MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cogman10 | 2025-09-25 15:44:17+00:00
> Why are you so hostile in tone to the truth?

Because it's not truth and because my family has been personally affected by this attitude.

My wife went in several months to an urgent care with blood in her urine. They ran cultures that kept coming back negative. Didn't matter, antibiotics and she was told she needed to wash more thoroughly while being offered a doctor's note to get out of work each time.

Eventually, they decided "hey, you are coming in here a lot, go to the ER and check to see if it's something else". So we did. Even there, she was treated as a "hood rat" (want to guess her skin color). They did a CT anyways and kidney cancer. We had her kidney removed as it was too big to salvage and unfortunately it ended up metastasizing to her liver.

So, sorry of I'm hostile to someone "speaking truth" about "hood rats".
by myrmidon | 2025-09-25 15:44:38+00:00
What is a reason to end up multiple times a week in ER?

I have a bunch of people with serious conditions in my "bubble" (spontaneus penumothorax, diabetes, ...) and none of those needed the ER more than ~1/lifeyear.

If weekly hospital visits were typical, competitive free market hospitals would be more feasible IMO but I don't think we're close to that (and I don't want to be, either).
by umutisik | 2025-09-25 15:44:50+00:00
It does make me uneasy that founding companies is becoming another tracked thing that people feel they can apply high-IQ pattern-matching to. Especially when startups are where first-principles thinking is the most valuable.

That being said, I can see this being useful to a lot of kids. Certainly beats going to grad school for someone who wants to start a company. Keep in mind that a 500K SAFE doesn't force a founder to go big or zero-out.
by varispeed | 2025-09-25 15:44:58+00:00
The whole “RTO builds culture and networks” story is upside down. Culture isn’t something you force by sticking bodies in the same postcode; culture is what people build when they trust each other, share information freely, and aren’t ground down by pointless commutes. If your company can only transmit knowledge through overhearing desk chatter, you don’t have culture - you have an ad-hoc crutch for bad processes.

Mentorship isn’t “minute-to-minute hand-holding.” It’s structured review, clear documentation, and intentional teaching. If seniors are expected to babysit juniors in person all day, you haven’t built a system for growth, you’ve built a dependency loop that collapses as soon as those seniors leave.

And claiming remote is “very difficult to do well” is just an admission of managerial laziness. Remote is harder only if your toolkit begins and ends with meetings and hallway gossip. The companies that are intentional about remote show it scales just fine.

So yes, RTO is about (damage) control - not because managers are cartoon villains, but because without control, the hollowness of their systems is exposed.
by guywithahat | 2025-09-25 15:45:04+00:00
The most incredible piece of logical gymnastics I remember from civics/history class in high school was that during economic downturns, we need government to spend more to help people, and during economic growth we of course also need more government to manage all the new growth. At no point do we cut the spending we've added, because it would always hurt those who have jobs.

People like to criticize DOGE for going after smaller amounts (like hundreds of millions instead of tens of billions) but those are still hundreds of millions that could be put elsewhere, or even returned to the taxpayer or put towards federal debt. The biggest concern with DOGE is that much of the spending is just going to come right back during the next election cycle
by crazygringo | 2025-09-25 15:45:13+00:00
I can't agree with a lot of this.

PR's should generally be the size of a feature, or a meaningful subfeature for large features.

When you arbitrarily split up PR's into something "300 lines" or "5-10 minutes" you can miss the forest for the trees. The little thing looks fine in isolation but doesn't make any sense as part of a larger approach. Different people are reviewing it piecemeal but nobody is reviewing the approach as a whole or making sure the parts fit together right.

And then the idea of "telling a story with commits" feels like a waste of time to me. I have no interest in the order in which you wrote the code, or what you wrote and then rewrote. The code itself needs to be legible. Your final code with its comments should speak for itself. Code is the what and comments are the why.

Now, what I will say is that the more junior the developer, the smaller their commits should be. But that's because they should be assigned smaller features, and have more handholding along the way. And when people are making larger architectural changes, they should be getting signoff on their overall approach from the start -- if you're frequently rejecting the whole approach to a problem in code review, something's going wrong with your communications processes.
by dinfinity | 2025-09-25 15:45:17+00:00
1. Microsoft is not a "dotcom startup". We live in a different, much more consolidated tech world of companies that either balloon to become behemoths or are bought by existing behemoths.

2. Power and data centers can be used for other things than AI.

3. They might turn out to be wrong and not need the deal/power. For companies sitting on a shitload of cash that would be an inconvenience whereas not investing and then later having to beg for electricity amounts to losing the race.
by dragonwriter | 2025-09-25 15:45:55+00:00
> As long as the Trump administration is willing to backstop any backslide on AI, things will only continue to go up.

Government trying to “backstop” firms to prevent a bubble bursting may be able to delay it somewhat, but not indefinitely, and only at the cost of magnifying the impact when it does.

And the capacity to even delay it is constrained by the state of the rest of the economy, and that isn’t looking great right now in the US, which is teetering on the edge of stagflation.
by mothballed | 2025-09-25 15:46:24+00:00
You're confusing the symptom and the reason.

The symptom is that emergent cases are getting worse care.

The reason is that non-emergent cases go to the ER even when it is known apriori the case is non-emergent.

The solution is to disincentive non-emergent cases from going to the ER when it is known apriori they are non-emergent.

How you actually accomplish that could be violence (use IRS men with guns to fund PCPs by taking away money from someone else they could have used on necessities as we currently do in social security), it could be charity (monetary or labor donations for medical services), or it could be finding ways to make people pay for abusing the ER system, or it could be deregulating health care so it's cheaper. There are lots of ways to implement the solution but your comment presents a false premise it's the only choice.
by stonemetal12 | 2025-09-25 15:46:44+00:00
> the training lasts 5 years. At the end of their training the year is 2021

The training lasts 5 years, 2021 - 5 = 2016 If they stopped accepting people into the radiologist program but let people already in to finish, then you would stop having new radiologist in 2021.
by dmoy | 2025-09-25 15:46:50+00:00
Benching is very common in any firm like Accenture, yea.

It does seem weird from the outside I agree. It can also depend on the person, skillset, etc. Some people will never get benched just because they don't have any or enough other people with equivalent skills, so there's constant demand.

(edit: skillset, not skillet, obviously your bench rate does not depend on your cookware)
by rexpop | 2025-09-25 15:47:04+00:00
Are you referring to Shaun Maguire remarks labeling Zohran Mamdani an "Islamist"?

Then you'll love that a16z general partner Katherine Boyle went on Bari Weiss's[0] podcast[1] to help spin the Charlie Kirk martyrdom narrative.

0. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/bari-weiss-free-pr...

1. And syndicated it, themselves: https://a16z.simplecast.com/episodes/charlie-kirk-and-the-ri...
by shepardrtc | 2025-09-25 15:47:13+00:00
> DOGE may not be the right answer, but it's the first actual reduction in spending in my lifetime

On what timeline? The week of the first round of RIFs? The first month?

I assure you, as someone who works with in the space where DOGE has played, it will NOT be a reduction in costs in the long run. In fact, costs will go up because of the indiscriminate nature of "cost reduction". When the only people with knowledge of a system are removed, the remaining people cannot run it - no matter what AI they are given. At that point, you have to either hire back the people you fired, with a serious delay of important work, or you stumble for years until it can be figured out at the cost of delays, protests, lawsuits, whatever.

Considering firing everyone a reduction in costs is a shallow, short-term view.
by shermantanktop | 2025-09-25 15:47:15+00:00
> Everyone left and right instinctively knows this

That’s the first sign that a large group of people are going to something thoughtless and destructive.

Looking around at actual data from both gov and think tank sources, this quote from Pew is a good summary: “While the number of federal workers has grown over time, their share of the civilian workforce has generally held steady in recent years.”

But that’s not the whole story. The postal service is shrinking, the vast majority of those federal employees work for the VA, the amount of funding being directed by the federal employees has grown (because of budget growth), federal regulations touch more private sector activity than in the past, and state and local governments employ significantly more people than they used to.

DOGE’s focus on headcount was wrongheaded because the number of federal employees is not the problem. The problem is Congress (budgets and laws) and states.

Conventional wisdom is that federal payroll growth is massive, and that is just wrong.
by mallowdram | 2025-09-25 15:47:23+00:00
Ask Gemini

The idea that "language has no meaning" highlights the arbitrariness of language, meaning there's no natural, necessary connection between a word's form and its concept. The relationship between a word and what it signifies is a result of social convention and agreement within a linguistic community. For example, the sound of the word "dog" does not intrinsically resemble the animal itself; rather, we've all agreed to associate those sounds with the canine creature.
by azemetre | 2025-09-25 15:47:46+00:00
Gonna sound lame but the passages that really moved me were those in the beginning talking about the Native American interactions with European colonists, how some colonist couldn't stand their lifestyles and found a home with the Native Americans.

Also the section on war, how British officials thought the blitz would dissolve the people into barbarism when the opposite happened.

Couple this with declining third spaces and a government that increasingly does not care about people's mental health, something has to change and it's not like it would be hard to start public jobs programs again or encourage more civic engagement via workplace democracy.
by mattkrause | 2025-09-25 15:47:52+00:00
Here's a report[1] arguing that $1 spent on an NIH grant generates $2.56 of economic activity---and these grants largely aren't even meant to have short-term payouts. Block grants for (e.g.,) preventative care or education probably have huge returns too: the ER and prison are expensive!

[1] https://www.unitedformedicalresearch.org/annual-economic-rep...
by photon_lines | 2025-09-25 15:47:58+00:00
If you guys like visual-explanations that are a bit more intuitive -- I put actually made guides on both data-structures and algorithms not too long ago which you can find here:

Visual-Focused Algorithms Cheat Sheet — https://photonlines.substack.com/p/visual-focused-algorithms...

Visual Data Structures Cheat Sheet — https://photonlines.substack.com/p/visual-data-structures-ch...
by balamuruganb | 2025-09-25 15:48:34+00:00
Hi HN, I’m Bala.

While working on my last startup I found myself spending most of the day with AI tools. I felt typing slowed me down. Since I was working on voice AI, I built a dictation tool for myself. It quickly became part of my workflow, and when I shared it with other developers they also loved it. That became Voibe.

Voibe is a fast dictation app for Mac that runs entirely on-device. It uses quantized Whisper models locally, so everything stays private and works without internet. It transcribes in real time and works in any macOS application.

A couple of things make it different: - Deep integration with coding agents like Cursor and Windsurf: you can speak file and folder names and it resolves them correctly from the active workspace. - Custom dictionary for your own vocabulary of technical terms, acronyms, or product names.

Why it matters: In our workflow we found talking > typing for AI work. We speak and type differently; speech preserves intent and usually produces longer, more clearer prompts. Early users report better first-pass results when they talk to AI.

Questions for HN: - Have you tried talking (instead of typing) to AI what's been your experience? - Do you use dictation in dev/AI workflows today? What blocks you (latency, accuracy on technical terms, punctuation, noise)? - For developers: would deep integration with Cursor/Windsurf—resolving spoken file/folder names from the active workspace—be useful? In which tasks (prompting, refactors, code search, commit messages)? - Does fully offline/on-device matter to you vs cloud tools? Why?

Happy to answer questions here.
by lesuorac | 2025-09-25 15:48:45+00:00
> but the internal tools aren't exactly the best (Accenture is too expensive to work for Accenture, haha).

I've always found this part to be so crazy. It's seems like both a politically bad idea to not dogfood your own stuff and just also a bad business sense to not get "free" testers using the products.

Like, if you're buying a car and you ask the salesman which of these Subaru's they'd be and they respond with I'd go elsewhere and buy a Ford. Why would you buy one of their cars?
by alex989 | 2025-09-25 15:48:53+00:00
A significant difference with gatcha games compared to traditional cash gambling is that you cannot chase your losses. You either get the skin/item or you don't, but there is no false hope that you could recover the money you gambled with if you spend even more. Obviously, that's not true when the game allows you resell the skins individually for real cash (eg. CS skins). Chasing losses and borrowing money to earn back the money you lost and getting even more in debt is what makes people kill themselves in casino parking lots.
by dismalaf | 2025-09-25 15:48:55+00:00
Yes, Netanyahu thought that pulling out of Gaza completely, giving them money and allowing them to hold jobs in Israel would improve their economic standing enough to make them docile enough to not attack. He was obviously wrong.

And preferring them to the PLO in the wake of the second intifada was reasonable. All Palestinian groups claim to want to kill all Jews, but at that point in time the PLO had actually done it for decades. For the record, the PLO still has the pay-to-slay program...
by nightpool | 2025-09-25 15:49:04+00:00
I'm not saying that they're just "a nice community member", I'm saying that they're the ones doing the work. They're not randos, they're trusted maintainers in the ecosystem with a proven track record. After the purge, rubygems and Bundler has only one active maintainer, one who's splitting his time between Rails, Ruby core, and many other open source projects. The bundler and gem-specific experts have been removed, and we've gone from a bus factor of 4-5 to a bus factor of 1. This is much, much more unacceptable then the theoretical risk of a trusted, active maintainer with 10+ years of community experience suddenly deciding to go rogue and rewrite history (has this ever happened in the history of a supply chain attack?)

Also, commit access to Github doesn't even say anything about access to deploying the actual package on rubygems. If security really was the goal, there were a million less invasive ways to make this change then revoking commit access from the active maintainers. Set up branch protections, require approvals, etc. There are a lot more tools in the toolbox other than "remove all of the maintainers".
by toomuchtodo | 2025-09-25 15:49:14+00:00
I have more money than time. Take my money to do things I do not have time for. What you call lazy, I call time and capital/cashflow efficient.

(cloudflare customer, in both personal and professional capacities; i pay Fastmail to host family email; both can easily be switched if needed to prevent lock in, with DNS changes and in the case of hosted email, an export of mailboxes and tenant config)
by Aunche | 2025-09-25 15:49:18+00:00
Part of it is that Americans consume a lot more healthcare than other countries. They take more medication. They take more cutting edge medication (e.g. it's rare GLP-1 agonists to be used for weight loss outside the US). They see more therapists and chiropractors. They are more likely to stay in private hospital rooms.

Much of this is heavily subsidized by insurance. Any drastic change in the status quo would inevitably cause pricing and coverage that people are used to be adjusted, which is why they say they want healthcare reform until it actually happens.
by hollandheese | 2025-09-25 15:49:35+00:00
>Creation of a recovery drive for a Snapdragon-based Surface (which you have to do from a working Snapdragon-based Surface) requires typing your serial code into a Microsoft website, then downloading a .zip of drivers that you manually overwrite onto the recovery media that Windows 11 creates for you.

That's just creation of a recovery drive for anything that Microsoft itself makes. It's the same process for the Intel Surface devices too.

>no Media Creation Tool

Why would anyone care about that? Most actively avoid Microsoft's media creation tool and use Rufus instead.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-09-25 15:49:36+00:00
I'd be skeptical of the performance of any getBits() implementation. With the traditional approach ((X >> A) & B), you'll have to redundantly bit-shift all the data above the field you're aiming for. The other option would be to mask prior to the shift, but then you have a redundant copy of the data below the field.

Also, there's no great story for getting a large byte blob into or out of a BigInt, short of converting it all to ASCII hex and back. I ran into that limitation when attempting to use BigInts for arbitrary-precision arithmetic.

For simple data storage, I'd rather just use a Uint32Array and split/merge bits over element boundaries as appropriate.
by ddahlen | 2025-09-25 15:49:48+00:00
I made a 3D visualization of this a few weeks ago:

https://dahlend.github.io/the_belt.html

This includes about 1.3 million known asteroids (most of the known ones), so the page is like 45mb. Consider yourself warned.

This is a plot of semi major axis, orbital eccentricity, and inclination of the orbit. The blobs are collisional groups, where a bigger rock(s) got smashed into 'families' of asteroids. Color is by the absolute magnitude H, which is a normalized, log scaled, brightness measurement. Typically smaller H means larger object.

You can see the Kirkwood gaps clearly along one axis, but as you move around you can see more complex orbital resonances. These resonances pump energy into or out of the orbit of the asteroid, causing them to leave the resonance after some time, depleting the region of phase space.

Source: I do solar system simulations for my PhD work.
by roguecoder | 2025-09-25 15:49:51+00:00
If that's what the code is like and you aren't allowed to make it better, that is not a safe workplace.

Especially if the software matters at all.

I purposefully find jobs in fields like healthcare and physics and finance where it actually matters that the software works. Right now, if there is a bug in my code people could die.

And in that case, there are worse things than being fired.

If people do find themselves in that situation, the best answer is "unionize". The second best answer is to work with your coworkers to adopt better practices (it is very unlikely that they are going to fire you all all at once). And the third best answer is to do the job well, regardless of what is going on around you, and if you get fired you get fired.
by MoreQARespect | 2025-09-25 15:49:54+00:00
Give me one example then. One is all it takes to disprove a rule.

Im fairly sure that I could explain how to break up any long PR in a sensible way. Parent thinks couldnt be done, so do you - what is an example?

The only exception i can think of is something where 99.9% of the changes are autogenerated (where i wouldnt really be reading it carefully anyway, so the length is immaterial...).
Ask HN: Anyone switched from software to physical world engineering?
by pesfandiar | 2025-09-25 15:50:10+00:00
Most of the people I know have gone the other way, from mechanical, civil, or electrical into software, but I’m curious if anyone here has managed the reverse: leaving a software development career for mechanical, civil, mechatronics, robotics, or related fields where you design and build physical things. If you’ve done it, how did you navigate the skills gap, credential requirements, and job market, and what was the experience like compared to staying in tech?
by palmotea | 2025-09-25 15:50:14+00:00
> They can't just raise the prices because people will bring their business to the competition.

Not necessarily. They're all under the same pressure. If they all provide similar services with little differentiation, the price will probably settle at a higher level to cover the fixed costs of 5 stores instead of 1.

> In my local market we literally got a scan for 2k where the hospital we'd usually go to wanted 10k.

You kind of get at it below, but I wonder if that's an effect of insurance negotiations (e.g. the hospital you usually "usually go" gave in to insurance discount demands in one area, but pushed back on scans pricing to get the revenue they need to operate).

I do think the totally fictitious nature of posted healthcare prices is a serious problem.
by trymas | 2025-09-25 15:50:43+00:00
I am not going to look for the information again, but this list was debunked many times in my news feed.

i.e. doge says they saved some insane amount of money for some program, but most importantly, for many cases:

- most of the money have been paid already, so almost nothing is saved (imagine 5 year program for 10B, but 4 years have passed, 8B has been paid and now it will not be finished);

- program brings more business than it costs;

- or both;

It grinds my gears when musk, trump and the like bring their “run government as a business” attitude. Government is a “meta-business”.

It takes care of things that businesses won’t. Roads, trains, growing and educating new generation of workers and businessmen, army, etc.

thiel’s technofascist libertarian dystopian city states will crumble from lack of infrastructure or if not - more powerful states (China?) will eat them up one by one.
by citizenpaul | 2025-09-25 15:50:53+00:00
This certainly reflects my experience with private equity in general. It seems private equity by definition does not care if you die in any form direct or indirect. IMO its one of the greatest evils going on that literally nothing is being done about.

Last year I went to an interview where they flat out admitted to me that the private equity that bought them fired the entire previous team because they "believed" it could be done with far less people (4 vs 25). I asked them who has been maintaining things since that happened and they told me they have been hiring contractors to get through the period but "they haven't really been doing the job". I guess at least they were honest with me so I could nope out of there ASAP.