MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Y_Y | 2025-10-07 14:19:14+00:00
But that's a different meaning of "need" to what's normally used. Gifted kids don't need special attention to get through school and life the same way the intellectually impaired do. It's much better in the sense, that if they will survive and probably not even cause a fuss if you treat them like the lowest common denominator. It's worse in the sense that you're unlikely to get a strong signal, but without special treatment they'll perform much worse than their potential (personal and economic) and are likely to end up with a psychological disorder. But that's not as bad as people who'll get in trouble with medical or legal issues, so it's not top of mind for legislators, educators , and caregivers. (References available on request)
by SketchySeaBeast | 2025-10-07 14:19:49+00:00
> It sucks if you bisect and find the change happened in some enormous incohesive commit.

But why are any PRs like this? Each PR should represent an atomic action against the codebase - implementing feature 1234, fixing bug 4567. The project's changelog should only be updated at the end of each PR. The fact that I went down the wrong path three times doesn't need to be documented.
by cs702 | 2025-10-07 14:19:54+00:00
Key quote:

> The hundreds of billions of dollars companies are investing in AI now account for an astonishing 40 per cent share of US GDP growth this year.

In other words, investment in AI is a massive private-sector stimulus program, powering economic growth.

Questions for which no one knows the answer include:

* Will these AI investments earn a positive rate of return in the aggregate?

* Without these investments on AI and their second-order economic effects, would the US economy be growing?

* Are the higher-order effects of AI investments temporary, or can they become self-sustaining (for example, via creation of new jobs and industries)?
by ssl-3 | 2025-10-07 14:20:03+00:00
Various ESP dev boards, Arduino, Pi Pico -- any of these are good places to get started from on the road towards doing useful things with microcontrollers, I think.

Arduino is just a familiar name with a long (~20 year!) history. There's a plethora of pre-existing projects that a person with no prior programming or electronics experience can implement easily to get their feet wet.

Some manner of ESP32 (or STM or MSP or RP2...) may be a good choice for a project for someone with some experience, but if you put a reasonably-motivated person in a room with a computer and an Arduino starter kit then they'll successfully be building simple things in no time.

It remains a friendly place to start doing stuff, and that was always the primary intent.
by s1mplicissimus | 2025-10-07 14:20:14+00:00
I've been telling people to add white/hidden prompt injections into their CVs since GPT4 came out and it was clear headhunters were using it to avoid doing the actual work of reviewing applications.

Ethically I don't see anything wrong with using the recruiters automation in your own interest. It used to be "use the correct terminology" to get the invite, now it's "use the correct prompt injection".
by bix6 | 2025-10-07 14:21:21+00:00
I have the pleasure of working with some small scale farmers and they are the truth.

We are destroying our soil health for short term profit. We need more regenerative farming but PE doesn’t like the margin on that.

Yvon Chounaird advocates for bringing small scale farming back. It’s good honest work that could help with our unemployment and purpose issues while restoring planetary health.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-10-07 14:21:37+00:00
The gap between Google’s and Apple’s SoCs is insane. Current Pixels bench at around a third of what current iPhones do.

Not that performance matters to all users, but with how much Pixels cost you have to ask yourself what it is you’re paying for. Even if you don’t care for Apple, for a little more you can get a competitor for a Snapdragon.
by rich_sasha | 2025-10-07 14:21:43+00:00
Something like 70-80%+ of US stock market ownership is institutional, which ultimately means overwhelmingly pension and insurance funds. I'd imagine much of the rest is individual investors' pension savings.

Bubbles can grow fine so long as no one wants their money back. But eventually they will, and then valuations will be real. When all these boomers draw their savings and buy themselves annuities, what's going to happen?

One pet theory of mine is that the US market goes up so much because of it's population growth. DM in Europe for example don't see this net inflow of people saving for retirement, instead the pressure is rather pensioners pulling money out.

Eventually though even the US stock market will have a reality check, and who knows what happens then.
by Simulacra | 2025-10-07 14:22:04+00:00
Good, clean, healthy food cost a lot of money. It cost more to buy a container of spinach, than it does to make cheeseburger macaroni. It cost more to buy products like Amy's, which supposedly have less highly processed ingredients, than it is to buy a can of Progresso. You're not wrong, but the healthy food companies are maximizing their profit, and riding on the healthy label and should be seen as contributing to the problem. This is putting healthier foods beyond the reach of the average person. Whole Foods is a classic example.
by joshstrange | 2025-10-07 14:22:12+00:00
I'm not sure if it's related but recently (last 2 years-ish?) I've noticed some issue with watching files on macOS. I edit a file but the dev server doesn't pick it up for way longer than it should. It's sometimes faster for me to restart the dev server than wait for it to notice the files changed.

I have not dug deeper into this aside from raising my open file limits and closing some apps I thought might be the culprit (but ended up not being the cause).

It's annoying because it's not consistent. The dev server will work just fine for a while then randomly slow down. It sucks because sometimes I spend a decent amount of time trying to figure out why my change/fix/etc isn't working only to realize I haven't been testing updated code (I made a code change and thought it hot-reloaded but it didn't).
by SigmundurM | 2025-10-07 14:22:23+00:00
The IndieWeb people use Microformats[1] extensively for things like Webmention[2] and such. Seems quite neat, though maybe I'd prefer the tags to be data attributes instead of classes.

[1]: https://indieweb.org/microformats

[2]: https://indieweb.org/Webmention
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-10-07 14:23:13+00:00
Taking finasteride means higher œstrogen levels, and reduced androgenic activity. There are subtle differences between the effect of testosterone and DHT (it's not just that DHT is a more potent androgen), but I wouldn't expect the effects of higher testosterone to counteract the effect of significantly-reduced DHT. Of course, the effects aren't too significant for most adult cis men, other than reduced hair loss.

I'm bringing up trans HRT in the 1930s (got the decade wrong, sorry!) because the Nobel Prize for the synthesis of testosterone was awarded in 1939. That discovery was made at the start of our understanding of what happens when you muck around with sex steroids: "what effect does this have on mental health?" has always been a question that people have considered, and I was frankly shocked by the article's claim that it hadn't been properly considered in the US.

Of course, others have pointed out that this article is more of a hit piece than a scientific work, so it appears my surprise was justified.
by flatline | 2025-10-07 14:23:19+00:00
The narrative around AI taking all the jobs, causing layoffs, etc. is certainly about power. The stock prices are about sentiment. When that sentiment evaporates because AI cannot in fact replace the workforce, the stock prices will fall, maybe precipitously. Ironically, if AI fulfills its promise, I suspect the same will happen due to a lack of confidence in the consumer economy from mass unemployment.

This bubble will pop either way, but it could continue like this for years.
by xyzzy_plugh | 2025-10-07 14:23:54+00:00
> The problem is that anything that's _apparent_ and not _enforced_ will be messed up over time

We already have the tools to enforce these things in many mainstream languages.

Breaking things apart into crates/modules certainly makes sense sometimes, but other times it does not? If you have a monorepo, do you really need multiple modules? And if you don't, does that mean your architecture is difficult to understand? I don't think that tracks at all, so I don't really agree with where you're headed.

> But then we all know that there are some huge repos out there that are just "one module" and you can't make anything out of their internal structure.

There's always some shitty code out there, sure. But I don't like the suggestion that "one module" can't be coherent. It's orthagonal to the architecture. Not everything needs to be made generic and reusable.

> And the whole point of the article is to say that import statements do actually _not_ solve this issue, because import statements are at the file level, not at the module level (whatever module means in your mind).

This is not true for Go, for example. Import statements absolutely do solve this problem in Go. I rarely need to ever look at module files which are in some ways a byproduct of the import statements.
by zozbot234 | 2025-10-07 14:24:14+00:00
> People always mention RDF when the semantic web comes up.

There's nothing wrong with RDF itself, the modern plain-text and JSON serializations are very simple and elegant. Even things like OWL are being reworked now with efforts like SHACL and ShEx (see e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.06096 for a description of how these relate to the more logical/formal, OWL-centered point of view).
by joshstrange | 2025-10-07 14:24:48+00:00
APFS snapshots for Time Machine suck so much. They take up a ton of disk space and TM's GUI is horrible, it will just sit there syncing for forever with nonsensical time estimates. Then, once it finishes syncing, it will _eventually_ clean up those old snapshots. I've considered dropping TM completely because of this and sticking with just Backblaze and CarbonCopyCloner instead.

If I exclude my git directories (one of the most important things on my computer) then I really don't see the point of using TM at all with the other backups I do regularly.
by kube-system | 2025-10-07 14:24:53+00:00
If you ever dealt with any projects at bloated Fortune 500s, it's not really that hard to believe.

Take five people at $200 an hour and drag them into three meetings. There's 3000 bucks right there.

Or, take one consultant and buy them the last minute plane ticket, to write 10 lines of code, at a customer who insists that everything be done on-site.

There's a whole lot of ways that a bloated company can blow $3000 really quickly.
by carefulfungi | 2025-10-07 14:24:53+00:00
Trump's stated goal is to deport 4M people (by deporting 3k people per day). They count border crossing apprehensions in this number, so this isn't 4M current residents. The government currently claims [1] 9,740 border crossing "encounters" per month. I'm unsure if it is correct to count these as deportations - but assuming so - then these account for ~480,000 of the 4M target. Leaving ~3.5M current residents to be deported.

Or roughly 1% of the current US population.

https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-enc...
by js2 | 2025-10-07 14:25:10+00:00
First two paragraphs to help folks decide whether this is worth their time:

If you haven’t already heard of Friend, the company that makes a $129 wearable AI companion—a plastic disk, containing a microphone, on a necklace—you probably also have not seen Friend’s recent ad campaign. Late this past summer, Friend paid $1 million to plaster more than 10,000 white posters throughout the New York City subway system with messages such as i’ll binge the entire series with you.

People hate these billboards. Revile them, even. Across the city, the ads are covered in graffiti criticizing the pendant (it doesn’t have eyes, bruh; cringe) as well as the idea of AI altogether (ai wouldn’t care if you lived or died); some vandals invite you to befriend a senior citizen instead of a chatbot, or volunteer with a community garden—you will meet cool people! Many of the ads have been ripped and torn. The backlash has grabbed far more attention than the product itself, so I wondered: How does Avi Schiffmann, the 22-year-old founder and CEO of Friend, feel about being the most despised tech founder in America’s largest city?
by madamelic | 2025-10-07 14:25:36+00:00
Additionally, to my knowledge, China is also doing significantly better on energy production and clean energy at that versus the US.

In the US, we are terrified of nuclear and the administration is trying to make economically worse energy production the norm because they are stuck in the past.

If there is an AI race, I have zero doubt that China WILL win simply because of energy production and the government's willingness to pour money in. It's a foregone conclusion at this point in my opinion because the time to build new energy sources was yesterday. The only way I see China losing is: major debt crisis or getting into a war.

There is no chance, in my opinion, that the US federal government will get off their butts suddenly to fund AI or infrastructure because they are so busy worrying about less than 1% of the population who don't affect them but that they find 'icky'.

Woke isn't destroying the US, it's the people who are busy ' "judging their neighbors' porches" meanwhile the neighborhood is burning down.
by brendoncarroll | 2025-10-07 14:25:40+00:00
The same API part isn't surprising, content addressed stores are the most natural way to accept encrypted data.

The public storage networks are targeting a different use case than Blobcache though, which I think of as a private or web-of-trust storage network. To use a cryptocurrency backed storage solution, one must manage accounts, or a wallet of transaction outputs, connect to unknown parties on the internet, and pay for the increased redundancy. There's also legal risk, depending on the jurisdiction, when allowing untrusted parties to store arbitrary information on one's devices.

I don't want to consult the global economy in order to make use of my extra hard drives, which would otherwise be idle.
by sequoia | 2025-10-07 14:26:03+00:00
How does he fit all his camping stuff in his one bag? This was not explained. He "tosses it in his bag" for outdoor trips but tossed from where? I thought everything he owned was already in his bag.

How does he "not buy stuff frequently" if he discards & buys new swim suits (and presumably other stuff) as needed?

Sounds like this guy has a pretty cool & minimal lifestyle but I suspect there's some exaggeration and elision going on in this post.
by im3w1l | 2025-10-07 14:26:21+00:00
Some emacs-fans really like emacs and will invent any justification for its shortcomings. You are 100% right it has a subpar debugging experience. There were better debuggers 20 years ago than emacs has now.

Stallman himself wrote it so it lies at the intersection of that camp and the lisp cultists (though Ig they are mostly extinct post-LLM), but they used to have a really strong belief that lisp was the path to AI because of it's homoiconicity.

What should be said in it's favor is that due to its architecture it is crazy extensible and hackable. And the fact that the line between configuration and code is very blurry really encourages you to dive into that.

The choice of lisp also helps ensure user freedom as it's a quite simple language - ensuring that compilers and interpreters are a commodity. You don't like one, pick another. Contrast that with say Rust where if you don't like the official Rust you are shit out of luck. It's also a rolling release deal so you can't even easily stay on an old version.
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-07 14:27:09+00:00
10k? Sorry, pal! We're in QualcommLand, and you need to be at least 100k units tall to ride this ride!

But if you are a small developer, there are options for you! Have you tried to: eat shit? And die? So that you don't insult our PRECIOUS FUCKING TIME by IMPLYING that a MERE 10K would be ENOUGH for THE GREAT QUALCOMM to ACTUALLY CARE?

The optimist in me wants to believe that this acquisition is a sign of Qualcomm actually trying to be better than that. But realistically? Yeah no. It's Qualcomm. They wouldn't have let it get this bad if they ever cared.
by dspillett | 2025-10-07 14:27:50+00:00
That might not be a filesystem issue. If NPM pulling a complex dependency tree down spawns a lot of sub-processes then it'll hit the same problem many build operations have when transplanted from Unix-a-likes to Windows (via cygwin, for instance): building up and tearing down processes is relatively expensive under Windows. Under many Unix-a-like systems forking a process is generally not much more expensive than starting a new thread, which is why multi-process solutions are more popular away from Windows (if the cost of using processes over threads is low, then it is worth paying it to get the reduced complexity of not needing to worry about thread safety).

Assuming you are using WSL2 (which is essentially Linux in a VM, unlike WSL1 which was a compatibility layer with processes running more directly on Windows) you will see this difference (any performance cost imposed by the VM will be small compared to the difference in process spin-up costs).

I don't think that this will apply to git, though.
by fireflash38 | 2025-10-07 14:28:02+00:00
It makes me wish for legislation to force companies to either

1. Provide security LTS for critical software as-purchased. If you bought Win 7, you get it. No forced upgrades.

Or

2. Force release of source code if not providing LTS. You don't want to support it fine. But don't block people from what they bought.

Pipe dream and wildly expensive to corps but hey they don't give a shit about us anyway.
by refulgentis | 2025-10-07 14:29:16+00:00
I'm curious:

Lets take that given, i.e. massive IO works reliably only when a single process has access.

How will SQLite handle concurrent access by multiple processes when git/npm/whoever switches over to it?

(A: It doesn't, even in a single process, you need to obtain a global lock to write while all readers pause.)
by more_corn | 2025-10-07 14:29:28+00:00
Eric Schmidt didn’t present as a creepy weirdo. He also didn’t make the company a reflection of himself. That kept the glasshole backlash compartmentalized.

Strange things happen when a leader merges the company brand and with his personal brand. It can strengthen the company brand (in the case of a plucky can-do technologist) but the company brand starts to get colored by the personality of the person (in the case of a person who goes off the deep end and starts saying weird and inflammatory stuff).
by andsoitis | 2025-10-07 14:29:28+00:00
The average person absolutely can avail themselves to healthier options than they currently consume. Blaming the environment and forgetting that people have agency is very cynical.

If you’ve availed yourself to educating yourself about nutrition AND you have adjusted your priorities so that healthier food takes the place of other expenditures and you still can’t afford healthy options, then let’s talk. If you buy soda instead of drinking water that comes free from a tap and you’re complaining about lack of healthy food accessibility, you’re not taking sufficient responsibility to improve your and your family’s health.
by hydrogen7800 | 2025-10-07 14:29:34+00:00
I think until now, the only real thing preserving these consumer protections (and civil rights, while we're at it) was simply the practical difficulty of collecting and compiling that information. Now it's trivial and effortless to collect this information. The old laws still apply, but now the rubber meets the road in actually having them enforced.

>"thing but on computer"

From a tech layperson, all the tech "innovation" I'm seeing seems to just be old stuff but "online" and therefore not subject to the "old rules".
by marcosdumay | 2025-10-07 14:29:52+00:00
You can always default to the user mode, and make a switcher that fetches another CSS file.

That way you will have a flash, but if the user set dark mode on their browser/DE, they'll flash in dark, not light.

Or, alternatively, you can always make it flash in dark. I never heard about anybody being annoyed by a dark flash.
by dahart | 2025-10-07 14:30:43+00:00
Personally I feel like keeping a list of annoying ad brands and avoiding them would take up too much of my mental space, and it would lead me occasionally to bad purchasing decisions. Advertising is what it is, sometimes manipulative and sometimes very annoying, but basically all companies have to do it and they tend to do what works and behave similarly. As long as I have a choice, I’ll avoid advertising in general, regardless of whether it’s annoying.

There is evidence that louder ads work: https://news.nd.edu/news/loud-and-clear-high-energy-ads-keep...

This feel unsurprising to me given the long known fact that people tend to rate audio quality based on volume. (It’s what the stereo sales scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High was based on.)
by gooob | 2025-10-07 14:30:53+00:00
the idea is to use AI to build super productive farms and greenhouses, improve the capability to do that in urban areas, automated and super efficient transportation. but it's not just AI doing all that, it's someone who wants to start a business using AI himself to figure out how to best start up a greenhouse in his community and setup the tech infra needed including the API for people to be able to view available produce, estimates on availability, initiate trades, etc. (this greenhouse thing is just one example).

another example could be someone wants to build an ecosystem monitoring station to monitor the nearby ravine (pollution levels with rainfall and other events etc.) and air quality over time. this is just a small datapoint but if people all over the place build their own ecosystem/weather monitoring things using basic electronics ordered from the internet and all plug them in to a standard observability software system then that could provide some pretty awesome outcomes including figuring the best way to clean polluted water (because some of the places will surely have implemented varying methods of sanitizing their own water).
by tomrod | 2025-10-07 14:30:55+00:00
Then it isn't the economy, since the economy is how people allocate scarce resources -- that is and always will be normalizable by the time a person has in a day. Abstract AI utilization of data centers don't impact my garden directly, so at least in partial equilibria I can ignore what David Brin in Existence calls the Message Flood, or otherwise known as the Fermi-Paradox Arms Race.

In Existence, Brin explores a speculative solution to the Fermi Paradox — the question of why we see no signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. The novel suggests that advanced civilizations create memetic or AI-based “message entities” — self-replicating digital ambassadors designed to spread across the galaxy to preserve their creators’ legacy or recruit new species.

This notion applies to other activities -- but basically, when a society puts all its resources to something other than its preservation then it expires in short order.
by myrmidon | 2025-10-07 14:31:17+00:00
I think it is incorrect to blame this on a currently corrupt president.

Counter-hypothesis: This is a systemic issue. Decisionmakers and shareholders that cause harm face very little consequences if their behavior does not violate the letter of the law.

Compare the leaded gas debacle: US lead industry suppressed knowledge about harmful effects, and even directly targeted researchers with smear-campaigns and lawfare for decades, but faced no real legal consequences once everything came to light.