MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by walkabout | 2025-10-09 19:58:36+00:00
> Because it's the biggest slice of the federal budget pie

It's not spent out of the general fund. The only—only—effect Social Security spending has on the budget is that for part of its spending, it calls in debt the general budget already owes it when it spend its money (which is invested in government debt). That money came from a dedicated, separate source, and wasn't generated by deficit spending, but by actual income. That money bought US government debt, so we owe that back, and that repayment is the only part of any of this that affects the budget.

[EDIT] To boil this down for international readers or people who just haven't ever bothered to learn the super interesting (LOL) way Social Security is structured:

1) Social Security is funded by the majority of the money that comes out of workers' paychecks under the "FICA" heading (some goes to other benefits-related stuff, but most of it goes to Social Security). This is a static proportion of ~15%, not progressively bracketed like ordinary income tax. About half is paid separately by your employer, typically, but people filing as independent contractors (form 1099) pay the whole shebang. This tax also phases out abruptly at a certain level (I forget exactly where, something like $200k for an individual tax filer I think) which means it's actually not just not-progressive, but rather extremely regressive (i.e. it preferentially targets income dollars with the highest marginal utility, not the lowest)

2) Under certain circumstances, but mostly when you get sufficiently old, you can start to draw benefits (payments back to you) out of Social Security. These benefits are (basically) adjusted for how much you paid in. Paid in more? Get more back.

3) For a long time Social Security ran a surplus from their FICA income, so that money went into the Social Security "Trust Fund". This money is not available to the general budget. The law is structured such that the excess money couldn't just be spent on other stuff.

4) ... however, you don't really want money just sitting around inflating away, you want to invest it. Plus, sure would be nice for the rest of the budget to access that big tempting pile of money somehow, if you're a politician and kinda an asshole (but I repeat myself). So, the trust fund bought government debt.

5) Social Security is now deficit spending, because we have a fuckload of old people drawing benefits from it, and not enough young people funding it to balance that out. That means it's spending down the trust fund (ITS OWN MONEY that it ALREADY COLLECTED). This requires cashing in some of those IOUs.

6) "Well when it runs out of money it saved up, won't that mean that spending becomes deficit spending against the general budget?" Nope! Not without changing the law, anyway (which opens up practically infinite possibilities, so it's kinda pointless to introduce to a discussion of "how does this work?"). What'll happen is the SSA (Social Security Administration) has to cut benefits until payments balance with income (from the FICA tax).
by tpmoney | 2025-10-09 19:59:06+00:00
All the FSA money in your account is available immediately at the beginning of the year. Ironically that would make it a better choice for anyone with a lot of medical expenses on an HDHP if it wasn’t for the fact that FSAs are capped by law.

As someone who does deal with enough medical stuff to clear the deductible (and sometimes the OOP max) on their normal health plan annually, it’s still much more convenient, again because the money is all there at the beginning of the year when the expenses are highest
by braebo | 2025-10-09 19:59:23+00:00
My experience is the opposite. The latest Claude seems to excel in my personal medium-sized (20-50k loc) codebases with strong existing patterns and a robust structure from which it can extrapolate new features or documentation. Claude Code is getting much better at navigating code paths across many large files in order to provide nuanced and context-aware suggestions or bug fixes.

When left to its own devices on tasks with little existing reference material to draw from, however, the quality and consistency suffers significantly and brittle, convoluted structures begin to emerge.

This is just my limited experience though, and I almost never attempt to, for example, vibe-code an entire greenfield mvp.
by sarchertech | 2025-10-09 19:59:26+00:00
If you know the domain the LLM operates in it’s probably fairly easy.

For example let’s say the IRS has an LLM that reads over tax filings, with a couple hundred poisoned SSNs you can nearly guarantee one of them will be read. And it’s not going to be that hard to poison a few hundred specific SSNs.

Same thing goes for rare but known to exist names, addresses etc…
by johnh-hn | 2025-10-09 19:59:49+00:00
It reminds me of a quote from Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann. It goes something like, "For distributed systems, we're trying to create a reliable system out of a set of unreliable components." In a similar fashion, we're trying to get reliable results from an unreliable process (i.e. prompting LLMs to do what we ask).

The difficulties of working with distributed systems are well known but it took a lot of research to get there. The uncertain part is whether research will help overcome the issues of using LLMs, or whether we're really just gambling (in the literal sense) at scale.
by leakycap | 2025-10-09 19:59:50+00:00
You're misunderstanding your source. You quote:

> have an unlimited exemption from displaying U.S. Government license plates

Yes ... but U.S. Gov't plates and state plates are not the same

The very thing you linked explains federal law enforcement who don't want to use "U.S. Gov't" plates have unlimited exemption to use standard state-issued license plates... you know, the kind everyone has, to blend in?
by at-fates-hands | 2025-10-09 19:59:50+00:00
The jeans I liked so I went and bought some at an actual Lucky Brand store. Not sure if you've ever felt Lucky Jeans but they're super soft. Mine were not the same denim or cotton they used. Mine felt rough, not as good quality.

Same thing with the keyboard. I ordered one off of the MS site. Got it and started using it for my work keyboard and immediately grabbed the other one I was using for my personal work. Subtle differences, but the one I got on Amazon was not the same. Rubber on the mouse was different the keys felt different, they had a different sound than the real one.

The JBL speaker my son pointed out the inconsistency in the logo letters. Got his real JBL cans and showed me - it was close to the naked eye, but when you saw it against the legit logo it was obvious.

The shorts and work out gear had that Chinese factory smell when it came. If you've ever bought stuff directly from China, you know what I'm talking about. Again, pulled out some of my other stuff I had bought that I knew was real and same thing, logo inconsistencies, poor stitching in areas, different thread than the originals.

Again, I ended up catching all these well after the fact, but the fact remains that stuff I thought I was buying on Amazon, was not. The troubling thing is it happened across products I would never suspect would be counterfeited.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-09 20:00:17+00:00
>What's an equal concern to me is how insufficiently resilient Reddit collectively appears to be, in face of this.

it's a three-fold issue here.

1. Admins really don't care about moderator behavior. As long as you aren't breaking reddit you'll be ignored. Events like r/wow going private is one of the few times they directly intervene.

2. Moderator rankings is seniority first. Without admin intervention, you can have a "head moderator" who only really acts once a month and they will have the final say on anything in that sub.

3. Network effects. Like anything else the soluion of "start your own subreddit" is a doomed task unless the sub is very new. People will pool around the sub with the most subscribers. So avoiding the bad mod is difficult.

These are issues I was hoping in the '10's they'd attempt to address. But not much has changed to addreess this. At best the rule of only moderating 5 "high-traffic" subs may help the most extreme cases, but I'm not confident.
by tomasphan | 2025-10-09 20:00:28+00:00
Question for n8n and other orchestration tool users: Why not use an LLM to vibe code the orchestration? Is it still hard to host or not mature enough? I tried n8n but found it easier and cheaper to have Claude code something and then throw it in docker as API that I could interact with. Tool integrations were also easy to vibe code. I am maybe more technical than the average n8n user? Not sure
by busterarm | 2025-10-09 20:00:49+00:00
You can set up EC2 instances in a way that that just having AWS root access doesn't give you ssh/console access to the instances. You can still do things like Run Command but that leaves a very obvious trail (although even this is preventable with enough effort).

Also you can enable cloudtrail log validation which can ensure you know if you're looking at tampered logs or not.

Really it all depends on how their accounts are set up. Unless you know the operational details you can't make a call here.

I've run a multi-million dollar/year AWS Org for the last decade or so and setting things up this way is kind of brass tacks.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-10-09 20:01:16+00:00
German Kuka were aquired 2016 yes indeed. But kuka is only 6th largest by market share. Swizz and Swedish ABB robotics is largest by market share and is still European.... hoold on... nonnononnno

https://new.abb.com/news/detail/129685/abb-to-divest-robotic...
by grimblee | 2025-10-09 20:01:17+00:00
A tolerant society cannot tolerate intolerance, lest it gets destroyed by it. In other words: the far right and fascists are an existential threath to our current society and cannot be tolerated, no matter what. We should call them out and fight them all the time, everywhere, for our childrens future, to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.
by dangus | 2025-10-09 20:01:43+00:00
If a better open source alternative to Autodesk Fusion comes around I'll certainly use it. I'm not saying that I'm against OSS or getting better software for free. I'm just saying that there's a $820 billion global market of software that's obviously worth paying for, and I'm going to pay for software if it fits my budget and is the best choice for me.

If all proprietary software that dared to charge a fee was destined to “die” this very forum wouldn’t exist.

If you think companies like Oracle are going to die, go ahead and short their stock. Better start selling your S&P 500 and QQQ shares. Oracle has just about doubled in the last year. Good luck!
by georgeburdell | 2025-10-09 20:01:45+00:00
Just an observation, but I've noticed that the white people of "elite" distinction have a preponderance of unusual surnames. I have noticed this having grown up working class, then attending both an elite/non-elite universities and then working at both elite and non-elite employers. Given the hereditary nature of most white surnames, it's thought provoking to think that one's eliteness was predestined hundreds of years ago, even in a society such as ours.
Show HN: An open-source framework for building "Apps in ChatGPT"
by zachpark | 2025-10-09 20:02:04+00:00
Hi! I’ve been experimenting with OpenAI's new apps SDK and found it, rough. The example project is unstructured, full of hardcoded file hashes, and takes hundreds of lines just to get something working.

So I built Chat.js — an open-source framework that makes building ChatGPT apps actually pleasant.

10-line apps instead of 300+ — just define a component’s name, title, schema, and handler. Chat.js auto-generates all the MCP wiring.

No version drift — both build and server use the same package.json hash, so filenames always match.

Works with two files — drop your component in /components, describe it in /server, and it runs in ChatGPT in under 3 minutes.

It’s 0% hardcoded, 100% automated, and open-source. Repo: https://github.com/DooiLabs/Chat.js

Would love feedback from anyone building with the apps SDK — or ideas for what kind of ChatGPT apps this framework could enable.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-10-09 20:02:16+00:00
> Besides, servants are nothing new. They're rare in the US but common in some other countries

Right, although "servants" conjures up rich people with full time staff.

A better comparison to the humanoid robot some people here are dreaming of to do their household chores is a country like India where it's common for middle class people to hire multiple different people to come do chores, daily or weekly, such as cooking, laundry, cleaning, yardwork, etc. These are cheap services.

In the US, probably most people here on YC News (higher paid tech workers?) could afford to have lawn mowing service, weekly maid service, laundry pick-up/drop-off service (or bring to laundry yourself), and either eat out all the time, or UberEats etc. It's not clear that having a robot to do these tasks would be cheaper or preferable.
by llimllib | 2025-10-09 20:02:17+00:00
I should have been more specific, I tested with:

`rm -rf node_modules && docker run --rm -ti -v $PWD:/app node:20.19.0-alpine3.20 sh -c "cd /app && time npm i"`

So an overlay FS (if I'm understanding you/the OP correctly), not the VM's disk
by dismalaf | 2025-10-09 20:02:54+00:00
> let those accused respond.

Literally all we've heard so far is from the other side...

> If they have factual evidence, they need to bring the matter to a court

I'd be surprised if they aren't. This post feels very much like the amount of disclosure a lawyer would recommend to reassure stakeholders.

> rules of engagement that doesn't put rich corporations atop the whole ecosystem

Right now the only thing stopping us all from being held hostage by rogue maintainers is a rich corporation.
by ninalanyon | 2025-10-09 20:02:58+00:00
> The government being this sloppy at getting accents right is surprising, I would expect them to value accuracy

That tells me you're German, I didn't even need to see the ä and ß.

Even in the UK I encounter websites that won't accept my Norwegian address because it begins with Å. English speaking countries generally are pretty bad at this sort of thing.
by churchill | 2025-10-09 20:03:06+00:00
>could

More like WILL. It's the nature of all empires, first to grow, and then to shrink. But, the empire's mechanism of repression won't suddenly become humane and forget all its tools and tactics for torture, rape, extralegal imprisonment, etc. As the shrinking empire causes friction at home, those same techniques will be unleashed to suppress dissenters.

Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction doesn't save you from this either, because you can still group your red-blooded countrymen into those brackets arbitrarily once you have plenary powers.
by aborsy | 2025-10-09 20:03:12+00:00
Self hosting is much more accessible today. The security issue has not been solved yet though. How do you make available your services to other people?

People won’t install VPNs. They are usually okay with authenticating to a web server, so you can put authentication with something like Authentik in front of your reverse proxy. But can you configure this front end security correctly and patch it, and are you sure it doesn’t have easy zero days?
by InTheArena | 2025-10-09 20:03:24+00:00
Really? Please provide a decline in net dollars (excluding projected drawdowns) that demonstrates this point.

On a dollar-by-dollar basis, regardless of economic station, _every_ American has seen a combined discretionary + non-discretionary increase in benefits since 1980. The group that is less advantaged is the upper-middle class, which has seen relative stagnation.
by MrTurvey | 2025-10-09 20:04:06+00:00
Hey everyone!

Im @turvsec on X, I’ve been in infosec for over 10 years and ive always loved finding new tools to use in this space. But, I struggle to find new tools.. and research.

So I built Pentest List. It's a curated hub for the best and newest tools and content in infosec.
by neom | 2025-10-09 20:04:28+00:00
https://bsky.app/profile/mark-bray.bsky.social/post/3m2ptssp...

Not to cast doubt on the guy, just it seems weird. Would have expected the airline to provide a bit more colour, it's a very open ended post for how serious the subject matter could be.

This article is a bit better imo: https://archive.ph/jsSKY
by LudwigNagasena | 2025-10-09 20:04:42+00:00
It's a general heuristic for any task.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/nova/latest/userguide/fine-tune-...

> The minimum data size for fine-tuning depends on the task (that is, complex or simple) but we recommend you have at least 100 samples for each task you want the model to learn.

https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/supervised-fine-tuni...

> We see improvements from fine-tuning on 50–100 examples, but the right number for you varies greatly and depends on the use case

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11140272/

> Model thresholds indicate points of diminishing marginal return from increased training data set sample size measured by the number of sentences, with point estimates ranging from 439 sentences for RoBERTa_large to 527 sentences for GPT-2_large.

> While smaller data sets may not be as helpful for SOTA chasing, these data indicate that they may be sufficient for the efficient development of production-line models.
by rossant | 2025-10-09 20:04:48+00:00
That's huge. Roberson was scheduled to be executed in a week. Almost all hope was lost. He would have been the first person executed on the basis of shaken baby syndrome, which is said to be "junk science". Now, he might get a new trial.

- Some context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402

- Reddit AMA (please read the lawyer's responses to all the concerns folks have had about this complex case): https://www.reddit.com/r/texas/comments/1nttmtu/my_client_ro...
by commandlinefan | 2025-10-09 20:04:53+00:00
How high can the debt go before it can't go any higher? What happens when the interest payments themselves are higher than annual revenue? What happens when the interest payments are higher than the entire GDP so that even a theoretical 100% tax rate still wouldn't pay it? I feel like this _has_ to crash at some point, but I would have thought we would have hit that point by now. I know what would happen if my own interest debt overtook my own income, but I'm not a government.
by mdip | 2025-10-09 20:05:15+00:00
I believe this has a lot to do with the problem in my area. We have a bunch of disconnected sidewalks almost everywhere. They've started connecting them. There's more pedestrian traffic at some lights at some times of the day but it's nowhere near consistent.

Driving, especially during commute, becomes an exercise of muscle memory for most of us. We are used to what we see. All year long I might encounter a pedestrian at my most commonly encountered intersections once a year. Most drivers are on auto-pilot, they're used to looking for cars, if people aren't abundantly obvious, they're missed.

They've started connecting sidewalks around me. Foot traffic has tripled as a result. Still, that means I encounter a pedestrian three times a year? That's not going to improve exposure enough to make anyone specifically look any more frequently. It's going to just create more opportunities for people to get hit. And that's what's happened.
by comrade1234 | 2025-10-09 20:05:37+00:00
The USA government can't even handle ü. I was filling out a simple form to replace my damaged passport. I live in Zürich but it couldn't handle the umlaut. I never know what to do in this situation - do I use 'ue' instead, which is most common in Europe, or do I just use 'u' which is wrong but usually works in America. I didn't even bother checking with 'ue' and just went with 'u'

Ü isn't even a special character or utf-8 - ü is part of ascii. How does this even fail? Is their database a 7-bit database?
by BoredPositron | 2025-10-09 20:05:39+00:00
You have the burden of proof completely backward. It's not my job to argue against your "belief." You made the claim, so you're the one who has to provide something to back it up.

And trying to make this about my supposed "resentment" is a classic deflection. It's way easier to guess at my motives than to actually defend your own argument. You literally described your own confirmation bias ("I see a very clear pattern"). I'm not the one arguing based on feelings here.

Believe what you want. Speaking of feelings the only feeling I have about omarchy is that it's a bit performative with the over ricing but that's mainly about visual taste and personally I am for less animations in my wm/de but hey whatever floats your boat.

We're done here unless you have something more than just your feelings to bring to the table. I checked the discord just for fun and found about 40 framework related posts with sort of an intention to buy. What a humongous amount of sales for a company like framework...
by masklinn | 2025-10-09 20:05:55+00:00
One thing to note tho is that they take character sets, as long as they encounter characters in the specified set they will keep stripping. Lots of people think if you give it a string it will remove that string.

That feature was added in 3.9 with the addition of `removeprefix` and `removesuffix`.

Sadly,

1. unlike Rust's version they provide no way of knowing whether they stripped things out

2. unlike startswith/endswith they do not take tuples of prefixes/suffixes
by s4mbh4 | 2025-10-09 20:06:03+00:00
FYI: Unlike what you expect: bahncard50 only gives you a 50% discount on the 'flex price' and not the 'sparpreies' class of price(there it's still 25%). Flex adds some cancellation and other conveniences but is generally more expensive.

Thank you for reminding me to cancel my bahn card.
by SeanAnderson | 2025-10-09 20:06:30+00:00
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/obra/dotfiles/6e088092406c... contains the following entry:

"- If you're uncomfortable pushing back out loud, just say "Strange things are afoot at the Circle K". I'll know what you mean"

Most of the rules seem rationale. This one really stands out as abnormal. Anyone have any idea why the engineer would have felt compelled to add this rule?

This is from https://blog.fsck.com/2025/10/05/how-im-using-coding-agents-... mentioned in another comment
by hadlock | 2025-10-09 20:06:38+00:00
One of the really big things that nobody talks about is the invention of the "mit cheetah actuator" which was invented in (well, the paper was published) in 2017, and commercial copies became freely availble in ~2020 online for about $350-400. Xaiomi and other companies now manufacture improved, updated actuators. They are roughly shaped like a hockey puck 1.5-2.5x upscaled. These are 1) very high torque for their size and weight and 2) offer "springback" similar to human joints. Not very useful for industrial welding machines putting cars together, but for walking robots, it reduces instantaneous strain and literally puts a "spring" in their step. This allowed robots to go from being stepper motor driven (which are huge, heavy), to much more compact, which greatly improves performance, battery life, and they can actually fit in human homes etc etc
by ctoth | 2025-10-09 20:06:52+00:00
So the attacker turns logging off (was log file validation enabled? usually isn't in Terraform ) which does not fire an alert because there is no alerting. Then does their bad stuff ... Then modifies the logs (which are in an S3 bucket on the compromised account, remember!) Then they turn logging on? The whole point is alerts go outside AWS. They go to like, your inbox or pagerduty or whatever. If they had no alerts then what use are their logs, which could have been modified? Do you think they set up cross-account logging or had enable_log_file_validation set to true?