MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by maj0rhn | 2025-10-08 15:46:19+00:00
You're missing a key fact, which others have noted, but I would phrase it differently.

Calcium is the end-stage of atherosclerosis. In other words, only advanced atherosclerosis has calcium. The electron beam CT test can, therefore, read zero in people with extensive atherosclerosis, if it is still in the earlier stages. As others note, even early atherosclerosis is bad.

That is why insurance doesn't cover electron beam CT -- it's a crappy test. It provides no reassurance if it's negative, and on a population scale the LDL is far more cost effective and convenient to identify people who need statins.

You might look back at studies from the early statin days, like AFCAPS/TexCAPS, which looked at healthy people like you, whose only risk factor was high cholesterol. The ones who got even the primitive statins of the day lowered their risk of a first coronary event by 37%. That doesn't even tell the whole story, because atherosclerosis can affect any artery in the body. You want your kidneys, eyes, ears, brain, legs, and penis (when present) to work well to the end of your days. Atherosclerosis is a terrible disease.
by jzb | 2025-10-08 15:46:20+00:00
I'm not sure Americans wanted to move for jobs so much as we were resigned to the idea. If you wanted to work in specific industries, you had to go where those jobs were -- which is still true if your job depends on being in a specific location, but less true for a great many jobs that are knowledge work that can be done from anywhere.

I had a good friend in college who never utilized her degree because she was not willing to move out of St. Louis. She wanted to be close to her family more than she wanted to get a job that made use of her degree. Today, she might've been able to find a job that better used her skills and still got to be around for her niece to grow up.

The choice of "family or job" sucks. It's always sucked. (Well, unless you're looking to get away from your family...) Now people have more options.
by thegrim33 | 2025-10-08 15:46:48+00:00
Whilst I really dislike the Qt licensing model, and it often stops me from using Qt, if the "personal / small projects" aren't commercial you can do whatever you want with Qt, and if they are commercial you can still use the LGPL license. In my understanding, you only have to pay for Qt if you have a commercial project and you don't want to use the LGPL license.
by phoenix3200 | 2025-10-08 15:47:00+00:00
Six years ago my box shit the fan. Synology could have recovered it for me, but they insisted I "upgraded" to their newest box. That was when I realized that I would never buy from them again. Thank goodness their hybrid raid is at least MDRAID.

https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/d3cmq2/ds1512_tha...

Honestly, old server equipment is more powerful than most of these RAID boxes. The only caveat there is that old server equipment is often not quiet, and rather power hungry (200W at idle with no power save mode).
by Neywiny | 2025-10-08 15:47:15+00:00
I'm not sure I understand why this is about agents. This feels more like contracting than SaaS. If I contract a company to build a house and it's upside down, I don't care if it was a robot that made the call, it's that company's fault not mine. I often write electronic hardware test automation code and my goodness if my code sets the power supply to 5000V instead of 5.000V (made up example), that's my fault. It's not the code's fault or the power supply's fault.

So, why would you use a SaaS contract for an agent in the first place? It should be like a subcontractor. I pay you to send 10k emails a day to all my clients. If you use an agent and it messes up, that's on you. If you use an agent and it saves you time, you get the reward.
by everybodyknows | 2025-10-08 15:47:19+00:00
> I want the UI to remain stable,

Certainly, though with one exception: Contextual help for controls, especially for infrequent actions like configuration, which to an ordinary user feels new every time.

Specifically, one or more of:

- Circled "i" links

- Hover-help

- Conflicting option selections to grey out, rather than disappear
by opello | 2025-10-08 15:47:45+00:00
> I didn't "restate the premise", I said it was wrong, and added information.

You originally wrote:

> Btw, the upside-down-rook trick is illegal in serious play.

You followed up to my asking for an explanation why with:

> As stated it's wrong

It seems like a very low effort restatement to say "illegal" and then "wrong." Your additional details were about the FIDE rules, which do not seem to forbid using an inverted rook as a proxy for a promoted queen. If they do, please tell me which rule[1]. The pivot from "illegal" to "wrong" adds a moral aspect to the evaluation which seems bizarre.

> I tried to be helpful and I got an aggressively hostile response.

I'm sorry if my spinning of a hypothetical yarn about the argument being one of identity of the piece in question came across as "aggressively hostile." It was not my intention in the least.

> And I see that the same happened to others here.

I grant you the other thread got more antagonistic and that's disappointing. I will defend that I think that if you want to claim the rules forbid this act, you should be able to cite a rule, and not a guideline about general consensus. The former is clear, the latter is something more akin to "tradition."

I'm also, across both of these descendant threads, annoyed with responses not readily engaging with my legitimate inquiry about why forbidding the use of the inverted rook as a promoted queen proxy may be the case. It's a neat quirk or curiosity to me. And I'm barely a casual player. It seems like an elegant solution to piece availability and actually preserves game pace -- those are aspects of the elegance that seem obvious to me.

[1] https://www.fide.com/FIDE/handbook/LawsOfChess.pdf
by borroka | 2025-10-08 15:47:54+00:00
I was laid off, and only a couple of my former colleagues reached out to me. People I had talked to for years and helped, some significantly, didn't even send me a message. Consider that at one point, I had put myself out there to ask for more promotions and higher compensation for my colleagues.

I didn't feel particularly offended, but in my next job, I will definitely not help my colleagues as much and will think about myself 99% of the time. It's disappointing to see grown adults who are so fearful, ungrateful, and reveal themselves to be rather miserable people, but that's the way the world works.
by dreamcompiler | 2025-10-08 15:48:02+00:00
Texas' grid was very reliable when I was growing up there. Since deregulation however, it's no longer reliable. It used to be mandated that grid facilities were overbuilt to have some headroom for emergencies. That's no longer true. Now, Texas utilities only maintain the minimum infrastructure needed for normal operations and they have no cushion if something goes wrong. Any CEO of a Texas utility that spends money building overcapacity gets fired by Wall Street.

This was supposed to change after the 2021 crisis, but I haven't seen much evidence that it has.
by egonschiele | 2025-10-08 15:48:12+00:00
Everyone is different! I personally find examples and visuals a very important part of teaching.

> But in recent years

Just to expand on this a bit: I have been teaching this way since at least 2016, when I published a book on algorithms called Grokking Algorithms. It is an illustrated guide to algorithms. If you didn't like this post, I imagine you won't like the book either :)

Here is an interview I did with Corey Quinn where I talk more about my teaching philosophy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZFvTTgR-V4
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-10-08 15:48:13+00:00
> we simply are far to the left on the laffer curve, raising taxes will raise revenue

I don't believe this, actually. I think that we will raise more revenue, yes, by squeezing more from the Fortune 500; but you will absolutely crush small business and consultancy work further. It's kind of like how an 80% tax rate on everyone making over $100K would do a fantastic job of raising revenue, but it's fundamentally stupid and would kill all future golden geese.

(On that note, I see this comment a lot about how we had huge tax rates, 91% in the 1950s; but this is misleading. The effective tax rate for those earners was only 41%, due to the sheer number of exemptions, according to modern analysis. We have never had an actual effective 91% tax rate, or anywhere close to it. Those rates were theater, never reality.)
by proxysna | 2025-10-08 15:48:42+00:00
People lived in arid places for as long we have existed. Civilizations rose and fell in deserts. Depicting these places as barren lifeless voids is a relatively new thing usually used to minimize the impact of whatever the current power is doing there (i.e. extraction, murder, exploitation). There is a good book about that "Deserts are not empty".
by samiv | 2025-10-08 15:48:49+00:00
I'd say the fear is justified. The economy should serve the people and the citizens not the other way around. Yet, our economies are increasingly the other way around, people have to fit into to the shape of the economy.

It's not hard to see a future where the workers displaced by AI get pushed to the sidelines and fringes of the society while the capital holders hoard more wealth and get the benefits of the "value" created.

We already have half the population on this planet living in slums without access to economic means and in the "developed" countries larger and larger group of people are barely hanging on either already displaced and unemployed or working jobs below living wages.

Frankly, It'd stupid not to be concerned.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-08 15:49:26+00:00
> Do you think more employee ownership and control, a "seat at the table," would've prevented technically competent leadership from testing customer hostile business decisions?

The only peers at the company who were enthusiastic about the decision were the ones who were buying more company stock and wanted it to go up. They thought that anything that increased the bottom line would increase the stock price, and therefore they were on board.

So, no, I don't think increased employee ownership solves anything.
by lossolo | 2025-10-08 15:49:44+00:00
Generally, I agree, but it also depends on perspective. Intelligence exists on many levels and manifests differently across species. From a monkey's standpoint, if they were capable of such reflection they might perceive themselves as the most capable creatures in their environment. Yet, humans possess cognitive abilities that go far beyond that, abstract reasoning, cumulative culture, large scale cooperation etc

A chimpanzee can use tools and solve problems, but it will never construct a factory, design an iPhone, or build even a simple wooden house. Humans can, because our intelligence operates at a qualitatively different level.

As humans, we can easily visualize and reason about 2D and 3D spaces, it's natural because our sensory systems evolved to navigate a 3D world. But can we truly conceive of a million dimensions, let alone visualize them? We can describe them mathematically, but not intuitively grasp them. Our brains are not built for that kind of complexity.

Now imagine a form of intelligence that can directly perceive and reason about such high dimensional structures. Entirely new kinds of understanding and capabilities might emerge. If a being could fully comprehend the underlying rules of the universe, it might not need to perform physical experiments at all, it could simply simulate outcomes internally.

Of course that's speculative, but it just illustrates how deeply intelligence is shaped and limited by its biological foundation.
by mgh2 | 2025-10-08 15:49:50+00:00
Title should have been more specific: "ChatGPT loses half of its 20M paid subscribers since April"

Although the numbers don't make sense, they announced 3M in June: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/04/openai-chatgpt-enterprise-ai...

February: 2M, April: 20M, June: 3M, October: 10M
by skmurphy | 2025-10-08 15:49:58+00:00
Key take-aways

"Regardless of technological innovations, the raw materials in question [wood, coal, oil] have never yet been obsolete. Exceptions to this rule are exceedingly rare. Whale oil offers a unique example of the disappearance of an energy source. Or I could mention sheep’s wool, whose use has declined by one-third since the 1950s, replaced by synthetic fibres. Or that of asbestos, now that it’s banned."

Q: Why has the history of energy been misrepresented like this?

J.-B. F.: The reason is simple: historians tend to look at energy from an economic viewpoint, seeking to understand the roots of industrialisation and growth. To that end, they convert those tonnes of wood, coal and petroleum into energy units, and examine the evolution of the mix in relative terms. So in the industrialised countries in 1900, the energy contribution of wood, for example, did indeed become negligible compared with that of coal.

Yet in terms of trees, biodiversity and climate, it’s absolute values that count, and the number of trees felled has never stopped increasing. Moreover, historians have not studied the interrelationships between energy sources – for example, all the wood needed to mine coal or all the coal necessary to extract and use petroleum.

Q: What solutions do you propose?

J.-B. F.: This is the key question that my book does not answer at all. What climate policy should we pursue once we realise that carbon neutrality is largely an illusion, and that we can slow down but probably not stop climate change?
by yesfitz | 2025-10-08 15:50:28+00:00
This is addressed in the post:

> "Usually, 'be more empathetic' was a veiled request for me to modify my behavior or thinking towards someone (e.g. they thought I was rude to someone and wanted me to apologize and change my behavior)."

And you actually illustrate the entire point of the post.

Imagine that someone's upset with you and tells you to be more "gropulent". Many people have said this to you, but gropulence doesn't come naturally to you, and the term is bandied about in a wide variety of situations, making it hard to pick up context clues. There are people who call themselves "gropules" who can't explain how they use gropulence to support the claims that they make about others, and they sound an awful lot like psychics, who we all know are frauds.

How would you start learning to be gropulent?

I hope you'd be as curious and thorough as the author of TFA.
by tristor | 2025-10-08 15:50:32+00:00
Every time I've looked at Synology, I've been shocked at how anemic the hardware is for the cost. I've always self-built my own NAS. I've sometimes felt regret when I have run into an issue that required more babysitting than I wanted to do, but when considering alternatives, I've always realized doing it myself was the right choice. I wasn't aware they'd even done this, but the fact they did is just more reason to always build your own NAS.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-10-08 15:51:07+00:00
> "successful" boycotts always have a weird decision afterwards, as you want them to be "rewarded" in reversing course, but still cost them enough to not be worth trying things again next time.

I wouldn't want a company to be "rewarded" for reversing an anti-customer decision, but instead they should be made to realise that their customers goodwill can disappear and be very difficult indeed to be won back.

However, most consumers aren't aware of these kinds of issues/boycotts, so most companies don't get to reap the full impact of shitty decisions.
by Theodores | 2025-10-08 15:51:22+00:00
Approximately half the S&P500 is in the Magnificent Seven. It doesn't matter what they sell, there is just too much money there. Calling this situation an 'AI risk' is disingenuous, or at best blinkered.

Everyone outside of the American empire knows that the gig is up. When Uncle Sam has his money printing press on full blast, the American people don't feel the full effect, but everyone in the global majority, where there are no dollar printing machines, gets to see too many dollars chasing the same goods, a.k.a. inflation.

The day when the American people elect a fiscally prudent government, for Americans to work hard, pay their taxes and get that deficit to a manageable number is never going to happen. But that is not a problem, the situation is out of America's hands now.

It was the 2022 sanctions on Russia that made the BRICS alliance take note. Freezing their foreign reserves was not well received. Hence we now have China trading in their own currency with their trading partners happy with that.

Soon we will have a situation where there is no 'exorbitant privilege' (reserve currency, which can only ever end up with massive deficits), instead the various BRICS currencies will be anchored to valuable commodities such as rare earth metals, gold and everything else that is 'proof of work' and important to the future. So that means no more 'petro-dollar', the store of value won't be hydrocarbons.

This sounds better than going back to a gold standard. As I see it, the problem with the gold standard is that you kind of know already who has all the gold and we don't want them to be the masters of the universe, because it will be the same bankers.

As for an AI 'Hail Mary', I do hope so. The money printed by Uncle Sam to end up in the Magnificent Seven means that it will be relatively easy to write this money off.
by ijk | 2025-10-08 15:52:23+00:00
Not rainforest, but rather savanna [1].

The Arabian desert is technically considered to be part of the Sahara, climate-wise, and participes in the same cycle [2].

This article is about researching evidence for ehat those transitions looked like, focusing on evidence that dates around the end of that particular dry period, pre-Holocene.

> Prior to the onset of the Holocene humid period, little is known about the relatively arid period spanning the end of the Pleistocene and the earliest Holocene in Arabia. An absence of dated archaeological sites has led to a presumed absence of human occupation of the Arabian interior. However, superimpositions in the rock art record appear to show earlier phases of human activity, prior to the arrival of domesticated livestock25.

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

[2]: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/green...
by robertlagrant | 2025-10-08 15:52:39+00:00
> If, on average, players are spending, say, £140 on two full price games (or less) each year

I buy games, but except for I think Call of Duty MW2, I don't think I've ever paid more than £20 for a game. I doubt the average purchase price is £70. Maybe if you limit to people who buy COD and Fifa (or Madden) every year?
by EnderWT | 2025-10-08 15:53:15+00:00
From: https://www.txse.com/trading-membership

> TXSE’s primary matching engine is located in Equinix NY6 in Secaucus, NJ, with latency equalization across NY4, NY5, and NY6. Customers outside these buildings will experience additional latency. The disaster recovery (DR) matching engine is hosted in Equinix DA11 in Dallas, TX.

> Customers may connect to DR either directly to DA11 or through TXSE infrastructure at 350 E. Cermak in Chicago. Cermak connections will have traffic backhauled to DA11 over redundant TXSE circuits. Backhaul from Cermak to the production data center is not available.
by kypro | 2025-10-08 15:53:46+00:00
This isn't bad advise if the wording wasn't so robotic.

You can empathise with someone for being upset without contributing to further the discussion. In situations like this I normally redirect... So if I received a message like, "I'm really mad at X-Corp and Mr Bossman, I can't believe they got rid of Joe!", I'd probably reply, "it's sad, I hope he's doing alright".

As long as you're not saying "yeah, f** Bossman!" you're probably fine.

That's obviously assuming you want to avoid trashing your employer... I find these events are often times for reflection. It's okay to be critical if you feel strongly, but you should do that in a professional and productive way. But if something happens which you strongly disagree with then you have a responsibility to do what you think is right, sometimes at personal cost.
by mallowdram | 2025-10-08 15:54:28+00:00
I would study what you're apparently intent on ignoring: that kids and screens do not mix well and reduces their ability to engage with the more complex aspects of reality. Do you want automatons or fundamentally happy beings?

“A growing body of evidence has found that children’s brains can structurally and functionally change due to prolonged media multitasking, such as diminished gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, where attentional control and complex decision making abilities reside, among other really important skills, like the development of empathy and understanding nonverbal social communication,”

There are over 300 studies detailing how early screen use damages children's brains and impairs their ability to reason and relate to others. How engineers ignore this is incredible.

https://www.childrenandscreens.org/learn-explore/research/?t...
by T3OU-736 | 2025-10-08 15:54:41+00:00
(Not disagreeing that this is a dupe), but this is The Verge's coverage of Lumafield's findings.

Not sure if there is any additional value in the re-coverage, though it does feel like the message is important enough to be spread, and I suspect there is more readers of The Verge than the original source.
by arnon | 2025-10-08 15:55:38+00:00
If I am a company that builds agents, and I sell it to someone. Then, that someone loses money because this agent did something it wasn't supposed to: who's responsible?

Me as the person who sold it? OpenAI who I use below? Anthropic who performs some of the work too? My customer responsible themselves?

These are questions that classic contracts don't usually cover because things tend to be more deterministic with static code.
by pants2 | 2025-10-08 15:55:46+00:00
One interesting approach to this is the gas auction system in DeFi where (on Ethereum) traders bid to have their trades included first in a block, and that additional payment is burned / accretive to ETH holders. Though that turns "fastest connection" into "highest bidder" advantage.

Another approach that Aztec and some others are taking is to shield all transactions with zkSNARKs such that the intent of a transaction isn't known until it's completed. Combined with deterministic block times you could force random ordering of transactions in batches, effectively mitigating the fastest connection OR highest bidder advantage.
by gosub100 | 2025-10-08 15:55:48+00:00
Your Toyota analogy doesn't hold up. If a customer puts SMR into their NAS, they are absolutely going to call Synology and complain. And they are going to have to re-explain this over and over because most people don't understand nascent HDD writing modes the way they do a vehicle tire. Even then, and appropriate analogy would be a tire that is cheap and new but refuses to spin above 25mph vehicle speed.
by bachmeier | 2025-10-08 15:56:06+00:00
As is this:

> Don’t feel like you have continue the conversation if they respond. You can if you want, but don’t feel obligated.

You: Sorry you got laid off. I'll miss chatting about your family.

Them: I understand why they did it, but this is tough. I've got a kid in college and another graduating high school this year. Hopefully I'll be able to find something in a few months. Know of anyone that's hiring?

You: <no response>