MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by UniverseHacker | 2025-12-06 15:22:22+00:00
> Dopamine withdrawal is real though and if you no longer get dopamine from an action or you physically prevent yourself from receiving that dopamine

Exactly, this is why the idea of addiction is more appropriately focused around the actual real world impacts rather than specific chemical mechanisms- the difficulty quitting and the negative impacts on your life. If it's strong enough to overpower your will and destroy your life, that is sufficient, it doesn't matter exactly how.

When it comes down to it, something like an amphetamine drug or other stimulants that directly increase synaptic dopamine, vs a behavior like gambling addiction that exploits the brains instincts and wiring in other ways to still cause the increase in synaptic dopamine are not fundamentally, categorically different in a way that one or the other shouldn't be taken seriously and considered a "real addiction." Either can completely destroy some peoples life, and for other people can be easily controlled and used in moderation.
by Aachen | 2025-12-06 15:22:54+00:00
From a hardware point of view I've also noticed that speakers work like poor microphones (and LEDs like poor solar panels / light sensors), but is there any way to actually make this work on most devices without physically changing wiring? If the circuits aren't made to take measurements (or the software can't get at the readings) but only set a voltage on the wires, there wouldn't be a way to (ab)use this. I don't know enough about electronics to know whether this is commonly the case

Not that it's not a good thing to be aware of, but do you have any sort of source for what kinds of devices can have their speakers turned into microphones? Then I'll believe you about the government part
by Scandiravian | 2025-12-06 15:22:55+00:00
I just realised I didn't answer the first question about what keeps me from discovering the issues earlier

The quick answer is complexity and the amount of energy I have, since I'm mostly working on my homelab after a full work day

Some things also don't run that often or I don't check up on them for some time. Like hardware acceleration for my jellyfin instance stopped working at some point because I was messing around with OpenCL and I messed up something with the Mesa drivers. Didn't discover it until I noticed the fans going ham due to the added workload
by bubblethink | 2025-12-06 15:22:58+00:00
But this isn't an ambiguous area of law. The statute is pretty clear in the text here - that the EB1-A criteria are necessary but not sufficient. That's what the step1 (necessary) and step2 (sufficient) boil down to. You can litigate on what qualifies as necessary if the agency is doing something weird, but ultimately it is a subjective evaluation. The court isn't going to adjudicate on the merits, USCIS is.
by SR2Z | 2025-12-06 15:23:03+00:00
These people will gladly watch human driven cars continue to run over children as long as Google doesn't get to make any money.

Last year, in SF, an old woman driving a big SUV took out an entire family of four that was WAITING AT A BUS STOP. On the SIDEWALK.

She hasn't gone to jail. She hasn't really paid any fine. The neighborhood carefully formed the street renovation committee so that the family that died would have been excluded, but the driver that killed them would have a seat if she wanted it.

When they rant about how unfair it is to let a company test a robotaxi I can't help but feel they'd also look at this problem and say NBD.
by idkwhatiamdoing | 2025-12-06 15:24:13+00:00
This hits home. For me stopping coffee (and caffeine) consumption was also one building block of taking care of my generalised anxiety disorder. I enjoyed the morning ritual, but it stopped with quitting drinking coffee. Maybe I should give decaf a shot, but I also miss just grabbing a coffee when out with friends (usually tea does not scratch the same itch and is not worth it when everyone else around you is enjoying a great smelling coffee). All I want to say is “Thanks for sharing” I guess. I was able to connect with what you said.
by toss1 | 2025-12-06 15:25:22+00:00
OK, now do that in reality, not just in theory.

86 billion neurons, 100 trillion connections, and each connection modulated by dozens of different neurotransmitters and action potential levels and uncounted timing sequences (and that's just what I remember off the top of my head from undergrad neuroscience courses decades ago).

It hasn't even been done for a single pair of neurons because all the variables are not yet understood. All the neural nets use only the most oversimplified version of what a neuron does — merely a binary fire/don't fire algo with training-adjusted weights.

Even assuming all the neurotransmitters, action potentials, and timing sequences, and internal biochemistry of each neuron type (and all the neuron-supporting cells) were understood and simulate-able, using all 250 billion GPUs shipped in 2024 [0] to each simulate a neuron and all its connections, neurotransmitters and timings, it'd take 344 years to accumulate 86 billion of them to simulate one brain.

Even if the average connection between neurons is one foot long, to simulate 100 trillion connections is 18 billion miles of wire. Even if the average connection is 0.3mm, that's 18 million miles of wire.

I'm not even going to bother back-of-the-envelope calculating the power to run all that.

The point is it is not even close to happening until we achieve many orders of magnitude greater computation density.

Will many useful things be achieved before that level of integration? Absolutely, just these oversimplified neural nets are producing useful things.

But just as we can conceptually imagine faster-than-light travel, imagining full-fidelity human brain simulation (which is not the same as good-enough-to-be-useful or good-enough-to-fool-many-people) is only maybe a bit closer to reality.

[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/more-than-251-mil...
by mapontosevenths | 2025-12-06 15:25:55+00:00
Proving a negative is often impossible. The rate of change in society would fall to near zero.

Given that technological improvements in farming are the only reason we haven't all starved to death and that society continues to grow while the amount of farmland stays the same I oppose anything that might impede our ability to produce food.

Did you know that 80% of the nitrogen in human tissues now originated with the Haber-Bosch process? If we were still waiting around for someone to prove that Haber-Bosch, or Ammonia in general, couldn't possibly harm humans then most humans would have long ago starved to death or never have been born.
by phantasmish | 2025-12-06 15:25:58+00:00
FTA: “only four donors have transmitted rabies to recipients since 1979”

ONLY?! Rabies cases are really uncommon! I’m seeing 17 in the us from 2015-2024. Even assume double or triple the rates in earlier decades and, what, maybe 200 since 1978? 2-4% chance a given person who dies of rabies has their organs given to someone else? That’s an order of magnitude higher than I’d have guessed. WTF.
by TacticalCoder | 2025-12-06 15:26:09+00:00
> As someone who loves immich, a VM is overkill but also without vGPUs or external configuration loses you access to some the best features, local AI searching akin to what google and apple photos offer.

I installed immich in a VM. And the VM is using GPU passthrough. I don't see how it's overkill: immich is a kitchen sink with hundreds if not thousands of dependencies and hardly a month goes by without yet another massive exploit affecting package managers.

I'm not saying VM escapes exploit aren't a thing but this greatly raises the bar.

When one install a kitchen sink as gigantic as immich, anything that can help contain exploits is most welcome.

So: immich in a VM and if you want a GPU, just do GPU passthrough.

I agree that the search using facial recognition is nice in immich that said.
by ur-whale | 2025-12-06 15:27:54+00:00
I was certainly not trying to say that differences between people do not exist and most certainly never claimed that your brain should work the way other people's brain do (At my age, I absolutely know mine does not, by a wide margin, and never has, and I'm in fact quite fond of that fact).

I'm simply saying that the way we're classifying people is utter BS, and assigning labels is very hurtful

Everyone is different. The "median man" does not exist. Or if he does there are maybe 3 on the whole planet, not something significant.

Much like your fingerprints, your brain is completely unique, and what chemicals / lifestyle / circumstances affect it in what way is a hugely personal affair. And to make matters even more complicated, it changes very much over time.

If you agree to let any kind of random bozo, with a so-called specialist title and a diploma tell you that you are a "typical neuro-divergent belong to class XYZ", run like hell.

The only way is to experiment with the way your mind works: chemicals, social groups, type of work, meditation, yoga, sports, more or less social interaction, whatever ultimately gets you to where you want to be.

But if you let every other snake oil salesman out there, or the rest of humanity in general, tell you who you are and who you ought to be ... good luck to you.
by james_marks | 2025-12-06 15:28:10+00:00
I stumbled across a fun trick this week. After making some API changes, I had CC “write a note to the FE team with the changes”.

I then pasted this to another CC instance running the FE app, and it made the counter part.

Yes, I could have CC running against both repos and sometimes do, but I often run separate instances when tasks are complex.
by typicalset | 2025-12-06 15:28:14+00:00
This is, not to put too fine a point on it, crank science. Opening up the linked document, the DOI fails to resolve, the paper investigates pH variations in urine during tide cycles, and also skimming over it doesn't appear to make a single prediction. This is at best unfalsifiable, and a "break with the scientific community" is an accurate assessment.

The physics of tides is largely well-understood, and the moon and sun provide the primary forcing. Accurate tide tables are regularly computed the world over, with measurements regularly made. Without even looking at measurements, the shipping industry demands accurate tide forecasts for navigating efficiently. The claim that "tidal phenomena are... primarily electromagnetic" requires some serious evidence to back it up, with calculates to boot, rather than invoking mysticism that tides are "beyond us". Many things are beyond our current scientific understanding, and that is humbling, but tides are quite well understood.
by mannykannot | 2025-12-06 15:28:15+00:00
I completely agree, and I will add one more thing: when you change how the product looks or works, make sure that users - especially inexperienced users - can easily find the documentation and tutorials that correctly describes the version of the product that they are attempting to use. I would guess that out of ten people who run into a situation where something does not work as described, maybe only one or two will push through the frustration and go on to become power users.
by starlight1980 | 2025-12-06 15:29:15+00:00
This is terrifying. The article accurately describes how the drive to build satellite mega-constellations (Starlink, etc.) has become a direct threat to science and security.

If the simulations are true and satellites will ruin up to 96% of images from orbiting telescopes, and potentially obscure near-Earth asteroids, we are facing a crisis.

This conflict between communications and astronomy demands immediate, international regulation. Technological progress cannot come at the expense of global planetary security and fundamental scientific research. Companies must be held accountable for polluting the orbit.
by LucidLynx | 2025-12-06 15:29:50+00:00
I remember organizing Linux install parties at my university (University of Lille (1), in France), each year for like 3 to 4 consecutive years.

It was always a pleasure to meet new people and explain how basically "their computer is working" and how they can free from Windows.

The most interested person at that time was a 55 years old woman who knew nothing in computer. I installed Ubuntu on its computer and she came the next year with strong system knowledge for a linux-newbie, and the same laptop... with Debian in it!
by fipar | 2025-12-06 15:30:09+00:00
Those 1-6am meetings are crazy. I’ve been fully remote for over 16 years now and my only 1-6am meetings are incident response, if I’m on call.

And I’m a nobody; that you have to do that makes it feel even crazier to me.

I admit I was a bit more flexible with that in the past, but once I had a heart attack at 40 it dawned on me any company would just replace me and keep on going while my family was going to have a much tougher time (and no help from whatever company would be employing me at the time).
by chneu | 2025-12-06 15:30:42+00:00
I'm not disagreeing but I do want to point out this is the exact thinking that many people think is responsible for the apathy/victim mindset.

Perspective is important. Does life happen to you or are you in control of your life? Are you a victim or do you take control?

The idea that life sucks isn't new. It's been around forever.

The difference is today we have a global media that reinforces this idea to sell us products. A victim is a much more lucrative customer than someone who is empowered because they can be convinced they aren't capable of doing things themselves. Ever notice the "life is hard, pay us to take this off your hands" advertising?

Start looking for the victim mindset or the "life happens to me, I'm powerless" mindset in people. You'll see it all over. Then look at people who are busy and doing things and generally happy, they don't have this mindset. They're more mindful, is one way of looking at it.

If ya wanna be a sad sack victim, go for it, but don't be surprised when happiness passes you by because you never bothered to experience adversity and don't have the skills to navigate life or the ability to inconvenience yourself. There is a lot of happiness to be had, just gotta go find it or make it happen. One person's great experience is another person's bad time, perspective is what changes that. If your perspective is victimhood then you're never gonna have a good time. You're always gonna think you're depressed if that's your perspective on life.
by sneak | 2025-12-06 15:30:49+00:00
Entirely suboptimal, granted. Massively reduced ROI for each dollar spent above maybe $2000 per year. But when the maximum extreme end of the spectrum (without going to 0 ROI) is still less than $1000 per month, why is it even a question?

People who make a fraction of what I do spend more than that on their shiny pickup truck with a perpetually empty bed. These are my work tools.
by quickthrowman | 2025-12-06 15:31:13+00:00
Glyphosate is used prior to harvesting oats to desiccate the plants to make them more uniform for harvesting as they ripen at different times, desiccating the plants makes threshing the grain easier, as the greener plants will dry out from desiccation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_desiccation
by Spooky23 | 2025-12-06 15:31:32+00:00
Not yet. Facical recognition in 2025 is where LPR was in 2010.

As the cost of compute and wireless communications continues to drop, facial recognition will be prolific. There are more limitations with cameras, but AI will make it easy to backtrack movement to a place where they get a clean shot that can identify you.

As an example, the transit authority in NYC Metro was able to plug existing security feeds from trains into Amazon Rekognition to count heads, which feeds their ticketing app — you can see which carriages are full. As time goes on, they’ll become able to track the breadcrumbs individuals from seat to platform. (If not already)

Detectives do this manually today. I was on a jury where the purse snatcher was followed by various cameras until he got on a bus. They pulled the bus passes and tracked his pass back to his girlfriend.
by pjmlp | 2025-12-06 15:31:57+00:00
Meanwhile there are people delivering solutions in iPaaS tools, which is quite far from the traditional programming that gets discussed on HN.

Some of those tools aren't yet fully there, but also aren't completely dumb, they get more done in a day, than trying to do the same workflows with classical programming.

Workato, Boomi, Powerapps, Opal,...
by quickthrowman | 2025-12-06 15:33:01+00:00
Yeah, I’d be fine with assuming either one of us could be correct as a baseline. I hesitated when posting this at first because it’s hard to ask that question without sounding like an asshole, I appreciate the measured response as I was not trying to be aggressive.

Like you said, my perception of neurodivergence in others could be entirely incorrect, I have no way of knowing.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-12-06 15:33:01+00:00
Huh?

I don't see why you're focussing on the manufacturing process rather than the products (final product and waste produced) although there are issues with the Haber process (e.g. high energy use and dumping nitrogen which can produce algal blooms).

There is a lot of distance between "we must never use any artificial process that hasn't been tested for x years" and "we must use every means of improving agricultural yields even if it means poisoning our children etc".

I feel like you're being disingenuous and not really evaluating whether poisonous chemicals should require a level of safety testing or not.
by escanda | 2025-12-06 15:33:16+00:00
No worries. I am schizotypy but I have suffered plenty. It's not so much better than Asperger's but I can lead an autonomous life. I could prefer to be normal but there's that. Some people use it for greatness, some suffer it for live; thing is you're not alone. Please give some time to the outward world and focus on some socials from time to time. Things will be fine.
by HamounKarami | 2025-12-06 15:33:53+00:00
thanks!

windowing: using a transparent nswindow hosting swiftui views for the floating call ui, and nspopover for the menu bar dropdown. we also toggle nsapp.activationpolicy to hide the dock icon when it's just running in the background

networking: livekit handles the webrtc video/audio (it’s been rock solid), with firebase cloud functions generating the tokens and firestore handling the signaling and presence state

security: standard firebase auth for user management, and we use the native macos keychain (ksecclassgenericpassword) to securely store credentials so you don't have to login every time

mac apis: lots of avfoundation for camera/mic permissions, nsstatusitem for the menu bar integration, and unusernotificationcenter to make sure you actually see incoming calls
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-06 15:33:55+00:00
You did see the part about the four year stint at BigTech in between? Unless you think the second largest employee in the US is a “small little company”.

I also added an HN submission that made the front page a couple of days ago by a staff engineer at Google, did you notice the difference between how he didn’t really seem to need to prove his “impact”?

Finally, this isn’t r/cscareerquestions where you have a bunch of 22 year olds needing to prove themselves by mentioning “they work for a FAANG” (been there done that. Got the t-shirt. Didn’t like it)
by sailingparrot | 2025-12-06 15:34:36+00:00
> I guarantee our hunter-gatherer ancestors felt all the same emotions—burnout, comparison, envy, anxiety, stress, overwhelm, hopelessness.

Yes they felt all the same emotions. You absolutely cannot guarantee they felt them in the same proportions thought.

> our brains have not changed that much.

That is the point: our brains have not changed and is still evolving at the speed of gene mutations. Our environment though is changing magnitudes faster than before.

> how is this line of reasoning constructive?

This is not trying to be constructive, just trying to understand the human condition. We probably have no choice but to learn to deal with it, that doesn’t mean technology has no adverse impact.
by nowaymo6237 | 2025-12-06 15:34:42+00:00
It usually came from serializing and deserializing objects which here it’s a shared json buffer? But even then there’s a serialization bottleneck right? You’d have to be mindful about how the context and closures work across boundaries. Then there’s also spinning up the workers, but I suppose you could do this ahead of time. Maybe my complaint is self-inflicted and is ultimately avoidable - but the complexity begins to mount.

There’s also the queuing and blocking nature of web-workers, I wish they could asynchronously process messages the same way js IO works, but that’s not the case. Rather you are batching full units of work. The mental model is different.

Anecdotally in Firefox I must have run into some memory leak issues and had to hard restart.

Ultimately I ended up going with service workers, which yes sounds strange but I found to be much easier to work with. Cancellable requests, async, long living in the background … but maybe it just works best for me ;)
by general1465 | 2025-12-06 15:35:29+00:00
It does not. Flex fuel cars are widely used South America, especially Brazil where Ethanol is more available than gas. In North America or Europe it depends. Sometimes it is available directly from OEM, sometimes you need aftermarket modification to add Ethanol sensor to run engine with correct lambda.

Here you have list of Flex Fuel cars - cars which has Ethanol sensor and are able to run on gas or Ethanol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flexible-fuel_vehicles...
by sneak | 2025-12-06 15:36:17+00:00
I don’t spend anywhere near that. It resells for 60-80% when I replace it a year or two later. That offsets the cost drastically.

Spending $700 per month on your work tools (where that represents 2-3% of revenue) is not unreasonable. My minuscule office space in the shitty part of town costs as much.

I think anyone running their small business that depends on high performance computers should have an annual budget of at least 1% of revenue for hardware.
by f13f1f1f1 | 2025-12-06 15:36:30+00:00
A diagnosis is literally just a heuristic category so they can do research on rough groupings of symptoms to evaluate how treatments impact them. That's it. To get a diagnosis is literally just a statement "my psychologist thinks my symptoms align with this group and that the treatments they found effective for those symptoms will be effective for mine." The idea these things are identities or real categories is completely absurd and disconnected from why they actually exist. There is 0 basis to assume because two people have the same diagnosis they have the same underlying causes for what leads them to end up with that rough grouping of symptoms. There may be some general similarities or correlations but again the whole point of these is literally just to establish heuristic groups so we can do research on how people respond to treatments. People allowing them or speaking in a way that makes them seem like more than that is extremely destructive.
by CharlieDigital | 2025-12-06 15:36:46+00:00
> Normal people, though, hate that. Instead of giving them a tool to get their job done, we've given them a puzzle

Normal people already have a process and mental model of fitting tools into that process. Loosely coupled tools -- as inefficient as they may be -- have the benefit of being able to conform to those existing processes and models. It's why the humble spreadsheet is still so widely used as the glue between people and processes because it is just rigid enough while offering endless flexibility and handling of edge cases.

On the other hand, highly integrated or opinionated tools need to be both easy and flexible enough to fit existing models/processes or it will simply overwhelm new users. Or it has to have some other benefit that is significant enough that users are willing to change their models/processes.