MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ravenstine | 2025-12-28 00:16:18+00:00
That's kinda wild to hear about the corn because I've found corn to be one of the easiest crops to grow.

If you want to try again, these are the seeds I last used which had 100% germination and produced plenty of ears of corn.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005MI33BS

I've also had a ton of luck growing corn in 5 gallon buckets with holes drilled in the side to allow air into the soil which keeps the roots from balling up (wasting energy that should go into growing ears). Used potting mix with a handful of lime and a handful of epsom salt, and topped the buckets with mulch to retain moisture.

If you're willing to try that approach, this was very similar to my system:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptgJn15TmRM
by LogicFailsMe | 2025-12-28 00:16:46+00:00
Series E was just 3 months ago. $2M for 3 months work seems fantastic to me. Series B equity was anytime through early 2021. This is a fantastic outcome for everyone in Groq.

What I'm reading here is 100% envy and resentment of their success. But that only works if you're already rich or president, preferably both for best results.
by beej71 | 2025-12-28 00:16:55+00:00
Resonates for me. I consume a bunch of content daily, but it's RSS mostly. Gemini, too. None of it is Facebook et al. I am in groups with friends and family on Signal and on Discord, and in email.

It feels more boring, for sure, but it is vastly more satisfyingly "human", if I can describe it that way.

Yes, I'm over 50.
by KPGv2 | 2025-12-28 00:17:28+00:00
There's way more good content available than an employed adult human has time to consume. I have watched five great seasons of TV this year (Frieren, Apothecary Diaries, Dandadan, Blue Box, Stranger Things, all on Netflix) and zero movies (no time with kids!), and have read twelve good books (ranging from prize-winning literature to incredible graphic novels). I have zero time for anything else besides two other hobbies, both of which involve the creative act: coding, and writing fanfiction.

When I hear "there's nothing good available," I assume the person is a dullard. Like where are you looking that you can't throw a rock and hit something worth watching?!
by RoyalHenOil | 2025-12-28 00:18:11+00:00
90% taxes on people with only 200% of the median wealth seems awfully excessive. For someone with $16,000 in assets, this would leave them with $1,600 -- just 20% of median wealth. I strongly suspect no tax system in history has ever worked like this.

Not to mention that taxes are collected and spent at the national level, not at the global level. If you are proposing a global government that administers taxes worldwide, that is an interesting idea, but it's not exactly a place to "start" a new tax policy, given that there is no political infrastructure in place to support it and likely couldn't be for decades even if the world made a concerted effort to make it happen.
by KPGv2 | 2025-12-28 00:18:44+00:00
> isn't HN more like professional news/discussion place?

I see enough racist and misogynist comments here to know that isn't true. And that's not even considering the low-knowledge comments offered up as expertise.

I long for the days of a Slashdot where you could filter out anyone with a UID greater than 200K or so, and it'd be nothing but 20yr experts in IT dropping rugged after rugged of tremendously insightful analysis. (Granted there was also plenty of GNAA frist psot stuff.)
by JCattheATM | 2025-12-28 00:20:05+00:00
Looking at the wiki page, PISA seems to have some criticisms, one being it seems very gameable. I'm not really familiar with it.

It might be interesting to try and find some more objective support of my claim, and I'll try and post anything worth posting, but anecdotally...the difference between the US and other developed countries is night and day. It's so incredibly easy to run into people in the US who genuinely astoundingly lack the basic knowledge that in other countries it is taken for granted that adults hold.

There's a reason other countries talk shows don't have segments like asking random pedestrians to name any country, literally any country on a world map, so they can laugh when they fail.
by KPGv2 | 2025-12-28 00:21:08+00:00
Sorry, I don't read lesswrong stuff.

Edit Okay for your sake, I did. It ends with "Screening off does not just apply to probability, it also applies to causality. If A causes B and B causes C, once you know the state of B, A provides no further information." which is such a laughably incorrect statement because it mistakenly treats a cause as having only one effect.

Less wrong is a bunch of people who think they understand Bayes better than they do.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-12-28 00:21:13+00:00
The government has had a flat cost model for so long that people would lose their minds if it ever changed. It's the only institution that is free for the poorest and ungodly expensive for the richest, while providing the same product to everyone.

Getting better government services logically follows from paying more for them, but the idea is so sacrilegious and alien that people would probably riot.
by nutjob2 | 2025-12-28 00:21:14+00:00
> 7 of the past twenty years

A lot of shit went down over that period.

But you seem upset by QE in general. It seems to upset a lot of people, possibly because the Fed created a lot of money, but that's what central banks do, they create and destroy money. It's really not that much of a big deal. People lose sight of the fact that money is an abstraction and not something concrete.
by jdsully | 2025-12-28 00:21:46+00:00
I was a bit surprised by this take, because I never questioned you would get the luggage back if it survived. Having looked into it more I was pleasantly surprised that even in cases where the airplane was severely damaged luggage was returned.

If you remember the "Miracle on the Hudson", they actually carefully dried everything and couriered it back to the owners. Far beyond what I would expect.

https://abcnews.go.com/Travel/story?id=7629396&page=1
by r2vcap | 2025-12-28 00:22:58+00:00
Suppressing car usage isn’t about punishing individuals; it’s about correcting urban systems that made car dependency the default in the first place. The Lewis–Mogridge position is well established, and making driving less convenient while improving proximity and alternatives is a core principle of sustainable urban planning.

A lifestyle that requires burning large amounts of fuel just to buy groceries, or maintaining water-intensive lawns at scale, only works under very specific economic and environmental conditions. As those conditions disappear, cities have to adapt—even if the cultural shift feels uncomfortable at first.
by zjuventus14 | 2025-12-28 00:23:01+00:00
Do you have any source for these numbers & the equivalent for auto travel? Would be interested to see - I’m generally aware of the cost vs. fare side of subways, but haven’t seen numbers that support individual car travel being cheaper when you account for subsidies there.

Also worth noting that comparing capital costs of underground transit to above ground private travel is pretty apples and oranges. Buses would be fairer comparison IMO.
by mistrial9 | 2025-12-28 00:23:03+00:00
conspiracy ? a flawed term.. I can tell you that 50 years ago in coastal California the proportion of Big Box retail to ordinary small business was vastly different; so different that you would not tend to believe it. The top 10 massive retailers did not exist, and thousands upon thousands of "small business" were operating. Not only "radio repair" or "clothe yardage stores" either.. I mean many of the same goods and services that are now commonly purchased via massive chain corporate stores.

Secondly, the flow of cheap plastic things from China turned into a steady stream of more and more sophisticated, and low priced, goods.. replacing things that were brand names, hand made, or niche markets. Senator Dianne Feinstein and her husband Richard Blum were particularly involved in that change fyi.

Lastly for now, the newspapers and media landscape. Books, magazines and daily newspapers.. immensely and unimaginably at the time, gone.

Technology plus boomers.. "like a pig through a boa constrictor" .. what is left is this headline. It is not only in the USA.
by adrian_b | 2025-12-28 00:23:11+00:00
While the use of zero and of the positional writing system for numbers have become widespread in Europe after taking them from the Arabs, which had previously taken them from India, these were already known in the Ancient World, both in Ancient Greece and even earlier in Assyria and Babylonia.

However, in the Ancient World the use of zero and positional numbers was restricted to some special applications, e.g. in astronomical tables, and it was unknown for most of the people.

The most novel feature of the Indian system was the application of the positional principle to decimal numbers, instead of sexagesimal numbers, and not the use of zero, which did not differ much from how it was used earlier.
by leptons | 2025-12-28 00:23:14+00:00
whoa...whoa... hold on there, did you say "woke"? Sorry but they're going to outlaw being "woke", so they have to shut down all the institutions that spread "wokeness" first, and that includes any and all providing climate data.

Once they eradicate "wokeness" from the government, then they can just declare something or someone "woke" and then get punitive with them. Or at least that's one way I think it could play out given the actions being taken.
by heavyset_go | 2025-12-28 00:24:42+00:00
> How would this be Apple’s fault if the OS audio stack can’t do direct AAC streaming? Or are you saying the headphones themselves decode, re-encode and then re-decode the AAC?

There are multiple Bluetooth standards for lossless audio that work across platforms. Instead of implementing those features, Apple uses a proprietary protocol to half-ass it only for the case of AAC. Even in that case, it requires a proprietary Bluetooth stack to work. Without that proprietary stack, the Airpods default to low quality transcoding of audio streams at 256kbps, and don't offer true high quality or lossless audio playback. So even in the one case where Airpods offer some semblance of lossless playback, it's non-standard and applicable to AAC only.

Cross platform high quality and lossless audio, multipoint pairing, etc solved problems and features that even $20 white label earbuds on Amazon are able to implement.
by theturtletalks | 2025-12-28 00:24:52+00:00
VendBench is really interesting, but vending machines are pretty specialized. Most businesses people actually run look more like online stores, restaurants, hotels, barbershops, or grocery shops.

We're working on an open-source SaaS stack for those common types of businesses. So far we've built a full Shopify alternative and connected it to print-on-demand suppliers for t-shirt brands.

We're trying to figure out how to create a benchmark that tests how well an agent can actually run a t-shirt brand like this. Since our software handles fulfillment, the agent would focus on marketing and driving sales.

Feels like the next evolution of VendBench is to manage actual businesses.
by condensedcrab | 2025-12-28 00:25:05+00:00
I mostly work with arrays in numpy but sometimes I get stuck with a problem that needs a for loop - only two things I can think of are parallelize the for loop or use numba/jax JIT functions and GPU acceleration.

Both don’t just work out of the box like Julia or MATLAB’s “parfor” loop, but seem to work well enough for non trivial for loop cases.
by lanfeust6 | 2025-12-28 00:25:58+00:00
Even wealth taxes are ineffectual and have been tried, but wealth limits is pants-on-head stupid. If you want to redistribute wealth, you need to generate it first. If wealth were zero sum we'd still be fighting in caves over sticks. This is the most anti-liberal and anti-prosperity idea next to "degrowth".

Inequality is mostly a red herring and not a core issue in and of itself. Public spending as % of GDP has only really been going up for over a century, and we expect UBI and the like to be in our future. Meanwhile we're already seeing what those excesses can lead to in France if we're not careful.
by pzo | 2025-12-28 00:26:16+00:00
> All I can really find is that Google's operating expenses are around $261 billion as of this year[1], and their revenue was $385[2] — and since operating expenses are usually at least substantially payroll, it's hard to tell

It's unlikely that this is mostly for payroll. From AI I got:

"median total compensation per employee was approximately $279,802 in 2022, and with 183,323 employees at the end of 2024, total estimated compensation (salary + equity + benefits) likely exceeds $50 billion, or ~14–15% of total revenue"

So maybe it's not 1% as in Varoufakis talk but even if it's 15% of revenue that's also quite low. Also keep in mind in this AI reponse it includes equity (stocks) so that in this way employee is becoming investor/shareholder.
by gmuslera | 2025-12-28 00:26:30+00:00
If you think SSL certificates are dangerous, try seeing the dangers of NOT using them, specially for a service that is a central repository of artifacts meant to be automatically deployed.

It is not about encryption (that a self-signed certificate lasting till 2035 will suffice), but verification, who am I talking with, because reaching the right server can be messed up with DNS or routing, among other things. Yes, that adds complexity, but we are talking more about trust than technology.

And once you recognize that it is essential to have a trusted service, then give it the proper instrumentation to ensure that it work properly, including monitoring and expiration alerts, and documentation about it, not just "it works" and dismiss it.

May we retitle the post as "The dangers of not understanding SSL Certificates"?
by electroglyph | 2025-12-28 00:27:51+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_stalking

this sums it up nicely:

"A study from Australia and the United Kingdom by Lorraine Sheridan and David James compared 128 self-defined victims of gang stalking with a randomly selected group of 128 self-declared victims of stalking by an individual. All 128 "victims" of gang stalking were judged to be delusional, compared with only 5 victims of individual stalking."
by torcete | 2025-12-28 00:27:58+00:00
There's an asian AI guy on youtube providing a lot of information about what is going on with the silver right now. Sometimes it seems like he has some insider information, and the whole reasoning seems to come from an expert.

It's strange because it's just not one channel but multiple, and the person behind has kept uploading videos during the entire duration of these holidays. So far, he seems to be quite accurate with his predictions. It's been quite informative.

If someone is curious, one of many:
https://youtu.be/vBIUZGlNkks
by coldtea | 2025-12-28 00:28:30+00:00
>Catastrophazing new media hasn't gone out of fashion yet. Remember when it was Reality TV that was supposed to be the downfall of civilizations?

And it was. We're now even further down in that downfall, and most content is "reality TV" style now: influencers, parasocial relationships, IG, TikTok, OF, news vlogs and podcasts that are about the anchor an not the content, and so on...
by PKop | 2025-12-28 00:28:35+00:00
There's no way to reel it back. You said it here though:

> Some people have the discipline to push back, but many do not

This is simply a genetic selective filter that will destroy some people while others make it through, and there will need to be an overall adaptation against finding fake slop debilitatingly addictive. Like drugs, alcohol, porn, food, opiates, etc and other things some can resist and are able to abstain while some can't. I used to worry so much about these things in aggregate but I realized it's too pervasive to eliminate and impossible to change people's nature when it comes to resisting it or even worrying about it as a problem to avoid, so simply resisting better than others and having children that hopefully are able to overcome and avoid by way of finding more value in real experiences is the only successful outcome.

If one has to really really think hard about and try really really hard to overcome, then they're probably just not going to make it... and we all know for many people avoiding addictions comes easy. This chasm of reaction to stimulus means there will be divergent outcomes. It can't be any other way.
by amrocha | 2025-12-28 00:28:51+00:00
I don’t even disagree with you about the system incentives. I hate capitalism just as much as you!

But I still trust the institutions around me to keep me safe. Obviously that depends on where you live, I wouldn’t feel the same way if I still lived in Brazil.

Last time I went to a doctor was about 3 years ago. They diagnosed me in 5 minutes, and took another 10 to treat me and write me a prescription. It was great, I loved it.

Sounds like you have this trust issue with lots of different areas of your life, it might be worth reexamining your own perspective. Or maybe you just have to move to somewhere that you do trust.
by cozymori | 2025-12-28 00:29:37+00:00
First, we don't actually vectorize everything.

We use a hybrid approach to keep costs low and performance high:

Function Metadata: Vectorized only once (for semantic search).

Execution Logs: Stored as standard structured data without embeddings.

Since we don't embed every log, the storage cost is virtually the same as using Postgres. The real value of VectorWave is automating this 'Vector for Search
by NiloCK | 2025-12-28 00:30:03+00:00
Being born in 83, I experienced the shift from "serious local nightly news program" into the 24 hr cable news platforms as a loss of focused, serious journalism.

Only much later did I read Understanding Media, Amusing Ourselves to Death, etc, and understand that the prior shift from print to the "serious local nightly new program" was itself a loss of focused, serious journalism.

For today's youth, Tik Tok is "the air we breath" - the de-facto standard against which the future will be judged. It's horrifying to imagine what will be worse.
by ip26 | 2025-12-28 00:30:19+00:00
If you have two lanes and want three lanes, you could build the third as public, or as toll. If you build as public, it comes out of taxes, such as the gas tax. If you don’t have enough public money, perhaps you increase the tax. If you build it as toll, you can bond the construction and pay for it with tolls.

At least in theory, this means the toll lane accomplishes the same total road throughput, but shifts the entire cost of its construction to its users instead of depleting public funds. It then appears regressive, but is arguably progressive.
by tomas789 | 2025-12-28 00:31:23+00:00
I don’t think this is as simple as it seems. For example, we have our own CA and issue several mTLS certificates, with hundreds of them currently in use across our machines. We need to check every single one (which we don’t do yet) because there is an additional distribution step that might fail selectively. And that’s not even touching on expiring CAs, which is a total nightmare.
by k1w1 | 2025-12-28 00:33:29+00:00
Typescript. I imagine most people writing Rails applications are also writing typescript for front-end code, so being able to use the same muscle memory for Ruby typing seems high desirable. That is the thing that stood out to me when I saw this site: it looks like they are taking the very positive lessons from Typescript and applying them to Ruby.

I agree with other posters here. I don't need everything typed - Ruby's duck typing is an awesome feature - but I do wish that some of the more important interfaces in our code were more strongly self-documenting and enforced.
by AlexBLR | 2025-12-28 00:33:40+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gthu9JVyOVA

The puzzle consists of several levels. At each level, you need to find a key to proceed to the next. The key is hidden or encrypted in the video and looks like something like vFmTBOhkd00. Once you find it, you enter it into the link https://youtube.com/watch?v=vFmTBOhkd00 and proceed to the next level. Please leave a comment under the video after completing the levels. This will serve as proof that you've completed them (like a leaderboard). Those who have completed the levels are kindly requested not to publish the keys (links to the levels) so that others can enjoy the experience. This puzzle isn't as difficult as Cicada 3301, but despite this, few people have ever completed it. If you know similar puzzles or have ideas for a sequel, please let me know (contact information is in the channel profile). I'd be grateful.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-12-28 00:33:57+00:00
Oh I see, that makes sense. Ya, I'm not sure how it works, maybe it has something to do with changing gene expression as we age? Ie, not the genes themselves changing, but the way that they are used / neglected? And then if that's the case, what would that mean for people that had taken this treatment? Perhaps they would see the age-related drop off, or perhaps it's different for some reason.
by TheEaterOfSouls | 2025-12-28 00:34:17+00:00
Not quite the same concept, but The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster (published in 1909, but still pretty relevant imo) is about where this all might lead, with humans living in almost total isolation and only communicating through "the machine", which mostly sounds like modern social media lol. It's terrifying. Also really demonstrates how static human nature actually is.
by shermantanktop | 2025-12-28 00:35:13+00:00
Not really. I check a couple of times a day, look for stuff from people who are likely important, delete noisy stuff once a week, and the rest lingers.

The threaded nature of email both helps and hurts. If it’s from a chatty sender with a chatty reply all conversation, I can delete it all, except if my boss replies, I should probably look at that.

I should also say that I work at a large company where people are auto-included with varying levels of intention. If I never sent an email, I would still get hundreds per day. Coworkers do zero inbox, so it can be done. I just don’t try anymore. Slack is where the actually urgent stuff is anymore.
by epage | 2025-12-28 00:35:56+00:00
> It may have been nice to expose some reasonable defaults for code coverage measurements too.

Would love built in coverage support but investigation is needed on the design (https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/13040) and we likely need to redo how we handle doctests (https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2025/10/01/this-devel...).
by theturtletalks | 2025-12-28 00:36:14+00:00
The video I watched, the CEO was openly taking criticism from the interviewer over the experiment.

The main reason it failed was because it was being coerced by journalists at WSJ[0] to give everything away for free. At one point, they even convinced it to embrace communism! In another instance, Claudius was being charged $1 for something and couldn’t figure it out. It emailed the FBI about fraud but Anthropic was intercepting the emails it sent[1].

Overall, it’s a great read and watch if you’re interested in Agents and I wonder if they used the Agents SDK under the hood.

0. https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-claude-ai-vending-mach...

1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-anthropic-ai-claude-tried-t...