MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chad1n | 2025-04-17 14:43:52+00:00
To be honest, checking if there is a path between two nodes is a better example of NP-Hard, because it's obvious why you can't verify a solution in polynomial time. Sure the problem isn't decidable, but it's hard to give problems are decidable and explain why the proof can't be verified in P time. Only problems that involve playing optimally a game (with more than one player) that can have cycles come to mind. These are the "easiest" to grasp.
by JasserInicide | 2025-04-17 14:44:05+00:00
Jason Fung is probably the world's leading research expert on obesity. If you want videos to watch on it, it starts and ends with this guy. He has done a ton of lectures and blogposts going back over a decade, and also has the stereotypical clickbaity YouTube videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpllomiDMX0
by Urgo | 2025-04-17 14:44:17+00:00
For mIRC's first 20 years when you bought it, the license was for all future versions for life. In ~2016 though that changed and they expired all previous lifetime licenses. Now you get a license only for a year.

I know I shouldn't be upset as I did get a ton of use out of mIRC in the 90s/2000's and they probably didn't expect it to still be around and updated to this day, but expiring something sold as lifetime just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. They should have honored all previous lifetime licenses and just made new ones follow the new rules.

You can see the changes on various pages here [1] pre 2016 and post 2016

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160215000000*/https://www.mirc...
by sanderjd | 2025-04-17 14:44:34+00:00
No, but I'm also not a die hard libertarian, so I'm open to arguments that 1. This is bad, and 2. There may be net positive policy interventions available.

On prostitution, I'm a bit skeptical that the policy interventions over time have been net positive, but maybe they have.

On social media, unfortunately I'm very skeptical of the proposed policy interventions, in general. But I'm convinced that the status quo is bad. But sometimes there just isn't a policy solution available that doesn't have tradeoffs that make it even worse than a bad status quo. It's still good to bring attention to the problems with that status quo, though.

In the case of TikTok in particular, I think forcing divestment is a no-brainer, but for totally different reasons than what Haidt is writing about.
by callc | 2025-04-17 14:44:41+00:00
> But when the Kentucky AG’s office was preparing to post their brief against TikTok, whoever was in charge of doing the redaction simply covered the relevant text with black rectangles. Even though you can’t see the text while reading the PDF, you can just use your cursor to select each black section, copy it, and then paste it into another file to read the hidden text.

Incredibly hilarious. Only leet hackers can pull this off though, same as pressing F12 in the browser to hack the mainframe!
by giantg2 | 2025-04-17 14:44:48+00:00
That's what I worded it the way I did. At least theoretically the humans have some judgement that could limit who they go after or how far they push and can't propagate infinitely. The issue with AI is the even greater lack of accountability and the potential for its messaging to more easily hit a critical mass. So far, the human version tends to focus on very small groups or subgroups. The scaling seems like a much bigger threat with different possible societal effects.
by snarf21 | 2025-04-17 14:45:00+00:00
Very true but how many people would pay the extra cost for vegetables outside the agricultural industrial complex? Most people want cheap and their fruits and vegetables year round, even if they are out of season. There is a major taste difference just between canned vegetables vs frozen.

My biggest annoyance is ordering a BLT in August and getting a green artificially ripened tomato even though ripe and flavorful ones can be found everywhere. You would think that CSAs would be a lot more popular and successful then they are but the reason (imo) is that most people really don't want to cook and even if they do, they don't want to do that every day so the CSA shares end up overwhelming them with fresh supplies that get given away or thrown out instead.
by xnx | 2025-04-17 14:45:06+00:00
> Facebook is for their grandparents now

I use Facebook for the local buy nothing group. Everytime I open Facebook I'm shocked by the manipulative AI slop (person in a boat pulling barnacles off a dolphin that's standing up in the water) that shows up in the first screen. I'm terrified that grandparents who vote are engaging with this stuff.
by 999900000999 | 2025-04-17 14:45:23+00:00
From my experience with playing with Claude Code vs Cline( which is open source and the tool to beat imo). I don't want anything that doesn't let me set my own models.

Deepseek is about 1/20th of the price and only slightly behind Claude.

Both have a tendency to over engineer. It's like a junior engineer who treats LOC as a KPI.
by hn_acker | 2025-04-17 14:45:24+00:00
> Jeez, what an asshole for trying to figure out a major problem, amirite?

Maybe people are treating RFK Jr. as an "asshole" for reasons other than "trying to figure out a major problem" (which is arguably not what he will do).

> What is this place? If you took his name off it, hopefully at least some of you would recognize that this is something we want people trying to do.

When it comes to a public figure who has spoken (lied [1][2]) for years about autism and vaccines, you can't accept the person's stated goals in isolation from their historical words and present beliefs. It's also naive to ignore the wider impacts of anti-vax rhetoric, including where Kennedy is not involved. For example [3]:

> Tommey then turned to the MMR vaccine, asking if the mother still felt that it was a dangerous vaccine after her daughter's death from the disease, prefacing the question by claiming to have seen a lot of "injury" from the vaccine. "Do you still feel the same way about the MMR vaccine versus measles?" she asked.

> "Yes, absolutely; we would absolutely not take the MMR. The measles wasn't that bad, and they got over it pretty quickly," the mother replied, speaking again of her four living children.

> "So," Tommey continued, "when you see the fearmongering in the press, which is what we want to stop, that is why we want to get the truth out, what do you say to the parents who are rushing out, panicking, to get the MMR for their 6-month-old baby because they think that that child is going to die of measles because of what happened to your daughter?"

> Through a translator, who spoke low German, the parents' primary language, her response was that she would still say, "Don't do the shots. There [are] doctors that can help with measles. [Measles is] not as bad as they're making it out to be."

[1] https://www.factcheck.org/2023/08/scicheck-what-rfk-jr-gets-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy_Jr.#Anti-vac...

[3] https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/03/anti-vaccine-group-fo...
by noworriesnate | 2025-04-17 14:45:30+00:00
While I don’t agree with the whole “Palestinian views should be censored” thing, that might be the ticket we need to set a precedent for regulating children’s access to social media. That’s the thing about politics—you have to be willing to make compromises with people you don’t see eye to eye on.

If your principles get in the way of making compromises that could help, you’re letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Something to think about.
by cashsterling | 2025-04-17 14:46:03+00:00
100% agree with you!

I have worked US manufacturing and manufacturing R&D for most of my career: pharmaceutical, microelectronics, materials, aerospace, etc. The US is awesome at manufacturing when we want to be.

One problem is that "modern MBA/business philosophy" views manufacturing and manufacturing employees as a cost center and there is so much emphasis on maximizing gross margin to increase shareholder value.

So business leaders scrutinize the hell out of anything that increases the cost of their cost centers:

- employee training & development? hell with that.

- Increasing pay to retain good employees in manufacturing? Why? isn't everything mostly automated?

- manufacturing technology development? Not unless you can show a clear and massive net present value on the investment... and, then, the answer is still no for no good reason. I have pitched internal manufacturing development investments where we conservatively estimated ~50% internal rate of return and the projects still didn't get funded.

There is also a belief that outsourcing is easy and business people are often horrible at predicting and assessing the total cost of outsourcing. I have been on teams doing "insource vs. outsource" trade studies and the amount of costs and risks that MBA decision makers don't think about in these situations really surprised me initially... but now I'm use to it.

Anyhow... the US (and Europe for that matter) can absolutely increase manufacturing. It is not "difficult"... but it would be a slow process. I think it is important to differentiate between difficulty and speed.
by ceedan | 2025-04-17 14:46:16+00:00
I used to think the same. I would guess that you do not have a big breakfast. Without getting a real meal in for breakfast, hitting a huge calorie surplus is difficult. If you counted your calories and tried to get a 1000 calorie meal for breakfast, hit 3000 calories a day, you’d probably gain 10% in a few weeks. Weight training is good too… you don’t want to just gain fat.

1000 calorie breakfast = bagel with cream cheese, 3 eggs, banana, some berries, protein shake. It’s a whole lot more than a bowl of cereal.
by fao_ | 2025-04-17 14:46:26+00:00
> During adulthood, the fat cells themselves just get larger.

While true, it's also important to note that the lifetime of a fat cell is around ten years. Maintaining a decent diet for around ten years (no mean feat!) should be sufficient to leave you bereft of the actual adipose cells.

I also wonder how this intersects with transgender stuff — there's a reason why HRT is referred to as "second puberty", as it resets and changes a lot of underlying biological mechanisms and produces a lot of interesting epigenetic effects (While it does boil down to "replacing the sex hormone", both estrogen and testosterone have major effects on the body's immune system, etc. — actually this is one of the reasons I suspect that there's such a high comorbidity of autoimmune diseases within transgender people pre-HRT — their immune system is all out of wack! Mine calmed down a lot after starting and a year in I no longer get seasonal allergies). There's a huge lack of data in this regard though because transgender bodies are generally not felt to be worth studying outside of "health risks", even though there's a huge amount of information we could glean about how everyone's* body functions from it. Personally, I wonder whether second-puberty "resets" what the body decides is the baseline for fat storage.

* — and for anyone in doubt, we have around 90 years of HRT now that shows it's essentially completely safe (outside of the mid-80s when the estrogen being given was synthetic and non-bio-identical, and outside of the health risks of various things for trans women changing to be roughly equivalent of cis women's health risks).
by bee_rider | 2025-04-17 14:46:30+00:00
Extremely few countries are “friends.” Maybe the past Canada/US relationship could have been considered legitimate friendship between two countries, but it was a very rare thing.

China is just a competitor, not some sort of boogeyman.

The US is a competitor with a lot of countries. Maybe they should ban our social media, but for whatever reason that is mostly not done. If we want to set that as the convention, it is certainly worth considering.
by Hizonner | 2025-04-17 14:46:35+00:00
> It has to be acknowledged that some things, like social media and pornography, are harmful to children.

It only "has to be acknowledged" if it's true. The "evidence" for either of those, but especially social media (as if that were even a single well defined thing to begin with) is pretty damned shakey. Nobody "has to acknowledge" your personal prejudices.
by alt227 | 2025-04-17 14:46:46+00:00
20 years ago we had reality TV, video games, and rock music which were the perveyor of body issues and FOMO etc. The issue is not technology, but popular culture. Pre the end of the 20th century most people considered knowledge and skill to be the peak of human progression. Now it is money and image. As money and image can easily be given/bestowed whilst knowledge and skill cannot, I believe the general population has become much easier to manipulate by using these traits.

There are very few young people today who dont value money and image as something to aspire to. IMO this is a really dangerous thing of which there is no way back.
by bmurphy1976 | 2025-04-17 14:46:53+00:00
Please add YouTube to the list. I'm watching my kids' brains slowly melt as they go from YouTube short to YouTube short like little crack addicts trying to get their next fix. Throw in a bunch of AI generated bottom of the barrel swill and I'm on the verge of blocking YouTube entirely yet again. I blocked YouTube for years because of all the garbage child targeted auto generated videos that were flooding the platform. It's very frustrating because there is a lot of good content that I would like them to continue to have easy access to, but the cost of entry is way too high.
by huntaub | 2025-04-17 14:47:08+00:00
Well, for active data, the idea is that the replication within the system is enough to keep the data alive from instance failure (assuming that you're doing the proper maintenance and repairing hosts pretty quickly after failure). Backup and recovery, in that case, is used more for saving yourself against fat-fingering an "rm -rf /" type command. Since it's just a file system, you should be able to use any backup and recovery solution that works with regular files.
by pogue | 2025-04-17 14:48:04+00:00
Fluoride and fluoridated water are non toxic in the levels it's used at and it's a privilege for us to have access to it.

If fluoride wasn't put in water by the "guberment" supplement companies would absolutely be hawking it to people as a miracle mineral, including it in our multivitamins and more.

Fluoridation: Don’t Let the Poisonmongers Scare You https://quackwatch.org/health-promotion/fluoride/
Ask HN: What nice, old software is maintained by solo dev?
by blenderob | 2025-04-17 14:48:06+00:00
This ASK HN is inspired by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43716006

> yes, and this is a 30 year old software maintained by a solo dev. It's an incredible piece of internet history.

> WinRAR is also about to turn 30 in a few days.

What more such stuff do you know?
by ziddoap | 2025-04-17 14:48:20+00:00
I'm not sure how this is answers my question at all.

How many whistleblowers would have been killed without a secure way to blow the whistle? How many journalists and journalist sources would have been killed? Etc. These people aren't using the USPS for good reason.

Point being, you are only doing one side of your calculation and presenting it as a full argument. But it's just a bad argument unless you calculate both sides.
by huntaub | 2025-04-17 14:48:22+00:00
Yes, I think this is probably true. I've worked with a lot of different hedge funds who have a similar problem -- lots of shared data that they need in a file system so that they can do backtesting of strategies with things like kdb+. Generally, these folks are using NFS which is kind of a pain -- especially for scaleability -- so building your own for that specific use case (which happens to have a similar usage pattern for AI training) makes a lot of sense.
by lolinder | 2025-04-17 14:48:31+00:00
This is an ignorant assumption about the author's motives that doesn't withstand even the least bit of scrutiny. Meta came first under Haidt's crosshairs and has been targeted since this article was released. Snapchat was targeted with a partner piece to this one yesterday:

https://www.afterbabel.com/p/industrial-scale-snapchat

Haidt isn't anti-China, he's anti-all-social-media.
by more_corn | 2025-04-17 14:48:34+00:00
The science is clear. There is no safe level of lead exposure. It is perfectly reasonable to measure the amount of lead in childrens’ toothpaste and seek to identify the source and further seek to minimize it. If it’s coming from one particular ingredient perhaps an alternative can be found.

Lead is well known to cause developmental and particularly mental development problems in children. Is it economically feasible? I don’t know. What would you pay for an extra 10 IQ points for your child? Better emotional regulation, fewer violent outbursts? These are all things lead is known to affect. I’d sure pay extra for lead free. I’m sure you could convince a few million hippy parents to go for it too.

As for preserved meat and smoked cheese… if it can’t be done safely I’m not sure I want it. Haven’t preserved meats been linked to pancreatic cancer? Once we discover that we give people the chance to make other choices.
by CSMastermind | 2025-04-17 14:48:45+00:00
Fentanyl is made from common chemicals that are used in normal industrial processes. We use them for everything from making insulation to medicine. And it only takes a small amount of these chemicals to make a large batch of fentanyl. All the fentanyl produced in a year only takes 1,800 gallons (around 33 oil drums) of chemicals to make.

The latest Annual Threat Assessment: https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ATA-202...

Noted that production of those precursors has shifted to India.

The fentanyl itself is made in labs in Mexico and then smuggled across the border. It requires no sophisticated lab equipment to make. You can easily obtain everything needed at consumer retail stores and make a batch in a garage. One liter of finished fentanyl is enough to create 50,000 to 100,000 doses.

So if you squeeze the balloon, it just pops up somewhere else. Put pressure on China and India starts supplying the chemicals. Start shutting down Mexican labs and they'll make the stuff in Oklahoma.

Not that these are bad things to do but unless you address the actual demand for the stuff it's going to be nearly impossible to eliminate it.
by constantcrying | 2025-04-17 14:48:54+00:00
But this fun thought exercise is also commiting a crime. That should be pointed out.

>Note the concern you share, which shows how far we've slid towards said authoritarianism.

Authoritarianism? This is about people saying they will commit acts of terrorism.

I absolutely think people should be critical of this type of police work, but if someone makes credible threats of commiting acts of terrorism they should obviously be taken in by police.
by csense | 2025-04-17 14:49:01+00:00
How do they prevent double spends?

Suppose Eve has $100 on her phone she could send to either Alice or Bob's phone.

To me, "permitting offline transactions" means Eve's phone can generate a message that says "Here's $100, Alice" -- and Alice's phone will accept that transaction. Likewise, it could generate a message that says "Here's $100, Bob" -- and Bob's phone will accept that transaction.

Now the software on Eve's phone might be coded to prevent both messages from being sent. But Eve has physical control of her phone and can modify the software or its database (i.e. backup the database, send the Alice message, then restore the backup so the software thinks Eve still has $100 and permits the Bob message to be sent.)

Now if Alice and Bob connected to each other, a central server, or a decentralized blockchain, they could see that Eve is executing a double spend. But that goes against the idea of "offline digital cash".

Actually reading this, they did think about it. The protected keys are handled by a "secure element" but it seems...like an awfully thin line, given Eve could open up her phone and access PCB traces, or write custom software to say "Yeah this transaction was totally processed by the secure element, for real!" but actually it was written by Eve.

And the secure element chips have to be manufactured somewhere, would anyone know if a backdoor was slipped in there?
by francio445 | 2025-04-17 14:49:23+00:00
Introducing DeepShot: An NBA Game Prediction Model Hey devs, sports fans, and data nerds!

After weeks of work, I'm excited to share DeepShot – an advanced NBA game predictor powered by historical data from Basketball Reference, machine learning, and a clean NiceGUI-powered web interface.

What it does: DeepShot uses team-level rolling averages (including Exponentially Weighted Moving Averages) and an Elo rating system to accurately predict NBA game outcomes. All predictions are visualized in real time through a sleek, responsive UI.

Key Features: Data-Driven Predictions using past performance & rolling trends EWMA-based Weighted Stats Engine Elo Ratings for contextual team strength Cross-platform interface built with NiceGUI Key stats highlight to visualize matchup advantages at a glance Tech Stack: Python Pandas, Scikit-learn, XGBoost BeautifulSoup, Requests NiceGUI for the frontend Hosted locally, runs on Windows/macOS/Linux Clone it here → github.com/saccofrancesco/deepshot

Want to see how predictive modeling and sports analytics come together? This is for you.

Feedback, stars, forks, and PRs are more than welcome!

Let me know what you think, or drop your ideas for improvements — always open to suggestions!

#NBA #Python #MachineLearning #SportsAnalytics #OpenSource #NiceGUI #PredictiveModeling #GitHub #XGBoost #EWMA #EloRating #Basketball
by setgree | 2025-04-17 14:49:45+00:00
Haidt is not the world's most careful data analyst [0], so a determined skeptic would probably not find this persuasive. But I think he's been directionally correct about all his major points in the past decade:

* Cancel culture is not compatible with democratic norms [1]

* Social media is making many people a little worse off and it makes some people a lot worse off

* having our phones on us all the time is bad for just about everything that requires sustained attention [2], including flirting and dating [3]

* Technology won't solve this problem. AI will make things worse [4]. If TikTok gets banned and some slightly more benevolent version takes it place, we're still headed in the wrong direction. What we need is culture change, which Haidt is trying his darndest at. Hats off to him.

[0] https://matthewbjane.github.io/blog-posts/blog-post-7.html

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/23/business/jonathan-haidt-s...

[2] https://thecritic.co.uk/its-the-phones-stupid/

[3] https://www.sexual-culture.com/p/its-obviously-the-phones

[4] https://www.npr.org/2019/06/04/726709657/sometimes-fascinati...
by _spduchamp | 2025-04-17 14:49:48+00:00
I bought a 4TB external hard drive from a thrift shop and found it is loaded with a huge unorganized treasure trove of MP3s that stops maybe around 2008. The tags and file names are a bit of a mess (looks like bad character encoding for anything with accents), and there is no genres or categorization. I'd love to use a subset of this archive on Jellyfin or Navidrome.

Any suggestions for a tool that can clean up file names and tags, and apply some sort of genre categories? I've tried Picard, but the process seems too manual for such a large archive.
by fullshark | 2025-04-17 14:49:52+00:00
It takes something that humans find genuine joy and fulfillment in (romance, building a home, bringing in a child) and cheapens it, likening it to something purely transactional. In this case: it's an offer purely for Musk's selfish goals with little consideration to the emotional and physical costs his broodmare will have to bear.

It's asshole behavior.