MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by asoplata | 2025-12-22 17:18:18+00:00
I briefly looked into this myself ( earlier in my life ) and decided that the "make a boatload and distribute it yourself" method really wouldn't help that much in scientific funding overall . Even if you made 10 million a year, and donated 99% of that, that would only help a handful of labs, which is something. Most science funding is orders of magnitude larger than that, and is on a scale that only nation-states can actually support. IMHO that translates to, if you want to have the biggest impact on science funding (including increasing the amount of funding), the best way would be to work in policy either at the NIH/NSF/etc. itself, as a congressional staffer specializing in science policy, an advocacy nonprofit (such as for a particular rare disease or a bigger, more popular one), or finally as a fundraiser/staff member at an independent science funding organization like the Wellcome Trust, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, or more specialized institutes like the Allen Institute for Brain Science.

I don't work in the science-fundraising space, but my gut tells me that now would be a good time to do the last option: with the Trump admin interested in trying to reduce the NIH's budget by 40%, researchers are increasingly looking to non-federal sources of money to continue doing their (expensive) research, like the private science-granting organizations mentioned above. At the same time, there's probably a lot of philanthropists who recognize how terribly shortsighted decreasing the NIH's budget is, and who are willing to contribute more to private science funders in an effort to fill the gap.
by toomanyrichies | 2025-12-22 17:18:46+00:00
For those who don't get the references:

"Lawnmower" refers to this. [1] And I'm guessing "acronym" refers to the joke that "Oracle" is an acronym for "One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison".

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886728
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-22 17:18:56+00:00
I don’t think there is any evidence that there is a state meaningfully denoted by “on the point of becoming a pedophile” which can be tipped by exposure to media in that way, no.

To be fair, understanding of the etiology of pedophilia is not super strong, but what there is doesn't, AFAIK, seem to support the kind of naive media-driven modelling that people like to apply to all kinds of behavior (Satanic Panic approach to D&D, Columbine and violent video games, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum, ad infinitum.)
by bgwalter | 2025-12-22 17:19:11+00:00
Everything is about "AI", "crypto" and substance grifting. There is no place for real science or useful economic activities like building houses.

Here is the latest fake poll that the Crypto/AI/Substance czar posted and that was retweeted by Musk, who claimed to be an "AI" skeptic not so long ago:

https://xcancel.com/DavidSacks/status/2003141873049952684#m

Getting favors for billionaires is all that these people are concerned about.
by vertix | 2025-12-22 17:19:35+00:00
Hi HN, I’m Sergey, the author of pos3.

I built this because I hit a wall with ML pipelines where I needed to feed S3 data into libraries that only understand local paths (like OpenCV imread, pandas, or PyTorch), and I didn't want to rewrite all my I/O code to use boto3 or s3fs.

Unlike s3fs which mounts S3 as a virtual filesystem (often slow for heavy random access), pos3 mirrors the specific data you need to a local cache before your code block runs. This means your script runs at native disk speed.

It handles the diffing/syncing automatically using a context manager:

---

import pos3, pandas as pd

with pos3.mirror():

dataset = pos3.download("s3://bucket/dataset")
df = pd.read_csv(dataset / "data.csv")

logs = pos3.upload("s3://bucket/output/", interval=30)
df.to_csv(logs / "processed.csv")

---

It's open source (Apache 2.0). I’d love to hear your feedback or if you've solved this differently!
by thinkcontext | 2025-12-22 17:19:40+00:00
There is certainly a case to be made for efficiently managing resources but DOGE's chainsaw methodology was a disaster. It had no comprehension whatsoever of what it was cutting, as we saw with frequent firing of vital divisions and then having to hire them back, its keyword approach to grant cancelling which resulted in trans-panic resulting in genetic research that included the word "transgenic". Worst of all were its broad workplace policies of offering deferred retirement and firing probationary employees. These disproportionately effected the most talented employees who could find employment in the private sector.
by VirusNewbie | 2025-12-22 17:20:17+00:00
When I got into the industry over 20 years ago, it was unheard of for an IC software engineer to retire early. Unless you got extremely lucky like working at Microsoft or Apple pre-IPO, you just weren't making the kind of money big law or doctors made.

That is not the case now. Yes the competition is incredibly fierce but the pay has skyrocketed.
by oofoe | 2025-12-22 17:20:23+00:00
A very long time ago, sometime during the first geologic age, I worked at a facility on Queen Street in Toronto. On the street side of the building, we had two Flame suites (very high-end (for the time) realtime editing and effects, used for composing television commercials). Each one had a Sony Trinitron TV of about this size as the client preview monitor. They were amazing, but every time a streetcar passed outside, they would get involuntarily degaussed!
by westurner | 2025-12-22 17:20:25+00:00
NewsArticle: "Scientists Engineer Synthetic Metabolism That Eats CO2 Waste" (2025) https://scienceblog.com/scientists-engineer-synthetic-metabo... :

> The system, called ReForm, takes formate (a simple liquid made from captured carbon dioxide) and transforms it into acetyl-CoA, the molecular currency that sits at the center of every living cell’s metabolism
by cheapbussy | 2025-12-22 17:20:31+00:00
+++ Non native english speaker, machine-edited text +++

English Version (clean, correct, humorous)
“Whoever ignores success because it doesn’t count as a mistake will make very little progress.”

The “Little Brother” Misassessment
Now, bro once said:
“If there’s no mistake, then I can’t learn anything from it. Without a mistake, there’s nothing to learn.”

But if his recipe for success - all the right, good, subtle, less noticeable things - isn’t even registered by his mind...

…then isn’t that a problem with the mental template he’s using?

“Fixed points of social polarization”...

Hey bro, before I hug you as the “Hero of Labor” - sincerely, warmly -
2,800 hours of work this year...

Tell me honestly:
Did only you earn that praise,
or do the employees of high‑performers like you also deserve some recognition?

I probably don’t know them -
but I do know you, which is why I’m asking.

Self‑reflection: Learning also comes from questioning routine
Keyword: Extremes (Mistake vs. Non‑Mistake)

Thesis: “You only learn from mistakes.”
Antithesis: “Then I must be a genius, considering how often I mess things up…”
Paradox: “If you never see success, you can’t do anything wrong.”

The “Little Brother” misjudgment is ultimately a cognitive trap.
It reduces learning to mistakes and filters out success, cooperation,
and quiet contributions.

The Mistake Olympics
Gold for the colleague who filled the coffee machine with dish soap.
Bronze for the intern - eventually you only learn how to apologize.

Punchline:
“I don’t make mistakes - I produce learning material.”

“My success is invisible, boss, because - as I’d like to emphasize -
I couldn’t possibly have done anything wrong.”

“Hero of labor? I’m a hero of coffee breaks.
Without me, there wouldn’t be any work at all.”

“If mistakes were the only source of learning, my life would count as a Harvard degree.”

Whoever ignores success because it doesn’t count as a mistake will make very little progress.

+++ COMMERCIAL BREAK! +++

LIFESTYLE: THE WIRELESS MOBILEBUTTON ?

The wireless button lifestyle
is a practical and simple solution
for users who want reliable communication
without unnecessary distractions.

Because modern smartphones can do way too much.

Forget apps, streaming, selfies,
and endless notifications -
and yes, even without emojis: finally real words again.

Pure minimalism:
One button, one life, your direction!

“Since I started using the one‑button phone,
I actually know what my friends look like.”
- A convinced ex‑smartphone addict

“I just wanted to quickly check something online…
Now I meditate.”
- A satisfied user

Because sometimes less is simply… less.

+++

hoped that it adds something ...useful...nor... hahaha!
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-12-22 17:20:54+00:00
This is not true for batteries at all. Just take a look at [1]. Many of these battery chemistries are in wide use. Batteries have several performance metrics: total storage, peak/avg power, round-trip efficiency, lifetime, capex, opex,etc. The relative value of these metrics is different for different applications, so we end up with many different types of batteries being used.

Grid level batteries have another very important metric. The actual possibility of buying a particular types of batteries from friendly nations. Simpler technologies like this CO2 battery have a huge advantage here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battery_types
by sebow | 2025-12-22 17:20:54+00:00
(If you're OP: this is not a solution per se but more of a generalist rant; just so you don't waste critical time)

People talk about changing laws or technical solutions, but the inconvenient truth is that technically literate people should peer-pressure nearby friends/family/etc. into being more aware of such possibilities. I've done so, to the extent that some people find it ether borderline schizophrenic/paranoid (to my "luck", I live in an ex-communist country, where most people are usually skeptical in many contexts with strangers; so this group of people is relatively small).

People who know better bear a responsibility towards helping others who don't; towards those who are too kind (or naive) for their own good; Even though I'm the "tech guy" in my close circles (family, friends,etc.) like many here, I often do the >opposite< of what other "pro-technologists" do these days: I don't encourage people, especially the older generation OR the more tech-illiterate ones to use more technology, because it is obvious that doing so "injects" another vector of attacks into their lives. More often these days this is not possible, everything gets digitalized to the detriment of such groups, but this also delves into the politics of keeping "older options" (cash, paper trails, etc.) available even if digitalization happens. Often times the older options are more secure, though obviously less convenient.

This is a non-solution, yes, but it is the correct way to approach this (imo), as more and more places LEGALLY force digitalization of different institutions(banking, gov. agencies, etc.) which inherently either add, or worse, completely shift the risk into virtual spaces. This is why a "legal" solution is more often than not either a slow one or a completely pointless one. It will always be an arms-race between scammers(which operate more effectively[in theory] due to their decentralized nature) and the gov./banks/etc., which operate in a more centralized fashion, thus demanding and imposing more control above all included parties. A legal way will always demand more than it's worth.

I digress from my shift into politics, but bottom line is this: don't let your peers/family/closed ones get into these situations. If you have "an authoritative" voice regarding tech, use it to first cultivate awareness regarding dangers, before cultivating hype/or anything else. (Obviously not talking about anyone specifically, but the whole "geeksphere" as a whole)

Good luck to you and your family.
by nayuki | 2025-12-22 17:21:13+00:00
I should have explained in my original comment why I think those sentences are wrong. I'll do so now.

> pumped hydro [...] can store thousands of megawatts for days.

You can't "store" a megawatt – because you can only store energy, not power.

But another interpretation is, if you actually store thousands of megawatts (i.e. gigawatts) for days, then at the very least, 1 GW × 1 day = 24 GW⋅h. If we take "a few" to mean 3, then 3 GW × 3 day = 216 GW⋅h. I'm not sure there exists a large enough pumped hydro plant in the world that stores 216 GW⋅h of energy. So I think the article meant to say, "store a few gigawatt-hours to be released over a period of a few days".

> Media reports show renderings of domes but give widely varying storage capacities—including 100 MW and 1,000 MW.

Once again, you can't store megawatts of power, full stop. You can store megawatt-hours of energy. The linked article at Bloomberg said that a project in China is building 600 MW of wind power, 400 MW of solar power, and 1 GW⋅h of energy storage – which is the correct unit.
by jjkaczor | 2025-12-22 17:21:26+00:00
Are you me?

Heh - going on 20+ years, my "running joke" is if the only exercise I truly get is lugging my laptop(s) around (sometimes as many as 3, depending on client-load) + "kit" (Kobo eReader, cables, powerbricks (although if it is an ongoing thing, I leave those onsite or rely on docks), powerbank, and various other gear (occasionally an active "gimbal", occasionally an HT radio + it's gear) - then at least one of them might as well be extremely heavy...

Haven't seen many "laptop-focused" backpacks that have both belts and sternum straps, would love any recommendations.
by JanisErdmanis | 2025-12-22 17:21:34+00:00
Having demonstrated error correction, some incremental improvements can now be made to make it more repeatable and with better characteristics.

The hard problem then remains how to connect those qubits at scale. Using a coaxial cable for each qubit is impractical; some form of multiplexing is needed. This, in turn, causes qubits to decohere while waiting for their control signal.
by pteetor | 2025-12-22 17:21:52+00:00
For complicated prompts, I always add this:

"Before you start, please ask me any questions you have about this so I can give you more context. Be extremely comprehensive."

(I got the idea from a Medium article[1].) The LLM will, indeed, stop and ask good questions. It often notices what I've overlooked. Works very well for me!

[1] https://medium.com/@jordan_gibbs/the-most-important-chatgpt-...
by jonplackett | 2025-12-22 17:22:00+00:00
People who have ideas seem to forget that a lot of people do not have ideas!

And even if everyone all of a sudden starts having ideas, only a handful will be useful and successful, and all the other ideas, and people who now have their future riding on them aren’t going to do well.

If everyone was Leonardo, what does the world look like? They can’t all be the greatest polymath of the age
by crossroadsguy | 2025-12-22 17:22:02+00:00
> please note

> The information contained in this communication is
confidential, may be attorney-client privileged, may
constitute inside information, and is intended only for
the use of the addressee. It is the property of
JEE

> Unauthorized use, disclosure or copying of this
communication or any part thereof is strictly prohibited
and may be unlawful. If you have received this
communication in error, please notify us immediately by
return e-mail or by e-mail to jeevacation@gmail.com, and
destroy this communication and all copies thereof,
including all attachments. copyright -all rights reserved

OR from someone called Philip Barden, here is a part of it:

> This email is intended for the addressee named within only. It may contain legally privileged or confidential information. If you are not the named individual you should not read this email and if you do so, you must not under any circumstances make use of the information therein. If you have read this email and it is not addressed to you, please notify IT@devonshires.co.uk and confirm that it has been deleted from your system and no copies made.

I really want to understand how binding and enforceable these annoying fucking notices at the bottom of emails are that was sent to me without me even asking for or knowing why and sometimes not even fucking certainly knowing whether I was the intended recipient or not.

So if someone fucked up and sent me a so called or really confidential email then not only I have the legal responsibility to delete that I am supposed to inform them that "hey yeah you sent it to me and I deleted it.. hope I was not the intended recipient.." or so.

I mean how does this thing work?

(I had received a couple of bank statements on one of my common Indian first name Gmail emails. I later realised those belonged to a lawyer who was probably informed by his bank that this happened because I had complained to the bank and had asked them to remove my email from that account. I received an email from that lawyer from another address I do not recall the domain of, but it was very angry and entitled and said shit like (paraphrasing) "By revealing this to a third party.. you have broken the law... you must hand over the email address without further delay…". I was younger and stupider, so I had just replied "Go fuck yourself" because I was really pissed. Luckily, I never heard from him again or any court because when I Googled him later he seemed to be a decently pedigreed lawyer from another city. Later, the bank replied saying it had been rectified - not before they wanted my phone number and KYC info and account details even though I had begun my communication to them saying it was not my account.)
Ask HN: How long before we get "coding agent in a box"?
by heavyarms | 2025-12-22 17:22:12+00:00
I've been using Claude Code since the early beta days and, since the 4.5 Sonnet release, it's changed my workflow a lot. At least in my view, the current iteration of frontier coding agents are good enough to automate a lot of rote software development tasks and are worth the money... if put in the hands of capable developers who know how to use them. But giving unrestricted access to all of your developers to something like Claude Code is also signing yourself up for huge variability in OpEx budgets.

I understand the current hardware limitations and that you can't just put a frontier LLM in a black box and hook it up to your existing MBP via USB-C. In my estimation, something like a Apple Mac Studio M3 (256gb or more of unified memory) is maybe one possible option ($7,500 - $10,000) for running a 405b open weights model... but it wouldn't be very fast. And it wouldn't come close to the level of quality or workflow of Claude Code.

To really run a current frontier LLM locally with something like >30 tokens per second would probably require four A100s.. add in NVLink bridges, expensive cooling, 256GB RAM, a cool case with LED lights (optional) and we're talking about ~$60,000? $80,000?

So my question is: How many generations—or what specific architectural shifts (specialized ASICs, better quantization, etc.)—do we need before we can buy a dedicated co-processor box that sits on a desk and runs a Sonnet-level agent at viable speeds... at a price point where it makes sense vs. spending $500-$2,000 per month per developer on API fees? In my opinion that "makes sense to me, here's the credit card" price point might be $10,000 right now, but I could be wrong.

And related question: Who will do this? Anthropic could probably make a killing right now IF they had could sell "Claude Code in a box for $10,000" but would they ever want to? It would be cannibalizing the majority of their business. But Apple might do this. And it might only be one or two generations of hardware upgrades away. They just need the "frontier LLM" to stick into the box.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-12-22 17:22:22+00:00
Yes, it’s true that Trump specifically has instructed civil servants to sabotage each other. You know why this is a dishonest answer, so I don’t see the point of continuing this conversation. The day will come when your heroes face the consequences of pointlessly killing all the children USAID helped, and you beg for everyone to forget you ever supported it; I look forward to rubbing the salt in your wounds, but until then I have no interest in what you have to say.
by piva00 | 2025-12-22 17:22:32+00:00
The USSR didn't have the advantage of getting all the manufacturing supply chains in its soil funded by customers of the products it produced.

If there's one thing China learnt from the USSR was on how to be part of the globalisation push, and get as an advantageous of a position as they possibly could, in that the CCP has been very successful.

We will see if the shift to more authoritarianism from Xi will unwind that but China's future, with all its issues, is starting to look brighter than whatever the USA has become. Perhaps limiting the influence of the finance industry has a much better long-term prospect, it's very much one of the major flaws of the American system leading from the 1980s.
by aw1621107 | 2025-12-22 17:22:33+00:00
Gah, can't believe I forgot about functional programming languages here :(

> even though Rust fans now adopted this claim

Did they? Rust's references seem pretty pointer-like to me on the scale of "has pointers" to "pointers have been entirely removed from the language".

(Obviously Rust has actual pointers as well, but since usefully using them requires unsafe I assume they're out of scope here)
by ryandrake | 2025-12-22 17:22:33+00:00
A very specific edge case: If you ever think you might want to become a pilot, even just to fly small airplanes, the FAA still considers ADHD, depression, social anxiety, and other conditions where you are prescribed medication, to be disqualifying. And this is a "have you ever in your life" question on the medical form. So if you're prescribed ADHD medicine, even as a child, I understand that while it's not impossible, you are going to have a major uphill battle if you ever want to fly airplanes.
by aristofun | 2025-12-22 17:22:35+00:00
> I’m not smarter than anyone else, I learned how to network, talk the talk and play the game.

Congratulations that you learned how to game the system. Fair enough. That doesn't mean you should brag about it or celebrate that terrible "school of thought".

> How will someone know what you’re doing if you don’t tell them?

That's a simple part: it's your manager's direct and one of the main job responsibilities. It's like 80% of what manager job is all about.
To be perfectly aware of what his team is doing, what was done good, what was bad, performance, strong, weak sides etc. For every individual report.

The hard part is to find the manager who at least understands that, even harder to find someone who are good at it. But in my limited experience it's not much harder than to find and spot a decent engineer.
by culebron21 | 2025-12-22 17:22:39+00:00
I couldn't figure out the main points, besides the "between Rust & Go" slogan. I've worked both with Rust and Go, and I like Rust more, but there are several pain points:

* macro abuse. E.g. bitshift storing like in C needs a bunch of #[...] derive_macros. Clap also uses them too much, because a CLI parameter is more complex than a struct field. IDK what's a sane approach to fixing this, maybe like in Jai, or Zig? No idea.

* Rust's async causes lots of pain and side effects, Golang's channels seem better way and don't make colored functions

* Rust lacks Python's generators, which make very elegant code (although, hard to debug). I think if it gets implemented, it will have effects like async, where you can't keep a lock over an await statement.

Zig's way is just do things in the middle and be verbose. Sadly, its ecosystem is still small.

I'd like to see something attacking these problems.
by 7373737373 | 2025-12-22 17:23:15+00:00
Coming up around 2041 (hopefully) will be the https://habitableworldsobservatory.org - which will be the first telescope sensitive enough to detect Earth-like exoplanets around Sun-like stars! Check out the "Simulated Observation of the Solar System" video toward the bottom of that page, coolest thing I've seen in a while!