MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by griffzhowl | 2025-11-09 18:20:50+00:00
Usually the chapter 0 is preliminary or prerequisite material. It makes sense in an obvious and intuitive way if you want an ordinal "before the first", even if that sense isn't a rigorous mathematical one (although I think there's no problem with it).

I guess the practice was influenced by computer science - I don't know of an example that precedes it, but one fairly early one I've found is Bishop and Goldberg's Tensor Analysis on Manifolds from 1968, with a chapter 0 on set theory and topology. Back then the authors felt the need to justify their numbering in the preface:

"The initial chapter has been numbered 0 because it logically precedes the main topics"

Quite straightforward.

There's also the "zeroth law of thermodynamics", which was explicitly identified long after the first, second, and third laws, but was felt more primary or basic, hence the need for an "ordinal before the first"
by lateforwork | 2025-11-09 18:20:52+00:00
Memory loss and confusion have been reported with statin use. The FDA makes note of this here:

https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-and-availability/fda-d...

FDA requires statins to have warnings about potential memory issues.

There are risks associated with extremely low cholesterol: https://www.webmd.com/cholesterol-management/cholesterol-too...

The human body creates cholesterol because it is essential for several vital biological functions. Cholesterol is a key structural component of cell membranes, providing rigidity and fluidity necessary for cellular function.
by lrvick | 2025-11-09 18:21:31+00:00
> Somewhat privacy. When you take cash out of an ATM, surely the serial numbers will be recorded as being dispensed to you.

For large bills that is true to some extent, but having worked closely with secret service in the past at multiple points, they have confirmed my suspicion that $20s and below are virtually impossible to track and they do not bother unless they are specifically giving you marked bills because you are already suspected of a crime.

Also avoiding tracking by a governments and tracking by surveillance capitalism are very different threat models.

Getting down to 0 tracking is of course impossible, but the less data we leak the less clear of a picture third parties get on how to predict and manipulate our behavior. Why help them?
by jll29 | 2025-11-09 18:21:32+00:00
I had a long debate whether a graphical programming environment like Scratch was better than typing out a classical language such as Python, my friends sided with Scratch but I ended up teaching (a bunch of 11-year-olds in a school) Python using the pyturtle library for simple graphics.

The advantage of Python includes being a "real" language - you can literally make money with what you learn. Also, the program as textual artifact means in can be read out and discussed.
by zzzeek | 2025-11-09 18:21:35+00:00
yeah I read all that and it's why i did "diet" (already exercised) first.

still doesnt explain what my cardiologist was talking about, though. he's not the first dr. to tell me that "diet isn't really going to help you much". one dr. said, "if you went totally vegan, maybe it would have a slight effect". so no I didnt go totally vegan.

i think the idea is diet/exercise can make a 20 point dent in your total cholesterol but in practice, not much more than that, if you have total cholesterol over 250 kind of thing.
by lioeters | 2025-11-09 18:21:43+00:00
> ultra-high-level language like C

LOL, thanks for the reminder that most of my career has been spent up in the stratosphere, towers upon towers of abstractions. Started re-learning C during pandemia for embedded systems and microcontrollers, feeling freer as I go deeper down the stack. Got into Lisp interpreter, then compiler and assembler. Had a chance to study eForth in this post, and it can get real close to the metal.

> need ridiculously powerful processors to run a C compiler

That's one thing I noticed while getting familiar with C, that it's a huge effort to write a compiler in itself. Whereas Lisp and Forth even more, creating a variant/subset of the language from scratch is an exercise for every student. These languages are hidden gems, even though they play such important roles in the history of computer science. They are relevant, perhaps now more than ever when people are losing touch with the ground, the basics of code and computation.
by gethly | 2025-11-09 18:22:09+00:00
Well the problem is simply user base. There is no point in being provider if you have 100 users. On the other hand, despite OIDC being standardised, there are way too many ways of implementing it. It is essentially impossible to have a "wildcard" support for OIDC providers. How do I know? I just implemented one myself. For example, providers usually support only one or very few authorisation flows, so in reality you would likely end up with a lot of failed attempts to sign up with some "3rd world" provider.

PS: just take PKCE where the provider has no way of communicating whether it is supported, or required, at all.
by bloppe | 2025-11-09 18:22:22+00:00
I think it's pretty easy to get behind disease elimination in principle. >90% of people would be thrilled to use crispr to edit a congenital disease out of an embryo assuming it were as safe as any reasonable medical procedure can be. I think that ship is getting ready to set sail, probably not in the US at first, but the US will probably catch up eventually.

I think the more controversial conversation around human improvement needs to happen at some point as well. There's a fundamental problem with the modern world. It has changed over the last ~1000 years so much faster than our evolution could possibly keep up with, and we are now woefully unfit for it. There are so many life-threatening diseases (obesity, tribalism, depression) that are due to our behavior. To speed up and guide human evolution to make ourselves more empathetic, more reasonable, better physically suited to lifestyles revolving around thought instead of physical work, would be a huge long-term win for our species.

Of course there are inevitably a bunch of assholes trying to inject racialized agendas into this conversation, and that understandably poisons the very concept of genetic betterment for most people. But those racist tendencies are exactly the kind of outdated human nature I'm talking about eliminating.
by al_borland | 2025-11-09 18:22:22+00:00
In the early days the barrier to comment was higher and there were no obvious points to score from doing so. If a blog had a post you had opinions on, you could write a response on your own blog, or email the author. These days we have sites (like this) where commenting is almost 0 effort, and people can rack up fake internet points for doing it.

The best thing I've seen in recent years in on bearblog, where people will most their email address, so if someone has something to say in reply to a post, they can simply email the author. It's not a public pissing match for who can have the hottest take.

There are a couple things that often resurface in my mind on this topic.

The first is from Teddy Roosevelt's Citizenship in a Republic speech.

> It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

The second is Ego's review in Ratatouille.

> In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.

In modern times with comment sections, influencers, talking heads, and a seemingly endless supply of opinions from those who risk nothing while judging those actually putting something out into the world, we seem to place far too much value in the critics, while dismissing the risk and efforts of those who actually create.

While some criticism is valuable or even necessary, it feels like we've gone overboard as a culture and the balance of creator vs critic is completely backwards. We have millions of people refreshing screens all day long just waiting to call the next new thing crap.
by philipallstar | 2025-11-09 18:22:51+00:00
Sanctuary cities are there to shelter people who enter the country illegally. That's not the government being lawless.

They were not a reaction to recent ICE moves; you've no history, and have reversed cause and effect.

In the 1980s they were a great moral move originally by the southwestern churches, they've just expanded into electorate jerrymandering and virtue signalling.
by munificent | 2025-11-09 18:22:58+00:00
Remote work benefits workers too, though:

1. It enables them to live in lower cost of living cities. This makes them more competitive relative to outsourcing because a lower wage in a cheaper city goes farther.

2. It opens up the job pool. If you work remote, you can work at any company that takes remote workers regardless of where you live.

3. It reduces the cost of switching jobs. Many people are stuck in jobs they don't want because there are few other local opportunities and switching jobs means uprooting and moving. For a single 20-something in an apartment, that doesn't sound so bad. But once you have a partner with their own career, kids with meaningful friendships, a mortgage, etc. then moving can be extremely disruptive.

In general, more job flexibility increases the efficiency of the job market for employees.
by dsign | 2025-11-09 18:23:20+00:00
I often think what would happen if somebody were to engineer some sort of quasi universal cure to cancer, and they were to do it out of desperation. Say the cure works, and then this person wanted for it to reach more people right now. Would they become fugitives? Would the long arm of the law chase them to the confines of the world? What would the drugs lobby do if the billions of investment they must throw into drug certification are jeopardized by some Rambo?
by toast0 | 2025-11-09 18:23:24+00:00
> On websites, at the bank, etc. nothing special about SSNs in this regard, except that they were leaked more times than you can count.

That's not that special either. Plenty of countries make their numbers de jure public information.

The most special thing about the SSN is that the cards say (or said) not for identification, and then they're used for exactly that.
by J_Shelby_J | 2025-11-09 18:23:31+00:00
And if AI makes workers more efficient, then businesses not actively hiring more employees are admitting that even with extra resources they have no strategy to grow their business. Like, if one person is effective as ten people, then a business should be able to grow quicker since their operating costs are effectively lower freeing up capital for growth.

So either their business is a dead end, the inefficiency is at the management layer, or AI isn’t actually making workers more efficient.
by zzzeek | 2025-11-09 18:24:13+00:00
both of my parents have low cholesterol, my mom's cholesterol is naturally under 200, my dad is on statins but the highest he ever got was about 230. they are in their 80s. Nobody on any side of my family (for which I have about 25 first cousins) has ever had any heart disease of any kind, no bypass surgeries, no heart attacks, nothing.

I'm familiar with the genetically high cholesterol thing and when you look at that you see parents/grandparents having heart attacks in their 40's. nothing like any of that in my family.

anyway yes im on the statins and probably need to boost my dose a little more to be below 200.
by tuveson | 2025-11-09 18:24:28+00:00
> There’s a much smaller network of people with relationships to Eastern European or other companies.

Unlike eastern Europe, India is geopolitically in a pretty good spot right now, having decent relations with most developed countries, and not engaged in any major wars with its neighbors. The last company I worked for outsourced a lot of work to Russia. At a certain time in 2022 they suddenly had to shift a lot of that work to... India!
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-11-09 18:24:29+00:00
Because most of the smartest people in the world moved to the U.S. because of the education system, great access to capital, and the fact that they and other smart people could easily move to, live and work with each other in the U.S.

The U.S. also has the largest useful single market in the world (the EU is broken up across many languages/cultures, China is isolated so you can’t really expand out).

The U.S. is actively working to destroy several of those planks right now.

Even the capital plank, which superficially looks strong, is being hurt by the government picking winners and choosers. If the current govt bets don’t turn out to be the right ones we’re looking at an ugly, probably tax payer funded (OpenAI has already hinted at this) collapse.
by matesz | 2025-11-09 18:24:54+00:00
As a side note NetBSD is THE ONLY operating system of which binaries are fully bit by bit reproducible.

Moreover it vendores patched gcc compiler, so the entire toolchain is reproducible too as well.

How cool is that?! For the record golang brings it further - its entire package registry containing +40mln packages is bit by bit reproducible.
by borski | 2025-11-09 18:24:56+00:00
It is, but dupes are allowed in some cases:

“Are reposts ok?

If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.”

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Also, from the guidelines: “Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something. Send it to hn@ycombinator.com.”
by guerby | 2025-11-09 18:25:54+00:00
Yes, you're right.

I pointed to this BMJ reference because in the article there is the following: "To help drive down our ApoB, we have statins which do miracles for lipid management. Some people believe that everyone should be on a statin so long as they don’t have adverse side effects."

Most statins prescribed today are not for secondary prevention.

A lot of doctors prescribe a statin immediately on seeing just one measure of "high" LDL without looking at any other parameter or context.
by al_borland | 2025-11-09 18:26:17+00:00
I thought it was cool, but the changing text sizing/wrapping made it difficult to read. I kept having to re-find my spot. But I read slow and was too lazy to just click on the era I wanted to set it back while I kept reading. Keeping the text layout consistent with the changing theme would have been a nice touch, and maybe a good future enhancement.
by lrvick | 2025-11-09 18:27:23+00:00
I think it is totally related. The more information you give surveillance capitalists about what you buy at the drug store, or liqueur store, or movie theater, when you leave home, etc. the more power you give them to manipulate you and keep you addicted to their platforms.

As a former professional magician with a background in studying mentalism, I can assure you ALL of us can be manipulated and distracted by entities that have enough seemingly small and insignificant bits of information about our daily routines in their widely sold and cross-indexed databases.

The less data you give these entities, the more boring targeted content and ads become, and the more attention you will have left for things that matter.
by bossyTeacher | 2025-11-09 18:27:25+00:00
This. Thank you. Parents tend to project a lot of their fears and desires into their child. Your child is not you and will never be. They are their own person with their own interests. It's fine showing them your interests but forcing them on the child is not. A lot of nerd parents believe their kids like nerding like they do even when it's not true. Listen without judgement and be willing to install Windows if they want it rather than judging them for not wanting Linux or not caring about the command line or whatever programming language you are trying to force on them. You are a parent first. Nerd second.
by dougg3 | 2025-11-09 18:27:28+00:00
Very cool that you worked on the OMAP3 and BeagleBoard! I didn't ask anybody else about it. I just decided to tinker with my USB sniffer to try to get to the bottom of what was going on.

I'm still a little puzzled about why the 2 second retry doesn't work. It might be worth diving in deeper to figure out why the data received during the retry never makes its way back to libusb. It's a bit of an edge case, but it seems like it could potentially be a bug. I might consider bringing that up as a question on the linux-usb list.
by asimpletune | 2025-11-09 18:27:37+00:00
If you’re at a corner and someone asks for directions, you say “three blocks that way”. That means three blocks starting from here.

Then what do you call “here”?

The name for where you start from in this scenario is usually not required because it’s obvious what you mean and everyone understands the first block means you have to first walk a block, not that where you start is the first block.

So in that sense yes we have a zeroth chapter. That’s when you’re at the beginning of the first one but haven’t read all the way.
by neilv | 2025-11-09 18:27:47+00:00
I think the thieves you worry about are actually going steal your code through LLM laundering, without even knowing who it was stolen from.

If you're not going to do a startup with your code, you probably need to focus on a mix of learning and self-promotion. With the market prioritizing self-promotion. Which probably means just trying to make sure that code that reflects well on you, does so.

Which probably means making it it open source, even if AI training data companies will steal it and give it away.
by weitendorf | 2025-11-09 18:28:16+00:00
That’s definitely one major and related factor, but I do think it’s separate from the problem that all most people can do on the Internet is consume or post on someone else’s website. Participating in the Internet doesn’t have to be just writing down your opinions on somewhere that shows up on Google Search.

There’s this technical-nontechnical dichotomy that I think really holds back the potential for rich/diverse Internet applications, because the interest and specialized knowledge necessary for eg a “24/7 remote plumbing video chat” service or “open source education-adjacent gaming” is primarily held by nontechnical people. Not that technical people couldn’t do these things, but the people who would want to make them “their thing” probably aren’t professional software developers.

Anyway, I think we’re culturally ready to learn how to forgive people who make forgivable mistakes and grow from them, even though there might still be some “cancel culture”. It’s just better for everybody because it disempowers the people that would abuse it, and everybody makes mistakes or changes their mind over time anyway.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-11-09 18:28:43+00:00
I'm a bit surprised that Trump isn't going after outsourcing in the same way he went after H-1Bs.

Not that I believe Trump actually cares about US jobs, let alone thinks strategically about the importance of a strong software sector, but you might expect him to at least do another mafia-style shakedown of the companies outsourcing jobs. Heck, you might think he'd even care about all the lost tax revenue, by having developer salaries going to India rather than staying here.
by charlie-83 | 2025-11-09 18:28:49+00:00
I guess I wasn't really thinking about it in the context of jobs since the post was about kids. I was thinking about the kinds of "non-techie" people I often help with computer stuff (often older people). They don't even know what the cloud is, they just want to have a spreadsheet for monthly expenses, make a document or two to print out and an occasional presentation. There are a huge number of these kinds of people but they don't really generate money as a market segment so MSOffice has completely abandoned them. Those people do sometimes need to open a file someone else made in MSOffice but LibreOffice compatibility is good enough for their purposes.
by montroser | 2025-11-09 18:29:00+00:00
That seems like something different though. My understanding is that this is not about the government handing out free laptops, the same way the second amendment is not about the government handing out free guns. Rather, this is saying people have the right to own general purpose computers.

As far as government expecting you to interface with them using a computer, I loathe this trend. And of course it's infinitely worse if they require a specific proprietary platform like iOS or Android. But I don't think this is about that.
by Johnny555 | 2025-11-09 18:29:05+00:00
>Setting aside the environmental impact of flying private, you'd think all those brilliant minds could come up with some kind of solution beyond flying further away and driving into Portugal. Maybe a jet that hundreds of people can charter at once?

Seems like there's a business model here -- create a company that owns large aircraft and have some kind of booking engine that lets people book seats on those airplanes. Maybe have those planes travel on a fixed schedule to let people plan travel in advance.
by monero-xmr | 2025-11-09 18:29:13+00:00
The vast majority of jobs in America give healthcare. The quality is vastly superior to London and Toronto, although we pay far more (and our medical professionals are upper middle class rather than middle / lower class). However this is a huge hidden portion of salary that most are not aware of, about $25k for a family of 4, which increases labor costs greatly.

On sheer metrics of access and quality, America kicks the shit out of Europe and Canada
by nine_k | 2025-11-09 18:29:34+00:00
PLEASE NOTE: the parent comment, made by me, is largely incorrect.

You only have to have presence in the UK if you do some larger-scale commercial activity there (like X/Twitter), but of course you can easily sell goods and services to UK citizens without all that. But sites like 4cahn and SaSu don't even sell anything at all.

Please downvote the parent comment into oblivion.
by Groxx | 2025-11-09 18:30:09+00:00
some of this is simply that it is a counter-culture, because it's in the minority (by a significant margin).

that doesn't mean it's defined by that decision, or even that it made that decision in the first place - the majority have decided it for them. and you're letting the majority define it for you, whether it's even remotely accurate or not.

indie web generally wants personal control and ownership. that isn't cynicism or "pre web-2.0" or counter-culture-as-self-identity, it's personal control and ownership. almost everyone wants that. the fact that the majority have given it up doesn't make them cynical, if anything it makes the mega-corps denying those things cynical.
by graemep | 2025-11-09 18:30:14+00:00
Limiting reading like that is extremely restrictive and unnecessary.

I do not think it can be compared to choice of OS where you have to choose one per machine (unless you dual boot or run VMs).

I am guessing when you say "religious books" you mean a narrow range of books approved of by a very narrow minded religious group. Not much mention of, say, scriptures and mystics using sexual imagery, for example. right? Of the many deeply religious major authors who did not fit that particular groups views?