MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2025-09-25 20:42:32+00:00
You wrote

"it is because the business is suffering from financial hardship or the current owner is unable to continue to run the business and cannot find a successor, so selling to private equity would be the least bad option."

It should be

"PE offered by far the most money and will make up for it by raising prices and reducing service"

That's exactly what happened with that dentist practice. For years I went there, got a cleaning and was told "keep doing what you are doing". After the takeover they found some problem with almost every visit and fixing it coincidentally would have cost exactly the $1500 my insurance was covering each year.
by ip26 | 2025-09-25 20:43:32+00:00
It doesn't have to be that way of course. You could envision an LLM whose "paperclip" is coaching you to become a great "xyz". Record every minute of your day, including your conversations. Feed it to the LLM. It gives feedback on what you did wrong, refuses to be your social outlet, and demands you demonstrate learning in the next day before it rewards with more attention.

Basically, a fanatically devoted life coach that doesn't want to be your friend.

The challenge is the incentives, the market, whether such an LLM could evolve and garner reward for serving a market need.
by EchoReflection | 2025-09-25 20:43:34+00:00
"Microsoft condones Hamas attack on Oct 7th."

"Microsoft changes company slogan to 'Allah Akbar Surveillance for the Future of Glorious Jihad"

"Microsoft Pledges Billions of Dollars to Help Hamas Rebuild Tunnels That Were Used to Invade Israel".

I wonder how the Jewish employees at Micro$oft don't quit en masse...I guess people need income/have families to think about, but still... Preventing Israel from using MS tech to protect itself from terrorist attacks is pretty disgusting. Highly recommend Douglas Murray's (extremely disturbing and sad) book "On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Western Civilization" (warning: includes horrific accounts of extreme violence against Israeli civilians)

https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/on-democraci...

https://www.audible.com/pd/On-Democracies-and-Death-Cults-Au...
by coffeecoders | 2025-09-25 20:43:51+00:00
On a slightly related note-

I've been thinking about building a home-local "mini-Google" that indexes maybe 1,000 websites. In practice, I rarely need more than a handful of sites for my searches, so it seems like overkill to rely on full-scale search engines for my use case.

My rough idea for architecture:

- Crawler: A lightweight scraper that visits each site periodically.

- Indexer: Convert pages into text and create an inverted index for fast keyword search. Could use something like Whoosh.

- Storage: Store raw HTML and text locally, maybe compress older snapshots.

- Search Layer: Simple query parser to score results by relevance, maybe using TF-IDF or embeddings.

I would do periodic updates and build a small web UI to browse.

Anyone tried it or are there similar projects?
by Joeboy | 2025-09-25 20:44:05+00:00
You linked audio of a phone call from a Hamas terrorist, as evidence that "Palestinians don't discern Jews and Israelis". I hope you can see the irony there.

There's also, I think, an irony that antisemites and Zionists are united in their their efforts to conflate Jewishness with the actions of the Israeli state. I think it's a welcome development that Parker / Stone / Sheila Broflovski aren't going along with it.
by leakycap | 2025-09-25 20:44:08+00:00
If your company has fewer than 100 people, LinkedIn is a waste of time.

If your company has somewhere between 100 and 3000 or so people, LinkedIn might help both internally and as you network in whatever capacity you can.

Once you start dealing with companies with multiple thousands of employees, an internal networking tool should be available that will more directly impact your career if you spend your "LinkedIn effort & time" there instead
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-09-25 20:44:16+00:00
> You're trying to frame the classic authoritarian power grab

Half of US states now have age verification for pornography; three will be requiring age verification to even download apps soon. There is indeed a push from society to get the internet under control, even if the EU is not necessarily connected the same way.

This is a huge, unprecedented reversal of opinion over the last decade that has almost completely gone over HN's head. The EFF, TechDirt, HN, Reddit view of the world has been tried, found wanting, and is being rejected. The EFF which once rallied the internet against SOPA/PIPA... currently is yelling into a void. Nobody believes in a free internet anymore.
by avsm | 2025-09-25 20:45:17+00:00
Yes it's very good fun just exploring the embeddings! It's all wrapped by the geotessera Python library, so with uv and gdal installed just try this for your favourite region to get a false-colour map of the 128-dimensional embeddings:

# for cambridge # https://github.com/ucam-eo/geotessera/blob/main/example/CB.geojson curl -OL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ucam-eo/geotessera/refs/heads/main/example/CB.geojson # download the embeddings as geotiffs uvx geotessera download --region-file CB.geojson -o cb2 # do a false colour PCA down to 3 dimensions from 128 uvx geotessera visualize cb2 cb2.tif # project onto webmercator and visualise using leafletjs over openstreetmap uvx geotessera webmap cb2.tif --output cb2-map --serve

Because the embeddings are precomputed, the library just has to download the tiles from our server. More at: https://anil.recoil.org/notes/geotessera-python

Downstream classifiers are really fast to train (seconds for small regions). You can try out a notebook in VSCode to mess around with it graphically using https://github.com/ucam-eo/tessera-interactive-map

The berries were a bit sour, summer is sadly over here!
by bob1029 | 2025-09-25 20:45:20+00:00
> Ignore this if you have real grown up CI where your PRs never stay open for more than a day.

A vast majority of the drama that comes out of source control is associated with branches living for far too long.

I've got an internal alarm that starts to go off somewhere around 72 hours. If something takes longer than this, I've probably screwed up in my planning phase. There are some things that do need to sit, but they should be rebased every morning like clockwork. The moment things start to conflict, the PR gets closed and the branch is now a reference for how to do it again when whatever blocker is cleared.

Another way to think about all of this is to pretend like everything you are touching is taking a synchronous lock out (even if it's not), similar to how tools like Perforce behave. So, you generally want to move as quickly as possible to get out from under lock contention. Git allows you to pretend like you aren't conflicting for a really long time, but at some point you must answer for all of this debt (with interest).
by s_brady | 2025-09-25 20:45:48+00:00
Inspired by [1] I have been working on a system to integrate the Normative Calculus of Lawrence Becker from "A New Stoicism" [2] into an LLM agent. This works out kind of like Constitutional AI but prompt engineering based. There is a Raku and a Python implementation. I much preferred using Raku as the built in text handling and multithreading is a joy to work with. Python is very clunky compared to it. it just has better libraries.

I make no great claims for the system, it has major issues being prompt based. It is a prototype to explore the feasibility of the idea of giving a chatbot arete, a code of conduct. There are few tests, no evals so all the usual caveats! An intellectual exercise in possibilities not currently being explored anywhere else. Does it work? Hmm, almost :)

It extracts normative propositions from incoming user requests then compares then to it's own internal ethical normative propositions using the Normative Calculus. The system also uses the Decision Paradigm algorithm from Lee Roy Beach [3] to make a forecast on whether to take up the user's task or not.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1013805017161 [2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1pd2k82 [3] https://books.google.ie/books/about/The_Psychology_of_Narrat...
by speed_spread | 2025-09-25 20:45:52+00:00
At least with Itanium Intel was trying something fresh. In comparison, the Pentium 4 arch was extra bad because it had a very long pipeline to achieve high core frequencies. Branch mispredictions were thus very costly. And it was soon obvious that the process wouldn't scale much above 3Ghz without wasting humongous amounts of power, defeating the long pipeline's purpose.
by viraptor | 2025-09-25 20:46:02+00:00
I don't think that's a realistic view of the timeline. I've done features as multiple PRs and there are really two cases:

1. I can't submit pieces until I have the final version. PRs go up at the same time and can be reviewed one after another immediately.

2. There's a very specific split that makes that feature two features in reality. Like adding a plugin system and the first plugin. Then the first part gets submitted while I still work on the second part and there's no delay on my side, because I'm still developing anyway.

Basically, I've never seen the "but if each PR has a delay of 1 hour before a reviewer can get to it," getting serialised in practice. It's still either one time or happening in the background.
by palata | 2025-09-25 20:46:09+00:00
Take it like this: your phone already "reads" absolutely everything you put on that phone. Apple or Google could do anything they want with that, but you trust them. You trust that they don't send everything that goes into your phone to their servers.

ChatControl would run locally on your phone. It would compare the images that you receive/send to a list of illegal images, and if you happen to deal with one of them, it would report you.

How is that destroying your democracy?

Disclaimer: I am against ChatControl, but too many people seem to not understand what the problem with ChatControl is.
by sadiq | 2025-09-25 20:46:31+00:00
Hyperspectral data is really neat though it's worth pointing out that TESSERA is only trained on multispectral (optical + SAR) data.

You are very right on the temporal aspect though, that's what makes the representation so powerful. Crops grow and change colour or scatter patterns in distinct ways.

It's worth pointing out the model and training code is under an Apache2 license and the global embeddings are under a CC-BY-A. We have a python library that makes working with them pretty easy: https://github.com/ucam-eo/geotessera
by troupo | 2025-09-25 20:46:34+00:00
> and suddenly the EU decided it was not good.

There's nothing sudden. There were several years of discussions with the industry and all the involved parties, including developers (something Apple never does).

On top of that all affected companies were given ample warnings and ample time to comply.

Even now Apple decrees it will not comply because "users and developers porn safety" bullshit never once getting off its high horse. At the same time the EU literally asks for feedback: https://9to5mac.com/2025/09/18/european-union-app-store-rule...

> Let the market decide!

How can the market decide when one of the duopoly players prevents others from competing? E.g. Pebble literally cannot compete with Apple Watch because Apple uses a completely unrelated product to cut them off from useful functionality https://ericmigi.com/blog/apple-restricts-pebble-from-being-...
by kelipso | 2025-09-25 20:47:04+00:00
I don’t know if this includes starting research budget but if it does, it’s a very modest offer for top researchers. Starting research budget offered by R1 universities in the US can be millions of dollars for top researchers (in CS but that’s all I know about), before they need to get funding on their own. I guess it would be good for researchers who lost all of their funding.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-09-25 20:47:25+00:00
This is quite the comment.

1) You start off saying the mandatory spending is a ruse.

2) You provide no evidence for it.

3) You ask some pretty basic (still good) questions that each department already undergoes.

4) You conclude the spending must not be mandatory after all, just by the mere existence of your questions. Almost assuming the worst case answer to each question you raised.

Do you understand this is Seagull budget planning? I am no government defender, but I am consistently flabbergasted by people who think government fraud detection started and ended with DOGE. Do you guys seriously write "Are we paying for unnecessary things" as though it's an insightful question nobody in government has looked into before? Even after we have confirmed DOGE did fuck all and likely made this whole process even worse?
by dotancohen | 2025-09-25 20:47:32+00:00
That's funny. In mid-October 2023 the narrative was "It doesn't matter who killed more" and now that so many Palestinians are dying - both by Israeli bombs and by Hamas rockets (1/3 to 1/5 fall back into the densely-populated Gaza strip) - the narrative is "Hamas has killed less Israelis than Israel has killed Palestinians".

The pro-Palestinian narrative adapts and changes as per the tides of war and the media. The Israeli narrative has remained consistent, even when it hurts.

Furthermore, your ideas about the colour of people's skin is an artifact of you dragging American racial issues into a place where they don't belong. The varied skin colours here favour neither side as darker or lighter.
by zer00eyz | 2025-09-25 20:47:38+00:00
> Takeaway: Be paranoid about MBAs running your business.

Except Andy is talking about himself, and Noyce the engineers getting it wrong: (watch a few minutes of this to get the gist of where they were vs Japan) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=At3256ASxlA&t=465s

Intel has a long history of sucking, and other people stepping in to force them to get better. Their success has been accident and intervention over and over.

And this isnt just an intel thing, this is kind of an American problem (and maybe a business/capitalism problem). See this take on steel: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/no-inventions-no-inno... that sounds an awful lot like what is happening to intel now.
by kiitos | 2025-09-25 20:47:55+00:00
> if you only use commits as some sort of help while developing, you might as well just squash them before making a PR.

yeah for sure you want to squash-merge every PR to main, right?

commits are just commits, there is no moral value to them, there is no "good history" or "bad history" of them, whether or not they're "made thoughtfully" isn't really interesting or relevant

git is just a tool, and commits are just a means to an end
by dimal | 2025-09-25 20:48:00+00:00
Don’t forget that the AMA has a monopoly on billing codes. Medicare defines the billing value of every procedure as Relative Value Units (RVUs). Then Medicare defers to AMA’s guidance on what these values should be. Insurers default to RVUs x multiplier. So the AMA has the ability to set prices.

Oh, and patient value isn’t considered for these units. They are explicitly defined as input driven, so a procedure that is less costly to perform but has higher value to the patient will be billed at a lower value. Hospitals are incentivized to choose procedures that they can bill at a higher rate, and so because of these perverse incentives, they necessarily will ignore cheaper more effective treatments and choose the more expensive ones.

I’m a lefty, but the older I get the less I believe in the old New Deal style leftism I’ve been sold my whole life. As systems get more complex, they simply become a way to obfuscate oligarchic control.
by leakycap | 2025-09-25 20:48:03+00:00
A human body contains trillions of atoms that collectively form a macroscopic object.

For someone to pass through a solid wall, every single one of these atoms would need to quantum tunnel through the wall's atomic structure at exactly the same moment in perfect coordination.

While quantum tunneling can occur for individual particles, the likelihood decreases exponentially with the number of particles involved.
by runako | 2025-09-25 20:48:20+00:00
> the size of the government has vastly and consistently outgrown the private sector in both times of feast and famine

The US government at the start of this administration was roughly the same as it was in 1970[1]. This, despite the addition of new departments (1970 is pre-EPA, for example), many new responsibilities, etc. And obviously the government has to perform all these services for 140 million more people than in 1970, a 70% increase.

Doing more with the same resources is a textbook definition of increasing efficiency.

1 - Seriously, you won't see the growth you describe in the data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-25 20:48:21+00:00
It's quite true that means testing has an efficiency cost. One of the best ways to improve the efficiency of social security would be to convert it into a UBI.

But that's a very different question than whether it would lower the budget, and we're talking about programs that are paying out a lot more than $20. If doing means testing means you can stop paying $1000+/month to someone who is already a millionaire, that's still a savings even if it adds $20 in overhead. Meanwhile we're already paying the cost of doing the means testing, because we do it in reverse, and removing that would increase efficiency and lower spending.

Moreover, other taxes require keeping track of that stuff regardless. You already have to track the value of your assets for the purposes of capital gains tax and property tax. Doing that calculation to begin with isn't free, but the incremental cost of copying that line from the other tax forms onto the Medicare form would cost far less than it does to pay benefits to people who don't need the money. And it also has an efficiency benefit whenever it isn't a cash payment, since insurance is a moral hazard -- if the government is paying for something then you take it even if you value it at a third of what it costs, whereas if you're paying your own money you don't buy things that cost more than they're worth, so having less insurance coverage for people who could afford to pay out of pocket increases efficiency.
by JohnLocke4 | 2025-09-25 20:48:35+00:00
>You can't even organize a resistance because all channels of communication are monitored.

One of the awful things about this proposed legislation is that what I quoted you saying is not true. Software like PGP is easy to use, and criminals already do. The government has absolutely no possibility of breaking RSA the way things are now, and as such scanning all messages will do nothing other than prove more definitively that criminals are still beyond their gavel. In reality, the only individuals who will get spied on are regular people who don't open their terminal just to send a text; exactly the people who should not be spied on in the first place.

When the government realizes this invasive legislature is ineffective, they will probably crack down even harder. After all, what we are willing to accept from rulers has by the looks of it already increased dramatically. I wonder if it at some point it becomes illegal simply to posses encryption software on your personal devices, perhaps even possession of prime numbers that could theoretically be used in modern encryption. How far will the government go to take this illegal math from you?
by snowwrestler | 2025-09-25 20:48:41+00:00
Right, which is why broadly-available old-age insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security work. Everyone pays in their own money, to which they are entitled. So there’s not really any reason to spend that extra $10.

It’s also why “Medicare For All” runs into opposition. It’s hard to make the case that a healthy 22-year-old is entitled to a lifetime of free health care before paying a dime into the system.
by avsm | 2025-09-25 20:48:51+00:00
That's should be a pretty good usecase; if you do just a few labels manually of known hotsprings you should be able to find others quite quickly using the TESSERA interactive notebook. The embeddings capture the annual spectral-temporal signature, so a hotspring should be fairly distinctive vs the surroundings.

Video of the notebook in action https://crank.recoil.org/w/mDzPQ8vW7mkLjdmWsW8vpQ and the source https://github.com/ucam-eo/tessera-interactive-map
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-09-25 20:49:05+00:00
What do you think it would be for you?

What's worse for you? Being raped as a child. Or, having people sexually gratify themselves looking at images of you being abused; using those images to groom other children, or to trade and encourage the rape of other children?

You might as well ask someone which eye they prefer to have gouged out with a blunt screw.

Let's do both: try to stop child sexual abuse and try to stop images of abused children being used by abusers.
by lxgr | 2025-09-25 20:49:14+00:00
Another way of viewing it would be that LLMs allow software developers to focus their development skills where it actually matters (correctness, architecture etc.), rather than wasting hours catering to the framework or library of the day’s configuration idiosyncrasies.

That stuff kills my motivation to solve actual problems like nothing else. Being able to send off an agent to e.g. fix some build script bug so that I can get to the actual problem is amazing even with only a 50% success rate.
by Animats | 2025-09-25 20:49:22+00:00
It's not so much running 16 bit code, but running something that wants to run on bare metal, i.e. DOS programs that access hardware directly. Maintaining the DOS virtualization box well into the 21st century probably wasn't worth it.

> The 64-bit builds of Windows weren’t available immediately.

There was a year or so between the release of AMD-64 and the first shipping Microsoft OS that supported it.[1] It was rumored that Intel didn't want Microsoft to support AMD-64 until Intel had compatible hardware. Anyone know? Meanwhile, Linux for AMD-64 was shipping, which meant Linux was getting more market share in data centers.[1]
by hossbeast | 2025-09-25 20:49:32+00:00
I once bought a SNES game that couldn't be found at local stores (final fantasy 2) by 1/ finding a guy on a message board with the cartridge, 2/ mailing that person a check, and 3/ waiting (probably weeks?) to receive the cartridge in the mail. The old Internet. I still have that game btw.
by entrepy123 | 2025-09-25 20:50:23+00:00
The normal approach would be:

1. Get a college degree in the engineering field of interest.

2. Get a job as an engineer in that field.

3. Optionally, become a licensed Professional Engineer (PE) according to however that is done in your location.

It's not really like software engineering, in which liberal arts or self-taught people get to be called engineers without the matching blood, sweat, and tears.

(If all you want to do is make stuff, you could learn the requisite sciences to know how things work, teach yourself CAD to design something close enough, and then either put in the hours at community hacker spaces or contract someone overseas to actually make whatever you came up with. But, it seems like you are considering a much more serious career shift?)
by hashim | 2025-09-25 20:50:35+00:00
If you think that figure is remotely accurate despite the fact Israel has decimated all hospitals, leveled entire areas, wiped out entire families and is starving those that are still alive to do the counting, you're being naive, and that's a generous interpretation. Once Israel finally allow the UN in, that figure is going up by a factor of at least 2 or 3. The true cost of most genocides are only counted years after it's over, when it's too late.