MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by giardini | 2026-01-27 19:28:53+00:00
tl;dr summary:

- "a net loss of 4224 STEM Ph.D.s"

Far less than the headline "10k"

- "departing Ph.D.s took with them a wealth of subject matter expertise and knowledge about how the agencies operate".

Whether such "expertise and knowledge" is worthwhile or exclusive to these Ph.D.s, or even useful at all, remains to be seen.

Every time I've seen a PhD enter a private organization they've gummed up the works and left only after bollixing things up. While possibly excellent for hard science research, PhDs can have a POV incompatible with solving problems quickly.

What this means is that even MORE than the usual STEM PhDs will be entering the private sector, possibly further gumming up the works, as bosses try to fit PnDs (round pegs) into private jobs (square holes).
by foxyv | 2026-01-27 19:28:53+00:00
You're kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. Sure, some PhDs are in underwater basket weaving and barely warranting the title. However, most PhDs are extremely valuable. They are pushing the boundaries of our knowledge to improve society.

Some part of the hatred for the current academic system stems from legitimate concerns about how it operates. However, I think this hate is mostly driven by rampant anti-intellectualism. Fueled in part by pseudo scientific scammers trying to sell you supplements on TikTok and religious demagogues.
by bri3d | 2026-01-27 19:28:54+00:00
The typical HN rage-posting about DRM aside, there's no reason that remote attestation can't be used in the opposite direction: to assert that a server is running only the exact code stack it claims to be, avoiding backdoors. This can even be used with fully open-source software, creating an opportunity for OSS cloud-hosted services which can guarantee that the OSS and the build running on the server match. This is a really cool opportunity for privacy advocates if leveraged correctly - the idea could be used to build something like Apple's Private Cloud Compute but even more open.
by ixtli | 2026-01-27 19:29:11+00:00
Yes.

I think well meaning people in the west are looking for a silver lining and in the process overcomplicating a rather simple issue: the US government is cutting spending everywhere while its electorate demands even deeper cuts. The money has dried up and people are leaving.

(One of my best friends was a nuclear medicine phd who left his cancer research lab after covid to work at a VoiP company, so i too have anecdotes)
by stackghost | 2026-01-27 19:29:34+00:00
My thoughts exactly. We're probably witnessing the beginning of the end of linux users being able to run their own kernels. Soon:

- your bank won't let you log in from an "insecure" device.

- you won't be able to play videos on an "insecure" device.

- you won't be able to play video games on an "insecure" device.

And so on, and so forth.
by jleyank | 2026-01-27 19:30:06+00:00
Yet they piss and moan about high house prices, horrible commutes, difficulty hiring the kind of people they want, ... If they want to be able to hire 2-professional couples, if they want to pay lower salaries, if they want their workers to be able to raise a family, they have to let them live where they can afford to do so. So either the companies need to have satellite offices located elsewhere, or they have to permit remote work.
by ActorNightly | 2026-01-27 19:30:51+00:00
And my point is that what you think are complex tasks are not really complex.

The simple case is that if you ask an agent to do a whole bunch of modifications across a large number of files, it often loses context due to context windows.

Now, you can make your own agents with custom mcp servers to basically improve its ability to do tasks, but then you are basically just building automation tools in the first place.
by OpFour | 2026-01-27 19:30:53+00:00
A riff on "The Revolution Won't Be Televised"...

the revolution won't be televised
because the bastards who own the networks
won't let you see it
and you probably wouldn't watch it anyway—
you're too busy with your
beer and your phone and your
comfortable numbness.

the revolution won't be televised
because it's not entertainment,
not something you can half-watch
while you're scratching your ass
and wondering what to eat for dinner.

you can't consume revolution
like you consume everything else—
passive, bored, already thinking about
the next thing.

the revolution won't be televised
because it happens in the place
you're most afraid to look:
inside your own goddamn skull.

it starts when you stop lying to yourself,
stop swallowing their garbage,
stop pretending this is fine.
it's not on TV.
it's not coming to save you.
it's just you and the choice
to keep sleeping
or finally
wake the hell up.
nobody's going to film that.
by JCattheATM | 2026-01-27 19:31:10+00:00
> How can the sub be less representative in that scenario?

Because there would be more messages that deviate from the average viewpoint as reflected across other social media and media platforms. There is no contradiction.

> I haven't spent any time looking at other conservative subs than the two you mentioned. How should I know?

They by what metric can you say the conservative sub isn't representative? You're just assuming it because they delete some dissenting comments?

> > Do you think all the numerous people defending the murder of Renee Good and defending ICE were bots?

> No

So then you would agree the people doing so to some extent are representative of the conservative point of view?

> the community you're pointing at is objectively not representative of the opinions of its users because it's heavily moderated and propagandized.

I don't think that equates to not being representative though! If, despite that, general sentiment in the sub still matches conservative viewpoints outside of it, in general/on average, then surely it still is?
by jeroenhd | 2026-01-27 19:31:14+00:00
Microsoft's WSL2 GUI integration works based on Wayland (and XWayland): https://github.com/microsoft/wslg

Rather than going fully protocol-based (like Waypipe), they used Weston to render to RDP. Using RDP's "remote apps" functionality, practically any platform can render the windows. I think it's a pretty clever solution, one perhaps even better than plain X11 forwarding (which breaks all kinds of things like GPU acceleration).

I don't know if anyone has messed with this enough to get it to work like plain old RemoteApps for macOS/BSD/Windows/Linux, but the technology itself is clearly ready for it.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-27 19:31:27+00:00
>Walmart isn't a budget grocery store,

The answer to this is complex, it has any number of products that are cheaper than products of similar quality from any other store. Places like Safeway/Aldi typically beat on price on very generic items that may or may not have similar quality.

The biggest thing to watch for at Walmart is price discrimination dependent on location. Back in the days I used to shop with them (read made less money) picking a store in a poorer neighborhood could save $10 to $30 dollars on the same car of items.
by LabsLucas | 2026-01-27 19:31:29+00:00
The new $39.99 USD Anker Nano 45W(A121D) charger claiming iPhone detection, charge percentage display, and "Care Mode" seems to offer up only gimmicks, but that is only true for most of the features.

The USB PD compatibility, charge speed, and smart features are tested and explored in the article.
by mikepurvis | 2026-01-27 19:32:02+00:00
Yeah, it took me a moment to clue in, but I think maybe "expat" is the more common term there.

In any case, I think it also applies to some degree to people who live outside the US just purely based on media diet. We all see clips of CNN and MSNBC and Fox on YouTube, but a person elsewhere will have the additional perspective of BBC, Al Jazeera, Le Monde, The Guardian, etc.
by mrighele | 2026-01-27 19:32:15+00:00
You can also reverse it.

(Western) Internet was mostly censorship free, unlike places like Iran, China and the like. Things were removed only if outright illegan, and then just because of a court order.

Then about ten years ago things changed.

ISIS videos about the Syrian revolution removed from Youtube because they were radicalizing people.

Conspiracy theories about COVID purged because they were dangerous.

Posts against Woke ideals down-ranked, purged or the people posting themselves canceled.

"Be careful, once the tables turn, it will be your turn" some people said.

Guess what, the tables turned, and the result is ugly.
by diath | 2026-01-27 19:32:21+00:00
> Surely if all these merge requests were of huge value

There were a lot of MRs with valuable changes however Red Hat wanted certain features to be exclusive to Wayland to make the alternative more appealing to people so they actively blocked these MRs from progressing.

> someone could have forked the project and be very happy with all the changes, right?

That's precisely what happened, one of the biggest contributors and maintainers got bullied by Red Hat from the project for trying to make X11 work and decided to create X11Libre (https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver) which is now getting all these fancy features that previously were not possible to get into X11 due to Red Hat actively sabotaging the project in their attempt to turn Linux into their own corporate equivalent of Windows/macOS.
by cypherg | 2026-01-27 19:32:28+00:00
the sheer lack of knowledge of the graff scene on HN isn't surprising in any way but wow there are so many idiotic hot takes in this thread hahaha. I've been writing graff for over 20 years - it's something the average civilian mind could never comprehend. Graffiti has existed almost since the beginning of civilization; it's primal, it's raw. Doing graff is one of the most human activities one could partake in. It's also one of the most pure art forms to be conceived. All of that is true and most graff writers are horribly toxic and terrible humans (most but certainly not all).
by otabdeveloper4 | 2026-01-27 19:32:45+00:00
> The limiting factor at work isn't writing code anymore

Was it ever? If you don't care about correctness and just want the vibes, then hiring idiots for pennies and telling them to write unlimited code was always an option. Way before "AI" even existed.

And I mean pennies literally. Hell, people will do it for free. Just explain upfront that you only care that the code technically works.
by JuniperMesos | 2026-01-27 19:32:46+00:00
Maybe this is true for academic institutions granting the PhDs (although even this I am skeptical of, training a PhD costs a lot in terms of time, money, and human effort). But that doesn't mean it implies that the federal government needs to employ a thousand STEM PhDs just to get someone like Karpathy - indeed, Andrej Karpathy does not work for the federal government! He made his name working in the private sector!
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-27 19:33:18+00:00
> I want to say it's very akin to doom scrolling. Doom tabbing? It's like, yeah I could be more creative with just a tad more effort, but the AI is already running and the bar to seeing what the AI will do next is so low, so....

Yea exactly, Like we are just waiting so that it gets completed and after it gets completed then what? We ask it to do new things again.

Just as how if we are doom scrolling, we watch something for a minute then scroll down and watch something new again.

The whole notion of progress feels completely fake with this. Somehow I guess I was in a bubble of time where I had always end up using AI in web browsers (just as when chatgpt 3 came) and my workflow didn't change because it was free but recently changed it when some new free services dropped.

"Doom-tabbing" or complete out of the loop AI agentic programming just feels really weird to me sucking the joy & I wouldn't even consider myself a guy particular interested in writing code as I had been using AI to write code for a long time.

I think the problem for me was that I always considered myself a computer tinker before coder. So when AI came for coding, my tinkering skills were given a boost (I could make projects of curiosity I couldn't earlier) but now with AI agents in this autonomous esque way, it has come for my tinkering & I do feel replaced or just feel like my ability of tinkering and my interests and my knowledge and my experience is just not taken up into account if AI agent will write the whole code in multi file structure, run commands and then deploy it straight to a website.

I mean my point is tinkering was an active hobby, now its becoming a passive hobby, doom-tinkering? I feel like I have caught up on the feeling a bit earlier with just vibe from my heart but is it just me who feels this or?

What could be a name for what I feel?
by quinncom | 2026-01-27 19:33:39+00:00
A few of the best reads in my Reader:

- Apricitas Economics
- Avery Pennarun
- Civic Texts
- Citation Needed
- Derek Sivers
- Die, Workwear!
- Electrospaces.net
- Ethan Mollick: One Useful Thing
- Lukasz Olejnik: Tech Letters
- Matt Kiser: What The Fuck Just Happened Today?
- Molly White: Citation Needed
- Paged Out!
- Patrick McKenzie: Bits about Money
- Peter Steinberger
- Peter Welch: Still Drinking
- Sam Rose
- Simon Willison
- Squishy Computer
- Sylvain Kerkour
- Zeynep Tufekci: NYT

Here's a OPML of these: https://s.strco.de/f/feed-20260127.opml
by OkayPhysicist | 2026-01-27 19:34:07+00:00
The best machine I've seen so far is one in my local gas station, where there's just a surface and a camera. Toss whatever you want onto the surface, all haphazard like, check that the screen agrees with reality (it always has so far), and bump your watch/phone/credit card and walk out. We're talking substantially less than 30s, oftentimes less than 10s.
by microtonal | 2026-01-27 19:34:40+00:00
There are genuine positive applications for remote attestation. E.g., if you maintain a set of servers, you can verify that it runs the software it should be running (the software is not compromised). Or if you are running something similar to Apple's Private Compute Cloud to run models, users can verify that it is running the privacy-preserving image that it is claiming to be running.

There are also bad forms of remote attestation (like Google's variant that helps them let banks block you if you are running an alt-os). Those suck and should be rejected.

Edit: bri3d described what I mean better here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46785123
by docdeek | 2026-01-27 19:34:53+00:00
One of the things that has been circulating in videos of the Signal chats online is someone confirming/not confirming that certain license plates are related to ICE. Perhaps if someone is misusing their access to an administrative or law enforcement database to ‘run plates’ and report on who owns the vehicle, this could be unlawful.

I don’t know if anyone IS using such a database unlawfully - they might be checking the plate number against an Excel sheet they created based on other reports from people opposed to ICE - but if its a databse they shouldn’t be using in this way, if might be against the law.
by jleyank | 2026-01-27 19:34:53+00:00
Soldiers are useful things to have around when there are external threats. Yeah, they're also useful when you wish to BE an external threat, but others are filling those roles at the moment. Europe would be a different, probably more secure place, if the larger countries stood up a new mech infantry division while the smaller countries stood up a support or mech infantry brigade. Shared weapon technology, Europe-made, heavy use of man-portable and drone weapons. Let the external threats have the massive investments in tanks and ships while the putative battleground try to arm for a more modern defence.

And ships are difficult to apply to the European land mass, aside from convoy protection or mobile airfields or missile platforms. Mobility, though, tends to come with lower load outs.
by cyphar | 2026-01-27 19:35:01+00:00
I'm Aleksa, one of the founding engineers. We will share more about this in the coming months but this is not the direction nor intention of what we are working on. The models we have in mind for attestation are very much based on users having full control of their keys. This is not just a matter of user freedom, in practice being able to do this is far more preferable for enterprises with strict security controls.

I've been a FOSS guy my entire adult life, I wouldn't put my name to something that would enable the kinds of issues you describe.
by s_dev | 2026-01-27 19:35:25+00:00
>Amutable is based out of Berlin, Germany.

Probably obvious from the surnames but this is the first time I've seen a EU company pop up on Hacker News that could be mistaken for a Californian company. Nice to see that ambition.

I understand systemd is controversial, that can be debated endlessly but the executive team and engineering team look very competitive. Will be interesting to see where this goes.
by goodluckchuck | 2026-01-27 19:35:47+00:00
If 14% of the PhDs employed by the U.S. Government was 10,109, then there were about 72,207 total. That's about 3.2% of the civilian government, compared to 2.1% in the public workforce (and 1.3% of population).

So, the government tends to employ PhDs at a substantially higher (~50%) rate than the public workforce.

Edit: Yeah, oops, people generally use public / private the other way around.
by mrandish | 2026-01-27 19:35:55+00:00
> And while it is not quantized as such there is an element of semi-digital protocol to it.

Yes, before posting I did debate that exact point in my head, with scanlines as the clearest example :-). However, I decided the point is still directionally valid because ultimately most timing-centric analog signal encoding has some aspect of being quantized, if only to thresholds. Technically it would be more correct to narrow my statement about "never quantized" to the analog waveform driving the electron gun as it sweeps horizontally across a line. It always amazes digital-centric engineers weaned on pixels when they realize the timing of the electron gun sweep in every viewer's analog TV was literally created by the crystal driving the sweep of the 'master' camera in the TV studio (and would drift in phase with that crystal as it warmed up!). It's the inevitable consequence of there being no practical way to store or buffer such a high frequency signal for re-timing. Every component in the chain from the cameras to switchers to transmitters to TVs had to lock to the master clock. Live TV in those days was truly "live" to within 63.5 microseconds of photons hitting vacuum tubes in the camera (plus the time time it took for the electrons to move from here to there). Today, "live" HDTV signals are so digitally buffered, re-timed and re-encoded at every step on their way to us, we're lucky if they're within 20 seconds of photons striking imagers.

My larger point though was that in the 1930s even that strict signal timing had to be encoded and decoded purely with discrete analog components. I have a 1950s Predicta television and looking at the components on the boards one can't help wondering "how the hell did they come up with this crazy scheme." Driving home just how bonkers the whole idea of analog composite television was for the time.

> first, how do you fit in the color so a monochrome TV can still show it?

To clarify for anyone who may not know, analog television was created in the 1930s as a black-and-white composite standard defined by the EIA in the RS-170 specification, then in 1953 color was added by a very clever hack which kept all broadcasts backward compatible with existing B&W TVs (defined in the RS-170A specification). Politicians mandated this because they feared nerfing all the B&W TVs owned by voters. But that hack came with some significant technical compromises which complicated and degraded color analog video for over 50 years.
by justsomehnguy | 2026-01-27 19:35:59+00:00
You wouldn't believe it but it was:

Sony: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc#Collaboration_and...

And also it was Sony: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_CDP-101#Legacy

But also it was Sony: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Music#1991%E2%80%932004:_...

And last but not least it was Sony: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_technical_specific...
by lotsofpulp | 2026-01-27 19:36:01+00:00
As I understand, 1930s (and 1920s) Germany was not a desirable place due to the losses from WW1.

I meant more of a place where things are mostly going OK (compared to most other places), and resources (human and natural) are available, so any failure modes have to come from within.

Germany flipped over the boardgame while losing, but USA flipped it over while winning.
by wolfejam | 2026-01-27 19:36:38+00:00
Creator here. FAF started as a way to stop re-explaining projects to AI tools.

The problem: CLAUDE.md works in Claude Code. SOUL.md works in Moltbot. .cursorrules works in Cursor. None of them talk to each other.

FAF is one source file (project.faf) that renders to all of them. YAML format, IANA-registered.

v4.0 adds:
- Moltbot integration (faf-moltbot on npm)
- Gemini CLI integration
- Full bi-sync (edit CLAUDE.md, it flows back to .faf)
- 21k+ npm downloads

Install: npm install -g faf-cli

Moltbot users: npm install -g faf-moltbot

Happy to answer questions.
by ncruces | 2026-01-27 19:36:41+00:00
So the original post had this added to the top:

> This post was updated at 11:15 a.m. Pacific time to clarify that the use case described here is a proof of concept. Some sections have been updated for clarity.

But then the bottom still says:

> Our team is using Matrix on Workers, handling real encrypted communications. It is fast, it is cheap, and it is arguably one of the most secure ways to deploy a homeserver today.

Which one is it?
by carlosjobim | 2026-01-27 19:37:05+00:00
Linking to the Facebook page of a small business is considered stepping over the line by this so called "sovereignty audit" tool. Sure, we can call that "associating with evil people". I say it's a cultish purity purge - a recipe for failure for those who participate. Because very quickly they start looking for impurities with each other and fragmentize into different sects.
by DaanDeMeyer | 2026-01-27 19:37:07+00:00
Daan here, founding engineer and systemd maintainer.

So we try to make every new feature that might be disruptive optional in systemd and opt-in. Of course we don't always succeed and there will always be differences in opinion.

Also, we're a team of people that started in open source and have done open source for most of our careers. We definitely don't intend to change that at all. Keeping systemd a healthy project will certainly always stay important for me.
by thisislife2 | 2026-01-27 19:37:11+00:00
Sure. I am from one such country (India) that was exposed to the Islamic culture through trade, muslim raiders and even many muslim rulers who made our country their home (the Mughal empire). We are also quite familiar with imperialism and colonisation as, like the Palestinians, we were once a British colony too. However, in my country no one rational advocates that as we are a relatively powerful nation today, we too should raid some foreign country or occupy and colonise it. Israelis unfortunately often use that as an excuse for their occupation of Palestine or when they seize the territory of their states to fulfil the dream of the Israeli-rights vision of a "Greater Israel" - "every superpower or former power has done it, so why can't we?". And that's really problematic.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-27 19:37:50+00:00
>medium size codebase

There's a paper that came out in the latter half of last year about this. I wished I kept its name/publisher around, but in synopsis is once you reach a particular amount of complexity in the task you're trying to achieve you'll run out of context to process it, compressing the context still loses enough details that the AI has to reconstitute those details on the next run, again, running out of context.

Currently at least, the task has to have the ability to be broken up in smaller chunks to work properly.