MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zimpenfish | 2025-11-08 10:09:31+00:00
> This US-government provided table of average SAT scores in the United States in 2023

If you look at their source[0], there's no information about how they controlled for confounders (because it's impossible as they acknowledge[1].)

There's a strong correlation between "education of parents" and "SAT score"[2] which implies that family wealth is a strong contribution to a child's SAT score (something we all know anyway); that's also backed up by [3].

(I'd suggest that [4] also contributes to the positive correlation between familial wealth and test scores but perhaps in a more oblique "the higher goals are aimed at by kids who have the backing to contemplate them because of family support structure, tutoring, ability to pay for the degree(s), etc." way.)

(Similarly for [5], I suppose - there's a distinct correlation between what I'd say was "perceived difficulty of major" and the mean SAT scores. Again probably down to familial wealth, support, tutoring, etc.)

Someone who's an actual statistician would probably rip this apart much more thoroughly and with more rigour than I, of course.

[0] https://reports.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/2023-total-group-...

[1] "Relationships between test scores and other background or Evidence-Based Reading and Writing (ERW) and Math contextual factors are complex and interdependent. Caution is sections of each assessment in the SAT Suite: warranted when using scores to compare or evaluate teachers, schools, districts, or states, because of differences in participation and test taker populations."

[2] Bottom of page 4: "Highest Level of Parental Education"

[3] Bottom of page 5: "Median Family Income"

[4] Bottom of page 8: "Degree-Level Goal"

[5] Top of page 8: "Intended College Major"
by foldr | 2025-11-08 10:10:05+00:00
How are you getting $166k take home for a $200 salary? If I use one of those online tax calculator things for New York, I get a take home of $135,000 from $200k. Ok, so let’s try a lower tax state that still has a lot of economic opportunity. For Texas I get $150,000 take home. Once you start adding on the costs associated in the US with having a serious medical condition, it’s far from clear that you’re going to be saving a lot of money from lower taxes. You’ll save a bit if you stay healthy and pay a lot more if you don’t.
by vladvasiliu | 2025-11-08 10:10:53+00:00
Indeed. But some are easier to change than others. I switched my e-mail provider, and it took all of five minutes to launch the copy of my data. Since I kept the same domain, everyone sending me e-mails didn't notice anything.

With Apple's approach, I'd have to go through each account and move it from something@icloud to something@new-domain.

However, for people who don't want to mess around with custom domain names and e-mail providers, apple's approach is very practical. You just need to tell it to "hide your email" when you register somewhere and you're good to go.
by imiric | 2025-11-08 10:12:21+00:00
You make several good points.

I would push back on the idea that alien civilizations might somehow be more enlightened so as to avoid internal conflict altogether. Unless they were artificially designed by a creator who explicitly factored out these traits, they likely also evolved from primitive beginnings. If we know anything from our single sample of living organisms is that competition and survival play a key role in driving evolution. Even if their planet had ample resources for everyone—which can also be said about Earth—those resources might not be accessible to everyone equally. This would inevitably lead to hoarding, tribalism, and conflicts. Besides, physical resources aren't the only cause for conflict. If they're social creatures, relationships, hierarchies, and politics also play a role.

So all of these things would be embedded in their organisms even after they've evolved to a technological civilization, just like they are in ours. Therefore it is not difficult to imagine that they would also struggle to balance their use of technology with their nature to distrust each other. I don't think this is a human-centrist viewpoint, but one we observe from nature itself. However limited that may be, it's the only place we can draw any kind of conclusions from. Thinking otherwise is interesting, but the realm of science fiction.
by thomasmg | 2025-11-08 10:13:01+00:00
I agree security issues are often hyped nowadays. I think this is often due to two factors: (A) security researches get more money if they can convince people a CVE is worse. So of course they make it sound extremely bad. (B) security "review" teams in software companies do the least amount of work, and so it's just a binary "is a dependency with a vulnerability used yes/no" and then force the engineering team to update the dependency, even thought its useless. I have seen (was involved) in a number of such cases. This is wasting a lot of time. Long term, this can mean the engineering team will try to reduce the dependencies, which is not the worst of outcomes.
by righthand | 2025-11-08 10:13:42+00:00
If you want to do this kind of thing but don’t like the looks of this indepth tutorial, I highly reccomend installing Bastille FreeBSD instead and let the bastille tooling do the heavy lifting of managing zpool cloning and what not. Their getting started tutorial should get you 90% of the way there and has Docker like tooling. [0]

Also found this self host on a Raspberry Pi helpful.[1]

[0] https://bastillebsd.org/getting-started/

[1] https://www.sharpwriting.net/project/bastille-jail-managemen...
by yetanotherjosh | 2025-11-08 10:13:52+00:00
So you can get native behaviors when it’s critical. Like share sheets, push and many other critical features that only apps get even if the bulk of the experience can be done in a webview. This is because mobile OS platforms choose not to make these available to web apps, because app store profits are better for them than an open ecosystem where sites can do the same things as apps.
by jdblair | 2025-11-08 10:17:22+00:00
In the 90s my dad turned into an organic lawn grower. He was always suspicious of Chemlawn but he used the standard recommended treatment of granulated fertilizer and herbicides. Then he had a revelation about root and soil health, and phosphorus pollution, and he never looked back. The result isn’t the “golf course” monoculture of his neighbors, but its good.
by inavida | 2025-11-08 10:18:39+00:00
I had in mind the datasets of Easy2Hard-Bench that the study tested against: math competitions, math word problems, programming, chess puzzles, science QA, and commonsense reasoning.

The last problem like this that I myself asked an LLM to solve was to find tax and base price of items on an invoice given total price and tax rates. I couldn't make sense of the answer, but asking the LLM questions made me realize that I had framed the problem badly, and moreso that I didn't know how to ask. (Though the process also triggered a surprising ability of my own to dredge up and actually apply basic algebra.) I'm sure it's that I'm still learning what and how to ask.
by hdgvhicv | 2025-11-08 10:18:40+00:00
So no social life for kids then?

It’s not 1995 any more. My 13 year old gets social contact doing things like playing Minecraft with people from school, organised via WhatsApp with group chats and then yelling about diamond swords and lava chickens or whatever.

There’s then the simple reality that most schools require smartphones for things like homework. It’s set on devices you can only access via an app. Ok maybe you could run some form of android emulator and maybe that works and maybe they can’t do the homework on the bus on the way home and instead can just stare out of the window, but then the teachers tell them to do something in class.

Then once they leave home at 18 and get introduced to something which has been banned yet is completely normal, they go overboard anyway.
by westurner | 2025-11-08 10:18:44+00:00
It is also possible to make water filters and air filters out of graphene layers with one or more pore sizes.

The pore size of graphene can be varied parametrically.

Water filters and air filters and superconducting electronic computers can be made by stacking layers of graphene.

Some products made out of graphene are compostable. Other forms of carbon are considered soil amendments.

Does or would passive distillation allow some of the waste sediment to settle?

Graphene can be added to concrete to make it stronger.

Could the graphene in water from next generation graphene-based semiconductor and superconductor production be used as a concrete additive?
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-11-08 10:20:25+00:00
If China has 1mm AI workers, for the U.S. to match that, only 0.3% of its population would need to be AI workers.

If the U.S. wanted to catch up, they could have, for 1 year, increase their H1B immigration quota to 800k instead of 80k, last year (the well is probably too poisoned under the current administration), for AI workers and they would have exceeded China’s number in a year, because I suspect a lot of those 1mm Chinese AI workers would have been the first to take advantage.

But also, since the U.S. recruiter (or at least used to), from the entire world and only a handful of China’s workers are immigrants, the US would get (or used to get) the best of the best in the entire world, so they wouldn’t even need to match China.

Heck, thanks to having recruited the best of the best fork the entire world for the past few decades the U.S. is ahead, or at least on equal footing even with this tiny fraction of people.
by sentomk | 2025-11-08 10:20:44+00:00
This is my first time posting about my open-source project here — it’s called Patternia, a header-only compile-time pattern-matching DSL for modern C++.

It provides a clean and expressive syntax for writing match expressions, all evaluated entirely at compile time with zero runtime overhead.

I’d love to hear your feedback — especially on performance, syntax feel, and any compiler corner cases you might find.

More updates are coming soon as I keep tuning and polishing the internal.
by oldestofsports | 2025-11-08 10:20:58+00:00
Sorry but you must have read with your eyes closed. Here’s a quote from the HTMX website:

”After all, both htmx and hyperscript are built in JavaScript. We couldn’t have created these libraries without JavaScript, which, whatever else one might say, has the great virtue of being there.

And we even go so far as to recommend using JavaScript for front-end scripting needs in a hypermedia-driven application, so long as you script in a hypermedia-friendly way.

Further, we wouldn’t steer someone away from using JavaScript (or TypeScript) on the server side for a hypermedia-driven application, if that language is the best option for your team. As we said earlier, JavaScript now has multiple excellent server-side runtimes and many excellent server-side libraries available.”

https://htmx.org/essays/hypermedia-on-whatever-youd-like/
by anonym29 | 2025-11-08 10:21:13+00:00
Cerebras offers a $50/mo and $200/mo "Cerebras Code" subscription for token limits way above what you could get for the same price in PAYG API credits. https://www.cerebras.ai/code

Up until recently, this plan only offered Qwen3-Coder-480B, which was decent for the price and speed you got tokens at, but doesn't hold a candle to GLM 4.6.

So while they're not the cheapest PAYG GLM 4.6 provider, they are the fastest, and if you make heavy use their monthly subscription plan, then they're also the cheapest per token.

Note: I am neither affiliated with nor sponsored by Cerebras, I'm just a huge nerd who loves their commercial offerings so much that I can't help but gush about them.
by invaliduser | 2025-11-08 10:21:23+00:00
In the early 2000s the video field was flooded with fast paced releases of new codecs and new codecs versions, and there was codecs implementation to downloads right and left, and people were bundling them and releasing them with names sounding like a warez group. It was a little crazy to watch a video at the time.

This was mitigated by vlc and mplayer, two video players that integrated most codecs as fast as they could, and it was a breath of fresh air. You just started them and any video would play, no codec issue anymore. MPlayer has not been updated for some times, and traction was lost, but VLC, although looking a bit old on the UI-side (and a little buggy on ARM Windows) is still here and is solid when someone just wants to watch a video on any platform.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-11-08 10:23:39+00:00
Yup. It’s called “metamerism.”

With most paints, the medium used can affect color, as well as aging. I used to use Ph Martin watercolor dyes, and they were notorious for fading after a relatively short time. The illustrations that I colored with them, are now monochrome. I’m sure they’re better, now. Pigment science has come a long way. Acrylic was always a lot longer-lasting.

Also, context matters. Our perception changes, based on surrounding colors. There’s a bunch of optical illusions that leverage this.

But I think this is kind of a cool project.
by eviks | 2025-11-08 10:24:34+00:00
> This is such a niche use case that it will never happen.

How do you square this with the simple fact that it has already happened? And just as simple of a forecast: it will continue to happen.

> Also many programmers will not want to use the unicode arrow instead of ->, thats a personal choice and nothing else.

So what? Other programmers will.

But I don't get your general point - are you saying that the only change worth doing is the one that has happened globally in the past? Like, currently some popular languages support "unicode letter" for identifiers, which means it includes various nonsense like dead languages from thousands of years ago (but doesn't include much more used stuff just because the designers outsourced all their thinking to some Unicode Annex). Do you want to remove all that for consistenty with the fact that no one will ever use those symbols in function names?

> It would also be fatal to retrofit old languages like this since it would just create confusion for little benefit.

Could you link to the death certificate of the old language called C since this compiles despite no one having 𓀄𓀂 in their keyboard layout

#include <stdio.h> int main() { int var𓀄𓀂 = 2; printf("%d\n", var𓀄𓀂 ); return 0; }

Are you confused to death?
by vkastei | 2025-11-08 10:24:42+00:00
After countless hours of coding applications with no real value, I thought about how I could solve the problem of new entrepreneurs being motivated to start something but out of ideas. So why not build a tool that does exactly that for others? aibizgen turns your skills, budget, and time into a complete, ready-to-launch business plan in under 5 minutes. Generate: - A catchy name - Step-by-step launch guide (tools, time, cost) - Realistic revenue path ($500 → $10K in 6 months) - Market validation, risks, and scaling plan

100% free to try

Open for feedback!
by dv_dt | 2025-11-08 10:25:26+00:00
One thing I'd mention is consider putting aside maximizing utility as a goal. Increasing utility is sufficient, and even then, there can be times in your life to ignore utility and relax or to learn more about the world. In the long run this puts yourself in a position to increase utility even more, but in the moment it wont be clear if it will lead anywhere and its beneficial to allow that space. I find that people (myself included) get blinded to the possibilities if they're overly focused on an optimizing mindset
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-11-08 10:25:26+00:00
Somewhat similar over here in Chattanooga (aka "Gig City"): our city's Electric Power Board has offered synchronous gig fiber for $75/month, a 300mbps "slower option" for $58/month — it's plenty fast — or 25gbps for $300/month... to all electric customers [0].

Of course our lobbied state congress critters passed a law to restrict this, so EPB can only offer internet to a limited geographic area (under the auspices of network monitoring of power delivery) — wouldn't want their Comcast-bros to have any competition! Certain apartment complexes are exempted, which prevents you from using EPB.

Wish more jurisdictions were even allowed to do this; wish politicians weren't such whores.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPB
by foldr | 2025-11-08 10:26:36+00:00
> One of the major beliefs of this view is that LLMs are essentially impossible because there's not enough information in language to learn it unless you have a special purpose language-learning module built into the brain by evolution. This is Chomsky's "poverty of the stimulus" argument

The argument is that there is not enough information available to a child to do this. So even if we grant the dubious premise that LLMs have learned to speak languages in a manner analogous to humans, they are not a counterexample to Chomsky’s poverty of the stimulus argument because they have been trained on a vast array of linguistic data that is not available within a single human childhood.

If you want to better understand Chomsky’s position, it’s easiest to do so in relation to other animals. Why are other intelligent animals not able to learn human languages? The rather unsurprising answer, in Chomsky’s view, is that humans have a built-in linguistic capacity, rather in the way that e.g. bats have a built in capacity for echolocation. The claim that bats have a built-in capacity for echolocation is not refuted by the existence of sonar. Likewise, our ability to construct machines that mimic some aspects of human linguistic capacity does not automatically refute the hypothesis that this is a specific human capacity absent in other animals.

Imagine if sonar engineers were constantly shitting on chiropterologists because their silly theory of bats having evolved a capacity for echolocation has now been refuted by human-constructed sonar arrays. The argument makes so little sense that it’s difficult to even imagine the scenario. But the argument against Chomsky from LLMs doesn’t really make any more sense, on reflection.

Chomsky hasn’t helped his case in recent years by tacking his name on some dumb articles about LLMs that he didn’t actually write. (A warning to us all that retirement is a good idea.) So I don’t blame people who are excited about LLMs for seeing him as a bit of rube, but the supposed conflict between Chomsky and LLMs is entirely artificial. Chomsky is (was) trying to do cognitive science. People experimenting with LLMs are not, on the other hand, making any serious effort to study how humans acquire language, and so have very little of substance to argue with Chomsky about. They are just taking opportunistic pot shots at a Big Name because it’s a good way to get attention.

For the record, Chomsky himself has never made any very specific claims about a dedicated module in the brain or about the evolutionary origins of human linguistic capacity (except for some skeptical comments on it being a gradual adaptation).
by IshKebab | 2025-11-08 10:28:30+00:00
It's useful as a distro-agnostic distribution method. CMake is also installable like this despite having nothing to do with Python.

Or I should say it was useful as a distribution method, because most people had Python already available. Since most distros now don't allow you to install stuff outside a venv you need uv to install things (via `uv tool install`) and we're not yet at the point where most people already have uv installed.
by xmprt | 2025-11-08 10:29:42+00:00
You kind of just proved my point. If they want attention to detail and good performance then writing native is probably better. The simplicity that I was referring to was the number of views that need to be implemented. A cross platform UI framework would help if there were hundreds of views that needed to be built consistently but for the number of views in Snapchat, I think native implementations would probably be faster and cheaper.

As for the "success of Snap could be attributed to how pixel perfect the app is". I think the success of Snap can be attributed to a lot of things. But if you took a look at how unoptimized the Android experience was in 2017 when it was taking off I don't know how you could call it pixel perfect.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-11-08 10:29:52+00:00
Ah yes, so one candidate for the Democratic primary (she isn’t even a Dem primary winner yet) for one of 434 Congressional seats may have a position that on the edge might be slightly more “left wing” on one issue in one of the more right wing Western European nations, is clearly evidence that the U.S. is no longer far to Europe’s right…

To be fair, setting aside my snark, I don’t disagree with you. The real problem here is simply the fact that the single axis left-right political framework is insufficient to capture even the simplest democracy in the world right now.

And the US has made huge leaps to the left on some axes, but is still far to the right of the European center on many other axes.
by 59nadir | 2025-11-08 10:29:59+00:00
Error data being returned instead of just error codes doesn't require allocation at all, and never would, unless the specific unions that you're returning require as much. Zig already has tagged unions with a tag field and associated payload, that is exactly what you would return. The overhead isn't remarkably worse than the cost of modifying the value someone passed in to "Fill this in in case of errors" (which is what you have to do now in Zig).
by klondike_klive | 2025-11-08 10:30:48+00:00
It used to be one of my favourite sites for weird DIY stuff. At some point in the mid 2010s I guess ad revenue tanked and social media killed their business model, and it made sense to cash in on their underground zine-y brand to hawk affiliate links, sponsored content, e-courses and clickbait. Sad but understandable. Around the same time I found the same vibe in other disparate places: The Cracked podcast (I still enjoy Jason Pargin's stuff) listening to Mark Frauenfelder's Cool Tools podcast, which is now called Recommendo, which carries on the affiliate link stuff and scratches that gadget itch. And the DIY and tinkering vibe is a huge part of HN.
by Earw0rm | 2025-11-08 10:32:04+00:00
The bigger difference is that Apple isn't just checking for malware, it's checking for conformance with various APIs, manifest requirements and so on. Not as strict as the iOS App Store, maybe, but it will refuse to notarize if it detects use of unsanctioned API calls.

You don't even need signing for Microsoft's system to do what it does - it can operate on unsigned code, it's all hash based.
by mattrighetti | 2025-11-08 10:32:13+00:00
WASM is not needed.

The author explicitly states that he likes to write Go and that’s why he picked it in this example, which in my opinion makes this article more interesting. The main benefit is that the 'local server' within the service worker mimics the 'real server,' which effectively means you only have to write the code once.

But I generally agree that a 10MB download on first load is not something that I’d be happy to serve to users, especially to those who are using their mobile network.
by flohofwoe | 2025-11-08 10:32:54+00:00
> It has something unique: a borrow checker.

Rust's borrow checker isn't unique either but was inspired by Cylone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_(programming_language)

IMHO a programming language doesn't need a single USP, it just needs to include good existing ideas and (more importantly) exclude bad existing ideas (of course what's actually a good and bad idea is highly subjective, that's why we need many programming languages, not few).
by bjackman | 2025-11-08 10:33:23+00:00
Yeah that's a good point, I don't call that confidential compute though it's a different use case.

CoCo = protecting consumer data from the industry. DRM = protecting industry bullshit from the consumer.

TBF my understanding is that in the DRM usecases they achieve actual security by squeezing the TCB into a single die. And I think if anyone tries, they generally still always get pwned by physical attackers even though it's supposedly in scope for the threat model.