MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sombragris | 2025-09-09 15:13:51+00:00
> Paraguay felt very much to me like the midwest / "Iowa/Ohio" of South America

Funny that you say that. I am by no means a countryside person, I'm as urbanite as any other. But while I never was in Iowa or Ohio (save for a short layover), I lived in West Michigan, and therefore in the Midwest, for some time; and yes, despite the climate being quite different, things seemed somewhat familiar to me in many aspects.
by mlyle | 2025-09-09 15:13:55+00:00
There's a little bit of a philosophical thing here -- do you adjust the earlier measurement by some function because it's usually been high and revised downwards? If you do, you need to let every user know that you're doing something different, etc.

The worst case is that both the statistics orgs and the users are adjusting the numbers for a bias and overshooting.

This means there's a certain inertia: it can be better to handle the interim reports the same, even if they've been biased one way for several years, than to introduce a change that makes the numbers not comparable to history.

> 50% error.

It's not a 50% error; it's a 50% error in the magnitude of the change.

That's like saying that my room increased from 71.4 to 71.6 degrees, but my thermometer only saw an increase from 71.4 to 71.5; therefore, my thermostat has a 50% error.
Show HN: VC-LLM – Visualization of YC Summer 25 startups
by kovezd | 2025-09-09 15:14:26+00:00
Hi HN! I’ve been experimenting with large language models for data analysis and thought today’s demo day would be a fun way to gather feedback.

The problem I see is that for the average investor, it’s tough to get familiar with 100+ startups in a short amount of time. To make it easier, I scored the startups across 12 dimensions so anyone can filter based on their own investment thesis. There’s also a ranked search and similarity view, which makes it simple to focus on a specific industry or discover related startups.

On the technical side, the implementation is straightforward. I use a small model to score the startups and then chart them in two dimensions with PCA. Each score has a rationale attached, making it easy to audit or test. From my experiments, Gemini did a surprisingly good job with the scoring, which makes the tool both useful and fun for exploring startups.

Congratulations to all the teams launching today—there are some amazing and inspiring projects. Looking forward to your feedback!
by mtrovo | 2025-09-09 15:14:34+00:00
I can't understand the perspective of those who defend privatizing natural monopolies. I'm not against privatization in any way, but good governance is impossible without consequences for failure.

Focusing on Thames Water's particular example, if we assume malice as the cause, what would be the potential consequences? While the government could impose fines, the possibility of non-payment exists and what would happen in that case? Instead of debt collectors taking action, like ripping pipes from the ground or causing pension fund collapse, the government would act as a last resort investor, potentially providing further funding for a few additional years before the situation likely repeats.
by pbk1 | 2025-09-09 15:14:46+00:00
I went on a road trip through Southern NM a couple years ago. Highly recommend stopping at Gila National Forest - it's a certified "dark park", remote enough from sources of light to see the Milky Way with the naked eye.

One thing that struck me - towns down there had a template. 90% of towns we drove through were just a blood plasma "donation" center, a dollar store, a gas station, and a cemetery. Very bleak existence out there, oil and gas boom notwithstanding.
by mystraline | 2025-09-09 15:14:58+00:00
In the USA, sensitive sites are not hidden by blur, but instead by fake scenery generation.

Nearby where I live, there is an oil pipeline pump/monitor station. Shows up on Google maps as dilapidated concrete pad, decades old. Its really a modern pump/lift station, with a razor fence around it.

Google maps indicates the tile data is from 2025. The station has been there for 10+ years.

Even weirder, is that Bing maps shows the pump station proper.
by sc68cal | 2025-09-09 15:15:29+00:00
This is very true. My circumstances are a little unusual where using Azure costed more than running it internally on VMs, and running k8s or an equivalent didn't really add much value since I would have had to manage that, and my workload is uniform where each VM runs the same services so just running a podman pod was easier. There was no need for dynamic scheduling and scaling would just be launching more VMs and running more podman pods, and the entire deployment is just an Ansible playbook that preps the VM after boot then launches the containers. It didn't make sense to have another kind of YAML file to deploy the containers.
by munksbeer | 2025-09-09 15:15:44+00:00
> But even so, the commission does whatever it wants anyway, they are complete autocrats when it comes to law proposal

For anyone reading this drivel, this is a complete misrepresentation of how the EU works. The commission changes and is appointed by the elected heads of the member nations to do their bidding. The push for chat control is coming from the member nations, not some "evil mysterious third party" that appeared out of nowhere to control us all.

People who don't understand the EU and resort to blaming it for these sort of problems are actually causing more harm, because they're directing people's anger at the wrong targets. Target your own elected officials, because they are the ones pushing for this and the ones who steer the commission.
by ramses0 | 2025-09-09 15:15:49+00:00
The concept of "auto"-tiered, transparent storage is _really_ compelling! ...and the use of AGPL is really clever as an "enterprise poison pill".

It still sucks that S3 is ~$20/mo/TB basically "in perpetuity", while random SSD drives are ~$80/TB and I'd feel comfortable effectively amortizing them out at ~$20/yr for local storage instead of $20/mo for S3. :-/
by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | 2025-09-09 15:16:05+00:00
I think it's all of the above and probably more. It might be difficult to find a biggest culprit since they all feed each other. As an example: COVID forced people inside onto their screens and now that people are more screen addicted they use more gen ai or lost the skills to solve things themselves. Gen ai reliance leads to more gen ai use as skills wither.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-09 15:17:26+00:00
> Would make sense IMO to provide an equal value waiver to those who take care of their kid rather than send them to childcare.

This is a great way to kill a policy.

It would technically be most fair if every parent was given the same amount of money per child, period. Then they could do what they needed or wanted with it.

But doing so would not only increase the costs dramatically (by a multiple) it would give money to many parents who didn’t need it for child care.

That’s great in a hypothetical world where budgets are infinite, but in the real world they’re not. The more broadly you spread the money, the less benefit each person receives. If you extended an equal benefit to parents who were already okay with keeping their children home, it’s likely that the real outcome would be reduced benefits for everyone going to daycare. Now you’re giving checks to parents who were already doing okay at home but also diminished the childcare benefit for those who needed it, which was the goal in the beginning.
by Kon5ole | 2025-09-09 15:17:32+00:00
>- They are inherently safe, no need to worry about meltdowns.

I don't worry about designed meltdowns, I worry about someone bunker-busting it, crashing a plane into it, detonating a convoy of trucks filled with fertilizer inside it, someone deciding that an old mine close the the ground water is "good enough" to store the waste from it, that war, forest fires, floods or famine will leave the sites unmanned until the storage pools dry out and the waste starts burning, or any number of similar scenarios which become so much more likely the more of these things we have.

But mostly I worry that they are more expensive than anything else even in a best-case scenario.

Why should we invest in more expensive electricity, that also carries a significant risk for immense disasters, when we have solved cheap solar, cheap batteries and synthesized fuels? The path forward seems obvious, even though it's less traveled.
by mrkeen | 2025-09-09 15:17:42+00:00
It's an interesting way to divide up a country's labour.

50% do child rearing, and the other 50% do literally all other professions.

If you did have such a large cohort engaged in that activity, there should probably be some kind of education where one could learn 'the best'.

Of course people with kids would be too busy to attend.

And the ones who did attend wouldn't have any kids to look after.
by furyofantares | 2025-09-09 15:17:44+00:00
Some of this has gotta be people asking more of it than they did before, and some has gotta be people who happened to use it for things it's good at to begin with and are now asking it things it's bad at (not necessarily harder things, just harder for the model).

However there have been some bugs causing performance degradation acknowledged by Anthropic as well (and fixed) and so I would guess there's a good amount of real degradation still if people are still seeing issues.

I've seen a lot of people switching to codex cli, and yesterday I did too, for now my 200/mo goes to OpenAI. It's quite good and I recommend it.
by deadbabe | 2025-09-09 15:17:52+00:00
You don’t understand the United States.

The point of the US has always been to make it easy for people to accumulate a lot of money, so that they can independently purchase things like child care if they need it, but if not, they can freely invest their money into other things.

Prioritizing cashflow over social safety nets results in a very liquid lifestyle, that can change quickly according to your own individual desires. Since you are not depending on any government handouts, you can simply take your money to wherever you see fit and live how you want. This appeals to many American individualist values.

If you live in a European society where you don’t earn a lot of money but you have most essential things provided by the government, you typically have to live a specific kind of lifestyle. Moving out of that country becomes infeasible, you can’t take government services with you. Your life will look very similar to people around you, everyone depends on the same government services and few have accumulated enough money to live an order of magnitude more comfortable than others. In a random sample of Americans, you will likely find a range of people from low-key millionaires to people up to their eyeballs in crushing debt.

Unfortunately though in the US, this entire concept collapses when people are no longer able to accumulate a lot of cash. They will live in the worst of both worlds: broke and the government isn’t helping them.
by delichon | 2025-09-09 15:18:30+00:00
50 out of 50, plus the District of Columbia, for 8 consecutive years. I recently spent a few weeks as a instructional assistant in a New Mexico high school classroom. I saw nothing but highly dedicated professional teachers doing their best. But student performance is astonishingly low. I felt like running through the halls screaming like my hair was on fire, but there is very little in the way of alarm or anything but a few changes around the edges.

I went to a school board meeting, where they voted to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a tire alignment machine for the shop class. I would rather have seen it spent on online math instruction, but I could see their point of view: they want to graduate students who have a chance to get a job, and the academic side of the school is not providing it, and not trending in that direction. So they spent the money where they saw some hope.

If you can afford to do better than public school for your children in New Mexico, it's an imperative.
by mjr00 | 2025-09-09 15:18:36+00:00
100 games over 40 years is not a lot. There's 23 games over the past decade on that list, Hollow Knight being one of them. If being one of the top 23 over the span of 10 years of something doesn't make it "one of the best"[0] in your book, you are entitled to think that. I'm just pointing out that most people believe it was one of the best. You can argue that you are right and the 500,000 concurrent Silksong players on Steam, plus the millions more on Switch/PS/XBox, are wrong, but frankly you're unlikely to convince me.

[0] By comparison, the Pro Football Hall of Fame had 28 inductees since 2022 -- are you willing to argue that being in the HoF doesn't make you one of the best?
by vel0city | 2025-09-09 15:18:52+00:00
There is also quite a difference between being able to type out and read short messages to friends like "who wants to go to the park today" or read a menu and know if a sandwich has mustard on it or not and being able to have deeper inferential and evaluative understandings of written thoughts and ideas.

I think back to some college peers who even in some more basic classes could clearly read the words of the assigned writings, they couldn't then parse out the deeper meanings behind the assignments. They weren't illiterate, you could ask them to read a passage, and they'd be able to say all the words. You could ask them face value questions about the text, and they'd probably be able to answer most questions right. But any deeper analysis was just beyond them. So, when the professor would ask deeper questions, they'd say "I don't know where he's getting this, the book didn't talk about that at all".
by nabla9 | 2025-09-09 15:19:01+00:00
They are neither.

Revisions and surprises are routine. Data comes in gradually, but estimates are useful even before all data has arrived. Early data is based on business reporting and businesses that report on-time aren't necessarily representative of all businesses. Those people who use this data know this, and prepare for revisions.

I hope this helps and you understand better. Anyone here who still thinks this is still incompetence or corruption because surveys come late?

>I wonder why there is such lack of accountability from firms whose data pretty much feeds the world's economy.

Create punishment system? Unless compaies report data back to BLS very fast, they pay big fee or are taxed higher. Small shops would hate it.
by phoenixhaber | 2025-09-09 15:19:08+00:00
Oh by the way these are all my comments which I've just talked into my phone so just read it as if you were reading someone talking to you there's no punctuation in there's multiple repeated words and stuff like that but just imagine someone's just talking to you while you read it so it's like a I don't know it's consider it like a literary art form where it's like the direst entry except someone's just speaking at you rather than like going through and playing with their thumbs in order to put in periods and s**
by RC_ITR | 2025-09-09 15:19:13+00:00
I think it's interesting that everyone's immediate reaction now-a-days is to assume incompetence or maliciousness, rather than curiosity at the root cause (very telling this attitude has even permeated a forum for supposed 'hackers').

A high-level is that 80% of the economy is very easy to track b/c it's not very volatile (teachers, for example).

What we have seen is a huge surge in unpredictability in the most volatile 20% of jobs (mining, manufacturing, retail, etc.). The BLS can't really change their methods to catch up with this change for classic backwards compatibility and tech debt reasons.

Part of the reason 'being a quant' is so hot right now is that we truly are in weird times where volatility is much higher than most people realize across sectors of the economy (i.e. AI is changing formerly rock-solid SWE employment trends, tariffs/electricity are quickly and randomly changing domestic manufacturing profitability, etc.). This means that if you can build systems that track data better than the old official systems, you can make some decent money investing against your knowledge.

I think this is a bad state of affairs, but I don't have a good solution. Any private company won't release their data b/c it's too valuable and I am reluctant to encourage the BLS to rip up their methods when backwards compatibility is a feature worth saving.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-09-09 15:19:14+00:00
See https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_danegeld.htm

Trump is "making deals" by making the other option worse. But the problem is, if you take the current best option, that may not be the deal for long. He may do it again... and again...

"I am altering the deal. Pray that I do not alter it further."

When dealing with someone like this, don't play the game the first time.
by bitpush | 2025-09-09 15:19:27+00:00
> Physically shipping goods across the world is far more expensive than delivering video.

Are you sure? It is a logistics issue, not a technology issue. Streaming video, near instantly, around the world, without any perceivable user-experience issues, infinite times, for infinite users is a massive-massive technology issue.

Amazon same day deliver was problably the most revolutionary thing that came to the domain, but otherwise shipping 1000 cars across the world, while impressive, is a pretty straight forward task. The technology that you need are ships and trucks. You can use a 1950s era technology to do that.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-09-09 15:19:35+00:00
> Amazon has also learned something about me I didn't necessarily need to tell them -- ie, that I'm privacy-focused.

Exactly, and it turns out privacy-focused people tend to be relatively self-similar in many ways and, at least back in the day, were easier to advertise to.

Now, Amazon (or whomever) still doesn't know your name, but they are still targeting you and, what I found super interesting, is the fact that it was often more effective targeting than if the person was just part of the bulk of the population. It's kinda like if the system observed all the nonconformist teens like to wear Doc Marten's.
by rurp | 2025-09-09 15:19:42+00:00
You might want to read up on the process a little more before forming such strong opinions. The BLS is extremely transparent, at least for now. The earlier reports are intentionally more noisy because there is value is being fast and then revising later, and everyone who uses this data is aware of that.

Calling this a 50% error rate is simply wrong. If an earlier report said a single job had been created and that was later revised to two jobs, that would be super humanly accurate and yet you would be calling for everyone to be fired over the 100% error rate.
by ddoolin | 2025-09-09 15:19:45+00:00
It's $16k for a 1-person household. Here's the rest:

$21,150 (2), $26,650 (3), $32,150 (4), $37,650 (5), $43,150 (6), $48,650 (7), $54,150 (8)

Also the median household income in NM is ~$62,000 according to the Census, which is already under the 400% threshold for just a one person household.

https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/federal-poverty-level-fp... https://data.census.gov/profile/New_Mexico?g=040XX00US35
by Aurornis | 2025-09-09 15:19:49+00:00
> You realize a lot of people actually prefer to give their child their best instead of outsourcing it

My wife and I staggered our work schedules to minimize the time spent at daycare.

The one thing we didn’t expect: The kids absolutely loved daycare. It was a great place with excellent caretakers. Most of all, it was socialization with their friends.

From reading sneering interment comments (like the one above) I was led to believe that daycare would be an awful experience and I should feel guilty for sending our kids away. Instead, it turned out to be a very fun thing they looked forward to that was also great for their development. Our kids still hang out with friends they made early in daycare days.
by cs702 | 2025-09-09 15:19:55+00:00
If unemployment continues to rise, and the one-time impact on prices of tariffs leads to self-reinforcing high inflation, we'll have stagflation:

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

I sure hope not, because stagflation would be extremely unpleasant for everyone. Central banks like the Federal Reserve would be forced to raise interest rates, to put stress on businesses and consumers, so businesses find themselves unable to raise prices further and consumers find themselves unable to demand greater pay at work.

Raising rates to put stress on businesses and consumers is the only method known to work for ending self-reinforcing high inflation. It's what Paul Volcker did at the Federal Reserve in response to the stagflation that started in the early 1970's in the US and other countries, after OPEC raised oil prices. Volcker raised the federal funds rate in fits and starts to a high of 20% in 1981:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Volcker#Chairman_of_the_F...

It worked. Volcker's actions are widely credited with ending self-reinforcing high inflation. His actions also triggered a recession.

Stagflation itself triggered a stock market crash in 1973-1974. It took over 20 years, until 1993, for the US stock market to recover:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973%E2%80%931974_stock_market...

Like I said, it would be extremely unpleasant, for everyone. I hope we don't end up with stagflation.
by georgeecollins | 2025-09-09 15:20:17+00:00
The department of labor has a methodology that gives an early number that tends to get revised. They have been doing it the same way for a long time and it would not be controversial, except the business press with too little news to report makes a big deal about it with very little context. So its, like jobs increased 200k (not saying +/- 200k is the error bar). It would be good for everyone if people who are not professional economists paid less attention to this.
by mh- | 2025-09-09 15:20:24+00:00
Not nitpicking, but they said:

> we never intentionally degrade model quality as a result of demand or other factors

Fully giving them the benefit of the doubt, I still think that still allows for a scenario like "we may [switch to quantized models|tune parameters], but our internal testing showed that these interventions didn't materially affect end user experience".

I hate to parse their words in this way, because I don't know how they could have phrased it that closed the door on this concern, but all the anecdata (personal and otherwise) suggests something is happening.
by SamuelAdams | 2025-09-09 15:20:43+00:00
Nonetheless, it looks like this new legislation is expanding the previous 2019 legislation:

> This announcement fulfills the promise made by the governor and the New Mexico Legislature when they created the Early Childhood Education and Care Department in 2019. Since then, New Mexico has expanded access to no-cost child care to families with incomes at or below 400% of the federal poverty level, reducing financial strain on tens of thousands of families.

> With Monday’s announcement *universal child care will be extended to every family in the state, regardless of income.* This amounts to an average annual family savings of $12,000 per child.

(emphasis added)
by cubefox | 2025-09-09 15:21:12+00:00
They do already correct errors since OpenAI introduced its o1 model. Since then the improvements have been significant. It seems practically certain that their capabilities will keep growing rapidly. Do you think AI will suddenly stagnate such that models are not much more capable in five years than they are now? That would be absurd. Look back five years, and we are practically in the AI stone age.