MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2025-12-16 00:42:34+00:00
Notably even the role of the professor has drastically changed in the last few decades. The "publish or perish" paradigm has really taken over and changed the type of research being done. Higgs famously said he wouldn't make it as a non-tenured faculty in today's academic culture.

Not to mention that the type of research being done has drastically changed too. There's many more projects that require wide collaboration. You're not going to do something like CERN, DESI, LIGO, or many other scientific mega projects from a single lab, or even single field of study.

The academic deal has changed. It used to be that by becoming a professor you were granted facilities and time to carry out your research. In return you had to help educate and foster the next generation. It is mutually beneficial. There were definitely abusers of the system, but it is generally not too difficult to tell who in your own department is trying to take advantage of the system, but incredibly difficult to identify these people when looking from the perspective of a university administration. There's been more centralization in the university administration and I'm afraid Goodhart's Law is in full force now.

What I'd like to see is more a return to the Laissez-faire approach. It shouldn't be completely relaxed, but to summarize Mervin Kelly (who ran Bell Labs): "You don't manage a bunch of geniuses, they already know what needs to be worked on. That's what makes them experts in the first place." At the end of the day we can't run academia like a business and it really shouldn't be. The profits generated from academia are less direct and more distributed through society. Evaluating universities by focusing on their expenditures and direct profits alone is incredibly naive. We're better able to make less naive evaluations today, but we still typically don't (it is still fairly complex)
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-16 00:42:48+00:00
> Cars are not critical infrastructure

Their production infrastructure is.

> the idea that China would turn off their EVs or starting to use them as weapons from the other side of the world is borderline absurd

Is it? If we got into a shooting match with Beijing, would we not try to hijack Tesla’s OTA features to disrupt their economy?
by gnabgib | 2025-12-16 00:43:20+00:00
Euronews (16 points, 4 hours ago, 3 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46279611

CNN (5 points, 4 hours ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46280375

Reuters (4 points, 1 hour ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46282647
by YossarianFrPrez | 2025-12-16 00:43:52+00:00
Not only do people leave the US but stay in Academia, plenty of people leave the research pipeline after receiving years and years of highly specialized, expert training. As an American who used to work in Tech and is currently getting a PhD, the geographic constraints on the (top tier) academic job market are more severe than people outside of Academia typically realize. It's a shame, because if it were the norm that science could happen by university-trained experts but in non-university institutions, we could a) fix the leaky pipeline, and b) see greater scientific progress.

What I mean is that if you don't like the company you work for in, say, SF, you can switch companies without having to switch houses. In Academia... it's akin to going to conservatory for classical music: you have to travel to where the orchestral openings are. This is a bit of a legacy problem from Wilhelm von Humboldt's idea to combine teaching and research, which led to the modern university system.

I'm far from the first person to say this, btw. Convergent Research's "Focused Research Organization" concept as well as The Arc and Astera Institutes are a few recent examples of people trying to provide escape routes from having to deal the large degree of "institutional tech/systems debt" in university contexts. For a great essay on why this is necessary, see "A Vision of Meta-science" (highly recommended if you are interested) [1].

The good news is that people are starting to come around to the idea that the scientific ecosystem would benefit from more diversity in the shape, size, and form of science-generating institutions.=The NSF just announced a new program to fund such "independent research organizations." I think this could give people who want to go into the sciences as a second career and who have a bit of an entrepreneurial tendency a new kind of Job opportunity [2]. We talk about Founders all of the time in Tech, we should probably have some equivalent in the best possible sense of the term, in the Sciences.

[1] https://scienceplusplus.org/metascience/ [2] https://www.nsf.gov/news/nsf-announces-new-initiative-launch...
by kryogen1c | 2025-12-16 00:44:03+00:00
This is pretty much dead on. I live in a rural part of the US and there are tons of old, worked-on trucks. The idea that there might be an all-electric f150 hanging out in 40 years is, frankly, laughable.

I know a lot of city kids think trucks are some obnoxious luxury good, but they're basically a functional requirement in most of the (very large) country.
by linsomniac | 2025-12-16 00:44:05+00:00
>You can get a very similar 16GB RAM, 1TB storage Minipc in the same form factor from Amazon for around $260

Not apples/apples, it looks like the Umbrel at $500 comes with 4TB, you're pricing out a 1TB above. A bare Samsung 990EVO 4TB is $328, on a straight $/TB that's an extra $246 putting your total build more like $500.
by mikepurvis | 2025-12-16 00:44:06+00:00
Some of the bigness is just tradition and buyer expectation (big = expensive). But also, modern AVRs are like 1000W devices amplifying 7, 9, even 11 channels of passives. That’s a lot of componentry and corresponding heat to shed— if you open one of those up, it’s not just empty space in there like an NES cartridge or something.
by jameslk | 2025-12-16 00:44:18+00:00
> We need to solve the job issue. If thoughtful analysis is done on this, it may actually turn out to be that the lack of lodging is a secondary issue, It may be the root issue is the inability for a sub-segment of our population to a stable 40 hour a week job that is the real Core problem.

It seems like a stretch to assume this is a jobs issue. You could make the same argument that it’s a lack of working enough hours. I’m not saying it’s either, simply that hours worked is not proof alone that the problem is the lack of jobs.

That said, housing prices continue to outpace household income [0], which should be a lot easier to explain as a cause for the problem that many cannot afford housing where they were able to before. Especially in California where there’s a greater incentive to hold on to a house and extract rent from it due to prop 13, and infamous amounts of attempts to constrain housing supply through regulations and lawsuits.

0. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1MH1V (Real Median Household Income vs Median Sales Price of Houses Sold)
by tptacek | 2025-12-16 00:44:41+00:00
I think it's more broadly "browsers vs. CAs", I think the balance of power shifted sharply after the Symantec distrusting, and I think very few people on HN would prefer the status quo ante of that power shift if we laid out what it meant.

Today, people are complaining that automation of certificate renewals are annoying (I'm sure they were). Before that, the complaint was that random US companies were simply buying and deploying their own root certificates, issuing certs for arbitrary strangers domains, so their IT teams wouldn't have to update their desktop configurations.

Things are better now.
by jofla_net | 2025-12-16 00:44:43+00:00
I don't feel the tradeoff for trying to to fix the idea of a rogue CA misissuing is addressed by the shorter life either though, the tradeoff isn't worth it. The best assessment of the whole CA problem can be summed up the best by Moxie, https://moxie.org/2011/04/11/ssl-and-the-future-of-authentic...

And, Well the create-a-browser was a joke, its what ive seen suggested for those who don't like the new rules.
by aorloff | 2025-12-16 00:44:48+00:00
I am reading this article and thinking, darn there's going to be too many people like me trying to find these on the used market, and the prices will stay high.

Big fancy expensive powerstroke mega trucks with a person-high wall in the front look cool, and occasionally haul heavy things, but little white trucks that are busted up and 20 years old do all the duty. And those trucks drive way less than the range on the lightning each day. Once these lightnings price down to work truck level, I expect to see them on the road a long time.
by nebula8804 | 2025-12-16 00:45:08+00:00
This video here describes why BYD is so competitive: They have done a splendid job vertically integrating as much as they can to get the price down. This $11,500 EV is an excellent example of how other companies should start to shift their thinking.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izvdO-zdlKg
by glst0rm | 2025-12-16 00:45:10+00:00
ZenBot Stock Scanner https://www.zenscans.com One-man built and maintained stock scanner that finds stocks with relative strength to the market. It grew out of my early attempts to algo-trade stocks and has a solid community following. Front end is C#/Blazor, back end is a C# console app with intense parallel processing and data aggregation.
by gamblor956 | 2025-12-16 00:45:50+00:00
No, that's incorrect. Others have provided citations demonstrating that the big tech AI facilities use more water than cities with populations of 100,000 people.

A city is not defined by its size. It is defined by its legal incorporation as a city. There are big cities, and there are small cities, and most cities are on the smaller side.

Try again.
by godelski | 2025-12-16 00:46:12+00:00
> Your suggestion would have fewer fresh eyes to look at the problem

Why? That paradigm doesn't change the influx of new students.

But the current system has a problem of training people for a job and then sending them to do something else. Even a professorship is a very different job than a graduate researcher or postdoc. Most professors do little research themselves these days, instead managing research. Don't you think that's a little odd, not to mention wasteful? We definitely should have managers, and managers with research backgrounds themselves, but why not let people continue honing their research skills?

> it’s brutally competitive for the individual scientists

It is. But this is also a social choice dictated by how much we as a country want to fund research.
by ralferoo | 2025-12-16 00:46:16+00:00
Reading the comments below make me feel like I should maybe be expected to already know what nostr is. But anyway, I don't and reading this article, it felt like it just suddenly cut off at the end.

It explained all the traditional approaches, which are all able to help discoverability and shareability of data between servers, and then says "the solution is relays" and then describes something that doesn't seem to be relaying anything. It sounds like a single dumb, untrusted message store on a single server that doesn't relay anything anywhere. It even specifically says "Relays don’t talk to each other, and users only need to join a small number of relays to gain autonomy—at least two, and certainly less than a dozen".

Not sure where the less than a dozen relay bit comes from. Are they expecting clients to do all the relaying between the relays? If so, wouldn't you get every relay getting pummeled by a load of clients simultaneously, all trying to push the same message. It sounds like the complete opposite of what you actually want. The article seems to just stop short at exactly the point when it should say how what they're proposing actually works.
by dTal | 2025-12-16 00:46:59+00:00
The output tokens are the only information that is carried forward through each inference pass, so "more room to think" is incompatible with "basically meaningless". Perhaps one could imagine it somehow stenographically encoding information in its precise choice of meaningless throat clearing, but there are only so many variations on that theme - word choice is heavily constrained, so it doesn't feel like you could store a whole lot of information there without it starting to read froopiliciously.
by bloaf | 2025-12-16 00:47:43+00:00
> Nowhere else can you get scientific computing, a GUI toolkit, a high level embedded software environment, a HiL/SiL toolkit, a model based simulation environment, a plotting and visualization toolkit and so much more in a single cohesive package. Nobody else has any offering that comes even close.

Mathematica does. Arguably Mathematica is even more cohesive because it's not split up into "feature sold separately" packages.
by linsomniac | 2025-12-16 00:47:55+00:00
Don't exactly know the difference in footage. I will say that I was on the fence about whether IMAX was a big deal for Spinal Tap 2, but afterwards we all felt like it was worth seeing in IMAX. Part of why I saw it in IMAX is that it was an early showing (IIRC the day before official release) and the IMAX theater 30 minutes away was the only option for seeing it that night.

The primary reason it shined in IMAX was the concert footage; It's giving "I'm on stage at a Tap concert".
by coppsilgold | 2025-12-16 00:48:07+00:00
If you intend to use SMS (phone numbers) as a resource constraint (sign up requires 'locking up' a resource that is worth at least a few cents) then at least you can offer a ZKP system where the 'consumed' phone number is not tied to an account. You could also offer to accept cryptocurrency for this function - call it a donation.

That Signal did none of those things implies that privacy was not their objective. Only secure communications was.

It's possible that the reason behind their anti-privacy stand is strategic, to discourage criminal use which could be used as a vector of attack against them. Doesn't change the fact that Signal is demonstrably anti-privacy by design.
by zbentley | 2025-12-16 00:48:12+00:00
That’s your choice, though please consider that many people who worked for those places may have done so before the behavior you disagree with started. Also consider that there are reasons to work for an organization other than “paycheck” and “alignment with organization priorities”, and that it is entirely possible (and sometimes uniquely possible) to do important, beneficial work while employed by an organization with which you fundamentally do not agree; the majority of my resume lines fit this description, I think.

Reasonable minds can differ as to whether that constitutes unethicality or hypocrisy.
by 1shooner | 2025-12-16 00:48:26+00:00
> I can't live my life out of fear.

I compare it to ecology. You're saying you will deal with the sea when it has risen to your doorstep rather than reduce emissions, or even build a levy. You've chosen to not worry about the sea, either because you don't think you can stop it, or it is not convenient for the moment to try. People who believe the sea is rising can't help but fear it because they are rational. People building privacy levies are not living in fear, they are reacting rationally to a hazard.
by mothballed | 2025-12-16 00:48:46+00:00
Repressing rather than refuting pretty closely models real life though.

Usually if you violate social norms people just push you out of the group and not bother explaining it to you. Not always, but usually. Yes if it is so bad it gets violent or something you will find out for sure why, but if you just show up to a friend function and start spouting off about gassing the jews or something most likely people just won't invite you back and never explain why.

Actually finding out why you were violating social norms I've found is mainly found either on the internet or from your parents when young. Hardly anyone in real life is going to bother telling you why, especially when some people are liable to act violently and there is no upside to them for bothering to explain it to you.
by jongjong | 2025-12-16 00:49:31+00:00
The utility of stablecoins is to bypass regulations. I suspect it could potentially be even more shady than that; could be some hack which leverages the Eurodollar system to allow EU entities to print US dollars which can be used inside the US.

The concept of fiat currency is fundamentally flawed. A US dollar in my bank account probably has nothing to do with a US dollar in your bank account besides the name. In reality; your bank uses one ledger, my (different) bank uses a completely different ledger. There is no consensus. It's not even the same currency in reality; only the name is the same.

If I hold a US dollar in a European bank account, it's yet another thing on a different ledger, operating under a different government with different incentives.

There are supposed to be checks and regulations to ensure that Europeans cannot print US dollars and then transfer them into the US for spending (to prevent Eurodollars from physically flooding the US economy), but correspondent banking is extremely complicated and there is no real consensus; one weak link in the chain (one nefarious or neglectful bank out of thousands) could potentially compromise the entire system and currency.

Imagine if some corrupt EU politicians, working with some big finance traders, found a way to digitally 'print' US dollars out of nothing within the EU and then spend them into the US; to redeem real US labor in exchange for these Eurodollars they printed out of nothing. I suspect this is where stablecoins may play a role as they are not as well regulated; some shady firms with minimal licensing and supervision could neglect to segregate Eurodollars from USD behind the scenes; thinking "A dollar is a dollar."

There is a big difference between exchanging currency vs converting currency. If, you were to set up an account which could receive both Eurodollars and USD and teat them both as the same; this isn't an exchange; this is a CONVERSION; it's counterfeiting.

But most people would see this situation and just think "This is just an international account which receives US dollars from both US and Europe; no big deal, nothing nefarious going on." They don't realize that the US Dollars printed by the US are not the same as those printed by Europe. I believe stablecoins may be an additional mechanism to try to blur the boundaries between the two monetary systems to allow counterfeiting.
by DLA | 2025-12-16 00:50:16+00:00
Not sure I’d call crossing traffic “within a few miles” a near-miss. Even at full cruising speed of 500-600MPH (less because the JetBlue was still on a climb) the civilian aircraft would cover a mile in 6-7 seconds, so we are talking 18 to 24 seconds to close 3-4 miles.

Also, it a common for military aircraft to not have a transponder on, especially in the vicinity of threats. Without a transponder the civilian aircraft TCAS/ACAS would not warn about traffic.

Not sure how far off the coast of Venezuela this occurred, but there are some very real SAM threats the Air Force aircraft would need to worry about.

(edited typos)
by nozzlegear | 2025-12-16 00:50:35+00:00
I love electric vehicles, but I want something that lands somewhere between the DIY-esque Slate and the literally-costs-more-than-I-paid-for-my-house F-150 Lightning. I have a 23 Chevy Bolt EUV which is the sweet spot for me right now, I just wish it had AWD for the winters where I live.
by beeflet | 2025-12-16 00:51:03+00:00
the blockchain is useful in solving double-spending problems in purely p2p applications. Aside from cryptocurrency, take for example name systems like namecoin or ENS: these systems need a way of reconciling who owns what, which involves synchronizing some data across the whole network.

It is inefficient, but the inefficiency seems to lie at some fundamental problem with p2p. Centralized systems need to do the same synchronization, but between fewer actors, and may outsource some of the verification for an exponential increase in speed.
by SkyPuncher | 2025-12-16 00:51:10+00:00
The difference is what is actually powering the wheel. Hybrid is still primarily ICE. EREV is electric motors (with the ICE just charging the batteries).

I literally couldn’t think of a better truck than an EREV. Give me an ICE engine that can haul my trailer into the boondocks knowing I just need a gas station nearby, but can power my trailer off the battery.
by cyberax | 2025-12-16 00:51:27+00:00
Try this map: https://supercharge.info/map , it has a feature called "range circles". If you set it to 50 miles, you'll see that most of the country is well within 50 miles of the nearest supercharger. Including almost all of Texas.

At 100 miles of range, you only have a couple of blank spots.

With third party chargers, there's really only one blank spot in Montana. At this point, the range is already a solved problem.

Earlier this year, I did experiments with placing stations manually on the map and using the US road networks to calculate the isolines. With just about 70 more stations, you can make any point on the public road network in the entire contiguous US lie within 50 miles of the nearest charger.

So the charging availability is likely going to be solved completely even during the current shitty admin.

> It's not just about being 50 miles from a gas station, it's about the time it takes to charge on top of that.

At 325kW charge rate (common on recent chargers), you're looking for maybe 20 minutes to get enough charge to reach your destination.
by tsimionescu | 2025-12-16 00:51:42+00:00
Except this isn't really viable for any kind of internal certs, where random internal teams don't have access to modify the corporate DNS. TLS is already a horrible system to deal with for internal software, and browsers keep making it worse and worse.

Not to mention that the WEBPKI has made it completely unviable to deliver any kind of consumer software as an offline personal web server, since people are not going to be buying their own DNS domains just to get their browser to stop complaining that accessing local software is insecure. So, you either teach your users to ignore insecure browser warnings, or you tie the server to some kind of online subscription that you manage and generate fake certificates for your customer's private IPs just to get the browsers to shut up.
by ninkendo | 2025-12-16 00:51:50+00:00
> electricity is super cheap here and gasoline is quite expensive

Yeah, not everyone has that arrangement though. I was shocked (shocked!) when I realized that for my plug-in hybrid van, running it on gas can be cheaper than charging it, depending on the time of day and time of year.

Where I live, peak hours electricity is $0.22/KWh in the summertime during peak hours, or $0.18/KWh off-peak. My van gets ~32 MPG on its tank, but also ~32 miles on a 16KWh charge. So it’s easy math, 1 gallon = 16KWh, so $0.22 * 16 = $3.52, so gas has to be more expensive than that to be worth it. Off-peak it’s $0.18 * 16 = $2.88, which makes it barely worth it to charge, with gas prices near me being close to $3/gallon.

(I have since bought solar panels and now it’s basically free to charge my car, but I can totally understand why electric vehicles just don’t work out cost-wise for a lot of people, even when accounting for ongoing fuel costs…)
by solarkraft | 2025-12-16 00:51:56+00:00
I like Umbrel’s technical approach: Its apps are just docker compose files with a little extra, making it very easy to support. The UI layer is Next JS, which gives tight coupling with the backend (so good state sync).

I also like their marketing approach: They really have a nice app store and a nice page for each app.

I did not like the reliability around app installations and the disappointment that it’s actually quite proprietary.

I wish there was a standard „server app“ format similar to what Umbrel uses with a strong ecosystem and multiple solutions. It‘s a key missing piece to self hosting stuff, IMO.