MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bitshiftfaced | 2025-09-12 13:48:14+00:00
Wikipedia has a history of how lead was known to cause problems, dating back to antiquity. Some excerpts:

> Dioscorides, a Greek physician who lived in the 1st century AD, wrote that lead makes the mind "give way".[121][274]

> Lead poisoning from rum was also noted in Boston.[291] Benjamin Franklin suspected lead to be a risk in 1786

> The first legislation in the UK to limit pottery workers' exposure to lead was included in the Factories Act Extension Act in 1864, with further introduced in 1899. William James Furnival (1853–1928), research ceramist of City & Guilds London Institute, appeared before Parliament in 1901 and presented a decade's evidence to convince the nation's leaders to remove lead completely from the British ceramic industry.

I don't know much about forever chemicals. Is there the same level of evidence as we had for lead?
by softwaredoug | 2025-09-12 13:48:15+00:00
You can test your model on past elections

IE X% of the time my model predicted the right result in this particular election.

You can test weather forecasts on the weather in the past.

You can test your model on a sports game on past games.

We do this all the time in many fields. With different degrees of certainty (error bars are small or large).

The entire basis of machine learning and predictions people use in everyday life is based on this assumption
by lenerdenator | 2025-09-12 13:49:09+00:00
It was pretty obvious from the get-go that leaded gas was an absolutely horrible idea, but this was before the mass-media age, so people didn't know that people who worked at the tetraethyl lead plant were going mad so often that it became known as the "looney gas building".[0]

Doses make the poisons, and apparently the dose for some of these chemicals is much, much higher than tetraethyl lead.

Also, apparently the molecular diagram for TEL sorta looks like a hackenkreuz. How appropriate.

[0]https://www.wired.com/2013/01/looney-gas-and-lead-poisoning-...
by jll29 | 2025-09-12 13:49:15+00:00
This post is a meticulous documentation, it's attention to detail is remarkable, and it all looks so clean. How much did your project cost in total, though, out of curiosity (tools and failed attempts included)?

Reading through the post, sadly nothing worked the first time round (bravo to the poster for his perseverance), and while things got slightly better, IT "stuff" is still surprisingly fiddly and fragile.

The quality of the build and the technical detail of the handbooks are areas where things got remarkably worse - how could we let that happen? How can children learn how stuff works without schematics of the devices they own and love?
by bluGill | 2025-09-12 13:49:51+00:00
That depends on what this can do. 6k would be a price I pay if it can do enough. I already have a $500 robot vacuum - which cannot do stairs and I have to carry it if I want it to do a different floor, so already $1000 is reasonable if all it is is a robot vacuum that can do stairs. If it can do things like fold and put away laundry, or load/unload the dishwasher (or wash dishes?). Can it put away the toys my kids leave all over (and also save me the bother of putting my toys away when I'm done)?
by m000 | 2025-09-12 13:49:56+00:00
Voting should be on specific clauses, and if anything is rejected there should be a cooling period before it can be brought up for voting again.

The cooling period does not preclude discussion of course. That's why we pay the MEPs: They are actually expected to show up in the EP and discuss. Not only show up on voting day and follow what their party dictated.
by Joker_vD | 2025-09-12 13:50:37+00:00
> better facilitates... the provision of legitimate goods and services.

Like what? A risque lingerie shop at balls.exposed or something? And new TLDs don't in any way facilitate "better search", you know, nor "information sharing".

> Along with the other TLDs in the Donuts family

Sorry, the what family?

> online identities and expression that do not currently exist.

What does this phrase even mean?

> the TLD will introduce significant consumer choice and competition to the Internet namespace – the very purpose of ICANN’s new TLD program.

"Considered harmful" etc.

> Individuals and groups will register names in .EXPOSED when interested in editorializing, providing input, revealing new facts or views, interacting with other communities, and publishing commentary.

Still not sure how "provision of legitimate goods" fits into this. Or the floating point formats, for that matter.
by 93n | 2025-09-12 13:51:02+00:00
Same setup, minus the Pi. That includes originally starting out with jellyfin!

When on Jellyfin, I used to manually transcode the entire library to ogg and use syncthing to replicate it to my devices. Symfonium's ability to cache transcoded files is quite handy (although the initial backfill of ~20K songs took a few tries)
by vladms | 2025-09-12 13:51:03+00:00
I prefer a simpler system if possible, adding further rules ("don't try anything similar for X years") seems to me that will make matters worse (who decides if it is similar enough? can you challenge that? at what stage you have to decide? etc.)

Also, are you sure most population is against ? I did not see a poll on that. I know enough people that like "authoritarian" governments and laws, so I think we (the ones that don't agree) should make an effort to convince people that too much "authority" is not the most efficient/smart way. Some of those people are in fact just afraid even if they would not admit it...
by timr | 2025-09-12 13:52:01+00:00
> I don't know much about forever chemicals. Is there the same level of evidence as we had for lead?

No. We have observational data in humans (which is problematic for drawing conclusions, since PFAS contamination tends to correlate with industry and population), and animal models, mostly in non-mammalian species.

As you correctly note, lead was known to be toxic since long before leaded gasoline -- the "question" was more about the delivery mechanism (auto exhaust) than the toxicity of the element itself.
by intrasight | 2025-09-12 13:52:05+00:00
>The only market for desktops is gaming.

I disagree. My premise isn't that desktops are going away. It's that DIY custom-build desktops are destined for the trash heap of history since you'll no longer be able to buy CPUs and memory. We will be buying desktops like the HP Z2 Mini Workstation - or the 10 years from now equivalent.

>Cases will probably survive since gamers love flashy rigs

But only as a retro theme thing? Would enthusiasts just put a Z2 Mini, for example, inside the case, wire up the lights, and call it a day?
by 4ggr0 | 2025-09-12 13:52:23+00:00
> But my perception is that the very notion of war would shock the s*t out of the 20-somethings that Western Europe would need to conscript in order to fight an all-out war

as a 20-something western european i don't see why i should die because some politicians behave like absolute fucking pieces of shits. if war breaks out in my country or they start conscripting people like me i'll just flee the country together with whomever would like to join me.
by javier123454321 | 2025-09-12 13:52:32+00:00
The thing that breaks my head about the conversation about timescales in the universe is that it would seem that time as a phenomenon needs to be experienced subjectively. This means that the concept of the earth existing for hundreds of millions of years in a state able to harbor life before the first organisms appeared kind of does not make sense. If indeed the great filter is that first jump to life, then the moment after the big bang to the moment before life appeared is an instant. Measuring years in our understanding of the ticking clock before life simply does not make sense to me.
by meken | 2025-09-12 13:52:34+00:00
There are paradoxes and chicken-and-the-egg problems throughout the article:

> For me, something shifted in my late twenties. Growing up I guess you could call it. I don’t remember the exact straw that broke the camel’s back, but a desire for change grew.

> If you identity as a failure, incapable of achievement, unfit, unlovable, destined to play a bit-part role in your own story, then by heck no matter how much willpower you put in to push that boulder up the hill, it will return to its place.

> You have to actually want it.

How do you actually want to change? That part remains largely a mystery, and appears to be the all-important ingredient everything pretty much flows from.

At the end of the day, nobody knows why they want certain things - they just do. There is a lot of magic to that part. Where does "motivation" come from?

I go back and forth on this, but I pretty much settle on that motivation is the all-important ingredient which no one actually knows much about and all the rest is just backward-rationalizing to make ourselves feel good and feel that we have more agency than we really do.
Ask HN: What do you recommend for test observability?
by vrm | 2025-09-12 13:52:54+00:00
I maintain an OSS project with a very involved CI setup. We're at the point where it is worth having observability into which tests are flaky, especially within intra-test-run retries. An ideal solution would be a managed service that takes junit.xml exports from cargo nextest, vitest, playwright, pytest, and go test. What do you all recommend?
by jebarker | 2025-09-12 13:52:56+00:00
As with all things it seems, this has a failure mode too, at least for the person growing up. I’ve become so un-confident in my opinions on most things that I basically don’t have any. For current event type things I just realized that everything is endlessly complex and finding authoritative, balanced and trustworthy sources is too time consuming to be practical. In work I am just constantly aware of the limits of my own knowledge that it manifests as imposter syndrome, low self esteem and procrastination. I often envy the folks that are confident in their opinions.
Form16x – Simplify tax season: JSON output and regime comparisons from Form 16
by taxedo | 2025-09-12 13:53:16+00:00
I got tired of manually copying numbers from Form 16 PDFs into India’s tax filing portal every year. So I built *Form16x*, a Python CLI + library that parses these PDFs into structured JSON.

Beyond extraction, it can: - Consolidate multiple Form 16s if you switched jobs - Calculate taxes under both regimes → recommends the better one - Show salary/deduction breakdowns directly in the terminal (tree view, colored output) - Suggest tax optimizations (80C, 80D, NPS, etc.) - Provide a Python API (`TaxCalculationAPI`) with multi-year tax rules (AY 2020–2025)

*Repo:* https://github.com/ri-sh/Form16x

Form 16 is similar to a W-2 in the US or a T4 in Canada — semi-structured PDFs with inconsistent layouts. Filing usually means manual data entry. Form16x tries to make that structured and automatable.

Would love feedback from HN — both on the technical approach (PDF parsing + structured extraction) and whether this approach could extend to other countries’ tax forms.
by dv_dt | 2025-09-12 13:53:22+00:00
If AI actually makes development faster, shouldn't going without sleep or fun or life be less necessary - otherwise what is the point of it all. If anything, keeping healthy with a balanced perspective is even more called upon and valuable with AI offloading work in the loop.

The booze I can take or leave but is laughable to give up booze but then impair your judgement another way with a low sleep schedule.
by aleksi | 2025-09-12 13:53:27+00:00
Not sure I understand your sarcasm. I read the documentation, source code, handler writing guide, and issues in the Go repository multiple times over two years, and I use slog extensively. Go is my primary language since r60. I think I know how to read Go docs.

Now, please point me to the place in the documentation that says if I can or can't use a value implementing the error interface as an attribute value, and will the handler or something else would call the `Error() string` method.

My definition of "supported" is simple – I could pass a supported value to the logger and get a reasonable representation from any handler. In my example, the JSON handler does not provide it for the fmt.Stringer.
by rs186 | 2025-09-12 13:53:55+00:00
A few years ago, I tried to open a bank account, and was turned away because my visa stamp expired (despite having valid immigration status). The clueless clerk and her advisor were going through The Patriot Act to find justification.

Fortunately, other banks weren't staffed with idiots, and I was able to open an account elsewhere after providing my documents.
by ch4s3 | 2025-09-12 13:54:04+00:00
Some places with weird water profiles will set up RO systems and add minerals to build a water profile on top of that, but it's far from the norm. People decide based on how their municipal water supply works with the kind of beers they want to make. I've seen a few brewhouses in the process of being built and talked to some commercial brewers about water, and depending on the location some places just use municipal water. New York water has a great profile for beer.
by fluoridation | 2025-09-12 13:54:05+00:00
I mean, I'm not sure I agree.

Situation A: A man is in a situation where he feels he can't refuse to shake someone's hand, so he does so, feels disgust at the clammy handshake, and then contracts a common infection.

Situation B: A man dates a woman, roofies her, takes advantage of her, but it turns out she's into that and nothing else happens.

From what you're saying, situation A would be much more "immoral" than situation B.
by ivape | 2025-09-12 13:54:26+00:00
No candidate can do that. The children were raised to be racist and ignorant. That basically means you are going to deal with poorly raised feral racist and entitled children. You aren’t going to rehabilitate that in your lifetime, the childhoods are fucked up. Maybe in 30-40 years these people will have a come to Jesus moment, but we don’t have a malleable national moral character to appeal to helpful sensibilities given how poorly the prior generation failed at raising proper children with good moral character.

Basically, a good portion of White America are gone cases. You won’t be able to explain to gone cases anything. That’s the reality of America.
by Vespasian | 2025-09-12 13:54:28+00:00
That's also problematic.

Currently the same proposal is being discussed over and over again but if that wouldn't be possible it's easy introduce "similar" ideas.

Ultimately law makers need to be able to pass new laws, even controversial ones, or the power to so slowly shifts to someone else (e.g. the executive in the USA)

Not having a majority is the only way to stop the process and if the population is in favor, doesn't care or can't be bothered any law will pass.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-09-12 13:55:29+00:00
I'm not sure who scuttlebutt is, but in the architecture of,

audio goes into mic => STT engine => translation model => TTS engine => audio comes out of speaker

a change in hardware would be a change in the "audio goes into mic" component of the model, which is not the critical part of the model.

All the parts of the above architecture already exist: we already have mics, STT, translation models, TTS, and speakers, and they all worked on other systems before apple even announced this, much less came up with a redesign. Most likely the redesign is aesthetic or just has slightly better sound transmission or reception – none of those were necessary for the functioning of the above architecture in other, non-apple systems.

I am, of course, assuming apple's architecture is a rough approximation of above. An alternative theoretical architecture might resemble the one below, but I have seen no evidence apple is doing this.

audio goes into mic => direct audio-to-audio translation model => audio comes out of speaker
by Insanity | 2025-09-12 13:55:32+00:00
Or.. drink enough of it until you forget that you were worried in the first place.

I feel it's needless to say that's not actual advice.. but well, better safe than sorry lol.

EDIT: I mean, of all the health reasons not to drink beer.. PFAS is _probably_ not the main one to worry about? I'm not a doctor, but it seems there's already enough known adverse effects that this additional piece of information is probably not a dealbreaker for those who drink?
by cedws | 2025-09-12 13:55:41+00:00
Sure. I spent the last 6 months in Tokyo, needless to say it was great and I felt quite content there. I continued working for my London-based employer, which obviously means that I wasn’t fully integrating there and experienced all the pros without the cons. I couldn’t stay any longer than 6 months as the digital nomad visa isn’t extendable. I’d like to find somewhere to settle down for longer, and I have a few countries on the cards for visiting. If that works out I’ll start moving my assets over. If I can’t find somewhere then I’ll probably do a rotation between Japan and some other country, other factors permitting.

Portugal seems like a good choice because of its digital nomad visa and after 5 years of living there I could apply for naturalisation and regain freedom of movement in the EU.
by standard_indian | 2025-09-12 13:56:09+00:00
On a linux box, is it possible to run tailscale/wireguard as an exit node along with Forti vpn?

Aka what I want to achieve is (my-machine + tail/wireguard) --> (server with tailscale/wireguard + forti vpn) --> Corporate network. So wireguard or tailscale to receive traffic and forward it through forti.

Or another option (my machine fortivpn over tail/wireguard) --> (server as exit node) --> corporate network

Rather than using the official forticlient I am using https://github.com/adrienverge/openfortivpn. It has some options to configure custom pppd/routes/dns etc if necessary, which I have not touched as I don't know enough :P DNS resolution is not important for my usecase, only traffic.
by nonethewiser | 2025-09-12 13:56:23+00:00
Without a doubt. Interesting idea and nice looking UI. But like you said it's creating a browser within a browser, without all the native browser support.

I found the navigation to be scattered and disorienting. In general clicking links opens new windows. In one case it navigated away from the current "page" and what I believe to be the back button (looks more like undo) didn't do anything. Why am I guessing what constitutes a page and how or if I can go back? Everyone has known how these things work in browsers for decades.
by skeezyboy | 2025-09-12 13:56:52+00:00
>As the quote you offered says, it is measured after.

i was quoting you... but you have tried to have it both ways. you said....

> Price measures what you are giving up to receive value.

notice you didnt say gave, you said giving. There is a price before the "transaction"

> Price is not determined until a voluntary transition takes place

But we had a price before we made the purchase??? If you swap price with market value in the second quote youre completely right.

Market Value is determined in this offer/sell kind of fashion precisely because it ISNT intrinsic.
by Nifty3929 | 2025-09-12 13:57:01+00:00
A lot of people keep looking for technology solutions to political problems. The fact is that privacy, especially of financial transactions, is becoming illegal. Any technology that allows you to send or spend money anonymously will be attacked by our governments. They won't be allowed.

You can argue about whether you can get away with it due to difficulty of enforcement, but all that does is turn us all into criminals. They won't put ALL of in jail, but they can put ANY of us in jail - the ones they don't like.
by mostertoaster | 2025-09-12 13:57:04+00:00
If a Baptist tells me I’m sinning because I smoke and drink whiskey, I don’t hate him, I just dismiss him. If Charlie Kirk said a male cannot be a woman, then the response was hate and was felt to be completely justified.

The hate mongering is from those who bow down to the zeitgeist of the age.

My hope is that Charlie Kirk bravely speaking the truth in the face of so much hate, even though it cost him his life, inspires many more to not fear for their lives to speak the truth, and raise their kids to be the same, until society turns and rejects what is false.
by non_aligned | 2025-09-12 13:58:07+00:00
I worked crazy hours in my early 20s because I liked it. I liked computers, I liked my team, and to be frank, I had not much else to do. If I went home early, I would be spending time on the internet anyway.

But the thing is, unless you're building your own business, it just doesn't matter. No one will remember this in five years. In a corporate environment, every doc, every line of code you wrote will be replaced or forgotten far sooner than you suspect. Two or three reorgs later, your team might not even exist as a distinct entity. There will be no statue of you in the hallway after you're gone.

It's also not your family. If you become any sort of a liability, if you make an off-color joke, if the revenue metrics are off by 5% - thanks kid, here's the door. The first layoffs you go through will be devastating precisely because they crush that illusion. Yeah, your manager might be a genuinely nice and caring person, but by the end of the day, if they're asked to sort a spreadsheet with your name in it and then draw a line somewhere, they will, and there will be "nothing they could do".

The only lasting thing you're getting out of the heroics is the money you save, the skills you learn on the job, and for a short while, the reference you get from your old boss when you apply for the next job. If you optimize for that, you'll probably have a satisfying career. If you don't, you wake up one day realizing that you've given up a good chunk of your life to make Sam Altman 0.01% richer, and that's that.

If a company is demanding that you sacrifice social life and well-being, ask yourself what's it worth to you. Are they paying more than anyone else? Or do they just want to get more kLOC out of you for free?
by achenet | 2025-09-12 13:58:12+00:00
As other comments on this post have mentioned, exponential backoff would still have some issues.

However, we could envision a rule where controversial bills have to be validated by a strict majority, or even a supermajority (75% minimum) of the voting population via referendum.

I feel like in 2025 it should be doable for a state to ask its citizens to vote online to show that they support a bill, and if a given bill lacks support amongst the citizen body of that state, it's probably not worth passing.
by dotnet00 | 2025-09-12 13:59:27+00:00
This has been a growing feeling for me too, seeing many users on various platforms go from mocking the murders of non-white people to claiming that their political opposition is hateful due to recent events. I used to think that being accepted in society was just a matter of integrating culturally (which I thought was fair), but the way people have been emboldened to say the most awful things has been changing my mind.
by graemep | 2025-09-12 13:59:53+00:00
It is a nuisance to the state.

I do not see how it is an existential threat.

Nation states existed for centuries in which money was frequently held as cash and even large transactions were often done in cash. its still common (or was until very recently) in a lot of (mostly poor) countries

> With financial privacy and real freedom, you can hire a competing army.

Having the money to pay an army is a long way from hiring one. Recruitment and buying military equipment at any scale would be obvious.