MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mike_hearn | 2025-06-23 18:04:13+00:00
> you have evidence that Fauci knew distance played no role in infection rates, or that a distance other than 6 feet was better, and put out information suggesting 6 feet was correct anyway.

There are three options:

1. Fauci knew the correct answer to some degree of accuracy and picked a rounded off version.

2. He didn't know the correct answer but thought he did.

3. Fauci didn't know the correct answer, was aware he didn't know, and he made one up in order to sound knowledgeable.

You're arguing what happened is (1). What actually happened is (3), which we know because he admitted it.

Social distancing had no effect, and this was known early on. There is no known distance curve that correctly models SARS-CoV-2 transmission in the real world, largely because it spreads via aerosol clouds as well as droplets. The data for this was available nearly from the start because:

1. SARS-1 acted this way, as do other coronaviruses. Outbreaks of SARS-1 could be found spreading between apartment buildings on the wind.

2. The outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship showed cases appearing all over the vessel at random, even though everyone was confined to quarters. There was no physical contact in that case and it made no difference whatsoever.

Social distancing had no visible effect anywhere it was tried. What did work was high quality air cleaning equipment, as found on planes - places that remained remarkably infection free despite everyone being much closer than 6ft together.
by midtake | 2025-06-23 18:04:27+00:00
I use my terminal too, but VSCode runs fast enough for me. Maybe it's because I'm a mid 30s year old boomer now, but I figure if it's caching symbol tables then the lag isn't the end of the world.

But for whatever reason, I'd rather vimdiff when I have to resolve conflicts on rebase.

What I really hate about VSCode currently is how huge pylance is though, and how it's all up in my grill when I am trying to manually code.
by opan | 2025-06-23 18:04:36+00:00
I'm mostly seeing this sentiment from people who have little to no experience using Wayland. I've been using Sway as my primary environment for 5+ years now and it's been working great. What are the actual specific features that you believe are missing? Copy/pasting works, screenshots work, video recording works, screensharing works, before you try to parrot some ancient stuff. Post-Sway Wayland (even if you don't use Sway itself) is really a whole different beast. Drew and emersion and co. really sped things up and a lot of new compositors have sprung up since then with similarly good or better support for things. Splitting out wl-roots from Sway so that other compositors didn't need to build as much from scratch probably helped, but some compositors are still doing their own thing successfully enough. Hyprland seems to be pretty popular these days. Even Pewdiepie is using it, last I heard. They even added a tearing protocol for people who think they need to have tearing to get just a bit more performance out of their games and such. On the note of games, the Steam Deck's Game Mode uses Valve's Wayland compositor, Gamescope, and has been greatly successful as well. Some people are even running Gamescope on top of other environments on desktops because of how well games work in it.

The only thing I've heard isn't working in the last year or two is stuff related to accessibility for blind users. Screen readers and related software aren't working as well as they should yet. I don't mean to dismiss that as unserious, by the way, though I would wager that the vast majority of people don't use/need those features and should've been fine to switch over years ago. I hope accessibility improves ASAP as well for those that need it (and sorry if you're one of those people).
by mikestew | 2025-06-23 18:04:59+00:00
I presume in Alaska's case, at least, it's a funding technicality. As you said, the roads are not built to interstate standards (with a few exceptions around Fairbanks and Anchorage, maybe). For example, without prior knowledge, no one is going to guess that the AlCan is an interstate, as there aren't even any signs indicating such.
by dekhn | 2025-06-23 18:05:21+00:00
I really like the Rubin because I think a lot of people focus too much on "deep" seeing (IE, looking at individual or several objects with very high magnification only once). The Rubin does much more "wide" seeing and this actually produces a ton of useful data- basically, enough data to collect reliable statistics about things. This helps refine cosmological models in ways that smaller individual observations cannot.

What's amazing to me is just how long it took to get to first photo- I was working on the design of the LSST scope well over 10 years ago, and the project had been underway for some time before that. It's hard to keep attention on projects for that long when a company can IPO and make billions in just a few years.
by Pxtl | 2025-06-23 18:06:01+00:00
That's my core complaint about git's history-destroying behavior. Git wants you to make a clean history, but it also has awful behavior when you modify history that you've started collaborating with people upon.

It is a fundamental flaw. Either git needs to work better at using the history in all of its warty and real glory (for example offering a separate mutable presentation-layer commit-log in front of the immutable data-layer commit-log), or needs to provide better automation and mapping concepts that allow you handle incoming code that has a different history from the current branch.
by toast0 | 2025-06-23 18:06:32+00:00
The writing was on the wall for this before RFK Jr got installed. He may or may not be putting it over the finish line, but things were moving in that direction anyway. In 2023, California passed a law banning some additives effective 2027 [1].

In 2016, Mars pledged to remove artificial dyes from their products by 2021 [2]; they didn't do it [3], but they pledged to.

[1] https://text.npr.org/2023/10/10/1204839281/california-ban-fo...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20190902043853/https://www.mars....

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20210204131124/https://www.cspin...
by zozbot234 | 2025-06-23 18:06:56+00:00
Not seeing the point of this, all that much. I'd rather run something like Mobian or pmOS (given the tiny, mobile-like screen on most of these devices) once the hardware support on mainline kernel is up to proper standards. A lightweight environment like sxmo would probably work quite well with the custom HID controls. And it would open up this whole emerging class of low-cost devices for doing a whole lot more than just the emulator-based "gaming" that they're used for out-of-the-box.

(Not all of them are low-cost, either; there's plenty of high-end handhelds with physical buttons and analog controls these days, that could probably be usefully repurposed for productive work.)
by jynelson | 2025-06-23 18:08:04+00:00
yeah, i got the original regex from tmux-copycat. but a) that regex doesn't handle `:` and b) copycat builds its own "viewer" abstraction on top of saving and restoring the pane state, which means that you can only have one action per search. my thing allows you to use normal tmux configuration syntax to bind actions to the files that are highlighted, because it reuses tmux's built-in search. note how all these plugins are either only supporting copy/paste or building their own "modes" on top, because tmux gives you very little control over highlights unless you use the built-in search.
Show HN: I made an open-source alternative of computer-use for windows
by jeomon27 | 2025-06-23 18:08:54+00:00
Hi HN,

I made Windows-Use, an open-source tool that lets (all LangChain-supported) LLMs execute tasks directly on the Windows desktop using tool calling.

It allows you to build AI agents that can interact directly with GUI elements in Windows apps using natural language. Basically, it acts like a layer between the Windows OS and the AI, making desktop automation much simpler. It uses the coordinates of interactive elements to perform actions, so you don’t have to write a separate script for every task.

The goal was to take care of the hard parts, so others don’t have to:

- Accessing the accessibility tree and preprocessing it to make it LLM-friendly (interactive elements + screenshot).

- Providing solid tools to interact with the desktop (clicking, typing, etc.).

- Creating a reusable agent setup.

I built the first version last September. It only took 2 days to get something working, but improving the speed took much longer. I had to do a lot of experiments and dive deep into how the Windows accessibility tree works. Initially, grounding took around 20 seconds… then, 3 days later, Anthropic released their "computer-use"

Since then, I’ve been steadily improving it; now the grounding time is down to 1.7 seconds, and the toolset has improved a lot.

The vision: Just prompt the agent, and it does the task; no need to worry about how. I call it “vibe automation.”

Demos I’ve made:

- Generate Word docs on any topic: searches the web, writes the content, opens Word, and saves it.

- Book flights on Google Flights using a browser.

- Navigate files in Explorer and open a specific file (e.g., "Open this file in D:\ drive").

- Change the desktop theme from dark to light, like a user would do manually.

You can install it on Windows using:

pip install windows-use

Try it out and let me know how it works for you!

I'm Jeomon George
by js2 | 2025-06-23 18:09:45+00:00
The amp is a Luxman SQ-505X:

https://www.hifido.co.jp/sold/10-50554-58488-00.html?LNG=E

https://hifi-wiki.com/index.php/Luxman_SQ_505X

There's a pair of bookshelf speakers above the Luxman that are probably what it's driving. Very generic looking, those speakers could be almost anything. Maybe Tannoy Revolution R1 based on what appears to be an oval badge below the grill cloth?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/177053328835

The two speakers on their side are subwoofers, likely with JBL drivers, possibly in DIY cabinets. The Luxman can't possibly be driving them (not nearly enough power). The subs may not be functional and the cabinets are just being used as a table?

Here's a similar DIY subwoofer cabinet and drivers for sale:

https://www.hifido.co.jp/sold/16-05245-90998-00.html?LNG=E
by 9rx | 2025-06-23 18:09:48+00:00
> Are (open) islands of humans communicating over the internet possible?

If there is a desirable quality about open islands of humans, sure. Of course. Whatever that desirable quality is will allow recognizing what and what isn't human.

But I suspect there isn't a desirable quality to be found there. In fact, before the "Facebook age" came along, the idea of humans on the internet was more or less considered to be a scourge. HN itself is a product of that era, removing all semblance of whatever humanity there might be hidden in the implementation details. The Internet was seemingly born to be a completely different world, void of humans, only software.
by jasonthorsness | 2025-06-23 18:09:59+00:00
I have a friend at a startup for "autonomous agents for science" and they have seen enough to also think this will be a big deal. It will be interesting to see whether or not there's a bunch of low-hanging fruit of insights to be gained from combining existing literature in a way that AI is able to do at scale (compared to human scientists who have only so much time/ability to read papers).
by timr | 2025-06-23 18:10:22+00:00
As a chemist, I can tell you that nearly everything you can think of -- "natural" or otherwise -- has been correlated to some negative outcome, in some organism, by some (usually crappy) study. These get laundered and blurred into "linked to negative health effects", by the lay press, which is widely repeated by people who don't know what they're talking about. P-hacking virtually guarantees that this will be the case, as long as someone, somewhere has the incentive to publish.

If you apply the "precautionary principle" this broadly, there's nothing left. It's basically the same reason that everything is labeled as "linked to cancer" by CA prop 65 (e.g. coffee, or...trees [1]).

[1] https://x.com/RhonaA_PhD/status/1056921307634380800
by dijit | 2025-06-23 18:10:42+00:00
OTR, for IRC/XMPP, PGP for Email and Olm/Megolm provided by Element for Matrix operators.

Essentially the software creating the keys is not controlled by the same entity controlling the transmission method.

In email/matrix you have an additional protection in that you can host your own server; the best protection is the one you never have the possibility of traffic being diverted, and even if it was it would be encrypted so that the server doesn’t leak anyway, security is like an onion after all.
by jynelson | 2025-06-23 18:11:13+00:00
glad you've enjoyed it :) i was trying to find something that was clear while still being easy to skim.

> You mentioned the arcane keyboard shortcuts of tmux.

oh, i've remapped almost all the shortcuts in tmux. `ctrl-k` is not the default prefix and `h` is not the default key for "select pane left".

i haven't tried byobu but from skimming the readme i expect it not to have a ton other than nicer default key bindings, and i'd rather not add more layers to my terminal.
by kadoban | 2025-06-23 18:11:20+00:00
Closer to home you can get similar things when you grind metals for instance. The sparks are at extremely high temperatures, but won't typically start fires or cause burns (it depends) because they're just too small to impart much actual energy to anything they touch.

You only get fire risks when the things they touch are themselves tiny (like dust), so they're unable to absorb and spread the heat.

A similar thing happens when you bake with tinfoil. The foil will be at like 350 F, but you can still touch it basically immediately if you're willing to gamble that nothing with thermal mass is stuck to it where you can't see. It just doesn't have enough thermal mass on its own to burn you, but if there's a good-sized glob of cheese or water or something on the other side you can really be in for a nasty surprise.
by adolph | 2025-06-23 18:11:41+00:00
The AUMF was an addition to WP so Iran's lack of support for AQ doesn't limit normal WP operations. Additionally sectarian concerns are more malleable than presented. As an example review Iran's long-standing support for Hamas which is Sunni-affiliated.

—Consistent with section 8(a)(1) of the War Powers Resolution, the Congress declares that this section is intended to constitute specific statutory authorization within the meaning of section 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution.
by grep_name | 2025-06-23 18:11:42+00:00
> TikTok, IG Reels, and YouTube don't depend on a social graph at all

The entire premise of these platforms is how many followers / subscribers you have. This controls how you interact with the algorithm and whether you get promoted, etc. They have incredibly complex and nuanced social graphs that govern everything that happens on those sites.

> No that's the intellectual trap that allows you to use different standards to judge the two types of social networks

Disagee. Meta-discussion of users at the platform scale, UIs that are so algorithmically tailored that I often can't find the same information as another user even if I wanted, and re-enforcement loops designed to alter the website to maximize engagement over all else are among the things that make these sites distinct. You're being obtuse because you have a foregone conclusion you want to reach. The social problems I'm discussing are unique to those platforms.

> Bots, astroturfers, growth hackers, zealots who spread exaggerated or fake information to further their cause, conspiracy ideation reinforced by the network, etc. To classify these networks separately is to be blind to how similar they all are.

The problems you listed here are possible by definition on every website that exists. None of these problems are what make a website social media or not. Hell, those problems exist in traditional broadcast media.
by im3w1l | 2025-06-23 18:12:24+00:00
Okay this may sound silly but what about a solar powered ac for cooling? Like solar radiation is 6000K right, so if you used that to pump your waste heat into say a 1000K radiator (aimed away from the sun obviously) I'm thinking it might give you plenty of negentropy but also radiate away heat at a decent pace.
by simonw | 2025-06-23 18:12:43+00:00
I built a Claude Project with special instructions just teaching it how to do this, which means it can output full scripts for me with inline dependencies based on a single prompt: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/19/one-shot-python-tools/

Claude 4's training cutoff date is March 2025 though, I just checked and it turns out Claude Sonnet 4 can do this without needing any extra instructions:

Python script using uv and inline script dependecies where I can give it a URL and it scrapes it with httpx and beautifulsoup and returns a CSV of all links on the page - their URLs and their link text

Here's the output, it did the right thing with regards to those dependencies: https://claude.ai/share/57d5c886-d5d3-4a9b-901f-27a3667a8581
by clcaev | 2025-06-23 18:12:54+00:00
> We already have a “default deny” system in place.

GRAS (Generally Regarded As Safe) defies this reasonable expectation.

https://www.fda.gov/food/food-ingredients-packaging/generall...

GRAS approvals include some rather novel food additives. Here is a list of recent notifications.

https://www.fda.gov/food/gras-notice-inventory/recently-publ...
by CliffStoll | 2025-06-23 18:13:23+00:00
Yep, I'm the same guy. Almost 40 years ago, I chased down those German hackers in my unix boxes; not knowing a thing about writing, I wrote Cuckoo's Egg. (a long story there - how to write a book)

Since then, I've lowered my periscope: my wife, Pat, and I decided to stay home together and raise two kids. They're now fledged - hooray! During that time, I started this micro-business of making Klein bottles - much fun!

Alas, but this past December, my wife left this vale of toil and tears. During the day, staying busy helps keep the grief under control; other times I'm in deep sadness, trying to find my way without her.

To all my friends & acquaintances on HN: my deep thanks for your kindness & support across decades. It's a joy to be considered a member of the tribe.
by colechristensen | 2025-06-23 18:13:37+00:00
Anaconda isn't free. I don't want to pay per-seat fees for slightly improved versions of open source tools which is why I'm very skeptical of Astral and uv.

One day they're going to tell me I have to pay $10/month per user and add a bunch of features I really don't need just because nobody wants to prioritize the speed of pip.

And most of that fee isn't going to go towards engineers maintaining "pip but faster", it's going to fund a bunch of engineers building new things I probably don't want to use, but once you have a company and paying subscribers, you have to have developers actively doing things to justify the cost.
by alephnerd | 2025-06-23 18:13:47+00:00
MS products allow you to store data locally without any egress, so an IT team has access to it.

This is the sticking point, because WhatsApp has now integrated Meta AI into the app, but (obviously) do not provide an on-prem data store. This is why Deepseek AI (the Deepseek app) and ChatGPT (the OpenAI app) are barred as well.

Data Stewardship and Zero Trust has been an internal initiative in the House for a couple years now.

The fact that almost no one on this thead knows these (imo overused) terms and design patterns highlights one of the various major gaps in Software Dev I've been observing for several years now - especially the North American market (given the hours that this was posted). The inability to incorporate or understand some basic security architectures is a major gap.

Edit: Keep pushing the downvotes. The truth hurts, and plays a role in jobs leaving, and funds like my employer funding cybersecurity startups in Israel, India, and Eastern Europe because the ecosystem doesn't exist in the US anymore. A similar trend happened in data layer related work.

We don't need more SKLearn plumbers calling themselves "ML Engineers" or Angular monkeys calling themselves "Fullstack Engineers" - we need people who truly understand fundamentals (or - shudders - first principles), be they mathematical (optimization), systems (virtualization), or algorithms (efficient data structures)
by simonw | 2025-06-23 18:14:28+00:00
Here's a loose answer to that question from uv founder Charlie Marsh last September: https://hachyderm.io/@charliermarsh/113103564055291456

I don't want to charge people money to use our tools, and I don't want to create an incentive structure whereby our open source offerings are competing with any commercial offerings (which is what you see with a lost of hosted-open-source-SaaS business models).

What I want to do is build software that vertically integrates with our open source tools, and sell that software to companies that are already using Ruff, uv, etc. Alternatives to things that companies already pay for today.

An example of what this might look like (we may not do this, but it's helpful to have a concrete example of the strategy) would be something like an enterprise-focused private package registry. A lot of big companies use uv. We spend time talking to them. They all spend money on private package registries, and have issues with them. We could build a private registry that integrates well with uv, and sell it to those companies. [...]

But the core of what I want to do is this: build great tools, hopefully people like them, hopefully they grow, hopefully companies adopt them; then sell software to those companies that represents the natural next thing they need when building with Python. Hopefully we can build something better than the alternatives by playing well with our OSS, and hopefully we are the natural choice if they're already using our OSS.
by nashashmi | 2025-06-23 18:14:33+00:00
That’s a false comparison. Giving out tickets is a civil law violation. Combating crime is a different matter.

You can criminally cheat civil laws as well at which point it becomes a criminal offense. But the treatment remains mostly civil instead of criminal.

If you want more policing for criminal offenses, then officers need to be solely designated for those offenses. Right now they are bogged down with civil matters.