MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xyzelement | 2025-09-14 23:05:54+00:00
The fact that the author writes about his buying decision in first person singular is telling. Home "as a product" (vs investment) is contingent on your situation in life.

If you are a single person who is likely to get married and/or move for work, why would you buy? The transaction costs of buying and then selling are non trivial.

On the other hand if you are with your wife and kids, the potential ability to move for a job is less important (objectively) than community you are establishing for your kids and family. So it's not just those who value stability vs flexibility as a behavioral trait but as a realistic reflection of a situation.

It's like a bike guy becomes a minivan guy when he has 3 kids.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-14 23:06:18+00:00
> A similar finding is that kids who smoke marijuana are likely to experience serious mental health issues later on -- that's indisputable. The problem is the same as in this case -- people assume a cause-effect relationship that isn't supported by the evidence.

This is one of those topics where people will set an impossibly high standard for evidence and then use that to reject everything.

We do actually know that heavy marijuana use is associated with increases of mental health conditions. We know that discontinuing heavy use can result in improvements in depression scores over time (following the withdrawal periods which, yes, exists despite decades of people claiming it doesn’t). We know that the increased availability of high concentration THC products has made it worse.

Yet if you want to set your threshold for evidence so high that nothing short of a large scale RCT will answer the question you can ignore all of this, because such an RCT will never be produced for obvious ethical reasons.

This pattern is common in topics where people simple don’t want to believe a casual relationship might exist. I knew a guy who started believing that there isn’t any strong evidence that flossing or even twice-daily brushing were important because he didn’t think the science proved causation that flossing and brushing improved dental health. He believed it was just correlation and people who were healthier in general were also flossing and brushing, coincidentally. His breath was terrible and he later abandoned those ideas when the dental problems undeniably arrived.
by squigz | 2025-09-14 23:06:39+00:00
These are symptoms of other people being unable - and/or unwilling - to communicate properly, not you communicating slowly. If people actually cared about having a real back-and-forth conversation - and not just waiting for their time to speak - then a friend talking a bit slowly or jumping around trying to get their point across wouldn't be an issue. Have a bit of patience and take a good-faith interpretation of what they're trying to say...
by ghaff | 2025-09-14 23:06:58+00:00
>And if you really have to move - then you can still sell that property. People are getting new cars every 2-3 years and it's not that different from swapping real estate.

Of course it is. I think the average American car age is 11 years or something like that. But, if I wanted to swap cars like that, I can go into a dealer and basically transact it in 30 minutes. Good luck doing that with a house.
by jhp123 | 2025-09-14 23:07:03+00:00
You don't seem to understand why the "very fine people" remark was unacceptable to many of us. Like I said, he was excusing political violence. A woman had been murdered by neo-Nazis and he went out of his way to minimize, justify and excuse the act, while condemning imaginary "alt-left" violence at the same event.

On the topic of Sicknick, I don't find it credible that he died coincidentally the day after being assaulted. The timing alone is strong evidence that the two are related.

Even if it was "merely" an assault on a police officer, it's political violence and it's acceptable to every Republican voter. You opened this door.
by patrickhogan1 | 2025-09-14 23:08:32+00:00
The impact of environment on mental spirals is underrated. I see it clearly in two pickup basketball groups I play with: one where people know your name, greet you warmly, and when you make a mistake they tell you how to improve in a way that makes you think "I can do better" not "I suck." The other is critical, lots of punching down and tense.

The key insight: when you're surrounded by people who genuinely create an atmosphere of belonging and want you to succeed, you know their feedback comes from good intentions. This creates a virtuous cycle. You want to take their advice, and once you improve you naturally want to give the same back to others.

Reminds me of this Simon Brodkin video perfectly capturing startup energy: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/q_FmhWARJ7Q
by pydry | 2025-09-14 23:08:39+00:00
The UK Labour government is one government particularly in favor of tapping all communications "for the sake of the children".

It turned out this week that they knowingly hired the "best friend" of famous pedophile as ambassador to the US.

>I didn't bring up CSAM here because HN is militantly against think-of-the-children arguments.

All consent manufacturing arguments promoting mass surveillance and backdoors are disingenuous to the very core.

Im surprised you dont see it.
by strcat | 2025-09-14 23:08:41+00:00
It's worth noting they're still regular sandboxed apps regardless of whether you use dedicated profiles for this. The main reason to use a separate profile for this is for fine-grained control over which apps can/will use Google Play. Apps in the same profile can see it's there and choose to use it.

For example, Signal will use Google Play services for push notifications via Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) when it's in the same profile. If it's not there, Signal uses their own inefficient WebSocket-based push which uses significantly more power due to lack of optimization. Molly is a fork of Signal with support for UnifiedPush as an efficient alternative to FCM.

Many apps from the Play Store don't use Play services, while many others be used with or without Play services where they may have extra functionality or different behavior when Play services is available. Others have a hard dependency on it.

There are many other ways to apps to get apps than the Play Store. For getting apps from the Play Store, there's both the sandboxed Play Store and Aurora Store as options. Play Store requires an account for installing/updating apps but it can be a throwaway one like the ones Aurora Store uses by default. Note Aurora Store does not currently check the store's signature metadata to secure the initial install better than HTTPS alone.
by 9x39 | 2025-09-14 23:09:13+00:00
Almost everyone I know has a significant portion of their wealth in home equity. The renters I know tend to have much lower wealth. This is reflected broadly in the US wealth distribution.

You brought up a good point though, and that’s the trap of being house poor. Too many owners fail to look / have not been taught to factor local property taxes and maintenance costs into their homes. My network definitely has people caught unaware by escrow shortages, siding costs, roof costs, HVAC stack costs.

Despite it all, US homeowners seem to edge out renters, but it doesn’t have to be causative, either.

https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/AS...
by nanolith | 2025-09-14 23:09:31+00:00
Much to the chagrin of my mother, I made it a point about a decade ago to standardize old family recipes on "from scratch" versions. As part of the process, I also did some research on old recipes and fixed some of the corruption of these recipes that occurred during the copying and recitation, bolstering them with culinary techniques that were in use at the time. I also captured things that drift over time, such as crude protein and carbohydrate measurements and grind sizes in flour. I provided standardized weights and measurements, in MKS units, preferring mass, when possible, over volume.

She's upset that the recipes are different, but when it comes to recipes from the thirties and later based on using a box of this or a can of that, these recipes are resistant to shrinkflation. The downside is that these recipes miss out on the advanced chemistry that went into making these boxed mixes so great to begin with. But, in my opinion, that's a small price to pay for reproducibility.

Some recipes, like cakes and cookies, will need to be adjusted once a generation. For these recipes, I include notes about how to tell when certain ingredients are "off" so that these can be re-calibrated as ingredients change in the future. Ingredients change. Some are no longer available. Others are derived from newer varieties or hybrids that have different flavor profiles. For instance, bananas taste differently than they did sixty years ago. That old and dusty banana pudding recipe meant to reproduce that amazing pudding that your great-grandmother used to make won't taste the same unless you adjust the amount of isoamyl acetate; modern varieties have less of this compound than the old Gros Michel varieties did. You can occasionally find Gros Michel bananas if you want to taste the difference, but they are no longer a viable cash crop due to their susceptibility to Panama disease.
by natnatenathan | 2025-09-14 23:09:39+00:00
My personal belief is that we can’t control every thought, but we can make sure we’re in a positive feedback loop instead of a negative one. For example, when I am getting negative, I’ve learned to take a step back and try to figure out why. If I can’t get myself in a better mood, I go to bed early and generally wake up happier. I also try to structure my days to make time for the things that make me happier (exercise, eating well, friends, family, hobbies) and cut out things that make me feel more negative (social media, news, sugar, etc). Not perfect, but it helps.
by m0llusk | 2025-09-14 23:09:46+00:00
Exactly what is going on here appears to be more complicated than that. For example: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/325050

Title: Marijuana users less likely to be overweight or have obesity

Opening line: New research finds that, despite the common phenomenon of having “the munchies” after using marijuana, cannabis users tend to weigh less and are less likely to be obese.

This involved 33k participants in the US, so at least one order of magnitude smaller and in a different context.
by jfim | 2025-09-14 23:10:32+00:00
Switzerland is a bit different from the US. From what I understand, property ownership entails paying the imputed rental value in taxes, which makes property ownership much less desirable. In the US, mortgage interest is tax deductible up to a certain limit, property taxes are deductible, and there's an amount of capital gains that's excluded from taxation when selling one's primary residence. Compared to other places in the world, the benefits of property ownership are pretty bonkers.
by al_borland | 2025-09-14 23:10:49+00:00
The lease terms would be important. Not all leases let you out whenever you want.

Plus, if a sizable portion of that household income is in the form of stock or a bonus, that isn’t showing up each month in the paycheck, lowering the monthly cash flow. If there is a layoff early in the year before the bonus pays out, and you can’t exit the lease, that would be a bad spot to be in.

There is still risk on the table, depending on how some of this is structured.
by cyanmagenta | 2025-09-14 23:10:51+00:00
> once you have children, owning your home is a very welcome level of stability

I think this is the biggest factor if it applies. If we want to be utilitarian about it, the benefit to your kids of having the same school to attend, same neighbors to play with, same room to call their own and paint the walls as they desire, etc. just dwarfs everything else. Kids just do well in stable, predictable home environments.
by codeptualize | 2025-09-14 23:11:48+00:00
"the science" I don't agree with this part, and I think it's quite dangerous to rope that in.

Science is not one way of thinking, it's a methodology, it's seeking truth. There might be bad actors and idiots, there is likely lots wrong, but the beautiful thing about science is that facts matter. If someone publishes bullshit you can repeat the study and proof them wrong.

That science is (wrongfully) taken as justification for stupid things, is not on "the science" as a whole.

If anything makes me hopeful, it is science and the remarkable developments happening.
by rlue | 2025-09-14 23:12:17+00:00
I'm skeptical that new materials like this will meaningfully drive down the demand for virgin plastic packaging. The problem is not just the absence of good alternatives; it's the fact that plastic is the fossil fuel industry's backup plan for the global transition to cleaner energy sources.

That is: in preparation for a decrease in global demand for energy from fossil fuels, the industry is ramping up production of plastic to compensate so that it can maintain profitability (instead of, you know, just slowing down the extractive capitalism). Plastic production is set to triple over the next few decades as new facilities are built to support this transition.

(Source: Paraphrasing from my vague recollection of A Poison Like No Other by Matt Simon, and also articles like this one https://www.ecowatch.com/plastic-production-pollution-foreca...)
by bcrl | 2025-09-14 23:12:50+00:00
I am disappointed that the top voted comments are so supportive towards yet more generation of AI slop. Sites like this are making accurate search results by people for real world products that exist harder to get in front of the eyeballs that are looking for them. Sure, you might get a few minutes of lolz, but the misinformation seeps into search engines and then product reviews. It's the toxic waste that keeps on giving limited only by the cost of token streams.
by varenc | 2025-09-14 23:14:11+00:00
Couldn't someone just build that Signal APK without spyware and then get it signed/verified by Google?

The Google change means that every APK has to be signed and linked to a developer with a verified identity.

Unless Google might not be willing to approve this alternative version of Signal, but is there any indication of that? The Signal clients are open source with a permissive license so there's nothing unauthorized about building and distributing a modified version yourself.
by ghaff | 2025-09-14 23:14:21+00:00
>As a homeowner, that is 100% in your control whereas with a condo it isn’t.

As a homeowner I have definitely had some 5 figure costs over the years that were totally unexpected and several in the low 5 figure range that really needed to be done. Doesn't mean I couldn't cover them in some way shape or form but they happened.
by ameliaquining | 2025-09-14 23:14:27+00:00
The argument is that the W3C shouldn't have included this feature in the spec, because it (allegedly) prioritizes the interests of publishers who want copy protection over those of end users who want to copy stuff. If true, this would violate the "priority of constituencies" HTML design principle: https://www.w3.org/TR/html-design-principles/#priority-of-co...

As it happens, the relevant standard actually includes a response to this argument (https://www.w3.org/TR/css-ui-4/#valdef-user-select-none):

"As user-select is a UI convenience mechanism, not a copy protection mechanism, the UA may provide an alternative way for the user to explicitly select the text even when user-select is none.

Note: none is not a copy protection mechanism, and using it as such is ineffective: User Agents are allowed to provide ways to bypass it, it will have no effect on legacy User Agents that do not support it, and the user can disable it through the user style sheet or equivalent mechanisms on UAs that do anyway. Instead, none is meant to make it easier for the user to select the content they want, by letting the author disable selection on UI elements that are not useful to select. Tools such as CSS validators, linters or in-browser developer tools are encouraged to use heuristics to detect and warn against incorrect or abusive usage that would hamper usability or violate common user expectations."
by carlosjobim | 2025-09-14 23:14:35+00:00
> Average rents are cheaper than average mortgage payments

The average mortgage is for a family, the average rent is for a broke young worker or student living in a much smaller and worse accommodation.

Renting is always more expensive than a mortgage for the same housing unit, because the landlord needs to make a profit from his tenants.

Cooking the numbers won't change reality. The truth beats all the lies, no matter how many lies.
by cptskippy | 2025-09-14 23:15:22+00:00
I wish they would just increase the price. The shrinking can sizes have messed quite a few of my recipes.

It's deceptive and people know something is off. I personally don't have the energy to figure out what's up and don't want 3/4 of a can of something sitting in the fridge.

My response is to just stop making broken recipes which means I stop buying those products entirely as they have lost their value and my trust.
by sugarpimpdorsey | 2025-09-14 23:16:51+00:00
Wrong. Enforcement is done by the browser. Yes, a CA's certificate policy may govern how long a certificate they will issue. But should an error occur, and a long-lived cert issued (even maliciously), the browser will reject it.

The browser-CA cartels stay relatively in sync.

You can verify this for yourself by creating and trusting a local CA and try issuing a 5 year certificate. It won't work. You'll have a valid cert, but it won't be trusted by the browser unless the lifetime is below their arbitrary limit. Yet that certificate would continue to be valid for non-browser purposes.
by 9x39 | 2025-09-14 23:17:01+00:00
Well, it depends on whether it’s a buyers or sellers market.

https://www.axios.com/2025/06/03/homes-buyers-sellers-redfin

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ACTLISCOUUS

When it was a sellers’ market, I knew people who sold in days, and buyers who lost out offering 50, 75k over asking price. Today, not so much.
Ask HN: Why do I keep getting logged out of HN?
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-09-14 23:17:03+00:00
Just wanted to see if anyone else is experiencing this or if something is going on.

I never have had to think about logging in / out of HN before and suddenly yesterday and today every time I open HN I'm logged out.

I primarily use on Brave on iOS. I don't think I've used it on any other device in the last couple of days.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-09-14 23:17:09+00:00
Shortening the certificate lifespan to e.g. 24h would have a number of downsides:

Certificate volume in Certificate Transparency would increase a lot, adding load to the logs and making it even harder to follow CT.

Issues with domain validation would turn into an outage after 24h rather than when the cert expires, which could be a benefit in some cases (invalidating old certs quickly if a domain changes owner or is recovered after a compromise/hijack).

OCSP is simpler and has fewer dependencies than issuance (no need to do multi-perspective domain validation and the interaction with CT), so keeping it highly available should be easier than keeping issuance highly available.

With stapling (which would have been required for privacy) often poorly implemented and rarely deployed and browsers not requiring OCSP, this was a sensible decision.
by lol768 | 2025-09-14 23:18:48+00:00
I think you are correct. There were similar issues with Firefox rolling out SameSite=Lax by default, and I think those plans are now indefinitely on hold as a result of the breakage it caused. It's a hard problem to solve.

> As an aside it's not clear that OCSP stapling is better than short-lived certs.

I agree this should be the end goal, really.
by skinnymuch | 2025-09-14 23:19:05+00:00
Ukraine arguably gave up its sovereignty when it became a neo-colony of the imperialist west and NATO in 2014.

No one has the heavens mandate to any land. We are only human. Not gods. You don’t get to do whatever you want on the land of your nation state just because of blood and soil arguments like you and your blood is from there.

Western and liberal democracy is not about human rights.

If China never had claims to Taiwan…then the KMT never should’ve gone there either according to your logic. And don’t have rights to that land now unless settler logic is used.

> one must wonder what your actual motive is.

I am an anti-imperialist and [pan-]nationalist. I don’t hide that. That is in contrast to most westerners or Europeans who go based off enlightened centrist and liberal vibes along with western, white, settler, and European chauvinism and supremacy.
by zahlman | 2025-09-14 23:19:14+00:00
(This is not investment advice)

Several companies (including major ones like Blackrock, and TD Bank) offer US equity ETFs denominated in CAD available for purchase by Canadians. This includes some basic sector and factor options, and even some leveraged and other derivative ETFs (but expect MER >1% on these).

Your bank can most likely set you up with a "direct investing" or similarly named option (after doing some KYC stuff of course) that allows you to buy ETFs directly in a TFSA or RRSP. Or you can try a third-party service like Questrade, WealthSimple etc. It's even possible to hold options in a TFSA if you have the right paperwork, as long as you don't give the CRA the impression that you're making a "business" out of "day trading". Once you're set up it should be easy to find "some small/medium cap ETFs", for both Canadian and American (and maybe international) holdings.

tl;dr: talk to someone at your bank. Make sure it's clear you aren't looking for investment advice and want to make the decisions yourself. Or look up those third parties. (If you hold registered accounts at multiple institutions, to my understanding you will be held fully responsible for observing a total contribution limit etc. across all of them.)
by AngryData | 2025-09-14 23:19:54+00:00
There does seem to be an effect on blood sugar levels, but apparently not in a simple way because studies struggle to get consistent results. It seems like it lowers it a little bit, atleast at first, but many people spend far more time with excess sugar levels, possibly due to eating in response.

Anecdotally it always seemed to me that it didn't make you that hungry straight out, but it did depress the feeling of satiation after eating so it is much easier to binge on food once you start eating something.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-09-14 23:20:03+00:00
Partially it is new corrupted people getting bought in positions of power. There is interest behind this stuff that we have not eradicated. As long as that is allowed to continue, we have to take down one puppet after another. A new puppet is already waiting for their chance to make buck campaigning for the same shit again. After some years in office they don't care what happens to society afterwards. They only care they got their fat paychecks and post politician positions in management layers of big corp.

And we elect their parties and these people over and over again, instead of making them utterly fail the next election. Too many of us do not see through these thinly veiled attempts and too many of us are too comfortable to vote them out.