MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ghjv | 2025-12-22 17:07:52+00:00
reducing wasteful government spending is an admirable goal but DOGE seems in mine and many others estimation to have focused less on reducing wasteful spending (overpaying for simple services, unnecessary doublings of effort, overly complex procedures etc) and was instead used to cut programs this administration has ideological disagreements with. Cutting programs it finds disagreeable is certainly this admin's right, but strange and dishonest to cloak it with talk of "efficiency" which is badly needed.

optimizing processes =/= removing goals
by robtherobber | 2025-12-22 17:07:56+00:00
I believe that we need to distinguish between convenience and preservation here. It is indeed convenient for consumers to use Spotify now whilst it exists and operates the way it does. They could go under, they could change their business model, they could decide to purge everything that is not easily justifiable commercially.

As a society, we should do our best to preserve this trove.
by nanolith | 2025-12-22 17:08:03+00:00
That is an excellent way of considering both leisure and work, and certainly, a testament to the importance of studying the humanities.

Aristotle famously developed the Greek concept of εὐδαιμονία (eudaimonia), which dovetails into what you wrote. Roughly, the concept translates into "human flourishing" or "living well". While Aristotle's conception of what best constitutes this differed a bit from more ancient Greek concepts passed down through their oral tradition, and definitely differs from what we may consider today, it bears investigation. I definitely think that education and personal research fits into my conception of it, but tastes differ. Nietzsche gave what I considered some excellent responses to Aristotle, especially when it comes to finding / making meaning in our lives with respect to the modern world. The Transcendentalist school, in particular Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, also provided some interesting flavor.

I think that your questions should be asked continuously. We should all adjust our life trajectories based on our own flourishing, in ways that challenge us and lead to growth. There aren't clear answers to these questions. In fact, they should lead to a bit of discomfort, like sand in one's clam shell. Much as this sand will eventually form a pearl, these questions should drive us to better ourselves, little by little.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-12-22 17:08:32+00:00
You are right. I am not trying to rewrite history, but I also wonder if, had the planners thought the internet would become as big as it is, would they allow it to be as unrestrained as it was at the beginning?

<< We inherited the current mess that we call the internet because several layers of it were centralized to satisfy corporate interests. They are responsible for our current predicament in the first place.

Separately, it does open an interesting question. Right now the push is to centralize, BUT lets speculate if they would push for decentralization if it meant it became useful for a different purpose ( solar system internet -- assuming private space exploration takes off). I wonder if they would try to cooperate vs force 'their' satellite ( I am assuming a lot now ) communication standard.
by mackeye | 2025-12-22 17:08:56+00:00
i was transcribing some songs for violin after picking it back up (mostly metal, which i have to take some liberties with to sound good on a violin + kick drum :> ), and thought about writing a language (maybe a rust steel module) to hand the typesetting for me, as writing out & erasing e.g. slurs can take a while. but lilypond really is good enough that there wasn't much about it i'd want to change, either syntactically or semantically (as really, i only need a very small subset of it). any language i do write, if i choose to, would probably use it as a backend --- its rendering is very good :)
by pityJuke | 2025-12-22 17:09:11+00:00
Some context from Matt Levine [0] as to what was different prior to this change.

(TL;DR, but please correct me if I'm wrong: it was previously backstopped by Ellison's revocable trust. Ellison could theoretically clear out the revocable trust at any time, and leave WBD high and dry. Now that it is backstopped by Ellison himself, there is no such worry.)

[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-12-17/war...
by parpfish | 2025-12-22 17:09:14+00:00
Wouldnt it be easier to just give everybody $1000/mo but then use the yearly tax bill to get high earners to pay it back rather than having graduated payouts?

That ensures that everybody gets prompt payouts and feels that there’s a safety net, but no complex means testing and bureaucracy. And the same net cost, although the timing of the payouts will shift a bit
by spenrose | 2025-12-22 17:09:15+00:00
I forgot two, er, three:

9. Python got lucky that its inevitable screwups (Python3) didn’t quite kill it.

10. Swift and Kotlin both define programming as serving the compiler (specifically LLVM) rather than serving the coder’s problem. (I haven’t discussed Rust so far since it isn’t attempting to compete with 98% of Python use cases, but if you squint you can see it as going one step further than Swift and Kotlin and in effect forcing the coder to be a sort of human compiler who thinks in types and memory management. This is not a criticism of Rust, BTW.)

0. And behind all of this is Moore’s Law and the demographic explosion of programmers. Python was an implicit, perhaps unconscious bet that if you served people thoughtfully, the tradeoffs with serving the needs of contemporary silicon wouldn’t matter as much.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-12-22 17:09:32+00:00
First? Try only. I'd be willing to wager a sizeable amount of money that no one save for a few niche research institutions trying to improve quantum computing will ever be using fully quantum setups.

QC is not a panacea. There are a handful of algorithms that are in BQP-P, and most of those aren't really used in tasks I would imagine the average person frequently engaging in. Simultaneously, quantum computers necessarily have complications that classical computers lack. Combined, I doubt people will be using purely quantum computers ever.
by BeetleB | 2025-12-22 17:09:35+00:00
> it was respected by hackers for the joy it brought people who 'got' it

Isn't that the crux of the issue? Perl was great if you're a hacker who 'got' it. For the remaining 95% of the population, Python worked.

Lisp/Scheme are also beautiful to those who 'get' it.

> I still don't understand how it won, stealing the halo of a language while having nothing of the sort.

Plenty of people have already told you. 95% of programmers do programming to get the job done. The linguistics grad student I knew 20 years ago did his work in Python because it was easy (he had no programming background). He would have simply changed his thesis topic if Python didn't exist. He would not have learned Perl.

Perl was for hackers. Python was for everyone.
by directorscut82 | 2025-12-22 17:10:07+00:00
Of course they hallucinate because we are training on random mode. +Since you mentioned 3blue1brown there is an excellent video on ANN interpretation based on the works of famous researchers who attempt to provide plausible explanations about how these (transformers based) archs store and retrieve information. Randomness and stochasticity is literally the most basic components which allow all these billions of parameters to represent better embedding spaces almost hilbertian in nature and barely orthogonal as training progresses.

The "emergent structures" you are mentioning are just the outcome of randomness guided by "gradiently" descending to data landscapes. There is nothing to learn by studying these frankemonsters. All these experiments have been conducted in the past (decades past) multiple times but not at this scale.

We are still missing basic theorems, not stupid papers about which tech bro payed the highest electricity bill to "train" on extremely inefficient gaming hardware.
by jsheard | 2025-12-22 17:10:11+00:00
Thomas Electronics in the US supposedly still makes and repairs CRTs for military and aerospace, but those will be much smaller than you'd want for a TV or monitor and often if not always monochrome. Even if they did make big colour tubes they wouldn't give mere mortals the time of day anyway, they're in it for the big money contracts.

https://www.thomaselectronics.com
by ModernMech | 2025-12-22 17:10:36+00:00
> What it did was ensure the civil services grew much further, since the only way the next political party in power could regain dominance was to hire even more civil servants until they overpowered the ones already there.

If this were true, why did the number of the federal government employees stop growing in the 80s?

https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-f...
by OutOfHere | 2025-12-22 17:11:09+00:00
For what it's worth, there is a very high number of harmful ultrafine particles in the air whenever a flight is taking off or landing, and also on the ground at the terminal. Most cases of exposure are just not acutely damaging to someone with normal lung function, but the damage absolutely accumulates with multiple flights. The heart in particular is no less sensitive to them than the lungs. The noted mask, if worn tightly, will block a good chunk of them.
by someniak | 2025-12-22 17:12:04+00:00
Goal is to do a full mirror repo to repo incl. all branches in an automated way. It's indeed nothing else than a git pull, git push but automated (with API key). Yes the destination can be different but a provider needs to be developed for that (currently only GitLab & GitHub supported). Developed this to have a full local mirror of all my GitHub projects; but it can also work the opposite way; where you have a local GitLab you want to mirror to GitHub.
by forks | 2025-12-22 17:12:37+00:00
Out of curiosity, why does the Algolia result for this submission show '4 days ago', the submission timestamp '3 hours ago', and the metadata on the submission timestamp '2025-12-18T15:34:11 1766072051'?

Is this an example of an article being resubmitted (by the same user?) or otherwise boosted back onto the front page?
by kcplate | 2025-12-22 17:12:37+00:00
Ok, sure… but my guess is that ACA costs aren’t your only political decision maker if you are financially independent. Other things, like market performance under one party over the other probably hold a greater weight on your political considerations. A person in that circumstance generally doesn’t vote with their wallet, they are voting with their portfolio.

But if you are younger, perhaps with a chronic condition, in a job that doesn’t provide a health insurance benefit, and with minimal 401k…you are weighting ACA costs…and are in a demographic that historically votes more blue.
by praveen9920 | 2025-12-22 17:12:42+00:00
There is a temple in India called “Konark Sun Temple”, meant to be worship place of sun god.

It is built east-west to signify sun’s journey. The temple has a wheel sort of structure which kinda acts as sundial with minute level accuracy.

In India, difference in day time between winter and summer solstices is minimal ( 3.5 hours ), I guess it doesn’t signify anything major close to equator.
by plorg | 2025-12-22 17:13:04+00:00
In the late aughts I worked a summer at a company that was designing an articulating (flat screen) TV mount. I went with the engineers to one of the Intertek testing sessions. We wanted it to be rated for a 60" TV, but I was given the impression that the weight formulas they used for testing were based on CRT screens. The salesperson who came with us was giddy seeing the thing loaded up with 1000lb of steel plates and not giving way, but the actuators could not lift and our advertised rating was not more than 200lb.
by lbrito | 2025-12-22 17:14:22+00:00
Really different questions with different answers.

If it were just for my own care-free leisure and benefit, I would probably go to school again and try some other academic path in math, physics or history. Or rekindle my CS study and do a phd - so many different interesting topics.

In the real world, as a parent with a huge mortgage? Pretty much anything. Janitorial work, insurance agent, landscaping, whatever.
by dpifke | 2025-12-22 17:14:24+00:00
As someone who has moderated online communities in the past, I recognize the value in having a page like this, to which you can point people if they want to enumerate such trifles instead of discussing the episodes or series themselves. Rather than just say such discussion is off-topic, you give them a separate, on-topic place to discuss it.

(I don't actually know if that is how this page came about, but it seems similar to other wiki pages I've seen used for such a purpose.)
by mmmlinux | 2025-12-22 17:14:35+00:00
Its either people complain that they go slow and are too careful, or they will video and complain about every small traffic infringement that they make. Humans never driver 100% within the law and no one really cares. The second a single one of those things steps out of line and its an uproar. they have to drive ultra conservatively. How long have people been complaining about that one cat.
by BeetleB | 2025-12-22 17:15:16+00:00
> My gut feeling is that it succeeded due to escaping scrutiny.

You keep saying it, but from 2000-2010, what scrutiny did it escape, exactly?

Are you saying when universities dropped Java/C++ for the introductory course and replaced it with Python, they simply threw dice to pick the language?

Are you saying all the Perl programmers who kept saying "Python will never have the power of CPAN" didn't exist?

Are you saying Eric Raymond never wrote an essay on the virtues of Python?
by piva00 | 2025-12-22 17:15:20+00:00
I was about to answer the same, I'd go to carpentry. I love being in the workshop, I love the pieces I made, I wish I had more time to properly finish some of them with all the details I had envisioned.

I've considered it a lot when I went through a big burnout, perhaps I should've just thrown away the 20+ years of career in tech at that moment to start as a journeyman since now it just became much harder to let go off the comforts this career brings me...
by jaggederest | 2025-12-22 17:15:28+00:00
Well, ficus (ficus elastica and others) are natural latex - their sap is one of the forms of latex that occurs naturally and used to be harvested, but these days latex is harvested from a different plant (hevea brasiliensis, the "rubber tree")

So it's not so much as "the latex ones are cheaper" as "the real leaves are already made of latex, so why artificially make one out of latex?"
by mothballed | 2025-12-22 17:15:35+00:00
>an you name even a single time when two groups of civil servants sabotaged each other in this way?

DOGE vs USAID

>If civil servants engage in this kind of sabotage, how has Trump been able to enact things that are both controversial and flagrantly unlawful without being sabotaged?

I mean they have, look at all the civil servants who were fired and then sued for their jobs back with the leverage of judges who were prior appointed by Democrat leaning politics. Trump's attempt to eliminate large portions of the civil service has failed pretty spectacularly.
by tracker1 | 2025-12-22 17:15:46+00:00
Agreed, it's heartwarming to see this. The past couple years, my vision has gotten significantly worse and I've been contemplating my life and even retirement. I honestly never even considered retirement or the thought of not being able to work, it's terrifying to me, and now seems all but inevitable.

I can only hope to be remembered by anyone as fondly as some of these people.
by janice1999 | 2025-12-22 17:15:49+00:00
OP has no idea what he's talking about. Passengers masks are for depressurisation events and oxygen supplies last 15 minutes - enough time for the pilots to descend. Pilots have a separate longer lasting oxygen supply. In many (most older?) planes, a single passenger activating their mask will activate the chemical based oxygen supply that feeds all passenger masks.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-12-22 17:15:54+00:00
>> Verifiers and CSPs SHALL NOT require subscribers to change passwords periodically. However, verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence that the authenticator has been compromised.

> though not strictly matching NIST, some ops find a never require change hard to swallow.

I think they're right about that. A scheduled change just represents the accumulating probability that there's been a compromise somewhere that didn't come to your attention.

It seems like it would make more sense for a scheduled change to affect all passwords at once, though.
by elestor | 2025-12-22 17:15:57+00:00
Of course pictures of gay people doesn't encourage being gay, but being gay is fine. Being a pedophile is not fine. If there is even a small chance that something will cause someone to be a pedophile, it's best to minimize it. We aren't talking about pictures of pedophiles, we are talking about what is, in essence, child pornography. Maybe 'encourages pedophilia' is not a thorough enough way to phrase it, but a 'dormant' pedophile is much more likely to become an 'active' one if they are consuming excessive amounts of media related to their interests.
by andrewflnr | 2025-12-22 17:16:02+00:00
What angle? The cloud bands are running at right angles to the terminator and roughly parallel to the axis of tidal stretching. Are you looking at "Image B"? That one might look a like tricky, but it's just because you're looking a bit upwards at one of the poles, so you can see the curvature of the cloud bands around the planet.

Now, would clouds around such a weird planet take such a familiar shape? I doubt it. But going with that familiar shape is probably better then making up something weird to happen at the stretched ends.
by bediger4000 | 2025-12-22 17:16:10+00:00
About prodigies getting the deliberate practice needed:

In some fields, that can be done independently, in others, there's an ecosystem of guides, teachers, and competitions. With LLMs, there will be many more

Good! A testable assertion, like "AI should enable a tsunami of apps and shovelware". I like this! We get to see if "AI" has any effect at except in fields were "barely good enough" works, like spam, advertising and propaganda.
by andrewaylett | 2025-12-22 17:16:24+00:00
It is, however, literally worth that amount of cash at the moment of redemption. If you were going to spend that money in that shop anyway, and you have no intent to sell the card to a third party, there's no need to apply a discount.

It's not all that surprising that "just like cash, but less fungible" should have a different valuation than "cash", but there aren't all that many things that mimic cash like that.
by sillystuff | 2025-12-22 17:16:36+00:00
Debian requires that packages be able to be built entirely offline.

> Debian guarantees every binary package can be built from the available source packages for licensing and security reasons. For example, if your build system downloaded dependencies from an external site, the owner of the project could release a new version of that dependency with a different license. An attacker could even serve a malicious version of the dependency when the request comes from Debian's build servers. [1]

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamGuide#:~:text=make%20V=1-,Su...
by c0balt | 2025-12-22 17:17:07+00:00
About that, we actually tried (with support from the network team) to open a small VPN Fron our office for some mobile devices as part of an event installation. Just plain wireguard on a public IP.

After two weeks of back and forth the wireguard packets were still being discarded somewhere by a firewall/router thanks to "deny VPNs by default". Tailscale got through those immediately though by using their relays + one of the workarounds for standard wireguard ports being blocked. Point being, the service provided by a mature solution like Tailscale for punching through networks is surprisingly effective even for corporate-level networks.
by qingcharles | 2025-12-22 17:17:18+00:00
No, the 40" ones are common. They were sold in the USA. You can find them on Craigslist etc (where I found mine). The 43" and 45" are the rare ones.

Here's a pic of one:

https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/ce52bb/behold_my...
by arunabha | 2025-12-22 17:17:21+00:00
That is increasingly becoming next to impossible in the current environment of 'influencers' trying to capture attention by amplifing every possible conspiracy theory.

The thing about science is that you need to be aware of, and accept the scientific method. There is no absolute truth, and future data can contradict established theory.

Unfortunately, this is often used to attack science by claiming that 'scientists change their mind all the time', and hence <insert unwanted result here> should not be relied upon since scientists cannot 'prove' or guarantee that they know the absolute truth. Never mind that the alternate position offered often doesn't have a shred of evidence. As long as it's delivered with absolute confidence, a vast majority of people will accept it.

We really need to do a much better job of teaching the essence of the scientific method in schools.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-22 17:17:28+00:00
I agree. I was optimistic that one of Bluesky, Mastodon, or Threads would emerge as a better version of Twitter without the problems, but that hasn't been the case for me. In fact, a lot of the people I followed who migrated to those platforms have seemingly spiraled deeper into negativity and doom on those platforms.

One person I followed described Bluesky as the place to go if you want to be viciously attacked and torn apart by people who 98% agree with what you're saying.
by mothballed | 2025-12-22 17:17:29+00:00
Because after 100 years of growth there was very little room left to keep hiring people, due to pressure on cap of taxes, that's part of why Trump had to resort trying to go back to firing.

Even if it had kept growing, at some point there's a limitation on number of people in the USA that can even work those jobs.

Seems kind of insane to critique the number can't expand to infinity rather to acknowledge it expanded until we got to the point we're already paying 30+% taxes at the upper income bands, plus a large deficit, and there's just very little room left for the populace to tolerate new programs administered by bureaucrats.
by devnavigator | 2025-12-22 17:17:34+00:00
Large language models struggle with one-shot SPARQL generation for multi-hop knowledge graph questions, but training them as agentic systems with reinforcement learning enables reliable, iterative query refinement using execution feedback. In this article, we summarize a published paper showing how a compact 3B-parameter model trained purely via outcome-driven RL learns to recover from errors and significantly outperforms zero-shot baselines, demonstrating a scalable blueprint for teaching AI agents to use formal symbolic tools effectively.