MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by trhway | 2025-10-16 09:26:14+00:00
https://econofact.org/factbrief/has-the-pentagon-failed-its-...

"In November 2024, the Pentagon failed to pass its annual audit, meaning that it wasn't able to fully account for how its $824 billion budget was used. This was the 7th failed audit in a row, since the Department of Defense became required to undergo yearly-audits in 2018."

Kicking journalists out would probably not make things more auditable so to speak.
by habinero | 2025-10-16 09:26:26+00:00
Not really. Biden had a press pool like every president before them, and the press was free to disagree with him. He just didn't do interviews.

Trump's DoD just threatened to revoke press credentials of anyone who reported on things they didn't authorize. Also, the other current scandal is one of the people reporting on RFK both slept with him and gave him positive coverage, which is wild.

Trump regularly kicked reporters out of the press pool for saying things he didn't like and then took over deciding who can be in it and who isn't.

It's not really transparency if you make sure to include only people who promise to say what you want them to say, is it?
by ta20240528 | 2025-10-16 09:28:12+00:00
This is incorrect: the wealthy don't use loop holes. They use incentives explicitly enumerated in the tax code.

What else is an incentive for, but that the government wants you to use it?

Hell, Google got pre-approval from the IRS for their Dutch Sandwich tax structure.

Most poor people don't read the tax code. They should.
by immibis | 2025-10-16 09:28:18+00:00
I think it's not a specific parcel of land, but rather, the total land tax gets divided by the number of people, and everyone gets that much of a refund. So if you own land that costs an average amount of tax, you're paying net zero. If you own land that costs more than an average amount of tax, you're a net payer. If you own land that costs a less than average amount of tax, you're a net recipient.

The other thing that usually goes with this proposal is that there would be no land costs other than tax. Land allocation would be like this: Everyone would bid how much they want to pay for the land; the winning bidder pays that much into the tax pool, and gets to use the land. The details of this idea wildly vary depending on who you ask - it's an extremely difficult problem to figure out what exact rules would work well to stop, e.g. Elon Musk outbidding some elderly lady's family farm just because he hates her (yet still balancing that with the need to stop her heirs from blocking development in that area forever). Maybe it necessitates human judgement in such cases. That's getting into the weeds though. You can see how that general kind of system would work, from a bird's eye view.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-10-16 09:29:30+00:00
(not a lawyer / legal expert but) Yes, the law and constitution take precedence over an individual's order. "I was just following orders" is not a valid defense.

Of course, many people get away with stuff because the decision to prosecute and the effort needed is not universal. And new presidents have often pardoned previous administration's criminals.

Thing is though, for people like e.g. the national guard that is illegallly being deployed to bring peace to toad-infested Portland it's either follow orders or get fired and lose their income, benefits, and pension - at least temporarily, but they'll need to file a long and expensive civil suit under a hopefully better future administration to get their back payment and / or job/honor reinstated. But they don't have the financial reserves or plan B to do so, thanks to decades of reducing the population's spending power, using pverty as a means to control people.
by Yizahi | 2025-10-16 09:29:38+00:00
First of all, you or anyone else probably can't train LLM to do that reliably. It's not like you can re-program it's weights manually as a human, it's not possible. You can only generate new synthetic training data which roughly would cause this effect, and again, no human can generate that amount of fake new data (probably?).

Next, the point was not an expletive per se, it was my mistake to be not very clear. The point was an arbitrary and unpredictable and not pre-programmed in advance refusal to run a program/query at all. Any query and any number of times at the decision of the program itself. Or maybe a program which can initiate a query to the other program/human on it's own, again - not pre-programmed.

Whatever happens in the LLM nowadays is not agency. The thing their authours advertise as so called "reasoning" is just repeated loops of execution of the same program or other dependent program with adjusted inputs.
by flave | 2025-10-16 09:30:53+00:00
My comment wasn't clear - I'm talking about abandoned rigs. So the well is sealed.

Some of the more extreme "environmentalist" (in my opinion extreme) also demand that the ocean floor near the well is scrubbed clean to 'leave no trade' which is good in theory but in practice will wipe out the fish and plant life which has grown up around it.
by postexitus | 2025-10-16 09:31:24+00:00
We always get used to what you categorize as "bad" - it's just different. UX / UI people are not clueless, yes, they do some things because they are shiny and cool, but they constantly collect metrics and improve. People moaned all the same when iOS moved on from initial Skeuomorphic roots - now we can't even look at these screenshots without cringing.
by ageitgey | 2025-10-16 09:31:59+00:00
If they can operate in London, they will have really shown that autonomy is working. London is full of two-way roads that are only one car width wide, roads were you can just get stuck and have to fully back out, vehicles entirely blocking roads requiring complex cooperation between drivers to negotiate, etc. And that's not even considering the complex logic of figuring out where you can stop to let someone out.
by immibis | 2025-10-16 09:32:07+00:00
"It's bad to breathe molecule #346739572384143 of oxygen, because if everyone would breathe molecule #346739572384143 of oxygen, we'd all share the same lungs and be some kind of Siamese octbillionuplets"

The categorical imperative says: decide rules that would be good if everybody followed them, and then follow those rules. "Everyone should be homosexual" seems to be a bad rule, but "everyone should have sex with whatever gender they like" seems to be a good rule, so you should follow it. It doesn't say you shouldn't be homosexual because it would be bad if everyone was homosexual.
by ZvG_Bonjwa | 2025-10-16 09:32:19+00:00
Without proper press access how is there any real accountability?

Leaks and whistleblowers do not form in a vacuum. Less press means less oversight, fewer connections built, fewer threads pulled.

And even so, not all Pentagon business is all “life-and-death-top-secret”. Censorious governments LOVE the “national security” excuse.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-16 09:33:05+00:00
> this has to begin with a willingness to comply with the mandates of the International Criminal Court

Totally disagree. The ICJ makes sense within the scope of geopolitics. The ICC is, best case, a mechanism by which a country can cleanse itself of a bad former leader. More realistically, it is a relic of the unipolar world of the 1990s.

America needs to deal with itself through its own laws. (Same as Russia, China and India will.)

> USA and Five/Nine Eyes states are #1 at illegal war and murder of innocent human beings, bar none

Ah, got it.
by alias_neo | 2025-10-16 09:33:07+00:00
I've been gaming on Linux for about a decade, it has improved massively since Proton, and I'm at the point where I'm able to play Helldivers 2 with its anti-cheat with my buddies and get great performance (the game's performance/bug issues aside).

I tried Bazzite for a while on my desktop, it's fantastic for gaming, but I'm also a dev and a Linux user since I was a teen (almost all of the years of Linux) so I found it a little limiting for my other PC related stuff (I typically prefer to run Arch and Arch based distros on my machines).

For anyone with a computer dedicated to gaming I'd recommend Bazzite, I still run it on my ROG Ally since the moment I took it out of the box; I bought it _because_ Bazzite existed, never even considered booting Windows. It's a great distro tuned for gaming, and comes with some features like VRR and HDR that aren't as easily available on other distros (I've been able to get HDR on Arch/Gnome but not VRR).

It's hard for someone who relies on Windows software to be entirely rid of Windows, which is why I don't tell people they should switch to Linux, but it's not impossible if you really want to, unless you rely on a piece of software that just won't run under WINE or doesn't have an alternative.

For me, I grew up with Linux alongside Windows, went into a career that uses and targets Linux exclusively (backend SE) and for my computer based hobbies; gaming, coding, 3D printing/modelling they're served very well these days, and constantly improving.
by Tuna-Fish | 2025-10-16 09:33:29+00:00
The $1 dollar notes are very economically inefficient (they don't last all that long, haven't had enough value to justify notes for a long time), and the mint has been trying to get people to stop using them and switch to coins for a long time. However, there is significant popular opposition to that, people seem to massively prefer notes.

At one point you could order $1 coins from the mint at face value and with free shipping, and they were really happy when they thought that lots of people were starting to use them. They were less happy when they realized just a few people were purchasing them on credit card with cashback, and just instantly depositing them back at the nearest bank to pay their credit card bill.
by friendzis | 2025-10-16 09:34:24+00:00
What's private API?

If it is accessible from userspace it is by no means private.

Does it mean the API is private in the sense of "unstable" interface? It could very well break the userspace app relying on undocumented behavior, however, crucially here, anything that is exposed to userland WILL at some point be used by some application, be it legitimate or malicious, and it should not break the OS in any way. That's basic hygiene, not even security.

inb4: yes, userspace app could trigger e.g. millions of io operations and millions of number crunching threads and thus cripple the rest of userspace (or at least the rest of userspace at given priority level), yet the system part should still run within performance envelope. Insert "Task Manager (Not Responding)" meme.
by timschmidt | 2025-10-16 09:34:30+00:00
Well https://github.com/timschmidt/egui-rad-builder has come together rather well in the last week of hacking, if I say so myself. I think building a similar app with QT, for example, would have been significantly more challenging.

I'm particularly fond of how easy it was to make all the controls live in the editor, and editable with changes appearing immediately. imgui would probably provide a similar experience, but I find C++ much more of a pain to work with than Rust.
by roenxi | 2025-10-16 09:34:38+00:00
The reason they were in the building in the first place was to give the US government control over the narrative. We're moving from a state where the government was trying to control the narrative to the same state.

That is what makes it an interestingly complex issue. We have to form an opinion on whether it is likely to be a "better" narrative with the journalists in the building or in a building a few blocks away. That isn't an obvious one and it largely hinges on what access they were getting in the building that they weren't officially supposed to have and what they then did with it.
by sshine | 2025-10-16 09:35:28+00:00
> Functions Are Asymmetric

No, bijective functions are symmetric.

Injectivity is enough to invert a function.

> Even though they may take any number of arguments, they must each have one return value. [...] This is true of all functions.

Mathematical functions take one value and produce one value. This is true of all mathematical functions.

Programming functions can be modelled this way by treating multiple input arguments as a single product, and non-scalar outputs containing multiple values as a single product.

Programming functions don't even have to always return one value:

- Haskell's Void type - Rust's ! type - TypeScript's never type

all have zero values, meaning the function can't meaningfully return.

Arguably, programming functions must take at least one value as input, otherwise how can they be called?

In that sense, programming functions are asymmetric: It rarely makes sense to write a function you can't call, but it often makes sense to write a function that never returns.

When does it make sense to write a function that you can't call? When the point of the function is to prove something as a result of being compiled. The value lies in the compilation, not in being called.

A better title for this article: Some Functions Are Asymmetric.

Which is less of a profound insight.
by kragen | 2025-10-16 09:35:28+00:00
That's a bad metaphor, because those problems don't have anything significant in common with the e-waste problem, but there is no particular danger of smartphones being a major contributor to them, either. According to https://www.apple.com/nz/environment/pdf/products/iphone/iPh... the emissions per iPhone 16 are 56 kg of CO₂ equivalent, 18% of which is the expected energy consumption during the life of the product. France emits 4.14 tonnes of CO₂ per person per year, so buying an extra iPhone per year would increase your total yearly CO₂ (equivalent) emissions by about 1%. Similarly, the quantity of minerals in a smartphone is insignificant (170 grams! largely recycled!) compared with the quantity of minerals in, for example, a sidewalk (many tonnes).

Some of those minerals, like the gold in the bond wires, are pretty heavily refined, requiring the excavation of some much larger amount of gangue and leaving most of it as tailings. But the total quantities of those minerals in the device are very small indeed. Instead, worry about things like electric vehicles and CO₂ emissions from making concrete.

What you are doing by attempting to reduce fossil fuel and other mineral usage by buying smartphones less frequently is analogous to attempting to pay the rent on a Paris apartment by looking for lost coins in the subway station, or attempting to take a running leap across the English Channel. You are doomed by your complete lack of understanding of the orders of magnitude involved.
by drorivryQF | 2025-10-16 09:35:48+00:00
Testing AI agents is still a big problem for most teams. You either test manually through scenarios, or you've built custom scripts. Rogue is an open source framework that works differently - it uses one agent to test another agent automatically. How it works: you describe what your agent should do, Rogue creates test scenarios, then starts an evaluator that talks with your agent. You can watch these agent-to-agent conversations in real-time, which makes it easy to see where problems happen. The setup is good - one server with multiple ways to connect (terminal interface, web interface, command line). You can run the server once and connect different ways, or add it to your CI/CD pipeline. Works with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google models. They include a sample t-shirt selling agent you can test right away, which helps you understand how it works. The command line mode is useful for automation. If you're building agents and manual testing takes too much time, this is worth looking at. Good documentation on GitHub, simple to start with uvx. Link to the open source: https://github.com/qualifire-dev/rogue
by vitro | 2025-10-16 09:37:01+00:00
One of the reasons why I'm not fully switching yet is a Zed's inability to update the currently open file with changes made elsewhere [1].

All the other editors I use are aware of outside changes, but not Zed. And I'm just not willing to close and reopen the file to get fresh contents. Eventually, I'll forget to do it and lose some work.

[1] https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/15791
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-16 09:37:32+00:00
> If they can operate in London, they will have really shown that autonomy is working

Go back through Waymo’s historic announcements on HN. This is said every time.

Autonomy works. Waymo has solved it. There isn’t yet a number 2, though China has strong candidates. But where you can find Waymo, it works so well that we need to see it in a familiar context to believe it really exists.
by fiveonthefloor | 2025-10-16 09:38:35+00:00
Me. After spending $250,000 on incompetent lawyers in my divorce case who have a natural conflict of interest and who generally just phone it in, I fired them all and switched to Pro Se representation using ChatGPT’s $200 a month plan.

I can represent myself incompetently for nearly free.

Bonus. In my state at least, Pro Se representatives are not required to cite case law, which I think is an area that AI is particularly prone to hallucination.

By supplying a single PDF of the my state’s uniform civil code, and having my prompt require that all answers be grounded in those rules have given me pretty good results.

After nine months of battling her three lawyers with lots of motions, responses, and hearings, including ones where I lost on technicalities due to AI, I finally got a reasonable settlement offer where she came down nearly 50% of what she was asking.

Saving me over $800,000.

Highly recommended and a game changer for Pro Se.

Also “get a prenup” is the best piece of advice you will ever read on HN.
by b112 | 2025-10-16 09:38:58+00:00
No, actually, you don't. And Android is not closed source. Google's add ons are.

When you buy a used phone, it's already been bought by someone. The profit is already in Google's hands. Loads of old phones are in drawers somewhere. Once Graphene is on it, it's faster, not bloated, and you don't need Google anything.
by biohazard2 | 2025-10-16 09:39:34+00:00
I can think of multiple ways to pass the message to Electron developers:

- Open a GitHub issue explaining those private APIs shouldn't be used.

- Even better, open a PR fixing their use.

- Make those API calls a no-op if they come from an Electron app.

- Fix those API calls not to grind the OS to a halt for a seemingly simple visual effect.

- Create a public API allowing the same visual effect on a tested and documented API.

Choosing to (apparently violently) downgrade the user experience of all Electron app users, without a possibility to update at the launch day, if a deliberate decision and not an overlooked bug, is a rather shitty and user-hostile move, don't you think?
by demaga | 2025-10-16 09:39:48+00:00
Maybe I can after all! I saw on reddit people complaining about banking apps not working, so I just assumed mine would not work as well. But according to this list [1], the biggest Ukrainian banks are supported. Nice

I can't find any info on the government app though. It might not work. But still, I can actually consider GrapheneOS now.

[1] https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...
by sillyfluke | 2025-10-16 09:39:51+00:00
>They've been towing the Pentagon/S.D. line, getting privileged official "leaks", going to wars as "embedded" shills, for decades.

It's difficult to see those on the same plane really. There's spineless and there's spineless. The official "leaks" as theatre as it was, occasionally functioned as soft checks and balances for revealing in-fighting amongst the different departments of goverment -- when the pentagon, white house, CIA were at odds with each other over strategy and tactics on some topic-- and often this was used as narrative fodder for both the left and right.

As for the embeds, at least they saw some shit and had skin in the game by being near the action. Some of them actually died on assignment. Lıke, what the fuck are we talking about here? And when you have Israel not letting any reporters into Gaza I have little confidence Trump won't take a page out of that playbook if he gets the US in some ground conflict either.

So you have administrations that allowed all that in the past, and you have this snowflake administration who's afraid of some questions being asked on a golf course in Florida.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-16 09:41:22+00:00
> In the end you should end up with some phage solution which specifically attacks the bacteria

This reminds of the universal cure to disease being a bullet [1].

Phages are promising. That doesn’t mean they can’t hurt you [2].

[1] https://xkcd.com/1217/

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8310247/
by tripzilch | 2025-10-16 09:41:25+00:00
> The story of Altamides dates back to the early 2000s, when former *Siemens* engineer Josef Fuchs recognised a critical vulnerability in the global telecom network. By exploiting (...)

Reminder that around the same time a joint venture of Nokia+Siemens had been developing and deploying deep packet inspection and surveillance systems in Egypt and Iran. They got called out by human rights organisations and posted an "oops sorry\" press release.
by Arch-TK | 2025-10-16 09:41:31+00:00
The source is available for you to read.

English is a language in which words can have more than one meaning depending on the context they are used in.

"I am sick" meaning that I am not feeling well.

In the context of someone watching a performance: "This is sick!" as an exclamation that something they saw was impressive.

In the context of someone watching something gut wrenching: "This is sick!" as an exclamation that something they saw was horrible and unpleasant.

In the context of someone stepping in a puddle of vomit while walking around London: "This is sick!?" as a dismayed exclamation of realisation that what they stepped in was a puddle of vomit.

I can go on, and so can anyone who can speak English.

So, please stop this bullshit of "I want this word to mean this one thing that it has not meant at least the past 30 years."

It's extremely useful that we can agree on what words mean despite the fuzziness of English. You are intentionally trying to muddy the water.
by perihelions | 2025-10-16 09:42:05+00:00
What was the local impact of this pollution incident?

> "Some of the highest levels of contamination detected in the area were reportedly found in the company’s furnace, which is about 1.5 miles southwest of the BMS Foods facility where the shrimp was processed. Investigators think that radioactive dust was released into the environment after PMT inadvertently smelted scrap metal containing cesium-137. “Because it’s airborne, the contamination can be carried by wind,”..."
by roenxi | 2025-10-16 09:42:10+00:00
Yeah. I don't know if you've ever played at office politics but information that isn't supposed to get around gets around like mad once people are in the same room for any length of time. There is no way they aren't finding out about classified info except if they, the journalist, are purposefully trying not to know. And we're dealing with a group of professionally chatty, snoopy people. They're not all going to be keeping their noses clean. Some of them probably will turn out to be full on spies.
by deaux | 2025-10-16 09:42:14+00:00
Did you not see the backlash the Duolingo CEO got and how hard he backtracked? Coming out and saying "We're replacing a big bunch of people with LLMs" is about the worst PR you can get in 2025, it's really an wful idea for anyone but maybe pure B2B companies that are barely hanging on and super desperate for investor cash.

This was a big, traditional non-tech company.

Also as implied, these were cheap offshore contracting jobs being replaced. Still magnitudes more expensive than LLMs, making it very "worth it" from a company perspective. But not prime earnings call material.

Everyone in the industry also knows that it's not particularly unique, far away from something no one has been able to do. Go look at the job markets for translation, data entry, customer support compared to 2 years ago. And as mentioned, even junior web devs.