MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2025-10-27 21:32:57+00:00
> The PSF is a relatively small organization, operating with an annual budget of around $5 million per year, with a staff of just 14.

This might be the bigger story.

How many trillions of dollars depend on Python?

Yes, I mean trillion. Those market caps didn't skyrocket on nothing. A lot of ML systems run on Python. A lot of ML systems are first implemented in Python. Even with more complicated backends a Python layer is usually available, and used. A whole lot of other stuff depends on Python too, but the AI part is obvious.

This is the weird part about our (global![0]) economics that I just don't get. We'll run billions of dollars in the red for a decade or more to get a startup going yet we can't give a million to these backbones? Just because they're open source? It's insane! If we looked at projects like this as a company we'd call their product extremely successful and they'd be able to charge out the wazoo for it. So the main difference is what? That it's open source? That by being open source it doesn't deserve money? I think this is a flaw we probably need to fix. In the very least I want those devs paid enough that they don't get enticed by some large government entity trying to sneak in backdoors or bugs.

[0] it's not just the US, nor is it just capitalist countries. You can point me at grants but let's get honest, $5m is crazy low for their importance. They're providing more than 1000x that value in return.

[side note] I do know big companies often contribute and will put a handful of people on payroll to develop, bug hunt, etc. But even if we include that I'm pretty sure the point still stands. I'm open to being wrong though, I don't know the actual numbers

[P.S.S] seems to parallel our willingness to fund science. Similarly people will cry "but what is the value" from a smartphone communicating over the Internet, with the monetary value practically hitting them in the face.
by dlcarrier | 2025-10-27 21:32:59+00:00
If I can hear quantization or distortion in my speaker system, it's unacceptable. It should, in the least, be able to beat the somewhat small bandwidth of human hearing, which can be accomplished with pretty cheap speaker systems.

Being able to see pixel-wide features isn't the point above witch nothing is gained, it's the bare minimum below which quality drops precipitously. In the least, you'd want to double that resolution, on each axis, to guarantee that patterns don't create quantization errors, similar to the Nyquist cutoff in audio. It's also worth aiming for at least the 90th percentile in visual acuity, if not the 99th, to ensure everyone gets the best experience.

Historically, good video quality has been expensive, but as the price comes down, there's no reason to not take advantage of it, just because some won't benefit from it.

Some people listen to music on their phone's loudspeaker, but that doesn't mean concert halls shouldn't aim for anything better.
by vermaden | 2025-10-27 21:33:19+00:00
Container support is ready since year 2000 on FreeBSD while Linux needed to catch up the game and with Docker finally made it in 2013.

More here:

- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/06/28/freebsd-jails-cont...

- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2025/04/11/freebsd-jails-secu...

- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2025/04/08/are-freebsd-jails-...
by estimator7292 | 2025-10-27 21:33:33+00:00
It's not an "us vs them" situation, that's just a strawman argument.

The real point is that you either believe that all humans are worthy of the same rights and respects by default then you're a bad person.

Such people aren't against "us" they're against everyone apart from their select group of the "right kind" of people.

This isn't a quid pro quo or zero sum bullshit. This is a matter of being a moral person or not. It's not even an opinion, it's the cold hard fact that if you think entire groups of people are subhuman, unworthy of basic rights, and fit to be abducted abused and deported, you are a bad person. It's that cut and dry.

You either think all people should be equal or you don't. You either want a civilized society for everyone or you only want it for the "right kind" of people. One of these stances is objectively moral and the other is objectively bad
by CamperBob2 | 2025-10-27 21:33:38+00:00
They will soon be illegal in the EU and, I suppose, the UK. Not in most other regions including North America and Asia.

Porsche's mistake lies in forcing all of their other customers, worldwide, to accept products designed to satisfy EU regulators. Lowest-common-denominator engineering has never been why people buy Porsches, but these days the engineers at Porsche take a bus to work, where they report to people who were chauffeured there.
by skydhash | 2025-10-27 21:33:42+00:00
Functional core usually means pure functional functions, aka the return value is know if the arguments is known, no side effects required. All the side effects is then pushed up the imperative shell.

You’ll find usually that side effect in imperative actions is usually tied to the dependencies (database, storage, ui, network connections). It can be quite easy to isolate those dependencies then.

It’s ok to have several layers of core. But usually, it’s quite easy to have the actual dependency tree with interfaces and have the implementation as leaves for each node. But the actual benefits is very easy testing and validation. Also fast feedback due to only unit tests is needed for your business logic.
by ihaveajob | 2025-10-27 21:34:16+00:00
The core sentence has an OR clause, which means if any of the 2 conditions happens (DEI promotion; violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws), then they're in violation. Their stated mission is directly in contradiction with the first part. Even if it wasn't, I'd probably vote in the same direction, given the (let's call it) volatility we are seeing with capricious interpretation of executive privilege.
by JPKab | 2025-10-27 21:34:40+00:00
It's funny how the quest for "unique strengths" entirely ignores people with pale skin who grew up in trailer parks in Appalachia or farms in the midwest, despite the fact that they are dramatically underrepresented in our industry and in elite universities.

The DEI policies favor people with dark skin (as long as they're not Asian) and 1250 SATs from wealthy suburbs over pale skin 1450 SATs from rural backwaters. It's discrimination, it's "diversity" only on the surface. Incredibly shallow, condescending, and dehumanizing. It's so shallow that in most of the places it's implemented, it doesn't differentiate between descendants of slaves and recent West African immigrants, some of whom are wealthy descendants of the elites who captured and sold slaves in ports like Lagos.

And before you call me a bigot: My kids are "bi-racial", so if you think i'm a nazi, ask yourself why I hate my wife and kids.
by sothatsit | 2025-10-27 21:34:59+00:00
I don't think tools like Claude are there yet, but I already trust GPT-5 Pro to be more diligent about catching bugs in software than me, even when I am trying to be very careful. I expect even just using these tools to help review existing Excel spreadsheets could lead to a significant boost in quality if software is any guide (and Excel spreadsheets seem even worse than software when it comes to errors).

That said, Claude is still quite behind GPT-5 in its ability to review code, and so I'm not sure how much to expect from Sonnet 4.5 in this new domain. OpenAI could probably do better.
by alfalfasprout | 2025-10-27 21:35:05+00:00
Yep. The problem is then leadership sees this and says "oh, we too can expect 10x productivity if everyone uses these tools. We'll force people to use them or else."

And guess what happens? Reality doesn't match expectations and everyone ends up miserable.

Good engineering orgs should have engineers deciding what tools are appropriate based on what they're trying to do.
by nobody9999 | 2025-10-27 21:35:58+00:00
>... I mean it absolutely does. What on earth are you _supposed_ to do? Give the unaccountable secret police the benefit of the doubt?

Exactly. Even if this guy holds beliefs that aren't aligned with those of the US government, so what? That is not a reason to detain or refuse entry to a place that's supposed to embrace freedom of expression and of the press.

This is blatantly anti-democratic (small 'd'), capricious and just one more example of the current administration's attempts to destroy a free and open society.

Yet here you guys (@ajroos, @dlubarov, etc.) arguing about why the US government is abandoning the rule of law and trying to normalize authoritarianism and bad-faith governance. It doesn't matter why. It's wrong and evil on its face.
by taneq | 2025-10-27 21:36:00+00:00
Hah, I love this sort of story. Recently I was on site and we needed some electrical as-built drawings. They’d been stashed in a tool box, which was locked (and pretty well designed to protect the padlock from bolt cutters / angle grinders). Unfortunately one of the guys had taken the key with him and it was now a two hour plane flight away. They already tried and failed to cut the lock, and were getting an angle grinder to just cut in through the lid (it was ~3mm steel sheet, so hardly impenetrable, but destroying the toolbox would not have been ideal) when I pulled the pin out of the hinge and recovered the drawings that way.

Turns out watching Pirates of the Caribbean wasn’t a waste of time after all. ;)
by jl6 | 2025-10-27 21:36:05+00:00
> if you don’t feel positively about diversity, equity, and inclusion, then you are sending a message that you instead support homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion

No, because we are not talking about Boolean variables where you can discover the logical opposite by negation. These are words with deeply fuzzy meanings. Supporters can support the best possible meanings, and opposers can oppose the worst possible meanings, and be closer to consensus than this binary, polarized, with-us-or-against-us rhetoric might imply.
by AlSweigart | 2025-10-27 21:36:33+00:00
I mean, it's also just the plain common sense move: accepting that money would just be putting a noose around their neck and handing the other end to the Trump administration. (And there is a 100.0% chance they'll just claw it back eventually anyway.)

It's a shame that months of NSF grant-writing work was completely wasted though.
by jones1618 | 2025-10-27 21:36:38+00:00
The rule that stops this cold for me is: "Note that the distinct numbers being sorted would be hidden. That is, all the nodes in the partial order would look the same."

So, you point to two random nodes and watch them sort? Do you see the "hidden" numbers after they are sorted?

As is, that sounds boring and "random" in the way my sons use that term, without purpose or reason.

If you had more in mind, please describe exactly what the player sees before and after they select two nodes.
by devmor | 2025-10-27 21:37:05+00:00
> It starts producing a weird dialogue that's completely unlike its training corpus

But it's not doing that. It's just replacing a relation in vector space with one that we would think is distant.

Of course you would view an LLM's behavior as mystifying and indicative of something deeper when you do not know what it is doing. You should seek to understand something before assigning mysterious capabilities to it.
by sxzygz | 2025-10-27 21:37:28+00:00
Sorry, I’m not in academia, but since no one responded I thought I may suggest some things.

I think it’s important to be deeply interested in work whatever lab you find is doing, otherwise they’ll feel like they’re babysitting you.

My physics is weak, but if I had your skills, I’d work in developing open source software for microchip simulation, verification, and design.

There are many groups working in this around the world, it’s super interesting, very civilization useful, and is at a nascent stage.

Check out the FOSSi Foundation, their various events, the speakers, their interests, and if anything sparks your imagination.

https://fossi-foundation.org/

Age does not matter, and 48 is young!
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-27 21:37:53+00:00
> Also, this is a golden opportunity for multi-billion dollar tech companies to also do the same and match or double the grant money in support of PSF! Google, AWS, Microsoft, anyone?

Doing so publicly would undermine the public efforts of the same big tech firms to curry favor from the Trump Administration to secure public contracts, regulatory favors, etc. (including the very public scrapping of their own DEI programs), so I wouldn’t expect it or any other positive public involvement from them that would be connected to this. They’ve already chosen a side in this fight.
by pbiggar | 2025-10-27 21:38:18+00:00
The Trump administration is definitively coming after 501c3s. I run a nonprofit and all the movement around us has been preparing for this since these laws were first announced. Ironcically, the laws to investigate nonprofits were first proposed under the Biden administration to attack the Palestine movement, and like most things in the Palestine movement, they were quickly turned against the rest of the country.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-trump-administration-is-comi...
by mothballed | 2025-10-27 21:38:25+00:00
I struggle for an example of that actually working. If it does it must be exceedingly rare. I can think of lots of example of having 25% of the market and then getting closer to the majority by cutting prices, but the part where they jack them back up usually doesn't work. For instance, Rockefeller did that to put his competition out of business, but then the price of Kerosene just kept going down.

The times where it actually worked (railroad) was because the people doing it convinced the government afterwards to "protect the market" (interstate commerce act) and created a violence enforced cartel that prohibited by law rebates and other methods by which cartels (and pre-ICA railroad cartels) commonly fall apart.
by jay_kyburz | 2025-10-27 21:38:32+00:00
I think perhaps you underestimate how antithetical the current batch of LLM AI's is to what most programmers strive for every day, and what we want from our tools. Its not about losing our job, its about "correctness". (or as said below - deterministic)

In a lot of jobs, particularly in creative industries, or marketing, media and writing, the definition of a job well done is a fairly grey area. I think AI will be mostly disruptive in these areas.

But in programming there is a hard minimum of quality. Given a set of inputs, does the program return the correct answer or not? When you ask it what 2+2, do you get 4?

When you ask AI anything, it might be right 50% of the time, or 70% of the time, but you can't blindly trust the answer. A lot of us just find that not very useful.
by sigmar | 2025-10-27 21:38:43+00:00
I added my US passport to my Pixel's wallet app in June. It's neat and let's you see what data is transmitted over NFC, and lists some details about the signed certificate for the data (seems they do only 2 weeks of validity for each cert signature, and the app fetches a new sig automatically) but I have yet to come across TSA agents advertising acceptance of digital IDs, so typically I default to my passport card.
by estimator7292 | 2025-10-27 21:38:49+00:00
The problem is that even with the seed rent-seeking, GMO crops are more productive and more profitable.

The farmer still makes just enough money, with some corporate middleman skimming off the top for no good reason. It's not that the fees are untenable- obviously nobody will buy it if they can't make a profit. The problem is the corporate rent-seeking. Producers have to raise costs which percolates up into increased costs for consumers.
by jcranmer | 2025-10-27 21:39:29+00:00
The text is:

> we "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."

There's some ambiguity in syntax as to whether or not "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws" attaches to "discriminatory equity ideology" or "any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology." Given the (improper) comma before the 'or', I'm inclined to lean towards an intended interpretation of the former. That is to say, the government intends to read the statement as affirming no advancement or promotion of DEI, regardless of whether or not they violate any US laws.

(The current administration also advances the proposition that advancing or promoting DEI itself is a violation of US laws, so it's a rather academic question.)
by burnt-resistor | 2025-10-27 21:39:29+00:00
Add-on, almost lights-out remote management.

Without lights-out management, eventually physical access to power cycle will be needed.

For systems people care about, they already have BMC (Supermicro), iLO (HP), iDRAC (Dell) controllers.

Anything that can capture HDMI and spit it securely over a wire without some cloud-dependency bullshit, present "virtual USB" or input over the network, and close a RST circuit momentarily would do the job. The problem is, in the name of consumerishism and convenience, none of these home-gamer "solutions" have been independently audited that I know of by any reputable firm. (A competitor, NanoKVM, is known to be shady AF downloading serialized binary crap. It talks to tailscale without user permission, communication, or approval. Never use it for anything.) Don't trust something simply because there's press release or social media hype about it. I have to endure constant Cloudflare CAPTCHAs because it's probable that a large fraction of other customers on my ISP have pwned IoT (cameras, doorbells, whizbang startup weather station, etc.) DDoSing and hacking the rest of the world.

PSA: For the love of the sysadmin gods, please don't use desktops as servers. ECC RAM, HA, duty cycle, lights out management, and vendor support are completely different beasts compared to retail gear.

For non-lights-out, host-based remote desktop that can be self-hosted, RustDesk is able to work locally without relaying to any clouds. And using WG (non-TS) for "VPN"/remote network bridging, that's a pretty compelling option. I haven't yet checked if it can work in an air-gapped environment but I think it might work; but if it doesn't, that would be sad.
by lionkor | 2025-10-27 21:39:40+00:00
Capable, yeah, but not reliable, that's my point. They can one shot fantastic code, or they can one shot the code I then have to review and pull my hair out over for a week, because it's such crap (and the person who pushed it is my boss, for example, so I can't just tell him to try again).

That's not consistent.
by nsagent | 2025-10-27 21:40:45+00:00
do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.

The government can certainly add restrictions to the use of the grant money, but applying that broadly over any actions the grantee performs during that time is overreach. I wonder about the legality of that condition.
by constantcrying | 2025-10-27 21:41:10+00:00
>Porsche's mistake lies in forcing all of their other customers, worldwide, to accept products designed to satisfy EU regulators.

Porsche can not afford to keep ICE development afloat just for the US market and a few others. There is no economic case for keeping ICE Porsches around when they can capture only a very small amount of the market. It is also preposterous to have engineers build cars in such an environment.
by b3ast | 2025-10-27 21:41:25+00:00
Hi HN,

I developed Tab Whisperer, a Chrome extension designed to help users manage their browsing habits effectively. The extension leverages Google's Gemini AI to:

Auto-categorize tabs into groups like Work, Social, and Entertainment.

Visualize time spent on each category with daily and weekly pie charts.

Offer personalized productivity tips based on browsing patterns.

It's built with privacy in mind, processing data locally and only sending necessary information to the Gemini API.

You can try it here: https://factverse2.gumroad.com/l/avewk

I'm eager to hear your thoughts and any suggestions for improvement.
by CobrastanJorji | 2025-10-27 21:42:15+00:00
It depends on what "secure" means. Any lock can be destroyed with tools. Most locks can be broken with a big pair of bolt cutters, a drill, or, failing that, melting.

If secure means "without leaving evidence of tampering," things get a lot more interesting, but that has narrow practical use cases outside of stuff like espionage. Once you're in this space, we can start talking about how difficult something can be without specialized tools. But now we're leaving "I am protecting my stuff" territory and entering "this is just a sport and we're agreeing on a ruleset" territory.

There are a couple of lock designs out there that I don't think anybody's successfully ever picked. The ones that first come to mind are a couple of the "smart" electronic locks. Many of those are junk, but a few are very well thought out.
by cls59 | 2025-10-27 21:43:40+00:00
Agreed. I think the buried lede here is actually the clawback clause. With that in the contract, this isn't a $1.5 million dollar grant, it's a $1.5 million dollar liability.

If you take the money and spend it on research and development and then get hit by a clawback, whether due to "DEI" or some other reason, that is a financially ruinous event to somehow come up with $1.5 million dollars that was already spent.

A shame and a waste as it sounds like the project would have been beneficial outside of the Python ecosystem, had it been funded.
by ravenstine | 2025-10-27 21:45:22+00:00
Maybe I'm just not imaginative enough, but I don't imagine myself relying on a digital device in order to prove my identity in foreign countries. Drop your phone and break it... then what do you do? And yeah, you can lose your physical passport, but you can also repeatedly stomp on it and even submerge it in water and it will still be useful.
by bsder | 2025-10-27 21:45:35+00:00
> What's happening guys?

The people who benefited from those who sacrificed for rights and equality over the past century got complacent and lazy.

The current rhetoric is exactly the same as was used to discriminate against my ancestors 100 years ago. The only substitutions are the different slurs. Everyone who wants to talks about race and immigrants should be required to listen to 8 hours of radio programs from the early 1900s saying the exact same thing about them and their ancestors.

"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." -- John Philpot Curran, 1790

You fight or you lose. Every time; all the time. Politics is a contact sport and you don't get to opt out.
by VintageCool | 2025-10-27 21:46:34+00:00
Nooo... we have a bunch of metrics and logs reporting systems at my company. Some of them are in UTC, some of them display my local time, some of them display China Time, and I'm trying to collaborate with colleagues in London and Australia who get data displayed in their local times as well. When I'm working to address an incident and combing through multiple systems to try to correlate events, it's a pain in the ass having to constantly double-check which time zone this data is in.
by _alternator_ | 2025-10-27 21:46:45+00:00
Ok, I read this post quite a while ago and something about the reasoning bothered me then, and it still bothers me now.

In short, my read is that the argument does not rule out that there is a computable function that grows faster than BB(N), but rather it shows that it is impossible to prove or “decide” whether a given computable function grows faster than BB(N).

Maybe this is equivalent to the conclusion stated? Am I missing something obvious? (That sees likely; Scott Aaronson is much better at this than me.)

Edited for clarity