MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 9rx | 2025-07-18 14:48:21+00:00
> Two people are cited as example. [...] Linus Torvalds has a master degree in computer science

Technically it was accomplishments that were cited. And in the case of the accomplishment of building Linux, that was done so prior to Linus receiving his CS degree.

That said, university was noteworthy in his case as that is where he gained access to Unix systems — something a regular person at the time wouldn't normally have access to otherwise — which ultimately developed his interest in creating Linux. Access to machinery regular people don't normally have access to is the value-add.

Which is the contention around modern CS degrees. What machinery, as it pertains to CS, can't you reasonably access today without going to university? Even state of the art GPU/TPUs, which might be the closet thing analog to Unix boxes of Linus' time, can be rented at home for a tiny fraction of the cost of attending a university.

> Purely self-taught yet outstanding engineers are the exception rather than the rule.

There is probably no such thing as a purely self-taught engineer, at least not alive today. Formal educational resources have been so easy to access over the past many decades that there is no advantage to being purely self-taught.

Before the advent of the printing press, you probably had little choice but to be purely self-taught. Access to formal resources was reserved for the lucky few. But those days are long, long, long behind us. I don't suppose the distinction between "self-taught" and "not self-taught" is even real anymore.
by nayuki | 2025-07-18 14:49:02+00:00
Can PFAS be removed by consumer-grade reverse-osmosis (RO) water filters?

Addendum: It turns out that a linked article from Le Monde answers that: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/our-times/article/2025/03/09/can-t... , https://archive.is/RFNe9
by peterldowns | 2025-07-18 14:49:14+00:00
A related fun fact is that you generally lose weight by exhaling, generally while you sleep. Sweating, defecating, etc. is all temporary. If you're trying to lose weight, make sure you're sleeping enough!

edit: see my followup comment, didn't mean to mislead here. I'm not a scientist and sleep and food science is both pretty hard to trust.
by maerF0x0 | 2025-07-18 14:49:16+00:00
What makes you assume that greediest and tyrannical people are the ones who would be preferentially selected for in a system that offers increased healthspan / lifespan?

It's my presumption that these services are expensive now but once proven will become commodity. In sufficient time it would be as cheap/free as penicillin or a multivitamin.
by specialist | 2025-07-18 14:49:46+00:00
It's hard to capture heuristics with a meme.

FWIW: I avoid added sugar (sweeteners), empty calories.

eg Pre-made spaghetti sauce has sugar, so I make my own. Can of costco tomato sauce, garlic, italian herbs, garlic, oil, garlic, pinch of salt & pepper. Then I add some garlic.

eg I use plain greek yogurt in my smoothies. Flavored yogurt means added sugar. I can add my own flavors.

In my house, we make a distinction between "snacks" (food in-between meals) and "treats". I mosdef crave potato chips, doughnuts, cake, candy, etc. To better moderate, I don't keep any of those "empty" calories at home.

YMMV. IIRC, type-2 diabetics use artificial sweeteners. I'm not a doctor and can't guess what's best for anyone else.
by wglb | 2025-07-18 14:50:33+00:00
This is in my past, so no COBOL recently but in one of my first consulting gigs I wrote several business programs in RPG III. Which is the nightmare that you might imagine it is. Think plugboards. Halfway through the IBM guy came by and installed COBOL and wow what a difference. My last act was to recommend that they get a computer department. And so Tom Monaghan called IBM
by joezydeco | 2025-07-18 14:51:15+00:00
Given the trend of everyone putting text on every social media video and people leaving captions on streaming services all the time, perhaps it will just be a standard in another decade or two.

https://raleighmag.com/2023/09/subtitles-craze/

Netflix is already adapting to this trend.

https://about.netflix.com/en/news/introducing-a-new-way-to-e...
by reactordev | 2025-07-18 14:51:18+00:00
I love how he ends it with “thinking about space habitats” as I immediately thought: “well, if you can trap it and compress it, you’ll have enough briquettes for a weekly bbq”.

He obviously knows this too. Dealing with human waste/by-product is a real challenge. Far more so in space than on an ocean or in an RV.

We humans need to learn to use everything and not let anything go to waste. Else we have nothing left to waste.
by acdha | 2025-07-18 14:51:41+00:00
In particular, his mother – Mary Maxwell Gates – was on the United Way board along with IBM’s chairman John Opel and reportedly discussed her son’s company with Opel a few weeks before they made the decision to license MS-DOS.

https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-gates-64-...
by mdp | 2025-07-18 14:52:06+00:00
"All of the under-sink reverse osmosis and two-stage filters achieved near-complete removal of the PFAS chemicals we were testing for,” Stapleton said. “In contrast, the effectiveness of activated-carbon filters used in many pitcher, countertop, refrigerator and faucet-mounted styles was inconsistent and unpredictable. The whole-house systems were also widely variable and in some cases actually increased PFAS levels in the water.” - https://nicholas.duke.edu/news/not-all-home-drinking-water-f...
Ask HN: Where do you guys find audiobooks?
by niksmac | 2025-07-18 14:53:00+00:00
In the process of digital detox, I am able to acquire a used iPod. Trying to find good quality downloadable audiobooks for me. I have some luck with using some torrents, but not enough audiobooks are there, at lease the genre I am interested in. What are your sources? How do you get them?

TA.
by elzbardico | 2025-07-18 14:53:13+00:00
Corporate interests are not a homogenous, a single block.

From time to time, it is very well known that a group of vultures organizes themselves to capture the State and royally fuck another vulture using the State's power and legitimacy.

Yeah, money have a lot of power, but a lot of money's power is contingent on the existence of the repressive apparatus of State. Don't discount the power of a charismatic populist leader (And I am not talking about Trump) or a political genius.

People thought that the oligarchs in Russia would overthrow Putin as soon as they felt the bite of sanctions on their backs. The only thing that got thrown were the oligarchs who didn't with the program, and didn't dance to the tune Mr. Putin was playing. And when I say thrown, I meant it literally, as in defenestrated from a high rise window.
by sibeliuss | 2025-07-18 14:53:19+00:00
I have a family member who participated in this trial and their life was utterly transformed, from top to bottom. And it resolved a lot of _other_ unrelated issues in a totally unexpected way.

They describe their participation as the most meaningful event of their lives, second to the birth of their children.

(Stage 4 metastatic lung cancer -- and still kicking nearly 10 years later ;)
by schmidtleonard | 2025-07-18 14:53:23+00:00
Yes, we know. It's not truly Republican unless it leaves the poor to die in a corner of bootstraps-itis. However, at the time the Heritage Foundation was still wearing the mask of caring because they hadn't pushed Single Payer out of the Overton window yet. It's bad optics to admit that you want the poor to die in a corner, so they had to pretend to have a solution and assistance was a cornerstone of the solution they pretended to have. The mask is off now, but history is history: it was part of their proposal.
by bpt3 | 2025-07-18 14:53:36+00:00
Not sure where that number is from, but what I've seen it's around 60% usage and 75% availability for non-Medicare eligible Americans (https://www.kff.org/health-policy-101-employer-sponsored-hea...)

It's also worth noting that the percentages are substantially higher than the averages for the portion of the population who generally votes.
by theshrike79 | 2025-07-18 14:54:36+00:00
I’ve had the … pleasure of working with outsourced talent for 20 years and I think it gives me an edge with LLMs

Both will never push back or say no and will just rush headlong into implementing - something. They will use 57 libraries when stdlib will do and make convoluted hierarchies when a simple functional program is enough.

But both can produce very good results if you have predetermined limits, acceptance criteria and a proper plan and spec.

Then you iterate in “sprints” and check the results after each one and challenge their output.
by JohnFen | 2025-07-18 14:54:51+00:00
I'm not talking about the possibility of breaking FHE, though.

What I don't understand is this: if I get encrypted data from someone and, without breaking that encryption, I can perform computations on it that yield a sensible result (even if the result is also encrypted with a key I don't have), then how does that not mean the encryption has been weakened? If the encryption were strong, that should not be possible.

Actually breaking the encryption is a different thing, and I wasn't questioning that.
by accrual | 2025-07-18 14:55:19+00:00
I think the main problem is just that's expensive and time consuming to do full body MRIs, especially on everyone over age 40. The only person I know who gets a full-body MRI each year was my neurologist who had the resources to do it.

There's only so many MRI machines in the world, staff to operate them, and radiologists to interpret the images. A limited study like an MRI of the brain might take a few minutes to read, but a whole body would take much longer. You may even want subspeciality doctors to read individual body parts (e.g. neuro, MSK) which would cost more and take longer.

There's also the risk of finding something benign then putting the patient through treatment and surgery for something that wasn't harming them.

If we could somehow have inexpensive scanners and an inexpensive way to interpret the resulting images - then yes, we should expand access to MRIs as they're a generally safe way to screen for abnormalities.

AI interpretation could lower the cost of reading the images, but a lot of the expense is in the hugely complex scanner which requires liquid helium, etc. and the technologists to schedule and operate it.
by ThinkBeat | 2025-07-18 14:55:34+00:00
A bit of context from the article.

The Biden administration started to heavily subsidized some health care plans with Covid as the backdrop, and now those temporary measures are ending.

In so far as I have found and I might be wrong, congress never voted to fund and subsidize those medical plans indefinitely.

Now health insurance companies are raising their rates on those specific plans since the government is no longer partially funding it, or perhaps not funding them as much.

Then I am convinced the insurance companies raised their rates more then strictly required as they nearly always to to make even more money.
by FredPret | 2025-07-18 14:55:47+00:00
But the code still has to work. LLC's and other corporate structures only protect the owners if the company goes bankrupt, which it will if its systems stop working.

Ditto with market control, it's not some permanent crown you achieve. Companies have to keep performing to keep their market share.

E.g., if you opened an account at a major bank, and your transactions started failing, would you keep banking there?
by bryanlarsen | 2025-07-18 14:56:13+00:00
Keep going, please.

Olympic fencing obviously sacrifices something, but as a layman I'd have trouble describing it.

Kendo uses wooden swords, does it sacrifice anything else? Would practitioners be proficient in HEMA and vice versa?

Another widely practiced sword art is stage combat. Obviously it has a different focus, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone well trained in stage combat could perform well against the average poorly trained swordsman.
by oldenlessons | 2025-07-18 14:56:25+00:00
I don't know. People working in web frameworks might be more visible, and more numerous than people working more low level stuff. But I don't think the latter is rarefied atmosphere at all. There are today several times more people working on those base levels than 10 or 20 years ago and I expect the trend to continue.

Sure, they will enable even more people proportionally to not think about those low level systems. But my argument is that the need for that low level expertise has always expanded and will keep expanding.

Automation entails tonnes of complexity that need to be managed. It doesn't just evaporate. More automatic systems will demand more people and teams to learn low level systems in great detail and at high levels of accuracy.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-07-18 14:56:44+00:00
Sure, but I was expecting more details on what was available. At least some analysis (perhaps using embeddings) on common function names, types, etc. What are people exposing? Is there overlap? What % of the open servers looked the same (indicating a common example / tutorial deployment)? What's the proportion of read/write functions (again using embeddings / word cloud maybe?)...

As is the article feels a bit light on details. I'm not surprised that there are open servers out there, but if you're writing an article about that, at least provide interesting details.
by OutOfHere | 2025-07-18 14:56:47+00:00
Note that the multistage RO filter can be a countertop one. It doesn't need to be an under-sink one. Just remember to change the filters on time.

Another thing that people overlook about RO is that it's critically essential to remineralize it safely and to normalize its pH. Drinking demineralized or acidic RO filtered water is harmful!
by culopatin | 2025-07-18 14:56:52+00:00
You really think they are getting access to their data and looking for some German dude’s data in every server they have? At most 23andMe gets some 250 item questionnaire that some poor soul with a red stapler in a basement has to answer, some middle manager puts a signature on it, sends it saying “yeah we good” and that’s it. Unless there is enough noise for someone to sue, no one is looking at that shit hard enough.

Even if they are, 6.5 million in fines is chump change.
by automatic6131 | 2025-07-18 14:57:30+00:00
>Things like what happens when someone who looks 25 is actually 55? Who should they date?

Genuinely, who cares about sci-fi questions like this?

Why aren't you worrying about how fairly matching four-armed martial artists against two armed? Answer: because it's so unlikely to happen, it's not worth it. We're not getting 55 year olds with the body of a 25 year old, we're getting slim 55 year olds wearing make up and taking TRT. That's not youth! It's a dumb facsimile.
by OutOfHere | 2025-07-18 14:57:32+00:00
There will be no correction. There will only be collapse and perhaps partial mitigation. Correction implies a brain, and if we collectively had one, we wouldn't have been polluting with these toxins in the first place.

Moreover, correction alone is not sufficient -- it doesn't remove the PFAS which is already in the ecosystem. It will take over ten thousand years of UV light to naturally break it apart.
by jmyeet | 2025-07-18 14:58:39+00:00
There are two takeaways from this:

1. US foreign policy is uniparty. As terrible as this administration is, remember that quashing anti-war protests happened under Biden, too. Columbia, Hind Hall, etc were all under Biden. That being said, moving to deport or denaturalize pro-Palestinian protestors is new; and

2. The state will turn violent to quash anti-imperialist sentiment.

Let me give you some examples:

1. The MOVE bombing. In Philadelphia in 1985 there was a black liberation group called MOVE. After a day-long standoff with police, the police dropped a C4 explosive from a helicotper on the house. The resulting fire killed 11;

2. Kent State. In 1970, there was an anti-war protest at Kent State University in Ohio. The Ohio National Guard had been called in. The protestors were unarmed. The National Guard were at least 100 yards from the protestors. Yet at some point the protestors got scared and fired on the protestors, killing 4; and

3. At a pro-Palestinian protest at UCLA, the encampment was attacked by pro-Zionists. The police stood by and did nothing and the next day used that violence as an excuse to violently break up the protest.

Facial recognition, mass surveillance, social media checks at ports of entry, weaponized deportation, etc. The state simply will not tolerate anti-imperialist protests.
by trycatchthroawy | 2025-07-18 14:59:11+00:00
I have a question for a friend who is looking to work at US-based companies either remotely and is open to relocating and moving there if required, but she is from the UK and a citizen there who just left her job as a software engineer at a startup in the UK recently.

She is looking to be able to legally work for some of these US based companies and is also interested in US startups but when applying she cannot answer the US authorization question in the application (If she said 'No' it will get her an immediate rejection). So my question(s) are:

What is the best visa for her to apply for as a UK citizen to work for a US company?

How long will it take for her to get the visa so she can apply for US jobs?
by esseph | 2025-07-18 14:59:13+00:00
"Of the subtypes of health insurance coverage, employment-based insurance was the most common, covering 53.7 percent of the population for some or all of the calendar year, followed by Medicaid (18.9 percent), Medicare (18.9 percent), direct-purchase coverage (10.2 percent), TRICARE (2.6 percent), and VA and CHAMPVA coverage (1.0 percent). While the private coverage rate was statistically unchanged between 2022 and 2023, the employment-based coverage rate declined by 0.7 percentage points to 53.7 percent in 2023. At the same time, the rate of direct-purchase coverage increased by 0.3 percentage points to 10.2 percent in 2023."

https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p60-28...

More:

https://www.unionhealthcareinsight.com/post/why-employer-hea...
by theshrike79 | 2025-07-18 14:59:22+00:00
Gemini CLI is like a fresh self taught coder on massive amounts of cocaine and adderall.

Just last night I asked it to create a project plan as markdown files. It started writing to disk and I tabbed out to watch Squid Game

When I came back it was 80% through implementation and was trying to fix some weird python async issue in a loop over and over again. I never told it to implement anything. But it will always - ALWAYS - rush into implementation unless you tell it not to with ALL CAPS.

Google really needs to add a Claude style explicit plan mode for it…

I interrupted it, gave the error to Claude Code, which fixed it in one go.
by zamadatix | 2025-07-18 15:00:02+00:00
I'm a networking guy by profession + a big IPv6 fan as well (yay HN these days! news.ycombinator.com->2606:7100:1:67::26)... but don't hold your breath that IPv6 will lower the price of routers at all, let alone by a factor of 10x. From a hardware perspective there are a few minor gains with changes to the protocol but there are also some losses due to the address and network prefix sizes taking up more expensive TCAM/SRAM.

You still want ports, they actually make networking hardware cheaper overall by moving some of the scaling requirements out of the IP layer and into the transport layer. Imagine needing router which can hold 1,000,000 IPv6<->MAC address bindings just because you have 1,000 clients in your network using new addresses instead of ports! ND code is more complex than the code to bind to ports, but I still like the introduction of ND more than not regardless :).

IPv6 infra will probably never adopt the cert stuff you mention. The protocol is just designed to be able to, it doesn't mandate it. In practice it's almost never done and having everyone do it would likely be harder than getting people off IPv4 has been. On the internet routing side, PKI with BGP doesn't really care about the address format and works fine with IPv4.

For the network manager the 2 biggest changes are 1) All of their client subnets are /64s, no more subnet mask tables. 2) No more NAT, which feeds into the debugging side of things, though some of this is advantage is intentionally lost in a tradeoff for increased privacy via temporary addresses. In the last one it's tempting to tie that back to enormous hardware gains but, in reality, the box at that position of the network needs to statefully track sessions regardless of if it needs to translate them, and that's the majority of the cost.
by logicchains | 2025-07-18 15:00:10+00:00
>Reviewing the code it writes to fix the inevitable mistakes and making adjustments takes time too, and it will always be a required step due to the nature of LLMs.

Yep but this is much less time than writing the code, compiling it, fixing compiler errors, writing tests, fixing the code, fixing the compilation, all that busy-work. LLMs make mistakes but with Gemini 2.5 Pro at least most of these are due to under-specification, and you get better at specification over time. It's like the LLM is a C compiler developer and you're writing the C spec; if you don't specify something clearly, it's undefined behaviour and there's no guarantee the LLM will implement it sensibly.

I'd go so far as to say if you're not seeing any significant increase in your productivity, you're using LLMs wrong.
by ceejayoz | 2025-07-18 15:00:24+00:00
The last decade doesn't give me much doubt about that.

We're talking about folks who non-ironically walk around with signs saying "keep government out of my medicare". https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/0...

> 44 percent of Social Security recipients, and 40 percent of Medicare recipients, believe that they don’t benefit from any government social program.
by ThinkBeat | 2025-07-18 15:00:36+00:00
If I understand what you wrote correctly, Your wife did not try any traditional medication to treat her anxiety? Or is that included under "supplements"?

If so the term "lost hope" is not in my opinion accurate.

I am quite happy that it worked and it is a better alternative than medication, I certainly do not think that medication is the cure all, or optimal.
by dmead | 2025-07-18 15:01:44+00:00
this is mine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnmwdfzYTbU

I was having problems with focus flop on this short refractor, so i printed a sleeve that attaches to a linear bearing on the losmandy plate.

the setup has several more 3d printed changes since I recorded this. The 'car' that carries the camera is longer and has two rails now.

I'm pretty sure this is novel. Its completely eliminated focus flop without spending like 3k on a nightcrawler.
by SL61 | 2025-07-18 15:01:57+00:00
A while back I came across job listings for a COBOL consultancy near me that only seems to hire fresh grads for well below market rate (not much higher than retail/restaurant jobs - this is in a cheaper part of the US). They promised to train their employees from the ground up and implied that COBOL knowledge would set them up for a really profitable career. It seems like they were taking advantage of the common advice: "just become a COBOL developer, it pays well because nobody wants to use COBOL!" But I'm skeptical that someone coming out of that consultancy with 2 or 3 years of experience in nothing but COBOL would do well on the job market.
by em-bee | 2025-07-18 15:02:01+00:00
you see that to an extent with the use diacritics in some languages. for example "ch" or "cz" in czech is written as č.

here is an interesting article listing digraphs in various languages with latin script that have lots of examples where the same sounds have a single letter in other languages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin-script_digraphs