MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kragen | 2025-12-15 23:41:42+00:00
The grad-student system in science at US R1 universities is sort of like a dollar auction. You know how a dollar auction works? I have a dollar bill, and I'll give it to whoever bids the highest for it—as long as both they and the #2 bidder pay me their final bids. The #2 bidder gets nothing. Bidding can start at 5¢. Once the bid goes over a dollar, the two remaining bidders are no longer competing to win free money; they're jockeying to lose less. It typically goes up to 2 to 5 dollars before one of them decides to cut their losses.

Numerous doctoral students (and postdocs, and adjuncts) are competing for a much smaller number of tenure-track positions with their research work. If their publication record looks just a little better than the #2 candidate, they can escape from the postdoc grind and land a nice assistant professorship. Then it's only seven more years of busting their ass before they find out whether they washed out, or are set for life with a cushy associate professorship, maybe a full professorship.

People are willing to sacrifice a lot for that. But the vast majority of those who make the sacrifice don't make it, like the #2 bidder in the dollar auction. They put in years on somewhat-above-minimum-wage grad-student and postdoc stipends, doing incredibly difficult and sometimes dangerous work, often postponing childbearing, leaving behind their families each time they have to move to a new university, and either leaving behind their intimate partners or uprooting them as well. All of that redounds to the glory of the PI who runs the lab they work in—but many of those doing all that work regret the sacrifice.

Scientific progress isn't just a matter of doling out research grants and possessing fancy lab equipment. It needs talent, but that isn't nearly enough—the talented people need to work incredibly hard for many years to make real progress. For decades the US has been recruiting the top talent from the rest of the world with this dollar-auction game, paying them peanuts to sacrifice the best years of their lives.

A doctorate doesn't sound like a bad life to me, really. But you have to feel that the system, like minor-league baseball, is kind of taking advantage of doctoral students' hopes and dreams to get the rather astounding rate of scientific progress we see today (at least by some measures). It funds public goods for everyone out of those sacrifices.

The least the US could do would be to show a little more gratitude by guaranteeing them permanent US residency after they graduate, but they don't even get that—many people are kicked out of the US, where they've spent most of their adult lives, when they wash out of the academic pipeline. And the current deplorable administration has promised to worsen this already deplorable situation.
by mmooss | 2025-12-15 23:41:50+00:00
In fact progressives are much more oriented toward freedom than others. They just don't think the powerful need much assistance and instead focus on the freedom of LGBTQ people to make their own decisions about gender and sexuality, the freedom of racial minorities to do what everyone else does, the freedom and opportunity of undocumented, unhoused, and addicted people. Freedom is the heart of progressivism. (I don't subscribe to any group, but HN usually does not understand and mischaracterizes progressivism.)
by Onavo | 2025-12-15 23:41:54+00:00
There's that and the fact that a lot of people who attain graduate degrees are immigrants who do so for the sake of immigration.

The whole system essentially self selects for cheap labor and exploitation.

If the feds put a high salary requirement on it like the E or O series visas, perhaps the system might change.

The scientific minds of India, China, and Russia don't come to the US and slave away in the lab purely out of passion for advancing science, they do so because it's a path towards the green card. The PIs and laboratory heads all know damn well how the system works, they are no better than those bosses of H1B sweatshops, except perhaps they do their exploitation from ivy filled ivory towers rather than in Patagonia vests.
by awesome_dude | 2025-12-15 23:42:02+00:00
A note about this conversation. and your improvements has been added to the "talk" page - Can I recommend that you make the appropriate change to the actual page?

(Mostly because 1) I don't think that the talk page will be paid any attention during the next... millenia.. and 2) I think that you should make the change because you knew that it was incorrect, and have receipts)
by esperent | 2025-12-15 23:42:12+00:00
TikTok operates in the US, so they are operating under US jurisdiction and subject to the same regulations as US companies.

The main difference is political pressure, not legal. US companies will bend the knee to Trump, Chinese companies will do so to Xi. Both of these leaders are authoritarian, but Trump's government is also fascist. However Xi's government is more experienced and successful.

I don't know which is worse, honestly. I mean, at this exact second, China is obviously a more authoritarian state, but the US is riding a bullet train into fascism. So who knows what things will look like in a few years?
by verdverm | 2025-12-15 23:42:12+00:00
The social media post you orig linked to has none of that

While I agree with the general problem, you do yourself a disservice by using such a poor example with so many more potent ones out there. You also do a disservice to the movement to fight back by making easy examples for "look at how out of touch they are" (i.e. making mountains out of mole hills when you could point out the actual mountains)
by Terr_ | 2025-12-15 23:42:41+00:00
The problem isn't what's on the keyring, the (reported) problem is that it can be arbitrarily inspected in full by any program. Doors should not be able to enumerate and copy all the keys that aren't meant for them.

> Why is your banking app entering a secret to your keyring?

What is any "keyring" for if not to carry things you keep secret and exclusive?

The problem here is leakage between purposes. I don't care if the banking app is just storing my logon name for convenience, even that should never be scrapeable by Linux BonziBuddy. [0]

> That would be like writing your safe code in a paper and let it hang onto a physical keyring.

Why even put any regular keys onto such a horribly flawed keyring either? There's no real difference between (A) seeing combination-lock numbers versus (B) seeing the shape of a key that is trivial to reconstruct. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitting_(key)
by ericmcer | 2025-12-15 23:43:31+00:00
Still very early stages, just put the site together a few days ago: Veform https://veform.co/

iOS/JS/Android Libraries for turning traditional inputs/forms into audio conversations.

Have everything working and am happy with how the underlying data structures came out.

It is interesting because where I ultimately landed there is just an additional "state". So there is a UI state (Browser managed DOM), your app logic state (consumers manage), and a conversation state. The library just exposes events so you can keep the conversation state in sync with your other states. I started out visualizing a direct like: <form/> as a conversation flow, but you could configure it to navigate pages, click elements, or whatever through audio conversation.
by toddgardner | 2025-12-15 23:44:44+00:00
It's more complicated than that. Apple (along with Google and Mozilla) basically held the CA's hostage. They started unilaterally reducing lifetimes. It was happening whether the CAB approved it or not.

The vote was more about whether the CAB would continue to be relevant. "Accept the reality, or browsers aren't even going to show up anymore".

I wrote a bunch about this recently: https://www.certkit.io/blog/47-day-certificate-ultimatum
by TrainedMonkey | 2025-12-15 23:45:02+00:00
AFAIK compute heavy datacenter in space don't work. But if you already have a vast fleet of laser connected LEO satellites throwing some efficient SSDs into them can make a lot of sense. A large portion of the traffic is fairly static, e.g. video based content or even model weights. Caching that will save you ground to space side of the transmission. This will let you put more user beams on satellites and use less ground stations.
by alephnerd | 2025-12-15 23:45:40+00:00
Based on personal experience (friends who either entered academia/industry or me being the son of white collar immigrants to the US) I'd say large portion want to return to China and India due to family ties, but a number would have stayed in the US if immigration wasn't such a PITA - especially because companies and programs don't really like filing for an O-1s unless they found a unicorn.

You hit the nail on the head on developing countries not being as poor anymore, and opportunties proliferating which reduces the pull factor, but there are a decent amount of academics and professionals who would gladly work in the US if given the opportunity and it wasn't such a headache.
by thatfrenchguy | 2025-12-15 23:45:51+00:00
> The least the US could do would be to show a little more gratitude by guaranteeing them permanent US residency after they graduate, but they don't even get that—many people are kicked out of the US, where they've spent most of their adult life, when they wash out of the academic pipeline.

And they often have no choice but to work in academia too, because Academic H1B are lottery exempt but not Industry H1B and they aren't transferable. Pretty messed up.
by magicalhippo | 2025-12-15 23:45:52+00:00
> It is of no protection at all if an application simply asks the secure-whatever for them and then proceeds to email them all to someone else.

On Windows the application can specify some extra entropy/salt, and the secret is not decryptable without it[1]. So it's a tad more difficult to exfiltrate than simply asking for it.

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/dpapi/nf...
by acdha | 2025-12-15 23:45:54+00:00
> It would waste my breath to try to convince you that MAGA Americans actually are intelligent

Definitely, because I never said they weren’t and certainly don’t believe that — I know too many smart conservatives for that. That’s a big part of the problem: smart people can put a lot of effort into constructing rationalizations so when they’re immersed in a culture where political correctness trumps objectivity they’ll construct elaborate narratives to support the ideologically useful outcome.

The relevance to security is that these people are more vulnerable because they can’t tell charlatans who appear to be on their side apart from people who actually know what they’re talking about. There are tons of right-leaning people in tech but as we saw with election fraud claims, the competent ones know it’s risky to contradict the narrative and stay quiet rather than being accused of being RINOs. It’s similar to how things like MLM scams spread in religious communities if you have experience with that, where things usually have to get pretty bad before someone is willing to criticize a friendly member of their congregation.
by TrevorFSmith | 2025-12-15 23:46:48+00:00
It's a shame they didn't ship an EV that fit the uses the F-150 serves. The Lightening is a luxury item. The F-150 is a tool, regardless of whether it's ICE or EV. I hope this puts more people in the market for the Slate truck. It won't serve everyone with an ICE F-150 but I suspect a bunch of farm and ranch vehicles that don't do many highway miles could be Slates.
by immibis | 2025-12-15 23:47:09+00:00
If the PoW cost is a low-end cellphone CPU for 2.5 minutes, then it's nothing to the spammer with the 200-core hourly AWS server. If each spammer can create 10000 identities (not connections, identities) per hour, then you might as well not have a limit at all. If they could even create only 2 identities per day that would be enough to spam with (yet still unacceptable to actual users). 250000 identities per day is way too many.
by kragen | 2025-12-15 23:47:18+00:00
Probably almost 40% of them came from China in the first place, because China has almost 40% of the candidates who are accepted to US grad programs in the first place. And, even without any grants, returning to China probably seems a lot more appealing than returning to Nigeria, Paraguay, or Bangladesh, whose acceptance rates are already handicapped by the much lower quality of undergraduate education available there.
by djfobbz | 2025-12-15 23:47:24+00:00
That's exactly what it is. But instead of keeping it as some proprietary tool for one shop, our goal is to make that same tech accessible and affordable for all shops. Not every fab shop is tech-first, and that's totally fine. We're building something that helps them compete without needing a full-time developer or a six-figure software budget.

As for your last question, we're not trying to replace any existing ERP or CRM systems. We're focused on delivering instant, accurate quotations through our own turnkey pricing model that helps job shops stay competitive day-to-day, manage payments seamlessly, and give customers real-time shipping options or an easy Will Call pickup if they're local.
by lazzlazzlazz | 2025-12-15 23:47:25+00:00
It has been long predicted that federated models (like Nostr) just degrade into a few providers that monetize in the same way they would if the network was centralized. It's the worst of both worlds between centralization and real decentralization — which (unfortunately to the haters) almost certain requires Byzantine fault tolerant consensus (blockchains).

Same thing over and over again.
by bigiain | 2025-12-15 23:47:41+00:00
I usually get a cert for my public domain (root and usually with www. as a Subject Alternate Name (SAN)) and if I'm going to use subdomains I don't intend to become widely public, I'll add a wildcard SAN of *.example.com so I don't have to expose subdomains in transparency logs.

There's some security downside there if my web servers get hacked and my certs exfiltrated, but for a lot of stuff that tradeoff seems reasonable. I wouldn't recommend this approach of you were a bank or a government security agency or a drug cartel.
by bell-cot | 2025-12-15 23:47:43+00:00
How high are you figuring Chick-fil-A's total lifetime revenue from a top-1% customer might be?

The big research university near me charges foreign STEM students over $50K/year in tuition.

And comparing the physical facilities of that university to the local Chick-fil-A location - I suspect the university's business model is considerably more lucrative. Even though students generally graduate and leave.
by exceptione | 2025-12-15 23:47:45+00:00
Maybe try a vpn? It is an European production, I am not sure, but there could be some rights limitation. It is available till end of January. Protonvpn is free and has EUR servers.

Bit of a shame for the hassle though, the documentary is very good and the topics it touches are rarely highlighted. So give it an other try.
by davidczech | 2025-12-15 23:48:16+00:00
A side note: I am very sad that HDMI-CEC apparently can only support like 3 "console-like" devices. I have an Apple TV, Nintendo Switch 2, Sound Bar (eARC) and PS5 hooked up, but only 3 can really interact with CEC.

It took me a long time to diagnose why it seemingly wouldn't work with my Nintendo Switch 2.

I ended up disabling it on my PS5 because I never use the darn thing, but it kind of stinks since most TV's have 4 HDMI inputs.
by mmooss | 2025-12-15 23:48:17+00:00
> isolationist and xenophobic rhetoric of recent years is mostly a reaction to a growing sense that increasingly few Americans are benefiting from global goodwill and development

I think the rhetoric is the cause, not the response to that sense (besides the obvious feedback loop). Internationalism created a world of unprecendented - literally in human history - freedom, peace and prosperity. You can see what things look like with even the beginnings of nationalism.
by wcallahan | 2025-12-15 23:48:52+00:00
I don’t do ‘evals’, but I do process billions of tokens every month, and I’ve found these small Nvidia models to be the best by far for their size currently.

As someone else mentioned, the GPT-OSS models are also quite good (though I haven’t found how to make them great yet, though I think they might age well like the Llama 3 models did and get better with time!).

But for a defined task, I’ve found task compliance, understanding, and tool call success rates to be some of the highest on these Nvidia models.

For example, I have a continuous job that evaluates if the data for a startup company on aVenture.vc could have overlapping/conflated two similar but unrelated companies for news articles, research details, investment rounds, etc… which is a token hungry ETL task! And I recently retested this workflow on the top 15 or so models today with <125b parameters, and the Nvidia models were among the best performing for this type of work, particularly around non-hallucination if given adequate grounding.

Also, re: cost - I run local inference on several machines that run continuously, in addition to routing through OpenRouter and the frontier providers, and was pleasantly surprised to find that if I’m a paying customer of OpenRouter otherwise, the free variant there from Nvidia is quite generous for limits, too.
by absoluteunit1 | 2025-12-15 23:49:11+00:00
I’ve been building a type of an educational app for the last 6 months.

Spent 6 months building the product. Now I’m focusing on marketing and branding.

I’ve spent last few weeks studying other successful educational products.

And so far, from my research, pretty much every single one of these apps/sites prioritized making the user “feel good” about learning rather than actually learning.

And unfortunately, this is what the users want. They want to feel good about learning.

All the successful education sites employ these mechanisms that you’re intending to avoid. I wanted to avoid using these as well - but I just don’t see another way. I’ve even had users explicitly ask me to add milestones, streaks, etc to motivate them.

Reality is - most people who really want to study or learn anything, can do so without an app. Even a book from a library will do. But it requires tremendous consistency, effort and time. Apps are way easier and make the user feel good - there’s still learning being done, don’t get me wrong. But user feeling good about it is what keeps them coming back.

Edit: I’ve also studied many of their ads. Often times on places like TikTok, Instagram, etc their ads are what I would call “intelligence porn”. They get you excited about being more intelligent, investing in yourself, intelligence eliticism, etc. These were a common ad strategy that I have discovered so far.

Some apps literally ran ads with text: “become dangerously intelligent” text and had the song from the show Succession play with images of famous researchers and scientists changing quickly. (Newton, Einstein, etc). Stuff like this cracked me up tbh lol. But apparently it works
by maqp | 2025-12-15 23:49:21+00:00
>but they suggest that you don't understand the landscape very well.

Yeah, what could I possibly know about secure messaging.

>Plus another half-minute every time you add a new contact.

Can you point to some instant messaging app that has you wait 30 seconds before talking to them? Now niché is it?

You want proper uptake and accessibility to everyone, you need something like Samsung A16 to run the work in 150 seconds. Some non-amateur spammer throws ten RTX 5090s to unlock access to random accounts at 80x parallelism (capped by memory cost), with the reasonable time cost of whatever iterations that is, with quite a bit shorter time than 150 seconds. 121.5GFLOPs vs 10x104.8 TFLOPs leads to overall performance difference of 8,800x. And that account is then free to spam at decent pace for a long time before it gets flagged and removed.

The accounts are not generated in five minutes per random sweat shop worker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHU4kWQY3E8 has tap actions synced across sixty devices. And that's just to deal with human-like captchas that need to show human-like randomness. Proof-of-work is not a captcha, so you can automate it. Signal's client is open source for myriad of reasons, the most pressing of which is verifiable cryptographic implementations. So you can just patch your copy of the source to dump the challenge and forward it to the brute force rig.

Either the enumeration itself has to be computationally infeasible, or it has to be seriously cost limited (one registration per 5 dollar prepaid SIM or whatever).

>Invite codes worked fine for Gmail

Yeah and back in ~2004 when Hotmail had 2MB of free storage, GMail's 1,000MB of free storage may have also "helped".
by justinsaccount | 2025-12-15 23:49:22+00:00
> It seems like AV stuff used to be so simple.

> without a bulky expensive receiver box

A "receiver" has been one of the standard options for making bookshelf speakers work for more than 50 years. A receiver is also not expensive. You can get a basic used one for under $100. I paid $30 for a perfectly working 5.1 Denon receiver with HDMI.

Your problem is that you aren't even using "Modern" AV stuff. If you were, your speakers and TV would both have HDMI Arc ports. Arc has been a thing since 2009.

> That's harder than it sounds though because you have to navigate the menu blind using short and long button presses with the one button.

Or you could unplug it and plug it back in.
by epolanski | 2025-12-15 23:49:23+00:00
Academia is a pyramid, like most organizations, eventually most PhDs cannot get a full time position.

The fact that many PhDs leave is..normal..if you get few high impact publications you can find full time positions outside US, even as an associate professor and not just a researcher.

And the reason why many go to universities around the world for PhDs is not because they want to stay in that place necessarily but because you're more likely to fund your PhD research and get a high impact publication.
by ericmcer | 2025-12-15 23:49:37+00:00
I am pretty sure 90% of playlists you hear when out and about are generated by spotify algorithms at this point. I would more be concerned because it seems like a weird use for LLM when recommendation engines are probably better than it? I suppose it has a ton of training data around music forums and people recommending songs, but it is hard to believe that would beat out billions of hours of tracked listening spotify has access too.
by sys32768 | 2025-12-15 23:49:50+00:00
I'm skeptical of some of this guy's stories.

In one interview he says that after being surveilled overseas for a while by an obvious amateur, he told the station chief who then gave him the OK to kill the guy.

Surely they would try evasion, counter-surveillance, or maybe even sending a team to grab the guy off the street to figure out who he is?

He claims the only reason he didn't kill the guy is because for some reason he randomly decided to mention it to a general in the local intelligence service, and then suddenly the tail vanished.

https://youtu.be/BXtDH2IXKY8?t=650