MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-11-24 01:48:12+00:00
From the article I linked:

> Brooke Nichols, the Boston University epidemiologist and mathematical modeller, has maintained a respected tracker of current impact. The model is conservative, assuming, for example, that the State Department will fully sustain the programs that remain. As of November 5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.

Which links to Impact Counter [0], if you want to read more on how they reached those figures.

I think it's fair to say with absolute certainty that thousands of people have died as a direct result of dismantling USAID, but that we aren't certain of the exact magnitude. One model estimated it's around 600 thousand, but we don't have exact figures because of the disruptions.

Do you think there's a way this could be communicated more clearly? I'm not trying to be deceptive in how I present this information, and I could be persuaded to re-evaluate the exact figure if presented with a better analysis.

[0] https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=inte...
by nine_k | 2025-11-24 01:48:35+00:00
NYC also has subway stations with intense commerce, e.g. the Columbus Circle, or some bits around Herald Square. As a regular user, I find this convenient.

Almost every smaller station shows ads on walls, too, and every train carriers ads inside.

I don't see why the subway specifically could not be self-sufficient, or even a profit center. Sadly, this is not so, because of very large expenses, not because of low revenue.
by saghm | 2025-11-24 01:48:46+00:00
No, I still don't have any idea what you're trying to say honestly. At first I thought you were trying to say that they didn't contribute to open source in a way that actually helped anyone outside of themselves. I stated that it definitively helped me do something I already had tried to do sometimes but would sometimes have issues with, and no longer do in large part because of their work. As best as I can tell, you're essentially arguing now some combination of an assertion that it's impossible by definition for a company's open source contributions to benefit anyone else in the long run (which feels pretty reductive, like the economics arguments that everyone always acts purely rationally, despite the fact that plenty of people quite often don't do that) and that because it's only software that helps running video games, it can't possibly be beneficial to humanity in general (which independent of whether it's accurate feels kind of irrelevant given that the original proposition from the parent comment was that they did care about that and therefore wanted to support it financially).
Preserve? Conserve? AI will need reasons
by sonicvrooooom | 2025-11-24 01:49:00+00:00
Time's ticking and no company or nation has any influence on the point of ... (this is cheezy) it's coming.

And there's a lot to consider. Most people are fine.

Current VC and AI industry culture, though, is making it insanely tough to find reasons. ... I mean, "Big Oil" and "stuff" (I'm lazy, but given adequate info, I'd go berserk) was hard enough, but even I could figure out whether and what kind of outs for these guys were probably feasible enough, ... in terms of workload ... so, I don't know, man ... AI can easily fuck itself and reproduce ... so what the fuck are you gonna do to get close enough to a net neutral (with a tendency for the positive) ...?
by Animats | 2025-11-24 01:49:25+00:00
I've posted this before, but whatever. [1]

Steampunk was fun while it lasted. This video was made in 2014.

Attendees could text messages via SMS to the system which drove the Teletype machine. Messages were printed and delivered by the messengers. We had antique desk accessories - a Bates sequential number stamp from the 1890s, the stapler that made its own staples from brass wire, and lots of rubber stamps. You can see those briefly on the desk.

We did this at five or six cons. The guy and girl shown were drama students, refugees from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. As experienced actors, they could bring all this off with more style than usually seen at cons. They're married now, by the way. Good people.

We gave it up when COVID hit.

[1] https://vimeo.com/124065314
by daft_pink | 2025-11-24 01:49:37+00:00
They need to come up with an ip solution that is useful enough that people actually want to upgrade to it.

When you compare it to other technologies like https, tls1.3, unicode, 5g cellular, wifi 6, wifi 5 or bluetooth versions, etc. It’s clear that ipv6 adoption is not what it should be if they launched a protocol with clearer benefits to the end user.
by nrhrjrjrjtntbt | 2025-11-24 01:49:58+00:00
So for a single person you need 4 x ~$80k median income i.e. $320k for housing, health insurance, food etc. and other basics?

Or are we talking federal minimum i.e. 4 x 14k = 56k.

I guess you are talking min(min wage)
by cheema33 | 2025-11-24 01:49:59+00:00
> I always wonder why the question isn't "how do we keep homeless people from living on our busses"

Similar questions get asked often enough. The problem is that there aren't any easy answers or solutions. Cities have tried different things but none that appear to work for medium to large sized cities.

If you see a city employ a workable solution that can used as a model and be deployed everywhere, that would be awesome.
by SchemaLoad | 2025-11-24 01:51:02+00:00
The average user does not see things like app config files, cache data, etc as their own files. The current /home has so much absolute junk that it's easy to not know where your stuff is. "Real" files to a normal user are .docx, photos, downloaded files, etc. Not auto generated configs.

There ideally should be some separation between your actual documents and system utility stuff. I guess this has mostly happen already with real files sitting in cloud storage. With local storage just being replacable.
by phantasmish | 2025-11-24 01:51:11+00:00
I know people who didn’t know the government had shut down until more than two weeks into it (and on discovering it were like “oh shit this might affect us!” because their whole lifestyle depends on money from the government).

The same people didn’t know the east wing had been torn down until a couple weeks after it happened.

In both cases they only found out when my wife told them.

They pay attention to lots of “news” but it’s AI videos of mass crimes and viral “look how bad democrats are” garbage.

That people are dense motherfuckers (can we stop sugar coating how stupid these people are if they’re surprised about any of these things? I mean dumb as a bag of hammers kinds of dumb, dimmest bulb in a box of broken bulbs, that level of dumb) doesn’t mean this wasn’t clear.

It is 100% these morons’ own fault they’re surprised.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-24 01:52:00+00:00
Very much so. When I was younger I assumed fares were for the cost of the public transport, but after following some local budgeting discussions I was stunned by how little the fares covered operating costs.

Small amounts of cost sharing are a useful technique for incentivizing people to make wise decisions in general, so there’s some value in having token small fares. It’s the same difference that shows up when you list something for $10 in your local classifieds as opposed to listing it as FREE. Most people who use classifieds learn early on that listing things for free is just asking for people to waste your time, but listing for any price at all seems to make people care a little more and put some thought into their decisions. I’ve often given things away for free after listing them for small amounts in classifieds because it filters for people who are less likely to waste your time.
by eru | 2025-11-24 01:52:02+00:00
> That means, 5/6th of the budget is subsidized by the taxpayers of SF. There is no reason why Muni can't be free.

You'd still want to charge for congestion. Ie when a particular bus (or rather bus route) is reliably full at a particular time of the day, gradually raise prices until it's just below capacity.

Basically, you want to transport the maximum number of passengers while making it so that any single person who wants to get on the bus (at prevailing prices) still can.

Instead of a bespoke dynamic system that adjust prices dynamically, you might want to keep it simple and just have a simple peak / off-peak distinction.
by shoo | 2025-11-24 01:52:03+00:00
> The reader can see my unusual notion of alternative accounting: $ 10 million earned through Russian roulette does not have the same value as $ 10 million earned through the diligent and artful practice of dentistry. They are the same, can buy the same goods, except that one’s dependence on randomness is greater than the other.

-- Nassim Taleb
by astrange | 2025-11-24 01:52:28+00:00
One of the random 19-year-olds they hired (whose nickname is "BigBalls") previously worked selling VPN services to a cybercriminal group ("the Com") whose activities involved extorting children for CSAM and then blackmailing them into committing suicide on livestream.

So, there's more to go after if anyone cares to.
by ggm | 2025-11-24 01:53:37+00:00
Selling onsite BI/Data support staff is one of those "why didn't I think of that, and how profitable it can be" moments. We used to revile IBM and Oracle onsite staff (as techs in the core company line) because they seemed to do little and were paid lots. But what we missed, is how strongly the seniors listened to what they said, and liked what they did. The whole "pay an engineer $1000 to tighten one bolt" thing is true: these people have skills you can acquire, but they also have knowledge you don't have right now, and tools to aide insights, and also have a useful quality which I like to call "surgically removing their ethics node" because they have no qualms proposing things like cross-key data matching, or applying inference rules over tax info to spending info to project where mismatches point to possible fraud: Things which to a Csuite mean they can deliver on their KPI and not have to worry their predecessors said we would never do that (data matching) or apply unconstrained AI/ML systems (like the Australian Robodebt system: people died)

Palantir is smart. it's what governments want. it's what corporates want. Sure, you can in-house the BI, or use Google, but then you find you're stuck behind your corporate ethics rules, or googles "my way no other way" where Palantir can afford to be venal, and do it your way. The rules don't apply because they don't give a shit.

What I think about Thiel's moral or ethical drive is utterly irrelevant, just as what I think about Ellison and Oracle, or Bezos and Amazon, or Watson and IBM. Mistaking the moral force in the political sphere of these high net worth individuals for core aspects of their business is I think a mistake: it does inform the asocial quality, but if you cut these companies free of their leaders, they wouldn't magically stop helping governments do oppressive things: there's too much money to be made.

Palantir has found an immensely profitable niche. Hire smart people, put them into the structure to listen, and advise on how to do things which internal staff find untenable or unwise.

Doge is what it looks like when you put a clown in charge. Palantir is what it looks like when you put a smart person in charge.
by eru | 2025-11-24 01:53:48+00:00
> Yeah comments like the parents are typical from people that don't use public transit. The people who can't/aren't going to pay that some people "don't want" on public transit are always going to not pay and still use it, so why not make it free for everybody?

Huh? I never owned a car and taken public transport all my live, and it's never been much of a problem kicking non-paying people off. What kind of lawless hellholes are you guys living in?

(I lived in Germany, Turkey, Britain, Singapore and Australia.)
by yencabulator | 2025-11-24 01:54:01+00:00
This is a big part of the appeal of short stories, to me. Either the story is brilliant, or I can skip to the next one quickly; churning through a 400-page book in the hopes of it getting better later is much worse. Or even worse, hearing rumors that it gets better in book #3 of a 5-book series. I hate how current-day publishers feel the need to tell authors to bloat their books because that's what sells. When an author ends up with 1.4 books worth of material, the good answer is to tighten it up, not split it into two books.

Then again, I most love really short stories. It's a challenge I enjoy, to do as much worldbuilding as possible in as few words as I can, while still having a plot and even more to the point telling a story that's bigger inside the reader's imagination that it is on paper.

For example, here's something I wrote way back when, that Joe Stech (the editor/publisher here) published in 2016. 747 words is not even a short story!

https://compellingsciencefiction.com/stories/seedsofwar.html
by josephg | 2025-11-24 01:54:12+00:00
No. Should I? It looks like a markdown renderer with a huge pile of custom extensions.

It looks like they've added support for some of the things I need (eg references). But not other stuff. It has hardcoded block support for Note and Warning. But it looks like I can't program my own?

It supports front matter, but only in a few predefined styles? And it looks like I can't define my own rendering / styling for image blocks? Like, if I want to make images clickable and be shown full screen, I can't do it using quarto?

Like I said in another comment, if you're writing a markdown-like document that can only be rendered properly in one bespoke tool, you're not writing in actual markdown any more. Like if I had my own C compiler with a bunch of custom extensions, code written which uses all of those extensions isn't really C code. With actual markdown, you can send people the markdown content itself and they can render it locally using whatever tool they like.

Use a tool like quarto if you want. But the need for something like this proves the point that markdown on its own isn't sufficient. If you're reaching for a markdown-incompatible document format, why stick with markdown at all, and not React, or ascii doctor, or typst?
by manquer | 2025-11-24 01:54:13+00:00
The net revenue would be lower than $200M. There are substantial costs associated with ticket revenue collection, from the % payment gateways charge, the maintenance and replacement cost the devices and turnstiles hardware, all the software and people who have to manage and enforce the system.

The issue with SF (unlike Iowa city) is that free for all everybody is going to be harder sell to voters when there is large amount of out of city traffic -travelers and greater Bay Area residents who do not pay city taxes.

What is more realistic is extend subsidies to all residents of the city beyond the current programs for youth/seniors/homeless/low income etc.
by cyberax | 2025-11-24 01:55:34+00:00
There are less formal math books in Russian. My absolute favorite calculus textbook is Fikhtenholts's "A Course of Differential and Integral Calculus". It is a bit less formal than many modern texts, but somehow much more approachable.

My pet peeve about calculus books is that they almost always overlook the importance of continuity. In some extreme cases, they even start with infinitely small sequences, with some rather gnarly theorems like Bolzano–Weierstrass theorem about converging subsequences.

I think this is a mistake. It's much easier to start with continuous functions and build from there. Modern readers then can visualize the epsilon-delta formulation of limits as "zooming in" on the function. The "epsilon" is the height of the screen, and the "delta" is the "zoom level" at which the function fragment fits on the screen.

And once you "get" the idea of continuity and function limits, the other limit theorems just fall out naturally.
by rewgs | 2025-11-24 01:56:59+00:00
I daily drive an M1 MacBook Air and a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 11 running Arch/Hyprland. Software-wise I absolutely adore the latter, but hardware-wise it falls short of the Mac on nearly every level.

Battery life is horrendous (despite extensive tuning). The speakers are complete crap (despite using Easy Effects). Fans get loud sometimes because, well, it's x86_64.

It's a shame, because even though the Apple Silicon CPU is faster on paper, the same task flies on the Thinkpad compared to the Mac. And of course the Thinkpad's keyboard is fantastic.

Honestly the one thing I simply can't look past are the speakers. I work from home so battery life isn't a massive issue for me. Fans I can look past. But I simply cannot stand listening to music or watch a YouTube video on it, they are SO bad.
by lanstin | 2025-11-24 01:57:07+00:00
As for collaboration I meant: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2024/09/25/a-pilot-project-in... The issue with horizontal scaling of maths research is trust: if you don't know the author, it is more work to verify their work, especially non-formal proofs. Lean4 enables large projects be split up into pieces where lean can validate each intermediate result, so a much broader group of people can contribute pieces without jeopardizing the overall soundness.
by filoleg | 2025-11-24 01:57:33+00:00
> What would happen if you had to tap a card/phone to get in to the subway system (and this was enforced, no jumping turnstiles), and then have to tap it to get out too.

Not sure about the "measure how long the subway rider has been in the subway system for a continuous period of time" feature, but otherwise that's how subway in Japan works. You gotta tap on your way in and out of the current system you are riding on (as there are multiple competing subway system companies running together even within a given city, often enough with their stops being near each other).

Their reason for doing so is a bit different though. In NYC, your ride is a flat fee, as long as you don't exit subway, no matter where you are going. In Japan, your ride cost is determined by your actual route, as some parts of it have different rates. They actually need to know where you exited in order to calculate the final cost of your ride.
by yanslookup | 2025-11-24 01:57:48+00:00
Describing it as "good reason" is something.

But I don't think you meant it that way.

For anyone reading that wasn't around it was very much an irrational hysteria. The bigots latched on to it to spread fear and justify their dehumanization of gay people. There were people that tried to bring reason and science to the conversation but they were drowned out by the panic/bigotry.

There was no good reason for the AIDS phobia in the 80s.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-11-24 01:58:00+00:00
This has been everyone else's experience of the Trump regime, as well.

Here in Australia we've been "America's Poodle" for generations, enthusiastically joined in on every war and bizarre colonial adventure that the USA has started. And then we get slapped with tariffs and insulted by the President. Our politicians are slowly grappling with the new reality that the USA is not our friend and ally any more.

Europe has a similar experience. No longer is the West "shoulder to shoulder" fighting the authoritarian regimes and defending shared values. Suddenly Europe is not an ally, possibly an economic enemy, and is being insulted by the President.

The damage that the last 9 months have done to the USA's standing with the rest of the world is unbelievable. As has been said before; Trump may not be a Russian agent, but it's hard to see what a Russian agent would have done differently.

And that includes DOGE - ripping up government institutions that have taken decades to build is not a productive measure, it's destructive. It's what the USA's enemies would do to it if they could.
by eru | 2025-11-24 01:58:28+00:00
I mostly agree.

> You can pick free, or scalable, or financially sustainable (and without sustainability, a political shift will kill it), but you cannot have all three at once.

Real polities are of finite size, so you don't need (infinitely) scalable.

Here in Singapore we could sustainably afford to make public transport free, if we wanted to.

However I agree with you that charging for public transport is the right thing to do. (And to charge users of government provided services in general for everything, and to give poor people money.) If nothing else, you at least want to charge for congestion at peak hours, so that there's always an epsilon of capacity left even at rush hour, so any single person who wants to board the train at prevailing prices can do so.
by quotemstr | 2025-11-24 01:59:09+00:00
I haven't tried Avy, but I gave ace-jump mode a shot. Maybe I didn't give it enough time, but it just never felt fast for me. The problem is the eye -> hand -> eye feedback loop latency. If I want to jump to a given place, I need invoke ace-jump, wait to read what letter ace jump assigns my destination, press that letter, read the new letter, and repeat until the destination becomes unambitious. It just feels slower than navigating by sexp or whatever.

Maybe if I combine it with eye tracking so I can limit letter assignment to the foveated region I can reduce the cycle count and make this style of navigation win.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-11-24 01:59:28+00:00
Related:

X begins rolling out 'About this account' location feature to users' profiles

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024417

Top MAGA Influencers on X/Twitter Accidentally Unmasked as Foreign Trolls

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024211
by darth_avocado | 2025-11-24 01:59:48+00:00
You clearly haven’t used MUNI. Homeless are already riding the buses without paying, and I’ve rarely seen them camp in them. Most bus drivers know these people on a first name basis and very few of them are actually do anything beyond going from place to place.

And if you’re from San Francisco and use MUNI, you’ll also know that half the people don’t pay anyway. There’s no reason to make people pay.
by saghm | 2025-11-24 02:00:09+00:00
I'd have to agree with you here. I often tell people that while we have control over our actions, we don't really have control over our emotions in the same sense. Feeling anger, happiness, sadness, bitterness, resentment, or anything else is something that will happen regardless of whether we want to or not, and all we can do is learn how to process our emotions to be able to learn how to react in ways that will hopefully hurt others less. I can't even begin to imagine the magnitude of emotions that the author has dealt with both the initial loss and the flurry of findings after the fact, so their reactions in both of the posts were quite mild all things considered. I'm lucky enough not to have lost either of my parents yet, and even with the hope that I don't find out anything anywhere close to as drastic as these revelations when I inevitably do, I still don't have any trouble imagining acting far more vain and bitter based just on the sadness I feel without needing to add any of the other bombshells into the mix.
by hodgesrm | 2025-11-24 02:00:15+00:00
I use public transit (mostly SF BART) on a regular basis. It's not a matter of "don't want," it's a matter of public safety. People won't use public transit if they have to deal with mentally ill people or hucksters.

This is very basic economics of public transit. I completely agree with the comment about having a minimum payment and enforcement.
by varenc | 2025-11-24 02:00:23+00:00
Love the most commit titled 'Release 1.33.4' that's actually just changing a log export file from `kdeconnect-log.txt` to `zorin-connect-log.txt` : https://github.com/ZorinOS/zorin-connect-android/commit/de6d...

but forking not to confuse users does make sense