MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ralferoo | 2025-12-15 17:37:15+00:00
If you don't know their birthday, you can presumably never answer that question in any case.

If you only know the birth year and keyed 99 as the month for unknown, then your algorithm would determine they were of a correct age on the start of the year after that was true, which I guess would be what you want for legal compliance.

If you don't even know if the birth year is correct, then the correct process depends on policy. Maybe they choose any year, maybe they choose the oldest/youngest year they might be, maybe they just encode that as 0000/9999.

Again, if you don't know the birth year of someone, you would have no way of knowing their age. I'm not sure that means that the general policy of putting a birthday into their ID number is flawed.

Many governments re-issue national IDs to the same person with different numbers, which is far less problematic that the many governments who choose to issue the same national ID (looking at you USA with your SSN) to multiple individuals. It doesn't seem like a massive imposition on a person who was originally issued an ID based on not knowing when their birthday to be re-issued a new ID when their birthday was ascertained. Perhaps even give them a choice of keeping the old one knowing it will cause problems, or take the new one instead and having the responsibility to tell people their number had changed.

Presumably the governments that choose to embed the date into a national ID number do so because it's more useful for their purposes to do so than just assigning everyone a random number.
by jtrn | 2025-12-15 17:37:49+00:00
I just finished reading article and honestly, my BS detector is going off the charts.

I’m not saying pesticides are health tonics, but this piece feels like pure litigation PR rather than an actual investigation. It prioritizes storytelling over science and engages in what I can only describe as lying by omission. Here are the main issues I found:

The nurse whose skin peeled off just from touching a patient’s urine? The article frames this to make you think, "Wow, this stuff is so toxic that if a farmer uses it, his body becomes a weapon." I looked into the medical case this is likely based on. That patient didn't just "farm" with Paraquat; he ingested a lethal, concentrated dose (usually a suicide attempt). By leaving out that the patient drank a cup of poison, the author conflates Acute Poisoning (death in days, acid urine) with Chronic Exposure (trace amounts over years). If the farmer in the main story had enough Paraquat in his system to burn a nurse’s skin, he wouldn’t be alive to give an interview about Parkinson’s. He’d be dead from multi-organ failure. Omitting this context is manipulative fear-mongering.

Then there is the math: Parkinson’s affects about 1% of the elderly population. There are 2 million farms in the US. Even if Paraquat was essentially harmless water, you would still have tens of thousands of farmers with Parkinson’s purely by chance. The article ignores this base rate to imply that every diagnosis is a result of the chemical. It treats a probabilistic risk as a deterministic cause.

It also ignores confounders (like the "Rural Cluster" Problem). Farming is a "chemical soup" lifestyle. You have well water (a known PD risk), head trauma risks, and exposure to dozens of other chemicals like Rotenone or Maneb. The article presents a direct line: Paraquat -> PD. But scientifically, isolating one chemical from 30 years of rural living is a nightmare. The article doesn't even attempt to falsify the hypothesis or look at other factors; it just assumes the lawsuit's narrative is the scientific truth.

The article also fails basic science standards. It is storytelling, not science. A real scientific inquiry follows Popperian standards—you make a conjecture and then try to disprove it. This article does the opposite: it acts like a defense attorney. It stacks up emotional anecdotes and selective correlations to confirm its bias and ignores the replication crisis in epidemiology where results often don't stick.

This isn't journalism and it’s not science; it’s advocacy via outrage. It uses the real tragedy of these farmers to push a specific narrative, relying on readers not knowing the difference between drinking poison and spraying crops. If you’ve ever wondered why science doesn’t make more progress, and we have the replication crisis, look no further.
by xpe | 2025-12-15 17:37:56+00:00
Ah, in case it didn't come across clearly, my conclusion isn't to blame the individuals. My assessment is to seek out better communication patterns, which is partly about "technology" and partly about culture (expectations). People could indeed learn not to act this way with a bit of subtle nudging, feedback, and mechanism design.

I'm also pretty content accepting the unpleasant parts of reality without spin or optimism. Sometimes the better choice is still crappy, after all ;) I think Oliver Burkeman makes a fun and thoughtful case in "The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13721709-the-antidote
by nutjob2 | 2025-12-15 17:38:05+00:00
It really is crazy. A lot of people here seem to miss the relative nature of countries' behavior and think they're all as bad as each other when the difference is huge.

Especially when it comes to China and Russia, people seem to think they're about as bad as the West when nothing could be further from the truth.

Maybe thats due to more people from the hard right haunting this place, or the general shift of the tech crowd to the right. I'm not sure what it is exactly.
by coldpie | 2025-12-15 17:38:05+00:00
Sounds bad man.

Meanwhile, Amazon and its executives are union-busting to keep worker rights minimal, running a nation-wide law enforcement surveillance network, supporting Republican politicians and all of their anti-American policies and practices, lobbying to oppose anti-trust enforcement to keep hold of their illegal market positions and keep our economy weak, and they own one of the nation's largest newspapers specifically so they can control the narrative over their own actions. And that's all happening right here, in the US, influencing our laws and our media, right now today, not in some theoretical future.

So yeah in terms of entities that are actually doing real harm to Americans, Amazon beats China no question.
by zugi | 2025-12-15 17:39:02+00:00
I disconnected my Roomba from the network right after programming its schedule. It still works great, following the same schedule for 7 years.

I recently bought a cheap Chinese roomba clone. It comes with a remote control so you don't need to connect it to the internet. I do have to press a button to start it but it works great.

If you care about your privacy, choose products appropriately and/or take 5 minutes to protect yourself. Most people don't seem to care, which is their choice.
by devrand | 2025-12-15 17:39:14+00:00
Is DOGE still there? The latest reporting [1] I've seen is that it's leaderless and has more or less just been absorbed into other organizations. This aligns with DOGE not posting anything for several months now.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/doge-doesnt-exist-with-eigh...
by qarl | 2025-12-15 17:39:22+00:00
Not at all. NOT AT ALL.

There are shades of gray here. But you are absolutely not required to extend benefit of the doubt to entities that have not earned it. That's a recipe for disaster.

Personally, I find myself to be incredibly biased against corporations over people. I've met a lot of people in my life, they seem mostly nice if a bit stupid. Well intentioned. Selfish.

Are corporations mostly well intentioned? Well, consider that some people tried to put "good intentions" into corporations bylaws and has been viciously resisted.

Corporations will happily take everything you have if you accidentally give it to them. Actual human beings aren't like that.
by margalabargala | 2025-12-15 17:39:26+00:00
> If you're really the first, you should be able to get about a 20 year head start.

That's an opinion, and not one I agree with.

If you and your competitor are racing to develop a thing, whoever wins by a couple months shouldn't get a monopoly for decades.

Most of the time when things get patented, it's strictly worse for innovation in that space until the patents expire. 3d printing is a great example.

It's asinine to think you can outsource manufacturing of whatever object to some other company in another country, but that no one on the planet can make the same thing because "the idea is yours".
by fbelzile | 2025-12-15 17:39:34+00:00
Not a mistake. Making an app that fits this niche might be how you differentiate yourself in the market and succeed as a solo developer. It'll let you grow at a slower pace, making it easier to iterate the app over time as you see fit. You could always offer an add-on service in the form of a subscription in the future.

I run a productivity desktop app by myself and have been doing it full time since 2017. The app is a one time payment, free support, no gimmicks, no marketing. Support is becoming time consuming, but profit is high enough that I may hire a few people to help soon.

Good luck! High growth rates with investors is one way to do things, but not the only way.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-15 17:40:17+00:00
> Participants will work on high-impact technology initiatives including AI implementation, application development, data modernization, and digital service delivery across federal agencies.

> The initial roster of private sector partners includes Adobe, Amazon Web Services, AMD, Anduril, Apple, Box, C3.ai, Coinbase, Databricks, Dell Technologies, Docusign, Google Public Sector, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Oracle, Palantir, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Snowflake, Robinhood, Uber, Workday, xAI, and Zoom. This list will expand over time.

Ever wanted to get involved in government-sanctioned espionage technology? This seems like an recruitment effort for that. Applicants beware. Remember that in just 3 years this will stop helping you to get hired, and will probably look like a blemish on your CV when you eventually need to get a new job.
by andrewmutz | 2025-12-15 17:40:20+00:00
These days the policy positions of each party are hashed out on social media by non-experts. For both the democrats and the republicans, instead of any sort of research or experts driving public policy decisions, it's instead the things that resonate with your average person's feelings as they scroll through their feed and get engagement.

The end result is of course populism. Each election cycle gets us closer to the policy positions of the Republicans being "Immigrants are bad" and Democrats being "Billionaires are bad".

We know where populism leads, and we've seen it for decades in south america. In a few decades, we will get to choose between the populist far left and the populist far right. Policy will get crazier and crazier and measurable societal outcomes will stagnate and perhaps go backwards.

This will continue as long as social media is the primary form of entertainment in the US.
by afavour | 2025-12-15 17:40:22+00:00
> Tech Force will primarily recruit early-career technologists

> Tech Force will include centralized organization and programming and serve as a recruiting platform post-employment.

Be prepared to struggle at the end of your two year placement because you have no idea how this is going to look on your resume two years from now. Maybe it’ll have the gravitas of having worked at the former USDS. But maybe it’ll be the black mark of having worked at DOGE. The latter feels much more likely than the former.

You will have no control over this outcome. If I had to bet I’d say they will take advantage of your junior status to get you to do the kind of wildly irresponsible hacking, slashing and AI injecting that a more senior engineer would object to and you’re going to face some tough questions in subsequent job interviews.
by simonsarris | 2025-12-15 17:40:34+00:00
https://meetinghouse.cc

A place to find and be found for twitter users only right now. As a silly project I am trying to make not a social network, but an extension of another social network. So far its going OK. It also functions as a link-tree like site with profiles: https://meetinghouse.cc/x/simonsarris

Eventually I might open it up more widely, or make a different globe per social media network.
by catapart | 2025-12-15 17:40:35+00:00
Daaang! On the one hand, as someone developing a code-example custom element[0] that includes highlighting, this is kind of a "so close, but not quite" situation where I really wish this was something I could use for that, but it's probably too heavy to ship around for something so "simple" (as far as users' default expectation; not implying that highlighting text is simple).

But then, on the other hand, I had given up on a scratch code editor for a game development project I'm working on, and just loosely wrapped up the monaco editor which I'm guessing is going to be pretty bare when I actually get around to trying to code with it, in browser (I'm aware that it is robust, but from what I gather, a lot of its features come from third-party dev as a way to keep the core functionality pure). Given that I want to be able to script in C# (aside from just js/ts), I was sure I was going to have to figure something complicated out.

But, honestly, I think this solves all of my most concerning issues! What a sweet little library!

[0] https://magnitce-code-example-e81613.gitlab.io/ (please excuse the unfinished-ness; I'm working on a JSDoc-to-documentation library that automates the documentation for me so there are minor issues, like the install text not changing on selection)
by Ukv | 2025-12-15 17:40:48+00:00
UUIDs are good for creating entries concurrently where coordinating between distributed systems may be difficult.

May also be that you don't want to leak information like how many orders are being made, as could be inferred from a `/fetch_order?id=123` API with sequential IDs.

Sequential primary keys are still commonly used though - it's a scenario-dependant trade-off.
by scottbez1 | 2025-12-15 17:41:09+00:00
Flashing can be easy, sure. Compiling that binary, including library management, is not, unless you’re using something like micropython. CMake is not hobbyist/student-friendly as an introductory system. (Arduino isn’t either, but platformio with Arduino framework IS! RPi refuses to support platformio sadly)

Arduino took over for 3 reasons: a thoughtful and relatively low cost (at the time) development board that included easy one-click flashing, a dead-simple cross-platform packaging of the avr-gcc toolchain, and a simple HAL that enabled libraries to flourish.

Only the first item, and a bit of the second), is really outdated at this point (with clones and ESP32 taking over the predominant hardware) but the framework is still extremely prominent and active even if many don’t realize it. ESPHome for example still will generally use the Arduino HAL/Framework enabling a wide library ecosystem, even though it’s using platformio under the hood for the toolchain.

Even folks who “don’t use Arduino any more” and use platformio instead are often still leveraging the HAL for library support, myself included. Advanced users might be using raw esp-idf but the esp-idf HAL has had a number of breaking API changes over the years that make library support more annoying unless you truly need advanced features or more performance.
by chillenberger | 2025-12-15 17:41:30+00:00
I am working on a text-editor that allows you to discuss specified file folders with AI agents for knowledge work. It is similar to vs code with chat but for non-technical users and not for code.

I feel like I am constantly fighting LLM interfaces to make available and organized the context needed for discussion. There just seems to be way to much copy pasta into and out of the infinite scroll interface. I also find the output tough to quickly edit and discuss with the chatbot.

It is simple enough but I couldn't find anything like it and it has quickly become one of my favorite tools. I am build over buy to a a fault, so if there is something out there like this already I would not be surprised.

https://github.com/chillenberger/text-editor-dt
by pimlottc | 2025-12-15 17:41:31+00:00
Fortunately that's addressed in the extremely fine FAQ:

> How is Tech Force related to other government technology programs, including ones at GSA or the United States DOGE Service?

> While Tech Force will coordinate across all of government, it is distinct from other technology initiatives within government, including the United States DOGE Service and programs managed by GSA. These programs differ in their mandates, structure, required skillsets, and ability to convert to the competitive service.

Any questions?
by pcf | 2025-12-15 17:41:49+00:00
I use this model in Perplexity Pro (included in Revolut Premium), usually in threads where I alternate between Claude 4.5 Sonnet, GPT-5.2, Gemini 3 Pro, Grok 4.1 and Kimi K2.

The beauty with this availability is that any model you switch to can read the whole thread, so it's able to critique and augment the answers from other models before it. I've done this for ages with the various OpenAI models inside ChatGPT, and now I can do the same with all these SOTA thinking models.

To my surprise Kimi K2 is quite sharp, and often finds errors or omissions in the thinking and analyses of its colleagues. Now I always include it in these ensembles, usually at the end to judge the preceding models and add its own "The Tenth Man" angle.
by bArray | 2025-12-15 17:42:00+00:00
Remember, Hong Kong was supposed to be in a 50 year transition period from 1997 where there were supposed to be one country, two systems [1]. The national security legislation is just one in a long line of failures [2]. If nothing else was learned, it was this: China, specifically the CCP, cannot be trusted.

It makes me sick that the UK sends billions to Ukraine to interfere in a war we have no fundamental right to involve ourselves in, meanwhile, Hong Kong was allowed to fall with only light media coverage. It is outrageous. The politicians that oversaw it should be ashamed.

Not to mention that Carrie Lam, former leader of Hong Kong, sold her people up the river by allowing the national security law in [3]. She was even hiding out in the UK with her husband from her own countrymen.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_country,_two_systems#Imple...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_country,_two_systems#2020_...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_Lam
by Aurornis | 2025-12-15 17:42:07+00:00
> I'm pretty sure reddits reason for blocking VPN's is they want the AI scrapers to pay them for a data feed.

Signing up for Reddit through a VPN has been difficult to impossible for a long time.

The amount of abuse that comes through VPN-sourced IP addresses is much higher than normal. It's common to block it on any social media site.
by ElevenLathe | 2025-12-15 17:42:38+00:00
I say they're wrong, and I do so in my capacity as a citizen. These large pools of capital should not be allowed to follow the whims of a handful of unelected oligarchs who have clearly lost the plot. In a functioning society, this scale of decision would not be left to the whims of international finance capital, but decided via democratic means. It's unfortunate that the last scraps of the Fordist labor truce are unraveling, because it means that I and my comrades are going to have to discipline this generation of oligarchs just like our grandparents did the last really nasty one.
by belter | 2025-12-15 17:42:40+00:00
Looking at the massive downvote of my comment and all the subsequent replies, lots of people here missed their MIT class of Ethics in Software Engineering...

In safety critical engineering, ethics are not opinions but process guarantees. Waymo system is ML dominant, non deterministic, and validated statistically, without a public end to end safety case, formal failure bounds, or provably safe fallback under unknown conditions.

Shipping anyway is not a technical necessity but a choice to externalize unbounded risk onto non consenting bystanders. Comparing that to bad human drivers or stock prices misses the point that this about what risks you knowingly impose.

Looks like the Waymo Software team could apply at Boeing. I hear they are hiring....
by alsetmusic | 2025-12-15 17:42:52+00:00
I've been buying only Samsung for about seven or eight years. I got a four-bay M.2 Thunderbolt 4 RAID enclosure in 2022 and I couldn't be happier with it. It absolutely smokes everything else I have (other than my internal SSD).

Tech news has been quite the bummer in the last few months. I'm running out of things to anticipate in my nerd hobby.
by lukeschlather | 2025-12-15 17:42:59+00:00
If a sequential ID is exposed to the client, the client can trivially use it to determine the number of records and the relative age of any records. UUID solves this, and the use of a cryptographically secure number generator isn't really necessary for it to solve this. The author's scheme might be similarly effective, but I trust UUIDs to work well. There are obviously varying ways to hide this information other than UUIDs, but UUIDs are simple and I don't have to think about it, I just get the security benefits. I don't have to worry about not exposing IDs to the clients, I can do it freely.
by the_af | 2025-12-15 17:43:12+00:00
Great Britain is very directly involved in a whole bunch of relatively recent messes in the Middle East, China, etc.

It's not whataboutism to point up the current messed up situation is not unrelated to the behavior of the UK, and their fingerprints are all over it. Of course things aren't static and new actors have changed the conversation, but this doesn't absolve them and they shouldn't be pointing fingers.
by munch117 | 2025-12-15 17:43:24+00:00
> Also worth noting that the author never actually stated that they did not use generative AI for this article.

I expect that they did in some small way, especially considering the source.

But not to an extent where it was anywhere near as relevant as the actual points being made. "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances,", the guidelines say.

I don't mind at all that it's pointed out when an article is nothing more than AI ponderings. Sure, call out AI fluff, and in particular, call out an article that might contain incorrect confabulated information. This just wasn't that.
by jtrn | 2025-12-15 17:43:24+00:00
Yeah, I found it myself. And yes, it's nasty stuff. But in the context of the article, it’s pure nonsense.

Should we ban anhydrous ammonia, chlorine, or gasoline? They are nasty and dangerous too. The article is purely scare-mongering to make it seem true while obviously pushing an agenda. This is not science. See my reply at the same level after I did a review.
by mike_hearn | 2025-12-15 17:43:37+00:00
You're right, the origin of this thread was making an argument about all taxes on capital, not just capital gains. I missed that, I guess because nobody mentioned wealth taxes specifically and it's fairly rare for taxes on capital to mean anything other than capital gains tax. Mea culpa.

> The startup wealth tax problem has another solution: allow payment in non-voting startup shares, instead of liquid cash

This is an excellent idea! Did you come up with this yourself or have you heard of others proposing it?