sseagull

> a commuter plane where the wings iced up a bit and the airplane stalled. The crew kept trying to pull the nose up, all the way to the ground.

There’s probably a lot that match, but sounds like Colgan Air 3407 in 2009 (the last major commercial airline crash in the US before the mid-air collision earlier this year in DC)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colgan_Air_Flight_3407

I went there and saw two hairs, and yeah thought it was a nice funny touch.

I then went back to HN and turns out one of the hairs was real and I needed to clean my laptop screen :)

That’s starting to change though

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-31/meta-xai-...

(Archive link: https://archive.ph/NBNEu)

OpenAI "spent" more on sales/marketing and equity compensation than that:

"Other significant costs included $2 billion spent on sales and marketing, nearly doubling what OpenAI spent on sales and marketing in all of 2024. Though not a cash expense, OpenAI also spent nearly $2.5 billion on stock-based equity compensation in the first six months of 2025"

("spent" because the equity is not cash-based)

From https://archive.is/vIrUZ

I’ve always found the pioneer, settler, town planner model to be a great way of thinking about this. Successful, long-term projects or organizations eventually can use all 3 types.

Maybe vibe coding replaces some pioneering work, but that still leaves a lot for settlers to do.

(I admit I’m generally in the settler category)

https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-to...

This made an impression on me:

https://www.spend-elon-fortune.com/

Buying all this stuff that seems expensive, but then seeing that it barely makes a dent in a truly wealthy person’s fortune.

Of course, he wants even more…

I'm somewhat split on this issue.

We already do have different kinds of organizations. We have "research universities" (R1 or R2) that give out PhDs and are somewhat like you describe. And then we have Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (PUIs) that focus more on education.

The risk you can run into is that dedicated education institutions can fall behind current trends, especially in fast-moving areas like tech. Sometimes the best educators are those that "practice what they preach", and you begin to lose that if you stick them in classrooms all day.

On the other hand, some of the best researchers are terrible teachers, especially those who don't really care about it and just want to focus on bringing in funding.

I think the split you have could work, however there must be a lot of incentive for cross-pollination of some sort, or else the teaching side isn't preparing students enough for the research (or industry) side.

I think the key part is "spirit" of the 1st amendment.

A better way to put it is that even if the 1st amendment doesn't apply, it's still against the ideal of "free speech"

> You can still buy the console that can read physical games and buy the physical games and never plug it on the internet, right?

I'm not positive this is possible. I seem to remember times when trying to play a newer game on the Switch required a system update, even though I had the physical card. I might be misremembering, though.

Spot on, but this in particular

> people tend to not live near parents anymore so they lose free childcare

For some reason I don't see this mentioned as often, but I've always felt it a significant root cause (among many of course).

Childcare is really expensive, but it used to be "free". I grew up with grandparents/aunts/uncles/older cousins available to baby sit me. But now very much of my cohort have moved away from our home region for better jobs. My nearest family is a 4 hour drive away.

Combine this with a strong individuality streak (less reliance on neighbors and community) and you have to turn to very expensive childcare.

Raising children without that support is very daunting, at least to me.

As a high school teacher would say:

“The good Lord gave you two eyes, two ears, but only one mouth”

Not in Rust, but I've seen it with Python in scientific computing. Someone needs to do some minor matrix math, so they install numpy. Numpy isn't so bad, but if installing it via conda it pulls in MKL, which sits at 171MB right now (although I have memories of it being bigger in the past). It also pulls in intel-openmp, which is 17MB.

Just so you can multiply matrices or something.

> that indirect rates being cut to 15% for Dept. of Energy grants

I've got some bad news - NSF basically announced the same thing today

https://www.nsf.gov/policies/document/indirect-cost-rate

As if review timelines aren't already way too long. I'm currently waiting 9 months for a small $250k grant (edit: waiting to hear if I've even gotten it. I barely remember what the proposal was about now).

I can tell you most scientists are just trying to do their jobs, studying hard stuff. Unfortunately, we do not really have the resources to fight anything.

Tough situation, and lots of scientists are pretty frightened. Many junior scientists (myself included) are looking at leaving the country.

Theoretically, if you can make Trump happy and show you are on his side, Trump could make that case disappear.

Or, more realistically, Trump will still screw them over anyway, scorpion & frog style.

Large companies are bending over backwards to curry favor with Trump (see Meta settling and paying millions on a case they were winning and almost certainly would win).

“There are reports of Musk staffers on the CDC campus today, and yesterday an NSF official said at an internal meeting that the agency is apparently planning to lay off up to half its staff over the next two months.”

This country is completely turning its back on science and education and there is basically nothing that can be done right now. It’s very depressing.

Thanks for the numbers!

For comparison, the NSF budget is about $8 billion. DOE Office of Science is about the same. NIH is $45 billion

(Also, compare that with the profit of large tech companies)

Depends on the kinds of positions. There's more to academia than tenure-track faculty (which isn't in my future at all anyway).

People around me tend to be in the RSE (Research Software Engineer) scene, which is growing in Europe. I, and many of my cohort, could fit in as research staff or faculty in many different disciplines.

Wouldn't get rich or famous, but certainly have a comfortable living working on interesting problems.

I’m a scientist currently on an NSF grant. I am certainly poking around other countries to see what’s out there, and I’m not the only one.

A lot of scientists (at least in my field, computational chemistry) have decent skills that are transferrable to other areas. So I expect quite a few to move on.

> I really like unbiased merit based societies

Just thought I would recommend some reading about this: "The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?" by Michael Sandel.

Basically, think about what the longer-term, overarching effects on society would be in a perfectly-meritocratic society. It likely wouldn't be all unicorns and rainbows.

Here's a review about it: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/08/montage-michael-sand...

May not change your mind, but we should always try to expand it :)

While not usually applied to everyday white collar workers, you seem to be hinting at what is called "moral injury"

Typically associated with the military and with healthcare professionals who go into their fields with good intentions, but then have to sacrifice on those for various (typically capitalistic or even arbitrary) reasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_injury

Windows has this as a feature in the OS with their stupidly-named Copilot+ PCs. I tried it a while ago and it seemed ok-ish at translating. Wasn’t terrible for doing it all on-device

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/use-live-caption...

Pretty much always fake. While the “risk” of using my real name is probably small, there’s also very little benefit to me personally if people knew who I really was, so why bother.

Exceptions: Github, maybe Stackoverflow, but it’s been a while since I’ve posted there.

I grew up on the internet in the 90s and early 2000s and the general rule then was not to give out your name and info. So I just keep following that.

Only 7 instances of “footgun” (or a variation) though. HN is slacking - must be the holidays

What kind of mechanism is there in place to prevent any compiler from just replacing your main() function with formatting /dev/sda?

That's nothing to do with the language, that's always on the compiler. Nothing stops the compiler from taking even correctly-specified code and doing whatever it wants.

Not a super amount of detail, but it’s subtle:

“It was very clear from King Kong to Frankenstein to Creature from the Black Lagoon that all the monsters were the most emotional. The humans were the ones that scared me,” he said.

“They were the angry villagers in Frankenstein - like the internet - these nameless faces…

Chemist pet peeve:

“The oil catcher consists of a series of tubes that start at the tip of KOBO’s rostrum and funnel down into a beaker.”

That’s an Erlenmeyer flask, not a beaker. The quote gets it right in the next sentence. Just sayin’ :)

Man Feels Like He Gets Gist Of Enlightenment After First Few Minutes Of Hearing Zen Monk Talk

https://theonion.com/man-feels-like-he-gets-gist-of-enlighte...

One painful one that is still reverberating a bit in some areas is the renaming of "SafeConfigParser" to just "ConfigParser" in the standard library (in 3.12). This caused a whole lot of breaking in some areas because versioneer (a package for determining a package version from git tags) used it (in code that was placed inside your package, and so couldn't be solved by just upgrading versioneer).

Also, I'm starting to get warning about something in tarfile that I will need to track down: https://peps.python.org/pep-0706/

I've been interested in donating before, but this is actually the main thing holding me back. I get so little spam and unwanted messages (email and text), and I am trying extremely hard to keep it that way.

So thanks for validating my decision :)