MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gcanyon | 2025-07-27 12:43:44+00:00
Given the low side effect rate and limited overall impact, shouldn't the bar for deciding to take statins be near-zero? Like, the articles say if there's a 5% chance of a heart attack in the next 10 years there's no reason to take a statin, but if the statin changes that 5% to 4% (that's speculation on my part) then given the limited side effects it would likely be worth it, right?
by atoav | 2025-07-27 12:44:31+00:00
Bosses always want workers who treat their job and the company like family, but when it comes to them treating their workers like family somehow it is all about the numbers and they barely even treat them like people (if the law permits it).

It may seem over the top, but my feeling is we as a society need to stop accepting, excusing or even applauding behavior like this for our own good. This should be a stain on their names for the rest of their lives and the rest of society might consider treating them as outcasts.

I know this is an extremely unpopular position to take on a platform where half of the people dream of creating a company, pretending it is the mission of their lives, just to sell it to the highest bidder and live a life in luxury after. Everybody has to watch out for themselves they would say. If your goal is to leave the planet worse off than before that is the sure way to do it. This is a model for a society of sociopaths who kill everything good and it is time we start putting up some resistance.
by sim7c00 | 2025-07-27 12:44:37+00:00
never though id be good at programming. doing it for 20+ years now, not fulltime.

still feel like that lil kid. other ppls program humble me and teach me how little i know.

sure i understand more than i did when i started, but theres various reasons you're never 'there', and to me, i wonder if feeling you are good would even benefit you.

sure, you can still program C like in the 90s. Still write python like its on v2, or html and CSS like its 1999, but in reality to tap into the systems and their potential you need to constantly keep up. and i think its pretty much impossible to keep up with everything. there is so much, and more and more every day...

im a bad programmer. my bugs sometimes compute stuff!
by QuiCasseRien | 2025-07-27 12:45:21+00:00
being backed by companies which use your product is often the golden ticket to making a living from open source.

think of why someone could pay for something you offer free :

- have some control over you : integrate feature, prioritize you backlog, influence the roadmap...

- have confidence that the project will be maintained and won’t be abandoned

- direct support from the maintainer

- visibility/marketing

- ...
by starfallg | 2025-07-27 12:45:23+00:00
>Easy. Google is basically spyware. It's an advertising company, and their product is you.

This is such a flippant and facile response.

Google isn't a advertising company, it is a tech company that gets the majority of its revenue via selling advertising. This can change, and also likely to change in the next decade or so.

The reason things are is that nobody was willing to pay for search - it's a product with a very low incremental cost. The market dictated this operating model, and nobody has been able to upend this model so far, not even OAI. The numbers just don't work out. Do you think OAI can continue to subsidise free ChatGPT queries with paid ChatGPT Plus subscriptions? Almost certainly not.
by 9dev | 2025-07-27 12:47:14+00:00
That used to be the case, and I agree in principle. With the current administration, however, this is no longer true. Freedom of speech stops being free speech if the government detains people and revokes visas for having a certain opinion, tries to dictate the curriculum at universities, forces trans people to their birth gender, acts against lawyers with the wrong clients, excludes unwanted media from press conferences or sues them altogether… this list goes on for a while.

Donald Trump is a danger to the fundamental rights granted by the constitution, and the republicans are assisting him in tearing it down.
by ericmay | 2025-07-27 12:47:34+00:00
Well, arguably it’s a win except for local populations in some areas where enough housing is converted to vacation housing that they complain and don’t like it for various reasons. There is a balance to be struck.

I’m sympathetic to that complaint a bit but it’s also a bit like NIMBY.

Generally I think the cheapness of travel has been an unsung net negative for humanity as a whole.
by rainsford | 2025-07-27 12:47:47+00:00
> It's virtually impossible to buy a car without fuel injection nowadays, but most GA airplanes still use carburetors.

That's because GA airplanes in general are significantly older than most cars on the road. If you're buying a brand new car and a brand new GA airplane you're equally unlikely to encounter one without fuel injection.

Now the reason this is the case is because instead of buying brand new GA airplanes, most people are just trading around the old ones because new GA airplanes are ridiculously expensive. This is also a regulation problem, among other things, but the fuel injection thing isn't because modern GA is behind the curve. The issue is that the vast majority of GA pilots aren't flying modern GA.
by AngryData | 2025-07-27 12:48:01+00:00
I think it very much depends on where they live. But part of the reason more people don't know how to swim is probably because many urbanites don't have good access to pools. Many public pools in urban areas were shut down in response to civil rights when black people were no longer allowed to be blocked from using them and racists would rather nobody has a pool than allow black people to swim with white people. And then in later generations, if a parent doesn't know how to swim, they aren't likely to take their own kids to go swimming.

A lot more rural people know how to swim because of all the natural bodies of water around, but our population overall has been consistently skewing urban for a number of generations now.
by ballenf | 2025-07-27 12:48:51+00:00
Your proposed engineered randomness goes against almost everything making lab grown diamonds popular -- pseudo mined diamonds would cost more than flawless ones and increasingly no one cares what DeBeer's exotic lab tests think. Your post didn't ring LLM to me, it just seemed disconnected from the article and market trends.

What I'd pay more for is an exotic color or multicolor diamond (a diamond built around a ruby?). Or one that changed color depending on the lighting -- picture moonlight turning it a brilliant blue or purple (basically I want it to come from Middle Earth). Or one that glowed red in the dark.

Actually, I wouldn't be the target for this, but I'd love it if they existed.
by m0llusk | 2025-07-27 12:48:54+00:00
This piece ignores some potentially critical points. Having large amounts of capital to carelessly throw at organizations that do not have sustaining cash flow is a recent thing. Zero interest rates are casting their shadow here. Also, with modern analytical tools it is relatively easy to see, for potential investors if not the general public, roughly how profitable or not any given entity is. This makes growth dependent plays hard to hide.

On a more robustly positive note, ongoing progress with solid legal frameworks for benefit corporations may address much of this. Such companies serve stakeholders instead of shareholders and have employee ownership as foundational.

Leaning back and declaring Capitalism as flawed isn't good enough. If you have property rights and ability to sell labor then you have Capitalism. Corporations are a new innovation that we can hone. Large, shared allocations of capital will continue to be needed for essential endeavors so we need to figure this out.
by michaelt | 2025-07-27 12:49:48+00:00
I suspect there is pressure in the opposite direction these days.

If you see someone wearing a 6-carat diamond, you know it's either a $100,000 natural diamond, or a $4,000 lab-grown diamond. And you'll assume it's the latter, as far more people can afford the latter.

On the other hand, a 1-carat diamond would be more like $2000 natural, $300 lab-grown, making it far more believable that it was natural.
by terminalbraid | 2025-07-27 12:50:46+00:00
Just so I'm clear, you then feel compelled to openly and publicly label every literally programming language as "unfortunate" because it doesn't live up to what LiveCode aspired to be?

An opinion that flatly and individually labels every extant thing the same has no signal to it. I'm not sure what to make of your original post other than you're expressing displeasure at the universe for not handing you what you wanted and that you believe that expression should be injected into arbitrary discussion.
by sim7c00 | 2025-07-27 12:51:19+00:00
pretty much evey commerical service with such huge user base chucking in their personal details and conversations is generally selling or handing in (or both) their data to some parties. its a main source of revenue..

the smarter a product is to get people to more clearly specify their personal world into it, the more accurate data, the more revenue. (easy to get massive investments to go big with such a product in certain regions more than others...)
by awjlogan | 2025-07-27 12:51:54+00:00
Do users share some “responsibility” (for want of a better word) as well? If people were happy to share their experiences to personal, or at least smaller, groups rather than with some implicit desire to be widely acknowledged then a portion are of the use of these platforms would not exist. Keep a blog of your routes, shared with your friends - others can stumble upon it (obviously less easily these days) - or even go with your friends and don’t bother sharing it to the rest of the world. Your activity might not be the best by some metric, but who really cares? Some of my favourite trips have been those that have gone completely wrong, as compared to the original plan, and enjoying that with the people who care about you is far better in the long run.
by starfallg | 2025-07-27 12:52:21+00:00
What makes you think that Google hasn't developed natural language processing, when they launched Google Translate in 2006?

Also, what makes you think that NLP would solve the problem you're describing? Only LLMs has proven that it could fully understand and process the queries in the way you're describing, hence why I brought that up. However it is expensive computationally, and only recently was it even technically possible to do.
by al_borland | 2025-07-27 12:52:46+00:00
When companies are changing their names to include buzzwords, it’s hype. This happened during the dotcom bubble, with crypto, and now AI.

Whatever your job is will dictate if, or how much, you may care. How things shake out at the end of the day will likely look much different than they do right now.

If you’re not someone who likes to try and ride hype waves with various get rich quick schemes, and not in the space, I wouldn’t worry about it. Sit back with your popcorn and watch these people fight for a few years and let the bubble pop. Then we’ll see who is left and what it’s actually good for. You can then adjust from there if needed.
by lock1 | 2025-07-27 12:53:05+00:00
"... pretty QR codes", reminds me of a paper from SIGGRAPH 2025 I saw a few weeks ago.

"Claycode: Stylable and Deformable 2D Scannable Codes"

https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.08666

https://claycode.io/pages/scene_claycode.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sx9k2iyXQhY
by voisin | 2025-07-27 12:53:14+00:00
I generally agree with you about it the article and would have preferred more data, but I don’t think specific regulations are needed to understand that when the rest of the world has 95% of the worldwide elevator market and North America carved itself out on an island with different regulations that limit the market for elevator equipment and replacement parts, the price will be higher and the supply with consequently be lower.

If it is good enough for the entirety of the rest of the world I have a hard time thinking our regulations are doing anything but protecting entrenched local interests.

I have elevators in a number of my buildings and I can tell you first hand that something is wrong with the market. Elevator technicians are no more highly trained than electricians or plumbers and yet their hourly rates exceed that of my Bay Street lawyer. Repairs are obscenely expensive.
by smokel | 2025-07-27 12:55:29+00:00
If I understand this correctly, it learns the rules of Sudoku by looking at 1,000 examples of (puzzle, solution) pairs. It is then able to solve previously unseen puzzles with 55% accuracy. If given millions of examples, it becomes almost perfect.

This is apparently without pretraining of any sort, which is kind of amazing. In contrast, systems like AlphaZero have the rules to go or chess built-in, and only learn the strategy, not the rules.

Off to their GitHub repository [1] to see this for myself.

[1] https://github.com/sapientinc/HRM
by 9dev | 2025-07-27 12:55:42+00:00
There are countless examples, and they are easily accessible via the news or your preferred search engine. Here is a selection:

* https://www.ibanet.org/Trumps-assault-on-the-First-Amendment * https://theconversation.com/x-252706 * https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/x-rcna208057 * https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/23/trump-harvard-michigan-dei.html
by smath | 2025-07-27 12:55:58+00:00
One thing I’ve wondered is why getting a diagnostic test done out of pocket in the US of your own volition (without a doc prescription) isn’t possible. Why does it need to be controlled by a doc and insurance?

In India this is common. They probably use the same expensive machines for x rays and MRIs but anyone can walk in, and pay for a diagnostic test and get numbers (well, not everyone can afford it, but generally middle class folks can). I’m not saying the healthcare system in India is great, but this distinction intrigues me. Maybe the volumes are much higher in India so the diagnostic center can recoup costs? Are there laws preventing this business model in the US?
by bmacho | 2025-07-27 12:56:50+00:00
It correlates with money, and logic can eliminate a lot of possibilities, like: it isn't money in the bank that makes people to be able to swim; also it is probably not race, ethnicity, religion, or location either. The most likely explanation is that poor people prioritize it lower (or rather: rich people prioritize it much much higher, it is a no-brainer for them).
by ballenf | 2025-07-27 12:56:51+00:00
> Nothing that I publish here has come from AI or answer engines. Every word that is written comes from this human.

I think we're rapidly approaching the point where no one will be able to make this claim anymore. AI summaries and answers are ubiquitous and our knowledge or beliefs are directly or indirectly informed by them. We can avoid 1st order AI use, but it is impossible to avoid 2nd order and further exposure.

The water supply has been poisoned and everyone needs to drink.
by zeeple | 2025-07-27 12:56:52+00:00
Hey HN,

I’ve been building an alternative to swipe-based dating apps, something slower, more intentional, and (hopefully) more meaningful.

Instead of browsing photos endlessly, users first talk with an AI that asks real questions: values, intentions, preferences, past experiences. Based on that, the AI suggests one person at a time. No galleries, no endless scroll. The photo is only revealed once an actual conversation has started.

The whole idea is to reduce the superficial dopamine loop and create real connections. Or at least try.

I’m still in early stages. The landing is live, the concept is working, and I’d love your thoughts: on the idea, the approach, or anything I might be missing. Also trying to get a bit of visibility outside of the TikTok/Instagram noise.

Appreciate any feedback.

Thanks, Loïc
by sarchertech | 2025-07-27 12:57:01+00:00
>they expect me to explain themselves

But the experts did explain themselves. They’ve published numerous studies on how small wolf populations impact the larger ecosystem.

It’s not even that hard to understand. Yes Yellowstone is large, but there are a finite number of elk herds and the wolves move to follow and prey upon the elk herds.

Wolf packs can kill 20 elk per year per wolf, there are 120 wolves inside the park and 500 immediately around the park wandering inside it and killing elk that wander outside.

At the peak there were 18k elk in the park and now the numbers are down to 2000. There’s plenty of evidence that the decline is a direct result of the wolves.

Controlling elk population has tons of 2nd and 3rd order effects which have also been well documented.
by ysavir | 2025-07-27 12:57:03+00:00
Downvoted as this comment feels like it's trying to be witty/upshowing the parent comment without actually engaging with it or offering anything of substance. If the comment was along the lines of "yes, but we've also done a lot of good, let's reflect on both", great. But that's not what it was. Instead it feels like a statement that's trying to argue with the parent comment despite the parent comment never saying we haven't done any good.
by noahjk | 2025-07-27 12:57:04+00:00
Babies will happily crawl off of the edge of whatever they're on. I'm not sure if it's because they aren't afraid, or if it's because they're so used to being carried that they don't grasp the concept of gravity, or both.

My toddler recently went out on our roof to retrieve a football. I expected her to be a bit nervous, but she walked right up to the edge, no fear apparent at all. I had to desperately shove my instinct to yell for her down so I didn't scare her and distract her.
by Hilift | 2025-07-27 12:57:42+00:00
Usenet groups pre-dated the web. There were "discussion" groups like alt.startrek. However, by volume, uunet was extremely popular for distributing pictures like for desktop wallpaper. It was also 100% accessible by dialup modem, which would connect on a schedule and download updates from your upstream server. I connected two companies to the Internet between 1991-1993, and uunet was one use, email was the other. Small-ish ISP's around 1991-1994 usually accommodated uunet for business accounts. Our ISP was notable due to if someone complained about a post, they required the complaint to be made in writing/fax, and you had to provide your name and address.
by mkw5053 | 2025-07-27 13:00:00+00:00
It's amazing the impact that the reintroduction has had. On a recent winter trip there I also learned that the reintroduction literally moved rivers [1]:

- Elk quit loitering along streams, so willow and cottonwood shot up, anchoring soil and narrowing channels.

- The new woody growth gave beavers lumber; their colonies jumped from one in 1996 to a dozen within fifteen years, raising water tables and rebuilding wetlands.

- With healthier riparian zones came deeper pools, colder water, and a surge in native trout and song-bird nests.

[1] https://phys.org/news/2025-02-predators-ecosystems-yellowsto...
by robertlagrant | 2025-07-27 13:00:45+00:00
Sure, but if you hadn't eaten the bar in 15s you'd have burnt other calories that are now being stored instead.

Not that this applies to people with loads of muscle in general; the saying isn't particularly for people who focus massively on fitness. It's for people who don't do anything and think going for a walk a day will sort out their health goals.
by nicoburns | 2025-07-27 13:01:19+00:00
> I see. It's a new rendering engine, not "Blink/WebKit/etc."

Correct

> Am I right that WebKit does not support what you and I are discussing equivalent wise? Passing structs or "binary" events?

I'm not sure. If I wanted to do this I'd probably look into https://ultralig.ht/ which is a commercial fork of webkit. See: https://docs.ultralig.ht/docs/calling-a-c-function-from-js
by forinti | 2025-07-27 13:01:27+00:00
I've recently read up on the Pirahã tribe and their unique language: apparently it doesn't have recursion. They also don't have words for colours or numbers.

A missionary called Daniel Everett tried to convert them to Christianity but ended up becoming an atheist and linguist.

Conversion certainly didn't go as expected in this case.

This is a nice documentary about them: https://youtu.be/9tKbVBePxyU
by tialaramex | 2025-07-27 13:03:19+00:00
> Another one is multiplex radio, again, it's 2025, the technology is there. Why are we still seeing so many blocked communications during emergencies in busy airspaces?

The difference between the radio on the WW2 era ex-pilot boat I spent time on recently and the radio in a brand new jet liner is crazy. The Global Maritime Distress Safety System - a global requirement from the 1980s - mandates a digital VHF radio service named DSC - it's not very clever by today's standards and it's hardly the easiest to drive UI - but it's night and day compared to what is provided for aeroplanes. First of all, and most crucial for its core purpose, many crucial elements of a "Mayday" call are automated so that rescuers have the most important information right away even if you're panicked and incoherent, and it won't get "blocked" by low priority callers trying to figure out which gate they're scheduled for, or whether they can get the longer runway for this approach.

It's almost aggressively bad, I guess they couldn't get an OK to use Morse code?
by vidarh | 2025-07-27 13:03:36+00:00
Now consider the Crime Survey for England and Wales, which shows that despite minor uptick in recent years, the rate of rapes are below past peaks even in the 2000's[1] (see e.g. figure 2), including for rapes. These are based on asking people, and so capture far more crime than police reports and are not affected by charging rates.

What you will see, however, is that the reports have dramatically increased. See figure 3. Combined with relatively static reported rates of rapes, this is good - it means a large proportion now do get reported.

But given the number of reports have drastically increased relative to the rate of crimes as reported in the crime survey, it is not surprising that charge rates have fallen, as it's at least plausible that a number of incidents that are now reported that wouldn't have been before are those incidents with insufficent evidence. (That doesn't mean it's not problematic that the charge rates have dropped, of course)

What is clear, is that there is no evidence for the contention in the comment I replied to. It's a common far-right talking point used to sow fear. I'm not suggesting that commenter who posted it are intentionally pushing far-right talking points - I know plenty of people on the left who have been tricked into repeating this as well. But they are unambiguously talking points that are being abused by the UK far-right to push a narrative of a collapsing society that does not match reality.

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand...
by diabllicseagull | 2025-07-27 13:04:05+00:00
Last I checked power management didn't work so they would run hot and burn through your battery. So unless there is full software support for hardware that makes laptops a portable computer, it's just not a practical solution for me.

Tho, I really want this to happen. As far as I've tested on Volterra (ms dev kit 2023), linux has a lot going right for it. there is a ton of ARM64 packages, and drivers just work (e.g. I had to wait so long for Wacom to release WoA drivers while it worked out the box with ARM64 linux builds). the potential is there and it's great.

On a last note, not being able to ship necessary firmware and relying on a WoA boot drive still sucks.
by kensai | 2025-07-27 13:04:58+00:00
The manifesto reads very leftish with many radical weasel words, as if the alternative is fantastic. Without a capitalistic structure they would have been long ago been headless chicken.

Now, don't get me wrong, it sucks majorly for the employees and it is painful; but particularly for the long-running ones, where is your equity? Komoot was once a startup, why did you accept to work there without equity.

Last but not least, indeed, never believe the bosses, unless you have (almost) the same end-game privileges.