MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by userbinator | 2025-11-25 06:46:49+00:00
Asbestos is harmless if not inhaled, and the most dangerous forms of it were banned long ago. White asbestos (chrysotile) is relatively safe especially if used as an encapsulated filler. Here's an interesting study of chrysotile miners, exposed to very high levels of it daily: https://asbest-study.iarc.who.int/

The effects of CFCs are still disputed, but they replaced far more dangerous refrigerants... but somehow people are being convinced into using propane and butane again.

On the other hand, I'll say that leaded petrol was bad, but that's because it was designed to be dispersed into the atmosphere and the effects of lead poisoning quite clear.

This microplastics bullshit has not passed the test of time or (real) science. It's not "progress", it's become radical ideology. Here's something which may enlighten you: a ton of articles which claim to have discovered "microplastics" are really implying to have done so by detecting the decomposition products of long hydrocarbon chains, which are of course present in polymers like polyethylene, the world's most common plastic; but guess what else has long hydrocarbon chains? Fats and oils. As in biological matter.
by fainpul | 2025-11-25 06:47:05+00:00
On macOS / Linux you can use `dd` to "copy" everything from /dev/yourssd to /dev/null. Just be careful not to do it the other way!

https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/dd.1.html

I have no idea if forcing a read is good / the right way. I'm just answering how to do it.
by siscia | 2025-11-25 06:47:41+00:00
With my partner we have been working to invert the overall model.

She started grading conversation than the students have with LLMs.

From the question that the students ask, it is obvious who knows the material and who is struggling.

We do have a custom setup, so that she creates an homework. There is a custom prompt to avoid the LLM answering the homework question. But thats pretty much it.

The results seems promising, with students spending 30m or so going back and forth with the LLMs.

If any educator wants to Ty or is interested in more information, let me know and we can see how we collaborate.
by b-karl | 2025-11-25 06:47:56+00:00
I started using keyboard navigation more and more around Win 7 and that has actually improved quite consistently since then and I remember Win 8 Win-key search was quite good, if you could look past the start menu…

Also reminds me of the layers of UI versions still present in Windows https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27556754
by breput | 2025-11-25 06:48:04+00:00
The spinrite[0] user group has noticed some of these effects, even on in-service drives.

The theory is that operating system files, which rarely change, are written and almost never re-written. So the charges begin to decay over time and while they might not be unreadable, reads for these blocks require additional error correction, which reduces performance.

There have been a significant number of (anecdotal) reports that a full rewrite of the drive, which does put wear on the cells, greatly increases the overall performance. I haven't personally experienced this yet, but I do think a "every other year" refresh of data on SSDs makes sense.

[0] https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
by questioner8216 | 2025-11-25 06:48:32+00:00
I dislike some of this article, my impression is similar to some of the complaints of others here.

However, are Go programs not supposed to typically avoid sharing mutable data across goroutines in the first place? If only immutable messages are shared between goroutines, it should be way easier to avoid many of these issues. That is of course not always viable, for instance due to performance concerns, but in theory can be done a lot of the time.

I have heard others call for making it easier to track mutability and immutability in Go, similar to what the author writes here.

As for closures having explicit capture lists like in C++, I have heard some Rust developers saying they would also have liked that in Rust. It is more verbose, but can be handy.
by homebrewer | 2025-11-25 06:48:37+00:00
the most basic solution that will work for every filesystem and every type of block device without even mounting anything, but won't actually check much except device-level checksums:

sudo pv -X /dev/sda

or even just:

sudo cat /dev/sda >/dev/null

and it's pretty inefficient if the device doesn't actually have much data, because it also reads (and discards) empty space.

for copy-on-write filesystems that store checksums along with the data, you can request proper integrity checks and also get the nicely formatted report about how well that went.

for btrfs:

sudo btrfs scrub start -B /

or zfs:

sudo zpool scrub -a -w

for classic (non-copy-on-write) filesystems that mostly consist of empty space I sometimes do this:

sudo tar -cf - / | cat >/dev/null

the `cat` and redirection to /dev/null is necessary because GNU tar contains an optimization that doesn't actually read anything when it detects /dev/null as the target.
by raincole | 2025-11-25 06:49:41+00:00
It's the opposite.

> focused upon memorization and regurgitation

This is what is easy to test in-class.

Teachers worry about AI because they do not just care about memorization. Before AI, being able to write cohesive essays about a subject is a good proxy to prove your understanding beyond simple memorization. Now it's gone.

A lazy, irresponsible teacher who only cares about memorization will just grade students via in-class multi choices tests exclusively and call it a day. They don't need to worry about AI at all.
by willywanker | 2025-11-25 06:50:58+00:00
What passes for a desktop app these anyway is just some variation of Electron - bundle the website along with a Chrome instance and serve up the resulting 300-400 MB bundle as a 'desktop' app. Who gives a crap about keyboard and mouse focused platform UI/UX conventions. Visually and functionally there's no difference between opening Whatsapp Web and installing this - both the earlier version and now.
by derleyici | 2025-11-25 06:50:58+00:00
8 for Windows 11? An OS that includes ads in the Start menu, made with React. I'm not even mentioning right-click, which has basically two views: you open it and see some uselessly chosen tools, and you still need to open the old version (with the old design, breaking design consistency) to access actually useful things. Viva Windows XP!
by kryptiskt | 2025-11-25 06:52:00+00:00
To me it looks like simple, clear examples of potential issues. It's unfortunate to frame that as "crapping on Go", how are new Go programmers going to learn about the pitfalls if all discussion of them are seen as hostility?

Like, rightly or wrongly, Go chose pervasive mutability and shared memory, it inevitably comes with drawbacks. Pretending they don't exist doesn't make them go away.
by rmu09 | 2025-11-25 06:53:58+00:00
Interesting. I sometimes get similar behaviour on KDE / wayland, usually it is "2" or "3", and it seems to only affect electron apps. Always thought it has something to do with a dodgy ps/2 to usb converter I use to attach my old mechanical keyboards. I think it does not happen if electron apps are started with "--ozone-platform=wayland" but not completely sure, and I have no reliable way to reproduce or somehow trigger that behaviour.
by chubot | 2025-11-25 06:54:47+00:00
People don't care if they're colluded against for tens of thousands of dollars? 6% of an American house is a lot of money

Because it's often spread over many years of a mortgage, I can see why SOME people might not. It is not as concrete as someone stealing your car, but the amount is in the same ballpark

But some people should care - these are the same people who track their stock portfolios closely, have college funds for their kids, etc.

A mortgage is the biggest expense for many people, and generally speaking I've found that people don't like to get ripped off :-)
by rustystump | 2025-11-25 06:55:01+00:00
On a phone and the formatting of the snippets is unreadable with the 8 space tabs…

That said, i think about all languages have their own quirks and footguns. I think people sometimes forget that tools are just that, tools. Go is remarkably easy to be productive in which is what the label on the tin can claims.

It isnt “fearless concurrency” but get shit done before 5 pm because traffics a bitch on Wednesdays
by userbinator | 2025-11-25 06:56:18+00:00
The problem is now you cannot choose because the factories/machines that make SLC are all gone.

You can still get pure SLC flash in smaller sizes, or use TLC/QLC in SLC mode.

I much rather have 64GB of SLC at 100K WpB than 4TB of MLC at less than 10K WpB.

It's more like 1TB of SLC vs. 3TB of TLC or 4TB of QLC. All three take the same die area, but the SLC will last a few orders of magnitude longer.
by aw1621107 | 2025-11-25 06:57:00+00:00
> In C++, a class like std::lock_guard also provides "Automatic unlock". AFAICT, the article argues that only Rust's API provides that.

The issue isn't automatic unlocking. From the article:

> The problem? Nothing stops you from accessing account without locking the mutex first. The compiler won’t catch this bug.

i.e., a C++ compiler will happily compile code that modifies `account` without taking the lock first. Your lock_guard example suffers from this same issue.

Nothing in the C++ stdlib provides an API that makes it impossible to access `account` without first taking the lock, and while you can write C++ classes that approximate the Rust API you can't quite reach the same level of robustness without external help.
by jrflowers | 2025-11-25 06:58:24+00:00
> nobody is yet ready to have a serious discussion about this.

There are a ton of people that are happy to have serious discussions about how their superior knowledge of biology gives them oracular insight into the minds of women. These discussions happen every day in Discord chats full of pubescent boys, Discord chats full of young men, and YouTube comments sections full of older men.
by Huppie | 2025-11-25 06:58:53+00:00
I was evaluating codex vs claude code the past month and GPT 5.1 codex being slow is just the default experience I had with it.

The answers were mostly on par (though different in style which took some getting used to) but the speed was a big downer for me. I really wanted to give it an honest try but went back to Claude Code within two weeks.
by nomendos | 2025-11-25 06:59:34+00:00
MS has a history of flagrant abuse of user's privacy much before Win11, with Telemetry, Recall fiasco and Cortana, just try to analyze the traffic from MS Teams and you'll have hard time to find a bigger nosing spyware (Zoom as a Chinese cloaked is arguably close). Mindset of "anything goes" as long as it decorated with "nice sounding words and names" while under the hood is doing a mix of potentially quite nefarious things. I stopped at sanitized Win10 and can not trust that Win11 sanitation can hold (therefore won't switch to it likely ever and there is growing number of users like me). Once you start seeing this, you can't unseen it. Long term it is bad intent strategic direction that will end in loose-loose.
by pbmonster | 2025-11-25 06:59:48+00:00
Sure. Just make sure the drive is warm before you take it out of the container - because this is when the critical condensation happens: you take out a cold drive an expose it to humid room temperature air. Then water condenses on (and in) the cold drive.

Re-freezing is also critical, the container should contain no humid air when it goes into the freezer, because the water will condense and freeze as the container cools. A tightly wrapped bag, desiccant and/or purging the container with dry gas would prevent that.
by questioner8216 | 2025-11-25 07:01:03+00:00
Rust concurrency also has issues, there are many complaints about async [0], and some Rust developers point to Go as having green threads. The original author of Rust originally wanted green threads as I understand it, but Rust evolved in a different direction.

As for Java, there are fibers/virtual threads now, but I know too little of them to comment on them. Go's green thread story is presumably still good, also relative to most other programming languages. Not that concurrency in Java is bad, it has some good aspects to it.

[0]: An example is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45898923 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45903586 , both for the same article.
by mikewarot | 2025-11-25 07:01:21+00:00
Research on the actual distribution of mRNA vacccines through the body is sparse. Here's the relevant quote from something recent[1]

Lipid nanoparticle mRNA vaccines have revolutionized vaccinology and saved many lives during the COVID-19 pandemic.1 Lipid nanoparticle mRNA vaccines typically contain 5 materials – mRNA, an ionizable lipid, a polyethylene glycol (PEG)–lipid, a helper lipid and cholesterol. Although the vaccines are delivered intramuscularly (IM) and act primarily in the draining lymph node, recent studies have suggested that at least small amounts of the mRNA vaccines may distribute in humans more widely than originally anticipated. A primarily cross-sectional study detected mRNA in blood for up to 15 days after mRNA vaccination.2 Low levels of the vaccine mRNA were detected in breast milk up to 45 hours post-vaccination.3,4 An autopsy study of people dying incidentally after vaccination found mRNA in tissues (axillary lymph nodes and heart) up to 30 days after vaccination.5 Presumably the mRNA reached breast milk and tissues following circulation in blood. Despite evidence in animals and humans that mRNA can be detected in blood after vaccination,2,6 studies of the pharmacokinetics of mRNA lipid nanoparticle components in blood in humans are lacking.

[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.07.25.24311039v...
by ahf8Aithaex7Nai | 2025-11-25 07:01:45+00:00
It's not meaningless. What do you do with a person who contradicts you or behaves in a way that is annoying to you? You can't always just shut that person up or change their mind or avoid them in some other way, can you? And I'm not talking about an employment relationship. Of course, you can simply replace employees or employers. You can also avoid other people you don't like. But if you want to maintain an ongoing relationship with someone, for example, a partnership, then you can't just re-prompt that person. You have a thinking and speaking subject in front of you who looks into the world, evaluates the world, and acts in the world just as consciously as you do.

Sociologists refer to this as double contingency. The nature of the interaction is completely open from both perspectives. Neither party can assume that they alone are in control. And that is precisely what is not the case with LLMs. Of course, you can prompt an LLM to snap at you and boss you around. But if your human partner treats you that way, you can't just prompt that behavior away. In interpersonal relationships (between equals), you are never in sole control. That's why it's so wonderful when they succeed and flourish. It's perfectly clear that an LLM can only ever give you the papier-mâché version of this.

I really can't imagine that you don't understand that.
by Animats | 2025-11-25 07:02:32+00:00
Some animals are ready to go as soon as they are born. These are called precocial animals. They are born knowing how to walk.

It's interesting seeing what comes built-in. You can see this if you watch a horse being born. Within the first hour, the foal will stand, and despite long legs, this usually works the first time. Lying down, however, is not preprogrammed. I've watched a foal circle trying to figure out how to get down from standing, and finally collapsing to the ground in a heap. Standing up quickly is essential to survival, but smoothly lying down is not. Within a day, a newborn foal can run with the herd.

Of the mammals, most of the equines and some of the rodents (beavers) are precocial. Pigs are, monkeys are not. It's not closely tied to evolutionary ancestry.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-11-25 07:02:59+00:00
AI should not grade them.

Code that the AI writes would be used to grade them.

- AI is great at some things.

- Code is great at other things.

- AI is bad at some things code is great for.

- AI is great at coding.

Therefore, leverage AI to quickly code up deterministic and fast tools for the tasks where code is best.

And to help exams be markable by code, it makes sense to be smart about exam structure - eg. only ask questions with binary answers or multiple choice so you don’t need subjective judgment of correctness.
by saurik | 2025-11-25 07:03:19+00:00
> My ideal environment would be Windows 95-like WM with zero configuration options which just works out of the box the way I want.

Why would we have any reason to believe that there would ever be a super-opinionated desktop environment that would be good? The examples we have -- which notably DO NOT include Windows 95, which had a zillion tiny knobs, many in the UI, but others requiring dropping to the registry (which is no different from screwing with confirmation files)... and, frankly, doesn't even include macOS, the system with some of the best customization of key bindings and the most universal automation -- are mostly bad. Put in the day or two of effort to make something that isn't opinionated work the way you want, and then reap the rewards for the following few decades of your productive career.
by rav3ndust | 2025-11-25 07:03:54+00:00
I plan on picking one of these new Pebbles up in the next batch. I loved my original Pebbles (I still have my old Time Steel). Before the Pebbles came back and PebbleOS open-sourced, the only real open smartwatch option we had around that I'm aware of is the PineTime, which I currently wear every day rocking Infinitime.

Will be fun to pick up one of these again and be able to hop back and forth between it and the PineTime! Great stuff, Eric and team.
by perlgeek | 2025-11-25 07:04:57+00:00
Because training a model is expensive, takes a lot of time, and new models need to be evaluated.

But you are right: the trend to represent some helpers compactly so that they don't eat up much of your context window, that's all a workaround for a very real limitation: that fully-trained LLMs cannot meaningfully learn from new context and new data.

It's a bit like writing super-compact HOWTOs for all the tasks that employees ought to be able to do, instead of properly training new employees. There's a place for that, but it only gets you so far.
by wlesieutre | 2025-11-25 07:05:32+00:00
When you hit print screen, it takes a screenshot, waits a blatantly visible number of frames while you type more letters or stuff keeps moving on screen, and then eventually rewinds time by overlaying the now outdated screenshot for you to select a target area

Pressing escape can sometimes cancel out of this overlay (in case you bumped print screen by accident). But sometimes it doesn’t, because the full screen overlay in front of everything has managed to lose keyboard focus, and you need to click on it before it can respond to keyboard input.

Godawful trash OS and I hate that I’m stuck working on it.
by aldonius | 2025-11-25 07:05:42+00:00
In Brisbane I think our ticketing system cost overhead is maybe 10%?

The cost of the programme rolling out new ticketing infra (the first major ticketing system upgrade in ~15 years since we first got integrated ticketing, going from a stored-value smart card to also being able to tap your credit card) is roughly the same amount of money as the annual revenue from fares.
by ANNOFlo | 2025-11-25 07:05:43+00:00
As someone who grew up with Vista (yeah, I'm young) I will always love that look. Probably a good bit of nostalgia, but as a kid who couldn't really even manage files well that always looked so fancy and fun!

Even still have the laptop I used back then, fully with the barely functioning charging port that makes booting it up an exercise in dexterity.
by somat | 2025-11-25 07:06:45+00:00
It was the style at the time. There are a lot of programs from that era with stupid, oversized nothing standard ui's, windows xp was a study in restraint compared to many applications. I think computers had just gotten powerful enough to have large bitmaps in the ui and the designers got a little crazy with their newfound power, as they tend to do. Our "modern" superflat look is probably the remnants of a reflexive recoil at all that excess. I expect it will start rebounding the other way in a few years as up and coming designers get nostalgic for their windows xp youth.
by skeledrew | 2025-11-25 07:08:22+00:00
Another consideration here that hits both sides at once is that the maintainers on the project are few. So while it could be a great burden pushing generated code on them for review, it also seems a great burden to get new features done in the first place. So it boils down to the choice of dealing with generated code for X feature, or not having X feature for a long time, if ever.
by 9dev | 2025-11-25 07:08:45+00:00
Have you tried talking to normies about this? Sure, nobody likes bad things happening to them, but they usually neither understand what would be bad about a loss of privacy, think the long-term consequences are just paranoid fear-mongering, and will shrug away the implications next time they encounter a decision between comfort and privacy again.

It reminds me of Jamie Oliver (I think it was him) showing a group of pupils how Chicken Nuggets are made, in all its brutality; afterwards, when asking them if they would like to eat some nuggets now, guess what they said? "Yeeeeees!"
by xg15 | 2025-11-25 07:09:19+00:00
https://futurism.com/zuckerberg-lonely-friends-create-ai

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mark-zuckerberg-ai-digital-futur...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1kjf4da/mark_zu...

To be fair, he was talking about "additional" friends. So something like 3 actual human friends + 15 "AI friends" to boost the numbers, or something.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-11-25 07:09:43+00:00
That’s absolutely not about backdoors and I fail to see how it concerns GrapheneOS.

This law says a judge can compel a key owner to decrypt something as part of an investigation.

This doesn’t in any way creating backdoor in encryption setup nor does it cover developer of encrypted system.

Did you go fishing for any law supporting your point and hoped that brandishing one which looked vaguely similar to what you were looking for would work? Because it sure looks like you did.
by sedatk | 2025-11-25 07:10:00+00:00
> With Windows 95, Microsoft managed to produce a version of its OS that scared Apple so much they ended up bringing Steve Jobs back, along with his own operating system, NeXTSTEP

Funny because Windows 95 contains many ideas from the more ambitious project codenamed Windows Cairo that was intended to mimic NextSTEP. Cairo was never released, but the gray slab 3D look, the "X" button on the top-right corner on Windows 95 are the hallmarks of NextSTEP.

Windows 95's most original GUI idea was the Start menu.
by sho_hn | 2025-11-25 07:10:50+00:00
Wow! I am stunned how wrong that feels. I remember adopting git in the first year, and it still feels fairly recent. That it only took 10 years from Win95 to git, and 20 years from git to now, is truly uncanny. Win95 feels like a genuinely old thing and git like a fairly recent thing.
by questioner8216 | 2025-11-25 07:11:38+00:00
That is a different topic from what I wrote about.

The article wrote:

> Automatic unlock: When you lock, you receive a guard. When the guard goes out of scope, it automatically unlocks. No manual cleanup needed.

And presented Rust as being different from C++ regarding that, and the C++ example was not idiomatic, since it did not use something like std::lock_guard.

I have not addressed the rest of your comment, since it is a different topic, sorry.