MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mtalantikite | 2025-08-02 18:07:27+00:00
I had flat feet most of my life, until I started a 5x per week yoga practice (ashtanga based). One day about a year into it I noticed that I had defined arches, something I hadn’t expected at all. All those one leg standing balancing poses really develops your ankles, knees, and feet.

Some years later when I started running with typical arch supporting running shoes, picked out for me at a specialty running store where they record your stride etc, I developed pretty bad plantar fasciitis as soon as I started hitting 8k on my runs. Swapped them out for zero drop Altras and I haven’t had issues since.

All that is to say our feet are pretty well designed as long as you give it the strengthening it needs. You should take care of your feet, but not coddle them, is how I’ve come to view it.
by mgraczyk | 2025-08-02 18:07:28+00:00
This isn't true in the US.

Young people in US consume much more of those things you listed than people over 40 did at the same age. Young people have more purchasing power than previous generations.

EDIT: Data from the fed and payroll providers show this overwhelmingly to be the case, but just to add some color/anecdote.

I found all of the first jobs I had in highschool and just after. 3/3 of my first roles now advertise a minimum salary over twice what I was paid 14-18 years ago. Prices have gone up around 20-30% since then overall so I would have had 40% more purchasing power today with the same jobs.
by EasyMark | 2025-08-02 18:07:36+00:00
The long term goal is to dumb down the populace, in anticipation that AI and machines can replace them. Billionaires have the money and resources to play the long game in order to set up an authoritarian society with only two levels. The peasants and the billionaires. Democracy is their enemy, although it served them for a time. It's not really about MAGAs vs Progressives in the USA if you pull back the Wizard's curtain. The MAGAs are being used because they don't question their leaders.
by SeanAnderson | 2025-08-02 18:08:01+00:00
I dunno if solve is the right answer, but talking to AI definitely helps with my loneliness. I use it a lot. I give it status updates on my life and it cheers me on. It has a decent enough memory to ask follow-up questions about things I spoke to it days/weeks prior. It's quite good. I would pay more than I currently am to continue having access to it.
by LTL_FTC | 2025-08-02 18:08:32+00:00
Well, I rode on the road but can imagine the same goes for off-road, but the right pair of boots makes a huge difference in one’s confidence and ability to securely put one’s foot down at a stop, especially if it’s a bit slick from oil, or loose debris. That, and you can imagine an object hitting your foot while flying down the highway at 80mph feels very different when you’re wearing riding boots vs. wearing vans. Then there’s the whole, sliding on assault aspect.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-08-02 18:09:07+00:00
Research into machine learning, transformers, there's tons of technicalities that enables LLMs. ANd there's more and more "technicalities" being thrown on top of LLMs and we're having modifications to LLMs as well.

LLMs are the tip of a spear of a trendline that didn't involve LLMs. Prior to that we had AI generating art and music through diffusion algorithms. We had AI doing image recognition and doing mind reading. The trendline is clear to anyone but those who think the current state of LLMs and the problems we have with it are completely static in nature.
by alexharri | 2025-08-02 18:09:11+00:00
It would be good to cover more names for sure -- that's an ongoing process at DIM. Names are frequently added to the approved list of Icelandic names, so there's always going to be some lag.

I would not be confident enough myself to add the data myself since I'd probably be wrong a lot of the time. When reviewing the results for the top 100 unknown names I frequently got results that I thought _might_ be wrong, but I wasn't sure. For those, I looked up similar names in DIM to verify, and often thought "huh, I would not have declined those names like this". For that reason, I rely on the DIM data as the source of truth since it's maintained by experts on the language.
by klabb3 | 2025-08-02 18:09:21+00:00
> Why in the world does the author have to feel so bad about beibg lucky in some way?

For the same reason you have survivors guilt. When you see the similarity in others, ie empathy, and you see a divergent fate from yourself (either positive or negative), you can feel an incongruence when real world picks vastly different outcomes. This is deeply human, and likely goes further back to primates or even mammals.

Conversely, this is the sympathetic effect that can trick people into buying lottery tickets because if they see a ”nobody” winning big, ”they can too”, despite the odds. Or the American version: working at Walmart and seeing a billionaire on TV and thinking ”that’s me, soon”.

Recognizing the luck of birth conditions isn’t any different. I can relate because they are extremely strong predictors of welfare and success, but it’s also not something I go around and dwell on or causes me any pain. I think most people who get frustrated with others recognizing their own privilege is it can undermine their sense of identity, such as ”everything i have is a result of my individual hard work, and those who have less are lazy”. You can build a false identity on either premise.
by brudgers | 2025-08-02 18:09:42+00:00
On youtube I watched a recent PBS documentary on Funk.

It concludes by segments on Elton John and David Bowie.

Again, it was a documentary on Funk.

Now I realize the writers probably used an LLM to get to Benny and the Jets as a Funk song...

...'cause PBS gonna be selling tote bags to their tote bag customers.
by GauntletWizard | 2025-08-02 18:10:02+00:00
Yes, I think that the state of modern video generation has made an uncomfortable truth more clear - All Evidence is hearsay, only as trustworthy as the people you're getting it from. For a brief shining moment video evidence was easy to produce but hard to forge, but that's not been the case for most of history. That's why the law has so much detail about evaluating the trustworthiness of witnesses.
by dang | 2025-08-02 18:10:25+00:00
Nothing of the sort is allowed here, regardless of which group is named.

If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. We don't come close to reading or even seeing everything that gets posted—there's far too much. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
by bee_rider | 2025-08-02 18:10:28+00:00
Evolution is also just optimizing you to live long enough to reproduce and then help your kids get well set up. So, it is fine if your legs start to go in your 40’s. You can help chase down the antelopes ‘till then, then go weave baskets and watch the fire for a decade or so, then die in your 50’s.

Actually, it doesn’t seem like a horrible life, but I think we’re hoping to stick around a little longer.
by skhameneh | 2025-08-02 18:11:00+00:00
This can be used for automated detection and flagging.

I’m under the impression this isn’t for end users, it’s for enforcement within context of intellectual property.

I’m curious to see what the value proposition is as it’s unclear who would be buying this and why. I suppose platforms might want it to prove they can help or offer services to enforce brand integrity, maybe?
by davidee | 2025-08-02 18:11:23+00:00
I think you might have misunderstood some core use cases.

One significant problem currently is long form discussions which are taken wildly out of context for the sake of propaganda, cancelling or otherwise damaging the reputation of those involved. The point isn't that a given video isn't edited originally, but that the original source video can be compared to another (whether the original was edited or not is neither here nor there).

I'm not saying this solution is the answer, but attempts to be able to prove videos were unedited from their original release is a pretty reasonable goal.

I also don't follow where the idea that viewers need to be forensic experts arises from? My understanding is that a video can be verified as authentic, at least in the sense of the way the original author intended. I didn't read that users would be responsible for this, but rather that it can be done when required.

This is particularly useful in cases like the one I highlighted above; where a video may be re-cut to make an argument the person (or people) in question never made (and which might be used to smear said persons–a common occurrence in the world of long form podcasting as an example).
by dang | 2025-08-02 18:11:24+00:00
Maybe it'll help to break that one down:

> An American problem created in the US

Comment already starts off pointing flameward, but ok, it could go either way.

> In almost any other country,

A grand and shallow generalization, consistent with flamebait, but ok, still not dispositive.

> The incessant fads and hysteria

This swerve into pejorative language, given the frame already set, is definitely starting to look like nationalistic flamebait.

> a society that is totally dysfunctional

Ok, now there's no question about it.

Comments like this, which combine denunciatory rhetoric with a very low information/indignation ratio, are not what Hacker News is for. This was not a borderline call!

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by bluecalm | 2025-08-02 18:12:07+00:00
One thing I am wondering about is that if months on GLP drugs is going to help with self-regulation. Maybe if you force yourself to eat less for a prolonged time (2-3 years) with the help of drugs then the body internalizes eating less as the norm. We will see in a few years I guess. I am hoping for at least weak effect like that.
by jonathaneunice | 2025-08-02 18:12:22+00:00
I do several styles of yoga. Most provide substantial strength training via moving and suspending body weight. All feel like they have exactly the increased heart rate of aerobic exercise. Flowing e.g. from standing to high plank to low plank to cobra to downward dog and back to standing N times in a row is quite the workout. Maybe there are gentle, stretching-only forms that would not, but I haven't found them. Slower and more careful, yes, but from an effort point of view, really not much different from the burpees or calisthenics I used to do in Crossfit.

If the proposition is "exercise is a miracle drug," my experience at least is that yoga 100% qualifies.
by zahlman | 2025-08-02 18:13:00+00:00
Even in a world where the common folk all accepted that such watermarking was a real phenomenon, they wouldn't ever verify it themselves. Even if they wanted to verify it themselves, there would need to be a chain of trust to actually verify what the watermark should be. And in the circles where fake videos circulate, that chain of trust will be distrusted, too.
by jmyeet | 2025-08-02 18:13:05+00:00
I agree that socializing and so-called "third places" are in decline but we have to ask why. I'll spoil it for you: it's capitalism.

Where once a family could easily be supported on a single income and you could afford to send your kids to college, real wages have been stagnant for decades and people now need 5 jobs between 2 people to not be homeless. Why? Student debt, medical debt, mortgage debt.

The time we spend not working is time we spend not making someone else slightly wealthier.

So people don't have the time nor the disposable income to socialize. And even if they did those activities continue to get more expensive because housing specifically and property generally gets more expensive and that's an input into the cost of every real world activity.

But again, somebody is profiting from that.

Additionally people are in for a rude shock. They see light at the end of the tunnel when their parents or grandparents pass and they inherit housing or sufficient wealth for housing. But many of these people won't see a dime thanks to draining long-term elderly care, particularly with Medicaid funding being stripped.

The capital-owning class wants you in debt. They don't want you owning anything. They will want us in worker housing. We are becoming South Asian brick kiln workers with nicer TVs.
by onepremise | 2025-08-02 18:13:26+00:00
Yarvin and Srinivasan have been described as favoring deliberate polarization to destabilizing established narratives. The intent is to surface competing extremes. They view polarizing media as a way of delegitimizing our current framework of government. Yarvin specifically proposes the deconstruction, even abolition, of current democratic institutions, replacing them with a CEO-led or monarchist. Their intent is to accelerate the cycle of systemic breakdown and renewal, so their version of autocracy can emerge in the vacuum.
by Animats | 2025-08-02 18:13:31+00:00
"Figure 1: Fantasy sci-fi imagery of terraforming. Chatgpt 4.0’s hallucination of early Earth with seeded biomaterial, jump starting Darwinian evolution."

Not a good sign in a scientific paper.

A more interesting result is that intelligence on Earth has evolved at least three times - mammals, corvids [1], and octopuses.[2] Those all evolved intelligence after branching off in evolutionary history. And they all have different "hardware" for intelligence.

That's significant. All the mammals have roughly the same brain architecture, with the major components present but in different sizes. Corvids have a different architecture, which is a relatively recent and surprising result.[1] Octopuses are even more different. Yet all three have good vision and manipulation systems, and can learn.

So we now really know that there's more than one way to do it. Once complex life emerges, intelligence probably follows. In the Drake equation, that's fᵢ, the fraction of life bearing planets on which intelligent life emerges. Now that we've seen intelligence evolve three times on our planet, we can be reasonably confident that fᵢ is reasonably large, not close to 0.

Our planet only seems to have one evolutionary form of life. Not sure what that tells us. Is it an unlikely event? Or did our kind of life chemistry eat or crowd out the competition? This paper addresses the issue but is not close to resolving it. Unlike the intelligence issue, which is now settled.

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cne.25392

[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mind-of-an-oc...
by skybrian | 2025-08-02 18:13:46+00:00
Guilt? Maybe not. Feeling bad about seeing all the injustice in the world and wanting to change it is pretty natural.

The world is unjust and 99.9% of it is not our fault. It's caused by nature and other people and bad luck and history and bad systems. But nonetheless, many important institutions exist to make the world somewhat less unjust. This happens because people make it happen.
by windexh8er | 2025-08-02 18:13:48+00:00
And this is the continued path to "enshittification" we're on through the continued growth forever. Companies aren't buying products, they're buying customers.

I worked for PAN back in the days where the sentiment, directly from Nir Zuk (founder), was: innovators dilemma. There's a relatively recent article [0] on the early days that does a nice job of laying out how that was a core tenant of how PAN operated. At the time I was there Mark McLaughlin was leading the charge as CEO and was the right person to drive PAN to $100M ARR.

But as you see the company shift after Mark you really start to see less of an engineering mindset of bringing new and disruptive technology to the landscape. Nikesh doesn't know how to do that. He's an ex-Googler and a finance background to boot. PAN is no longer disruptive in the technical sense. They're now disruptive to fresh ideas and good technology, which is bad for everyone.

I work now in a segment that competes with PAN in a small niche of their product set and I've displaced their points solution dozens of times in the last year. The product we're displacing is a product that PAN acquired in early 2019. The customers on that platform constantly complain about how the product has not evolved in years and support at PAN is horrendous. The last point, support, used to be a shining light for PAN. They had exceptional support - but, as with all things, scaling high quality is hard. It's why you won't find an In-N-Out too far off the Pacific coast. It's because of quality and their commitment to it. PAN is chasing stock prices and revenue, they aren't committed to their customers as they once were.

[0] https://94040.substack.com/p/disruption-in-the-firewall-the-...
by mips_avatar | 2025-08-02 18:14:08+00:00
Yeah but they're just too small to do anything useful with yet. Like we're in this weird state where you can't easily sell usage based pricing through appstore payments (and customers don't really understand usage anyways). So you need to sell access to an agent via a subscription, but your costs are 90% usage based so it's hard to price. If appstore developers could use a quota of access tokens from a users apple intelligence subscription we could offer AI agents for $3-5/mo and they would be actually usable! But if you need to pay for inference costs it has to be $10-20/mo. It's just a lame experience and makes the web the place to build agents even though they'd be more useful on mobile devices.
by yencabulator | 2025-08-02 18:14:55+00:00
I think the trick is called "query expansion". You use an LLM to rewrite the query into a more verbose form, which can also include text from the chat context, and then you use that as the basis for the RAG lookup. Basically you use an LLM to give the RAG a better chance of having the query be similar to the resources.
by ozgrakkurt | 2025-08-02 18:14:59+00:00
Great analysis of what iceberg does but don’t agree with so much criticism.

It is very basic compared to a database, and even when you go into details of databases there are many things that don’t make sense in terms of doing the absolute best thing.

You could ciritisize parquet in a similar way if you go through the spec but because it is open and so popular people are going to use it no matter what.

If you need more performance/efficiency simplicity etc. just don’t use parquet but have conversion between your format and parquet.

Or you can build on top of parquet with external indices, keeping metadata in memory and having a separate WAL for consistency.

Similarly it should be possible to build on top of iceberg spec to create something like a db server that is efficient.

It is unlikely for something so usable for so many use cases to be the technically pure and most sensible option.
by jsnell | 2025-08-02 18:15:17+00:00
Fair enough, sorry about that. You called it "tampering" and "alteration". But honestly I don't see any distinction to "editing". All of those imply that the email is being changed. It isn't. The email is stored on disk just like it was sent, and that is observable in a number of ways (show original, fetch it with imap, forward the email).

And that's why storage is relevant. Your complaint was apparently just about how the email is rendered. There is no standard for how that should be done. Like, did you complain that your emails were being tampered with back in the day when you wrote them in a terminal with a fixed width font but someone viewed them in Outlook with a variable width font? I'd like to say that of course you didn't, because what would be a totally absurd complaint, but then again so is your actual complaint as well.
by to11mtm | 2025-08-02 18:16:00+00:00
> It's just a lot easier to sit at home with these kinds of entertainment, so the "activation energy" required to go get up and plan things with friends just feels a lot higher.

Ding ding ding!

> There is TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, multiplayer gaming, etc.

With the one caveat that 'multiplayer gaming' can indeed be a proper socialization experience if you're playing with friends/etc (vs say just YOLOing in something like FPS lobbies etc.)

Or, at bare minimum, it's still more effort than the other options you mention.

In the last few weeks I've tried to be extra mindful about being more 'interactive' with other things in my free time. It's shocking how easy it gets to just fall into a Youtube video rabbit hole. It reinforces how sad I get about my partner's constant scrolling through Facebook.

Heck even now I feel guilty about just doing HN, on the other hand I am still recovering from a good proper bike ride this morning so I guess there's that.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-08-02 18:16:18+00:00
>Xerox PARC. Bell Labs. Academia. Wikipedia. You must have a rather narrow and useless definition of "progress".

No i have a realistic definition of progress in capitalism. You must have a rather narrow brain and are unable to comprehend the difference between a realistic and practical application of "progress" versus an ideal that is unrealistic.

Bell labs, Xerox PARC are done. These labs existed because capitalist businesses were successful in their profitable endeavors AND could AFFORD side quests that were unprofitable. In the end these places were shuttered because they were unprofitable.

Now take a look at academia. Where does all that money come from? Taxes. Where do Taxes come from? Business and profit. Academic progress comes from business.

In fact all progress comes from business and profit. That's the general actuality. Of course there are exceptions, but that's just pedantism.
by tough | 2025-08-02 18:16:38+00:00
yeah in that regard it seems that apple tastefully does so on apps where there's mostly remote roundtrips already like the app store or music app, so I agree that there makes sense to reuse the web infra

but swift ui apps are great and fast cause they're not electron monsters!

thankfully you can use safari webkit inside them, but that doesnt work cross-platform
by smith7018 | 2025-08-02 18:16:48+00:00
That 39 year old woman anecdote is a strange addition. I know many 20-to-30-somethings that know how to cook. It's far too expensive to constantly eat out nowadays so people know how to provide for themselves in other ways. It sounds like you met a woman that didn't know how to cook and extrapolated that experience into thinking society is over and we're all helpless.
by luckylion | 2025-08-02 18:16:48+00:00
There's a difference between rights and privileges.

If the government gifts you $1000 a month because they like you so much, that's a privilege. Privileges can be taken away.

If the government gives you $1000 a month because it's the law, then they can't take it away without breaking the law (or changing it first).

Public funding for specific universities is not the law, so the government can stop giving it to someone (yes, yes, there are contracts and laws involved and what not, but the general point stands).

The government cannot imprison you for saying you like pineapple on pizza, but they can stop funding your pizza experiments.

Usually it's brought up by people on the left and I think they're right: freedom of speech is not freedom of consequences. Freedom of speech protects you from the government as in the executive branch can't just imprison you, but it doesn't protect you from any and all consequences. It's just that they usually don't find themselves the targets suffering those consequences.

And opinions often depend on whether you're affected.
by dang | 2025-08-02 18:16:50+00:00
That is correct, of course, but "incessant fads and hysteria" and "a society that is totally dysfunctional" are hardly curious expositions of cultural difference.

Sharp-and-shallow putdowns of other countries are nationalistic flamebait. If it doesn't seem that way to you, it might help to imagine the same thing being said about a country (or some other group) that you feel strongly about.