MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jfengel | 2025-10-16 21:05:27+00:00
What kills me is that it's not even saving that much money.

The average salary for a government employee is $67k. Round it up to $100k, and multiply by 2 for the usual overhead. That means that removing 4,000 salaries saves us $800,000,000 a year. Or about .046% of the deficit.

(That's the amount of the shortfall. It's .012% of the budget.)

Employees aren't the driving factor in the cost of the government. A lot of the money goes out the door, in the form of entitlement payments, grants to states, and contracts. If you want to cut the budget seriously, you have to cancel programs, not just the individuals who manage them.

The article says that these 4,000 employees are 20% of the agency. Applying that to my estimate, that means you could fire everybody, and save $4 billion per year. That would still leave $21 billion in NASA's budget.

Canceling that, too, would not even be a rounding error in our $6.66 trillion budget and $1.27 trillion deficit.

It attracts a lot of attention, and removes the much-reviled government employees that they've spent decades demonizing. But it doesn't solve any of the budget problems, and doesn't even pretend to. So we're losing a key element of American prestige, and getting basically nothing in return.
by asdff | 2025-10-16 21:05:33+00:00
Trader joes and costco aren't really the same thing as grocery stores. I know this is confusing for foreigners. Kroger/publix/vons/ralphs/albertsons/giant eagle are the real grocery stores. You can get all sorts of good eats there. baguettes and sourdough loafs cooked daily by the in house bakery staff. All sorts of cheese sold by the pound. All sorts of fruits and vegetables although some are seasonal.
by joshstrange | 2025-10-16 21:06:41+00:00
I’m not “blaming” anyone really. I don’t fault the restaurants for raising prices to cover the costs. I don’t love how opaque the whole thing is but I understand both sides.

It’s all a shell games so that they can say “free delivery” and/or not have to call out “this item is $5 but you will pay a 20% more to get it delivered through DoorDash”. They just hide that “fee” in the item price.
by Diggsey | 2025-10-16 21:06:52+00:00
I've found Gemini to be much better at completing tasks and following instructions. For example, let's say I want to extract all the questions from a word document and output them as a CSV.

If I ask ChatGPT to do this, it will do one of two things:

1) Extract the first ~10-20 questions perfectly, and then either just give up, or else hallucinate a bunch of stuff.

2) Write code that tries to use regex to extract the questions, which then fails because the questions are too free-form to be reliably matched by a regex.

If I ask Gemini to do the same thing, it will just do it and output a perfectly formed and most importantly complete CSV.
by Terr_ | 2025-10-16 21:07:12+00:00
Thanks, here's my current model:

1. Your data on the drive/partition is encrypted by $BIGKEY, which basically never changes because that would require redoing everything.

2. The LUKS header stores one-or-more encrypted versions of $BIGKEY, generally encrypted using a more convenient $SMALLKEY that a human could memorize. Optionally, $PIN can also be part of the encryption step.

3. Unlike $BIGKEY, the $SMALLKEY and/or $PIN can be changed over time. This changes the ciphertext of $BIGKEY and rewrites the LUKS header.

4. Optionally, secure boot is capable of storing and retrieving $SMALLKEY into system chips in such a way that most tampering ought to destroy $SMALLKEY.

> So for [Secure Boot] to be effective against the evil maid, you really need to bind the LUKS key to it.

If my $SMALLKEY is not stored inside the secure-boot chips, I can see how that would be inconvenient, but I'm not sure how that is safer.

Is it because the route $SMALLKEY automatically travels bypasses tricks like a hardware keylogger?
by saurik | 2025-10-16 21:07:32+00:00
1) It seems strange that this spec isn't an extension of the previous cache manifest mechanism, which was very similar and served a very similar purpose: it listed all of the URLs of your web app, so they could all be pre-downloaded... it just didn't include the hashes, and that could easily have been added.

2) That the hashes are the primary key and the path is the value makes no sense, as it means that files can only have exactly one path. I have often ended up with the same file mapped to two places in my website for various reasons, such as collisions in purpose over time (but the URL is a primary key) or degenerate objects. Now, yes: I can navigate avoiding that, but why do I have to? The only thing this seems to be buying is the idea that the same path can have more than one hash, and even if we really want that, it seems like it would make a million times more sense to just make the value be an array of hashes, as that will make this file a billion times more auditable: "what hashes can this path have?" should be more clear than "I did a search of the file to check and I realized we had a typo with the same path in two places". No one -- including the browser implementing this -- is trying to do the inverse operation (map a hash to a path).

3) That this signs only the content of the file and not the HTTP status or any of the headers seems like an inexcusable omission and is going to end up resulting in some kind of security flaw some day (which isn't an issue for subresource integrity, as those cases don't have headers the app might want and only comes into play for successful status). We even have another specification in play for how and what to sign (which includes the ability to lock in only a subset of the headers): Signed HTTP Messages. That should be consulted and re-used somehow.

4) Since they want to be able to allow the site to be hosted in more than one place anyway, they really should bite the bullet and make the identity of the site be a key, not a hostname, and the origin of a site should then become the public key. This would let the same site hosted by multiple places share the same local browser storage and just act like the exact same site, and it would also immediately fix all of the problems with "what if someone hacks into my server and just unenrolls me from the thing", as if they do that they wouldn't have the signing key (which you can keep very very offline) and, when a user hits reload, the new site they see would be considered unrelated to the one they were previously on. You also get provenance for free, and no longer have to worry about how to deal with unenrollment: the site just stops serving a manifest and it is immediately back to being the normal boring website, and can't access any of the content the user gave to the trusted key origin.
by jmyeet | 2025-10-16 21:07:34+00:00
I don't think Rust is very complex. What you're doing is very complex. It's just that doing it in C/C++ lulls you into a false sense of security.

C++ is incredibly complicated. I mean there's a 278 page book just on initialization [1].

I have seen all sorts of bad multithreaded code that compilers have let someone write. It would've been much harder in Rust but Rust would've forced you to be correct. As an example, I've seen a pool of locks for message delivery where the locks are locked on one thread and unlocked on another. This would get deadlocked every now and again so every half second or so a separate process would just release all the locks.

[1]: https://leanpub.com/cppinitbook
by bazoom42 | 2025-10-16 21:07:41+00:00
Well I lived through it, and you are absolutely right. Netscape 4 was terrible. Internet Explorer was much better and more standards compliant in comparison. Netscape 4 was hated by web designers just like IE6 later came to be hated. The difference was that Netscapes marked share dwindled pretty fast, while IE6 lived on for an eternity.
by thadt | 2025-10-16 21:07:47+00:00
I'll actually argue that you're arguing exactly what I'm arguing :)

My comment near the end is that we absolutely need transparency - just that what we need tracked more than all the code ever run under a URL is that one signing key. All your points are right: users aren't going to check it. It needs to be automatic and it needs to be distributed in a way that browsers and site owners can be confident that the code being run is the code the site owner intended to be run.
by dzaima | 2025-10-16 21:08:25+00:00
And even that only helps with the length problem, and doesn't help with doing new operations.

For SIMD, baseline x86-64 (i.e. SSE + SSE2) didn't have dynamic shuffles & shifts & blend, float floor/ceil, integer conversions & min/max & 64-bit comparisons & 32-bit mul, just to name things useful for even very boring SIMD; then in AVX2 we also get gather/masked load/store, FMA, and in AVX-512 we get a bunch of neat mask stuff, integer narrowing & rotates, compress.

(much of those things RVV has in its base extension, but RISC-V already has a good number of extensions on top of base RVV for things like like float16/bfloat16, expanded bitwise stuff (Zvbb - rotates/popcount/lzcnt/widening shift), clmul, and a bunch of crypto things; and presumably in a decade there'll be a bunch more things that people will want in their CPUs that'll have no choice but to be new extensions)
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-16 21:08:26+00:00
Capital, in an existing capitalist system, never wants an actual (as opposed to a distracting but powerless figurehead, which they might want) king-like figure (because such a figure is a transfer of power from capital as the existing ruling class to the monarch-like leader), but it is also structurally vulnerable to the emergence of such figures because for each individual capitalist there is an incentive to cooperate with any emerging king-like figure to receive favorable treatment over other capitalists.

This is one of the areas where a popular leftist mantra tends to be right in its conclusion (“Capital will always side with fascism”)—and this works for a wide variety of authoritarianisms that don’t overtly seek the utter destruction of private capital, not just fascism in the narrow sense—but exactly backwards in its rationale (“because fascism does not threaten capital”, when in fact the reason is because fascism does threaten capital, but does so both less and less immediately for capital that cooperates with it than capital that resists.)
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-10-16 21:09:16+00:00
I like the pelican riding a bike test, but my standards for what’s “good” seem higher than generally expected by others.

The models can generate hyper realistic renders of pelicans riding bikes in png format. They also have perfect knowledge of the SVG spec, and comprehensive knowledge of most human creative artistic endeavours. They should be able to produce astonishing results for the request.

I don’t want to see a chunky icon-styled vector graphic. I want to see one of these models meticulously paint what is unambiguously a pelican riding what is unambiguously a bicycle, to a quality on-par with Michelangelo, using the SVG standard as a medium. And I don’t just want it to define individual pixels. I want brush strokes building up a layered and textured birds wing.
by panick21_ | 2025-10-16 21:09:25+00:00
Fellow Swiss here. I mostly agree. I think the consensus government is incredibly important. I think that style of governments lead to a system where the polices stay along the center of the opinion of people more or less. That leads to some progress (voting for woman) being late, but it also leads to no share turns and extreme adoption of one position or another. Even when those positions are reversed, they often leave behind some institutional decay.

Another factor outside of consensus government is the federalism of government. From outside people would not believe how federal Switzerland is. In terms of school system, you can take the train, go 5 villages over and the school system might be very different. Along with many other things that would be different.

The amount of federalism Switzerland is comparable to what the US has, except Switzerland has it for areas that would be counties in the US.

What this prevents is the ultra dominance of capital city regions like England or France has. Infrastructure is developed for the whole country (even if the French speaking parts endlessly complain about not getting enough, arguably for good reason).

I would say, one of secret of Swiss success is simply, don't do anything really badly. Everything is somewhere between good and great.

One of the things I think we are not very good at is digital government, but because the old school government works pretty good and government is pretty responsive its not as big a deal. But I would love to be Estonia level with that. This is one case were federalism makes things harder.
by suzzer99 | 2025-10-16 21:09:41+00:00
Well, JavaScript didn't have a ton of features back then to muddy up the waters. So that helped. And no frameworks kept things simple.

The most complex part was a dynamic query builder where you could pick columns and various kinds of filters. We could have gone to the server each time the user changed the query, but I found it a lot snappier to do it all with document.write().

For a while, JavaScript was shunned by a lot of web shops. Applets and Flash were the future! Then Google Maps came out and showed what you could really do, and JS became cool again.
by Antoniocl | 2025-10-16 21:10:10+00:00
My read of the comment wasn't that he was "blaming" either, but explaining where the fees come from.

It sounds like the direct increase to the consumer's prices is done by the restaurant itself, but the reason the restaurant is charging higher prices are to make up for the fees they're charged by UE/DD.

In other words, UE/DD restaurant-side service fees eat into the restaurant's profit margins, so the restaurant passes on the cost increases to the consumer to get them back.

To be clear, no idea about how closely these statements correspond to the world, just that this seems to be OP's claim.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-10-16 21:10:39+00:00
I see, thanks for channeling the GP! Yeah, like you say, I just don't think getting the tool call template right is really a problem anymore, at least with the big-labs SotA models that most of us use for coding agents. Claude Sonnet, Gemini, GPT-5 and friends have been heavily heavily RL-ed into being really good at tool calls, and it's all built into the providers' apis now so you never even see the magic where the tool call is parsed out of the raw response. To be honest, when I first read about tools calls with LLMs I thought, "that'll never work reliably, it'll mess up the syntax sometimes." But in practice, it does work. (Or, to be more precise, if the LLM ever does mess up the grammar, you never know because it's able to seamlessly retry and correct without it ever being visible at the user-facing api layer.) Claude Code plugged into Sonnet (or even Haiku) might do hundreds of tool calls in an hour of work without missing a beat. One of the many surprises of the last few years.
by Flamingoat | 2025-10-16 21:10:53+00:00
It was Chrome, Win 7 and Smartphones that killed IE. Firefox was extremely niche and was downright bad browser when 3.0 was released.

Chrome when it came out was much faster than Firefox. It was lighter and worked better.

Also macs had moved to Intel chips a few years before and were actually pretty decent so a lot of people were moving to them.

Also of this chipped away at XP and the few people running XP machines were diehard xp fans or corps that were dragging their heels upgrading.
by Wilduck | 2025-10-16 21:11:23+00:00
Personally, as a DM of casual games with friends, 90% of the fun for me is the act of communal storytelling. That fun is that both me and my players come to the table with their own ideas for their character and the world, and we all flesh out the story at the table.

If I found out a player had come to the table with an LLM generated character, I would feel a pretty big betrayal of trust. It doesn't matter to me how "good" or "polished" their ideas are, what matters is that they are their own.

Similarly, I would be betraying my players by using an LLM to generate content for our shared game. I'm not just an officiant of rules, I'm participating in shared storytelling.

I'm sure there are people who play DnD for reasons other than storytelling, and I'm totally fine with that. But for storytelling in particular, I think LLM content is a terrible idea.
by trhway | 2025-10-16 21:11:32+00:00
> a baby some robot neglects to prevent from falling off the changing table

that is when we think about 2 handed robots. 6 handed robot can easily have 2-3 hands assigned to tightly keeping the baby. Humanoid robots are handicapped by their similarity to humans which is really an artificial constraint. After all we aren't building airplanes using birds as the blueprint.

On the similar note - while not about baby, was just rewatching an early Bing Bang Theory season with this episode where Howard "falls right into the mechanical hand"
by jqpabc123 | 2025-10-16 21:12:01+00:00
Well, the bad news is that nuclear isn't cheap and "trying" isn't producing results.

60% of new electricity capacity added to US grids (over 30 GW) this year will be solar.

China currently has twice the solar capacity of the US and adding capacity at 3-4x our rate.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65064
by cal_dent | 2025-10-16 21:12:03+00:00
While I agree housing situation keeps getting worse year by year, I do wonder if we need to consider that historical comparison like these have become increasingly meaningless?

It's certainly not a good thing but part of the second order effects of the broad economic change is that household income alone has long stopped being a useful driver/source of house prices - interest rates, second order effect of boomer wealth through bank of mum & dad, more 2 person full time working households, global migratory movement have all changed the dynamic so much that it feels very apple and pears now.

There's also a point around averages being meaningless from a relativity perspective too. Australia is expensive but as someone who moved from London to non-sydney australia, I do sometimes find it amusing that what is deemed expensive here would get you a shoebox in London v 500+ m2 land house here.
by tallowen | 2025-10-16 21:12:28+00:00
A car sale is an activity that is already registered with the government. It doesn't seem impossible for the data about an electric vehicle sale and it's purchase price to make its way to the IRS. The IRS could create an API to share this type of data with tax preparation software.

> their pet things that are obviously worth complicating the tax code to do

I agree that this is at the root of the problem but I think that can be addressed by making it easier to file taxes or by reducing the complexity of the tax code. The child tax credit is a relatively common type of benefit across rich countries. The tax code could be simplified by administering this benefit via direct cash transfers through a different government agency. I think from this perspective, the IRS is _extremely_ efficient at benefit administration.

My personal opinion is that the tax code is not always a bad way to administer benefits but the paperwork burden is the problem and the experience of filing taxes needs to be made easier.
by happytoexplain | 2025-10-16 21:13:03+00:00
I don't hate people who voted for Trump. I sympathize with or outright agree with most conservative grievances (but not their expressions of those grievances).

Supporting Trump, in the general sense, is not the same thing. E.g. "a lot", as you say, implies "majority" or at least more than one or two things, which, of the dozens of (meaningful) things Trump has done, is about how many I'd peg as "theoretically defensible" (for example: Immigration control and getting jobs back to America, both of which I agree with; but obviously not in practice due to his counter-productive/performative/un-American implementations). The rest fall pretty clearly into the category of "materially hurting my home country and my community".

For example: Obliterating discourse, disrespecting rule of law, disrespecting the constitution, disrespecting rights and American principles, encouraging petty hatred and childish mockery, threatening to deport American citizens, calling every crime that might have been committed by a liberal "domestic terrorism", threatening via policy announced on Twitter to imprison my wife (who is a government worker) for the apparent crime of merely attempting to find a legal way to support our local legal immigrant(s) jailed by ICE for months for past non-violent non-drug-related crimes they have already finished serving for, which didn't even include jail time. The hysterical debasement of the amazing country my family has loved and served for hundreds of years.

Just off the top of my head.

There is no "I agree with some of it", or, "on average". It's moot, is what I mean. Yes, "honest discussion" is depressingly rare, but even truer: Focusing on the common person who isn't good at dispassionate political discourse is itself dishonest, when what's happening is hell.
by dkarl | 2025-10-16 21:13:06+00:00
This is an application of an engineering term to a product-level concept, but it fits. I guess you'd say "domain model" in product-speak, but to my engineering brain it doesn't evoke the cascading consequences of the model for the rest of the system. It's a rare product manager who treats the domain model as a consequential design product and a potential site of innovation.
by crowcroft | 2025-10-16 21:13:18+00:00
I don't understand the 'Nextjs is good for SEO' hype. I think it's better to frame it as Nextjs isn't bad for SEO. Whether a site loads without client side rendering is a pretty binary thing.

If you're using Nextjs to get a high level of rich interactivity then your SEO issues aren't about CSR vs SSR anyway though. As you point it it's just bundle size and site speed, and URL structure that end up causing a negative impact. Nextjs doesn't fix that.
by dctoedt | 2025-10-16 21:13:40+00:00
> you can provide all the proof you need to discount the government narrative and prove yours

That's backwards: The burden of proof is on the government to show that the prerequisites have been met for invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 [0] or the Alien Enemy Act of 1798 [1] or the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 [2]. To be sure, the president gets some deference, but s/he doesn't have absolute discretion.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act_of_1807

[1] https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB11269

[2] https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45618
by shakna | 2025-10-16 21:13:41+00:00
Because the rainbow parenthesis alternate in frequency of brightness, its actually really easy to distinguish which is which, unless you're severely colour blind.

I can't tell some apart, but because they've got a different colour in-between, it makes it easier to jump between start and end of expressions. Being able to box blocks in my head faster.

That being said, I always have to tweak accessibility settings anyway. Change of font, change of size. Having to toggle off rainbow as well doesn't seem to really add to the large list of things.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-10-16 21:14:41+00:00
Oh sure! And if I was talking someone through building a barebones agent, I'd definitely tag on a warning along the lines of "but don't actually use this without XYZ!" That said, you can add prompt caching by just setting a couple of parameters in the api calls to the LLM. I agree constraints is a much more complex topic, although even in my 100-line example I am able to fit in a user approval step before file write or bash actions.