MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bgnn | 2025-08-28 20:50:18+00:00
Most people don't realize but the biggest thing China has going on for it is the start-up scene in semiconductors.

There's too much focus on the chip production in the news, but the industry ecosystem is much bigger than that. Especially chip design and design automation are stagnated fields in the West because of the limited talent pool and lack of investment. You guys here are used to all the VC money, but in HW development world the story is different. There's simply a lack of investors to put down 10s of millions with 5-10 years horizon. Couple this with lack of talent: there aren't enough EE graduates with necessary training, you get a bleak situation. So most if the industry relies on foreigners from developing countries: Iran, China, India, Bangladesh.. Now that those Chinese EEs have better prospects at home, most of them are returning back to China to start their own companies.

Similar trend is happening in design automation tools. We have 3 monopolies in the West extracting 20-30 peecent of the revenue from the semicon companies. There are competitors showing up in China. They aren't on par yet but it's just SW, so it's a matter of time. Since there's competition their pricing is so much better too. Unfortunately we don't have access to these SW, but Chinese companies do.
by pton_xd | 2025-08-28 20:50:44+00:00
Agreed. The beauty of programming is that you're creating a "mathematical artifact." You can always drill down and figure out exactly what is going on and what is going to happen with a given set of inputs. Now with things like concurrency that's not exactly true, but, I think the sentiment still holds.

The more practical question is though, does that matter? Maybe not.
by gs17 | 2025-08-28 20:51:34+00:00
> Until they go back home

Many international students want to stay in the US after graduation. Getting the visa to allow it is the hard part, they're forced to go back. The "profoundly stupid" part is putting so much effort into giving someone a world-class education and then demanding that they don't use it for the betterment of our country's economy.
by fibers | 2025-08-28 20:51:55+00:00
Then you would have to think twice about the company you may be giving money to (ie the stock market and private bank loans). That's the whole objective of this. Every company is going to need an accountant in one way or another and you don't really need to follow strict GAAP for management requirements (what else is EBIDTA for if anything?), but it's something completely different than saying: I made x dollars and spent y dollars, here is what I have and what I owe, please give me money.

At the end of the day it is a question of convenience/standards, if GAAP didn't exist maybe firms could use a modified accrual standard that is wholly compliant with tax reporting and that's it.
by mitchellh | 2025-08-28 20:51:57+00:00
Funny to see this pop up again (I'm the author). The year is now 2025 and I still use Chase as a personal bank and I'm now discovering new funny banking behaviors. I'll use this as a chance to share. :)

My company had an exit, I did well financially. This is not a secret. I'm extremely privileged and thankful for it. But as a result of this, I've used a private bank (or mix) for a number of years to store the vast majority of my financial assets (over 99.99% of all assets, I just did the math). An unfortunate property of private banks is they make it hard to do retail-like banking behaviors: depositing a quick check, pulling cash from an ATM, but ironically most importantly Zelle.

As such, I've kept my Chase personal accounts and use them as my retail bank: there are Chase branches everywhere, its easy to get to an ATM, and they give me easy access to Zelle! I didn't choose Chase specifically, I've just always used Chase for personal banking since I was in high school so I just kept using them for this.

Anyways, I tend to use my Chase account to pay a bunch of bills, just because it's more convenient (Zelle!). I have 3 active home construction projects, plus pay my CC, plus pretty much all other typical expenses (utilities, car payments, insurance, etc.). But I float the money in/out of the account as necessary to cover these. We do accounting of all these expenses at the private bank side, so its all tracked, but it settles within the last 24-48 hours via Chase.

Otherwise, I keep my Chase balance no more than a few thousand dollars.

This really wigs out automated systems at Chase. I get phone calls all the time (like, literally multiple times per week) saying "we noticed a large transfer into your account, we can help!" And I cheekily respond "refresh, it's back to zero!" And they're just confused. To be fair, I've explained the situation in detail to multiple people multiple times but it isn't clicking, so they keep calling me.

I now ignore the phone calls. Hope I don't regret that later lol.
by windsor | 2025-08-28 20:52:06+00:00
We tried to keep things simple, so our runner utility class is currently stateless.

However, it's highly extensible, and we can support stateful logic if we wanted to. For instance, we have a cool concept called "Policy" in our SDKs, which is basically a user-defined callback function that is run after each runner step (see our docs for more info). You can build some pretty advanced use cases with this, e.g. executing conditional database calls on a per-step basis.

The code for the runner is open source, in case you wanted to check out how we did it: https://github.com/dedalus-labs/dedalus-sdk-python/blob/main...
by Aloisius | 2025-08-28 20:52:11+00:00
Given the number of academic papers about it, model collapse is a popular idea among the people who know a lot about AI as well.

Model collapse is something demonstrated when models are recursively trained largely or entirely on their own output. Given most training data is still generated or edited by humans or synthetic, I'm not entirely certain why one would expect to see evidence of model collapse happening right now, but to dismiss it as something that can't happen in the real world seems a bit premature.
by tokioyoyo | 2025-08-28 20:53:58+00:00
I would highly suggest checking out China, before comparing GDP per capita. Or at least have close Chinese friends who live in T1/T2 cities.

China has a lot of problems, like a lot. But comparable QoL isn’t there. I’d say insane competition and work hours is probably the biggest problem for average person, from what I’ve heard from my friends, and browsing Chinese media.
by colechristensen | 2025-08-28 20:54:04+00:00
"Liberal Arts" was originally meant to be literally the education required to make you free, I think that sort of thing (and universities and lower education) needs to be rethought because so many people are so very... dependent and lacking so much understanding of the world around them.

If exposing you to an LLM causes psychosis you have some really big problems that need to be prevented, detected, and addressed much better.
by Tarean | 2025-08-28 20:54:18+00:00
Interval arithmetic is only a constant factor slower but may simplify at every step. For every operation over numbers there is a unique most precise equivalent op over intervals, because there's a Galois connection. But just because there is a most precise way to represent a set of numbers as an interval doesn't mean the representation is precise.

A computation graph which gets sampled like here is much slower but can be accurate. You don't need an abstract domain which loses precision at every step.
by quantified | 2025-08-28 20:54:28+00:00
The business and political elite really don't care. They'll purchase protection from infectious disease. Voters care more about hating other voters than about their own health. Care here is defined by actions, not by words.

Pharma makes more from diseases occurring, agriculture makes more from diseases undetected.

If you believe, as capitalists do, that the highest goal of government is to protect the ability of people to make money, you support this.
by riku_iki | 2025-08-28 20:54:53+00:00
> The key takeaway is that the United States does not have the stockpiles of munitions necessary to engage in a long-term conflict with China

I think this is missleading conclusion, my reading of the link is that it says that in 4 week of active phase, US stockpile will deplete, it doesn't assess what damage China will receive, will it have enough ships/airplanes after US activated thousands of munitions, and will it rebuild them faster than US will restock missiles inventory (99% not).

> US Navy is looking to outsource ship production to South Korea.

could you provide citation?
by griffzhowl | 2025-08-28 20:55:10+00:00
Ah ok, well, obesity incidence is probably almost entirely explained by the amount of sugar and fats in modern diets. I wouldn't have thought of it as pertaining to gut health specifically, but no doubt there can be relationships there.

The other things seem more plausible. Purely anecdotally, my step-dad always thought he was intolerant to gluten because of his reactions to British bread, but when he spent a lot of time in France and tried bread there, he was fine.

Could be there's something about the production process of the standard British "Chorleywood loaf" that aggravates some bowels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorleywood_bread_process

In general, I find it quite easy to believe that a lot of mass-produced foods contain what are essentially poisons, but I'm curious about evidential links (and I'm also aware that lots of naturally-occurring foods can be poisons if eaten too much, but that's a different question)
by codedokode | 2025-08-28 20:55:20+00:00
The situation with phones is pretty bad now. The phones that have or support open-source ROM (Pinephones, Pixels etc), are usually expensive and cost like 2-3 normal phones. So it might be cheaper just to buy a non-free phone and keep it in airplane mode (and connect it only to a airgapped home WiFi network to transfer data), and a second dumb phone for calling. Or have one phone with your data, connecting to Internet via second $50 phone, which has connectivity, but no data, and DPIs all requests from first phone, basically serving as a portable router.

And proprietary phones are really bad, today I read the news that Samsung promised to comply with law and auto-install Russian software (like Vk, Kaspersky, Rustore) when the phone is connected to the Internet. And that's a Korean company. Consumers are treated like garbage today.

It's understandable that you earn more on expensive phones, and freedom is not free, but I don't want to buy a phone that costs like 2 cheaper phones + a guitar.

I would prefer simply having something like GrapheneOS with root access.
by spankibalt | 2025-08-28 20:56:00+00:00
When your fingers are too fat and/or your hands are too big for a Libretto, or you have pathological issues troubling the relevant appendages, then do yourself a favor and don't bother.

It's obvious: These keyboards are, or should be, primarily made for mobile people, so high quality and tray or coffee table compatibility are a must. The Psion 5-series keyboards are ideal for this as long as you don't fuck with the formula.
by rgblambda | 2025-08-28 20:56:31+00:00
Small nitpick. You mean conscripted not enlisted.

I have no experience in the matter but I suspect that's not it. A conscript and a recently recruited professional soldier should in theory have the same level of training. Many professional soldiers only enlist for a few years.

I reckon it's more that equipment is a lot more complicated now than in the past. And maybe something to do with literacy levels in the 1960s meaning you couldn't trust a soldier to have read and understood a manual.
Ask HN: Services for Shutting Down a Startup?
by Felicia_Juhn | 2025-08-28 20:57:06+00:00
Going through the difficult process of winding down my company.

Looking for recommendations on services that helped make this smoother, whether legal, financial, operational, or administrative.

What worked well for you? What would you do differently? Any services designed explicitly for startup shutdowns?

Thank you.
by perihelions | 2025-08-28 20:57:13+00:00
> "Credit: Alamy" (x5)

Actual credit for the hero-image engraving is Crispijn van de Passe (attributed, at least), sometime between 1600–1604, currently in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Besides the misattribution, even the description is wrong: only the right drawing (label "18") is the "Mespilus germanica" the article's about—the left one is an unrelated flower, drawn on the same page. (Or however you say it, for an engraving).

It's one plate from a large collection of botanical engravings, "Hortus Floridus" (published 1614–1616) you can browse on archive.org (I link below).

https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie/object/Dagkoekoeksbl...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crispijn_van_de_Passe_the_Youn... ("Dutch Golden Age engraver, draughtsman and publisher of prints")

https://archive.org/details/hortusfloridusin00pass/page/n248...

And the watercolor in the 6th image is by Anselmus Boëtius de Boodt (née Alamy?), also in the Rijksmuseum, dated 1596–1610.

https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie/object/Mispel-Mespil...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anselmus_de_Boodt ("Flemish humanist naturalist, Rudolf II physician's gemologist")
by joshryandavis | 2025-08-28 20:57:19+00:00
I lived in China for a while and there were several waves of VPN blocks. Also very few VPN services even try to actively support VPN-blocking nations anymore. Any commercial offering will be blocked eventually.

What I settled on for decent reliability and speeds was a free-tier EC2 hosted in an international region. I then setup a SOCKS5 server and connected my devices to it. You mentioned Cloudflare so whatever their VM service is might also work.

It's very low profile as it's just your traffic and the state can't easily differentiate your host from the millions of others in that cloud region.

LPT for surviving the unfree internet: GitHub won't be blocked and you'll find all the resources and downloads you need for this method and others posted by Chinese engineers.

Edit: If you're worried about being too identifiable because of your static IP, well it's just a computer, you can use a VPN on there too if you want to!
by magicalhippo | 2025-08-28 20:57:20+00:00
I was looking at the 5060 Ti 16GB, and it has about half the memory bandwidth of the 5070 Ti, but at half the price here. With four of them you'd have 64 GB VRAM and still a lot cheaper than a 5090. Should get around 20-25 TPS for Qwen 3 Coder 30B, which is within usable range.

Need a big case tho or go bitcoin miner style.

Not seriously thinking about it, just playing around.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-08-28 20:57:45+00:00
I read the whole story and I'm still struggling to understand what you did wrong here. You indicated many times "I know, that was a mistake" (or similar phrases), but each time I was baffled because I saw no mistakes. It was your business, and you had every right to move around the funds within your account. What gives anyone at Chase the right to say diddly squat about how you manage your business' finances?
by nerdsniper | 2025-08-28 20:58:19+00:00
Why use a "web bot" instead of an API? Either can be driven by an AI "agent"...but this just seems like an "API key for a visual api interface", and rather wasteful in cost and resources. If a company could afford to pay a partner for an API key they wouldn't need this. If they can't afford to pay the partner for access -- they'd still be blocked with or without "Web Bot Auth". I don't understand what this is for.

I suspect I'm missing something, what am I missing?
by riku_iki | 2025-08-28 20:58:39+00:00
I googled some numbers for human development index, as the most developed/popular/reliable, and have following findings:

- there is strong correlation between index and EU countries GDP per capita: countries with high GDP are at the top, and countries with low GDP are at the bottom

- US index is higher than combined EU index, some EU countries with high GDP top US
by cuuupid | 2025-08-28 20:59:55+00:00
Cloudflare is the last party that should be running this for two reasons.

1. THey have already proven to be a bad faith actor with their "DDoS protection."

2. This is pretty much the typical Cloudflare HN playbook. They release soemthing targeted at the current wave and hide behind an ideological barrier; meanwhile if you try to use them for anything serious they require a call with sales who jumps you with absurdly high pricing.

Do other cloud providers charge high fees for things they have no business charging for? Absolutely. But they typically tell you upfront and don't run ideological narratives.

This is not a company we should be putting much trust in, especially not with their continued plays to become the gatekeepers of the internet.
by cb321 | 2025-08-28 21:00:09+00:00
GNU indent was already at version 1.9.1 by 1994: https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/indent/

If you grab that version and unpack it and look at /OChangelog then it seems to date back until at least 1989, same as Python itself.

That was for C source, of course. I expect there were pre-GNU indent variants, perhaps posted on comp.sources.unix and maybe some commercial things as part of very expensive compiler packages.

I would say that running autoformatters in any kind of routine way was pretty rare. EDIT: but I think ascribing the language design to commonality or not is probably ahistorical. Even today it's a rather passionate debate. And even at the time, Lisp - the poster child of copy-paste friendly PLangs - was routinely autoformatted within Emacs', but that was not enough for people to not find Lisp code "ugly".
by discoutdynamite | 2025-08-28 21:00:14+00:00
The double entendre of "having studied Agrippa" in the footnotes is probably going to go unnoticed unless someone mentions it here. Contemporary to the cited Camillo Agrippa, fencing master, was Henrichus Cornelius Agrippa, whose collections on philosophy and occultism are much more relevant to the topic. H.C. Agrippa's work is still considered authoritative in its fields: the numbers represent the ideas, which were both created in the first moments by God. the difference between set of reals and set of integers might have a correlation to the difference between the set of all expressible concepts, and (the smaller) set of actually meaningful concepts. Maybe some computability theory could be tossed in there too.
by chao- | 2025-08-28 21:01:04+00:00
The fraud story is interesting, but something I had hoped would be addressed by the end of the post, wasn't. You wrote:

>Someone out there is probably mentally screaming at me "you fool!" at this point. With hindsight, I agree...

I was hoping the piece would end with what you would do now (or what should you have done) when Alex called you. Did I fail to understand something in the piece, and simply staying on the phone with Alex would have somehow avoided the fraud situation down the line? It doesn't seem so?

If I were to get such a call, today, my instincts would be to engage in the same "I'm fine" get-off-the-phone-fast actions. What is the alternative?
by krapp | 2025-08-28 21:01:22+00:00
That isn't a problem with every head of state, it only seems to be a problem with the US where social cohesion and national identity no longer exist, and partisan politics overrides everything. Other democracies don't have the all-powerful executive the US does, nor the innate hate and fear of effective government that the US was founded on, leading to a government designed to maximize friction and gridlock.

The US is dragged down by an archaic political system designed for a pre-industrial society of slavers that immediately devolved into a two-party binary of entrenched elites - a system the US doesn't even spread when it does nation building because it's so fundamentally broken.

So yeah, the solution here is just don't be like the US.
by Scubabear68 | 2025-08-28 21:01:35+00:00
"Hallucinations aren’t a bug of LLMs, they are a feature. Indeed they are the feature".

I used to avidly read all his stuff, and I remember 20ish years ago he decided to rename Inversion of Control to Dependency Injection. In doing so, and his accompany blog, he showed he didn't actually understand it at a deep level (and hence his poor renaming).

This feels similar. I know what he's trying to say, but he's just wrong. He's trying to say the LLM is hallucinating everything, but Fowler is missing is that Hallucination in LLM terms refers to a very specific negative behavior.
by danaris | 2025-08-28 21:01:44+00:00
Under the conditions being created by Trump's administration, that will only last so long.

If vaccines are no longer being researched, then it doesn't matter how much money you have: you can't buy what doesn't exist.

If all the nonwhite scientists and doctors are being rounded up and deported or put in camps, that sharply reduces the speed at which any kind of new medical progress will continue.

If all the international students are being kept out—or staying out in fear of ICE—there's fewer new scientists.

And if every college has to pay 500 million to Trump out of operating funds to get 1 billion in restricted grants, pretty soon there won't be any left to train the scientists and doctors anyway, whatever their skin color.

What's happening right now isn't just a retrenchment of the elite in order to protect their private interests at everyone's expense. They're trying to do that, too, of course, but this is much too broad. It's essentially just destroying the possibility of a stable, healthy, improving life in the United States for the foreseeable future for everyone.
by fibers | 2025-08-28 21:01:56+00:00
I think you are conflating 2 things. AI could be going after new entry level jobs in software engineering. I am not a professional engineer but an accountant by trade (I like writing software as a hobby lol) but this article looks like evidence that IIT grads will have a harder time getting these jobs that AI is attacking. My comment rests on the fact that the report doesn't really reconcile with AI destroying entry level jobs for accounting, but rather this type of work being offshored to APAC/India. There are still new COEs being built up for mid cap companies for shared services in India to this day and I don't mean Cognizant and Wipro, but rather the end customer being the company in question with really slick offices there.
by mmphosis | 2025-08-28 21:02:25+00:00
Either way, expect no HyperCard (or work-alikes) from Apple. But how about other vendors? What about open-source projects? Nothing there, either. Oh, there is no shortage of attempts. And all of them are failures for the same reason: they insist on being more capable, more complexity-laden than HyperCard. And thus, none of them can readily substitute for it.

https://www.loper-os.org/?p=568#selection-660.0-660.5
by bee_rider | 2025-08-28 21:02:29+00:00
It seems relevant to the chain of comments they were responding to. They are disagreeing with the comment that says multiple states might want to split up the country now, by pointing out that some of them might not be economically viable if they did.

You’ve come up with more reasons not to split up the country, by pointing out some ways the other parts of the country might have trouble.

I think (correct me if I’m wrong) you disagree with the partisan jab at the end, not the actual line of argument.
by XorNot | 2025-08-28 21:02:55+00:00
Money has the problem that no matter how clever you are someone will punch all the values into Excel and then complain they don't match.

Or specify they're paying X per day, but want hourly itemized billing...but it should definitely come out to X per day (this was one employer which meant I invoiced them with like 8 digits of precision due to how it divided, and they refused to accept a line item for mathematical uncertainty aggregates).