MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwaway13337 | 2025-09-21 03:32:40+00:00
I recently went down a rabbit hole on how researchers make mice depressed so they can test antidepressants on them. The short answer is they disrupt the mouse's environment in ways that are unpredictable and uncontrollable. It's a standard protocol. We know that this causes depression.

The culture of products not under the control of the customer does the same thing. A culture that sees this as normal is a depressed culture.

To test whether the mice are depressed, researchers give them something rewarding that requires a little effort to get (e.g., sugary water vs. plain water).

The depressed mice give up. They are apathetic.

I imagine the mice believe that there is no way to change things. That might be true for the mice but it's not true for us.
by 0x20cowboy | 2025-09-21 03:33:02+00:00
I agree with the spirit of this, but I’d go one more step with the example:

export function clamp(value: number, min: number, max: number): number { return }

That is just adding an extra jump and entry on the callstack where you could just have done:

Math.min(Math.max(value, min), max);

Where you need it.

(The example used was probably just for illustration though)
by justahuman74 | 2025-09-21 03:33:28+00:00
To give a concrete datapoint, last month's bill was $820 for just the electricity generation and transmission (so no gas included) - that was for 1900 kWh for 1 month. That handles a 2000 sqft house with central AC, with two EV cars that are driven about 20mins/day, and we only charge those at night when the rates are low (low=$0.3/kWh)
by braebo | 2025-09-21 03:34:04+00:00
I suspect anyone lacking a base level of self awareness and self mastery could be considered “incompatible” with anyone else, especially another lacking said mastery.

I could study myself and my spouse, gain insight through therapy and the study of psychology and evolutionary biology into the nuance at the source of my interpersonal problems — or, I could outsource the insight to an LLM to exploit another’s weaknesses, leaving my own unattended to.

While I don’t rule out the existence of truly incompatible parties, I wonder how many otherwise salvageable relationships will be undermined by this practice.
by woooooo | 2025-09-21 03:34:07+00:00
> West dominated global policy via a more or less liberal democratic model

This model only ever applied to Europe. Fruit companies and oil companies were more important than democracy elsewhere. South Korea and Taiwan were both autocracies for decades while we sponsored them in the name of freedom.

What we did have was a foreign policy that mostly encouraged peace and prosperity via trade, which was nice while it lasted.
by theonething | 2025-09-21 03:34:47+00:00
Mazda does a good job with screen placement. It's higher up on the dash, so you can see it clearly while looking straight ahead in normal driving position. Ie you don't have to take your eyes off the road to see it. Also, instead of touch screen to navigate and select, you use a scroll wheel that is in the center console behind the gear shifter. It's within easy reach of your right hand (in left driver side cars) and again, you don't have to take your eyes off the road to use it.
by snapplebobapple | 2025-09-21 03:35:10+00:00
Perhaps true regarding requiring the change to payor expected value to work, however, if you made that change you would no longer have social democracy, socialism, Marxism, or communism because payor expected value is the opposite of the basis of all those ideologies. All of those ideologies have taking as much as possible from the payor under the false assumption that transferring to other individuals directly or spending indirectly through growing government is a net positive, when it is not strictly (or even likely) to be so.
by somat | 2025-09-21 03:35:47+00:00
I think it is because your lever to control the plane does not go up or down but forward and back. and then you pitch the lever the same way you want to pitch the plane. forward to pitch forward and back to pitch back.

Same reason throttles are pushed forward to go faster and backwards to go slower. Except on bulldozers, which have a deaccelerator for some reason. and game controller shoulder levers for ergonomic reasons.

I think if the lever were mounted up and down they(the wright brothers) probably would have wired it to pitch the plane up and down. I am not sure why it was not mounted up and down, probably a combination of arm strength, ergonomics of movement and simplicity of mechanical design.
by DannyBee | 2025-09-21 03:36:40+00:00
Interesting question, short answer - almost certainly not any more or less than you are already, and to the degree it does, it almost certainly is making things better and not worse.

First - ~all food illness causing bacteria is denser than air. about 1000x denser. On its own, it won't float.

Second - almost all cutting motions are still going to throw it around. So you are already doing this when you cut or chop food. You are slicing cell walls, etc, releasing pathogens that exist inside. But it doesn't like aerosolize in the sense of floating around, because it's denser than air[1]. How far it goes depends on the cutting motion, etc.

Third - does ultrasonic make it better or worse - well, again, it doesn't overall float, so it's really a question of does it do anything to make go farther/less far, and does it do anything to destroy or the opposite?

44khz (used here) is a common ultrasonic frequency in cleaning[2] and leak detection.

In fact, it's also used to remove bacterial cells from surfaces at higher intensities (and detect them at lower intensities). It's actually one of the major ways non-heat pasteurization is done.

While it's not 100% at removing individual bacterial cells, even at super high intensity, ultrasonic frequencies are both detrimental to cell growth, and as used here, will cause lots and lots of bacterial death because of everything from cavitation to pressure changes to instantaneous heat to you name it.

Does it fling pathogens any further? Maybe? I'm sure there are some situations in which it will. But they don't seem normal. Like if you are just slicing raw meat or chicken, it's hard to see how it could do that.

Overall, it probably helps more than it hurts. As far as i can tell, it's not even a close question.

[1] It is possible to get the bacteria to float in air anyway due to brownian motion and other mechanisms, but it still seems overblown - the percent of food borne illness caused by inhaling bacteria vs eating underprepared food it is so small they don't even bother to track it. This knife is not going to change that.

[2] If you google it, you will also discover it's emitted by fearful rats. I don't know if the knife also scares rats away.
by Moto7451 | 2025-09-21 03:36:52+00:00
For a while Samsung made a lot of everything Apple made. I think that’s maybe more coincidence than ODM.

That said, if it were the case it wouldn’t be the first time. The LG 5K display was very much an Apple/LG project the former wasn’t happy to put their name on (in its defense, I have a revision 2 model and think it’s great). Logitech made Apple keyboards and Mice for a long time (no idea if that’s still the case) and would happily let you know in System Profiler or a manufacturing sticker somewhere in the product. In the 90s, many printing products were straight up HP and Cannon printers with a rainbow Apple logo. I’m guessing we wouldn’t really hear as much about the ODM rebrands of minor devices that work out that don’t make it obvious what they are.
by ackfoobar | 2025-09-21 03:37:20+00:00
> Most home cooks (I would bet millions) are not worrying about "the cutting experience"

Indeed, and they won't buy the knife at this price anyway. My point is that not being dishwasher-safe does not matter for ~everyone. If they care, they won't do it; if they don't, they won't buy it.
by rockwotj | 2025-09-21 03:38:09+00:00
Yeah I built a custom sysroot for Redpanda (Bazel/C++/Distributed Kafka) using a really simple docker image: https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/blob/dev/bazel/too...

We also have an dockerfile for clang/LLVM in that repo so the whole thing is hermetic. It’s a bit of shame Bazel doesn’t come with stronger options/defaults here, because I feel like I want to reproduce this same toolchain on every C++ project with Bazel
by FredPret | 2025-09-21 03:38:30+00:00
The bad part here is letting “poisoned” inventory in.

Adding vendor tracking adds a layer of ERP difficulty that isn’t practical for bulk, cheap items.

You either have to have serial numbers (unique per item, not just a product identifier barcode) or you have to physically segregate inventory by vendor, which is not practical.

If the vendor doesn’t serialize the item, then Amazon has to add it on receipt. Certainly not worth it for $10-20 item.
by john_minsk | 2025-09-21 03:39:36+00:00
Interesting idea, but I would say that it is orders of magnitude harder compared to having an integrated system. Vibration in such a compact space with a very sharp blade... I want this system be stable around me.

I would say, if this idea becomes popular, knife producers can create their own versions in the new models, or retrofit old knives at the shop.
by akst | 2025-09-21 03:40:01+00:00
I think the author may have linked to the wrong paper in their opening paragraph (hopefully they see this and update the link) https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.01201

I opened it wondering what RNNs were, and for anyone else wondering they are apparently Recurrent Neural Networks, though you find that answer if you continue reading on (though the lack of a definition kind of stopped me in my tracks).
by bsder | 2025-09-21 03:42:06+00:00
> I always have to "figure out" sharpening process.

Get the Worksharp fixed angle sharpener for about $70 (about the price of 2 decent stones). If you're really interested, get the leather strop add on for about $10. Get on with sharpening your kitchen knives. Put it in your closet until next year.

Is it "great"? No. If you want to be a knife nerd, it's not for you.

If you have a couple of kitchen knives you need to sharpen once a year, it's absolutely fine. And you don't have to "get the feel" of sharpening again before you can get sharp kinves.

Even with the stones and equipment I have, it is way more mindless and a lot less messy to simply use a fixed-angle sharpener. Sure, you won't get "The Ultimate Hair Whittling Edge(tm)", but your knives will quite readily Julienne your vegetables.
by DannyBee | 2025-09-21 03:42:38+00:00
Good news - ~all food borne pathogens are much denser than air. Not like slightly, about 1000x denser.

You are going to have about as much aerosolized raw chicken meat water (ARCMW) whether you use an ultrasonic knife or not.

The ARCMW touched by the ultrasonic knife will probably have significantly less alive bacteria than the stuff touched by the regular knife.
by Moto7451 | 2025-09-21 03:42:38+00:00
This, and the options you probably would hate on the phone stock.

For my 17 Pro I got a case with a kickstand. If the kickstand breaks off I get a new $16 case. If it was built into the phone I’d possibly need a new backplate depending on the damage. Probably not $16 to fix. A built in kick stand would certainly become a love it or hate it feature based on how people use the thing.

And there are people out there who are going to be huge fans of the Flower Power iMac. They can get just such a case and Apple doesn’t have to take the loss on that given 2025 design aesthetic .
by ipnon | 2025-09-21 03:43:10+00:00
There are many apps that have utilized formal methods in an attempt to teach languages as optimally as possible. But Duolingo is still the leader in language learning. Why? Language learning is an emotional process. Every word you can bring to mind likely has some specific memories tied to them, from another time and place. So even though Duolingo is far from optimal in terms of how and when to present new items to learn, it is close to optimal in vibes, and apparently in the market of language learning this is what consumers prioritize over all else. I believe it is for good reason. Whoever displaces Duolingo will do so not because they teach more efficiently, but because they improve on embedding particular emotions and sentiments into the lessons.
by a2128 | 2025-09-21 03:43:25+00:00
I bought an electronic item brand new, sold by Amazon, and they sent me a used one that already had its digital bundle redeemed by someone else and 5 out of 12 manufacturer warranty months used. I contacted Amazon support about this within a week and they told me replacement is not possible in my situation, I can return it but a full refund is not guaranteed
by joules77 | 2025-09-21 03:43:33+00:00
It's like being behind a McDonald fry station when suddenly thousand people show up for lunch. So sort of like a Prank video.

Now the real question is why do prank videos mesmerize people?

The chimp troupes handles randomness and unpredictability, with the 3 inch chimp brain whose hardware hasn't been updated in 100K years, only one way - tell stories. It's our randomness handling hack.

The stories breakdown all the time.
by gpm | 2025-09-21 03:44:00+00:00
That's not my understanding, or wikipedia's [1] understanding, of the term. Phishing is the general category of tricking people into telling you things they shouldn't. Email phishing, voice phishing (vishing), sms phising, and so on are subcategories.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing

Etymologically "phreak" and "fishing" both have nothing to do with email, "phreak" is "phone freak" and I believe it originally described messing with the tones that controlled the telephone system...
by neilv | 2025-09-21 03:44:07+00:00
As a consumer, this is great.

If Amazon can also ensure that every "Sold by Amazon" unit is legitimate (that they aren't sometimes sourcing badly), then it's 10x great.

(That I didn't feel comfortable enough trusting Amazon for some kinds of items is usually the only reason I've been buying direct-to-consumer from the brands' Web sites. I've had even Samsung and Crucial do DTC poorly in the last couple years.)

(Also, if I felt I could trust Amazon for genuine brand-name monthly OTC allergy products, that would mean no more hassling with the pharmacy chains. And maybe no more Walmart, though I don't recall a recent problem in their execution, and have been trusting them a little more than Amazon recently.)
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-09-21 03:45:39+00:00
MGM reportedly refused to pay a ransom, resulting in an estimated $100 million in losses and roughly 10 days of system outages affecting reservations, slot machines, room keys and websites. Caesars, in contrast, was reported by the Wall street Journal to have paid $15 million of a $30 million ransom demand and experienced less operational disruption.

So what happened to the $15 million?
by JBlue42 | 2025-09-21 03:46:41+00:00
Hulu had some major problems during the broadcast of the Oscars so I was surprised but not surprised to hear about the issues with this.

>Disney's internal systems for something like this are a hodgepodge of the Hulu, D+/Bamtech, old corporate disney, and some bits sent out to SaaS. There's been multiple layers of layoffs and service ownership changes since the pandemic. I don't think the org would be able to rate limit by faking crashes if it tried.

Finance bros and execs love M&A because they can hire a consultant to do all the hard work and get a nice paycheck yet they really suck for the little people and those trying to keep the lights on. Good luck out there.

Maybe one day we'll figure out this anti-trust thing.
Lint your commits using natural language
by mujasoft | 2025-09-21 03:47:14+00:00
I made NaturalCommitLint , a linter that checks commit messages using natural language rules instead of regex.

You write rules in plain English (e.g. “Title < 54 chars”, “Body must include PR number”). A local LLM enforces them and outputs LINT_PASS or LINT_FAIL.

Why different?

No regex maintenance

Works across codebases

CI-friendly (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab, etc.)

Repo + demo GIF: https://github.com/mujasoft/NaturalCommitLint
by seer | 2025-09-21 03:47:37+00:00
After iPhone 14, they are remarkably durable in any fall situation.

My 14 pro flew from its mount while driving 80km on a motorbike in Vietnam and bounced about on the asphalt, when I eventually retrieved it, it had a few small scratches, and a crack at the back, which I “fixed” by just adding a case.

Honestly I was incredibly surprised, previous phones I owned would shatter to bits if the fell from the bedside table, this guy literally survived a highway toss. Props to the engineers.
by ggm | 2025-09-21 03:47:51+00:00
Recognition that older linux swap strategies were unhelpful sometimes, which this piece of writing does, validates out past sense it wasn't working well. Regaining trust takes time.

Sometimes I think if backing store and swap were more clearly delineated we might have got to decent algorithms sooner. Having a huge amount of swap pre-emptively claimed was making it look like starvation, when it was just a runtime planning strategy. It's also confusing how top and vmstat report things.

Also, as a BSD mainly person, I think the differences stand out. I haven't noticed an OOM killer approach on BSD.

Ancient model: twice as much swap as memory

Old model: same amount of swap as memory

New model: amount of swap your experience tells you this job mix demands to manage memory pressure fairly, which is a bit of a tall ask sometimes, but basically pick a number up to memory size.
by bsder | 2025-09-21 03:48:11+00:00
> The worst are cucumbers, they stick to the blade

Is this issue possibly that amateur knives are too "polished"?

This doesn't seem to be a "professional chef" problem yet seems to be a significant "amateur chef" problem.

Is this simply the case that a knife with professional use takes enough dings and scratches that foods won't vacuum seal to the face of the knife?
by kijin | 2025-09-21 03:49:24+00:00
> 6. Disabling swap doesn't prevent pathological behaviour at near-OOM, although it's true that having swap may prolong it. Whether the global OOM killer is invoked with or without swap, or was invoked sooner or later, the result is the same: you are left with a system in an unpredictable state. Having no swap doesn't avoid this.

This is the most important reason I try to avoid having a large swap. The duration of pathological behavior at near-OOM is proportional to the amount of swap you have. The sooner your program is killed, the sooner your monitoring system can detect it ("Connection refused" is much more clear cut than random latency spikes) and reboot/reprovision the faulty server. We no longer live in a world where we need to keep a particular server online at all cost. When you have an army of servers, a dead server is preferable to a misbehaving server.

OP tries to argue that a long period of thrashing will give you an opportunity for more visibility and controlled intervention. This does not match my experience. It takes ages even to log in to a machine that is thrashing hard, let alone run any serious commands on it. The sooner you just let it crash, the sooner you can restore the system to a working state and inspect the logs in a more comfortable environment.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-09-21 03:49:31+00:00
Delivery makes sense for another reason: delivery services could have mechanisms that don't make sense for individual people to own, such as dollies or carts to get things from a vehicle to your door. (Due to the current over-reliance on gig-style delivery people using their own vehicles, rather than dedicated employees with specialized tools, this often doesn't happen today, but it should.)

In general, it makes a huge amount of sense for a specialized employee with specialized tooling to pick up groceries for many people and deliver them; the net result is less total person-hours spent shopping, less vehicle miles driven, and less overall labor.
by JohnFen | 2025-09-21 03:49:58+00:00
> ask a mid-career software engineer making 150k if they'd trade 10k/year to get an additional 10hrs/week of free time back, and I think a LOT would say yes.

Maybe a lot would. Although I could certainly afford it, I wouldn't. There are a lot of more useful/fruitful things I can put that money towards.

> is there something about American class psychology where it feels wrong to employee somebody to do this?

Personally, I don't think it feels wrong at all, nor is it a question of trust. For me, it's just that the cost/benefit ratio isn't good enough (the cost is more than just the financial outlay, and the benefit of gaining a bit less than 1.5 hrs/day isn't that much). That said, I have certainly hired people to come in once a week to clean my house before and could see doing it again if my time and/or energy budget demanded it.
by maest | 2025-09-21 03:50:34+00:00
A KGB spy and a CIA agent meet up in a bar for a friendly drink.

"I have to admit, I'm always so impressed by Soviet propaganda. You really know how to get people worked up," the CIA agent says.

"Thank you," the KGB says. "We do our best but truly, it's nothing compared to American propaganda. Your people believe everything your state media tells them."

The CIA agent drops his drink in shock and disgust. "Thank you friend, but you must be confused... There's no propaganda in America."
by buu700 | 2025-09-21 03:50:42+00:00
I go caseless just because of sheer amount of bulk cases add, even the "thin" ones.

That's why I use an aramid fiber case from AliExpress. It's paper-thin, but has saved my phone from more drops than can remember. I used to go caseless, but since trying out aramid I don't see any practical benefit to caselessness.
by DrewADesign | 2025-09-21 03:50:43+00:00
> making US companies using foreign labor adhere to the same labor standards they must adhere to domestically.

There are already rules in place but no real enforcement. Large software companies save a fortune making workers compete with workers from countries that have dramatically lower cost of living, entirely circumventing the market constraints that favor workers.

In hiring the people the H1B was designed for, 100k is nothing.

> Most Pro-labor people would, I imagine, consider the global labor pool in their analysis.

This is a disingenuous argument. Allowing companies to pocket a huge amount of money that would have gone to the people they laid off to hire H1Bs with common skill sets is not pro labor by any measure.
by yibg | 2025-09-21 03:50:55+00:00
> Hey, quick question: who founded America?

That's what I'm responding to. That the first immigrants to America came under very different circumstances. Circumstances that wouldn't get them into America today.

Abandoning your parents isn't absurd when you don't have other good options. It's also not the most normal thing imaginable. Would you abandon your parents and go to another country if they can't join you at all?

We want the "best and brightest" but we also want them to have to abandon their parents to do it? Many of the best and brightest have other options.
by rajatkulk | 2025-09-21 03:51:20+00:00
As someone who specifically started building Octarine, just for this reason, I understand.

Having to rely on random devs for the most basic functionality and passing it off as `community does what it wants` is weird. Either add it in yourselves, or accept the fact that given your app requires external contributors to work at a little above the basic level, there are going to be security issues.

Writing a whole blog post, and throwing shade on "other apps" that have far more dependencies than Obsidian is weird to me.

Anyway, it seems like you can't really talk bad about them, since there's a huge following that just comes at you, and that feels weird, cause they apparently can throw shade, others can't just talk back.