/NY office.

- Senior Engineer: AI Applications. AI Applications Engineer that blends full stack software development expertise with agentic/multi-node workflow architectures. You will be responsible for creating and building our portfolio of LLM-based classification, reporting, and analysis applications. Stack: Python (langgraph, pandas, celery, flask, MCP), JavaScript (Vue.js, Node.js), MongoDB, GraphQL, and a variety of LLM providers.

- Senior Engineer: Full-stack Web. Full-stack web to build and enhance our core browser-based applications for building surveys, collecting responses, and visualizing results generated by our suite of sophisticated numerical and qualitative analyses. Stack: Vue 3 (Nuxt), Tailwind CSS, Node (Express), GraphQL, Mongoose, MongoDB, Cypress.

- Senior AI/ML Engineer: Scientific Computing. Blending Python software development expertise with scientific computing, machine learning, and AI experience to advance the state of the art analytics engine that powers our core product. Stack: Python (Numpy, Pandas, scikit-learn, Celery, Flask), machine learning (linear regression, casual AI, text classification), MongoDB, and GraphQL.

Postings are available at https://www.swayable.com/careers/ or free free to contact me (the hiring manager) at eng-jobs@swayable.com
by hinkley | 2025-08-02 01:16:53+00:00
There's nobody who really has a library that's set up to feed a sequential task into and have it force a synchronous call to be async with breakpoints to check for early termination.

This seems like a problem Sorhus should have a library for, but he does not.

I've had the conversation too many times in the last couple months about how setTimeout() does absolutely nothing to fix this problem in NodeJS. Even Java had trouble with this and tried to delete the API that seemed like it should support this problem, due to undefined behavior.
Show HN: LLM-txts I created for developer documentation that does not have it
by caaaadr | 2025-08-02 01:20:29+00:00
github: https://github.com/abidsikder/llm-txts

I kept ad-hoc creating llm.txts in my personal LLM use for projects that don't have them so I made this to make it more automated for myself.

Hoping to see if the community finds it useful, or can recommend a better tool for this and using long context LLMs that I've missed :P
by ssfrr | 2025-08-02 01:22:18+00:00
Is there evidence that minimizing finger movement is ergonomically desirable? It seems like "repetitive" is a key part of RSI, so making the exact same small motion over and over again may not be optimal.

I think about piano players, who obviously need to move their hands and arms a lot to hit the keys (and with more force). Definitely takes a lot more energy than typing on a computer keyboard, but is there evidence that it's any more or less likely to cause injury?
by 48terry | 2025-08-02 01:22:33+00:00
> doctor of philosophy (hardly a "kid")

Media has this strange need for fully-grown responsible adults to be thought of as children. Not only for the amazing stories of "this (mid-30s career professional) kid did something", but also helpful to try and shirk responsibility.

Thinking about attempts to frame SBF as a wee smol bean kid in over his head while actively committing fraud.
by ycombiredd | 2025-08-02 01:22:37+00:00
Here's the current supported tunings:

$ gtrsnipe --list-tunings Available Tunings: - STANDARD : E4 B3 G3 D3 A2 E2 - E_FLAT : Eb4 Bb3 Gb3 Db3 Ab2 Eb2 - DROP_D : E4 B3 G3 D3 A2 D2 - D_STANDARD : D4 A3 F3 C3 G2 D2 - DROP_C : D4 A3 F3 C3 G2 C2 - OPEN_G : D4 B3 G3 D3 G2 D2 - OPEN_E : E4 B3 G#3 E3 B2 E2 - DADGAD : D4 A3 G3 D3 A2 D2 - OPEN_D : D4 A3 F#3 D3 A2 D2 - OPEN_C6 : E4 C4 G3 C3 A2 C2 - C_SHARP : C#4 F#3 B2 E2 C#2 - BASS_STANDARD : G2 D2 A1 E1 - BASS_DROP_D : G2 D2 A1 D1 - BASS_E_FLAT : Gb2 Db2 Ab1 Eb1 - SEVEN_STRING_STANDARD : E4 B3 G3 D3 A2 E2 B1 - SEVEN_STRING_DROP_A : E4 B3 G3 D3 A2 E2 A1 - BARITONE_B : B3 F#3 D3 A2 E2 B1 - BARITONE_A : A3 E3 C3 G2 D2 A1 - BARITONE_C : C4 G3 Eb3 Bb2 F2 C2
by coderatlarge | 2025-08-02 01:23:51+00:00
thanks! yes we sort of saw it as “if it’s not for her better that she know early on”. we don’t want to talk her out of it (quite the contrary), yet we know many others who pursued lab bench science for a decade+ before realizing it was not for them for one of many practical reasons and we thought it best to give her a preview… there are many fields she was happy to rule out after simple conversations but there is a small handful that she finds compelling as stories or narratives but don’t survive the first level of unpacking (math, software, cybersecurity). fortunately the central science has stood up to actual challenges so far…
by msgodel | 2025-08-02 01:24:20+00:00
Enron was an energy futures brokerage/exchange that made the age old mistake of market making your own order book with unlimited margin from... yourself. Always very tempting, never a good idea.

It's exactly the same thing FTX did except with energy instead of crypto.

AFAIK they never misrepresented who they were, they were just very loose with their accounting. It probably started out as a small lie to themselves like those things tend to.
by Neywiny | 2025-08-02 01:24:46+00:00
Huge respect to anybody who ships a product, even software. I have yet to use any indoor navigation or even have that offered, but it would be nice. Question is, is SLAM the correct term? I thought mapping meant like the device doesn't have any prior knowledge of the environment and is, well, mapping it. This more feels like sensor fusion with a kalman filter.
by nxobject | 2025-08-02 01:25:11+00:00
Their rhetorical strategy only flies if you’re inclined not to believe in climate change…

> Far more often the report follows a familiar pattern, wrote Ben Sanderson, a climate scientist at CICERO, a Norwegian climate research institute, on Bluesky. “Establish a contrarian position, cherry pick evidence to support that position, then claim that this position is under-represented in climate literature.”