MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thehappypm | 2025-07-29 02:06:58+00:00
Not to diverge too much but Florida has some interesting topography

South Florida is basically all coral and sand at a few dozen feet above sea level except for the small ridge on the east coast (peaking at a whopping 86 feet) which provides the bedrock for Miami.

Central florida gets up to ~300 feet, downright alpine compared to south Florida.

Then you have the panhandle, which has the highest point in Florida, which isn’t surprising because it’s actually on the main continental block of North America
by another_twist | 2025-07-29 02:07:30+00:00
The people who dont believe in vaccines or that they cause autism dont really get science. Wasting hard work trying to convince them is useless. These people truly are idiots, at best a burden on society and at worse a threat to public health. Its one thing to have a skepticism of the pharmaceutical industry, its not ill founded but if their entire personality is based on denying science I dont think we should waste time or resources in convincing these idiots.
by zahlman | 2025-07-29 02:07:37+00:00
> Is "Israel" a race or a country? Should a Canadian not be allowed to boycott the US?

The legislation described does not prevent boycotts, except by government contractors who have a duty to government policy and thus do not necessarily enjoy those protections (https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47986):

> Speech restrictions imposed by private entities, and government limits on its own speech, usually do not implicate the First Amendment.

As for public investment funds: you'll need to explain to me how saying that X may not invest in Y because Y is refusing to buy things from Z, causes Y to stop being able to refuse to buy things from Z (i.e., compels Y to buy things from Z).

If you want to not buy things from Israel, then... just don't. You don't need my money, or a private investment firm's, in order to achieve that.
by TuringNYC | 2025-07-29 02:08:24+00:00
>> But if they are offering royalty-free production to generic manufacturers, why wouldn't insurance companies simply insist on using the cheaper generic?

I'm not an expert on this, but my PBM insists on going with stores that have higher prices. If I go with the less expensive store, they do not cover it. Sometimes, it makes sense to co with the less expensive store, but then it doesnt even draw down your annual deductable. Damned if you do, damned if you dont.
by devmor | 2025-07-29 02:08:32+00:00
Again, where it comes from is an important part of this. You are cherry picking the most extreme example you can think of while using a word specifically implying genetic inferiority.

You are using that term when talking about an issue that disproportionately targets marginalized groups and victims of traumatic assault.

There is one very specific, well known group in history who would take your side on this issue and use the same terminology. You know who they are.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-07-29 02:09:18+00:00
The problem is that a massive orchestrated campaign to sow distrust of institutions can succeed well beyond what's needed to achieve their destruction.

The actual truth and institutional trust are both far harder to establish than they are to destroy. I'm not sure how institutions survive in the presence of this asymmetry, alt-media's conscious effort to exploit it, and freedom of speech.
by henriquegodoy | 2025-07-29 02:09:52+00:00
I've been tinkering with agentic systems for a while now, and this post nails some key pain points that hit close to home. The emphasis on splitting context and designing tight feedback loops feels spot on—I've seen agents go off the rails without them, hallucinating solutions because the prompt was too bloated or the validation was half-baked. It's like building a machine where every part needs to click just right, or else you're debugging forever.

What really resonates is the bit about frustrating behaviors signaling deeper system issues, not just model quirks. In my own experiments, I've had agents stubbornly ignore tools because I forgot to expose the right APIs, and it made me rethink how we treat these as "intelligent" when they're really just following our flawed setups. It pushes us toward more robust orchestration, where humans handle the high-level intentions and AI fills in the execution gaps seamlessly.

This ties into broader ideas on how AI interfaces will evolve as models get smarter. I extrapolate more of this thinking and dive deeper into human–AI interfaces on my blog if anyone’s interested in checking it out: https://henriquegodoy.com/blog/stream-of-consciousness
by mikepurvis | 2025-07-29 02:09:59+00:00
I’ve wondered about this as well, like most clients should be capable of still doing a bit of compositing. Like if you sent billboard renders of background objects at lower fidelity/frequency than foreground characters, updated hud objects with priority and using codecs that prioritize clarity, etc.

It was always shocking to me that Stadia was literally making their own games in house and somehow the end result was still just a streamed video and the latency gains were supposed to come from edge deployed gpus and a wifi-connected controller.

Then again, maybe they tried some of this stuff and the gains weren't worth it relative to battle-tested video codecs.
by carom | 2025-07-29 02:10:04+00:00
Ok, hold up. This study came up on Reddit a few weeks ago and my wife linked it to me. A lot of the comments were similar about how vaccine skeptics will never be convinced by it. So, being a vaccine skeptic, I went and read it.

>In this primary analysis, except for Asperger syndrome (hazard ratio, 1.13 [CI, 0.89 to 1.44]) and atypical autism (hazard ratio, 0.94 [CI, 0.79 to 1.12]), estimates for the individual outcomes were incompatible with any increased risk, with the upper bounds of the 95% CIs below 1.00. [1]

My understanding of this, and I am a software engineer so take it with a grain of salt, is that this study failed to disprove a link between aluminum in vaccines and aspergers! There is another section where it appears they played with the hyperparameters of their study and ended up with a lower hazard ratio for aspergers (I believe by extending the analysis window to 8 years of age, but it wasn't clear to me).

>Except for Asperger syndrome (hazard ratio, 1.02 [CI, 0.93 to 1.12]) and atypical autism (hazard ratio, 0.95 [CI, 0.88 to 1.03]), estimates for the individual neurodevelopmental outcomes assessed were incompatible with any increases in risk, with the upper bounds of the 95% CIs equal to or below 1.00.

That is to say, after reading the study, I am not convinced at all. I would like to see a longer analysis period (e.g. to 50 years of age) as many things go undiagnosed until later in life. From my reading though, this study failed to disprove a link despite what all the popsci headlines are saying.

1. https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-25-00997

Edit: I know I am going to catch downvotes for this, but please go read the study and let me know where I am incorrect!
by cyphar | 2025-07-29 02:11:13+00:00
Also, malicious homeservers can add fake devices to rooms and the default client configuration is to send encrypted data to untrusted devices (and I have never seen anyone opt-in to "don't send to untrusted devices" because even with device signing, it breaks usability in most group chats).

Arathorn has argued before that this is "only an issue for malicious homeservers" but that is literally the entire threat model for E2EE -- if you didn't care about malicious servers you could just use TLS and avoid all of the "unable to decrypt message" issues.

Let's not get into the fact that even though they copied the Signal protocol (which is a good thing!), the amount of metadata stored by users' homeservers probably invalidates any of the deniability properties that motivated the development of OTR and Signal in the first place. Yes, the ability to keep chat logs forever is a key feature of Matrix, but you really have to ask whether trying to adapt the Signal protocol to their needs really made sense.
by TuringNYC | 2025-07-29 02:11:33+00:00
Also, markets are supposed to have associated prices. In US healthcare you learn the price later, sometimes weeks or months later, in the form of balance billing. For those not in the US -- you pay six ways:

1 - Premium

2 - Co-Pay

3 - Deductible

4 - Co-Insurance

5 - Balance Billing -- you dont learn the full cost until weeks/months later

6 - Non-covered items -- you dont learn the full cost until weeks/months later
by senectus1 | 2025-07-29 02:11:50+00:00
I dont know if this is just my 50 yr old view of the world... but imho there is a lot this going around.

Workmates, family, people of the streets and in shops. just so much angry toxic people. it's like a cultural change (am in Australia btw).

its not everybody but its a definitely larger number than I remember in the past few decades.
by hydrox24 | 2025-07-29 02:12:07+00:00
For what it's worth, this is still quite loaded, and I think it's far more helpful to drop the stuff about lies and protection of loved ones and simply say:

It's good to weaken or strengthen your views based on the evidence given, and intellectual humility often leads to a better grasp of issues.

And it's also worth recognising, as another commenter has noted, that this is something that extremely few people are good at. It's an error to think that assenting to mainstream views is a strong sign of intellectual humility.
by m463 | 2025-07-29 02:12:25+00:00
> Ask "could you pressure-wash this thing"?

Is that a necessary requirement? I mean, that would probably damage current harvesters, who are human people.

I mean, there are lots of parts of cars where pressure washing would probably force fluid into the bearings.

Might that not apply to hydraulic, pneumatic or electronic systems too?

(I do get what you're saying though)
by lotyrin | 2025-07-29 02:13:10+00:00
Buy wildcard certificates from a vendor, install them everywhere you find you need them manually, don't write down where you put them or when they're going to expire. Cross your fingers the private key doesn't get leaked.

Collect every metric possible and set up arbitrary blanket alerting thresholds and black-box anomaly detection and tune nothing ever. Now you can hire a whole team dedicated just to suffering from alert fatigue.

Standardize on a single LTS OS release across all your infrastructure and wait until the absolute last possible second to start trying to switch to the new current LTS release, biting off about a decade of OS changes to everything everywhere all at once.
by uint23 | 2025-07-29 02:15:38+00:00
Hi, Thanks for the reply! This is basically what I did initially and it did land me a software engineering job at a startup which was owned by my friends dad but that's the extent of it. I had to leave due to approaching exams and couldn't get rehired due to it not doing so well. I live in a quite rural area with not so many people I've basically tried everyone that comes to mind so far.

If you have any other way to contact people I would greatly appreciate it!
by zamadatix | 2025-07-29 02:16:39+00:00
FWIW neither hoard nor ration imply anything about permanence of the thing to me. Whether you were rationed bread or you hoarded bread, the bread isn't going to be usable forever. At the same time whether you were rationed sugar or hoarded sugar, the sugar isn't going to expire (with good storage).

Rationed/hoarded do imply, to me, something different about how the quantity came to be though. Rationed being given or setting aside a fixed amount, hoarded being that you stockpiled/amassed it. Saying "you hoarded your rations" (whether they will expire) does feel more on the money than "you ration your rations" from that perspective.

I hope this doesn't come off too "well aktually", I've just been thinking about how I still realize different meanings/origins of common words later in life and the odd things that trigger me to think about it differently for the first time. A recent one for me was that "whoever" has the (fairly obvious) etymology of who+ever https://www.etymonline.com/word/whoever vs something like balloon, which has a comparatively more complex history https://www.etymonline.com/word/balloon
by moggers123 | 2025-07-29 02:18:15+00:00
SQLx is great, but I really wish they had a non-async interface. I had to switch a project from sqlx to rusqlite seemingly just due to the overhead of the async machinery. Saw a 20x latency reduction that I narrowed down to "probably async" (sort of hard to tell, I find it very difficult to do perf analysis of async code). I try to avoid discussing async so as to not come off as a frothing-at-the-mouth-chest-thumping-luddite but honestly, if sqlx had a non-async interface I'd be very happy to accept the "you don't need to use it" argument. its the only place where I don't feel like I really have a choice.
by uint23 | 2025-07-29 02:18:22+00:00
Well I'd mainly like experience in something new and something I can put on my CV/Resume. I also would like to gain some money although I don't expect much and I'm happy with minimum wage. I legally can't full-time yet as you are required to be in some form of education until you are 18. After my A-Levels I'm planning to go to Cambridge for Computer Science as I like their course and, well it's quite prestigious but that's well in the future so it can change
by lapcat | 2025-07-29 02:18:42+00:00
> Most people lack the ability to understand inferences drawn from mathematical analysis.

It was never about that. The modern anti-vax movement has been traced back to Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent 1998 Lancet paper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_MMR_autism_fraud But it's not like the anti-vaxxers ever fully understood the original paper, much less the follow-up papers disputing it. And in fairness to the anti-vaxxers, the paper is an example of the failure of scientific peer review. What happened was that ordinary people heard about the paper and became frightened, which is natural, but then when Wakefield's fraud and conflicts of interest were revealed, and the paper was ultimately retracted, the people who bought into the scare never came back and revised their beliefs based on new evidence. What's missing is the capacity for self-correction. Mathematics was never involved.

I suspect that people are reluctant to admit that they were duped, so they'd rather continue to believe something that's been proven false. It's emotional, not rational. And it's also social: people tend to surround themselves with others who reinforce their beliefs. This prevents backtracking and self-correction, because you have to convince your entire social group that they were wrong, not just yourself.
by joules77 | 2025-07-29 02:19:17+00:00
Phrase generators are busy. So we now have...

Neoliberalism, Platformization, McDonaldization, Disneyfication, Alienation, Financialization, FIRE Economy, Attention Economy, Surveillance Capitalism etc etc

Create a nice lexicon. Hand it off to next gen. Then kick the can. That's the plan.
by MattGrommes | 2025-07-29 02:19:43+00:00
Everyone deserves companionship, it's just that chatbots don't provide it. What I worry about is people who don't want to have conversations with people at work, or go do a hobby with other people, etc. and use a chatbot as an alternative when it's just a parrot pretending to be a person but providing no actual interaction. A chatbot has no needs, tells no embarrassing stories, requires no compromise, makes no promises, does no favors. That's why I said it was candy, not McDonalds. They provide no nutrition but sure taste good.
by nulld3v | 2025-07-29 02:19:58+00:00
rany has given a good answer, but I also want to add that currently the Egyptians only control the Rafah crossing on paper.

In reality, Israel controls the crossing because they have occupied/seized the strip of land in Gaza that is adjacent to the crossing (Philadelphi Corridor). Here's a similar complaint from Egyptian media: https://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/1234/550260/Egypt...
by sherburt3 | 2025-07-29 02:20:24+00:00
At least when I see raw sql I know me and the author are on a level playing field. I would rather deal with a directory full of sql statement that get run than some mysterious build tool that generates sql on the fly and thinks its smarter than me.

For example, I'm working on a project right now where I have to do a database migration. The project uses c# entity framework, I made a migration to create a table, realized I forgot a column, deleted the table and tried to start from scratch. For whatever reason, entity framework refuses to let go of the memory of the original table and will create migrations to restore the original table. I hate this so much.
by antonvs | 2025-07-29 02:20:34+00:00
You're overthinking it. You're building on your own definition of what a tool is, but courts are likely to find that a person who used an AI with a specific type of prompt were using it as a tool and are responsible for the clearly stated intent behind their use.

Whether that's actually legal in this case I don't know, but I'm pretty sure courts won't conclude "welp, it was the AI, not the user" in a case like this.
by 2muchcoffeeman | 2025-07-29 02:21:15+00:00
I feel like it would have been harder to get this far without international support had the Oct 7th attack not happened. I don’t know about you, but I’d be a bit more lenient if you’re trying to rescue civilian hostages.

I don’t know anything about the impetus for the Oct 7th attack was, but you have to wonder why.
by const_cast | 2025-07-29 02:21:21+00:00
It's not rubbish, it's a real solution.

The only reason this isn't a free speech problem is because it's monopolized in the private sector. Well, if it's already centrally planned and controlled, then we can just put it in the public sector.

Now, we have some guarantee of rights. We can even use our voting powers to influence the payment processor. Because, right now, we essentially have this same exact scenario - except, it's opaque, we can't vote, and they're allowed to completely trample over the US constitution, because it doesn't apply to them.

What's the actual drawback here? I mean, it's not like things can get more consolidated. I understand not wanting to disturb a market, but there's no market to disturb.

We can also go the other direction and split Visa up. But that's bad in different ways.

I don't want 50 payment processors, you don't want that, and certainly Visa doesn't want that. So who wins? Nobody, it's all losers. If you think it's expensive now, just wait until you're paying for the integration and complexity costs of all those payment processors.

IMO, payment processors are public infrastructure. That's an opinion of course, but it's really hard to argue otherwise. It is to the benefit of everyone that we have good payment processors. We already pay for Visa via taxes - that's what that 2% charge on all transactions is.

Given that, we should treat it like a public asset.
by badlibrarian | 2025-07-29 02:21:26+00:00
In the fog of the day, you can understand why 1 transmission per 1,250 occurrences qualified as unlikely. Female prostitutes were self-reporting that they didn't use condoms and weren't showing symptoms. Meanwhile the disease decimated the gay male population which is why it was called GRID ("Gay-Related Immune Deficiency"). It was a complicated and horrible time and the data really wasn't there.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-07-29 02:21:37+00:00
> As such, I'm betting very strongly that it's going to be part of our future, and that means now is a good time to start understanding how it works and what people are saying about it and what might come next.

Getting a feel for what LLM's can and can't do is also proving to be an interesting and fun exercise for me. I use them daily, but haven't committed a line of code written by one. I suspect that will always be the case, but nonetheless not using them would be a career limiting move.

I suspect that's because an LLM is just a specialised AI that's not good for much beyond understanding the written language and regurgitating what they've seen before. (That almost sounds flippant, given how much in awe I am at both their language abilities and how much they remember.) There are lots of other AI's out there. They play chess and go, do protein folding, predict weather and I'm sure a plethora of other things I don't know about. They are all universally better at their respective tasks than humans (and that includes LLM's ability to process language.) I can't shake the feeling that one day, someone will create one that can do more than spit out code similar to what it's seen before.
by gus_massa | 2025-07-29 02:23:09+00:00
I'm not sure to call it ideal, but there is a nice story that was posted a few times "Four Magic Words" https://www.fortressofdoors.com/four-magic-words/ HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39051691 (145 points | Jan 2024 | 90 comments)
by addaon | 2025-07-29 02:23:41+00:00
The thing to realize is that interns cost companies far, far more in time spent in mentorship than they add in value, even ignoring compensation. The reason to invest in an intern is to help a promising engineer mature, while simultaneously increasing the chance that they choose to go to your company full-time, reducing the (also large) cost and risk of hiring. Trying to find an internship when you're not going to be on the market for 6+ years kind of upsets this value proposition. I'd suggest that if the goal is some pocket money and coding experience, talk to local (non-tech) businesses, figure out what technical problems they have, and offer to fix one of them. Think point-of-sale system integration, etc.
by vdupras | 2025-07-29 02:24:36+00:00
That's an interesting point of view. If that is actually the goal of Israel right now, what if the Hamas executed all hostages on the spot, right now? Would Israel say "we have no more military objective, time to go home" or would they leash out in retaliation?

I think we know what the answer would be. Because we know that, how can what you say possibly be true?
by trhway | 2025-07-29 02:26:01+00:00
>new data

that is the main point for me. There are a lot of claims, yet almost no verifiable data. With smartphones everywhere and having seen how war is documented say in Ukraine (and also how the propaganda lies are made there), i believe practically no claim until there is a video for it. For example the news of shooting near aid distribution centers come almost every day. How come nobody has recorded it? Especially with Hamas flying a bunch of drones there, they would undoubtedly have made such footage and published the footage around the world.

At the beginning of the Gaza war i put a bit of effort to calibrate for myself how much lying is there https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38751882
by DoctorOetker | 2025-07-29 02:26:22+00:00
I wonder if quartz fibers can be used.

In 1887 Boys published this very entertaining article on how he produced long fine wires of quartz, by heating a small thread of glass (and other materials) with a blowpipe, such that it beads, the rod of glass was attached to a tiny dart on a crossbow beforehand, with a foot pedal to release the dart. When he released the dart right when the molten ball formed, the dart would shoot all through the hallway and 2 rooms before meeting a wall. The dart would stick in the wall and a continuous thread was formed between the crossbow and the dart on the end wall (about 90 feet or 30 meters away). When he switched to quartz he immediately observed that quartz took a much larger force, and hence decelerated the dart, so it wouldn't reach the other wall.

I wonder if quartz could be used for matching up Delta v for intercept missions.

Either way the first such probe should be called spiderman...

I cannot do justice for the style and presentation of this article, so you should read it for yourself:

https://zenodo.org/records/1431517/files/article.pdf