MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thelastgallon | 2025-09-10 13:06:23+00:00
Life is full of impossible choices. Do I worry about the perfume of a lady on the train or worry about death/disability from a drunk driver on the road. Car deaths per year in the US are about 40 - 45K; injuries, some of them permanent are most likely 20 - 30x. Deaths and disability from perfume on a lady on the train are most likely far higher.

I wish schools teach something, whats that called, math? probability? to help everyone make decisions to wisely use a car and keep themselves safe from lady with a perfume attacks on the train. This will also free up emergency room infrastructure, we don't need that many EMTs, ambulances, helicopters, trauma doctors and an incredible range of equipment and facilities to deal with odor attacks.

---

Google search for "car accidents single largest cause of death under 50": motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for people under 50 in the United States, and for several specific age groups within that range, such as 1-54-year-olds and 5-29-year-olds globally.
by tolerance | 2025-09-10 13:06:33+00:00
I think what speaks to the core of today's young men runs counter to my impression of the kind of books being popularized.

When I was younger and read fiction I had access to a fair amount of copies of young adult novels that would never be front-and-center at a bookstore or library. In fact I think that most of these books were the rejects from the main libraries in my town. Violence, abandonment, resent, regret abound! Many of it was senseless and the endings were not as neat and resolved as the schoolteacher led me to believe how all books ought to end.

I’m not recommending this experience. But young men do need author[itie]s to guide them through the discomforting aspects of their lives in an un-fantastic fashion.
by empath75 | 2025-09-10 13:06:55+00:00
> Nearly half of kids aren’t being raised with their parents in the home. This was rare 50 years ago, and all the research shows that home dynamics matters the most.

Every thread about something like this is full of people just blaming it on whatever social trend annoys them personally.

But also this statistic is absolute bullshit. 71% of kids in the US have two parents at home, and the number is going up.
by fayten | 2025-09-10 13:07:09+00:00
This depends on how you define ROI. Car infrastructure and lack of density reduces tax revenue for cities and strains infrastructure.

There are other human benefits to reducing car traffic and use in favor of public transportation: * Reduces air pollution * Noise pollution * Allows a focus on human centric urban planning * Allows for higher density commercial and residential increasing tax revenue * Reduces pedestrian traffic injury

Well done video essays:

Parking minimums https://youtu.be/OUNXFHpUhu8?si=xAxUHCA0xmxCIZWg

Noise pollution https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8?si=Eov6X3Z3I1T0l_bd

Infrastructure strain https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=KrVJ3tDaODHNGBwm

More on Infrastructure and Sprawl https://youtu.be/SfsCniN7Nsc?si=0ulEtryX4K6Ysy-N

Articles:

https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/public-transportation#:~:...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379358672_Vehicle_n...

https://www.britannica.com/topic/urban-sprawl/Costs-of-urban...

Climate town videos are all well researched and provide an enormous amount of follow-up content from their sources.

Generally, I care about all of the above and I perceive investments in public transportation to have a higher ROI.

Some extra historical context is helpful too: https://youtu.be/oOttvpjJvAo?si=ZGXF81qJnD_Fgw0L

The book The Color of Law by Rothstein is worth a read.

In the end there is a balance between public transportation and car dependency and right now the scales are leaning too much in favor of cars.
by jfasi | 2025-09-10 13:07:46+00:00
For the people rushing in to call this the beginning another great financial crisis: remember that back then the tower of cards that collapsed wasn’t the mortgage backed securities themselves but the spiderweb of derivatives and secondary securitizations built on them.

Obviously everyone who invested in MBS’s lost their shirt, but the general economy was hurt by the sheer level of exposure to MBS’s and the suddenness with which the realization of their corruption hit. I’m no expert, but I see no reason to believe a similar level of exposure and surprise is at play here.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-09-10 13:08:07+00:00
US spend per student per year is $16,000. Fairly high investment on the international playing field, especially when adjusted for the poor results.

The view that the education institutions are bloated and inefficient is a fairly mainstream (because some things like low pay for the actual teachers in the classrooms is quite publicly apparent). I'd hazard to say that there's some truth to it, after taking in the first point into account.

Tl;Dr money is part of the problem on some levels, but it's not primarily a money problem.
by danielvaughn | 2025-09-10 13:08:11+00:00
I'd have to think more about the synesthetic experience, but I'll never forget that my fingers hurt when I wrote Objective-C. I could never locate what the source was; I could have been pressing harder on the keyboard, or I could have been holding tension in my hands. But the language quite literally felt different in a very real, physical way.

edit: it could also have just been me typing with more frustration due to XCode :p
by notmyjob | 2025-09-10 13:08:24+00:00
That’s one hypothesis: American culture is degenerate.

I offer an alternative hypothesis: corporations influence policy.

Corporations would simply prefer to import skilled workers than to have to pay taxes to educate Americans. Evidence for my hypothesis can be found in Vivek et al’s endorsement of the lazy Americans hypothesis. It is a narrative the GOP gets from corporate donors and not from Joe Sixpack fox tv viewers who make up the base.
Ask HN: Who do you trust when it comes to recycling electronics?
by thinkingtoilet | 2025-09-10 13:08:46+00:00
I know sometimes places like Best Buy say they take them but I am suspicious of if they are properly disposing of old electronics. I am happy to pay for this to make sure they are recycled as best as they can be. These are very old phones and laptops that do not work anymore. Who do you trust when it comes to electronics recycling?
by pclmulqdq | 2025-09-10 13:08:54+00:00
You can also design things so that people are not crammed in at a rate of hundreds of thousands per square km. Then, car-based infrastructure gives you a lot of freedom to place homes and businesses far apart and have reasonable travel time and capacity for everyone.

When I moved from Manhattan to an "evil" suburb full of "stroads," my door-to-door time to pretty much everything decreased. Getting rid of waiting for the elevator was a big time saver. Waiting 10-15 minutes if you get unlucky about the arrival of the train was pretty bad. Added all up, most walks took at least 10 minutes to go each direction and non-local trips took 30 minutes or more.
by ericmay | 2025-09-10 13:09:01+00:00
The thing that is so great about better transit for folks in cities in America is that it benefits you specifically in the lifestyle choices you want to live. Introducing better transit options gets folks out of their cars and onto the tram or sidewalk and that leaves you with your desire for solitude with more open highways.

> It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".

Fair but you have to remember that this anti-car lobby is rather tiny in comparison to the pro-car lobby which is every state department of transportation, automaker, insurance company, oil executive, auto dealer, etc. they aren’t as loud and annoying because they don’t have to be, but take away some of their power and you unleash lunatics.
by gazook89 | 2025-09-10 13:09:14+00:00
+1 to urban arrow. Schlep my infant and pre-k kid in it every day of the year and the older kid loves it, is more engaged with the community (she has mentally mapped it and we commonly stop to talk to neighbors in a way we can’t in car), and I can actually fit more kids in it than the car. The car requires a car seat for each kid, which won’t fit across the back seat— the bike takes in an infant seat, and space for two kids on the bench.
by philipwhiuk | 2025-09-10 13:09:17+00:00
> Even if you can have multiple eSIMs in a phone, switching carriers on the fly becomes effectively impossible (which is a big thing for carriers, and harks back to when US carriers did not use GSM).

He writes 'Even if'. There's no 'Even', it's the reality.

I don't understand the switching problem either. I used an e-SIM in Austria perfectly fine - disabled the data line on my primary SIM, enabled it on the e-SIM. I could have disabled the entire primary SIM if I'd wanted.

Switching carriers is easier with e-SIMs - you don't have to fiddle about with the tray.
by ethbr1 | 2025-09-10 13:09:19+00:00
I'd say it's an incomplete measure, but it's far from useless given the US' continued statistically-significant disparities between ethnicity outcomes. The first step of solving a problem, etc. etc.

I do agree with the general sentiment though and think that too much research/news over the last couple decades has been exclusively ethnically segmented, given the economic segmentation that should always also be involved.

They're perpendicular questions and best triangulate the American experience in tandem.

E.g. what are outcomes for wealthy members of disadvantaged ethnicities? What are outcomes for poor members of advantaged ethnicities?

Those are interesting socioeconomic questions!
by fennecfoxy | 2025-09-10 13:09:21+00:00
I think they will be, but more for hand-off. Local will be great for starting timers, adding things to calendar, moving files around. Basic, local tasks. But it also needs to be intelligent enough to know when to hand off to server-side model.

Android crowd has been able to run LLMs on-device since LlamaCPP first came out. But the magic is in the integration with OS. As usual there will be hype around Apple, idk, inventing the very concept of LLMs or something. But the truth is neither Apple nor Android did this; only the wee team that wrote the attention is all you need paper + the many open source/hobbyist contributors inventing creative solutions like LoRA and creating natural ecosystems for them.

That's why I find this memo so cool (and will once again repost the link): https://semianalysis.com/2023/05/04/google-we-have-no-moat-a...
by dzdt | 2025-09-10 13:09:25+00:00
If this was true wouldn't there be a market for a ruggedized version that has the toughness of a case, from the factory as shipped? Its a little silly for Apply to shave every possible half-millimeter from the design and then have 99% of people add back the thickness plus a lot of extra by adding a case. Why not have a factory-ruggedized version which isn't as thick as adding that case but is just as rugged?
by evermike | 2025-09-10 13:09:25+00:00
Oh, that’s a very good and difficult question. I’ve broken down many times myself and still go through tough periods. Maybe over time you just grow a bit thicker-skinned. But I can really imagine how hard it feels when you’re just starting out.

To be fair, though, it’s not necessarily easier in a venture-backed startup — maybe even harder. On top of the project risks and challenges, you also have to deal with investor pressures.

If you’re interested in diving deeper into this topic, I’d be happy to share more — but maybe if your question is a bit more detailed or specific.
by freetime2 | 2025-09-10 13:09:27+00:00
> Growing up in suburban California I was basically in an outdoor prison until I could drive.

Just as a counter point, I grew up in suburban Massachusetts and this wasn't the case for me. My friends and I rode all over town on our bikes. Bike lanes weren't a thing back then at all, and this was in the 90s when violent crime was at its peak in the US. We just tried to stick to streets with less traffic, rode on sidewalks where available, and took alternate routes through the woods, the cemetery, private property, etc. to avoid busy areas. This is anecdotal, of course, but no kid from my town ever got hit by a car when I was growing up (one kid did die chasing a ball into the street, though).

I'm all for building bike lanes and public transport. And also not all suburban areas are equal - I've definitely seen areas of the US where I would not feel safe riding a bike even as an adult. But I think whatever is keeping kids confined to their homes is just as much a cultural change as it is a lack of infrastructure.
by etempleton | 2025-09-10 13:09:35+00:00
In the US there are a few obvious things, but everyone acts as if we are powerless to solve them:

1. Cell phones in classrooms.

I don’t know how or why they were ever allowed. They should have to be in a backpack or in a locker and off during class.

2. Not removing students with bad behavior from classrooms and schools.

The current thinking on how to handle a student who is seriously misbehaving and potentially violent is to remove all of the other students from the classroom versus just removing the problematic student in question. This is because there have been instances where a child has been physically removed and has gotten seriously injured. The thinking on expulsion is that it should essentially never happen because kids who get expelled have bad outcomes later in life. But the net effect is that one bad student can hold an entire classroom hostage and there is nothing the teacher can do. This is obviously detrimental to all of the kids who are compliant and behaving. It also causes burnout which leads me to the next major issue facing public schools.

3. Good teachers are quitting

It isn’t worth it to teach in America. You need a lot of expensive education. You get paid very little. You have no power to remove a student who are major disruptions and make it impossible to teach. And, in many districts, teachers are being accused of trying to indoctrinate children because we live in a politicized world.

4. Too many parents aren’t parenting

The number of kids who are not potty trained by kindergarten continues to rise. This is an issue of parents not wanting to do something that is hard and takes patience.

5. Lowering Standards

When faced with kids failing the solution should never be to lower long held standards. The kids are the same, they are just as capable, it is all of the above that is different.

Bonus. We feed kids junk in schools

This has been going on for decades. Why is it so hard to make fresh food for kids? It could probably cost about the same if done properly. The answer is it takes some effort and people have to think about it.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-09-10 13:09:53+00:00
> Isn't that "Umvolkung" nonsense again?

No, I wasn't talking about "Umvolkung", it was a genuine question.

Isn't that "I'll low-key call you a Nazi because you asked a question about a thing that vaguely resembles what Nazis talked about" nonsense again?"
by RHSeeger | 2025-09-10 13:10:18+00:00
No?

It's not an idiosyncrasy, it's a preference/optimal work environment. And it varies by person. Stop acting like the people that are on the other side of the opinion are being childish/stupid.

Nobody said you needed to stfu. Pointing out what works best for you is important in making sure the best decision is made. But, as I was trying to say, any decision that is made will be wrong for some of the people involved.
by reaperducer | 2025-09-10 13:10:35+00:00
In a conversation with my parents (who both have an apple watch) we realized they will likely be the first generation to navigate aging with a consistent and extensive history of health data from these devices. I’m curious what benefits and challenges that will bring.

I read an article in the newspaper recently about how now that we're several decades into the computerization of medical records, it's possible to spot trends that were previously untrackable.

One item was cancers. It's emerging that different generations get different types of cancers more often.

For example, Baby Boomers have a lot of cancer x, while Gen X gets a lot of cancer y, but very little cancer x. And Millennials get cancer z, which is almost never seen in the other two cohorts.

There was one type of cancer that seemed to hit Millennials almost exclusively. Unfortunately, I can't remember which one, as I read the article back toward the beginning of the year.
by vid | 2025-09-10 13:10:40+00:00
Once you get used to it, you get more solitude in public transit. Plan your route so you get access to a seat, settle in with a book or music. The other people melt away. Whereas driving a car involves constant interaction with other drivers which in many places (including rural areas, not to single out pickup drivers but there is a pattern) can be quite fraught.
by eigenspace | 2025-09-10 13:10:47+00:00
If you haven't discovered the problems with this model, then it's only because not enough of your neighbours have had the same idea.

Look around at places with very high car use (especially in North America) and you'll discover that this solution simply does not scale. Cars take up a gigantic amount of room on roads, and even gigantic highways like Onatrio's 401 [1] just have not been able to keep up with the level of sprawl that occurs when people move out of the city to surrounding suburbs and commute into the city by car.

Adding lanes to the highway does not help and just induces more traffic on it, and it also causes all the surrounding villages to sprawl outwards until they become indistinct blobs that merge into the nearby metropolitan city.

Trains are a much better solution to this problem because they have way better throughput, don't destroy cities with massive highways and parking garages, and encourage denser development that lets nearby villages retain their character and size.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Highway_401
by Zigurd | 2025-09-10 13:11:11+00:00
I'm pretty confident that, eventually, new roads and substantially renovated existing infrastructure will be designed to help AVs work better. But between lack of foresight, slow moving civil engineering standards, and self interest by incumbent manufacturers, we're going to get their ass end first.

First we're going to make AVs work in existing traffic on existing infrastructure. That will be more expensive and slower than it needs to be. Other things like vehicles designed specifically to be AVs used in mainly urban environments, with varying passenger capacities, and also variants for freight delivery are going to be developed along the way.
by dematz | 2025-09-10 13:11:19+00:00
I like the "does the problem justify the solution's complexity" question. The deserialization performance improvement seems like an actually important benefit though.

Also https://antonz.org/go-json-v2/#marshalwrite-and-unmarshalrea... not completely sure but maybe combining

dec := json.NewDecoder(in)

dec.Decode(&bob)

to just

json.UnmarshalRead(in, &bob)

is nicer...mostly the performance benefit though
by kiwicopple | 2025-09-10 13:11:20+00:00
We are tracking the patches here:

https://www.orioledb.com/docs#patch-set

The actual storage engine is written as an extension - these patches are mostly to improve the TAM API. If these are accepted by the community then it should be simpler for anyone to write their own Storage extensions.

I think (correctly) it will take a lot longer to upstream the extension - the PG community should take a “default no” attitude with big changes like this. Over time we will prove its worthiness (hopefully beyond just supabase - it would be good to collaborate with other Postgres providers)
by pizlonator | 2025-09-10 13:11:21+00:00
Does that study include enabling intra object overflow protection, or not?

When I say that this optional feature would force you to change a lot more code I’m comparing CHERI without intra object overflow protection to CHERI with intra object object overflow protection.

Finally, 6 million lines of code is not that impressive. Real OSes are measured in billions
by avasan | 2025-09-10 13:11:49+00:00
LLMs sometimes hallucinate while stating one thing and outputting disconnected commands/code on the back end in many superficial/general models (Claude included) - does the MCP try to correct/account for that? Or is user oversight necessary to ensure that actions match the LLM output? Is the only way to stop aberrant operation by hitting a physical emergency stop or can the LLM interface be used to for that?
by ericmay | 2025-09-10 13:12:46+00:00
They by and large don’t though. Instead, big houses and yards are the only options on the table for most Americans because of zoning regulation and developers just copy/pasting designs to save money.

There isn’t an option for new brick house in neighborhood built before cars were a thing. You either have the existing housing stock, which is astronomically more valuable, or you don’t. There’s no developer building those formats anymore.
by moregrist | 2025-09-10 13:12:57+00:00
> Being willing to switch employer for convenience does not make someone a good worker and it's not like bad hires can't change employer.

Your comment is really quite out of touch of how layoffs actually affect people.

I’ve been through a few rounds now. Morale is essentially destroyed in the short term. Your team suddenly has a lot more work with no additional support or even acknowledgement that people are now slammed.

It’s not inconvenience. It’s a significantly negative change in the work environment, and a sign that maybe your company’s long-term prospects aren’t great. Of course good people leave in these situations.
by gobdovan | 2025-09-10 13:13:05+00:00
OpenAI just recently took a systematic look into why models hallucinate [0][1].

The article you shared raises an interesting point by comparing human memory with LLMs, but I think the analogy can only go so far. They're too distinct to explain hallucinations simply as a lack of meta-cognition or meta-memory. These systems are more like alien minds, and allegories risk introducing imprecision when we're trying to debug and understand their behavior.

OpenAI's paper instead identifies hallucinations as a bug in training objectives and benchmarks, and is grounding the explanation in first principles and the mechanics of ML.

Metaphors are useful for creativity, but less so when it comes to debugging and understanding, especially now that the systematic view is this advanced.

[0] https://openai.com/index/why-language-models-hallucinate/?ut... [1] https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/d04913be-3f6f-4d2b-b283-ff432ef4a...
by randunel | 2025-09-10 13:13:12+00:00
The topic is about cities, not about rural areas. No cars in cities, simple. This concept will probably blow your mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_and_ride

Imagine a city without personal cars in its inner limits. Residents who decide to own a personal car can park it in a Park&Ride which also includes unlimited transit access for the duration of the parking.

Deliveries, you say? Those aren't personal cars, but I'll comply. Businesses will be able to drive in the cities, within the permitted times/routes.

Emergency vehicles? Those aren't personal cars, either. They're also allowed.