MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by QuantumNomad_ | 2025-09-13 23:57:12+00:00
> consumers get this experience as well when they make larger purchases

Or as I like to do, buying random things on AliExpress and Temu knowing full well that some of the things will not meet the expectations you’d have from the product listings.

Sometimes I’m lucky and the stuff is good. Sometimes I’m a little unlucky and it’s worse quality than I’d like.

At least I quickly learned to read carefully what was said to realize that what’s depicted is not exactly what’s being sold. Some sellers do this misleading trick where they have some amazing photo up front but there are either multiple variations of it or the thing being sold is only some component for that thing. I still sometimes see product reviews from other buyers that were upset that they didn’t get what they thought they were buying and I don’t blame them because it can be pretty misleading at times, but if you read carefully and look at all the pictures and check what the “color” or similar option dropdown says etc you will usually spot it when they are selling something different than what it might look like at first. So I haven’t had that kind of misfortune for years now. But sometimes you still get products that are lower quality than you were hoping for, even when the product listing was pretty accurate. Some kinds of bad quality is just not possible to judge unless you see the product in person.
by Lerc | 2025-09-13 23:57:35+00:00
>No, the incentive to hide harm is being given as a reason that studies into harm would be suppressed, not as evidence of harm in and of itself. This is a direct response to your original remark that "Part of me thinks that if the case against social media was stronger, it would not be being litigated on substack."

That seems like a fair argument. I don't think it means that it grants opinions the weight of truth. I think it would make it fair to identify and criticise suppression of research and advocate for a mechanism by which such research can be conducted. An approach that I would support in this area was a tax or levy on companies with large numbers of users that could be ear-marked for funding independent research regarding the welfare of their user base and on society as a whole.

>Short term gains always take precedence.

That seems a far worthier problem to address.

>If you dig through history there are hundreds of examples of companies knowingly harming their users

I don't deny that these things exist, I simply believe that it is not inevitable.
by sky2224 | 2025-09-13 23:57:40+00:00
While applying for jobs, try to build a network that's actually meaningful. Don't just blindly connect with people on LinkedIn, rather, try to develop relationships with people.

You're essentially caught in a bad spot right now and will likely need to resort to some old-school cold calling like what sales people do. Only difference will be that "no" means no here. You're selling yourself, but you don't want people to hate you while in the process of that.

The reason I'm mentioning the above is because cold-applying to random posts on LinkedIn, Indeed, etc, results in about a 5% response rate. So I mean do the cold applications because something is better than nothing, but ultimately, you're going to need to do more.

An additional reason I'm mentioning doing this form of "cold-calling" is because recruiters are overwhelmed, but no one seems to want to admit this. They are inundated with applications that all look identical, but instead of only getting 100-200 applications for a position (which is still a lot), they're getting 500+. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if the cold-application response rate has dropped closer to 1%-2%.

> Has anyone been in a similar situation? What would you do if you were me?

The truth is, this downturn is a little more unique than those in the past. AI and people gaming the system is wreaking havoc on the jobs pipeline in addition to the economic aspect of things.

As for anything else you should do: turn off sensational social media and try to block the doom and gloom. It will not help you.
by timeon | 2025-09-13 23:57:41+00:00
Interesting, I do not see politics on Mastodon, while YouTube recommends me not just random politics, but conspiracy theories about politics.

On Mastodon, those I follow do not post about politics and if they do it is hidden behind content warning.

YouTube is probably location based as I have no account there and that type of content is relatively mainstream where I live.
by nostrademons | 2025-09-13 23:57:44+00:00
I've noticed this as well. It's a huge boon for startups, because it means that a lot of functions that you would previously need to hire specialists for (logo design! graphic design! programming! copywriting!) can now be brought in-house, where the founder just does a "good enough" job using AI. And for those that can't (legal, for example, or various SaaS vendors) the AI usually has a good idea of what services you'd want to engage.

Ironically though, having lots of people found startups is not good for startup founders, because it means more competition and a much harder time getting noticed. So its unclear that prosumers and startup founders will be the eventual beneficiary here either.

It would be ironic if AI actually ended up destroying economic activity because tasks that were frequently large-dollar-value transactions now become a consumer asking their $20/month AI to do it for them.
by Nevermark | 2025-09-13 23:57:49+00:00
> Consumers, however, will be the biggest beneficiaries.

This looks certain. Few technologies have had as much adoption by so many individuals as quickly as AI models.

(Not saying everything people are doing has economic value. But some does, and a lot of people are already getting enough informal and personal value that language models are clearly mainstreaming.)

The biggest losers I see are successive waves of disruption to non-physical labor.

As AI capabilities accrue relatively smoothly (perhaps), labor impact will be highly unpredictable as successive non-obvious thresholds are crossed.

The clear winners are the arms dealers. The compute sellers and providers. High capex, incredible market growth.

Nobody had to spend $10 or $100 billion to start making containers.
by armchairhacker | 2025-09-13 23:58:14+00:00
No doubt the specific algorithms used by social media companies are bad. But what is "non-algorithmic" curation?

Chronological order: promotes spam, which will be mostly paid actors. Manual curation by "high-quality, trusted" curators: who are they, and how will they find content? Curation by friends and locals: this is probably an improvement over what we have now, but it's still dominated by friends and locals who are more outspoken and charismatic; moreover, it's hard to maintain, because curious people will try going outside their community, especially those who are outcasts.

EDIT: Also, studies have shown people focus more on negative (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias) and sensational (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salience_(neuroscience)#Salien...) things (and thus post/upvote/view them more), so an algorithm that doesn't explicitly push negativity and sensationalism may appear to.
by muzani | 2025-09-13 23:58:22+00:00
A lot of people do the same thing, except they have 5 years of experience on top of yours and still don't have jobs.

It sounds like you're already a good enough candidate - most people don't know and don't care about basic things like how a CDN works or what's the difference between TCP and UDP. And all the DSA grinding in the world don't help if you don't know the basics. If you go deep, you could be going deep into something with no value.

There's generally two things interviewers look for - smart and gets things done. You're smart enough, now you have to get the job.
by foxglacier | 2025-09-13 23:58:32+00:00
I live in a society as toxic as that. It's New Zealand. One of the minor parties currently in government aims to undo systemic racism. However, the popular opinion is that they are the racists because of that. I don't dare tell people that I voted for them because I'll be judged as a racist by some of my family members and loose friends. If I say it on the local internet groups, others will be hostile to me for it. Anonymity helps people to speak up about these issues.

How do we solve those bigger issues when we live in an emperor's new clothes society? Wait for children who haven't learnt the rules to point them out?
by fzeroracer | 2025-09-13 23:58:54+00:00
>Not really. Religion and race are protected classes.

Which conveniently, isn't what the Supreme Court seems to actually believe given that they signed off on racial discrimination being A-OK as long as it's by the feds. So I think it's more than fair to say that this is authoritarian before we even see what comes next given that the feds and the Supreme Court are moving in lockstep.
by cs_throwaway | 2025-09-13 23:59:11+00:00
> It used to be that if you lost your job as an H1-B, you had 30 days to uproot your life and get out of the US otherwise you'd be in violation of immigration laws.

This is still true, right?

Overall, the only hard requirement of the H1B seems to be "can you hold down a job 100% of the time, until you choose to depart or receive a green card?" It is quite hard to think of other requirements that are possible to implement at scale, but I do wonder.
by zahlman | 2025-09-14 00:00:40+00:00
> "Great Replacement Theory" is an inherently racist ideology

No, it is neither racist (edit: as described by Kirk) nor an ideology.

It's an accusation about the intentions of others, in a "the purpose of a system is what it does" kind of way (faulty logic — as I've argued on HN before — but not bigoted), based on observing demographic trends, the rate of immigration etc.

It is deeply conspiratorial thinking, but it does not claim that the people being "replaced" are inherently superior. Thus it is not racist even if we establish that the ingroup-outgroup distinction is racial, which already requires a quite broad conception of "race". (And Americans really are strange about that, in my opinion. There have been multiple occasions where I have been told that Americans generally consider a specific person to be "black" and I have deeply struggled to understand how that could be.)

It is perfectly legitimate to suppose that the existing population of a country has a greater right to continue to exist on that land, and for their offspring to live there, than those who are petitioning from abroad to live there. In fact, it's hard to argue that a legitimate nation exists, in a place that lacks a government trusted to determine questions of citizenship. Besides which, one individual's use of a term does not necessarily carry every other user's intent.

In brief, Kirk never argued that someone should be extradited, or lose citizenship, on the basis of race. Nor does that argument follow from anything he said.

And note that you have not at all addressed the point about "words that support killing people".

> In general, I haven't seen people making the hard assertion online that his words justified his death

I have been shown many people outright celebrating. This is not something that can be feasibly done by someone who has normal psychological aversion to death and doesn't consider the death justified.

> But I have seen plenty of "I don't think Charlie Kirk should have died, but the philosophy Charlie Kirk espoused shouldn't care if Charlie Kirk died"

I've seen plenty of messages that included the second part without the first part. But regardless, this reflects a plain misunderstanding of that philosophy.

Again, no pro-killing ideology here, outside of e.g. support for potentially-lethal police force to apprehend criminals in the act.
Show HN: Mystwright – AI generates dynamic murder mysteries you can solve
by jaronp | 2025-09-14 00:00:52+00:00
I built Mystwright, an AI-powered "murder" mystery game engine.

(Other mystery types are possible too! But I'm still working on making those feel right.)

Instead of pre-written cases, Mystwright procedurally generates a world, a crime, and a cast of suspects — each with unique motives, relationships, and secrets. You investigate in any order: interview suspects, search for clues, follow leads. The story adapts as you play.

Core mechanics:

- Procedural mystery generation (no two games are the same)

- Seeded mystery worlds

- Procedural dialogue generation

- Distinct character personalities

- Consistent timelines and evidence trails

- Generative voice dialogue

- Location exploration experiments are underway

I'd love feedback on:

- Does the mystery feel engaging/coherent?

- Ideas for mechanics that would make solving more satisfying

- Is it too easy, too hard, or just right?

- Etc!

*Also there are some worlds I have made public (under the community tab) which I consider some decent examples. Feel free to try those so you don't have to wait for a world to generate!*

Live Site: https://mystwright.com

Would love your thoughts!

P.S. Re: pricing - You can use the service for free to a point. Right now you can make 1 world, send up to 30 messages to characters, and can only use the default model which is not the fastest but is well rounded.
by gyomu | 2025-09-14 00:01:29+00:00
They are not within 10% of each other when you consider human mortality rates.

Ie if you live to 100, you do not have 10% chance of living to 110.

Eg this study says:

"Three percent of females and 1% of males in the 2019 birth cohort, given age-specific mortality rates in that year, are projected to survive to 100 years old. Only 0.4% of females and 0.09% of males will survive to 105 years which is 10 times rarer than survival to 100. Survival to 110 years is 150 times rarer for females and 333 times rarer for males (0.02% for females, 0.003% for males) than living to 100. "

https://www.bumc.bu.edu/centenarian/statistics/
by nerdsniper | 2025-09-14 00:01:42+00:00
https://www.privatemdlabs.com/

https://www.discountedlabs.com/

I’ve used both of these in USA with no physician or insurance involved at all. Zero red tape. I believe Canada has some additional rules/barriers against private testing without a physician.

The CEO of PrivateMD labs is on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=JeanPierreK
by mallowdram | 2025-09-14 00:01:57+00:00
The missing link to our epistemic collapse is language. The acceleration of language, which is arbitrary, accelerates language distortion. The contagion on social media is merely a symptom of the disease of language.

“Historical language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades” https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2102061118
by lisper | 2025-09-14 00:02:03+00:00
> A study asked different age groups to mentally count 120 seconds. People under 30 averaged 115 seconds; those over 50 just 87.

This can be interpreted in two ways, which lead to diametrically opposite conclusions.

1. I say "start" and you say "stop" when you think 120 seconds have passed, and the result (115 or 87) is the actual elapsed time.

2. I say "start" and some time later (which happens to be 120 seconds, but you don't know that) I say "stop" and ask you how much time you think has passed. The result is your response.

On the first interpretations, everyone's internal clock runs fast (everyone gets to 120 ahead of the actual time), and an old person's run faster than a young person's. On the second interpretation, everyone's mental clock runs slow and an old person's run slower than a young person's.
by scarface_74 | 2025-09-14 00:02:12+00:00
Exactly when did we make progress? In 2008 - before social media really took off how much of the population was a yelling that a Black man wasn’t a “real American” and was a “secret Muslim”?

Before then we had the “Willie Horton ads”. Not to mention that Clinton performatively oversaw the electrocution of a mentally challenged Black man to show that he was tough on crime.

https://jacobin.com/2016/11/bill-clinton-rickey-rector-death...

Yes I know that Obama was also a champion of laws like the defense of marriage act. We have always demonized other in this country. It was just hidden before.
by sidibe | 2025-09-14 00:02:45+00:00
I think that he wrongly believes, because of his self-created social media bubble, that there's a like-minded majority of people everywhere who want white people back on top of a hierarchy, and if he can just tip things a little bit he can make it happen and he be a great hero for leading it.

I hate to point to people's family but since he has seemingly doubled down on their views I think it's ok to point out his grandparents were pro-Nazi in Canada and moved to South Africa BECAUSE OF apartheid. It's not surprising if he was raised with some strange extreme views
by smt88 | 2025-09-14 00:02:46+00:00
> How does flu affect the heart?

Even temporary stress on the respiratory system can cause long-term damage to the brain, lungs, and heart. Because of Covid, we started to learn that an acute, severe infection can affect people much later.

That research led to the beginning of an understanding that repeated flu infections can contribute to premature death even many decades later.
by 3np | 2025-09-14 00:03:02+00:00
Wayland is great and ready for (idk) 95% of users/use-cases.

There is a long tail of more-or-less critical stuff that depend on X11 and do not have working Wayland substitutes. While the tail has been shrinking for every year, it will be decades if ever until all can be realistically migrated. Consider the Lindy Effect and that some of these systems have been running for >10y already. Consider shared but secured environments at universities and research institutes. Consider obscure hardware incompatibilities and hardware-specifix performance issues which might never be fixed.

On the software side, acessibility aside, there are a lot of VNC and other remote-X setups out there with no viable replacement in sight (yet).

Alsa, pulseaudio, pipewire and jack can all coexist and so can display servers.

I understand GNOME and RedHat will do things their way. I understand distro and GUI framework maintainers wanting to reduce their load. I understand people who like Wayland, want it to succeed, and want to evangelize. I do not appreciate when it turns into tribalism, forcing of monoculture and insisting "X11 is deprecated".

---

OP is from 2023 but as they note in their update, the situation is fundamentally not that different 2y later. Are maintainers and decision-makers really sincerely imagining that a supposed deprecation and removal of X11 can be forced onto the wider community over a couple of years from now?
by jrecyclebin | 2025-09-14 00:03:09+00:00
One of the main things I put in my instructions is "hey I'm a solo dev and it's just you and me working on this stuff, so I'm looking for all responses to be concise." I think it helps to give your situation so that the output can be in the proximity of "solo dev" content - which is going to be more concise and practical by nature.

Kind of like telling it to generate Ghibli pics. These things are best at imitation.
by boplicity | 2025-09-14 00:03:29+00:00
Plenty of people are perfectly willing to be publicly despicable online in their social media accounts, using their real names. Pretty easy to find them.

The problem is the leaders of the large social media organizations do not care about the consequences of their platforms enough to change how they operate. They're fine with hosting extremist and offensive content, and allowing extremists to build large followings using their platforms. Heck, they even encourage it!
by cesarb | 2025-09-14 00:03:47+00:00
> Why isn't DNS in a service on the operating system instead of libc?

On modern Linux systems, it is: systemd-resolved (https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...) is a system service which can be queried through RPC (using dbus or varlink), through the traditional glibc APIs (using a NSS plugin), or even by being queried on the loopback interface as if it were a normal recursive DNS server (for compatibility with software which bypasses glibc and does direct DNS queries).
by AlotOfReading | 2025-09-14 00:04:56+00:00
The language standard assumes that everyone collectively agrees to standard semantics implying certain things. If users don't follow the rules and write something without semantics (undefined behavior), the entire program is meaningless as opposed to just the bit around the violation. You know this, so I emphasize it here because it's entirely incompatible with the view that "good enough" is a meaningful concept to discuss from the PoV of the standard.

Rust does a pretty good job formalizing what the safety guarantees are and when you can assume them. Other languages don't, but they also don't support safety concepts that C++ nominally does like safety critical systems. "Good enough" can be perfectly fine for a web service like Go while being grossly inadequate for HPC or safety critical.
by zahlman | 2025-09-14 00:05:02+00:00
> if you believe you are making the point that Charlie Kirk did not assert that the tradeoff of protecting the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms was an acceptable tradeoff for the deaths of Americans in mass shootings

He did make that assertion.

> (which implies the ones lost are expendable, at least expendable enough that we won't change the society's norms to prevent those deaths)

It does not imply this.
by awesome_dude | 2025-09-14 00:05:39+00:00
Before iPods and iPhones, people thought that those spaces were "solved" and there was no room for "innovation"

mp3 players were commodity items, you could buy one for a couple of dollars, fill it up with your favourite music format (stolen) and off you went.

Phones too - Crackberry was the epitome of sophistication, and technological excellence.

Jobs/Apple didn't create anything "new" in those spheres, instead he added desireability, fancy UX that caught peoples' attentions
by nodja | 2025-09-14 00:06:46+00:00
There's a whole subsection of app devs that will just stop making apps for android. Getting graphene or a chinese phone with android won't mean anything because all you will be running is old version of apps since there will be very few devs interested in developing for the platform. The vast majority of people owning an android will be buying "certified" devices which means they can no longer run these apps, essentially drying the whole ecosystem up, which I think is google's goal.

Hopefully this means that a third player will join and provide a truly open android platform.

If an OS is owned and controlled by a single company, it's never truly open. No matter how much they claim it is.

edit: I should clarify, I'm talking about devs that develop for third party stores exclusively. Usually privacy conscious or devs whose apps aren't allowed on the play store for this and that reason like tachiyomi.
by franga2000 | 2025-09-14 00:07:03+00:00
If your payment processor takes a per-transaction fee (not all do) then yes, this is a slightly worse deal for the customer. However, I think this would still be a good choice to give them, even if many would probably not chose it in order to save a few cents.

If I burn 1 € per day and my max owed based on whatever risk assessment is 20 €, I can set my payment treshold to 15 €, meaning if a payment fails, I have 5 days to fix it and settle the debt before you suspend my access. If the trigger amount is the same as the max owed, I have zero time (well, presumably there is already some wiggle room for the time it takes to process the transaction).