MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mgh95 | 2025-12-22 21:20:03+00:00
> Once one decides to ration healthcare based on estimated remaining QALY, the same logic says we shouldn’t subsidize, e.g., healthcare for people who suffer from cystic fibrosis, or HIV, or aggressive cancers, or. . .

Those are risks. Risks are insurable. However, death is a certainty. It is very reasonable to discuss what we believe society should subsidize for end-of-life care as it will impact everybody, myself included.

> Or if you’d rather, there are millions of children without healthcare in the United states. Would you forgo your access to healthcare for them?

I don't see what pediatrics has to do with end-of-life care in the context we are discussing (Medicare), but I would much rather subsidize pediatrics than elder care.

> That’s all? Musk alone is worth twice that, and who knows how many QALYs he has left but it can’t be that many. He seems pretty miserable most of the time.

Musk is worth 244B [1]. Even if we could tax wealth 100% into cash, we would fully exhaust the wealth of the 25 wealthiest American families within 7 years. These expenses, however, will likely continue for the next ~20 years. We need to discuss benefit cuts or tax hikes on the American population writ large.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_Americans_b...
by flatline | 2025-12-22 21:20:15+00:00
You are correct in that I did not specify what the actual problem is. There is a problem of perception, which the transparent bag policy will at least partly address, at relatively little cost. The problem of perception is almost certainly more troublesome than the reality in the majority of cases - the exceptions being notable - and while transparent bags may not be an effective deterrent, that doesn't mean they don't serve as one at all. There is also, in this case, a very real and well-known problem in American schools, including multiple guns confiscated and at least one credible threat in the past semester at this particular school.

I too kind of roll my eyes at the bag policy but it's at least an acknowledgement that something needs to be done about the problem - more than we've gotten from our politicians in the past two decades.
by alwa | 2025-12-22 21:20:18+00:00
Nothing at all, unless you’re someone who doesn’t have family in a different country. In which case it may not have occurred to you that it’s even a thing, with its own rules and hazards and ways things are done.

Even if you’re such a person in the professional class, who sends money back to their family via formal means, you might not be sensitive to the means informally-employed people use to send money (or value) back to their families.

Any more than it occurs to you to go to a payday lender and pay $5 to get $50 today against your $250 paycheck next week, in order to make rent…
by semenko | 2025-12-22 21:20:32+00:00
I found the most interesting part of the NIST outage post [1] is NIST's special Time Over Fiber (TOF) program [2] that "provides high-precision time transfer by other service arrangements; some direct fiber-optic links were affected and users will be contacted separately."

I've never heard of this! Very cool service, presumably for … quant / HFT / finance firms (maybe for compliance with FINRA Rule 4590 [3])? Telecom providers synchronizing 5G clocks for time-division duplexing [4]? Google/hyperscalers as input to Spanner or other global databases?

Seriously fascinating to me -- who would be a commercial consumer of NIST TOF?

[1] https://groups.google.com/a/list.nist.gov/g/internet-time-se...

[2] https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-se...

[3] https://www.finra.org/rules-guidance/rulebooks/finra-rules/4...

[4] https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2019/8/what-you-need-to-kno...
by KaiserPro | 2025-12-22 21:20:33+00:00
> unanswered drone incursions all over Europe

But thats nothing to do with turbines. Its not like russia are hiding behind wind turbines launching drones between them.

They are just sitting there, well within radar range launching away. they also have AIS on, so its not like they are hiding.

Also if you look at where they are: https://openinframap.org/#8.13/51.48/1.67 there is plenty of overlap for existing radar to overlap.

Also they are the perfect platform for extending your radar network. they are tall, well connected and widely spaced.
by mopsi | 2025-12-22 21:21:08+00:00
> Meanwhile, the EU just unpersoned a Swiss citizen, a writer, Jacques Baud*, for not taking the European side in the US-Russia conflict. Not for lying about it, but simply for not taking the European side.

He was not "unpersoned", whatever that means, but sanctioned for being a professional Kremlin troll and for spreading lies such as claiming that the Bucha massacre was committed by British and Ukrainian secret services, that the war actually started a week earlier with a Ukrainian offensive that the entire world has suppressed, and so on. This is not even a matter of viewpoint, but a malicious flood of obvious lies.[1] Such superspreaders of lies are exactly the kind of people who should be sanctioned.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
by theshrike79 | 2025-12-22 21:21:24+00:00
It goes like this:

Codex is an outsourcing company, you give specs, they give you results. No communication in between. It's very good at larger analysis tasks (code coverage, health etc). Whatever it does, it does it sloooowwwllyyy.

Claude is like a pair programmer, you can follow what it's doing, interrupt and redirect it if it starts going off track. It's very much geared towards "get it done" rather than maximum code quality.
by jeffbee | 2025-12-22 21:21:49+00:00
People are mad about this but, in the end, not really mad enough to do anything. California has high volumetric, margin rates for electricity but the typical monthly electric bill just isn't that high, because we don't need that much of it. The median bill is estimated to be $135 – $165/month, that's in the middle of the pack for the 50 states. Moreover, the people who can effectively get mad about this — rich people and retirees — don't suffer from it because they are protected by rooftop solar, special rates for seniors, etc. The people most exposed to the marginal prices are the ones renting old, inefficient dwellings, and they don't get a voice.
by zephen | 2025-12-22 21:21:54+00:00
That's probably true, but there are a few reasons for it:

- Face it, decorator syntax is kinda ugly

- History. Decorator syntax is new

- For things which will be repeatedly subclassed, the metaclass automagically tags along

But it's almost certainly easier for a maintainer to look at a decorated class and figure out what's going on.
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-22 21:22:10+00:00
Post-pandemic we are all being treated like shit every day as consumers. Enshittification is bad, but if it's the new normal I find it desirable for the companies practicing it to get the same treatment in return from their own suppliers (employees or subcontractors).

Given long enough it should put pressure on paying more for actually good work (aka those who don't slack off get paid more), or at the very least move some of the proceeds from enshittification from the company's boss into the slackers' pockets.
by roadside_picnic | 2025-12-22 21:22:39+00:00
I personally don't think implementation is as enlightening as far as really understanding what the model is doing as this statement implies. I had done that many times, but it wasn't until reading about the relationship to kernel methods that it really clicked for me what is really happening under the hood.

Don't get me wrong, implementing attention is still great (and necessary), but even with something as simple as linear regression, implementing it doesn't really give you the entire conceptual model. I do think implementation helps to understand the engineering of these models, but it still requires reflection and study to start to understand conceptually why they are working and what they're really doing (I would, of course, argue I'm still learning about linear models in that regard!)
by satvikpendem | 2025-12-22 21:23:14+00:00
> The issue is that your claim was that if you are using up tokens you are probably vibe coding.

I said "by and large" ie generally speaking. As I mentioned before, the exception does not invalidate the trend. I assume HN is more heavily weighted towards non-vibe-coders using up tokens like me and you but again, that's the exception to what I see online elsewhere.
by paganel | 2025-12-22 21:23:23+00:00
It's a good thing that the anti-comprador discourse has find its way on this forum, too, out here in Eastern Europe they (the compradors, that is) occupy almost all positions of power, it's really tiring.

Back to the article, it only took me one click to find this info about its author [1]:

> Prior to his career in journalism, Binion worked as a contractor at NATO,

They're not even trying to hide it anymore, like in the good old days of the Paris Review.

[1] https://reason.com/people/billy-binion/
by kashyapc | 2025-12-22 21:24:14+00:00
Hi, I think we both agree to a good extent. A couple of points:

> the flaw with this logic is that you're treating "prompting an LLM" as equivalent to "communicating with a human"

Here you're making a big cognitive leap. I'm not treating them as equivalent at all. As we know, current LLMs are glorified "token" prediction/interpretation engines. What I'm trying to say is that habits are a slippery slope, if one is not being thoughtful. You sound like you take care with these nuances, so more power to you. I'm not implying that people should always pay great care, no matter the prompt (I know I said "No ifs, buts, or maybes" to make a forceful point). I too use lazy shortcuts when it makes sense.

> I talk to a lot of very smart people and we communicate with virtually no caps/punctuation.

I know what you mean. It is partly a matter of taste, but I still feel it takes more parsing effort on each side. I'm not alone in this view.

> The usage of proper capitalization and punctuation is more a function of the medium than how well you can communicate.

There's a place for it but not always. No caps and no punctuation can work in text chat if you're being judicious (keyword), or if you know everyone in the group prefers it. Not to belabor my point, but a recent fad is to write "articles" (if you can call them those) in all lower-case and barely any punctuation, making them a bloody eye-sore. I don't bother with these. Not because I'm a "purist", but they kill my reading flow.
by vablings | 2025-12-22 21:24:15+00:00
> We have seen what Boeing has become when it's effectively unregulated.

I think this is vastly overstated by the media. Boeing is still heavily regulated and has a pretty good safety record compared 20 or 30 years prior. The biggest disaster of recent times (MCAS) was because of the tight regulations around type certification and trying to avoid costs to carriers

> Some things need to be regulated, esp. if mistakes are costly to the planet and/or people on the said planet.

I absolutely agree. I am not for the removing ALL regulations from nuclear energy but there is a whole political servitude cycle that has taken place for a number of years to make nuclear "safer" when in actuality it has little to no influence on the technology and just adds burden and overhead especially in the new construction of a nuclear power plant

Nuclear is this big scary monster because its invisible death machine. Despite us being regularly exposed various levels of radiation in our lives most people are completely unaware of. Some people are terrified of dental x-rays but will happily jump on an intercontinental flight without any second guess.

I think arguing in the opposite of "you can never be too safe" is kind of like the whole double your bet every time you lose at the casino yes, its technically true but you need an infinite pool of chips for it to work.
by phainopepla2 | 2025-12-22 21:24:49+00:00
> Statistically, mentally ill people are far more likely to be victims of violence than to perpetrate it

I think this is one of cases where a broad label like "mental illness" obscures more than it clarifies. There are some subgroups of people with mental illness (schizophrenia, bipolar, antisocial personality disorder) who are more likely to commit violence than others, especially when combined with substance abuse. But of course that fact doesn't generalize to all people with mental illness.
by roenxi | 2025-12-22 21:24:51+00:00
> Why on earth is a government-protected monopoly entitled to 10% margins?

Indeed, how do they pick any margin? If higher is better, why not pick 1000%? If lower is better, why not pick 0%? If we want something reasonable, why not make it market based to figure out what people think when they have to stump up real resources themselves? Once profit margins are set by committee decision there is little point trying to claim that the concern is profit motivated. The profits aren't doing much useful signalling. It just sounds stupid.
by ilamont | 2025-12-22 21:25:17+00:00
> Things got washed out in a bright room compared to a direct-view CRT.

You're right about that. A friend's dad was a gearhead and had one of those. It always seemed dim, practically unwatchable during the day and even at night it was flat which made darker films hard to watch.

But it was a mid-80s model and I figured 10 or 20 years later the tech had improved.
by alphazard | 2025-12-22 21:25:33+00:00
Bringing up a map of wind power deployments tells the story; what you will see is a hot vertical strip in the center of the US.
That is where it actually makes sense to deploy windmills, and people will continue to put them there even if subsidies end.
It makes sense for the area, the amount of wind, the serviceability of the deployments, etc.

Off shore has always been politically contentious because it's much more dependent on subsidies, it's a battle for/against rent-seeking.
One party is in favor of this particular kind of rent-seeking and the other party isn't (they will be in favor of a different kind, no doubt).
The subsidies are necessary for these deployments to make financial sense, and if they went away, then it would just be a bad place to put a windmill.

There is no national security issue, there is no real case for energy infrastructure either. This use case needs government money to make sense, and is therefore sensitive to political fluctuations.
by linkage | 2025-12-22 21:25:34+00:00
Trust me, your situation is more common than not. Having been an IC for most of my career and then a manager and back to being an IC again, I can say that OP is way off base. Managers are incentivized to make sure that their reports can grow and can be promoted. When I was a manager, all my colleagues were perpetually diligent about making sure that we were fostering a great working environment for everyone.
by PhotonHunter | 2025-12-22 21:25:46+00:00
I think there are a couple of misconceptions stated.

One, endowments, this is thoroughly covered by others in past threads about funding on this site and in any number of articles elsewhere. University endowments are directed to specific purposes and largely do not cover basic science, nor can they be redirected to do at will. This is not a discretionary research fund.

Two, the private sector funds projects on time horizons that are far too short for fundamental discoveries to reach a technology readiness level that supports commercial R&D efforts, and in many cases, is unwilling to fund the commercial development too. You're frequently looking at a decade plus for fundamental R&D, with massive upfront costs and no clear commercialization path. Even if you have something that is ready for commercial development, it's still an uphill battle to get across the valley of death with patient capital.
by tediousgraffit1 | 2025-12-22 21:25:55+00:00
> It used to be that a well-written document was a proof-of-work that the author thought things through (or at least spent some time thinking about it).

I think you hit the nail on the head here. The problem isn't so much that people can do bad work faster than ever now, its that we can no longer rely on the same heuristics for quickly assessing a given piece of work. I dont have a great answer. But I do still think it has something to do with trust and how we build relationships with each other.
by sellmesoap | 2025-12-22 21:26:01+00:00
My first try at LLM coding was with Claude, got back confusing results for a hello world++ type test and ran out of credits in a couple of hours, asked for a refund all the same day. I'm slowly teaching myself prompt engineering on qwen3-coder, it goes in circles much like claude was, but at least it's doing that at the cost of electricity at the wall, I already had a GPU.
by jiggawatts | 2025-12-22 21:26:02+00:00
This is the same argument as “why is software X so bloated when nobody uses more than 10% of the features?”

Because everyone uses a different 10%.

I write these documents too and I’ve watched people “read” them. They all do the same thing: flip to the conclusions and then if there is a need they will skim the section that’s relevant to their role.

The project manager cares only about the risks, costs, and time estimates.

The architect just wants to see the diagram and maybe check that the naming conventions have been followed.

Sysops just wants to know what they’re on the hook for after go-live.

None of them read the whole document, but the whole document ends up being read.

PS: I’ve found I have to take care of distributing documents myself. All organisations big and small are shockingly bad at disseminating information. Help them!
by iteria | 2025-12-22 21:26:22+00:00
I feel like they should try the potato diet. I recommend it, not because I believe it is effective (it wasn't for me), but because it is very good at removing the pleasure from eating. When you are eating to survive, you will come to understand how what being sated is. From there, I found I could lose weight because I had broken the habit of eating for any other reason than to fuel myself. Although, admittedly, I enjoyed losing weight this way better than the potato diet.

With some people, I think they have just lost what being sated feels like.
by BuildTheRobots | 2025-12-22 21:26:42+00:00
> Syncing networked clients to play audio at exactly the same time is a solved problem.

I was going to point out that with the variance in FM demodulation chips, using a pile of FM receivers probably wouldn't get you perfectly synced audio these days at all, even more so if it's going through usb/software/audio stacks.

Then I re-read the Ops comment and this actually seems to be a network of _transmitters_. I'm not sure what problem they're trying to solve, but I can't believe multiple PiFMs is ever the answer.

Commercial DAB radio does use single frequency networks (with tight timings and clever calculated offsets), and I am somewhat curious how analogue FM responds with regard to offset destructive interference, but this isn't that.

Please don't do this. For context, a car FM transmitter is limited to 250nW (in many jurisdictions). A Pi GPIO pin with the right bit of wire is potentially capable of 10mW or more. 40,000 times more powerful and a lot more noisy. One could be causing problems for people surprisingly far away.
by roadside_picnic | 2025-12-22 21:27:05+00:00
The most valuable tutorial will be translating from the paper itself. The more hand holding you have in the process, the less you'll be learning conceptually. The pure manipulation of matrices is rather boring and uninformative without some context.

I also think the implementation is more helpful for understanding the engineering work to run these models that getting a deeper mathematical understanding of what the model is doing.
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-22 21:27:39+00:00
I'm happy for employees to be accountable for their own actions to the same level companies are (currently that's none at all). Although in some of the scenarios you describe, it seems like someone can coast for a year doing nothing and still get paid, so maybe at least in some places the accountability is indeed equivalent?

I'm the first one to complain about enshittification and bad work. But if it's the new normal and very much rewarded in the current business world, I think employees should make the most of it and A/B test how much they can get away with just like the company does.

Practiced long enough this should push wages up for those who do actually work and benefit us all, or at the very least redistribute some of the wealth from the boss to those slacking off.
by lowkey_ | 2025-12-22 21:27:41+00:00
If I compared HN today and Reddit 5 years ago, I'd agree, but I'm still extremely grateful for HN as I tried looking at Reddit this year and it actually made me feel like there's an extremely misinformed, radical, brainwashing happening there. I've never seen so much misinformation and negativity in one place aside from Truth Social or Threads.

HN today is equivalent to Reddit 5 years ago: not as great as it was when smaller 10 years ago, but still better than Reddit today.
by lbrito | 2025-12-22 21:27:42+00:00
Yes, I'm aware.

There are literally thousands of years of sino-korean wars, so its hard to pin that blame on a specific government. Tibet is a more straightforward case of imperial expansionism from China, although it is also a centuries-old one, dating from Qing dynasty (1700s). The border skirmishes with India stem from mutual dissatisfaction with old British imperial border lines, which both governments disagree with.

Now compare that with the USA list. China's list is, to say the least, much more lightweight, straightforward and understandable. I'd go with that list any day, and most of the world would too.
by dkdcio | 2025-12-22 21:28:07+00:00
that is fair —- you’re claiming this person has a pattern of lazy, low-effort comments. I didn’t check and if you’re right, I appreciate you calling it out

just as you’re annoyed by low-effort LLM posts/comments, I’m annoyed by low-effort “this sounds like it was written by ChatGPT” comments (hence my response and at least a possible explanation of downvotes)

edit: I also scrolled through, you’re absolutely right! it does look like a low-effort bot