MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rayiner | 2025-12-22 17:59:17+00:00
You're conflating two very different things. You're correct that civil service reforms sought to ensure employees would be hired based on merit. But that does not mean they were granted "decision-making independence." The point was to have highly qualified people executing the agenda of the elected President--not to allow them to exercise discretion independent of political forces.

In Federalist 70 Hamilton emphasizes that a key feature of the Constitution is "unity" of executive power in the President: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed70.asp. Hamilton explains that the Constitution expressly rejects a model that had been adopted by several state governments, where the exercise of executive power was subject to the independent check of the executive's subordinates:

> The ingredients which constitute energy in the Executive are, first, unity; secondly, duration; thirdly, an adequate provision for its support; fourthly, competent powers.

> That unity is conducive to energy will not be disputed. Decision, activity, secrecy, and despatch will generally characterize the proceedings of one man in a much more eminent degree than the proceedings of any greater number; and in proportion as the number is increased, these qualities will be diminished.

> This unity may be destroyed in two ways: either by vesting the power in two or more magistrates of equal dignity and authority; or by vesting it ostensibly in one man, subject, in whole or in part, to the control and co-operation of others, in the capacity of counsellors to him.

So the view being espoused here is not a "recent development." Hamilton was explaining back in 1788 the problems with a model where the President was "ostensibly" the head of the administration, but was "subject, in whole or in part, to the control and cooperation" of his theoretical subordinates.

The constitution was understood this way from Hamilton until Myers v. United States in 1926--which held that the President could fire agency heads without Congressional approval because that was necessary to secure his authority to carry out his will as the executive. The Supreme Court only discarded the traditional view of the executive in the 1930s when FDR created the modern administrative state. And what's now labeled "unitary executive theory" is a legal movement that arose in the 1980s to restore the original view of how the executive worked. The new development wasn't the view of executive power, but instead the idea that we should try to restore how things worked prior to the 1930s.
by hnthrowaway121 | 2025-12-22 17:59:18+00:00
I’m careful like this to a point, but you can establish trust with managers. Most decent cultures don’t favor hoarding good employees how you’ve described.

> It's ridiculous to think that helping you build a successful career, which likely doesn't involve them or your current employer for very long, is something that they would do.

This is a very short term perspective. If I am a good manager to you, you are much more likely to stay because that’s an important relationship & you are benefiting. If it means you move on because I helped you gain the skills/confidence you needed, great, maybe sometime down the road you can help me when I’m looking for me next job or refer my next awesome employee. But who cares, at least neither one of us had to be miserable.

You always have to be _cautious_ but don’t let relentless cynicism keep you from good useful professional relationships that can actually help you.
by ufmace | 2025-12-22 17:59:20+00:00
In addition to the other sibling comments, I think there's also a factor of greatly increased computing power. Back in the 90s and earlier, we just didn't have the computing power generally to encrypt everything with super-strong algorithms in realtime. This probably also affects who can practically do development work on state-of-the-art algorithms.

I recall, when it was originally created, SSL was a rarity, a thing only for the your bank account and the payment page for online stores, because nobody could afford the CPU load to encrypt everything all the time. Now, it's no big deal to put streaming video behind TLS just to ensure your ISP can't mess with it.
by vintermann | 2025-12-22 17:59:53+00:00
He's a former Spotify employee now, but he was a Spotify employee when he made it. I think it hasn't been updated since he lost his data access.

I have a lot of respect for Glenn McDonald for spam fighting all these years on Spotify, but we can go better than PCA for mapping music these days. Any neural embedding model is going to produce more meaningful axes. In fact Spotify had an intern who did just that, just before the launch of Discover Weekly: Sander Dieleman. Along with Aäron van den Oord he was snapped up by Deepmind after their Spotify internship. Those two guys were (and are) wildly good at what they do.
by logicprog | 2025-12-22 18:00:08+00:00
This is exactly it for me as well. I also communicate with LLMs in full sentences because I often find it more difficult to condense my thoughts into grammatically incorrect conglomerations of words than to just write my thoughts out in full, because it's closer to how I think them — usually in something like the mental form of full sentences. Moreover, the slight extra occasional effort needed to structure what I'm trying to express into relatively good grammar — especially proper sentences, clauses and subclauses, using correct conjunctions, etc — often helps me subconsciously clarify and organize my thinking just by the mechanism of generating that grammar at all with barely any added effort on my part. I think also, if you're expressing more complex, specific, and detailed ideas to an LLM, random assortments of keywords often get unwieldy, confusing, and unclear, whereas properly grammatical sentences can hold more "weight," so to speak.
by uxjw | 2025-12-22 18:00:11+00:00
Yes, the cheap engineered "foods" don't help, and they're everywhere. This part of the article really hit home:

> He is worried that without additional support for people making the transition, society's unhealthy relationship with food means little will change.

> "The environment that people live in needs to be one that promotes health, not weight gain.

Also generic versions of Ozempic are coming to Canada soon: https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/ozempic-generic-canada-weight...
by maerF0x0 | 2025-12-22 18:00:47+00:00
The problem is the competitive landscape by which other nations which are Anti- us, are taking but not giving. And are happy to see us go down the drain to their own profit.

It's less about zero sum and more about the existence of enemies in the world who are even willing to lose smally if we lose bigly. (to speak like dilbert)
by ck2 | 2025-12-22 18:00:55+00:00
remember when people first started experiencing TSA and there were massive protests at how obscene and violating it all was, then uncovering how useless they were as fake security theater

and they were going to get it all shut down

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS NOW

so good luck getting rid of flock where people don't even know it's happening

Not sure if people realize that cellphone locations, several layers in the firmware and software, can be had without warrant by anyone YEARS LATER
by jdpage | 2025-12-22 18:01:16+00:00
I don't think it's that the lawyers are undifferentiated; some are better than others, in the same way some real estate agents are better than others (source: people complaining bitterly about theirs).

The problem is that there's currently no effective way to comparison shop. Needing a real estate agent or lawyer is a rare event for most people, so they don't have grounds to make a comparison. And you can't really tell how good they are until you've hired them.

Compare to, say, an auto mechanic. In the US, 90+% of households own a car, and after a few years of car ownership, unless you're a much luckier person than I am, you've probably been to a few mechanics and had some good and bad experiences. On top of that, most of your friends have done the same, so it's much easier to get enough data to figure out who to take your car to next. And, of course, the stakes are a bit lower: a lot would have to go wrong for you to end up in jail because you picked a bad mechanic, and cars are usually cheaper than houses.
by thewebguyd | 2025-12-22 18:01:18+00:00
Excel I'd argue is the primary reason for most in the business world.

What LibreOffice misses, and sheets to a lesser extent, is that Excel isn't just a spreadsheet app. It's a general-purpose programming environment for non-devs (although, at a certain point, you could argue they are effectively programming even if they don't see it that way).

Yeah, there are better solutions. At a certain level of complexity, you probably shouldn't be using Excel and should switch to Python+some SQL database, but there's something to be said about the visual environment Excel provides.

Excel is Microsoft's killer app
by hombre_fatal | 2025-12-22 18:01:48+00:00
It depends what your goal is.

Having to use a browser to crawl your site will slow down naive crawlers at scale.

But it wouldn't do much against individuals typing "what is a kumquat" into their local LLM tool that issues 20 requests to answer the question. They're not really going to care nor notice if the tool had to use a playwright instance instead of curl.

Yet it's that use-case that is responsible for ~all of my AI bot traffic according to Cloudflare which is 30x the traffic of direct human users. In my case, being a forum, it made more sense to just block the traffic.
by tracker1 | 2025-12-22 18:02:05+00:00
Sometimes, I think some aspects of "the old west" in the US might be worth considering a return to... such as "outlaw" and "dead or alive"

I realize that in society we don't typically care for these kinds of approaches, but how else do you actually deal with literal evil that sits safely on the other side of the globe, when their own governments won't do anything to stop it?

The problem is, in reality any such activity would largely be indistinguishable from terrorism.
by monkaiju | 2025-12-22 18:02:13+00:00
i guess that while it is alarming that these feeds were "unsecured" I'm just as concerned that they exist at all. Folks worry about it getting into the "wrong hands" but from my POV it was put up by the wrong hands.

While both are a problem I am far more concerned about the power this gives our, increasingly authoritarian, government than about individual stalkers/creeps.
by dang | 2025-12-22 18:02:46+00:00
Yes, changed above now. (Submitted title was "Origin of Hallucination in LLMs, The physical source of hallucinations has found")

Submitters: If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
by tptacek | 2025-12-22 18:03:08+00:00
I would love to watch a shorter version of this video that just discussed the deltas between the status quo and Flock, rather than breathlessly reporting the implications of cameras as if they were distinctive to Flock. He'll spend 30 seconds talking about how you can see every activity and every person on the camera --- yeah, that's how cameras work. There are thousands of public IP cameras on the Internet, aimed at intersections, public streets, houses, playgrounds, schools; most of them operated that way deliberately.

There are Flock-specific bad things happening here, but you have to dig through the video to get to them, and they're not intuitive. The new Flock "Condor" cameras are apparently auto-PTZ, meaning that when they detect motion, they zoom in on it. That's new! I want to hear more about that, and less about "I had tears in my eyes watching this camera footage of a children's playground", which is something you could have done last week or last year or last decade, or about a mental health police wellness detention somewhere where all the cops were already wearing FOIA-able body cams.

If open Flock cameras gave you the Flock search bar, that would be the end of the world. And the possibility that could happen is a good reason to push back on Flock. But that's not what happened here.
by tzs | 2025-12-22 18:03:21+00:00
> Also, propping up ACA ( I say this as an ACA user ) is not the answer, either. The subsidies were temporary, making them permanent only adds to the never ending flood of red ink.

It does not add to the red ink, at least according to the accounting rules Republicans used to justify the so-called Big Beautiful Bill's (BBB) costs.

The BBB made many of the 2017 Trump tax cuts, which were temporary and set to expire at the end of 2025 (just like enhanced ACA subsidies), permanent.

Republicans argued that the loss of revenue from making the tax cuts permanent should not count when accessing the effects of the BBB on the deficit because extending something that is expiring doesn't really change anything.
by lenerdenator | 2025-12-22 18:03:23+00:00
I think that it's both a rewriting of history and a rationalization of the investment on some people's parts.

Nixon's opening of relations with China was definitely a move against the USSR, but that was nothing compared to the extent of investment that was seen after the fall of Communism in Europe. The fact that the CPC was still very much in charge while all of this investing was occurring had to be rationalized somehow in the minds of people who were less cynical, and "it'll help liberalization" was probably one of the rationalizations used. And in some ways, you can use investment as a way to leverage social changes within countries, and some people (though apparently not enough) thought that was the intention with China, but there was only a carrot, not a stick, and by the time there was a desire to use a stick, there was too much dependency on China as a market and producer for the West. That's where we're at now.
by csnover | 2025-12-22 18:03:32+00:00
As someone who uses Debian and very occasionally interacts with the BTS, what I can say is this:

As far as I know, it is impossible to use the BTS without getting spammed, because the only way to interact with it is via email, and every interaction with the BTS is published without redaction on the web. So, if you ever hope to receive updates, or want to monitor a bug, you are also going to get spam.

Again, because of the email-only design, one must memorise commands or reference a text file to take actions on bugs. This may be decent for power users but it’s a horrible UX for most people. I can only assume that there is some analogue to the `bugreport` command I don’t know of for maintainers that actually offers some amount of UI assistance. As a user, I have no idea how to close my own bugs, or even to know which bugs I’ve created, so the burden falls entirely on the package maintainers to do all the work of keeping the bug tracker tidy (something that developers famously love to do…).

The search/bug view also does not work particularly well in my experience. The way that bugs are organised is totally unintuitive if you don’t already understand how it works. Part of this is a more general issue for all distributions of “which package is actually responsible for this bug?”, but Debian BTS is uniquely bad in my experience. It shows a combination of status and priority states and uses confusing symbols like “(frowning face which HN does not allow)” and “=” and “i” where you have to look at the tooltip just to know what the fuck that means.
by empath75 | 2025-12-22 18:03:33+00:00
They didn't.

They didn't like go out on Dec 21st, and look where the sun was and mark it. They didn't even have calendars like that. They watched the sun every day, and waited until it stopped being lower in the sky at it's highest point in the day (or whatever other sign of the solstice they wanted to use), and marked that angle and built whatever viewport they wanted (a door, tunnel, etc).

Then they could just go wherever they built the thing that pointed at that point in the sky, and go, oh, okay, the solstice is soon, or just happened, or whatever and plan accordingly.

It actually wasn't really accurate to the day, anyway. There are a few days on either side of the solstice where the effect is basically the same for the viewer.

Something to keep in mind is that this isn't only useful for determining the exact date of the winter solstice, which they may not have even cared that much about. You can see roughly where you are in the year on either side of the solstice by looking at how far out of alignment the sun is on a given day. So it could be useful throughout the fall and even well into the winter for gauging the passing of time. People didn't need to plan day by day or even week by week, but they did need to do things in roughly the right part of the year.

People act like this is some unexplainable advanced technology, and anybody can just do this with a stick and some rocks.
by mackeye | 2025-12-22 18:03:41+00:00
i'd say it's less predatory for all users to have the same algorithm. maybe on HN, the userbase is small enough, and the articles generally focused enough, that it'd be less impactful were the algorithm somewhat divergent per user. but on other platforms, rabbitholes appear very quickly, and very inorganically. to be plain, i've liked a number of pro-palestine posts on instagram, and started getting very anti-semitic reels until i hit "not interested" a certain number of times. the algorithm is opaque, but also stupid, and motivated to aggravate me into commenting, scrolling more, etc., to view ads. i don't know if i have a way to categorize HN into "good" and ig/X/... into "bad", to be honest.

for what it's worth, discord doesn't really have a user algorithm to get people into certain servers, and yet people are readily radicalized on discord (especially to the far-right, in my experience), but obviously the way people interact on discord is different to social media.
by anyfoo | 2025-12-22 18:03:44+00:00
Note what I actually wrote:

> And while I don’t doubt that there are serious physiological conditions that warrant, even necessitate, medicating, my impression is that the first response to “depression” in general shouldn’t be medication.

It’s very well possible that you, and the person you answered to, are solidly part of the “needs medication” fraction. I do not believe that medication against depression is bad in general.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-22 18:03:58+00:00
> While it is a human right to own property and use it to rationally pursue one's self-interests, that does not mean that capitalism in its current form is conducive to that for the greatest number of people, or to the evolution of other human rights in the societies in which capitalism is practiced.

I'd argue that communism is the only system of government that guarantees property for all. That's somewhat a core tenant that every member in a communist society collectively owns everything.

Capitalism is optimized to reduce or eliminate property access. For example, a free market capitalist has no problems with a very rich individual buying a city and perpetually renting the property to it's employees at rates above their salary, putting them in perpetual debt to that individual. They own nothing and can't escape their circumstances. Nor can their children.

Capitalism with minimal or no regulation naturally devolves into feudalism.
by nicoburns | 2025-12-22 18:04:11+00:00
https://docs.rs/subsecond for hotpatching general Rust code Live++ style.

Many of the UI frameworks have domain-specific hot-reloading on top of that (e.g. Dioxus can hot-reload CSS assets and RSX without resorting to binary patching) which covers the common case of wanting to quickly iterate on design details.

I've found the domain-specific stuff to be completely instant (even faster than a typical browser hot-reload). The hotpatching is typically around 0.5-2 seconds for me, but that does partially depend on project size (and of course hardware - I'm running an Apple M1 Pro).
by floatrock | 2025-12-22 18:04:56+00:00
I was simply just made uncomfortable by how much CYA the lawyers had to insert into a technical blog post.

This is fun cool tech and I appreciate the insider look, but when the lawyers are peering over your shoulder so much that they need to plaster their "final product may be different" disclaimer even to a r&d audience, well, the Disney Imagineering org sounds more like Disney Legaleering.
by program_whiz | 2025-12-22 18:05:18+00:00
undifferentiated to the laymen perhaps, just as I'm sure programmers are to the uninitiated. Guessing if you dug into their past cases, their degrees, grades, etc, you would see differentiation. If you were facing life in prison or the death penalty, you would probably want to know the specifics and not just "lawyers are interchangeable, give me a script to read in court -- its something we should have automated already."

Perhaps a more apt approach would be to expose more information about lawyers to the public, so they can make a better decision. There are sites that do this (showing average win rates, average payout, response time, years in practice etc).

But maybe people don't know about these sites, or there are other reasons people select based on advertising rather than cold logical analysis.
by CharlesW | 2025-12-22 18:05:31+00:00
It's strangely difficult to find official information about this, but here's what I've learned:

• Use `/plugin` to open Claude Code's plug-in manager

• In the Discover tab, enter `lsp` in the search box

• Use `spacebar` to enable the ones you want, then `i` to install

Hope that helps!
by aeonik | 2025-12-22 18:05:37+00:00
Probably Math and science teacher/professor.

I also could end up being happy in condensed matter physics, astrophysics, robotics, materials science, nano tech, optics, or RF. Some combination of engineering and science.

I love teaching and building things to help people. So there are a bunch of areas that would fit the bill here. I gravitate towards any tech that feels like magic.
by mackeye | 2025-12-22 18:05:57+00:00
to be honest, i've been playing violin for a number of years and my strategy is still to listen to a part of the song, rewind until i can play it (even if slowly), then write that down. some of the pieces i want to write down are twin-guitar pieces, where i need to (generally) choose the melodic guitar over the harmonic. i haven't found AI good at that, but, thinking now, i haven't tried it in years, so it may have gotten good enough? sorry for the lack of much insight, lol. (for metal, finding tabs online can at least help with the rhythm, so i just need to try and transcribe the notes & flourishes).
by maerF0x0 | 2025-12-22 18:05:59+00:00
I actually agree here too. America (and Americans) spend waaaay too much, and especially on niche things that profit very specific subgroups. We need to get back to the basics. Johnny can't read[1], or do math. That should be funded long before we worry about today's PhDs, those kids are the pipeline of future PhDs.

/r

[1]-https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryancraig/2024/11/15/kids-cant-...
by zkmon | 2025-12-22 18:06:03+00:00
I spoke to a few people outside of IT and Tech recently. They are senior people running large departments at their companies. To my surprise, they do not think AI agents are going to have any impact in their businesses. The only solid use case they have for AI is a chat interface which, they think, can be very useful as an assistant helping with text and reports.

So, I guss it's just us who are in the techie pit and think that everyone else is also is in the pit and use agents etc.
by GravitasFailure | 2025-12-22 18:06:22+00:00
Yeah, I'm curious how Prusa will go about enforcing this license and how it will play out for them overall, especially more that they're pursuing patents.

Voron isn't quite the only open printer. There are some others that are loosely based on/related to Voron, like Micron and Salad Fork, plus Ratrig which has a very different lineage.