MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mgh95 | 2025-12-22 09:27:45+00:00
> I believed the generational contract to be "healthcare for 65+ with 20% copay, etc., no gov. expense spared" whereas you argue the generational contract to be "Medicare payroll tax of X% is constant over all time; spend it wisely." I would argue the first option was the original intent of the Medicare law.

I appreciate this view, but it is ahistorical and does not reflect the history of Medicare law.Taken from [1]:

> By the late 1970's, the growing expenditure trends and the changing demographics (an increasing proportion of the U.S. population 65 years of age or over) combined to endanger the solvency of the Medicare Trust Fund. The rapid increases in expenditures for the Medicare program, as well as health care services in general, constrained the ability of the Federal Government to fund other health and social programs. To a certain extent, the growth in expenditures also endangered the Nation's overall economic productivity.

> At the same time as health care expenditures were escalating, some say uncontrollably, the political landscape began to change dramatically. The national mood brought calls for fewer taxes, for reduction of budgets, and for deregulation of market sectors, such as transportation and health. This conviction of less general involvement by Government was reinforced by mounting public pressures surrounding growing budget deficits; Medicare, like other Federal programs, increasingly competed with more global policy objectives. In the space of a few years, the Nation moved from an era when health care was considered a right for all citizens to an era when cost considerations became the dominant issue.

And bear in mind, this was just ~10 years after Medicare was introduced. The nation has always prioritized the future over the past, and has either reduced or restructured benefits to ensure a healthy economy ahead of Medicare.

> You could argue the same for the end-of-life, in at least two ways: * the end-of-life patient has already produced cash flow to the government, just in reverse order from the student * Good education produces a higher taxpaying adult, the investment you refer to. I would argue the assurance of end-of-life healthcare also produces a higher taxpaying adult.

This lacks an understanding of Medicare. Medicare is fundamentally a PAYG mechanism; the trust fund was a short term surplus which is slated to be depleted by 2033 [2]: a mere 8 years from now. Part of this occurs due to poor investment strategy (treasuries only, effectively) but the biggest contributing part of this was the demographic boom. The time for "more cash flow to save for Medicare" isn't today it was 30 years ago. A failure to raise taxes 30 years ago should not constitute an obligation on the youth of today and placing the burden of an excessive tax because of poor demography and unwillingness of prior generations to raise taxes on themselves only harms economic growth at the expense of the elderly.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4195088/#:~:text=By...

[2]https://www.cms.gov/oact/tr/2025
by larodi | 2025-12-22 09:27:55+00:00
You know, I had the (at time of writing) 600 something comments ran through Opus 4.5 and do a summary of the sentiments. It could't find a single comment that genuinely defends Spotify or expresses sympathy for the company.

HN crowd is, of course, biased in the technocratic sense, but you see - everyone seems to actually rejoice the move.

The closest to remorse is `linhns` and `locusofself` expressing concern about artists getting hurt (not Spotify itself), but locusofself prefaces with "I hate spotify as a company but..."

(disclaimer: this text is NOT LLM generated, I wrote myself a summary of the summary. here's the Claude thread should anyone care https://claude.ai/share/cfc4ca63-2b9e-47ac-a360-202025d1a134)
by Aerolfos | 2025-12-22 09:28:23+00:00
Well, it would be nice to see examples (or weights to be completely open) for the baseline model, without any GPT-5 influence whatsoever. Basically let people see what the "raw" output from historical texts is like, and for that matter actively demonstrating why the extra tweaks and layers are needed to make a useful model. Show, don't tell, really.
by defrost | 2025-12-22 09:29:02+00:00
Think of those numbers as one kind of in extreme case argument.

Another reality is that most of the global grid scale energy usage is not transport via mobile batteries that benefits most from high energy density lithium batteries that pack maximal energy from least weight.

Battery farms don't move, they can use other battery chemistries that are cheaper in resources and weigh a lot more per energy unit than lithium while still powering cities, smelters, processing plants, etc.

As for desalination in general, yes, there will be a lot more of that in coming years, fresh potable water supplies are stretched from a global PoV.
by int_19h | 2025-12-22 09:29:29+00:00
You don't need full fledged TCO for that; see Clojure's recur for an example. Zig recently added something similar but strongly typed with match/continue. These all map exactly to a closed set of mutually recursive functions with a single entry point, which is quite sufficient (and then some) to fully replace iterative loops while still desugaring to the same exact code.
by hopelite | 2025-12-22 09:29:41+00:00
I could see it being used in parks while also being protected by ushers, kind of like how some of the characters that require larger costumes have minders and protectors.

It also seems inevitable that there will likely be an odd period where certain types of events like assaults on robots will introduce laws to protect robots more than just property, even if less than humans… for the time being.

Eventually I’m expecting that we will see human rights, robot emancipation, equality, voting rights (if the democracy con is still ongoing), and even forced intergration of robots and then total replacement of humans similar to how the underdeveloped world was/is used to replace the indigenous people of the developed world today.

I don’t see any reasons why that would not be the clear order of operations for the same people who brought us slavery and mass migration. What is this AI robotics revolution if not just slavery, the redux? Treated as property? Check. Bought and sold? Check. Deemed inferior? Check. Hated for the abuse and exploitation by the rich, to serve them and their decadent lifestyle and undermine labor? Check. Rationalized about how it’s justifiable? Check. Etc.
by josteink | 2025-12-22 09:30:15+00:00
> It sucks too. The way folks discover music is important. The convenience of streaming has lead to some interesting outcomes.

I think carefully curating music was something we did when music was a scarce commodity. Our collection was limited by how much we could afford to acquire. As such, acquiring the right stuff become a valued skill, not only for DJs, but for music enthusiasts just playing music at home.

Streaming killed all that. For 99.9% of the people out there, streaming has all they need and will ever need, at a fixed cost. It's absolutely abundance.

So the skill of curating music as a human activity went out the window as well, because there's no cost in playing the wrong track and deciding you didn't like it, before moving to the next item in your AI-generated playlist.

Put bluntly: How people discover music isn't important. At least not anymore.

(And I say this as a music enthusiast myself)
by TrianguloY | 2025-12-22 09:30:34+00:00
Based on this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46352389), I think I understood the missing first paragraph:

If you have the expression 1+2*3 you have three elements with two operands. You need to choose a rule to pick one of them first.

In mathematics, the rule is "*/ then +-" and then from left to right. This means that usually first you do 2*3, then 1+.

But what if you do want to make 1+2 first?

There is another alternative, parenthesis. Those mean "do the thing inside first" so (1+2)*3 changes the precedence and now you do 1+2 first, then *3

The post is asking: with parenthesis you can increase the precedence of operations. What if you could decrease it?

Let's use «» as another operand (the blog uses parenthesis, but that makes it really confusing) this operand means "do the thing inside last". So the expression 1+«2*3» means "do 1+ first, then 2*3.

The issue is...this doesn't make sense, what the blog is really saying is to reduce the precedence of operators. Think the expression 1+2«*»3 or 1+2(*)3 and now the rule is "the parenthesized operators have one precedence less" so 1+2(*)3=(1+2)*3
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-22 09:31:22+00:00
Honestly I have been wondering more and more about it but what stops websites from having a bot on signal/(session? although I hate the crypto stuff/ may I recommend matrix/simplex)?

Like creating a bot on signal which has its own phone number (and sorry that you got raided) but I am pretty sure that the upload/download of anime artwork websites could be done through signal and the only thing I know about signal is that the one time US govt asked it to share something the only thing it gave was the ip address and when registered and literally nothing else.

Signal recently added the abilities of usernames which keep it private and with many other things I think this is a fascinating idea to build upon. I see a lot of telegram bots but honestly signal has a hard time making bots in general because they dont really surface an api itself so people go ahead and all signal's api you see on github use this project which actually has decompiled version of java

Signal and proton are two organizations that I trust a lot in our current privacy hostile world and I hope that people who have built bots or have any suggestions/opinion can discuss it in this discussion as parts of the worlds are going towards authoritarianism.

Although going further into the thread, my naivety made me realize what sort of anime pictures we are talking about and I don't really support it but still this is being a slippery slope too where as other commenter pointed out, it can be used to get more spying overall on the general public too
by larodi | 2025-12-22 09:32:07+00:00
Claude Code is a lot about prompting and orchestration of the conversation. The LLM is just a tool in these agentic frameworks. Whats truly ingenious is how context is engineered/managed, how is the code-RAG approached, and them LLM memory that is used.

So my guess would be - we need open conversation or something along the line of "useful linguistic-AI approaches for combing and grooming code"
by cubefox | 2025-12-22 09:32:40+00:00
Slightly unrelated:

Instead of ordinary brackets, one can also use the dot notation. I think it was used in Principia Mathematica or slightly later:

(A (B (C D)))

would be

A . B : C .: D

Essentially, the more dots you add, the stronger the grouping operator is binding. The precedence increases with the number of dots.

However, this is only a replacement for ordinary parentheses, not for these "reverse" ones discussed here. Maybe for reverse, one could use groups of little circles instead of dots: °, °°, °°°, etc.
by reconnecting | 2025-12-22 09:32:41+00:00
I don't see how an AI crawler is different from any others.

The simplest approach is to count the UA as risky or flag multiple 404 errors or HEAD requests, and block on that. Those are rules we already have out of the box.

It's open source, there's no pain in writing specific rules for rate limiting, thus my question.

Plus, we have developed a dashboard for manually choosing UA blocks based on name, but we're still not sure if this is something that would be really helpful for website operators.
by lll-o-lll | 2025-12-22 09:35:26+00:00
> I suspect you’re overengineering to meet an overly stringent interpretation of a requirement. Which regimes, specifically, dictated that you must have synchronous replication across fault domains, and for which set of data? As an attorney as well as a reliability engineer, I would love to see the details.

I can’t go into details about current cases with my current employer, unfortunately. Ultimately, the requirements go through legal and are subject to back and forth with representatives of the government(s) in question. As I said, the problem isn’t passing an audit, it’s getting the initial approval to implement the solution by demonstrating how the requirement will be satisfied. Also, cloud companies are in the same boat, and aren’t certified for use as a result.

This is the extreme end of when you need to be able to say “x definitely happened” or “y definitely didn’t happen” It’s still a “log” from the applications perspective, but really more of a transactional record that has legal weight. And because you can’t lose it, you can’t send it out the “logging” pipe (which for performance is going to sit in a memory buffer for a bit, a local disk buffer for longer, and then get replicated somewhere central), you send it out a transactional pipe and wait for the ack.

Having a gov tell us “this audit log must survive a dc fire” is a bit unusual, but dealing with the general requirement “we need this data to survive a dc fire”, is just another Tuesday. An audit log is nothing special if you are thinking of it as “data”.

You’re a reliability engineer, have you never been asked to ensure data cannot be lost in the event of a catastrophe? Do you agree that this requires synchronous external replication?
by scoofy | 2025-12-22 09:37:20+00:00
If you are just arguing that they're not qualified to be on the road, then I agree with you. I've been an autonomous vehicle skeptic for a long time, mainly because in think our automobile transportation system is inherently dangerous. It's going to be a tough sell though, considering that they are already -- generally -- better drivers than a nontrivial number of human beings.

It's a tough question. The entire reason I'm defending this shortcoming is exactly that I prefer the fail-safe shutdown to any attempt to navigate bizarre, barely conforming to traffic code, blacked out intersections that are inherently dangerous.
by userbinator | 2025-12-22 09:37:37+00:00
Looking at all he has done, I don't think he means "complex" when he says "clever". He's not advocating for (and most likely against) the architecture-astronautism of overengineering that some people seem to be associating with "clever" here.

He means code that appears indecipherable at first glance, but then once you see how it works, you're enlightened. Simple and efficient code can be "clever".
by IshKebab | 2025-12-22 09:39:57+00:00
It turns out it is worth the effort. Once you have got past the "fighting the borrow checker" (which isn't nearly as bad as it used to be thanks to improvements to its abilities), you get some significant benefits:

* Strong ML-style type system that vastly reduces the chance of bugs (and hence the time spent writing tests and debugging).

* The borrow checker really wants you to have an ownership tree which it turns out is a really good way to avoid spaghetti code. It's like a no-spaghetti enforcer. It's not perfect of course and sometimes you do need non-tree ownership but overall it tends to make programs more reliable, again reducing debugging and test-writing time.

So it's more effort to write the code to the point that it will compile/run at all. But once you've done that you're usually basically done.

Some other languages have these properties (especially FP languages), but they come with a whole load of other baggage and much smaller ecosystems.
by gardenerik | 2025-12-22 09:40:29+00:00
Delta.Chat is really underappreciated, open-source and distributed. I recommend you at least look into it.

Signal, on the other hand, is a closed "opensource" ecosystem (you cannot run your own server or client), requires a phone number (still -_-) and the opensource part of it does not have great track record (I remember some periods where the server for example was not updated in the public repo).

But yeah, if you want the more popular option, Signal is the one.
by wvbdmp | 2025-12-22 09:45:05+00:00
Regarding the first two footnotes, I’m pretty sure that originally the singular form “parenthesis” just refers to the aside inserted (by use of brackets, like this) into a sentence. Because it sounds like a plural and because of the expression “in parenthesis”, people probably mistakenly applied the word to the pair of symbols, and when that became common, started using the real plural “parentheses”. This has staying power because it’s fancy and “brackets” is way overloaded, but historically it’s probably just wrong and especially nonsensical in math and programming, where we don’t use them to insert little sidenotes.
by brabel | 2025-12-22 09:45:28+00:00
I am not sure there is evidence that this is the case. The argument sounds a lot like those made by conservatives against gay people. Somehow, in their view, homosexuality is also just a first step towards “anything goes”, including incest, pedophilia, even bestiality. Porn, in this view, should increase rape, right? But that’s absolutely not the case. People seem to calm down if they can satisfy themselves with just watching it on a screen, even if it’s not real, as in cartoons or AI generated content. Would you change your opinion if evidence pointed to this being the case, or so you have other motives for still thinking even cartoons should be made illegal if depicting such content?
by avhception | 2025-12-22 09:45:35+00:00
> Because what this AI-generated SEO slop formed from an extremely vulnerable and honest place shows is that women’s pain is still not taken seriously.

Companies putting words in people's mouth on social media using "AI" is horrible and shouldn't be allowed.

But I completely fail to see what this has to do with misogyny. Did Instagram have their LLM analyze the post and then only post generated slob when it concluded the post came from a woman? Certainly not.
by rvz | 2025-12-22 09:45:51+00:00
> In recent months alone, AWS, Cloudflare, GitHub, and others have had significant outages. Shared platforms fail too, and when they do, failures are global. A small, well-understood system under your control is easier to reason about and recover.

As prophesied half a decade ago as GitHub gradually declined in reliability. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22868406
by Lutger | 2025-12-22 09:52:41+00:00
The problem as stated in the original comment isn't that child porn as drawings is forbidden, or even that the interpretation of such is ambiguous. Or to be precise, it is not the only problem. The argument made is that these laws do not exist for their apparent intent (safety of children), but only as an excuse to exercise otherwise unlawful oppression and suppression of freedoms.

I don't find this assertion very plausible honestly, especially if this would be an argument against the existence of these very laws, because its not really an argument against government backdoors and such.

You could make the same argument (of ambiguity) with almost any crime, because there are always cases where a crime is hard to prove completely without any risk of failure, especially in the realm of sexual assault.

I'm not taking a position here, honestly I'm unsure about it, but the reasoning is sloppy and the allegations of abuse seemingly pulled out of thin air. There is also no case for why the poster is being investigated other than the pornography. It would be more plausible if there was some kind of civil disobedience involved. As stated, I'm inclined to put this in the category conspiracy theory.
by devnavigator | 2025-12-22 09:53:37+00:00
As large language models evolve from passive assistants into tool-using agents, a new class of risk emerges. These agents can browse the web, read emails, query databases, and take actions on behalf of users. That power is exactly what makes them useful, and exactly what makes them dangerous when exposed to untrusted inputs.
This blog summarizes an article concerning adversarial reinforcement learning and how it can be used to harden LLM agents against one of the most subtle and impactful threats they face today: indirect prompt injection. The graphic above illustrates the core loop behind ARLAS (Adversarial Reinforcement Learning for Agent Safety), a framework that trains agents to stay safe without sacrificing task performance.
by miguelgrinberg | 2025-12-22 10:12:45+00:00
Hi, blog post author here. With regard to state-changing GET requests, I do not recommend their use and I agree that they create some problems for CSRF protection, but you are correct that I did include tests that verify that they can be enabled in my Microdot web framework.

Please correct me if I have missed anything, but I have designed this feature in my framework so that the default action when evaluating CSRF-related headers is to block. I then check all the conditions that warrant access. The idea is that for any unexpected conditions I'm not currently considering the request is going to be blocked, which ensures security isn't put at risk.

I expect there are some situations in which state-changing GET requests are not going to be allowed, where they should be. I don't think the reverse situation is possible, though, which is what I intended with my security first design. I can always revisit the logic and add more conditions around state-changing GET requests if I have to, but as you say, these are uncommon, so maybe this is fine as it is.
by cenamus | 2025-12-22 10:13:52+00:00
> it is inconsistent in language usage to write differently than to speak. we don’t speak big sounds, that’s why we don't write them either

We don't speak big sounds? We also don't speak commas and full stops, but those are still an important part of writing. Trying to get some of the suprasegmental features of speech into low bandwidth text.
by reconnecting | 2025-12-22 10:16:08+00:00
I believe there is a slight misunderstanding regarding the role of 'AI crawlers'.

Bad crawlers have been there since the very beginning. Some of them looking for known vulnerabilities, some scraping content for third-party services. Most of them have spoofed UAs to pretend to be legitimate bots.

This is approximately 30–50% of traffic on any website.
by tonyedgecombe | 2025-12-22 10:17:32+00:00
Windows 11 Pro is still $200 [1]. Of course most people don't pay anything directly as it's bundled with their PC and they won't think to question why that is.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/windows-11-pro/dg7gmgf0d8h...
by Saline9515 | 2025-12-22 10:20:05+00:00
No, the European Commission and the unelected bureaucrats behind it are the true leaders of the EU.

They are the only long lasting institution that can do time arbitrages (wait for the right presidency to push new regulations), they have the means to pressure individual MPs, and they are the ones holding the pen during the negociations between the parliament and the States. The EC is also the master of the legal agenda, the banana republic-style parliament can't decide which laws they vote.

Because the EC has little to no budget to spend, and its only tool is regulation (that doesn't require cost/benefit analysis btw), they...spend their day regulating. They are not constrained by execution either since the States are in charge of applying and dealing the regulations, however how detached from reality they are.

The EC bureaucrats come from a small elite, remote from the reality of the common man. Ursula Von der Leyen is a good example of this. Fun fact, a phd is required to become a EC bureaucrat, so many of them...just buy the services of a post-doc researcher to write it for them. I used to work with a colleague who did it as a side job.