MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lostdog | 2025-09-06 22:07:40+00:00
I'm not sure if there's any hope of US healthcare improving for a long while. The ACA was the only recent improvement. It was a small change, but the electorate decided that it was bad, pushed its supporters out of office, and elected a series of people who promised to "repeal and replace" it, but weren't really serious about any improvement. And then when the "repeal and replace" crowd failed, they were not held accountable, but reelected anyways.

There also isn't much interest in improving healthcare from either side right now. The right has nothing. Their current platform is ignorant views about vaccines. The left has a stronger interest in Palestine and housing abundance right now, though all of that is dwarfed by trying to keep the rule of law going, and preventing us from falling out of a democracy. Healthcare is way way down the list for everyone sadly--even Bernie doesn't talk about it much anymore. The electorate has spoken, and they are not interested.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-09-06 22:07:51+00:00
>There is not necessarily a connection between what an LLM understands and what it says. It’s totally possible to emit text that is logically consistent without understanding. As a trivial example, just quote from a physics textbook.

This is true, but you could say the same thing about a human too right? There's no way to say there's a connection between what a human says and whether or not a human understands something. Right? We can't do mind reading here.

So how do we determine whether or not a human understands something? Based off of what the human tells us. So I'm just extrapolating that concept to the LLM. It knows things. Does it matter what the underlying mechanism is? If we get LLM output to be perfect in every way but the underlying mechanism is still feed forward networks with token prediction then I would still say it "understands" because that's the EXACT metric we use to determine whether a human "understands" things.

>I’m not saying your premise is necessarily wrong: that LLMs can understand the difference between truth and falsehood. All I’m saying is you can’t infer that from the simple test of talking to an LLM.

Totally understood. And I didn't say that it knew the difference. I was saying basically a different version of what you're saying.

You say: We can't determine if it knows the difference between truth and falsehood. I say: We can't determine if it doesn't know the difference between truth and falsehood.

Neither statement contradicts each other. The parent commenter imo was making a definitive statement in that he claims we know it doesn't understand and I was just contradicting that.
by WJW | 2025-09-06 22:08:02+00:00
Last week my primary task was writing a github action that needed to log in to Heroku and push the current code on main and development branches to the production and staging environments respectively. The week before that, I wrote some code to make sure the type the object was included in the filters passed to an API call.

Don't get me wrong, I actually love writing parsers. It's just not required all that often in my day-to-day work. 99% of the time when I need to write a parser myself it's for and Advent of Code problem, usually I just import whatever JSON or YAML parser is provided for the platform and go from there.
Show HN: Zyg – Stop Writing Status Updates
by flyingsky | 2025-09-06 22:08:10+00:00
Hi HN, I’m Tobi. For a couple of hours over the past few days I’ve been hacking on something to fix a pain point in my dev workflow: writing status updates. Progress is invisible by default. GitHub, Linear, Jira all track tickets and code, but they don’t do a good job of capturing the narrative between “ticket started” and “ticket done.”

You start working on a feature, your PM asks “how’s it going?”, and even though you know exactly how it’s going - because you’ve been committing and making progress - you still struggle to answer. That usually means breaking your flow to piece together an update, or just saying “it’s going fine.” You could point them to the commits, but tbj they probably don’t want to wade through diffs.

To solve this I built Zyg [pronounced zeig]. It tries to turn commits into human-readable progress updates. It’s a lightweight CLI + dashboard that wraps `git commit`. Running `zyg` will generate a detailed commit message from your changes, produce a project update from that commit or a set of commits you choose, and notify any stakeholders who are subscribed. If you’d rather not share updates automatically, you can just copy the generated summary and drop it in Slack or email.

Zyg is free for September thanks to an API credit grant from Anthropic. After that I’ll figure out pricing, but you can also plug in your own key and keep using it for free. It’s still rough around the edges, but I’d appreciate you giving it a spin.
by metadat | 2025-09-06 22:08:15+00:00
TFA states the Cape Station plant (created and operated by a company called Fervo) are closed systems - they capture the emissions so no water is wasted or spewed into the environment as steam.

They deserve big props for this innovation and effort, as historically Utah has frequently been been treated as an industrial dumping grounds. The long-term ecological damage and visual eyesores due to strip mining, chemical dumping and other pollution is significant.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-09-06 22:08:25+00:00
>This isn't how LLM works.

I know how an LLM works. I've built one. At best we only know surface level stuff like the fact that it involves a feed forward network and is using token prediction.

But the emergent effect of how it an LLM produces an overall statement that reflects high level conceptual understanding is something we don't know.

So your claim of "This isn't how an LLM works" which was said which such confidence is utterly wrong. You don't know how it works, no one does.
by kelnos | 2025-09-06 22:08:59+00:00
I think you're missing the point, though. Patients are much more likely to abuse/misuse an opiate, leading to much more than the "therapeutic" dose being taken. But most people aren't going to overdose on ibuprofen or acetaminophen. If they do, it's because they've made a foolish decision ("the pain didn't go away with one pill, so if I take five maybe it will"). When it comes to opiates, taking too much will generally be because of a chemical dependence, not a conscious choice. Even if the ibuprofen overdose is a stupid choice, it's still a conscious one.

> regular consumption of acetaminophen causes hepatotoxicity, too

That would be misuse/abuse, though. The bottle label tells you to seek a doctor's advice if you need to take it longer than a certain period of time. Sure, people can fail to read that and not know about it, or just choose that the risk of complications is acceptable given their pain situation, but that's still not as bad as chemical dependence driving the decision-making.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we should ban opiates or never prescribe them, and I imagine the result of the backlash toward decades of over-prescribing has been a foolish swing to the other extreme. But I still don't think we should prefer opiates over ibuprofen/acetaminophen when the latter will do the job. Maybe that's not what you were arguing, but I do take issue with your suggestion that opiates are safer.
by guywithahat | 2025-09-06 22:09:25+00:00
As much as I hate to re-enter this convo, aerostable_slug is right. You've consistently been wrong throughout this whole conversation.

The people detained were suspected of being here illegally and weren't citizens. Being detained is not the same as being deported, and is simply holding until more information is known. The INA was created before the cold war and only applies to non-citizens, which is a milder policy than a lot of developed countries. Plus, while I'm not inclined to believe everything the government says, immediately rejecting government data because it violates your desired world view is childish, especially when there's no reason to doubt it.
by didibus | 2025-09-06 22:09:53+00:00
When tuning predictive models you always have to balance precision and recall because 100% accuracy is never going to happen.

In LLMs that balance shows up as how often the model hallucinates versus how often it says it doesn’t know. If you push toward precision you end up with a model that constantly refuses: What’s the X of Y? I don’t know. Can you implement a function that does K? I don’t know how. What could be the cause of G? I can’t say. As a user that gets old fast, you just want it to try, take a guess, let you be the judge of it.

Benchmarks and leaderboards usually lean toward recall because a model that always gives it a shot creates a better illusion of intelligence, even if some of those shots are wrong. That illusion keeps users engaged, which means more users and more money.

And that's why LLM hallucinates :P
by drak0n1c | 2025-09-06 22:09:53+00:00
Similarly in mobile apps where install size is key, designed image assets are better exported as SVG or platform draw code. There are tools to do this conversion easily and the benefit of draw code is that it is crisp at all sizes and can be dynamically colored and animated. Whether or not an app does this is often the reason why some relatively basic apps are 1 mb while others are 100+ mb.
by dreamcompiler | 2025-09-06 22:10:11+00:00
Nest itself did this too. My gen 1 (pre-Google) Nest did forced OTA updates. Once or twice it bricked itself; fortunately it was still able to receive updates and Nest corrected the problem.

Then they couldn't resist fiddling with the UI. Every new update changed the UI such that I had to relearn how to operate it.

That was the last straw, so I disconnected it from my wifi and just used it as a standalone thermostat.
by sgnelson | 2025-09-06 22:10:21+00:00
This is interesting due to the tying of DPRK and PRC. It seems hard to say how much coordination there is between the two, but whatever it is, it appears to be greater than zero. While not necessarily surprising, I wonder if this public attribution will make it harder for the PRC to deny involvement with both the DPRK's efforts and their own.
by treis | 2025-09-06 22:10:50+00:00
I feel like this is mostly bullshit because high SPFs are mostly bullshit. A promised SPF of 50 and a tested value of 40 means it blocks 97.5% instead of 98% of the sun.

Anything higher than 30 or even 15 isn't really meaningful. At that point how long it lasts and how resistant it is to water is far more important.
by asdff | 2025-09-06 22:10:55+00:00
>The human remains the driver in this definition

I don't understand why that is. They literally do nothing. The car drives itself. Parks itself. Does everything itself. The fact you have to engage with the wheel every now and then is because of regulation not because the tech isn't there imo. Really to me there is zero difference between the waymo and tesla experience save for regulatory decisions that prevent the tesla from being truly hands free eyes shut.
by socalgal2 | 2025-09-06 22:11:08+00:00
ImGUIs you do whatever you want with your state. You read your state and call UI functions.

React requires knowing about your state because it wants to monitor all of it for changes to try to optimize not doing things if nothing changed. This ends up infecting every part of your code to do so. It's the number 1 frustration I have using React. I haven't used Flutter or SwiftUI so I don't know if they are analogus
by araes | 2025-09-06 22:11:58+00:00
It actually saw a fall even for the Home Sale Price Indices in Memphis. Memphis appears to be the winner of worst housing investment.

In 2006, prices were 0.92x the prices in 1911. (several towns would not calculate before 1910-1911)

The winner of highest, most wildly escalating prices appears to be San Diego. Prices in 2006 were 6.73x the prices in 1911.

Several surprises personally, figured Houston and Dallas would have increased more. Atlanta was a surprisingly bad investment at 0.99x (also negative) since 1911. Baltimore was surprising positive at 3.81x in 2005 vs 1911 prices, with how much people badmouth Baltimore from anecdotal perspective.

Lot, kind of what was expected. Los Angeles is expensive (6x). New York is expensive (4.61x). San Francisco is expensive (5.23x). Boston is expensive (5.49x).
Show HN: Feature flags on Cloudflare Workers in 223 lines
by NomadicBurrito | 2025-09-06 22:12:04+00:00
Built this because existing feature flag services are either expensive (LaunchDarkly) or requiring "complex" self-hosting (Flagsmith needs Docker/PostgreSQL).

This runs entirely on Workers + Durable Objects. No database. Real-time updates via WebSocket.

GitHub: https://github.com/infix/miniflags Demo: https://miniflags.minimalist.workers.dev (token: demo, made it readonly for now but you can still toggle flags)
by asdff | 2025-09-06 22:12:17+00:00
That recent bloomburg report showed tesla fsd was an order of magnitude safer than human drivers in the U.S. People on reddit tried to discount it because "fsd is not actually fsd because you have to tap the wheel every now and then so those miles don't count" but really that is just a regulatory constraint not some real technical issue. The car drives itself and its drivers don't pay attention at all and its getting these numbers.
by iLemming | 2025-09-06 22:13:18+00:00
> I thought it was a JVM-based language

Clojure is not a "JVM-based" language, it's a hosted language - means Clojure is designed as an abstract language that can be implemented on different runtime platforms. The language's core abstractions (persistent data structures, protocols, vars, etc.) are not tied to any particular host - it's just that JVM variant was first and remains the main focus. Clojurescript run on JS VMs, ClojureCLR on .NET, ClojureDart - targets DartVM, babashka is great for scripting, SCI - for small embedded Clojure DSLs. There is also Clojerl - that runs on BEAM, and Jank for native compilation. You can run Python in Clojure and Go, and it just keeps growing. Seriously, one could learn only Clojure and write code for [almost] any platform.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-09-06 22:13:55+00:00
Not really an issue in the US at least. Their primary geothermal basins already have earthquakes far stronger than any that might be triggered by fluid injection. They also have earthquake swarms due to natural circulation of geothermal fluids in some of these areas.

It is mostly an issue in places like Europe that do not have a history of strong earthquakes and therefore lack seismic resistance civil engineering. There are a few places like that in the US (e.g. New England) where a minor M5 earthquake can cause damage but those don't overlap with areas with high geothermal potential.
by imglorp | 2025-09-06 22:14:22+00:00
This makes me so angry.

I have an ipad mini - a wonderful piece of hardware that can do almost nothing useful now, as OP indicates. I would love to run my choice of OS on it and not landfill the device. Instead Apple controls it, like I never owned it. Not only do they control it, they decide when it's time for me to buy new hardware and force me to landfill this one.

Why do I need to "jailbreak" my own hardware? Why do we put up with this madness? There should be allowance for accessing my own hardware, especially 13 year old hardware abandoned by the vendor and locked for the user.
by jmull | 2025-09-06 22:14:27+00:00
> Think about it. When you get JSON from an API, you don't just parse it as any and then write a bunch of if-statements. You use something like Zod to parse it directly into the shape you want. Invalid data? The parser rejects it. Done.

Isn’t writing code and using zod the same thing? The difference being who wrote the code.

Of course, you hope zod is robust, tested, supported, extensible, and has docs so you can understand how to express your domain in terms it can help you with. And you hope you don’t have to spend too much time migrating as zod’s api changes.
by dennis_jeeves2 | 2025-09-06 22:14:33+00:00
>Perhaps you need to be reminded of the whole sentence you quoted from my post, rather than just the first subclause?

My mistake, I did not quote your original comment correctly.:

I meant to quote:

>Could it perhaps be related to the increases in various kinds of air pollution? Water pollution? Pesticides or herbicides in our foods? Or even the dramatic increase in EM signals being broadcast everywhere?

>This is bullshit. We do not know what causes autism. We certainly do not have any compelling evidence that anything the medical community is doing is causing autism.

I would not put it past them. Harmful until proven otherwise is the approach I would take with most drugs/vaccines in the market out there, today. There is no third party testing for any drug/vaccine today - so pharma is free to manipulate the stats, and they have done it in the past.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-09-06 22:15:48+00:00
Alot of the heat comes from radioactive decay. Heavy radioactive elements under alot of pressure and heat. There's also friction from our moon (earth seems to have a more active core than many other planets) and simply being very well isolated. (Rock is a terrible heat conductor)

Also... Iceland. They're massive in aluminium production for a reason. They have basically infinate abundant energy boiling out from the ground. Here in sweden its used by alot of homes for heating; getting a well producing 60c water is pretty cheap. (A single home may have their own well)

The issue is using it for power really only becomes viable when you reach superheated steam temperatures. And at those depths; drills melt, so its use outside of volcanic regions has been real slow.
by j1elo | 2025-09-06 22:15:54+00:00
> why can't we find ways to build new areas they want to live in?

Because people want to live their lives today, while what you propose takes decades and must be a process worked on by Town Halls, not "the people". And no, it's not the same. The Town Hall of rich people who didn't yet have the need to leave, is dominated by rich people who didn't yet have the need to leave, not the people who is more affected by the excessive centralization.
by daemonologist | 2025-09-06 22:16:08+00:00
It was the tallest freestanding structure in France from 1889 to 2004 (when it was surpassed by one of the pillars of the Millau Viaduct; it's still the second-tallest). Must have been absolutely mind blowing at ~312m when it was new - the record was around 150m for centuries before it.
by Sesse__ | 2025-09-06 22:16:35+00:00
I don't know exactly how long gives you too much dispersion (obviously depends on the fiber), but if it's short enough you just don't need to care, indeed.

I don't work with this myself, but my understanding is that you only start ripping this out when you are positive every wavelength from every customer actually has coherent detection, and that could take a while. :-) Obviously this will differ from site to site, too; I would assume new ones don't care unless there's a lot of legacy involved.
by asdff | 2025-09-06 22:16:43+00:00
Not much at all. Setup is pretty easy with a lot of guides out there for setting up open hardware on open standards. Once its set up its rock solid forever unless you decide to change something for whatever reason. Way better than the alternative where the company decides to push an update no one asked for and breaks some feature you relied upon or enshittifies the device without your consent.
by jmyeet | 2025-09-06 22:17:22+00:00
I don't think Chinese support for NK has ever been a secret anymore than the the US support for South Korea has. And it's in China's backyardd so they've got way more of an excuse.

And if you think that doesn't matter, look at the Monroe Doctrine [1].

Taken further, the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis should really be called the Turkey Missile Crisis. The US (through NATO) placed Jupiter nuclear MRBMs in Turkey, only hunddreds of miles from Moscow. The USSR responded by doing the exact same thing, by placing nuclear weapons in Cuba. And the US almost started World War 3 over it.

It was the USSR who stepped back from the brink and, as a result of a secret agreement, the Jupiter MRBMs were quietly removed from Turkey [2].

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

[2]: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/jupiter-missiles-and-...
by DrSAR | 2025-09-06 22:18:09+00:00
no. there might be some mild advantages (less environmental damage? also protection from excessive IR+VIS?) But in the published testdata listed above there are mineral sunscreens promising 50 SPF and not getting there either. Combined with the often more difficult application you might end up with even less protection. So buyer beware (or wear hats and shirts).
by kelnos | 2025-09-06 22:18:24+00:00
> I wonder if Americans know how much of their society and culture bled incompletely into other countries via movies.

As with anything, it depends. I'd never heard specifically of your Tylenol example, though I'm generally aware of the idea that (pop-)cultural references often won't be understood when viewed/heard by audiences with different cultural context.

But I think many people in the US just don't think about it, because they don't need to and it never occurs to them. If you told them your story, they'd just think "huh, that's funny; makes sense, but I never thought about it that way".
by sandworm101 | 2025-09-06 22:18:39+00:00
The rate doesn't actually matter. Over time and with a large pool of users it all averages out. Whether you charge fast or slow, your EV still consumes the same number of watts per day/week/month to cover your driving. (5A is about 600 watts, which is like having a space heater running: Not a small load.)
by somat | 2025-09-06 22:19:10+00:00
Only slightly related, but I recently wanted to show some instrumentation on an old android phone. Now there are many good ways to do this. But I chose none of them, Instead I had just installed termux on the phone and noticed they had some sort of X11 package and went "This, I want this"

And honestly, it sort of rocked, despite using X11 for many years I have never actually sat down and just played with a raw, bare X server, only the encrusted, encapsulated ones tied down for desktop use. best I can describe it is having a a shared network attached monitor. I was using it sort like you would have a large central status display in an operations center, but small, on a phone.

If curious, I wanted to monitor system temps while playing a full screen game using the excellent but unsearchable "trend" program.

http://www.thregr.org/~wavexx/software/trend/
by iqasimov | 2025-09-06 22:19:22+00:00
i swear god nothing can be cringer and funnier than when wannabe kiddo hackers write writeups. i can assure that they did dirty things for couple months before they actually report that but i can not prove it LMAO. I love this god level smart aleckness and the level of confidence is always ultimate LOL. idk man it is very sweet hahah. 50 grades of gray ahahahahahah
by socalgal2 | 2025-09-06 22:19:24+00:00
You should always start from source IMO.

> Blender exports KTX2, your engine supports KTX2, Gimp exports DDS/KTX2, Substance Painter exports DDS/KTX2, three.js has a KTX2 converter.

If you're manually doing this conversion from source images to shipping formats your wasting your artist's time, AND, you'll likely lose the source images since people will generally only give you what's needed to build. "Hey, could you tweak building-wall-12.ktx?" "No, It was made in Photoshop and I can't find the file with the 60 layers so no, I can't tweak. Sorry"
by bediger4000 | 2025-09-06 22:21:40+00:00
There were any amount of accusations of censorship ca 2020-21 when Twitter, a private company, chose to enforce terms of service and throw folks off for COVID-19 disinformation. I assume those same absolutists, who insisted that Twitter was censoring someone, will come down hard on the US Open for more overt, more specific censorship.