MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by defrost | 2025-08-08 14:37:10+00:00
No drama, as first worded it irked my experience in multichannel geophysical processing; every data source has potential biases, tweaks, scaling, shifts and normalizing applied to get them to best fit and reveal a larger picture.

eg: https://www.ga.gov.au/bigobj/GA13928.pdf as an example of stitching 40 years of survey data collected with a range of different instruments and procedures.

In the climate domain the same care is taken to preserve raw data from historic methods, the challenge is syncing data streams that have covariant features (such as matching years against tree patterns from differing logs from a variety of species), in this case logs from a variety of ways of sampling sea water temperature.

Glad you took my comment well, no offense was intended :)
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-08 14:37:32+00:00
Insurance is the problem.

Like it's not even close. I pay about the same per mile for it as I do fuel (!!!!). The cost of my shitty cars is a rounding error. Tires are a rounding error. And my driving record is squeaky clean for close to a decade now. I'm sure they're screwing me for being a statistical contradiction (high income, not diverse, lives in zip code and drives cars opposite of that) because insurance generally hates anything that doesn't conform to the fat parts of the bell curve but it's still insane.

The story on the house side of things is similar. You add in health and the sum total of insuring my life is within spitting distance of my mortgage. I could shove the money into bonds and in all but the worst cases come out ahead, pick stocks and the comparison gets even worse.
by ajross | 2025-08-08 14:37:34+00:00
And that sounds more like apologia than elaboration. Needless to say the PRC itself does not agree with the DPP's assessment of itself as the government of a sovereign Taiwan.

The point was a glib response to an assertion that China is somehow especially unified as a matter of policy or politics. And, yeah, no; no it is not. At all.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-08-08 14:37:38+00:00
That would simply make food and housing more expensive, as it would devalue money, as it increases circulation, because it wouldn't produce more housing and food - just increase demand - unless they "donated" (tax) that 2.5% to increase production, and not to subsidize poverty.

If you could subsidize your way out of poverty, Venezuela wouldn't be poor. They tried printing money and handing it out. It doesn't work. If you don't have enough housing and you take money from the rich and give it to the poor, you still don't have enough housing.

Anyone who thinks "as long as we have higher than 0% vacancy rates, and homeless-ness, we have enough housing," is a moron who has never been on the market to try and rent an apartment or buy a house.

We don't live in a perfect world. You need more than the perfect amount of housing.

The vast majority of home owners in this country are massively against increasing the supply of housing, so good luck 1) convincing them to pay more tax, and 2) spending those tax dollars on the exact opposite of what they want to spend them on.

Homeowners are almost 75% of voters most years. And in most counties (housing is largely a local issue, not a national one) can be >90% of voters.

Homeowner here, and I do agree, it would be a great investment.

But there are lots of great investments that will never happen, because many people would shoot their own head off before they did something that benefited everyone, but didn't benefit them the most.

There's literally a million things we could do to make healthcare more affordable. But we also won't do any of those because of entrenched interests in healthcare, admin, and insurance - and, perhaps especially, people's entrenched interests to continue living unhealthy lifestyles and exporting the cost onto others as negative externalities.
by dylan604 | 2025-08-08 14:38:08+00:00
> ignoring R&D (which is definitely a huge cost) they run at a profit.

how can you say such a hand wavy comment with a straight face? you can't just ignore a huge cost for a company and suddenly they are profitable. that's Enron level moronic. without constant R&D, the company gets beat by competitors that continue R&D. the product is not "good enough" to not continue improving.

if i ignored my major costs in my finances, i could retire, but i can't go to the grocery store and walk out with a basket of food while telling them that i'm ignoring this major cost in my life.

get real
by elictronic | 2025-08-08 14:38:39+00:00
Its not that he doesn't trust the census. It's that they want a census marking US citizens vs. immigrants and illegal immigrants. It doesn't matter what they say so much, more what the end goal is.

Voting districts with higher populations receive a larger number of representatives. Currently we do not differentiate and legally the census defines these numbers which is very hard to change. If a census is run with these identified you have strong legal arguments with the "Current" Supreme Court to remove those immigrants/illegal immigrants from the representative totals.

The side benefit for this admin is many legal immigrants and some residents become more untrustworthy of those style questions and also do not answer again lowering representation in those districts further.

The Census is inaccurate if the goal is legally removing those people from the representative counts.
by IIAOPSW | 2025-08-08 14:38:54+00:00
Probably what you want is "numerical methods" and "computational physics".

"Physical simulation" is a very broad scope, so your code for simulating fluids is going to be very different from your code for simulating planetary orbits, and at times it may feel a bit ad hoc. But at its foundation physical laws are written in differential equations and linear algebra.

So whatever algorithm lets you numerically integrate several inter-related variables is going to be broadly applicable to simulating any physical phenomena. At the simplest end of the spectrum you just naively approximate integration by brute force. Eg at each step just update your physical state variables by doing velocity += acceleration, position += velocity. This is called Euler's method, and while simple, it accumulates unacceptable errors rather quickly in most circumstance. The more advanced approach is to use a method like Runge Kutta. In circumstances where you have some known property, like say energy conservation, you can implement a method which explicitly imposes the constraint. This is good for cases where the motion is highly periodic as it prevents the numerical error from accumulating exponentially in orbits that spiral out of control.

Of course at some point you'll have to grapple with the issue of if you are simulating trajectories of free particles or values of neighboring grid points in a field. This question of how best to encode physical systems and simulate them cuts to the heart of physics.

I'll leave it at the old cliche "information is physical"
by dataflow | 2025-08-08 14:39:15+00:00
> It has always felt insane to me that macOS and Windows will both just let some random auto-updater steal focus and eat your keystrokes while trying to work on something.

Wait, what? Hasn't Windows prevented focus stealing for literally decades at this point?

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090220-00/?p=19...
by ff12wq111 | 2025-08-08 14:39:28+00:00
Hi HN! I've been thinking about why developer communities are controlled by corporate boards instead of the developers who create the value.

This white paper explores a new governance model where: - Every contribution (posts, code reviews, helpful answers) earns "Stars" - Stars = voting power on platform decisions (features, policies, algorithms) - Community votes on everything from tech stack to moderation rules - Transparent, democratic process with public voting records

The core insight: developers deserve platforms where their voices actually matter in decision-making, not just engagement metrics.

I'd love your thoughts on the governance mechanisms, potential abuse vectors, and whether this could work at scale.
by reactordev | 2025-08-08 14:39:51+00:00
I mean, anything could replace elasticsearch, but can it actually?

It sounds like they had the wrong architecture to start with and they built a database to handle it. Kudos. Most would have just thrown cache at it or fine tuned a readonly postgis database for the geoip lookups.

Without benchmarks it’s just bold claims we’ll have to ascertain.
by piva00 | 2025-08-08 14:39:57+00:00
> Also, the question is why would anyone want to work, if you would be given money for free even if you don't work anywhere (I mean, you're below the poverty line)?

Because people want more comforts than just being barely above the poverty line, of course there will be freeloaders just as in anything (there are even freeloaders at many companies right now, shocker!) but it doesn't mean everyone that gets some cash to be above poverty would just stop working.

It opens their lives to pursue other stuff they wouldn't be able to while fighting to barely survive, they could go to school, take better care of their kids with the free time available, they could look for jobs that are not a dead end because they wouldn't be hostages of working for shitty pay to barely survive.

This argument comes purely from a puritan/protestant belief, the data usually shows that people who get money to cover their basic needs will have better outcomes, commit less crimes, seek education, etc.

Isn't the cost of a minority of freeloaders good enough to provide better outcomes for the whole society? Or do you prefer to keep punishing the poor just in case some of them decide to be freeloaders? Rather inhumane to think that way.
by qwertylicious | 2025-08-08 14:39:59+00:00
> There are many ways to make consumption taxes not regressive. You can implement refunds up to certain threshold. You can use the revenue to fund services used by lower income families

Every one of those "solutions" is just a patch on the basic problem that consumption taxes are fundamentally regressive.

Go tell someone living paycheque to paycheque that it's okay, you'll get a rebate every quarter for the extra tax they paid, or worse, on their annual tax filing, and tell me how that'll make their household budget actually work.

Honestly, when I read ideas like this, I realize just how massive the disconnect is between the lived experiences of the relatively well off and the working poor...
by filoeleven | 2025-08-08 14:40:09+00:00
You're not likely to find much support on this forum for these ideas. For those that have interest, the book Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century is a well-written treatise on the topic.

A gentler step in that direction is to see what Michael Levin and his lab are up to. He is looking for (one aspect of) intelligence, and finding it at the cellular level and below, even in an agential version of bubble sort. He's certainly challenging the notion that consciousness is limited to brain cells. All of his findings arise through experimental observation, so it forces some reckoning in a way that sociological research doesn't.
by BenJacob1 | 2025-08-08 14:40:43+00:00
My gripe isn’t “no regulation,” it’s the shape of this one for teams in a sector that’s already stretched. Some of these requirements are so high burden that it will add 10% to our OpEx e.g. data governance/provenance reqs: document sources, bias reviews, copyright posture, retention + redoing this after every model change; quality management system across the company (policies, roles, training, audits); conformity assessment + CE marking, with a third-party review all of which will be costly and slow.

I’m all for protecting students. But in practice this shifts months of team time and serious cash into paperwork before schools even pilot the tool. Big incumbents can eat that but small teams either raise prices, slow down, or skip the EU. That’s the innovation tax I’m worried about especially when schools need better tools now.
by cyberpunk | 2025-08-08 14:40:52+00:00
And still none of these do protobuf/grpc/http2 properly.

I had to MITM some grpc service a while ago to develop a replacement for it and it was basically impossible in the end. MITMProxy got the closest, but it couldn't decode the protobufs.

I'd pay for any tool which could do that; if it existed.
by floatrock | 2025-08-08 14:40:54+00:00
The search limits are surely mostly from limits on energy and compute costs.

The better analogue is "Imagine in the 70's being able to teletype into an insanely expensive compute infrastructure and have reasonable timesharing capabilities of a limited resource across multiple users."

Unix. I'm describing the motivation for Unix there.

We already look back on earlier times with constraints that were appropriate.

Presumably compute will get cheaper, we'll build more datacenters, maybe we'll even power them in a way that doesn't destroy our planet, and GPT questions will become too cheap to meter. Just give it some time.
by Epa095 | 2025-08-08 14:40:58+00:00
I encourage everyone to do the following simple exercise:

look at the main stock market in your country, and see how far back you must go for the main index to be half of what it is today. The answer is probably somewhere between 5 and 7 years. Then find salary statistics, and see how much the average salary has increased in the same time. The answer is probably somewhere between 20 and 30%.

And it really is as simple as that. As society we have tremendously increased productivity, and most of it is taken/given to the owner of the capital, not the provider of labour.
Ask HN: Old dev, new economy – how to adapt?
by throwy000 | 2025-08-08 14:41:11+00:00
I'm a seasoned, and more than competent developer. Like many others, I am completely left out of the current economy - there are few or no jobs for skilled software engineers. Especially outside a few geo hotspots.

To me the frustrating part is seeing all those huge amounts of investment going to AI. I feel as if I could be part of that somehow, instead I'm on the other side of the fence.

What effective things can I do to survive and even thrive in this new economy?

I feel as if the best thing I could do was to "sell shovels". Which is risky, and in a way dishonest.

I also could go for a non-AI type of business, but more often than not, code is not the bottleneck. Sooner or later you need marketing/sales and perhaps capital.

In the meantime I keep seeking for high-quality jobs, but those are rare (for my geo) and competition is acute.
by M95D | 2025-08-08 14:41:15+00:00
You would prefer a cutting-edge nightmare?

It's no longer possible to not be a nightmare. Companies no longer employ devs for life to keep the system functional and up-to-date, and (most probably) no devs would stay in such a role for their entire career.

When nobody knows how the system works, it can only be a nightmare: they keep it barely functional with marginal patches, accumulating debt until it finally crashes in such a way that it can't be fixed, then a new team comes in, designs and builds a new system, patches some major flaws, and then leave, and the situation repeats for another 10 years.
by lordkrandel | 2025-08-08 14:41:15+00:00
Yes, AI deals with sensitive informations, and no one has an idea what it stores about it or what will be done with it. Heavy regulations here. Barriers to making profit by exploiting people and their data. That's the EU. A frontier of freedom and freedom costs. You can have your business in the non-free US where you are a puppet of your tech bro guys. Leave what you don't understand alone.
by freedomben | 2025-08-08 14:41:16+00:00
Also there's a lot of humans that won't look at the commit history, and in many cases if the code has been moved around the commit history is deep and you have to traverse and read potentially quite a few commits. Nothing kills the motivation more than finally finding the original commit and it mentioning nothing of value. For some things it's worth the cost of looking, but it's ineffective often enough that many people won't bother
by mnightcommander | 2025-08-08 14:41:30+00:00
This may be very similar content by the same author...

"TodayThe great data journalist John Burn-Murdoch at the Financial Times is out with another excellent if disturbing column about a steep decline in conscientiousness and other personality changes in young people."

Collapsing Conscientiousness - by Aaron M. Renn

https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/collapsing-conscientiousness
by sdsd | 2025-08-08 14:41:44+00:00
One argument I often hear in my corner of the internet is that AI is one of the only remaining sectors of unregulated, meritocratic activity. The smart people have been pushed out of the real economy, so we're congregating here.

EXIT blog talks about this a lot. Eg in this article, "Sanctuary Cities are Special Economic Zones - Just Not For You": https://blog.exitgroup.us/p/sanctuary-cities-are-special-eco...

Anyone else knows fun writing like this, please recommend it to me
by dahart | 2025-08-08 14:41:57+00:00
These are two symptoms of the same problem, I don’t see any issue with the statistics. Plus, of course, not everyone who’s poor or hungry is obese.

If you think about it, it makes sense that food insecurity and obesity go together. If I didn’t know when I’d have food, I’d try to overeat when I could, like many wild animals do before winter. And most of our cheap food is low quality and very high in fat and carbs (esp. sugars).

The problem that’s bigger than both obesity and hunger is poverty, and poverty causes both of those things.

See this paper for a longer explanation: “Food insecurity as a risk factor for obesity: A review” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9549066/
by throw9349494 | 2025-08-08 14:42:03+00:00
Do you own and manage company in germany? If yes you are tax resident, if not you pay exit tax. Winwin.

This what ifs do not really work in tax laws. The question is, if your current current structure and tax law interpretation will hold in 8 years. After germany had new election, new socialist goverment changed and it is trying to milk everyone.

Some flight ticket from lufthanza are not going to save you!
by Aurornis | 2025-08-08 14:42:09+00:00
If you put a 2.5% annual tax on net worth, that net worth would very rapidly find its way to other countries.

Wealthy people would learn to structure their earnings to flow into businesses in other countries to avoid this wealth tax. This would reduce income tax in the United States. I would guess the overall effect would trend toward a net tax loss.

If you gave 40 million people an extra $15K per year to spend, the prices of the things those 40 million people buy would go up. The poverty threshold would rise.

There are many second order effects like this that are always ignored in simplistic analyses.

It’s never simple math like taking one number, moving it into another column, and problem is solved.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-08 14:42:27+00:00
https://penncapital-star.com/uncategorized/americans-suffer-...

> In 2022, UnitedHealth Group made over $20 billion in profit. Cigna made $6.7 billion, Elevance Health made $6 billion and CVS Health made $4.2 billion. All told, America’s largest health insurers raked in more than $41 billion of profits in 2022.

Universal healthcare is good. America's for profit system is bad. You have to get rid of for profit insurers (to start, lots of other changes need to be made as well, PBM and private equity ownership, etc). Is there will to do that? What is it going to take to get there? Every other OECD country has a functioning healthcare system, to keep the existing system in the US is a policy choice.

Edit: Absolutely wild to see the apologists who say, "This is fine." to billions of dollars being sucked out of the healthcare system as profits instead of being spent on care or reduced premiums.

Investors Are Pressing UnitedHealth Group to Deny More Care - https://jacobin.com/2025/06/investors-unitedhealth-group-car... - June 10th, 2025

Democrat senators probe UnitedHealth over nursing home care denials - https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/democrat-senators-probe-... - August 8th, 2025

Revealed: UnitedHealth secretly paid nursing homes to reduce hospital transfers - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/21/unitedhealth... - May 21st, 2025

> UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest healthcare conglomerate, has secretly paid nursing homes thousands in bonuses to help slash hospital transfers for ailing residents – part of a series of cost-cutting tactics that has saved the company millions, but at times risked residents’ health, a Guardian investigation has found. Those secret bonuses have been paid out as part of a UnitedHealth program that stations the company’s own medical teams in nursing homes and pushes them to cut care expenses for residents covered by the insurance giant. In several cases identified by the Guardian, nursing home residents who needed immediate hospital care under the program failed to receive it, after interventions from UnitedHealth staffers. At least one lived with permanent brain damage following his delayed transfer, according to a confidential nursing home incident log, recordings and photo evidence.

As long as a profit motive exists, there will be incentives to reduce or avoid care for more profits.
by Xss3 | 2025-08-08 14:42:40+00:00
My mother, now in her 70s, has about 4tb worth of photos and videos, and we haven't even started digitizing stuff.

My friend, in her mid 20s, uses nearly 3tb of apple cloud space with photos and videos, mostly of her kids and dog.

I dont even film much but im using about a terabyte.
by thisisit | 2025-08-08 14:44:09+00:00
Nate Silver has a piece on this: https://www.natesilver.net/p/trumps-jobs-data-denialism-wont...

The point being that revisions can be huge.

Given the climate created by the TACO-ing over tariffs its not surprising that these numbers are inconsistent.

And Trump keeps rewriting history about the numbers impacting elections. The last number before elections were the Oct numbers released on 1-Nov-24. That was abysmal at 12k jobs. Trump even complained about in his campaign speeches. But never let truth stand in the way of Trump and his supporters.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/empsit_11012024.ht...
by piva00 | 2025-08-08 14:44:14+00:00
Unfortunately there are lots of people on the sidelines that watch them screaming "censorship!", "persecution!", "injustice!" and fall for it. Any act against them is met with whining and fake outrage, and it works politically.

You can see this in action even in here, a forum where most people are more well-educated than 90% of the global population, they still swallow those cries as if this administration is the victim.

What is even more amusing and weird is how much the same side likes to scream "stop being a victim" while continuously playing into victimising themselves.