MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fl7305 | 2025-12-07 22:57:05+00:00
> See the recent deals where it’s been used as a political bargaining chip; it still ended up being a very desirable and capable platform from my understanding.

From a european perspective, I can tell you that the mood has shifted 180 degrees from "buy American fighters to solidify our ties with the US" to "can't rely on the US for anything which we'll need when the war comes".
by phantasmish | 2025-12-07 22:57:23+00:00
... if you're making $250+k/yr as an individual in your 20s, yes. If you've just hit that at age 40+, maybe you're just looking at a comfortable 60-67ish retirement. The US medical system gives you exposure to well into the five figures of risk per year on top of at least high-four-figures in premiums per year (at age 50). Each extra year puts an early retirement without crazy money behind it at serious risk, because your expenses could suddenly and unavoidably shoot up by tens of thousands per year for several years on end.
by staff0rd | 2025-12-07 22:57:30+00:00
I started using AI to review my diffs and write commit messages a few weeks ago. Simple quality-of-life thing. Then I switched to a project where I hadn't set it up yet. I went to write a commit message and my brain just resisted. I've written thousands of them, I know how. But it suddenly felt like a task that didn't belong to me anymore.

There's a quiet reallocation happening. Certain tasks cross a threshold and stop feeling like "mine." And that mental energy goes somewhere else. Toward problems I'd rather be thinking about.
by wpietri | 2025-12-07 22:57:46+00:00
And starting in the late 1970s, there were tools available to simplify building LoB CRUD apps. [1] That has continued with things like Rails and Salesforce and no-code tooling.

If something is truly boring in software, it gets turned into a library or a tool for non-programmers to use. Our value is always driven by the novelty of the need.

And no, people don't need to estimate the tasks. My dad did LoB apps in the 1970s to the 1990s. E.g., order entry and shop floor management systems for office furniture factories. His approach was to get something basic working, see how it worked for the users, and then iteratively improve things until they'd created enough business advantage and/or cost savings to move on. Exploratory, iterative work like that can at best be done with broad ballpark estimates.

I grant that people want estimates. But that is usually about managerial fear of waste and/or need for control. But I think there are better ways to solve those problems.

[1] e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBase
by jazzyjackson | 2025-12-07 22:57:58+00:00
Obviously you accidentally recreated a language from the 70s :P

(I created a template language for JSON and added branching and conditionals and realized I had a whole programming language. Really proud of my originality until i was reading Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines and found out I reinvented TRAC, and to some extent, XSLT. Anyway LLMs are very good at reasoning about it because it can be constrained by a JSON schema. People who think LLMs only regurgitate haven't given it a fair shot)
by karlgkk | 2025-12-07 22:58:02+00:00
No? What?

I mentioned Lifestyle creep before but what is with everyone’s fried brains?

A small condo in a nice neighborhood in Santa Clara is below $500k. Yes, that’s a lot, and you certainly can get more bang for your buck if you’re willing to do a little commuting.

Btw a $1m house is accessible if you make $250k yr, although to be honest, I would highly recommend against it
by GMoromisato | 2025-12-07 22:58:27+00:00
Starlink (collectively) already has 10 times the solar power of ISS, with present-day launch capabilities. If Starship works out (not guaranteed) launch cost should drop to ~$100/kg, which would enable very large constellations.

Musk is planning for 1 megaton/year of satellites, each with 100kW, yielding about 100GW per year.[1]

He thinks they can do that in 4 years, but adjusting for Elon-time, it's probably no less than 8 years, if ever.

But will the AI money last that long? Maybe not.

-------------

[1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1997706687155720229
by mpyne | 2025-12-07 22:58:34+00:00
There are agile methods that forgo estimates and deadlines though

This is what "agile" is: https://agilemanifesto.org/

More specific methodologies that say they are agile may use concepts like estimates (story points or time or whatever), but even with Scrum I've never run into a Scrum-imposed "deadline". In Scrum the sprint ends, yes, but sprints often end without hitting all the sprint goals and that, in conjunction with whatever you were able to deliver, just informs your backlog for the next sprint.

Real "hard" deadlines are usually imposed by the business stakeholders. But with agile methods the thing they try to do most of all isn't manage deadlines, but maximize pace at which you can understand and solve a relevant business problem. That can often be just as well done by iteratively shipping and adjusting at high velocity, but without a lot of time spent on estimates or calendar management.
by monerozcash | 2025-12-07 22:58:46+00:00
I don't think the Mangione case is a particularly good example, you wouldn't use a 911 call by a random McDonald's manager to disguise parallel construction.

The caller is easy to identify, how could the government ever trust this person to not reveal their parallel construction? If they were planted by the government, that'd be extremely difficult to hide. The government also likely wouldn't be able to compensate them in any meaningful way for telling such a lie.

The Kohlberger case also does not suggest parallel construction, the DOJ policy isn't binding and the DOJ can in fact legally violate that whenever they want.
by throwforfeds | 2025-12-07 22:58:53+00:00
Yeah, I think "vanity" is not totally the right term here, but I do think they have a point that there are diminishing returns with staying up on the news cycle.

For instance, I think there is a difference between reading some news daily and consuming only news. My father was in the latter category growing up -- I never really saw him read a book, but he was always reading a paper or listening to/watching a news program. Personally I find that I get more from reading books as they're afforded the space to go into depth on a topic. I think the author is trying to point out that that surface level news consumption is fine but probably not as beneficial as we might want to tell ourselves.

The one thing I've found most helpful news-wise, though, is that I find that it's one of the better ways to learn a foreign language to an upper-intermediate or advanced level. I relied heavily on RFI and other news outlets when learning French, with the added benefit that you're often getting international news the media doesn't report on here in the US.
by charlie-83 | 2025-12-07 22:59:09+00:00
This is what I do but I don't try to make it complicated with too many numbers. "2 weeks but there's a 10% chance something bad happens and it takes longer".

I have no problem if they just hear the "2 weeks" part. If they come complaining in 3 weeks I just say "we hit that 10%".

The other important thing is to update estimates. Update people as soon as you realise you hit the 10%. Or in a better case, in a week I might be able to say it's now "1% chance of taking more than a week".
by dzhiurgis | 2025-12-07 22:59:09+00:00
Latest source says probed and accused, but haven’t been proven. Not that I wanna defend them or Russia, but they do operate psyops on both sides.

Of course she couldn’t say what she means while she was in politics, that would be suicidal. Merkel kept buying Russian gas for decades, German money indirectly responsible for killing thousands if not millions of Ukrainians…

And then there’s Shroder literally working for Gazprom - https://www.ft.com/content/f6814055-26ac-4a48-8dff-c295a1a1b...

https://www.ft.com/content/366fad8a-d680-4b11-b7dd-ebe28fe04...
by einpoklum | 2025-12-07 22:59:18+00:00
I would disagree with you both about the past and the present and what's "janky", but - that's actually beside the point:

LibreOffice works just fine on _Windows_ - and that's what the majority of its users are running.

So, Schleswig-Holstein can switch to Linux, or not switch, or let specific agencies or individuals choose.
by runjake | 2025-12-07 22:59:41+00:00
Being familiar with the USG classification system, I was thrown off by the beginning of this article. It doesn't sound like something that would be classified merely as Secret.

The article begins with:

> XKeyscore (XKEYSCORE or XKS) is a secret computer system used by...

This should be edited to:

> XKeyscore (XKEYSCORE or XKS) is a classified computer system used by...

The program is allegedly a Top Secret program.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-12-07 22:59:53+00:00
They don't break encryption, they circumvent it. They get into people's computers and access the stored data after it's been decrypted. They stockpile zero day vulnerabilities and use them against their targets in order to install persistent malware. They intercept equipment and literally implant hardware onto the PCBs that let them access the networks. They have access to hordes of government CCTVs. They have real time satellite imaging. They have cellphone tower data.
by wpm | 2025-12-07 23:00:41+00:00
Adafruit sells a DS3231 module with standard 2.54mm pin headers. I'm using one on a Beaglebone Black that I setup as my NTP/PTP server (using work based on your work from 2021, so thank you!). No soldering required.

https://www.analog.com/en/products/ds3231.html

https://www.adafruit.com/product/3013
by wakawaka28 | 2025-12-07 23:01:18+00:00
Money has lost about about 10% per year in value for the past 5 years. It used to take like a million dollars to retire, but now it's like double that. In addition, nobody really knows how long they might live or how bad inflation could get. Imagine retiring at 50 only to be wiped out, and maybe still on the hook to pay for your own expenses for another 50 years, plus whoever you have in your life who counts on you.
Show HN: I turned Naval Ravikant into an AI agent
by arlanrakh | 2025-12-07 23:01:29+00:00
I cloned Naval (@naval), fully powered by the Nia API (trynia.ai).

The agent has access to all of his indexed archive of learnings and essays from his website. Simple RAG tools often surface paraphrased ideas instead of exact quotes from Naval’s original writing. I built this because I was tired of manually searching through every essay to find the precise passages and real context behind his thinking.

This agent can search, cite, and retrieve Naval’s actual words directly from the source. It is free and open source.

You can check the code here: https://github.com/nozomio-labs/naval-ai
by mpyne | 2025-12-07 23:01:49+00:00
> Which if you try to do - those agile people will kill you for it.

Does this actually happen to you? This is literally the whole point of agile, is to change the plan as you learn more about your work. If you didn't want to change the plan you'd spend a lot of time on up-front planning and do waterfall.

Like, a Gantt chart is more or less explicitly anti-agile. I'm aware of the 'no true Scotsman' thing but we shouldn't buy into people using agile terms for what is really a BDUF-based plan.
by wilsmex | 2025-12-07 23:02:10+00:00
Well this was interesting. As someone who was actually building similar website in the late 90's I threw this into the Opus 4.5. Note the original author is wrong about the original site however:

"The Space Jam website is simple: a single HTML page, absolute positioning for every element, and a tiling starfield GIF background.".

This is not true, the site is built using tables, not positioning at all, CSS wasn't a thing back then...

Here was its one-shot attempt at building the same type of layout (table based) with a screenshot and assets as input: https://i.imgur.com/fhdOLwP.png
by monerozcash | 2025-12-07 23:02:56+00:00
Sure, and you could also just submit fake warrants as many criminals have successfully done.

Neither of these approaches would enable bulk collection.

I'm sure the NSA can read essentially any specific emails they're interested in, they just can't do so at anywhere near the scale they used to pre-Snowden.

Not only that, these days almost all chats have moved to E2EE platforms. Reading that traffic in a stealthy manner requires compromising endpoints, bulk collection simply isn't possible.
by gruez | 2025-12-07 23:02:59+00:00
>Private equity firms have much more devious ways of looting the companies, like management fees, acquiring other portfolio companies, and various other tricks.

"looting the companies" is non-nonsensical when they also own it. It's like saying a scrap yard is "looting" the cars it bought by taking out the valuable parts to resell or whatever. The rest of the stuff might make sense in the context of the LPs getting screwed over, but not in the context of portfolio companies that they own.
by hocuspocus | 2025-12-07 23:03:07+00:00
Kotlin has become a pretty big and complex language on its own so I'm not sure this is a good counterexample.

The fundamental issue is that fixing Scala 2 warts warranted an entirely new compiler, TASTy, revamped macros... There was no way around most of the migration pains that we've witnessed. And at least the standard library got frozen for 6+ years.

However I agree that the syntax is a textbook case of trying to fix what ain't broke. Scala 3's syntax improvements should have stuck to the new given/using keywords, quiet if/then/else, and no more overloaded underscore abuse.
by technothrasher | 2025-12-07 23:03:34+00:00
Back when I was a kid and paid any attention to the Bermuda Triangle myth (do kids still pay attention to it? I have no idea), we didn't have any idea about the details of Flight 19. It just got mushed into a vague "planes drop out of the sky". Because, I think, we didn't actually care about explaining anything. It was just fun to believe in spooky things, as you say.
by godelski | 2025-12-07 23:03:38+00:00
I wouldn't go that far, but I do believe good tool design tries to make its failure modes obvious. I like to think of it similar to encryption: hard to do, easy to verify.

All tools have failure modes and truthfully you always have to check the tool's work (which is your work). But being a master craftsman is knowing all the nuances behind your tools, where they work, and more importantly where they don't work.

That said, I think that also highlights the issue with LLMs and most AI. Their failure modes are inconsistent and difficult to verify. Even with agents and unit tests you still have to verify and it isn't easy. Most software bugs are created from subtle things, often which compound. Which both those things are the greatest weaknesses of LLMs: nuance and compounding effects.

So I still think they aren't great tools, but I do think they can be useful. But that also doesn't mean it isn't common for people to use them well outside the bounds of where they are generally useful. It'll be fine a lot of times, but the problem is that it is like an alcohol fire[0]; you don't know what's on fire because it is invisible. Which, after all, isn't that the hardest part of programming? Figuring out where the fire is?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zpLOn-KJSE
by bdangubic | 2025-12-07 23:03:44+00:00
I am a dual citizen. I wanted to buy a condo near my parents where I spend my summers with my family. I have never in my entire life felt like a criminal more than trying to buy something, with the money I made with my wife, going through regular financial system. after weeks of feeling like a criminal over coffee with my cousin who owns the company that was selling me the condo I was like “can I just fucking give you two bitcoins on a thumbdrive…”

I would never own a crypto but working with the current financial system can make you feel like a criminal more than crypto at times… :)
by jazzyjackson | 2025-12-07 23:04:27+00:00
Re: tokens, there is a point where you have to decide what's worth it to you. I'd been unimpressed with what I could get out of chat apps but when I wanted to do a rails app that would cost me thousands in developer time and some weeks between communication zoom meetings and iteration... I bit the bullet and kept topping up Claude API and spent about $500 on Opus over the course of a weekend, but the site is done and works great.
by nowittyusername | 2025-12-07 23:04:29+00:00
The "miserable" existence ascribed by modern day humans to past human life is colored by their modern day psychological profile. If they were born and raised at that environment their psychological profile would be very different. A modern day human can be easily traumatized by something that past humans would consider trivial. Sure death was more common, possibly even violence, but that would not mean people were less happy. Satisfaction in human psychology has a certain profile, and that profile mainly follows the things i talked about. Close human relationships in small cohort groups, perception of agency, among a few other important factors. things that are missing among many citizens of modern day societies world wide. My point is that on average if you performed a statistical analysis of how happy people were, the claim is that they were happier back then then now.
by drpixie | 2025-12-07 23:04:42+00:00
I always liked the idea of literate programming, but it never seemed to get a toe in the door.

A good start would be just commenting code! Almost all the code I've looked into recently has been startling - the only comments are the licence boilerplate at the top of each file!

I can think of only one product/library/package that was commented to explain what was happening. Go look at the source for a random package that you depend on. If you're really lucky, there might be something hinting at the meaning of function arguments, but like as not, not even that ;(
by nerdsniper | 2025-12-07 23:04:47+00:00
Because Wikipedia. My edit got immediately auto-bot-reverted[1] by some anti-vandalism crusader. Insert bell-curve meme[1] where "just edit wikipedia" is the middle of the bell-curve.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Discospinster#WTF_ed...?

[1] https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/533936279/Bell-Curve
by analog31 | 2025-12-07 23:05:48+00:00
"... anybody with any brains has already left town..." -- Bob Dylan

Anybody with any business experience has already isolated themselves from the certainty of software project failure, where "failure" is a euphemism for "late." So it doesn't matter if software can't be estimated.

This can be nerve-wracking to a beginner, but one gets used to it over time.
by ironhaven | 2025-12-07 23:06:07+00:00
There have been countless articles claiming the demise and failure of the F35 but that is just one side of the story. There has been an argument started 50 years ago in the 1970's about how to build the best next generation fighter jets. One of these camps was called the "Fighter mafia"[0] figure headed by John Boyd. The main argument they bing was the only thing that matters for a jet fighter is how well it performs in one-on-one short ranged dog fighting. They claim that stealth, beyond visual range missiles, electronic warfare and sensors/datalink systems are useless junk that only hinders the dog fighting capability and bloat the cost of new jets.

The evidence for this claim was found in testing for the F35 where it was dog fighting a older F16. The results of the test where that the F35 won almost every scenario except one where a lightweight fitted F16 was teleported directed behind a F35 weighed down by heavy missiles and won the fight. This one loss has spawned hundreds of articles about how the F35 is junk that can't dogfight.

In the end the F35 has a lot of fancy features that are not optional for modern operations. The jet has now found enough buyers across the west for economies of scale to kick in and the cost is about ~80 million each which is cheaper than retrofitting stealth and sensors onto other air frames like what you get with the F15-EX

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighter_Mafia
by phantasmish | 2025-12-07 23:06:11+00:00
We're probably around $1,200 for groceries and related (cleaning stuff, mostly) in our house, but we're a family of five. Yeah I'd say $2k is nuts for just two people, even today.

For a long while we managed to stay around $500-600 but that was before COVID inflation. I dunno how the official inflation rate's as low as it is, we don't buy much that'd be considered "luxury" level (we're not buying caviar, say, and rarely even get stuff like the grass-fed "fancy" butter [actually yellow instead of white, tastes like something rather than just having texture but no flavor] instead of the cheapest available) and I'm pretty sure we buy a lot less meat per person than the US average, but if we fill up a cart now it's like $250-$300. I've hit $150 on small shopping trips where I didn't even fully fill one of the smaller, short carts.
by CognitiveLens | 2025-12-07 23:06:43+00:00
but as mlinsey suggests, what if it's influenced in small, indirect ways by 1000 different people, kind of like the way every 'original' idea from trained professionals is? There's a spectrum, and it's inaccurate to claim that Claude's responses are comparable to adapting one individual's work for another use case - that's not how LLMs operate on open-ended tasks, although they can be instructed to do that and produce reasonable-looking output.

Programmers are not expected to add an addendum to every file listing all the books, articles, and conversations they've had that have influenced the particular code solution. LLMs are trained on far more sources that influence their code suggestions, but it seems like we actually want a higher standard of attribution because they (arguably) are incapable of original thought.
by tptacek | 2025-12-07 23:06:55+00:00
... why wouldn't that be allowed? They're basically just doing an options-structured version of buying on margin, which you yourself can do; using options limits their downside risk. What "insider" information are you even talking about?

People keep talking about how wildly Pelosi beats the market. You could beat Pelosi! Just go all-in on NVDA. Max out your margin limit to do it. So long as tech stays on a bull run, you're a genius.

Of course, you'll eventually lose your shirt. This is the problem with "the Pelosi tracker" stuff. Your risk tolerance is not that of the Pelosis: Paul Pelosi has spent decades in venture capital and they've allocated a small portion of their portfolio to very long bets on tech. If tech craters, they're fine. You aren't.

That's the "secret" to their success.
by currymj | 2025-12-07 23:07:09+00:00
the papers themselves are publicly available online too. Most of the ones I spot-checked give the extremely strong impression of AI generation.

not just some hallucinated citations, and not just the writing. in many cases the actual purported research "ideas" seem to be plausible nonsense.

To get a feel for it, you can take some of the topics they write about and ask your favorite LLM to generate a paper. Maybe even throw "Deep Research" mode at it. Perhaps tell it to put it in ICLR latex format. It will look a lot like these.
by gruez | 2025-12-07 23:07:24+00:00
>Call the police to stop a store from criminally restraining the freedom of a customer [...]

Realistically no store is going chase after the customer for that, but that doesn't mean the average shopper is going to risk arrest/banned (for what the store essentially sees as shoplifting) to send a $2 message over the price difference. And all of this assumes your novel legal theory is actually correct.