MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Freak_NL | 2025-07-17 15:36:03+00:00
Do you mean why vapes aren't allowed to be sold in exciting flavours in a lot of countries?

Because what happened there was that 'strawberry kiwi', 'banana ice', and 'miami mint', and whatever fruity flavour in a colourful package you can come up with, turned vaping from something adults did to quit smoking tobacco into the biggest hype amongst teenagers since fidget spinners. Only they get addicted to nicotine as a bonus, and switch to 'proper' tobacco in their senior years.

Even with a complete ban on those the damage is done, and all across the globe society is now dealing with a huge profitable underground Snapchat-enabled market geared solely at selling the equivalent of a pack-a-day habit in nicotine to kids. (The ban helps to gradually denormalise vaping again, so it is good to have in place.)
by evanjrowley | 2025-07-17 15:36:17+00:00
Various U.S. institutions of authority took the position that flavors were not for adults, but instead, a strategy to attract minors.

https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/e-cigarettes/why-youth-vape.html

https://www.fda.gov/tobacco-products/ctp-newsroom/misleading...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6663555/

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2018/05/...

https://www.drugs.com/news/study-finds-powerful-sweetener-va...
by nmstoker | 2025-07-17 15:36:22+00:00
A friend told me about a company where the CISO instigated security newsletters aimed at staff to build up their experience on such topics, yet the newsletters were emailed from an external email and contained links to a hosting site that wasn't related to any of the employers regular website domains and like this case would often come across as a phishing attempt, especially when they ran competitions (apparently they appeared too good to be true, as friend's employer was famously tight!)
by Yizahi | 2025-07-17 15:36:56+00:00
Considering that the only purpose of chat-bots is to bullshit customers and filter out as much as they can before redirecting to the human support, then yeah - LLM chat-bots are good. Just not good for the the customers. I recently had to call my telco and they had a temerity to demand that I have(!) to speak to the fucking bot. And then bot declared it doesn't understand me and hang up the call. I have no idea if that bot was neural network powered, but the only improvements LLM bot may have achieved is to keep me in the hamster loop longer and delay transfering to the support even more.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-07-17 15:36:58+00:00
> Such a ridiculous example of delusional LLM hype, comments like this are downright offensive to me.

Sorry you got offended at a thing I didn't say.

That was a generic comment about designers/engineers/experts, not untrained users.

Also you swapping "can be" with "should" strongly changes the meaning all by itself. Very often you can force a design to work but you should not.
Show HN: Stibbly – Amazon Product Change Tracking
by sebsanswer | 2025-07-17 15:37:57+00:00
Hey HN, I’m Sebastian, and I just launched Stibbly.com - a tool built for Amazon sellers, agencies, and competitive intelligence teams to stay on top of every change across their product landscape.

If you tired of manually checking dozens of ASINs every morning, only to miss updates or spend hours hunting through revision histories. Stibbly automates that entire process so you never miss a tweak in your competitors’ listings again.

With Stibbly you can: - Track every listing change - Monitor titles, bullet points, descriptions, and even specification tables, and more - Visual evolution of images - See side-by-side diffs of product images over time, so you know when a brand updates lifestyle shots, new angles, or packaging visuals - Daily monitoring, zero effort - Stibbly scans your chosen ASINs every 24 hours and flags any modifications directly in your dashboard - Custom ASIN lists - Add your portfolio of products or competitors’ items to get hyper-focused insights on exactly what matters to you - Exportable change logs - Download CSV or JSON reports to feed alerts and analytics into your own BI tools

There’s no need to cobble together custom scripts or manually scrape the site. Just sign up, drop in the ASINs you care about, and get started with: - A growing visual library of leading brands and how they’re evolving - Side-by-side content diffs to reverse-engineer messaging strategies - Specification and price tracking so you’re always in the know

Stibbly is fresh off the press, and if you’re an Amazon seller, agency, or love data-driven insights, give it a spin: https://www.stibbly.com

Happy to answer any questions or hear your feature requests. Feedback is welcome!
by orbital-decay | 2025-07-17 15:38:46+00:00
My point is there's nothing "cultural" about it, those suggesting it either have zero idea about it or have never lived through or at least analyzed 80s-90s-2000s in Russia. It's purely the artifact of manufactured consent, and media takeover that was creeping in since Listyev's times and went full speed in 2001 is a primary factor in it. Willingly going into an invisible mode for Russians while having a huge leverage (language+presence), leaving them in their bubble, is a colossal blunder.

Consciously or not, you're spreading Putin's propaganda and justify/validate his actions. "It's world vs Russia, always been and always will be, since Adam and Eve. Nothing can be done. Everybody supports the government, it's cultural. We've always been at war with Eastasia. Spread out, nothing to see here, people are powerless anyway." People like you might have a lot in common with many Russians without realizing it.
by xiwenc | 2025-07-17 15:39:09+00:00
OP here. We, from Low-ops.com, needed a way for users to get started with their private instances with minimal friction. Since it is an application platform that comes preloaded with diverse set of services, a wildcard (public) subdomain is needed.

Tech wise it is a simple nextjs app that uses AWS Route53 as store and state.

I’m happy to answer any question you might have.
by andsoitis | 2025-07-17 15:39:18+00:00
Nice breakdown of different types games.

One thing I didn’t see (but could have missed), are the two grand archetypes of games:

- finite games

- infinite games

The former have rules for winning and a clear beginning and end.

Infinite games are those where the purpose is not to end the game by winning, but to continue playing indefinitely. Players want to perpetuate play itself. There’s no fixed roster (players can join at any time, number of players can change). Rules are changeable and exist to ensure the game continues. When rules threaten to end the game, they get modified. Boundaries are fluid and can expand or contract as needed to keep play alive.
by _alternator_ | 2025-07-17 15:39:26+00:00
Cool link, despite being a bit later than some of the other stuff on BB(6). Basically, it shows a 6-state Turing machine can encode a Collatz-type iteration:

``` a,b=8,0 while b!=-1: b+=2-a%2*3 a+=a>>1 ```

Showing that these halt or not are long-standing open problems, so knowing upper bounds BB(6) would immediately solve them (modulo a lot of compute time).
Show HN: WordPress Without PHP – Build Apps and CLI Tools in TypeScript
by rnaga | 2025-07-17 15:39:37+00:00
WP-Node is a TypeScript project that lets you build apps, scripts, and automation tools using data from a WordPress database — without needing to run the WordPress PHP runtime at all.

It gives you:

* Fully typed access to core WordPress tables (posts, users, terms, meta, etc.) * A CLI framework to run custom commands, queries, and migrations * Utilities to build headless APIs or background jobs (like cron tasks)

Support for both single-site and multisite WordPress

Use it to:

* Build apps in Next.js, Express, or serverless environments * Write migration scripts, cleanup tools, or data sync jobs * Avoid dealing with WordPress internals if you only need the database

It doesn’t replace WordPress — but makes it easier to use WordPress as a backend. Would love feedback from others building tools on top of WordPress or modernizing legacy systems!
by benreesman | 2025-07-17 15:39:55+00:00
Equilibria for iterated vs. non-iterated play in the prisoner's dilemma are generally very different.

To the extent that the current leadership of government and business are facing a collective action problem it is because different actors have a different number of iterations they are optimizing for.

Put differently, when it's #CrimeSeason, you gotta get yours before the bill is due, and different crooks on different schedules.
by hollywood_court | 2025-07-17 15:40:41+00:00
Mostly from people at supply houses and lumber yards. They know how to tell if a contractor is good or not.

Or if we catch wind of a good contractor doing great work for another builder, we'll go inspect their work and then try to get them to jump ship and work with us.

Trade school information won't help us any because we're hiring contracting companies. We don't hire individuals unless it's for something specific that can be handled by one individual like kitchen installs.

Highly skilled tradesmen are often like really good lawyers. Just because they're good at their craft doesn't mean they'll necessarily be good at running their own contracting business (or law firm).

So being a successful contractor really boils down to being able to properly manage your skilled labor (and keep them content) while also keeping things on budget and following the critical path.

The single most common mistake I see with most contractors (and most all small business owners in general) is the fact that they think "hey, I own this business, therefore I should be the highest paid person here." So they don't take care of their labor and they end up losing them to someone who will take better care of them.

They think that they own the business so they must provide the most value to the company and should earn the most. That's rarely the case in real life though.

When I was a contractor out on my own, there were plenty of times when I was paying some of my employees more than I ever took home. The President of the company I work for now isn't the highest compensated member of our team.
by ncallaway | 2025-07-17 15:41:45+00:00
The intersections of the joists/beams and the rafters require you to cut angled cuts on the rafters to sit appropriately on the joists/beams.

See: https://www.structuralbasics.com/rafter-roof-design/ and imagine how you would get a rectangular piece of wood for the rafter to sit flush against the rectangular joists/beams.
by lokar | 2025-07-17 15:42:21+00:00
You could pick from many attributes and find that “many” people with that attribute do better.

Also, this (and other things I’ve read) always seems to argue against the strawman that “you need a formal education to do well in software “. I’ve never seen anyone say that (including during many years involved in hiring at big tech). The argument is that the pool of CS graduates are more likely to do well (and bigger and simpler to find) , so it makes sense to focus there if you need to hire a lot of people.
Show HN: LangWhich – a 30‑second daily challenge to recognize languages
by jdmelin | 2025-07-17 15:42:43+00:00
Hi HN - I built LangWhich (https://langwhich.app), a quick browser game where you try to visually recognize the world’s most spoken languages—just from the written form of a single word or phrase.

It’s a 5‑round daily challenge shared by all players: - 30 seconds total to finish all 5 rounds - Each round shows a different language - Choose the correct one from 5 multiple‑choice options - Scoring: 15 points per correct answer + up to 25 bonus for speed (max 100)

It currently rotates among the 20 most spoken languages, mixing different scripts (Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Devanagari, Kana) and closely related orthographies (e.g. Dutch vs German, French vs Portuguese).

Thanks for checking it out! I’d appreciate any feedback or questions.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-07-17 15:42:45+00:00
> pedagogy is borderline quackery

A lot of it is, I would agree, and I think the increase in homeschooling is partly motivated by that belief.

The basic question that needs to be asked: what is education for? What is its intended aim? The answer given will vary depending on the anthropology or vision of the human person that a particular culture has absorbed or that a culture has been organized around, though usually, I don't think this question is explicitly asked. It is a dangerous question, because it makes a person realize that perhaps better aims exist.

So, in capitalistic societies like ours, education has been reduced to what the capitalist class wants it to be, which is the production of cogs for the machine (and secondarily, a method of extracting money for what I take to be a mediocre education). This much is obvious. What do primary schools say college education is for? To get a "good job". The job is the primary focus of education in such a society. Test results are more about funneling workers into industry than helping students attain intellectual maturity and to gain insight into discerning their vocation.

(This is not an endorsement of collectivism, btw. Both hyperindividualism and collectivism are founded on a fantastically wrong vision of the human person; solidarism is by far the best account of the proper norm.)

But this is not the classical view of education whose aim was the formation of the person so that he can be free to be more fully human, of which the ability to known and understand the truth and to reason about life and the world are central. Intellectual formation presupposes moral formation as well (of which parents are taken to be the primary and first educators). This realization has caused an increase of interest in curricula such as classical liberal education which draws from the trivium/quadrivium tradition.

The biggest takeaway here is that we need to start asking fundamental questions questions again. We need to be Socratic again. We need to pay attention to first principles and to reconnect with our traditions to see what they have to say about them. The idea that you can do a better job by throwing inherited tradition overboard and starting from scratch is not only patently arrogant on its face, but has been demonstrated empirically to be disastrous.)

In this case, I cannot understate the importance of asking what it means to be human. Every society, every political order, every culture is guided by some anthropology, however implicit.

A quote for thought:

"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about." ― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-07-17 15:42:53+00:00
Think of knowledge as a circle on a board. https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ is a great example.

Everyone that goes through university learns within a pretty similar circle initially. That circle is surprisingly narrow in the broader field. Who has time to teach the dmc algorithm (used in all highest ratio data compression software) for example. Instead everyone's taught a pretty common curricula in all comp sci courses despite the field being much much larger than that.

Now some who go through university will go well beyond that circle of knowledge. These are the most amazing programmers you'll ever meet. They'll know algorithms that are mentioned in white papers, not taught in courses and they'll kick ass. Those who've been in the industry a while have met a few like this.

Likewise self-taught engineers. They may have humbling gaps in knowledge of that big circle of knowledge that everyone that went through a comp sci course was taught. This may be a constant source of imposter syndrome but also humbling motivation for them. What they'll also know is a whole lot of stuff outside any standard curricula. After all they have the same motivation that the super engineers who went through university and continued to self-teach had. Their circle of knowledge was organically created through passion and that passion is actually one of the best signals for performance in not just engineering but anything in life.
by RiverCrochet | 2025-07-17 15:42:54+00:00
With .gmi files or "gemini://" URLs and a compliant Gemini client, I don't need to even need to load the document beforehand to know if it intends to execute code on my device or not. It already won't by design, it won't in the future, and it doesn't require settings management, vendor whitelisting, popups, or caring who makes the browser for me to make it behave that way.

Whereas that .html document with it's noexec meta tag might be updated in the future to suddenly contain code.
by belter | 2025-07-17 15:42:55+00:00
Looking at the team it's clear its a bunch of brilliant but indisciplined cats. They will be difficult to herd but for what the real plan is here, acquisition, it clearly does not matter.

They will do a couple of tools, then another panicked company like Apple, or Facebook or AWS, needing to justify the millions spent on AI and with nothing to show for, will acquire them for billions. When somebody will point out they don't make money or have no product, somebody here will point to the "team" as you just did :-)

But since we are talking about 12 billion, let's play the VC and do the due diligence first on the leader?

Reporting from The Optimist by Keach Hagey and other open sources, plus the famous thread here when Sam Altman got fired from OpenAI, reveals that Mira Murati had a central role in Sam Altman November 2023 firing.

For VCs, this is a masterclass in corporate survival and a massive red flag. Evidence shows Murati was the primary architect of the case against Altman:

- Collected "screenshots from Murati's Slack channel" documenting alleged toxic behavior

- Wrote private memos questioning Altman's leadership

- Initiated board contact through Ilya Sutskever

- Sent "hefty PDF files of evidence" to board members via self-destructing emails

Then ...When employees revolted, fearing lost equity, immediately switched sides, signed the letter demanding Altman's return, then later claimed she "fought the actions aggressively."

She survived by reading the room perfectly:

- Became interim CEO during the crisis

- Positioned herself as essential to Altman's return

- Exited in September 2024 just before the for-profit restructuring

- Immediately raised $2B for her new startup showing it had it planned all along.

Investment Implications:

This reveals someone who will systematically undermine leadership while maintaining plausible deniability, then switch sides when politically convenient. Remember Paul Graham's famous quote about Sam Altman? That he "could be parachuted into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and be king"? Murati might be even more astute.

She went from Intern → Tesla PM → Leap Motion → OpenAI VP → CTO → interim CEO → $2B startup founder, all with zero AI research background.

Her OpenAI trajectory shows world class political instincts. Join during post-Musk power vacuum (2018), build alliances with both sides, orchestrate a coup when convenient, flip sides when it fails, exit perfectly timed before restructuring.

For VCs:

Whether you see this as exceptional political skill or dangerous executive behavior depends on your risk tolerance.

Let's just hope the 10 millions dollars the government of Albania, the poorest nation in Europe, invested on this have been secured with proper share rights. That could make for some awkward reactions back home.
by liampulles | 2025-07-17 15:43:37+00:00
I like the "lower level of abstraction" of Go. It was a transition coming from writing Spring Boot Java code to having to actually implement the "magic", but I like that I can clearly see the control flow of things in Go.

Out of all the languages I've used, Go programs are the ones that have the highest percentage chance of working "first try". I think that has a lot to do with the plain and strongly typed style.
by dapperdrake | 2025-07-17 15:43:45+00:00
The C standard library is hamstrung by undefined behaviour versus implementation defined behaviour. This kills all attempts at offering reliable overflow-checks.

The biggest fulcrum is: Can developers also build a complete copy of the standard library or must you be a language implementor? This is what killed Elm. And both Java and Clojure survived. Even a tool like a debugger can be added to the hotspot VM by developers as opposed to just language implementors. Yes, there are many details, but it isn’t precluded on principle.
by Traviseric | 2025-07-17 15:43:48+00:00
I've been working on AI book generation for 22 months. The biggest bottleneck was always sequential generation - each chapter waiting for the previous one to complete.

I discovered chapters don't need to be generated sequentially if you provide proper context upfront. By making generation stateless and running chapters in parallel, I reduced generation time from 60+ minutes to under 5 minutes for an 80k-150k-word non-fiction book.

The key insight: Traditional approach treats each chapter as dependent on previous chapters. But a well-planned book already knows what each chapter should cover. By capturing this in a global context document, we eliminate sequential dependencies.

Results: - Generation time: <5 minutes vs 60-90 minutes - Success rate: 94% (vs 60% for sequential) - Quality: Professional editor rated output 4/5

I've open sourced the architecture pattern: https://github.com/Traviseric/parallel-book-generation

Also built a "knobs" framework as one example of how I'm maintaining quality/variation in parallel generation: https://github.com/Traviseric/knobs-framework

Currently using this to generate 100 books in 90 days as a real-world test. Happy to answer questions about the technical challenges or parallel content generation in general.
by asoneth | 2025-07-17 15:43:54+00:00
If only one company offers jobs in your profession or skill set, that company has a labor monopsony. Back when companies provided lifetime job security and pensions, moving to a remote corporate campus might have been a reasonable tradeoff to consider -- your reduced negotiating leverage would depress your wages but that might have been offset by the lower cost of living (e.g. housing).

But modern skilled workers know how risky it is to put down roots in a place where they only have a couple employment options. So companies struggle to attract talent to remote areas and end up needing to hire in places that already have an established pool of skilled labor, which is typically in the cities and more affluent areas of the state or country.

In this case, the lack of employment options means many of the engineers laid off by Intel will end up needing to uproot their families' lives and move to a new city or state to find a new employer who can to pay for their skills.
by crowcroft | 2025-07-17 15:43:56+00:00
Another common unintended consequence I've seen is conflating crawling and indexing with regards to robots.txt.

If you make a new page and never want it to enter the Google search index, adding it to robots.txt is fine, Google will never crawl it and it will never enter the index.

If you have an existing page that is currently indexed and want to remove it, adding that page to robots.txt is a BAD idea though. In the short term Google will continue to show the page in search results, but show it with no metadata (because it can't crawl it anymore). Even worse, Google won't notice up any noindex tags on the page, because robots.txt is blocking the page from being crawled!

Eventually Google will get the hint and remove the page from the index, but it can be a very frustrating time waiting for that to happen.