skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The question no one asking is why Elon is sending a team of teenage programmers and not a team of financial auditors if he really wanted to cut government spending?

If it's working, why would it matter? The most curious thing in all these discussions is that the elephant in the room is never addressed: they already found on hundreds of billions of pure fraud and funding for extremely dubious endeavors.

But nobody talks about that: everybody attacks the messenger. Everywhere.

Are people not happy that the fraud team already uncovered the following:

USAID fund diverted to the Clinton family, part of which funded a $3m for Chelsea Clinton's wedding and $10m for Chelsea Clinton's mansion.

$41m to study transgender mice

$3m to BBC (seriously, what? BBC in the UK? With US taxpayers dollars? Why? To push what kind of narrative?)

$8m to the supposedly independent "Politico"

$40m+ to EcoHealthAlliance to fund gain-of-function on modified bat viruses (moreover now official report to Congress says the most likely source for the Covid-19 outbreak is a lab-leak: so we have USAID partially responsible for the *death of tens of millions of people*

$20m for a "Sesame Street" show in Iraq

$110m to find water in Afghanistan

funding of a movie in Portugal glorifying incest

countless NGOs worldwide who got funded by USAID and who constantly pushed for tens of millions of illegal migrants to make their way both to the US and the EU (now you may believe it's a good thing that countless NGOs do actively work towards migrating tens of millions of people to the US and the EU but *why* is this done with US taxpayers' money?)

The examples are endless and yet everybody shoots the messenger. If out of hundreds of dubious endeavour (money to publish trans book for children in Guatemala: I mean, come on guys), if one happens to be justified spending or a wrongly attributed spending, then people will focus on that to attack DOGE.

But the elephant in the room is constantly dodged: why? The elephant in the room is there. And it's a gigantic elephant.

Why is it that to some, like me, it looks like USAID (and certainly more with more revelations to come) is basically a gigantic money laundering operation combined with the push of a worldwide leftist agenda?

And the curious thing: people keep crying "attack on democracy" although DOGE keeps exposing, day after day, actual attacks on democracy, where US taxpayers dollar were used to fund a leftist agenda.

To me DOGE is doing something right. Instead of shooting the messenger, discuss the actual findings they already did.

Explain to me how you defend $40m+ going to fund gain-of-function bat viruses and how you defend Biden pardoning Fauci who lied about it in Congress? Because that's what DOGE is exposing.
The correct way to do this is through congressional oversight, not through unelected and unaccountable billionaires illegally cutting programs they personally don't like.
Where do you see sunshine? Are the "audits" public at all? It's indistinguishable from just having Musk kill every agency he dislikes with no further proof, while siphoning data to some unspecified server. The timeline also hints at no serious audit taking place.
I think for most smaller orgs you can get away with an off the shelf product to surface some more basic cost stuff. In relatively large engineering orgs, you're looking at optimising on stuff like cross-region calls to save millions a year so yeah there's a good reason to invest in cloud cost management.
For all the talk of legacy media, I assume anything posted on X is misinformation. And Rubio only cares about possibly being POTUS one day. Please post an article of any other administration that has ever complained about USAID being 'rogue'?
Isn't there a tell-all book or three about the founding of PayPal? I think many people here have read those books, and some readers here were involved? Please, enough breathless conjecture, the content is serious enough..
Because before the people that had access to this data got that access after passing background checks, had years in the treasury, supervision from higher-ups, and other processes in place. Now it's being accessed by cyber-criminal Nazis in their 20s who describe themselves as wanting to "Normalize Indian hate", " want a eugenic immigration policy", and who "were racist before it was cool" https://www.npr.org/2025/02/06/nx-s1-5289337/elon-musk-doge-....
Process for security clearance might have caught this kids background, and then decision makers would have at least had a conversation about it. This kid is more a symptom of a wider lack of controls though, who knows whether any of Musk's script kiddies has a criminal background. Important to note that previous Trump administration has already followed out/bypassed security clearance process, so this is really just the next evolution of the disregard for criminal elements or foreign interests.
Isn't it concerning to have someone in the highest offices of power who thinks that's a funny joke, someone who has the lack of taste to find it funny in that context, the lack of diplomacy to think it an acceptable thing to do in such an important situation, and the lack of fear of consequences because he's in an almost completely untouchable position, and the unwillingness to say anything to excuse or apologise for it? Only the President can really do anything to him, and it's quite likely that he funds the president such that that can't/won't happen.

Trump has set a precedent of pardoning the January 6th insurrectionists - people who break the law doing what he wants get pardoned.

The supreme court is majority Republican, and he's been dismissing senior department heads and replacing them with people who have been pre-vetted for their Trump loyalty.

And he's possibly setting the precedent of ignoring court rulings he doesn't like; it's at least being accused by Republican nominated federal juste John Coughenour[1], JD Vance has spoken about ignoring supreme court rulings[2].

And The Whitehouse has announced that Elon Musk will police himself over his own conflicts of interest[3].

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/31/politics/john-roberts-yea...

[3] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/white-house-says-mus...
And this can be a mixed bag.

Princeton, MA is a really good example because they've got success and failure. They sort of succeeded with Internet and sort of failed with electricity (and windmills).

See Mad Ned blogs for Internet:
https://madned.substack.com/p/thin-pipe-part-i
https://madned.substack.com/p/thin-pipe-part-ii
I have a huge amount of respect for the fact that they would even publish the information.

I mean; zeitgeist at the time was that it’s unconscionable to ever give men any equity in the discussion about equality. The only narrative that was permitted was that men were “superior” to women for time immemorial and men today should be punished, that they are over represented in everything of any importance and given much more favourability in all endeavours. - at least, as a person who grew up stunningly poor, surrounded by drugs and violence but happening to be a white man, this was how it felt.

The reality is of course much more nuanced than that, however it remained the only discussion permissible. It must have took a great deal of courage to publish something that went against this, especially from a company that’s so widely promoting the narrative. In fact, it makes me believe their other initiatives are more genuine than I would have thought otherwise.

PS: I don’t mind if what I said makes you uncomfortable. It was my truth and made me resoundingly bitter; because I couldn’t even talk about it.
I know you're being facetious but it's also worth spelling out somewhat explicitly as well: the US has never had a supply problem like that because through effective diplomacy and alliances it has commanded an excellent position to negotiate as a preferred trade partner through its world leading expertise in many areas and the export of its military spending as a security partner which up till very recently ensured alliances like NATO would prioritise these sorts of issues in its favour.

The very recent turn of "we must literally own this territory" has been the surest possible way to create a crisis where none existed.
Do you have a link to the code with the error? Following your link I didn't see it.
I'm in Nebraska — but I think, due to my ISP, I appear to be in the Chicago area. Oh well.
See perhaps the "Cold Climate Air Source Heat Pump (ccASHP) Product List and Specifications" from the Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships (NEEP):

* https://neep.org/heating-electrification/ccashp-specificatio...

And their product list:

* https://ashp.neep.org/

One of the search criteria is their rated capacity (BTH/h) at 5˚F. A 'proper' installer will figure out the energy you need for the design day in your area:

* https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/design-temperat...

If you're in a really cold area (IECC Zone 7+), then a dual fuel system could be one option:

* https://www.carrier.com/residential/en/ca/homeowner-resource...

* https://www.lennox.com/residential/buyers-guide/guide-to-hva...

* https://www.trane.com/residential/en/resources/glossary/dual...

Of course before you go spending money on equipment, it's probably a better ROI on better air sealing / draft elimination and insulating. Once you're not leaking (as much) heat then you may need less powerful equipment to keep indoor conditions comfortable.
I find it strange that neither activists nor politicians nor journalists cared about that enough to make it a continuous news cycle. There was also no outrage about various security breaches that exposed personal information for 100 million Americans, like the Change Healthcare breach. The reaction to alleged violation of privacy here seems inconsistent and disproportionate, and I wonder why?
I had the same thought. It reminds me of solving Project Euler problems, where there is often an obvious naive approach which is guaranteed to produce the correct answer but would consume prohibitive memory/compute resources to execute to completion. I suspect the models would perform much better if prompted to formulate a strategy for efficiently solving these challenges rather than solving them directly… which indicates a direction for potential improvement I suppose.
Bouvet island

Gravett Island [1]

Rottum

Rottumerplaat [2,3]

Mysterious Island [4]

Lost Island [5,6]

[1] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Gravett_Island

[2] Dutch writers visit deserted island https://nos.nl/nieuwsuur/artikel/2308321-terug-naar-rottumer...

[3] https://www.staatsbosbeheer.nl/wat-we-doen/nieuws/2021/07/ro...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Island

[5] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1691800/Lost_Island__ARK_...

[6] https://lostpedia.fandom.com/wiki/The_Island
We can speculate all we want. He said what he would do, he's doing it. Here we are. I encourage you to reach out and get involved with your local and representative politicians if you want to be a voice for change.
EILI5? How compelling is this study against Omega3?
It seems amazing it has taken this long. Electric motors are so critical to national security, as well as the US economy.

I keep wondering if these folks have a realistic alternative: https://www.nironmagnetics.com/
(They claim high performance rare earth free magnets.)
Isn’t that part of mandatory spending (that DOGE can’t touch)? Anyways, the social security administration (even under Biden) has made clear that they have to cut the payments in the future. We simply have too much spending overall to fund and sustain it. But by cutting elsewhere maybe it can be saved.
You can have intuitions about any of these issues, but you can't use heritability research as evidence for them without understanding the technical meaning of "heritability". That's all that's being said here.
> in 25 states

Will the program advance into other states after the dissolution of the organization that created it? Will it be kept up to date? Or will it quietly disappear in the name of efficiency?
Is this news for anyone who is technical? Everyone already knows to not click links in SMS, and only silly people would click anyway...
ISTR the origin of Cyril and Methodius (the two monks that created the precursor to the cyrillic alphabet, can't remember the exact name of that alphabet ATM) cannot be pinpointed as either Greek or Bulgarian because no such documentation has been found. They surely were Byzantine, though.
If you ask me? A very large consumption tax would probably handle most of it, as well as some form of asset taxation (eg. on land and voting-rights shares, in terms of their equivalent rental value).

This would basically amount to a leveling function across society: people consuming less than the mean earn (much) more in UBI than they pay in sales taxes. Wealthier people who consume more than average would pay in more than they get out. With wealth being power-law distributed, the wealthy would end up paying a lot more.

Then you just tune the UBI value to achieve any desired balance of equality vs incentive to work, while adjusting the tax take to control inflation.

The megacorp wealth flows back to the shareholders, who eventually will want to spend it on something.
That's probably it. I found a weird Java version of the benchmark here:

https://github.com/newspeaklanguage/benchmarks/blob/master/S...

At least for some parameters, non-generational Shenandoah is faster than generational G1 (both overall run time and time spent in the benchmark phase, and overall CPU usage). But I expect it's possible to get wildly varying benchmark behavior depending on the parameter choices (the defaults are of course much too low).
If the debt and spending are so important, why focus on cutting random programs and throwing tens of thousands of people in chaos?

You really haven't seen reporting defending PEPFAR, for example, as a program of USAID? The same org that also track and help prevent Ebola outbreaks? That funded hospitals for innocent civilians in Gaza?

Why is the first priority of the GOP Congress to renew and expand the Trump tax cuts, which the government is estimating to cost at least $4 trillion dollars and will mostly accumulate to the top 0.1%? It's also estimated that it will explode the federal debt.

This is a government by and for oligarchs like Musk. He's attempting distraction while the plan is to grossly enrich themselves.
The story did get memoryholed very fast. At the time, I was not sure what to ascribe it to ( well, still don't ), but I did find it interesting that it was pointed out how limited in scope it was.
does it matter if it is?
> don't name them manually let PG name them for you

If you care about catching stuff like unique constraint violations in your code then you should know what the indexes are named.

Always name your indexes and constraints. They're part of your code. How would you catch an exception that you don't know the name of?
You aren't taking enough of it. I've gone back 2 years.
“Load reduction device.”

https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1497965
Don't know, this seems both important and of technical interest.
Beloved Milwaukee institution.
Running/managing the firm, doing pitches, sales, schmoozing, etc.
So whoever wins no longer has to follow the law?
LLMs that use Chain of Thought sequences have been demonstrated to misrepresent their own reasoning [1]. The CoT sequence is another dimension for hallucination.

So, I would say that an LLM capable of explaining its reasoning doesn't guarantee that the reasoning is grounded in logic or some absolute ground truth.

I do think it's interesting that LLMs demonstrate the same fallibility of low quality human experts (i.e. confident bullshitting), which is the whole point of the OP course.

I love the goal of the course: get the audience thinking more critically, both about the output of LLMs and the content of the course. It's a humanities course, not a technical one.

(Good) Humanities courses invite the students to question/argue the value and validity of course content itself. The point isn't to impart some absolute truth on the student - it's to set the student up to practice defining truth and communicating/arguing their definition to other people.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.04388
This is an audit that is actually meant to get results
For Nordic people, Norwegian salmon is likely the worst possible source. Too many bad things going on with that farming.
On the whole, I appreciate and respect your approach to moderation. However, it’s hard to ignore the fact that many leaders in the YC sphere — possibly including Garry Tan — seem to be aligned with Thiel and Yarvin on the topic of government and democracy. (The “smart ones” should aggressively take over and restructure our republic in the image of a corporation.) If there is, in fact, an active and ongoing conspiracy against the government headed by SV technocrats, how can we trust moderation on this site to be unbiased? (This is my fear, not an accusation.)
Thank you, dang. I think you've done the right thing here, and I'm sure you're also under a lot of stress right now. Thanks for having faith in the community to discuss this amicably.
There are way more possibilities. And the main one is that any negative effect would only be visible in a long time (let's say 10 years) and by that time it may take 10-20 years again to change course.

For instance say you lower standards for building bridges, how do you assess the success? First you may notice nothing, because all bridges under construction stay with their design, so consequence 0. After a few years, construction costs may go down because the new standard allow to cut some corners. Great! Success! Now 30 years in the future maybe suddenly the bridge has a failure that costs 20x the savings at the time of construction. Well suddenly not great. But changing the standard at that point would not fix all the bridges built over those 30 years.

Evaluating public policies is often very hard and it's sometimes only possible a long time after. I would also say that weather or not a policy is good or has positive impact has little impact on winning or losing elections. Lots of terrible policies can win you voters. Just like building the best product is not the easiest way to make money. For both goods and elections, playing on emotions works a lot better.
You seem pretty optimistic. A plausible alternative is that it really ends up hurting the US.

In some way, it has started hurting the US. Ask anyone in the world who is not a US citizen if they think the US is stable. I think the answer has changed a lot in, say, the last 10 years.
The NIH and CDC have incredibly detailed medical event data for infectious diseases, cancer diagnoses, and death certificates (which have a ton of data beyond "John Doe of New York City died of such and such on such and such date." It's how we have incredibly effective epidemiologists. Hospitals and non-profits use the data published by the government to make large decisions about equipment purchases, types of staff to hire, and community health programs to run.

All the government professionals I've met who work with that data are very careful with it. The guiding star is "Never let anyone use our data to find out something about any individual. Then, if you still can, publish someone useful."

>Meanwhile someone goes in there to try to break up this 30 year pile of technical debt and it's all lawsuits and handwaving theatrics to try to stop it.

They only had to get security clearances and follow the Constitution. Clearances are routine, so shouldn't be a problem (unless the person being cleared is a problem). The Republicans control all branches of government, and cost-cutting is very popular among all voters, so writing a better budget is possible. Things won't collapse if they work on it until before the midterm elections. It just seems like Trump is testing how far he can walk along the path to tyranny.
Just a quick response to that last point: I totally agree—HN's guidelines are not a moral code. They're just heuristics for (hopefully) producing the the type of website we want HN to be.

Another way of putting it is that the rules aren't moral or ethical—they're just the rules of the game we're trying to play here. Different games naturally have different rules.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I will admit I did not think of that aspect of it. I think the reason I didn't is because, supposedly - as it was presented to me at the time, those systems run on some ancient hardware/software. In other words, even if something was left behind, it shouldn't be that hard to locate.

If anyone with real experience in that area could chime in. Until now I was under impression COBOL ran it all:P
This is an excellent point about scientific writing. We'll add something to that effect.

We have not taught this course from the web-based materials yet, but it distills much of the two-week unit that we covered in our "Calling Bullshit" course this past autumn. We find that our students are generally very interested to better understand the LLMs that they are using — and almost every one of them does, to vary degree. (Of course there may be some selection bias in that the 180 students who sign up to take a course on data reasoning may be more curious and more skeptical than the average.)
Political appointees don’t get root, and they still had to get clearance for sensitive materials (as it’s legally required for the people securing a SCIF not to allow anyone who doesn’t have clearance in the door). Part of why the new administration is trying to bull through the process is that his first term had many delays due to appointees failing those checks.
I got into AI music back in 2017, kind of sparked by AlphaGo. Started by looking at machine listening stuff, like Nick Collins' work. Always been really curious about AI doing music live coding.

In 2019, I built this thing called RaveForce [github.com/chaosprint/RaveForce]. It was a fun project.

Back then, GANsynth was a big deal, looked amazing. But the sound quality… felt a bit lossy, you know? And MIDI generation, well, didn't really feel like "music generation" to me.

Now, I'm thinking about these things differently. Maybe the sound quality thing is like MP3 at first, then it becomes "good enough" – like a "retina moment" for audio? Diffusion models seem to be pushing this idea too. And MIDI, if used the right way, could be a really powerful tool.

Vocals synthesis and conversion are super cool. Feels like plugins, but next level. Really useful.

But what I really want to see is AI understanding music from the ground up. Like, a robot learning how synth parameters work. Then we can do 8bit music like the DRL breakthrough. Not just training on tons of copyrighted music, making variations, and selling it, which is very cheap.
/* */ is a PL/I thing that somehow ended up in B. I suspect that Ritchie just wanted multiline comments (which BCPL didn't have - it only had // line comments), and just grabbed the syntax from another language he was familiar with without much consideration.

Or maybe he just didn't care about having to use whitespace to disambiguate. The other piece of similarly ambiguous syntax in B is the compound assignment, which was =+ =- =* =/ rather than the more familiar C-style += etc. So a=+a and a= +a would have different meaning.
Writing is thinking.
Is this going to be something we deal with after each election now? This just sounds like the 2020 election fraud conspiracies all over again.