MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by asgraham | 2025-12-15 18:52:52+00:00
I was so with you the first half of that. But the notion that everything should be capitalism is just as wrong as the notion that nothing should be capitalism (or, that capitalism only leads to bad things; obviously wrong but somehow a broadly accepted truism).

Capitalism works when a market works; capitalism fails when a market fails. Healthcare is a great example, because there’s an obvious and inherent imbalance in demand vs supply. Firefighting is another great example. These also have externalities to the community as a whole that everyone gets, even when you don’t pay/need the service; so it makes sense to make everyone pay (taxes). Even if you never have a child, even if you send your kids to private school, you live in a society that could only exist because of a (formerly, relatively) high standard of public education. So everyone pays for schools.

The idea of government bureaucrats lining their pockets is also (formerly, relatively) ridiculous: who would get into US government bureaucracy to make money? They are all (formerly, relatively) doing it almost uniformly because they believe in the mission, because they would almost all make more money going private.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-12-15 18:53:35+00:00
Even if you were to liquidate every billionaire in America, at a 100% tax rate above $1 billion, and were able to sell the shares at current stock prices without a collapse, you would pay for the government deficit for... 3 years. Because their combined wealth, on paper, is $7T while we're running over $2T shortfalls every year.

3 years of not taking out debt, while still needing everyone else to pay current rates. Then you're back to square one. Sans billionaires and sans any major capital investment anywhere.
by tptacek | 2025-12-15 18:53:38+00:00
I have my complaints about this, but "blue areas" over the last several decades have meant "all major metros", and some forms of crime are just endemic to density, and in some sense all crime simply tracks population.

But we don't have to agree on that; people everywhere care about crime, and the promises ALPR vendors make, while arguable, are not ludicrous.
by scuff3d | 2025-12-15 18:54:12+00:00
I'm confident I can learn it, but the whole ecosystem drives me nuts. It's always a bunch of shit spread across a ton of small file, at least three different "languages" between JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, frameworks or other languages compiled to JavaScript on top of that. Plus the behavior of web browser and trying to wrangle that nonsense.

No disrespect to FE devs. Pretty much all software development is one type of mess or another. But backend and terminals are the kind of mess that make sense to me.

Also, agree that LLMs are actually great for learning if you use them carefully.
by gruez | 2025-12-15 18:54:20+00:00
>Since police are part of the law, when they don't hold their own accountable, there's no recourse. And that's a real problem.

I don't see how this is a relevant factor for the two cases I mentioned. Sure, it's bad that are part of the justice system, and therefore you can't use the justice system to correct their misbehavior, but you're not going to involve the justice system for incompetent teachers, or not enough doctors being admitted. For all intents and purposes the dynamic is the same.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-12-15 18:54:34+00:00
Are there any microbial derived biofuels in wide deployment today? I have assumed that the practicalities of cleanly growing industrial quantities of chemicals will never be cost competitive vs an inorganic process.

There are already inorganic mechanisms to synthetically generate petroleum feed stocks from air/water, so would be happy to hear the state of the art.
by Jeremy1026 | 2025-12-15 18:55:05+00:00
I had Claude write a piano webapp (https://webpiano.jcurcioconsulting.com) as a "let's see how this thing works" project. I was pleasantly surprised by the ease of it.

I actually just put together a write up showing my prompts and explaining what was generated after each, if you're interested at all https://jcurcioconsulting.com/posts/how-i-used-claude-code-t...
by lab14 | 2025-12-15 18:55:35+00:00
> so if you’re hosted there, it should be about the same latency as using their managed DB service.

yes and no. In my AWS account I can explicitly pick an AZ (us-east-2a, us-east-2b or us-east-2c) but Availability Zones are not consistent between AWS accounts.

See https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ram/latest/userguide/working-wit...
by tptacek | 2025-12-15 18:56:17+00:00
The belief system opposing "very strong heritability of intelligence" isn't "blank-slatism". Plenty of researchers who believe there are only weak connections between genes and intelligence also reject the strong-form blank slate hypothesis, to the point where, when I see people bring "blank slate" into a conversation, I immediately have to convince myself that they're not just trying to stop the conversation.

The comment you wrote really isn't a response to anything this article said.
by aprentic | 2025-12-15 18:56:24+00:00
I'm pretty sure China considers that as "signing under duress" and therefor invalid.

The relevant points on the timeline, from China's perspective, are:

China: Stop selling opium in our country. UK: How about no? China: We're kicking out your drug dealers. UK: How about an Opium War? China: Oh crap, you have way more guns. We surrender. UK: OK We're taking HK for 100 years. China: I guess we don't have any say in the matter....

A few years later... China: We get HK back now, right? UK: Yeah but we've altered the terms. Take it or leave it. China: OK. I guess.

A few years later... China: Now we have more guns so here are the new terms. Take it or leave. UK: But our deal!!
Detecting hidden market regimes beyond correlation (empirical results)
by johnoliveiradev | 2025-12-15 18:56:43+00:00
Sharing an empirical regime-detection study based on structural coupling rather than correlation.

Key finding: correlation can stay high while structural dependence collapses. The signal detects rigid, transitional and chaotic regimes across scales.

Black-box engine, results only. Not predictive, no ML.

Looking for feedback on interpretation and related literature.

Repo: https://github.com/johnoliveiradev/Multiscale-structural-regime-benchmark/tree/main/results/BTC%20vs%20ETH%2060%20days
by teraflop | 2025-12-15 18:56:47+00:00
Adrian Schoolcraft is the name that comes to mind for me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft

> Schoolcraft amassed a set of tapes which demonstrated corruption and abuse within New York City's 81st Police Precinct. The tapes include conversations related to the issues of arrest quotas and investigations. [...] Schoolcraft was harassed, particularly in 2009, after he began to voice his concerns within the precinct. He was told he needed to increase arrest numbers and received a bad evaluation.

His fellow officers had him involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward. They told the hospital that his claims were a sign of paranoid delusions. He was eventually vindicated, but his career was destroyed.
by greasegum | 2025-12-15 18:56:50+00:00
Maybe I'm way off, but this post reads like AI wrote it, which diminished my interest in reading it. This probably has some bearing on the thesis. To wit: when mediocre analysis is so very cheap, actual human touch, i.e. editing/filtering/writing becomes way more valuable to anyone who cares to read it. Relatedly, reading becomes much more of a chore when I both have to filter for what interests me, and also simultaneously be on guard for whether I am reading the unedited machine written slop. The perceived value of the written word is taking a massive hit and that's frankly terrifying.
by outside1234 | 2025-12-15 18:57:00+00:00
There has been decades of propaganda about how unions destroy jobs in the United States and most software engineers have grown up in those decades.

I'm not trying to argue that Unions are exact right answer (perhaps something like worker's councils would be better) but the underlying issue is that collective action in the United States has been effectively demonized for a very long time (going back to blaming unions for our uncompetitive cars vs. Japan).
by adriand | 2025-12-15 18:57:24+00:00
> "It" being "that it's harder than it looks"?

Honestly, I'm not sure what to expect. There are clearly things he can't do (e.g. to make it work in prod, it needs to be in our environment, etc. etc.) but I wouldn't be at all surprised if he makes great headway. When he first asked me about it, I started typing out all the reasons it was a bad idea - and then I paused and thought, you know, I'm not here to put barriers in his path.
by Induane | 2025-12-15 18:57:25+00:00
Of course they also took the route of inventing a new 3d api Metal which is at odds with Vulkan. There is HoneyKrisp of course, but if one want's decent gaming on an M1 or M2 laptop, Asahi Linux is actually the superior choice.

I don't think one can call it even close to success when the best way to run AAA games on your hardware is to literally replace the entire operating system which uses cobbled together components like FEX and wine/proton, etc... the fact that that works with more games is insane.
by int_19h | 2025-12-15 18:57:29+00:00
A market economy is a distributed compute engine. The main reason why planned economies do worse historically is because the amount of compute needed to actually account for everything centrally is so immense (and thus costly), the implementers necessarily have to adopt some kind of simplified model, and then you get divergence between what the plan says and what's actually happening.

It's not a given that this will remain true forever, although I don't think it's tied to AGI. One could argue that AGI push is the trigger for a massive increase in compute capacity and corresponding decrease in price that might make this kind of thing viable, but that's just wishful thinking, not a fact.
by zamadatix | 2025-12-15 18:57:43+00:00
I've been doing my home NASes in m.2 NVMe for years now with 12 disks on one and 22 disks on another (backup still HDD though):

DWPD: Between the random teamgroup drives in the main NAS and WD Red Pro HDDs in the backup, the write limits are actually about the same. With the bonus reads are infinite on the SSDs, so things like scheduled ZFS scrubs don't count as 100 TB of usage across the pool each time.

Heat: Actually easier to manage than the HDDs. The drives are smaller (so denser for the same wattage) but the peak wattage is lower than the idle spinning wattage of the HDDs and there isn't a large physical buffer between the hot parts and the airflow. My normal case airflow keeps them at <60C under sustained benching of all of the drives raw, and more like <40 C given ZFS doesn't like to go more than 8 GB/s in this setup anyways. If you select $600 top end SSDs with high wattage controllers shipping with heatsinks you might have more of a problem, otherwise it's like 100 W max for the 22 drives and easy enough to cool.

PLP: More problematic if this is part of your use case, as NVMe drives with PLP will typically lead you straight into enterprise pricing. Personally my use case is more "on demand large file access" with extremely low churn data regularly backed up for the long term and I'm not at a loss if I have an issue and need to roll back to yesterday's data, but others who use things more as an active drive may have different considerations.

The biggest downsides I ran across were:

- Loading up all of the lanes on a modern consumer board works in theory, can be buggy as hell in practice. Anything from the boot becoming EXTREMELY long to just not working at all sometimes to PCIe errors during operation. Used Epyc in a normal PC case is the way to go instead.

- It costs more, obviously

- Not using a chassis designed for massive numbers of drives with hot-swap access can be quite the pain to troubleshoot install for.

The biggest upsides (other than the obvious ones) I ran across were:

- No spinup drain on the PSU

- No need to worry about drive powersaving/idling <- pairs with -> whole solution is quiet enough to sit in my living room without hearing drive whine.

- I don't look like a struggling fool trying to move a full chassis around :)
by tovej | 2025-12-15 18:57:47+00:00
If you need a shipping dashboard, then yeah, that's a very common, very simple use-case. Just hook up an API to a UI. Even then I don't think you'll make a very maintainable app that way, especially if you have multiple views (because the LLMs are not consistent in how they use features, they're always generating from scratch and matching whatever's closest).

What I'm saying is that whenever you need to actually do some software design, i.e. tackle a novel problem, they are useless.
by 0x457 | 2025-12-15 18:57:47+00:00
> Have you heard of balcony solar? Stick some storage with it?

Sure, let me throw away everything I grow on my balcony so I can get some storage and panels. Still not going to work for me because my balcony is west facing. I have a bunch of solar-powered devices on my balcony, and metrics tell me realistically I get 2 hours of sunlight that matters a day.
by NewUser76312 | 2025-12-15 18:58:15+00:00
No, "AI" is software, and software is a tool, and tools aren't people that should pay taxes.

You wouldn't charge your CNC Machine taxes for the productive labor it produces that could have otherwise been done by a dozen blacksmiths.

By all means have corporate and sales taxes pertaining to the owner of said tools though. Even as a right-leaning individual, it's become pretty clear to me that corporations pay too low in taxes compared to the broad 'middle class'. Corporate tax cuts don't help the common man. An extra few hundred in their pockets each month certainly would though.
by ghaff | 2025-12-15 18:58:23+00:00
I didn't care about sales :-) It was free and I did a couple of book-signings at sponsored conferences that other people paid for. A lot of the historical content remained accurate but the going-forward trajectory shifted a lot.

The way DevOps evolved was sort of a mess anyway but welcome to tech.

I sort of agree more broadly but I can also see a lot of students rolling their eyes at using outdated tools which is probably less the case in other disciplines.
by giaour | 2025-12-15 18:58:24+00:00
You owe tax based on your percentage of ownership. The taxing authority doesn't care about equity because you own 100% of your house (albeit with a lien) even if your outstanding mortgage obligations exceed the value of the house. Generally, when you close on a house in the US, you walk away with the title to the house and a mortgage equal to a large percentage of the house's value. The bank only owes property taxes if they foreclose on the property and take the title from you.
by NYCNews | 2025-12-15 18:58:34+00:00
Early Snow Blankets New York City Ahead of Winter’s Official Start By David Greene Bronx Voice December 15, 2025

BRONX LOCAL NEWS - New Yorkers woke up to a classic winter surprise this week as an early winter snowstorm in New York City blanketed neighborhoods across the five boroughs—nearly a full week before winter officially begins. For many residents, the sudden snowfall was unexpected, but for others, it was a welcome reminder that winter has officially made itself known.

According to the National Weather Service, the early snowstorm hit the city on Sunday, December 14, bringing below-freezing temperatures and steady snowfall throughout the day. In Co-op City, one of the hardest-hit areas, 3.2 inches of snow were recorded, coating streets, sidewalks, and parks in fresh white powder.

City agencies moved quickly to respond. The New York City Department of Transportation announced that Alternate Side Parking rules were suspended across all five boroughs to allow sanitation crews to clear snow safely and efficiently. The suspension is expected to remain in place through at least Tuesday, December 16, giving drivers a bit of relief during the early-season storm.

While commuters dealt with slick roads and cold temperatures, many families took advantage of the snowfall. At Fort Independence Park in Jerome Park, children could be seen snowboarding and playing as parents watched from nearby paths.

Andrea, a local resident, stood bundled up as she watched her son enjoy the snow. “We just live in the neighborhood,” she said. “We had church this morning, and any time there’s snow, we come out and play.” For families like hers, the storm turned an ordinary Sunday into a spontaneous winter outing.

Early December snow in New York City isn’t the norm, and Andrea acknowledged that. “We don’t usually have snow this early in December,” she said, adding with a smile, “but I hope it will continue and that we’ll have a lot more this season.”

Meteorologists note that early snowfall in NYC doesn’t always signal a snow-heavy winter, but it does serve as a reminder to prepare for colder weather ahead. With temperatures expected to remain low, residents are encouraged to dress warmly, check travel conditions, and stay informed about city service updates.

Whether viewed as a hassle or a holiday preview, this early snowstorm in New York City has already left its mark—bringing together neighbors, slowing down the city’s pace, and offering a glimpse of winter before the calendar officially turns the page.
by barfoure | 2025-12-15 18:58:35+00:00
As a DIY fixerupper who has had a fair share of repairing all sorts of household appliances, I truly do like the simplicity of washing machines. It is good to be able to reduce its bare function down to something that can be manually operated. I anticipated a gearing system for these reasons which the article kindly mentions.

I haven’t seen the insides, I would probably incorporate some sort of a heating element but given power requirements it probably would not be hand driven at that point. Maybe im wrong and they have one? I do enjoy the sturdy construction and repairability of this.

I suppose it’s too on the nose but I think the bigger story here is just how big of a task it is to run, and maintain, electricity and current required for everyday life. It is a big barrier.
by 9dev | 2025-12-15 18:58:46+00:00
The point I am making is that the reason artefacts of highly automated production (even with minimal human labor required) will never become accessible for very low human labor, because all that automation has its own cost. We can externalise that as long as possible and defer the bill to somewhere or someone else, but it will have to be paid eventually.

> […] those are things that should still be solved at a much higher level of abstraction […]

I don't think that makes much sense. If a data center consumes all available electricity in a given municipality, it may provide AI services at a very low cost, but thereby makes the region uninhabitable. There is no way to "solve" this at a higher abstraction level. Or alternatively, consider a factory producing consumer goods, which emits toxic fumes; we can limit the amount of fumes the vicinity of the factory is exposed to by implementing very expensive filters—thus increasing the final price of the goods—or externalise all the negative effects—such as health risks in the population, ecological demise, and subsequently lower property values—to society, achieving a lower final price.

Currently, we often pick the latter option, because it usually has the better profit margin. I agree that it's a systemic issue that must be addressed holistically, but the actual solutions have to be implemented at all levels of the production chain. And this means the cost attached will have to be included in the price of all goods.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-12-15 18:58:52+00:00
I prefer SSDs because the connector is so much more accessible. Ripping out the video card and futzing with the pain of that tiny NVME screw is no fun.

I am almost never IO blocked where the performance difference between the two matters. I guess when I do the initial full backup image of my drive, but after that, everything is incremental.
by OptionOfT | 2025-12-15 18:58:54+00:00
Belgium's national register number is similar:

YY.MM.DD-AAA.BB

In either the AAA or BB component there is something about the gender.

But it does mean that there is a limit of people born per day of a certain gender.

But for a given year, using a moniker will only delay the inevitable. Sure, there are more numbers, but still limited as there are SOME parts that need to reflect reality. Year, gender (if that's still the case?) etc.
by palmotea | 2025-12-15 18:59:12+00:00
> These days the policy positions of each party are hashed out on social media by non-experts. For both the democrats and the republicans, instead of any sort of research or experts driving public policy decisions, it's instead the things that resonate with your average person's feelings as they scroll through their feed and get engagement.

That would actually be a major improvement over what we have. Right now public policy decisions seem to get hashed out by nutjob activists on social media, not "average people."

Also the "research[ers and] experts" need to own up to their own responsibility for this situation. Right now we live in a populist moment because they got caught up in their own ideology and group-think, which created an opening for someone like Donald Trump. They should have seen the problems he used to build his support, and came up with effective solutions for them.
by yashgaroth | 2025-12-15 18:59:45+00:00
Is there a reason why this specifically has to happen in living cells? I get that you can skip the hassle of DNA delivery, but it makes the entire thing about 1,000x more difficult - which seems to offset the posited benefits.

Not to mention that the requirements in the solicitation for speed, accuracy, and length of product are each at least an order of magnitude above what is possible in current in vitro oligo synthesis. And that's just for the intermediate, 19-month goal, much less the later ones.

Certainly, DNA synthesis has been a limiting factor in bio R&D and both the cost and turnaround time have remained fairly stagnant, especially for gene-length products and given the near-term explosion in demand from AI-designed proteins.

I can appreciate that DARPA is a fan of moonshots but would it be advisable to break this into sub-projects such as generally improving DNA+gene synthesis, developing new methods for cell transfection, error correction, in vivo assembly, etc? Focusing on in vivo and light-directed only (and together) might not be the best path forward, though it certainly sounds sci-fi.
by blazingbanana | 2025-12-15 18:59:47+00:00
Thank you, glad you like it!

The average model and upwards should support all languages from the whisper models by default.

I haven't tested them all so I'm unsure of the quality, however it should in theory support the following:

---

Albanian

Amharic

Arabic

Armenian

Assamese

Azerbaijani

Bashkir

Basque

Belarusian

Bengali

Bosnian

Breton

Bulgarian

Cantonese

Catalan

Chinese

Croatian

Czech

Danish

Dutch

English

Estonian

Faroese

Finnish

French

Galician

Georgian

German

Greek

Gujarati

Haitian creole

Hausa

Hawaiian

Hebrew

Hindi

Hungarian

Icelandic

Indonesian

Italian

Japanese

Javanese

Kannada

Kazakh

Khmer

Korean

Lao

Latin

Latvian

Lingala

Lithuanian

Luxembourgish

Macedonian

Malagasy

Malay

Malayalam

Maltese

Maori

Marathi

Mongolian

Myanmar

Nepali

Norwegian

Nynorsk

Occitan

Pashto

Persian

Polish

Portuguese

Punjabi

Romanian

Russian

Sanskrit

Serbian

Shona

Sindhi

Sinhala

Slovak

Slovenian

Somali

Spanish

Sundanese

Swahili

Swedish

Tagalog

Tajik

Tamil

Tatar

Telugu

Thai

Tibetan

Turkish

Turkmen

Ukrainian

Urdu

Uzbek

Vietnamese

Welsh

Yiddish

Yoruba

---

Apologies for the formatting, not sure how to make it look nice in the comment.

A new bugfix update for the "Translate to English" toggle (which was functionally always set to on) should be available soon, it's just awaiting Play Store approval.