MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by joshmarinacci | 2025-06-25 16:19:34+00:00
The PNG format has chunks with types. So you can add an additional chunk with a new type and existing decoders will ignore it.

There is also some leeway for how encoding is done as long as you end up with a valid stream of bits at the end (called the bit stream format), so encoders can improve over time. This is common in video formats. I don’t know if a lossless image format would benefit much from that.
by avoutos | 2025-06-25 16:19:42+00:00
The PlasticList tests seem to have accounted for matrix effects / contamination.

They used several various reactions (w acetonitrile, PSA, MgSO4, C18) to selectively dissolve / isolate the plastic compounds. This is also assisted by certain techniques (sonication, GC-MS/MS). They also added isotopically-labeled control plastic samples. That should enable them measure matrix affects and adjust for them in the non-control sample.

It is the isotopic labels that give me the most assurance.

While the ziploc bags had pthalates, I agree that it is probably not enough to impact the results, especially considering the lab used acetonitrile on the bags to test them. There's also the hand soap. These would probably cause a difference of + 80 at most.

Overall, I'd say the tests were the best we can get with current techniques / technology.

To fully assess the health impact of ingested plastics, we have to establish the underlying mechanism (e.g. bioaccumulation + endocrine activity) as well as the pattern of health consequences in real-world data.

The first part is easier and I believe has been demonstrated (especially regarding endocrine activity) fairly well.

The latter is notoriously difficult; it is probably better approached with animal studies as human association studies are too unreliable and would take too long to tease out effects.

Dosage is also an important factor and often makes poison-in-principle not poison-in-practice, though low-dosages over a long period of time may still have an effect that is not immediately noticeable. Bioaccumulation is also related to this.

As for the "plastic spoon" claim, it originated from this study -- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12003191 -- in Nature.

The study you list is specific to analysis of human blood, whereas the original was done on human brain tissue. The original study cites other papers that have demonstrated the accumulation of plastics in other organ tissues using different techniques so I wouldn't discount plastics research because of the potential flaws of one method. Plus the fact that in the original study, the level of plastics increased by 50% between those who died in 2016 vs 2024 and increased further in those with dementia suggests that there is a real relationship here and something to be concerned about.

There are many other studies that establish a negative health relationship here. I don't think we should discount them.
by bitwize | 2025-06-25 16:19:56+00:00
Math is a grind. Inherently. You gotta drill the basic arithmetic in order to learn it, and no amount of sugarcoating will make kids like it. So incentivizing kids to commit to the grind will beat attempting to make the subject more interesting, every time. This is the lesson unlearned by proponents of "New Math" and "Common Core" in the USA; in fact, maybe one of the reasons why Singapore Math is so successful is because Singaporeans, like many Asians, learn the value of discipline from an early age.
by freejazz | 2025-06-25 16:20:16+00:00
If you want to pretend to not understand the difference between the different branches of gov't that's fine. I'm sure there is a childrens' playground where you can have a similar level of nuanced discussion, as to your liking.

> government order

They aren't called "government orders" they are called "court orders".

Give me a break with this nonsense alreayd.
by rob | 2025-06-25 16:20:40+00:00
For anybody trying to do this in bulk, instead of using OpenAI's whisper via their API, you can also use Groq [0] which is much cheaper:

[0] https://groq.com/pricing/

Groq is ~$0.02/hr with distil-large-v3, or ~$0.04/hr with whisper-large-v3-turbo. I believe OpenAI comes out to like ~$0.36/hr.

We do this internally with our tool that automatically transcribes local government council meetings right when they get uploaded to YouTube. It uses Groq by default, but I also added support for Replicate and Deepgram as backups because sometimes Groq errors out.
by loughnane | 2025-06-25 16:20:49+00:00
I agree with the principle that you should tell the user what matters, but theres a tension between that and making it too long.

Every word is an opportunity for the reader to stop reading. Once they get a sense you're droning on, they'll stop.

To take the first example the author says needs fixing:

Added “duplicate” button to the event menu.

I think a better fix than the one in the article is:

Create events 10x faster When you create a new event, first you copy/paste text from another event. This is slow, so we built added a "duplicate" button, You can find it in Options > Duplicate.

```

For reference here's the one from the article:

Use “Duplicate” to create events 10x faster When you create a new event, chances are that the first thing you do is copy/paste information from an existing event. Creating events this way is tedious and slow, so we’re sparing you this toil with the new Duplicate feature. When you need to create a new event based on an existing event, go to the existing event, and select Options > Duplicate. Duplicating events is 10 times faster than copy/pasting fields.
by a4isms | 2025-06-25 16:20:58+00:00
For those fascinated with Mondrian and/or De Stijl, I strongly recommend the book “Inside out Victory Boogie Woogie: A Material History of Mondrian's Masterpiece,” which is mentioned in TFA. As a lifelong fan, I found the detailed analysis of Mondrian’s unfinished masterpiece riveting.

https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789089643735/inside-out-victory-...
by incomingpain | 2025-06-25 16:21:07+00:00
This is super odd. This morning I was testing out deep-research on local llm and 1 of my test questions was about nicotine.

It found this source: https://today.duke.edu/2001/08/mm_medicaluses.html

2001 study finding benefits for parkinsons and alzheimers.

Obvioisly they are suggesting patches or whatever, not smoking.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-06-25 16:21:11+00:00
I would hazard a guess that it’s more of a “devs only test against Chromium” problem than it is a Firefox problem. It’s a problem seen under WebKit-based browsers at times, too. Gecko and WebKit often behave differently and have different performance characteristics than Chromium/Blink does, but that’s often not accounted for at all. The extent of QA on non-Chromium browsers too often stops at “it technically runs”.
by jabroni_salad | 2025-06-25 16:21:46+00:00
I do think social desperation is real and does a number on some people. There are people out there in the world who will enter fairy tale love story mode if the right sequence of words reaches them as if they were some kind of self destructive sleeper agent.

A lot of these people lived decent rational lives and should know better. They are college educated and had good careers and large retirement accounts and made all the right financial decisions to lead a good life. But then some stranger pretends to misdial your number and reads a script about how they feel like they really connected with you. You get 'activated' and enter an irrational universe where you can be convinced to send your money away and keep the relationship a secret from everyone you know and lie to your bank about why you are withdrawing anything and who knows what else.

I like to think I am immune to this but who knows what I will be in 30 years. I make a living by being distrusting (security) and got activated as a good boglehead at a really young age. Or maybe the stupid-juice will suffuse my brain at age 70 and I'll give it all away to a cute AI voice that robodials me after decades of not answering any call that isn't already in my contacts, and everybody who knows me will be mystified as to why, including myself.
by ipsum2 | 2025-06-25 16:21:46+00:00
If you use this, all of your code data will be sent to Google. From their terms:

https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/resources/p...

When you use Gemini Code Assist for individuals, Google collects your prompts, related code, generated output, code edits, related feature usage information, and your feedback to provide, improve, and develop Google products and services and machine learning technologies.

To help with quality and improve our products (such as generative machine-learning models), human reviewers may read, annotate, and process the data collected above. We take steps to protect your privacy as part of this process. This includes disconnecting the data from your Google Account before reviewers see or annotate it, and storing those disconnected copies for up to 18 months. Please don't submit confidential information or any data you wouldn't want a reviewer to see or Google to use to improve our products, services, and machine-learning technologies.
by TheCraiggers | 2025-06-25 16:21:56+00:00
Maybe not? We already have a variety of metals in our bodies, and cells already interact with them as needed and filtering them if not. (I'm obviously being very generic here. Heavy metals are an obvious exception to this.)

Meanwhile, biology has no idea what plastic is and it seems like our bodies have a hard time filtering it out.

Sorry if you were joking and I missed it.
by ectospheno | 2025-06-25 16:22:30+00:00
When I was a child in the 1980’s I was blissfully unaware that many adults around me were convinced the world was about to end. I went to school, came home to read and ride my bicycle, then went to bed. I didn’t really care the news existed or bother trying to consume it.

After reaching adulthood I wondered why the situation was now different. Why did I read so much of it? Why did I care? Was the news I was reading important or was this just a thing adults did and bandwagons are fun?

It took me a bit to realize the economics at play. The valuable part of the news transaction isn’t the news. Properly reported news is the relaying of factual data. The portion of our transaction that has value is my time.

I as a consumer have a fixed amount of time in the day to be presented with things I’m supposed to pay dollars to consume. “Cheap” news outfits dispense with the pretense and load me up with ads. “Reputable” news outfits can’t do that so they are forced to make the news itself be the thing I pay for.

But the news sites that want the most money have the longest time to publication and are selling editorials rather than facts.

What sane person pays for that with money, much less their time?
by jart | 2025-06-25 16:22:43+00:00
Mozilla and Google provide an alternative called gemmafile which gives you an airgapped version of Gemini (which Google calls Gemma) that runs locally in a single file without any dependencies. https://huggingface.co/jartine/gemma-2-27b-it-llamafile It's been deployed into production by 32% of organizations: https://www.wiz.io/reports/the-state-of-ai-in-the-cloud-2025
by alephnerd | 2025-06-25 16:23:13+00:00
> my experience with tech in NY/DC has generally been that it's dominated by an extremely risk-averse group of the silver-spoon class on one side and get rich quick schemers on the other

I'd agree to a certain extent with regards to the East Coast tech scene. It definetly feels much more immature than what you would see out West (Seattle and Austin have startup scenes similar in operational mindset to the Bay Area/SV scene).
by IlikeKitties | 2025-06-25 16:23:13+00:00
This is a misunderstanding. It's just that Google Pixel are the only devices that have this level of hardware security engineering AND are open to thirdparty roms like grapheneos to a decent degree.

Samsung Flagships and Iphones seem to have similar level of security engineering in them (Pixels use Samsung CPUs essentially) but aren't open to the required degree for third party roms.

There's nothing else on the Market that delivers on that Level. The GrapheneOS guys are working with someone one a potential custom phone to get the required level of hardware security but nothing has materialized. Companies like Fairphone are free to deliver hardware that is competitive in the security space and i'm sure that the grapheneos team will consider them then. But until anyone else does i'll keep buying whatever phone grapheneos wants me to buy, i don't care.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-06-25 16:23:54+00:00
Try to find a way to try various facial interfaces and head strap arrangements. The stock ones can be uncomfortable for longer-term usage on many people's faces. I don't find this to be much of an issue while playing games (I use Ace, the competition pistol shooting simulator), but it gets to me when viewing movies or reading text/code. Also, extended batteries mean you can't easily rest your head in a chair.
by toast0 | 2025-06-25 16:23:58+00:00
> For a long time I wondered who would use hotpatching

As someone who used a lot of hotpatching and now can't...

This isn't aimed at production, but ... Hotpatching is essential to update code without losing program state. A lot of people work in http request/response stuff and program state lasts the duration of the request/response; you don't usually need hotpatching for that unless your responses are very long --- there's lots of ways to swap in new code where requests after some time hit the new code and requests that started in old code finish and that's usually what you want.

If you've got something with long requests and you might want to change things during the request, hot patching is needed. If you've got something with long running connections or some other elaborate session, hot patching eliminates a lot of disconnect/reconnect session movement and lets you get everything running on the new version with a lot less hassle; as long as you accept the hassles of hot patching.
by bigyabai | 2025-06-25 16:24:02+00:00
I don't use Bluesky at all, but the author's point stands. The politicization of social media is making people realize the inherent liberal bias of the internet. An average day reading X is like following Fox News retractions in-media-res, it's starting to look like you can't take the public opinion for granted without looking like Simple Jack.

Personally I think Bluesky is headed for the toilet in much the same way X is. Both are neo-reactionary platforms with no appeal to people with interests outside the hilariously pitiful American political zeitgeist.
by TechDebtDevin | 2025-06-25 16:24:02+00:00
Yeah but this collapses under any real complexity and there is likely an extreme amount of redundant code and would probably be twice as memory efficient if you just wrote it yourself.

Im actually interested to see if we see a rise in demand for DRAM that is greater than usual because more software is vibe coded than being not, or some form of vibe coding.
by Larrikin | 2025-06-25 16:24:05+00:00
The default mind set for a normal person should be there is no reason for them to waste their time to improve a closed source data set for a for profit company. You can break this mind set if you truly care about the product and they are small enough to matter, like a local restaurant or single dev software, but we should not be contributing our time to helping Amazon weed out the complete crap USB cords from the only kinda crap USB cords. Professional organizations like consumer report and America's Test Kitchen can do it at scale and smaller reviewers (who refuse free products) can handle more niche things in the interim.

But I believe open data sets will become as important as open source for the future. Filtering out the spam, fakes and slop will be similar work to what AdBlock filter people do today.
by gavinray | 2025-06-25 16:24:46+00:00
I own two AR devices:

- Viture Pro XR glasses

- Vuzix Z100 glasses (through Mentra)

The Viture's I use as a lightweight alternative to VR headsets like the Meta Quest. I lay down on the couch/in bed and watch videos while wearing them.

The Vuzix are meant to be daily-wear glasses with a HUD, have yet to break them in.

Later this year, Google/Samsung are due big AR releases, so is Meta I think as well.

It'll be the debut of Android XR.
by miloignis | 2025-06-25 16:24:47+00:00
That's frustrating, I'm sorry! I don't experience anything like that, and I have over a thousand tabs open in Firefox on NixOS.

Based on https://frame.work/linux Ubuntu 24.04 is the minimum supported version for the older AMD F13's, so I'd suggest updating and then reaching out to Framework if the problem persists on a supported distro.
by n1b0m | 2025-06-25 16:25:02+00:00
While there is a kernel of economic truth in your comment (government spending stimulates activity), the logic breaks down by assuming:

- All spending is equally productive

- All tax comes back efficiently

- Big contractors = better fiscal outcomes

In reality, value-for-money, fiscal responsibility, and economic multipliers are more nuanced. More spending doesn't necessarily mean better outcomes; how it's spent matters enormously.
by echelon | 2025-06-25 16:25:50+00:00
> I wonder if there's a way to automatically detect how "fast" a person talks in an audio file.

Stupid heuristic: take a segment of video, transcribe text, count number of words per utterance duration. If you need speaker diarization, handle speaker utterance durations independently. You can further slice, such as syllable count, etc.
by whatshisface | 2025-06-25 16:25:59+00:00
Realistically speaking I don't see how we would get credible evidence that there would not be a permanent war, not when so many people have been trying to create one for so long. Who would be able to promise that?

I can't give you a prediction with timing either, because Israel would have to claim that Iran had rebuilt its facilities for the US to get pulled back in again, and an outsider has no way of telling when they would choose to do that.
by coolKid721 | 2025-06-25 16:27:13+00:00
ai power users will drop shit immediately, yes they probably have long term contracts with companies but anyone seriously engaged has switched to claude code now (probably including many devs AT openai/google/etc.)

If you don't think claude code is just miles ahead of other things you haven't been using it (or well)

I am certain they keep metrics on those "power users" (especially since they probably work there) and when everyone drops what they were using and moves to a specific tool that is something they should be careful of.
by gmueckl | 2025-06-25 16:27:46+00:00
In mynunderstanding, the actual image data encoding isn't altered in this update. It only introduces an extended color space definition for the encoded data.

PNG is a highly structured file format internally. It borrows design ideas from formats like EA's Interchange File Format in that it contains lists of chunks with fixed headers encoding chunk type amd length. Decoders are expected to parse them and ignore chunk types they do not support.
by throwawayq3423 | 2025-06-25 16:27:54+00:00
Another example:

> https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14842359/Norwegian-...

> It comes after an Australian writer claimed he was turned away from the US border after being grilled on his views on the Gaza conflict and articles he wrote about pro-Palestinian protests.

> Alistair Kitchen, 33, boarded a flight from Melbourne to New York to visit friends on June 12 when he was pulled to one side by a Customs and Border Protection officer during a layover in Los Angeles.

> He was detained for 12 hours at Los Angeles International Airport before being put on a flight back to Melbourne.

> Mr Kitchen claimed a customs officer told him he was being detained because of his views on the pro-Palestinian rallies that took place on campus at the New York university last year.

> 'I was interrogated about my beliefs on the crisis in Gaza. I told him what I believe: that the war is a tragedy in which all parties have blood on their hands, but which can and must come to an immediate end,' he wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald.

Was this drugs too? Or maybe he did something else DHS can blame instead of owning their behavior?

So again, how many times does this government have to police thought before you admit that is what they are doing, and how does that not directly conflict with your free speech ideology?
by potato3732842 | 2025-06-25 16:28:19+00:00
The people who see the rest of their career being in agriculture will be very happy with the move. It's much easier to parlay your job studying agriculture into a job for someone who makes equipment for or an academic institution or trade group dealing in agriculture when you're in the same economic region. Moving isn't the end of the world to most of them because most of them knew it was in their future at some point.

The people who will get the shaft here are the career bureaucrats who see themselves jumping to another agency as they can either make that way harder for themselves by moving or quit because they are already located in the best place for their intended career track.

Given the choice I know exactly who I'd rather have staffing the agency.

Replace USDA with 18F or (pre Doge) USDS and the insanity of your agreement is laid bare for even the most uncritical reader to identify. Of course such agencies would be better off (from a hiring perspective) in SF or some other tech city than they would in DC (of course their customers are in DC so that kind of complicates things).
by bigyabai | 2025-06-25 16:28:24+00:00
I don't see how that would help, and in a lot of ways I feel like PopOS is an example of how phyrric the effort is. They're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to support a distro that most users will probably replace with something else. Really all they have to do is ship a Debian/Fedora image as default and test the hardware config before shipping it so people have a level of QC to depend on. Building and maintaining an OS from scratch is a baby+bathwater solution to this, at least from where I'm standing.

What kind of problems do you anticipate this would fix?
by jeremy_k | 2025-06-25 16:28:31+00:00
Working at a company that has a structure for our product announcements that falls in line with this article, everything you said resonated. It is very interesting to come to the comments and see some negative feeling towards writing that is focused on the end user. I mean I get it, HN has a heavy user base of software engineers and so there is likely bias in what a software engineer wants to read vs the typical end user. It seems there may be value in product announcement geared towards end users and a release notes geared towards developers.
by yesfitz | 2025-06-25 16:30:28+00:00
They had been!

But in 2024, Brian Niccols pitched the "Back to Starbucks" plan, with point 3 of his 4 point focus being, "Reestablishing Starbucks as the community coffeehouse."[1] He said, "Our stores will be inviting places to linger, with comfortable seating, thoughtful design and a clear distinction between “to-go” and “for-here” service."

Whether or not that's working is another story[2]. Long story short is that Scooters, Dutch Bros. and other brands are doing drive-thru better, and cafe attendance is down 22% since before the pandemic.

Consumer tastes have shifted. And given Gen Z's preference for online interaction over in-person, I'm not sure if Starbucks will be able to steer the ship.

If I were Starbucks, I'd strongly consider splitting the branding on the cafes and drive-thrus. Keep the Starbucks brand with the drive-thrus, then try opening a few new cafes as a new brand. Worst case scenario, you rebrand those cafes as Starbucks. I bet they've talked about it.

1: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/10/new-starbucks-ceo-brian-nicc... 2: https://intelligence.coffee/2025/05/back-to-starbucks-long-o...