MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Freak_NL | 2025-07-17 16:11:28+00:00
No, what is reported is that older high school kids who vape take up smoking tobacco because vaping is perceived as childish by that time.

This is from a Dutch newspaper article interviewing one of the researchers from the Trimbos Institute:

> De overstap naar sigaretten met tabak is vervolgens snel gemaakt, zegt Croes. „We horen ook dat de jonkies op het schoolplein vapen, maar dat in de bovenbouw niet meer stoer vinden. Dan gaan ze roken, wat in hun ogen nu weer een positief imago heeft gekregen.” Zo vormen e-sigaretten volgens haar een „enorme tegenkracht” voor campagnes die jongeren van roken moeten weerhouden.¹

(Tobacco) smoking is cool again. The young kids vape, so to be really cool and adult…

1: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2024/10/01/beginnen-met-een-sigare...
by bevr1337 | 2025-07-17 16:11:30+00:00
> When you don't know what you don't know, having someone to efficiently guide you can save a ton of time, and for some topics, that mentor is a great textbook or teacher.

A bit of a self insert, but I think you described the reality so well that I wanted to offer my own anecdote.

I'm somewhere between formally educated and self-taught. I did not complete higher level undergrad maths like discrete or linear. Because of this, my vocabulary is lacking. I don't even know what to google, even if I could teach myself!

Some subjects really benefit from instruction and direction. It's actually hard to find a math tutor to proof your vector math program in your late 30s. My colleagues either forgot or are using that energy elsewhere.
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-07-17 16:11:44+00:00
Rules around fruity flavors (trying to target sales that disproportionately go to kids) are one thing. Rules around menthol are another, only slightly less heinous thing.

About 85% of African Americans who smoke use menthol cigarettes, compared to a rate of less than 30% menthol use among white Americans. [1] They're disproportionately advertised and were (in the past) literally given away in poor Black communities to get people addicted.

Basically, policy makers can target their regulations to a specific group by specifying flavor. Sure, an individual white adult might like fruity flavors or menthols, a black adult might like originals, and some kids might prefer original or menthols, but there's a strong statistical bias.

When health departments are trying to address a particular health concern - say, young children smoking - they can do so by targeting fruity flavors. Conversely, when tobacco company marketing departments are trying to advertise their products to Black users without drawing unwanted attention from disproportionately white regulators, they can achieve their goals by promoting menthols. An individual from any population might have any flavor preference, but the dice are shockingly heavily weighted when you're looking at large groups.

[1]: https://datatools.samhsa.gov/das/nsduh/2019/nsduh-2019-ds000...
by passivegains | 2025-07-17 16:13:31+00:00
There's something beautiful about the kid using performance as language. They've hit upon the greater truth that reading and speech are important because text and the spoken word are powerful mediums, but what truly matters is what they allow us to express to each other.

Though I have worked with children enough to sympathize with the not-beautiful part of this story too. (also that book sounds rad as hell.)
by foobiekr | 2025-07-17 16:13:46+00:00
It is not. These companies are actively hostile to this sort of thing and with good reason: muddy liability in a context where people can be injured, maimed, crippled and killed.

The “add on” thing belongs in he list of tarpit ideas. Watching Cruise and Ghost Automation flail about for years vaporizing cash trapped on this idea was like watching a comedy.
by meroes | 2025-07-17 16:14:11+00:00
DOA doesn’t mean forever and always. But certain claims like the advent of living beyond 200, humans on Mars, etc can just be immediately dismissed outright for several decades. What you’re talking about is unsupervised LLM therapy. Even when my dentist used AI to read my X-rays, he’s overseeing everything. I’m fine sticking my neck out to say LLM therapy is DOA for the foreseeable future.
by mcphage | 2025-07-17 16:14:22+00:00
> I see these sorts of comments all the time and I have to say that I don't find they add much to the conversation.

I think it's a valid question—sometimes things end up on the front page just because. And sometimes there's an actual reason that not everyone is aware of—maybe it was mentioned in a popular article, or in a movie, or a viral tweet, or whatever. And in those cases, someone will respond with "here's why people are interested in this right now."

Asking "why is this on the front page" doesn't always mean "this doesn't belong on the front page", it can mean "is there some context here I'm unaware of?"
by gamerdonkey | 2025-07-17 16:15:30+00:00
I'm pretty sure the post you're replying to was referring to "legit ways" as in the purchase would be actually from the current rights holder. Buying on the secondary market comes with its own problems:

1. The people who made-- er, own the rights to the game get no financial benefit. Functionally, what is the difference to EA if I download a copy of NFS: Underground, or if I buy a copy from some rando on eBay? Yes, the courts care, but it's not exactly like I'm supporting the artists.

2. You are not guaranteed a legitimate copy. eBay sellers will ship duplicated discs all the time, whether contemporary copies or ones made recently to meet the demands of retro gaming. Can you claim you got duped and offload your moral responsibility to the seller? Maybe. But you could still be a pirate.

3. Copyright law is complicated, and you might still be pirating if you do get a legitimate copy. The arcade cabinet is a great example. Did the seller own it outright, or was it on a lease that got abandoned when the game was no longer profitable? In the latter case, your purchase would not be covered by the US first-sale doctrine. So you could spend £4095 and then may as well hoist the jolly roger.

4. The used game market is a long-standing problem currently being solved by games publishers. It will not be long before there are no old CDs of retro games available because they never existed in the first place.

I've just always been weirded out when people hold up gray market purchases of used media as some paradigm of moral responsibility. It's like a financial transaction with the transfer of physical media is some magical incantation that erases all questions of ownership.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-17 16:15:52+00:00
Neurotypical flocking at its worst. Kanye West, who has a bipolar diagnosis and behaves like someone with bipolar, says he is autistic. A common theme is finding a reason why it's OK to be lacking into insight into yourself and others.

This study does some quality work that deconstructs "autism"

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-025-02224-z

into several phenotypes which are really different diseases, which might be the beginning of the end of this nightmare.
by lapcat | 2025-07-17 16:15:56+00:00
> College being a huge expense is an anglo-centric issue

Ok. Well, the tech industry itself is rather "anglo-centric", don't you think?

> It's important for those concerned, but most people aren't

If you just want to ignore the United States, then fine, but in general, good luck trying to ignore the United States.

>> You speak only for yourself though. I'm largely self-taught and have done these things.

> I did say "often fall apart"

I'm a bit confused here. I was referring to the first paragraph in your original post, whereas you seem to be referring to the second paragraph?
by dasil003 | 2025-07-17 16:16:28+00:00
Your criticism of the specific details rings true, but I also liked the overall thrust of the GP which is that two common failure modes for working software engineers are either being overly academic and not efficient at practical application of that knowledge, or else being too superficial and direct about solving the immediate problem in front of them without recognizing or even being aware of the theoretical knowledge and concepts that can greatly improve their local solutions.

I think it’s fair to say those failure modes tend to disproportionately accumulate university graduates and self taught developers respectively. As long as we don’t use it as some kind of litmus test then I don’t think it hurts to call that out.
by ta8645 | 2025-07-17 16:16:31+00:00
For most of human history, it has been completely normal. It was fine to make your own cave painting look exactly like the one you saw on a visit to a neighbouring cave. It wasn't til the early 1700 that there was any formal idea of copyright, and almost 1900 before it became pervasive.

Even today, nobody gets their panties in a knot if you sell a copy of the Mona Lisa. Everyone accepts that the copyright has long expired. In other situations (as in retro games) the only question is how long, and under what circumstances, copyright should persist. Reasonable people can disagree. Making it a moral issue is a bit tiring.
by ffsm8 | 2025-07-17 16:16:50+00:00
It's over hyped insofar you're looking at the current valuation of the AI companies and look at the value they actually produce at the end of the day.

AI is here to stay, and long term, it's likely going to revolutionize almost all parts of the job market. But to get there... I'm really not sure what a reasonable time estimate would be. I can see it take something like 3 years, which would make current evaluation plausible, but I wouldn't bet on it.

It'd bet on it taking a tad longer, but I strongly suspect by 10-20 yrs, we'll get there.

Under that time horizon, it feels overvalued and hyped, because the winner's of this revolution might not even have been founded yet.
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-07-17 16:16:51+00:00
Regulators have no control over who looks at a given billboard or television ad.

It's a new phenomenon that they might (might) be able to tell TikTok or Youtube to estimate the age of individual viewers and limit which topics can appear in advertisements to different age groups.

The existence of the candy flavors and any public marketing of those flavors (even on the label in the store aisle) is implicitly marketing to children.
by Freak_NL | 2025-07-17 16:17:19+00:00
> Why is alcohol something that's okay to market to kids?

It's not in many places. Where is it OK? There is a reason abstinence from alcohol is getting normalised for under 18s.

> I don't think vape kids are ever switching to tobacco […]

Demographic research polling suggests otherwise. Besides, it is gradually becoming more apparent that vaping is very much not a healthy thing to do¹.

1: Just one example of reporting on this issue: https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/sep/08/vapi...
by consp | 2025-07-17 16:17:40+00:00
Sugar is bad, but not that addictive and has no withdraw symptoms.

Nicotine is highly addictive and bad for you health. You pretty much have a customer for life ... which is the point. So next to having something which is bad for you, inhaling glycerol, combined with a substance which is addictive and bad for your health, you also are at a financial loss for life.

And it's targeted at teens ...
by wpm | 2025-07-17 16:17:40+00:00
Diamonds were never a luxury. They were a trinket, a shiny, that used to take hoardes of slave labor to extract out of the Earth's crust. Now we can grow them in a lab, and can be higher quality than the "natural" ones, for cheaper, without the slave labor. Outside of their use as an abrasive, gem-quality diamonds have few if any uses outside of "ooooh, aaaah", much of which is a product of their perceived rarity and prestige perpetuated by De Beers' marketing.

De Beers should be having a moral and ethical reckoning, not a financial one. They should be happy they get to keep any of their ill-gotten wealth at all, let alone that the fucking gravy train is running out. Eat shit. Sorry asshole, the business is dead. Get over it.
by IceDane | 2025-07-17 16:17:43+00:00
Yeah, maybe the original message sort of got lost along the way. I think there is still some truth in the post when applied to the title.

I think one of the most important things I ever learned is that hard things take time. There is an obvious relationship between the effort required and the size of the undertaking, but also the worthiness of the effort. In other words: rarely, if ever, can you build great things in a short amount of time or with little effort.

And that's where this post makes sense: to build something great or to solve something hard, you have to show up every day and chip away at the problem, piece by piece. The progress will be slow and nearly invisible to you as you experience it, and is usually only clear in hindsight after a year or two (or more), when you can look back and see all that's changed -- hopefully for the better -- since you started.
by tracker1 | 2025-07-17 16:18:03+00:00
I was just talking about this the other day... it was nearly a panacea of interconnected, interoperable messengers. My memory shortened it to a few months, but I remember it pretty well. The protocol sucked, but it did work.

I really miss the group chats on Yahoo that included voice. X spaces is close-ish, and I know that discord and others have similar features... just feels a lot less connected.
by piotraleksander | 2025-07-17 16:18:22+00:00
I wasn't aware of DBOS back then, only now had time to check it out. Actually love the idea of keeping everything in Postgres.

One thing that would hold me back from migrating is https://www.inngest.com/docs/guides/user-defined-workflows - thanks to which my users could quickly add automations (like sending newsletter announcing new blogpost)
by jlokier | 2025-07-17 16:19:08+00:00
I've had the version of that where I called my bank's listed number to confirm the incoming "call us on this number" voicemail was legit, and they said NO, the call is not a legit number of theirs, the account looks fine, I was right to check, and they agreed it seemed like a scam call.

A few days later I found out the call really was from the bank, and the bank had blocked my account, in a way that took a long time to unblock (don't get me started...). As ever, I found out the hard way, when I needed to use the account for something in real-time and it wasn't available.

But the call was from a different department than general customer support, the department's number wasn't known to customer service, and the account status change wasn't visible to customer service either.

So the bank's own customer service thought it was a scam call!
by hobs | 2025-07-17 16:19:14+00:00
Correct, most archeology digs take decades because A) its hard work and you have to do it very precisely (and also we're always inventing new tech and wondering how to keep stuff in the ground) and B) There's very little money funding it - active digs might be a few weeks a year in the best of cases, and the rest of the time just trying to get money to pay the grad students basically nothing to help.
by 93po | 2025-07-17 16:20:12+00:00
i had to look up whether stuff like mini excavators use control-by-wire/CAN bus or if the controls are actually mechanically operating valves, to determine how hard it'd be to just throw a lil computer connected to the CAN bus to autonomously operate equipment. it seems like newer and nicer models are control by wire, and older ones have joysticks and pedals that directly open and close hydraulic valves.

i looked this up in a "cost of humanoid robot" versus just doing a retrofit on a computer/actuators on older equipment. i think even in the actuator approach, adding 12 electronically controlled hydraulic valves to replace the human actuated valves is still gonna be cheaper than a humanoid robot
by RandomBacon | 2025-07-17 16:20:21+00:00
I called the number on the back of my Chase credit card (which goes to a call center in what sounds like India), and the person told me he has to verify me by hanging up, and then not to call anyone because he will call back in a few minutes... (Probably while he's on a "bathroom break" running to the scam center on the next floor of the same building.)

All the other times, they just ask for my verbal password to verify me.

I reported it and they said they created a ticket, but a month later when I called for a follow-up on the ticket, they said they had no idea what I was talking about :-/

(If anyone from Chase reads this, I have the recordings of those calls if you want them.)
by cjbgkagh | 2025-07-17 16:20:44+00:00
Certainly expanding the cohort alone is sufficient to cause a drop in average IQ scores - which is exactly what I said. College is no longer a useful proxy for IQ score. I made no claim that college would cause IQ scores to increase and if they do play a role I don't think it is a very large one. Raw scores are fitted to a normal distribution but the IQ scores are normalized across time by comparing that distribution to other distributions. Certainly some processes for obtaining IQ scores can be more flawed than others.

There is a reverse Flynn effect (peaked for children born in 1975) so not only are average IQ scores lower for college grads but there has been a drop in IQ for the general population.
by FerkiHN | 2025-07-17 16:20:56+00:00
No, I'm talking about the PIT project. Because on the contrary, my project is about GIF I only posted once today, I couldn't repost it many times because I created it yesterday, I just don't know what to do, I feel useless because I create projects that I myself find useful, I can't create others because they don't interest me.
by ryandv | 2025-07-17 16:21:15+00:00
Having been on both sides of the fence I can definitely speak to autodidacticism as having yielded some of the most durable and rewarding lessons of my lifetime spent programming, if only because I was really internally motivated to try my hand at game modding, or writing fun toy websites or mobile apps, or even learning Haskell. There are indeed some practical realities you will learn how to overcome that simply are not (and should not) be covered in a usual computer science curriculum (e.g. git, vim, basic shell fluency, etc.).

At the same time I feel that the self-taught dev or bootcamper from the 2010s is really a far cry from the geek culture of yesteryear. As opposed to misfits obsessed with computers, we now have grifters appropriating geek culture to make a buck off the industry. These people lack internal motivation; they are driven only by the external motivation of monetary reward. Consequently it's unlikely that they would delve into more of the esoterica of computing that, while interesting and fascinating to learn about, doesn't yield immediate monetary benefit.

In concrete terms what this amounts to is people "self-identifying" as "senior software engineers" who have never heard of the term `xor` in their life, and don't even understand what a truth table is when it's drawn out for them.

Even still, those who are highly internally motivated are still likely to have blindspots in their knowledge or not know that a field of study useful to them even exists, which is why having a more systematic and thorough review of the field's basics is useful.

Is knowledge of basic boolean logic, "advanced and impractical theoretical computer science," or merely, "table stakes?"

When anybody can identify as anything you eliminate the possibility of drawing meaningful distinctions and assessing qualifications.
Ask HN: How vibe coding apps are retaining users?
by yogini | 2025-07-17 16:22:12+00:00
Today, I read the news of Lovable raising $200M and becoming a unicorn!

The team is super talented, all Lovable, Bolt etc are doing really good but I do not understand how they will retain users?

Whenever I have talked to people who vibe coded apps using them, they do it once in a while for the sake of fun and never go back to them. Developers are not using them much, then how will these apps retain users?
by michaelcampbell | 2025-07-17 16:22:31+00:00
> Anyone with a decent enough budget is not even considering Windows.

Uhm, no. This is so totally dependent on your use case. I use my home box MOSTLY for gaming; it's just better on Windows. I also want a box I can upgrade. I never need to carry it with me.

Apple isn't even in the consideration space for me for that.

For work I don't have a choice, but the M[1-4] machines are _good enough_ for that; the battery life is nice, but I'm not mobile that often. I don't use its screen, mouse, or keyboard, so don't care there. The OS is close enough to familiar unixen that I like it fine, but WSL2 on Windows or native linux would be MORE THAN FINE, and closer to my deployment environment so would be better at way less cost, but our IT dept. doesn't want to support it so I get what I get.
by bityard | 2025-07-17 16:22:36+00:00
It's great that these kits are available and fairly cheap. But as it turns out, the kit that TFA links to is a Chinese clone of Arduino and none of the profits made on that kit contribute to further development of Arduino hardware, software, documentation, community, and so on.

I'm not saying don't buy this kit, what I am saying is if you find yourself needing or wanting a second dev board, consider purchasing an official Ardiuno from https://store.arduino.cc to support the folks that made all of this happen in the first place.
by freedomben | 2025-07-17 16:22:47+00:00
I have had nothing but trouble with GoDaddy and their ridiculous identification routines. We've spent hours with (allegedly) real humans who will tell us "ok I've released the domain for transfer. It will be clear in about 30 minutes" (or whatever it is at the time) and it never is, and then we have to start the entire process over with a new rep. There are other reasons to hate them too, but I won't go on a rant :-D
by theoffice | 2025-07-17 16:23:00+00:00
We just published our red team report on Google Gemini 2.5. It’s the first in-depth security review of Gemini’s multimodal models at enterprise scale.

Found some serious issues with image, audio, and text-based attacks, especially important as more teams plug these models into agents and workflows

Link here if you want to check it out or share:

Happy to do a quick recap if helpful!
by s1artibartfast | 2025-07-17 16:23:01+00:00
I had a similar realization in biotech. I saw a lot of engineering masters grads hired to break down cardboard boxes and document chamber temperature logs. The idea was they could read and write, and perhaps fit into yet undetermined roles later.

I think it speaks to common challenges when hiring mangers are disconnected from the work, degrees and resumes are worthless, and turnover is difficult.

In many companies team leads dont have a role in the hiring or firing of the employees working for them.
by bko | 2025-07-17 16:23:11+00:00
Tax software isn't expensive and complicated just because. It's expensive and complicated because the tax code is expensive and complicated. Otherwise there would be a ton of free tools.

People are focused too much on the tooling. Do you think having the government re-write TurboTax software and give it away for free is a good idea? Do you think they would do it cheaper? They literally employee hundreds or even thousands of people to support this software.

You'll pay one way or another, whether its tax payer funding of IRS or through TurboTax. I guess the question is whether you think some government agency can write tax software more efficiently than a private company.

Some people don't understand software and think it doesn't require maintenance, which is especially wrong when you're trying to work with ever changing federal and state tax codes. I'm surprised whenever I see this issue on HN, presumably an engineering heavy group, this idea of "free tax filing software" is so popular.

I'd prefer they simplify the tax code and this problem takes care of itself