MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stocksinsmocks | 2025-12-28 01:06:23+00:00
It’s probably necessary long term as gasoline taxes are yielding less per mile as total fuel efficiency improves. The dedicated funding source is necessary because if DOT construction budgets (which are huge) were in the general fund, they would be looted by lawmakers to fund patronage programs and the entire surface transportation network would be unfit for service within 20 years. TxDOT loves NTTA because it’s a huge cash cow and hits non-residents hard. If I have to go to Dallas, I expect to spend at least $25 one way. Usually someone else is footing that bill. By extension, I consider myself very lucky that I don’t have to live there.
by loloquwowndueo | 2025-12-28 01:07:00+00:00
Your idea shifts monitoring to end users, which doesn’t sound awesome.

Just check expiration of the active certificate; if it’s under a threshold (say 1 week, assuming you auto-renew it when it’s 3 weeks to expiry; still serving a cert when it’s 1 week to expiration is enough signal that something went wrong) then you alert.

Then you just need to test that your alerting system is reliable. No need to use your users as canaries.
by jasonwatkinspdx | 2025-12-28 01:07:34+00:00
> I imagine it could play a pure 7Hz tone if you turn it up.

You're misunderstanding the numbers here. Going from 12 to 7 Hz is most of an octave, nearly doubling wavelengths.

Also SVS's numbers are gonna be the usual marketing stuff, so they're assuming a fat room gain curve, and just looking at their website they have a disclaimer on their graphs that it doesn't represent actual total output capability. Which is a way of hiding that if you actually try to drive it that hard that low with ~3kw electrical in those voice coils are going to torch.

The non lying way to prove that claim is to show large signal Kipple results including the heat soak. They ain't doin' that here.

Basically stuff going this low is really exotic and more in the realm of servos that simulate earthquakes than traditional transducers.

Tom Danley is the world expert on this sort of thing. He used to build stuff like ultrasonic levitation ovens and full scale sonic boom simulators for JPL/NASA.

In the audio world he was first famous as the tech lead behind ServoDrive. This now defunct company made special effects subwoofers using DC rotary servo motors to drive the diaphragm. They were used as special effects subs in that era by big acts like Garth Brooks. But they didn't catch on outside that niche because very little music has significant content below 40 hz as it just turns into a muddy rumble that harms sound quality as a whole. So to use these sorts of things you have to mix for it specifically. Cinema goes lower with the rumbles down to 15hz, but that's basically it.

Getting anything that's like a clean tone at 7hz is not gonna happen without a purpose built device.

FWIW Tom Danley started his own company[1] after Servo Drive failed on the business side, where he focuses on large scale horn speakers using novel topologies. They're among the best in the business at what they. Again, they don't have anything that even remotely tries to go down to 7hz.

[1]: https://www.danleysoundlabs.com/

Tom's a nice guy, I've traded emails with him a few times over the years. He used to be pretty active on the DIY speaker building mailing lists sharing his very in depth knowledge freely.
by jim201 | 2025-12-28 01:07:41+00:00
The book Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman seems really relevant here. The thesis is that different modes of information are best suited to different tasks. Postman argues that television is best suited for entertainment. So the programs that do well on TV will naturally tend to be entertainment.

That book was written in 1985, but the core observations are also applicable to modern cellphones (which have become, for the majority of users, entertainment devices).

Postman then talks about how our communication systems have degraded as a result of entertainment being the strength of our current modes.

Fantastic read.
by jmyeet | 2025-12-28 01:07:43+00:00
I'm surprised the WSJ didn't have any depth on what's happened and why.

"Backwardation" is a term that must be used here. That's where the spot price was higher than the future price.

For anyone unfamiliar, pretty much any commodity can trade under a futures contract. That means you as a producer or consumer can lock in a price at a future point. But you must come up with the commodity on that date or come up with the money and take delivery.

So imagine the spot (current) price is $70/oz but the future price is $65/oz. That means nobody is really buying at $70 when a price a month out is $65. So how does this happen/ Because dealers in the market have written futures contracts for silver they don't have and they will have to buy at the spot price to cover it at some point. They either don't want to or can't. Best case scenario, they're going to take a massive loss. Worst case, they are insolvent.

So there was little to no activity at the spot price even though it's at a record high. Refiners weren't buying.

There's a market for borrowing silver from people who have it and that market exploded this year as these dealers sought temporary relief for the futures contracts they had to cover.

All of this signaled that banks and refiners were essentially conspiring to suppress silver prices to remain solvent and that at some point the dam was going to burst.

And it did because China, who refines 60-70% of the world's silver, decided they would cease exports because of local demand for things like solar panels.

So here we are.
by albumen | 2025-12-28 01:07:49+00:00
This is provably wrong. Preventative public health measures against for instance cigarettes and nicotine reduce uptake, reduce consumption and increase quitting. [1] In the case of smoking, this also cut second-hand harm/death from smoking. Similarly, preventative measures have first order and second order benefits for alcohol and other drug consumption.

Just giving up on those who show higher likelihood for addiction is a travesty. Failure to eliminate an addiction is no reason to give up reducing its harms, both to the person themselves, family and friends, and wider society.

[1]: https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/21/2/172
by venturecruelty | 2025-12-28 01:08:15+00:00
>Wait until you hear about the true costs of transit. A transit ride in a large city is typically MORE expensive than a car ride. Even when you take into account the cost of depreciation, insurance, financing and other related expenses.

Meanwhile, we're barreling toward 2-3 C of warming above pre-industrial levels by 2100. Oh, sorry, that doesn't have a line item on the toll receipt, silly me.

>It's THE real reason we have a failing democracy. Thoughtless social experiments with subsidizing transit have led to distorted housing and job markets. You can't just subsidize one facet of life and hope for it to work.

Lol. Lmao, even.
by throw0101c | 2025-12-28 01:09:09+00:00
> I’m pretty sure no-one has argued that a gold standard would prevent economic disasters. That sounds like a straw man. My understanding is that there would be more of them but the individual and cumulative impact would be far less.

Contrary to popular opinion, the historical record shows that gold does not actually bring price stability; see "Why the Gold Standard Is the World's Worst Economic Idea, in 2 Charts":

* http://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archi...

Most of the claimed benefits of gold-backed currencies are myths:

* https://archive.is/https://www.vox.com/2014/7/16/5900297/cas...

Before what we call "The Great Depression" (of the 1930s), that label was applied to another years-long economic malaise, which was in part caused by using gold-backed currency (as was the 1930s Great Depression):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression

You'll find that US economic downturns became less frequent as the US went off the gold standard, and the Fed gained more and more independence:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GDP_growth_1923-2009.jpg

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...
by raron | 2025-12-28 01:09:36+00:00
> atomic clock time signal that (was/is?) broadcast nationwide

Probably DCF77 or WWVB.

> I think the actual antenna and hardware were relatively large since it's a long wave signal

Casio has some normal sized wristwatches that synchronizes to DCF77, it would definitely fit into a stove, microwave, or basically anything.
by lanfeust6 | 2025-12-28 01:09:54+00:00
Anti-trust laws exist for a reason. Mitigating monopoly is key and already accounted for. There's no reason to believe corporations can inevitably grow themselves into that position, and as history shows, no one can predict which ones will be the most valuable (let alone valuable) in the future.

As for individuals, dynasty dissipates and breaks up in wealth. A rich person doesn't live forever, and seldom do competing offspring manage to generate as much. Their pile shrinks as they spend it away.

Notwithstanding that, name a dollar figure above Bezos' wealth at which suddenly he can operate outside the law. We can already see what concentrated power looks like; it is entrenched and intertwined with government, not operating outside its bounds. See: Xi Ping, Putin and others. Power often comes with wealth, but wealth in itself doesn't lead to that level of power, at least in the Liberal world.
by bsder | 2025-12-28 01:10:46+00:00
> Overall, I think fare at point of use is a great structure. In the past we couldn’t enforce it but now we can do this for more things.

I don't agree. Price "discrimination" for government services is not acceptable. The perverse incentives that sets up are far too strong and the profits too juicy to avoid corruption.

We have historical analogs (paying for fire service and the corruption that caused in Rome). We have modern analogs (money from marijuana funding police forces that then arrest marijuana offenders and fight legalization efforts).

Letting price discrimination enter government services is simply a road to corruption and disaster.
by loeg | 2025-12-28 01:12:42+00:00
This is allocating wear and tear on scarce highways. Dividing it evenly by use. Poor people who would never drive on this road should not be subsidizing the use by software engineers, for example (the non-toll model).

> for example, software engineers a shorter commute on average than teachers?

Housing prices already have this kind of effect -- highly compensated employees can afford to live closer to their preferred locations. There's no reason not to allocate road resources to the users who are willing to pay for them (which is a much broader segment of the population than just software engineers). Pricing is a better system than road communism.
by nextaccountic | 2025-12-28 01:13:11+00:00
If your language isn't ergonomic then people will not use it (or use it less). Maybe another theorem prover will arise that makes "correct" definitions more ergonomic

Note that the same thing happens in Rust. Rather than putting trait bounds in structs (like struct Aa<T: Something> { .. }, people are encouraged to make the structs more generic (struct Aa<T> { .. }) and put restrictions on impls instead (impl<T: Something> Aa<T> { .. }). The rationale being that this is more ergonomic because it doesn't require you to repeat bounds in places you don't need them, and if every impl requires a Something bound, you will need the bound to make anything with this type (doubly so if the fields of Aa are private and so you need to build one using a method with T: Something)
by rjrjrjrj | 2025-12-28 01:13:11+00:00
Civic fuel economy is about 2x an unloaded SuperDuty, so the SuperDuty owner likely pays maybe a bit more than 2x in gas tax + registration.

+700lb (+25%) => 2.25x damage
+2800lb (+100%) => ???x damage

Your story doesn't provide a formula, but seems obvious it is much, much greater than 2 - this isn't a linear relationship

And that's the very lightest SuperDuty model, unloaded.
by ogogmad | 2025-12-28 01:13:38+00:00
Isn't a more modest opinion that gold admits a guaranteed minimum on its price because of scarcity and demand from industrial applications? That guaranteed minimum on its price is what enables it to be used as a hedge against a possible hyperinflation event of the USD. By comparison, the USD, like all other fiat currencies, might not have any guaranteed minimum price.

I'm out of my depth, so apologies.
by Enginerrrd | 2025-12-28 01:13:59+00:00
I think you just need-sniped me but I’m not convinced it’s impossible to assign a consistent ordering to events with relativistic separations.

For starters, the spacetime interval between two events IS a Lorentz invariant quantity. That could probably be used to establish a universal order for timelike separations between events. I suspect that you could use a reference clock, like a pulsar or something to act as an event against which to measure the spacetime interval to other events, and use that for ordering. Any events separated by a light-like interval are essentially simultaneous to all observers under that measure.

The problem comes for events with a space like or light like separation. In that case, the spacetime interval is still conserved, but I’m not sure how you assign order to them. Perhaps the same system works without modification, but I’m not sure.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-12-28 01:15:04+00:00
Streamer[1,2], formerly pro gamer[3]. “Creator” here is a clipping of “content creator”, an overtly ad-industry term that makes me a little sad(der) each time I hear it but is unfortunately universal nowadays, especially for people making videos (as we don’t really have another umbrella word for that).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsHlla-bq0C_2OtEy8s2_Sg

[2] https://www.twitch.tv/kinggeorge

[3] https://liquipedia.net/rainbowsix/KingGeorge
by OxfordOutlander | 2025-12-28 01:15:43+00:00
I built this partly because i wanted a cleaner side-by-side comparison of the big “2026 outlook” reports (banks + asset managers), and partly as an experiment in whether codex / claude code / cursor together can be pushed to handle citations accurately rather than hallucinating summaries. Quite pleased with the result.

The workflow was roughly: ingest publicly available outlook reports, extract claims, numbers, and framing (& force every synthesized statement to be tied back to a specific source/page), anchor on key themes (ai capex, policy path, power/energy, credit, etc.) rather than by institution.
by asveikau | 2025-12-28 01:15:45+00:00
> Oh, there was plenty of internalized propaganda about civil disobedience being the "wrong approach"

Yes, I'm aware of this. But I think it's surprising to me because decades later, MLK et al. are nearly universally accepted to have been right, but people using the same tactics are not.

But the cyclical propaganda lines do cross the decades. In the Bush 2 years I was rather taken by similarities between discussions of the Vietnam war or Watergate (which I read about in books or heard about from boomers) and what was then current events. A lot of the right wing stuff we've encountered more recently reminds me a lot of the 90s, when Rush Limbaugh or Newt Gingrich bursted on the scene. All of the same talking points go in waves. Nothing new under the sun.
by throwayaw84330 | 2025-12-28 01:16:00+00:00
I use https://github.com/longregen/claude-sandbox

It uses bubblewrap (no root needed) and only exposes ~/.cache stuff and the current folder (no git credentials, no ssh credentials, and as few permissions as it's feasible).

bubblewrap is a little bit more lightweight than docker (afaiu no overlayfs, launches way faster), but has the same underlying mechanisms for security (cgroups)
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-28 01:16:49+00:00
>. Regardless of whether there are tolls or a higher gas tax, the current suburban development pattern is going to get more and more expensive for the end users, but you could have learned that from Strong Towns a decade ago.

We incentivize density in this country by having a ton of compliance hoops that increase cost on a per-building basis. People might just decide that they love suburbs so much that they vote for politicians who tell the Strong Towns crowd, the environmentalists and the trades and engineering groups to shove it and we go back to the 1980s and slap up street after street of chap AF single family homes on septic with nary a site plan in site.
by josephg | 2025-12-28 01:16:50+00:00
> You can’t verify LLM’s output. And thus, any form of trust is faith, not rational logic.

Well, you can verify an LLM's output all sorts of ways.

But even if you couldn't, its still very rational to be judicious with how you use your time and attention. If I spent a few hours going through the ffmpeg documentation I could probably learn it better than chatgpt. But, its a judgement call whether its better to spend 5 minutes getting chatgpt to generate an ffmpeg command (with some error rate) or spend 2 hours doing it myself (with maybe a lower error rate).

Which is a better use of my time depends on lots of factors. How much I care. How important it is. How often that knowledge will be useful in the future. And so on. If I worked in a hollywood production studio, I'd probably spend the 2 hours (and many more). But if I just reach for ffmpeg once a year, the small% error rate from chatgpt's invocations might be fine.

Your time and attention are incredibly limited resources. Its very rational to spend them sparingly.
by dmazin | 2025-12-28 01:16:59+00:00
I highly recommend anyone to look up how PTP works and how it compares to NTP. Clock sync is very interesting. When I joined an HFT company, first thing I did was understand this stuff. We care about it a lot[1].

If you want a specific question to answer, answer this: why does PTP need hardware timestamping to achieve high precision (where the network card itself assigns timestamps to packets, rather than having the kernel do it as part of TCP/IP processing)? If we use software timestamps, why can we do microsecond precision at best? If you understand this, it goes a very long way to understanding the core ideas behind precise clock sync.

Once you have a solid understanding of PTP, look into White Rabbit. They’re able to sync two clocks with sub-ns precision. In case that isn’t obvious, that is absolutely insane.

[1] So do a lot of people. For example audio engineers. Once, an audio engineer absolutely talked my ear off about ptp. I had no idea that audio people understood clock sync so well but they do!
by jppope | 2025-12-28 01:17:01+00:00
I spent the first chunk of my career doing sales (2nd half spent in software engineering). Theres a lot of good books out there but you're going to find a lot of the direct advice to be non-applicable (as I'm sure you can pick up from the comments). Most of the Literature out there is directed at professional sales people, who for the most part are non-technical, have the backing of a marketing org, and are also different than a founder. Anyway, heres a reading list. Most of the trainings I've been a part of were custom built to the org or market, and frankly I learned more from Rules of the Game by Neil Strauss. I did enjoy "the Wedge" training by Randy Schwantz... that one you should do the video not the book. It also sounds like you could use some marketing stuff so I'll throw some of that in there too.

In no particular order, and please keep in mind this is off the top of my head:

* Influence (the classic)

* YC videos (e.g. https://youtu.be/0fKYVl12VTA?si=I9uylXSRyOf1nXRv, https://youtu.be/DH7REvnQ1y4?si=Ke858PmaaBr5ar-e, https://youtu.be/hyYCn_kAngI?si=sO_co6kbDaNn3cql, etc)

* Thinking Fast and Slow

* Purple Cow

* Clayton Christensen stuff

* Spin Selling

* Challenger Sale

* Guerrilla marketing (for the mental muscle)

* Jeffrey Gitomer (basic but useful)

* Lean Startup (for positioning)

* Charisma Myth

* Minimalist Entrepreneur (bits and pieces)

* The presentation secrets of steve jobs (just a good book on presentations, framed around Steve Jobs to sell more)

For what its worth this question comes up fairly often. It seems like technical people would like a "technical people" guide on how to do Sales and marketing. Does that sound useful to anyone?
by salawat | 2025-12-28 01:17:40+00:00
It really isn't followed through on as often as you think, and since Citizen's United, the typical candidate tends to chase the donations of people who think tolls are a grand idea. Not so much the rest of the working stiffs. Institutional inertia is a hell of a thing when your working demographic is keeping the retiree's and children's heads above water.
by bdangubic | 2025-12-28 01:17:40+00:00
Biden is a 5+ decades politician, he is corrupted and has had every fiber of being sold to the highest bidder over and over again. it is you that care about “which team you are on” - not me. I have been a democrat my entire life and will continue to be so especially now that alternative barely exists but I also posses intelligence to know that democrats (especially fucking establishment ones like biden) are corrupt to the core
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-12-28 01:17:52+00:00
Is anyone else worried that a lot of people coming from the Rust world contribute to free software and mindlessly slap on it MIT license because it's "the default license"? (Yes, I've had someone say this to me, no joke)

GnuPG for all its flaws has a copyleft license (GPL3) making it difficult to "embrace extend extinguish". If you replace it with a project that becomes more successful but has a less protective (for users) license, "we the people" might lose control of it.

Not everything in software is about features.
by stocksinsmocks | 2025-12-28 01:18:35+00:00
I subscribe to the opinion that there are probably some good reasons why people in the US tend to spread out when they have the option. I think the problem of collective human action is complex enough that optimizing at the individual level is probably the best we can do. I would rather spend time thinking about how to serve people in ways that they actually want instead of “big idea” approaches.
by anonzzzies | 2025-12-28 01:18:49+00:00
A friend started that type of business in my country a few years ago (end covid): she is pretty successful and I gave her a chance for a trip I am on now. It mostly exposed how absolutely terrible everyone seems to be at this: she did absolutely lazy work I could have done fast(er) and better myself (usually do and will do again), but, seeing her other clients, including a friend, it seems most people are just really bad at it, far worse than she is (or wants to spend time on I guess).
by wlonkly | 2025-12-28 01:19:12+00:00
The author repeats:

> that runtime continuously works to make the infrastructure match your intent.

The flipside of that is that the infrastructure, at any given time, might not match your intent, or might be continuously working to try to match your intent, which means the state of the infrastructure often does not match the state of its configuration, which is hell during an incident.

It makes me wonder if declarative, converging systems are actually what we want, or if they're what we ended up with, or if all the alternatives are just worse.
by Gigachad | 2025-12-28 01:19:45+00:00
What I would do is the same as what most cities around the world are doing, spending more on public transport, spending less on roads, implementing tolls and congestion charges, and over time reshaping cities to be better for walking, PT, and cycling.

The US is not unique in having fully adopted cars and ripped up old PT networks. It happened all over Australia which is also a massive very spread out country. But significant effort has gone in to reversing the damage.

There is something deeply wrong about a society that can afford to create hundred billionaires but can’t afford busses.