MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hearsathought | 2025-07-18 15:11:36+00:00
> 1. US foreign policy is uniparty.

Only in regards to one foreign entity.

> Let me give you some examples:

2 of those 3 directly involve the US and US action. The outlier says a lot.

> The state simply will not tolerate anti-imperialist protests.

The current administration ran on an anti-imperialist platform. You can protest american, russian, french, chinese, british imperialism all you want. You can quote george washington's warning about empires and foreign wars all day long. What you can't protest is israel. Period.
by hydrogen7800 | 2025-07-18 15:12:58+00:00
>palatial orthopedic facilities

I'll see your anecdote with another anecdote. Around where I live, for the past few years there was a sudden massive ad campaign for a new orthopedist complete with billboards featuring the presumably founding doctor's smiling face, and various other print and sponsored ads. Their main building is a giant gaudy marble, glass and brass clad building, but there are others that have taken up more mundane buildings. I don't know how such a business launches so quickly with so much $$, but it must be PE. They've certainly got a lot of debts to pay off now, and I can imagine the assembly-line level of care with more focus on low-margin patient satisfaction, encouraging reviews about how nice and friendly everyone was, rather than actual effective care. This is of course my cynical uninformed take after seeing mucho $$ spent on advertising. Maybe they are actually great and effective doctors, for all I know.
by aziaziazi | 2025-07-18 15:13:03+00:00
> These fortifications come from [...]

Many baby's brewage or powder are also skimmed and re-enriched with fortifiants AWA most cereals and salts. Caw milk has more Calcium and Phosphorus but Soy milk gets more Iron, Magnesium, Fibers and Polyunsaturated Fats. You easily get P from lentils and Ca from green vegetables, without fortifiant.

Milk protein efficiency is 25% [0], this means with 1kg of soy you either get 380g of soy protein or 95g of whey. Accounting for a bio-disponibility of 0.95 the ratio is still 1/3.8! This is so inefficient that a lot is wasted in US and Brazils :

> 97% of U.S. soybean meal goes to feed livestock and poultry. [1]

0: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/protein-efficiency-of-mea...

1: https://soygrowers.com/key-issues-initiatives/key-issues/oth...
by cjs_ac | 2025-07-18 15:13:09+00:00
Olympic fencing has very well-defined rules, and so is a poor reflection of actual combat. You can lose a point in fencing just because it wasn't your turn to attack.

Kendo is highly ritualised, and therefore has the same problems. The shinai (bamboo swords) also behave very differently to actual swords.

I forgot to mention bohurt/buhurt, which, as far as I can tell, is just Eastern European chaps donning plate armour and giving each other concussions with pollaxes.
by goda90 | 2025-07-18 15:13:12+00:00
A couple weeks ago mosquitos were at their peak in my yard. I started thinking about adult mosquito traps, but I don't love the idea of using propane as a CO2 source like most commercial solutions do. I casually looked into solar powered direct air capture of CO2, but that would not scale down. Then I realized maybe I could just capture my own exhalations for 30 minutes a day to use in a trap. Not sure I'll ever actually implement it.
by square_usual | 2025-07-18 15:13:16+00:00
Hey Peter! Thank you again for doing this series. Apologies for the broad question, but do you think it applying for PERM during the current administration is a good idea? My understanding was that in the first Trump administration, PERM denials went up quite a bit, and with immigration being an even larger concern for the second administration I'm wondering if it makes sense holding out for a few years if that's a possibility.
by 7jjjjjjj | 2025-07-18 15:13:24+00:00
You exhaling carbon isn't causing climate change. Those carbon atoms came from your food, or from your food's food, which was a plant, and the plant got the carbon from CO2 in the air. You breathe it out, it goes to the plant, you eat the plant, and you breathe it out again. This is the carbon cycle.

The reason we have climate change is the we're extracting carbon from geologic formations where it's been trapped for millions of years. There is no carbon cycle: It gets extracted, burned, the CO2 goes into the air and stays there (maybe in 10 million years more oil and coal will form, but there are reasons to believe these processes are no longer occurring.)
by KevinMS | 2025-07-18 15:13:31+00:00
> Now that those subsidies are going away for next year, premiums are going to spike. For example, if someone paid $60 a month for their health insurance this year, they might be looking at $105 a month next year.

If you payed $60 a month you were mega subsidized. I'm at about $500 a month (50s, single, bronze). There's no way I'm suddenly going to be around $900. This is either clickbait or a NPR scare tactic.
by theshrike79 | 2025-07-18 15:13:38+00:00
Exactly, I switch between multiple languages, projects and library conventions daily.

I can’t be arsed to remember how I add parameters in which type and did this one have context or not.

Just today I got bit (again) by the fact that the Go log library doesn’t have Debug as an option. And I’ve been writing Go for a decade. (log/slog does have levels though)
by jdjnofk738373 | 2025-07-18 15:13:41+00:00
> If there is a virtue to CS degrees, it's that most engineering tracks require an immense amount of coursework in hard sciences that require a high intellectual aptitude to complete.

> I'm really struggling to believe that a majority of people can work through that material and then can't do the type of work that most developers do.

In practice, the way maths and sciences are taught to CS students is without demand for any ingenuity. Most of the time, students don’t prove theorems, they only perform rote calculations according to an algorithm. The few proofs that do show up are things like a few very basic proofs by induction, where students are basically given the algorithm how to solve such a problem beforehand. Statistics, same story – fit a problem to one of the template solutions you were given earlier. Physics, same story.

That’s what for me explains why in my experience maths graduates have been better programmers than CS graduates (as work colleagues). And why some people in this industry hold it as a badge of honour that they can’t invert a binary tree.
by echelon_musk | 2025-07-18 15:13:43+00:00
Pali terms for anyone interested in the "source code" of the modern Mindfulness Movement that allows you to look up the original Pāli technical terms:

> [unskilful] desire

taṇhā (The second Noble Truth)

> aversion

dosa

> we're never satisfied

dukkha (The first Noble Truth)

> moral code

sīla
by killerstorm | 2025-07-18 15:13:58+00:00
They aren't predicting any new capabilities here: all things they mentioned already existed in various demos. They are basically saying that the next iteration of Operator is unlikely to be groundbreaking, which is rather obvious. I.e. "sudden breakthrough is unlikely" is just common sense.

Calling it "The world sees its first glimpse of AI agents" is just bad writing, in my opinion. People have been making some basic agents for years, e.g. Auto-GPT & Baby-AGI were published in 2023: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/12by8mj/i_used...

Yeah, those had much higher error rate, but what's the principal difference here?

Seems rather weird "it's an agent when OpenAI calls it an agent" appeal to authority.
by AlphaAndOmega0 | 2025-07-18 15:14:01+00:00
Eh? That isn't right. The metabolic rate while asleep is even lower than the basal average. The only reason there's a net loss after sleep is because you're not regularly consuming food or water as you would when you're awake, not anything special about sleeping by itself. You're burning fewer calories than usual at that time!
by entropie | 2025-07-18 15:14:06+00:00
I made a telegram bot for my mother that downloads yt videos and extracts the audio and makes it available to her via jellyfin from my homeserver. She downloaded way over 1tb in a year.

Once every few month I transfer everything to an SD kart and hand it to her.

So: youtube is pretty full of audiobooks also very recent ones - and shes only searching for german ones.
by jihadjihad | 2025-07-18 15:14:26+00:00
Like others mentioned, your library + Libby is a great resource, especially if you're in a major metro. I moved away from a major metro and kind of miss how rich the selection for materials was (I was spoiled!). It's not bad where I'm at now, but any major city should have a great selection, and using Libby is easy.
by nayuki | 2025-07-18 15:14:34+00:00
> Drinking demineralized or acidic RO filtered water is harmful!

What is the evidence for that? I drink homemade distilled water without any remineralization steps and it's perfectly fine.

Also note that pure water becomes slightly acidic from absorbing carbon dioxide in the air, producing carbonic acid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonic_acid#In_biological_so...
by Nursie | 2025-07-18 15:15:18+00:00
Look at what happened with PCBs… in much of the world, nothing.

I was pretty shocked to discover quite recently that in the UK you are advised to eat two portions of oily fish per week, for your health. But no more because of the levels of PCBs in the fish. The UK isn’t the only place with this problem and (for instance) the Bay Area is pretty contaminated as well.

And PCBs were banned in the late 1970s/early 80s.
by flashgordon | 2025-07-18 15:15:19+00:00
But what if you could re-solve all of today's problems (solutions) with GenAI. Ie if there was an app or game that you like and just want to clone it, that itself today is quite achievable (there was a game -weewar from about 20 years ago that I loved but went out of business. I was able to "clone" it in about 3 weeks).

Even if AI is not solving P=NP even doing the repetetive boring bits feels like a huge boost no?
by ben_w | 2025-07-18 15:15:43+00:00
"Talking about" is relatively easy for all four; but IMO the use of accountants and lawsuits is much more likely than people using Bitcoin and JavaScript.

If we don't have lawsuits, there's no process by which someone's failure to have an accountant could be held against them. If you don't have something accountant-shaped that can examine the real world, then you have no way to audit that your debit of 100 Martian Pesos was balanced with a credit of 100 traditional Martian didgeridoos, no matter if the Martian Peso was a cryptocurrency, a fiat currency, or commodity money consisting of transmuted post-transuranic-island-of-stability-metal. If you don't care about that, you're probably only playing with money and assets anyway and are functionally post-scarcity.

We might be post-scarcity, annihilated, or post-apocalyptic in 100 years, but none of these three would likely keep Bitcoin, and only one JavaScript.
by 93po | 2025-07-18 15:15:46+00:00
i hate terminal stuff and refuse to write code in terminals, and i still think claude code has better results than cursor IDE with sonnet 4. it might be a mixture of it mixing in opus (which i never really used with cursor) or it might be that there's a bigger context window or its agentic process is somewhat different. im not entirely sure. but i feel like it gets things right more consistently and introduces fewer issues. it might also be the use of CLAUDE.md which i think has helped a ton in consistently making sure its following best practices for my project
by reaperducer | 2025-07-18 15:15:46+00:00
Any active COBOL devs here?

A legitimate question, but so far not many answers, and they're mostly from people who know people who know COBOL devs. This is to be expected.

Demographically, COBOL devs skew older, and there aren't a lot of graybeards left on HN. This place used to be full of them, and they always had interesting and unusual insights and techniques to share. Those days are long gone.

IMO, Graybeards have largely left HN for a few reasons:

- They're tired of being shouted down by the Reddit-quality ageism that lingers through this forum.

- They're mature enough to no longer be interested in chasing every little tech fad as if their lives depended on it, and that's 90% of what HN has become.

- As most older people do, have other things in their lives that are more interesting than work. Family. Children. Hobbies. Traveling. Service. The world is full of things more rewarding than being terminally online, or being reminded of your day job.

I applaud your curiosity, but you're standing in a church asking, "Where are all the atheists?" COBOL devs aren't here. And where they are is likely not online.
by mschaef | 2025-07-18 15:15:47+00:00
I haven't worked in COBOL, but I've worked with it.

This was around 1999, and I was building a system for configuring and ordering custom PC's at a large distribution company. One of the feature requirements was that we display inventory over the various options. (ie: There are 373 20G disks in stock, but only 12 30G disks in stock). The idea was that this would let a customer ordering 200 machines know that they should pick the 20G disk if the wanted it now.

The way inventory at this company was done was via two systems. There was a normal SQL database that had access to a daily snapshot of inventory taken from a mainframe that always had the up to date data. With the mainframe taking a while to process queries, we used the less current SQL database for the majority of the UI, but took the time to query the mainframe once a customer was in the shopping cart. Customers might see a change during the flow, but it would at least let them see the most current data prior to committing to a purchase.

The mainframe query itself was implemented by someone else as a COBOL job that produced the required inventory numbers. From my point of view, it was just a limited sort of query conducted over a specialized JDBC driver. (Not necessarily the weirdest aspect of that design.... for a variety of reasons, we did the UI in ASP/VBScript, the back end using Microsoft's JVM invoked via COM Automation, and the SQL database link was via a dubious use of a JDBC/ODBC bridge to connect to SQL Server. It all worked, but not the most solid architecture.)

==

My only other mainframe experience was working as an intern for a utility company a few years prior (1991-1992). They used CDC Cyber mainframes to run the power grid, using something like 4MM lines of FORTRAN code. The dispatchers themselves interfaced to the system using consoles with 4 19" color displays running at 1280x1024. Heady stuff for 1991. (The real time weather radar screen was cool too, in an age before the internet made it common place.)
by tumsfestival | 2025-07-18 15:15:55+00:00
No one is gaming on PC because of "first party" games, and Valve's offerings are literally the whole of Steam with more excellent games you could ever possibly play in a lifetime. Then there's GOG and the other stores. Hell, there are many great games outside any of the major stores. This flimsy excuse only has any sway if all you want to play is the next Mario or Zelda slop, but even then there are emulators.
by tialaramex | 2025-07-18 15:16:02+00:00
ML-KEM? How did you get from ChaCha20 to ML-KEM? Is it just that you skimmed the original comment and are focused on a different topic altogether? I was trying to understand what constitutes "Soup-to-nuts" here because I think Thomas is putting the distinction in the wrong place.

Still, now we're here:

It's foolish to wait for a "perfect language" but it's not foolish to look for a way to improve the status quo, and I don't buy that just because it so happens it "never panned out" previously that won't ever change.

Which actually gets me back to that DIV instruction. What ensured Go couldn't have this problem? Just luck? The IRA's warning to Thatcher seems very applicable.
by kopecs | 2025-07-18 15:16:37+00:00
I think the suggestion is that the government use of that public data could be such as to create a chilling effect. That is, the upload and interaction of the user with the private company is almost irrelevant: it is just part of the antecedent to the government's conduct.

If you believe the government would only use that data for just purposes then you probably wouldn't then believe that there is a 1A issue. But if you think the government would use it to identify persons at a protest and then take adverse actions against them on the basis of their presence alone (which to be clear, seems distinguished from the immediate instance) you would probably think there is a 1A issue.
by dust42 | 2025-07-18 15:17:02+00:00
Same happened in Germany: in the region of Mittelbaden, harmful per- and polyfluorinated chemicals (PFAS or PFC) have been contaminating groundwater and arable land for years. The district of Rastatt, which is particularly affected, holds a compost producer responsible for the widespread contamination. In the region, about 1,100 hectares of arable land and approximately 170 million cubic meters of groundwater are polluted. The beginning of the scandal dates back to 1999.

That's when a compost company started processing so-called paper sludges. These are waste materials from the paper industry and are believed to have contained PFAS. The company mixed these wastes with compost and spread them on fields—until a regulatory ban in 2008. According to reports, the PFAS eventually entered the drinking water via soil and groundwater.
Show HN: A tool to play with prime-generating functions and patterns
by ilmenit | 2025-07-18 15:17:04+00:00
Hi all,

I don’t have a strong math background, but after watching some YouTube videos like "Why do prime numbers make these spirals? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK32jo7i5LQ) and Prime Numbers on Numberphile https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0D0BD149128BB06F I got curious about the different patterns and functions that might generate primes or interesting visualizations.

Out of curiosity, I put together a web tool: Prime Fold: https://ilmenit.github.io/prime-fold/

The tool lets you: Enter or evolve mathematical functions to generate numbers and see which outputs are prime. Visualize primes in 2D or 1D sequences. Use built-in optimization algorithms to search for functions that generate more primes or interesting patterns.

I’m not sure if this is useful for anything serious, but it was fun to build and experiment with. If anyone finds it interesting or has suggestions, I’d be happy to hear your thoughts.
by FL410 | 2025-07-18 15:17:22+00:00
In my experience, it's usually lack of awareness about modern security risks, and lack of familiarity with modern infrastructure paradigms. The latter really isn't a problem since these systems are usually standalone, but the former does become a problem - they often are from a time where this just wasn't something to consider. As a result, these legacy systems are often using default passwords, have tons of crazy stuff exposed to the network, and are comprised of custom code written specifically for the business purpose (so the documentation is only as good as what they made).

On the other hand, these guys generally write pretty neat, lean code that is quick, reliable, and directly responsive to the business. The really fun thing is watching the users fly through the keyboard-only screens, sometimes with muscle memory that is faster than the terminal emulator can update - they're literally working ahead of the screens.
by hobofan | 2025-07-18 15:17:35+00:00
Seems like half of the comments here have only skimmed the article.

There doesn't seem to be an intent to implement reimbursement of the fee from the time it is implemented, and clear incentive to be as slow with it as possible.

> On that basis, CBO estimates that enacting the provision would increase revenues and decrease the deficit by $28.9 billion over the 2025‑2034 period
by edwardbernays | 2025-07-18 15:17:52+00:00
No, it actually is kind of important. Because he obviously does not understand what he's talking about, nor does he apparently have a good mental model of the standard model and its relation to prior work. He is just using buzzwords and leaning on that for sloppily gesturing at his imagination saying "look at all of our treasures, we can already solve all the most fundamental issues! We already have all of the pieces!"

Forgive me if I insist somebody show the most minute amount of competence before entertaining their absolutely wild speculation regarding whether the corpus of our species can explain physics-to-culture.
by mvdwoord | 2025-07-18 15:17:57+00:00
I would say these people were in a relationship with the mainframe, if that makes sense. And also having worked at IBM in the past where I sat adjacent to the mainframe support team for Business Services, I totally get it. Mainframes are awesome if you ask me, and in a sense we have been trying to reinvent a lot of its goodness with "commodity" x86 hardware.

From a technical-cultural perspective it was mostly sulkiness, and a complete and utter lack of embracing the paradigms of distributed computing. Also, like most internal clouds, there were plenty of issues as it was. Initially they just tried to replace mainframe application components 1:1 onto VMs in whatever way and whenever anything was <100% reliable they complained that our cloud was not able to do it. I had to explain in a very harsh way, under a lot of pressure (I believe not hitting the deadline of switching off the mainframes meant renewal for a year at 40 Mil.. or thereabouts) the realities of "cloud".

The developers I spoke with in that time though, were very much the opposite of the move fast breaking things crowd. Intelligent, but also narrow minded I would say.
by hk1337 | 2025-07-18 15:18:02+00:00
meh. There's a lot of really good self-taught engineers but this seems like a weird thing to bring up.

I worked with someone that was self-taught, them vs 2 of use with more formal education, we had a difference of opinion on how something should be be handled so our boss at the time basically posed a contest that whoever could get it done first would be what was implemented. Of course they outperformed and got it out faster.

1. That's a horrible way of deciding what gets pushed, pitting developers against each other. 2. The resulting code was awful to read and very procedural. Written by the same developer that made a god awful hero function.
by delusional | 2025-07-18 15:18:53+00:00
I'm not American. This is the first time I'm hearing either "demographics is destiny" or "coalition of the ascendant".

"Demographics is destiny" seems to be a quote from a french philosopher from the 1800s, while "coalition of the ascendant" seems to be a description of the coalition Obama sought to build in his second term, an idea swiftly dismantled in 2016.

The articles I can find discussing these things don't contain any democrats scheming about using immigrants to overtake the republicans. The only people I find talking about how it will "estrange the republican party from these growing demographics" are republicans. I'm not going to claim that no democrat has ever considered that outcome, but I am going to propose that it seems more likely to me that if that were to happen it would be a result of politics they'd be in favor of anyway.

In general, it's pretty popular to help people. I don't think republicans would disagree that part of their coalition is built on higher income individuals, which they hope to grow by raising incomes. They're not doing that as a sort of underhanded tactic, they believe income is good. In the same way I think the Obama democrats do believe in helping immigrants, and obviously that makes them more popular amongst immigrants. That's not a scheme, that's just a policy.

I don't think this is nearly as clear cut as you believe it is.