MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by deadbabe | 2025-07-27 13:44:43+00:00
Doesn’t matter. Any “feeling” you get at that point is just endorphins and placebo. As soon as you stop, you quickly feel like shit again.

A lifetime of bad eating and no exercise means your arteries are clogged, nothing you can do to change that you just live with it, and physical activity could eventually give you a heart attack as your heart fails to keep up with the new demand.

You will likely have little muscle mass, most of your body will be a bunch of layers of fat covering small weak muscles, and at age 50+ your body is simply not going to build muscle the way it used to, if at all. On the contrary, if you had built a fit muscular body early when you’re young and maintained it all your life, your body in old age would be mostly dense muscular structures, and thin layers of fat. Two old people can appear the same size but have radically different compositions underneath. Even though we lose muscle as we age, the best defense is to have plenty of muscle to spare. The muscles also help in the regulation of insulin.

And then of course there’s the issue of bones. Physical exercise and lifting weights builds strong dense bones and if you’ve neglected both then you’re plunging into old age with a bad skeletal foundation. Your bones will be brittle and hollow and more prone to breakage and unable to tolerate stress. Building strong bones takes time, it’s measured in microfractures. At 50+, you don’t have time.

With bad bones, bad muscles, and a bad circulatory system, it’s easy to see how you should be in a bed “getting some rest” instead of out doing strenuous activity where you can break something easily.
by rubyfan | 2025-07-27 13:45:45+00:00
This resonates with me. I’m willing to pay for content for humans by humans.

I am reducing my engagements with the web and technology in general due to lack of quality. It due to AI content, AI hype seeping through everything non-stop. Throw in ads literally everywhere, hyper partisan politics, phony influencers, social media algorithms that live off of FOMO.

It’s all gross and has been sapping the joy from people for too long.
by pydry | 2025-07-27 13:46:10+00:00
This isnt really about using "resources" to fight fraud. None of this was illegal and it was all very profitable - it was encouraged.

This is about us consenting to capital being put at the very heart of society's locus of control, which is what drove this kind of parasitism to be encouraged rather than discouraged.

It is a unique feature of western (especially American) society - something which actually isnt represented in other power centers.

China has "private equity" for instance, but it's not really private - it operates like all financial institutions as an arm of the state (not run by capital) and has no real incentive to destroy healthy and valuable companies for profit.
by khfsoc | 2025-07-27 13:46:42+00:00
> Saying definitively that we don't know something (1) requires an investment of time to verify that lack of knowledge, and (2) can become incorrect at any time.

And (3) doesn’t necessarily make you lose credibility but too many believe it does and partially it can.

Those who believe science is truth are innocently choosing an answer without full knowledge. That is the definition of religion and faith.

True science is a search for truth like philosophy and theology. I think you can get too caught up in any one of these three.

If you have hard core faith, that’s awesome, but put your faith into that which won’t fail you.
by pegasus | 2025-07-27 13:46:52+00:00
Yes, 20 years later, the JVM is considered a marvel of engineering, and, surprisingly, some of those marketing claims have in fact come true. Or at least, more than would be expected after doing the hype-correction always called for in such situations. Yes, Java can be faster in certain contexts: the kind of contexts Java is usually employed in addressing these days. Stuff like enterprise backend systems and big data processing, where startup time or precise memory control are not important. Then there's GraalVM which allows for AOT compilation, etc.
by chrismorgan | 2025-07-27 13:47:26+00:00
LLVM did do some with noalias, but it wasn’t very mature because it wasn’t broadly useful in C/C++, because it was too hard to use correctly.

Then Rust made it trivial to use correctly, and found that what LLVM did have was quite buggy, because it hadn’t been exercised. These were bugs that could in theory have been found in C/C++, but in practice never would have been. And so for quite some years Rust would toggle the noalias optimisations on and off, depending on whether there were any known bad-codegen issues at the time. I think the last toggle was a few years ago by now, this stuff is finally actually stable and appreciated.

My recollection is that the figures for the Rust compiler are in the vicinity of a 5% improvement from emitting noalias in the LLVM IR.

And it’s likely that quite a bit more is possible.
by smokel | 2025-07-27 13:47:51+00:00
Hm, I'm not so sure it's fair play for the Sudoku puzzle. Suggesting that the AI will understand the rules of the game with only 1,000 examples, and then adding 1,000,000 derived examples does not feel fair to me. Those extra examples leak a lot of information about the rules of the game.

I'm not too familiar with the ARC data set, so I can't comment on that.
by vel0city | 2025-07-27 13:48:02+00:00
There's still a lot of work in managing the custody of all that cryptocurrency safely and securely from a business perspective.

It's the same thing as a company needing a building for their factory. They decide they don't want to pay rent anymore, they're going to control their own properties they own themselves now. But the business of managing the property now falls to the business to do. So even when companies own their own properties they often end up hiring a property management company to deal the the day to day operations of running a commercial property. Because in the end they don't want to have to worry about their janitorial contracts, handling elevator certifications, landscaping contracts, maintenance techs, etc. They want to focus on producing widgets.

Same thing with hosting a digital storefront. Sure one could spend all the time managing servers on your own offices and ensure good uptime and security and what not, or you can just sign up for Shopify or others and they'll manage it all for you. If managing servers and software stacks and digital security isn't your main business competency, why get into it?

Most companies won't want to deal the logistics of handling crypto. So they'll often outsource that work, because I'm the end they want to focus on selling widgets not handling payments. For the same kinds of reasons why they'll hire a company to do cash logistics.

Do you need to hire payment processor to accept crypto? No. But in the end you will need to do that work though.

I'm not the reason why people choose these big centralized services. I'm not that powerful. They choose them because they see value in the services they offer. Not everyone wants to be their own bank.
by pbaam | 2025-07-27 13:48:12+00:00
https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#opaque

> opaque {} declares a new type with an unknown (but non-zero) size and alignment. It can contain declarations the same as structs, unions, and enums

So it can contain methods, just like structs. The only thing it cannot contain is fields (which the example above doesn't contain). An opaque type can only be used as a pointer, it's like a `typedef void* ...` in C but with the possibility to add declarations within a namespace

Edit: the documentation doesn't contain any example of an opaque type which happens to have declarations inside. But here is one: https://codeberg.org/andrewrk/daw/src/commit/38d3f0513bf9bfc...
by Demiurge | 2025-07-27 13:49:20+00:00
I think it’s safe to assume every commenter speaks for themselves. I agree with the grandparent comment, this narration is cheesy and I couldn’t get through it, or figure out the point. If it’s fan fiction, it should be labeled as such. But, if there is news in there, I’d like a TLDR synopsis. Fortunately, there is a browser extension for that :)
by chasd00 | 2025-07-27 13:49:52+00:00
I don’t have a workout regime but I do walk a lot. I have adhd so can only take staring into the abyss of dancing colors (my laptop) for so long. I wfh and there’s a coffee shop and small grocery store that is a 30min walk round trip from my house. I make that walk maybe 2 or 3 times a day.

I don’t sleep that well but am working on it. Ever since I had my first kid (15 years ago) the slightest noise or interruption in the middle of the night and I’m 100% awake ready to rock. I was the night duty parent for both kids so that’s where that comes from I assume.

In my 20s and early 30s I did a lot of drugs and was blackout drunk two nights per weekend. Having kids and a no nonsense/assertive wife put an end to that with the side effect of dramatically improving my health and career.
by bognition | 2025-07-27 13:50:21+00:00
Back in school I was often told the lead pipes in Roman aqueducts likely played a key role in the fall of Roman. We know lead is a poison with negative long term effects on cognition.

The aqueducts were also responsible for Romes ability to proliferate and grow. Lead was both a blessing and a curse.

I wonder what future generations will say about our highly enriched and processed diets. Calories have never been cheaper and food is ubiquitous. However I believe our food is playing a huge role in our degraded health.

It’s not surprising that most studies looking at the consumption of unprocessed food, fresh fruit and vegetables show benefits to our health.

The challenge is how do we get this food in the hands of those who need it cheaply and without sacrificing the nutritional (and microbial) content.
by holowoodman | 2025-07-27 13:50:45+00:00
>> LLVM is still slower than GCC, even in plain C.

> Citation needed. Last time I checked LLVM beat GCC on -O3.

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

https://www.phoronix.com/review/gcc-clang-eoy2023/8

There is tons more, just ask your favourite internet search engine.

> Why should two nearly idenfical operations have such wildly different performance? And why isn't the safer/saner interface more performant?

Because in hardware, checking a zero-flag on a register is very cheap. Big NAND over all bits of a sub-register, big OR over all those flags for the whole SIMD register. Very short path, very few transistors.

Checking a length is expensive: Increment a length register through addition, including a carry, which is a long path. Compare with another register to out if you are at the last iteration. Compare usually is also expensive since it is subtract with carry internally, even though you could get away with xor + zero flag. But you can't get around the length register addition.

There can be an optimisation because you do have to increment the address you fetch from in any case. But in most modern CPUs, that happens in special pointer registers internally, if you do additional arithmetics on those it'll be expensive again. x86 actually has more complex addressing modes that handle those, but compilers never really used them, so those were dropped for SIMD.
by tkrn | 2025-07-27 13:50:45+00:00
Although I'm a recovering sexp addict I must confess that I fail to see what makes the cons cell so important to those purer in their faith?

To me the homoiconity of Lisp is mainly about code-as-data, the exact nature of the data doesn't matter to me that much as long as it's a first class citizen and enclosed in nicely balanced parenthesis (though sadly here Janet seems to have fallen to the temptations of the curly braces, and thus, is indeed heresy).
by isaacremuant | 2025-07-27 13:51:03+00:00
To be honest, I've lost faith in HN not being reddit like because I've seen the similar hive mind mass labeling of "wrongthink", specially when it came to covid policies, US/NATO warmongering, and advocating for what once was standard hacker culture around freedom and equality of individuals.

I expect you'd propose that this is still a place where we can have the civil discussions and should not get in these flame wars so I'll try it your way for a while and see how it goes.
by djtango | 2025-07-27 13:52:28+00:00
I can't remember where (maybe here) that you shouldn't use mouthwash after working out because of the effects on your oral microbiome. That fact shocked me just like this article does because it was unintuitive that your oral microbiome could have such an impact on your physiology.

The effect may actually be a similar one because nitrates do sound familiar...
by greenpenguin | 2025-07-27 13:53:31+00:00
In the UK a CIC (Community Interest Company) is an option, which can legally oblige the company to act in the interest of "the community they serve". I think in the USA a benefit corporation might be similar.

Alternatively if Komoot was a worker co-op a sell-out would only be possible with consent from the employees. Consumer co-ops (where users can vote too) are also an option but with more caveats.
by Towaway69 | 2025-07-27 13:53:32+00:00
Users are humans, you might as well say do humans share some responsibility.

As a user, nothing much will probably change. You will still be able to share your personal data with the world.

It’s a little overreaching to say because users did this , they are responsible for making the company popular and then getting sold off to a make money for the founders and then these users are responsible for the blight of the employees (who were also “users” probably).
by immibis | 2025-07-27 13:53:48+00:00
Yeah, but that's also true for video games, board games, social media (HN included), and yummy food. Pretty much everything anyone ever enjoys, actually. The difference is that some of them (like, I'm assuming, board games) are associated with other outcomes you want (real life socialization)

I am writing this from the tail end of a 4-day techno music festival. I haven't taken any mind-altering substances, but I've enjoyed dancing to the music. Should it be banned?
by JimDabell | 2025-07-27 13:53:58+00:00
One of the reasons people prefer AI to visiting the source websites is because the source websites have so often made it such an unpleasant experience, making you jump through hoops and navigate a maze of dark patterns. Meanwhile, AI gives you what you want without all those roadblocks.

This is like Napster vs iTunes all over again. People started paying for media online as soon as it became convenient to do so. You make things inconvenient for people, you’ll lose out to whatever the more convenient option is.
by aisenik | 2025-07-27 13:54:25+00:00
It feels like malpractice to leave Andreessen off the list, if only because he's such a good example of how losery and pathetic the tech moguls really are.

Imagine becoming wealthy and powerful in an age of abundance off of NCSA Mosaic and throwing it all away because you feel threatened by black people and think that government funded research is now bad. That's the level of "advanced thought" in these guys' group chats.
by coffeefirst | 2025-07-27 13:55:30+00:00
This might get worse.

The free open web was economically dependent on reaching large audiences by search and social, and supported by advertising. Without that scale, you're looking at more paywalls and membership programs. The smaller the niche, the more expensive and tighter the program needs to be.

A lot of that gating went into effect after social media start suppressing links.

If you believe in making quality products available to mass audiences—information wants to be free and all that—this is a problem.
by pyman | 2025-07-27 13:55:37+00:00
> What does this have to do with enabling parental controls?

You're shifting responsibility to parents instead of asking billionaires to check kids' ages before letting them access porn sites, just like other businesses ask for ID when someone tries to buy alcohol or tobacco.

Telling parents to fix the problem isn't the answer, that's what governments are for: to regulate billionaires and hold them accountable.
by mettamage | 2025-07-27 13:55:51+00:00
Why I do programming?

> To keep my mind sharp. To explore the mysteries of the world.

Why I do programming?

> I'm not special but I happen to live in my body.

Why I do programming?

> Yea sure, why not other endeavours. I do have other endeavours, they all have in common that things are quite conceptual and don't require a lot of actual resources. I like that form of minimalism.

Why I do programming?

> Funnily enough, I don't have a good answer to this one. It just happens to be one of those fields of "applied math" that feels practical and not too high brow.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-07-27 13:56:19+00:00
A recent biology teacher of mine claims that military bases often contain ecosystems that are:

- intact enough to have quick bounce back behavior upon species reintroduction and

- small enough for you to have a good idea about which species are present

- come with a built-in control variable: the civilian space on the other side of the border represents what would have happened if we had let economics have its way with the land

Maybe you don't need quite that level of protection to see such effects, but generally you do need some. Throwing some wolves at a once-forest that's now half way to being a desert will not always save that forest.
by amy214 | 2025-07-27 13:56:35+00:00
This a wonderful summary of the unfair dystopia that is the Bay Area real estate market.

I would also add, the forklift driver who bought the house for 40k in 1971, by state law (Proposition 13), is still paying 1971 valuation property taxes and contributing essentially nothing to local school funding, funding which is mostly covered by you according to a "new guy has to hold the bag" type scheme. In a state obsessed with fairness, a most unfair policy.

Should you wish to modify the property, conventional area wisdom is to just do so unpermitted. Boomers don't like construction because it increases supply and they want no supply, only demand, home price go brrrr. Environmentalists don't like construction because the more nature the better. Others don't like construction because they make it their business to set the vibe of the area as static and frozen. These political interests culminate in a construction permitting process that basically autorejects everything, paradoxically increasing public danger because everyone now does everything unpermitted.

Even the famously wealthy Steve Jobs ran afoul of it and couldn't buy his way out. He had a property he wanted to modify but they wouldn't let him touch it at all. So he just let it sit and rot to make a point. Ultimately the government agreed his plan was better than a rotting house.
by brookst | 2025-07-27 13:56:58+00:00
This is false.

Modern chatbots use tool orchestration where the LLM is given a list of tools it can use. Tools include things like searching the web and, yes, executing code. The LLM can generate arbitrary code (typically Python) and call a tool to execute it and return results. The tool takes the Python input, launches it (in a container in this example) and returns the output, which the LLM can further process.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-07-27 13:58:15+00:00
Is OpenID liable for identify verification? I don't see how they could be without physical offices everywhere in world.

Passports require people to physically go prove themselves to a government employee, an actual attempt at identity verification.

>There's no problem here other than actually trying to force ID for internet access (one of the excuses is the old "who will think of the children", age verification for social media).

There is a problem with people impersonating other people. There is economic gain from creating a trustable system in which to do business.

>You're describing the same outcome pretending it won't happen.

What outcome? The internet is still there, and all users can still do whatever they want. Including website owners that want to verify identity, and website owners that do not want to verify identity.
by pydry | 2025-07-27 13:59:05+00:00
>capital has become such an important gatekeeper in society in the first place because most people aren’t that trustworthy

Not really. It became that way because wealth begets power.

The narrative it tells us is that we should be terrified to change this because nobody else except the owners of capital can be trusted as stewards of our economy and political system (particularly not "government").
by ForOldHack | 2025-07-27 14:00:28+00:00
Brilliant observation. Dynamic systems like this are rarely a cut-n-done. Like the study of ozone, with it's seven counter intuitive steps, it is all an evolving study.

It also proves the worth of just simple studies over a long period of time. Science used to do a lot of that, and it was very interesting, as many appear on hacker news, but now it seems that cut-n-done grab more popular news.

It also bears the question: what longitudinal studies are popular here besides this one, and retro computing?
by MisterSandman | 2025-07-27 14:00:43+00:00
And I hate to say it, but in this context, Musk would’ve been at least a little useful in having around. I’m aware he’s not the best person to make reliable predictions, but he does run SpaceX.

With both the cuts to NASA and Musk leaving the core inner circle of Trump, space exploration is going to be set back. Mars ain’t happening in our lifetimes, IMO.

I hope I’m wrong.
by Theodores | 2025-07-27 14:00:50+00:00
As an aside, I am amazed that chairs can be sold without some redundancy, in case of breakage. 350 pounds is not exceptional these days, that is only 160Kg, which is only 90 Kg more than what I weigh with clothes, cup of tea and plate of food... 80Kg is reasonable for a healthy person and two people should be supportable by the chair.

However, chairs get left outside and they can rot. This can lead to collapse even if a 50Kg person gets on. This can be incredibly dangerous. Hence every chair should have a secondary support structure, in some cases this can be wire under tension, other times it might have to be steel tubing.

There are thousands of chair designs, none of them built for the ultimate eventuality of catastrophic failure.
by Eisenstein | 2025-07-27 14:02:34+00:00
Most people don't watch films in the theater run exclusively. It has been viewed by many hundreds of millions of people after it left the box office. Also, network effects account for a lot. One person seeing the film and talking about blood diamonds to their friends and family leads to 2 others who look into it, which leads to 4 more, etc. That's how ideas spread.
by dzink | 2025-07-27 14:02:38+00:00
Public investors have an expectation of not losing their money. Thus public companies have to have either expectation of growth or strong cash flow to feed dividends. If a company has neither of those, Private Equity either turns it around or sells it for parts. They are the vultures of the business world. They buy the company with debt that its cash flows are supposed to pay back, and profit from the tax deduction on the debt and whatever is left in the end. A company is a machine where you put in 1 dollar and it comes back with more than 1. Employees get paid with steady reliable income called salary before investors do until the machine runs out. By law the board has to pay payroll if the employees are not compensated, or the board is personally liable for the salaries. They also have an inside view with how the company is doing better than any investor. They can and will bail when something goes funky. Any equity over is the perk of taking risk by investing in the company. The stress of wondering whether you will make payroll or have a business left after you have worked so hard to create and sweat so hard to work it is so deep that few would take it on - thus you have to give them proportionate carrot to look forward to or there would be no jobs.