MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by reedf1 | 2025-08-18 10:18:48+00:00
To me the obvious "cure" for your sore-throat in this story was doing nothing. This has surprising efficacy. Antibiotics are serious drugs. They are inordinately useful, but they also have side-effects. Antibiotics can wheel your body completely out of equilibrium - your sore throat could have been due to yeast or been some kind of fungal thing which the antibiotics inturn made worse (or caused some kind of fungal -> bacterial cycle). In this case homeopathy gave you some utility; it gave you psychological permission to do nothing while feeling like you were doing something.
by 999900000999 | 2025-08-18 10:19:08+00:00
I've heard this argument from conservatives a lot. The reason the rest of the world can have affordable health care and cheap or essentially free college is because America pays for their security.

How does that make any sense at all, why exactly do we need to have military bases in both Japan and Germany almost 80 years after the war ended. At this point why can't they just take care of themselves ?

Most countries offer trades as a respected alternative. Plus it's not like you can't start as a carpenter at 19, decide that you hate getting splinters and then go and study poetry later.
by FooBarWidget | 2025-08-18 10:19:56+00:00
Aside, I'm quite surprise that systemd won out, given all the hate for so many years. You got nearly every forum and HN thread that even tangently mention systemd, flooded with people proclaiming systemd to be the spawn of the devil "forced down their throat". At the same time I noticed that a lot of regular Linux users (like developers that just want to deploy stuff) seemed to like systemd unit files. I guess all those complainers, however vocal, were neither the majority, nor the people who actually maintained distributions.

This feeling is particular striking for me, because I once worked on a Linux project with the aim of improving packaging and software distribution. We also got a lot of hate, mainly for not being .deb or.rpm, and it looked to me as if the hate was a large reason for the failure of the project.
by griffzhowl | 2025-08-18 10:20:32+00:00
Yes, that's what I mean: you need a further explanation beyond the placebo effect for why there's a different effect of the antibiotics and homeopathy, e.g. the antibiotics having their own negative effects, as you suggest, or some other confounding variable.

I'm just saying that the placebo effect, by itself, doesn't explain why homeopathy would be more effective than antibiotics
by lukan | 2025-08-18 10:20:33+00:00
"We’re afraid of love, because we’re afraid of exposing our true selves."

But maybe we are afraid, because some like to stab straight to the heart, anything that is exposed?

Homo homini lupus ..

But fortunately I experienced circles and groups where opening up is not met by an attack, but rewarded with true connection. They are a bit rare, though.
by stoltzmann | 2025-08-18 10:21:05+00:00
>And the admins, even paid ones working for big corporations, have finite patience and time.

We're talking community servers here, not corporate ones.

>Sure, the cheater will eventually run out of IPs. But you might as well save both yourself and the cheaters some time and hassle and just add 0.0.0.0/0 and [::]/0 to your IP banlist right now. You will effectively end up with the same result if you're willing to chase every cheater across the address spectrum.

It's not going to end up with 0/0 as the final result. You're assuming that almost any address is available to the cheaters, but that's simply not true. By blocking datacenter IP ranges and Tor exit nodes, you've stopped most of the ways cheaters can easily change their IPs.

You ban their own home IP address, and what are their options? 1. They get a VPN and don't make it through because that IP is already blocked. 2. They hope their ISP allocates a random IP from a range, so if that works they come back and they instead get a range ban. 3. They get a residential VPN and start burning through those precious IPs.

You don't have to chase cheaters if you're running a server. You ban them once or twice and call it a day.
by sneak | 2025-08-18 10:21:17+00:00
Not at all. If it happens to you even when you don’t want it and don’t want to pay for it (and are forced to pay for it on threat of violence), that is no service.

Literally nobody alive today was “involved in politics” when the US income tax amendment was legislated.

Also, you can’t leave; doubly so if you are wealthy enough. Do you not know about the exit tax?
by Telemakhos | 2025-08-18 10:21:56+00:00
I find it interesting that the western silver is supposed, according to the article, to have been “obtained through raids or ransom” but the eastern silver is supposed to demonstrate trade, and that the mixture of the two symbolizes “the fusion of cultures.” The Rus were raiding around the Caspian at the time, including Muslim territory, so it would be interesting to know how the archaeologists ruled out raiding as a source of the eastern silver.
by Agraillo | 2025-08-18 10:21:57+00:00
The management thinking from your example seemed very natural and not so surprising after all. They just needed someone with a "just in case" mindset, similar to the tailor from one of my favorite scenes/movies "The Hudsucker Proxy" - "The Double Stitch" [0]. I even sometimes act like that character. For example, when the boss says we will drop a feature, I don’t fully kill it, instead, I temporarily disable it because the chances of it coming back are not zero.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LM5DiHYfKfM
by iammjm | 2025-08-18 10:22:19+00:00
There is a difference between dying at 40 and dying at 80. Also, I see no reason why people couldn't live for, say, 200 years or even indefinitely. I think it is an engineering problem that can be solved and I wish we as humanity allocated more attention and resources into solving this particular problem. Especially as it concerns all of us. Solving suffering and then solving mortality sounds like a good project to me.
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-18 10:22:19+00:00
Reading is not sufficient. If you want it to produce the appropriate HTML, you must parse too.

When you write a file name a_b_c in one place, and a mathematical expression a*b*c in another place, and you don’t want to use `code formatting`, you need to know Markdown’s rules. Because otherwise, you’ll write a*b*c and get abc, instead of writing a\*b\*c to get a*b*c.

(And those are only the exact rules if you’re using CommonMark. On another engine, it might behave differently.)

If you only want to read, don’t use Markdown. But if you want to process as well, you need to know the processing.
by ay | 2025-08-18 10:23:05+00:00
I found your example of a joke child made very interesting - me a good jokes is something that brings is unexpected perspective on things while highlighting some contradictions in one world models.

In the adult would model there is absolutely no contradiction about the joke you mention - it’s just a bit of cute nonsense.

But in a child’s world this joke might be capturing the apparent contradiction - the sky is “in the tree”, so it must have climbed it, to be there (as they would have to do), yet they also know that the sun is already in the sky, so it had absolutely no reason to do that. Also, “because it’s already there” - which is a tricky idea in itself.

We take planetary systems and algebra and other things we can’t really perceive as granted, but a child model of the world is made of concrete objects that mostly need a surface to be on, so the sun is a bit of a conundrum in itself! (Speaking of my own experience remembering a shift from arithmetics to algebra when I was ~8).

If not too much of a personal question - I would love to hear what your child would answer to a question why she finds that joke funny. And whether she agrees with my explanation why it must be funny :-)
by 0xEF | 2025-08-18 10:23:52+00:00
Your replies indicate that you are not able to have this discussion as you are too steeped in your field of study, which I assume you consider to be objectively correct. I respect the time and effort you've put into it, but Philosophy, though useful at times, is conjecture, not science. It does not have a place in a discussion about the inherent truth of measurable natural phenomenon if one is not able to cast doubt on it. I shall move on.
by preisschild | 2025-08-18 10:23:59+00:00
Giving apps root permissions exposes a huge hole in the Android security system (normal permissions) though. This is inherently more insecure than not having root at all.

> rather than taking away the power from the user for the device they purchased

I disagree with that. Not having root doesn't mean it's inherently anti-user. I use GrapheneOS without root and am still in total control of my device.
by energy123 | 2025-08-18 10:24:21+00:00
When I look at disciplines other than my own, I can recognize the skill and elegance that goes into it, even though I don't have those skills myself.

But when I look at the output of web development, and I see smooth scrolling, scrolljacking, excessive whitespace, artificial latency before UI popups ... I just don't get it. How can an entire field, as a default practice, intentionally make things bad?
by slowhadoken | 2025-08-18 10:25:05+00:00
Trump was ambushed by COVID at the tail end of his first term during an election year. The Biden administration had to pickup all the pieces for nearly three years. It got him elected and then spread him thin.

Look I’m not advocating for any of these people but you have to get the story straight to mount a respectable campaign against Republicans. That’s the Achilles heel to Democrats these days, they’re hotheaded, intellectuals in decline. Learn to take criticism and strategize.
by vbezhenar | 2025-08-18 10:25:10+00:00
systemd is very complex software. Alternative is very simple software with complex scripting which will reimplement parts of systemd in a buggy way (and that's not necessarily a bad thing). systemd probably is inspired by Windows and other service managers, while old sysv init is just a tiny launcher for script tree.

Just an example of systemd limitation is that systemd does not support musl, so if you want to build a tiny embedded sysroot, you already have some limitations.
by tpoacher | 2025-08-18 10:25:25+00:00
Same. I have a couple of nice html templates (with locally-defined css and mathjax styling), and I now take all my notes directly in html in nano.

Once you've written a couple of documents, the usual tags become muscle memory and are no more of a bother to write than markdown. I've even created a couple of nano macros to automate some of the process.

"But it's not readable like markdown" you might say. Well. This might be true of 'some' html, especially autogenerated stuff, but the stuff I write is totally readable. Once you settle on some meaningful indentation and tag presentation conventions, readability is not a problem. We're talking about plain html documents, after all, not complex websites. The subset of html tags you'll need is generally very small and largely unintrusive.

I could even go a step further and say, my HTML is as readable as this guy's rST, but this guy's generated HTML code is far worse than how my direct HTML would have looked.
Show HN: Fireworks in one click – built a tiny web app for instant sparkles
by Bob_Chen | 2025-08-18 10:25:28+00:00
I cooked up a small web app that lets you launch virtual fireworks with a single click—and it’s surprisingly soothing.

Spent a bit of time playing with particle effects and sound synchronization to make the “boom” feel lively. Click anywhere and you get an explosion of colorful sparkles.

Try it here: https://trickle.so/apps/fireworks

Would love to hear: • What element of it feels most satisfying (sound, visuals, physics)? • Bugs or visual quirks you notice? • Ideas for simple tweaks—more fireworks types, sound effects, or control gestures?
by johanneskanybal | 2025-08-18 10:25:42+00:00
Fun read, from a Swedish background "Uncertainty is weakness" seems so very American though and the opposite of both how we operate and what TheRightWay (tm) should be. As a senior dev working as a consultant for the past 8 years coming in and questioning how things work and recognizing what's unknown or doesn't make sense on a daily/weekly basis sometimes feels like my biggest contribution to the team and usually starts many interesting and productive sessions.
by brongondwana | 2025-08-18 10:26:39+00:00
We tried very hard to convert FastMail to Fastmail and... it's been about 90% successful but there's definitely a bunch of things out there spelled the old way. We just joke about BIG M occasionally.

[TIL - it's not even as old as me!] https://australianfoodtimeline.com.au/1978-launch-of-big-m/
by panphora | 2025-08-18 10:26:57+00:00
1. Security: It operates under the same security model as most website builders (think SquareSpace), we completely trust the end user to modify their own site in their own best interest. If the end user violates this trust, they will lose access to their paid account and could be liable to damages from other users. Their actions, their consequences.

2. Who can modify: You can modify any app you create. You can also "enable signups", which allows other users to easily fork your app, but they all trace back to your source app. We're making a plan right now where you can ship updates to forked apps.

3. Difficult to maintain: Pieter Levels (of NomadList) famously codes his $60k/month apps in single index.php files, so I suppose it matter how you organize your code and what level of navigating-through-the-cruft you're comfortable with.

4. Other people can fork your app and track their own beers. We also want to integrate collaboration features, so 2 people can have control over the same page simultaneously, but for now it's best for single-user apps.
by dlenski | 2025-08-18 10:27:33+00:00
During the early age of scientific inquiry in Europe, very few human travelers were following the white stork's migration route (Europe→Anatolia→Levant→Nile→East Africa), and I'd guess that most of those who did were from the Muslim world and not particularly accessible to European observers.

The small number of long-distance travelers and cultural contacts between the Eastern Mediterranean and Western Europe did result in lots of valuable learning; this particular bit of learning just took a while.
by camillomiller | 2025-08-18 10:28:06+00:00
Did you read my comment, instead of framing it as ideological? Such a framing is a quite interesting way to dismiss the issue at hand isn't it? Do you share the aknowledged reality that Meta has fostered genocide in Myanmar, as per their own admission in front of Congress, and that Instagram has led teenage girls to depression, as per admitted by internal documents seen in discovery that prove how they weaponized those same mechanisms?

If YES, why do you think Meta is a normal company, with regular "contradictions", and why do you frame as ideological someone who just reminds people of what Meta and Zuckerberg do? If NO, how exactly do you justify your answer that negates what we know for a fact, and/or how do you justify Meta's behavior?
by Topfi | 2025-08-18 10:29:34+00:00
I am honestly interested in any examples you might have, cause I do spend a bit of effort keeping up with whether LLM releases are delayed or lack certain features in EU member states specifically and know no recent example of that.

GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 4 were released across the same time frame (staggered releases that affect users even within regions not withstanding) for EU and US customers.

ChatGPT Agents meanwhile had a three week delay, but that was not EU specific and affected other countries such as Switzerland as well. Previously, I have also seen the very much not EU UK included in such delayed releases.

Essentially, all recent LLM releases I am aware off either dropped simultaneously for EU and US customers or, if they were inaccessible within the EU early on, that generally included none-EU countries with different or no applicable regulation as well. Any example of differences in accessible features I know of hasn't been limited to EU member states.
by panphora | 2025-08-18 10:29:52+00:00
Hi Clemens, I'm a big admirer of yours and what you're doing with Webstrates. I first heard of you about a year ago, when I was first exploring the ideas that became Hyperclay.

I love the idea of a local-first Hyperclay. Offline editing is one of the pillars of personal software and I'd like to head in that direction.

Would you be open to hopping on a video call at some point? I'd love to compare notes.
by rbbydotdev | 2025-08-18 10:30:05+00:00
I really like this idea, I envision something where this would be made possible on browsers now. This could only happen after further consideration about the security implications of localhost html files using secure context apis like indexeddb and localstorage The powers that be would rather turn this concept into a mArKetPlaCe -- Just let us create! Why must we always kneel before the altar of capitalism?

I experimented a bit with the concept to build my resume, I had naively been using gatsby a while back. "Just use a plain html file!" - It was a real "duh!" moment. You just edit the embedded markdown then viola. Want a pdf? Press cmd+P

https://github.com/rbbydotdev/resume
by alexey-salmin | 2025-08-18 10:32:55+00:00
Not an OP, but I think the search monopoly is likely to end within the next 10 years. There were fundamental reasons that kept it alive and all of them are becoming irrelevant at various speeds.

Not that it must kill Google, they can still pivot and e.g. Google Cloud is already non-negligible in their revenue structure. But I'm relatively confident that search/ads duo won't be their main earner anymore just like Windows is not the main earner of Microsoft.
by rldjbpin | 2025-08-18 10:33:22+00:00
> OK, not GitHub "because Microsoft".

all well and good to host your own code. but from a contributer's point of view, it is between managing dedicated accounts per project you want to participate in...or sign in with github [1]

openid exists, and is arguably older, but odds are most people would not be using it to begin with.

[1] https://code.ffmpeg.org/user/sign_up
by metalman | 2025-08-18 10:34:04+00:00
I am very certain that framing ageing as a disease that can be treated with a drug is a false oversimplication that can not yield meaningfull results. Personaly I love complexity and trying to parse all of the moving peices in a problem, but ageing involves an unknown total number of peieces, and what we do know is daunting, many of the biological processes operate within tollerances of parts per billion, and the large number of processes effect each other. The worst part of "anti ageing" is that it completly ignores the reality of lifestyle inputs demonstrably having accelerated ageing effects. cart, horse
by nsaintt | 2025-08-18 10:34:11+00:00
Show HN: 1,500 waitlist signups for HustleAdvisor in 25 days with near zero spend. HustleAdvisor is a social network where entrepreneurs share practical lessons and earn from paid posts and subscriptions. We reached 1,500 emails by leaning into TikTok and niche communities. We post short motivational edits with a clear hook, sometimes using scenes from films like The Wolf of Wall Street; one edit hit about six hundred thousand views and drove most sign ups, and we used TikTok Promote a few times with very small budgets. We also replied in Whop and Skool subreddits when users felt ignored, acknowledged their issue, explained that me and my team listen and ship from feedback, and invited them to the waitlist. The landing is a single screen with a single action and a clear value promise, followed by a short survey after sign up. Lessons so far: one strong message beats many weak ones, meet people where they already are, and keep the path from attention to sign up very short. See what we are building or join the waitlist at https://hustle-advisor.com/
by cb321 | 2025-08-18 10:34:19+00:00
I would also push back (agreeing with @TylerE, but linking in this part of the subthread seems best). It all depends, but sometimes macros change the division of labor between library authors and library users so that they specifically have to learn less. For example, https://github.com/c-blake/cligen makes it so that you don't really have to learn an "API" to roll a nice CLI on top of a procedure. You just need to learn literally 2 or maybe 3 names: "cligen", "dispatch", and maybe "help={}". Everything else, you already know from knowing Nim basics (or even Python basics). (The dispatchGen macro itself is rather a monster of static introspection and code generation and not at all pedagogical -- mostly from filling like 100 user requests on closed issues.)

It's just important to keep in mind that library / framework authors, library / framework users, and final end users are not all the same person or even type of person. Metaprogramming enables the first group the most, but can deliver benefits to the latter two groups by easing their lives quite a bit. This is easy to lose track of in a niche language like Nim where all 3 groups might well be the same human for most of the life of some project.

This partly also relates to how much of a "full stack debugger (of either correctness or performance or both)" personality one has. Then there are even more layers -- like all the levels in the language / compiler itself down to the CPU and beyond (such as "u-code" & micro-architectural resource sharing).

What macros mostly do is enable fluid, simple syntax for things either too rare, too niche, too unanticipated or too disagreed upon to be in "the main language", whatever that is. As a shibboleth (or marker for group inclusion), the existence of this expressivity selects for programmers who want to fix rare, niche, unanticipated or disagreed upon things, and these people can be even harder "cats to herd".

Nim has other very flexible features - such as the rare "user-defined operators" that enable very nice looking custom syntax. But you can also SCOPE their use very simply. E.g., put their definitions inside a template so that you can say `ptrArithmeticNow: expression` and only have pointer arithmetic within `expression` (maybe with +! to look a little diff from ordinary arithmetic), and (ptrArithmetic itself can be scoped within a module name). It also has even more powerful (and more rare) term-rewriting macros, used most commonly in Lisp systems, perhaps doing computer algebra.
by appstorelottery | 2025-08-18 10:34:20+00:00
BBC basic on this platform was amazing, inline assembly, SWI & SYS calls made calling firmware & inline assembly programming a breeze. Mapping memory and registers to basic variables was trivial. Such a nice programming experience.

I recall a few years ago writing a BBC basic program under Riscos that used the Raspberry Pi's BCM2835 undocumented random number generator - no problems. You can see how simple the source code is here:

https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/11/topics/15091
by 0xEF | 2025-08-18 10:34:26+00:00
More ! should get your point across.

It takes some pretty impressive mental gymastics to rationalize holding people today accountable for something that happened hundreds or thousands of years ago, as though the people today were somehow responsible. Wouldn't working together to share the space be a much more reasonable and sustainable solution?

But no, let's tell people who had nothing to do with historical events to get out and create more conflict. Sure.
by cauliflower99 | 2025-08-18 10:34:27+00:00
I wrote a blog post looking at a similar vein: https://www.dcaulfield.com/mastery-4-ai

If everyone uses AI, then the standard of mastery hasn't lowered - it's increased!

We're now caught in a dilemma: Do we play the short term game and use AI at the expense of our skills, or do we play the long term game and avoid AI where possible to build up expertise while risking being out-competed by everyone else who is using AI?