MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-31 10:27:35+00:00
Do you think that there's a single "aging" master switch that could be flipped to "off", resulting in zero aging and immortality for everyone forever?

That's beyond optimistic. What's more likely to happen is, we'll uncover some major pathways for aging and find a way to target them to slow aging down somewhat, at first.

People who get anti-aging treatments would live for longer, and would be healthier while they do. The adoption would be gradual, and it'll take a while for them to come down in price and proliferate worldwide - and it would still be up to people to decide whether they want them, although most doctors would recommend they do. The first generations of anti-aging treatments would allow people to live to the age of 100 fairly reliably, and remain healthier and more active while they do. Future generations would improve on that.

There will be no "sudden infinite number of humans" to deal with. Even if we started out tomorrow (for example, if it was confirmed that Ozempic has broad anti-aging effects), it'll take decades for this effect to become noticeable. Humanity can adapt to something like that easily.
by kelnos | 2025-08-31 10:27:57+00:00
> Market share (for a given period)

That's not a thing. Market share has no time period. It's an instantaneous measure of the state of things right now. How many of your company's units are out in the wild right now being used, vs. how many total units (sold by any company) are out there in the wild right now being used.

That number can and will be different at different points of time, as people buy and return your products, and buy and return your competitors' products[0]. You can certainly say that your market share increased by 300% or by -40% over a given period of time, but your actual market share is always a number between 0% and 100%.

> Market share (for a given period) is the participant's sales in the market divided by total sales.

No, that's a company's share of sales as compared to the industry/product category as a whole. Not market share.

[0] You also should take into account people who throw your product in the trash (or for software, delete it) without returning it. Depending on context, you might even want to take into account people who put your product in a box in their basement and never use it again. Assuming you could actually divine those numbers, which of course you likely can't.
by heresie-dabord | 2025-08-31 10:28:04+00:00
It's hard to graph the semantics of a set of arbitrary human statements. It's even harder to work with literal, even intentional non sense.

Humans can indeed make sense. Not to be too Swiftian, but in some countries, children even go to school for it.

For semantic analysis, however, git is just not the right tool. It's a chronological graph that affords diffs. For code.

We need Python NLP and spacy here. But even the best tooling won't get far. A compiler would abort nonsequential logic and unsatisfied contracts and grammar.

An important business presentation would have structure and facts. Inside the theoretical classroom, a public speech is different from casual, random remarks. Unless the speech is intended for entertainment (e.g. comedy, theatre) or some dark usage, such as propaganda.

From TFA:

> the cyclical pattern of his speeches, little snippets of “the best words” and talking points assembled like a ransom note cut from a magazine

That's gold!
Show HN: A01 – personal news agent to follow anything
by shingkwan | 2025-08-31 10:28:28+00:00
Hi HN!

A01 is a personal news agent that follows exactly what you tell it to, without the algorithmic noise.

I built it because I often had to jump between different sites and platforms to stay updated. When topics get really niche, there’s no single platform to rely on, and I’d often get distracted by unrelated content along the way.

How A01 works: - Ingests 2,000+ RSS feeds hourly (The Verge, NYT, Nature, IEEE, arXiv, etc.) - Creates embeddings using Voyage - Vector search matches your custom prompts against new content every hour - Delivers only what matches your interests

We’ve been building alongside 1000 early users, and here’s what they’re following: - Industry updates like AI, crypto, and fintech - Research papers in areas like physics, ML, and HIV - Market movements across different sectors

Download on App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/a01-your-personal-news-agent/i... For Android users, sign up here: http://www.a01ai.com/

Really excited to hear what you think! Especially curious about what topics you'd want to follow that current news apps handle poorly, and any edge cases where semantic matching might fail.
by xpe | 2025-08-31 10:28:48+00:00
> There is a ton of bias on Wikipedia.

I would rephrase the question as "what kinds of bias systemically point in a particular direction?"

- If by "bias" one means "following the principles set out in Wikipedia's mission" then one probably should ask "Isn't this what non-profits do... and even if that mission is unpopular, a proper government supporting various civil liberties would need a _very_ strong reason to meddle."

- If by "bias" one means that there is a significant percentage of individuals that bring their own personal bias, then one should probably ask:

-- what's the problem with individuals bringing personal bias? -- this is what people do, after all;

-- to what degree does the claimed bias reflect a natural effect of any aggregation of people;

- if the bias is coming from editors, does this matter?

- is Wikipedia breaking some law?... perhaps (seems like a stretch and quite difficult to prove) Wikipedia is doing something illegal when it comes to aggregation that is making the disparate biases "add up" (like vectors) to point in some direction?

Finally, for all of the above, on what basis might the government have a legally-supported basis for acting (whether it be hearings, demands for data, or otherwise)?

A claim that foreign interests are interfering with US elections (by way of platform X) is easy to make, but any official actions from the government must flow from some legal authority. (Practically speaking, ultimately a citation from the U.S. legal code, Constitution, or Supreme Court.)

Expansions, criticisms, etc always welcome.
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-31 10:29:34+00:00
Yes and called viruses, dozens of toolbars on your computer, key loggers, malware, ransomware, etc.

If you want an open phone, buy one. But I instruct all of the older members of my family to buy iPhones and iPads.

I’ve been programming computers since 1986 and even I have never said it would be cool to side load on my phone.
by yubblegum | 2025-08-31 10:29:44+00:00
New York is teeming with what appear to be newly arrived "immigrants" who do no speak a word of English (and frankly are rather aggressive about their refusal to do so) yet are employed in various crafts. We had fairly substantial renovation recently in our building. Every single worker was clearly a recent arrival. How do we know how many jobs were actually created if so many of them are not "officially recorded"?

(I am an immigrant myself (via the legal means) lest you take my observation as a xenophobic expression.)
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-08-31 10:30:19+00:00
I had a professor in a math heavy subject that just started throwing out maths on the blackboard to derrive formula after formula.

It could take 20 minutes until we reach the conclusion, at which point he finally explains what the purpose of the final formula is and why we want it.

I got the habit of reading his book in reverse before the lectures; reading section by section in reverse order from the end. This way the mathematical calculations had a clear goal and were faar easier to follow.

... brilliant maths, but he was fully and utterly incompetent at teaching it. And he had a bit of an ego about how many students fail each year because "they're lazy".

Me and a few friends did deep recaps to de-tangle the explanations using his book, rephrasing it in a easier and shorter format; and he accused us of cheating because our scores deviated from the normal distribution.

All this to say; sometimes clever doesn't correlate well to great with words.... though dont take that as a endorsement of trump.
by Xmd5a | 2025-08-31 10:30:52+00:00
You're probably thinking about Obama's prepared speeches. A fair comparison would rather involve spontaneous conversations Obama partook in. And yes you would see the same patterns as in Trump's improvised announcement, the pauses, the hesitations, the sudden ruptures to fix unclear anaphora, the pushing and popping of items on the stack of topics, etc...

It's certainly not what is drawing attention to this thread, but Trump's ideas. However we should be aware that transcribing someone's speech with high fidelity 1°) will inevitably make them look dumb 2°) but only because we're not used to do this task, in fact our brains constantly do the opposite, fixing and filtering what we perceive in order to make out what is being communicated. You need some training to do that in fact!

Nonetheless, the author decided to included repair initiators ("uh") but not pauses, because I think he wanted to underline how dumb Trump sounds (pauses do not carry this connotation). This argument was used during the 2012 French presidential election against candidate Eva Joly (a prosecutor) in an attempt to tackle critics about her Norwegian accent on more objective grounds. Moving beyond right-wing gut-driven glottophobia, some people on the left thought they had found reasons to validate this criticism by examining improvised declaration she made during interviews through the filter of written transcription. I can accept this argument only if the author's article is a transcription of a spontaneous monologue (which is impossible of course).

Anyway I stress my point: we underestimate how messed up our actual linguistic production are. We're all too focused on the ideal of written language.

https://assets.cambridge.org/97811084/17211/frontmatter/9781...

>SPONTANEOUS SPOKEN ENGLISH

>A new, thought-provoking book on the theory of grammar and language processing, Spontaneous Spoken English is based on the analysis of authentic speech produced in real time. Drawing on insights from cognitive psychology, neurology, and conversation analysis, the author offers a fascinating, easy-to-follow account of why spoken English is structured the way it is. The traditional product-based approach to grammar is given up in favor of a dynamic, speaker-based perspective that integrates language-structural, neurocognitive, and dialogic aspects of speech production. Based on fresh empirical research, Haselow argues that grammatical knowledge rests upon two cognitive principles of linearization called microgrammar and macrogrammar, which are shown to interact in various ways. The book discusses a broad range of speech phenomena under an integrated framework, such as the omnipresence of “unintegrated” constituents (e.g. discourse markers), ellipses, or the allegedly “fragmented” character of syntax, and explains the mechanisms of processing efficiency that guide syntactic planning.
by _mattt | 2025-08-31 10:31:42+00:00
I think HTML -> Markdown is a bit of a red herring.

In many cases, a Markdown distillation of HTML can improve the signal-to-noise ratio — especially for sites mired in <div> tag soup (intentionally or not). But that's an optimization for token efficiency; LLMs can usually figure things out.

The motivation behind Sosumi is better understood as a matter of accessibility. The way AI assistants typically fetch content from the web precluded them from getting any useful information from developer.apple.com.

You could start to solve the generalized problem with an MCP that 1) used a headless browser to access content for sites that require JS, and 2) used sampling (i.e. having a tool use the host LLM) to summarize / distill HTML.
by bonoboTP | 2025-08-31 10:32:40+00:00
Why can't an artist or band just make songs and upload them to the platforms directly? And do live shows. What extra does a label give? As you said, they used to invest in artist development and were indispensable for producing the physical media at scale and distributing it to physical record stores everywhere, including internationally. Today all this is much simpler to manage.
by mdp2021 | 2025-08-31 10:33:20+00:00
> Democracy is about having choices - and authoritarianism is about not having them, says lawyer and writer Ian Bassin.

> These authoritarian movements work like Trojan horses. Typically, their leader comes to power through an election and once inside dismantles the system from within. And and they have a playbook for doing so. The authoritarian playbook.

> They politicize independent institutions like the civil service, law enforcement, and eventually the military.

> Second, they spread disinformation including from the government.

> Third, they arrandise executive power and undermine checks and balances.

> Fourth, they quash descent from limiting what can be said and taught and read to using the regulatory state to punish critics.

> Fifth, they scapegoat and delegitimize vulnerable groups. This has been the tyrantʼs favorite tool since antiquity because if you can pit people against each other on the basis of race, religion, or sexual orientation, itʼs easier to pick their pockets of money and power.

> Six, they corrupt elections.

> And finally, they incite violence.

> Itʼs not that people openly support authoritarianism or even secretly favor it. But in a time of rapid change and uncertainty, it can be tempting to think the solution is just to give someone a little bit more power.

Full talk at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-vVO3nRFzI
by kruffalon | 2025-08-31 10:34:51+00:00
Yes!

But more importantly wealthy countries shouldn't depend on there being poor countries where women still have "too" many children but rather we should fix our own problems so we want and can have sufficient young people of our own (not said in a nazi way).

And we should also redistribute wealth so there aren't any poor countries to exploit for natural resources, crops and people.
by jermaustin1 | 2025-08-31 10:35:11+00:00
> E.g. playing a song at a live event is different from using it in television which is different from using it in your youtube video which is different from using it in a film for cinema.

Not a criticism, just an addendum for anyone interested:

In the US, almost every bar/restaurant/venue is an ASCAP licensee, and it is relatively cheap (around $10/year/occupant for all forms of media), so a venue that wants to play live or recorded music, television broadcasts, etc., and seats 100 people would pay about $1000/year.

It's a very good price, and one of the main reasons that at any concert hall or arena, you will hear even huge artists playing covers without having to get them pre-approved.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-31 10:35:51+00:00
> where I quoted: "-0.2% Average Annual Inflation 1774-1912"

You quoted VE. They misquoted MW. If VE is adding error bars to MW’s data, they—one—should not. But if they do, they should show how they manipulated the data.

There is no legitimate source showing negative annual inflation between 1774 and 1912; your source’s own sole citation disagrees with its claim.

> 0.1% and -0.2% are realistically well within the error bars

What error bars?! They’re the same data!

Your chart on VE says it is showing data from MW. I took those same data and calculated the same number your chart claims to calculate with the same data they link to. The answer is different. And this isn’t, like, I used CAGR and they did simple growth because the sign flipped!

> inflation measurements before 1900 are a bit difficult, as how does one compare prices from 1774 with 1912?

You really can’t. Not meaningfully. You’re integrating data covering the pound sterling, Continental Congress, eras with no federal currency, eras with state and wildcat currency, and a civil war to boot. You’re also trying to compare a basket of wooden teeth and suet with one holding smartphones, gasoline and antibiotics.

But you brought the data and made the claim, and while VE is lying about what their source says, the actual data at MW is actually a legitimate attempt at the problem.
by KronisLV | 2025-08-31 10:36:17+00:00
> This feels comparable to the intel's battlemage offering of GPUs.

I'd very much like whatever card can run LLMs with Ollama or vLLM without bankrupting me and hopefully with somewhat low power usage.

Nvidia L4 cards seem to fit the bill when it comes to the power usage and getting things done, but the costs are way out there, not functionally different from H100s (I can afford neither).

So I'd very much welcome the Intel B60 Pro cards or honestly anything I could actually buy online. Until then, I'm stuck throwing money at OpenRouter and other API providers every month.
by styanax | 2025-08-31 10:36:23+00:00
You can preload them now in your profile `user.js` - FF will ignore any settings it does not know about, it's "safe" to leave old things that got deleted and add new things coming in the next ESR without harm (that I'm aware, been doing it for years). A user.js is portable, not relying on any given vendor configurations.
by adrian_b | 2025-08-31 10:36:45+00:00
The most perfect things from this POV that have been made by humans are spheres of monocrystalline silicon, which have been made for the purpose of counting how many atoms they contain, for an extremely accurate determination of the mass of silicon atoms.

The accuracy of their volume and radius did not reach the level of a 64-bit float, but it was several orders of magnitude better that of 32-bit FP numbers.

While you cannot build a thing made of molecules with an accuracy better than that of a FP64 number, you can have a standing wave in a resonator, which stays in a cryostat, where the accuracy of its wavelength is 4 orders of magnitude better than the accuracy of a FP64 number, and where the resonator is actively tuned, typically with piezoelectric actuators, so that its length stays at a precise multiple of the wavelength, i.e. with the same accuracy. Only the average length of the resonator has that accuracy, the thermal movements of the atoms cause variations of length superposed over the average length, which are big in comparison with the desired precision, which is why the resonator must be cooled for the best results.

However, it does not really matter whether we can build a perfect sphere or circle. What it matters that modelling everything while using a geometry that supposes the existence of perfect circles we have never seen errors that could be explained by the falseness of this supposition.

The alternative of supposing that there are no perfect circles is not simpler, but much more complicated, so why bother with it?
by jokoon | 2025-08-31 10:36:51+00:00
1. I type faster with a touchscreen because I use the swipe finger thing, so a physical keyboard is not really that interesting

2. I doubt that keyboard will last forever, it will probably get quite dirty or tired.

3. I don't think an ink screen saves that much power.

4. I just have a cheap smartphone without 4G internet, 2 euros/months, 50MB in case I need to read some email. That way I will not stay on my phone for long.

5. I watch movies and shows on my phone, actually.

6. Physical books feel better, honestly.

Although I can find it useful to write code with it, but again, apps are not tailored to write code, the toolchains are not made for it.
by onion2k | 2025-08-31 10:38:21+00:00
You can only really be a landlord if there's a limited supply of land (or capital to build useful things on the land). Neither is true on the internet. The premise is flawed to the point it's always going to be a scam if anyone claims this is a useful thing to do.

The salient point is right on the front page of this site:

Starting a website is something that can be done in a lazy afternoon and costs pocket change.

If that is true for someone attempting to become an "internet landlord", it is also true for all of their potential customers.
by remus | 2025-08-31 10:39:42+00:00
> I could easily see them filling the voids that US policy chaos is currently creating.

More than that, I think China would be mad not to step into the vacuum the US is creating with it's isolationist policies. For years US aid has been extremely influential around the world, doing a huge amount of good (e.g. USAID) and buying relatively cheap influence in many countries. Countries that were reliant on that aid are going to be understandably jaded by their experience with the US and looking for more reliable allies.
by kelnos | 2025-08-31 10:40:19+00:00
I won't touch on whether or not you're still you as you replace your biological components with artificial ones.

But who says that's the endgame? Presumably an advanced enough medical technology could remove the internal byproducts of aging, and get your cells to stop dying / running out of steam / going cancerous. Obviously we have no idea how to do that, and maybe we never will, but it seems plausible.
by hnlmorg | 2025-08-31 10:40:47+00:00
That already happens. Content creators have merchandise, patron exclusives, fan clubs and so on and so forth.

The problem isn’t that other revenue streams don’t exist. It’s that they’re still dependent on the whims of YouTube to get their brand out.

And unfortunately, these other revenue streams are only more profitable than YouTube for the smallest percentage of video content creators (baring those who specialise in adult content, but that’s a whole other domain of content creation ;) ).
by sorenjan | 2025-08-31 10:41:32+00:00
> I’ve been programming computers since 1986 and even I have never said it would be cool to side load on my phone.

Because you know about the options, and probably have at least one computer where you can install what you want. Imaging if 1986 you only had access to an iPhone, like most young people today, would you still be programming computers 40 years from now then? There are new computer science students in university that doesn't know how file paths work.
by necarcu | 2025-08-31 10:41:44+00:00
Every accelerator is looking for the same thing. It's practically a identical job ad for 400+ companies. With my tool you blast 32 accelerator applications in one go (using your YC application).

The logic: - If every application gives me a 0.1 (or something like that) chance (assuming my application is good), - Why not send my application to all the best accelerators. - Either way good luck blocking a mass application tool (it's almost impossible).

I also added a Shit Tier Blaster - where you also blast the hundreds of shit tier accelerators. (The one's that ask for 10% equity for 50k and also tell you how to spend the money, or the one's that ask to get paid).
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-31 10:42:01+00:00
> Friedman quotes attributed inflation to the actions of the Fed

Then this is a lie: “Inflation started the year after the Fed was created. See ‘Monetary History of the United States’ by Milton Friedman” [1].

> for inflation through the history of the US, see

I’ve already pointed out how that source lies about the data it cites [2].

I will assume you’re misunderstanding what you’re reading. But it’s too close to willful dishonesty for me to continue to engage if you’re just going to double down.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45081413

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45081346
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-08-31 10:42:04+00:00
Likewise, some people prefer ternary statements for short checks; I want to agree because ternaries are one of the first things you learn after if/else/while/for, but at the same time... they're a shorthand, and shorthand is short but not necessarily more readable.

For one-off things like value = condition ? a : b I don't mind much, but I will make an issue as soon as it spans more than one line or if it's nested.