MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Barrin92 | 2025-12-22 18:12:50+00:00
>But that still does not nullify the local's people preferences,

One reason why Lai's fate has only limited impact is because it doesn't resonate that strongly with working people for whom Hong Kong isn't an example of upward prosperity. His rags to riches 'boomer optimism' appeals more to the Western audience than to someone who has lived in the stagnation of Hong Kong of the last few decades, where ambitious tech talent now migrates to the mainland.

Likewise on the mainland the youth is significantly less interested in emulating the West or old Hong Kong which to them is not a symbol of dynamism.
by alephnerd | 2025-12-22 18:12:53+00:00
> public sector investments

Both public and private. Read my first citation - I don't feel like relinking dozens of citations on 1970s-80s US-China relationship.

Tl;dr - the Carter and Reagan administrations both heavily invested in building the PRC's R&D, military, and industrial capacity through a mix of public-private investments primarily as a bulwark against the USSR along with US Army boots on the ground in Xinjiang.
by dahart | 2025-12-22 18:13:06+00:00
It’s superficially easy to bike-shed on use of clever code and debugging, but there is an interesting and fundamentally difficult question to answer underneath about what to spend your limited time learning, and how to think about it.

Yes Kernighan was trying to pass along advice to future programmers about what he thinks is how to reduce unnecessary effort, and yes at the same time spending time debugging difficult code often/ideally increases your skill and avoiding that effort might mean you miss out on developing those skills. Both things are true, so how does one decide which way to go? Of course it depends on your goals, but it’s also worth asking what the opportunity cost is. What if instead of doing battle with complexity and debuggers, you could instead pick up different skills?

It is possible that people should deliberately ignore Kernighan’s advice, and use clever code in order to gain the skills and experience needed to see that Kernighan was right. ;) It’s also possible that spending that valuable time learning how to scale to larger systems would pay off. Or, for some people, spending less time coding and more time devoted to other pursuits.

The ‘stopped evolving’ comment seems like it might be designed to stir the pot, but the best programmers I’ve ever known tend to work hard at reducing complexity by thinking hard about dependencies and about how to write large systems. They don’t necessarily shy away from high performance tricks or hard problems. It’s possible that what a young programmer means by “clever” and what a very seasoned programmer means by “clever” aren’t the same thing at all.
https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/norris-numbers.htm...
by QuantumGood | 2025-12-22 18:13:24+00:00
Personally, I find the advice useful. Most who provide a framing for causes of success either do not place it in relation to anything, or relate it primarily their own situation, and their argument becomes susceptible to interpretation as survivorship bias. Some try to extend their argument to cover more cases, but can be seen as overconfident based on limited experience. It's hard for one writer to "prove" what general success rules are.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-22 18:13:30+00:00
> Markets can't decide "families can have only one child"

Actually they can. It's part of the reason why a lot of capitalist nations are seeing major problems with population stagnation and possibly shrinkage.

The problem is markets don't care at all about society. If they can require that every member of a household has to work and extract all their money as efficiently as possible, then they leave little room for society to have families.

Capitalism is geared towards minimizing workers' free time. And, unfortunately, free time is how babies get made and kids get raised.

That is where western capitalism is failing. Shouting louder and young adults to pull on bootstraps harder isn't making them have kids in their studio apartments.

South Korea and Japan are 2 examples of this train-wreck that's coming for the US and other nations.
by nine_k | 2025-12-22 18:13:42+00:00
> seems not possible in Russia.

But Russia has never removed the Communists from power. It removed the Communist party, that's true. But plenty of the revolutionaries were themselves Communists; both Gorbachev and Yeltsin were very high-ranking Communists. They liked the idea of economic liberalization, but the political liberalization was only allowed as long as they stayed in power. I'm not sure Russia has seen even a single honest presidential election. The current "president" of Russia is a former KGB officer.
by maerF0x0 | 2025-12-22 18:13:43+00:00
Capital will seek the best opportunities, let's keep the incentive structure sane. Which means first tackling the biggest problems, with the highest probability of success, for the most people. As the opportunity space is explored or saturated, we'll move on to lower EROI opportunities. By getting the highest EROI initially we'l be richer still for chasing down philanthropic spaces (for the opportunities which do not make economic sense, but make moral, humanitarian sense)
by _alaya | 2025-12-22 18:14:29+00:00
It was a scrap of paper folded into a square.

While he stood at the urinal he managed, with a little more fingering, to get it unfolded. Obviously there must be a message of some kind written on it. For a moment he was tempted to take it into one of the water-closets [toilets] and read it at once. But that would be shocking folly, as he well knew. There was no place where you could be more certain that the telescreens were watched continuously.

- George Orwell, 1984
by Mawr | 2025-12-22 18:14:32+00:00
It was designed by a person with good taste, not by a committee. That's about it, there's nothing inexplicable or accidental about a well designed language rising to the top.

The excessive mentions of Perl are weird — it, along with PHP are prime examples of awful taste. Those are the languages that only gained any traction because they happened to be available at the time, not because they were any good.
by fuckflock | 2025-12-22 18:15:09+00:00
HN is the malice in this instance.

> The financing was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with backing from Greenoaks Capital, Bedrock Capital. Meritech Capital, Matrix Partners, Sands Capital, Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, Tiger Global, and Y Combinator also participated.

https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-safety-secures-major-...
by grantsingleton | 2025-12-22 18:15:27+00:00
OP here, happy to answer questions.

I use BrowserForge to automate getting the latest research papers onto my other project arxivexplained.com.

You can auth a browser and the AI will be able to use that authenticated session.

There is an AI prompt generator so you can just describe what you want it to do and it will write a prompt that brings in all the tools needed.

You can run the browser agents on a schedule, from a trigger, or manually.
by fuckflock | 2025-12-22 18:15:38+00:00
By top brass do you mean the people behind this website?

> The financing was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with backing from Greenoaks Capital, Bedrock Capital. Meritech Capital, Matrix Partners, Sands Capital, Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, Tiger Global, and Y Combinator also participated.

https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-safety-secures-major-...
by ISL | 2025-12-22 18:15:48+00:00
Whoops -- was away from HN for a few days.

Here is JJ's account -- he is a prolific flight-tracker: https://bsky.app/profile/jjindc.bsky.social

Here is an Avelo flight moving through California right now: https://bsky.app/profile/jjindc.bsky.social/post/3malkyew432...

Here is an Avelo flight on the ground in Seattle on Saturday: https://bsky.app/profile/jjindc.bsky.social/post/3magxcnri32...

Avelo flies a number of flights each week for ICE.
by archerx | 2025-12-22 18:16:00+00:00
Yea I’ll give meta a bit of credit for that but I remember llama’s first release was a leak and i remember frantically downloading them just incase they would get permanently taken down but to everyone’s surprise meta decided to roll with it and embrace the open source community. Unfortunately they face planted with llama4 which was weird since they were supposed to have so much “talent” working on it.

The new SAM (segment anything) and SAM3D are actually impressive and good on them for releasing it to the public. They still need to release an image model.

I honestly believe the weird pursuit for “safety” is what sabotaged them, it seems to lobotomy models. It’s also the reason Stable Diffusion went from the hot thing to a joke. Stable diffusion 3 was so safe you couldn’t generate a woman laying down on some grass because that’s apparently dangerous for reasons unknown.

All models have had their “safety” and guardrails removed by the community and the world didn’t end.
by ahyattdev | 2025-12-22 18:16:02+00:00
> Tax dollars don't fund the government. The government funds the government. That's what "Fiat currency" means.

There was $4.9 trillion in revenue and $6.8 trillion in outlays in 2024 [1]. 95% of that revenue was from taxes. In spite of the high deficit, it remains a true statement that the federal government is funded by taxes as they account for the majority of funding.

[1]: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61185
by hu3 | 2025-12-22 18:16:06+00:00
Yeah I found that for daily work, current models like Sonnet/Opus 4.5, Gemini 3.0 Pro (and even Flash) work really well without planning as long as I divide and conquer larger tasks into smaller ones. Just like I would do if I was programming myself.

For planning large tasks like "setup playwright tests in this project with some demo tests" I spend some time chatting with Gemini 3 or Opus 4.5 to figure out the most idiomatic easy-wins and possible pitfalls. Like: separate database for playwright tests. Separate users in playwright tests. Skipping login flow for most tests. And so on.

I suspect that devs who use a formal-plan-first approach tend to tackle larger tasks and even vibe code large features at a time.
by Apreche | 2025-12-22 18:16:10+00:00
If it wasn’t about the money I would be a teacher of some kind.

When I’m retired I plan to get a part-time job as an usher at a theater, arena, concert hall, or stadium.

Another good option is to get a really low-stress job at a tropical resort. I can imagine running a little stand that rents out umbrellas and chairs on a beach. Or maybe walking around the beach selling ice cream out of a cart.
by bikenaga | 2025-12-22 18:16:12+00:00
Abstract: "We study poverty minimization via direct transfers, framing this as a statistical learning problem while retaining the information constraints faced by real-world programs. Using nationally representative household consumption surveys from 23 countries that together account for 50% of the world’s poor, we estimate that reducing the poverty rate to 1% (from a baseline of 12% at the time of last survey) would cost $170B nominal per year. This is 5.5 times the corresponding reduction in the aggregate poverty gap, but only 19% of the cost of universal basic income. Extrapolated globally, the results correspond to a cost of (approximately) ending extreme poverty of roughly 0.3% of global GDP."

And they note at the end of the paper: "...the world spends seven times as much — 2.2% of global GDP — on alcoholic beverages."
by enragedcacti | 2025-12-22 18:16:19+00:00
Free rider problems/tragedy of the anticommons - research that isn't directly patent-able would result in a dearth of private investment because there isn't a comparative advantage in researching it

Tragedy of the Commons - Research into monitoring, maintaining, regulating, and improving resources shared by private companies

Positive externalities - Some research will not pencil out without including return on investment that cannot be captured by a company

Negative externalities - Companies won't invest in research to reduce injury to other parties (could fix with regulation also but depending on specifics this may be very difficult to enforce)
by gruez | 2025-12-22 18:16:37+00:00
For what? Under current jurisprudence collecting license plates images isn't illegal, because there's no expectation of privacy in public. They could post the information online if they wanted to and they'd be in the clear. It's fine to object to ANPR networks on the basis of "mass surveillance" or whatever, but screaming for people to be arrested without legal basis, just because you don't like what they're doing is childish and counterproductive to the conversation.
by beej71 | 2025-12-22 18:16:44+00:00
I'd do what I do now: computer science instructor and author. :)

My wife is an SLP at a hospital and she loves it. I couldn't handle the more medical parts, but I can see crossover there with assessment and problem-solving. She geeks out on it.

Both of us are definitely interested in work that benefits lives. (For me, a lot of that is driven by my desire to repent for working in online advertising for so many years.) If that's something that matters to you, and it sounds like it is, I definitely recommend pushing for that. But think outside the box, too--there are a lot of places in tech that benefit people and provide interaction.

Finally, watch out for the student loan-to-income ratio for things like SLP. Make sure you're balancing that.
by acossta | 2025-12-22 18:16:46+00:00
I ran into a recurring problem when working with LLMs and coding agents: it is surprisingly hard to consistently communicate a product’s brand.

When we rebranded BrainGrid, I wanted a simple, repeatable way to tell any LLM or coding agent what the brand is, without re-explaining it in prompts every time.

I ended up creating two files:

https://www.braingrid.ai/brand.json

https://www.braingrid.ai/brand.txt

Together, they describe tone, voice, terminology, naming conventions, and visual guidelines in a way that is easy for both humans and LLMs to consume.

I tested this by having Claude Code update the branding across our docs site: https://docs.braingrid.ai/
. The experience was smooth and required very little back and forth. The agent had the context it needed up front.

This made me wonder if we should treat brand context the same way we treat things like README files or API specs.

Would it make sense to standardize something like /brand.json or /brand.txt as a common convention for LLM-assisted development?

Curious if others have run into the same issue, or are solving brand consistency with AI in a different way.
by npodbielski | 2025-12-22 18:16:51+00:00
I understand that and I agree. Though I think the real question is what you would do when you will achieve this goal. What then? Will you be happy? What you will do with the money? Will this amount be enough?

Can this ever be enough?

I am not sure. Is this even possible in current feudal corporate structures? I did spoke with some people from my work. One was afraid for his job because of another employee. Other was afraid of reorg and if there will be lay-offs. Another company and the merger there caused one guy to be afraid of loosing his job because system he build will be discontinued. Maybe their current position is not the career they really want and after the setback, they are afraid off, they will be able to advance it further in the direction they are actually aiming for... but what if not? What if they will never will be able to advance it further? What if they will never will be get back up?

At some point the only direction you can go is down. Is this all?

Even if you will be able to build your own company things may go wrong and you may loose it. Economy can change. Market can change. Your company may be bought or taken over. Nothing is truly sure.

Should you not invest in the carrier then? No, this is wrong. If you will not set course for you someone else will. And you may not like the place when you will end up. Setting up your own goals is very good practice.

But I am not sure if this should be your life goal because this is so dependent on so many variables. Variables you have absolutely no impact on. And with that uncertainty comes stress. I think that your life goals should be set to something that depends only, or almost only on you.
by earth2mars | 2025-12-22 18:16:58+00:00
not a communist, but the communist manifesto articulated this problem very well in people end up doing work that does not matter to them because of capitalism. imagine a world, where people do that, they are passionate about and not have to worry about basic means and even some wants (entertainment, comfort living etc). a world of abundance for everyone where people just do what they are super passionate about. will AI help towards that or not is a big question.
by qcnguy | 2025-12-22 18:17:06+00:00
That's a reasonable question with several answers.

One is that US healthcare cost inflation is very high. The average family premium in 1999 was $6k, it is now $27k, for an annual cost increase of 6.1% per year. The long term rate of productivity increase is much lower than that, at only 2.1% per year.

https://www.bls.gov/productivity/images/pfei.png

So costs have just risen a lot more than productivity has.

Another reason is that productivity increases aren't evenly distributed. Most productivity growth has been in other sectors, primarily oil+gas and tech i.e. sectors dominated by men who aggressively automate. Healthcare has seen no increase in worker productivity for decades:

https://x.com/DrDiGiorgio/status/1834317735943438835/photo/1

Output is up, but only because of more hours worked. And much of that output is growth of administrative overhead, not actual healthcare as most people perceive it.

Soaring demand + zero productivity growth + cost inflation 3x higher than inflation + no political will to control costs = a death spiral in which the lowest risk decide to go it alone and drop out, leaving ever higher premiums for the rest.
by tripletao | 2025-12-22 18:17:14+00:00
I could iterate with an LLM and Lean, and generate an unlimited amount of logic (or any other kind of math). This math would be correct, but it would almost surely be useless. For this reason, neither computer programs nor grad students are rewarded simply for generating logically correct math. They're instead expected to prove a theorem that other people have tried and failed to prove, or perhaps to make a conjecture with a form not obvious to others. The former is clearly an achievement, and the latter is a falsifiable prediction.

I feel like Norvig is coming from that standpoint of solving problems well-known to be difficult. This has the benefit that it's relatively easy to reach consensus on what's difficult--you can't claim something's easy if you can't do it, and you can't claim it's hard if someone else can. This makes it harder to waste your life on an internally consistent but useless sidetrack, as you might even agree (?) Chomsky has.

You, Chomsky, and Pearl seem to reject that worldview, instead believing the path to an important truth lies entirely within your and your collaborators' own minds. I believe that's consistent with the ancient philosophers. Such beliefs seem to me halfway to religious faith, accepting external feedback on logical consistency, but rejecting external evidence on the utility of the path. That doesn't make them necessarily bad--lots of people have done things I consider good in service of religions I don't believe in--but it makes them pretty hard to argue with.
by Subtextofficial | 2025-12-22 18:17:25+00:00
I've resolved the 5σ Hubble tension by accounting for temporal evolution of spacetime compression. Both Planck (H₀=67.4) and SH0ES (H₀=73.0) measurements are correct for their compression states. Compression-corrected H₀ = 70.7 km/s/Mpc.
Empirically validated with 6K lines of Python analyzing Hubble Legacy Field. 3.3σ significance. No new physics required—just proper GR application.
Full papers, complete software (MIT licensed), and video demonstration included. Seeking peer review and independent verification.
by abbbi | 2025-12-22 18:17:33+00:00
If i could start over again i would love to work as forester. I even considered working as lumberjack. I got required certificates, im legally allowed to work in the industry doing sawork (as in, felling trees, even if not private property).

I know it is an highly physical demanding and also very risky job. Now that a second child arives, obviously, life changing again, i just cant do it, i need to feed two kinds soon and these kind of jobs are not well payed.

So ill stick to doing my own firewood once a year, a couple of days outside in the woods and keep dreaming about it.

Live goes by too fast.
by anxman | 2025-12-22 18:17:40+00:00
It's actually more complicated, but the draining of scam money at scale (ie: billions) is done with the help of collaboration of the Triads and Mexican cartels. IE: Chinese scammers rob the world of billions. They ultimately end up with tons of crypto but still need to launder it. They collaborate with the Mexican cartels to buy USD cash from them paid via crypto. Then the Triads re-launder that cash or sell it to other Chinese nationals in the USA.
by CPLX | 2025-12-22 18:17:42+00:00
You'd have to make it do that. Here's a cut and paste I keep open on my desktop, I just paste it back in every time things seem to drift:

> Before you proceed, read the local and global Claude.md files and make
sure you understand how we work together. Make sure you never proceed beyond your own understanding.

> Always consult the user anytime you reach a judgment call rather than just proceeding. Anytime you encounter unexpected behavior or errors, always pause and consider the situation. Rather than going in circles, ask the user for help; they are always there and available.

> And always work from understanding; never make assumptions or guess. Never come up with field names, method names, or framework ideas without just going and doing the research. Always look at the code first, search online for documentation, and find the answer to things. Never skip that step and guess when you do not know the answer for certain.

And then the Claude.md file has a much more clearly written out explanation of how we work together and how it's a consultative process where every major judgment call should be prompted to the user, and every single completed task should be tested and also asked for user confirmation that it's doing what it's supposed to do. It tends to work pretty well so far.
by shadowgovt | 2025-12-22 18:17:52+00:00
Disney's had a notable amount of success with that formula. Turtle Talk with Crush arguably saved The Living Seas pavilion space at EPCOT, and it's executed via a digital puppet operated by a behind-the-scenes cast member doing their best Crush voice.

I sincerely doubt that what makes that experience magical can be replicated with AI in my lifetime. Too much contextual knowledge, too much detail in the nuances of human-human interaction, and too much je ne sais quoi in the timing of getting humor right. I've seen Turtle Talk deal with a particularly excited young person leaning on Crush's "tank" by having Crush look at him and go "Hey little minnow... One of the big humans behind you is gonna come scoop you up. I've seen it happen, lots of times!" You can program that interaction in, but the domain-space of having an interaction for every possible "improv moment" might be outside the bounds of what the next several generations of learning models are capable of.

... or I'm wrong, in which case I look forward to enjoying robo-Seinfeld in the retirement home.
by eddyg | 2025-12-22 18:18:02+00:00
Yes, they should be secured so they can only be accessed by law enforcement.

But if your spouse/SO/sister/mother/girlfriend/whatever was assaulted while jogging in a park that had Flock cameras, and it allowed law enforcement to quickly identify, track, apprehend and charge the criminal, you'd absolutely be grateful for the technology. There's nothing worse than being told "we don't have any leads" when someone you care about has been attacked.