MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by robwwilliams | 2025-09-21 14:55:00+00:00
Worth drawing a distinction between governmental support for science and for the humanities.

The first does a lot of relative low mark-up contract work requested by governmental agencies. Governments and all of us would like to see cancer and Alzheimer disease cured.

The request for “bids” (aka grant applications) from NIH, DoD (now DoW) and NSF is what has greatly expanded research-focused universities and msde the USA the greatest source if cutting-edge science since WW2 (now relative success is shifting rapidly to China).

The recipients of these small but numerous contract to big medical schools usually are totally agnostic about politics—at least at work.

Turns out even autocratic-leaning politicians and the public are almost universally interested in learning how to live a long healthy life.

In contrast, the humanities are not a bread winners for universities. These faculty are ultimately paid by tuition or red or blue state support. These much more socially saavy and interested faculty mainly teach, and if they are lucky, have some modest time to think, read, and write. They are not beholding to government funds. They can speak truth to power.

So if a university like Columbia is brought to heel by the administration it is mainly due to the addiction of university administrators for the relative modest overhead they receive for NIH compared to that any corporation would accept for the same work.

And the ultimate source and cause of that addiction of administrators now willing to bend the knee to retain their federal funding overheads is the hard and intense work of their research scientists.
by mapt | 2025-09-21 14:55:17+00:00
Another way of looking at this would be in terms of the millionaire managerial and professional class holding up the Democratic Party versus the interests of the billionaire aristocratic and executive class holding up the Republican Party.

The billionaires are far less numerous, have far better ability to coordinate and summon resources, and have interests that diverge farther from the thousandaires who actually do most of the voting, compared to the millionaires.
by jacquesm | 2025-09-21 14:55:18+00:00
Funny, I've been reviving an OS I wrote in the 90's as well as the graphics package, window manager and a couple of demo apps that I wrote to go with it. It's been a long and arduous trip down memory lane but after a couple of weeks of work I have it working under Qemu or Virtualbox. The thing that still befuddles me is how to get the COM ports to work, for some reason they really don't emulate those well in either one of those.

Yesterday evening I finally got VGA modes 16 and 18 working, so now I have 640x350 and 640x480 graphics. Major milestone, and lots of fun to get it working this far. The last time it ran was 26/Jan/1994 so it's been mothballed since then and the old hardware is long gone.

As for how it is done: you use the BIOS to switch modes, then you have some basic info about the memory map of the video mode and usually a page register where you can set which part of the memory on the graphics card is exposed in a window starting at A000:0000. Later graphics modes, such as VESA based modes used a slightly different mode switch and tended to have the option to address all of the RAM in a contiguous stretch doing away with the bankswitching, which greatly improved low level performance.

All of the graphics primitives were in software, no HW acceleration at all.
by chubot | 2025-09-21 14:55:41+00:00
Yes definitely, but I'm pretty sure that he was just saying vibe coding is POSSIBLE and a fun thing to try, to see how far you can get (which is true, it can do some surprising things)

Not that companies should literally try to "vibe code" production software

Two publishers and three authors fail to understand what “vibe coding” means - https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/1/not-vibe-coding/

( I think Karpathy addressed what he meant in this video, though I forget the details: Software Is Changing (Again) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCEmiRjPEtQ )

The phrase got totally taken out of context, probably because it's what people WANTED to believe. They wanted to believe that the hard thing was now easy, and they could make/save a lot of money that way
by thegrim33 | 2025-09-21 14:56:00+00:00
Man it drives me crazy when people/products use Ah instead of Wh as a way to specify battery "capability".

Without knowing more details about the battery, "20Ah" alone does not convey enough information to determine how long the battery could power a given load for. If I need to power a 100 watt lightbulb, will a 20Ah battery power it for an hour? 10 hours? 10 days? No way to know.

Wh is the unit of stored energy, Wh is what I want to see. Even the official Amazon product page for it doesn't list a Wh figure.
by jerf | 2025-09-21 14:56:31+00:00
They've discovered how to write dynamically-typed code correctly, or at least, a philosophy of it. It's not "discovering static typing" because that doesn't come up in static type languages. (Typescript is, for this particular purpose, still effective a dynamically typed language.)

I remember writing Python and Perl where functions largely just aimed you passed them the correct types (with isolated exceptions where it may have made sense) years before JavaScript was anything but a browser language for little functionality snippets. It's a dynamic language antipattern for every function to be constantly defensively checking all of it's input for type correctness, because despite being written for nominal "correctness", it's fragile, inconsistent between definitions, often wrong anyhow, slow, and complicates every function it touches, to the point it essentially eliminates the advantages of dynamic language in the first place.

Dynamic languages have to move some responsibility for being called with correct arguments to the caller, because checking the correctness of the arguments correctly is difficult and at times simply impossible. If the function is called with the wrong arguments and blows up, you need to be blaming the caller, not the called function.

I observe that in general this seems to be something that requires a certain degree of programming maturity to internalize: Just because the compiler or stack trace says the problem is on line 123 of program file X, does not mean the problem is actually there or that the correct fix will go there.
by lxgr | 2025-09-21 14:56:58+00:00
That's an optional USB-PD feature, though (called PPS).

Devices that support it can potentially charge more efficiently (and by extension more quickly, if they're limited by heat dissipation), but they can't rely on any USB-PD adapter supporting it.

It's also different from AVS (which Apple's adapter seems to support), which allows controlling the voltage in finer steps, but not limiting the current in the same way that PPS does.
by sieve | 2025-09-21 14:57:34+00:00
There is no single prompt.

The languages I am learning have verb conjugations and noun declensions. So I write a prompt asking the LLM to break the given paragraphs down sentence-by-sentence by giving me the general sentence level English translation plus word-by-word grammar and (contextual) meaning.

For the grammar, I ask for the verbal root/noun stem, the case/person/number, any information on indeclinables, the affix categories etc.
by jackstraw42 | 2025-09-21 14:57:51+00:00
I'm not saying they didn't. But Britain didn't defeat Germany alone, and certainly didn't get the entire share of control after Germany was defeated. And after that the further decline of the UK showed that the power was shifting into the hands of those with wealth anyway, and here we are.

Since around Nixon (maybe?) there has been a gradual post-WW2 deregulation that really accelerated under Reagan and now with Trump its accelerating again. More and more keeps shifting into the hands of unelected, wealthy individuals who see that their power keeps growing and growing and as far as I can tell, won't stop until they have it all. It doesn't make any sense to me why that looks like a stable world to them, but the one thing that is certain is that there is no 2nd amendment that will stop the billionaire club.
by fanf2 | 2025-09-21 14:57:57+00:00
That sentence is specifically about composers of methods in change ringing, where the musical possibilities are tightly constrained by the rules and the physics of ringing large bells. Change ringing is based on permutations constructed by swapping adjacent pairs. (Except for the jump changes that the article is about.) For a “triples” peal on 7 bells the ringers are supposed to ring all 5040 possible permutations. It’s called “triples” because you can make up to 3 swaps at a time; one of the challenges (for example) is to construct a triples peal that only uses triple changes.
by dotancohen | 2025-09-21 14:58:05+00:00
I happen to agree with every single word you said. I will emphasize, however, there are two horrible complications. They are pretty much the root of all the problems you see today.

First, borders. Israel's internationally recognized borders encompass all the West Bank and Gaza - the areas of Mandatory Palestine. Gaza and the West Bank were occupied by Egypt and Jordan militarily, but the current borders between those two territories and 1948 Israel are only ceasefire lines, not borders. Despite 19 years of there being no Jews in either territory after being ethnically cleaned by the occupying forces, both territories have literal millennia of history of Jews living in there. And Jews live there today. The Jewish state unilaterally uprooted all Jews living in the Gaza strip in 2005, which is widely regarded as a social mistake and a security mistake, and there is very little chance that this will be done again in the West Bank.

Secondly, education. The people of Gaza and the West Bank were prevented from establishing functions of state by UNRWA. In the West bank, the PA currently rules and does a decent job of providing state services - far below the standards anyone would actually want to live in, but able to be rehabilitated. In Gaza however, Hamas has been providing state services in parallel with UNRWA. However, UNRWA was largely responsible for children's education in both areas. UNRWA's curriculum teaches that Jews are to be genocided from the holy land, and that the entire areas of Mandatory Palestine are to be part of the Palestinian state. They teach that dying to kill Jews is the highest honor that one could achieve in Palestinian society. Many Westerners, and of course Israelis, have a hard time imagining a peaceful Palestinian state established when these are the values of the population. Remember, no matter what the final borders will be, they will be long and hard to defend, and we are wary of a hostile population amassed on those borders.
by fluidcruft | 2025-09-21 14:58:13+00:00
True but the n00b is very fast. A lot of coaching is waiting for the n00b to perform tasks and meta things about motivation. These LLM are extremely fast and eager to work.

I don't need a study to tell me that five projects that have been stuck in slow plodding along waiting for me to ever have time or resources for nearly ten years. But these are now nearing completion after only two months of picking up Claude Code. And with high-quality implementations that were feverdreams.

My background is academic science not professional programming though and the output quality and speed of Claude Code is vastly better than what grad students generate. But you don't trust grad student code either. The major difference here is that suggestions for improvement loop in minutes rather than weeks or months. Claude will get the science wrong, but so do grad students.

(But sure technically they are not finished yet ... but yeah)
by mystraline | 2025-09-21 14:58:47+00:00
In Indiana, there were groceries that had early morning for healthcare workers and elderly only. That helped limit spread as well.

Again, we had no real lockdowns. School was remote, which had its own really bad effects on early socialization.

I'm not at all sure what we should have did differently. Technically a hard lockdown for 6 weeks could mostly eradicate it everywhere. But a lot of people can't handle that.

What I do now know is our society and public kinda sucks, people will show up and do stuff sick, spread sickness, and not really care much. And our government has been getting steadily worse and worse as long as Ive lived. And my generation and younger ones are either in for a terrible time, or already IN a terrible time.
by simpaticoder | 2025-09-21 14:59:03+00:00
Anecdotally, having lived in Germany for a couple of years recently, there is a perceptible national character. The best way to understand it is to ponder the difference between a drag race and a rally race - in one, success means going as fast as possible; in the other success means getting to navigation points within a window of error. Or, with beer: in America success is discovering a new beer with a different flavor profile. In Germany, success is figuring out a way to even more precisely and consistently conforming to a centuries-old brewing standard. This, along with a kind of blunt speech that presupposes the listener to have little in the way of vanity or ego (or challenges them to not express it), is the "German character" as far as I can tell.

I suspect in part this was because they were burned very, very badly by the outward striving into the unknown that Hitler represented, and still having creativity and effort to apply turned inward to asymptotically approach perfect execution of the known.
by peteforde | 2025-09-21 14:59:05+00:00
You're technically right that an air fryer is a type of small convection oven, but dismissing them as "stupid" ignores why they're so popular. The point isn't that they reinvent physics, it's that they package convection in a way that's faster, uses way less electricity, is easier to clean, and perfectly sized for 1-2 people. Most folks aren't cooking for a big family every meal. I often just want to make fries, roast veggies, or crisp up leftovers. My Cosori lets me do that without heating the entire kitchen (and way faster, too).

I also simply don't have a convention oven. I rent my place, and it's not like I can just swap out the white goods.

Yes, the smallest ones are limited in capacity, but that's not the whole category. Larger models handle whole chickens.

The proof is in the market: people buy them in droves because they make food hot/crispy really quickly. A conventional oven can do the same thing, but it's like saying a desktop computer makes laptops "stupid". Technically true, but it ignores convenience, size, and efficiency, which are the reasons air fryers took off.

Anecdotally, most air fryers are owned by people who used to believe that they didn't need an air fryer. Have you actually had one in your life?
by mijoharas | 2025-09-21 14:59:08+00:00
DHH complains about people that aren't "White British" in the article[0]. If he were talking about foreign born he would say "only 65% are native Brits" [1].

You may not think that nationality is equivalent to race, but DHH does in the article you're referencing.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45303305

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45303447
by coder543 | 2025-09-21 14:59:22+00:00
More fearmongering. Provide proof, or please stop confusing people. This thread was asking for recommendations to understand how to charge their phone. The answer is extremely simple. This is not the thread to dig into irrelevant details. Read the room.

If you want to get technical, the difference in conversion losses between AVS at 13.3V@3A and a non-AVS 15V PDO @ 2.667A is going to be rounding error. Both need to be regulated down to about 3.5V to 4.2V by the phone's internal circuitry. A hypothetical buck converter that is just as efficient at 15V -> 3.5V as it is at 13.3V -> 3.5V would see no difference at all in heat generation. In the real world, such a small difference in input voltages at >1A would likely yield a less than 1% efficiency difference. 1% of 40W is 0.4W, but I repeat: I am saying less than 1%, not 1%. Based on tests I've seen in the past, previous iPhones could dissipate at least 4W of power continuously, forever, in normal ambient conditions. For a 95% efficient buck converter (which is probably conservative here), the total thermal load from charging at 40W is 2W. Unless the thermal load exceeds 4W, there should be no difference in charging speed potential. 2W + 0.4W would be 2.4W, which is well below the 4W threshold, and the buck converter on a high end smartphone is probably more than 95% efficient, while the difference in input voltages probably yields less than 1% difference in efficiency, so 2.4W is a very conservative number here. Keep in mind that phones can dissipate significantly more than 4W for brief bursts, and the charge curve on the battery isn't going to allow 40W charging for very long regardless of the thermals, so the phone likely has even more thermal headroom here in the real world. Even a 20V PDO @ 2A -> 3.5V should be perfectly fine here. I see no evidence that there is even a possibility of AVS making a difference here unless you wrap the phone in real insulation (not a phone case) or stick it in a toaster oven while charging.

Talking about how there might be an imperceptible difference under very specific extreme conditions is exactly what I would call fearmongering in a thread where someone was specifically asking for recommendations. It won't matter to anyone, ever, in any real world situation. This is not the thread to be contrarian for the sake of digging into minutiae. You're welcome to start a thread where that is the goal.

In summary: OP does not need to buy a fancy AVS-enabled charger. They shouldn't avoid such chargers, but there is no reason to get one. Unless you have material proof to the contrary that you want to present, but it seems like you don't.
by kevingoslar | 2025-09-21 14:59:39+00:00
If the thinking was truly "slower", i.e. have less throughput, it would result in fewer insights overall, i.e. lower intelligence. This doesn't seem to be the case since the author describes equal success of these "slow thinkers" to neurotypical ways of thinking.

The problem therefore seems to be more accurately described as having the same insights as others, but they arrive later, i.e. "delayed" insights.

Delayed processing could be an effect of delayed context switching, i.e. monotropism [0]. Monotropism can be an indicator of mild autism.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotropism
by JamesonNetworks | 2025-09-21 14:59:47+00:00
Yeah, we live on the backside of a circle with no through traffic and today I watched a teenager race around the circle going faster than 20mph for several laps. My driveway is sloped and balls roll into the road that my small children go after all the time. Its been a point of focus for me to convince them to check the road, stop, look both ways, ALWAYS, and make sure there are no cars.

Even if they dont clock it car, its my hope the driver sees them on the side while they pause to check. Them getting hit by a car in my own neighborhood is my biggest fear and also the most likely disaster that can probably befall them.

I also love transporting them in our van, so its just a very complicated issue. I wish our populace was more into walkable solution and more attentive at driving.
by throw0101c | 2025-09-21 14:59:50+00:00
> They just lost the war. Had they won the war(s), their fortunes would have been different.

"Just". LOL. Is that all?

They lost the war in part because of bad economic policy:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Destruction

The UK was out producing Germany in planes and many other sectors—and that was before the US even got involved.
by p_ing | 2025-09-21 15:00:47+00:00
You're misreading those stats. The Census doesn't define "city", it defines "urban" vs. "rural".

My "city" of 5K is considered "urban" according to the 2020 census. There are nearly zero services in this "city", only a couple of restaurants, the largest employer is the school district, and it's surrounded by farms and mountain forests. It takes 15 minutes by car to get to the next town over on a two lane highway.

If you want to get to any real city, you're looking at a 30-45 minute drive at highway/freeway speeds.

So yes, there may be more individuals in "urban" areas, but not all "urban" areas are functionally urban. My "urban city" per the 2020 census is no LA, Austin, or Portland.
by 0manrho | 2025-09-21 15:00:58+00:00
None of this makes or is a result of the language js (being) secure. Security is far and away predominantly a matter of how it's used, not a character of them language itself. "Safety" helps, but you can still easily write and package unsafe and insecure code in "safe" languages like rust, just as you can in C, JS, python, etc etc etc.
by jagged-chisel | 2025-09-21 15:00:59+00:00
> … world-class researchers …

These people can’t possibly be at every university, let alone colleges, community colleges, or technical schools.

> … rote memorization and bad classes …

Not every school will be good. There are at least three post-secondary schools within driving of me that take the minimum required curricula as a script and offer nothing more than the bare minimum required to get certification, accreditation, and receive that sweet state and federal budget money.

I can’t imagine how someone with a good or great post-secondary education is confused that this would be the situation for millions of students.
by markus_zhang | 2025-09-21 15:01:01+00:00
I wouldn't say corporations and oligarchs are going to fight. I'd say elites infight all the time, but they all agree that the other humans are simply "human resources" and they have the common interests to extract as much value from those fellow humans as possible.

Exactly the same model for pretty much all large countries, each with a bit of different "flavour" that the elites learned throughout the centuries, and conveniently serves as one of the topics to divide the human resources.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-09-21 15:01:13+00:00
This is much easier said than done. What if her severance was significant? What if she needed it to survive? Meta's line is she was fired for "poor performance and toxic behavior" and a non-disparagement clause often cuts both ways; now instead of saying "she worked her from <start date> to <end date> this was her job title" they can publicly disclose she was let go for serious job failures. It doesn't matter if this is true, good luck getting a new job.
by cantrevealname | 2025-09-21 15:01:32+00:00
Let's think about possible applications of audio-video recorders camouflaged to look like something in the form factor of credit cards:

- Induce your target to apply for a certain credit/debit card, gym/movie/gallery/store membership, airline pass, then mail them a bugged card

- Blindly mail a $100 gift card to your target along with a plausible sounding cover letter about why they are receiving it

- Give your target a badge to wear when they are visiting your office so you can hear and see what they do when they're not in your presence

- Leave your bugged card on the table while having dinner with your targets at a restaurant to hear the conversation while you go to the restroom

- Substitute one of the targets legitimate cards with a bugged card via covert entry at the target's home or office

- Obtain the cooperation of the target's employer or health club to swap their usual ID card for a bugged ID card

- With the cooperation of the target's bank or credit card issuer or insurance provider, send the target a replacement card or "upgrade" card which is now bugged

- Issue a bugged driver's license whenever the target goes to renew their license. Or send them a fine by mail to force them to visit the driver licensing office and then invent a reason to reissue the target's driver's license when they visit

- Whenever someone applies for or renews a Global Entry, Sentri, or Nexus card, issue a bugged card if they are on the target list