MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hedora | 2025-05-19 00:14:14+00:00
I’d pay to get them to stop tracking me. There’s no way to implement that without tracking me, so I just go with anyone but Google whenever possible.

The fact that Google has been intentionally making their products worse to enable price gouging (as proven in court) has made it easy for competitors to outperform all of Google’s offerings (except, arguably, YouTube, but that seems pretty moatless / prone to piracy).
by zrobotics | 2025-05-19 00:14:44+00:00
I used to work night shift and tried a few different things. Maybe the super-premium blinds block more light, but IME the most effective solution is blackout curtains. You'll need to hang a curtain rod that's wider than the window and get curtains that are wide enough, ideally just a single curtain rather than 2 if your window is narrow enough.
by twodave | 2025-05-19 00:14:57+00:00
As an American, this sort of brings back into question for me thoughts of, "What should constitute a public utility in a Capitalism society?" Upon doing some cursory research (so cursory that I'm afraid to provide links), it occurs to me that I was maybe under a false impression that there _are_ any nationwide public utilities in the first place. We basically have:

* The Federal Reserve

* The Interstate Highway System

* The Postal Service

* Homeland Security

* Medicaid/Medicare (does this even fit the list?)

* Other entitlements I'm also not sure fit this list

Did I leave anything major out? But getting to the point, I think the question is relevant because in order for something like this set of principles to take hold in the US I think we'd essentially have to kill certain classes of software in the private sector. Can you imagine the sorts of craziness that would ensure if the US government tried to adopt LibreOffice? Maybe it could happen at the state or municipal level, but we can't even agree that the government should own any of the power lines.
by Johanx64 | 2025-05-19 00:15:03+00:00
> There’s also a facet of strict benthamite utilitarianism that falls into the trap of accepting reified societal norms as being objective reality - for instance, the core idea that pain and suffering are bad.

Man, people DO vax poetic online, but when you introduce them to the blowtorch, some tweezers and a steel pipe, they don't need much convincing that pain and suffering is ... in fact ... objectively bad.

They convert to recognizing the badness of pain and suffering..... very, very quickly.

> I would hold that they are the whetstones that sharpen the soul

You really have no idea what you're talking about, are you? How can anyone type this naive drivel?
by Aurornis | 2025-05-19 00:15:09+00:00
The funny thing about the “healthspan” trend is that it’s simply describing what everyone meant when they said they wanted to live a long time.

Nobody wanted to live a long time but be unhealthy in their older years.

It wasn’t until health and fitness podcasters started holding up the “healthspan” term as something novel that we had to hear about the supposed difference.

It’s also unfortunate that the “healthspan” influencers frequently get into health trends that have the opposite effect. The main example I can think of is Dr. Peter Attia, who started out praising ketogenic diets (recently shown to have very negative effects on cardiovascular health, not surprisingly) and later Rapamycin (briefly praised by lifespan influencers until they all decided it was hurting more than helping).

I think one of the best things people can do for long-term health is limit their consumption of health and fitness influencers who are pressured to constantly invent and push new things to keep themselves relevant.
by eru | 2025-05-19 00:15:32+00:00
You set it up for them automatically for them. Just like you set up a new environment automatically from scratch each time you run tests or when running the AI. See eg https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/containers or https://github.com/features/codespaces for some established standards for doing this, but you could also roll your own custom system.

GitHub's codespaces also drive home how the customer/user only needs a browser, which even people in legal will have. No additional software required on their end.
by BeetleB | 2025-05-19 00:16:32+00:00
Basic undergrad statistics. This doesn't make me better at doing statistics, but now I can understand things I read. Whereas prior to SR, I had learned the material three separate times - always forgot because of lack of use. SR made it stick.

Algorithms and data structures.

Basics of HTML/CSS/JS. I'm not a frontend developer, but this was enough for me to (mostly) understand colleagues' JS code. And often I would inform him of one of the newer JS features he didn't know of (e.g. null coalescing operator). Does it make me a JS developer? No. But it ensures I'm not useless at it.

Python 3.x new features. Simple things like "Stop using os.walk and use scandir instead".

A whole lot of Emacs keybindings. I was a heavy Emacs user before SR, but this really helped take it to the next level (I now mostly rely on hydras, so I no longer memorize keystrokes, cut I can't deny its effectiveness).

Some amount of elisp.

Probably a whole lot more random miscellany I can't recall right now.

Basically, what it does is let you retain information without usage. Prior to this, I would mostly retain only things I use (or had used) often.

I was in university for over a decade. Took lots of notes. But they're useless if you don't review them. Some years after leaving university I stopped trying to learn anything technical unless I was putting it to immediate use. Why bother if you're going to forget?

SR is what let me get back to studying for fun.
by OptionOfT | 2025-05-19 00:16:56+00:00
> This data was parsed from a set of 458 Excel workbooks that the DMV prepared for someone else's public records request. I received the files as a consolation prize in response to my own related records request, which I was told would cost $2,000 to fulfill otherwise.

That's very interesting. It implies that there seemingly is no central place in CA where this data is stored, otherwise there would be 1 source and 1 format.

Then again, last time I went to the DMV in CA I filled out paperwork online, only for them to print it and then manually process it. And this was 2.5 years ago.
by al_borland | 2025-05-19 00:17:05+00:00
This was my first thought. I would probably actively avoid a product if I saw ads pop up in the most annoying way possible.

I already have Premium, so this won’t really impact me, but I hope it fails.

I’ve really liked the engagement graph on videos, so I can jump to key moments, but I guess this is the monkey paw of that feature.

Though I do expect the AI to get it wrong. A significant number of peaks on the graph are after ad reads or when text is flashed on screen quickly, which people go back to read. These aren’t necessarily peaks points of the narrative.
by azan_ | 2025-05-19 00:17:12+00:00
Yes, and since there is a factor that affects both fitness and dying in car accidents or homicides, then it's harder to establish for how big reduction of mortality is fitness really responsible (causal). What you are complaining about is exactly the point of this study:

> This suggests that people with high and low fitness levels may differ in other important ways, which is something that previous studies have not fully taken into account
by fn-mote | 2025-05-19 00:17:45+00:00
> This is just ADHD meds right?

Not really. They're just stimulants. Anyway, I'm very skeptical of this use.

I'd guess uni students are buying methamphetamines them because they have gotten themselves into a situation that they cannot handle - too many non-academic scheduled activities, not enough time management skills, possibly a heavy courseload combined with several weeks of avoidance of things they found difficult, poor sleep habits, etc. They need to stay awake and work. I don't think that's all you're talking about, though.

I wouldn't discount the idea that some have an undiagnosed attention deficit problem.
by cbarrick | 2025-05-19 00:17:53+00:00
You should read more about Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) and Game Theory in general.

The word "solve" is well defined in this context, and is used accurately by OP. You "solve" a game by finding the policy that maximizes the expected return.

Obviously we can only talk about "expectation" because the outcome is random. But that doesn't mean that an optimal policy doesn't exist.

Optimal policies are also often random, expressed like "in state S, perform action A with probability P and action B with probability 1-P". A policy then boils down to a table, with a row for each state and a column for each action, where each cell is the probability of performing that action in that state.

Even more interesting are partially observable Markov decision processes, where your agent doesn't even know what state it is in. Instead, you get observations that hint to the true state, and you model the state as a probability distribution over possible concrete states. Solving these POMDPs is quite a bit more difficult than traditional MDPs.

It is possible to solve some MDPs (and POMDPs) by hand, but in practice we often use reinforcement learning to learn the policy table by simulating games.
by soraminazuki | 2025-05-19 00:17:59+00:00
There are countless more convenient keys that you can use to navigate up and down without counting. Basic ones are /, *, n, N, H, M, L, {, }, %, ctrl-]. ]c, [c when you're in a diff buffer or have a Git plugin that offers this key. ]d, [d, [q, ]q, ]l, [l if you use Neovim.
by ksec | 2025-05-19 00:18:22+00:00
> Apple is planning to give users in the EU the ability to set a default voice assistant other than Siri, this means that users in the EU will be able to set options like Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant as their default voice assistant on Apple devices.

I am not entirely sure I like the direction EU is heading. At some point they might / will cross the line. ( People old enough may remember Drivers wasn't included in the OS and you have to buy them separately ) Although I am sure the power of default always win unless it is really bad.
by ip26 | 2025-05-19 00:18:49+00:00
This feels like such a commonly missed point. Any “enlightened” movement with a notion of not having kids will by definition extinguish itself in one generation.

I don’t see this as meaning ultra-traditionalists are bound to inherit- I think it’s more likely the discourse would revert to the mean, aka the centrists.

But it also applies at the national level. If country A consistently makes having kids miserable, then in the long arc of time, the way of life in country B (which makes family life great) will win out.
by lisper | 2025-05-19 00:19:18+00:00
Reminds me of the Journal of Irreproducible Results and the Annals of Improbable Research.

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

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

And TIL about the Journal of Polymorphous Pervisity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Polymorphous_Perver...
by nunez | 2025-05-19 00:19:55+00:00
We are child-free in our late 30s. We didn't lose friends, but hanging out with the ones that had kids became more challenging as did our ability to relate to things. Not impossible, just more challenging.

Here's an everyday example. We can decide to randomly go somewhere for drinks and food on a weeknight. Parents need to do major coordination to make this work if they wanted to join (in most cases, you can forget it if there isn't a sitter).

Unless they want to bring the kid, which changes everything about our plans: the time we leave, the place we go to, how long we can stay at that place, etc.

This isn't bad, and sometimes we can accommodate, but if we just want to low-key get a drink and maybe some food at our local bar, this would likely become a weekend get-together. Given that we both usually have things going on during the weekend, it can be a few weeks or months before we're able to finally hang.

There's also a suite of stuff that parents deal with that us child-free folks don't. Picking a good school (and a house within that school district, usually out in the burbs, because school districts in most cities are underfunded and struggling to perform). Crushing daycare costs. Getting sick every month because of said daycare. Kids shows. Screens vs no screens. Tons of everyday things that every parent deals with that we have zero experience to. We can listen, sure, but it is easier to maintain experiences with people who "get it."

We do get to be the fun friends/family that spoils them when they grow up though. That's been a lot of fun!
by ohelabs | 2025-05-19 00:21:20+00:00
> In the study, the researchers leveraged data from 1.1 million Swedish men who were conscripted for military service between the years 1972 and 1995

For anyone from the US reading this just throw it out… we eat significantly less healthy and have significantly more obesity. Sweden as a country is significantly more healthy and active. To everyone reading this and thinking that this applies is sorely mistaken.

Fitness might not “extend your life many years” but being morbidly obese will most certainly end it significantly early.
by kayodelycaon | 2025-05-19 00:22:07+00:00
I know a professor who has everyone except 1 student completely failing one of her classes because they all used AI to write their papers. Most of them didn’t check the output and have things like “like and subscribe” in the middle.

The real headbanger was how many people wouldn’t write proper sentences and would skip capitals, grammatical marks, and spelling on the in-person exams.

These people graduated from high school with a high enough grade to go to college.

To say I didn’t believe said professor is an understatement… but I know them and they have no reason to lie. They don’t know what to do because they are getting pressure from administration to pass the students.
by Johanx64 | 2025-05-19 00:22:51+00:00
It absolutely isn't default world view in most of the world.

The reason people don't have children - most of them anyway - have nothing to do with antinatalism.

Having children simply would be a massive, major inconvienience, and would negatively affect their quality of life, income, expenses, career prospects, housing, etc, etc.

Ie. their decision making for having children and not having them is exactly the same. I want to, I don't want to (inconvenience, etc), there's no deeper reasoning behind it in most cases.

Plummeting birth rates have little to do with antinatalism, and is a self-correcting problem. It will - without doubt - self correct. You just might not see the change in your lifetime.
by amluto | 2025-05-19 00:23:02+00:00
> Next, the researchers examined how fitness was associated with the risk of dying in random accidents such as car accidents

> The researchers found that men with the highest fitness levels had a 53 per cent lower risk of dying in random accidents. Yet, it is unlikely that the men’s fitness would have such a big effect on their risk of dying in random accidents.

Wait, what?

https://aaafoundation.org/rates-motor-vehicle-crashes-injuri...

The risk of being in a motor vehicle crash increases as one gets older than ~70 years. The risk of dying increases even more dramatically.

Now maybe this effect is independent of physical fitness, but that’s quite an assumption. I would guess the contrary: that poor fitness quite dramatically increases one’s risk of a car crash, both due to reduced motor control and increased risk of various neurological issues.

Vascular dementia, for example, seems very likely to be correlated and often caused by poor fitness. Various sources seem to think that exercise can quite dramatically reduce Alzheimer’s risk. Alzheimer’s disease is related to PCA, and I suspect that PCA is very much under-diagnosed and that it causes a lot of crashes.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-05-19 00:23:33+00:00
There's a lot of tools that are very useful but I'm not going to spend that much on. My water bottle is one.

And I don't think food is a good comparison. Or renting a physical space, depending on what you get out of being a regular.

Still, the basic price of $50 a year for sync is something I wouldn't be very upset with... except my main goal is a collaborative setup with other people and I'm not paying 5x or more to make that work.
by theandrewbailey | 2025-05-19 00:24:30+00:00
Most of the PCs I had access to growing up sucked in some way, so I have no nostalgia to recreate any of them as entire systems.

In 2013[0], I built a PC with the loose goal of being the best the 20th century had to offer, at least as far as core components were concerned. (I considered 2000 as part of the 20th century for the purposes of this build.) I ended up with a Pentium 3 600 MHz, 256 MB RAM, Geforce 2 Ultra, 52x CDROM drive, and crappy "multimedia" speakers. Somehow, I still had the same Yamaha-based soundcard I grew up with, so that's the only original part of this nostalgic ship of thesis. I threw in a 40GB hard drive, and later upgraded to 250 GB. The 17" CRT, keyboard, and ball mouse are early-mid 2000s and Dell-branded (the PC case is beige and unbranded). The only thing that would complete the build would be a modem, but no one liked dial-up, ever, so I have a fast ethernet card instead. The clock noticeably drifts out of sync by a few minutes every month, so I have an NTP client.

I installed Windows 98 on it, and promptly started playing games I loved growing up, and later, others: Starcraft, SimCity 2000, Road Rash, Chips Challenge, Fallout, and Diablo. It barely runs the original Warcraft 3 (but Frozen Throne refuses to install).

[0] https://theandrewbailey.com/article/120/Project-Twentieth-Ce...
by overgard | 2025-05-19 00:24:47+00:00
I hope you didn't read what I said as a personal attack, it's not, that's just my feedback on how I feel about this particular idea. I will say that it is clever though, even if it's definitely not for me.

I think the "ick" factor for me comes from the feeling that social engagement shouldn't really be queryable. When I participate here, it's an in-the-moment thing. While I realize my opinions are stored forever and searchable, and I generally stand by most of what I say, I think making meta-products around social engagement changes the flavor and the feeling of how we interact. It's like when someone points a camera at you. Sure, it doesn't really change anything, but also, it completely changes things right?
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-19 00:25:09+00:00
I must commend CA DMV for their wise leverage of UrbanDictionary.com, which is cited over 170 times in that file.

And I must wonder about how reliable they consider UD to be, given that UD is 100% user-generated content. Is it possible to tank a perfectly innocent license plate if someone gins up a misleading UD entry?

Signed,

Don Palabros
by idoubtit | 2025-05-19 00:25:27+00:00
This is just for show, and facts won't follow. It's not the first time a French government vows to stick to Open Source. Yet most of the public money goes to proprietary software, and Open Source is the exception.

Two months ago, the French government signed an "open bar" contract with Microsoft for the "Éducation Nationale" department. 152 M€, not for Open Source. Source (fr) https://www.april.org/nouvel-open-bar-microsoft-le-ministere...

A few days after that, a major state-owned institution (Polytechnique) announced it was migrating (including the email system) to MS Office 365. Even if it violates several laws and official decrees (it's a semi-military school). Source (fr) https://cnll.fr/news/polytechnique-men-office-365/
by burnt-resistor | 2025-05-19 00:26:03+00:00
Terrorist death cult. One of many who are a threat to all life. Billionaires exploiting oil ravaging the stability of the climate, "child free" virtue signalers (albeit more passively), religious nuts who insist on narrow theocratic orthodoxy, and those who outright harm others for their crazy ideas stochastically in the style of the Unabomber.
by netsharc | 2025-05-19 00:26:55+00:00
Well, if you asked someone in a windowless room what date/time it is they wouldn't know either, but if they have access to an online calendar/clock, they'd be able to tell you. And as you figured out, the LLM you interacted with is "in a windowless room", but that's common knowledge.

AI wouldn't even need any AI powers to be able to repeat that it's currently 00:26 in London.
by roxolotl | 2025-05-19 00:27:17+00:00
It’s wild how when you expose enough people to utilitarianism some of them become utility monsters. We’ve seen it with effective altruists(the modern ones not Singer’s initial conception), zizians, and I guess now efilists. We really need more modern moral theories which resonate with people. They all have downsides but the speed with which utilitarianism has been reduced to absurd once exposed to the internet is impressive.
by echelon | 2025-05-19 00:27:28+00:00
I was totally unaware of this philosophy. At a cursory glance, I really dig it.

> [Cosmism] is characterized by the belief in humanity’s cosmic destiny, the potential for immortality, and the use of scientific and technological advancements to achieve control over nature and explore space [Wikipedia, 1].

> Cosmism, specifically Russian Cosmism, is a philosophical and cultural movement that emerged in 19th and early 20th century Russia. It's characterized by its focus on the cosmos, humanity's relationship with it, and a belief in the possibility of humanity actively shaping its own destiny and the destiny of the cosmos through technological progress and spiritual transformation. [Google Gemini]

This is so much richer than efilism, nihilism, anti-natalism, and the rest of the misery lot.

This philosophy is a transhumanist, solarpunk ideal, full of infinite adventure.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cosmism
by hollerith | 2025-05-19 00:28:06+00:00
I prefer taxes on purchases whose main use is status competition (e.g., a yacht, a dress or a pair of shoes that costs more than $1000) over other kinds of taxes, and I suspect that vanity license plates are mainly purchased for their effects on status (and a full 100% of the purchase price goes to the taxing authority, which is nice).
by ggm | 2025-05-19 00:28:29+00:00
Anyone looking nonplussed at this, may not know that Kipling co-invented a ritual for induction of Canadian engineers, a ceremony to mark the birth of their career and their role in society.

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

And this poem is part of it.

I tend to stop at "Kim" but my mother was rather fond of "Stalkey & Co" and "Puck of Pooks hill"
Ask HN: How to implement a national "do not email" list
by tonymet | 2025-05-19 00:28:36+00:00
Follow-up marketing emails have become obnoxious. Every point of sale (especially brick and mortar) sends a marketing follow up, and it’s not clear how to opt out during the transaction.

Restaurants, bars, parking apps, ticketing apps , first parties, third parties are all “spamming” with promos, surveys.

Since cash is not an option, a single night on the town results in 6-12 emails the following day.

Since no one is addressing the network affects, nor tracking the violations to the CAN-SPAM act

my question for HN community is:

How would you create a national do-not-email list to opt out of automatic marketing enrollment during the point of sale.