MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hereme888 | 2025-11-15 22:17:45+00:00
I've found great difference in how I feel based on the source of caffeine.

From best to worst, for me: Yerba mate > healthi-ish energy drinks > white/green/black tea > coffee.

Coffee almost always results in significant anxiety (at same caffeine dose), jitteriness, and acid reflux. Yerba mate is by far the best for me.
by deinonychus | 2025-11-15 22:19:01+00:00
Am I crazy or did those WAAD guys themselves just link the public to potentially illegal content?

As of writing, they have a public response hosted on their website, including screenshots of emails to/from Google with URLs that Google agreed to remove. WAAD censored out the URLs, except they didn't actually because whatever paintbrush tool they used didn't have the opacity maxed out.

I'm not looking up those URLs to find out.

edit: They also leaked the Adguard admin's email, which WAAD complained about being the victim of.
by cben | 2025-11-15 22:19:18+00:00
[Python is great; my comment is only within block-based languages] For those actively teaching¹, consider Snap! (https://snap.berkeley.edu/) over/after Scratch. It's nearly a superset, similarly "low-floor" but much "higher ceiling" powerful language.

Data structures, control structures/message passing, functional programming... It's really "Scheme in Scratch clothing" under the hood.

In particular, its "build your own blocks" facilities are powerful enough (including macros i.e. custom control structures receiving "body" arguments as unevaluated lambdas) for you to build any scaffolding they need to focus on concepts you want them to learn at this stage.

¹If you don't have much time to sit with them, Scratch may win on "go find tutorials on youtube".
by CSMastermind | 2025-11-15 22:20:30+00:00
When I was in college they did an audit to see if I could graduate and it was flagged that I had been allowed to skip the Introduction to Computer Science class because I got a 5 on the AP Comp Sci test. The problem was that I took the test while it was administered in C++ and it had later switched to Java.

The school decided they were not going to recognize the test results and instead would only credit me with an elective class for it, I would still have ot pass the introductory class. This is in spite of pass all the later comptuer science classwork.

I escalated it to the dean, who told me that while he recognized this made no sense, "rules are rules and if we didn't follow them they wouldn't be rules".
by roenxi | 2025-11-15 22:20:31+00:00
It doesn't speak volumes. It just says that the people being hired had enough status that they don't have to go through what amounts to an initiation ritual.

Polygraphs appear to be another sad outcrop from the same pseudoscience formation as phrenology or witch-ducking; basically theatre to legitimise people exercising power in a way they were already going to do. The fact that it gets used speaks more volumes about the culture in intelligence services than the people who may or may not undergo the test.
by rolph | 2025-11-15 22:20:41+00:00
an RNA interference scan of maternal gametic DNA would go a long way toward revealing identified epigenetic modifications; also would not be cheap.

this would also be accompanied by interviews, that would reveal high risk factors, as well as very intimate details of family history.

the payoff would have to be large, something more than the wellbeing of a single person from start to end, until we collectively grow up a bit more as a species.
by tucnak | 2025-11-15 22:21:11+00:00
I did paint a cynical picture, so please do take it with a grain of salt.

Poly is just one tool, and it's never a solution to anything. What you say about potential abuses, undesirable selection, etc. I agree 100% and hate the office-politique jockeys as much as the next man. In most corporate environments, fucking with people has no place and use, but it's far from only application, in fact it's pretty much the worst application possible. Doesn't change the fact that it happens, even though it shouldn't. I also believe that it's important for many orgs to start taking security seriously; in the world where there's so much exploitation, and where applicable, it helps a lot if your org can have some kind of counterintel function. It doesn't have to include poly, but whatever helps you better understand the people you work with is surely a boon.
by muunbo | 2025-11-15 22:21:58+00:00
Hi hackers, my friends recently asked me to make a tutorial showing how to set up their phone with adblockers and dark mode. So I did! Hope it helps you browse the web more calmly. Below I copied my youtube blurb so you know what the video is about (pls don't mind the overly compelling/engaging text copy).

Take control of your iPhone and stop letting websites overload your brain. In this short video, I show you 3 free iPhone hacks that instantly make web browsing calmer, cleaner, and less distracting.

You’ll learn: • How to install a powerful Safari ad blocker • How to watch YouTube ad-free • How to force dark mode on every website to protect your sleep and avoid melatonin disruption at night
by andrepd | 2025-11-15 22:22:25+00:00
It's a matter of scale. Objectively, yandex is a great resource, and Kagi's results would be degraded without it. Pennies per user go to them. The sum of the entire money that has ever transferred from Kagi to yandex is what? 30 seconds of EU oil and gas purchases?

In short: pick smart battles.
by wartywhoa23 | 2025-11-15 22:23:13+00:00
False dichotomy, we're talking about the same.

In the framework of Laplace's Demon, no single human, the whole humankind nor any machine or algorithm it creates is capable of 100% precise prediction of anything at the level of operation of said Demon. If there's any experiment proving otherwise, I'd like to know.

If you insist that we talk about 100% prediction of my personal choices, let's play a simple game of guessing UUIDs. I generated one and changed a single digit in it at my free (or predetermined) will. Here it is, protected by another UUID which I'll post as soon as you make your prediction.

https://eu.onetimesecret.com/secret/2ttgx3flngktuelcswh861hm...
by Neywiny | 2025-11-15 22:25:09+00:00
Goodness I still can't stand his articles. For me, my understanding of the situation was that everything before maybe Ryzen 2-3000 was like "meh, it's good enough". You can actually see a bump in Q1 2017 when Ryzen first came out. I really hoped to see annotated graphs, long term analysis, etc.
by Muromec | 2025-11-15 22:25:13+00:00
Look, I'm as much an enjoyer of Kropotkin and von Mises as the other guy and torched more then zero regional police HQs in my life.

You are right in principle, but there is a varying degree to which different governments actually oppress people and there are certain patterns of what to expect from which.

I would not trust american company, like msft to not snitch to me to US government either, but the likehood of random shmuk being coopted is much more likely in one case as opposed to another.
by brewtide | 2025-11-15 22:25:21+00:00
You can also install AdGuard home as a home-assistant add-on, and then configure your router to hand that IP out as the network DNS server -- so all of your network traffic is ad blocking as soon as it hits your wifi. (like a pihole).

It's pretty slick, highly recommend. (Also super useful to see what devices are reaching out to where and how frequently, custom block lists, custom local DNS entries, etc).
by WCSTombs | 2025-11-15 22:25:28+00:00
Here's my intuition: you can reduce the variance of a measurement by averaging multiple independent measurements. That's because when they're independent, the worst-case scenario of the errors all lining up is pretty unlikely. This is a slightly different situation, because the random variable aren't necessarily measurements of a single quantity, but otherwise it's pretty similar, and the intuition about multiple independent errors being unlikely to all line up still applies.

Once you have that intuition, the math just tells you what the optimal mix is, if you want to minimize the variance.
by RealityVoid | 2025-11-15 22:26:10+00:00
> But that's a level of understanding I don't think they currently have

I think they do, at least in some of the cases, especially if it's something well represented in the dataset. I've been surprised sometimes by the insights it provides, and other times it's completely useless. That's one of the problems, it's unreliable, so you have to treat all info it gives you with doubt. But, anyways, at times it makes very surprising and seeming intelligent observations. It's worth at least considering it and thinking it through.
by varenc | 2025-11-15 22:26:11+00:00
Door locks are a deterrent that increase the difficulty and cost of a crime. If your neighbor's house is locked and yours isn't, then you're going to be more of a target. In that sense they do provide security, but of course any lock might still be defeated.

Similarly, I can see how structured psychological interrogation, assisted by a polygraph, is a useful deterrent. The presence of moles doesn't negate all of its value. Just like having your house broken into once doesn't mean you'll stop using door locks.
by 827a | 2025-11-15 22:26:36+00:00
Ternus is the leading candidate; VP of Hardware Engineering. He was very likely more directly responsible than Cook for all the things you liked about Cook's Apple.

My fear for Apple right now is how most decisions they make appear to incentivize them toward becoming a perpetual middle-man in all aspects of your interactions with their products. They don't manufacture much of anything anymore; its on-contract. They design the M-Series chips, but don't make them. Their software sucks; they'd rather just take 30% of your interaction with actually-good software. Their AI and search sucks; they just pay Google $30B a year for theirs. Etc and etc.
by thephyber | 2025-11-15 22:27:24+00:00
In the movie The Imitation Game, the Alan Turing character recognizes that acting 100% of the time gives away to the opposition that you identified them and sets off the next iteration of “cat and mouse”. He comes up with a specific percentage of the time that the Allies should sit on the intelligence and not warn their own people.

If, instead, you only act on a percentage of requests, you can add noise in an insidious way without signaling that you caught them. It will make their job troubleshooting and crafting the next iteration much harder. Also, making the response less predictable is a good idea - throw different HTTP error codes, respond with somewhat inaccurate content, etc
by killerstorm | 2025-11-15 22:30:10+00:00
~12 years ago I installed Linux on Fujitsu UH572.

As an "ultrabook" it came with 16GB of fast SSD which could be used as a cache via some Windows-specific Intel feature, while main storage was a slower spinning disk.

As Linux did not support cache feature, I thought I can just format it as ext4 and use as a storage for things which can benefit from more iops, e.g. running DB tests. And as SSD technology was still rather new at that time, I started with running some IO benchmarks.

Well, it survived formatting into ext4 and few minutes of that IO benchmark, then it became permanently unresponsive.

My guess is that wear-leveling algorithm was designed specifically for the FS originally had (some version of FAT?), and different FS caused it to corrupt some internal data structure, so SSD's controller firmware went into panic on each boot.

Unfortunately, this added few minutes delay to boot as Linux tried to communicate with unresponsive SSD controller, but otherwise laptop worked fine...
by underlipton | 2025-11-15 22:30:46+00:00
Me, once again tapping the, "If they had done genetic studies on the Dutch at the beginning of the 19th century, genetic patterns currently associated with exceptional adult height may have instead been associated with exceptional short stature," sign.

What social democracy does to a dude('s growth spurts). If people ever internalized that socioeconomic circumstances have material and profound effects on not only their own health and development, but also that of their children and children's children, both in the positive and negative direction... Man.
by gwbas1c | 2025-11-15 22:31:11+00:00
Some are Word documents that I view on my phone. (Via OneDrive).

My turkey recipe is a PDF that I print out two copies of when I prepare the turkey. My hands get messy (and unsanitary) when I follow it, so I don't want to handle my phone.

(In case you're curious: When I called up a BBS for the first time as a teenager, I didn't realize that I had to make up a name for myself. My GWBasic manual was sitting in front of me, so I just called myself GWBasic and really liked the name. At the time, GWBasic was very obsolete, so most people didn't get the reference.)
by thephyber | 2025-11-15 22:32:42+00:00
I argue that politicians are absolutely rational. I frequently argue that even the dictator of N Korea acts rationally, only by very different rules than we are used to thinking about. Generally I reserve “irrational” to people who are functionally/mentally disabled, severely traumatized, or acting under the influence of mind altering substances (eg. RFK’s drugs history + trauma of 2 men in his life being assassinated during his formative years).

They are acting according to the expected responses to the stimuli they create. The problem is that the culture, society, previous legislation/jurisprudence, and the parliamentary rules they voted in all make the calculus of predicting what is rational for them uncertain.
by dijit | 2025-11-15 22:32:52+00:00
I think a better way of thinking about it is to be a lifeline instead of monetary amount.

Otherwise you very much risk wandering in to social services, and managing this can be unfair too.

If you really want to hold me to a number, then each country has a “poverty index” of some form, if you are able to assist with a roof over someones head and provide them with as much as needed to be over the poverty line, then you’re well on your way to dragging someone out of being poor. The important caveat is one time investments (like buying a cheap car, fixing a car or getting rid of a fine) are sometimes needed and this is what separates poor from everything else: being able to invest in common sense things that are simply impossible because the money simply does not exist to do it.

Being a lifeline to those in need is the best possible thing you can be in this case, as you’re taking the “it’s not cheap being poor” mantra away.
by thomascountz | 2025-11-15 22:33:49+00:00
Hey! Have you come across the recent(ish) paper from Google researchers about self-replicators? In one of their experiments they used a self-modifying (metaprogrammable) variant of BrainFuck that I've found very interesting for EAs. I haven't fully replicated their findings as I've been experimenting with better ways to observe the evolution progress, but perhaps it might be interesting for your work as well.
by Nevermark | 2025-11-15 22:36:40+00:00
> A bee weighs 100mg. If they are 5% brain, their brain weighs 5mg. 5mg of carbon is 2.5 * 10^20 atoms.

Any rational characterization of the problem has left the building here.

Nobody wants to simulate any creature's brain or nervous system atom for atom.

Most of what atoms do in any cell, including neurological cells, is operate a vast number of complex but common survival systems. And the very small fraction supporting specifically neurological behavior, do not meaningfully contribute at the level where specifics of individual atoms matter, but at a level many orders of magnitude higher in scale.
by jiggawatts | 2025-11-15 22:38:37+00:00
The congestion control algorithm in TCP has some interesting effects on throughput that a lot of developers aren’t aware of.

For example, sending some data on a fresh TCP connection is slow, and the “ramp up time” to the bandwidth of the network is almost entirely determined by the latency.

Amazing speed ups can be achieved in a data centre network by shaving microseconds off the round trip time!

Similarly, many (all?) TCP stacks count segments, not bytes, when determining this ramp up rate. This means that jumbo frames can provide 6x the bandwidth during this period!

If you read about the network design of AWS, they put a lot of effort into low switching latency and enabling jumbo frames.

The real pros do this kind of network tuning, everyone else wonders why they don’t get anywhere near 10 Gbps through a 10 Gbps link.
by teo_zero | 2025-11-15 22:39:06+00:00
> there's nothing I'd spend my money on if I can just as well install Asahi on an M-series laptop.

But such laptops don't work 100% with Asahi. Speakers and mic, external displays, fingerprint reader, suspend are the sore points I've read about, and shorter battery life compared to when they run Apple's SO.
by afandian | 2025-11-15 22:39:45+00:00
One day, when I get enough spare time, I will make the thing. I even have some components ready.

Until then I daydream of how I will make it and how it will fit together.

If I never get round to it then that time will have been wasted. But if I do, all that daydreaming will have been useful mental prototyping.

But was it «doing the thing»?
by grishka | 2025-11-15 22:40:17+00:00
It's been a few hours. These particular bots have completely stopped. There are still some bot-looking requests in the log, with a newer-version Chrome UA on both Mac and Windows, but there aren't nearly as many of them.

Config snippet for anyone interested:

if ($http_user_agent ~* "Chrome/\d{2,3}\.\d+\.\d{2,}\.\d{2,}") { set $block 1; } if ($http_accept_language = "") { set $block "${block}1"; } if ($block = "11") { return 403; }
by fragmede | 2025-11-15 22:40:57+00:00
> No one goes "hikomori" or "forever alone" when they could have just put up with some disagreements and uncomfortable situations.

Without interviewing a group of people that aren't looking to be interviewed, how can you make that claim? I can't say I've done that either, but in the total range of humans I've met over my time on Earth, there is a huge spectrum of the level of uncomfortable that people are able to put up with. As simplistic example, how much hot/cold humans are able to put up with before complaining varies from individual to individual. Some complain at the slightest temperature change. Other would rather pass out than complain. If there's such a wide variation on such a simple measure, so, too, we should expect variation on the level of ability to "just put up with some disagreements and uncomfortable situations."

I'm not here to try and somehow sell the idea that forced arranged marriages are a good thing, or that we should go back to the 1950's where women were more chattle than people. Or that people should stay in toxic relationships that are slowly killing them inside.

I seek none of those things.

The question is, how do we, at large, as a society, make toxic people less toxic? An absolutist approach towards it failed the 2024 US election.

What is increased polarization, in the people around me and in the world. I don't know how to heal that. How to lessen the toxicity being spewed about, even here. (Not remotely accusing you of it, mind you, just there are certain threads/topics that HN does not do well.)

> People are being more isolated

Some people are being more isolated simply because they can afford to. Part of the reason there is a housing crisis is that more people are choosing to live alone. If a house previously housed 6 people is now housing one, maybe two, the demand for housing shoots way up. That is not the only reason, but we can't ignore it either.

The telephone required another person on the other end of it. If people don't talk in-person because of the telephone, they still need to talk to another person, who's personality is lumpy and spiky and loveable in their own way. Anthropomorphization aside, LLMs aren't people and so my concern, which may prove to be "old man yelling at clouds", only time can tell; my concern is that we'll collectively get used to talking exclusively with LLMs and not need the social skills necessary to interact and live amongst other humans.

In a society that's becoming increasingly polarized, going no contact with the toxic people in your life is the right move for individual self-preservation, but those toxic people find other toxic people and become even more toxic. And we all each have one but one vote to give. Well, billionaires get a couple more because we worship the rich, but the rest of us; the rest of us each only have one.
by vbezhenar | 2025-11-15 22:41:03+00:00
Most websites do not need CDNs.

CDNs became popular back in the old days, when some people thought that if two websites are using jquery-1.2.3.min.js, CDN could cache it and second site would load quicker. These days, browser don't do that, they'll ignore cached assets from other websites because it somehow helps to protect user privacy and they value privacy over performance in this case.

There are some reasons CDNs might be helpful. Edge capability probably is the most important one. Another reason is that serving lots of static data might be a complicated task for a small website, so it makes sense to offload it to a specialised service. These days, CDNs went beyond static data. They can hide your backend, so public user won't know its address and can't DDoS it. They can handle TLS for you. They can filter bots, tor and people from countries you don't like. All in a few clicks in the dashboard, no need to implement complicated solutions.

But nothing you couldn't write yourself in a few days, really.
by righthand | 2025-11-15 22:41:11+00:00
Anecdotally, I tried using Amazon Q when trying to generate configs and get questions answered for Aws ses configs. However even though: the icon was on my screen and fully functioning and I could enter a question, I could not send the question or use it because my admin had not granted my dev profile access to use Amazon Q.

And my guess is that people have that same experience and give up. Because the admin permissions are probably stored in a yaml config somewhere and it will require a meeting with a devops admin and ultimately be a huge waste of time for answering 1-2 questions.
by imiric | 2025-11-15 22:42:06+00:00
I've been happy with OpenObserve for personal use. It's a minimal deployment, so I'm not sure how well it scales, but I really like that it's self-contained, easy to deploy and manage. Not having to think about integrating a half-dozen different tools is great. I just setup otel-collector on each node, and point them to the OpenObserve host. Easy.

I've been doing monitoring since before it was called observability with good old Nagios, and the modern observability stack is insane. I'm glad that tools like OpenObserve and SigNoz exist.
by ryandrake | 2025-11-15 22:42:23+00:00
Cook's been great for massively scaling Apple (and its stock price) up, but the art, vision, and soul of the company is gone. It's just a stock price maximizing lawnmower now, just like every other corporate stock price maximizing lawnmower. If that's what shareholders want, fine, I guess. But I'd be bored just manufacturing the same boring rectangles every year. I think Steve would have been, too.
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-15 22:42:25+00:00
Don’t bother. HN has a very hard anti-Microsoft bias, especially when it comes to Windows. At the same time will completely overlook many of the same warts or different warts that exist on macOS or Linux because they get a free pass for some reason.

Despite its flaws Windows still remains a very capable workhorse general purpose OS, and with WSL dev is a non issue. Hell, having actual Linux is better than the macOS Frankenstein Unix and homrbrew