MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-17 08:27:51+00:00
Or just start with eating less meat, learn to cook and identify which vegetables you need for a balanced diet.

The recommendations / sciences - which predate concerns about greenhouse emissions etc - for how much meat you need per day is about 65 grams, or about 1/2 quarter pounder in American measurements. In macronutrient language, you only need about 46-56 grams of protein a day (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_Reference_Intake#Macro...).

I won't deny that good beef contains heaps of both essential macro- and micronutrients in a convenient and tasty package, but people really don't need as much per day as they are eating.
Show HN: Interactive coloring and learn about space (for kids)
by zengineer | 2025-07-17 08:27:51+00:00
Hi there,

we have just launched our new space world, where kids (and often also grown ups) color planets, rockets, astronauts and then bring them alive on a screen.

Additionally to the coloring-fun you learn interesting facts about all kinds of space things.

Right now the facts are all in English, but soon more languages are gonna be supported.

Happy coloring!
by rep_lodsb | 2025-07-17 08:29:46+00:00
Just disable automatic updates, so you can then instead yell at them about how they're compromising security?

What is really needed is being able to choose what updates to install, and more generally, being able to get rid of all the crapware that uploads everything you do on your device to your corporate overlords. Not just particular "apps", but the operating system itself.

The fact that most people in 2025 simply accept carrying around 24/7 a device with GPS, microphone, camera and wireless network connection, which they cannot control or even know what it does at all, is dystopian.

Imagine if this was the norm with PCs back in the 1990s. Linux would never have existed, since there would have been no way to replace the pre-installed Microsoft OS with something else.
by tauntz | 2025-07-17 08:30:01+00:00
I switched from a Pixel 3a to an iPhone 16 and it really bothers me that it's way too huge for everyday usage. Maybe I have extremely short thumbs but here's the maximum reach I have on the screen when I hold my phone "normally" in my hand: https://i.postimg.cc/Cx97jxLZ/iphone16reach.png - I can't reach the upper part of the screen at all, without doing finger-gymnastics or using my other hand. I'd love to switch to a phone that is 50-60%% of the size of the iPhone 16 but there are essentially no (modern) options for this. It's really a bummer :(
by close04 | 2025-07-17 08:30:11+00:00
The problem is that we don't factor in the externalities adequately in the price of most products.

Building and operating an amusement park is also incredibly inefficient just to get a giggle. If every product would be priced in a way that includes all externalities you'd see a shrink in the industries with the highest (negative) impact.

I'm setting aside the Pandora's box discussion about allowing only the rich the luxury of destroying the environment.
by chneu | 2025-07-17 08:30:27+00:00
Nobody has any confidence in ai to not ddos. That's why there have been dozens of posts about how bandwidth is becoming an issue for many websites as bots continuously crawl their sites for new info.

Wikipedia has backups for this reason. AI companies ignore the readily available backups and instead crawl every page hundreds of times a day.

I think debian also recently spoke up about it.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-17 08:30:31+00:00
> To me where in the world was Carmen Sandiego was a fun trivia game. To the creators, they were trying to address the issue of americans not knowing where the country was on a map.

Was there a show? To me Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego was a reoccurring segment on a show called Square One. I liked it, but it didn't feel like it was the source of Carmen Sandiego mythology; it felt more like a minor epiphenomenon.

There was also a computer game, which I didn't play much of because it was a lot of work. It felt a lot more fully developed than the TV segments, though.
by franga2000 | 2025-07-17 08:30:43+00:00
Ecosystems can repair themselves from moderate amounts of damage and adapt to coexist with the thing that causes it. The problem is that we're causing too much damage too quickly.

It's also entirely possible to sustain a civilization without causing continuous damage to the planet, it just isn't allowed to be constantly growing in population and resource consumption. That's not a necessary part of civilization, it's just the way we're doing it currently.
by arjie | 2025-07-17 08:30:53+00:00
My family is featured at the bottom of the article. If you're curious about the process I wrote most of it down here as it occurred and some after from memory: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/IVF

The actual process of our pregnancy is written here: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Pregnancy

And a quick primer on our gene mutations is here: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Gene_Mutations

Feel free to ask me any questions.
by cnity | 2025-07-17 08:31:19+00:00
The cattle doesn't have to _be_ on the same wasted land that is used to feed it. Soy is imported from other countries to feed cattle in the UK (around 2M tons of soy per year[0]).

It is a common and convenient misconception that raising cattle is not bad for the environment because it is raised on non-arable land -- the cattle still gets fed imported soy.

0: https://www.efeca.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/UK-RT-on-Su...
by quonn | 2025-07-17 08:32:45+00:00
Wrong.

- mass unethical treatment (assuming you do not mean the fact that animals are killed) is related to the conditions which are related to price

- health risks can be minimal depending on the amount and type of meat you eat

- the CO2 impact again depends on the meat and conditions. Surely chicken in your backyard can be kept without CO2 impacts with some effort.

- your very existence has a CO2 impact. By your own logic you have two choices …
by phtrivier | 2025-07-17 08:33:02+00:00
1) Do you have numbers to help use compare ? I have no idea how much methane was unleashed during this single event. So it's pretty hard to compare with to the impact of cattles. (I have a suspicion it's a drop in an ocean.)

2) You are right, they are hypocrites. At least you can vote some of the politicians out - unfortunately, their electorate The bad news is that physics does not care about their hypocrisy. The good news is that neither do we have to - we can make a lot of choices ourselves. Including what we eat, how we heat, and who we vote for.

3) Why do you think "everyone" is flocking to bitcoin ? [1] the usage is still confidential enough. The GHG impact is therefore hard to evaluate ; sure it might use a lot of electricity (about as much as a small country [2]), but it depends on how valuable you value the thing.

I don't think bitcoin is more usefull than a big "gambling ponzi scheme", but I understand people have other opinions. Do you use bitcoin daily ? More than you national currency ? More than other digital services.

4) Do you believe those things to be exclusive ? In turns of carbon, we need to "turn off lights" (I suppose you mean "reduce our own consumptions") _and_ demand that AI be at least powered by carbon heavy sources (or - unpopular opinion on HN - consider not using them too heavily ?) But we also need to lobby for building carbon-light electricity sources. AND we need to reduce the impact of agriculture.

The fact that some people are oblivious to the impact of activity A does not remove the impact of activity B.

[1] https://theconversation.com/almost-no-one-uses-bitcoin-as-cu...

[2] https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/ghg/comparisons
by xqb64 | 2025-07-17 08:33:11+00:00
I've had this exact bug happen to me when I implemented my git clone.

The way I found out was that Github kept rejecting my push, because as I later discovered, my git history was invalid precisely due to entries being sorted improperly due to the forward slash requirement. I could have solved this with the real git, but the point was to use my tool exclusively for version control from inception, so I just deleted the .git folder. So, my git history appears to begin near the end of the whole cycle. But I did manage to learn a lot, both about git and about the language I implemented it in.
by _Algernon_ | 2025-07-17 08:34:04+00:00
Any living creature would fit that definition of "civilization". A sponge takes up resources from its environment, and releases its waste products into the environment. Non-native species often disrupt ecosystems when introduced somewhere new. So unless you moderate your argument by including some required scale it doesn't make any sense. But it would follow that we could reduce resource inputs and outputs to such an extent that civilization is no longer harmful, which puts a damper on your statement that this is "factual observation, not nihilism".
by andy_ng | 2025-07-17 08:34:16+00:00
I hear your concern, and you're absolutely right to be thinking about this. It's true that AI development involves intense competition, and that can feel overwhelming - like we're all just passengers on a train we can't control. But I don't think we're as powerless as it might seem.

Throughout history, we've found ways to guide powerful technologies toward better outcomes, even when there were strong economic incentives pushing in other directions. Think about how we've developed safety standards for cars, regulations for medicines, or international agreements around nuclear technology. It took time and effort, but people working together made a real difference.

When it comes to AI, we still have meaningful choices. We can support leaders who take these issues seriously, back companies that are genuinely trying to develop AI responsibly, and speak up when we see problems. We can also stay informed and help others understand what's happening - sometimes the most important thing is just having honest conversations about what we want our future to look like.
by dijit | 2025-07-17 08:35:13+00:00
But now we're returning to the assumption that everything thats fit for cows is fit for human edible crops.

Cows aren't often eating the "human grade" crops, to my understanding.

I'm not making an argument that we shouldn't scale back cattle-rearing, if anything my personal preference would be to eliminate all oil-based feed and see how sustainable we can make things; I just think we've got a real convenient scapegoat here when the largest polluter is definitely car dependence as it's adding carbon to the carbon cycle.
by theshackleford | 2025-07-17 08:35:13+00:00
> For... well, most people.

You don’t speak for most people. You can only speak for yourself. The feelings of “Most people” are clear as demonstrated by the market; they not only find large phones fine, they find them preferable.

> modern phones are not one hand operable

So? I mean for me they are so it’s irrelevant, but what should it matter if they are not? The market obviously does not share your interest in devices to be operated in such a manner as a priority or something of particular importance.

That being said, it’s of course unfortunate that if that is your preference, that nothing in the market caters for it. Your preferences and wants are obviously entirely valid and it’s a shame there is no interest even from a boutique vendor in meeting them.

I have plenty of preferences for products that are not catered too, as I am sure is true for us all and of course I don’t love it, but I must live in the reality that the larger market doesn’t always want what I do.

> We’re optimizing for engagement

The market is optimizing for what consumers asked for, which was larger devices. You say I am in a minority, I claim equally that you are in a minority as well.
by otikik | 2025-07-17 08:35:45+00:00
> A clean planet is a planet without civilization

That's not at all true, from either side.

To begin with, a planet can be "dirty" without any civilization. Most planets are. Look at Venus. Our own planet had already gone through 5 mass extinction events before we came up. The Great Oxigenation Event in particular does look like "pollution until planet death" without any civilization involved.

On the other side, it possible to have clean civilization - even one that cleans up more as it advances. You make it sound like it's an inherent problem - like civilization is "by definition" unclean. That is not at all the case. We have seen it is possible. What it isn't, is (as) profitable as simply not dealing with the externalities.

Civilization,Clean Planet,Maximal Profit: pick two.
by prmoustache | 2025-07-17 08:36:01+00:00
Most people don't really need more than 2 hours of battery life anyway[1] as their laptops barely ever leave the house. >8H of battery is nice to have but it is really an important parameter for a specific population while for others it is just convenience. I wouldn't trade an OS/desktop I don't like over my linux setup just because it last longer when I never need more than a couple of hours on battery[3].

[1] which means you need a 4 to 6h range when new if you don't plan to replace the battery too often

[2] students, construction companies, people who are always on the road...
by londons_explore | 2025-07-17 08:36:45+00:00
I think OP is saying it's impossible to have no impact - both theoretically and practically.

From a theoretical perspective, that sunlight on your solar panel isn't free - there was some tree or plant who would have used it if you had not.

Even if you build over the ocean, there would be some algae grown with that light and fish who ate the algae.

From a practical perspective, good luck making and deploying huge amounts of solar panels without huge mines for materials, a big road network cutting through the forest to deliver the parts, huge cities for people to live in who operate the factories etc.
by thrance | 2025-07-17 08:37:53+00:00
> mass unethical treatment (assuming you do not mean the fact that animals are killed) is related to the conditions which are related to price

Source? I really don't buy that more expensive meat producers kill their animals that much more "humanely". And even if the killing was painless, you're still killing tens of animals per year for the sole sake of a tastier meal.

> health risks can be minimal depending on the amount and type of meat you eat

True.

> the CO2 impact again depends on the meat and conditions. Surely chicken in your backyard can be kept without CO2 impacts with some effort.

I trust you raise all the animals you eat, and don't feed them with imported grains? Don't be ridiculous.

> your very existence has a CO2 impact. By your own logic you have two choices …

You're basically telling anyone who's self-conscious about their environmental impact to kill themselves. Great.
by lowsong | 2025-07-17 08:37:58+00:00
> VCs are risking money they manage, it's not like they're putting anyone else at risk.

They're putting everyone at risk.

As others in this thread have pointed out what these VCs do is make wildly risky gambles. When it pays off they make billions of dollars in profit and congratulate themselves for their foresight and the power of capitalism. When it doesn't they go cap-in-hand to the federal government, saying that if they're allowed to collapse it'll destabilize the entire economy.

If it were just some rich billionaires who might have to sell their second private jet when this collapses I'd agree with you: who cares what they do with their own money. But what's going to happen is that the taxpayer will end up footing the bill for their reckless behavior, and millions of people will end up worse off for it as governments cut back on welfare, healthcare, and aid programs to balance the books. In a very real sense, people are going to be paying for VC greed with their lives.
by singularity2001 | 2025-07-17 08:38:13+00:00
aɪ ˈɹɪəli lʌv ðæt əˈpɹoʊt͡ʃ ðɛɹ ɪz ˈivən ə ˈkʌstəm ˌd͡ʒiːpiːˈtiː ðæt dʌz ðə d͡ʒɑb fɔɹ ju

ənˈfɔɹtʃənətli ˈnən əv ðə ˈwənz aɪ ˈtɹaɪd ɡɪv jə ˌʌnkənˈdɪʃənəli ɪˈmidiət ˌaɪpiˈeɪ wɪˈðaʊt ɪnˈstɹʌkʃən ænd ˈnən əv ðəm ˈænsɚ ˈkwɛs.tʃənz ɪn ˌaɪpiˈeɪ bəɾ aɪ kən ˈfɪks ðɪs baɪ ˈsɪmpli kɹiˈeɪtɪŋ maɪ ˈoʊn ˌdʒiːpiˈti ðæt ˈdəz ɪɡˈzæktli ðæt

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ipafy/

https://chatgpt.com/g/g-6878bd78e06c8191bcdf6de7a57eac52-ipa...

PS: it might take some time to learn the difference between IPA and API but it will be worth it finally we created the spelling reform we've always dreamt about
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-17 08:39:42+00:00
That is a Waldorf perspective, though presumably not exclusive to them. I was sent to a Waldorf kindergarten, and my mother despised it because they repeatedly insulted her for having taught me to read. They felt this was unhealthy.

Independent of Waldorf, kindergarten teachers - like most teachers - don't like it when their students already know the material they're supposed to be teaching.
by throwawaylaptop | 2025-07-17 08:39:46+00:00
I made an account finally just because this no laptop thing was too shocking. I get kids and teens have preferences. But what in the world is going on with the parents? Who cares if Timmy wants to write his paper on a phone. You tell him to sit down at a desk, focus, and write like a normal person. You can always regress to your own quirks once youve proven yourself.
by Expurple | 2025-07-17 08:40:10+00:00
They are all fragile for different reasons: dynamic typing (that always leaks through bolted-on type hints anyway), implementation inheritance, null, exceptions, uncontrolled mutation, abuse of reflection and downcasts, weak leaky interfaces that the compiler doesn't check, no help with issues in multithreaded code, insecure defaults, poor semver practices in the ecosystem, poor tooling, fragile runtime dependencies.

I use Rust. From what I've read, Swift seems better than the others, with Typescript and Go following closely. All four happen to be widely praised in this thread.

To clarify, I don't have "professional experience" with every popular language, including Swift and Typescript too.
by grandarchmaster | 2025-07-17 08:40:32+00:00
Those who call themselves Central Europe are a part of the European Union, and so lean towards the UK English since school education and relevant English certifications are geared towards it. Perhaps those who would like to ignore the fact that Central Europe is a region distinct geographically and culturally from the Eastern Europe, nowadays more than ever, should not project their views unto others and speak for them?
by forgotoldacc | 2025-07-17 08:40:42+00:00
And our descendants are going to hate us for doing this on an even more massive scale.

Most of our info is encoded digitally now. We put everything on some cloud server and that company gets shut down. Whoops. We change formats somewhere along the way and nobody converts old things over. Whoops. Documentation for implementing a decoder for that data was all stored online and maintained by one nerd who maintained the open source project all on their own. That will be arcane knowledge 5 years after they die. More so 50 years and 1000 years later.

And that's not even taking into account that data simply rots away over time, and things we don't actively copy over will be lost. Plus disasters like massive solar flares that could wipe everything. We've had a few solar flares that knocked out electricity before. We think that's about as bad as it gets, but the fact is, we don't know just how bad solar flares can be. We haven't had any way to measure them before fairly modern times and people didn't have any devices that would be affected by them.

If (when) Google dies, there's zero chance everything on Youtube gets backed up. There'll be a 2 week notice and then it's all gone. Only things with active fanbases will have data copied. And once people forget about that content, it'll also fade away with time.

A lot of people here will think, "Nah, no way. Someone will definitely save that stuff and it'll be fine." That's what our ancestors thought, too. "Someone will do it. Why worry? Who cares?"
by peterashford | 2025-07-17 08:40:50+00:00
Methane also traps at least 100 times as much heat as CO2. It causes significant near-term warming, and cutting methane gives fast climate benefits. Cutting down on methane emmisions can have considerable more effect on global warming over the next 20 years, compared to CO2 (which we also have to reduce), Atmosphere experts all agree on this.

And "[cows] exist in a closed system" assumes we’re not expanding herds, clearing forests, or using fossil inputs.
by chneu | 2025-07-17 08:42:15+00:00
Eh yes and no.

Intel absolutely flubbed some nodes and bad employee execution was a part of it.

But management has consistently tried to tell customers what they want/need. Intel has a history of developing products with no customer base or pulling out of markets too early. Neither of those are the responsibility of low level employees. That's higher management.

One of the big concerns about the GPU division is "Will Intel keep going long enough for this to matter or will they pull out the second there's an issue?"
by mike_hearn | 2025-07-17 08:42:23+00:00
I work for them so take with a pinch of salt, but Oracle DB. It gives you a fully multi-master horizontally scalable database with ACID transactions (not sharding), full SQL, elastic scalability, built in queues, JavaScript stored procs, automatic REST API construction, many other features. Its pricing is competitive with a cloud hosted Postgres, believe it or not (the clouds are making a lot of money off customers who are wedded to Postgres). I work through some of the numbers for an extreme case here [1].

Behind the scenes, the way it works is by combining software tricks with special hardware. You rent a (part of a) database cluster. The cluster is running on high end hardware running customized kernels, with a private Infiniband RDMA-capable interconnect between the nodes separate from the front-side network that clients connect with. A lock manager coordinates ownership of data blocks, which can be read either from disk nodes or directly out of the RAM of other database nodes. So if one node reads a block then writes to it, the only thing written to disk immediately is the transaction log. If another node then needs to write to that block, it's transferred directly over the interconnect using RDMA to avoid waiting on the remote CPU, the disk is never touched. Dirty blocks are written back to disk asynchronously. The current transaction counter is also poked directly into remote nodes via RDMA.

In the latest versions the storage nodes can also do some parts of query processing using predicate push-down, so the amount of data to be transferred over the interconnect is also lowered. The client drivers understand all the horizontal scalability stuff and can failover between nodes transparently, so the whole setup is HA. A node can die and the cluster will continue, including open transactions.

If you need to accelerate performance further you can add read-through coherent cache nodes. These act as proxies and integrate with the block ownership system to do processing locally.

Other than financial reasons (I own some stock), I've started making this argument here on HN because it's unintuitive but correct, which is just enjoyable. A lot of people in the startup world don't realize any of the above, thinking that horizontally scalable fully coherent SQL databases either don't exist or have severe caveats. E.g. one reply to you suggests FoundationDB which is great, but it's a KV store and not a SQL database.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074506 (last paragraph)
by kleiba | 2025-07-17 08:42:49+00:00
The Christian library one town over from where we live does a "reading summer" event every year for the school holidays: kids who borrow books, read them, and write a small book report (2-3 sentences) for them enter a lottery and can win a small prize at the end of the holidays. And I believe every participants gets a certificate also.

You'd think that this would not appeal to anyone, but they actually have a great turnout every year. Quite amazing actually.