MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by n4r9 | 2025-08-14 10:49:33+00:00
> If you narrow it down to just studies that use the scientific method correctly and which are built on strong evidence, no convincing findings remain.

That's a significantly weaker claim than the "masks did nothing" claim you've made in other posts [0-1]. And yes, the Cochrane review stated an inconclusive result; it explicitly doesn't say that masks do nothing. Nor does it really support what you're saying.

Firstly, note that the Cochrane review reviewed the effectiveness of promoting mask-wearing. Not the effectiveness of mask-wearing. It heavily weighted studies with a low (40-50%) adherence to mask-wearing [2]. This limits what it tells us about how well masks work.

Secondly, the Cochrane review arguably overstates its case. There were two randomised controlled trials studying the effectiveness of mask-wearing during the pandemic. The first found that promoting mask-wearing in rural Bangladesh increased mask-wearing by about 30% and reduced the risk of COVID-19-like illness by about 10% [3]. The second found that promoting mask-wearing reduced coronavirus infection by about 18% [4], but the low sample size meant that it could only detect very large effects of 50% of more [5], and the adherence was again low at 46%. Many leading experts in epidemiology believe that this points to a small but worthwhile reduction in COVID transmission when mask-wearing is promoted [6], implying that correctly wearing masks hass a significant effect in reducing transmission.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44882816

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44885801

[2] https://www.cochrane.org/about-us/news/statement-physical-in...

[3] https://poverty-action.org/publication/impact-community-mask...

[4] https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817

[5] https://www.factcheck.org/2020/11/danish-study-doesnt-prove-...

[6] https://www.factcheck.org/2023/03/scicheck-what-the-cochrane...
by eqvinox | 2025-08-14 10:49:50+00:00
The conclusion reached by the researchers is the same one you’re probably already thinking—the same one that a lot of you probably don’t want to admit, purely for ideological reasons: socialized healthcare.

F*ing lies.

There is no indication of the researchers explicitly connecting socialised healthcare. They didn't collect data to draw such a conclusion. They collected income+location(+other bits) vs life expectancy, but not healthcare type vs life expectancy.

And in reality, I believe Europeans also walk notably more than US-Americans, which might equally well have an impact. And a whole bunch of other things. There might be studies on it. This is not one of them.
by rsolva | 2025-08-14 10:50:12+00:00
I like to think that humanity is starting to build up some amount of immunity and aversion towards algorithmic feeds. Non-tech friends and family in my life (Norway and the Netherlands) express a rapidly growing discomfort being on Google and Meta's platforms, and some have gone cold turkey, others are actively formulating an exit strategy.

I dropped out of these platforms some years ago and have been very happy having the Fediverse (and HN!) as my only social media. It is just the right amount of engagement and impulse for me. I do not check my feeds compulsively, but occasionally – and the people I follow is a diverse bunch, giving me food for thought and keeping me up to date with topics and software projects.

It is still a niche place to hang out, but I'm OK with that. Now and then, friends get curious enough to join and check it out.
by lproven | 2025-08-14 10:50:27+00:00
You're not wrong, but there is a bit more subtlety here.

Classic MacOS had no multitasking at all until Multifinder arrived, several years after the Mac was released. I was going to say it appeared in System 6 but I checked and it was actually System 5 in 1987.

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

Similarly, the "Jackintosh", the multi-million-selling Atari ST with DR GEM on TOS (launched 40 years and 2 months ago, in June 1985) also was single-tasking.

That was normal for the mid-1980s. DOS was single-tasking. The ST shipped before Windows 1.0.

But RISC OS 2 shipped in 1988, the same year as the Mac System 6, and it had cooperative multitasking built-in as standard from Day 1.

(RISC OS 1 was "Arthur" in 1987 and its multitasking was basically just multiple Clock apps.)

Secondly, yes, the Amiga had full multitasking even at launch (the month after the ST) but it also had no memory protection at all. It was not very stable at all. Amiga users got very used to "Guru meditations."

Co-operative multitasking was pretty common in the 1980s because it's much more efficient. Microcomputers then barely had enough RAM and CPU to display a GUI and they didn't have enough for process isolation.

Windows 2, 3.0, and 3.1 could pre-empt DOS apps, but used co-op multitasking for all GUI apps.

Windows NT 3.1 (1993) was the first version that could pre-empt GUI apps. Win32 apps had pre-emptive multitasking, but 16-bit apps (that is, Windows 3 apps being run on NT) were co-op multitasked, unless you were rich, had a £5000+ PC with lots of RAM (like 32MB+) in which case there was a ticky-box to enable running a particular Win16 app in its own memory space. All the rest shared an instance. But this feature ate RAM.

I installed and supported Win NT 3.1 in production and used the option to run Excel in its own memory space, so that an errant copy of Word or MS Mail couldn't crash Excel. It was in a stockbroker and Excel was our single most important Windows app.

But we only had 1 guy with an NT PC at first and that box cost about £8000.

So, yeah, co-op multitasking wasn't as reliable, wasn't as stable, but it was much more memory-efficient and used less CPU, it worked fine on limited 16-bit CPUs, and so it was the norm for almost all computers.

Win NT was too expensive and needed a very expensive PC. OS/2 flopped. It wasn't until Windows 95, a full decade later, that most computers got pre-emptive multitasking.
by Daub | 2025-08-14 10:51:14+00:00
I believe that Kodak’s missed opportunity was in not realizing the social sharing potential of digital photography. They had all the ingredients: the first digital camera, the almost first online sharing of photos… but didn’t grok it. Instead they clung to existing outdated models. A camera nowadays is a different animal to what it was when there were such things as height street photographers.

Compare that to the increadidble lateral thinking they employed when they re-packaged their movie film stock into short rolls, made a cheap-ass camera to accommodate it (the box brownie) and established a printing service to process the results. Pure genius.
by teamonkey | 2025-08-14 10:51:21+00:00
> but policies of uniformly tracking everyone in the US, as if big cities are the same as the middle of nowhere in South Dakota or most of Utah

This makes it seem like the entire UK is an urban sprawl, evenly monitored, which it isn’t.

In London you’re likely to be on someone’s camera pretty much all the time, much less so in suburbs and smaller towns. There is plenty of countryside, woodland, rural land and villages where there is no CCTV coverage at all.
by RS-232 | 2025-08-14 10:51:58+00:00
Pythonista is awesome. Although it hasn’t been updated in 2 years and only supports 3.10, it’s still a beautiful and capable Python IDE.

Now that iOS and Android are Tier 3 platforms, we should be getting closer to the day that we can generate an IPA or APK from our Python project in a single click.
by mna_ | 2025-08-14 10:52:02+00:00
You can do that manually. Say for example you learn integration by trig sub today and you do 30 problems from a book. Next week you do some more trig sub problems. Then 2-3 weeks after that you do some trig sub problems and then in a few months you do some. You can do spaced rep manually. Is mathacademy more efficient? I don't know. It's too early to say. But what I do know is millions of people have learned mathematics with books, pen and paper for hundreds of years.
by rock_artist | 2025-08-14 10:53:11+00:00
> Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?

Rather than dangeours, society became dumber in a sense. overload of data resulted attemps to summarize or even make anything binary (I'm Pro X or Anti X).

(the text below is opinionated so please be forgiving :) )

I can name multiple countries (as I'm coming from one) that makes more "reforms" that has or will hurt human rights. (and we're still talking only on the "western world" which suppose to aim for freedom and human rights).

Coming from such a complex place in the world, I sadly say, that looking at stages in my life, I can easily remember the "good'ol'days" where there was one horrible thing, but I didn't know it can get worse.

I do hope society (and brits in the context of the above), will find the right balance to make a balance between feeling secured and invading privacy.
Show HN: Add line ranges to AI agents, not files, save context (VSCode)
by sortafreel | 2025-08-14 10:54:14+00:00
Tiny VSCode/Cursor extension to copy selected lines in relative path + lines format (@src/extension.ts#L10-12) with cmd+alt+l.

The goal is to provide limited context to coding agents without mentioning the whole file and eating the context window.

Highly specific use case, tiny open code (1 file). Will publish to marketplace if there's value in it.

P.S. There are existing extensions with a couple hundred downloads, but they either copy a single line or use a different format, so it was faster to write a new one.
by jMyles | 2025-08-14 10:54:52+00:00
Yeah, I think that basic distinction applies in some universal way.

Whether or not privacy is proper in a particular situation, or whether censorship is, that's another matter. But it's frustrating to see them confounded in this way.

Crippling the user's device (which is ultimately an affront to freedom of general purpose computing) in order to censor data which is plainly available through sensory input is not, in any sense, "privacy".
by pjmlp | 2025-08-14 10:55:08+00:00
We don't have to agree in anything, I wasn't asking for any agreement to start with.

I call them dishonest by comparing outdated Java 7 subset with Kotlin, when back in 2017 the latest version was Java 9, and in 2025 it is Java 24, and yet the documentation keeps using Java 8 for most examples on Java versus Kotlin.

How come Google doesn't want to have anything with Oracle, when it is impossible to build an Android distribution without a JVM, again people like yourself keep forgeting OpenJDK is mostly a product from Oracle employees (about 80%) with remaing efforts distributed across Red-Hat(IBM), IBM, Azul, Microsoft and JetBrains (I wonder what those do on Android), Kotlin doesn't build for Android without a JVM implementation, Gradle requires a JVM implementation, Android Studio requires a JVM implementation, Maven Central has JVM libraries,....

If Google doesn't want anything to do with Oracle why aren't they using Dart, created by themselves, instead of a language that is fully dependent on Oracle's kigdom for its own very existence?
by mna_ | 2025-08-14 10:55:59+00:00
When do you do exercises, do you refer back to sections in the book or examples? If so, this is a bad habit. Try to do exercises without looking back. This will force you to use your memory. Also don't be too quick to check solutions for things you're stuck on.

Everyone who does mathematics feels the way you do when learning something new. It's a normal feeling. Don't get disheartened. Push through it.
by johnisgood | 2025-08-14 10:57:05+00:00
> Which several people have already pointed out

That was what, N = 4?

So are you saying what I posted has no merit?

> According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales 2024, an estimated 78,000 people had phones or bags snatched from them on the street in the year ending March 2024.[1]

> This is equivalent to 200 'snatch thefts' a day and is a 153% increase on the number of incidents in the year ending March 2023. London is regarded as the “epicentre” of phone thefts with £50 million worth of phones reported stolen in London in 2024.[1]

This is coming from your own Government, for crying out loud.

And 1-10 people saying "oh it's perfectly safe" does not mean anything. It is an actual issue, and you may not believe me until it happens to you, or someone you know, which is kind of typical, so I get it.

[1] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-...
by mtts | 2025-08-14 10:57:33+00:00
You can, but you will spend a lot of time figuring out what it is that you need to study and where your weak points are. MathAcademy does that for you so you can spend your precious studying time on, well, what you need to study.

I think it’s very expensive, and the correct price should be €$25/ month at most, imho, but its spaced repetition system definitely provides value over self study.
by throw0101c | 2025-08-14 10:57:48+00:00
> Only extremely old ARM CPUs (i.e. 32-bit CPUs from more than a decade ago) do not have AES hardware.

I remember when Sun announced the UltraSPARC T2 in 2007 which had on-die hardware for (3)DES, AES, SHA, RSA, etc:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T2

(It also had two 10 GigE modules right on the chip.)
by Greenpants | 2025-08-14 10:58:16+00:00
I've had this phone as my main device for half a year and now using a Pixel 9 Pro Fold sometimes in "laptop" folded mode. So far, neither of these devices come close in my typing speed to a proper keyboard. The F(x)tec was great though because you do get all special characters in tactile buttons; on the Fold I constantly need to check my keyboard and make sure I'm writing what I think I'm writing. And, it's a shame that the space in between letters on the 'Gboard' keyboard on the Fold remains unused, when it could've been a perfect mouse trackpad.

I think the ideal form factor for a proper development phone would be the Astro Slide (https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transforme...) – I haven't personally used it but I can imagine it's the smallest size possible for proper two-handed typing. The F(x)tec was a two-thumber instead.
by dwedge | 2025-08-14 10:59:10+00:00
Usually the solution is to either not add ssl until you have the certs, or use selfsigned/snakeoil placeholder certs to get nginx started.

Personally I use dns everywhere. I have a central server running dehydrated and dns challenges every night which then rsyncs to all the servers (I'm going to replace it with vault). I kind of like having one place to check for certs
by procaryote | 2025-08-14 10:59:23+00:00
Unless the thing you're building is a python library you want other people to install, you don't need to understand all that much of it.

You just need to understand how to setup a venv, and for each thing you want to depend on how to install it in the venv. Put those bits in a shell script and you can clone the project, run the script and then have a working env

It will break sometimes because python and a lot of python packages have zero respect for backward compatibility, but that's python for you.

It's ugly and horrible, but you don't have to relearn the latest python packaging "standard" every other year
by PicassoCTs | 2025-08-14 11:01:07+00:00
You can get a feeling of the scope of the crisis to come, on just how much government is ready to clamp down and trying to preserve "civilization" through surveillance. Even if western liberal society vanishing in the process makes that protection measure in relation to the protection goal is dizzying.

And encoded in all that ruckus is a uncomfortable truth! This is as far as we will go! There is no miracle tech on the horizon, that can be handed out to the masses, bribing all of us with a 60s like surplus to be peaceful. Instead its panopticon or bust!
by _1tem | 2025-08-14 11:01:36+00:00
One way to solve this problem is to have a certain commodity require the new payment method. If AWS for example created a new currency/payment method and made it the sole accepted way to pay for servers it could very quickly catch on as others adopt. Look how “Sign in with Google” became the default.

I’m pretty sure the main reason Apple/Google/Microsoft haven’t done this already is because they would be directly competing with the US government. The idea must get shut down pretty quickly by powerful people.
by HKH2 | 2025-08-14 11:01:38+00:00
Sorry, I thought you were dogwhistling.

A dominant culture means a step back from individualist values. The most effective 'policies' are created through communities not through law. We cannot rely only on the law for a healthy society; it is necessary but not sufficient.

Rebelling against cultural norms is not the problem. The problem is when people escalate quickly because of it and threaten others. That means the gaps between cultures/subcultures have gotten too big.
by richmans | 2025-08-14 11:02:38+00:00
Author here. Awesome that this post got boosted by my latest post. As i wrote in an earlier post, my reason for wanting to develop on my phone is that i became a dad, and my kids did not want to sleep in a bed, so i spent a lot of time sitting in a rocking chair with trying to get them to sleep. One arm is needed for child support. One arm left to do development…
by vintermann | 2025-08-14 11:03:40+00:00
Yes, there's no such thing as rationality except rationality towards a goal.

But Big R Rationalists assume that if we were rational enough (in an exotic, goal-independent way nebulously called intelligence), we'd all agree on the goals.

So basically there is no morality. No right or wrong, only smart or stupid, and guess who they think are the smart ones.

And this isn't an original philosophy at all. Plato certainly believed it (and if you believe Plato, Socrates too). Norse pagans believed it. And everyone who believes it seem to sink into mystery religion, where you can get access to the secret wisdom if you talk to the right guy who's in the know.
by homebrewer | 2025-08-14 11:04:14+00:00
Instead of creating multiple wikis with probably 80% of duplicate information between them, it would be great to have a cross distribution wiki with separate sections for distribution-specific instructions where it makes sense. Gentoo had a fantastic wiki before they lost it to disk array failure (IIRC) around ten years ago, now pretty much everyone is going to the Arch wiki, why not try to turn it into a shared project?
by eptcyka | 2025-08-14 11:04:32+00:00
Yeah, all the people who stand to lose from oppressive surveillance can just gtfo into the desert, that will solve their problems and definitely isn’t what the surveyors wanted then to do in the first place. Yeah, like, if you do not like being surveilled in the society, have you considered not participating in it? This marginally better than being exiled forcefully.
by permo-w | 2025-08-14 11:05:13+00:00
the EU has literally banned facial recognition by law enforcement across the entire bloc.

HN has terrible EU Derangement Syndrome:

any time its mentioned here, suddenly there are tens of people lining up to blindly shit on it, usually for laws it hasn't actually passed, or literal anti-truths like your comment, despite the fact that it is consistently passing the best tech-focused laws of any major governmental body anywhere, and the proposed laws that everyone repeatedly loses their minds over have never once actually come to pass. even when they released the DMA and DSA, possibly the two most HN-friendly pieces of legislation of all time, half the comments were attempts at criticism, basically seemingly because people here just love to hate the EU, sans facts
by teamonkey | 2025-08-14 11:05:26+00:00
Not true.

If the CCTV gives a clear and obvious result they will pursue it. If there’s a string of thefts they will investigate and use the CCTV to provide evidence. CCTV won’t always provide that but sometimes it does.

What they won’t do is send Columbo to track down your laptop, because your laptop is worth a few minutes of police time at best, and by the time you report it it’s already been fenced and there is almost zero chance of recovery. They should prioritise violent crime.
by DataDaoDe | 2025-08-14 11:06:56+00:00
I used math academy for several months. I was curious and wanted to try it out since it’s a problem I’ve also worked on in the past. Th system is good, the fractional spaced repetition is a nice system and really reduces the spaced repetition overhead. Still IMHO, it provides nowhere near the value of the $50 a month pricing. But again I also know a lot of higher level mathematics and can work my way through a topology book on my own, so I’m probably not in the target audience. Still, I would think that even for people wanting to get into math or high school students this would still be a very steep price.
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-14 11:07:02+00:00
> general housework, wife of the master ordered

Yes you were part of the family for better and for worse. I don't see how that is problematic, you weren't working for a different household, you were just part of this household.

> They would beat you

Sure life sucked back than. There is a reason we are not in the middle ages anymore. I would say that was more a problem with the general attitude in society, not specific to masters.

> no you could not just look for another master

But you were required to look for a different master every few years? That claim doesn't make sense to me.

Of course not everything was all roses, it was just different. You didn't had a social net from the state, there wasn't an independent police you could report beatings from the master. On the other hand you had a social security net by the family/household currently living in (meaning your master's in this case) and if you have rows with everyone you can just walk for a day to the next city, where nobody knows you, and start afresh. The latter isn't possible now anymore.
by frankdejonge | 2025-08-14 11:07:34+00:00
I’ve given up on hopes of having funding on open source. My open source packages account for about 1.2% of all PHP code downloaded from Packagist (package manager) but unless there is a commercial effort behind it, I do not see it happening. A couple devs in highly hyped companies is able to generate a following big enough to solicit some non trivial amount of funding but the majority just doesn’t care enough about it to fund it. In the end, is open source maintainers are stupid enough to give our code away for free, so who’s really to blame for this. Perhaps it’s an overly pessimistic view, but not a view that has historically been disproven.
by graemep | 2025-08-14 11:07:45+00:00
> spray painting British military equipment.

Spraying paint down military jet engines rendering them inoperable until repaired, at a cos of millions of pounds.

> historically terrorists would actually need to commit acts that instil a sense terror in people to further their political objective

The legal definition of terrorism in the UK has for many years (at least all of the current century, I think a lot longer) included "serious damage to property":

https://www.cps.gov.uk/crime-info/terrorism

and I think causing many millions of pounds worth of damage is clearly serious.

I do not entirely agree with the definition (I particularly oppose making collecting information and disseminating publications terrorism) but it is what has long been accepted.