MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by runarberg | 2025-09-18 18:41:54+00:00
It is not about whether or not genes can encode behavior, they obviously can. But explaining behavior with genetics has never actually been done, and most attempts of doing so have been pseudo-scientific race science with the goal of showing the superiority of the white race.

Yes we can select a behavioral trade and breed animals that are more likely to behave in a certain way in a given situation. Those animals are usually also trained from birth to behave in that matter, demonstrating how important environmental interaction is to explaining behavior. Selective breeding is a proof that some behavior is heritable. But heritability does not mean that you can explain behavior with genetics, it just means that some behavior is more likely within some population, regardless of whether or not genes are the reason for the variety. Twin studies, even if they were valid and unbiased, fail to account for that, and are therefor not evidence for the wild claims of behavior genetics.

But it gets worse. Like I said before, twin studies are inherently biased and they don‘t actually show an accurate estimate of heritability as behavior geneticist claim. Twins are not a random sample of the population, twins share the same environment at least until the first minutes after birth (and quite often months or even years after birth), they often interact with each other, and even if they are separated soon after birth, they are more often adopted into similar (often high income) families. In short twin studies suffer from bad statistics resulting from junk-in junk-out.

And it gets even worse, because even looking past the fact that heritability does not offer any evidence for behavior genetics, and the fact that twin studies are fraught with bad statistics, the fundamental assumptions of twin studies are wrong. The human genome is not static throughout the live of the individual, our own genes only account for less then half of our genetic mass (the rest are from microorganisms some are there from birth, others leave and enter our bodies frequently, some we might even trade genes with, and a lot of them affect our behavior).

If you are interested, here is a 2014 report debunking twin studies as proof for behavior genetics: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1745-9125.12036

EDIT: As for the claim that “[w]e already know that genetics predispose people to certain conditions like schizophrenia.”, that is not so clear either: https://slate.com/technology/2016/02/schizophrenia-genes-fou... and if you want an unopinionated review of the current status of the genetic theory of schizophrenia: this is a nice one: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7465115/ and concludes:

> From the impressing 80% heritability stated by Sullivan, very little has been pinpointed and confirmed in live models or come even close to the ultimate goal of targeted therapy. [...] Many confounding variables still plague all levels of testing starting from sample sizes, absence of negative studies of insufficient follow-up for high credibility.
by marojejian | 2025-09-18 18:42:18+00:00
The root cause here is not specific to AI - this the same force that incentivizes "leaders" to produce unethical results by delegating tasks and setting results-based goals. You'll eat gross sausage if you don't see how it's being made, or reap the rewards of crimes it wasn't your hand physically on the switch.

So in that sense there is nothing new or surprising here.

But: I do think there's a potential "difference in degree is a difference in kind" situation here. Having humans in the loop does still provide some ethical friction. In the Milgram experiments there were degrees of compliance related to both the degree of pain inflicted, and the justification / authority for doing so.

But automated agents need not have any such friction. Thus there's potential for huge increase in how easy it is to both effect, and justify to yourself, delegating unethical actions.
by blonder | 2025-09-18 18:42:31+00:00
I don't think you can confidently say how it will pan out. Maybe OpenAI is only unprofitable at the 200/month tier because those users are using 20x more compute than the 20/month users. OpenAI claims that they would be profitable if they weren't spending on R&D [1], so they clearly can't be hemorrhaging money that badly on the service side if you take that statement as truthful.

[1] https://www.axios.com/2025/08/15/sam-altman-gpt5-launch-chat...
by ceejayoz | 2025-09-18 18:42:35+00:00
But he considered it disqualifying out of Biden's mouth…

> December 22, 2023: "Pull him," Rogan said. "If you had any other job, and you were talking like that, they would go, 'Hey, you're done.'"

but mysteriously not when it turns out to be Trump:

> November 5, 2024: Popular podcast host Joe Rogan officially endorsed Donald Trump on the eve of the election, a move Trump’s team swiftly touted as a major win in the final hours of their campaign. (https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/04/politics/joe-rogan-trump-endo...)
by anonfunction | 2025-09-18 18:42:48+00:00
Shameless plug but I made a similar tool called asXiv[1] which allows you to "ask" arXiv.org papers questions.

It also recommends questions on initial load that can help understand or explore the paper, here's a demo[2] from the popular Attention Is All You Need paper.

The code is all opensource[3], it uses the google 2.5 flash lite model to keep costs down (it's completely free atm), but that can be changed via env var if you run it locally.

1. https://asxiv.org

2. https://asxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762

3. https://github.com/montanaflynn/asxiv
by iterance | 2025-09-18 18:43:10+00:00
“Rereading, an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society, which would have us ‘throw away’ the story once it has been consumed (‘devoured’), so that we can then move on to another story, buy another book, and which is tolerated only in certain marginal categories of readers (children, old people, and professors), rereading is here suggested at the outset, for it alone saves the text from repetition (those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere)..." - Balzac
by abandonliberty | 2025-09-18 18:43:31+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat shows up in this list as not replicated, however, it is one of the most studied phenomena in psychology.

>meta-analyses and systematic reviews have shown significant evidence for the effects of stereotype threat, though the phenomenon defies over-simplistic characterization.[22][23][24][25][26][27][28][9]

Failing to reproduce an effect doesn't prove it isn't real. Mythbusters would do this all the time.

On the other hand, some empires are built on publication malpractice.

One of the worst that I know is John Gottman. Marriage counselling based on 'thin slicing'/microexpressions/'Horsemen of the Apocalypse'. His studies had been exposed as fundamentally flawed, and training based on his principles performed worse than prior offerings, before he was further popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in Blink.

This type of intellectual dishonesty underlies both of their careers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascade_Model_of_Relational_Di...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Principles_for_Makin...

https://www.gottman.com/blog/this-one-thing-is-the-biggest-p...
by pixelpoet | 2025-09-18 18:43:34+00:00
It doesn't really bother me, I just think it's not fit for purpose the exact same way as could care less to communicate not caring.

BTW thanks for the hot tip regarding the posting delay feature! Lord knows I need it, nothing induces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27esprit_de_l%27escalier like hitting that reply button :"D
by vegadw | 2025-09-18 18:43:38+00:00
Maybe? I feel like the most in group of people who do have the discretionary income to toss $100 at a Geiger counter for fun also have enough to toss $250 at it and would rather given the extra utility. I might be wrong though. And it certainly depends as the $100 line drops. If it's $50 for a Geiger, that's a lot closer to "I don't care money"

I had someone tell me a while back $100 is an adult $20. As in, what you saw as a kid as $20 of fun but factoring in how long it took you to get the $20, it's about the same. I know that math will be massively variable, but I like the idea of equating kid brain money to adult money for "toys" like this. A $5 toy vs a $40 toy, as a kid, is a big deal. A $40 toy vs a $70 toy almost isn't, because they're both already "expensive".

I suspect for most on HN, their toy-money equivalence leans to the Radiacode or equivalent being the better buy.
by dlcarrier | 2025-09-18 18:44:09+00:00
This style of classical fascism or economic fascism, or whatever the term is differentiate it from the modern unrelated usage of fascism, being used in the US is a bit unnerving, and it's crazy that it's usually from the Republican party, who claims to espouse free markets.

It also happened under G. W. Bush with banks and auto manufacturers, but the worst offense was under Nixon with his nationalization of passenger rail.

At least with the bank and car manufacturer bailouts the government eventually sold off their stocks, and with the Intel investment the government has non-voting shares, but the government completely controls the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, (the NRPC aka Amtrak) with the board members being appointed by the president of the United States.

We lost 20 independent railroads overnight, and created a conglomerate that can barely function.
by xyzzy123 | 2025-09-18 18:44:44+00:00
That's cool, thanks! So it's not like traditional ultrasonic cutting where you're trying to couple energy into the material, but vibrating the knife sounds like it's doing genuinely interesting things.

Have you been able to find out how this is producing the cutting action? Like, is it the blade motion back & forth that's doing it or some other effect? (cutting and ultrasonics can both be surprising independently, so together...) Does the knife when powered have "sweet spots" that it helps to get a feel for? I imagine you learned a lot of interesting things during development of this.
by flux3125 | 2025-09-18 18:45:06+00:00
I always "wanted" to switch to KDE for good, but I never managed to because of instability issues and random crashes, but this was ~6 years ago. Today I use it as my daily driver and I'm immensely satisfied. I've been using it for a few months now (since March according to my pacman.log) and haven't had a single problem. Kudos to the developers for the amazing work!
by gopher_space | 2025-09-18 18:45:06+00:00
People in sales think it's pretty ok, and it's easy to find contractors who will set up or expand it for you. A couple of full-time devs could set up a CMS better tailored to your company with free components, but lots of places that use Salesforce don't have in-house developers.

Salesforce knows that its codebase is a hot plate of spaghetti, but it doesn't really matter because software developers "in general" aren't their target audience in any sense.
by dredmorbius | 2025-09-18 18:45:36+00:00
Linked from my HN profile page is the style I use (via the Stylus browser extension):

Dred's HN CSS Madhackery -- Dark Mode: <https://pastebin.com/6PF3dCXH>

You'll also find there my standard "light mode" styling which is how I typically browse the site.
by gizmo686 | 2025-09-18 18:45:42+00:00
It's not quite that bad. There are about 100 known stars within 20 light years; with the nearest only about 5 away.

https://www.stellarcatalog.com/stars.php?offset=100

Actually getting a spacecraft to them in a reasonable amount of time is still well beyond us. But if we could get a probe up to relativistic speads, that would put missions to nearby stars on a similar timescale to existing space missions.

Our ability to actually get
by qball | 2025-09-18 18:45:58+00:00
Boxing out the next generation with environmentalism as the excuse.

This is also a massive problem in BC; the ALR exists to do exactly this. There's lots of land available, it's just illegal to build anything other than a farm on it, and the real estate market is as a consequence as usurious as you'd expect it to be.

Of course, none of this is new. Enclosure predates the Romans.
by ummonk | 2025-09-18 18:46:03+00:00
That's why I cancelled but I'd be curious about the technical reasons that something like this could happen, given that I'd expect cancellation to not be that much of a load on the servers compared to all the other actions users take on a streaming platform. Perhaps subscription changes go to a specific microservice that got overloaded? Or to an unsharded database that got overloaded?
by mschuster91 | 2025-09-18 18:46:13+00:00
> and they handed market to AMD that AMD used to be a better market competitor.

AMD isn't precisely a market competitor. The server and business compute market is still firmly Intel and there isn't much evidence of that changing unless Apple drops M series SoCs to the wide open market which Apple won't do. Intel could probably release a raging dumpster fire and still go strong, oh wait, that's what they've been doing the last few years.

AMD is only a competitor in the lower end of the market, a market Intel has zero issue handing to AMD outright - partially because a viable AMD keeps the antitrust enforcers from breathing down their neck, but more because it drags down per-unit profit margins to engage in consoles and the lower rungs and niches.
by jerf | 2025-09-18 18:46:50+00:00
They want a source of chips for the wars they want to conduct that is not either controlled by the party they want to go war with, or way way closer to the party they want to go to war with than they are. Buying a chunk of Intel is a way of making sure they do the things the government wants that will lead to that outcome. Or at least so the theory goes; I've got my own cynicism on this matter and wouldn't dream of tamping down on anyone else's.

Right now if the US wants to go to war with China, or anyone China really really likes, they can expect with high probability to very quickly encounter major problems getting the best chips. AIUI the world has other fab capacity that isn't in Taiwan, and some of it is even in the US, but they're all on much older processes. Some things it's not a problem that maybe you end up with an older 500MHz processor, but some things it's just a non-starter, like high-end AI.

Sibling commenters discussing profits are on the wrong track. Intel's 2024 revenue, not profits, was $53.1 billion. The Federal Government in 2024 spent $6,800 billion. No entity doing $1.8 trillion in 2024 in deficit spending gives a rat's ass about "profits". The US Federal government just spends what it wants to spend, it doesn't have any need to generate any sort of "profits" first. Thinking the Federal government cares about profits is being nowhere near cynical enough.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-09-18 18:47:04+00:00
>which is why, I think, atheist culture over time devolves to childlessness

I don't think the data supports this, yet. Religiously affiliated completed TFR is 2.2 while unaffiliated is 1.8. However, completed TFR means this is looking at those older than 60, so expect those numbers to drop in the future.

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/religion-fer...

From my observations, TFR is not much different between most people who describe themselves as religious and most people who describe themselves as non religious. However, the TFR is different for those who I would describe as the most religious, compared to the "casually" religious/non religious.

For example:

https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/israel-has-high-birth-ra...
by zuInnp | 2025-09-18 18:47:20+00:00
I got a 5 year old Lenovo Thinkcentre for free and tried multiple desktops. The only desktop that had great scaling at a 4k screen was KDE. Gnome was okay with 1x or 2x scaling, but 1.3x ... big nope. Did not work out, performance was very bad.

With the end of Windows 10 support, I installed KDE Neon on my parents computers. Works fine, they can use it. Even on the Surface Pro 5 touchscreen, KDE works great.

In the past I was using Gnome (or Ubuntu's Unity) and never was a fan of KDE, but right now (especially because of the great 4k scaling), I really like it.
by tiffanyh | 2025-09-18 18:47:22+00:00
This information is a bit dated but ...

Since "nm" is meaningless these days, the transistor count/mm2 is below.

As reference: TSMC 3nm is ~290 million transistors/mm2 (MTr/mm2).

IBM TSMC Intel Samsung 22nm 16.50 16nm/14nm 28.88 44.67 33.32 10nm 52.51 100.76 51.82 7nm 91.20 237.18 95.08 5nm 171.30 3nm 292.21 2nm 333.33

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27063034

https://www.techradar.com/news/ibm-unveils-worlds-first-2nm-...
by parenwielder | 2025-09-18 18:47:43+00:00
I would say that the primary interest in building the type system is in supporting a better developer experience, both in terms of productivity (better autocomplete, go-to definition, etc.) and in terms of correctness (identifying bugs earlier, which is why we're actively concerned with having a _sound_ type system). There's a pretty limited surface of areas where we accept unsoundness today (outside of casting) and they're all connected to limitations of the type system that we've been working to resolve.

Longer-term, there's definitely some interest in how we could leverage types to support more optimized code, but it's been a notoriously difficult problem for gradually-typed languages in general, see [Is sound gradual typing dead?](https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2837614.2837630)
by h3lp | 2025-09-18 18:47:43+00:00
Most of the SBCs are supported by fairly standard Linux distributions: Debian/Armbian or Fedora; you just boot from the approriate image on an SD card. Some SBCs have eMMC storage and/or a M2 connector, so you can either keep running off the SD card or transfer the image to that storage.

The value proposition of using SBCs is in their embedded connectivity; in addition to standard USB/network/HDMI ports they tend to have built-in connectors for:

* MIPI input, for video cameras

* MIPI output for LCD panels

* i2c and SPI for weird peripherals (accelerometers, temp sensors, etc)

* i2s for sound

* GPIO and timers/PWM for custom peripherals like motors/servos, contacts, programmable LEDs etc.
by gausswho | 2025-09-18 18:47:54+00:00
Intriguing. I wonder if an Arabic reader looks more prominently at the right side (Europe), the way an English speaker looks more prominently at the left side (Africa).

Would be interesting to see a world map designed with latitude vertically instead. If the top were the Pacific, your eyes would first appraise East Asia. If the top were the Atlantic, North America.
by naasking | 2025-09-18 18:47:55+00:00
Windows 11 settings are worse than they were prior to Windows 10. Before I could have multiple windows open for settings to monitor progress (like of windows updates) or check settings against each other. Now it's a monolithic interface that forces me to back out of something I'm looking at to look at something else, like a website that doesn't let me open multiple tabs to browse it. Terrible UX IMO.
by coder543 | 2025-09-18 18:49:27+00:00
> We discussed zulip a bit before deciding on mattermost, but the very subpar mobile app of zulip caused us to not go with it

This keeps being repeated, but didn't Zulip just roll out[0] a brand new mobile app? Are you sure that was the app that was evaluated? What specifically was "subpar" about it when you tried it?

Given the extreme limitations that Mattermost is trying to impose on the free self-hosted solution (250 users maximum!), Zulip seems like it needs to be considered again.

I have not really had a chance to use either Mattermost or Zulip, I'm just pointing out what I see as an obvious mismatch between Hack Club's needs and what Mattermost provides.

[0]: https://blog.zulip.com/2025/06/17/flutter-mobile-app-launche...

[1]: "User limit reduced to 250 (from 1,000)." https://forum.mattermost.com/t/mattermost-v11-changes-in-fre...
by 72deluxe | 2025-09-18 18:50:06+00:00
This is an excellent summary of the issues I have faced, where if you inform someone in the middle of a conversation of an experience you had in the past where someone else has done something bad, they tell me I am being negative... But it wasn't me who did the bad deed. It is completely baffling to me, and you summarised very well how people just want to effectively be tickled instead of dealing with facts. It is very isolating.
by electric_muse | 2025-09-18 18:50:41+00:00
Content is one thing. But it gets me really concerned about these kind of appeal processes when it comes to more critical things like your identity or proof of personhood.

It is not hard to imagine getting a black mark in some invisible proprietary profile that determines if you can access Uber Eats, LinkedIn, etc. and have no recourse to fix it or get another chance.
by its-kostya | 2025-09-18 18:51:44+00:00
Call me pessimistic, but it is in YouTube's interest to have creators complain and be effected. Then Google and YouTube "solves this problem" with a drastic measure that tries to kill ad blocking content on the platform. The drastic measure will be viewed hostile but they will point to "complaining creators whose monetization is affected". Even Linus Tech Tips mentioned view counts are off but not revenue count.
by pixelready | 2025-09-18 18:51:56+00:00
Mobile form factor and touch inputs are pretty inseparable, and are so different from desktop + pointer. A lot of subtle pain points get missed because people tend to focus on one over the other. So many desktop patterns rely on hover interactions. Touch targets need to be big enough for beefy fingers (which will then cover the thing being touched). Gesture is considered normal on touch devices but not pointer ones. Reading distance differences between mobile devices and desktop ones impacts typography. And that’s just a few basic UX concerns all before you get into the weeds of WCAG and other accessibility standards.

TL;DR - your designer needs a hug
by m-watson | 2025-09-18 18:51:56+00:00
Yea, I have re-read things for goals as well. I also re-read things for the mental approach it may instill for a period of time while and after reading it, to enjoy it (like you said), or to see how the perspective fits to my new mental models a few years later. Three fiction books I constantly go back to at different times are Brave New World, The Alchemist, and Prey.

I'm curious what books others go back to over time.