MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shadowgovt | 2025-09-25 15:08:02+00:00
Without knowing the details of the thirteen thousand contracts cancelled, we don't know.

As a thought experiment ad absurdum, we can save 100% of the cost of government by shutting down the entire government.

... but then what happens next? This trivial exercise demonstrates how on-the-surface positive metrics can hide costs that either aren't being tracked at all or aren't tracked here.

On this topic: some fascinating research recently out of Yale https://ysph.yale.edu/news-article/study-reveals-stark-diffe... investigated the known discrepancy in life expectancy in the American South vs. other states. Their conclusion is that likeliest cause is weather. The reason it didn't show up is that metrics weren't tracking the secondary effects of a region being smashed by one or two hurricanes a year; immediate death tolls are in the low dozens and wouldn't move the needle, but the shared cost of infrastructure rebuilding puts local and state governments perpetually in a reactionary mode, which means they set up welfare programs that they can never fund. It's those on-paper-existing but perpetually-emergency-drained programs that are likely accounting for the difference in life expectancy; it's not about dying in a hurricane, it's about a mother three years down the line losing her newborn to preventable illness that wasn't caught in time because she can't afford pediatric care and her county doesn't have enough money to subsidize it, they're too busy rebuilding all the bridges that got torn in half by floodwaters before that newborn was even conceived.
by WorldMaker | 2025-09-25 15:08:14+00:00
Since around .NET 5 the raw binary serializer (BinaryFormatter) throws danger warnings at compile time, generally doesn't work cross-platform, and most standard analysis configs upgrade those to compile errors. The documentation is full of similar danger warnings. It mostly remains for a backwards compatibility commitment, and most of the original use cases for BinaryFormatter have been generally all replaced with Span<T>, Memory<T>, and smarter "Unsafe" [0] Marshallers.

I'm not sure I'd call the situation similar.

[0] Unsafe in terms of doing memory access that can result in danger, but still far more safe than BinaryFormatter sledgehammers.
by taeric | 2025-09-25 15:08:26+00:00
My expectation on cost of banana will be more on how much it costs to ship to said town? Similarly, which town has higher tax burden to cover? Assuming any sort of health inspection on places that store food, the town with more stores has a higher burden.

Which is all to say, my gut is it is far more complicated than that allows for. Not a useless model, but also not a very actionable one.
by 1dom | 2025-09-25 15:08:49+00:00
I can't downvote, but this comment feels a little rude or standoffish towards someone who read what you wrote, thought about it, and gave a response.

You said you didn't care for 1000 words that someone wrote about their trip abroad, and that's clearly an example to illustrate something, but it's not clear what, because it's contrived and falls apart easily: nobody else really read those blogs either, people read blogs from people and topics they're interested in.

So what about 1000 word blog from an a single individual that does interest you? Or more than 1000 words from a single individual on a different topic, like a novel?
by cogman10 | 2025-09-25 15:08:53+00:00
> And the actually sick people who have something they can get sued for are terrified to go because now they have to subsidize all the bad actors and they get gutted to do so

Or maybe they are dealing with hospital staff being openly hostile to them and calling them "hood rats" and claiming they are just there with STDs and the flu?

> they have to subsidize all the bad actors

You're right, we are all subsidizing the health insurance and private medical industry.

The problem you describe "People go to the ER because they are uninsured while working" isn't a problem with people being lazy terrible people, it's a problem with the entire US healthcare which binds insurance and healthcare to employment.

You want to make the whole thing cheaper and more efficient? Then nationalize health insurance either by expanding medicare or medicaid to everyone (I prefer medicare). Then you won't see these "hood rats" using the ER for more minor medical issues because they can simply afford to go to a clinic instead.
by ben_w | 2025-09-25 15:09:18+00:00
> Are they captured by cabal or something?

Nah, just local minima/maxima.

Bunch of politicians with different interests, bunch of different polities within and outside Israel with varying agendas, some pro-Israel, some anti-Israel, some merely aligned with Israel for now but don't really care, and the same goes for Palestine.

That plus patriots in every nation close their eyes and cover their ears about crimes by their nation, or make excuses when this is no longer possible.

That's all just boring mundane human nature.

Best I can do is try to stop people hating each other, but that's gonna be tough — and not just for any surviving Palestinians, as the October attack a few years back was proportionally worse for Israel than 9/11 was for the US, and look how long it took Americans to collectively get over that.
by rdtsc | 2025-09-25 15:09:20+00:00
> The U.S. military was unaware of the unprecedented Israeli ballistic missile strike earlier this month on a Hamas compound in Doha, Qatar, until it was already inbound

This has that Dr. Strangelove feel to it. "Looks like the missile is already inbound, might as well commit to support the attack"

> The IAF hit a compound where negotiators for Hamas were meeting to consider a Gaza ceasefire proposal put forward by the U.S. government. The attack killed six people

Right... and someone remind us, how many billions of dollars does US send to Israel's military, directly and indirectly?
by yorwba | 2025-09-25 15:09:37+00:00
龍旂 is the dragon flag of Chinese emperors. https://kotobank.jp/word/%E7%AB%9C%E6%97%97-658618 A computer flag is フラグ (furagu). https://jisho.org/search/%E3%83%95%E3%83%A9%E3%82%B0

Going from フラグ to 龍旂 is no less weird than going from English "flag" to "dragon."

风 and 极 are Simplified Chinese. The corresponding Japanese characters are 風 and 極 and they don't connect to defaults or limits in software either. Now it's of course possible that 松本武 is not Matsumoto Takeshi (松本•武) but instead Song Benwu (松•本武) and the original message was in Chinese, but that doesn't explain the curious word choice either.
by electroly | 2025-09-25 15:09:39+00:00
Yeah, I understand this and said it correctly in my post. We need nested virtualization to run WSL2 inside a VM: this is a Linux VM inside a Windows VM inside a Windows host. WSL2 is already a VM, so if you want to run that inside a VM, it requires nested virtualization. Nested virtualization is one of those features that people don't know about unless they need it, and they find out for the first time when they get an error message from Hyper-V. If you have a development VM on a system without nested virtualization, you're stuck with WSL1 inside that VM, or using a "sibling" Linux VM that you set up manually (the latter was my actual solution to this issue).
by fundatus | 2025-09-25 15:09:42+00:00
Because (since they control the platform/market) they're giving themselves an unfair advantage over competitors.

Example: iCloud photos backup can upload a photo to iCloud in the background immediately after it was taken. Competing cloud storage providers cannot do this[1], because Apple withholds the API for that. Of course they're saying this is for "privacy" or for "energy saving" or whatever, but the actual reason is of course to make the user experience with competing services deliberately worse, so that people choose iCloud over something else.

[1] There is some weird tricks with notifications and location triggers that apps like Nextcloud or Immich go through to make this work at least somewhat but those are hacks and it's also not reliable.
by pyrale | 2025-09-25 15:09:51+00:00
Hate the font, love the editor.

edit: tried to type "à", and the letter is not recognized in the font (appears in red in the editor).

Would there be a way to tell the editor that "à" = "a" + "`", rather than retyping the symbol from scratch?

edit2 : Having to remove all the [2..n] points if you want to change the second point you made is also a bit of a pain, especially for people like me with little experience of where the points end up being on the line vertically.
by lesuorac | 2025-09-25 15:10:05+00:00
I don't think that's an accurate analogy.

It's like if I stop commuting by car to work every day and rent a helicopter. I'm going to save a ton of money by selling the car and not buying gasoline. Of course I spent a ton of money with the helicopter method but we're not going to list _new_ expenses on the website are we?
by STKFLT | 2025-09-25 15:10:07+00:00
It is somewhat complicated by the specific requirements of the DMA specifications for Apple:

> The interoperability solutions for third parties will have to be equally effective to those available to Apple and must not require more cumbersome system settings or additional user friction. All features on Apple will have to make available to third parties any new functionalities of the listed features once they become available to Apple.

Apple is saying, "We designed our API in a way that requires trusted headphones as part of the privacy model, and DMA would force us to give everyone access to that API."

What goes unstated is that trusted headphones aren't necessary for the feature and a company trying to meaningfully comply with the spirit of the DMA probably would have chosen to implement the API differently.

https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/questions-and-answe...
by klez | 2025-09-25 15:10:34+00:00
Why would you compare "any modern game that ranks on Steam" with random games from the era?

You said

> It's the same phenomenon where people think their Nintendo 64 or PlayStation 2 was a masterpiece never paralleled, revisit it in 2025, and realize: "wow... this... sucks actually."

I actually tried re-playing PS games I remember enjoying, and I still enjoy them.

I see what you mean about the fact that people look at old stuff with rose-tinted glasses, but really some things did age well (including parts of the early web).
by gtowey | 2025-09-25 15:10:37+00:00
Of course they know the UI doesn't really do what you want. But they also know they make more money when it's filled with manipulative anti-patterns.

Companies love algorithmic content because because it's the ultimate shield from criticism. "Don't blame us for bad content! It's just the algorithm and we can't control it! Maybe if you interact with it more it will give you better results." Or course in practice it means they have plausible deniability when they shove a stream of ads in your feed.

The one that kills me is on YouTube: "show fewer shorts". fewer than what? Why isn't zero an option? It just means they will shove them in your face again and again. Don't want them at all? Too bad! We need to increase metrics so the PM of shorts can get their promotion!
by throwaway0123_5 | 2025-09-25 15:10:56+00:00
If the program being cut is valuable, I would say absolutely. Ignoring that this website is obviously going to have massive bias, a huge amount of the savings listed are for programs I would generally support: Health services, health research, USAID (we saved a billion dollars on "polio immunization," yay), environmental research, education, etc. Maybe the specific contracts cut were wasteful, but they certainly don't provide enough information to determine that and I'm not going to assume the cuts were good because "money saved."

Also, the savings are pretty minor overall. If we trust the website, we get $1.3k saved per taxpayer. The vast majority of the programs cut would have to be completely useless for me to think it is worth it to save $1.3k.
by dvcoolarun | 2025-09-25 15:11:07+00:00
RC's funding ( partially from sponsors like Shopify, not just conferences ) was allegedly conditional on this takeover.

Arko registered the Bundler trademark to prevent this corporate capture and plans to give it to a new, truly community-governed organization.

The biggest risk is the loss of long-time maintainers and a resulting community split/forking of key infra. Total mess.
by empiko | 2025-09-25 15:11:18+00:00
The Arab petrostates and their citizens regularly support all kinds of Sunni terrorist organizations. During the Syrian Civil War, it was a common knowledge that certain islamist groups were funded by certain states, and the states were competing with each other in this regard on the battlefield.

I would also argue that the regimes in these countries are not considered particularly stable and they don't want to end up with Iran situation again.
by openasocket | 2025-09-25 15:11:43+00:00
I'm skeptical of that claim. I'm not even sure the Israelis would need refueling assets for this. According to the DoD source in the article, the ALBMs were fired from aircraft over the red sea. That's not far from Israel. Depending on the aircraft used and the exact loadout aerial refueling would probably be unnecessary. If it was necessary, Israel has aerial refueling assets of its own: they were able to conduct a strike campaign against Iran, which is much further away, without foreign tanker support.

It just doesn't make sense to me. This seems well within Israel's own capabilities. Why would they even ask another country for support? Just adds diplomatic complexities and increases the risk of the strike getting leaked.
by btilly | 2025-09-25 15:11:58+00:00
This is selection bias. You are picking companies that, in retrospect, we all know because they did well.

But most of the companies that people were "investing" in at the time, the ones that drove that PE, were dot coms that went out of business. Like pets.com.

As Warren Buffett warned at the time, every new technology wave results in a similar bubble. People invest because we know that the technology will reshape the future. And we reward the first to the market because we can't imagine that they won't be long-term winners.

But the companies that arise early in a technology bubble, are seldom the ones that survive long-term.

We are witnessing the same today. Most of the current AI leaders, won't be AI leaders in 20 years. So which one will you invest in?
by shadowgovt | 2025-09-25 15:11:59+00:00
These are exactly the kind of questions an administration could have, hypothetically, asked before forming a department dedicated to acting like it already had the answers.

Did they ask them? I haven't seen evidence they did (if anything, the releases from the White House suggest DOGE became the tail that wags the dog, with OMB being asked to justify cuts to projects DOGE had already become convinced were waste, if they were consulted at all).
by leakycap | 2025-09-25 15:12:01+00:00
Microsoft can easily point to their updates program, and probably will

Moving to a new platform is very difficult, but for over a decade Windows has been making linux look better...

Now macOS Tahoe is making everything else look better, so I find myself actually investing in linux.

Windows 11 will be treated the same way as Windows 10, and Windows 12 will be worse. So why keep limiting my options with a closed source OS?
by em500 | 2025-09-25 15:12:13+00:00
> what are ETFs and/or financial products that take this into consideration?

They often have something like "Value" in the name, e.g. VTV, IUSV, SPYV. While not explicitly targetting now Shiller PE, they usually have significantly lower PE than "growth orienten" stocks (such as most of the tech megacaps that currently dominate SP500, VT and other market cap weighted funds). What exactly goes into "Value" funds is either too opaque or takes too long to explain in a comment.

> what difference does it make in terms of volatility and/or expected returns to invest in something like SP500 or $VT compared to Shiller-PE-adjusted products?

Volatility is likely (but not certainly) lower. Expected returns: convincing narratives could be told either way, but nobody knows with any certainty.

> does this matter in the long-term, or better, when exactly is "long-term" long enough so that Shiller PE doesn't matter and one can just go with SP500/$VT without sleepless nights?

Again, nobody knows, and you should be skeptical about pretty much any opinion that smells like investment advice. The posted graph shows that the current S&P 500 PE (or some approximation thereof, SP500 didn't exists until the 1950s) is high by historical standards. What to make of that is open to different interpretations.

Many people might intuit some sort of mean-reversion process behind (Shiller-)PE, but

- it's unclear which to "mean" and at what time frame it would revert

- as another poster pointed out, mean-reversion could take place by E going up as well as P going down
by toast0 | 2025-09-25 15:12:25+00:00
Emergency room care is definitely not a rational market. Hospitals have a federal obligation to provide stabilizing care regardless of ability to pay. That's not really a market.

I wonder how this study controlled for hospital selection though. In locations with multiple hospitals available, ambulances route patients on multiple factors... Perhaps there are factors leading to these hospitals receiving patients less likely to survive.

Additionally, PE often purchases distressed companies, so the likely alternative to a PE purchase of a hospital is a closed hospital. In some cases, closing the hospital would be better, but probably not all of them.
by stego-tech | 2025-09-25 15:12:30+00:00
Looks like this is just an empty excuse to justify their margins at the expense of people:

> The cuts allowed Accenture to say it would continue to expand operating profit margins at its historic annual rate of at least 10 basis points in the next fiscal year, a target that some analysts had worried might have to be dropped given the tough industry conditions.

The company itself is doing just fine, thanks for asking.

> The company said revenues grew 7 per cent to $69.7bn in the year to August, for a net income of $7.83bn, up 6 per cent.

They’re citing internal data to prop-up this AI narrative, too, and claim - like everyone else doing layoffs - that headcount is expected to grow in the coming year.

It’s basically a giant celebratory puff piece for Accenture. Nothing of substance in there if you’re immune to the usual corporate doublespeak.
by Findecanor | 2025-09-25 15:12:31+00:00
Apple silicon also has special hardware support for x86-64's "TSO" memory order (important for multithreaded code) and half-carry status flag.

BTW. A more common term for what Rosetta does is "binary translation". A "transpiler" typically compiles from one high-level language to another, never touching machine code.
by the_af | 2025-09-25 15:12:31+00:00
> I'm a neurobiologist with a start up that's about replacing the symbolic

What's your startup? What are your publications? That Google doc link is more word-salad and random quotes and citations.

What on earth is a "start up that's about replacing the symbolic"?

> If you understand the nature of language fully, then its ultimate function is to refute itself. In other words, all our use of arbitrary signals leads eventually to specific signals. To make that simpler, each statement in any existing language is about replacing language.

This is word salad, for example. You're not trying to "make it simpler", you're trying to obfuscate (or it's just random).

> That's a warning CS hasn't done its homework.

What's a "CS"?
by slfnflctd | 2025-09-25 15:12:43+00:00
There is a lot of skimming at multiple levels. Far too many middle layers and gatekeepers, constantly haggling and looking for more ways to profit. Continuous market consolidation to fewer players looking to exploit economies of scale over decades. Perverse incentives everywhere.

There are still people trying to behave ethically within this framework, but it's hard when the framework itself is so corrupted by profit motives which should never have been there in the first place. Direct providers should be running the show, not financiers. They need to be aware of how to balance the books within reason and be paid properly, but beyond that it should be much more patient focused. We definitely don't need so many profit-taking leeches in all the places we have them now.
by appreciatorBus | 2025-09-25 15:13:05+00:00
Every single article about Israel devolves into an unpleasant and unproductive flame war. This is not true as reliably true about your other examples.

From the guidelines: “Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.”

There are already so many forums across the Internet, where you could discuss Israel and Palestine if you want. There’s no reason that every discussion forum has to discuss all topics.

As far as censorship, everyone above a certain karma is able to flag stories, and some number of flags will kill a story. I am but a n00b but at various times I have flagged articles I’ve seen about Israel and Palestine simply because the articles and the ensuing arguments seem to violate the community guideline about politics. I’m sure others do the same.

Additionally, some specific posters seem intent on hijacking the forum, and submit endlessly on this topic, and almost nothing else. That feels like abuse to me and behaviour worthy of being flagged.
by gen3 | 2025-09-25 15:13:24+00:00
>// Classify incoming emails using Workers AI const { score, label } = env.AI.run("@cf/huggingface/distilbert-sst-2-int8", { text: message.raw" })

This is neat but be careful using an LLM to parse email content. The demo is a BERT model which is a good but I can see how someone might swap this without realising the implications

Also really nice to see emails from workers, its something I have wanted for a while!
by simonw | 2025-09-25 15:13:27+00:00
"Accenture has reduced its global workforce by more than 11,000 in the past three months [...] The IT consulting group on Thursday detailed an $865mn restructuring programme and an outlook for the year ahead that reflects continuing sluggish corporate demand for consulting projects and a clampdown on spending within the US federal government."

The big story here is that Accenture are losing a TON of work. The AI part of this headline isn't particularly interesting IMO.
by cogman10 | 2025-09-25 15:13:39+00:00
> Who is gonna decide how the R&D money gets spent?

Same way the NHS previously funded medical research. Grants and grant review. You can expand that department and effort.

> What's their skin in the game and their feedback mechanism?

Believe it or not, some people just want to research and look into cures for diseases. Shocking I know. Feedback can be reviews of their work and blackballing bad actors that consistently kick out bad research.

> Why will they do a better job picking what to research than current pharmaceutical companies?

Because they already are. Pharmaceuticals aren't doing the majority of research, they are taking NHS funded research and running it through FDA approval.

Ozempic, for example, didn't come from pharmaceutical research, it came from grant research into lizard spit.