MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anthuswilliams | 2026-01-01 18:56:10+00:00
The claim about who subsidizes who was always hyperbole, I'll grant you that. I included the statement to make the point that this is the phenomenon people are referring to when they make that statement.

I happen to think there is validity to the statement if you control for other actuarial factors. But if you don't think that makes sense as a lens through which to look at the problem, I won't quibble, even though I disagree. We're also only talking about drug prices here, which is a small portion of overall healthcare spending.

In any case, the central point, that insurers benefit from higher prices, still stands.
by igouy | 2026-01-01 18:56:25+00:00
Back in the early '90s, an envelope was delivered to me containing a physical 3.5 inch diskette. The contents was a Smalltalk/V 286 image file. A bug had been found in a program I'd written a couple of years earlier.

The client had saved the program state at the bug (and exported their current data to CSV files, just in case). I stepped into the debugger, fixed the problem, saved the new image file to a 3.5 inch diskette, went to the post office and sent it back to them.

Of course they had continued working but I don't recall which approach they took to merging their new data with the corrected program.

The past is a foreign country …
by giantrobot | 2026-01-01 18:57:16+00:00
> Last time I benchmarked a VPS it was about the performance of an Ivy Bridge generation laptop.

I have a number of Intel N95 systems around the house for various things. I've found them to be a pretty accurate analog for small instances VPSes. The N95 are Intel E-cores which are effectively Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge cores.

Stuff can fly on my MacBook but than drag on a small VPS instance but validating against an N95 (I already have) is helpful. YMMV.
by FloorEgg | 2026-01-01 18:57:16+00:00
What if there is no such thing as a "post scarcity" society in the sense of a clear boundary and categorical difference, just a long, fairly consistent, gradient of increasing productivity and efficiency and increasing abundance?

Under this lens we have endless examples of answers to your question today. Hobbyists with CNC machines, high school students sequencing DNA, satellites and drones monitoring for forest fires, a good portion of HN posts about open source hobby projects, all the art people produce, etc.

We also have a lot of sci-fi which presents many ideas, some of which may come true, some of which have come true, and some which will probably never happen.

But my guess is this is all missing the spirit of your question, and I don't want to come off as curmudgeon, so I will do my best to answer in good faith:

If we truly have abundance and all needs are met, and there is no longer a need to be productive:

- I am a curious person so I will say experiments to advance understanding. Building more and more complex simulations to understand illusive aspects of reality.

- I am a creative person so I will say art, more impressive and expansive installations which serve no purpose other than to express and inspire.

- and I am a realist, and although it is not a motivation if mine, I expect it always will be of some others, so I will say social status. Ever more weird and complex ways to infer social status.

In other words, if we no longer need to engineer for economic productivity then perhaps we will engineer more for things that are not directly economic productive.

But I think it's more likely that the free energy principle applies at all levels of abstraction and we will always have some forcing function that biases resources towards increasing economic productivity, with some small percentage (with ever increasing absolute magnitude) left over to play with.
by d--b | 2026-01-01 18:57:24+00:00
I'm all for privacy and alternative app stores, but opening browser engines to the competition isn't something I'm keen to have.

Now every phone will ship with 2 engines (inevitably chrome is going to be bundled in at least one of your apps). Both are tied to large tech companies. And both have approximately the same feature set.

At this stage, I can't think of any upside for the end user. New CSS crap or obscure web APIs, or proprietary DRM? And the cost is that we're going to get new website badges "only in Chrome", or "only in Safari", like it's 1999.

This is Apple, people know what they get into, and they kind of want that an iPhone is not a PC.

It looks like everyone thinks that this is a good thing. Can anyone explain beyond the "this is a monopoly" argument? It's not a monopoly if the engine is free, and if they need the engine to more or less match all the desktop engines.

I don't feel cornered by Apple on that one.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-01-01 18:58:25+00:00
We need to start holding executives accountable for things going on in their companies, and go as far as holding board members, and if its an external company then hold them accountable as well, and their board members. Just go all the way on accountability to the point where it becomes hard to mess around because someone will freak out. I wonder how many "save my skin" whistleblowers we will see at the executive level if everyone at the top of a company can be held liable for stuff like this, that goes on for over a decade. Its pretty obvious Facebook KNOWS there's fraud, but they willfully do nothing, harming consumers everywhere.

What you would see is firms divesting from companies that do this to save their own skins too, so funds would dry up if they don't remediate it.
by CodeMage | 2026-01-01 18:58:32+00:00
> Then I thought "why not just remove the borrow checker?" without any real motivation.

Reminds me of a chemistry kit I had as a kid. None of this tame, safe stuff you can buy these days. Mine was a gift from my dad and I never thought of asking him where he dug it up, but it had stuff like pure sulfuric acid in it.

One day, when I was done with all of the experiments I had planned to do, I decided to mix a few things and heat them up, just for fun, without any real motivation other than "let's see what happens".

Let's just say I was lucky we only had to replace some of the clothes my mom had left out for me to put away. ;)

> Another point is, as you guys are well aware, the borrow checker will reject some valid programs in order to never pass any invalid program. What if I'm sure about what I'm doing and I don't want that check to run?

Then you do it using the "unsafe" keyword, and you think long and hard about how to design and structure the code so that the unsafe code is small in scope, surface, and blast radius.

That's precisely what unsafe code is for: to get around the borrow checker and assert you know what you're doing. Of course, if you're wrong, that means your program will blow up, but at least you know that the culprit is hiding in one of those unsafe areas, rather than literally anywhere in the whole codebase.

Alternately, you can switch to a language with a different ethos.

The ethos of Rust is caring for memory safety so much that you willingly limit yourself in terms of what kind of code you write and you only step out of those limits reluctantly and with great care. That's something that resonates with a lot of people and Rust has been built on top of that for years.

If you suddenly take the product of those years of hard work, strip out the foundation it has been built on, and unironically offer it as a good idea, a lot of people won't like it and will tell you so. Mind, I'm not excusing the personal attacks, I'm just explaining the reaction.
by philipkglass | 2026-01-01 18:58:32+00:00
The article linked by 8bitsrule says:

A team of scientists led by Cornell University, with support from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, used new models and measurements to assess GPP from the land at 157 petagrams of carbon per year, up from an estimate of 120 petagrams established 40 years ago and currently used in most estimates of Earth’s carbon cycle.

Whether 157 billion tons or 120 billion tons, these numbers are large compared to anthropogenic releases. Of course most of this carbon is quickly cycled back out from land plants due to animals/insects/bacteria/fungi consuming the biomass produced by land plants.
by zorgmonkey | 2026-01-01 18:58:40+00:00
Here's an excerpt about the anti-rollback feature from Nvidia's docs on how the Tegra X1 SoC in the switch 1 boots [0] (called Tegra210 in the document)

> By default, the boot ROM will only consider bootloader entries with a version field that matches the version field of the first entry, and will stop iterating through the entries is a mismatch is found. The intent is to ensure that if some subset of the bootloader entries are upgraded, and hence the version field of their entries is modified, then the boot ROM will only boot the most recent version of the bootloader. This prevents an accidental rollback to an earlier version of the bootloader in the face of boot memory read errors, corruption, or tampering. Observe that this relies on upgraded bootloader entries being placed contiguously at the start of the array.

[0] https://http.download.nvidia.com/tegra-public-appnotes/tegra...
by runako | 2026-01-01 18:59:09+00:00
> Everyone's take on the 1980s

Nope, I was there.

You're generally agreeing with me? You're making an argument that American makers improved by exposure to Japanese makers, and yes I am suggesting they also need exposure to Chinese makers for the same reasons.

> Japan was making the king of low quality cars that people wanted

This is China today, except by all accounts they are simply inexpensive and not low quality. Your bit about buying a compact car in the 80s has echoes in American automakers largely exiting the market for cars. (IIRC it's only Tesla, Lucid, the Mustang, and a couple Caddy models remaining.)

The main point is that in the 80s we could all see for ourselves Japanese cars. We could talk to people about how they liked them. People working at Ford could drive a Honda and figure out how to compete against it. That laid the ground for the resurgence of the American makers. Protectionism is depriving the automakers of this opportunity to retool to compete with the Chinese.
by bruce511 | 2026-01-01 18:59:10+00:00
Yes, I agree, I don't see cargo plane pilots being replaced here. Or indeed commercial pilots in general.

Pilots are an unusual species because most of their utility and training is in the ability to deal with (very) edge cases. Indeed it is their ability to deal with unanticipated edge cases which is their most valuable attribute.

Sure, most pilots won't need those skills during their careers, but the value when they do us immeasurable. Landing on the Hudson anyone?

Equally it is the situational awareness and anticipation of problems which avoid things that could have escalated into disaster but instead become near misses.

Sure 99.99% of their work is routine and could be done hy a machine. But that last 0.01% is thousands of lives, and billions in equipment and cargo.
by MegaDeKay | 2026-01-01 18:59:18+00:00
Agree 100%. But lemme tell ya, "protein fluff" make from 150g skim milk, 10g protein powder, and 3g Xanthan gum whipped into a still meringue by a stand mixer is the most satiating thing I've ever eaten and it isn't even close. It is like the meringue doesn't collapse back down right away in your stomach so it is like eating (tasty) closed cell foam. I used to make it from a full cup of milk but had trouble finishing it. It's crazy filling and a godsend when cutting.

I found it needs to be skim milk. Otherwise the fat in regular milk seemed to prevent the meringue from setting up.
by Rochus | 2026-01-01 19:00:24+00:00
Ok, I see. Raymond wrote this in 2003, at the peak height of "Java OO madness" where deep inheritance and over-engineered, totally inefficient systems were common. In The Art of Unix Programming, Raymond clarifies that he isn't against "objects" as a conceptual tool but against the "gospel of OO" that dominated the 1990s. His main argument is not that OO is inherently "evil", but that OO designs often become "spaghetti-like tangles" of inheritance hierarchies that hide logic behind "thick layers of glue". He represents the "Unix Philosophy", which is a specific culture, and he was writing to defend this culture against the rising tide of Java and C++, which he saw as a threat to the simplicity and "text-based" interoperability of Unix. Interestingly, Wirth’s Oberon and OO approach actually aligns well with much of Raymond's philosophy. Raymond would certainly agree that OO is just one of many tools in the toolbox of an engineer, and our job is it to chose the right tools for the job.
by quesera | 2026-01-01 19:00:57+00:00
Interesting, I think "nuclear engineer" might be too colloqualized, a la "software engineer".

But he was trained to operate nuclear facilities on subs, and with a few more months of service he would have qualified for the label "nuclear engineer" without any asterisks...

Tha National Academy of Engineering says:

> A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and a trained nuclear engineer

https://www.nae.edu/19579/31222/20054/327746/331204/Jimmy-Ca...

US Navy history says:

> He served as executive officer, engineering officer, and electronics repair officer on the submarine SSK-1. When Admiral Hyman G. Rickover (then a captain) started his program to create nuclear-powered submarines, Carter wanted to join the program and was interviewed and selected by Rickover. Carter was promoted to lieutenant and from 3 November 1952 to 1 March 1953, he served on temporary duty with the Naval Reactors Branch, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Washington, D.C., to assist "in the design and development of nuclear propulsion plants for naval vessels."

> From 1 March to 8 October 1953, Carter was preparing to become the engineering officer for USS Seawolf (SSN-575), one of the first submarines to operate on atomic power. However, when his father died in July 1953, Carter resigned from the Navy and returned to Georgia to manage his family interests.

https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/people/presiden...
by npalli | 2026-01-01 19:01:01+00:00
Just like San Francisco and Dallas/Texas (from his article) are very different in the US, we should expect lot of differences in Europe (as others mentioned, he clubs UK with EU). Housing is a general problem for all major cities though, not sure why you think it is unique to London in the whole continent. Stockholm, Paris, Dublin, Lisbon to name a few, are pretty bad for housing in their own unique ways. Certainly shouldn't be "breaking your brain".
by jmward01 | 2026-01-01 19:02:02+00:00
CWIS is pretty massive, not that this isn't still big, but I think this is taking a miniaturization turn, is upping the accuracy and number of engagements it can handle significantly and potentially upping the range especially in urban environments. CWIS in an urban environment would cause chaos and a lot of collateral damage to buildings but you can now be very sure that only your intended target is being hit so people could die without all the optics of buildings crashing down. It is much easier to have a war when the cameras don't see the destruction. Positive ID is huge, if you really care about it, but even with perfect positive ID if a government is ok with genocide then everyone is a valid target. Are you a male older than 13? You are a combatant and will be killed once you are in sight. Did someone help you in any way (like your mother of family giving you food?) They are also combatants. It is unfortunately not a stretch with modern tools to see this happening in real time. This weapon is, unfortunately, on an inevitable path.
by m3047 | 2026-01-01 19:02:09+00:00
> Because insects are part of a natural diet for chickens.

It's actually a welfare issue for chickens. They have feathers, and they molt. Just like hair, feathers need methionine. Methionine is very hard to get solely from plant sources. If they don't get enough methionine they eat each other's feathers, not just the discarded feathers (which left on their own they do normally).
by h2zizzle | 2026-01-01 19:02:15+00:00
90% of Japanese residents live in, essentially, a walkable megacity, and plenty of them ride motorcycles on the country's many tracks (which you would expect, since Japan houses several of the top motorcycle manufacturers). They don't have any issues participating in their hobby, and you wouldn't either.

Note that this holds without even having to mention that holding the ability for millions of people to be independent and mobile without needing to purchase and maintain a vehicle against a niche and expensive hobby is ridiculous. But there's no need to bring that up because we can have both.
by jfyi | 2026-01-01 19:02:23+00:00
It's only low cost for general usage chat users. If you are using it for anything beyond that, you are paying or sitting in a long queue (likely both).

You may just be a little early to the renaissance. What happens when the models we have today run on a mobile device?

The nokia 6110 was released 15 years after the first commercial cell phone.
by tootie | 2026-01-01 19:02:29+00:00
These kind of findings are probably accurate on average, but not to a person. Some people are wired differently. Some (presumably most) require community and extensive social connection. I really think that some of us just need much, much less. I don't get much sense of reward from social interactions. It really does just feel like a dull chore most of the time. Even with people I genuinely like and respect.
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-01 19:02:57+00:00
> The Trump administration made a Twitter post repeating far right supremacist calls for deporting 100 million Americans. Statistically this would also mean deporting a large number of citizens. [...] Apart from the humanitarian impact and potential unconstitutionality

Estimates vary, but the total US foreign-born population (including naturalized citizens, and legal permanent and temporary residents, and the undocumented) is something under 55 million, so deporting 100 million people (about 30% of the total US population) would mean deporting the entire foreign-born population (including naturalized citizens and legal residents) plus at least another 45 million natural-born citizens; nearly as many (possibly more, since the foreign-born estimate range starts under 50 million) natural-born citizens as foreign-born persons irrespective of citizenship, which is around 1 out of every 6 natural-born citizens.

It is blatantly both unconstitutional and a crime against humanity.
by leptons | 2026-01-01 19:03:03+00:00
>> people will figure that out and adapt for themselves

>No they won't. People on HN will. Not the average person.

Yes they will, Apple has made it very easy to see.

To check iOS app power usage, go to Settings > Battery, where you'll see a breakdown of battery consumption by app for the last 24 hours or 10 days, showing usage time and background activity, allowing you to identify power-hungry apps and manage settings like Background App Refresh to improve battery life.

So yeah, it's easy to see which app is taking the most power, and users can do this easily, unless you think Apple's UX is so bad that users won't know how to read it?

>The problem is, arbitrary code execution vastly expands the risks. Your "should" is doing all the work there.

If that's a problem for web browsers, then it's a problem for every single app in the app store. There's nothing really unique about a web browser app that makes it more risky than any other app. Javascript is already very much sandboxed. And there have been plenty of exploits that already target Safari. So saying other browsers are the problem is like blaming the victim (of Apple's anti-competitive practices).

>Huh? Apple follows web standards. Why the heck should it make Safari available on Android and Windows? Safari isn't a standard, web standards are.

If web standards are standards, then let other web browsers on iOS.

The real reason Apple disallows other browser engines on Safari is so they can force developers to create native apps where they can get a cut of any purchase made through the app. The problems with Apple's anti-competitive practices have been spelled out in the DOJ lawsuit against them:

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline
by FloorEgg | 2026-01-01 19:03:11+00:00
I'm a long term Veritasium fan, and this video stands out to me as one of the best.

I find it interesting how the physics communities were so dismissive of the science in the early years, which seems to have led directly to ASML's current monopoly. The engineering is indeed incredible, and it's also incredible that so much of it was accomplished within one company. Talk about a competitive moat...
by reactordev | 2026-01-01 19:03:12+00:00
the fact that many new electric cars do have solar panels, I fail to see your reasoning. A solar panel isn't going to provide you with enough energy to drive. Merely enough energy to trickle charge your batteries.

Now, should you run out of charge during your drive, you simply have to wait a while and you'll have enough to get you to a charging station. Or you can walk, taxi there. On an ocean or channel crossing, you don't have that luxury and must rely on other ships if you run out of charge. The point I'm making is that any electric vehicle should incorporate solar panels into the design to minimize it's dependence entirely on the batteries and can extend it's time doing what it's designed to do.

As solar panels advance and the wattage increases, this will be more and more important as it will open up new avenues for transportation. Like the solar LSA plane "Solar Impulse" that can fly indefinitely.
by jay_kyburz | 2026-01-01 19:03:44+00:00
Actually, I'd go one step further and say they are harmful to everybody else.

It might just be my circles, but I've seen Carl Sagans quote everywhere in the last couple of months.

"“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”"
by soganess | 2026-01-01 19:04:18+00:00
I would never own an ARM Mac as my main (or even lead secondary) machine, but the whole higher-cost thing is such a joke at this point.

At the same performance/quality tier, Macs can at times/trims be cheaper. Plus, buying an old M2 MacBook Air as Apple refurbished (new battery) is $800, and third-party can be sub-$600. With M1s cheaper still.

Sure, they aren't new, but an Apple refurb is generally better quality than a bargain-bin (not to be confused with something nicer in the Acer lineup like the Swift X) Acer. Plus, the Minis are just great desktops.

Again, these are not for me, but price? Unless you are ultra price conscious (sub 300), nawh brah.