MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2025-08-24 23:45:41+00:00
> could not generate sufficient revenue to pay back the loans

I think there's an oversimplification here. Even at 0% interest the government gets returns on those loans. "Death and taxes", right?

Governments aren't people. If I gift you money, that money doesn't come back to me. But if a government gifts someone money, it makes its way back. As long as that money gets spent, there's returns. Even if you die, and even if you don't have that $14m for the death tax, that money still pays dividends back.

The only way it doesn't is if the economy crumbles or that money is taken out of the entire economy (which is much harder to do considering the dollar being the current global currency). So basically you need to light it on fire.

You can do things to slow that flow but it does come back. A low interest loan is just increasing that flow and this is why a negative interest rate can still generate a return. A company can fail and there'd still be returns through taxes in the mean time. The money doesn't just evaporate.

I think a lot conversations about money get weird because we over generalize what money means, applying money's context for an average person more broadly. But money has a very different context when you're talking about governments, corporations, or even billionaires (due to the shear amount). Nor are those examples the same either.

In this case I think it matters. The government already has a stake in Intel, and in all companies. Shares only decrease the pie available to the public while increases the ability for government official to do insider trading and increases nationalization.
by sidibe | 2025-08-24 23:45:56+00:00
Space enthusiasts seem quite immune to politics compared to the Tesla consumers, they still hang on his every word when it comes to Starship.

As an ignorant outsider who only watches these Starship launches and doesn't do Kerbal, seems to me like another Cybertruck, where he after super successful model goes all in for big and cool (to him) even if it doesn't work
by aspenmayer | 2025-08-24 23:46:02+00:00
> The healthcare industry is receiving perpetual bailouts through drug import restrictions, tax deductions, subsidies and favorable legislation.

The chip fab industry builds billion dollar bespoke superfund sites, and they're paid for the privilege.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv65swcp.5 | https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv65swcp.5

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfund
by verbify | 2025-08-24 23:46:33+00:00
The article claims you can figure out the almost correct answer to the Monty Hall problem by running simulations hundreds of times instead of doing the maths (and the same for coin flips).

My problem is that it still relies on some mathematical intuition - that large sample sizes approximate the true distribution. Similarly bad intuition (like the gambler's fallacy) could easily be coded.

I agree that formally calculating the probabilities isn't necessary if you have the right intuition. But I believe getting good intuition is the result of training on problems (and then you can learn how to formalise it - which is the easier part).

Edit: Being good at mental arithmetic isn't necessary for programming, but being good at mental arithmetic isn't necessary for working as a mathematician either.
by TOGoS | 2025-08-24 23:46:38+00:00
Being a good programmer requires thinking about things that, whether you realize it or not, are math problems. Things like managing complexity, or analyzing a program to understand what it even does. You can get pretty far just with a strong intuition, but stripped of all the syntax and culture around programming, what you're dealing with is, like, graph theory, and combinatorics, and stuff. If you recognize the concepts then you can reason about systems at a higher level and save yourself a lot of trial and error.

Or: You don't necessarily have to take math classes to be a good programmer, but the skills that differentiate a good software engineer from an LLM (previously 'code monkey') happen to correspond to things that mathemeticians would recognize and could give you a word for. This CoRecursive episode comes to mind: https://corecursive.com/050-sam-ritchie-portal-abstractions-...
by srvo | 2025-08-24 23:47:04+00:00
The problem here isn't that the government gets involved in businesses. That has always been something they do.

The problem is that these days they do it capriciously, without any sort of plan or intention.

The government played a foundational role in supporting the early stage research that enabled companies like Intel to emerge. Underwriting that sort of long-term investment that wouldn't easily attract commercial capital is a great place for them to be.

Meanwhile, is it even the case that the American chip industry is declining? Apple, Nvidia, and Google all have significant chip manufacturing operations. And this isn't an industry I even follow particularly closesly.
by mvdtnz | 2025-08-24 23:47:22+00:00
Battlefield 2024 (and the upcoming 6) and all recent Call of Duty games are the obvious ones. And if you're interested in sim racing then device compatibility is a major problem even before you get to launch the game.

> I am ok with that not being solved

Great, good for you? You can't claim a problem is solved and then say "well I don't care" when shown it's not solved.
by Dave3of5 | 2025-08-24 23:47:23+00:00
> Which is much harder to dose correctly when the kid spits or drools it out.

Never met a non autistic child who would spit or drool out calpol. I'd take the stuff myself as an adult it tastes brilliant.

> Total culture shock for me, as in Europe the default for children is rectal ingestion (which is probably a culture shock as well for Americans)

Huh are you talking about new born babies or something? I've been to a few different EU countries and you can buy liquid stuff for kids in the chemists. (Spain, france, germany, italy) source me as a child getting the stuff when I was sick abroad and the local doc sold my parents basically some off brand calpol.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-08-24 23:48:22+00:00
> But my hunch is that most of the economic value of code is contingent on there being a set of human beings familiar with the code in a manner that requires writing having written it directly.

This reminds me of a software engineering axiom:

When making software, remember that it is a snapshot of your understanding of the problem. It states to all, including your future-self, your approach, clarity, and appropriateness of the solution for the problem at hand.
by SpecialistK | 2025-08-24 23:48:27+00:00
I'm not in the EU (as I have already stated that in this chain.)

And again, my whole hypothesis was that a well-intentioned regulation can still fall short or have loopholes which need addressing. An in-depth discussion on the merits of the GDPR was a little beyond my plans to be honest.

Anyways, fun chat!
by adinhitlore | 2025-08-24 23:50:12+00:00
"I believe Sam Altman recently stated that whatever you write in ChatGPT, it can also be shared with government agencies." - yeah i saw it on theo von too and btw when chatgpt first hit the news internationally (december 2 years ago...was it then?) i asked it if it shares info with fbi/cia: it kind of admitted it does lol. This was when they had cia former agent on their board, maybe they still do?

I'm sure if i type something like "hey chatgpt, in 3 days i'll shoot the pedo" - the NSA will improve Trump's security (man this joke is so good i should consider standup, the AI context pedo = trump is a proof of the AGI of chatgpt 5 lol.

But anyway, grok was very curious about hobby projects of mine that involve an attempt to build agi prototype or "Reactionless drive" (well not reactionless but anyway). Yet when i asked about symptoms of mental health: it ignored the question and someone even reposted it, it ignored it again. So it's not just data collecting tool but it's an ROI tool, it tries to get as much as possible by giving as little as possible and Musk thinks he's such a genius he or his "big balls" coders think they know how to manipulate people, including myself.

Well one week: zero posts from me on x.com, looks like grok lost yet another free info flow. I'm trying to migrate to Bluesky instead and so far it's going great,but i'm busy and have no time to post, maybe in the upcoming months will post more there who knows.
by colesantiago | 2025-08-24 23:50:24+00:00
> What Google tracking is there in, for instance, vanilla MacOS?

Mail > Google

Internet Accounts > Google

As I said:

> Absolutely zero Google tracking here and an esoteric OS has zero Google tracking. Not in source code not in network requests, zero.

Even with the mere integration of Google this deep into the OS is enough for those respect their privacy to not want to use MacOS.
by monkeywork | 2025-08-24 23:50:26+00:00
yup - it's the users gooseus fault.

If you're wasting your breath talking about someone, it's not on them, it's on you. We live in a world where everyone should have realized by now that attention is the most valuable currency you have ... and yet people continue to use that currency on things they claim to dislike ... I have a hard time feeling bad for them.
by idiotsecant | 2025-08-24 23:51:27+00:00
Elon Musk is one nepobaby with poor emotional regulation. SpaceX is an enormous number of very smart, very driven, very dedicated professionals who all work ridiculous hours in not great working conditions because they believe in the outrageous idea of humanity out among the stars.

It's ok to not like the guy at the top, but still marvel at the achievements of the people he pays.
by lazyeye | 2025-08-24 23:51:52+00:00
I was using the term "one-party state" metaphorically. I thought that would be obvious.

In any case the demographics in California are now such that it is close to impossible for a Republican governor to be elected. Which means that Dem politicians are now only really accountable to the people of influence in their own party, not so much the general public. And they have an entirely different set of interests to the general public.

It doesn't matter what your political persuasion, a "one-party state" is in nobody's interest. For example if politics was not so dysfunctional in California you might have had a competent mayor in LA and the Palisades would still be standing....
Show HN: Making hardware-integarted app development easier (open source)
by mmajzoobi | 2025-08-24 23:52:11+00:00
Over the past several years, I have worked on many embedded projects that shared a similar challenge: building a good UI/UX for the app's end user on an embedded platforms.

The UX in some cases required voice interactions, others needed a graphical user interface (GUI), and in one instance I needed camera for reading barcodes/QR codes.

Unlike desktop or mobile apps, where there are well-developed SDK and development environments like Android Studio, Xcode, etc (which separate the low level concerns for developers), there is no fully open source capable alternative for embedded linux.

So for example, if you are developing a hardware-integrated app on Raspberry Pi that requires audio/speech interactions, an embedded graphical user interface, interfacing with sensors, camera, and/or other on-board hardware, you typically have to start from scratch and integrate these elements directly in your application (instead of using platform APIs).

So I started Ubo projects a few years ago which aims to address this issue through a collection of open source building blocks (software and hardware).

I am exciting to release the latest stable version of Ubo app (v1.6) which abstracts system and hardware level interactions with a clean event driven API.

It allows developers to add GUI, audio, speech, camera/vision, LED ring, Infrared RX/TX, sensors, etc to their apps with a few lines of code.

You can run Ubo app on Raspberry Pi 4 and 5.

For hardware specific capabilities, you can either DIY your hardware as explained in README.md or obtain an Ubo pod (an open hardware companion for Ubo app).

Some of the hardware capabilities such as the embedded GUI and audio playback is currently also emulated in the browser.

For more information Ubo app, check out my GitHub repository.

Would love to hear your feedback and how something like this could help you in projects.

P.S. there are some experimental ai driven features enabled by pipecat-ai in the works to bring more interactive voice/vision interfaces to developers apps.
by nh2 | 2025-08-24 23:52:32+00:00
I don't see how the journal delete depends any more on a specific file system's behaviour than the main data write: If a specific file system can decide to automatically fsync unlink(), it can equally decide to automatic fsync write().

In either case it is clear that (on Linux), if you want guarantees, you need to fsync (the file and the dir respectively).
by jongjong | 2025-08-24 23:52:50+00:00
It feels like all the 'low hanging fruit' ideas in the software space are basically gone, made non-viable because of too much competition. It was already somewhat the case that software industry was very competitive, even before people could code entire apps with AI... At least you could find a niche which was too small to be of interest to big VCs. Now, it's like, regardless of whether you choose a big idea or a niche, you have to compete on a global scale with either big VC or big AI...

This only leaves a few areas; niches which are both small and require very complex solutions; or software with low profit margins which have high risk of failure and short-lifespans (which is what most games are). Due to media saturation, for the former approach (complex niche), you basically have to market the solution to people door-to-door, one-by-one.

My experience of the game sector is that it's very difficult. Before you even begin coding, the definition of runaway success is basically "Attain a few million views, then watch traffic dry up completely as the game becomes completely irrelevant over 6 months." I could never get into games because knowing that you probably won't get recurring income is just too demoralizing as a starting point. Building a game like Minecraft is basically outside of the realm of possibility... Games like Minecraft, World of Warcraft are essentially 1 in a million games. You're better off just buying lottery tickets.

That said, I think the game sector seems to be more meritocratic than all other sectors of software that I'm aware of... Not sure that's saying much but I do think there is a correlation between quality and 'fun level' of the game and the short-term adoption of the game.

Most other sectors of tech are a maze of regulatory capture, network effect monopolies or the sector is fully government-controlled to begin with. It would be nice if governments would tell people "Don't do a startup in this sector because we already decided which company will control that sector." because it sucks to find out after building a solution for 1 year.
by mettamage | 2025-08-24 23:53:02+00:00
I never understood why libraries also had the word API. From my understanding a library is a set of functions specific to a certain domain, such as a statistics library, for example. Then why would you need the word API? You already know it’s a library.

For end points it’s a bit different. You don’t know what are they or user facing or programmer facing.

I wonder if someone has a good take on this. I’m curious to learn.
by lisbbb | 2025-08-24 23:53:16+00:00
The handwringing over Trump continues and is completely unwarranted. Obama bailed out the entire banking industry to horrifying moral hazard. The US is bailing out Intel for national security reasons and taking a 10% stake is a better deal for US taxpayers than how typical bailouts like GM played out. Sheesh! It's like you can't even read a news story these days without seeing the anti-Trump bias programmed into the article.
by engcoach | 2025-08-24 23:57:22+00:00
Is the danger here token replay? It's using Bearer tokens, so it's not sending a password over:

<https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Guides/Aut...>

Threats section for Bearer tokens: <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6750#section-5.2>

Does OAuth reuse tokens across domains? If not, doesn't this just mean it is requesting an auth token for ghrc (the "fake" domain) but it can't access any auth tokens for ghcr (the real domain)?
Prompt engineering is collapsing – GPT-5 just proved it
by yuer2025 | 2025-08-24 23:57:32+00:00
GPT-5 is a beast. But here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud: it just killed prompt engineering as a sustainable practice.

Carefully tuned prompts from GPT-4o? Broken.

Styles, logic, answer habits? All shifted.

Companies? Forced to roll back or re-test thousands of prompts overnight.

This isn’t progress. It’s technical debt disguised as innovation. Every new release means paying a Prompt Migration Tax: rewriting, regression-testing, and re-training teams.

Meanwhile:

Users are losing trust — sticking with old models or switching providers.

Security is a joke — OWASP already flagged prompt injection as the #1 LLM risk, and NIST said the same.

Vendors keep pushing “best practices” like longer separators or system prompts… band-aids on a structural wound.

The cycle looks like this: upgrade → break → patch → break again → patch again. How long before the entire industry realizes this is a dead end?

Prompt engineering isn’t the future. It’s a trap. And GPT-5 just made that painfully clear.
by estimator7292 | 2025-08-24 23:58:02+00:00
That's how I learn as well. I've found that reading code is a completely different thing from learning. Not even tangentially related.

I can read a codebase and run simulations in my head. But this almost never results in learning anything. I can study code and see how a particular task is done, but I don't learn it until I put it into practice. Just about the only thing I get from reading other people's code is the most egregious ways to not do something.

This is a pretty common thing, a plurality of humans learn this way. We just have different standards for software, for some reason. We like to pretend books teach you something more "real" than just getting your hands dirty and writing some real fucked up code. But the reality is that figuring out why your disaster code doesn't work, and then fixing it is one of the most educational experiences a programmer can have.
by kkylin | 2025-08-24 23:58:14+00:00
This is not an uncomon situation in e.g., math departments across the US. Luckily I've not had to grade more then 60-70 in a single term, or ~200 but a select number of problems in a large course.

Also, second stapled exams with prescribed spaces for answers. So much time wasted just looking for where the answer is.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-08-24 23:58:26+00:00
>The only absurd here is to think republicans care about anything other than power . Doesn't matter what they did or said yesterday

Right, but it's an absurd juxtaposition when taken at face value none the less. I agree with what you said, but my point was more about other possible structures for the deal rather than political conclusions. I was attempting to brush aside the political considerations and take a somewhat tabula rasa approach, not spur a partisan political conversation, which clearly I failed at by mentioning the absurdity in messaging.
by brandonb | 2025-08-24 23:58:58+00:00
The paper's original title is 66 characters too long for HN.

The "25% higher mortality" comes from the all-cause mortality result in "Findings", which is one of the main results of the paper. The paper expresses it as a hazard ratio (HR) of 1.25 [1.10–1.42]. Hazard ratios are standard in medical research, but I wanted to summarize the main result without jargon.
by a_bonobo | 2025-08-24 23:59:53+00:00
This is what Naur, 1985, Programming as Theory Building is about!

https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

The act of programming is building the theory of what the program does, so that you acquire new knowledge of doing things. It's not just text production.

>"[...] not any particular knowledge of facts, but the ability to do certain things, such as to make and appreciate jokes, to talk grammatically, or to fish."

Which is why re-building a program from scratch is so tempting: you've figured out the theory as you went along, now you can build the real thing.
by nicce | 2025-08-24 23:59:58+00:00
GitHub Container registry does not even support fine-grained tokens, instead it uses classic ones [1], which makes this even more dangerous.

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/packages/working-with-a-github-pa...

Edit: most relevant issues?

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/38467

https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/558
by _aobj | 2025-08-25 00:00:24+00:00
Raptor engine fuel lines. The most obvious candidate is diamond nano threads. If they plan on using for cabling for a Space elevator. Then they should be suitable as a flexible fuel line outer layer. Having looked into the future(pressurised fuel lines at present stainless steel), I am sure that Space Ex Starship should have a successful launch. As the previous launch should have been successful, checking every component, like a Halo Elite Spacecraft 'load master', checking individuals equipment before deploying into space on a space flight. Is the right way to go. So getting it right takes time, regardless of the media circus!
by bigyabai | 2025-08-25 00:01:57+00:00
> Ultimately, it is inevitable that you will encounter a cheater eventually, but we will just keep banning them all over and over again until they finally work up the courage to run the uninstaller.

What a great message to send to your fans. "We know we installed Ring 0 anticheat on your PC and banned Linux/Steam Deck players, but look at how useless it is!"
by rootusrootus | 2025-08-25 00:02:04+00:00
Yes, they should know that now, in 2025. But last year, or 10, 20, 30 years ago? Nobody joined a federal law enforcement agency expecting the president to utilize them for political goals. And for sure nobody joining the national guard was expecting that.

I hope that someday we will put this genie back in the bottle and return to the previous normal.
by frozenlettuce | 2025-08-25 00:02:44+00:00
that might be possible by asking it to create an 3d model with animations (based on a template) and then capture the sprites. but then again, not sure if building it would be worthwhile because 1) openai might add that as a native product (like what happened with .ppt generation) or 2) the capability to do so might be 6 months away
by MrCoffee7 | 2025-08-25 00:02:50+00:00
Those are some pretty sweeping allegations made in the 18 bullet points. It would be interesting if you could run an AI summarizer to list which points were raised during Lex's podcast that support each of the 18 bullet points, and then run some kind of AI fact checker on each supporting argument. That makes me wonder if there are any people or discussion forums that are already doing fact checking of Lex's podcasts? It looks like some researchers are beginning to study the issue of fact checking podcasts, eg. https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.01402 .
by kkylin | 2025-08-25 00:03:27+00:00
Gradescope partially solves the problem. There are certain kinds of questions that are more amenable to rigid rubrics (e.g., techniques of integration in a beginning calculus course) where the space of correct solutions is rather limited. Once the material gets more advanced, the space of correct (and partially correct) solutions gets really large, fast. One could design exam questions to restrict the solution space, but sometimes at the cost of testing real understanding. Also, at that point giving partial credit with Gradescope-style rubrics is not always straightforward (not impossible, but not trivial).
by seabrookmx | 2025-08-25 00:03:58+00:00
E5-2650v2 in a Chinese mATX motherboard for me. Got the cpu years ago for like $50 as an eBay server pull. 970 Evo SSD. 24GB of mismatched DDR3. Runs all my home server junk and my dev environment (containerized with Incus). Every year I tell myself I should grab a newer Ryzen to replace it but it honestly just keeps chugging along and doesn't really slow me down.