MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by apical_dendrite | 2025-11-24 04:54:32+00:00
If you look at the sources for the $100-200 figure, she's looking at a particular form of humanitarian aid - community-based therapeutic care for children with severe acute malnutrition. There are other models like inpatient programs that are more expensive, but also reach fewer children, and then if you're supporting people who don't have severe acute malnutrition it's presumably much less expensive because you don't have to include the healthcare costs.

If you look at the papers that are being cited, these programs are incredibly effective:

> A total of 328 patient cards/records of children treated in the programs were reviewed; out of which 306 (157 CTC and 149 TFC) were traced back to their households to interview their caretakers. The cure rate in TFC was 95.36% compared to 94.30% in CTC. The death rate in TFC was 0% and in CTC 1.2%. The mean cost per child treated was $284.56 in TFC and $134.88 in CTC.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1478-7547-10-4

If you look at what they mean by CTC program, it's ongoing support in addition to the treatment for acute malnutrition, so it's not just throwing a child back into the same environment:

> CTC programs use decentralized networks of outpatient treatment sites (usually located at existing primary health-care facilities), small inpatient units (usually located in existing local hospital facilities), and large numbers of community-based volunteers to provide case detection and some follow-up of patients in their home environments. Patients with severe malnutrition, with good appetite, and without medical complications are treated in an outpatient therapeutic program (OTP) that provides ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) and medicines to treat simple medical conditions. The food and medicines are taken at home, and the patient attends an OTP site weekly or fortnightly for monitoring and resupply.

In terms of overhead, the overhead for the organization providing care is already accounted for in the $100-200 figure, including the costs of managing the program from the capital. Presumably Save The Children takes a chunk of the grant for its own overhead but I believe these costs are typically capped by the US government at something like 10%. Similarly, USAID has its own costs but I'm not sure if those are accounted for in the $168m line item or if they're accounted for elsewhere.

So, sure, Nichols' paper is using a cost estimate that's based on specific types of programs and generalizing that. Given the number of countries and organizations involved, I'm not sure how much more accurate you could get.

But your cynicism is also pretty unfounded. The sources take into account the organization's overhead, the logistics of reaching remote areas (the Ethiopia paper points out that much of the overhead goes to vehicle rental and gives a distribution of patients by how far they have to walk to get to the treatment center). It accounts for ongoing vs acute care.

So I wouldn't take 168,000 number especially seriously - and I would note that the author adds some very large error bars - but I also wouldn't dismiss it as a complete fiction.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-24 04:54:54+00:00
The US is pretty average I'd say, not an outlier at all.

It's obvious nowhere near e.g. Switzerland or Singapore, for example.

But then on the other hand, people obey the rules a ton more than in places like Brazil or India.

Just as many foreigners are shocked at how polite and orderly Americans are, compared to back home.

The world is a vast and diverse place.
by lazylizard | 2025-11-24 04:55:04+00:00
on the other hand. gdp is ~200 days of work. 1 day is 0.5% gdp. 1 hour (assuming 8hr day) is 0.06% gdp. gdp/capita is nearly us$90k. 1hr of work is >us$5k!

it might be more cost effective to expand public transport to transport every singaporean to where he/she needs to be on time, than to make them wait..
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-11-24 04:56:29+00:00
> Its compilation is slow. I mean SLOW. Slower than C++. I know over years Rust became several times faster, but objectively we need it to be two orders of magnitude faster, not just two times.

This is not objective. You're entitled to your opinion, but I at least am fine with compile times the way they are. For it to be objective, it would have to be something that is true independent of your or my opinion, but ultimately this is a subjective matter.

> Memory safety is not that sacred. In fact, for many applications malfunctioning is better than crashing — particulary in the embedded world where Rust wants to be present. You cannot get 99.999% reliability with Rust — it crashes all the time.

This is a completely baseless assertion; Rust does not "crash all the time". If a programmer chooses to crash rather than keep going when the program is in an unforseen state, that is his choice, not something the language requires. Presumably that programmer feels that crashing is beneficial (because it helps to make bugs obvious sooner), but you aren't required to do the same.
by boroboro4 | 2025-11-24 04:56:35+00:00
Probably if you use a lot of Arc<Mutex<Box<T>>> languages with proper runtime (like Go or Java) are gonna be more performant, in the end they are built with those abstractions in mind. So the question isn’t only how much the nature of the problem it is, but also how common the problem is, and is rust a correct way to solve this problem.
by charcircuit | 2025-11-24 04:57:07+00:00
>but after it was first set up

Your link is talking about work Baran did before ARPANET was created. The timeline doesn't back your point. And when ARPANET was created after Baran's work with Rand:

>Wired: The myth of the Arpanet – which still persists – is that it was developed to withstand nuclear strikes. That's wrong, isn't it?

>Paul Baran: Yes. Bob Taylor1 had a couple of computer terminals speaking to different machines, and his idea was to have some way of having a terminal speak to any of them and have a network. That's really the origin of the Arpanet. The method used to connect things together was an open issue for a time.
by com2kid | 2025-11-24 04:57:32+00:00
My team once encountered a bug that was due to a supplier misstating the delay timing needed for a memory chip.

The timings we had in place worked, for most chips, but they failed for a small % of chips in the field. The failure was always exactly identical, the same memory address for corrupted, so it looked exactly like an invalid pointer access.

It took multiple engineers months of investigating to finally track down the root cause.
by cyrusradfar | 2025-11-24 04:57:51+00:00
Super fascinating project. I'm very interested in this. I truly hate using the tools by hand and as a programmer, this feels waaaay more intuitive. That said, when reviewing the gear video, I think understanding to start with the gear primitive would require giving the libraries a good once over as I wouldn't have assumed those existed.

Can imagine more and more forms being built in as the community goes.

kudos!
by Gud | 2025-11-24 04:58:06+00:00
You are making a lot of assertions. Meanwhile, I travel globally for work and my preferred mode of transportation is walking and public transport(ideally tram).

There are BIG DIFFERENCES between how well different cities handle this. There is no "equilibrium", only wise(or unwise) governance.

How do you explain Luxembourg? They've had free public transport for 5 years now.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2025-11-24 04:58:25+00:00
Looks like a "visual thinker":

https://www.eoas.ubc.ca/courses/atsc113/snow/met_concepts/07...

His other research

had involved discovering the mechanism of ICE CRYSTAL GROWTH HABIT CHANGE, an outstanding problem for more than 50 years in cloud physics that is closely related to the “thousands’ variations” in snowflakes.
by bruce511 | 2025-11-24 05:00:09+00:00
It'll vary by location, but typically credit scores are a measure of -credit- management, not -money- management.

So people who are good at managing money, who tend to avoid credit, don't get a chance to demonstrate good -credit- management and hence end up with a low score.

This is one reason why getting a credit card, using it, and then paying it off in full every month is a valuable thing to do.

So for all the good money managers out there, be even smarter - build a good credit management history as a side effect of your good money management. That'll pay off in the long run.
by julianlam | 2025-11-24 05:00:34+00:00
Thank you so much for commenting.

As a parent with a child with mild-to-moderate hearing loss it is heartening to know that the hearing aid technology is progressing, and progressing well!

He's been using a pair of Phonak Skys since infancy, and while they can be tuned by the audiologist I sometimes wonder what it'll be like if and when he gets his next pair.
by captainkrtek | 2025-11-24 05:00:50+00:00
I've struggled throughout my life with anxiety, ADHD, and bouts of depression.

I've done years of therapy, and use some medication to help with my ADHD. I will say though, singlehandedly, the best (and hardest) thing I've had to do is fight my own phone/internet/computer usage.

I grew up with computers and still work professionally with them day to day, but have made a serious effort in the last year to cut down my usage in an extreme manner:

- Using a 'brick' device to control which apps work on my phone, requiring I physically tap my phone to the brick to lock/unlock the restricted mode. This is always on.

- Blocking tons of sites via multiple means (iOS screen time, eero network profiles)

- Turning my iPhone into a very very basic phone: in "bricked" mode, which I will find myself using for continuous days at a time, I can only use: gmail, photos, notes, weather, maps, spotify, telephone, imessage. No news, no internet browsing, no social media.

- I've deleted all social media accounts (except LinkedIn, but this too is blocked on my phone).

From all of this, the initial realization was, "wow, I'm bored..", which is hard at first to sit with as a feeling, when normally my first instinct to that feeling was "let's open some app/youtube/etc." Then you slowly find positive things creeping in to occupy that boredom time: reading, calling friends/family, getting chores done, etc. And for anything "restricted" that I can't do on my phone, I largely can do on my computer (though I still block sites like reddit, youtube). But this is much healthier as I'm much less likely to pick up my laptop for hours on end, vs. opening my phone at every moment I'm bored.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-24 05:01:30+00:00
> the initial invasion of Crimea by Russia in 2014 and Israel's strikes on Iran this year may count - both were closely aligned to rising domestic pressure on the leaders at the time

I don't know enough about what prefaced Putin's moves into Crimea and Ukraine larger. I'd describe Israel's recent wars as being closer to a WWI-esque powderkeg strike inasmuch as without the October 7 attack, none of this would have happened (when and how it did).

What's unique, here, is that it's practically entirely domestic elements which are driving Trump into Venezuela. I can think of historical examples. But they're all from the 19th century or classical history.
by randallsquared | 2025-11-24 05:03:29+00:00
Have you tried that? I gave up on hosting my own email server seven or eight years ago, after it became clear that there would be an endless fight with various entities to accept my mail. Hosting a webserver without the expectation that you'll need some high powered DDOS defense seems naive, in the current day, and good luck doing that with a server or two.
by forgotoldacc | 2025-11-24 05:05:19+00:00
> Generally, if they were worth fixing - they would have been fixed.

???

Basically any major software product accumulates a few issues over time. There's always a "we can fix that later" mindset and it all piles up. MacOS and Windows are both buggy messes. I think I speak for the vast majority of people when I say that I'd prefer they have a fix-it year and just get rid of all the issues instead of trying to rush new features out the door.

Maybe rushing out features is good for more money now, but someday there'll be a straw that breaks the camel's back and they'll need to devote a lot of time to fix things or their products will be so bad that people will move to other options.
by heljakka | 2025-11-24 05:05:24+00:00
I can confirm this after hundreds of talks about the topic over the last 2 years. 90% of cases are simply not high-volume or high-stakes enough for the devs to care enough. I'm a founder of an evaluation automation startup, and our challenge is spotting teams right as their usage starts to grow and quality issues are about to escalate. Since that’s tough, we're trying to make the getting-to-first-evals so simple that teams can start building the mental models before things get out of hand.
by godelski | 2025-11-24 05:06:01+00:00
I understand that interpretation but it's different from what I meant.

The difference may be in two different cavemen. One throws his spear on intuition alone. The other is thinking about the speed he throws, how the animal moves, the wind, and so on. There is a formulation, though not as robust as you'd see in a physics book.

> the definition of what "using" maths is then it can apply to everything

In a sense yes.

Math is a language, or more accurately a class of languages. If you're formulating your toilet activities, then it might be math. But as you might gather, there's nuance here.

I quoted Poincaré in another comment but I'll repeat here as I think it may help reduce confusion (though may add more)

Math is not the study of numbers, but the relationships between them.

Or as the category people say "the study of dots and arrows". Anything can be a dot, but you need the arrows
by jcelerier | 2025-11-24 05:06:22+00:00
a 4.5k$ M4 Max barely competes with an entry-level laptop with a 4060 which will be around ~1K in FPS in cyberpunk given the same settings. For AI it's even worse - on NVidia hardware you're getting double-digit speeds for FPS for real-time inference of e.g. stable diffusion, whereas on the M2 Max I have you get at best 0.5 FPS
by stroebs | 2025-11-24 05:06:23+00:00
The problem is far more nuanced than the internet simply becoming too centralised.

I want to host my gas station network’s air machine infrastructure, and I only want people in the US to be able to access it. That simple task is literally impossible with what we have allowed the internet to become.

FWIW I love Cloudflare’s products and make use of a large amount of them, but I can’t advocate for using them in my professional job since we actually require distributed infrastructure that won’t fail globally in random ways we can’t control.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-11-24 05:06:24+00:00
> The fact that, in practice, with Rust you get a crash instead of UB is 100% a reliability issue with the language. The crashes are inbuilt.

This is totally false. It's not in the least hard to avoid crashing.

match some_result { Ok(value) => { // handle the value }, Err(e) => { // handle the error condition } }

The fact that Cloudflare chose to handle a result with the "panic if this result is an error" function is 100% on them, not on the language. Blaming the language is like claiming that any language which has assert is a problem because the assert can crash your program. Yes, that's what it's there for, so don't use it if that isn't what you want.

And don't give me the "the method name isn't obvious enough" argument you used elsewhere. That holds no water. It's basic Rust knowledge to know that "unwrap" will panic if the value is an error (or None if it's optional). If the engineers writing the code didn't know that, then the problem is they didn't bother to learn how their tools work, which again is not the language's fault.
by captainkrtek | 2025-11-24 05:06:43+00:00
A company I worked at also did this, though there was no limits. Some folks would choose to spend the whole week working on a larger refactor, for example, I unified all of our redis usage to use a single modern library compared to the mess of 3 libraries of various ages across our codebase. This was relatively easy, but tedious, and required some new tests/etc.

Overall, I think this kind of thing is very positive for the health of building software, and morale to show that it is a priority to actually address these things.
by alganet | 2025-11-24 05:09:55+00:00
It is very likely that agent tooling will get better at doing asynchronous things and being aware of the user interacting in parallel, without git, and probably within a single session.

It's feasible, and it makes more sense than separating and merging later (or keeping patches in memory then applying in bulk).

Why do I say it's feasible? We have the technology, right? The IDE knows which file the user has in focus, and can orient agents to use tooling that would inform them of that fact when they're running. Similarly, that same tooling could just spend a little bit of time planning focus to spread to multiple agents in a way they won't overlap.

Maybe big repos, monorepos and so on are a limitation. If we were on the previous "small-to-middle interlinked projects" era, that division would come in naturally. You only really need multiple agents in parallel on a single project if that thing is big enough to have more than one angle to work on. It's a push-and-pull that changes with the times, maybe we're heading to a more granular way of doing things.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-11-24 05:09:55+00:00
There's a boatload of Linux contractors who will do the technical work for you and maintain it for as long as you want, at the right price. That includes fairly large names like Suse. As far as I'm aware, all of those contractors focus on the embedded Linux market because consumer OEMs simply aren't asking for those services. The major OEMs don't have either the margin or the consumer demand for it, and they're not willing to commit the resources to escape that local minimum.
by jjj123 | 2025-11-24 05:09:57+00:00
The main idea is not an excuse to be a bad person, but it does justify making an ungodly amount of money, and making even more money after you’ve already made an ungodly amount of money. And for not letting that money get taken by taxes (god forbid, how ineffective!).

So I’d argue on OPs side, I don’t care what EA stated intent is, it works pretty well as a smokescreen for the types who want to get really fucking rich by any means necessary. Even better if the donation target is a North Star they never actually reach.
by troupo | 2025-11-24 05:11:57+00:00
> I’m referring to MCP as the sum of the protocol, a server adhering to the protocol, and clients adding support (e.g. “Connectors”).

Why?

Do you refer to REST APIs or GraphQL as a whole? There are servers "adhering to the protocol" and "clients adding support" for these.

These are literally APIs.
by toast0 | 2025-11-24 05:12:22+00:00
You haven't seen the same kind of bugs I have, I guess.

This kind of thing takes more than 2 days to fix, unless you're really good.

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=217637

Or this one

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/104845/dhe-rsa-...

I can find more of these that I've run into if I look. I've had tricky bugs in my team's code too, but those don't result in public artifacts, and I'm responsible for all the code that runs on my server, regardless of who wrote it... And I also can't crash client code, regardless of who wrote it, even if my code just follows the RFC.
by weedhopper | 2025-11-24 05:12:23+00:00
I don’t think i’ll ever understand the compile time argument https://xkcd.com/303/

One thing that this blog doesn’t address though, is the cult-like following of Rust. It’s like the “AI” of oss — a main selling point by itself despite not being a feature. Seemingly, there is an assumption that software written in Rust is inherently better than any other, or that if something is written in Rust, it cannot have any errors.

Sure, new software should be written in it instead of C. But why fix programs that are already memory safe?
by gucci-on-fleek | 2025-11-24 05:13:29+00:00
As the other comments have already mentioned, it interferes with itself, so you still observe the same interference patterns [0] [1]. Which admittedly seems impossible at first, but so does the rest of quantum physics.

[0]: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/III_01.html#Ch1-S5

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave%E2%80%93particle_duality#...
by bblb | 2025-11-24 05:14:14+00:00
Perhaps. Perhaps not. But it will survive it. It will survive a complete nuclear winter. It's too useful to die, and will be one the first things to be fixed after global annihilation.

But Internet is not hosting companies or cloud providers. Internet does not care if they don't build their systems resilient enough and let the SPOFs creep up. Internet does it's thing and the packets keep flowing. Maybe BGP and DNS could use some additional armoring but there are ways around both of them in case of actual emergency.
by rramadass | 2025-11-24 05:16:41+00:00
When it comes to learning/understanding Complex Numbers there is one pre-eminent source which everybody should lookup;

A series of videos named "Imaginary Numbers are Real" by Welch Labs - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiaHhY2iBX9g6KIvZ_703...

You can buy book versions (used to be free earlier) at - https://www.welchlabs.com/resources
Show HN: TikTok-Meets-AI-Game-Maker Platform
by gamesparkapp | 2025-11-24 05:16:56+00:00
I made a mobile first platform where people can use chat with AI to make games and record game content. People can also remix games others have created. These games are simple, but I've had a lot of fun making and playing on the platform. It's got some rough edges, i'm still working on it. But I'm hoping for some feedback. Hope players find it as enjoyable as I do and it can turn into something big.
by impendia | 2025-11-24 05:18:36+00:00
> The point of calculus is...

As a math professor who has taught calculus many times, I'd say there are many different things one could hope to learn from a calculus course. I don't think the subject distills well to a single point.

One unusual feature of calculus is that it's much easier to understand at a non-rigorous level than at a rigorous level. I wouldn't say this is true of all of math. For example, if you want to understand why the quadratic formula is true, an informal explanation and a rigorous proof would amount to approximately the same thing.

But, when teaching or learning calculus, if you're willing to say that "the derivative is the instantaneous rate of change of a function", treat dy/dx as the fraction which it looks like (the chain rule gets a lot easier to explain!), and so on, you can make a lot of progress.

In my opinion, the issue with most calculus books is that they don't commit to a rigorous or to a non-rigorous approach. They are usually organized around a rigorous approach to the subject, but then watered down a lot -- in anticipation that most of the audience won't care about the rigor.

I believe it's best to choose a lane and stick to it. Whether that's rigorous or non-rigorous depends on your tastes and interests as a learner. This book won't be for everybody, but I'd call that a strength rather than a weakness.