MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pseudoscienflst | 2025-08-23 19:05:38+00:00
Just to be clear - I'm not anti vax and I'm not commenting here in support of RFK or his specific criticisms. This is something of a sidebar.

I'm just curious about how many intelligent people take pharma company statements, or conclusions they've paid researchers for, as gospel.

(I'm being rate limited, as you noticed in your other comment. Yes I am here in good faith, no I am not ragebaiting. I don't have permanent accounts on HN to avoid doxxing, thanks for your concern, hope you can drop the ad hominems and focus on the discussion at hand)
by ryanshamim | 2025-08-23 19:05:51+00:00
I’ve been working on an approach to AI that moves beyond brute force GPU scaling. Instead of simulating meaning through repetition, we explore ways to compute meaning directly.

Early experiments suggest workloads can collapse from months to days, with energy costs reduced by orders of magnitude.

I would love feedback from this community. Could computing meaning directly ever replace brute force, or will GPUs remain dominant?

Thanks for taking a look. I know this is a contrarian perspective, and I am sharing it here to test the strength of the idea against critical feedback.
by darth_avocado | 2025-08-23 19:06:39+00:00
There’s so much good advice in the article and I think most developers know these intuitively to a certain extent. The problem with it though is that corporate culture tends to ignore these and is very unforgiving in my experience. When you have to deliver everything on time, all the time, you can’t take any of this advice and practically use it. Taking time with learning for example is something you can do only when your manager allows it, your peers (technical and non technical) won’t take any issue with it and the price of taking time isn’t going to be a negative performance review.
by RaftPeople | 2025-08-23 19:08:02+00:00
Interesting tangent (I worked at an IBM partner and my brother in law was a VP at egghead at the time):

Egghead used large as400's as their backend systems and purchased a new one for about $500,000. The people installing it at their HQ had to go up a flight of stairs but something happened and it fell down the stairs.

The insurance company paid for a replacement and the IBM sales rep got commission on 2 sales.
by noelwelsh | 2025-08-23 19:08:28+00:00
I am someone who enjoys exercise, but I only enjoy certain types of exercise. I cannot stand mindless "monostructural" endurance events like running or swimming. However I'll happily chase a ball until I am exhausted. I need some complexity and mental stimulation in my exercise. My favourite type of exercise, which I only discovered relatively late in life, is what I call "compositional movement", where the movement complexity is the point. Things like gymnastics, dance (particularly breakdance), some kinds of parkour, and so on. In other words, I think different kinds of exercise suit different kinds of personalities. It's unfortunate that most physical education doesn't do a good job of introducing people to a range of movement possibilities.
by textadventure | 2025-08-23 19:09:26+00:00
As some who loves dark mode, I hate that extension. I get the appeal of forcing every website to be dark mode, but that ends up breaking half of them or just making them look like trash. People need to custom design their dark modes for whatever each design is.

If you don't care about breaking design and stuff looking the way its supposed to, I guess the extension is fine but I rather use something like Stylus where you can use people's custom designed stylesheets for most known sites.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-08-23 19:09:38+00:00
The important thing would be for moderators to be able to police "what is liked/disliked". Hear me out.

If you've got this space where dozens or hundreds of people all have a high overlap of favorable content, but there's this one turd who comes in and downvotes everything, always... he's not just a little different, and he's not assimilating. He's trying to sabotage. If this was visible to a moderator, that moderator could decide he doesn't belong to the group. I don't advocate that he no longer be able to view the content, but maybe his votes just stop counting. Maybe he's no longer able to post content of his own (would be up to the moderator, I think, perhaps his content was always good enough, but his voting is counterproductive).

I think that on places like reddit they avoided this functionality because it would give moderators too much control over their communities, and outsiders would be unable to come in and eventually take over and force the original group out. Being admins, they could of course have done this anyway, but it would require them to be heavy-handed and obvious.
by jq-r | 2025-08-23 19:11:16+00:00
You maybe stayed in that house in Rome but didn’t live in it. I grew up in a 100+ year old stone and mortar house with almost 1.5m thick walls and relatively good window insulation. The problem is the thermal capacity of those walls. When they heat up during a hot summer spell it’s like living in an oven. You cannot sleep most nights during the summer. Something similar happens in the winter too, if you go on a vacation. The house gets so cold you need couple of days to warm it up again. When my parents installed AC it was heaven during summer.
by colingauvin | 2025-08-23 19:11:31+00:00
>I'm not a scientist, but if you were to tell me "this trial shows that substance X is not harmful", I would think ideally it would give substance X to one group and a placebo to the other group. If not possible, it would look after the fact to see group A that received substance X compared to group B that didn't, large enough sample so it would be relatively controlled for extraneous variables. Seems like you would def want to compare the two groups, so what did this study actually do?

You cannot give a placebo vaccine once is it standard of care. No IRB is going to approve a placebo control group for a study (nor should they) on a vaccine that is already SoC. This is why we let actual scientists and doctors design the experiments, and not random HN readers. It would be incredibly unethical to give a placebo vaccine for tetanus. Think about what you are suggesting here. You are suggesting that children potentially die of entirely avoidable tetanus, for the sake of running an experiment. At the bare minimum, that is medical malpractice. I won't get into what it is at the other end of the spectrum, beyond this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study
by LeftHandPath | 2025-08-23 19:11:31+00:00
This is a flawed idea. It presumes, in the abstract and conclusion, that changing admissions preferences to artificially increase diversity would result in a more diverse group of leaders in the country, because elite colleges tend to produce leaders and high-income earners.

Fundamentally altering the admissions process will also fundamentally alter the institution and what graduates of it look like. If we alter selection for Navy SEALs -- because SEAL school graduates are known to be athletic, motivated, and team-oriented, and we want more people like that -- I have a feeling that we'd simply destroy the image of the SEALs rather than increasing the number of people with those personality traits.

Back to my point: It always starts with the notion of focusing on merit, but devolves into checkboxes and quotas and arbitrary preferences, because those are easier to measure than actual merit. The end result is an institution that still fails to reward merit, and no longer creates the generous benefits it did at the start of the exercise. It also creates a group of bitter, resentful people who feel wronged by the changes that will significantly reduce any prior public goodwill towards the institution.

To be even more explicit, a lot of the reason that these colleges are so strongly correlated with high incomes and high achievement is that they allow attendees to network with people whose parents and family members have already reached the upper echelon. Refactoring admissions to replace that will shred that benefit altogether. Colleges are not a totally isolated system; the value of a degree does not derive solely from the lectures the individual receives there, nor perhaps from the name-prestige of the university, but largely from the networking people are able to do there and the companies that visit and recruit from the school because of that network.
by moodap | 2025-08-23 19:11:38+00:00
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by scott_w | 2025-08-23 19:12:18+00:00
I think this is the biggest factor. Comments about the USA potentially cutting access to software updates could have cooled interest. The UK is the only country that can operate F-35 semi-independently (our government bought the system to run our own updates).

I’ve seen people point out that the F-35 is still better than anything else you could buy but an inferior jet is probably better than an F-35 with no targeting information!
Show HN: Docura – A Lightweight API Documentation Platform
by xarahe | 2025-08-23 19:12:20+00:00
I built Docura, a lightweight and open source platform for viewing and sharing API documentation based on OpenAPI/Swagger specs. Docura is easy to set up, customizable, and designed to help you quickly publish beautiful, interactive API docs for your projects.

Demo: https://docura-playground.netlify.app/
by iku | 2025-08-23 19:12:48+00:00
Very much appreciated the essay. The abstract / meaning / story component of many current-day products (value propositions) these days is unbelievable. I’d like to understand it better.

Basically, if you want to create a successful product, you have to offer some kind of relatable and attractive story for people to buy. And it is not the same thing as producing a good product per se. I’m struggling with that. And see great many people around struggling too.
by Telaneo | 2025-08-23 19:12:50+00:00
I agree, but that argument becomes a lot harder to make when the things that usually did use that infrastructure, like government mail, completely evaporates.

As per the article, the parcel side of the postal system is still profitable, so no problems there. It's the letter side of things that has fallen into disuse, and is thus being scaled back into nothingness, since nothing serious or important actually uses it anymore.
by pseudoscienflst | 2025-08-23 19:13:02+00:00
Yeah, there are countless examples. And I wouldn't say we should get rid of cars (just as I'm not saying we need to get rid of vaccines).

I'm amazed at the bristling when the possibility that vaccines are dangerous is brought up. As it relates to your car analogy - can you imagine someone reacting similarly to the claim that cars are dangerous, car manufacturers know this and downplay it, and they could possibly be made safer?
by DistractionRect | 2025-08-23 19:13:30+00:00
It's not the end of the world, it's a minor convenience and better than busy waiting.

There are plenty of cases where you want to manipulate an object but it's not guaranteed that it exists before your code is run. You get similar functionality with:

while not parentObj:FindFirstChild("childObj name") do wait() end

AFAIK, wait() is >= 1/30 of a second, if you wanted to be extra timely you'd instead run every heartbeat.
by mwambua | 2025-08-23 19:13:42+00:00
If you do set this up, consider also feeding data to non-commercial aggregators who make their data available for free and do not censor certain flights: https://github.com/rickstaa/awesome-adsb?tab=readme-ov-file#...

It's been a while since I ran a receiver, but back when I did ADSBExchange was pretty popular. It looks like there are a number of other options at the moment though - like ADSB.lol and airplanes.live
by mingus88 | 2025-08-23 19:14:00+00:00
Supplements, which by the way do not need any FDA approval or need to verify their claims to be sold.

Isn’t it a coincidence that the loudest voices against vaccines also earned their wealth peddling supplements on their shows?

https://roganrecs.com/supplements (Joe Rogan founded Onnit)

https://thealexjonesstore.com/collections/supplements
by fuzztester | 2025-08-23 19:14:56+00:00
cpio is not that hard.

A common use case is:

$ cpio -pdumv args

See:

$ man cpio

and here is an example from its Wikipedia page, under the "Operation and archive format" section, under the Copy subsection:

Copy

Cpio supports a third type of operation which copies files. It is initiated with the pass-through option flag (p). This mode combines the copy-out and copy-in steps without actually creating any file archive. In this mode, cpio reads path names on standard input like the copy-out operation, but instead of creating an archive, it recreates the directories and files at a different location in the file system, as specified by the path given as a command line argument.

This example copies the directory tree starting at the current directory to another path new-path in the file system, preserving files modification times (flag m), creating directories as needed (d), replacing any existing files unconditionally (u), while producing a progress listing on standard output (v):

$ find . -depth -print | cpio -p -dumv new-path
by SilverElfin | 2025-08-23 19:15:42+00:00
> While I admit that legacy and donations can be a factor as they always have been across all institutions, admissions always have been predicated on finding students who are most likely to find true high level success in the real world. This means finding well rounded students: those that excel in leadership positions, extra curriculars, and athletics as well as in the classroom.

But the SATs still matter. They are a generalized measure of the student’s quality and are a good measure of how they’ll succeed in general. They should be given more weight than subjective measures. And focusing on them also avoids favoring those “extra” activities that are more accessible to students from wealthy families, who can afford it (money and time). For example, a family that needs the big kid to help watch the little kid can’t afford to have the big kid stay for after school sports.

By the way, plenty of public school students also have good test scores AND the extra things you mention. The big corruption of the process is when these qualified students are displaced by decisions that aren’t meritocratic. That’s legacy admissions but also race or gender based quota based discrimination.
by microtonal | 2025-08-23 19:16:09+00:00
Indeed.

So the question becomes whether these countries truly want to move off of the platform, or if this is all more of a bargaining chip in the trade negotiations.

JD Vance pretty much single-handedly destroyed most trust in the US in with his speech at the Munich Security Conference. Europe (and probably Canada and Australia) were shaken for days after it and realized that the US is not a reliable ally (or even not an ally) anymore. This was confirmed by the disastrous meeting with Zelensky in the White House and the US stopping to provide intelligence to Ukraine and F-16 updates (F-16s which were provided by European countries, not the US).

The pathetic little show you saw at the White House last week (with Macron, Mertz, etc.) is just a strategy to appease the US as long as needed so that the Europe can speed up its own weapon's production, increase independence, etc. It's damage control. The reason countries have stopped buying the F-35 is because nobody trusts the US anymore. And one or two sane presidents are not going to fix it (the US elected Trump a second time after all).
by dlcarrier | 2025-08-23 19:16:42+00:00
20 years ago:

You only need oodles of RAM and the latest vector instructions if you're running enterprise software like statics modeling, CAD, or video editing. If you're just playing games or web browsing, is overkill.

Today:

Most games and enterprise software can run on a potato of a computer, but for a web browser, you'll need 16 GB of RAM and the latest vector instructions on your processor. Also, something as basic as a chat window might be running in a web browser instance, so you better upgrade.

Worth's law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law) has saved the computing industry. Sure you could run most games on 4 GB of RAM, or probably even 2 GB, but Steam, Discord, and Slack each have their own Chrome instance, plus you probably have another one running, so good luck getting by on even 8 GB of RAM.
by lovich | 2025-08-23 19:16:58+00:00
I’ll respond since this does appear to be good faith. Also yeah, they turned up the rate limiter, I’m getting hit every day, but you’ve got to admit between your user name implying you’re not real science and the content of your comments, how people would not believe you were being in good faith.

Anyway, we’re not taking the pharma company’s word as gospel, that’s why people are looking at scientific studies which can be analyzed and falsified in a reproduction. The alternative in this situation is either doing nothing, in which case what is there to discuss, or taking RFKs word as gospel and he is historically a crank, his argument is logically flawed, and critically, he’s brought no counter evidence or science on his side.

He just doesn’t like the results of the study and wants it to go away
by softwaredoug | 2025-08-23 19:17:17+00:00
People have a hard time thinking probabilistically.

What is more likely,

(1) the scientists/doctors in the world genuinely believe vaccines are safe AND we see in front of our own eyes routine, safe vaccination. The odd medical issue that happens at the same time is actually mostly coincidence - autism is often diagnosed at the same age that routine childhood vaccination happens.

Or

(2) these scientists are all in cahoots with Big Pharma and a disease happening rarely at the same age as vaccination is NOT coincidental. All the supposed vaccine safety boards that try to find safety issues are corrupt and we can’t trust them.

Add to (2) oh but we can trust this guy over here RFK Jr.

My prior would be (1) and I would need a lot of evidence to move to 2.

I think a lot of people fall for the Cynical Genius illusion where non trusting people look smarter

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/trust-games/202111/t...
by wat10000 | 2025-08-23 19:17:19+00:00
Why are you amazed at the bristling? Vaccines are literally the most lifesaving medical intervention ever created. They’re second only to sewers for most lifesaving invention of any kind. They’re extensively studied and extremely safe overall, with a few outliers quickly detected and resolved.

Despite this, we are faced with this incredible resistance to them. People want to take this stuff away from us. This would kill millions. There is no legitimate reason to bring up the possibility that vaccines are dangerous anymore. Anyone who does so is either ignorant or malicious. Either way, doing your helps the people who would kill millions if they got their way.

Is it really a surprise that people bristle when you take the side of megadeaths?
by silisili | 2025-08-23 19:18:17+00:00
Yeah China Post. It's a combination of factors, including something called the UPU, de minimis, and subsidies on both sides. The USPS loses money on every item sent.

Most small trinkets use something called ePacket, check its pricing here - https://jingsourcing.com/shipping-from-china-to-us-cost/

It would cost me as an American 4x that amount to send something to even my neighbor via USPS.

I wouldn't say I'm a tariff fan, but US sellers have been getting ripped off for years, and few people even know or care.
by atoav | 2025-08-23 19:18:18+00:00
In most European countries I have traveled to during the past months the popular opinion regarding the US is that we have to operate under the worst-case-assumption that the US won't assist or would even actively use their tech as leverage in the case of a conflict.

That was unthinkable a year ago, but it is now. Given that it is probably better to roll your own in the mid/long term and not rely overly on US tech.
by buynlarge | 2025-08-23 19:18:35+00:00
I think, if you have a saboteur, they're probably not part of your 'network'. The people you've endorsed probably won't have endorsed the saboteur, so the saboteurs activity should not effect your feed in any meaningful way. This is how trust works in real social circles.

Moderators clearly work but it's a shame it relies on single people doing a good thing. It's a shame the moderation can't be done by everyone all the time, unconsciously.
by btilly | 2025-08-23 19:18:46+00:00
Yes, but the problem is that optimizers will sometimes change join conditions without warning in production.

There is a real need to be able to take key queries and say, "don't change the way you run this query". Most databases offer this. Unfortunately PostgreSQL doesn't. There are ways to force the join (eg using a series of queries with explicit temporary tables), but all create overhead. And the result is that a PostgreSQL website will sometimes change a good query plan to a bad one, then have problems. Just because it is Tuesday.
by MyOutfitIsVague | 2025-08-23 19:20:19+00:00
You're somewhat mistaken, in that "UTF-32, or UTF-8 for that matter, is perfectly capable of representing [U+D83D U+DE00] as a sequence distinct from [U+1F600]." You're right that the encoding on a raw level is technically capable of this, but it is actually forbidden in Unicode. Those are invalid codepoints.

Using those codepoints makes for invalid Unicode, not just invalid UTF-16. Rust, which uses utf-8 for its String type, also forbids unpaired surrogates. `let illegal: char = 0xDEADu32.try_into().unwrap();` panics.

It's not that these languages emulate the UTF-16 worldview, it's that UTF-16 has infected and shaped all of Unicode. No code points are allowed that can't be unambiguously represented in UTF-16.

edit: This cousin comment has some really good detail on Python in particular: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44997146