MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thisisit | 2025-12-22 20:05:13+00:00
It is pretty much clear that the current WH has decided science has a bias against them and wants to curb it. There is no reason apart from that.

People still bring in bad faith arguments about private companies funding research or replication crisis. Sure these are big issues in current scientific research. There is no denying that.

While there might be an intuitive sense of less public research means money saved, there is no data or research (duh!) showing the impact of reduced public research.

From what we have seen so far this will make things worse - because for one private research is going to biased. It happens today but public research can counter that. Later there will be no defense. Like MAHA report making up BS sources using AI to push its agenda.

The irony in all of this is - the man pushing ivermectin during a pandemic - one of the biggest replication issue if not the big one - is telling others how to do research and people are defending him.
by robmccoll | 2025-12-22 20:05:21+00:00
That's the thing about investing in scientific research, especially toward the basic science end of the spectrum - the real benefit is seen years down the line after technology transfer to public-private partnerships and private industry. It can take many years to decades to see the long-term benefit, which is why it needs government backing. It's not sustainable for most players in the private sector to invest research that is high risk (with respect to applicability), long term, or both. This also makes it easy to cast doubt on the value of research being done now or recently - we don't have a ton of concrete results to show for it yet. The best numbers to look at would probably be emigration / immigration of PhDs, papers published in top-tier journals and the universities associated with them, and where conferences are being held.
by jrmg | 2025-12-22 20:05:37+00:00
Did big businesses in the West really think “investing” in China would lead to “freedom” and such?

You’re right in your assumption that profit-seeking was the major part of it - like, it wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

But the idea that the West trading and interacting with China would mean the populous (and perhaps government) would come to understand the benefits of a free society, and so China would trend towards a Western political system - probably gradually rather than violently - was a mainstream view from the 80s to the early 2010s.
by eterm | 2025-12-22 20:06:10+00:00
I completely agree. Likewise I'm amazed Microsoft hasn't done it themselves for Roslyn and Copilot. Roslyn analyzers are so incredibly powerful, and it's being ignored.

An explainer for others:

Not only can analyzers act as basic linters, but transformations are built right in to them. Every time claude does search-and-replace to add a parameter I want to cry a little, this has been a solved science.

Agents + Roslyn would be productive like little else. Imagine an agent as an orchestrator but manipulation through commands to an API that maintains guard rails and compilability.

Claude is already capable of writing roslyn analyzers, and roslyn has an API for implementing code transformations ( so called "quick fixes" ), so they already are out there in library form.

It's hard to describe them to anyone who hasn't used a similarly powerful system, but essentially it enables transforms that go way beyond simple find/replace. You get accurate transformations that can be quite complex and deep reworks to the code itself.

A simple example would be transforming a foreach loop into a for loop, or transforming and optimizing linq statements.

And yet we find these tools unused with agentic find/replace doing the heavy lifting instead.

Whichever AI company solves LSP and compiler based deep refactoring will see their utility shoot through the roof for working with large codebases.
by jmward01 | 2025-12-22 20:06:12+00:00
For the year ending May 2024, China released more scientific papers -in English- than the US [1]. We have been on a decline for a while.

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

[edit]
I think that list is total, not just for a single year. Still telling though.
by materialpoint | 2025-12-22 20:06:25+00:00
It is not out of memory, with 32GB it is just slow even on a fresh start.
It all goes to say that Microsoft willingly chose to use UI kits with 100x overhead compared to real functionality and rendering. It needs to die, when FOSS can make 12 year older hardware outshine 8x more expensive hardware in every single aspect, without any tweaking.
It's the very definition of insanity.
by kelnos | 2025-12-22 20:06:31+00:00
Ah yes, the good ol' appeal to fear. "Think of the childr--err, I mean poor defenseless woman!"

No, I don't want these cameras. I don't care if they make law enforcement's job easier. They are an invasion of privacy and a part of the disgusting dragnet surveillance state.

They need to go.

A decade ago, I was attacked on a public sidewalk by three men, who roughed me up a bit and stole from me. The police were utterly unhelpful, and as far as I know, they never caught anyone. But ultimately, that didn't really matter. I was traumatized for a while, but eventually worked through it. Whether or not they were caught would not have changed any part of that process.

I get that, emotionally, we want some sort of justice when things like this happen, but I am not willing to put up with even more constant surveillance in order to feel a little bit better about a bad thing that happened to me. I would much rather criminals sometimes went free.
Genesis Open Source Embodied AGI Simulation, Rust (Mamba-3, Not Transformers)
by RGBra | 2025-12-22 20:06:33+00:00
Hi HN, we are building an open-source alternative to the "scale is all you need" paradigm.
We believe the quadratic cost of Transformers (
O
(
N
2
)
O(N
2
)
) and their lack of physical grounding make them unsuitable for continuous, long-term autonomous agents.
Genesis is an attempt to build Embodied AGI using:
Architecture: Pure-SSM (State Space Models) using Mamba-3 for linear scaling
O
(
N
)
O(N)
.
Inference Engine: Written 100% in Rust (using Oxidizr) for low-latency (<16ms) control loops.
Learning: Homeostatic Active Inference (minimizing free energy/surprise) instead of just next-token prediction.
We are simulating agents in voxel environments where they must survive, plan, and evolve social structures (validated against Turchin's Cliodynamics).
The project is early stage (Phase 1: Survival). We are looking for Rust engineers and ML researchers interested in SSMs and ALife.
White Paper: discord
Feedback on our "3-Lane Temporal Architecture" is very welcome.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-12-22 20:06:37+00:00
Again, this isn’t a hypothetical. The administration has recently been deploying political appointees to prosecute cases the career employees thought were too weak, and they’ve had little success at even securing indictments. The reason Trump and his supporters insist on dragging the discussion to hypotheticals is that all of the concrete things they feel have been “sabotaged” are either impossible or illegal.
by zahlman | 2025-12-22 20:07:23+00:00
> I wonder why activating a venv ended up being implemented as a script you source (updates env vars in the current process) and deactivate (puts them back) rather than being something that puts you in a subshell (detects your current shell and re-invokes it with new vars).

The venv is just the folders and Python stubs.

The activation script concept is probably just what happened to occur to Ian Bicking first. But also maybe the subshell UX isn't so pleasant on Windows?

Certainly others have implemented subshell-based venv management.

> As it is, deactivating takes you all the way out to the system package namespace (or maybe you can nest them, not sure, but it's up to the venv implementation and not your OS to restore the intermediate env).

The effects do not nest, at least not with the *sh activate script. You'd need to implement a stack of old environment variable settings.

But I think the use case you describe just doesn't resonate with a lot of people.
by a1j9o94 | 2025-12-22 20:07:42+00:00
I would argue that's just your coworker giving you a bad answer. If you prompt a chatbot with the right business context, look at what it spits out, and layer in your judgement before you hit send, then it's fine if the AI typed it out.

If they answer your question with irrelevant context, then that's the problem, not that it was AI
by meowface | 2025-12-22 20:08:12+00:00
I think that is the most likely outcome. However, if the decline starts occurring too rapidly, I do think violent far-right (and perhaps far-left) paramilitary action could become a major problem, like in 1920s/1930s Germany. Tons of time spent lurking in far-right extremist communities out of morbid curiosity, and the spread of far-right ethnosupremacist sentiment on basically every social media platform, has me concerned.
by 0xWTF | 2025-12-22 20:08:23+00:00
Histotripsy means "cell pulverizing". We know disruption (pulverization or otherwise) of a tumor bed tends to incite a local inflammatory reaction, and a brisk inflammatory reaction seems to correlate with survival. So the idea here seems to be an extension of high energy ultrasound methods developed for lithotripsy (breaking up kidney stones) to disrupt tumor beds. Not something I'd want for a pre-cancerous lesion, but if it's stage 4 liver mets ... sure. Have at it.
by derektank | 2025-12-22 20:08:33+00:00
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that US policymakers deregulated capital flows with China in the hopes that it would lead to political liberalization. Businesses always just follow the money, but for a long time American policy makers had made it difficult to invest in China, from regulatory uncertainty to restrictions on dual use technology exports to high tariffs.

It really was an intentional decision, largely on the part of the Clinton administration, to make investing in the country easier and improve the economic well being of Chinese citizens in the hopes it would inevitably lead to democratization. Clearly, those hopes were just that though
by JuniperMesos | 2025-12-22 20:08:37+00:00
Why not compare America against all countries instead of just Western ones? Which countries do and do not count as part of the West in any case? People hold different opinions about whether e.g. the entirety of Latin America counts as Western or not, and the choice to include or exclude those countries makes a big difference in how the US compares in terms of relative violent crime rates.
by linuxftw | 2025-12-22 20:08:42+00:00
To be fair, there could absolutely be national security issues. One example might be undersea (or even surface) navigation. If the coastline is littered with windmills off shore, this might create a negative of submarine navigation routes. That's clearly information we don't want shared with adversaries. There might be undersea classified cables. There might be classified sonar stations. It might be hard to detect adversary subs within a windmill field due to extra noise, etc.
by maerF0x0 | 2025-12-22 20:08:48+00:00
I can't answer why, but I would suggest it has very little to do with the government spending on research, or in the way it allocates it annually vs 4 year blocks.

I have noted in the past that I do enjoy how intense the FTC and other consumer protection style agencies get when Democrats run the whitehouse, ideally companies would behave because if they dont the institution that has a monopoly on violence will club em really good, so to speak. IMO Citizens united and the way we fund the political game has broken the incentives to being a company on good merit rather than on legalized corruption.
by ahmedfromtunis | 2025-12-22 20:08:56+00:00
I recently read "Chip War" and it talked about an era (around the 80s and 90s) were american dominance on electronics (and economy) seemed in deep decline.

Japan was the next big thing.

But the collective efforts of some government agencies, academia and the private sector helped reverse the trend.

American dominance is sure not a given but with an almost century of inertia, all hope is not lost (especially compared to the alternative).
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-12-22 20:09:02+00:00
> be aware it's going to have a funky non C# compliant field name

That's longstanding behaviour. Ever since features such as anonymous types or lambdas arrived, they mean that classes and methods need to be generated from them. And of course these need names, assigned by the compiler. But these names are deliberately not allowed from the code. The compiler allows itself a wider set of names, including the "<>" chars.

I have heard them referred to as "unspeakable names" because it's not that they're unknown, you literally can't say them in the code.

e.g. by Jon Skeet, here https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/category/async/ from 2013.

> they’re all "unspeakable" names including angle-brackets, just like all compiler-generated names.
by tony_cannistra | 2025-12-22 20:09:26+00:00
I looked into this a little because I was curious. I guess the ostensible "national security" rationale (which clearly is not the only reason!) for this is that turbines severely degrade the utility of radar surveillance along the coastlines.

This is particularly relevant for low-altitude incursions and drones.

Now, other large governments (UK) have resolved this in several ways, including the deployment of additional radars on and within the turbine farms themselves.

So clearly this is politically motivated, and they're using what seems to be a real but solveable concern as a scapegoat.
by bendmorris | 2025-12-22 20:09:34+00:00
In the previous Trump term "diversity related topics" included things like biodiversity which is an important area of research and should be apolitical. Not because of a shift in focus, but because of top-down orders to not fund anything related to "diversity."

Conservatives in the past have also tried to belittle research grants to justify eliminating them, such as "studying X about fruit flies." It might sound silly to a lay person but drosophila is an incredibly important model organism from which many discoveries have come.

The problem is a highly political, often careless or incompetent, and sometimes blatantly corrupt administration taking a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel to so-called "waste."

[1] https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2019...
by cyberax | 2025-12-22 20:09:40+00:00
It doesn't matter. You won't invest billions into new plants if they can be cancelled on a whim.

And mind you, the previous cancellation was contested through the courts, and it was found to be illegal. So now the administration did essentially the same, but without citing any reasons (they are "classified").

If this stands, then it is really a death blow to the US industry. It undermines the main pillar of capitalism: protection of property rights.
by ryandrake | 2025-12-22 20:09:55+00:00
> Person gets kidnapped, government surveillance camera helps police find the car before the kidnapper kills them. Or, probably more common: murder happens, government surveillance camera helps police find murderer and jail them before they kill someone else.

It's a good steelman/devil's advocate of their position, but I wonder if proponents realize how much wishful thinking drives those supposed outcomes.
by catigula | 2025-12-22 20:10:45+00:00
It's interesting that people are very incredulous of there being a legitimate defense reason for this when we have had unilateral unanswered drone incursions all over Europe and the US.

There's obviously some sort of arms race occurring and some of it is public.

The world in on the precipice of many technologies advancing at an all too rapid pace. The idea that technology will become tightly regulated isn't inconceivable.

FYI Sweden did the same thing last year. There is likely a (drone) reason, it's all but completely clear.
by silisili | 2025-12-22 20:11:00+00:00
Agreed with this sentiment. The average American doesn't care about any of this. Why would they? You have someone working 40+ hours a week to just barely be able to afford a dumpy apartment, with no real prospects or signs of escape - tell them that the US may no longer be paying top dollar to import the smartest people around the globe and see what they care.

In order for all of this to work cleanly, you need the everyman taken care of and actually willing to participate and have hope for the future. Until then you'll just get a slew of likely underhanded populists, because they at least pretended to care.
by mediaman | 2025-12-22 20:11:01+00:00
I don't understand this. In supabase, the default is to turn on RLS for new tables. If you turn it on and have no policy set, no user can fetch anything from the table.

You have to explicitly create a read-all policy for anon keys, and with no constraints, for people to get access to it.

The default is secure.

If you turn off RLS, there are warnings everywhere that the table is unsecured.

The author goes on to compare this with PocketBase, which he says you "have to go out of your way" to make insecure. You have to go out of your way with Supabase, as well!

I wonder if the author tested this? I do agree that some third party website builders who use supabase on the back end could have created insecure defaults, but that's not supabase's fault.
by ramenos | 2025-12-22 20:11:08+00:00
A blog is a personal space where you can share your critical point of view with your own rule. It's a footmark that may help other people, but most important, where you can express the way you want.

Writing is also a great way to structure your thoughts, ideas and sometimes "bleed" a bit when you want to share a sensitive point of view.

I have been blogging for the past 21 years. I like it, writing is really something I enjoy doing. It may be simple or complex posts, and the consistency varies depending on my times or ideas that pop up in my mind.

Short answer is YES
by chrisfosterelli | 2025-12-22 20:11:11+00:00
There are events that may affect more than one machine which are not netsplits.

e.g. an ISP with common users experiences an outage, an IRC client with common users has a bug, common users within the same time zone have automated system updates run at the same time, the IRC server experiences an upstream network disruption affecting only some routes, a regional power outage occurs, a hosted bouncer service with common users has an outage, etc, etc, etc...
by imiric | 2025-12-22 20:11:25+00:00
The idea that this technology isn't useful is as ignorant as thinking that there is no "AI" bubble.

Of course there is a bubble. We can see it whenever these companies tell us this tech is going to cure diseases, end world hunger, and bring global prosperity; whenever they tell us it's "thinking", can "learn skills", or is "intelligent", for that matter. Companies will absolutely devalue and the market will crash when the public stops buying the snake oil they're being sold.

But at the same time, a probabilistic pattern recognition and generation model can indeed be very useful in many industries. Many of our problems can be approached by framing them in terms of statistics, and throwing data and compute at them.

So now that we've established that, and we're reaching diminishing returns of scaling up, the only logical path forward is to do some classical engineering work, which has been neglected for the past 5+ years. This is why we're seeing the bulk of gains from things like MCP and, now, "agents".
by sheepscreek | 2025-12-22 20:11:40+00:00
> I rotate providers. My comment above applies to all of them. It really depends on the work you’re doing and the codebase. There are tasks where I can get decent results and barely make the usage bar move. There are other tasks where I’ve seen the usage bar jump over 20% for the session before I get any usable responses back. It really depends.

Ah, I missed this part. Yes, this is basically what I would recommend today as well. Buy a couple of different frontier model provider basic subscriptions. See which works better on what problems. For me, I use them all. For someone else it might be codex alone. Ymmv but totally worth exploring!
by lateforwork | 2025-12-22 20:11:42+00:00
But he didn't just cancel wind projects. He cancelled solar. He cancelled EV tax credits.

Then Trump went a step further: He is using tariffs to pressure other countries to relax their pledges to fight climate change and instead burn more oil, gas and coal [1].

The oil princes are getting their moneys worth.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/climate/trump-internation...
by blahedo | 2025-12-22 20:11:56+00:00
I've been wondering all year about what happens when an executive-branch office issues orders that it is not legally qualified to issue; by and large everybody has just... followed them. This may be another example (I don't know quite enough of the legal specifics in this case, though there are certainly others that are more slam-dunk-y in this respect).

What are the enforcement mechanisms here if the states in question---MA, RI, CT, NY, NJ, and VA---just said "no go ahead, keep building"? What happens to the companies if they just keep building? I'm not saying they should but at this point rule-of-law has fallen apart so badly that I literally don't know what happens when the government invents a new rule and people just... disregard it. (Particularly if state-level enforcement decides not to play along.) Do they bring in the FBI? Military?
by dragontamer | 2025-12-22 20:12:23+00:00
Yes. Deleting data does wonders for the filesize. The question I'm bringing up is one of quality.

If you must delete, delete starting from the 50GB+ original BluRays if at all possible, or some other very high quality source. That way the compression algorithm has the best chance of saving the important scene data.

And keep an eye on the known hard to encode scenes. A lot of the typical shots of a movie are handled well on one set of settings, but suddenly screw up on other scenes (or other animation styles. Anime vs Cartoons vs 3D vs Live Action can have subtle differences leading to quality issues).

It's not easy, and AV1 is our best bet at doing this well so far. But when the future algorithms come out, you need to start over from the best sources of you want AV2 to have a chance.

You should *Never* double compress. (Blu-ray -> H265 -> AV1). This is horrible for the quality. You'll get better results from BluRay -> AV1 by a large margin.
by im3w1l | 2025-12-22 20:12:41+00:00
Applying for phony ghost jobs and pretending your dream in life is to work some shitty dead end job is basically a humiliation ritual. I think it would be much better if unemployed people were simply assigned work by the government. Feeling unambitious? No shame in staying as long as you like. Want something more? Send out as few or many applications as you want.
by ten_hands | 2025-12-22 20:13:26+00:00
Slightly amusing story: the year is 1990-something and I'm in grad school working a lab where we do electromagnetic simulation. That code has to run fast, obviously, but some of us in the lab were looking for some glue language to wrap around the very utilitarian C that the simulation code was written in.

One of us started playing with Perl. He ended up dropping out and going to work as a SysAdmin.

One of us started playing with Tcl/Tk. He ended up changing majors and going into UI/UX testing.

I started playing with Python, which at that point was, I think, at 0.9.2 or something. Eventually, after some twists and turns, I went on to work on ML stuff.

Is there a lesson in that? Probably not, but somehow I find it amusing all the same.