MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jjice | 2025-07-17 15:53:46+00:00
Let me preface by saying that I'm not a fan of the evolution of e-cigs since they ended up being more of an entry point than a transition out of nicotine. Probably half of my friends started by vaping and moved to cigarettes.

That said, tons of other vapes are allowed on the market, so why should Juul specifically be banned?
by jsnell | 2025-07-17 15:53:57+00:00
I'm pretty sure what's happened is that you'd agreed to it and forgotten. These features were very explicitly turned off in the EU half a decade ago, and all European users had to make an explicit decision of whether to opt in or not via exactly this kind of modal consent dialog.

> I think it was linking to https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15604322 but can't confirm 100% since I can't see that modal anymore.

Fair. But I don't think that page is saying what you originally said it did. They're not asking for consent for using data for product improvements or sharing with third parties. Consent is the stated legal basis for using the data for providing the features. Legitimate interest is the basis for using the data for product improvements. I can see no claim about data being shared with third parties.
by Jach | 2025-07-17 15:54:14+00:00
No, I really don't think it's accurate to say that the line about peer pressure and emotional distraction having more of an impact on teens than adults, which is grounded in research on risk-reward behavior in presence of peers, is just "in other words" the same as the claim about teens not being able to excel in good judgment. That's a huge leap and not supported. Teens can and often do exercise good judgment, including in high-stakes or emotionally charged situations. They often fail, too, but so do adults, even sometimes adults who "excel" at it. A key phrase in the Slate quote is "more likely to hamper" -- this is important and careful wording, because context matters, both in teens and adults. Sometimes a specific context (like presence of peers) matters a lot more in teens.

Yes, I did notice the source, and I found that more unfortunate because it's using Stanford's name to peddle crap. It might not be a literal popsci magazine piece, but it's peddling the same popsci flavored falsehood about how the brain isn't "fully developed" until age 25 or so and it follows the same popsci tropes of grossly oversimplifying, exaggerating, and using science words to sound legitimate while discouraging actual scientific inquiry. The article's actual audience is layman parents, not even the general public, and clueless ones at that if they need to be reminded about things like "become familiar with things that are important to your teens". As another example, its claim of saying "Adults think with the prefrontal cortex ... Teens process information with the amygdala" is not just grossly oversimplifying, it's just wrong. Both use both. It's just a very bad article.
by diggan | 2025-07-17 15:54:30+00:00
> So if you’re not connected, you won’t get messages

That's true, if you're not connected, you don't receive messages.

> even after you reconnect?

That's not true, once you're connected, you start receiving messages again.

> For many that’s not very useful.

Yeah, I understand it isn't useful if your perspective is that you should be able to read what happened when you were away. But I guess my previous point is that people shouldn't have to do that, there should be another resource for catching up what happened when you were away, and instead it should be OK to return without having to read through all the messages.
by duped | 2025-07-17 15:54:38+00:00
> I would have loved to pay for both underground games but I was forced to pirate them since there was literally no other option.

The alternative is to play a different game, which is what the media rights holders want you to do. Or buy it at a second hand shop or off a collector. People aren't mandated to sell you something in the form you want, and you aren't entitled to buy it.

Like I have a growing collection of scifi books that are out of print. I don't complain that I can't pirate the ebooks in order to read them, I look for them where they can be found.
by nayuki | 2025-07-17 15:54:51+00:00
> English isn't actually a language: it's three languages stacked on top of each other

To give an example, number words are often covered 3 times in English - one from English (Germanic?) roots, one from Latin roots, and one from Greek roots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeral_prefix#Table_of_number...

one / uni / mono two / bi / di three / ter / tri four / quad / tetra

Other examples include: A dentist works on your teeth, a canine is a dog, the meat from a cow is beef, a foreword is a preface.
by chubot | 2025-07-17 15:54:56+00:00
This is kinda dumb, but I realized in my 40’s you can cook almost any good quality vegetable the same way, and it tastes good

Most vegetable recipes look like a lot of ceremony, and it seems like they may be sensitive to mistakes

So instead I just cut any vegetable up, peeling anything that seems hard or stringy

Then toss in a high quality oil and salt (I use walnut oil, seems to make a difference)

And roast it from 350 to 400 for 25 to 45 minutes, turning it in the middle

Using your eyes and nose is enough to fine tune the temperature and time

This works for celtuce (make sure to peel it), lotus root, all kinds of leafy especially bitter greens, all kinds of potatoes, squash, and root vegetables, eg beets, celery root, parsnips, …

Lotus root is a real standout: it has a pleasant fragrance with just salt and oil. You don’t need any sauce

The main ones I stay away from are anything stringy, like celery, some asparagus

I’ve gotten very good reactions from people who are much better cooks than I

I keep a wiki page of the times and temperatures

I’ve tried different spices, but it doesn’t make it much better. The quality of the ingredient matters more than the recipe and cooking method — by a lot IMO

So many of these vegetables I get from the farmers market (eg amish), but also from the Chinese market

Some vegetables from Safeway and now Whole Foods are quite bad imo — they require elaborate cooking to make palatable

Probably the only thing I would tweak is adding some acid like lemon or vinegar to some, but empirically it works without
by ohman876 | 2025-07-17 15:55:08+00:00
You obviously are against that 'one sect', but natural law IS the thing. This is what most people consider to be the norm that governs how we behave. It's not written down, it's what you know is right or wrong. Let me give you some examples:

- Raping woman on the street - wrong

- Giving starving person some food - good

- Stealing from your employer - wrong (unless you are not paid or cheated)

- Killing random person - wrong

- Caring for your spause and children - good

and the list goes on

And the general rule, written down by 'that sect' in their book is 'love your neighbor as you love yourself', you should prefer to live among people who really apply this in their life, whenever you share their beliefs or not, because it's so much easier to live among such people than to live among selfish people who will not hesitate to harm you if only their actions go unpunished.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-07-17 15:55:17+00:00
Unless you're asserting the number of people who will actually buy small devices is zero (which I would hope you aren't given the evidence to the contrary in this thread), his priors are in fact correct. If there exists any number of people willing to buy small phones, then the statement "you have people who want them to fit in your hand" is true.
by usrbinbash | 2025-07-17 15:55:27+00:00
The fact it is so long, underlines the magnitude of the problem.

English is one of THE WORST languages when it comes to encoding its phonemes in its alphabet.

I am familiar with pretty much every word in that poem. Knowing the word isn't the problem. How these words are correctly PRONOUNCED though, that is the actual issue. And even I got tripped up on some of them.
by slightwinder | 2025-07-17 15:55:51+00:00
Hence, the "usually". Poisoning your sources with potentially illegally acquired content is a separate problem from the legal status of the compiled system's output. I mean, if you steal the book you use as an inspiration for your own book, would the author or bookseller of the stolen book then have any rights to your work? This is a fundamental problem, not one where the specific fails of companies matter.
by JohnFen | 2025-07-17 15:56:24+00:00
Are you talking about your gif decoder project? You've reposted it a bunch of times, and mostly it hasn't been flagged, and when it has it seems to be because people perceive the reposts as spamming.

It may just be that the project isn't interesting to enough people here to gain traction, or that it appeals to a niche audience that isn't well represented here. Just speculating, I don't actually know.
by 0xfaded | 2025-07-17 15:56:28+00:00
My reading is that the statement wasn't an opinion either way, rather it was questioning whether survivorship bias needs to be accounted for.

To your point though, I think it doesn't matter so long as you've learned to deliver business value. Application of broad and diverse skills may deliver value at a start-up for example, but wouldn't get too far at a ticket shop.
by whycome | 2025-07-17 15:56:58+00:00
Vapes aren't just for adults to quit smoking tobacco. They're a nicotine-delivery system. It's a way to use a legal stimulant. The flavors would make it potentially more enjoyable.

I don't think vape kids are ever switching to tobacco - that doesn't fit the model that they want at all: its an electronic device that delivers a stimulant.

Why is alcohol something that's okay to market to kids? (The new supergirl is a drunk party girl). Isn't alcohol much more harmful?
by pacmansyyu | 2025-07-17 15:56:59+00:00
Yes, SOPS does have `exec-env` which does the same thing, kind of. From one of the issues, it currently lacks support for the POSIX-semantic way to run commands: https://github.com/getsops/sops/issues/1469, where you cannot add a `--` to tell sops that everything after it is supposed to be a command, so you end up having to quote everything. Other things that I found lacking were that with SOPS, adding a new team member means manually updating .sops.yaml, re-encrypting all files, and managing PGP/age keys. With kiln, you just add their SSH key to kiln.toml and run `kiln rekey`.

kiln also lets you have different access controls per environment file (devs get staging, only ops get production) without separate .sops.yaml configs, automatically discovers keys from SSH agent/~/.kiln/, and has built-in template rendering and export formats for different tools. You could definitely build similar workflows with SOPS + scripts, or any other tool, but kiln packages these common patterns into a single tool with better UX for teams.

Think of kiln as "opinionated SOPS", focused specifically on environment variables rather than general file encryption.
by Jensson | 2025-07-17 15:57:02+00:00
Bubbles happen because they haven't happened before, people know their history and don't repeat the same bubble. So just because there hasn't been a catastrophic stock market bubble in USA before doesn't mean it can't happen, it has happened in other countries and those stocks didn't recover.

Bubbles looks very impressive until they pop, most fall for them, that is why they are bubbles.
by cjs_ac | 2025-07-17 15:57:05+00:00
> Tech work used to come with a story: “You’re an owner. You’re early. You’ll make it.”

I suppose the Harley-Davidson salesman told you that the motorbike would get you all the women too.

Investment is always about risk, and being a early-stage employee of a startup was always a matter of buying your shares with labour rather than capital, but the payoff was always a risky proposition.
by freshtake | 2025-07-17 15:57:15+00:00
The reactive ingredient is passion, not the learning modality. Low motivation is really limiting, no matter how you like to learn. Of course, this topic is hard to discuss in a quantitative way because the number of engineers you come across in your career is a minuscule fraction of the total. Hard to draw broad conclusions like this, but here are a few:

- Formal education is great for foundational concepts (math, hardware, operating systems, compilers, graphics, etc.). Self-taught approaches tend to be goal oriented (I'm learning X because I want to do Y), which can overlook fundamentals that are important. When you don't know what you don't know, having someone to efficiently guide you can save a ton of time, and for some topics, that mentor is a great textbook or teacher.

- Most engineers I know would consider themselves a mixture of formal and informal/self-taught. Again, if you have passion for engineering then you probably like to learn and build, which means you're complementing any formal training with your own tinkering.

I've met and worked closely with amazing engineers and have never found their education style a distinguishing factor. Their passion however, was obvious.

Also, the examples given in the post (Linus, Margaret) were incredibly academic :-)
by atq2119 | 2025-07-17 15:57:33+00:00
Let's not give up just like that.

The rule of law is one of the greatest achievements of western society and a major reason for the west's global dominance.

True, it was always imperfect due to the realpolitik of power. But that doesn't change the fact that the very idea of rule of law is in opposition to rule of power.
by Reubachi | 2025-07-17 15:57:39+00:00
"we grant them monopoly rights to do so"

Who is we? the combined world's governing bodies? the US corporate legal protections systems? japanese corruption?

Regardless, that is not how IP works and I do not think you think this is a proper resolution.

"just because we want it" or "it's been x years" does not pass legal scrutiny and would be dismissed in any legal venue on improper cause. You are free to not purchase the product whe navailable, where made no promises at time of orignal purchase, and are in no way harmed from the decision making of the firms.

is 30 years too long for copyrighting/trademarks? Maybe...but can't really argue that if for those 30 years they have actively defended the IP and proliferation of it from other vendors/firms. And even then.....the world is not the US.

The solution is to never purchase from the IP holder as a matte or protest. But with global scales, good luck affecting any corporations decision making.
by EPendragon | 2025-07-17 15:57:44+00:00
I can see how it could lead to more overhead when communicating with the requesters. That could be a lot in the event that lots of them might want to crawl your resource.

I can see the argument that if I want to hide something, I should put it behind the layer of authentication. Robots is not a substitution for proper access control mechanisms. It is more of a "if they do honor this document, this would reduce the unnecessary traffic to my site" notion.

I appreciate you highlighting your personal experience in dealing with bots! I like the ideas of monitoring and being behind something like Cloudflare tools which would protect against the major influx of traffic. I think this is especially important for smaller sites which either use low or free tiers of cloud services.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-07-17 15:57:59+00:00
So I’m gonna guess you’re basing all of that on news headlines you’ve been reading as opposed to actually being an AI employee at OpenAI, Google, or “scale AI” or any other “AI startup”

Nothing in your post is special about AI. The only difference is the out of pocket valuations that a company releases a product and immediately it’s 50B before demonstrating any ability to run or manage a business, generate profit, etc.

The view that “we must distribute Google+NVIDIA+OpenAI+Meta+Microsoft market cap to the AI researchers who paved the way for the GPT papers” is noble maybe, but doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense
by bashmelek | 2025-07-17 15:58:14+00:00
The official arduino starter kit teaches some beginner level information, but it is very rudimentary. It is really hard to penetrate the next level of electronics—electronic engineers will stress the importance of precise calculations where previously I was just used to putting together whatever components I had from a kit, with few caveats.

It was not until I tried buying extra transistors that I realized I didn’t understand anything—-and this was after taking the Georgia Tech introduction to electronics free online course. Suddenly there were data sheets and graphs, and not to mention prices. The Build Your PCB course I found myself similarly in over my head, as it felt geared towards EE’s. But I learned about KiCAD. Maybe I will give Ben Eater another try
by trealira | 2025-07-17 15:58:30+00:00
> "C is the language that combines raw power of assembly with expressiveness of assembly."

The most expressive part of C is the syntax oriented around writing terse, side-effectful expressions that manipulate buffers, pointers and counters, with the array of precedences and the pre- and post-increments and assignment operators and short-circuiting operators. You can write stuff like this:

while (--n > 0 && (c = getchar()) != EOF && (*s++ = c) != '\n') ; *s = '\0';

Or these snippets (taken from K&R):

// Parsing flags for command line arguments while (--argc > 0 && (*++argv)[O] == '-') while (c = *++argv[O]) switch (c) { // ... } // Last line of a buffered `getchar()` implementation return (--n >= 0) ? (unsigned char) *bufp++ : EOF;

You can write other programs in C, like GUI programs and compilers, but it's not as nearly tailor made for such programs and it's basically just like assembly, like you said.
by bearjaws | 2025-07-17 15:58:31+00:00
1. Workflow builder is cumbersome at scale, it's often hard for anyone to jump in to understand what is going on exactly. Especially if you cannot avoid using a JS node to perform a more tricky manipulation.

2. Often times you end up writing code to help support node-red, you must avoid this at all costs because you end up shifting more and more into code bases, making node-red pointless.

2. Lots of sub menu "advanced" functions that you will need to use for any complex flow.

3. Observability is poor out of the box, especially if you use a service like datadog or NewRelic, we ended up using a catch all error handler that just shipped events to NewRelic.

4. Poor out of box defaults for security, mainly authentication

5. Conflict resolution sucks, you have to JSON stable stringify the changes to ensure you can deal with conflicts and conduct proper code reviews.
by ramesh31 | 2025-07-17 15:58:45+00:00
Because we have to. It's obviously survivorship bias. I don't have a single chance at interviewing against someone with a degree unless I can undeniably prove that I am head and shoulders above the pack. And so you grind and grind and grind in a way that someone with that piece of paper to rely on doesn't feel the need to, because the bar is that much higher.

It wasn't always this way; making it without a degree used to be a badge of pride in this industry. But the glut of CS grads these days has made it something of a handicap to be brushed around at this point.
by turtledragonfly | 2025-07-17 15:59:09+00:00
As an aside, this "robot tentacle" paper was referenced in a recent HN story: "SpiRobs: Logarithmic Spiral-shaped Robots for Versatile Grasping Across Scales"[1]

Seems like a pretty high bang-for-the-buck for versatility and capability with only a few cables controlling it.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.09861
by AndyMcConachie | 2025-07-17 15:59:11+00:00
There are already so many specialized machines in construction. When I was a kid I thought we needed exo-skeletons. Then I watched modern construction happen and realized we already have all these wild Bobcat like machines doing all the heavy lifting that humans have done in the past.

I guess it's cheaper to use a computer to drive a Bobcat than a human driver. But I wonder if the cost is worth the loss in immediate knowledge and speed. There's no way a computer is going to be faster than a human while also being safe. So I have my doubts.
by ianburrell | 2025-07-17 15:59:22+00:00
What you need is a power bank. Then you can charge your phone, or any other device Why do you need multiple days? Charge your devices overnight. Get a fast charger that charges in minutes if you forget or are out. There are power banks with builtin chargers.

Also, if you want really small device, I found smartwatches are nice adjunct to phone. Can check notifications and do basic things on watch instead of pulling out phone. The watch uses phone for data, but there is no point in terminals when smartwatch chip can handle that. There are watches with LTE that work without the phone.
Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network
by HoyaSaxa | 2025-07-17 15:59:54+00:00
If you have the Notion Desktop App installed, you may have started to notice a "In a meeting? Start AI Meeting Notes" notification pop up exactly when you are joining a virtual meeting (e.g. joining a Google Meet on Firefox).

At first, I assumed it must have been using my Google Workspace account to snoop on my calendar. But then I started to notice it would notify exactly when I joined even if I was late and the meeting had previously started.

This was the response from Notion Support after they worked with the Notion Engineering team.

> Meeting Detection Architecture:

> - The system uses a sophisticated dual-detection approach: microphone monitoring combined with network port analysis

> - Detection is implemented separately for macOS and Windows at the native operating system level

I've uninstalled the Notion Desktop App...
by jasonthorsness | 2025-07-17 16:00:01+00:00
There's still good money in being a "smart mercenary" in AI, compensation is competitive in the space. Not everyone making seven figures quickly is not unusual.

For the rest of the industry, the capital (Meta's 5 GW data center etc.) and operational ($200/month subscriptions for developer tools) are super troubling; however I can't help but observe that the practical impact on my day-to-day so far (with LLMs for search and programming assistants like LLM autocomplete and Claude) has been majorly positive.
by Ancapistani | 2025-07-17 16:00:38+00:00
Yeah... about that.

> As of 2021, life expectancy in the U.S. varied significantly by race: Asian Americans had the highest at approximately 84 years, followed by Hispanic Americans at about 78 years, White Americans at around 76 years, Black Americans at about 70 years, and American Indian/Alaska Native individuals at approximately 65 years.
by imtringued | 2025-07-17 16:01:00+00:00
A properly thought out retirement system should reward those who have children, take care of step children or pay child support with retirement benefits based on the number of years of child care. This would give women a few extra years of retirement in line with their longer lifespan without artificially subsidizing them (child care is a form of labor that should be directly depositable in exchange for a pension).

That would align the incentives for fathers to stay with children or pay child support and for unlucky men to at least have an economic legacy that will work in exchange for their pension money, which would otherwise be worthless.
by jghn | 2025-07-17 16:01:06+00:00
The point I was raising is that I don't think it's the self taught angle itself that is the causal factor. As an example, there's lots of things I'm self taught at but also terrible.

However, someone who already has the talent to be really good at something and who has the inner drive and motivation to push themselves is someone who is likely to excel. So if you find someone who is excellent at something and self taught, it's not a surprise. They probably combined natural talent with a strong work ethic, and lots of exploration of the entire search space.