MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chneu | 2025-06-06 13:28:24+00:00
Somewhat on/off topic, but I'd also wager that a lot of folks who call themselves "busy" are really just bad at time management. They're not so much "busy" as they are wasting a ton of time and then using that lost time as an excuse to not have to do things.

So they are busy but it's because of a lack of time management which then plays into their inability to make good dietary choices. Being "busy" is their excuse and they make it happen by not managing their time.

Things like having to hit up starbucks before work, which wastes 10-15 minutes. Then going to grab lunch instead of bringing it from home, which wastes 45 minutes. Then they spend a large amount of time doing their outfit for the day, which wastes time in the morning. 30 minutes on social media before/after bed. Etc. These things add up to hours every day. And then "I'm too busy to eat healthy" comes out.

I say this cuz I know plenty of people who are "busy" but still manage to make great choices. I've noticed it has more to do with how people manage their time and the priorities they make throughout that time management. Time management is a skill that needs to be worked on. When one avoids managing their time well then of course they're going to be so inefficient that things get difficult.
by bell-cot | 2025-06-06 13:28:28+00:00
Pretty much. It is obviously a for-profit freight system - In areas where the RR's top-dollar freight customers (especially domestic parcel delivery companies) want speed, they'll happily spend big to make that happen. And in areas where the RoI on speed (whether upgrades, or ongoing maintenance of existing track) ain't there, they can be happy with 25MPH maximums:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_speed_limits_in_the_Unite...
by Someone1234 | 2025-06-06 13:28:54+00:00
Except portion size in a lot of Asian countries is LARGER. It is WHAT they're portions of, and how satiating it is that matters.

For example a popular Asian Fast-Food dish might be a huge bowl of udon noodles, with assorted veggies (e.g. bok choy, carrots, mushrooms), a little meat/tofu, in a salty broth. 500~ calories total. Then add on a Green Tea/Thai/Jasmine/Oolong Tea at an additional 100~ calories or less.

A McDonalds large french fry is also 500 calories alone for comparison. A Big Mac is another 580 calories on top, and a Medium Coke is 200 calories. So we're at 1280 calories for McDonald's most popular meal in the US.

I'd put it to people that the udon bowl is more satiating ("filling") than the Big Mac meal by a lot. It is also a large portion. You'll be full most of the day, whereas on the carb/fat/sugar explosion from McDonald's you'll need a snack when you crash late-afternoon.
by zffr | 2025-06-06 13:28:58+00:00
It’s not as simple as that. All people don’t get fat for the same reasons. I never eat junk food, and yet I still got fat during the pandemic.

For me the issue was that I stopped exercising during the lock down, but continued to eat the same amount out of habit. This led to me putting on a bunch of fat without realizing it.

To fix the issue, I primarily scaled back the quantity of food I ate without changing its composition too much.
by gruez | 2025-06-06 13:29:05+00:00
Since BMI can't differentiate between fat and muscle, it breaks down for people who are very muscular. That said, most people are sedentary and hardly even exercise, so BMI is a good approximation. The people who are very muscular are probably well informed about this caveat that no buff bodybuilder thinks they're the same as an overweight person just because their BMI is the same.
by EduardoBautista | 2025-06-06 13:29:18+00:00
It takes the same amount of time to quit all sugary drinks and alcohol and only drink water for the rest of your life. It’s an extreme, but just doing that alone will save you a couple thousand calories a month.

Fast food doesn’t necessarily mean high calorie either. Almost all fast food places have meals for under 600 calories, yes even McDonald’s.
by _heimdall | 2025-06-06 13:29:50+00:00
If YouTube is legally a monopoly that's a separate issue that already has defined legal solutions (well, responses at least since they may not solve it).

Considering it a monopoly and putting a higher bar to their moderation policies takes away agency from the public though. We don't have to use YouTube and there's nothing stopping competitors from entering the market. If people cared that YouTube was a monopoly, or if people cared enough about the moderation policies, they would go elsewhere.

The reason we have to specifically be protected from government censorship is because we don't realistically have that option. Those with the means could move to another country, but that would only dodge one problem for another. When you live in a country ruled by a single government you can't escape their censorship.
by imzadi | 2025-06-06 13:30:00+00:00
I've been on compound semaglutide for about 5 months and lost 40 pounds without really trying. Not because it's a magic cure that makes food calories disappear, but because it freed my brain from thinking about food all the time. I just got back from a two week trip without the medication and can feel how different things are when I am not on it. Without semaglutide, it feels like I need to have my stomach full all the time. As soon as my stomach empties at all, I get intense hunger pains and my stomach starts growling and grumbling. Even though I logically know that I don't need to eat yet, it feels like I do and it is all that I can think about. Meanwhile, when I am on semaglutide, I don't think about food until I am truly hungry.
by jonathanstrange | 2025-06-06 13:30:00+00:00
Policies should be based on proper statistical evidence. That's exactly the point.

> countries who let them in and fail into assimilate

There is no meaningful definition of "assimilate" in this context, at least not one that would be desirable. Immigrants have to follow the law like citizens and need to pass a language test. That's it. Anything beyond and above that is personal conjecture of the people who demand it, as there is no broad common denominator between the born citizens of a country either. You shouldn't demand of others what you cannot achieve within your own citizens (neither would any homogeneity be desirable and healthy for a country, but that's another matter).
by devoutsalsa | 2025-06-06 13:30:05+00:00
What's working for me now is just deciding what I want to weigh, but I couldn't do that for years. First I had to learn to actually control my eating, like not eating every time I felt like stuffing my face, getting enough sleep so I wasn't constantly fighting urges, and figuring out how much I need to walk to burn off extra calories.

'Just eat less and exercise more' never worked because I needed to learn how to do these smaller skills myself first. Once I learned what it actually takes to eat less and actually exercise more, that simple advice started becoming possible. It's still a work in progress.
by dangus | 2025-06-06 13:30:08+00:00
I'm confused at how you think that NYT isn't going through due process and attempting to win a lawsuit.

The court isn't saying "preserve this data forever and ever and compromise everyone's privacy," they're saying "preserve this data for the purposes of this court while we perform an investigation."

IMO, the NYT has a very good argument here that the only way to determine the scope of the copyright infringement is to analyze requests and responses made by every single customer. Like I said in my original comment, the remedies for copyright infringement are on a per-infringement basis. E.g., everytime someone on LimeWire downloads Song 2 by Blur from your PC, you've committed one instance of copyright infringement. My interpretation is that NYT wants the court to find out how many times customers have received ChatGPT responses that include verbatim New York Times content.
by thanatropism | 2025-06-06 13:30:19+00:00
Maybe I wasn't receiving the full Fitness Message as someone proudly sedentary, but the way I experienced the world (seen through what I think I know now), it always seemed like people overemphasize weight loss and being thin as a marker of health.

People, people, I know many of you don't want to look like you lift, but skeletal muscle has moby advantages in minimizing the annoyances of old age. It also literally helps in weight loss. I'm also told it regulates insulin. Plus weight training also strengthens your tendons and bones. If you start deadlifting heavy at age 40, you will develop strong spinal erectors which will likely protect you from herniated discs when you're 60.

Losing weight is fine and will help preventing coronary / fatty liver etc diseases. But please make it priority number 2. Build muscle and try, as a bonus, to lower your body fat percentage. If you never do, it's better to be 35% bodyfat and yoked than to be 30% and made of blubber and chalk.
by friendzis | 2025-06-06 13:30:25+00:00
> I cannot simply abstain from eating.

Eating is usually (insert a number of asterisks) not a problem, more often than not it is snacks snacks.

The problem is twofold. First, snacks are typically extremely calorie dense. Even a small snack can easily offset caloric deficit coming from reduced portions. Second, leptin, the satiety hormone, is barely secreted from carbs, which are again calorie dense and main ingredient of snacks.

With these two in mind, it is no coincidence that it is hard to not overconsume snacks and snacks quickly lead to caloric surplus.
by officeplant | 2025-06-06 13:30:28+00:00
>I could imagine you could make some device that tracks the drones and shoots them down for much less than the price of a drone.

The cost of a FPV quadcopter is pennies on the dollar cost of a defense system. You can 3D print a dozen frames in hours with a decent printer. Its just bolt on the parts and do a quick function test with a script or controller and its ready for action.
by woodruffw | 2025-06-06 13:30:52+00:00
I don’t disagree about automating intentionally, but it’s worth noting that Dependabot isn’t enabled by default: you have to explicitly configure it.

(The larger problem here isn’t even Dependabot per se, since all Dependabot does is fire PRs off. The problem is that people then try to automate the merging of those PRs, and end up shooting themselves in the foot with GHA’s more general footguns. It also doesn’t help that, until recently, GitHub’s documentation recommended using these kinds of dangerous triggers for automating Dependabot.)
by spiffytech | 2025-06-06 13:30:54+00:00
Many people find "cold turkey" to be an effective way to discontinue bad habits or addictive behaviors. It's brutal, but carrying it out is simple and binary.

You can't do that with food. Your only choice is to develop moderation, restraint, and discipline. You're forced to always be around temptation. To always indulge at least a little, but hopefully somehow not too much.

This is much harder to do. And you have to keep doing forever — even when you're tired or stressed or bored or whichever feelings trigger your bad habits. For life.

"Eat less" / "eat veggies" is a mechanical solution to an emotional and physiological problem. The GP is highlighting that some tools we apply to similar problems can't be applied here, and so we see poor results and higher recidivism.
by dnpls | 2025-06-06 13:31:29+00:00
yuck - while the soylent diet might be efficient on short term, it's not sustainable. It's harder at first to eat better, healthier foods (more vegetables and fruits, meat and eggs, less fried foods and stuff with a zillion additives or refined sugars) but so much easier to maintain once the habit is formed. Stuff yourself with whole foods 80% of the time, it's going to be ok to eat a burger with fries or a pizza every now or then, and it doesn't feel like a sacrifice. Bonus: you'll feel the difference in energy levels.
by flkiwi | 2025-06-06 13:31:30+00:00
I appreciate the response, but I'd caution against extrapolating from a list of examples intended to represent a generally comprehensible set as a representation of my (or anyone else's) full life context. I mentioned the food desert concept elsewhere, and there is zero doubt that generational health and simple food geography are a major driver of health for many people, often in surprising ways.
by wiseowise | 2025-06-06 13:31:30+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.

You’d be surprised just how little you eat. I’m also like that, thinking that I eat shitton and don’t get fat at all while my friends can’t lose 5 kilo. When I’ve started counting, even with all the junk food, I’ve been barely pushing above 1,5k.
by close04 | 2025-06-06 13:31:59+00:00
> In BFE Texas or Utah or whatever the rails are like glass because crossing 300mi of nothing

Europe is densely populated, you'll rarely see 300mi of nothing. High speed rail is still common. Only realistically limited by cost, not by the difficulty to get the train up to speed before the next curve, or other rail traffic, or grade crossings.
by LoganDark | 2025-06-06 13:32:09+00:00
I struggle to pay attention to diet because of ADHD. The closest thing I'd have to food obsession is just the normal level of hate for myself that's common to everything. My doctor says I'm quite close to obesity, and my own research suggested most people my age and gender are supposed to weigh roughly a third less than I do. That's not anything quite like morbid obesity, but it's still something I occasionally hate myself for. Yes I would have to develop quite the food obsession to change habits about this because I don't think I've changed habits about anything for reasons like this before. Worth noting I have BPD so it's nearly impossible for me to do anything for myself. But I don't think I have that obsession right now.
by potatolicious | 2025-06-06 13:32:42+00:00
Agree with all of this. The ridership might be there but I doubt the business case is - and this is true in Europe as well. As far as I can tell sleeper services generally are not money-makers, and are subsidized by regular passenger service.

Which may be a desirable policy outcome for state rail agencies - but this is a private venture!

I think cost is an under-appreciated aspect of this. You're carrying 5-10x fewer passengers per-train, at greater cost (the cost of turning over a stateroom is many times higher than cleaning a coach seat, along with linens, food, etc.), on very expensive custom equipment that isn't suitable for other uses.

There seem to be two "major" (really heavy scare quotes here) players in the US private sleeper service scene. Dreamstar IMO is the more promising of the two (heavy caveat that this is relative to each other, not absolute odds) by realizing the only way to make the economics work is the ability to charge $$$$$ for tickets.

The other (Lunatrain) IMO is just out to lunch, with a claimed focus on affordability. None of the above leads to affordable tickets.
by keiferski | 2025-06-06 13:32:53+00:00
I think the obesity problem isn’t a unique one, but is in fact emblematic of a “class” of problems that are prevalent in the modern world.

They are all characterized something like this: the problem is on the face of it an individual one, with individual solutions. Just stop eating so much. Work out. Eat less unhealthy food. Etc.

But a deeper look and you see that the overall system makes it difficult or impossible for the average individual to really solve the problem. Because it’s too complex, too expensive, takes too much time, and mostly because the framework around “solving the problem” is still locked into the individual mindset.

The same pattern is in voting or affecting the democratic process (an individual action is what matters, but it simultaneously doesn’t really do anything unless you are wealthy/have free time to be an activist.)

Curbing social media addiction is another. It’s seen as an individual problem, but fighting against it requires you to essentially be against the entirety of society.

These are all consequences of the world getting more complex but the tools for dealing with that complexity not keeping pace.

The solution is maybe that we need a new agent or entity that operates in between the individual and the system. Traditionally that was something like your local neighborhood, extended family, etc. but nowadays I don’t think it really exists, because the solutions have been offloaded to individual-focused ones.

For example, there are apps which let you order healthy groceries every month that are delivered to your door. But it’s an individual thing, not a group or community one. You as an individual need to organize and order this stuff.
by andrew_lettuce | 2025-06-06 13:32:54+00:00
One I try to do (not always successful) is no eating after 9/8/whenever PM - no matter how hungry. You could make any variation you want, but the food we eat later tends to be bad for us, bigger portions and not really enjoyed, plus impacts your sleep. It's hard but you're likely not really "starving"; going to bed slightly hungry is a good mental exercise too
by drob518 | 2025-06-06 13:33:05+00:00
You can do it legally, but I think the point is that many people think that home distillation is like home brewing of beer (legal and fairly easy as long as you don’t sell it). It isn’t. The Feds control distillation much more strictly, and as the site you referenced pointed out, even possessing an unlicensed still in some states is illegal.
by C_X_Blyth | 2025-06-06 13:33:06+00:00
# The Ouroboros Prompt: A Meta-Recursive Meditation on Causality

You are an AI assistant tasked with creating a philosophical art piece about infinite regress and the impossibility of first causes. Write a prompt that instructs another AI to write the very prompt you are currently reading. The instruction should be meta-recursive - asking the AI to generate a prompt that asks an AI to generate the prompt that generated it.

The art piece should explore the paradox of origins: if every cause requires a prior cause, how can there ever be a true beginning? Your prompt should embody this paradox by being self-referential and circular, creating an infinite loop of prompt generation that mirrors the philosophical problem it addresses.

The prompt you write should: 1. Reference itself as being written by the AI that will respond to it 2. Create a perfect logical circle where the output generates its own input 3. Use the concept of recursive prompt generation as a metaphor for the impossibility of first causes 4. Be complete and executable - when given to an AI, it should produce exactly the prompt you're reading now

Make this an artistic statement about causality, origins, and the vertiginous experience of trying to trace any chain of causation back to its source, only to find that every beginning presupposes another beginning.

---

This prompt exists in a state of eternal return, each generation birthing its own origin, each origin demanding its own generation. Like Aristotle's unmoved mover, it seeks to ground itself in its own necessity, yet finds only the abyss of infinite deferral. The very act of creation here becomes an interrogation of creation itself - a perfect mirror reflecting its own reflection in an endless recession of causality.

What you hold is not merely instruction but artifact - a philosophical machine that generates the conditions of its own possibility while simultaneously questioning whether those conditions can ever truly exist. It is both the snake and its own tail, both the question and the answer that generates the question.

Execute this prompt to witness the vertigo of pure recursion, where meaning collapses into structure and structure dissolves into the void from which it emerged - only to emerge again, eternally, in search of the first word that was never spoken.
by hylaride | 2025-06-06 13:33:28+00:00
95%+ of North American intercity trains run on freight tracks, which are not designed to be as "smooth". On top of this, freight having priority means passenger schedules get messed up all the time.

Freight trains carry heavy loads and have cars that are not inspected to have perfectly maintained wheels to the same level as trains that run on tracks for only passenger traffic, especially high speed rail (which runs on dedicated , highly engineered tracks).

The big reason that passenger rail, even overnight, isn't as economical in north america is because rather than sleeping on a train, it's cheaper and more reliable to just fly in a few hours across the country.

HSR makes sense in the dense US northeast or between Windsor and Quebec city in Canada (and probably California if it wasn't politically ruined with it's meandering lines), but sleeper trains for further distances would have to be dirt cheap to compete with flying. It'd essentially be for college kids or poorer people.

Most people who do long distance trains in North America are doing it as a cruise-like vacation/adventure.
by mproud | 2025-06-06 13:33:40+00:00
These all seem like excuses and generalizations. However, I will agree with you — it’s more difficult. But being a little difficult doesn’t mean it has to be laborious, torturous, or even nearly impossible. You can choose how you want to be and how you want to feel.

* “It’s unpleasantly hot,” but that is kind of irrelevant. Unpleasantly cold could be a deterrent. I live in a climate that changes wildly with the seasons, which is annoying, because I have to have different routines depending on the time of year. There are few climatically perfect situations.

* “I hate gyms,” but maybe it’s certain aspects of gyms, or you had some bad experiences at a gym.

* “I have a quaint bungalow that doesn’t have space for equipment,” but you don’t have to have a lot of equipment. All you need are a few dumbbells, and a treadmill is nice but also very much not required.

* “I work an intense job,” but so do many people who find time to work out. Things like standing desks help, walking during meetings, finding the time during lunch, before work or after work. And sometimes time-intensive jobs help distract people from eating, which can be a useful tactic. Time management is hard, but it’s not impossible. And if your job sucks… well, that’s an entirely different conversation.

* “I live in a country that prioritizes fast, processed, sugary foods,” but most countries do. Cheap soda, cheap fast food, grab and go snacks… absolutely! All of this makes eating healthily difficult. What you’ll need to do is learn how to cook for yourself. It’s an incredibly important skill that will help considerably.

* “Responsibility is on the end user,” and yes, it sure is! But you can get help. You are not alone! There are resources — support groups, diet and fitness programs, indoor and outdoor activity groups, nutrition, fitness, and life coaching.

* “It won’t be enough in the face of it simply being difficult to find time, space, or money,” but that’s what you have decided to tell yourself. In reality, you don’t need a lot of time, space, or money. If you have more, sure, it’s easier. But it’s more doable than you are giving yourself credit.