MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by UncleMeat | 2025-10-18 00:47:03+00:00
We did not consume canola oil prior to the 70s. I do not understand why this should carry nutritional information.

Hexane is used to extract oil from rapeseeds. This sounds spooky but is pretty deeply studied. It does not appear to make its way into our bodies at measurable levels.

"Well it must be something so why not canola oil" is not the right way to approach this problem, in my opinion. The swap to include "flavor enhancers, stabilizers, and preservatives" (none of which are are canola oil) is also odd here. Why would we expect there to be a shared pharmacological cause across these different things?
by laurencerowe | 2025-10-18 00:47:23+00:00
Healthcare is such a large part of national expenditure that I think it is worth adjusting for it when comparing government expenditure shares of GDP. It is around 12% in Switzerland.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?locat...

Many countries organise healthcare largely through non-government health insurers, but those still get counted as part of government expenditure in both Netherlands (69%) and Germany (80%), not much less than the UK's (83%) with a National Health Service. Switzerland on 35% is a huge outlier here.

In terms of administration the Swiss system seems not completely dissimilar to the German system in that coverage is mandatory and there are a range of non-profit providers to choose between. But the Swiss scheme is classified as private expenditure because its mandatory payments are made directly with income based subsidies rather than equivalent amounts being paid through the tax system.

That one simple accounting change lowers the government share of GDP by 5.4%.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.GHED.CH.ZS?locat...
by signatoremo | 2025-10-18 00:47:45+00:00
Huh? The authors of Blackbalze report are obviously bias since HDD is their business. That doesn’t make their reports less worth reading.

Nathan Benaich has PhD in Computer and Mphil in Biology from Cambridge, and majored Biology from Oxford. He is more than qualified to discuss tech topics, a lot more than many pieces of content here on HN. Not reading him because he is an investor? Give me a break
by tlahtinen | 2025-10-18 00:48:55+00:00
It's not out of the question.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pce.14060 https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/plants/tropical-rai...

And the planet may well have been warmer in the past, but the ecosystems had millions of years to adapt to it.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-10-18 00:49:12+00:00
You can also take out a loan from a credit union for the repair bill on your older car. Or even putting it on a credit card is an option.

A $3k repair loan is a lot easier to pay off than a $30k new car loan.

A lot of the people I know try to justify “new car fever” and will use some version of “I don’t feel safe in it anymore” or “I don’t think I can trust it.”
by konishipolis | 2025-10-18 00:49:17+00:00
my suspicion is that much (or at least some) of the negative sentiment towards claude code is from folks that were on it early (when code was even more widely used than codex) and created intensive workflows using it. when anthropic tightened quotas to make it more equitable across plan users they were much more likely to be impacted.

this is obviously pure conjecture, but perhaps the OE folks had automated their multiple roles and now they need to be more involved.
by brazukadev | 2025-10-18 00:49:31+00:00
It is funny most people discussing here does not understand MCP at all. Besides tools, MCP has resources, prompts, sampling, elicitation, roots and each one of them is useful when creating apps connected to LLMs. MCP is not only about MCP Servers, the host/client part is as important as the servers/tools. For example, nowadays most LLM clients are chatbots, but an MCP client could be a chess game or a project management app.

> I know about resources and prompts but I've seen almost no evidence of people actually using them

these are features that MCP clients should implement and unfortunately, most of them still don't. The same for elicitation and sampling. Prompts, for example, are mostly useful when you use sampling, then you can create an agent from an MCP server.
by middayc | 2025-10-18 00:50:04+00:00
there is no if { } else { } in REBOL or Rye and it wouldn't really fit. There is either function that accepts two code blocks. It can act as a typical if / else or as a ternary expression as it also returns the result of a block:

print either pwd = "correct" { "Hello" } { "Locked" }

This is Rebol's doc on either, Rye's works exactly the same: https://www.rebol.com/docs/words/weither.html
by CJefferson | 2025-10-18 00:50:22+00:00
Given the amount of work emulator authors go to supporting consoles like the Neo Geo CD, with 8 not very good games (they had to do serious work, over many years, breaking the encryption), and the amazing cycle accurate emulators for consoles like NES and SNES, I’m confident we will continue to have good emulators in the future for any system anyone cares about.
by tw04 | 2025-10-18 00:50:48+00:00
> Now a few years later, you can buy a BYD for 26k, that does 450km (ext version) on paper. That same BYD is WAY more fancy, tech gadgets etc...

Right, because the other $26k is being subsidized by the party. And much like the US found out with rare earths: once China has the market cornered, the price will rise and/or they’ll use access to their goods as a tool of war.

They’re playing the long game and western nations seem unable or unwilling to do the same.

https://insideevs.com/news/763687/china-zero-mile-used-evs/
by tim333 | 2025-10-18 00:51:40+00:00
AI researchers and CS people and the rest of us are human brain users and so have some familiarity with them even if they haven't studied neuroscience.

You can make some comparisons between how they perform without really understanding how LLMs or brains work, like to me LLMs seem similar to the part human minds where you say stuff without thinking about it. But you never really get an LLM saying I was thinking about that stuff and figured this bit was wrong, because they don't really have that capability.
by d3Xt3r | 2025-10-18 00:52:14+00:00
Let's not forget how they also killed the iconic "Office" brand - which is now called Microsoft 365 Copilot.

And if you go to office.com, it says "Welcome to the Microsoft 365 Copilot app", which doesn't even make any sense - the page I landed at is clearly a web page, NOT an app.

I can't even picture the kind of people who would come up with these dumb names, and the kind of people who actually approve it.
by Rudybega | 2025-10-18 00:53:43+00:00
> what about the fact frontier labs are spending more compute on viral AI video slop and soon-to-be-obsoleted workplace usecases than research?

That's a bold claim, please cite your sources.

It's hard to find super precise sources on this for 2025, but epochAI has a pretty good summary for 2024. (with core estimates drawn from the Information and NYT

https://epoch.ai/data-insights/openai-compute-spend

The most relevant quote: "These reports indicate that OpenAI spent $3 billion on training compute, $1.8 billion on inference compute, and $1 billion on research compute amortized over “multiple years”. For the purpose of this visualization, we estimate that the amortization schedule for research compute was two years, for $2 billion in research compute expenses incurred in 2024."

Unless you think that this rough breakdown has completely changed, I find it implausible that Sora and workplace usecases constitute ~42% of total training and inference spend (and I think you could probably argue a fair bit of that training spend is still "research" of a sort, which makes your statement even more implausible).
by pessimizer | 2025-10-18 00:55:02+00:00
Remoaners still don't acknowledge how psychotically they were whipped up over this. But they still talk about the dumb lying bus that the people driving admitted was wrong like 5 minutes after being confronted about it.

They were predicting Mad Max, and they still call the Brexiteers dumb.

That being said, the UK had an good deal in the EU, access to the markets without having to accept the dumb currency. which is why the EU played so rough with them, and is generally better off for them having left.

The problem is that the UK being between France and Germany, maybe because English is an unholy combination of French and German, was a stabilizing influence. When Europe finally faces the fact that they're no match for Russia and should just leave it alone, there will be nothing left but to turn on each other again. I suppose the winner can invade Russia again and lose, again.

But the fantasy that this stupid trade union meant that much was a collective elite hysteria. They couldn't just admit that they just liked to be able to travel and work in Europe like they were at home, because they knew most people couldn't actually afford to do that. Also, they loved the cheap labor, and that's another embarrassing thing to say out loud.
by incompatible | 2025-10-18 00:55:15+00:00
I was looking at the site and it already has a whole section linking to this comment, from 18 minutes ago, Impressive!:

Wait, Not Enough Tailwind?

Someone said "Not enough tailwind. 6/10." So here's a literal tail in the wind.

[picture of cat, no tail visible, with alt text "Dog with tail blowing in wind"]

This is as close to Tailwind CSS as we're getting on a pure HTML site. But hey, we added rounded corners and shadows, so basically the same thing.
by estimator7292 | 2025-10-18 00:55:26+00:00
"Offering to" is a nonsense term. The website exists on the open internet regardless of jurisdictional borders. A UK citizen must actively go to the website, initiating a connection from within the UK and requesting data from an IP address that may or may not have some kind of relationship with geography.

4Chan isn't popping up unbidden on people's phones. Wither a UK citizen chooses to visit a website is no business of the website operator.

To say that 4Chan is somehow responsible for the actions of unknowably many private citizens is absurd. If the UK wants to enforce internet censorship within their borders, that's their own business. Putting pressure on wholly independent foreign businesses for the crime of existing is not reasonable. This is just as bad as US credit card companies censoring adult material from the entire global online economy.

They're trying to censor large parts of the global internet for everyone, not just their citizens. If they cared about UK citizens so much, they'd do something like proactively blocking noncompliant websites to force them to immediately either comply or fuck off. They should be trying to protect their citizens instead of trying to bully foreign companies they have no jurisdiction over. It's their responsibility to enforce their laws, not the US courts.
by Terretta | 2025-10-18 00:55:43+00:00
OK, call it a half day (four hours) a month.

But really, if DIY, someone's got to actually have it meet SLOs and SLAs. So you need a person or two, which is when those hours add up.

These days housing and benefiting an employee can cost 50% to 100% overhead, depending on firm efficiency. So, $400/hr means $800k/yr (because 40 hrs x 50 weeks = rate x 2000) but half that can be considered overhead (recruiting, real estate, benefits, training, vacation, "management" when some number of headcount requires adding a lead or manager who is expensive overhead), so it's really 400k a year which is not out of line at firms with regulatory requirements.

Anyway, if your workload is critical, you can't have only one, so call it 2 at 200k. Point is, when all these things matter, GCP/Azure/AWS isn't the thing that stands out.

---

> As the rest of your comment, personally, I see it more like a pitch to use AWS

Re AWS, I thought I was clear:

If YAGNI, don't choose it.
by tomp | 2025-10-18 00:55:49+00:00
I don't think photosynthesis "just adapts", it evolves quite slowly (if it could evolve faster, it would be much more efficient!).

Also, your geological timelines are way off. Last interglacial period (with temperatures higher than today) was 100k years ago.

HN has literally became an anti-intellectual echo-chamber.
by xvv | 2025-10-18 00:56:35+00:00
> I guess I am not alone in wondering how different the Middle East might have been had it not been for the seismic influence of Al-Ghazali, that revered scholar of Sunni thought, who in the 12th century argued that science is not a liberator but a threat to the word of God and a danger to the clerics, who had every incentive to thwart the thirst for knowledge to maintain their power and privileges. “Innovator” was not regarded as a term of praise but, as the scholar Toby Huff has put it, “a term for a heretic and non-believer, subject to death”.

This quote has two parts, both of which are wrong and sensationalized. About al Ghazali being anti science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QjSXJSt7KI

And on the status of innovator. The author is equivocating, the negative term innovator is applied to people who innovate in religious matter, ie: altering the religion. Not referring to people who advance knowledge of the "worldly sciences".
by nsonha | 2025-10-18 00:57:12+00:00
it's the only official writing system that we have. The non latin scripts have practically disappeared from modern life.

We had centuries of Chinese scripts, which is definitely not native, then a short lived Chinese-like writing system that is the closest thing to "native", (it's not, see "Chinese-like"). Even that was not used as official system for as long as the current latin alphabet.
by kijin | 2025-10-18 00:57:25+00:00
"Legitimate" is relative here. I would count you as using unusual software to hide your actual source address. Not a huge concern because if you're doing that, I assume you also know how to move around to avoid getting blocked.

In fact, the ability to move to a different cloud on short notice is also part of the CAPTCHA, because large cloud-based botnets usually can't. They'd get instabanned if they tried to move their crawling boxes to something like DigitalOcean.
by ishandotpage | 2025-10-18 00:58:19+00:00
Very cool, reminds me of both [sqlc](https://sqlc.dev) and [oapi-codegen](https://github.com/oapi-codegen/oapi-codegen)

I'm not a fan of the enterprisey hexagonal-style code this generates, but I can understand where this might be useful for someone who does follow that.

A question regarding evolution: it's rare that schemas stay constant. I'm not sure if this tool will lend itself well when the time comes to, say, add another table, though I might be misunderstanding here.
by sarchertech | 2025-10-18 00:58:46+00:00
>You just placed biology and neuroscience firmly outside of his wheelhouse.

For biology he had a collaborator. You aren’t likely to find many biologist / quantum physicists.

The term neuroscience wasn’t even coined until after he finished his PhD. You could probably name many other relevant sub specialties that doesn’t have formal training in.

If any of his theories are correct, you wouldn’t expect a neuroscientist, or biologist to be equipped to come up with them.

>If he is approaching things from a purely hypothetical standpoint it’s an unlikely but reasonable idea

He is. His first book essentially had no proposed mechanism. Then an anesthesiologist and researcher read it and contacted him with the proposal that microtubules might provide an environment that is insulated from the normal warm, wet, and noisy environment of the brain.

His next book investigated that idea, but he’s repeatedly said that this is just an interesting place to investigate and he has no idea whether it’s true.

>but it utterly fails as part of how a larger system we actually understand quite a bit about works.

How does it fail? I’ve read quite a hit about it and plenty for people are skeptical but I’ve never seen anyone showing how it “utterly fails”.
by dmix | 2025-10-18 00:59:29+00:00
There's always a market for these kinds of people. They used to mostly be religious leaders predicting doom because of the latest social trend or local issue. I remember reading an archived letter from the middle ages by a British religious leader and he predicted the collapse of society after witnessing the Norman invasions and border raids happening. Some churches got looted and he saw it as an end times, a signal of a wider cultural decay. A line once crossed it will be impossible to come back from.

These days the internet news junkies are writing those letters.
by hunterpayne | 2025-10-18 00:59:30+00:00
Oh, its funnier than that. The most sophisticated data trackers don't even use cookies anymore. Anyone you would have to worry about getting that data hasn't used cookies in years. So the entire exercise punishes small companies that don't do anything with the data except pre-populate fields for you. But big tech companies that the law was targeting don't have to change a thing.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-10-18 00:59:48+00:00
I assume your project directory also looks like this if you used Claude…

index.html

index-working.html

index-revised.html

index-revised-2.html

debug-site-on-mobile-issue.sh

index-backup-2.html

DEBUGGING-RESULTS.md

CLAUDE.md

INSTALLATION-INSTRUCTIONS.md
by ShellackGobln7 | 2025-10-18 01:00:09+00:00
Here's a nix flake for v0.2.0

{ description = "IMAP to Maildir synchronization tool";

inputs = { nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable"; flake-utils.url = "github:numtide/flake-utils"; }; outputs = { self, nixpkgs, flake-utils, }: flake-utils.lib.eachDefaultSystem ( system: let pkgs = nixpkgs.legacyPackages.${system}; in { packages = { default = pkgs.buildGoModule { pname = "imapgoose"; version = "0.2.0"; src = pkgs.fetchFromSourcehut { owner = "~whynothugo"; repo = "ImapGoose"; rev = "v0.2.0"; hash = "sha256-+LHj4scdMDBOJ0f04IEeVVZSLEJQSQSndbtHEjN6kLs="; }; vendorHash = "sha256-nD2KgBWmzkTQZHwH/IaGVbhIC2zR4VYdoUTocL0cP+A="; subPackages = ["cmd/imapgoose" "cmd/capcheck"]; ldflags = ["-s" "-w"]; postInstall = '' install -Dm644 imapgoose.1 -t $out/share/man/man1/ install -Dm644 imapgoose.conf.5 -t $out/share/man/man5/ install -Dm644 LICENCE -t $out/share/licenses/imapgoose/ ''; meta = with pkgs.lib; { description = "IMAP to Maildir synchronization tool"; homepage = "https://git.sr.ht/~whynothugo/ImapGoose"; license = licenses.isc; mainProgram = "imapgoose"; }; }; }; devShells.default = pkgs.mkShell { buildInputs = with pkgs; [ go gopls gotools golangci-lint ]; }; } ); }
by forgotoldacc | 2025-10-18 01:00:21+00:00
I feel like this shows a change in mindset these past couple decades.

More and more people buy things for the purpose of reselling them. Houses are now more investments than places to actually live in. Rubbing alcohol was bought up during Covid so people could resell. Cryptocurrency is bought with the goal of selling for double a few months later and nobody really believes in the "currency" aspect of it. Pokémon cards, originally made for kids and to play in a card game, are now all scooped up by cart load by adults so they can resell them on eBay, and those buyers hope to resell later. The 2020s has people trying to sell used cars for equal or more than their new value. Strange times.
by topspin | 2025-10-18 01:00:37+00:00
I wouldn't cite the 4L60E in this argument. It's an ancient design, as Wikipedia puts it, "The 4L60E is the electronically commanded evolution of the Turbo-Hydramatic 700R4, originally produced in 1982." The 700R4 is a THM350 from 1969 with an additional overdrive gear.

I'm not writing about 50+ year old platforms, around which a huge market of suppliers and technicians has evolved. The ICE transmissions GM sells today are vastly more complex, with zero design commonality with the classic stuff, and enjoy none of the benefit of long adoption that make the classic stuff cost effective. Further, and this is the important part, because the lifecycle of everything ICE is much shorter now, measured in years as opposed to decades, they never will.

So ten years from now, when your circa 2020 10L60 dies, there won't be a transmission shop in every town that's equipped and stocked to deal with it cheaply. The cost will be greater than the value of the vehicle. And that's my point: these vehicles are not going to be economic to operate out of warranty.
by autoexec | 2025-10-18 01:00:48+00:00
I think it has more to do with stagnating wages which haven't kept up with inflation (or for that matter productivity) than it does with irresponsible spending. The growing number of people who can barely keep the lights on aren't spending all their income on door dash. They're cutting back on groceries, going to food banks (who have seen record demand) and being forced to resort to Buy Now Pay Later loans for regular groceries (14% more than they were last year https://www.cbsnews.com/news/buy-now-pay-later-bnpl-loans-gr...)
by brian_cunnie | 2025-10-18 01:01:23+00:00
Measuring oneself as an engineer by the title of the salary band you're in is a disservice.

I remember at Bell Labs they had one title: MTS (Member of Technical Staff). You were an engineer, and that was that. (disclaimer: there were a handful of DMTSes (Distinguished Member of Technical Staff)).

No one said, "I'm an E7" or "I'm a Staff Engineer II". Those statements strike me as distasteful. And begs the question if we're being suckered by Human Resource's gamification of work.

I worked at a company, Pivotal Labs, where everyone's title was "Pivot". It made for an egalitarian workplace. That changed after the acquisition, and we got titles. My proudest moment? Not when I was promoted from Senior Engineer to Staff Engineer, but rather the after-hours work I did with Dimtriy to expand our offering to include IPv6.

At my current startup, there are no titles, and I'm grateful for that.
by klodolph | 2025-10-18 01:02:34+00:00
All this hand-wringing about surveillance powers is not keeping up with how quickly our ability to surveil people is expanding. The fourth amendment seems kind of like a wet fart in a timeline where private companies can surveil the public and then simply choose to share their data with law enforcement.

I had to buy a surveillance camera recently, but I made sure mine doesn’t connect to the internet in any way.
by proc0 | 2025-10-18 01:04:00+00:00
" If you imagine a forest fire: When it first starts, it’s not very hot around it. You can approach to within a few feet of it, and you won’t feel much heat. But as it gets larger, the heat generated by the fire heats up the air around it, and so it spreads more easily."

Wow, genius. Who would have thought popularity spreads like fire because things get "hotter". This required a model?
by Nevermark | 2025-10-18 01:04:24+00:00
> I could be wrong but I think there is a broad consensus that reflection is a Bad Idea.

Reflection may be bad in practice for other reasons/conditions, but the lack of simple/minimal/regular primitive conventions in many languages, makes reflection a basket of baddies.

The code blocks of Rye seem comparable to closures, which is a sensible thing to have. Once all code blocks are closures, there are fewer concepts to wrangle, and functional control makes excellent sense.
by estimator7292 | 2025-10-18 01:05:10+00:00
Putting the burden on site operators to geoblock UK users is not only placing an incredible burden on individual operators, it doesn't even work.

It is not the responsibility of foreign companies to enforce or even acknowledged the UK's laws. If the UK has a problem, they have tools to solve it on their own soil. If they want to enforce their laws they need to pay for it.

The UK is trying to bully and scare foreign website operators regardless of scale or type of business into paying to enforce UK laws outside of the UK.

If they want a website blocked, the only way to make that work is to block it and pay for it themselves.