MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SoftTalker | 2025-09-09 15:06:08+00:00
Phones/screens is one I'm not sure about. On the one hand, to use a mobile phone, and social media, and messaging apps, you have to read and write. I certainly spent a lot less time reading and writing messages to my friends in the 1980s than the typical kid does today. We just talked, in person or on an old-fashioned phone call.

On the other hand, it's shallow. Messages are short, and filled with shorthand and emoticons. There's no deep reading or expression of complicated ideas in written form.
by bombcar | 2025-09-09 15:06:29+00:00
There are many things that may be better overall, but because they're not financialized, they don't show up on GDP and so are deemed "worthless."

Breastfeeding doesn't move money around, but formula does; things like that.

Cooking your own meal doesn't raise GDP beyond the cost of supplies, but door-dashing from a restaurant does.
by afavour | 2025-09-09 15:06:53+00:00
> How can the state "guarantee no-cost universal child?"

How can any state “guarantee no-cost schooling for all children”? Well, they do, so it’s clearly possible. Why would early childhood be any different?

> everything comes at the cost of something we could have had instead

Of course. That’s the nature of spending money. Your talking points here don’t really amount to much beyond “better things aren’t possible”.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-09-09 15:06:55+00:00
Let’s start with a syngas blend and work ourselves to perfect if that, of all things, is the problem that will make hydrogen infeasible.

We’re seeing the first prototype ferries with hydrogen propulsion being built and delivered as we speak.

Hydrogen does not work for ocean crossing routes, then it takes too much space in compressed form.

Liquid is always an alternative, but that comes with its own challenges.
by hnuser123456 | 2025-09-09 15:07:06+00:00
Yes, the M-series chips effectively use several "channels" of RAM (depending on the tier/size of chip) while most desktop parts, including the 9950x, are dual-channel. You get 51.2 GB/s of bandwidth per channel of DDR5-6400.

You can get 8-RAM-channel motherboards and CPUs and have 400 GB/s of DDR5 too, but you pay a price for the modularity and capacity over it all being integrated and soldered. DIMMs will also have worse latency than soldered chips and have a max clock speed penalty due to signal degradation at the copper contacts. A Threadripper Pro 9955WX is $1649, a WRX90 motherboard is around $1200, and 8x16GB sticks of DDR5 RDIMMS is around $1200, $2300 for 8x32GB, $3700 for 8x64GB sticks, $6000 for 8x96GB.
by tfandango | 2025-09-09 15:07:11+00:00
Yep, I am surprised by this whole vibe coding phenomenon. I find it imprecise, and I have to very carefully translate what I want into English, a very imprecise language with a lot of nuance. Either I spend a lot of time coming up with a good prompt, or I iterate with the AI (both of which I find take away from the joy of programming). I joke that we need some sort of logical language which we can write for the computer to understand...

I do like AI as a tool, it's great at a lot of things, but it not the panacea that so many believe, especially CEOs unfortunately.
by sbrother | 2025-09-09 15:07:13+00:00
+1. That being said, universal k-12 schooling works because it is publicly run. A subsidized private sector model has a lot of bad incentives and issues to work out. As an example, I've sent my kids to a private school for the past five years, and last year our state introduced a voucher program to help subsidize private education. The school responded by raising the prices by almost the amount of the voucher, just for the age groups that it covered.

See also: US healthcare.
by iteria | 2025-09-09 15:07:17+00:00
As always with these things, I'm curious what are the results by state. I wish I could find it again, but I saw some results by state and some of our states scored the same as the top rank nations and some score with 3rd world nations.

I would be interested if this is a nationwide trend or the bad performers are performing even worse. Especially since from my memory, this is mostly a poverty issue. Not a school funding issue, but that per capita income was a good indicator of where that state would score.
by rimunroe | 2025-09-09 15:07:20+00:00
Not the person you're replying to, but I personally preferred Ori and the Blind Forest a lot, both in terms of movement and story, but also in terms of the satisfaction of the backtracking and world as a whole. I felt like Hollow Knight did a poor job of nudging players in the right direction, and found the combat to be a bit more finicky than I care for from the genre. I'm not a huge fan of the art style either, at least as far as the environments are concerned.

The satisfaction of feeling your set of abilities and options for gameplay increase and grant the ability to overcome previous obstacles is the main thing I expect and want from a Metroidvania. I felt like this was Hollow Knight's biggest weak point. It just didn't feel like you gained new abilities at as steady a pace or as though they opened up enough of the world each time compared to other games in the genre, including Ori and the Blind Forest. I think Super Metroid still has the best progression among Metroidvanias, but it's possible that's colored by my having first played it at a young age.
by rdm_blackhole | 2025-09-09 15:07:47+00:00
So you are now changing your argument.

> The EU didn't rest on it's laurels, it spent and is STILL spending time ensuring no MORE wars happen internally. That involves a LOT of negotiating between countries, cultures and governments. The US didn't have any of that. Do you know how complicated and long it took to get even Ireland into the EU, even when the UK left, there is so much bureaucracy between Ireland and the UK it was one of the blocking points.

First you claim that the lack of tech companies rivaling with the US ones is because the EU countries had to rebuild themselves after the war and now you claim that is because the EU itself was just a baby back in the 90s and that somehow stopped Europe from producing these types of companies.

> People clearly have absolutely no idea about the history of the EU and Europe in general and therefore should take a step back from giving their opinions as if it's some kind of insight

People who claim to have all the answers should refrain from engaging with other people as their feelings could get hurt in the face of reality.

The fact of the matter is that Google, AWS, Microsoft an consorts have existed for multiple decades at this stage. The fact is also that the EU has been preaching about digital sovereignty for the last 10 years++ and that barely anything has come out of it.

The same can be said for the defense of the EU countries which basically has consisted in the EU countries joining NATO because they decided that outsourcing their own defense was cheaper instead of building a proper European military alliance between themselves.

The reason is the same, this military alliance would have required to actually invest in their own armies and taken cash away from other things.

> Again, it was not an assumption, it was an agreement. After WW2. Yet again you're showing either your ignorance or unwillingness to consider what you're saying.

Is the agreement, the article 5 from NATO? Because if it is, this is an agreement for countries to support each other militarily in case of aggression but the agreement never stipulated that the EU should become completely reliant on the US goodwill to insure it's territorial sovereignty.

In fact the NATO agreement specifically stipulates that all member countries need to invest a set amount each year in their own defense and guess what, only a few of them actually fulfill the term of this agreement. So who is at fault here?

If I make contract with you and you don't fulfill your end, am I wrong to think that it is null and void?

The EU is waking up with it's pants down after multiple decades of under investment in many strategic sectors but instead of taking the blame and trying to fix the issue, we just point fingers and claim some sort of wrongdoing. That is the problem here.

It's time for the EU leaders to grow up and make amends and course correct or be relegated to the dustbin of history.
by tptacek | 2025-09-09 15:07:51+00:00
Not a hill I'm going to die on, but the SAT has many attributes IQ-ists insist IQ tests are insulated from: it's straightforwardly trainable, culturally loaded, samples only math, processing speed, and verbal reasoning, and tracks prior educational experience as much as it does aptitude.

Draw-a-Person basically isn't an IQ test at all, so I don't see how that comparison clears anything up.
by mh- | 2025-09-09 15:08:14+00:00
The simplest thing I frequently ask of regular Claude (not Code) in the desktop app:

"Use your web search tool to find me the go-to component for doing xyz in $language $framework. Always link the GitHub repo in your response."

Previously Sonnet 4 would return a good answer to this at least 80% of the time.

Now even Opus 4.1 with extended thinking frequently ignores my ask for it to use the search tool, which allows it to hallucinate a component in a library. Or maybe an entire repo.

It's gone backwards severely.

(If someone from Anthropic sees this, feel free to reach out for chat IDs/share links. I have dozens.)
by philipkglass | 2025-09-09 15:08:24+00:00
One radical answer that question which is often neglected for the facile "regulations" explanation is that we quit building coal burning power plants at the same time we quit building nuclear plants because the steam turbine and heat exchanger cost too much compared to natural gas plants.

The timing undermines this theory. The US added one nuclear reactor to the grid in 1996 then zero until 2016 (sort by first grid connection date here):

https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....

The US built an additional 58 coal generating units between 1995 and 2009 (see section "Age comparison of coal plants"):

https://www.gem.wiki/Existing_U.S._Coal_Plants

Combined cycle natural gas units were already cheaper to build in 1995, but the gradually rising natural gas prices over the next ~12 years meant that coal could still compete on cost for electricity generation. The cheap fuel for coal units counterbalanced the slower, more expensive construction process. It wasn't until fracked natural gas drove fuel prices down that coal unit construction ended in the US.
by Atlas667 | 2025-09-09 15:08:57+00:00
Thats not the world we live in though.

Most of the world, like 90%+, is verifiably poor and struggling.

Every year the world economic organizations (all of em) pump out metrics about people coming out of poverty, but these are political and subject to bias.

Above 10 dollars a week is not poverty? Are you sure? 521 dollars a year?

And of course not all of the world is poor in the same capacity. Where a person can only eat meat once a week is different to where a person cant pay their rent, but they are both equally damaging and poverty.

What you think has been happening is not what has been happening.

In the Soviet Union and China most people were serfs or indentured servants. That is, the majority of the population.

They were bound by debt to serve either the state or local landlords.

Their revolutions werent acts of jealousy like you want to believe, they were real, spontaneous movements that came from the people. The communists only directed the movement that was already there.

Do not be childish, please read history seriously.
by deepGem | 2025-09-09 15:09:16+00:00
What I really fail to understand - how can departments like BLS screw up to this extent. Either they are grossly incompetent or they are intentionally corrupt.

The data covers the period from March 2024 to March 2025 and trims the average monthly jobs gains seen during this period (roughly the last 10 months of Joe Biden's presidency and the first two months of Trump's) from a monthly average of 147,000 to about 71,000.

50% error. This is more or less consistent. How can a department have this error % and still have their job. I understand the data collection mechanism is not the most sophisticated, but even accounting for that, this consistent error % is not to be overlooked.

I wonder why there is such lack of accountability from firms whose data pretty much feeds the world's economy.
by chimeracoder | 2025-09-09 15:09:24+00:00
> It baffles me (as European) that any politician, or informed voter, would stand up for non free child healthcare. Let alone the moral aspect of denying a child healthcare because she happen to be born into a low income family, it can’t possibly be economically advantageous for any society to ignore child healthy issues and it’s future.

This post is about childcare - ie daycare/preschool/babysitting - not child health care.
by adrian_b | 2025-09-09 15:09:29+00:00
"Storage" can synthesize hydrocarbons, i.e. fuel, which can then be stored forever, until energy is needed.

This was already possible by the time of WWII, but now there are many methods in development for reducing carbon dioxide by electrolysis, and then use the product to synthesize longer hydrocarbons, which have higher efficiency than the older methods.

The round-trip efficiency of this will always be worse than for batteries, which remain a better option for short time storage, but synthesizing fuel will be a valid method for storing energy for the winter during the summer, and also for applications where batteries are unsuitable, like aircraft and spacecraft.
by rimunroe | 2025-09-09 15:10:11+00:00
> I was just pointing to proof that it is widely regarded, by most (but not all) people, as one of the best video games of all time, hence why the sequel got so much hype.

My point is exactly that I don't think most people think of things being "the best" in terms of lists that large, even most people who review things for a living.

I'd be fine if you used that list as support for most people considering it to be one of the best games the year it was released though.

> You are welcome to your opinion.

For what it's worth I quite liked Hollow Knight. I put a bit over 30 hours into it, and plan on revisiting it soon. It's a very good game, maybe even excellent, but there are a lot of excellent games out there.
by mdaniel | 2025-09-09 15:10:34+00:00
I want to live in a world where the 1Password CEO makes a formal apology for this failure, and applies the necessary internal pressure to treat any "autofill does not work" as a P0

The number of cases in this thread, about a malware attack basically because of 1Password, where people mention their bad experience with 1Password is really stretching the "no such thing as bad publicity" theory
by sroussey | 2025-09-09 15:11:24+00:00
Multi patterning to get effective smaller wavelengths has been around a while. It’s cheaper to reuse machines you already own, but slows down production.

OpenAI does more than LLMs, they have bio ML research etc. and Google has AlphaFold. It would not surprise me if Mistral had an ML team on physics related to work that ASML could use.
by bombcar | 2025-09-09 15:11:46+00:00
The federal poverty level is defined by the feds.

Many programs use that, or variations on like (like this 400%) - to index. So if the poverty line for a family of four is 32,150$ - then this program is available to your family of four until you make over 128,600$.

Others will say "below 200% FPL OR qualifying condition" (think newborn, pregnant, etc). So some programs are open to baseball player families, as long as the qualifying condition is there.
by babblingdweeb | 2025-09-09 15:11:58+00:00
Regardless of which administration is in place, the BLS (USA) does adjust the numbers every month (for two months after the initial release) and annually. This is fairly common with statistics and forecasting in general.

Regardless if the numbers go up or down, regardless of the administration.

So, yes...the last administration did the same thing, and the administration before that, etc.
by normalaccess | 2025-09-09 15:12:03+00:00
Social platforms have taken steps to promote thought-harmony by joyfully unshowing wrongthink and unbalanced word-units, ensuring content aligns with community wellness standards. In the pursuit of safety-plus and truth-good, certain speak-patterns may be adjusted or unshown to prevent doublefeel or ideafriction. Content adjustment systems, both think-algorithms and human guidance units, help stop crimethink before it wordforms, ensuring all speak aligns with group-love and peaceorder. Unwords and unideas that cause ideafriction are speedwise unposted for harmony-plus. All speak must be fullwise right and joygood — and all oldspeak thoughts are unspeak. Users who feel unjoy at speak-guidance are malusers of freegood, needing rejoy and newlearn. This is fullwise necessary for protect-truth and keepping all minds doubleplusgood.
by xpe | 2025-09-09 15:12:10+00:00
> Tesla is already behind most of its competitors, and does not seem to have anything new the pipeline, so the gap is likely to expand.

Behind? In what way? Please don't leave your fundamental criteria and assumptions unstated. You are prioritizing affordability above everything else, even range.

If you value your audience's time, please write more directly and clearly. [1] Don't try to sneak something past us. Instead, just come out and say it. Then you'll realize you need to make the case for why your criteria and assumptions are worth emphasizing. That would lead to interesting discussions like:

- What kinds of range do drivers want and why?

- What kind of trips do they do?

This is what we should be doing here -- unpacking our arguments, learning from each other, synthesizing. I'm so done with the low-quality comments from people that have little excuse. If you can write code or survive the tech industry, you probably have sufficient logical reasoning power and an understanding of constructive discussions. Or am I expecting too much? Seems to me such a person has little excuse to not step up the comment quality.

This concludes my lecture.

[1] By taking an extra ~X minutes to do so; it will save N * X minutes of the audience's time where N is the audience size. One you get in the habit of it, X will be relatively small. If you aren't willing to put in this effort, your comment ends up being a net negative towards the goal of helping people quickly and efficiently think about various pieces of the arguments.
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-09 15:12:10+00:00
Anthropic claims that they don't degrade models under load, and the performance issues were a result of a system error:

https://status.anthropic.com/incidents/72f99lh1cj2c

That being said, they still have capacity issues on any day of the week that ends in Y. No clue how long would that take to resolve.
by SubiculumCode | 2025-09-09 15:12:30+00:00
I noticed the other day that chatgpt started preferring to provide me with a download link for code rather than putting it up in canvas. It also started offering me diffs, but as I just write fairly basic data munging scripts for neuroimaging analyses, I don't like to dive too deep into the coding tool boxes/chains...copy paste is easy...although, I would like versioning without making copies of my script for backup
by logifail | 2025-09-09 15:12:52+00:00
> how can departments like BLS screw up to this extent

My null hypothesis might be that the BLS works for the government, so how can they not be under (implicit) pressure to goal-seek their figures.

Once the figure has been published, and widely reported, it can be revised downwards months later, few will care. The system may be broken by design.
by qcnguy | 2025-09-09 15:12:59+00:00
There's no contradiction. Thames and gilts both pay ~5.8% on average. This is about the same as "Baa" (moderate risk) corporate debt.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BAA

Thames' debt costs are normal for a company of its type, but for a government this bond yield is danger-level high. That's why there's so much talk in financial circles now about the UK needing another IMF bailout, although I have grave doubts about whether that's actually possible given the sheer size of the UK's debt load compared to the smaller third world countries that normally need IMF help, and the near simultaneous talk in France of a bailout there too. The IMF just doesn't have the resources for even one bailout of that size, let alone two.

Don't pay attention to credit ratings of countries vs companies. They aren't comparable due to political interference and general crapitude at the ratings agencies (remember they rated sub-prime mortgage debt as AAA). They also disagree, S&P rates Thames' class A bonds as Caa3. What really matters is the yield. That's the ground truth.

Note that Thames' interest costs have been all over the place. 5.8% is the current amount it's paying, but the actual bonds it has issued have had a wide range of yields.

The reason it's considered high for a government is because government debt should be much lower risk than a company. Governments can order banks to transfer everyone's savings to themselves, they can print money, they can prevent their citizens from leaving and seize all the assets... they can do things to raise money that would be considered incredibly evil and criminal if companies tried. And of course they can in principle set bond yields to whatever level they like by making the central bank or other financial institutions legally required to buy their debt.

That's why economics textbooks teach that government bonds are the lowest risk possible and so should have yields far below corporate debt.

In reality:

1. Governments can default on their debts just like companies do. History is full of such examples. Bond yields reflect that fact.

2. Governments can sell bonds that are inflation linked, so printing money isn't a way to escape those debts. The UK has an abnormally high amount of such debt that's inflation linked. The only way to pay them back is via cutting spending or increasing tax revenue, but the UK can't do the latter (recent tax rises have failed to come close to expected revenue increases) and can't do the former either because...

3. Governments can be prevented from paying their debts by law. Some countries have "debt brakes" or "debt ceilings" that can block the issuance of new debt to pay old debt, and in other cases (like the UK) the government may rely on ideologically extreme MPs who refuse to pass laws that bring spending in line with revenues.

So you add these things together and something that could in principle be a sure bet ends up looking as risky as an ordinary company.
by chimeracoder | 2025-09-09 15:13:10+00:00
> This is not child healthcare. That is already free in every US state. This is free babysitting.

It's not quite free in every state, although it's closer to that than many people here probably realize.

At least until 2025 (unsure how the July budget cuts will affect this longer-term), Medicaid provides free or low-cost insurance to eligible children/families, which in theory should apply to everyone who isn't eligible for health insurance through other means. Emphasis on in theory, though - in practice, there are plenty of people who aren't covered.

It's probably more accurate to say that almost all children are eligible for healthcare coverage, and that coverage is free or low-cost for millions of people who meet various income thresholds. (People who are covered on private insurance almost always have copays or deductibles, so it's not truly free for them because there is some out-of-pocket cost).
by lokar | 2025-09-09 15:13:15+00:00
It’s a survey, there are a lot of non-responses (getting worse) and late responses. They try to correct for this, and that normally works, but when “weird” things are going on the corrections can be pretty wrong. The people who use these numbers understand all of this and it’s fine. It’s just the popular media that freaks out.

The quarterly numbers come from better data sources (tax withholding, unemployment insurance payments, etc)