MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SonOfLilit | 2025-06-06 13:13:40+00:00
I have extremely lucky genes and have managed to stay just within the green BMI range despite eating all the carbs and fats you can imagine and at times consuming 200-300g of milk chocolate a day.

Some of my friends are obese despite exercising heavily every day.

Finding ways you enjoy to keep an active lifestyle is a great idea, probably the highest impact thing you can do for your long term well being (for people in this community I strongly recommend trying rock climbing or martial arts, especially BJJ, both very mentally challenging sports).

However, author's recipe doesn't work for everyone, and you shouldn't feel terrible if it doesn't work for you. Also, I'm hearing amazing things about those new drugs.
by tome | 2025-06-06 13:13:46+00:00
I have the definitive answer to this question in my article “foldl traverses with State, foldr traverses with anything”

https://h2.jaguarpaw.co.uk/posts/foldl-traverses-state-foldr...

In short: use foldl’ when you’re iterating through a list with state. foldr can be used for anything else, but I recommend it for experts only. For non-experts I expect it’s easier to use for_. For more details about that see my article “Scrap your iteration combinators”.

https://h2.jaguarpaw.co.uk/posts/scrap-your-iteration-combin...
by mamonster | 2025-06-06 13:14:10+00:00
>Reduce refined carbs, unhealthy fats and alcohol from your diet. Focus on getting enough vegetables, fruits, complex carbs and healthy fats.

Alcohol is by far the biggest one(was the case for me). Used to work at a place where "lets go grab a pint or two after work" was the norm every day. A pint is like 250kcal, you do that for a month you will gain like half a kilo easy.

Liquid calories in general are the most dangerous thing because of how easy it is to ingest.
by EduardoBautista | 2025-06-06 13:14:31+00:00
I am going to be blunt here. Why is everyone using time as an excuse? In fact, it should be easier to lose weight if you are truly busy, because the only thing that will make you lose weight is eating less.

This whole idea about exercising to lose weight is unhelpful when the truth is that no amount of exercise is going to compensate for eating more calories than you have to.

And yes, you will go to bed slightly hungry for weeks or even months if you want to lose a lot of weight.
by EbNar | 2025-06-06 13:14:40+00:00
Agreed. I lost about 10 kg back to ~60 kg of the teen myself (now I'm 50). It took quite a lot of exercise but that was the easy part. The most difficult part was avoiding eating off hours apart from avoiding alcohol and sugar altogether. Now. Maintenance is surely easier.

On a side note, I keep exercising at least 2-3 hours per week and honestly I feel physically much better than I used to feel in my 30s.
by thrance | 2025-06-06 13:14:44+00:00
> As history has shown

No the hell it didn't. When has policing nazi speech ever led to authoritarianism? It's quite the contrary, let the bigoted invade public space and you end up with a fascist government, like the one currently in the US, who won't give a fuck about your free speech.

Paradox of tolerance [1]:

> If a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance; thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance.

To be clear, are you claiming that the repressive censoring in China started with good intentions and then degenerated, or that free speech absolutism guarantees the perenity of your freedom of speech? Because neither claim is true.

An authoritarian government won't care about what your constitution says. We have to take measures to stop wannabe dictators from getting power, as that is the only protection of your free speech. Why respect the free speech of nazis, who would send you to a death camp the second they're able to?

> If it is not against the law, it should be up.

Well, yeah. The question is what we set the law to be. Siegheiling in public is illegal where I live, and rightfully so if you ask me. There is always a line. The US draws it a CSAM.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
by rckt | 2025-06-06 13:14:53+00:00
The article is basically describing one's addiction to anything. It can be any habit at all. So whether it's a fat trap or any other trap the way out is always the same - willpower. And it comes from the sincere desire for something.

I spent overall around 5 years quitting smoking. It was extremely hard, for the most part because of the mental trap. Physically I got rid of the addiction in a couple of weeks. And physical exercises were the thing that helped me. I still do my routine, because it became the substitute for my smoking habit. But in a healthy way.

And from my experience this is how everything works, regarding the quality of life that you have control over.

And I agree that judging and shaming is not helpful. You need to clear your mind and concentrate on the better future you want rather than reflecting on bad things that you have in your present or past.
by Pxtl | 2025-06-06 13:15:03+00:00
I mean the most brutal solution would be that for Google Play Store certification the manufacturer must use a cryptographic challenge/response process to enable admin on the phone and run a free global hotline for the user to phone/TTY in to get their their response, circumventable by factory resetting the phone (although scammers might still be able to talk somebody through that too).

Then the staff (or a chatbot) could be trained to intervene and confirm that the caller is not getting scammed.

Phone vendors could also be licensed to use a simple web interface to do this at the shop if the buyer requests, and the vendor license would be logged so if the user gets scammed immediately after unlocking it's not anonymous who helped them get scammed.

Similar to Root, really, but mid-tier since enabling Root involves giving up some other security assertions.
by aristofun | 2025-06-06 13:15:25+00:00
> they will replace most of the work force

Never gonna happen. Next question :)

> It seems like we're openly building a dystopia

Im not sure, but there are signs that you have been sold a distorted view of the world. Probably modern media and all sorts of propagandists who prey on people’s fears have caught you on the hook.

Yes, world is not a perfect place. It has its problems, ups and downs. It was always like that.

No. It’s not getting worse and no, you can’t predict the future and long term consequences of your actions.

For example there is a strong argument to be made that if not for nuclear weapons we would currently have massive wars (because no reason to restrain yourself).

While current conflicts (as terrible as they are) are magnitudes less deadly (in relative numbers) than ever before. At least in some parts of the world.

How can you be so confident AI will not create more jobs?

I personally don’t see current LLMs being such a major disruption as steam engines etc before.

But even if it is - I know from history that eventually all economy shifts make humanity better longterm.

Even current standards of “poverty” in some regions are so high that it would look like a luxury for people 200 years ago. Imagine having cheap internet and electricity.
by timcobb | 2025-06-06 13:15:28+00:00
> but you have the choice to step out of the fat trap.

People should also talk about the volition trap. I'm 40 and it feels like I've had more than a life's worth of people talking about how "you can do it if you just try!"

> ... advertising signs that con / you into thinking you can do what's never been done / meantime life goes on all around you

The sheer scope of the obesity pandemic should make it clear that we are not the problem, that our volitions are not the problem. Certainly so many people can't be too weak to regulate one of the most basic facets of existence? How did we come all this way as a species if we are so fundamentally flawed at basic metabolic regulation? Certainly so many people shouldn't have to try so hard? Sure, some people succeed, but in world where the overwhelming majority are failing, maybe "trying harder" is just akin to insanity?
by xnx | 2025-06-06 13:15:55+00:00
You're absolutely right. Almost everything in the US is (intentionally or not) working to make and keep people fat. The most effective steps are those that make better choices easier by default. I have very weak impulse control for junk foods in the house, but much better control in the grocery store, so I try my best to keep high-calorie and low-satiation foods out of the house.
by chneu | 2025-06-06 13:16:05+00:00
Americans, and lots of folks, love excuse culture and the "victim" mindset(life happens to them, they dont have agency). It's really easy to blame someone or something else than to just be honest with themself. It's always so and so's fault, or the corporations, or the government, or the climate, or you just had a big bad day, or something.

It's rarely "This is really hard and I doubt I have it in me right now" or some other honest answer.
by andrew_lettuce | 2025-06-06 13:16:11+00:00
I don't disagree with you, but also don't think (based on what you described) that you're a great example of the environmental components. Compared to say someone who hasn't known non fat as a norm for generations and doesn't have a grocery store for miles you actually recognize the issue and problems. It sounds like you have a lot of tools and resources to overcome systemic aspects but prioritize other things. There's no doubt you brought up relevant components, but individual and environmental in your case don't seem at all mutually exclusive.
by jitl | 2025-06-06 13:16:33+00:00
Really happy to see TigerBeetle live up to its claims as verified by aphyr - because it's good to see that when you take the right approach, you get the right results.

Question about how people end up using TigerBeetle. There's presumably a lot of external systems and other databases around a TigerBeetle install for everything that isn't an Account or Transfer. What's the typical pattern for those less reliable systems to square up to TigerBeetle, especially to recover from consistency issues between the two?
by tome | 2025-06-06 13:16:53+00:00
Regarding catch, yes, I agree types help, but they can help even more! I suggest an IO-wrapper effect system (mine is called Bluefin; effectful is also a good choice). Then there is absolutely no ambiguity about where an exception can be handled. There is exactly one place -- no more, no less. It makes dealing with exceptions very easy.

https://hackage.haskell.org/package/bluefin-0.0.16.0/docs/Bl...
by 90s_dev | 2025-06-06 13:17:41+00:00
Last night I tried for maybe about 6 hours so many combinations of efforts to compile a C++, SDL3 and Lua program on Windows, with different IDEs, build systems, compilers, package managers etc. Finally I'm just giving up and using VS with CMake and vcpkg. The main problem is that there's way too many words on all those documentation pages. It would have taken 3 or 4 days to read them all, and maybe only 2 hours worth of it would have been helpful or relevant at all.
by arp242 | 2025-06-06 13:18:09+00:00
It's not so much about "time", but rather mental bandwidth. It takes effort and energy, that you may not have if you have lots of things going on.

When people say they "don't have the time" this is often what they mean.

It's like the joke from Airplaine!: "Guess I picked a bad time to quit smoking", "Guess I picked a bad time to quit drinking", "Guess I picked a bad time to quit sniffing glue", "Guess I picked a bad time to quit amphetamines", etc.
by didgeoridoo | 2025-06-06 13:18:47+00:00
I think he’s more saying that if you’re fat and you want to lose weight (and keep it off) you have to develop an obsession with food — that it requires an enormous amount of constant attention and effort, unlike the relationship with food that normal-weight people can enjoy.

This is why GLP-1s are so interesting. They suppress hunger, but more importantly they suppress “food noise” — the state of constantly thinking about food. You can separate this effect from appetite suppression due to its seemingly global (although still anecdotal) effect on ALL compulsive behavior, from drinking to smoking to shopping.
by atemerev | 2025-06-06 13:19:11+00:00
Absolutely all mental trap issues were resolved when my doctor finally approved Ozempic. Apparently, all this was caused by a tiny chemical disbalance in my neural circuits.

Snap, instant cure. No side effects. I lost 26 kg (57 pounds) in 18 months. I finally eat normally. I am no longer prediabetic. My cholesterol is now fine.

So, I constantly thank the researchers for making this wonder drug, and I hope the same success can be repeated for other disorders.

This is not a question of "discipline", or "willpower", or "mental trap". Just a physiological imbalance that can be easily resolved. For some people, staying lean is easier because they don't have this disbalance. For others, it is much harder, but this is not their fault.
by ericmay | 2025-06-06 13:19:13+00:00
> I live in a place where it is unpleasantly hot (upper 90s and humid)

Work out in the early morning or late evening?

> I hate gyms and toxic gym culture

Stop hating gyms. Stop over-analyzing "toxic gym culture". Get off social media because that's the only place this exists. Nobody in the gym cares about you or what you're doing as long as you aren't harming someone else, breaking equipment, etc.

> I have a quaint bungalow that doesn't have space for equipment

Give Crossfit Linchpin a try - they have 5 workouts/week including "no equipment" workouts.

> I live in a country that prioritizes fast, processed, sugary foods, etc

Yes but you don't have to prioritize those foods.

> I work an intense job that keeps me focused for hours at a time

This is fair. We all unfortunately have to deal with this in some fashion, but even then you can probably find 15 minutes/day to exercise in a way that you enjoy, if you want to.

> Much like fighting climate change, placing all the responsibility on the end user without changing some of the social conditions is a flawed approach

Our environments shape us. For sure. If you are surrounded by a bunch of obese people encouraging you to drink milkshakes all day and making fun of you for working out, that's going to be hard to overcome! But just like climate change, you can't control these social conditions, or at least you can't have much of an effect. But you can make a difference in your own life according to your own principles. Often times it just means being "less bad" instead of giving up.

Blaming corporations or the built environment is a convenient excuse you can use again and again and never have to overcome.
by tome | 2025-06-06 13:19:17+00:00
Can I ask which conference? Did people behave towards you in that way at that conference, or are you referring to behaviour online? I will try to use whatever authority I have in the Haskell community to improve the situation.

(Still, hopefully in this case it's clear from instig007's reply that it's not a member of the Haskell community behaving in that way.)
by admissionsguy | 2025-06-06 13:19:19+00:00
Controlled diet + controlled exercise. Freshly prepared daily full-day meals delivery + personal trainer at the gym 2x/week combo is the only thing that ever worked for me. And it worked every time (3 times) in different countries. I would get fat again in between those periods, like I am now, after staying in a rural area without those facilities.
by HideousKojima | 2025-06-06 13:19:21+00:00
>But that didn't happen.

The latter part definitely did. See Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave) and all the parts of Germany that were ceded to Poland.

And the expulsion of ethnic Germans living in non-German lands across Europe postwar was certainly a form of ethnic cleansing, even if you believe it was justified to remove the justification Germany had for prewar annexations like the Sudetenland.
by Xmd5a | 2025-06-06 13:19:35+00:00
They've surrounded me. Cameras in every corner. Every move dissected in blogs, forums, peer-reviewed takedowns. "Cult leader". "Crank". "Outcast". Good. Let them watch. I'll solve equations with my right hand... and write names with my left. I'll take a potato chip... and eat it. [CRUNCH echoing like thunder] If I praise Joshi, he's tainted—marked as one of mine. Dismissed by association. But if I drag him... if I bury him in scorn... then they listen. Then they think, "Maybe he's different. Maybe he's not one of them."" I'll throw him under the bus... and save him! And the witness to my alibi... is the mathematical community itself. [A flicker of Scholze's blog. Stix's preprint. Joshi's strained silence.] They're all watching. They won't get it now. But when the theorems land... when every insult has aged into irony... ...they'll see it was all part of the proof.
by radicalexponent | 2025-06-06 13:20:00+00:00
Step one in making a new repo is disabling Dependabot. Automate intentionally or get pwned your choice.

Also, is automated version bumps really such a good thing? Many times I have wasted hours tracking down a bug that was introduced by bumping library. Sometimes only the patch version of the library is different so it shouldn't be breaking anything... but it does! It is so much better to update intentionally, test, deploy. Though this does assume you have a modest number of dependencies which pretty much excludes any kind of server-side javascript project.
by amarcheschi | 2025-06-06 13:20:16+00:00
Tea is a nice alternative to water, and I say this as someone who doesn't like most drinks other than water.

There's a huge variety of tastes among green teas, white teas, oolong, black teas... Specific tea variety, different locations where the plants are grown, different manipulations, all concur to a lot of different tastes. However, a lot of people I've met just say it tastes like "earthy/dirty water"
by lanfeust6 | 2025-06-06 13:20:27+00:00
Exercise is also a very strong predictor of long-term success in keeping weight off. Plus it's important for overall health anyway. Protects lean body mass, so that when you're shedding the pounds, you lose less muscle and more fat.

That's one effect people are less aware of. One reason your metabolism drops as you lose weight is you can also lose lean body mass. Muscle and organs.
by nemomarx | 2025-06-06 13:20:56+00:00
being able to still focus and complete your daily busy schedule while restricting is a different sort of obstacle, so that mostly moves the costs around.

I found the best weight loss success eating about 1200 or 1300 measured calories a day and using a fairly strict routine, but it left me on edge and distractible. And that kind of diet has social costs too - much more of a pain to eat with coworkers at lunch, for instance.

CICO is easy to say, but the trick is actually knowing both of those measurements and being able to control them.
by ajuc | 2025-06-06 13:21:08+00:00
> It doesn't matter what YouTube, or any other company or person, restricts. It matters what our government restricts

If there is a monopoly - what the monopoly owner restricts matters just as much as what the government restricts. More in fact - because youtube has more influence over what people watch than any single government.

These monopolies should be broken up, obviously - but internet is the perfect example of network effects and there's no regulation - so of course it's monopolized to a degree unimaginable before.

Governments should break up such monopolies, obviously - but they aren't, so far.
by chneu | 2025-06-06 13:21:25+00:00
They take thousands of years to decompose in a landfill. Out in the real world they decompose much faster thanks to environmental factors(mostly physical abrasion). They break down into microplastics and chemicals which mimic hormones, among other issues.

Any reduction in new plastic is offset by people using more plastic because they think it's recycled.

Again, the goal is to remove plastic entirely from the ecosystem. Recycling encourages more plastic use. That is the entire reason that plastic manufacturers and petrocompanies pushed for plastic recycling so hard, people use more plastic if they think it's recycled. The only real solution are plastic bans in consumer goods/spaces.
by tiahura | 2025-06-06 13:21:31+00:00
Your response hinges on a fallacy of equivocation, but ironically, it commits one as well.

You conflate the absence of a statutory or regulatory regime governing private data transactions with the broader constitutional right to privacy. While it’s true that the Fourth Amendment limits only state action, U.S. constitutional law, via cases like Griswold v. Connecticut and Lawrence v. Texas, and clearly recognizes a substantive right to privacy, grounded in the Due Process Clause and other constitutional penumbras. This is not a semantic variant; it is a distinct and judicially enforceable right.

Moreover, beyond constitutional law, the common law explicitly protects privacy through torts such as intrusion upon seclusion, public disclosure of private facts, false light, and appropriation of likeness. These apply to private actors and are recognized in nearly every U.S. jurisdiction.

Thus, while the Constitution may not prohibit a website from selling your data, it does affirm a right to privacy in other, fundamental contexts. To deny that entirely is legally incorrect.
by flkiwi | 2025-06-06 13:21:56+00:00
I knew I'd run into this reaction. Here's the secret: an individual can be fully dedicated to a cause, but the weight of surrounding circumstances defeats them. See, e.g., food deserts. No, it is not more fun to go through live believing you have enough mental fortitude only to have context tap you on the shoulder the moment you take that first step.

I don't, for the record, disagree with much OP's point, though I do have some misgivings about "food addiction" being explanation for everyone's struggle with weight (I don't think that's his point, really, but it's clearly what his experience has been and it's the focus of the piece). His approach mirrors my own (successful) approach with any of a number of challenges. I just question the effectiveness as a complete solution.
by jorangreef | 2025-06-06 13:22:04+00:00
The DBMS is Apache 2.0 and our customers pay us (well) for everything else to run, integrate, migrate, operate and support that.

For more on our open source thinking and how this is orthogonal to business model (and product!), see our interview with the Changelog: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Yr8Y2EYnxJs
by abirch | 2025-06-06 13:22:23+00:00
I love Dr Jason Fung. His position is that our current system focuses on calories and not eating all the time, not avoiding processed foods, being insulin insensitive, and eating real food. Here's a good video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgmFEb0b0TI His hypothesis is that having high levels of insulin is the issue.

People need to remember that being insulin resistant and being overweight are chronic conditions. You won't be able to fix them overnight. Don't focus on decreasing calories, focus on eating real food. The article mentions this too.

One thing that was counterintuitive to me is that most people's bodies produce insulin in response to artificial sugar so there's no real difference between diet coke and coke on your body.
by imzadi | 2025-06-06 13:22:43+00:00
The less time you have, the harder it is to make healthy choices. You're more likely to grab fast food or something that is easy to throw together in the microwave. It's not just time, but also energy. The more you work and the harder your job, the less energy you have to expend on preparing food. Add in mental health issues and/or chronic illness, and you have even less energy. Usually, when I say I don't have time, I mean that I don't have energy. I don't have enough time to mentally prepare myself for the task, then execute the task, and then recover from doing the task.