MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kube-system | 2025-10-14 19:57:03+00:00
It's not the responsibility of news organizations to educate people. Health education should probably come from our educational institutions.

The statistics on the left hand in the article, unfortunately, have conflated preventable deaths with unpreventable deaths. While some of them made people preventable, we really have no clue how many. However, every single non-preventable death is included in that column. Talk about bias...
by mschuster91 | 2025-10-14 19:57:08+00:00
Forget it. As long as China remains a dictatorship, investors will not pump in too much money - it's too uncertain what happens to your investment.

The reality is that everyone in China who managed to build up some wealth sooner or later exfiltrates it despite capital controls. And Russia prior to the war was similar. That's a large part of why London's and Vancouver's real estate markets got screwed up so hard - tons of real estate just sitting empty because it's just a proxy, a storage for wealth in a country that has laws and follows laws instead of the will of a dictator.
by BoiledCabbage | 2025-10-14 19:57:16+00:00
> why do healthy people die

Except the majority of people in the US at least aren't healthy. So why are we elevating that question to be something that should be discussed nightly when it doesn't affect most people (as shown by death rates by cause)?

That's still a specific choice with wide ranging implications. Not saying we should or shouldn't report on it, but saying your question has pretty deeply ground assumptions on "importance". And it is not a given.
by WillPostForFood | 2025-10-14 19:57:18+00:00
The top elite kids aren't in public schools, so they don't even factor into the equation. Whether there is inequality in spending will depend on the state and whether the funding is local, or redistributive. But if you take California as an example, they do try to make sure money goes to poor students, and it has had no positive effect. California sends mor to Black, Latino, and low income students than white or high income students.

https://www.ppic.org/publication/financing-californias-publi...
by sgarland | 2025-10-14 19:57:30+00:00
> have you ever seen a terrible db schema?

I am a DBRE, so yes, unfortunately most days I see terrible schemata.

> Having to suddenly iterate fast with a brittle codebase that doesnt really allow that ive seen bring teams to their knees for a year+.

IME, the “let’s move fast” mindset causes further problems, because it’s rare that a dev has any inkling about proper data modeling, let alone RDBMS internals. What I usually see are heavily denormalized tables, UUIDs everywhere, and JSON taking the place of good modeling practices. Then they’re surprised when I tell them the issue can’t be fixed with yet another index, or a query rewrite. Turns out when you have the largest instance the cloud provider has, and your working set still doesn’t fit into memory, you’re gonna have a bad time.
by MisterTea | 2025-10-14 19:57:36+00:00
As someone who grew up in a machine and wood working shop and now builds, repairs and retrofits machinery, I can say that 50 years old is nothing and absolutely fine.

> The thing is, those 50 yr old machine tools might be still good, but the more recent CNC machines are much more efficient, and require way less manual dexterity to use (say, compared to a lathe).

I assume you are referring to manual operated machinery vs CNC machinery? Otherwise there is little to no efficiency gained from a new CNC machine. I've run both and the setup of a CNC for simple jobs that can be done on a manual isn't worth the effort. CNC's really shine at high production and very complex parts.

> The fact that machines that are 50 yrs old are still in operation is quite a feat but also an indication that the production methods remained static

If the requirements haven't changed, e.g. machining flanges that meet ASME B16.5, and the production methods are already optimized, why even bring this up?

> (of course, if the production machines are good enough already, then investment into new machines don't bring in new profits).

Right. If the specs didn't change then why bother investing in pointless upgrades?

The ONLY reason companies toss out machinery: it's no longer useful to the company, or so hopelessly broken that it cant be fixed. And there is very little that can render a machine scrap unless something catastrophic happened. And there is very little preventing old machinery from being retrofitted with new controls.
by toephu2 | 2025-10-14 19:57:42+00:00
What many Americans don't realize is that China has already surpassed the United States in terms of development (developing country vs developed country sense of the word). Obviously both are 'developed' countries at this point but compare Chinese tier 1 cities vs American tier 1 cities. I would argue Chinese tier 1 cities are 10-20 years ahead of their American counterparts.

source: visit any Chinese tier 1 city (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen) and it will blow your mind if you've only lived in the West.

And if you haven't visited, for example this is tier 1 China: cashless society, amazing public transportation, clean streets, no homeless, practically zero crime, drone food delivery (in Shenzhen, certain spots only), high-speed rail to every major city in China (and even to smaller tier-2, tier-3 cities), wonderful infrastructure that gets built in years (vs decades in the West), extensive subway systems with protective barriers at every single station (so you can't suicide or push someone on the tracks) etc.
by legitster | 2025-10-14 19:58:08+00:00
In the US, the kids are doing poorly. But unlike China, there is actually a large number of children being born.

One of the deep ironies of the current world order is that as America recedes in power, other countries are receding even faster (and less documented). America has too much in the way of natural resources and favorable demographics and can continue to fail forward for a long time.
by nostrademons | 2025-10-14 19:58:59+00:00
It seems to be reversing, at least among affluent kids. "Sold a story" had a huge impact on the educational establishment. My local district reintroduced phonics for the 2023-2024 school year, and reintroduced it in kindergarten. By the end of kindergarten, every single one of my kid's classmates could read. This class is today's 2nd graders; they are avid readers today, I'll usually run into one of them walking with a book in front of their face at aftercare. They're too young to show up in the test scores, though, because these kids won't have their first round of standardized testing for another 2 years.

Schools and parents are also banning cell phones and cutting down on computer use, which should help with the distraction angle.

The socioeconomic divide mentioned in the article is still worrisome, though. I doubt that kids in the bottom 30% of America have the same experience. And simultaneously, the middle class has largely stopped having kids, which means there's a top 20% and a bottom 30% and pretty much nothing in between. If this continues for another couple generations, we're potentially faced with an America of an educated nobility and illiterate peasantry, and the future may look very Medieval indeed.
by next_xibalba | 2025-10-14 19:59:52+00:00
OK, let me help a bit more.

A government has a monopoly on violence. A government has a monopoly on money printing and taxation. A government has a monopoly on the legislation. A government has far more human and financial resources than any other economic actor within its borders.

If a company goes out of business, people lose their jobs. If a government goes out of business, people lose their lives.

It is not a difference in degree, it is a difference in kind. There is a reason that economist distinguish between private firms and government.
by ashtonsix | 2025-10-14 20:00:36+00:00
I just did a mini-ablation study for this (prefix sum). By getting rid of the cross-block carry (16 values), you can increase perf from 19.85 to 23.45 GB/s: the gain is modest as most performance is lost on accumulator carry within the block.

An absolute value every 16 deltas would undermine compression: a greater interval would lose even the modest performance gain, while a smaller interval would completely lose the compressibility benefits of delta coding.

It's a different matter, although there is definitely plausible motivation for absolute values every X deltas: query/update locality (mini-partition-level). You wouldn't want to transcode a huge number of values to access/modify a small subset.
by CobrastanJorji | 2025-10-14 20:00:56+00:00
They have certainly gotten better, but it seems to me like the growth will be kind of logarithmic. I'd expect them to keep getting better quickly for a few more years and then kinda slow and eventually flatline as we reach the maximum for this sort of pattern matching kind of ML. And I expect that flat line will be well below the threshold needed for, say, a small software company to not require a programmer.
by bigyabai | 2025-10-14 20:01:07+00:00
Seeing how strained your good-faith interpretation is has further entrenched my belief that San Bernadino was a false flag operation by the FBI.

There is no world in which a post-PRISM compliant Apple cannot be coerced by the feds for an investigation. It's just a matter of how much pressure the FBI wanted to apply; Apple's colossal marketing win is the sort of thing that you would invent if you wanted to manufacture consumer trust, not "prove" anything to cryptographers. Playing devil's advocate, "authoritarian regimes" are exactly the sort of place you would send the iPhone to if you already had the information and wanted to pretend like it was hard to access.

If we assume a worst-case-scenario where Apple was already under coercion by the FBI, everything they did covers up any potential wrongdoing. It was all talk, no walk. Neither side had to show any accountability, and everyone can go on happily using their devices for private purposes.
by mikkupikku | 2025-10-14 20:01:13+00:00
I don't understand the "your boss" framing of this article, or more accurately, the title of this article. The article contents don't actually seem to have anything to do with management specifically. Is the reader is meant to believe that not being scared of AI is a characteristic of the managerial class? Is the unstated implication that there is some class warfare angle and anybody who isn't against AI is against laborers? Because what the article actually overtly argues, without any reading between the lines, is quite mundane.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-10-14 20:01:26+00:00
Similarly, I thought of "A Canticle for Leibowitz." Stephenson is right, of course, but I think that Miller more fully understands that our fall begins not just with the fading of literacy and the rise of ignorance, but also in post modern relativism and the reign of cynicism. If one more otherwise clever person tries to explain to me how there's no such thing as objective truth, I might just scream.

“Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power. Even literacy they fear, for the written word is another channel of communication that might cause their enemies to become united. Their weapons are keen-honed, and they use them with skill. They will press the battle upon the world when their interests are threatened, and the violence which follows will last until the structure of society as it now exists is leveled to rubble, and a new society emerges. I am sorry. But that is how I see it.”
by sh34r | 2025-10-14 20:01:45+00:00
If you know your way around the Docker CLI, you can mount your workspace in a new container environment and run it however which way you want. You can attach VSCode to arbitrary containers. You can find the commands used to build the dev container image and run it, either in the logs or with docker inspect.

There’s no coupling being forced by devcontainers. It’s just a useful abstraction layer, versus doing it all manually. There is some magic happening under the hood where it takes your specified image or dockerfile and adds a few extra layers in there, but you can do that all yourself if you wanted to.

I will say, if you stray too far off the happy path with devcontainers, it will drive you insane, and you’ll be better off just doing it yourself, like most things that originated from MSFT. But those edge cases are pretty rare. 99% of workflows will be very happily supported with relatively minimal declarative json configuration.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-10-14 20:02:46+00:00
SIMD intrinsics are less C and more assembly with overlong mnemonics and a register allocator, so even reading them is something of a separate skill. Unlike the skill of achieving meaningful speedups by writing them (i.e. low-level optimization), it’s nothing special, but expect to spend a lot of time jumping between the code and the reference manuals[1,2] at first.

[1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/docs/intrinsics-guid...

[2] https://developer.arm.com/architectures/instruction-sets/int...
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-14 20:03:23+00:00
> remember when the popular academic consensus was "you can't imprison your way into a safe society."

Who said this?

I thought the argument was always you can’t do this and maintain the high living standards of a modern economy built on the rule of law. It’s essentially a challenge to a society: fuck up enough on security and you lose the fruits and freedoms of a modern state fielding a growing economy.

> more or less saying "you can't just discipline children."

Who said this?

I thought the argument was it inhibits learning in the long run and is not fair to poor kids or something. (We know that’s B.S. now.)

But totally unrelated to El Salvador.
by erxam | 2025-10-14 20:03:43+00:00
Reinventing yourself only goes so far before you bump into the political and economic reality of today.

Especially since I'm not a westerner. It's not great out here.

> There is tons of beauty in the world, just ignore the noise, politics, and people and companies gaming you for your data making humanity worse off one step at a time.

It would be easier if said politics and people didn't want people like me or my (online) friends suffering and/or dead. I avoid going outside as much as possible.

I'm not doing too badly economically, honestly. I'm extremely lucky to be able to gild my cage. Doesn't really make me happy, but I guess this is as good as it gets.
by tptacek | 2025-10-14 20:03:45+00:00
It would help if this piece was clearer about the context in which "AI bugs" reveal themselves. As an argument for why you shouldn't have LLMs making unsupervised real-time critical decisions, these points are all well taken. AI shouldn't be controlling the traffic lights in your town. We may never reach a point where it can. But among technologists, the major front on which these kinds of bugs are discussed is coding agents, and almost none of these points apply directly to coding agents: agent coding is (or should be) a supervised process.
by zackmorris | 2025-10-14 20:03:54+00:00
I'm definitely outside my wheelhouse but I've been thinking about this lately.

I heard that CRISPR can only cut segments that match a pattern, so if there are other genes between the ends that are cut, then those are lost as well. So to do a proper substitution, we'd need to sequence the patient's genes between the cuts, and possibly the whole rest of their genome, to make sure that any patterns don't appear anywhere else, so that nothing important is removed elsewhere.

That sounds insurmountable, but it may not be. Human beings basically all have nearly identical DNA, so maybe we can just derive someone's diff from a known DNA sample. If I ever won the internet lottery, that's the sort of tool that I would want to invest in.

Then we probably need more vectors to get CRISPR where it needs to go. That sounds like more of an engineering challenge to me than having to invent something new. Or at least, the number of vectors found might correlate with R&D funding.

It's not that hard for me to imagine getting the recipe figured out to the point that it's 100% reliable and can even be delivered to specific parts of the body with a certain frequency of light, for example.

Then come up with an iterative process, probably using AI, to catalog and repair all major genetic disorders.

I don't see too much mystery there, even if the final recipes seem byzantine to human understanding. But I wanted to be a genetic engineer before I got into computers when I was 12, so I've had a long time to think about it. If AI eats the programming world like it looks like it's going to, maybe we can find work in biotech. Then it's probably 5-10 years before gene editing is a solved problem.
by alganet | 2025-10-14 20:04:03+00:00
Does that really matter?

He is trying to lax the general public perception around AIs shortcomings. He's giving AI a break, at the expense of regular developers.

This is wrong on two fronts:

First, because many people foresaw the AI shortcomings and warned about them. This "we can't fix a bug like in regular software" theatre hides the fact that we can design better benchmarks, or accountability frameworks. Again, lots of people foresaw this, and they were ignored.

Second, because it puts the strain on non-AI developers. It blamishes all the industry, putting together AI with non-AI in the same bucket, as if AI companies stumbled on this new thing and were not prepared for its problems, when the reality is that many people were anxious about the AI companies practices not being up to standard.

I think it's a disgraceful take, that only serves to sweep things under a carpet.
by mullingitover | 2025-10-14 20:04:39+00:00
> If you don't like autocracy, China is way worse than the US

The US only has one additional political party beyond China has, and arguably both US parties are simply 'wings' of a larger party owned by the actual ruling class, something neither party wishes to acknowledge. When viewed through this lens the US and China aren't that different politically, and at the same time China is far more meritocratic and promotes leaders on a much more results-oriented basis.

It's like a household where the voters are the kids and the leaders are the parents. In China the parents are happily married and communicate with each other. Kids can't really manipulate the parents, but the parents are reasonable and the household is demonstrably a successful one. In the US the parents are bitterly divorced, bickering, and are easily played against each other by the kids. The household is a disaster, in constant disarray and the kids are going to end up dropping out of high school. However, at the end of the day both of these households are overseen by the same leadership system: the parents.
by tobihrbr | 2025-10-14 20:04:40+00:00
Thanks for pointing that out. Ultimately, we wanted to strike a balance between being fair and open to the community, welcoming contributions, and ensuring that people can self-host without having to worry about licensing issues, while also ensuring that Metorial, as a company, can exist and work on OSS sustainably. This isn't easy and I don't think there's a right answer. To us FSL strikes a pretty good balance. Allowing the community to use and participate while ensuring that Metorial makes sense as a business as well.
by dazhur | 2025-10-14 20:04:48+00:00
Mark's Final Version perfected productivity system (https://archive.constantcontact.com/fs004/1100358239599/arch...) has been very comforting over the years when I'm feeling overwhelmed. I just put everything in a long list and work through it.

His other systems are also worth a read (http://markforster.squarespace.com/tm-systems/), as are his books
by aeternum | 2025-10-14 20:04:50+00:00
Idk I think the plow still has similar scaling. You can make a much bigger plow now maybe it replaces 40 humans. You could make it bigger still and have ox pull it, now maybe 400 humans since you still need one to lead the ox.

Farmer Joe then claims he can train ox + border collie teams to eliminate the need for humans entirely when it comes to plowing. But by that point no one cares because the cost to plow a field is so low that it really doesn't matter, other things are the bottleneck.

The cost of things where AI can produce value will trend downward and human labor will move to other things, like entertainment, services. IMO there will always be demand for things like human-given massages, human chefs, human teachers, etc.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-10-14 20:05:03+00:00
Bukele has 91% approval. If that doesn't meet the formal academic definition of people feeling like they are living under the rule of law, then the academic definition was wrong.

Both are related in the sense that they said you can't just discipline people, more or less, with the same spirit of focusing on people's good side, to their detriment. Different application, same principles, same failure.
by Zee2 | 2025-10-14 20:05:16+00:00
This is AI-written.

- Ten em-dashes

- "not just A, but B"

- wasn’t just a vacuum cleaner; it was a small computer on wheels - they didn’t merely create a backdoor; they utilized it - they hadn’t merely incorporated a remote control feature. They had used it to permanently disable my device

- incessant bullet points/markdown-style formatting

- And an overly dramatic/promotional tone

Obviously the image is AI as well, but /shrug
by ajross | 2025-10-14 20:05:20+00:00
> heart disease is primarily not age-related

Uh... it absolutely is? Not sure what you're trying to say here. All progressive diseases, including heart disease (cancer too) are going to be "age related" simply because they take time to develop.

And plaque-related heart disease, the big killer, takes a long time to develop. The statistics are really clear here. People under 30 simply don't die of congestive heart failure absent one of a handful of very rare disorders. It starts to show up in middle age and really takes off after 70.

They are preventable, sure. They are "early" deaths in that the sufferer would die before something else got them. But they absolutely skew toward the elderly. Heavily.
by tmostak | 2025-10-14 20:05:43+00:00
Even without NVLink C2C, on a GPU with 16XPCIe 5.0 lanes to host, you have 128GB/sec in theory and 100+ GB/sec in practice bidirectional bandwidth (half that in each direction), so still come out ahead with pipelining.

Of course prefix sums are often used within a series of other operators, so if these are already computed on GPU, you come out further ahead still.
by itopaloglu83 | 2025-10-14 20:05:47+00:00
To me, it looks like a festival ground, so I imagine people coming from all directions and multiple nomad tents etc. around it.

What makes me wonder is that why did these hills survive, and why are we not finding similar things in north Africa and other civilization cradles.

Maybe these were one off sites with limited use and were later just left alone, while anything in Egypt had continuous settlements so things just eroded over time, with the things like pyramids as exceptions.
by cvoss | 2025-10-14 20:06:15+00:00
In some sense, our small size with respect to astronomical-scale processes does not make us all that fragile, because we are also very short-lived with respect to these things.

Afraid of the impending collision of Andromeda with the Milky Way? Not to worry. Life as we know will be gone by then. Huge processes like galactic mergers are "in slow motion" relative to our every day processes due to light speed bounds. The time they take to occur is enormous because the distances involved are enormous. In a cool way, the presence and influence of an astronomical object is just as insignificant to our processes as the presence and influence of one electron, and for the same reason: enormous difference of scale. The big stuff is no more scary than the small stuff.