MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by programjames | 2025-10-14 20:17:09+00:00
I believe the issue is measures of 'achievement' and 'excellence' typically use the 20th and 50th percentiles, respectively. For example, most education studies focus on what improves graduation rates, passing rates, or the bottom 10–20% on standardized assessments. Most school districts' financial incentives rely on these metrics as well. Occasionally you'll get a study that looks at the median (and even more rare, the 90th percentile), but no standardized assessment even showcases the bellends of the distribution. This is why you get claims like this

> High-achieving kids are doing roughly as well as they always have, while those at the bottom are seeing rapid losses

in the article, when they're actually doing much worse as well, which can be seen from the median (or top) scores in STEM competitions. All the financial incentives are for schools and teachers to focus on their bottom 20% of students, and even if they cared about their top students (culturally, most education departments do not), it's not even feasible to collect that data, short of signing everyone up for the AMC 12. So, naturally, the percent of elementary schools offering gifted programs has declined by fifteen (twenty?) percent in the last twenty years, and the general standards and curricula have been lowered to teach to the 20th percentile. This also creates a cultural issue where many students recognize they're bored, and that schools are not trying to teach them, so they become disaffected and stop caring. My friends in high school joked that school was for socializing, and frankly, what other purpose does it serve anymore for most kids?
by lostmsu | 2025-10-14 20:17:59+00:00
Raw data website for people who are interested in getting their own opinion: https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/usa-cause-of-death-by-ag... Discuss here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45584294

Personally, the "poisonings" between 15 and 35 are what I most care about as a parent.
by verisimi | 2025-10-14 20:18:11+00:00
Do you have a link or something that compares the power in both? I can't find one.

This is the summary I get from chatgpt - comparing Histotripsy and ultrasound imaging

| Property | Strongest Diagnostic / Imaging Ultrasound | Histotripsy (Therapeutic Ultrasound |

| Frequency | 2 – 10 MHz (obstetric: 2–5 MHz; high-res imaging up to 15 MHz) | 0.25 – 3 MHz (sometimes up to 6 MHz) |

| Pressure (Peak Negative) | Up to ~5–6 MPa (mechanical index limit ≈ 1.9) | 10 – 100 MPa (depending on type: intrinsic vs. boiling histotripsy) |

| Intensity (Spatial Peak, Temporal Average) | Typically < 0.1 W/cm²; upper safe limit ≈ 0.72 W/cm² (FDA/AIUM) | 100 – 10,000 W/cm² (very high peak intensities) |

| Pulse Duration | Microseconds (∼1–5 µs typical) | Microseconds to milliseconds (short bursts for mechanical disruption) |

Its kind of hard to know what this means - some of the numbers seem pretty close/crossover - but I don't think saying the difference is akin to a laser and a light.
by mcphage | 2025-10-14 20:18:33+00:00
This article is a weird mix of things. Early on we see:

> States were given latitude to spend their funds as they saw fit, which, it seems, was a mistake. Instead of funding high-quality tutoring programs or other programs that benefited students, districts spent money for professional development or on capital expenditures such as replacing HVAC systems and obtaining electric buses.

And then later, discussing Mississippi:

> it began screening kids for reading deficiencies, training instructors in how to teach reading better (by, among other things, emphasizing phonics), and hiring literacy coaches to work in the lowest-performing schools.

Leaving aside the idea that capital expenditures on aging school buildings and busses is a mistake instead of an absolute requirement, the author criticizes states that spent money on professional development, and then later praised Mississippi for (among other things) training instructors—that's what professional development is.
by cestith | 2025-10-14 20:19:01+00:00
I hear you about rigging those repos together artificially.

I used to work somewhere that had several different systems written as monoliths that eventually needed to interact more closely with each other. There was an in-house ticket system (since made a support service wrapped around ZenDesk, but ZD wouldn’t replicate all its functionality). There was an in-house employee management system. There was a first-party CRM. There was a homegrown e-commerce store. They’d built their own licensing servers for their software. Eventually the CRM was managing large customer licenses, the ticket system linked to the store to sell priority support, and the store was selling licenses to smaller customers.

So instead of making these things all support APIs that supported the other applications, people started copying libraries around from service to service. Then to make sure those libraries didn’t fall out of date, the (at the time rsync) deployment process for each of those apps was changed to require a pull from every one of those repos, then a push from that staging server to the production servers. Then security did a PCI-DSS internal audit, and the developers couldn’t just get onto a staging server and make direct changes to production.

So I, as the lead SRE at the time, wrote a builder web app that takes a config file per project. It holds the data on the repos and the default tag to pull from each. The web app allows the developer to update to a different commit or tag for any particular repo involved. Then a single button pulls everything and serially takes production servers out of rotation, updates them, and puts them back into production. It’s something that could have been avoided many different ways including using a monorepo for those systems.
by hackeraccount | 2025-10-14 20:19:25+00:00
I have a PC running Omarchy and it's really nice. The little touches are really pleasant. I'm more a half assed Unix Admin though then a developer and there are some pain points that are making me give it up.

* I don't really like Hyprland. I want to use Niri and hacking at Omarchy to make that happen doesn't seem worth it.

* getting flatpaks working with it is painful

* it's too dependent on the aur which I try to avoid

A lot of the nicer features - some of the shell and nvim setup configs are things that I don't really care about.

I think this is really good setup for someone smarter then I am. I think at the end of the day I want something simpler then this - though it does say "opinionated" right on the tin and I had a blast playing around with it.
by Analemma_ | 2025-10-14 20:19:30+00:00
Yeah, Intel's problem is that this is (at least) the third time they've announced a new ML accelerator platform, and the first two got shitcanned. At this point I wouldn't even glance at an Intel product in this space until it had been on the market for at least five years and several iterations, to be somewhat sure it isn't going to be killed, and Intel's current leadership inspires no confidence that they'll wait that long for success.
by hinkley | 2025-10-14 20:20:51+00:00
Sort of at the opposite end, I knew a PT who harped on balance exercises and pointed out that a lot of old people have pneumonia as cause of death on their death certificate. The pneumonia was often acquired while immobilized by a broken hip. The broken hip was caused by falling (+ lower body atrophy), so really these people died from falling. It just took a while.

I don’t know what the right answer is for coding death certificates. Maybe the correct answer is to record several so we can see comorbidities and contributing factors more easily when deciding what science to fund, charities to endow, and which treatments to disfavor.

Died of complications of cancer, reaction to chemo. Died of complications of hip fracture, pneumonia.
by nxor | 2025-10-14 20:20:58+00:00
Don't we though? My generation is also known for watching hour long youtube videos (video essays), and even if that's not all of us, that's more than past generations (of course). And we are known for listening to hour long podcasts. Even if these podcasters are not necessarily as informed or as rigorous (same for youtube), I think my generation still in some ways shows a curiosity for information

That said I mostly agree with this and think for one, if foreign language was appreciated more here, maybe people would read more
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-14 20:20:58+00:00
> There are plenty of dictators with sky high approval ratings

Do you have evidence Bukele’s polling is corrupted?

Wikipedia lists several polling organisations [1]. And while there are building risks against fair and free elections [2], I haven't seen a credible monitor call that out as having already happened.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_the_Nayib_B...

[2] https://freedomhouse.org/country/el-salvador/freedom-world/2...
by anon291 | 2025-10-14 20:20:59+00:00
MAE is a wholly different beast than teacher's unions in most states. Mississippi does not require teachers to join the union, thus the union needs to compete to attract teachers. Thus, it is incentivized to actually do stuff. Usually, when people say teacher's unions (or at least when I refer to them), I refer to the set up in the most populated states like CA, NY, IL, etc, where it is a requirement for teachers to join the union, regardless of what they think of the union.

I'm fine with employees banding together. What CA and other states do (require teachers to pay dues to the union) is criminal.

Basically, the strength of the union correlates with educational outcomes: https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/how-strong-ar...

As of 2006 (a bit dated), only 36% of MS teachers were in the union.
by hypfer | 2025-10-14 20:21:03+00:00
> That was the moment my vacuum ceased functioning. The timestamp matched precisely with when it had stopped working, even though I hadn’t touched the app.

> 2024/02/29, 14:06:55.852622 [LogKimbo][CAppSystemState] Handle message! cmd_id 501 RS_CTRL_REMOTE_EVENT, len 8 serialno 0

> Someone—or something—had remotely issued a kill command.

Uuuuh are you sure that you're not reading a bit too much into the word "REMOTE" in that logline?

These are some very strong accusations and opinions that to me don't feel like they're being backed up with equally strong evidence. At least not evidence that is part of that post.

What even is a RS_CTRL_REMOTE_EVENT? Did you maybe check with e.g. Ghidra?
by SalientBlue | 2025-10-14 20:21:07+00:00
I don't think he's doing that at all. The article is pointing out to non-technical people how AI is different than traditional software. I'm not sure how you think it's giving AI a break, as it's pointing out that it is essentially impossible to reason about. And it's not at the expense of regular developers because it's showing how regular software development is different than this. It makes two buckets, and puts AI in one and non-AI in the other.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-10-14 20:21:21+00:00
> the same unwillingness

The "unwillingness" in question is the decision not to read and engage with another's perspective. The replies calling this a fact are actually engaging with the points being made. Whether or not American politics is becoming more fascist isn't really a matter of debate unless one simply doesn't know what the word "fascist" is referring to.

You seem, er, "unwilling" to engage with an objective definition of fascism. It's in another comment in this thread if you want to discuss it in good faith. What do you think? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45575415) Personally, it seems kinda obvious that the phrase "Make America Great Again" was chosen specifically for how it evokes palingenetic ultranationalism.

> It's prudent to understand whose minds can actually be changed on issues like this.

It's prudent to say what you believe. Whether or not someone is willing to engage with your beliefs in good faith is on them.
by d_burfoot | 2025-10-14 20:21:30+00:00
A big chunk, perhaps the majority, of the "Accidents" are from cars. Another infographic I observed recently showed that, for children, the risk of death due to traffic accidents was greater than all other risks combined.

People should be raving and screaming for faster rollout of self-driving cars. If self-driving cars were an experimental drug undergoing a clinical trial, they would cancel the trial at this point because it would be unethical to continue denying the drug to the control group.
by mrguyorama | 2025-10-14 20:21:44+00:00
The dodge Neons had a an issue for over a decade where the bottom trim 4cyl engine would leak oil constantly. They often needed a top up of oil with each tank of gas.

In late 2000s, the problem was finally fixed by Dodge switching to a multi-layer steel head gasket. They had previously used a cheaper option. No more oil leaks.

Gotta love penny pinching.

Absolute dogshit cars. Mine ran better when you first started it up in the dead of winter at -10f because then the tolerances were actually good! Once it warmed back up it ran like shit again.

They handled outright abuse very well though. My sister drove it up state to deliver it to me for 400 miles with zero oil and she does not drive slow. It once threw the alternator belt while I was driving and I couldn't understand why the electrics were acting so weird, at least until I turned off the windshield wipers and headlights and CD player and things worked better. The OEM belt we bought to replace it basically did not fit and we had to move the alternator to the absolute extent of its travel to make it work. But work it did. It also never ran on more than 3 cylinders except in the freezing cold.

Probably one of the best "For your young child" cars ever produced. That was before everyone had to armor up little Timmy in a Pershing Tank though, so now we all suffer from worse roads, more expensive cars, and lack of tiny car market. It was weirdly good in the snow, which is funny because the tires were $34 at walmart, but it weighed almost nothing so it didn't need traction.
Ask HN: How old is your data centre?
by Theodores | 2025-10-14 20:21:48+00:00
Does anyone work somewhere where there are racks full of vintage Sparc, PowerPC, MIPS or 486 machines, still working on their original tasks?

Or, has everything been replaced?

With a lot of talk on how much the AI build out is costing, I want to know if any of those vast server rooms of the past are still going, and, if so, what for?

Also, if there are any unusual factors such as cheap electricity that have enabled the old kit to keep going.

Mainframes are slightly different as we know there are some which have to keep going because the software is locked into the hardware and migration is near impossible, but server farms are not like that, everything can be upgraded without much difficulty to compatible boxes.

Hence, do you work with a remarkably old 'data centre' built many decades ago and not upgraded to the new shiny.
by cheschire | 2025-10-14 20:21:54+00:00
What about where MAE[0] got their Republican governor[1] to approve the largest teacher salary increase in state history[2]?

You're painting with an awfully broad brush there.

0: https://www.maetoday.org/about-mae/our-history

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tate_Reeves

2: https://www.maetoday.org/about-mae/media-center/press-releas...
by thenaturalist | 2025-10-14 20:22:10+00:00
Have you looked in detail at the economics of this?

Career finance professionals are calling it a bubble, not due to their suddenly found deep technological expertise, but because public cos like FAANG et. al are engaging in typical bubble like behavior: Shifting capex away from their balance sheets into SPACs co-financed by private equity.

This is not a consumer debt bubble, it's gonna be a private market bubble.

But as all bubbles go, someones gonna be left holding the bag with society covering for the fallout.

It'll be a rate hike, it'll be some Fortune X00 enterprises cutting their non-ROI-AI-bleed or it'll be an AI-fanboy like Oracle over-leveraging themselves and then watching their credit default swaps going "Boom!" leading to a financing cut off.
by jongjong | 2025-10-14 20:22:16+00:00
This article makes a solid case. The worst kinds of bugs in software are not the most obvious ones like syntax errors, they are the ones where the code appears to be working correctly, until some users do something slightly unusual after a few weeks of some code change being deployed and it breaks spectacularly but the bug only affects a small fraction of users so developers cannot reproduce the issue... And the cose change happened such time ago that the guilty code isn't even suspected.
by SpecialistK | 2025-10-14 20:22:22+00:00
Okay, but I also won't hold it for you unless you belong to the same branch of my religion.

In fact, I'll just provide a form and you can let me know everything you believe. If it's not 100% identical to mine you're wrong and I'll lock the door. Because I said so. If that's how this works now.
by wvenable | 2025-10-14 20:22:29+00:00
In my experience actively maintained but not heavily modified applications tend towards stability over time. It don't even matter if they are good or bad codebases -- even a bad code will become less buggy over time if someone is working on bug fixes.

New code is the source of new bugs. Whether that's an entirely new product, a new feature on an existing project, or refactoring.
by constantcrying | 2025-10-14 20:22:31+00:00
I have read maybe a thousand books of fantasy or science fiction, including 10k pages long fantasy series. Some of it was good, but most of it was pure slop.

People read for a variety of reasons and I am not saying that people should not be reading their genre fiction slop. But to a culture of reading belongs the idea that reading challenging works is also important and that a deeper meaning is to be found in classical works.

If we want a society which reads we need books which are more than movies without images. We need to tell adults that reading is a worthwhile endeavor, especially when reading complex material. Only then literacy can rise again, because only then will people believe that it is important to be able to read.
by dylan604 | 2025-10-14 20:23:22+00:00
Lots of movie plots with hacking critical infrastructure. Hackers controlled the ballast of a ship. Some other movie(s??) have taken over the flow of oil/gas at refineries. The entire US electrical grid is nothing but a soft target. A Ukranian style sneak drone attack on enough substations would knock the entire country into a blackout without ever touching the generation plants.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-10-14 20:23:23+00:00
[EDIT] I removed an extremely sarcastic comment. It was quite puerile.

I am a bit skeptical that they are "reaching for the best."

Once you start to hire and promote folks with a certain "corporate culture," they start hiring and promoting folks that fit that culture (and driving out ones that don't). I suspect that the problems actually started years ago, and now, those managers are hiring less-than-stellar SWEs, managers, and designers.

The thing about the really good people at Apple, is that they don't need to be subjected to an ugly corporate culture. They'll take their toys and go home (or to other companies), which is pretty much exactly what the less-than-stellar people want. The dichotomy of hiring high-Quality talent, is that they don't need to work for you, so you have to figure out ways to keep them. Often, money isn't the biggest driver. The good ones don't do it [just] for the money, and they'll always be able to make plenty, so, as their manager, you need to figure out what they really want.
by morshu9001 | 2025-10-14 20:23:41+00:00
Yes. I'm glad the FBI was able to crack the phone without Apple's help in that San Bernardino case, which humiliated Apple as a little bonus.

Apple also tried to freak the public out saying the FBI wanted a backdoor added, which was inaccurate. You can't retroactively add a backdoor, that's the whole point of it. FBI wanted Apple to unlock a specific phone, which Apple said they were capable of doing already.
by anon291 | 2025-10-14 20:24:00+00:00
I addressed this in another comment. Unlike many states, Mississippi does not require teachers to pay dues to the union (California for example, does). Mississippi has a low rate of teachers union membership as a result (only ~36%). Mississippi has one of the weakest teachers unions in the country.

Because of this, the union has to do what teachers want, rather than vice versa.

I'm speaking from experience with the California Teacher's Association. CA mandates even non-member teachers to pay union dues.

EDIT: Here is an article from the CTA highlighting their efforts to fight phonics-based reading instruction: https://calmatters.org/education/k-12-education/2025/04/read...

Woohoo! teachers unions!!!
by filchermcurr | 2025-10-14 20:24:04+00:00
It also doesn't help when we have programs like Accelerated Reader. The original goal of the program, from what I understand, was to encourage reading by rewarding kids for succeeding at reaching goals. Unfortunately, schools decided rewarding was bad and punishing was good. So instead of being an optional reward-driven approach, it became a mandatory part of your grade.

This sort of thing makes kids resent reading. Especially kids, like me, who were given extremely unrealistic goals to meet because they happen to have a high reading level. Plus you're restricted to books that are: 1. Your exact reading level. 2. In your school library. 3. Have A.R. tests available. That, especially in smaller schools, is an extremely difficult set of criteria for meeting a goal. It made me HATE reading because there were no books of any interest to me, but I had to read the most bizarre (and, frankly, age inappropriate) things to meet the goal and get a good grade.

Bring back Pizza Hut and toss A.R. back in hell where it came from.
by theshrike79 | 2025-10-14 20:24:42+00:00
I just literally sat down on my computer after walking the dogs.

During my walk Codex (gpt-5-high) rewrote a Python application to Go in one shot. I sat down, tested and it works. Except now I can just distribute a single binary instead of a virtualenv mess =)

Maybe the instruction was SUPER simple? Dunno.
by meonkeys | 2025-10-14 20:24:51+00:00
It shows up at https://boydkane.com under the link "Why your boss isn't worried about advanced AI". Must be some kind of sub-heading, but not part of the actual article / blog post.

Presumably it's a phrase you might hear from a boss who sees AI as similar to (and as benign/known/deterministic as) most other software, per TFA
by themafia | 2025-10-14 20:25:03+00:00
It doesn't really. The START and STOP codons define clear cut frames for your cells to use. Think of your DNA like ECC memory. There's a bunch of extra stuff in there which makes it suitable for use as a memory storage. It has nothing to do with the actual replicated genes and their associated proteins or the role of those within the body.

The really cool part about that storage is it is environmentally sensitive. So as the environment changes around your DNA it's shape slightly changes and so the available START sites also change which alters the types and numbers of genes that are copied for use.

Biology isn't one system it's dozens all stacked and layered on top of each other. It's like trying to understand computing by watching what individual electrons do. Of course it looks messy. On the larger scale it's far more elegant.