MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by teraflop | 2025-12-22 16:39:51+00:00
"The administration" is not a monolithic entity. For the last ~150 years, even though it's had political appointees at the top, the vast majority of its employees have been selected (at least ostensibly) on the basis of merit, not political loyalty. They're supposed to be somewhat insulated from the changing political winds. The layers of bureaucracy in between were created deliberately, to preserve some degree of decision-making independence.

When people talk about "the Trump administration tightening its hold", they mean Trump and his political appointees exerting direct control over things that have a strong precedent for being out of their direct control.

Using the word "administration" to conflate the presidency with the layers of organization below it is the main premise of the "unitary executive theory", which is an extremely recent development of the current Supreme Court. Previously, when Congress said "such-and-such a decision is supposed to be made by the staff of agency XYZ, not by the President/Secretary personally", the courts assumed they meant it.
by ghjv | 2025-12-22 16:40:01+00:00
How should one orient themselves and their career if they wanted to work to increase funding to scientific development? Outside the obvious "make a boatload of money doing something obscenely profitable and distribute the money yourself"

Editing to clarify: this is not a hypothetical. This is something that I've been trying to do previously and am interested in doing a better job at in the future.
by franch | 2025-12-22 16:40:13+00:00
The relevant comparison is fines vs. actual budget, not fines vs. some cherry-picked industry segment.
EU general government spending (across 27 nations) in 2023 was around €8.4 trillion. €3.8B in fines is 0.045% of that, again, completely immaterial.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1379290/government-expen...
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-12-22 16:40:26+00:00
> That would mean grants would be going out without close supervision by any elected officials (Congress or the President).

Right, traditionally that’s how it worked. Elected officials set the broad parameters of grantmaking, but did not closely supervise individual grants, because we didn’t want scientific researchers to feel like pleasing politicians is their job. But Trump feels that everyone should please him at all times and enjoys punishing anyone who won’t.
by Sesse__ | 2025-12-22 16:40:28+00:00
The short answer is that it's not.

The longer answer is that a lot of people already use Git for Debian version control, and the article expands on how this will be better-integrated in the future. But what goes into the archive (for building) is fundamentally just a source package with a version number. There's a changelog, but you're free to lie in it if you so wish.
by dns_snek | 2025-12-22 16:40:30+00:00
They received a complaint, they investigated and issued a fine. You're asking them to selectively enforce laws based on their subjective opinion of some industry, which would be highly illegal.

The entire advertising industry needs to die and I'll support every fight in pursuit of that goal, but this isn't about that. You don't dismantle an industry by picking a winner and letting them get away with crime.

And yes, there needs to be an EU-wide action over all of those other issues you mentioned too but that has nothing to do with this particular case.
by theamk | 2025-12-22 16:40:50+00:00
This makes no sense.. Python _was_ heavily scrutinized when it was introduced - the whole "Perl vs Python" comparison was pretty popular for a while, with either of those being declared winner, depending on the author.

If there is really a killer argument for Perl over Python that was overlooked in all those years, why don't you say that argument, or even better, write a blog post explaining why Perl is better than Python? Then we could discuss that instead of nebulous "different ways"/
by MarsIronPI | 2025-12-22 16:41:17+00:00
What I've always found off-putting about the Debian packaging system is that the source lives with the packaging. I find that I prefer Ports-like systems where the packaging specifies where to fetch the source from. I find that when the source is included with the packaging, it feels more unwieldy. It also makes updating the package clumsier, because the packager has to replace the embedded source, rather than just changing which source tarball is fetched in the build recipe.
by scapbi | 2025-12-22 16:41:25+00:00
It is much easier than you might imagine. Hundreds of thousands of people live together almost like a city, scamming their own people, speaking the same language as their victims. They train day and night to manipulate the human mind, supported by an underlying system of fake accounts. When I was building the system against that, I felt like David facing Goliath. The problem goes far beyond what technical systems alone can solve.
by manuelmoreale | 2025-12-22 16:41:42+00:00
Income tax paid by public internet tech companies is not the same as “revenues from the entire tech industry”

This report is indicating around 800B in value for the sector (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...)

While other reports have significant higher numbers https://en.ilsole24ore.com/art/tech-europe-is-worth-4000-bil...
by kace91 | 2025-12-22 16:41:53+00:00
>All I'll say is if you meet someone who doesn't read, please please encourage them to try a "highschool read" or something "very mainstream" and don't put them off for life with some obscure liberal arts piece.

I think you assumed implications in my comment that weren’t at all intended. By all means read whatever you enjoy, and by keeping at it you’ll eventually reach less known work just as a side effect of getting deeper in your niches.

As I said in another comment, I just see the selection as a sign of a lack of exploration.

It’s not that the books themselves are bad -the original super Mario is a nice game, but if it’s the only game being significantly mentioned the crowd is probably not really into gaming. It’s just surprising to me that the HN crowd isn’t really into literature.
by D-Machine | 2025-12-22 16:41:55+00:00
This comment and GP comment are why the word "causal model" is needed. LLMs are predictive* models of human language, but they are not causal models of language.

If you believe that some of human cognition is linguistic (even if e.g. inner monologue and spoken language are just the surface of deeper more unconscious processes), then, yes, we might say LLMs can predictively model some aspects of human cognition, but, again, they are certainly not causal models, and they are not predictive models of human cognition generally (as cognition is clearly far, far more than linguistic).

* I avoid calling LLMs "statistical" because they really aren't even that. They are not calibrated, and including a softmax and log-loss in things doesn't magically make your model statistical (especially since ad-hoc regularization methods, other loss functions and simplex mappings, e.g. sparsemax, often work better and then violate the assumptions that are needed to prove these things are behaving statistically). LLMs really are more accurately just doing (very, very fancy and impressive) curve/manifold-fitting.
by tracker1 | 2025-12-22 16:42:03+00:00
FWIW, I really like the way C# has approached this need... most usage is exposed via attribute declaration/declaration DllImport for P/Invoke. Contrasted with say JNI in Java or even the Go syntax. The only thing that might be a significant improvement would be an array/vector of lookup names for the library on the system given how specific versions are often tagged in Linux vs Windows.
by zarp | 2025-12-22 16:42:08+00:00
> it seems pretty random as to when it decides to drop that out of context

Overcoming this kind of nondeterministic behavior around creating/following/modifying instructions is the biggest thing I wish I could solve with my LLM workflows. It seems like you might be able to do this through a system of Claude Code hooks, but I've struggled with finding a good UX for maintaining a growing and ever-changing collection of hooks.

Are there any tools or harnesses that attempt to address this and allow you to "force" inject dynamic rules as context?
by colechristensen | 2025-12-22 16:42:35+00:00
I knew someone who was getting significant public assistance to help get out of homelessness.

The requirements were a nightmare. Your employer had to fill out regular forms, the office administering the program had to fill out regular forms, when they made mistakes they'd threaten to take away your housing (and the office frequently made mistakes). If you were employed there were perverse incentives... they would reduce your benefits my MORE than you earned so it only made sense to get a job if the pay would completely disqualify you from the program. It really was torture.
by yoan9224 | 2025-12-22 16:42:43+00:00
This is a clever aggregation project, but I think the methodology might miss some important signal-to-noise distinctions. A book mentioned once in passing ("oh yeah, like in [book]") carries very different weight than a book recommended explicitly ("you should read [book] if you want to understand X"). Are you parsing comment sentiment or just doing keyword extraction?

The real value would be in clustering books by topic and showing which ones appear together in discussions. If someone mentions "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" and "Database Internals" in the same comment, that's a stronger signal than two isolated mentions. You could build a recommendation engine from that co-occurrence data.

Also curious about the temporal aspect - tracking which books surge during certain news cycles. For example, did "Chip War" mentions spike when the AI compute restrictions hit? That contextual analysis would make this way more useful than a static ranked list. Would definitely use this if it had those features.
by Certhas | 2025-12-22 16:42:55+00:00
Of course highly correct C code is possible [1]. But ADA makes it easier. Rust makes it easier. You can write anything in any language, that is _not_ the argument. How could you plausibly advocate for a culture that invests a lot of effort [1] into making codes correct, and not also advocate for tools and languages that make it easier to check important aspects of correctness? A craftsman is responsible for his tools. Using subpar tools with the argument that with sufficient knowledge, skill and an appropriate culture you can overcome their shortcomings is absurd.

Rust is also often not the right tool. I looked at it fairly deeply some years ago for my team to transition away from Python/C hybrids, but settled on a fully garbage-collected language in the end. That was definitely the right choice for us.

[1] e.g. MISRA C, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_10:_Rules_for_Dev...
by yoan9224 | 2025-12-22 16:43:00+00:00
The cost analysis here is solid, but it misses the latency and context window trade-offs that matter in practice. I've been running Qwen2.5-Coder locally for the past month and the real bottleneck isn't cost - it's the iteration speed. Claude's 200k context window with instant responses lets me paste entire codebases and get architectural advice. Local models with 32k context force me to be more surgical about what I include.

That said, the privacy argument is compelling for commercial projects. Running inference locally means no training data concerns, no rate limits during critical debugging sessions, and no dependency on external API uptime. We're building Prysm (analytics SaaS) and considered local models for our AI features, but the accuracy gap on complex multi-step reasoning was too large. We ended up with a hybrid: GPT-4o-mini for simple queries, GPT-4 for analysis, and potentially local models for PII-sensitive data processing.

The TCO calculation should also factor in GPU depreciation and electricity costs. A 4090 pulling 450W at $0.15/kWh for 8 hours/day is ~$200/year just in power, plus ~$1600 amortized over 3 years. That's $733/year before you even start inferencing. You need to be spending $61+/month on Claude to break even, and that's assuming local performance is equivalent.
by fleahunter | 2025-12-22 16:43:10+00:00
Interesting point about removing branding! I've noticed that many early users really appreciate it when they can customize their experience, especially if they plan to present the tool to clients. I remember trying a few budget tools in the past that offered branding removal for a one-time fee, and it really made me feel like I had more ownership over my projects.

It could be a neat way to upsell, too—kind of a win-win where users can feel good about their investment. Plus, there's something appealing about making something feel more premium with just a small one-time buy. I wonder if adding a super low-cost option like that might draw in more users, even outside the indie maker community.

I’m curious—how big of a factor do you think branding really is for smaller teams? Would it really sway someone to choose your tool over another?
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-22 16:43:14+00:00
> I forgot what it was but I think it was some kind of single payer.

It was not, despite universal single payer having, at the time, outright majority support in polling. That’s one reason it lacked popular support on either side of the political spectrum.

> So under Obama, the democrats took the Massachusetts plan created by Romney (GOP), which I believe the Heritage Foundation even endorsed, thus created the ACA.

IIRC, it wasn't created by Romney, it was created by the insurance lobby and became a (rhetorical) Republican alternative during the debate over the Clinton plan; once that was killed, the Republicans didn't push it nationally (though I think Bush briefly, maybe only during the campaign, pushed a similar mandate-and-subsidy plan that was restricted to only including High-Deductible plans tied to HSAs.)
by yoan9224 | 2025-12-22 16:43:18+00:00
This captures something crucial that gets lost in the "validate your SaaS idea in 48 hours" culture. The best products often emerge from deep exploration of a problem space without immediate commercial pressure. When you're optimizing for fun and learning, you make different architectural choices - you experiment with weird ideas that might unlock novel solutions.

I see this in the analytics space constantly. Everyone rushes to clone Plausible/Fathom with minor tweaks because that's the "validated" approach. But the genuinely interesting problems - like real-time 3D geospatial visualization or AI-driven anomaly detection across behavioral patterns - require months of tinkering with WebGL, spatial databases, and ML pipelines before you know if it's viable.

The counter-argument is that "fun" can turn into perfectionism and never shipping. I think the balance is: have fun building the core innovative piece, but be ruthlessly pragmatic about everything else. For Prysm, I had fun building the real-time Globe visualization with Three.js and Supabase Realtime, but used boring proven tools (Next.js, Stripe, Resend) for auth/payments/email. Ship the fun part, commoditize the rest. That's how you avoid the "two years building in stealth" trap while still doing creative work.
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-12-22 16:43:30+00:00
It's a growing threat everywhere. Here in Russia it's nearly always in the news. They can even trick a person into selling expensive property (real estate) and then steal the money.

One thing is the government must act. These calls are mostly done from abroad. Phone companies can implement some protective measures. Banks too need to watch for common patterns (doesn't always help because scammers talk the victim around the checks). The society as a whole needs to get aware. What a single person could do is to keep contact with the relatives. I've read an expert report on one such case; the author wrote that even a single close someone could break the trance and stop the scam. In that case the victim happened to be a popular singer seemingly never alone, yet as it turned out she actually was a lone old lady with not a single confidant close enough for more than a month.

She was, of course, shattered with what happened (she lost close to $3M), but after some time in one if her interviews she said: "I will survive". She said it in Russian and did not comment on the phrase further, it must be too personal. Yet of course she meant that song. The song helps her. The song's story is different, but the emotion is same. We have all our love to give. A hard hit will do good if it makes us to commit on that.
by yoan9224 | 2025-12-22 16:43:36+00:00
The round-trip efficiency comparison (60-75% vs lithium-ion's ~90%) is interesting but somewhat misleading without context. For grid-scale storage, the relevant question isn't efficiency in isolation - it's lifecycle economics including capex, degradation, and replacement cycles.

Lithium-ion has superior efficiency but degrades significantly after 5,000-7,000 cycles, typically reaching 80% capacity in 7-10 years. If CO2 batteries can maintain performance for 20+ years with minimal degradation (which the article suggests), the lower efficiency becomes less relevant. You're trading 15-25% energy loss for potentially 2-3x longer operational life and no lithium supply chain dependencies.

The real breakthrough is duration-flexible storage. Lithium-ion economics break down beyond 4-hour discharge rates because you're paying for both energy capacity and power capacity. CO2 systems decouple these - the turbine size determines power output, the storage tank size determines duration. That makes them ideal for seasonal storage patterns where you might charge for days during high renewable production and discharge slowly over weeks during winter lulls.

What's missing from the article: what's the round-trip efficiency at different discharge rates? Does efficiency drop significantly when discharging over 12 hours vs 4 hours? That would determine whether these make sense for daily solar smoothing vs weekly wind intermittency vs seasonal storage.
by OutOfHere | 2025-12-22 16:43:43+00:00
From what I recall from a prior article, this really is a bigger problem on Airbus planes than on Boeing planes, so much so that I will not fly on an Airbus plane. Until you vote with your wallet, no one will care.

Also, for multiple reasons, no one should fly without wearing a P95 or comparable or superior mask. You never know when smoke will hit. It is most critical during takeoff and landing, or if on the ground at a terminal. 3M 8577 is decent, with an essential bonus carbon layer. Place a disposable ASTM level 3 surgical mask on top too.

Note that an SpO2 finger meter can fail to recognize CO poisoning; it can be misleading with a false normal value of SpO2.
by mothballed | 2025-12-22 16:43:56+00:00
Yes "~150 years" ago (sounds right to me, not sure on the exact date), there was civil service reform. Prior to that every administration would fire the prior servants and install their own because every political party then and now wanted their own people to be of influence in civil service.

This was replaced with a system where it is very difficult to fire most civil servants but the executive could still select new hires (The Trump administration has tried the firing method via DOGE but with not much luck).

There is a common misconception that this reduces political influence and loyalty. This couldn't be further from the truth. What it did was ensure the civil services grew much further, since the only way the next political party in power could regain dominance was to hire even more civil servants until they overpowered the ones already there.

This meant it is even more important to get loyal ones, since they will be there for a long time and can't be fired. So now we have a large civil service full of loyal people that seemingly often sabotage each other, fighting one loyal group against another loyal group. It might be even worse than before civil service reform.
by yoan9224 | 2025-12-22 16:43:59+00:00
The normalization of internet shutdowns as a "riot control" tool is deeply concerning, especially given how technically unsophisticated most implementations are. In many cases, governments aren't doing surgical BGP manipulation - they're literally ordering ISPs to turn off infrastructure or block DNS at the national level. This is the equivalent of cutting power to an entire city to stop a protest in one neighborhood.

What's particularly insidious is the asymmetry: governments can coordinate offline through military/police radio while citizens lose all communication infrastructure. The $1.5B average economic impact cited in the article is conservative - it doesn't account for destroyed business relationships, lost international contracts, or long-term reputation damage from being seen as "internet shutdown country."

The technical countermeasures are evolving but limited. Mesh networks like Briar or Bridgefy work peer-to-peer over Bluetooth but have tiny range. Satellite internet (Starlink) requires hardware that's easy to detect/confiscate. eSIM switching only works if neighboring countries' towers reach across borders. The hardest problem is the "last mile" - even if you can get data out via satellite/mesh, how do you distribute it locally when cellular is down?

We need international frameworks treating internet access as critical infrastructure with humanitarian protections, similar to water/electricity during conflicts. The ITU could mandate technical transparency - requiring governments to publicly log shutdown orders with specific geographic/temporal scope rather than blanket national blackouts. That wouldn't prevent shutdowns but would create accountability records.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-22 16:44:50+00:00
I could have been an academic or an activist. My son reactivated in me the "making" aspect of experimental physics that had a big impact on me despite doing theory for my PhD. (My son builds buildings by day, guitars by night)

In the last two years I've become a semi-pro photographer. I guess I am also an "activist" now but approach it as personal change [1] instead of interpersonal conflict.

[1] a kind of global "daoism" that embraces all kinds of human development
by scapbi | 2025-12-22 16:44:54+00:00
It is almost impossible. Unlike in developed countries, where banks can offer some level of protection to customers, in third-world countries, banks mainly protect themselves. All responsibility is pushed onto users. Banks take no accountability, and the government protects the banks.

Let me give a concrete example. When money is transferred to scammer accounts, it is immediately distributed across hundreds of other accounts and moved out of the electronic system in under 30 seconds. At that point, everything is gone.
by foldr | 2025-12-22 16:45:32+00:00
They are not predictive models in the domains Chomsky investigated. LLMs make no predictions about, say, when non-surface quantifier scope should or should not be possible, or what should or shouldn’t be a wh-island. They are predictive in a sense that’s largely irrelevant to cognitive science. (Trying to guess what words might come after some other words isn’t a problem in cognitive science.)
by TulliusCicero | 2025-12-22 16:45:39+00:00
> The power imbalance inherent in the expectation that you prove you're 'good enough' to a functionary who has the ability to determine if you have money to buy food or not sounds like a deeply unpleasant scenario to me.

You've essentially described how employment works, and yes, it can be rather unpleasant.