MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by notatoad | 2025-12-27 21:54:24+00:00
it's pretty silly to have a tax that incentivizes the opposite behaviour to what you want. registration surcharges benefit the people who drive the most, at the expense of the people who drive the least.

if you're trying to pay for wear and tear on the roads, or reduce congestion, making people feel like they have to "get their moneys worth" on the registration surcharge really isn't helping.
by qbow883 | 2025-12-27 21:54:40+00:00
But the chances of you being able to achieve the same with the linked tool are also zero. That's all I am really saying. I'm not arguing that ffmpeg can get very complex (I was talking about "basic" ffmpeg usage in my original comment), just that `ff convert inputfile to ext` is not really simpler than `ffmpeg -i inputfile -o outputfile.ext`, which is all that this (this specific) tool is really doing.
by emptybits | 2025-12-27 21:54:44+00:00
> But disconnected events can be seen in different orders depending on speed of observer.

What are "disconnected events"? In a subtle but still real sense, are not all events causally linked? e.g. gravitationally, magnetically, subatomically or quantumly?

I can understand that our simple minds and computational abilities lead us to consider events "far away" from each other as "disconnected" for practical reasons. But are they really not causally connected in a subtle way?

There are pieces of space time that are clearly, obviously causally connected to each other. And there are far away regions of the universe that are, practically speaking, causally disconnected from things "around here". But wouldn't these causally disjoint regions overlap with each other, stringing together a chain of causality from anywhere to anywhere?

Or is there a complete vacuum of insulation between some truly disconnected events that don't overlap with any other observational light cone or frame of reference at all?
by patmorgan23 | 2025-12-27 21:55:08+00:00
Nah. Roads, specifically giant limited access highways through urban cities cost lots money to build. it makes perfect sense for them to be funded by user fees. Urban land is at a premium, if you want to utilize it you have to pay for it. Mass transit is a much more space efficient way to move people in urban environments, and encourages people to walk more in their daily life which has tons of health benefits. Also transit really help urban air quality (even electric cars cause air quality issues because of the rubber tires)
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-12-27 21:55:11+00:00
I appreciate the sentiment, but I don't think that calls for generic revolt are likely to get us anywhere. It's gotta be targeted and meaningful and executed with a measure of a restraint. It needs to be clear we can be reasoned with.

So what kind of revolt are you calling for? Are we dumping GPU's into the ocean like we did with tea in Boston that one time? Are we disconnecting datacenters from the internet? Are we all gonna change our profile picture? Specifics please.
by epistasis | 2025-12-27 21:55:29+00:00
Even calling what the national lab does "alarmism" is objectively a lie meant to distort and politicize basic and important science. I don't need to tell you the political party of the person from the quote because that political party has been working for six a long time to take non-partisan science and politicize it and use that politicization to divide the country.

There is no national lab producing "alarmism" and calling it that as justification for cutting funding is meant as a justification for restricting free speech and free science.
by hrunt | 2025-12-27 21:56:15+00:00
> Archive vs. Delete is another question but not as important. Over time I've found that I'm probably deleting too much (e.g. where did I buy that <nice thing> 5 years ago? want it again, can't find the order). Then business email are all archived with the exception of business spam of course.

An executive co-worker of mine used his Deleted Items folder as his Archive. Problem solved.
by jcranmer | 2025-12-27 21:56:36+00:00
Don't you think it's time to update it, given you start by saying that "If someone, while trying to sell you some high security mechanical system, told you that the system had remained unbreached for the last 20 years you would take that as a compelling argument"?

Because you're clearly presenting it as a defense of PGP on a thread from a presentation clearly delineating breaks in it using exactly the kind of complexity that the article you're responding to predicts would cause it to break.
by alphazard | 2025-12-27 21:57:51+00:00
> Devalue against what is the main question though, isn't it? The real longer term issue is that the USD is devaluing against the Euro...

I don't think that FOREX rates are the best way to think about this, but if you work in that world or otherwise have an intuition for it, then go ahead.
Most of us only handle 1 currency, and reasoning in terms of 2 isn't exactly an intuition pump.

Instead think about:

1. The dollar valued against itself a year earlier, and a year in the future. That is the interest rate or yield of the asset if held.
It should go up, but right now it goes down.

2. How much your personal basket of monthly expenses costs in terms of dollars.
Ignore a basket that someone on the news told you to care about, like CPI.
I mean your personal basket, all the stuff you personally buy, how much is it in dollars, now, a year in the future, a year earlier.

If keep your wealth in business or a precious metal in the last year and then converted back, you would probably have more dollars, or be able to buy more stuff, that's all there is to it.
by pandaman | 2025-12-27 21:57:58+00:00
Treasuries are not some kind of artifacts that can be stored indefinitely, they are bonds with maturity dates. As they mature they turn into cash automatically and that cash used to come from selling new treasuries. As the demand dwindles the US has to sell its bonds cheaper thus borrowing at higher interest and that interest will have to be paid by selling even more treasuries at even higher interest so it's already a feedback loop.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-27 21:58:04+00:00
> Dollars are currently only in demand for short-term use in transactions

This is all currencies. You store value in debt. You spend in the hot currency.

> no one wants to hold them because they devalue and will continue to do so at an accelerating rate

Literally what Treasuries are for.

> everyone should think of their checking account as something that they pay negative real interest on for the privilege of being able to transact with the rest of the world

One, you shouldn’t be storing wealth in cash-like instruments, that’s literally using currency wrong (and has been across human history). Cash is for transacting.

But in today’s economy, you generally can find checking accounts with pay around inflation. And if it really worries you, you can buy TIPS.
by spwa4 | 2025-12-27 21:58:17+00:00
> Taking this analogy further, is today's end goal of social media to provide AI generated content that users can endlessly consume?

The singular purpose of social media has always been advertising. That 100% depends on the ability of platforms to control the message, which Facebook achieved to an extent that politicians started paying them in order to game elections.

Then "influencers" came, and largely control the message on essentially all platforms.

By contrast, on Youtube and Twitter, advertisers are making deals directly with specific influencers so their advertising remains on-target. Only "old-style" generic geo-targeted advertising, what you used to see on TV, uses the platforms themselves.

AI achieves many things for these platforms:

1) get rid of influencers by creating AI influencers (done both by influencers themselves, attempting to create fake/AI influencers that are cheaper, and by the platforms that want to control the process)

2) allow advertisers to control the message (think of a guarantee not to get shown on pro-Nazi channels)

3) force advertisers to come to the platforms instead of specific influencers

4) also get the ability to influence and later even control elections
by dokyun | 2025-12-27 21:59:04+00:00
The thing about the Fediverse is that no one person gets to decide how the network is used: This guy seems to like bending sentences that other people wrote into supporting his narrow ideas of what the network should be. People can use it for whatever they want, just cause the AP spec says its designed for one thing doesn't mean its constrained to it.

Also, even though I'm an active Fediverse user, the side of fedi that I call home is quite different from his, a stick out being that we tend to use a different set of software (Pleroma instead of Mastodon, usually). Having and using alts on several different instances running the same software is very common. I can't say I've ever interacted with a Pixelfed account from my side of Fedi, though.
by pklausler | 2025-12-27 21:59:12+00:00
Fortran requires compilers to “honor the integrity of parentheses” but otherwise doesn’t restrict compilers from rearranging expressions. Want a specific order of operations and rounding? Use parentheses to force them. This is why you’ll sometimes see parens around operations that already have arithmetic precedence, like `(xx)-(yy)`, to prevent the use of FMA.
by orionspelt | 2025-12-27 22:00:14+00:00
Not such a shock for people paying attention. Groups have been pushing back about inequality and climate, healthcare, for decades and just ignored. Every political issue in our faces now was called out as a future problem years ago by various groups. Water is finally too hot now for frogs in the middle of pot.

Free speech doesn't create an obligation. It's not a binding magic.

The shift to information age and science education did not start until after the Boomers and much of GenX were in and out of school and college. The world for them was cheap and just winging it. Science! Bah! Uncle Rico can still throw them balls over that mountain!

Was warning people 15 years ago the now 80 year olds in charge are nihilistic and not going to change; they will be dead and are just trolling youth about caring. They’re self selecting biology.

Takes $800k/yr to have the buying power $200k/yr had in 1980. The rise in inequality and the global temperature follow a growth pattern that was way too normal to be winging it; what's been allowed economically has been very carefully studied and managed to preserve freedom of agency for the elders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_deni...

Same old stupid political inanity as when I was younger. It still works on a lot of people.
by woodruffw | 2025-12-27 22:00:35+00:00
With Let’s Encrypt, your private key is (typically) rotated every 90 days. It’s kept on disk because 90 days is too long to reliably keep a private key resident in memory on unknown hardware.

With attestations on PyPI, the issuance window is 15 minutes instead of 90 days. So the private key is kept in memory and discarded as soon as the signing operation is complete, since the next signing flow will create a new one.

At no point does the private key leave your machine. The only salient differences between the two are file versus memory and the validity window, but in both cases PyPI’s implementation of attestations prefers the more ideal thing with respect to reducing the likelihood of local private key disclosure.
by troupo | 2025-12-27 22:01:05+00:00
Useful idiots believe that these systems have "nascent emotions" or agency, or emergent behaviour [1]. So the will push for more and more idiotic uses of these systems. These behaviours need to be called out and shamed. And proper behaviours taught.

[1] Prime example in this very discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46395196
by poisonborz | 2025-12-27 22:01:22+00:00
It is in the distant future still (if we ever get there without apocalypse first) but I think the goal was set out to be, from the very first bits of digital data, is to completely transition ourselves to a digital world. Living it in parallel will make less sense if Earth conditions get worse, and even less in space or on a hostile planet. In a digital world possibilities become limitless, disabilities, distances, shortcomings of the mind eliminated. Once you can't see a difference, will it matter if something is "real"? Sure, it can also become a hell and inhumane much easier, but this doesn't make it a less compelling dimension.

Looking through this lens, fighting, limiting internet usage is akin to moving to the rainforest to avoid capitalism - lone rebelling acts in the wrong direction of history, a temporary, partial victory for the few who dare this hassle.

Time is better spent to make this emerging space better, for everyone.
by KoolKat23 | 2025-12-27 22:02:13+00:00
They're wrong on multiple fronts, they're regressive. The poor bear the brunt of them.

Despite the bad press, a well run government highway is much cheaper, generally 30% or more of that toll goes directly to maintaining the system and it's profits, there's more efficient funding methods out there.

They're natural monopolies, they fill up with traffic regardless of how much you rip people off.
by majormajor | 2025-12-27 22:02:24+00:00
You're complaining about the level of weather notifications. Those exist because people die in the heat and they die in big storms and now there's more technology to make people think about it before driving their car into a flash flood.

There are severe weather alerts even in red-states that don't believe the climate is changing at all. Because they do notice when people die.

Maybe that's too much "big government" for you tastes - "oh no, they made my phone beep!" - but...

That's not really the same thing as research into knowing what is going on long-term.
by zomiaen | 2025-12-27 22:03:02+00:00
There are a vast number of scientists in agreement with each other that it is not a nothingburger.

It takes nothing but stark intentional ignorance to make a statement like yours.

It absolutely boggles my mind at the suggestion that green energy is all profit seeking, as if the counterparties in big oil aren't also just as or more interested in maintaining status quo in the opposite direction. Yet I never see someone who expresses ideas like this recognize or acknowledge that.
by dangus | 2025-12-27 22:03:51+00:00
Of course, this project cost $2.1 billion, including $815 million to build the toll lanes in the freeway’s center.

And it could be made ineffective as regional expansion continues. As soon as enough people who are willing to pay the toll saturates capacity you end up with the same issue (“just one more lane bro”). I see this all the time in the DC metro area’s toll express lanes that often save no significant time.

Another effective way to control highway congestion is to get people off of highways and invest in your transit system, make it better than driving so that people don’t drive as often.

But maybe Houston is too far gone for that.

For comparison, the Chicago red line extension project adds 5 miles of heavy rail for about twice the cost, so 4x more per mile. But the Houston toll lane project doesn’t do anything positive for adjacent property values like new rail stations do. Chicago will get money back from more property taxes and the new stations will relieve traffic on the Dan Ryan.

Transit lines get faster as ridership increases due to the ability to increase schedule frequency, the exact opposite of highways.

I am not saying Houston should magically turn into 1800s-era urban fabric but maybe some decent park and ride commuter transit would be a start? There are cities in Texas with 6 figure populations that have NO public bus system.
by orthoxerox | 2025-12-27 22:04:06+00:00
> The very well-known in Germany satiric news website "Der Postillion" had an interesting provocative piece just yesterday (German, but auto-translate takes care of that): https://www.der-postillon.com/2023/12/weihnachtsmann-ungerec... -- "Schlimmer Verdacht: Bevorzugt der Weihnachtsmann die Kinder reicher Eltern?" ("A disturbing suspicion: Does Santa Claus favor the children of wealthy parents?")

Canadian stand-up comedian Casually Explained (I don't actually know if he stands up to record his videos) had basically the same joke a few days before them.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-27 22:04:38+00:00
> As the demand dwindles the US has to sell its bonds cheaper

To be clear, we see no indication of this. (The Fed reduced its balance sheet in the last 3 years on the order of the GDP of Spain or Brazil [1][2].)

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/policy-normali...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
by azinman2 | 2025-12-27 22:05:00+00:00
People as a whole are not experts in every possible area, nor is everyone universally smart. When politics get bought at an entire party level for decades, it’s hard to place blame on those who allow it. Don’t forget that culture wars is used as a wedge such that everything is combined. People don’t get to vote on their issues, they vote on buckets of viewpoints.

Fox News literally had a segment on the difference between pedophilia and some other philia whose name I forget.. it was basically saying hey they weren’t 5, they were 14-16! That’s different! Wonder why they’d feel the need to air that viewpoint…
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-12-27 22:05:01+00:00
From the video, it sounds like he engineered his own cells. Using a virus that is known for transferring genetic material into other organisms, he added a gene for producing lactase, and then ate it. I suppose that would affect both his gut bacteria and his own cells. But it lasted for ~1.5 years, which probably indicates that it truly was his cells. Also he seems to know what he's talking about, and he claims it was his own cells.
by hinkley | 2025-12-27 22:05:19+00:00
We now know that gravity moves at the speed of light. Imagie that you aretwo supernovas that for some unknown reason, explode at essentially the same time. Just before you die from radiation exposure, you will see the light pulse from each supernova before each supernova can 'see' the gravitational disruption caused by the other. Maybe a gravity wave can push a chain reaction on the verge of happening into either a) happening or b) being delayed for a brief time, but the second explosion happened before the pulse from the first could have arrived. So you're pretty sure they aren't causally linked.

However if they were both triggered by a binary black hole merger, then they're dependent events but not on each other.

But I think the general discussion is more of a 'Han shot first' sort. One intelligent system reacting to an action of another intelligent system, and not being able to discern as a person from a different reference frame as to who started it and who reacted. So I suppose when we have relativistic duels we will have to preserve the role of the 'second' as a witness to the events. Or we will have to just shrug and find something else to worry about.
by kibwen | 2025-12-27 22:05:37+00:00
It's worth emphasizing this: without the US Navy, the remaining European powers don't have the naval force to stop Russia from blockading the Baltics. And without the ability to break such a blockade, there's little hope in aiding the Baltics against a land invasion from Russia and Belarus. Russia wants a land route to Kaliningrad, and they'll take it at this rate.
by jcranmer | 2025-12-27 22:05:39+00:00
There's like one or two use cases where encrypting email could work. The best case I've come across--Bugzilla has the ability to let the user upload a public key to encrypt emails for updates to non-public bugs. It's not a big use case--pretty much the intersection of "must use email" and "can establish identity out of band," which does not describe most communication that uses email. (As tptacek notes in a sibling comment, you pretty much have to limit this to one-and-done stuff too, not anything that's going to be in an ongoing discussion, because leaks via unencrypted replies are basically guaranteed).
by some_furry | 2025-12-27 22:05:43+00:00
Why is a keyring important to you?

Would "fetch a short-lived age public key" serve your use case? If so, then an age plugin that build atop the AuxData feature in my Fediverse Public Key Directory spec might be a solution. https://github.com/fedi-e2ee/public-key-directory-specificat...

But either way, you shouldn't have long-lived public keys used for confidentiality. It's a bad design to do that.
by Alupis | 2025-12-27 22:06:41+00:00
> The poor bear the brunt of them.

Going to need a citation for that, because it seems the wealth(ier) and/or business-classes would bear the most significant burden of toll roads.

Typically, in my experience, tolls are assessed at boundaries of cities, regions, and intra-region/city transit is toll-free.

Businesses that use the toll road (think trucking/freight, etc) pay tolls because they come from outside of the boundary. Wealthier individuals may commute into the boundary for work, also paying tolls.

One can live inside the city of San Francisco and never pay a toll - but someone that lives outside and commutes in for work or business pays tolls every day.

Other states, such as Illinois have a vast amount of toll roads - where tolls are trivial (typically) but also still only assessed at boundaries. The roads are often much more well maintained than government roads, since the toll collector has a direct financial interest in maintaining traffic on the roads.
by ofalkaed | 2025-12-27 22:07:08+00:00
Communication was mostly lost before the rise of social media—assuming we ever had anything more than isolated pockets of actual communication, which I am not convinced we have. Literature has been exploring this for a good many decades, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a good example and even shows how our relation to it has changed in the 80 odd years since its release; these days when it comes up the interpretation/discussion about it is more often than not, about social causes, which is depressingly ironic, it is using the novel in the same way the characters of the novel use Singer.
by philipkglass | 2025-12-27 22:07:20+00:00
This is subscriber-walled, but the full article is available here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240909093450/https://www.statn...

The key reason Pfizer passed was that executives didn't think patients would accept a new therapy that required injection to administer:

Despite our emerging results, the Pfizer executives in charge of research and external alliances told us the company did not want to develop a new diabetes therapy that required injection, a space held exclusively by insulin since 1922. They gave us a year to find a way to deliver GLP-1 via transnasal, transcutaneous, or oral administration. Effective delivery by any of these approaches would have been great, but we knew success was unlikely in the year they gave us. Our effort was predictably unsuccessful, and after four years, Pfizer terminated our agreement as permitted under the alliance contract.

The first commercial GLP-1 receptor agonist, Exenatide, went to market as an injectable medication in 2005 [1]. Orally delivered GLP-1 medications didn't come to market until 2019 when orally dosed semaglutide was approved as Rybelsus [2].

Now that injected GLP-1 drugs are among the most-prescribed drugs in America, I wonder if drug company executives are going to be more receptive to drug candidates that require injections. There are a lot of molecules (especially peptides) that are degraded by the digestive system; maybe people will be more willing to inject medications when so many have started self-injecting for GLP-1 drugs or know someone who has.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exenatide

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaglutide#Legal_status