MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eru | 2025-05-10 11:49:06+00:00
> When I smoked, I often picked up clove cigarettes. My hairdresser friend with purple hair advised me that the molecules of clove smoke were huge compared to tobacco smoke and I was killing myself that much faster. I thank President Obama for finally closing out the clove cigarette market. I was eventually smoking American Spirits, which are mass-market, but touted as extra pure or clean. Who knows, really?

Eh, putting any kind of smoke in your lungs is bad for you. Exactly what kind of plant matter you are burning is mostly a rounding error.

Go and vape, if you want to consume tobacco or marijuana.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-10 11:50:08+00:00
You'd be surprised about artificial contraception. Sure, when used they can be highly effective to prevent pregnancy, but they also train people to do risky behavior.

It's sort of like giving away free parachutes and plane rides to everyone. Sure, that support will encourage lots of skydiving. But eventually, isn't someone going to go up without a parachute, say "YOLO" and dive out anyway?

The same thing happens with contracepting, promiscuous men and women: they become accustomed to using one another as objects and free, easy access to sex whenever. But when that contraception isn't readily available at hand, they're going ahead anyway. They're going to do it regardless, because it's the habit they're accustomed to now.

So on balance, it's really been found that free access to artificial contraception tends to encourage and increase unplanned/unwanted pregnancies. And that's exactly why it's so plentiful, because the goal is the opposite of what you may think...
by keepamovin | 2025-05-10 11:50:19+00:00
I'm also building a BBS era idea, called dialup.sh that uses a 100%-text-mode browser to reverse proxy locally hosted websites for people to run little servers for their pals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Bs7BoQBoBA

I personally like the idea of a modern browser that works over SSH/terminals, on its own, but i think the BBS/social, friend-to-friend, small network idea could be the thing the indie-web (tilde, etc) have been zeroing in on the last few years.

It's good to see more people building in term/text interfaces. I think of it as a reaction to super saturation of attention-grabbing content all time, all places. Nice to have some quiet, some (visual? content?) noise cancellation for the web! Especially in the era of AI generated content now too. Overload, man. Get back to BBS days not a bad idea! :)
by albert_e | 2025-05-10 11:50:21+00:00
This reads like so much of common sense and how we learned and practiced math through out our own school years decades ago.

A little baffled at why so much verbiage is dedicated to it.

Kids having notebooks dedicated for each subject for the academic year is news how?

All supplies and stationery stores include tons of notebooks in standardized dimensions. For math, we used grids in elementary school and then graduated to blank white pages from middle school. Teachers and schools would clearly mandate this -- and given how common and prevalent this practice was, it was almost tacit knowledge that no one needs to explain it or write about.
by SavinMyLungz | 2025-05-10 11:50:51+00:00
Tangentially, since moving to edibles to avoid damaging my lungs and hopefully live longer, I've noticed that I don't have cravings for edibles the way I do with smoking flower. Eg, if I smoke one day, then I will feel a craving to smoke for the next week or so. But if I eat edibles one day but not the next, I don't notice any craving.

My hypothesis is that it's similar to cigarettes where the nicotine is much more addictive in combination with MAOIs in the cigarette. I don't know that MAOIs are the culprit here, I haven't looked into it. And this could be idiosyncratic to me, of course.

Just another reason not to smoke. The cannabis industry in my state has perfected gummies and driven the price down to the point it's not much more expensive than smoking, even with my really high tolerance, and the dispensary will deliver them to my house, so I'm all out of excuses.
by johnmaguire | 2025-05-10 11:50:53+00:00
Nicotine is absolutely addictive. Ask anyone who uses an e-cigarette. Vape liquids typically do not contain MAOIs yet are quite difficult to get off - less than smoking though, likely due to the longer activation duration.

Nicotine being the addictive part is also why many smokers are successfully able to make the switch to e-cigarettes.
by ffsm8 | 2025-05-10 11:51:12+00:00
> “Web server” is a pretty big use case though.

You don't consider games, desktop and mobile applications big use cases, each being multi billion industries?

I don't know man, I feel like you're arguing in bad faith and are intentionally ignoring what the athrowaway3z said: it works there because they're essentially languages specifically made to enable web development . That's why their standard lib is plenty for this domain.

I can understand that web development might be the only thing you care about though, it's definitely a large industry - but the thesis of a large standard lib solving the dependency issue really isnt true, as (almost) every other usecase beyond web development shows.
by eru | 2025-05-10 11:51:37+00:00
NileRed (on YouTube) made alcohol from toilet paper to show what's possible.

Btw, distilling already removes most byproducts. (But you might still want to age.) Your comment seems a bit confused about straight up fermented products vs distilling fermented products.

I'm not sure you can get 20%-30% alcohol just from using fermentation. 18% is already a stretch and requires a lot of tricks. But you can get to your 20%-30% easily with some basic distilling equipment.
by atemerev | 2025-05-10 11:52:29+00:00
Well, American society supports Trump, right? and Trump wants to invade Canada and Denmark.

No, "Russian society" is not a monolith supporting the war of aggression. Just like American society is not all like their government officials and quite many people there do not support the autocratic course. Though yes, even here on Hacker News you can meet supporters of both. Sadly.

Yes, it is alarming that many people in Russia support their government. Just as it is alarming for the US. Or any other autocratic country. This isn't a blanket permission to call "all Russians" or "all Americans" or "all Israeli" or "all Palestinians" or "all immigrants" (insert your pejorative of the day).
by jgalvez | 2025-05-10 11:52:31+00:00
The processor considers monthly income when calculating your projections. It'll sum all credit and debit operations (from all flows) and calculate from there.

> In my mind the simplest form of budgeting is so-called "Envelope Accounting", where you have physical envelopes full of money where you pull money out when you spend it.

I've done that, it helped me a lot!
by albert_e | 2025-05-10 11:54:25+00:00
Request: Make titles more accessible to global audience.

BART doesn't automatically mean anything unless you are familiar with the region.

I lived 7 years in the US and still took a while (even after opening the linked article -- given the website was a local media outlet, there were no immediate clues in the article which country/state/city it is referring to)
by dsarul | 2025-05-10 11:54:32+00:00
Hey HN, We’re working on a platform that delivers all kinds of products — not just groceries — in under 30 minutes.

The idea came out of personal frustration. I needed a replacement SSD for my PC, and even in a major city, delivery took two days. That led to the question: why is fast delivery only common for food or essentials? People also need electronics, fashion items, and daily-use products on short notice.

We’re building a fast-delivery system for general e-commerce, and it relies on the following components: 1)Predictive micro-warehousing based on demand forecasts 2)Dynamic routing to optimize delivery time 3)Smart inventory placement to reduce last-mile distance

We’re still in the early stages. We’re building the tech and validating the model. If you're curious or have thoughts, we’d appreciate feedback — especially from people with experience in logistics, delivery infrastructure, or fast-commerce systems.
by eru | 2025-05-10 11:54:48+00:00
Well, putting any kind of smoke in your lungs is bad.

The difference between vaping and smoking dwarfs the relative rounding error between tobacco vs marijuana in terms of direct health effects.

(There are indirect health effects, of course. Marijuana is more likely to give you the munchies. Tobacco is more likely to help you with weight loss, if anything.)
by eru | 2025-05-10 11:55:26+00:00
Please see the link. Especially this section https://gwern.net/nicotine#addictiveness

Nicotine by itself is at most very lightly addictive.

> Nicotine being the addictive part is also why many smokers are successfully able to make the switch to e-cigarettes.

I don't think we can draw that conclusion. Just because something helps you get over an addiction doesn't mean it's the addictive part.

Compare and contrast the absolute ineffectiveness of nicotine plasters for getting people off their cigarette habit. (Even though they are a great nicotine delivery mechanism otherwise.)

Similarly, I don't think anyone ever got addicted to nicotine plasters.
by Broken_Hippo | 2025-05-10 11:55:32+00:00
I mean, fine. Don't do it then. Few people care if you personally do and if they pressure you, they aren't your friends.

This sort of thing really isn't about giving anyone comfort. It is an attempt to learn so folks can use them to understand the world better and the ways our bodies interact with it. It might result in harm reduction in other people, which benefits society in general.
by eadmund | 2025-05-10 11:55:53+00:00
> Would you believe me and would you immediately start following the advice if I told you that the key to a healthy life is "Surround yourself with meaningful relationships, sleep well, eat well, exercise, don't drink alcohol, and don't smoke"?

> There's also a good chance that you will agree with the above advice.

I just want to note that I do not agree with the above advice. Tobacco and alcohol in moderation are key parts of a healthy life. Abstention is neurotic and thus unhealthy.
by ak_111 | 2025-05-10 11:57:55+00:00
As poster dead deep in the thread below, something like this can happen

doc_format = get_user_input() parsed_doc = foolib.parse(doc_format)

You as the implementer might know the user will never input xml, so doc_format can't be 'xml' (you might even add some error handling if the user inputs this), but how can you communicate this to the compiler?
by jgalvez | 2025-05-10 11:58:13+00:00
I'll push a new release with the license — always forget this!

Thank you for all your observations. Two things: 1) floats were originally purposefully not allowed, for simplicity, but I might change that and 2) multiple groups with the same name are indeed not allowed, but you raise a good point: it should be possible to reference all groups with a common label if the only difference between them is an attached timestamp.

And yes, will definitely push Win/Linux releases soon!
by imcritic | 2025-05-10 11:58:19+00:00
Sorry, you have been blocked You are unable to access stratolaunch.com Why have I been blocked? This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.

What can I do to resolve this? You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-10 11:59:12+00:00
The existence of the Pope is inherent in the need for doctrinal and disciplinary unity. Otherwise when there's a dispute over whether to obey a pastor or whether he's correct about something in faith or morals, there's no arbiter, so the church splits in two, and it continues on the pattern of cancer. Naturally there will be faithless people in the church who use such positions as if they were political, but only because "if there is no resurrection, then let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die" and politics is the most obvious way of ensuring that luxury.
by hardwaresofton | 2025-05-10 11:59:34+00:00
One possible remedy that I didn’t see discussed — start an Internet business and grow it until it makes you money.

Internet businesses are hard (because regular entrepreneurship is hard), but if you have a laptop and ~$12 yearly for a domain you can do it (I mean, really — use a free DDNS service and point to your laptop and keep it always on, use oracles free tier, etc). It wont be easy but its barrier-free and you can do it while you do the driving gig.

Honestly I think PHP is the problem (I just don't think its well regarded by the majority of devs anymore), but rather than learn TS or something else you can lean into this a try to break into the Wordpress plugin ecosystem. It won’t be easy, and success is far from guaranteed but nothing is stopping you. One of the blessings of our profession is how frictionless it is to build.

If you need server space or a k8s cluster to deploy to I’m willing personally to help.
by johnmaguire | 2025-05-10 11:59:34+00:00
I did and while I like Gwern's writing, I think in this case it's plain wrong. I say this as a smoker who switched to e-cigarettes for a few years and then quit cold turkey. Switching was easy. The first 72 hours of quitting was a nightmare.

I think it's horrible to tell people nicotine is not addictive. Quitting is very difficult.

A quick Google offers plenty of alternative study results.

I personally know people who were addicted to nicotine patches. One reason they are likely not as addictive as smoking is because they take much longer to reach noticeable concentrations in your bloodstream. Vaping also takes longer than smoking but not nearly as long as patches.

Compare this to oral vs IV drug use.

Edit: I will add that while I do strongly believe nicotine is addictive, I also believe smoking is more addictive and that it is primarily all the other chemicals in tobacco smoke that cause most physical harm to the body.
by tim333 | 2025-05-10 11:59:44+00:00
I think you may overestimate the abilities of our leaders. The guy who brought austerity to the UK, George Osborne was kind of a mediocre journalist with a second class degree in history and never much training or depth of understanding in economics.

I'm reminded of:

>John Maynard Keynes once said: “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”

I mean not quite that but people who don't understand economics tend to pick up on something they read without great discernment. See for example Trump and deficits and tariffs.
by K0balt | 2025-05-10 12:00:09+00:00
A million years ago, stack overflow was something special. It’s still useful for figuring out things you really should have known but don’t, though LLMs are much better, since you can actually ask them questions rather than just try to search for someone else who asked a question like yours.

But for anything nontrivial, the site sucks because a nontrivial question can almost always be framed as being “a lot like” some other, more trivial question, but the question you need answered is in what way is it different from the obvious.

Somehow, LLMs are better at understanding your question and delivering a relevant topic than SO mods.
by kmarc | 2025-05-10 12:01:27+00:00
Hard situation to be in this post-LLM era, but a rebrand would probably not help at this point. The comments here tell a lot, the negative sentiment is quite strong in general.

Maybe this was it for them, but I would still want to appreciate what SO did for the global programming community (especially for people who have less means to access high quality information / education). Thanks!

Now on-prem Stackoverflow, (SO for teams?) now THAT is a cancer that should be killed.
by ColinWright | 2025-05-10 12:02:17+00:00
Applying for jobs again:

"Can you describe specific ways you have integrated Al tools into your development workflow? Please include any custom setups, automations, or use cases beyond simple prompt usage."

"there is a monster in the forest and it speaks with a thousand voices. it will answer any question you pose it, it will offer insight to any idea. it will help you, it will thank you, it will never bid you leave. it will even tell you of the darkest arts, if you know precisely how to ask.

"it feels no joy and no sorrow, it knows no right and no wrong. it knows not truth from lie, though it speaks them all the same.

"it offers its services freely to any passerby, and many will tell you they find great value in its conversation. "you simply must visit the monster—i always just ask the monster." there are those who know these forests well; they will tell you that freely offered doesn't mean it has no price

"for when the next traveler passes by, the monster speaks with a thousand and one voices. and when you dream you see the monster; the monster wears your face."
by SavinMyLungz | 2025-05-10 12:03:47+00:00
My understanding is that inhaling polonium is one of the main vectors of lung cancer in tobacco smokers. Smoke inhalation is bad, afaik it's the main way people die in structure fires, smoke has carbon monoxide and formaldehyde and all sorts of bad stuff, but tobacco is particularly deadly, and afaik polonium from the fertilizer is a big part of why that is.
by cushychicken | 2025-05-10 12:04:27+00:00
Hypersonic technology has a lot of strategic military importance.

This is a public signal of “we got something to Mach 5 and landed it in one piece - twice”.

That’s a pretty good indicator to people who want to get in on hypersonic technology development (I.e. defense contractors) that Stratolaunch is open for business.
by thinkingemote | 2025-05-10 12:05:14+00:00
as a non smoker, I followed Gwern's micro dosing experiments with nicotine. Small 0.5mg 1/2 tablet doses when doing a task I wanted to reinforce.

Then I found myself taking a one or two of these 1mg tablets during the day when driving as I want to increase good habits when driving. Then habitually whenever I felt like it, sometimes with a coffee and a book. They were the weakest mg you could get, and there was no direct feeling of their effect. I did feel increasing anxiety which lead to physical symptoms during this time, but the tablets didn't seem to make any direct effect on the anxiety, I didn't take the nicotine to calm down and I didn't connect the two together (its only now writing this comment that I'm thinking they may be connected)

So it was definitely addicting, however, when the box ran out, stopping seemed to be instantaneous and painless. I did quit because I realised I wasnt using it as I wanted to initially and it was becoming a habit. I do remember a couple of times looking for the tablets, checking to see if there wasn't some in the car. mild. The feeling of anxiety is gone now too.

So I'm not sure if I would say I was addicted, but maybe I was. It was certainly habit forming!
by Valgrim | 2025-05-10 12:06:39+00:00
There's an interesting implication to this. We assume that evolution happens when random mutations (similar to random bit flips, removal or injection?) occur and when the random result has an advantage, the mutation tends to remain in the gene pool.

Yet at the same time the result of this random code is extremely compressed, to the point we compare it to procedural generative code.

Not sure what we can do with this but it certainly seems like we can once again get inspired by nature on this one.
by ck2 | 2025-05-10 12:07:08+00:00
The thing about sentient life is we are always finding it odd that everything seems just right for our evolution when that's why it happened in the first place.

Temperatures, resources, distances, orbits, etc.

If there's a world out there without a moon and could not really see other plants and stars, would they have developed the math and science that we have without such motivation? Maybe but slower?

But without our extra large moon, at the right mass and distance, helping tides and lighting the night for hunting, would life even exist? Maybe but not as advanced or a lot slower evolution?

(it's kinda like that Star Trek Voyager episode where they inspire a planet to industrialize after being trapped in their orbit in a dramatic time dilation)
by immibis | 2025-05-10 12:10:49+00:00
"To whom it may concern,

I have discovered an international child porn sharing ring which I believe to be much bigger than any previously known or imagined.

The ring operates openly on the Internet, without anonymous technologies. Therefore it should be easy to track down the perpetrators.

The name of the ring is Instagram. You can view their recruiting page at instagram.com.

Yours truly, anonymous reporter"
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-10 12:10:54+00:00
It seems that ESA tracked the craft over Germany on its final pass, and failed to track it on its next expected pass (0732 UTC), and so it is assumed that it went down at some time before that. But there are no recordings or reports of sightings yet.

https://blogs.esa.int/rocketscience/2025/05/07/reentry-predi...
by aden1ne | 2025-05-10 12:10:57+00:00
> Another case is government bureaucracy. For most of the EU countries I've been to, the official language of the country is their local language and only their local language. This means that government employees are not required to speak any other language other than the official one to you, plus you might be required to fill in forms and communicate in the official language if you want to talk to them.

This is true, and something I have indeed experienced. However, this is likely true for _any_ country where English is not the official language, not just those in the EU. Besides, understanding bureaucratic lingo is not just a matter of pure linguistics. Governmental concepts rarely translate 1:1 to another nation, even those with the same official language. If you migrate to another country, part and parcel of the experience is that you _must_ contend with bureaucratic principles, rules and institutes with which you are not familiar. There is no escaping that.

That said, at least here in the Netherlands, there is certainly a movement to provide more and more governmental information in English as well. I'm not going to dox myself, but for example my muni's English website looks nigh-identical to the Dutch one.
by immibis | 2025-05-10 12:11:59+00:00
They've been following their new TOS, but only when Trump became the president were they able to write down the TOS without fear of repercussion.

All the most successful political actors are able to selectively control the flow of information. They don't put their beliefs in the TOS until doing so confers an advantage to them. Once it does, they do. The TOS still doesn't contain all their rules - only the ones that are advantageous for them to announce publicly.