MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nonameiguess | 2025-06-24 16:29:02+00:00
It matters in discussion forums like this involving ordinary people. There are two reasons we might care about statistics and trends like this.

One, you're a public health official or maybe even just a voter trying to weigh various policy options or assess the success of what has already been done. In this case, sure, you have to care about national averages and other measures of central tendency and ways to characterize distributions.

Two, you're an individual American trying to figure out how much you should worry about an early death. In this case, national averages or even per-culture averages seemingly mean next to nothing for you. I can't speak for all Americans, but I expect to outlive the average by quite a bit.

For gun violence, it's often travelers and visitors worried they're going to get shot if they come to the US, and we're trying to tell them that whether they really need to worry heavily depends on where they're visiting. Even if they're actually visiting Chicago or Baltimore, gunshot deaths in tourist districts are damn near unheard of, and besides which, the vast majority of people ever killed by guns at all are either killed by themselves or someone who knows them. There aren't a whole lot of random stranger attacks happening anywhere.
by mohsen1 | 2025-06-24 16:29:05+00:00
To be a genuinely good Airbnb host and offer your home at a fair price, two things are usually required:

1. A well-furnished, comfortable home — which often comes with a higher income bracket.

2. The time, energy, and motivation to handle hosting duties — managing logistics, cleaning, communication, etc.

The problem is, those two qualities rarely overlap. People with high-quality homes often have demanding careers or other priorities and don’t want the uncertainty or effort of renting to strangers — especially when guest quality can vary a lot.

That’s partly why platforms like Kindred are interesting. They focus on home exchanges, not rentals, so everyone involved is both a guest and a host. That creates better alignment in expectations and care. There’s no pricing involved, no taxes, and a built-in sense of trust — since it’s a mutual exchange.

It’s not a perfect solution, but it shifts the dynamic in a way that feels more human and less transactional.

If you’re curious, here’s a referral link with 5 free credits: https://livekindred.com?invite_code=MOH.AZI
by dakiol | 2025-06-24 16:29:27+00:00
> Perhaps you’re a user of LLMs. I get it, they’re neat tools. They’re useful for certain kinds of learning. But I might suggest resisting the temptation to use them for projects like this. Knowledge is not supposed to be fed to you on a plate

Am I the only one using LLMs as if they were a search engine? So before LLMs I was searching on Google things like "pros cons mysql mongodb". I would read the official documentation of each db, forums, blog posts, stackoverflow entries, etc. It was time consuming on the searching side. The time it took to read all the sources was fine for me (it's learning time, so that's always welcomed). Now with LLMs, I simply prompt the same with a little bit more of context "pros and cons of using mysql vs mongodb when storing photos. Link references". So, I get a quick overview of what to keep an eye on, and the references are there to avoid relying on hallucination.

It's true that sometimes I go ahead and say "give me a data schema for storing photos metadata in postgres. I wanna keep X in a different table, though" (or something like that). But I do that because I know very well what the output should look like (I just don't wanna spend time typing it, and sometimes I forget the actual type that I should use (int vs integer?)).
by veggieroll | 2025-06-24 16:29:33+00:00
Ok, do rent next.

Paying rent doesn't count towards your credit score (at least it didn't a decade ago when I was getting my mortgage). And it's a glaring signal of how the system isn't built for what it claims: evaluating your ability to pay obligations on time. No, the system is built to trap people in poverty and enrich the rentier class.
by dack | 2025-06-24 16:29:33+00:00
yeah it's crazy to think that claude 4 has only been out a month. And the previous iteration 3.7 was launched only in February!

but also I think the interesting thing is that people didn't jump on MCP immediately after it launched - it seemed to go almost unnoticed until February. Very unusual for AI tech - I guess it took time for servers to get built, clients to support the protocol, and for the protocol itself to go through a few revisions before people really understood the value.
by Melatonic | 2025-06-24 16:30:00+00:00
Textiles do make a huge amount of microplastics. This has been known for awhile.

As for dust in the home - I have not heard these are microplastics. And given how it reacts I do not think it is.

The tire thing was a more recent discovery but makes a lot of sense - tire dust cannot be good for us to inhale or be getting into our bodies via other methods.
by Delk | 2025-06-24 16:30:08+00:00
The expected effectiveness of chemo treatment would depend on several factors that could inform the choice a lot even before some kind of a specific test.

Some forms of cancer are rather susceptible to known chemotherapeutic cocktails and have such high cure rates (in some cases over 90 %) with chemo that you'd have to be suicidal not to take the treatment.

Other forms can be significantly less susceptible, and the prognosis can be rather bleak even with the most effective known treatments. I can see how one might not want to suffer intensive chemo for a minuscule chance of survival or to extend life by a few months.

Also, n=1 and I don't know how my experience compares to others or to the average, but my experience with chemo wasn't that terrible. Definitely not pleasant, and there's a chance of side effects that could even be permanent. But not terrible. I've got the impression that the treatments for associated nausea etc. have also improved over the decades, and I didn't really have a whole lot of that.
by x0x0 | 2025-06-24 16:30:11+00:00
Maybe uncharitable, but it seems like BotGhost comprehensively doesn't take security seriously. Not only were there bad vulnerabilities, but they didn't have the logging (or didn't use it) to see who was affected; didn't want to roll keys; didn't want to announce; and didn't even have their own bots use their own security features. So yeah. I'm a bit more sympathetic if Discord decided that BotGhost in particular wasn't going to be using Discord's platform any more. Because I'd guess the probability these are the last of BotGhost's serious vulnerabilities to be about 0%.

So now botghost is doing a pentest. But I dunno... my guess at the likelihood of doing a good job backfilling security into a codebase that wasn't built with that as a core concern is also low.
by labrador | 2025-06-24 16:30:12+00:00
It happens that groups invent their own rules, but I assure you, the rest of the world doesn't have a problem with a 39 year old man and a 22 year old woman. I don't know how the poeple in your bubble expect to have kids.

I’m struck by how much of this discourse functions as unintentional anti-natalism. You can’t build families in a culture where the first step (asking someone out) is treated as inherently suspect. Is the long-term plan here just to fade away politely?
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-06-24 16:30:18+00:00
I suspect the Biden DOJ miscalculated badly. They wanted to let Trump be the convicted as late in the 2024 election cycle as possible, in order to mess up the Republican campaign. (Almost a mirror image of what happened to the Democrats when Biden decided not to run.) But Trump was able to delay the process until it was too late.

If my suspicion is right, that was one of the more spectacular political miscalculations in American history. If I'm wrong... well, maybe the DOJ was investigating and stuff, but from the outside it looks like they wasted a year that they really could have used.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-06-24 16:31:11+00:00
Per the Bash `history` manpage:

int history_write_timestamps If non-zero, timestamps are written to the history file, so they can be preserved between sessions. The default value is 0, [...]

So this isn't true by default on many machines unless it is explicitly turned on.

I could find no command line history for Bash when I poked around. I use the fish shell, however, which does embed timestamp data by default - but I rarely think to look there when the detail might be pertinent. C'est la vie.
by alephnerd | 2025-06-24 16:31:29+00:00
You absolutely should do the same spatial inequality analysis in Japan and Italy as well (in fact, this is the norm in Italy's policymaking space due to the documented north-south divide). Heck, this is called out in the Nature article as well if you read TFA.

The US (330m), Japan (120m), and Italy (60m) are all large countries, and in the US and Italy's case, extremely federalized with social service delivery responsibilities falling onto subnational governments.

And for large developed countries like the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, etc their developmental indicators have largely converged at a macro-level (the difference in living standards between countries with a national HDI of 0.900, 0.920, and 0.940 are marginal), but spatial inequality continues to act as a persistent laggard.

Outliers matter. This is like statistics/EDA 101.

P.S. If you do EDA on Japan versus US from an HDI perspective, you find that the Southern Kanto region (ie. Greater Tokyo) tends to skew Japanese statistics - with a subnational HDI comparable to MA - but the rest of the subnational regions of Japan have HDIs comparable to Tennessee (0.890-0.900) or Florida (0.920-0.930).

What this highlights is that public service delivery is stronger in the Greater Tokyo region than the rest of Japan.

And this is unsurprisingly a major topic of discussion in Japanese policymaking as well, as the poorer regions have seen a massive youth flight to Tokyo.

Same with the less developed regions of the US as well.

When you do a similar spatial analysis of the US, you find the Deep South (MS, AL, AR, LA), Appalachia (WV, TN, KY), and MO continuing to lag. You also end up identifying rust belt states like MI and OH starting to lag.

The interest thing is, the Deep South and Appalachia didn't seem to lag in the early 1990s compared to the rest of the states, but remained stuck at 1990s levels while other states improved significantly in the 2000s and 2010s, and it was these states that regressed the most in the COVID years (2020-2022) [0]. My running theory is that these states were the kinds of states where low value single factory/industry towns (eg. Textiles) were most prominent, and were the worst hit by a mixture of NAFTA, China Shock, and the Great Recession.

This would also explain why GA, NC, and SC didn't see the same laggardness despite being comparable with the rest of the south in the 1990s - Atlanta, Charlotte, RTP, Greenville, and Columbia were industrialized enough in high value industries like automotive and power systems and had significant additional industries like Finance and Tech that allowed them to upskill and diversify.

[0] - https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/healthindex/USA/?levels...
by marcosdumay | 2025-06-24 16:31:32+00:00
Yeah, make the network deeper.

When all you have is a hammer... It makes a lot of sense that a transformation layer that makes the tokens more semantically relevant will help optimize the entire network after it and increase the effective size of your context window. And one of the main immediate obstacle stopping those models from being intelligent is context window size.

On the other hand, the current models already cost something on the line of the median country GDP to train, and they are nowhere close to that in value. The saying that "if brute force didn't solve your problem, you didn't apply enough force" is intended to be listened as a joke.
by Aurornis | 2025-06-24 16:31:58+00:00
> I believe that MCP is a bit over-marketed

MCP is pretty cool, but the way every AI influencer pivoted to producing MCP glorification posts at the same time has been groan-inducing. I can usually ignore the hype cycles, but I've been bombarded with so much MCP influencer content in the past few months that I feel exhausted every time I see those three letters.
by labrador | 2025-06-24 16:32:12+00:00
A lot of single women hoping to start families would be happy to have a tall, gainfully employed and hard working man take an interest in them. Your group has made rules that insure the fade out of the human race through depopulation, like Japan is experiencing.

It’s interesting that you’re in your late 30s, because you sound like the same kind of moral enforcer who publicly humiliated my son. Not protective. Performative.

You didn't ask whether the woman was harmed. You didn't ask what really happened between two people who knew each other. You rushed to frame a man who simply expressed interest as “pathetic” and “deluded.” That’s not feminism. That’s ritual purification through male scapegoating.
by naberhausj | 2025-06-24 16:32:38+00:00
Cheap, ubiquitous plastics have revolutionized every industry (tools, food, automotive, etc...). We wouldn't be able to consume anywhere close to current level without them.

Not saying that's a good thing. But giving up plastics (not just in our personal life, but across the entire supply chain we rely on) would probably be harder for the average American than giving up alcohol for a drunk.
by pikelet | 2025-06-24 16:32:47+00:00
I think that if people are trying to avoid plastics but unknowingly using them anyway due to misleading design or greenwashing then their heart is in the right place and we shouldn't sneer at them. At least they're conscious of the problems and trying to do better. Call out the companies who are doing this. Don't blame people for being confused by something designed to be as confusing as possible.
by easyThrowaway | 2025-06-24 16:33:29+00:00
...All while the Paris (or Milan? Can't remember for sure) Fashion Week was live. It was a stupidly nerve breaking job, I'm glad I'm very, very far away from it.

Shoutout to The Level Group guys (https://www.thelevelgroup.com) who kept the infra live and running during all that madness.
by whartung | 2025-06-24 16:33:30+00:00
It's a balance I find.

On the one hand, the machines can spin up these bridges over unfamiliar code chasms.

But on the other hand, you (at least I) have no investment in the code. No familiarity with it. No "skin in the game" when I can tell the AI to just redo it.

One way around that is by using the "Chat bots as search engine", and then, rather than cut and pasting stuff into your project, type it in by hand. Even if you're just straight up copying it, by typing it in you have a bit more connection to it. When I do that I can better see the unfamiliar patterns rise out of the code. It's much better for me than just reading it.

Also gives me opportunity to tweak it as I like, which can break things, which can teach me things.

Mind, I've been advocating this "type it, don't paste it" philosophy for years and years, for any code snippet found in a book or tutorial or wherever. It's just now with the bots, the code is more tuned to our exact use case, and the incentive for moving it over is less.

But I find grabbing a blob of code, pasting it into my project, and getting errors so that I can tell the bot whats wrong is not particularly satisfying.

Watching Claude figure out its own errors even less so. (It's very cool to watch, just not very joyful to me outside of "wow, that's cool".)

On the other hand, I have no problem pasting a snippet back with a "what exactly is this doing here" to get better explanations of what I'm seeing.
by eviks | 2025-06-24 16:33:36+00:00
> and when one thinks about it for a minute

... one still can't correct the fault. You haven't answered the question of the original disconnect in arguments.

Your new arguments aren't relevant either since they're also NOT connected to the original re. bad defaults. You can have bad defaults that aren't there for any good reason and still think that reducing maintenance is more valuable! Fine, but that's a different argument!
by nwah1 | 2025-06-24 16:33:47+00:00
Landlords like the idea of incorporating rent payments into credit scores, since it adds extra incentive to pay on time. Or, phrased differently, extra punishment for failing to pay on time.

Framing the current default as a help to the rentier class is just silly.

The rentier class are indeed a major cause of stagnation and inequality in our economy, but they are innocent of this one.
by mtalantikite | 2025-06-24 16:33:52+00:00
Absolutely. And whenever you bring up wanting to build cities more like NYC the discussion inevitably devolves into people clutching their cars and complaining it would be tyrannical to make people walk and take public transit. It'd be great if we had more options here, rather than everyone that wants to live in a big city piling into just NYC (which is still a small city in the global scheme of things).
by hiatus | 2025-06-24 16:33:53+00:00
> "Instead, it was a fair use because all Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies."

> Did Alsup just declare emulators as legal? Assuming you ripped the rom yourself, all you're doing is playing the game in a more convenient manor.

Wasn't this always allowed? That is, making copies of something you own for your own use so long as you aren't distributing methods of circumventing digital controls.
by falcor84 | 2025-06-24 16:34:02+00:00
The way I see this, from the explore-exploit point of view, it's pretty rational to put the vast majority of your effort into the one action that has shown itself to bring the most reward, while spending a small amount of effort exploring other ones. Then, if and when that one action is no longer as fruitful compared to the others, you switch more effort to exploring, now having obtained significant resources from that earlier exploration, to help you explore faster.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-06-24 16:34:06+00:00
Background: During the riskiest span of my life, financially, I used to have a 780+ score and an AMEX Gold (for about a decade, early 2000s); now I don't have any credit cards, my vehicles are entirely paid.

My Conclusion: Credit scores demonstrate ability to re-pay interest (i.e. lender profits); it is a score that demonstrates how profitable you might-could-be, not necessarily representative of fiscal wisdom.

Meditation: not caring about your credit worthiness is a fantastic approach to life, as long as you've already bought your house (or have alternate plans, not involving a mortgage).
by ArtTimeInvestor | 2025-06-24 16:34:33+00:00
I expect that Tesla's FSD progress will accelerate now.

They are now operating a service where Tesla themselves is responsible for every mistake the cars make. Operating in public. Having the media and the authorities breathing down their neck.

Plus they have a clear benchmark: Growing faster than Waymo.

This should motivate everybody at Tesla to work their asses off. Including Musk.
by daft_pink | 2025-06-24 16:35:12+00:00
Is having your payments reported to a credit bureau really a benefit to you to allow you to have a better credit or is it a collection activity intended to help the creditor collect?

The reason buy now pay it later is being added, is because those lenders are having trouble collecting, so they want to add it to the credit score so there is an additional consequence if they don’t get paid. It’s a collection activity, not something that’s designed to help the payor.

Adding rent is mostly a benefit to the landlord not to the poor people.
by 9rx | 2025-06-24 16:35:13+00:00
That's not what your link says:

The Java language allows source code to express Unicode characters in a UTF-16 encoding, and this is unaffected by the choice of UTF-8 for the default charset.

Perhaps you pasted the wrong one by mistake?

Not that such a change to the language for future code, even if only hypothetical, would bear any difference to this discussion anyway as legacy Java code encoded in other charsets is still Java code.
by DrillShopper | 2025-06-24 16:35:26+00:00
> You also don’t lend to a friend you will not be paid back by, will you?

I don't lend to friends and family. It's not worth losing those bonds over. I'll help financially where I can, and I'm not going to stop anyone paying me back, but I'm assuming that money is just gone.

Completely different calculus compared to credit.
by bschwarz | 2025-06-24 16:35:32+00:00
Here's a demonstration of 120 WPM on the Lalboard, the base/inspiration for Svalboard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMhOIgrdeE0

I'm currently sitting at around 90 WPM on the Svalboard - slower than I was on a normal keyboard but now pain-free.
Tell HN: Stop using "dropped" to mean "added"
by OutOfHere | 2025-06-24 16:35:36+00:00
I don't know what it is with people using the word "drop/dropped" to mean "add/added", when the latter will do fine. They don't respect the language. People think they're being cool when they're misusing the word, but they're not. Even LLMs have been picking up this bad habit.
Show HN: Adventures in UTM – Busy Beaver in under 5–10 mins
by polymetron | 2025-06-24 16:35:53+00:00
Explorations in geometric computation and dimensional math.

This demo runs Busy Beaver 5 and 6 through a CPU-only simulation using a custom logic layer (ZerothInit), written in both Python and Odin.

No GPU. No external libraries. Just raw logic and branch evaluation.

Repo: https://github.com/ElSolem/al_dara_ia/blob/main/math/busybea...

https://github.com/ElSolem/al_dara_ia/blob/main/math/busybea...

https://github.com/ElSolem/al_dara_ia/blob/main/math/busybea...
by BadCookie | 2025-06-24 16:35:58+00:00
“Difficulty accessing healthcare” brings to mind doctors and hospitals being too far away—a real concern for lots of rural Americans, especially the ones who cannot drive. Or perhaps doctors are nearby, but wait times are too long. This is also a real issue. I have seen wait times for primary care doctors creep up to 4+ months in my area.

So I just wanted to highlight that even if those problems don’t exist, you still have the scary unknown cost question that might be the largest impediment of all.
by gbacon | 2025-06-24 16:35:59+00:00
The HN crowd dislikes brick-and-mortar landlords but often sides with charging rent for certain bits. Which side will prevail?

Interesting excerpt:

> “We will have a trial on the pirated copies used to create Anthropic’s central library and the resulting damages,” Judge Alsup wrote in the decision. “That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages.”

Language of “pirated” and “theft” are from the article. If they did realize a mistake and purchased copies after the fact, why should that be insufficient?
by jfengel | 2025-06-24 16:36:13+00:00
Arguably, the last Presidential election was lost because the candidate was insufficiently anti-Israel. I heard a number of people claim that the incumbent's support for Israel during the Gaza conflict was sufficient to reject his hand-picked successor.

It's impossible to know for sure, of course. I do not trust people's claims about their reasons. If she had somehow taken a position that would attract their votes, I can't know how many votes that position would have lost.

Nonetheless... AIPAC didn't make an endorsement in the last election. I don't think that she could have taken an even-more-pro-Israel position and gotten their endorsement. So it may well be that the only path forward is to hope that the anti-Israel crowd would vote if they were pandered to.

(I'll note that I don't believe that they will. I am quite certain they will find some other reason not to vote. But options are becoming thin on the ground.)