MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nerdsniper | 2025-07-20 13:17:58+00:00
A) Erythritol has ~90% bioavailability. See note at bottom.

B) Is a reasonable assumption. See same note at bottom.

C) Erythritol damages the microvascular endothelial cells, which form the BBB. So it doesn't need to cross the BBB, because that's what it damages directly. The name of TFA's study is "The non-nutritive sweetener erythritol adversely affects brain microvascular endothelial cell function"[0].

N.B. Erythritol is known to pass through the BBB via diffusion, though that's somewhat limited by its partition coefficient (logP) of -2.3. It's a small molecule, so it's not blocked based on size.

Also, this study isn't "just one study". There's a large corpus of research accumulating data both in vivo and in vitro showing both that erythritol causes these problems, and demonstrating how. This was a very thoughtful and reasonable study. The main point of the study was to measure oxidative stress, nitric oxide (NO), endothelin (ET)-1, and tissue-type plasminogen activator (t-PA). Their dysregulation is already well-known to be directly linked to the health of brain blood vessels and shown to be quite relevant in the development of stroke.

Epidemiological studies involving thousands of patients first established a strong, independent link between higher blood levels of erythritol and an increased risk for events like heart attack and stroke[1]. Subsequent mechanistic studies then showed that erythritol makes blood platelets hyper-reactive and more prone to clotting, providing a direct link to thrombosis[2]

Also in response to:

> A) is certainly wrong.

A previous study gave participants 30g of erythritol orally and their serum concentration rose from 4 µM to 6,480 µM [3]. That's why this study chose 6mM - they didn't just do some napkin math and YOLO it - previous studies pointed the way after showing that "(A) is certainly right".

[0] https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/japplphysio...

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36849732/

[2] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/ATVBAHA.124.321019

[3] https://consultqd.clevelandclinic.org/evidence-mounts-that-s...
by mikhailfranco | 2025-07-20 13:18:19+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driverless_train_syste...

The length ranking seems to be something like:

Riyadh - 176 km

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riyadh_Metro

Dubai - 90km, first operation 2009

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubai_Metro

London DLR - 38 km

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docklands_Light_Railway

Shanghai is probably in the running as it upgrades:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Metro#Infrastructure
by torginus | 2025-07-20 13:18:19+00:00
I'd argue the very reason Rust was created to get rid of the aliasing problem that's plaguing C-family languages, (meaning that there's always a chance 2 pointers refer to the same piece of memory, meaning all writes might potentially invalidate all variables).

This isn't really solvable in C/C++, and its worked around with a bunch of hacks, which might be overly convervative at times, and at others, generates buggy code.

Rust managed to fix this issue elegantly, but I'm wondering if the solution might be worse than the problem.

It's essentially impossible to write a Rust program without relying on many of its escape hatches like RefCell and unsafe, that make the borrow checker go away.

Essentially any program, that needs to communicate or store data in some sort of persistent structure, which is then accessed in some other part of the program, has multiple mutable references to said abstract central point, which is not allowed in Rust, without the aforementioned workarounds.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-07-20 13:19:02+00:00
> especially when referencing the USA which is basically 50 countries and has a population exceeding all of Western Europe.

Germany is basically 16 countries (federal states [Bundesländer]). Europe is a whole countinent - here a suitable American analogue miht be USA+Canada+Middle America. Or if we talk about the EU, a suitable analogue would be NAFTA (the EU also started as a set of free trade agreements).
by ryukoposting | 2025-07-20 13:20:39+00:00
Have you ever actually used a long-life incandescent lightbulb? They suck. It's like your bedroom is lit by the miserable little lamp in your oven. That's because Tungsten lighting has inherent tradeoffs between life span, and every other desirable characteristic. Brightness, spectral quality, and energy efficiency all improve as you make the filament thinner, and thus less durable.

The Phoebus cartel is an example of planned obsolescence, but it's a bad example for your argument because it made lightbulbs much, much better at their intended purpose. Consumer number-gawking incentivized manufacturers to make their product objectively worse, and the cartel solved that problem.
by sgt | 2025-07-20 13:21:13+00:00
> Airplane seats are getting smaller and smaller,

This is infuriating. Due to better nutrition, we all got bigger. Our parents were smaller in comparison, and our grandparents seem tiny. I'm 6'6" and I'm on the tall end, but I see more and more giants roaming the Earth (and they do seem like giants if you're used to be the tallest in the room).

Yet they make airplane seats smaller. I have to pay hundreds of dollars extra just to buy extra leg room and all that crap. It's frustrating.
by nirui | 2025-07-20 13:21:17+00:00
Ignoring is not how it works. Internet is a basically huge social circle, if not enough people got on broad, a site can die out really quickly. I've observed quite few examples of small community closed down because no one was there anymore, some websites that I loved as a child no longer exists because of this reason too, gone with it is all the content they once hosted.

Here's the problem:

1. Software/Infrastructure have a cost: If you want to self-host, there's a consistent dread of maintaining things. It wears you down, slowly maybe, but eventually.

2. The problem of discovery: Back to the past, people used to sharing links and resource manually, often on a forum ("forum life", i call it). But now days people are more rely on platform recommendations (starts from "Just Google it"). If your content/link is not recommended, then you can't reach far. Also, people now days really hates registration (and memorizing/recording account/password), and they will not even try to use "strange" websites.

3. Government regulation: The government pushing laws upon laws that could restrict self-hosting content, by either making self-hosting difficult, or forcing websites to self-censor (which most personal sites just don't have enough admin to do).

4. Some people who has the capability and know-hows on solving the problem are "solving" it the wrong way. Instead of creating systems that modern users would love to use, they tries "being back the old way" so do speak, but not giving any consideration on why people abandoned "the old way" in the first place. The software they created maybe even quite hostile to regular non-tech-savoy people, but hey at least they themselves thinking it's cool.

There are few projects gets it right, like Mastodon, and maybe Blue Sky etc. But, then these project still don't earn a lot of money and political capital, meaning it still can't escape the point 1 above and maybe point 3 as well.

Over all, I think it's less that the platforms exploiting the Internet, it's mainly that most people just "moved on" to what could make their life easier. Internet is a tool after all.

P.S. If someone wants to solve the social media over-monopolization problem, I'd recommend that you make sure you're "user forced", user, user, user, regular old man/woman John/Marry Doe user. That's how you create social circle/network effect and that's how you grow and sustain.
Solving the Issue of Interpretability of AI
by mikeai686 | 2025-07-20 13:21:38+00:00
# Making AI Thoughts Understandable Through Separate Translator Models

I want to propose a new approach to the problem of AI opacity.

## The Core Problem

Modern AI systems work as "black boxes" - we can't see how they think. Recently, leading researchers warned that we might soon lose even the small transparency we currently have. Here's the difficulty: if we force AI to "think aloud" in human language, it reduces efficiency, but if we allow it to use efficient mathematical representations, we don't understand what's happening.

## Proposed Solution: A Modular System with Translators

I propose dividing the system into four parts:

*1. Free Internal Thinking* Let AI use any mathematical representations that are most efficient for solving tasks. We don't limit its thinking methods.

*2. Multiple Specialized Translator Models* We use several separate models trained to translate AI's internal representations into human-understandable language. Each translator can: - explain the logical structure of reasoning - highlight the main concepts the model is working with - explain how confident the model is in its conclusions Each function is performed by several different translators so results can be cross-checked.

*3. Contradiction Resolution Mechanisms* When translators give different explanations, we: - Highlight areas where they agree (high reliability) - Emphasize discrepancies (likely complex or ambiguous reasoning) - Explain why different interpretations arose If translator results don't contradict each other, we combine non-contradictory aspects into a unified explanation.

*4. Ethics Verification* We use "constitutional AI" (a special rule system, like in Claude.ai) to check: - Compliance with ethical standards - Logical consistency - Alignment with human values

## Main Advantages

- *No delays*: The model can think and produce results without delays (especially important in verbal dialogue), while explanations can be generated in parallel for quality control and, if necessary, future corrections. - *Moderation*: For critically important decisions requiring human moderation, we can wait for the translation and for the human moderator's decision - *Different perspectives*: Different translators show different aspects of thinking - *Transparency of complexities*: When translators disagree, we know the reasoning is complex - *Ethical safety*: An additional verification layer ensures alignment with values

## Open Questions

1. How do we train translators without "correct answers" from humans? 2. How many translators is optimal to use? 3. What to do if all translators cannot clearly explain the reasoning? 4. How to prove that translators accurately reflect internal thinking?

## Next Steps

I would like to: - Create a simple example of such a system working - Develop methods to verify translation accuracy - Combine this approach with existing tools

I would appreciate community feedback, especially regarding potential problems and practical challenges.
by actsasbuffoon | 2025-07-20 13:22:32+00:00
The bulk of the harm from ultra-processed foods was specifically from meats, with smaller contributions coming from sugary drinks and dairy desserts. It’s the pink slime, reconstituted McRib, and hot dogs that are causing the most significant health problems.

Beyond burgers have no cholesterol, hormones, or antibiotics. They’ve got significantly lower saturated fats. Studies have shown that swapping out regular burgers for Beyond burgers lowers your LDL cholesterol and TMAO.

I’m not going to pretend they’re as healthy as a burger made out of black beans and carrots. But if concerns about UPFs are your primary reason for avoiding them then you can relax; they’re not that bad.
by sokoloff | 2025-07-20 13:22:52+00:00
> Arduinos are not good for much more than babby's first microcontroller project.

Baby’s first microcontroller project is exactly what they excel at and, by doing so, they made hobbyist microcontroller development vastly more accessible.

The Arduino value comes from the ease-of-starting and they made that a lot easier than the then-extant state of the art.
by mousethatroared | 2025-07-20 13:23:10+00:00
A lot of things are "hard wired" and yet we expect people to control themselves.

Men's sexual drive, for example, is tuned to fairly rapey if not for a "patriarchal" society that crushes this drive through the threat of a girls father beating a boy to a pulp. Stats are pretty clear here too wrt sex workers and their relationship to their fathers.

And IVF is a tragedy of rented wombs, unfulfilled motherhood dreams, expensive and painful surgeries almost exclusively brunt by women whilst profited by men.

But I'm not worried. A society that inverts the child-parent merit is one whose open loop gain is less than one. It's pretty obvious why: those who think children are deserved are unlikely to have the ability of self-sacrifice to want more than the one, maybe two kids.
by benjiro | 2025-07-20 13:25:38+00:00
Unless your running cheap consumer NVME drives, that is not a issue on Enterprise SSD/NVMEs as they have their own capacitors to ensure data is always written.

On cheaper NVME drives, your point is valid. But we also need to add, how much at risk are you. What is the chance of a system doing funky issues, that you just happened to send X amount of confirm requests to clients, with data that never got written.

For specific companies, they will not cheap out and spend tons of enterprise level of hardware. But for the rest of us? I mean, have you seen the German Hetzner, where 97% of their hardware is mostly consumer level hardware. Yes, there is a risk, but nobody complains about that risk.

And frankly, everything can be a risk if you think about it. I have had EXT3 partition's corrupt on a production DB server. That is why you have replication and backups ;)

TiDB, or was it another distributed DB is also not consistency guaranteed, if i remember correctly. They give for performance eventual consistency.
by mountainb | 2025-07-20 13:25:52+00:00
It is often easier to make another sale of a downgraded product using earned customer goodwill than it is to continuously innovate, delight existing customers, and win new ones based on quality. It's less risky just to run a brand into the dirt, get paid, and screw any shareholders remaining.

Also many of these kinds of activities are illegal, but people do it anyway on the reasonable calculation that they won't be sued and that the government won't investigate them.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-07-20 13:26:08+00:00
Indeed. The title, taken at face value, is misleading. This is in part because English doesn’t distinguish between the various kinds of law, save as modifiers of the word “law”.

The prototype for all social organization is the family, as the family is the origin of all human beings and the context in which human beings are raised. The parents, especially the father, is the prototype for the ruler or lawgiver or king. The family is the primordial society that serves as the basic pattern for everything else. When there is disdorder in the family, there is disorder in society in general.

But contrary to tyrannical legal positivism, which posits that all it takes for a law to be a law is that is is “willed into existence”, the classical legal tradition makes a distinction between lex and ius, and ius itself is divided into the ius gentium and ius naturale. The last, the natural law, is morality, so the remainder of the law is a matter of determination of broad moral principles to concrete circumstances. The “law” in this article is therefore “lex.
by ben_w | 2025-07-20 13:26:09+00:00
Not the poster you're replying to, but the USA, Russia, China, India, North Korea, and Israel are not in the ICC, and that list by itself is already ~45% of the world population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States_parties_to_the_Rome_Sta...

That also means, out of all nuclear powers and all permanent members of the UN security council, only France and the UK are in the ICC.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-07-20 13:27:39+00:00
You seriously need to open a history book to get some perspective on what is actually harmful with this agenda. As for the science, maybe check out wikipedia on human genetics [1]. You'll find tons of further sources there.

>The lack of discontinuities in genetic distances between human populations, absence of discrete branches in the human species, and striking homogeneity of human beings globally, imply that there is no scientific basis for inferring races or subspecies in humans, and for most traits, there is much more variation within populations than between them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation
by shortrounddev2 | 2025-07-20 13:28:44+00:00
On a gdp scale, basically every country on earth is "poorer" than the united states. As you point out, even the poor in America can own cars and tvs and smartphones.

But if you visit any of these other countries you can often be shocked by how much they accomplish with so little. Vastly better standards of customer service, much higher quality public transportation systems, and they often have cheap quality goods and services which compromise in the right areas instead of being so crappy as to basically be a scam
by azlev | 2025-07-20 13:30:02+00:00
I bought the same Ray-Ban sunglasses model 15 years ago and 2 years ago. The older one is way better.

Cellphone is the opposite: the new one is way better.

So all in all, it's just capitalism: if quality sells more, people buy quality (whatever quality means). If cheaper sells more, companies cut costs.

I think the answer change from time to time.
by Lord-Jobo | 2025-07-20 13:30:28+00:00
I am in a similar group; the mostly-vegetarian. Chicken when I don't have a real choice, red meat at a wedding like once a year or something.

I like beyond meat products, the price is obviously a problem but they go on sale locally frequently enough to be a good substitute for us.

Something about them I HATE though is that they have two burger products that are extremely similar with one main difference: product A is kept frozen and requires thawing to cool properly and product B is kept frozen and cooks from frozen.

They are so similar that we accidentally get the wrong one all the time.

Once cooked, both products are indistinguishable from an eating perspective. Get product A the fuck outta here, please.
by neogodless | 2025-07-20 13:30:36+00:00
Can we discuss food packaging a bit?

What's better -- often food packaging has clever ways to be resealable so you can use it without letting your food get stale.

What's worse -- the above is combined with "make it as thin as possible to not fall apart before it gets home. Quite frequently... I try to carefully open a resealable package, and completely shred it ruining the part that is supposed to reseal.

I imagine this is regional, but our local deli meat bags... well this adds a second issue... the bags are super thin, but then they put strong stickers folded across the resealable portion. It's nigh impossible to get the sticker lifted without ripping a hole in the bag and again, ruining the "resealable" feature.
by Deeksha676 | 2025-07-20 13:30:47+00:00
“A lot of what I worked on I can’t talk about. And I will continue to not talk about until they ship. That was the problem.” While I understand why these measures are in place at apple, the resulting effect is the siloing of information and a lack of idea exchange, or even communication which leads to many problems further down the road. It’s hard to build great things when you can’t even talk to the people working on pieces adjacent to yours.
by ijk | 2025-07-20 13:31:02+00:00
It sounds like you're proposing doing this operation on the tokens in the reasoning. While it would be interesting to know if allowing it to choose arbitrary tokens, the biggest issue is that there's quite a bit of evidence that the tokens it prints have only a loose relationship with the internal model processes.

I question your premise; first demonstrate that having it think aloud in "efficient mathematical representations" is a useful efficiency. Then you can demonstrate that you can do any interpretatability work on the output.
by somenameforme | 2025-07-20 13:31:59+00:00
I think it's more of late stage consumerism.

Why do middle class people spend $1000 on a phone that's, for every single purpose they use it for, basically identical to a phone that would cost a fraction as much? Why do low class urban people buy sneakers for hundreds of dollars that, again, for every single purpose they use them for - are essentially identical to some no brand sneakers that would cost a tenth as much? Somehow, at some point, being overtly ripped off became a way of signaling 'class', which is just about the most idiotic thing imaginable. In 'better times' people would look at somebody with a $1000 phone or $300 sneakers as a gullible idiot, and that seems correct to me.

The way people spend money creates a major incentive for companies to rip them off. Our economic system isn't forcing people to behave this way, although mass advertising is probably playing a huge role in maintaining it.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-07-20 13:32:14+00:00
Tool rental is a thing (I don't imagine many people own their own cement mixer for example.)

I recall my grandfather having (decent) tools sitting in his garage. Neighbors/relatives often borrowed tools in those days.

To be a little more nuanced though, some tools don't benefit from "quality" versions. Perhaps an angle grinder is a good example. (The consumable grinding disk is probably the place not to cheap-out.) Maybe the cheap one is fine.

But other tools, like a wood plane, you're going to have a bad time if you cheap out on those and wind up with steel that doesn't hold an edge for example.

(Though I kind of wouldn't want to loan out a nice hand plane of mine to someone that might not worry as much as me about hitting a nail in a board they're planing.)
by atoav | 2025-07-20 13:32:36+00:00
I design and repair electronics for the past decade and quality has gone down, significantly so. A part of this is increased complexity introducing more failure modes, but the main reason is bean counters trying to reduce the BOM cost as far as they can get away with. This naturally means the perfect product (from a bean-counter-perspective) uses the cheapest components and fails reliably one day after the warranty has run out.

They even have succeeded in selling people bean counting solutions as "design". So instead of a satisfying 1.50 € power switch and a 2.50€ rotary switch you get a SMD push button for 0.05 € and have to memorize multiple gestures for that button. Long press means off or something among those lines.

People hate it, but it is cheap.
by walterbell | 2025-07-20 13:32:58+00:00
The search term BIFL (Buy It For Life) helps with some products. With ongoing supply chain, currency and trade variables, it's worth buying spares of proven products, which may later disappear from the market.

As for reputable brands, we may soon need version numbers for both products and companies, based on factors like supply chains, regulation, trade policy, corporate management, leadership or ownership (e.g. PE) changes. 2019 jeans from "Acme Corp v10" may be quite different from 2026 jeans from "Acme Corp v12".
by Paradigma11 | 2025-07-20 13:33:14+00:00
I dont know how the massive context works but Caching is certainly a thing and cheaper: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/caching?lang=python

Gemini is better than Sonnet if you have broad questions that concern a large codebase, the context size seems to help there. People also use subagents for specific purposes to keep each context size manageable, if possible.

On a related note I think the agent metaphor is a bit harmful because it suggests state while the LLM is stateless.