MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pazimzadeh | 2025-11-08 20:42:45+00:00
I think the reason western civilization is afraid of the idea of inherent genetic limitations to intelligence is because the logical next step would not be focusing on education, but probably restarting some form of eugenics or genetic engineering of our progeny, and the last time that happened it didn't go very well. Also, much of 'western civilization' is founded on treating people as if they are equal, so the idea that one subgroup of humans is superior to another obviously rubs us the wrong way.

I can't even tell what your suggestion is, what is the low-hanging fruit you are talking about? If you come out and say what your stance is (maybe you think we should genetically engineer babies to score higher on IQ tests?) then we could have a debate about the merits of those ideas. As it stands I have no idea what you're suggesting, which has the side effect of making you irrefutable I guess.

Your general analysis seems way off. Secular skepticism goes back a long time in Iran (way before the European Enlightenment), and few Iranians would be shocked to hear "Allah probably does not exist".

Here are some quatrains by Omar Khayyam (1048 CE) which are well known by everyone in Iran:

They say that in paradise there will be maidens with beautiful eyes, There will be wine, milk, and honey. If we have chosen wine and a beloved here, what’s the harm? Since in the end, the outcome is the same. The secrets of eternity neither you know nor I; The solution to the riddle neither you find nor I. There are inscriptions on the Tablet of Fate; But when it comes to reading them, neither you can nor I.

Same goes for Russia and China, I'm very skeptical that the general population has a taboo about those ideas. A social taboo is not <whatever the government has banned you from talking about>.
by labrador | 2025-11-08 20:44:47+00:00
All jokes aside, COBOL is actually a pretty good AI prompting language

IDENTIFICATION DIVISION. PROGRAM-ID. GEMINI-PROMPT-V1. AUTHOR. A.I. RESEARCHER. DATE-WRITTEN. 2025-11-08. DATA DIVISION. WORKING-STORAGE SECTION. 01 PROMPT-RESPONSE. 05 OUTPUT-PARAGRAPH PIC X(500). PROCEDURE DIVISION. MAIN-PROCEDURE. DISPLAY "MOVE 'WRITE A HAIKU ABOUT MAINFRAME COMPUTING' TO PROMPT-REQUEST". PERFORM GENERATE-TEXT-HAIKU UNTIL RESPONSE-IS-COMPLETE. MOVE RESPONSE-BUFFER TO OUTPUT-PARAGRAPH. DISPLAY "RESULT: " OUTPUT-PARAGRAPH. STOP RUN. GENERATE-TEXT-HAIKU. *> AI Model Magic Happens Here, following the precise instruction. CONTINUE.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-11-08 20:45:05+00:00
> The 136-metre-long vessel had to rely partly on its auxiliary motor and its remaining sail after the aft sail was damaged in a storm shortly after departure.

Well, that's a bummer. That said, this does seem the way of the future. We just need to either figure out maintenance robots and/or find a way to keep human crew happy on long, slow voyages across the Pacific.
by WalterBright | 2025-11-08 20:45:10+00:00
I have never written a Zig program, I've just browsed the specification. I do admire the energy and enthusiasm of its creators. The fast compiles of it are well done.

Mostly what I think is the syntax is more complex with less utility than the equivalent D syntax. For example, the use of the 'comptime' keyword is not necessary. For another, the import declaration is overly complex.

I don't know enough about Zig to make informed suggestions on evolving it. D has borrowed stuff from many languages, but I don't recall suggestions in the D forums of a Zig feature that should be added to D, though I might have missed it.
by benatkin | 2025-11-08 20:45:22+00:00
To me, gamelike user interface would be simply editorialized, while gamified user interface would be poorly editoralized. One is editoralized with an opinion, the other also has an error. It isn't a fact that it's gamelike over all, nor is it how it's described in the README - the author says "with a game inspired menu system" which is a far cry from game-esque, game-like, game-ified, etc.
by mrlongroots | 2025-11-08 20:46:55+00:00
Same, I don't understand the complaints against modern C++. A lambda, used for things like comparators etc, is much simpler than structs with operators overloaded defined elsewhere.

My only complaint is the verbosity, things like `std::chrono::nanonseconds` break even simple statements into multiple lines, and you're tempted to just use uint64_t instead. And `std::thread` is fine but if you want to name your thread you still need to get the underlying handle and call `pthread_setname_np`. It's hard work pulling off everything C++ tries to pull off.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-11-08 20:47:16+00:00
https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-support-among-men-eroding-108...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-absolutely-craters...

Young women are also most liberal than ever, and who carried recent election wins. I expect this trend to continue.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/gallup-analysis-finds-yo...

https://news.gallup.com/poll/609914/women-become-liberal-men...

https://msmagazine.com/2025/11/03/2025-election-results/
by tedivm | 2025-11-08 20:47:43+00:00
I live in Chicago, and this article doesn't even scratch the surface of how bad it is. My wife went to the beach yesterday for 10 minutes to try and rest from the chaos and a fucking black hawk helicopter buzzed by her. They literally fly over my house daily.

People, US citizens included, are literally being abducted. People have been shot and killed by masked agents. People have had their children abandoned on the side of the road after being kidnapped. Just today they raided Little Village with hundreds of masked troops. I'm in a dozen signal groups to get alerted about where things are.

What scares me the most is how few people seem to actually know what is happening here. I talk to people outside of Chicago, and watch the news, and I don't see or hear about anything that's going on here. I tell them what's happening and they are shocked.

It is impossible to convey what is happening here, how scared we all are for this country, and how much things seem to escalate every single day that this goes on.

Edit: This post has been flagged and hidden, just demonstrating how much this country wants to pretend this isn't happening. It's unflagged now, but the fact that anyone would want to hide what's happening here shows how bad things are for all of us.
by dwohnitmok | 2025-11-08 20:47:46+00:00
(HN is going to collapse this comment because the code makes it too long).

My functions are exactly equivalent to transducers.

My link in the original comment goes over it at a more theoretical level.

But if you want runnable code, I've included Clojure below that translates between the two representations (there's some annoying multi-arity stuff I haven't handled very rigorously, but that's mainly an artifact of the complection in the traditional Clojure representation of transducers and goes away when you think of them as just `a -> List<b>`).

There's a line in the original article that the author doesn't go far enough on. "Everything is a fold." Yes more than that, folding is not just a function over a list, a fold is a list and vice versa (this holds for any algebraic datatype). Transducers are just one example of this, where Clojure has decided to turn a concrete data structure into a higher order function (wrongly I believe; although I haven't gone to the effort of truly specializing all my functions to verify my suspicions that you can actually get even better performance with the concrete data representation as long as you use specialized data containers with specialized behavior for the zero and one element cases).

(defn tmap "Map transducer" [f] (fn [x] [(f x)])) (defn tfilter "Filter transducer" [f] (fn [x] (if (f x) [x] []))) (defn ttake "Take n elements" [n] (let [n-state (volatile! n)] (fn [x] (let [current-n @n-state] (if (pos? current-n) (do (vswap! n-state dec) [x]) []))))) (defn simple-transducer->core-transducer [simple-transducer] (fn [rf] (fn ([] (rf)) ([result] (rf result)) ([result input] (reduce rf result (simple-transducer input)))))) (defn core-transducer->simple-transducer [core-transducer] (fn [x] ((core-transducer #(cons %2 %1)) [] x))) (defn catcomp ([f g] (fn [x] (mapcat g (f x)))) ([f g & fs] (reduce catcomp (catcomp f g) fs))) (def example-simple-transducer (catcomp (tmap inc) (tfilter even?) (tmap inc) (ttake 2))) (defn example-simple-transducer-manual [x] (->> ((tmap inc) x) (mapcat (tfilter even?)) (mapcat (tmap inc)) ;; Stateful transducers are hard to work with manually ;; You have to define it outside of the function to maintain the state ;; This is true for traditional transducers as well ;; (mapcat (ttake 2)) )) (def example-core-transducer (comp (map inc) (filter even?) (map inc) (take 2))) ;; Yields [3 5] (into [] (simple-transducer->core-transducer example-simple-transducer) [1 2 3 4 5]) ;; Also yields [3 5] (into [] example-core-transducer [1 2 3 4 5]) ;; Yields [3] (simple-transducer 1) ;; Also yields [3] ((core-transducer->simple-transducer example-core-transducer) 1)
by metabagel | 2025-11-08 20:48:37+00:00
ICE are wearing masks, refusing to identify themselves, abducting citizens and non-citizens alike. They are accusing citizens of assault and then releasing them without charging - a pretty good indication that they lied.

They are conducting warrantless searches. There is a case where they rammed the car of a U.S. citizen (clearly seen on video), promptly took her into custody, accused her of hitting them, and then released her without charging her.

They are profiling people based on race and ethnicity.

The abductions look like kidnappings. They don’t look like law enforcement actions.
by programmertote | 2025-11-08 20:48:57+00:00
> All of these can be accessed through bloodwork and urinalysis and can be done at a local Quest Labs (I’d venture to bet there’s one within a 10-mile radius of your home), prescribed by your doctor, and will likely cost anywhere between $80-$120 out of pocket.

A frustrating thing about this suggestion -- if I tell my physician (I live in the US) that I want these unusual tests prescribed, s/he would scorn at me (as if I'm acting like a know-it-all and am questioning his/her wisdom attained through years of medicine school and practice).

I truly don't understand about US healthcare is why we allowed medical practitioners to put up barriers around medicine (sure, ban opioids,chemo drugs and maybe a handful of other toxic-with-low-dose meds) and testing by requiring everything doctor's prescription?!

For example, my wife had an swollen eyelid (through infection) recently. She is an oncologist in training (is a board-certified internal medicine doctor). She knows how to treat it -- by putting clean, warm cloth over her eyes to allow pores to expand and let secretions seep out (to treat the symptom); by adding anti-bacterial eye drop like Tobramycin ('mycin' means it's Penicillin-variant, which is usually used to treat bacterial infection) OR by taking antibacterial medicine like Azithromycin. If we were in our home country (in SE Asia), we'd just go to a nearby pharmacy and buy either the anti-bacterial eye drop or pill, and get it sorted. Since we live in the US (for now), my wife has to asked one of her coworkers to prescribe her the medicine (she wasn't sure if she can self-prescribe because we just moved to CA and don't want her to lose her license). Then she took the anti-bacterial pill three times (with the warm cloth treatment for symptom), and the infection was treated completely.

I strongly believe that this kind of infection treatment or self-prescribed blood tests should be allowed without any doctor prescription. Otherwise, it only adds more (unnecessary) patient volume to doctors, clinics and hospitals. I remember reading someone from India advocating for similar approach on HN or Reddit a year or so ago too. In India (just like my SE Asian country), they could just go buy medicines over the counter from a local pharmacy. No doctor's prescription needed (maybe the law is there, but it's not enforce strictly).
by JuniperMesos | 2025-11-08 20:49:09+00:00
> The Netherlands Institute for Human Rights said in a February 18 decision that Facebook’s algorithm reinforced gender stereotypes by mainly showing “typically female professions” to female Facebook users in the Netherlands and that Meta (META), the social platform’s owner, should have monitored and adjusted its algorithm to prevent that.

> For example, ads for mechanic positions were predominantly shown to men, while those for preschool teacher roles were primarily directed to women. Global Witness said its experiments in the Netherlands, France, India, Ireland, the United Kingdom and South Africa demonstrated that the algorithm perpetuated similar biases around the world. The non-profit’s investigation led to four complaints from the Dutch human rights group Bureau Clara Wichmann and the French organization Fondation des Femmes.

I don't think any of this should be illegal. I don't think anyone is meaningfully harmed by being algorithmically shown job ads stereotypical of one gender rather than another, and I have no problem with any organization at all that does this, whether it's Meta or anyone else. I do not agree with the position of any of these European human rights organizations, and I'd probably be in favor of reforming French anti-discrimination law to explicitly legalize what Meta is doing here.
by SilverElfin | 2025-11-08 20:49:39+00:00
Yes exactly. They were within 1000 yards of each other and less than 5 seconds from colliding according to some videos analyzing the GPS data. If you listen to the ATC chat, the American Airlines pilot noticed the other plane going the wrong way himself and made a proactive change to avoid collision without waiting for ATC. Although the traffic controllers did notice and quickly gave out new directions, it may have been too late if the pilot didn’t act.
by goblin89 | 2025-11-08 20:50:42+00:00
It seems to be nearly impossible for me to advocate for myself at a place like a hospital.

It might be easier to do this for someone else, but it seems narcissistic to assume I of all the patients is so special. If there’s nobody to advocate for me, clearly I’m not!

Let’s say I try it anyway. I tend to be a slow rational thinker in real-time situations, especially under pressure. If I try to advocate for myself and ask questions, I would need to have time to consider the responses (did I even get the information I requested, what are the implications) and maybe do some research in order to make an informed choice as to whether to proceed or not, or whether to ask further questions. However, if I actually request time and have people wait for me, I enter a high-pressure mode in which I can’t think well. The clock is ticking, the stakes are high.

Even if it’s a simple routine case, I am entrusting myself to people who have the power to kill me. If it’s anything beyond routine, killing or harming me may not even be consequential to them (mistakes happen). It is a very particular type of situation.

The natural thing for me to believe is that all of these people are professionals. If I have reasons to supervise them, it automatically implies I believe they are either unprofessional or malicious, in which case I really should not be there in the first place. The arrangement is that I am not supposed to know better than them. If I try to supervise them, that implies I think I do. At worst it would be disrespectful or offensive and would make them hostile on a personal level (which is always at play between humans, regardless of the protocol), at best it would make me look like a crackpot not to be taken seriously anyway. Besides, if I already assume they make mistakes or are unprofessional, their answers can be false anyway.

On the other hand, I am aware that many, many mistakes are made in hospitals daily, so I know they are not such infallible professionals.

As a result, this makes me very reluctant to go to a hospital or a clinic for any reason. It’s probably bad.

Anyone has advice for overcoming this? Maybe training to think quickly and finding ways out in high-stakes situations like this? Tricking yourself into a mode where you feel natural advocating for yourself and act in a way that makes people treat you seriously without being offensive to them (considering the power they have over you)? Learning to not care what people think in a healthy way? (Please don’t suggest LLMs.)
by baduiux | 2025-11-08 20:51:10+00:00
I can share a bit on this one. I’m doing hybrid apps for the last 8 years and stick to Cordova on my day job but also tried Flutter and RN for a bit. As I’ve seen some other comments about the iOS/Android look and feel (swiping gestures, etc.), Ionic (or the Cupertino package in Flutter) is the way to go. Without this, it would be a lot of trouble. However, as the recent iOS 26 update has shown, neither Ionic nor Flutter is going to support the new liquid glass design (yet). Since we never went with “our app must exactly match the (apple) design guides” this is not a problem for us but I’m sure others would love to be able to adapt the new liquid glass style. I also never heard of any app being rejected due to being a hybrid app or not having the correct look and feel. Of course, you might see/feel that it’s not a native app but who cares. Back in the days we even used a OTA plugin (it was a MS plugin, don’t remember the name) to automatically ship new .js/.html files without going through the review process. If I remember correctly Ionic still provides something like this.

When it comes to native stuff it get’s tricky. As always it really depends on the use case of the app. In our case we develop a navigation app using a native SDK to show a map + turn-by-turn nav + offline maps etc. This is probably the most non ideal use case for a hybrid app. We developed a few plugins to share data between js /native to initialize the map etc. However, the idea of sharing business logic is long gone. There’s so much stuff that’s happening natively and each time we implement it on Android, we have to switch to iOS and implement the Swift version of it.

Some others have also mentioned that a single person now has to know three platforms (iOS, android and Cordova (in our case with ionic + angular). This is true and the real downside. I’m quite familiar with iOS and android yet I’d never call myself a native iOS / Android developer. Yet, I’ve to write so much native code regarding permission handling, geolocation, threading (Ui/non-ui) and there’s always a ton to stuff happening from version to version (e.g. 16 KB Page Size on Android, iOS support for rotation the device/adaptive layout on iPadOS, etc). This is where a lot of time is lost. And the time is not only lost there but also with unmaintained outdated community plugins you suddenly need to understand and fix.
by jeffbee | 2025-11-08 20:51:22+00:00
As much as the HN trend is against AI features in client software, this is an excellent use of Gemini-in-Chrome. Instead of wracking your brain for English synonyms, you can just ask it if the page discusses hypertension, a kind of weapons-grade ctrl+f. Mine said

"Yes, the article discusses hypertension, referring to it as "high blood pressure.""
by btilly | 2025-11-08 20:51:28+00:00
I have an objection to the "better lifestyle and diet" approach.

Sure, it is absolutely true that better lifestyle and diet has a huge effect. However it is absolutely certain that the vast majority of people who are told to improve their lifestyle and diet, won't.

The result is doctors giving advice that they know won't be followed. And thereby transferring potential fault from the doctor to the patient, with no improvement in actual outcomes. "I told the patient to lose weight and maintain that with a controlled diet." And yet, most people when told to diet, won't. Most people who start a diet won't complete it. And most people who lose weight on a diet, have the weight back within 5 years. Where each "most" actually is "the overwhelming majority". And the likelihood of the advice resulting in sustained weight loss probably being somewhere around a fraction of a percent.

What, then, is the value of the doctor giving this lecture?

(Disclaimer. I have lost 20 of the pounds I gained during COVID, and am making zero progress on the remaining 30. A few months ago I successfully started a good exercise routine. Given my history, I would expect to only follow it for a few years before falling off the wagon. I believe that this poor compliance puts me well above average. But do you know what I do reliably? Take my prescribed medicine!)
by eszed | 2025-11-08 20:51:56+00:00
> people would look at the map before setting off

Yeah, I drove back then. That's not, in practice, what people did, or only what people did. People did map out a route ahead of time, of course, but when they (we) got confused, or missed a turn, out came the map - while driving. Not saying it's good, but that's what happened.

> people driving just fine before satnav

You can check the data. DOT's website is terrible, so I can't link to individual tables, but the relevant one is under Trends > General > Table 1:

https://cdan.dot.gov/tsftables/tsfar.htm#

Fatalities and Injuries are obviously dependent on (very welcome!) advances in automobile safety design and medical care, but if accident rates have been increasing over time we'd expect to see many more "property damage only"° accidents. In fact, the raw number of those have been remarkably stable since 1988, despite a huge increase in miles traveled!

There's even an absolute-number decrease between 2007 and 2013, which corresponds with the years during which mobile phones became ubiquitous, and a relative (to miles-traveled) decrease which continues to this day. None of this (of course!) excuses allowing oneself to use a phone in a distracting manner, but my conclusion is that mobile phones have, on net, made driving safer, rather than the reverse.

—

° Or, alternatively "all-type"? I think "property damage" might be cleaner - and, in fact, it's strongly biased against my case, because it's risen from 67% of accidents at the beginning of the dataset to 71% more recently, due to exogenous safety and life-saving improvements.
by tobyjsullivan | 2025-11-08 20:52:19+00:00
Not exactly this but found a similar experience recently by throwing Linux lite on an 15-year-old thinkpad with a physical wifi switch.

Was for my kid in this case. Loaded a few education-friendly games and then disabled the wifi. Now it’s a simple, focused, and relatively safe box.

Could easily do the same for writing or any other activity.
by niles | 2025-11-08 20:52:21+00:00
Blog spam? Now reads:

"There's no better PC under $350 than this Ryzen 7 powerhouse with a CPU that's faster than a 10-core Apple M5 CPU, and that's no mistake

Deals

By Wayne Williams published November 4, 2025

Machenike AI Mini PC comes with 16GB of high-speed RAM and a 512GB M.2 SSD

"
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-11-08 20:52:49+00:00
No - you are confusing C and C++.

In C a structure passed by value will just be shallow-copied.

In C++ a structure/class passed by value will by copied using whatever copy constructor is defined by the structure type. If there is no explicitly defined copy constructor, then a default copy constructor will be used that does member-wise copy using the member's copy constructors.

So, unless you have chosen to shoot yourself in the foot by defining a class who's copy constructor doesn't do a deep copy, then C++ pass-by-value will indeed do a deep copy.

The case of a structure with a pointer member (e.g. maybe you defined your own string class) is certainly one where you would need to define an appropriate copy constructor, and not doing so would indeed be shooting yourself in the foot.