MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by twirlip | 2025-12-15 15:28:09+00:00
If you actually read the article, it indicated epidemiological studies showing that people living or working near farmland where paraquat is used have a higher incidence of Parkinson's.

Additionally, the article cites a leading neuroscientist in Parkinson's research who says that pesticides are one of the "biggest threats" linked to Parkinson's

Lastly, I personally discount your sort of arguments because it is the same kind we've witnessed the tobacco industry, the sugar industry, and the gasoline industry use regarding the science showing harmful effects of their products.
by dominicrose | 2025-12-15 15:28:32+00:00
> The types exist whether you write them down or not

That's easy to say when we're talking about primitive arguments in private functions, or primitive local variables, but let's not ignore the fact that it takes much more work to write a C# program than a Ruby program for instance.

We can see that by looking at a vanillajs library's typescript typings that were created after the js library when typescript didn't exist. The types are insanely complex and if you get one type wrong you can break compilation of some library user's program (its happened to me).

That being said I'm aware that dynamic programming languages are a "use at your own risk" type of language.
by thomashabets2 | 2025-12-15 15:28:56+00:00
I can't even begin to comprehend how you got from here to there.

I encourage you to elaborate on how you think that's connected, and not make a strawman argument. You may have not done so deliberately, but if you can't begin to comprehend that I would mean what you said, then you could give me the benefit of doubt and maybe entertain the idea that I did not.

Edit: In my blog post I give the example of getpwnam_r. One should not check for if the OS is Solaris in a given version range, but if getpwnam_r is one or the other type.
by zug_zug | 2025-12-15 15:29:07+00:00
So assessments of safety of a chemical aren't hard science. They are statistical judgment calls (often based on things like giving a much, much higher dose to a rodent and looking for short-term effects).

And the reason that is is because there's no affordable, moral way to give 100,000 farmers [nor consumers] a small dose of a product for 20 years before declaring it safe. So the system guesses, and it guesses wrong, often erring against the side of caution in the US (it's actually quite shocking how many pesticides later get revoked after approval).

Europe takes a more "precautionary principle" approach. In those cases of ambiguity (which is most things approved and not), they err to the side of caution.

Notice how this claim here is again shifting the burden to the victims (their research doesn't meet standard X, allegedly). Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.
by novaRom | 2025-12-15 15:29:20+00:00
No additional tax is needed, instead just do fork them once they reached certain level. So, basically split each company once it overgrowth certain level of its revenue. This will allow more automation split more equally among more people. Basically, strong AI is a "one-man company" dream. Just do whatever needed to allow equal access to AI by every member of your society, and make founding new businesses quick and easy.
by happytoexplain | 2025-12-15 15:29:30+00:00
Usually the implication of this (very common) analogy is that people in the past were somehow behaving wrongly, despite the fact that anybody is right to fight savagely against dramatic disruption to the life they've built, regardless of what the best solution is theoretically. Though even beyond that, the comparison is thin. With AI disruption, the size of the total affected jobs in comparison to the entire economy, as well as the speed of the change, is much more significant.
by timschmidt | 2025-12-15 15:29:30+00:00
I spoke to some researchers about this while working for a Science and Technology Research center affiliated with the regional supercomputer center. I was told that there are still far too many molecules in a single cell to simulate fully, but that simulations had been run with state of the art quantum physics simulation software for some dozens or hundreds of molecules over several femtoseconds. The researcher told me that this took several weeks of supercomputer time, and that when the results were examined one take-away was that "around biological molecules, water seems to behave in an exceedingly ordered manner" as if the water molecules themselves are an integral part of the machinery, not just a medium they're suspended in.
by fallat | 2025-12-15 15:30:19+00:00
Oh, I'll have to correct this! I've only seen eForth mentioned with Dr Ting's name all over. Thank you.

The metacompilation part is really nice. Did the self-modification section of the essay not convey that to you? Because that's what it was :s I'll have to revise it.

I really want this essay to be definitive, so even after 4 revisions there is still some way to go. All the comments have been extremely helpful to further reach that goal :)
by Ukv | 2025-12-15 15:30:26+00:00
> Stripping information from an identifier disconnects a piece of data from the real world which means we no longer can match them. But such connection is the sole purpose of keeping the data in the first place.

The identifier is still connected to the user's data, just through the appropriate other fields in the table as opposed to embedded into the identifier itself.

> So, what happens next is that the real world tries to adjust and the "data-less" identifier becomes a real world artifact. The situation becomes the same but worse (eg. you don't exist if you don't remember your social security id). In extreme cases people are tattooed with their numbers.

Using a random UUID as primary key does not mean users have to memorize that UUID. In fact in most cases I don't think there's much reason for it to even be exposed to the user at all.

You can still look up their data from their current email or phone number, for instance. Indexes are not limited to the primary key.

> The solution is not to come up with yet another artificial identifier but to come up with better means of identification taking into account the fact that things change.

A fully random primary key takes into account that things change - since it's not embedding any real-world information. That said I also don't think there's much issue with embedding creation time in the UUID for performance reasons, as the article is suggesting.
by charles_f | 2025-12-15 15:30:28+00:00
If something transformative is just coming in and threatens the economic flows that sustains your social model, it is worth asking the question of how the economic flows should be proactively updated moving forward.

The tractor created the middle class by giving more people access to jobs that paid better and provided more free time. It is yet to be proven who will benefit from the advancement of LLMs, but there is some consensus in the article that the large companies operating these LLMs will be. From there, proposing taxes on that additional profit doesn't seem ridiculous.
by lvl155 | 2025-12-15 15:30:45+00:00
100%. Amazon actually has a sizable robotics presence in Boston. It would have been great for Boston job market and there are actually a handful of companies based out of MA including BD. You really need a cluster of companies to strengthen an industry. I mean see biotech in Kendall if you need an example.

Every time I hear someone applaud China for doing it cheaper and better, you don’t actually know that long-term. Technology goes into China but rarely comes out of it. Meaning they like to “transfer” IP in exchange for cheap labor but they don’t share a lot of things. There’s a very real long-term price to pay for that.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-12-15 15:30:46+00:00
You're not totally wrong, except the US didn't lose it's talent. Instead it all went to software and finance, which pay drastically more, with much comfier working conditions, and much more generous benefits then becoming a machine tool maker.

The US is an advanced, mature, economy. Our children three generations back aspired to never don a blue collar. We would lead the world at the absolute cutting edge, and delegate the rest to lower economies. That's what we did, and that's what we have. So now we just argue about the need for people to go back and do dirty work, but ain't nobody volunteering to give up their $150k/yr hybrid job to make $80k commuting 5 days a week to process engineer job at scary health hazards factory. Ain't no VC funding an e-bike factory when an e-bike picker app costs 1/1000 the cost and can be done with a team of 5 people and scaled to 50 million users.
by samfriedman | 2025-12-15 15:30:49+00:00
I use the non-Pro version for 1080p streaming and have for years. It’s great, does what I want and gets out of the way. Some years ago they were forced by Google to use the standard AndroidTV UI instead of their own custom one, which means it now shows ads on the home screen (a carousel of “watch this on service X”), which are inoffensive enough I haven’t bothered to circumvent them. You can swap to your own custom UI if you want with some ssh futzing.
by zamadatix | 2025-12-15 15:31:04+00:00
The article already talks to the numbers they mean and what scale they believe it to be:

> More than 6,400 lawsuits against Syngenta and Chevron that allege a link between paraquat and Parkinson’s are pending in the U.S. District Court of Southern Illinois. Another 1,300 cases have been brought in Pennsylvania, 450 in California and more are scattered throughout state courts.

> “I do think it’s important to be clear that number is probably not even close to representative of how many people have been impacted by this,” said Christian Simmons, a legal expert for Drugwatch.
by cjfd | 2025-12-15 15:31:13+00:00
I agree that auto should be used as little as possible. There are good uses, though. It is okay to use when the type is trivially inferred from the code. What is auto in "auto ptr = std::make_shared<MyNiceType>();". Everybody who knows any C++ knows. Also, lambdas do not have a type that can be written down, so it is okay to use auto for them.

I also prefer not to use auto when getting iterators from STL containers. Often I use a typedef for most STL containers that I use. The one can write MyNiceContainerType::iterator.
by leadingthenet | 2025-12-15 15:31:51+00:00
You're right: I didn't answer the question, because I suspect it was asked in bad faith to begin with, given that a simple online search would yield ample evidence. Much of which has already been discussed here on HN.

Given that you've dismissed said evidence provided in other comments as not compelling and/or you attacked the source without addressing the evidence, I think my concern was well placed.
by evanjrowley | 2025-12-15 15:32:16+00:00
>Yeah they're bad because anyone who knows how to do it ... does not stick around

Can confirm! I'd also like to add that the employer is happy to keep you in that position for a decade or more (as long as the client keeps paying) but one job over an extended period of time reads very poorly on a resume. Switching is a disruption necessary for growth.
by armedpacifist | 2025-12-15 15:32:30+00:00
Just adding to the conversation: I can strongly recommend the documentary The Story Of Plastic to get an insight on recycling in general.

Reduce, reuse, recycle. I used to be big on trying to reduce my plastic usage, but I gave up on it because the more I got aware of how f*'d up it all is, the more guilty and depressed I started to feel. It felt like fighting a hydra.

I've witnessed it myself: a lot of the waste that gets recycled by the consumer gets thrown on the same pile and goes in the same incinerator. It's not economically feasable to properly recycle plastics. It's all bs greenwashing.

I just stopped caring at some point and became a little more pessimistic about humanity. Sad really.
by MarkMarine | 2025-12-15 15:32:31+00:00
I just read another article about this, but the affected group is military from Camp Legume. The water in Legume was contaminated, and its actually given a control group test for the incidence of Parkinson’s with Camp Pendleton, where the water was not contaminated.

Spoiler: it looks like the farmers are right

https://www.wired.com/story/scientists-thought-parkinsons-wa...

Amazing thing is TCE was banned by the Biden EPA in 2024 and Trump’s EPA stopped its ban.
by pxc | 2025-12-15 15:33:02+00:00
> It looks like you were in the minority that would have preferred to continue using the original CUE SDK - I'm sorry that we didn't find a way to continue supporting it.

I admit that when I went to the CUE documentation (because I was learning Dagger!) and read about the idea of thinking of validation as locating both schema and configuration on an infinite type/value lattice and sort of walking down from schema to concrete configuration, I thought "holy shit, it makes perfect sense". I'd never really thought about unification in configuration languages before, and it's a really cool idea, one of those things that's simple enough to be intuitive but also really powerful. First-class deep merge support is something that I really miss in hacky configuration languages like HCL, for example. So right away I felt "these CUE guys are onto something! let's see how it pans out".

It felt painful for me to abandon that investment, as I'm sure it did for many on your team, too.

While I'm fairly happy with what I've managed to do since moving on from using Dagger, the CI space is still a mess overall, and I think it needs tools like Dagger and more. So while it will likely be some time before I reevaluate Dagger for use at my current job, I do still wish you and your team present and continued success!

Thanks again for dropping by and listening.
by wccrawford | 2025-12-15 15:33:04+00:00
They didn't, though?

The H2D's printer/laser combo was done by Snapmaker before that, and the "2 heads" thing was done numerous times in many different ways before the H2D.

The AMS may not have looked exactly like that, but the same idea was already in place by Prusa at least.

Tool changers are not new, and the way that the extra hotends are held and dispensed was already in use in industrial machines. The "6 extra hotends" thing ... I'm willing to admit that might have been an innovation not yet seen in the 3d printing space, but BondTech announced their INDX before Bambu announced their solution. Both were in R&D for years before that, of course.

But Bambu was big and popular long before their current generation of printers. Only the AMS could be seen to contribute to their popularity, and again, it was because it works so well, not because it was a new idea.
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-15 15:33:40+00:00
> > Only (possibly cv-qualified) non-POD class types (or arrays thereof) with automatic storage duration were considered to be default-initialized when no initializer is used. Each direct non-variant non-static data member M of T has a default member initializer or, if M is of class type X (or array thereof), X is const-default-constructible, if T is a union with at least one non-static data member, exactly one variant member has a default member initializer, if T is not a union, for each anonymous union member with at least one non-static data member (if any), exactly one non-static data member has a default member initializer, and each potentially constructed base class of T is const-default-constructible.

That's just a list of very simple rules for each kind of type. As a C++-phob person, C++ has a lot of footguns, but this isn't one of them.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-12-15 15:33:42+00:00
It would to interesting to compare the "virtuous" reasons offered in these comments for hating recycling with USA vs EU (or other high Vs low recycling areas, like countries or states).

Does the USA or Missisippi have the lower recycling rate because they are uniquely immune to the corporate oil lobby that scammed Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium?

Is it because they instead reduce their consumption and reuse their empty containers unlike the lazy Belgians who are too addicted to feeling virtuous? Has the EU plastic use risen more than in America, because of recycling?
by cylentwolf | 2025-12-15 15:33:51+00:00
I feel like most first intro classes in Computer Science is learn the coding language on your own. At first I was like why? Why don't they hold our hands while we do this. But since I have had some space to look back it really is a pretty good representation of our industry. You are going to need to learn new languages. So getting thrown in the deep end is a pretty good precursor for what work is going to look like.
by martinald | 2025-12-15 15:33:53+00:00
Author here. What I'm seeing in particular is CRM/ERP solutions at risk. I know of two people in my peer group who are actively trying to replace a 'niche' ERP/CRM (not salesforce) with a agent built alternative. These are both >$100k/yr contracts.

They've outgrown the current (industry specific) products, arguably a long time ago. The discussions started like this:

1) Started building custom dashboards on top of data exports of said product with various AI tooling. 2) This was extremely successful, as a non developer "business" person could specify, build and iterate on the exact analytics. Painful to work with a developer on this as you need to quickly iterate once you see the data and realise where your thinking was wrong. Non developers also really struggle to explain this in a way that makes sense from a developers PoV. 3) ERP system at play wanted a renewal price which was a big increase, and API deprecation. This would require a lot of existing (pre "AI") integrations to be rewrote/redone. 4) Now building an internal replacement. They would not have even considered this before AI Agents.

FWIW this tool is not super complex, but it is extremely expensive (for what it does). It already has a load of limitations which are being worked round with various levels of horrible hacks.

There are a _lot_ of these kind of SaaS products about, for each industry. You never really hear about them.

Btw I use claude code nearly every day for many hours. Opus 4.5 has been a huge leap forward, I am blown away with how it can do 10-30 minute sessions without going wrong (Sonnet definitely needed constant babysitting). And the models/agent harnesses are only getting better. Claude Code isn't even a year old yet!
by Aachen | 2025-12-15 15:34:01+00:00
Oh, so I did understand correctly that it's Apple's version of Word etc.

My question was why one can't back up one's data though. I'm even more confused now that I know it refers to Pages/Keynote/etc. since those have always been file-based so far as I've seen from classmates who used it. Surely even Apple allows downloading your documents and spreadsheets from whatever storage front-end their live editing server uses?
by huevosabio | 2025-12-15 15:34:04+00:00
The answer is, no, just tax land value.

Henry George, and David Riccardo before him, figured that as productivity and thus wealth increases the value accrues to the land owners, not capital not labor.

This is because Land is the fundamental bottleneck of human activity, the core finite resource. And as everything else gets more productive, the land itself becomes more valuable.

So, yes, tax Land, and redistribute as a dividend to all citizens. After all, no one can be credited for building that Land.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-12-15 15:34:10+00:00
> most SaaS products contain many features that many customers don't need or use. A lot of the complexity in SaaS product engineering is managing that - which evaporates overnight when you have only one customer (your organisation).

This is the key point. Sure, you don't have the chops to be able to replicate the SaaS product locally with Claude/Gemini, but you don't have to, because you're no trying to make a product that can handle N+1 workflows.
by mariocandela | 2025-12-15 15:34:13+00:00
So I run research honeypots (Beelzebub) and caught something wild this week.

A threat actor is running a massive credential theft campaign against Next.js servers - I'm calling it "Operation PCPcat". The kicker? Their C2 infrastructure is completely exposed. Like, /stats endpoint showing live campaign metrics exposed. Amateur hour OpSec, but the operation itself is industrial-scale.

What they're doing:

Chaining CVE-2025-29927 + CVE-2025-66478 for RCE

Harvesting .env files, SSH keys, AWS creds, Docker configs, Git credentials

Dropping persistent backdoors

Everything flows through their open C2 - task queues, exfil data, the works

Happy to discuss in comments.
by mike_hearn | 2025-12-15 15:34:51+00:00
No, that's been a common proposal from economists pretty much since people started examining how economies work. Some places do have a capital gains tax of zero. Switzerland is one of them, and Switzerland is economically more successful than the rest of Europe.

Tax is one of those issues where there are actually correct and incorrect answers, thanks to many hundreds of years of active experimentation and relatively simple/robust theory. But people ignore the correct answers for social reasons.

The correct answer on tax is:

1. Figure out how much money the state needs to supply the services that are in-scope for it to an acceptable level of quality.

2. Aim to raise that much in taxes.

3. Optimize deadweight costs. That is, configure taxes to minimize the level to which the activities being taxed are discouraged and driven either out of existence or abroad.

If you do this sort of thing then you get Georgeism, you get zero capital gains, I think you get zero taxes on businesses, and a bunch of other policies I can't remember right now. The results can be economically very efficient i.e. they make everyone better off. However, almost nowhere uses them because there's nothing in the above three items about social engineering, and governments use taxation largely as a tool of social engineering. And in particular to please leftist voters who use the tax system to penalize wealth for its own sake, and to reward groups of client voters. Many governments also have a lot of trouble defining what's in scope for them and then working backwards to needed tax revenues; they prefer to raise as much tax as they can manage without totally crushing their economies and then find ways to spend it.
by snark_sr | 2025-12-15 15:34:52+00:00
We’re working on an AI-first interview platform for developers: Valuate.dev The usual approach to coding tasks doesn’t work anymore - companies are looking for AI engineers, yet it’s still unclear how to assess AI proficiency.

Our goal is to design challenges that combine prompting + coding, allowing us to score both how well a candidate prompts and how good the resulting code is. The aim is to bring measurement to AI prompting skills - how well-aligned prompts are and how candidates handle LLM-generated code.

At the same time, we want to keep a strong human balance in the process: hiring is a two-way street, and screening shouldn’t be fully offloaded to AI. We’re human-first.

Several tasks are already live - you can try them here: https://valuate.dev
by knackers | 2025-12-15 15:35:05+00:00
https://github.com/cdlewis/snowboardkids2-decomp

A matching decompilation of snowboard kids 2 for the n64. Why this game? Well it's awesome but also I wanted to work on a decomp project from scratch. I've written several blog posts about my experience for those interested. I hope to do more in the future, probably with less of an AI focus.

* Using Coding Agents to Decompile Nintendo 64 Games https://blog.chrislewis.au/using-coding-agents-to-decompile-...

* The Unexpected Effectiveness of One-Shot Decompilation with Claude https://blog.chrislewis.au/the-unexpected-effectiveness-of-o...