MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thisislife2 | 2025-09-25 16:14:30+00:00
"Regulatory capture" is a nice euphemism for the problems that a corrupt political environment creates. It is corruption that really hampers the creation of a fair and competitive capitalistic market.

Regulation can indeed be balanced to create a fair and competitive capitalistic environment. A great example of this was the telecom industry in India during Dr. Manmohan Singh's government. Both the economic and telecom policies created a very booming and competitive telecom industry in India, with many foreign and local businesses trying their best, to be the best. It also ensured that the technology was accessible and affordable to all, providing a further fillip to the indian economy that increased connectivity delivers in a society. Contrast that 2+ decades later with the current telecom industry scenario in India where only 3 major private players (and 1 government owned company) survives today due to flawed and corrupt policies of the Narendra Modi government. (As the government owned telecom enterprise now doesn't really "compete" with the private players, the 3 private players have already formed a cartel to dictate pricing, and keep gouging the public, with increased pricing, with the connivance of a government that believes in oligarchy vis the South Korea Chaebol model).

And let's not ignore that regulation is necessary in a democracy because capitalists are only (rightly) focused on creating capital. But obviously they are not the only contributing members of a society (nor, do I dare say, the most important ones) and the rights and needs of others in a society are just as important in a democracy. That is why everyone today also realises that things like monopoly, hoarding or black marketing, for example, aren't good for the overall well-being of a society, even if that's how capitalists can derive "maximum" value (i.e. make the most profit). History says that imperialism is the capitalist model that delivered peak "efficiency" in terms of deriving the maximum "value" for the (low) capital invested in it. But obviously, imperialism, even in its limited form today, is not compatible with democracy or concepts of sovereignty.
by Jcampuzano2 | 2025-09-25 16:14:33+00:00
I unfortunately have had to be in and out of medical offices and hospitals recently - and I feel like compared to 10-15 years ago practically everyone I deal with is a physician assistant. Nothing against them but it's kind of annoying that it's almost impossible to actually talk with a doctor anymore.

I get it they're probably overworked too and their time is valuable but it's not quite as reassuring not actually interacting with doctors very much. The few times I have it was literally for my actual surgeries and surgery pre-appointment. Practically everything else is some assistant.
by belorn | 2025-09-25 16:14:38+00:00
Children often lack experience and education to prevent harm, as that is one of the distinguishing aspect between adults and children. We also know from biology that children are more prone to poor impulse control. Children in general are dependent on an adult for safety, and children agency is occasionally removed in favor of security. Auto-lock-on-drive doors is a prime example of this. The adult driver is also liable for their passenger, especially children, so they have multiple incentives to ensure good security.

Treating children as children is fine and expected. Treating adults as children is not. Protecting children from disinformation, under the assumption that they lack the experience, education, impulse control, and expectation to handle information security themselves is fine. The government can also be an acceptable party to define this for children, even if some parents will object to not carry that role. An alternative could also be to make the parent liable if they fail in their role to protect their children from information harm.

Going back to auto-lock-on-drive doors, giving the government remote control of the car doors with no override, including the driver door, is unlikely to be acceptable to the adult driver who own the car.
by saltcured | 2025-09-25 16:14:41+00:00
Hmm, color me confused... I am not a pilot but heard this from pilot acquaintances and thought I understood the physics. I wonder if we're still talking about different time intervals though? I'm talking about the immediate effect in situations like buffeting/turbulence, in milliseconds before the pilot's nervous system can even react.

Think of the pilot and plane being in level flight and the nose suddenly pitches up. In that moment, the seat jerks away from the pilot's back and the instrument panel and windshield jerk towards the pilot. In that moment is where I believe there would be some negative input to the yoke. The plane is pitching up but the pilot is still level.

I understand that, eventually, the pilot will also pitch up, due to pressure from the seat bottom and tension from straps. In the longer time scale where that happens, the pilot's nervous system also allows them to intentionally modify their control inputs.
by luma | 2025-09-25 16:15:10+00:00
Agreed, I'm not sure where the OP from TFA is working but around here, radiologists have all been bought out and rolled into Radiology As A Service organizations. They work from home or at an office, never at a clinic, and have zero interactions with the patient. They perform diagnosis on whatever modality is presented and electronically file their work into their EMR. I work with a couple such orgs on remote access and am familiar with others, it might just be a selection bias on my side but TFA does not reflect my first-hand experience in this area.
by seneca | 2025-09-25 16:15:31+00:00
> In Western culture, we are socialized to believe that the desire to inflict counterviolence upon or retaliate against someone who has hurt us or a loved one is innate and that justice has always been done and will always be done in this way. In fact, far from universal or natural, this adversarial vision of justice is a relatively recent cultural and historical construction, arising around AD 1200 with the dawning of the nation-state and racial capitalism.

Socrates was jailed and put to death in ~399BC. The Code of Hammurabi called for "an eye for an eye" nearly 3000 years before the claimed period.
by danaris | 2025-09-25 16:15:36+00:00
Because the user's device, providing the user's data to the user's Meta headphones, via a Meta app, can then record all the time and exfiltrate all that recorded data to Meta.

Or whatever other shady company wants to make headphones that sell for dirt-cheap in order to get their private spy devices into people's homes and offices.

I'm personally a bit on the fence about whether I think this is a sufficient concern to justify what Apple's doing, but AIUI this is the gist of their objection.
by SkyBelow | 2025-09-25 16:15:39+00:00
Sample hypothesis with only minimal amount of knowledge on it.

PEs seek to make profit, and are looking for places where they can either raise prices or lower costs (which will quickly correlate with worse outcomes) while not losing customers (yes, you could call them patients, but PE will view them as customers), or at least losing so few that the overall numbers result in more profit. One way of doing this is looking for barriers to competition/moats. CON is just one type of moat, and so is one factor PEs evaluate, but the presence or absence of other moats can still override the presence or absence of this one moat. One could try to work this out from data with some sort of regression, but with so many possible moats and a relatively limited number of data points, it would be easy to overfit the data.

In comparison, non-PE hospitals might have some profit motive (or keeping to budgets, not going bankrupt, ect.), but will be less driven by this mentality and thus their relationships to moats will be more complex, and so something like a CON requirement won't be as fully exploited to raise prices or lower costs.

This also fails to account for other ways that PE can seek to make money, which involves more complex parts of law and financing that I'm not well versed on (I've ready some things about real estate, but don't know enough to fairly analyze the claims).
by gorgoiler | 2025-09-25 16:15:47+00:00
The author isn’t wrong but is it the right battle to fight?

They talk about dams and bridges being the birth of the engineering profession. Software though isn’t some newbuild home or bridge foundation or aircraft turbine blade, where I have to have faith in a system that stops crooks from selling me a house that will fall down, a bridge that will collapse, or a jet engine that explodes.

In fact, given the source code, build system, and some documentation, I — little old me! — can find bugs, fix them, and ship a working build. So can thousands of other fellow consumers.

I would rather advocate for statutory openness and freedom than trying to force quality control on what’s left of the closed, proprietary status quo. It would be a utopia indeed if we could get out of this rut where I (and my community of consumer tinkerers) are forbidden from unlocking our iPhones and Subarus and LGTVs to their full potential.
by adipose | 2025-09-25 16:15:57+00:00
It would be great to see this github account restored so that we could hopefully get *some* kind of public update on the Cloudflare Book he announced on HN over two years ago, which he collected money for early access, but has then provided *zero* updates about, and which has zero indication of ever being finished.

It was on github here: https://github.com/skerkour/cloudflare-for-speed-and-securit...

Though it's currently unavailable of course.

What's up with that Sylvain? If your github account is restored, will you finally either give some kind of update to confirm that this was not a scam, and/or refund folks' money if they request it?

You want to hear from a real Human [sic] here in your case, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who wants to hear from a real Human (you) about wtf is going on with this mystery book whose completion seems...dubious.
by rolph | 2025-09-25 16:16:07+00:00
Leucovorin, is not some newly discovered miracle drug. its vitamin B9.

and yes you can overdose:

hypervitaminosis

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

Uncovering the Hidden Dangers and Molecular Mechanisms of Excess Folate: A Narrative Review

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10648405/
by mothballed | 2025-09-25 16:16:21+00:00
I don't know what to say, your wife was victimized by the very people I describe, and the main takeaway is we will attack the messenger for saying it in a way they didn't like. I'm advocating to improve things for people like your wife, but we don't like to hear "hoodrat" or something like that we'd rather not hear it because we have this magical belief that people will get worse health care if some people are accurately called hoodrats.

Maybe I didn't say things in a politically correct way, hopefully someone will come along and package it in a very delicate way for gentle sensibilities that won't be so triggering.
by avetisk | 2025-09-25 16:16:47+00:00
When I said I know the author, I meant I know his public internet existence.

https://kerkour.com/announcing-pingoo

He wrote different books about Rust, Cybersecurity, etc.

I just wonder if he may have used, I don't know, a VPN with blacklisted IPs and because he had many connections to his account from it, he was flagged.
by FinnLobsien | 2025-09-25 16:17:20+00:00
> speaking only for recent graduates I know personally well: ambitious students also want to be writers, for example. If only it were so easy as writing more makes you a better writer! So if you have to sit around and get life experiences that are interesting to write about (a good way to be a good writer), do you want to do that while working for Stripe, drinking kombucha and getting free lunches and being able to live in New York? Yes. You don’t want to do that while being an investment banker or a doctor or a YC founder.

But nobody's closing that option, are they? YC is simply offering another path.

There are different kinds of ambitions of course. Not all of them are about money, some are about creative fulfillment or family or whatever. That's totally true.

But it's not like anyone's yanking those people out of their kombucha-on-tap associate job and forcing them into YC.
by n1b0m | 2025-09-25 16:17:25+00:00
Netanyahu preferred Hamas to the PLO in order to guarantee that no unified Palestinian movement might arise. The way to do that, according to Netanyahu, was to strengthen the Islamist Hamas in Gaza at the expense of its rival, the Fatah-dominated PLO in the West Bank.

“Anyone who wants to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas,” said Netanyahu at a Likud party meeting in 2019. “This is part of our strategy, to divide the Palestinians between those in Gaza and those in Judea and Samaria.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/21/the-netanyahu-...
by WorldMaker | 2025-09-25 16:17:27+00:00
JS is a fun language where argument defaults can accidentally shoot you in the foot because of no runtime type checking of argument application. With your example, you might want to map a bunch of lengths through it, which in simplest form might look:

someLengthArray.map(randString)

The classic surprise is that map provides 2 arguments with the second argument being the index of the array. Depending on how `randString(length, alphabet)` uses its alphabet it might just use the string form of the index so you accidentally get random strings of n length '0' then '1' then '2', etc.

(The most common case of this problem in JS is probably `parseInt(string, radix = 10)`. Accidental arbitrary radix from an index parameter is a fun way to get unexpected numbers back from your array of strings.)
by StillBored | 2025-09-25 16:17:36+00:00
Which because they have gotten away with it for so long, everyone else has been copying (or well I guess this has been going on for decades in various forms) them.

Ex, netflix, which has decided to pop up a 'we noticed there are people who don't live with you using your account, click here to pay us another $9/month' every time it starts on my TV, presumably because my underage child, who legally lives with me, uses it on her phone when she is away at school for 5 months a year.

And then when someone clicked the default pay us button, I was unable to figure out how to remove the charge without actually calling and telling them I was canceling after 20+ years. (the whole extra member thing wasn't showing up in the web ui, no idea why, maybe its because of the TV clicking process).
by matheusmoreira | 2025-09-25 16:17:44+00:00
> someone else's platform

> Parts of the "Old Web" disappeared when the platforms hosting it stopped.

The key is to put everything under our own domains. This turns the platforms hosting it into mere implementation details. If the host goes down, just move the data elsewhere.

I use GitHub Pages for my static site but I could trivially move everything to Cloudflare Pages if needed. I could also pay for a VPS or make my own server somehow. Moving away from gmail to my own domain was also one of the best things I've ever done. I'm a happy Proton Mail customer now but that's just an implementation detail, I could switch by simply reconfiguring DNS to point to new mail servers.

DNS is the ultimate layer of indirection. We must own the domain. If we don't have a domain, then we're just digital serfs in someone else's digital fiefdom.

And that includes sites such as this one. Make it yourname.com, not ycombinator.com/threads?id=yourname.
by ivape | 2025-09-25 16:18:00+00:00
This is an impossible argument to make in America because the mindshare and persuasion behind the idea that free markets are best have clouded all humane judgement.

We have to move the argument to “this is an illegal business”. The Right is an amalgamation of extreme Libertarianism and race-centric Nationalism currently, and making a persuasive argument to them requires breaking everything they think they know about what is “good” in the world.

I say this with respect to actually politically reshaping the discourse dynamic (it has to start at debate).

The Right is the obstacle to solving this, not the Left. This is not a universal issue, it’s only a universal issue for people to politely agree and get along, but all actionable items are against the ideology of the Right. To put it simply, to get to where we need to get, we have to chisel and whither away their narratives and mindshare in debate, they skate freely on this topic. Their stance and narrative actually have no place in a problem-solving environment (we can’t solve it if the underlying ideology holds free markets paramount, over humanity).
by dragonwriter | 2025-09-25 16:18:12+00:00
H-1b is not an immigrant visa but, because it is dual intent, it is frequently used as a part of the path to immigration but would-be immigrants, and the fact that H-1b immigrants disproportionately come from places where immigrant work- and family-based visas have long wait lists because of per-country caps has a positive feedback relationship with this, both contributing to it and being reinforced by it.
by majormajor | 2025-09-25 16:18:23+00:00
VC investment has rebounded but it's also been extremely concentrated in AI in the last couple of years.

"Starting your own thing" in a vc-backed way (need a big exit, or bust) as a fresh college grad who now has to come up with a thing and sell it to a lot of customers within a couple of years sounds incredibly hard.

Especially when framed as "you won't have to look for a job" - not having the hustle skills to be at the top of the pack in the job-hunt vs your classmates doesn't really give a good signal for your hustle-and-build-and-sell-a-VC-startup alternative.
by jonahx | 2025-09-25 16:18:25+00:00
> nobody reads intermediate commit messages one by one on a PR, period. I worked on a team where the lead was adamant about this and started to write messages in the vein of “if you’re reading this message, I’ll give u $5”. I never paid anyone a dollar. Don’t waste your time writing stuff for no one.

I do. Especially if the author is competent.

That said, empirically, you're correct most people don't.

However, that said, I think changing the culture rather than throwing away the practice would be a better response.

Reading and reviewing clean history is really so much nicer. I'd also argue that actually making your history clean (as opposed to theatrically and thoughtlessly making small commits, say) forces you as the author to review it more carefully.
by dominicrose | 2025-09-25 16:18:56+00:00
Since they compiled the python interpreter to webassembly, yes you can now totally do a <python></python> webcomponent if you like. Of course it requires the extra work of importing this interpreter. Web browsers aren't going to come with multiple interpreters built-in, it would be too heavy.

I would be interested to see how short the time to run "Hello World" can be with python in a webpage, counting the time to load the whole page without cache.
by matltc | 2025-09-25 16:19:00+00:00
Would you mind sharing some of the ways that you leverage LLMs in your learning?

Some of mine:

* Converse with the LLM on deeper concepts

* use the `/explain` hook in VSCode for code snippets I'm struggling with

* Have it write blog-style series on a topic, replete with hyperlinks

I have gotten in some doom loops though when having it try to directly fix my code, often because I'm asking it to do something that is not feasible, and its sycophantic tendencies tend to amplify this. I basically stopped using agentic tools to implement solutions that use tech I'm not already comfortable with.

I've used it for summarization as well, but I often find that a summary of a man page or RFC is insufficient for deeper learning. It's great for getting my feet wet and showing me gaps in my understanding, but always end up having to read the spec at the end
by jajuuka | 2025-09-25 16:19:00+00:00
It definitely depends on the proximity to the genocide itself. Plenty of Americans easily call what happened with the Uyghurs in China a genocide. And if they know about, the genocide in Sudan a genocide as well. But when it comes to Israel it's a real reluctance. Will definitely be interesting to see how this time is viewed through history. It's close enough to western culture that it will likely stick around and just be something that happened in a poor country that gets forgotten.
by toast0 | 2025-09-25 16:19:04+00:00
Good luck with this. Requiring licensure to publish software is as tractable as requiring licensure to publish news or literature or music. The barrier to create software is perhaps a bit higher, but not meaningfully so.

I call myself a Softwate Developer. I have an Engineering degree (Computer Engineering), but I don't wear a stripey hat, so I'm clearly not an engineer.

Employers are welcome to title me as they please, within the law. I enjoyed being titled as a Technical Yahoo, but only one company seemed to prefer that title.
by roguecoder | 2025-09-25 16:19:16+00:00
It's interesting: the original definition of "performative" is "a speech-act that changes something about the world".

And that basically describes all of programming: we are building metaphors that will run electricity at a higher or lower voltage, and be translated again into something meaningful to a different human.

In many ways, all we are doing is performing. And that is some of what makes this job challenging: the practices that build software well are all just ways of checking how humans will interact with the ones and zeros we've encoded.

Returning a PR because it doesn't have tests means that code will have automated validation, which is a real change. It also means the code will be written in a testable way: too often we don't realize we wrote code in a way that is hard to test unless we try to write the tests. And on a larger level, it means that this team of engineers will learn and use the practices and tools that lead to testable code and effective tests and more easily-changeable code.

It makes total sense to not keep reading if there aren't tests, because adding the tests can be expected to change the code. But just because that is a performance doesn't mean it doesn't profoundly change the world.
by kube-system | 2025-09-25 16:19:33+00:00
> The biggest concern with DOGE is that much of the spending is just going to come right back during the next election cycle

In many cases, because they're slashing things that we are realizing that we do need, and we're going to pay even more to reconstruct the things they've destroyed.

The only way to effectively reducing spending and waste is by doing things slowly and carefully, evaluating the impact of the changes you are going to make carefully. This happened successfully in the 90s, but DOGE is not doing things that way.