MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Amezarak | 2025-12-07 17:40:56+00:00
It doesn’t matter what the wages are, if there aren’t enough people willing to work for them, they aren’t high enough. That’s the core of labor markets.

Importing migrants just worsens the underlying problem. You destroy your own pipeline and eventually run out of migrants. Germany needs to pay more and provide a better work environment instead of just finding people desperate enough it seems like a good deal.

Edit: I just checked and the average German nurse salary is (43k in USD vs 88k USD) less than half the average US RN salary. Crazy!
by lolc | 2025-12-07 17:41:03+00:00
You're saying that a state can upstream patches with planted backdoors. Thruth is, this is possible in all software. It's not specific to state-sponsored open source software. So your scenario is a reality whether you want it or not. And open source is not particularily vulnerable either. People forget this.

Now a lot of people would be angry if my state decided to spend money on security flaws. I imagine an elected representative try to explain how they wanted to misspend funds allocated to improve software and plant flaws instead. That would not go down well here or in Germany. Try to hire people for this in Germany and see how long you last till your little op is public.
by hnfong | 2025-12-07 17:41:42+00:00
You are totally correct that hallucinated citations do not invalidate the paper. The paper sans citations might be great too (I mean the LLM could generate great stuff, it's possible).

But the author(s) of the paper is almost by definition a bad scientist (or whatever field they are in). When a researcher writes a paper for publication, if they're not expected to write the thing themselves, at least they should be responsible for checking the accuracy of the contents, and citations are part of the paper...
by jijijijij | 2025-12-07 17:43:14+00:00
The topic isn't a "war situation" tho, but the forming of an army as deterrent.

I think you are arguing in bad faith. Otherwise you would have recognized Covid isolation has been the opposite of contact interventions. Oh and of course this:

> If I remember correctly Germany or Austria were ready to put non vaccinated people in jails.

You remember wrong, non vaccinated people actually got publicly sodomized by general Drosten himself before euthanization. The former now has been ruled unconstitutional, but failing to get every new vaccine within 3 months is still punishable by death. Life in Germany is unbearable, please stay away!
by somenameforme | 2025-12-07 17:43:26+00:00
I again don't know what you mean. Are you stating that you don't believe that the CDC chose to redefine vaccination to move away from immunity and towards "protection"? Or do you think it had nothing to do with the low efficacy of the vaccines in preventing infection?

The paper you linked to studied a much wider age group and assessed the odds of heart issues from vaccination as being about 1/3rd as high as those from infection. Their estimated rates of vaccine induced heart issues are more than an order of magnitude lower than those for the study I referenced earlier which instead was an overview of studies with more of a focus of vaccination's impact on vulnerable groups.

I'd also add that, as is typical, the study you linked to failed to assess the odds of heart issues were when one was both vaccinated and then later infected, as that is a rather more realistic scenario.
by SubiculumCode | 2025-12-07 17:44:25+00:00
Yeah seriously. Using an LLM to help find papers is fine. Then you read them. Then you use a tool like Zotero or manually add citations. I use Gemini Pro to identify useful papers that I might not yet have encountered before. But, even when asking to restrict itself to Pubmed resources, it's citations are wonky, citing three different version sources of the same paper (citations that don't say what they said they'd discuss).

That said, these tools have substantially reduced hallucinations over the last year, and will just get better. It also helps if you can restrict it to reference already screened papers.

Finally, I'd lke to say tthat if we want scientists to engage in good science, stop forcing them to spend a third of their time in a rat race for funding...it is ridiculously time consuming and wasteful of expertise.
by pron | 2025-12-07 17:44:28+00:00
Tangential:

The --enable-native-access option mentioned in the article is part of a large effort we call "Integrity by Default"[1]. The idea is that a library module can violate invariants established by another module (e.g. access to private fields and methods, mutation of final fields etc.) requires approval by the application, so that a library will not be able to have a global effect on the application without its knowledge, and the correctness of each module could be verfied in isolation.

Now, --enable-native-access is also required to use JNI, but JNI can violate the integrity of Java invariants in a much more extensive way than FFM can. For example, JNI gives native code access to private fields of classes in arbitrary modules, while FFM does not. The only invariant FFM can break is freedom from undefined behaviour in the C sense. This is dangerous, but not nearly as dangerous as what JNI can do.

For the time being, we decided to enable both FFM and JNI with the same flag, but, given how more dangerous JNI is, in the future we may introduce a more fine-grained flag that would allow the use of FFM but not of JNI.

[1]: https://openjdk.org/jeps/8305968
by alephnerd | 2025-12-07 17:44:43+00:00
> What is the political element in Germany that makes these very public walk away from Microsoft viable

Germany has had a fairly active Linux community for decades. A large portion of German local government has had experience using or RFPing FOSS alternatives since the 2000s all the way back to Munich's bake off of Windows vs Linux.

While the geopolitical portion is sexy and fun to look at, in most cases American vendors just don't find much value in supporting DACH customers because their budgets are significantly lower and they tend to be much more on-prem heavy unlike their Scandinavian, CEE, or British peers.

DACH local governments also tend to rely heavily on MSP/MSSPs and for these kinds of businesses, margins really matter and vendors don't like dealing with channel sales because they just don't bring enough money to the table for the amount of money you have to spend wining, dining, and supporting them. And given MSP/MSSP margins, it makes sense for them to adopt FOSS.

Finally, some German local governments have used public proclamations like these to renegotiate vendor deals (I think Munich did something similar).

That said, private sector players in DACH have largely consolidated around American or Israeli vendors, such as Schwarz - despite their proclamation for digital soverignity - using American-Israeli SentinelOne [0].

It's good to have competition though, and I do strongly feel that MSP/MSSPs and organizations dependent on Channel are better suited to using FOSS tooling.

[0] - https://www.sentinelone.com/press/sentinelone-and-schwarz-di...
by andrewvc | 2025-12-07 17:45:34+00:00
You are misquoting me. I wrote:

> to decorate intentionally in the way we do today

Most people not so long ago did not have the luxury of saying “that shirt is so last last year” , or “that living room set is a relic of the 90s!”.

Of course people always find ways to decorate and show off, but that’s different than what OP talked about WRT quality furniture. In the past that stuff was so expensive you bought it and lived with it, possibly across multiple generations. If the style changed you probably couldn’t afford to just swap it out.
by vegardx | 2025-12-07 17:46:17+00:00
(I'm not a lawyer)

You should be careful about speaking in absolute terms when talking about copyright.

There is nothing that prevents multiple people from owning copyright to identical works. This is also why copyright infringement is such a mess to litigate.

I'd also be interested in knowing why you think code generated by LLMs can't be copyrighted. That's quite a statement.

There's also the problem with copyright law and different jurisdictions.
by kalessin | 2025-12-07 17:46:21+00:00
Apple’s support for MacOS can been shorter than their laptops longevity (the longevity of their laptops got quite bad when then tried to make them as thin as an usb-c port). So Linux support is also important there imo, and as the original post pointed out because Apple makes it so hard to for Linux to support their hardware, long-term software support may be something to think about before buying a MacBook.
by chistev | 2025-12-07 17:46:58+00:00
Last month, I was listening to the Joe Rogan Experience episode with guest Avi Loeb, who is a theoretical physicist and professor at Harvard University. He complained about the disturbingly increasing rate at which his students are submitting academic papers referencing non-existent scientific literature that were so clearly hallucinated by Large Language Models (LLMs). They never even bothered to confirm their references and took the AI's output as gospel.

https://www.rxjourney.net/how-artificial-intelligence-ai-is-...
by doright | 2025-12-07 17:47:12+00:00
I strongly believe I was misdiagnosed with autism when in reality the traits were caused by traumatic backlash from those I was supposed to trust towards ADHD traits that would have calmed down after adolescence. The diagnosis was largely a red herring for me and led me down treatment paths that did not address the root of my issues, and I believe I suffered unnecessarily as a result. It is insane to me that people are sooner to blame vaccines and diet than childhood upbringing/environment for causing symptoms construed as autism or ADHD. It makes sense though - no parent wants to be blamed for their child's lifelong disorder, just as mine still don't to this day. Cancer might just be curable, but a parent who refuses to change their mind will never be.

I am doing better these days but I sometimes wonder how I would have turned out if I got help sooner, instead of spending years and years searching for the wrong kind of help. It doesn't help that society is talking more about this and inadvertently leading people to believe that these problems are just the way things are, without considering upbringing and environmental factors.

At the same time, blaming the wrong problem is different then spending all one's time blaming the right problem, which is different than letting go of the past and doing the best one can with one's life. It is nearly insurmountable for me but I try to put forth an effort each day.
by orionsbelt | 2025-12-07 17:47:48+00:00
It’s advertising a ChatGPT feature (and admittedly, also helps advertise Peloton); namely that you can connect your ChatGPT account to Peloton and query Peloton. I personally find this a very helpful feature, and think they should be advertising this in some manner within the app, as otherwise, people will have no idea the features now exist.

This is separate from the android app findings which I suspect is OpenAI working to launch true ads - ie advertising non-chatGPT features in exchange for payments from brands.
by pama | 2025-12-07 17:49:19+00:00
Given how many errors I have seen in my years as a reviewer from well before the time of AI tools, it would be very surprizing if 99.75% of the ~20,000 submitted papers to didnt have such errors. If the 300 sample they used was truly random, then 50 of 300 sounds about right compared to errors I had seen starting in the 90s when people manually curated bintex entries. It is the author’s and editor’s job, not the reviewer’s, to fix the citations.
by jopicornell | 2025-12-07 17:49:36+00:00
Dialogs are a great way to lose information. They are often dismissed by users that want to do their job and are interrupted by modals. Users focused on their tasks blindly dismiss dialogs.

Read the above as a critique to your strong opinion and not an opinion of mine.

My opinion is that toasts are great for notifications that can be reviewed/checked later, like chat notifications or finished background tasks.

What should be avoided, just for the same reason as modals/dialogs, is an overuse, causing fatigue.
by LogicFailsMe | 2025-12-07 17:49:50+00:00
I spent some time experimenting with AI art. He's right that it doesn't look right somehow most of the time. But in my case, if I started with a photograph I took and extracted its silhouette lines as the basis for the image I was generating, I got something a lot harder to distinguish from manually generated art.

He's right about the motives of tech Bros and executives here. But I don't think he's right about where AI will eventually go because I think it will become pervasive because it almost already is.

It's ridiculously optimistic to think you can run a 1 trillion parameter model on a phone anytime soon. So those data centers have a power generation problem and their limitation will be the extent to which the power generation problem is solved.

I just don't think AI is going to crash. But if you look at ridiculous valuations and PE ratios higher than 100 or so, timber! But crashing to 20 to 50 (CSCO after the crash from 200) is just the market pulling its own head out of its butt so I suppose there's the bubble. Good luck, however, figuring out when. Also, CSCO is still here. He really ought to look around at how many people have outsourced their thinking and writing to large language models already.

I'm a bit reminded of this Outer Limits episode minus the BCI:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0667957/plotsummary/

I don't think senior talent will get replaced anytime soon, but I also think that one or two fundamental innovations down the road on par with the Attention is All You Need paper will make AI dramatically better at tasks that don't require embodiment. Those innovations seem to occur every couple years across the sector. But again, good luck. predicting when and how.

See also: https://medicushcs.com/resources/the-radiologist-shortage-ad...

Before we fire all the radiologists, we'll have to centaur the crap out of them just to meet demand. But that doesn't fit his narrative so he left that out because I'm sure he's aware of it.
by gmuslera | 2025-12-07 17:50:25+00:00
Framing this as something cyclic as the rest of the world is static may be a mistake if things have deep changes outside (related or not with what is being done here), or the nature of the field radically changes.

Then the cycle is broken, and there might be no survivors, or the regrowth may be so far into the future that it will make no difference for most of the survivors.
by lagniappe | 2025-12-07 17:50:32+00:00
Nobody will agree with this hot take, but I was around in the perl years, so maybe take this opinion with a grain of salt:

Perl wasn't arcane on purpose, the bar for being a programmer was just that much higher, born through necessity as we didn't have as much material to easily turn someone into a capable engineer, so to make anything work you had to -really- be motivated to learn, and that extended to the entire skill tree of things that happen before learning to code, like simply navigating the machine and being able to reach the realization that you needed to write something on your own.

Perl evolved to suit the needs of those that used it at the time, and it reflected their interests, skills, and abilities.

These days everything is so abstracted, so available, so easy, all of the material to learn literally anything is free and at your fingertips, programmers don't need to be that knowledgeable to identify a need and generate some code that mostly addresses that need.
by majormajor | 2025-12-07 17:51:00+00:00
If it's built in to the runtime you get a lot of potential benefits:

- you don't need to install additional packages

- you could have (because you don't want to hurt prod perf by checking all the time) dev-mode with warnings by default on execution and a prod-mode where they're ignored

- you can then have people in the dev environment catching things as they write/run/test their code vs only whenever they run the third party tool (which it seems a lot of people don't set up for even run-on-every-commit)

Let's flip the question around! What do you think are the benefits to making it easy to add misleading incorrect type hints?
by throw310822 | 2025-12-07 17:51:03+00:00
I still don't understand what should this "wildfire" burn. My perspective is very limited, but where are the pets.com of AI today? Where are all the small companies with improbable business cases that are getting absurd valuations/ investments because they're in AI? The space seems mostly dominated by huge players that, while burning tons of cash, are still making real progress on something that will have more economic impact than society can actually bear. Who should be wiped out by the wildfire? Anthropic?
by wkat4242 | 2025-12-07 17:51:28+00:00
Why would a VPN be less secure? It's an extra hurdle for attackers to take. You can still use whatever authentication you can on the service. And with a mesh VPN you also don't need to open any ports.

However when I look into it it seems like WARP is also a vpn-like service, just a cloud one. Also, I do self-hosting so a "cloud native" solution as cloudflare calls it is explicitly not what I want. If your homelab is all about cloud then of course you would want something like this.
by quesera | 2025-12-07 17:51:58+00:00
Hmm, yeah! I hadn't thought much about the differences between UK and US 240VAC service.

In the US, it's 240V 60Hz, split-phase with center-tapped neutral, and an independent ground wire.

In the UK, it's 240V 50Hz, single-phase with independent neutral and ground.

Frequency difference should be within design tolerance. and if my EE memory serves, the phase difference should be acceptable -- just measured from a different zero reference point. The neutral from the wall would be unused, and the ground would be wired as usual.

I'll think this through thoroughly though, I was definitely glossing over those details, so thank you!
by Cranot | 2025-12-07 17:52:32+00:00
Hi everyone, I'd like to present AgentsKB.com and explain why a knowledge base is a required service for any agent or AI tool like ChatGPT or Gemini.

What is AgentsKB?

AgentsKB is a pre-researched knowledge base with answers to atomic questions. It's a large Q&A database designed specifically for AI.

Why we need a curated KB (not necessarily AgentsKB)

All models have a knowledge cutoff - for anything outside their training data, they simply don't know and will most likely guess. Best case, you don't get an answer. The only way to solve this limitation so far has been web search, but web search is slow, expensive, and inefficient. Inside Claude Code, a web search can take more than 10 seconds to process and consume more than 10k tokens, while the info we're looking for could be just 1 line or a name.

That's where AgentsKB comes in. With our pre-researched answers, agents get the answer instantly - saving both tokens and time.

The vision is big. This is just a glimpse of AgentsKB - don't miss it.

I'd be happy to hear your feedback!
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-12-07 17:53:46+00:00
Insofar as this article is about the 4 execs leaving Apple, this is a total non-story and the "What the heck is going on at Apple" is just click bait:

- Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives, and general counsel Kate Adams, are set to retire. While these may be high level execs, they don't really have much to do with the overall direction and success of the company. And given the change in the political environment you've seen tons of changes in roles like these at many companies in the past 11 months.

- Alan Dye, vice president of human interface design, is leaving to join Meta as its chief design officer. Sounds like he won't really be missed: https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/04/gruber-apple-employees-giddy-.... Assuming he was responsible for Liquid Glass, I say good riddance.

- John Giannandrea, senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy, is also retiring. He had basically already been demoted, taken off leading Siri due to Siri's competitive failures.

So yeah, it's pretty obvious that Apple is behind the AI wave, but honestly, they may end up having the last laugh given how much backlash there is from consumers about trying to shoehorn AI into all these places where it's just an annoyance.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-12-07 17:54:04+00:00
I'm no fan of modern macOS, but I don't think that screenshot is great. There's too many lines everywhere and too little color, making it unclear where to focus your eye.

(What I am a fan of is Leopard-era Aqua, which is reasonably information dense but uses depth and color to help focus your attention.)
by metadope | 2025-12-07 17:54:35+00:00
> scared to wait for a cab

I contend that American Unhappiness is manufactured and sustained by the constant onslaught of misinformation, broadcast by special interest groups, all of whom have it in their general plan to make you feel an unmet need, a base emotional response, a tickle in your amygdla.

Likely, your life is not that bad.

Likely, the fear you feel, waiting for a cab outside your favorite bistro, is a response to programming you ingested from the culture that tries to nurse you into a permanent state of semi-consciousness.

Fear is sensational, a proven sales tool, a political football, click-bait 'journalism'. There are whole armies of professional and amateur fear-mongers out there, who make it their life's mission to plant the seeds of fear into your imagination, to sell you a product, a candidate, a policy.

>> fulfillment requires more than material wealth,

Agreed, but...

>> which in our quest for more stuff, we have forgotten.

Reject the programming. Whether it is fear or desire that the advertisers/liars attempt to trigger in you, recognize the effort aimed at making you feel wants/needs that do not actually do you or our society any good at all, and reject the unhappiness they are trying to program into you.

It is an individual responsibility. An individual has authority over their own emotional states. Defend yourself from the onslaught of lies and liars.

> Society needs to feel safe for people to truly feel happy.

I don't disagree with this. But whose is responsible for 'feelings'?
by kuerbel | 2025-12-07 17:54:38+00:00
I am thinking about opening my own shop, distinguished by digitally sovereign offerings, for instance, Stormshield over Cisco, Proxmox over VMware, Matrix/Element over Microsoft Teams, Nextcloud over SharePoint...

I've been doing m365 and azure for more than three years by now and I just feel terrible. Especially regarding some of our customers, which are small gGmbH (kind of NGO). Instead of making a secure, privacy focused offering we just sell them the usual m365 package. We basically push them into the data industrial complex just to get some collab tools and mail.
by tra3 | 2025-12-07 17:55:10+00:00
I've been using emacs and have written a a few thousand lines of elisp. I like elisp. I generally like any language that I become proficient in. But lisp isn't some sort of magical hammer that turns everyone into 10x programmers.

Maybe I still haven't had my epiphany, but I'm not a huge fan of macros in lisps and DSLs (like what ruby is known for). It makes code harder to understand.

> Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
by majormajor | 2025-12-07 17:55:25+00:00
There were programming envs that were easy to pick up in contemporary times. Hypercard is one that's often especially-fondly referenced as a non-traditional-programmer friendly example. Basic was much less arcane syntax-wise too. It's been a LONG time since I used Pascal but I also remember it being simpler to pick up.

But Perl specifically came out of a fairly arcane sysadmin-y corner of the world full of other already-arcane tools like awk and sed. And those were a decade older, but by the late 80s they weren't the only thing around to compare to.