MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hmontazeri | 2025-11-08 17:51:55+00:00
Triglyceride-to-HDL Ratio (TG/HDL)

Interpretation: • < 2.0: Insulin sensitive • 2.0–3.9: Moderate insulin resistance risk • ≥ 4.0: High likelihood of insulin resistance

Your ratio = 5.0 → Suggests likely insulin resistance.
by kingofmen | 2025-11-08 17:51:59+00:00
There's something I deeply don't understand about this.

> I shared these results with a leading lipidologist who proclaimed: “Not sure if the lab or the primary care doc said an LDL-C of 116 mg/dL was fine but that concentration is the 50th percentile population cut point in the MESA study and should never ever be considered as normal.

> It’s also important to note that, according to a lipidologist friend, an ApoB of 96 is at a totally unacceptable 50th percentile population cutpoint from Framingham Offspring Study.

So... the exact median value is "totally unacceptable" and "should never ever be considered as normal"? I'm open to the possibility that the US population is so deeply unhealthy that this is true, but then that needs to be argued for or at least mentioned. Like, you can't say "you're exactly average in this respect" and expect your and that's terrible to be taken seriously without any followup.

Or if I'm misunderstanding what's meant by "50th percentile population cut point" then again, I think this jargon should be explained, as it's plainly not the usual meaning of "50th percentile".
by estebank | 2025-11-08 17:52:01+00:00
This is true of almost everything: it's not that Zig or Rust are unique on most features. Most of them have existed in one shape or another before. The praise they receive is because of the level of polish their design and implementation have and how they interact with their other features. There's no one stopping other projects from doing the same thing (modulo technical and organisational considerations), but they haven't yet, so it is reasonable to highlight them. If people talk about how good X is in language Y enough, people from language Z might notice and "steal" it. That's a good thing!
by jorvi | 2025-11-08 17:52:08+00:00
The "be an advocate" thing is both true but also incredibly selfish and egotistical.

If everyone did that, the whole system would grind to a halt. Doctors aren't in a rush because they enjoy so, they are because they're already overworked. 1 out of every 25 patients (their family) demanding extra attention is possible although still a burden. 21 out of every 25 is not possible.
by dumbmrblah | 2025-11-08 17:52:09+00:00
I agree. As a physician, this is sticking out to me as bad / dangerous advice. By getting unneeded regular CT scans, you’re dramatically increasing your risk of developing cancer. Beyond the radiation exposure itself, there is also the very real possibility of incidental findings that can lead to further testing, invasive biopsies, and unnecessary interventions, all of which compound your overall risk. You might solve one problem, but you’ve just guaranteed a much bigger, more explosive one down the line.
by e2le | 2025-11-08 17:52:16+00:00
I'm at the point now where I simply stop reading the article once it has too many red flags, something that is happening increasingly often.

I don't enjoy reading AI slop but it feels worse when users of AI tools have chosen not to disclose the authors of these articles as Claude/ChatGPT/etc. Rather than being honest upfront, they choose to hide this fact.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-11-08 17:52:19+00:00
Yes - in addition, medical professionals warn against “overdiagnosis” from unnecessary screenings.

This can happen when we choose to treat otherwise benign issues that would have had few negative consequences for our health or longevities. Those treatments can have negative effects that are worse than the ailment we’re trying to treat.

I know it’s a natural tech-guy impulse to quantify everything and get access to as much data as you can, but that myopic focus can actually lead us to optimize for the wrong thing.

[1]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4077659/

[2]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6135119/
by elteto | 2025-11-08 17:52:31+00:00
Right, binary gates are discrete elements but neural networks operate on a continuous domain.

I'm reminded of the Feynman anecdote when he went to work for Thinking Machines and they gave him some task related to figuring out routing in the CPU network of the machine, which is a discrete problem. He came back with a solution that used partial differential equations, which surprised everyone.
by overfeed | 2025-11-08 17:53:25+00:00
> The world's first AI powered phone

Do you remember the Facebook phone? Not many people do, because it was a failed project, and that was back when Android was way more open. Every couple of years, a tech company with billions has the brilliant idea: "Why don't we have a mobile platform that we control?", followed by failure. Amazon is the only qualified success in this area.
by kazinator | 2025-11-08 17:53:30+00:00
That's not the case.

Rather, you don't provide reasons to motivate people to switch to your font and stick with it.

You have mainly two kinds of users:

- those who have always stuck with whatever font came up by default in their text editor or terminal emulator.

- those who have gone through a phase of experimenting and tried a good bunch of fonts, then settled.

When you motivate the former group to experiment, they will tend to go into the second group: once they get into the workflow of installing fonts, they won't just stop at the one that was suggested to them first.

The second group is harder to motivate to try new fonts; they will do it if there is some compelling reason they can understand /before/ installing.

You don't explain how your font stands out above the competition. Or, maybe the personal angle: I tried these fifteen different fonts and still had to make one because X, Y, Z, so here it is.
by laxd | 2025-11-08 17:54:08+00:00
> But before Zig, there was C. For fifty years, C has been the foundation of modern computing.

And for fifty years, language theory has made progress. While C, brilliant as it once was, has given us never ending problems with security and reliability. The software world is saturated anyways. It's time to revise rather than just layering new junk in chase of profit.

> This article does not aim to dismiss Zig. Its focus is on the fact that C never stopped evolving.

It didn't stop but it certainly slowed down to glacial pace. There's plenty of fundamental issues that will never be fixed.

That said. I wish the software world would just keep its cool and not commit to Rust so fast. Rust was the first in a trend of new low level languages. It snowballed and now we may not get to make an informed decision on how the future of low level programming should be. I personally like Zig a lot more. Unfortunately people seem to be neither adequately scared of complexity nor sufficiently impressed by simplicity.
by saffron-sh | 2025-11-08 17:54:18+00:00
yt-dlp works just fine, no breakage for as long as i created m2m and now am maintaining it, and as for the thing about private playlists, IT WORKS ON THEM as long as you have the link for them and thus have them as "unlisted" meaning anyone with a link can view so you can download all of the videos of a playlist with its link
by derbOac | 2025-11-08 17:54:28+00:00
Sometimes I think the way this type of thing is framed is misleading. There's a list of putative causes of death and there's an assumption that they're equally systemically impactful, and you can go down the list and just lower the probability of each and lower your overall likelihood of death.

That's not totally off, but the thing about cardiovascular disease is it affects everything because it's how your body distributes oxygen. Stop distributing oxygen and you die.

That's not to say other organs aren't important, it's just that if you replace "cardiovascular" with "oxygen distribution" it becomes apparent that almost by necessity it's going to include a lot of deaths.
by ahaucnx | 2025-11-08 17:54:52+00:00
I actually think this could be the completely wrong approach.

By focusing on only one persona, you might focus on one that for reasons NOT covered in this questionnaire does not work out.

Practical example from us at AirGradient. Initially, we had a strong focus on selling air quality monitoring to schools.

Our strategy would have ticked all boxes in this article but selling to schools turned out to be extremely difficult. In our case, the problem was that decision makers are often not the people benefiting from the solution. Another reason for that persona being very difficult was that air quality is not a core competency of a school.

So I actually think that you should have a relatively broad approach because often the customer that you will be successful with you actually might not know when you start.
by arjie | 2025-11-08 17:55:24+00:00
The primary thing I did was ask a cardiovascular surgeon in my network to send the lab requisition form to a lab. This is the gate for much of this stuff, even if you pay out of pocket. If someone knows a simple “pay and play” testing service that would be fantastic.

Most doctors recommend against these and against the full body MRI one can get because they believe you’ll always find things you don’t expect and that will make you indulge in interventions that have weak support, resulting in deleterious iatrogenic effects.

I found that I had no such impulse with the data I had. But a friend of mine, supplied with evidence of a little arrhythmia went through a battery of tests and experimentation. He was in line for getting a cardiac ablation when he finally quit his job and stopped having the problem. So I get why they say that. There’s people like that.

Anyway, if you’re curious what you can get for $800 email me and I’ll post here. I’d do it proactively but I’m traveling so it will take a little work.
by Izkata | 2025-11-08 17:55:28+00:00
Between their two questions, I'm guessing more directly what they're getting at is if events 100 and 101 can be reordered, what's the guarantee that reconnecting doesn't end up giving you event 100 twice and skipping 101?

[Edit, rereading] Shortened down, just this part is probably it:

> which will include _all_ operations prior to the replacement of the node due to the no-op.

Sounds like a graph merge, not actually a replay.
by mlmonkey | 2025-11-08 17:55:32+00:00
Whenever I'm dealing with C++, I get tripped by the most basic of things: like for example, why use "&&" for what appears to be a pointer to a pointer? And if this indeed the case, why is int&& x compatible with int& y ?? Make up your mind: is it a pointer to a pointer, or a pointer to an int?!?

I have steadfastly avoided dealing with C++ for almost 30 years, and I am grateful that I did not have to. It seems like such a messy language with overloaded operators and symbols ( don't even get me started on Lambdas!)
by 201984 | 2025-11-08 17:56:20+00:00
Press F2 to go to setup, then go to "Meters" on the left. Under "Available Meters" you should see "GPU usage", which can be added to the status meters at the top. Available options for format are "Bar", "Text", "Graph", and "LED".

I'm using 3.4.1, so it's possible you have an older version that doesn't have it.
by gnabgib | 2025-11-08 17:56:43+00:00
Red sprite lightning, related:

Unveiling the mysterious 'red sprite' lightning strikes over the Himalayas (46 points, 8 months ago, 6 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43462510

Red Sprite Transient Luminous Event Photographed from ISS (3 points, 4 months ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44502998

ESA Astronaut Captures Images of Rare Thunder Phenomenon (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38507507

Elusive red sprites, like glowing jellyfish in the night sky in Oklahoma (3 points, 2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19722403
by fwip | 2025-11-08 17:56:54+00:00
Edit: Apologies, it looks like I misunderstood. Original response left below for posterity.

It's not "weirdly defensive and uninformed" to question the value of posting a bunch of inaccurate LLM slop, especially without any disclosures.

If you're pro-AI, you should be against this too, before these errors get used as training data.
by terminalshort | 2025-11-08 17:57:26+00:00
I have none. Did the engineers who developed autopilots start out as pilots? Did the people who invented email start out delivering mail for the post office? The point is that the new system doesn't have to look like the old system. Automating ATC isn't going to be the current ATC system, just done by computer. That makes about as much sense as designing driverless cars with a humanoid robot as driver.
by Apes | 2025-11-08 17:57:39+00:00
I strongly suspect the truth is both are "right", but they're both optimized answers to slightly different problems.

Mainstream medicine is hyper optimized for the most common 80% of cases. At a glance it makes sense: optimize for the common case. Theres some flaws in this logic though - the most common 80% also conveniently overlaps heavily with the easiest 80%. If most of the problems in that 80% solve themselves, then what actual value is provided by a medical system hyper focused on solving non-problems? The real value from the medical system isnt telling people "it's probably just a flu, let's just give it a few days and see" it's providing a diagnosis for a difficult to identify condition.

So if your question is "how do we maximize value and profit in aggregate for providing medical care to large groups of people", mainstream medicine is maybe a good answer.

But if your question is "how do we provide the best care to individual patients" then mainstream medicine has significant problems.
Show HN: Allos – An open-source, LLM-agnostic agentic SDK for Python
by undiluted7027 | 2025-11-08 17:57:51+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm the creator of Allos. For the past few weeks, I've been building a tool to solve a problem that's been personally frustrating me: every time I wanted to build an AI agent, I felt forced to choose between a simple framework that locked me into one provider (like OpenAI or Anthropic) or a complex one that felt like overkill.

I wanted the ability to switch the LLM "brain" of my agent on the fly without rewriting my code. For example, use GPT-5 for a coding task and then switch to Claude 4.1 Sonnet for a writing task, all with the same agent logic.

That's why I built Allos. It's an MIT-licensed Python SDK with a few core goals:

1. True Provider Agnosticism: A unified interface for providers. The MVP has full support for OpenAI and Anthropic. The agent's code doesn't change when you switch.

2. A Simple, Powerful CLI: The main way to interact is through a single allos command. You can give it a high-level task, and it will use its tools to get it done (after asking for permission for anything sensitive). E.g., allos "Create a FastAPI app in main.py and run it."

3. Extensible Tools: It comes with secure, built-in tools for filesystem and shell operations. Adding your own custom tool is just a Python class with a decorator.

4. No Magic: The architecture is simple and transparent. It's a straightforward agentic loop without a heavy layer of abstraction to fight against. The code is 100% unit tested.

Here's a 3-minute video showing it in action (including building a multi-file app from a single prompt): https://youtu.be/rWc-8awcAJo

The next big feature on the roadmap is first-class support for local models via Ollama.

I'm here to answer any questions. I'd love to get your feedback, critiques, and ideas.

Thanks for checking it out!
by mlmonkey | 2025-11-08 17:59:32+00:00
> Why would Apple do such a thing?

Because Steve is not around to rip these MBA-types a new asshole for even mentioning such crap.

Tim is not a visionary leader. He is a great manager who can manage logistics like nobody else and deliver the finished product.

But Steve was the visionary leader: he laid out the plan of where they were going, sold his troops on the big picture and Tim helped get the troops there.
by stephc_int13 | 2025-11-08 17:59:49+00:00
The Zig self-contained toolchain is one of the most appealing feature IMO, and it can also be used to compile C.

That said, I was very interested in Zig 2-3 years ago but that has mostly cooled off, C is not perfect but good/flexible enough for what I am building.

Zig has some opinionated language features/idiosyncrasies that I don't like and the syntax feels somewhat less clean.

Also, while I really like the memory management approach (passing allocators as parameters) the way it is implemented is conflicting some of my needs. There are probably some workarounds but I don't feel the need to invest much time in this language as the added QoL benefits are not simply not outweighing the cost for me.
by 201984 | 2025-11-08 18:00:05+00:00
Did you not even try the original command? As you've now updated it (https://github.com/little-book-of/c/commit/43b0a89852a507bdd...), it is definitely not one simple flag since arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc has to be installed from somewhere. It doesn't exist in a default installation of GCC that only targets the host, and you'll need to install a GCC version for every architecture you want to target.
by tonymet | 2025-11-08 18:00:16+00:00
in this case “useful” means applying the facts and making changes. A detailed map that goes unused is useless. A hand drawn map that gets you home is priceless.

People don’t need more facts and information – those are in surplus. In fact, for most people when they receive too many facts, they just glaze over.

The changes needed are trivial
by puttycat | 2025-11-08 18:00:19+00:00
I cannot judge the science in most of the article since I'm not a medical doctor.

But since I have a PhD in computer science in a relevant subdomain, I can certainly judge the part where he recommends the following:

> What should you do with your test results? Throw them into ChatGPT, of course!

Do not count on anything coming out of ChatGPT for medical advice. Period.
by nothrabannosir | 2025-11-08 18:00:21+00:00
You’re not wrong but it is not a fair TLDR. TFA has a TLDR which says

> If you only read one thing here, make it the “How to not die of heart disease” section.

Which itself is still quite long but it emphasizes:

> Every lipidologist I’ve spoken with has stressed the importance of measuring and managing ApoB above all else – it’s a far better predictor of cardiovascular disease than LDL-C (which is what physicians are most familiar with). Every standard deviation increase of ApoB raises the risk of myocardial infarction by 38%. Yet because guidelines regularly lag science, the AHA still recommends LDL-C over ApoB. Test for it regularly (ideally twice a year) and work to get it as low as possible (longevity doctor Peter Attia recommends 30-40mg per deciliter). Many lipidologists will say to focus on this above all else.

And:

> I asked several leading lipidologists to stack rank what they believe are the most important biomarkers for people to measure and manage. […], and will likely cost anywhere between $80-$120 out of pocket.

That’s a pretty interesting and relevant part of TFA. Omitting that is not a fair “long story short”, but rather just “different story”.
by somenameforme | 2025-11-08 18:00:49+00:00
Just expanding on a peer post, but industrial made food tends to have a large number of preservatives, stabilizers, coloring agents, and much more added for commercial reasons. An obvious example of this is in something as simple as bread. If you've ever made homemade bread. It goes stale in a day or two, and it's hard as a rock shortly thereafter.

But that loaf you buy at the store? It'll generally be covered in mold before it gets hard, and that's quite the achievement since it also tends to be more resistant to mold as well! Bread should get hard. This is where a ton of old recipes come from. The Ancient Greeks would dip it in wine for breakfast, Euroland has bread soup/puddings, and even stuff in the US like Thanksgiving stuffings or croutons.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-08 18:00:57+00:00
> When I see that it is widely accepted that ApoB is better to measure than LDL-C, but the industry continues to measure LDL-C, but not ApoB, I wonder why. It makes me skeptical.

ApoB is shaping up to be an incremental improvement in measurements, but health and fitness influencers have taken the marginal improvement and turned it into a hot topic to talk about.

This happens with everything in fitness: To remain topical and relevant, you always need to be taking about the newest, most cutting edge advances. If it’s contrarian or it makes you feel more informed than your doctor, it’s a perfect topic to adopt for podcasts and social media content.

ApoB is good, but it’s not necessarily the night and day difference or some radical medical advancement that obsoletes LDL-C. For practical purposes, measuring LDL-C is good enough for most people to get a general idea of the direction of their CVD risk. The influencers like to talk about edge cases where LDL-C is low but then ApoB comes along and reveals a hidden risk, but as even this article shows there isn’t even consensus about where the risk levels are for ApoB right now. A lot of the influencers are using alternative thresholds for ApoB that come from different sources.

> In the end statins reduce the chance of heart attack by like 30% I think. Not bad, but if you have a heart attack without statins, you probably (70%) would have had a heart attack with statins too. That's what a 30% risk reduction means, right?

30% reduction in a life threatening issue is huge. I don’t see why you would want to diminish that.

If you were given the choice of two different dangerous roads where one road had a 30% lower chance of getting into a life-threatening car crash, you would probably think that the choice was obvious, not that the two roads were basically the same.
by appreciatorBus | 2025-11-08 18:01:18+00:00
… and yet today in this imperfect system murder is illegal, and the weak thrive, even if they do not thrive as much as the strong.

The point is not which system gets rid of these, in my opinion, permanent aspects of human nature, but which one results in the best outcome despite them.

If the belief is the collectivism deals with these issues better, that’s wonderful. But I never hear that, instead, I hear that not-collectivist systems are the one and only cause of these systems, and that only collectivism will solve them. And I just don’t believe that’s true, and I think we have lots of historical evidence of societies that tried forced collectivization and failed.
by keybored | 2025-11-08 18:01:26+00:00
Remember a basic premise. For actually existing democracy the people have power. The people have power yet they have urgent “fish to fry” like getting food and keeping their homes? Why are they so apparently downtrodden when they have power?

And the leaders? They do not have these bigger fish to fry?

Is the real reason here that there are regular people and then there are elites? And the difference between these two groups’ capacity to act (power) is so different that the first just has to stay busy staying alive (or rather: deal with all their everyday chores, doesn’t have to be bare survival at all) while the other group has the capacity to wield and exercise power? Then the premise is false: you are not talking about a democracy to begin with.

What didn’t exist cannot be given away.