MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by everdrive | 2025-12-10 15:50:22+00:00
Well on the one hand, an obviously terrible solution is not inherently better than doing nothing. ie, LLM mental healthcare could be _worse_ than just letting the current access times climb.

My other stance, which I suspect is probably more controversial, is that I'm not convinced that mental health care is nearly as effective as people think. In general, mental health outcomes for teens are getting markedly worse, and it's not for lack of access. We have more mental health access than we've had previously -- it just doesn't feel like it because the demand has risen even more sharply.

On a personal level, I've been quite depressed lately, and also feeling quite isolated. As part of an attempt to get out of my own shell I mentioned this to a friend. Now, my friend is totally well-intended, and I don't begrudge him whatsoever. But, the first response out of his mouth was whether I'd sought professional mental health care. His response really hurt. I need meaningful social connection. I don't need a licensed professional to charge me money to talk about my childhood. I think a lot of people are lost and lonely, and for many people mental health care is a band-aid over a real crisis of isolation and despair.

I'm not recommending against people seeking mental health care, of course. And, despite my claims there are many people who truly need it, and truly benefit from it. But I don't think it's the unalloyed good that many people seem to believe it to be.
by mguerville | 2025-12-10 15:50:36+00:00
AI gives you the average of all expected answers (steered a bit to one side or another via prompt), I think people come to HN to hear decidely non-average viewpoints. So from that standpoint I'd say yes forbidding AI answer would go a long way towards preserving the differentiation of HN vs Reddit and other more mainstrean (i.e. average) communities
Show HN: Auto-generated type-safe CRUD for SQLAlchemy
by dbsrbals26 | 2025-12-10 15:51:44+00:00
I put together a small library after getting tired of rewriting the same CRUD and filtering code in a FastAPI + SQLAlchemy project.

It’s meant to provide type-safe CRUD on SQLAlchemy 2.x (async), with mypy/typing as a first-class concern. Pydantic schema mapping is optional.

I’m not sure the abstraction is worth it outside our codebase, so I’d like feedback: does this feel like it solves a real problem, or is it just adding another layer? Repo: https://github.com/4jades/base-repository
by sipofwater | 2025-12-10 15:52:02+00:00
"FBI Making List of American “Extremists,” Leaked Memo Reveals": https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/leak-fbi-list-of-extremist... (www.kenklippenstein.com/p/leak-fbi-list-of-extremists-is-coming), https://archive.ph/fnNGc
by sjreese | 2025-12-10 15:52:05+00:00
UN RES 1701 is being violated - in Lebanon -- the public news suppression is total from - HN point of view there is two questions - HOW and WHY -- The IDF has created a new adware insertion tools - that has the ability to drop malware by clicking on an ad -- infecting cell phones in 150 countries -- the test of the tool was to shutdown 28% of the internet in the last 30 days ( Cloudflare spin team reports 1 man gave a bad updated ) -- This was done Three times. Second this new tool can create false ad impressions - generating real profit from ads no human every saw - and because of the placement of malware the SLPP ( London based ) lawfare team can sue for millions if you don't pay. for google, meta and XAl the loss with be in the 100's millions on 4.5 Billion in total revenue. The real target is REAL news UN/1701 and YOU.
by Gud | 2025-12-10 15:52:08+00:00
My father, who used to be a power plant mechanic, and before that a ship mechanic , helped install converted old aeroplane turbines from decommissioned US bomber planes in the 70s(we are Swedes) for use as power plants.

I think the turbine was used as a spare power generator to start the actual gas turbine, in case the plant itself lost power, if that makes sense.
by chroma205 | 2025-12-10 15:52:11+00:00
> The next step forward has been to stop moving scooters to power and instead bring power closer to where vehicles operate.

Asia already has swappable batteries not just for bikes and scooters, but also motorcycles and even some cars.

This is in addition to slow-charging bike stations (similar to CitiBike in NYC) and scooter parking with wireless charging.
by eldavojohn | 2025-12-10 15:52:11+00:00
You kind of have to read the article to understand the big bold headings.

He is postulating that the way we deal with physical memory (an example of L2 and L3 caches is provided) demonstrates that, as we proceed with trying to form AGI out of our classical computer architectures, there are some fundamental problems for example larger caches are slower. With human intelligence, this doesn't always seem to be a problem for some humans. If you understand the "attention" part of recent developments in this field, he's saying that transformers are the most efficient way we got to achieve that and it's starting to look like a problem from a "physicality" standpoint as the author puts it.

The "physically" here is that larger caches are not just computationally larger banks of data but are actually physically larger and, by Euclidean distance, further away. Yet paradoxically the elephant nor blue whale is not the smartest brain on the planet, the distance from the center of my head to broca's region seems to have no effect on my elocution. Etc. Studying Einstein's brain doesn't do much (I guess the insulators are somewhat important?) for understanding Einstein's intelligence ... but that is 100% critical when understanding L2 and L3 caches on a die.

> Who is to say biological computers won't be built?

No one is saying that. We're just pretty sure it's not happening in our lifetimes.

I think you misunderstand the author's intent. He's not saying "The things I can't imagine are not going to happen". He's trying to argue that, "Look, the way things are going, the diminishing returns we are already seeing, the way our hardware works, this isn't going to get us to AGI." Of course, if you had some new architecture or weird "wetware" that somehow solved these problems I'm sure this article would concede that that's not the point.
by apical_dendrite | 2025-12-10 15:52:23+00:00
It's not really a "mundane daily object" though. It's a communications device that's issued to people on the Hezbollah private communications network. It's only accessible to non-combatants if they are (1) in the Hezbollah hierarchy in a non-combatant role, or (2) the person with the pager was exercising poor operational security and letting someone else handle their pager.
by jodrellblank | 2025-12-10 15:52:28+00:00
As I sometimes repeat on HN, Dr David Burns started giving his patients a survey at the start and end of every session, to rate how he was doing as the therapist and to rate their feelings, on a scale of 1-5.

Reasoning that if he's not good it would show up in patients thinking he's bad, and not feeling any better. And then he could tune his therapy approaches towards the ones which make people feel better and rate him as more understanding and listening and caring. And he criticises therapists who won't do that, therapists who say patients have been seeing them for years with only incremental improvements or no improvements.

Yes there's no objective way to measure how angry or suicidal or anxious someone is and compare two people, but if someone is subjectively reporting 5/5 sadness about X at the start of a session and wants help with X, then at some point in the future they should be reporting that number going down or they aren't being helped. And more effective help could mean that it goes down to 1/5 in three sessions instead of down to 4/5 in three years, and that's a feedback loop which (he says) has got him to be able to help people in a single two-hour therapy session, where most therapists and insurance companies will only do a too-short session with no feedback loop.
by btbuildem | 2025-12-10 15:53:03+00:00
> Palantir ended up having to rent a second-floor building that housed its Tel Aviv office, to accommodate the intelligence analysts who needed tutorials

Has anyone here tried using their software? It's salesforce-level fucked. They did a great job spewing lofty concepts, with their ontologies and their kinetic layers, but in the end it all ends up being a giant wormy ERP. There might be one good idea in there (articulating the schemas and transformations in separate layers) but overall it's a perfect vibe match for orwellian bureaucracies.
by shagie | 2025-12-10 15:53:31+00:00
I took a semester long 500 level class back in college on the theory of knowledge. It is not easy to define - the entire branch of epistemology in philosophy deals with that question.

... To that end, I'd love to be able to revisit my classes from back then (computer science, philosophy (two classes from a double major), and a smattering of linguistics) with the world state of today's technologies.
by StratusBen | 2025-12-10 15:54:49+00:00
https://instances.vantage.sh/ recently added alerts for any pricing changes on EC2, including newly launching new instances. The site rebuilds every 4 hours so it usually breaks the pricing news first. I have it on for myself and its super helpful just to see when AWS changes things.

[Disclaimer, I'm CEO of Vantage - the company that maintains the site]
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-10 15:54:58+00:00
Calculating Air Pollution’s Death Toll, Across State Lines - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/climate/air-pollution-hea... | https://archive.today/HEapE - February 12th, 2020

Premature mortality related to United States cross-state air pollution - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-1983-8 | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-1983-8
by SoftTalker | 2025-12-10 15:55:09+00:00
See also, all the ads for prescription medication on TV. Maybe it's just the programs I watch but it really seems like this has become the predominant advertising. Every break has an ad (or several) urging me to "ask my doctor about..."

Should be banned. Average people have no basis to know whether drug X is appropriate for them. If your doctor thinks you need it, he'll tell you. These ads also perpetuate the harmful idea that there's a pill for everything.
by spongebobism | 2025-12-10 15:55:15+00:00
> > they'd evolve so completely that you'd become a different person anyway.

> How is that a bad thing?

The point isn't that it's bad, but that it's equivalent to dying and then someone else taking your place. So if it's OK for your character to change fundametally over the span of your life, then it must also be OK for you to die at some point and yield the stage to the next generation.
by troyvit | 2025-12-10 15:55:19+00:00
Back in the day I worked for the makers of Yellow Dog Linux, and I think because of these scarcities we had a pretty good model of buying Apple Risc hardware at OEM prices and putting Linux on them, mostly for university scientists but also for enthusiasts. There was a lot of work keeping Linux running on hardware created by a company that was ambivalent about having alternative operating systems on its hardware, but it was fun and a great group of people to work for.
by ceejayoz | 2025-12-10 15:55:48+00:00
Tire wear is probably a thing - although I suspect the per-wheel control allows them to better respond to slips and sudden acceleration. I've noticed test driving a Tesla that it accelerates rapidly much more smoothly with no tire slippage than a combustion car.

Brake wear is likely nulled out by regenerative braking. And you're probably not driving highway speeds through Manhattan, either.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-10 15:55:59+00:00
Then you've probably only been to/worked at McDonald's in the built-up parts of major cities.

McDonald's in the suburbs and more rural areas and smaller cities are quite pleasant. Spacious, clean, just local folks.

If your local McDonald's has a homeless person problem, then all your local fast food franchises do. It's a social services problem, not a McDonald's problem.
by WXLCKNO | 2025-12-10 15:56:04+00:00
Agreed on Bryan Johnson. Before I actually watched a bit of his content, I just thought he had nutjob vibes and looked weird. No offense intended, if possible.

But honestly he just seems like a guy enjoying a fun project. He seems calm and happy in his videos.

Barring any hidden issues with chronic depression, it would be unlikely that he's unhappy. He's very well off financially, has a nice beautiful girlfriend who's with him in his journey, he sleeps a ton, works out, eats well and in general experiments with life.
by bfeynman | 2025-12-10 15:56:21+00:00
The quality is most definitely suspect for how much revenue it brings it and how poorly its allocated. MTA has been full of cronyism and corruption for years and the cycle of kickbacks. Yes, its a complicated service, however you cannot deny the lack of transparency and ineptitude leaves the service in a much worse place than it currently could be. People can understand price increases when it translates to service.
by th0rine | 2025-12-10 15:56:22+00:00
#8 - If someone absolutely insists on a demonstration and otherwise has to "do it live" this makes you look like a god on stage - https://github.com/sloria/doitlive

Basically just schedules whatever code you want to run so when you invoke the script it will step through whatever you want to run no matter the keystroke you make. No mistakes!
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-10 15:56:35+00:00
I'll argue the opposite.

(1) The demand for mental health services is an order of magnitude vs the supply, but the demand we see is a fraction of the demand that exists because a lot of people, especially men, aren't believers in the "therapeutic culture"

In the days of Freud you could get a few hours of intensive therapy a week but today you're lucky to get an hour a week. An AI therapist can be with you constantly.

(2) I believe psychodiagnosis based on text analysis could greatly outperform mainstream methods. Give an AI someone's social media feed and I think depression, mania, schizo-* spectrum, disordered narcissism and many other states and traits will be immediately visible.

(3) Despite the CBT revolution and various attempts to intensify CBT, a large part of the effectiveness of therapy comes from the patient feeling mirrored by the therapist [1] and the LLM can accomplish this, in fact, this could be accomplished by the old ELIZA program.

(4) The self of the therapist can be both an obstacle and an instrument to progress. See [2] On one level the reactions that a therapist feels are useful, but they also get in the way of the therapist providing perfect mirroring [3] and letting optimal frustration unfold in the patient instead of providing "corrective emoptional experiences." I'm going to argue that the AI therapist can be trained to "perceive" the things a human therapist perceives but that it does not have its own reactions that will make the patient feel judged and get in the way of that unfolding.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Rogers

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countertransference

[3] why settle for less?

[4] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010440X6...
by VonTum | 2025-12-10 15:56:41+00:00
Oh nono, with tree-sitter, you get an untyped syntax tree. That means, you have a Cursor object to walk the tree, which creates Node objects as you traverse, that have a "kind" (name of the tree-sitter node), span, and children. (I recommend using the rust tree-sitter bindings itself, not the rust wrapper rust-sitter).

Yes, portability like that is a huge benefit, though I personally utilized it for that yet. I just use it as an error-tolerant frontend to my compiler.

As to how errors are reported, tree-sitter creates an ERROR or MISSING node when a particular subtree has invalid syntax. I've found that it never leaves a node in an invalid state, (so never would it create a binaryop(LeftNode(...), Op, ERROR) if RightNode is not optional. Instead it would create an ERROR for binaryop too. This allows you to safely unwrap known fields. ERROR nodes only really bunch up in repeat() and optional()s where you would implicity handle them.

For an example, I can only point you to my own use: https://github.com/pc2/sus-compiler

tree-sitter-sus has the grammar

sus-proc-macro has nice proc macros for dealing with it (kind!("binop"), field!("name"), etc)

src/flattening/parser.rs has conveniences like iterating over lists

and src/flattening/flatten.rs has the actual conversion from syntax tree to SUS IR
by throw-qqqqq | 2025-12-10 15:57:17+00:00
> I thought that smoking and bad dietary/exercise habits were the main factors

While that is true, PM2.5 is still a major cause of lung cancer in non smokers, see e.g.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11729863/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11969995/
Show HN: Built an app that converts IG/TikTok videos into micro-workout programs
by chetansorted | 2025-12-10 15:57:56+00:00
This started as a personal frustration.

I save lot of workout reels on Instagram/TikTok but when I’m at the gym, they’re basically useless — lost in a messy “Saved” folder and impossible to find again.

I wanted a way to turn those short clips into actual workouts I can follow.

So I built an app: Here is the quick MVP demo of the app: https://vimeo.com/1144764933?fl=pl&fe=sh

Paste an IG or TikTok reel link Extracts the exercises + sets/reps Automatically creates a structured workout card Lets you save, tag, organize, and even build full programs from your favorite creators Sort by “Chest”, “Glutes”, “Push Day”, etc.

It feels like having a personal library of every workout you’ve ever saved.

If anyone is interested: https://lavender-staple-090021.framer.app/

I genuinely feel this is kinda Genz fitness app.
by umanwizard | 2025-12-10 15:58:26+00:00
LLVM is free software. You appear to be making the common mistake of confusing the permissive vs. copyleft distinction with the open source vs. free software distinction.

Open source and free software mean almost exactly the same set of software; the only difference between the two terms, according to RMS and other free software advocates, is the emphasis. Sort of like the difference between the Gulf of America and the Gulf of Mexico: they mean the same body of water, but reflect a different viewpoint about it.

This confusion arises because RMS prefers the term "free software" over "open source", and also prefers copyleft over permissive licenses, so people sort of get the idea that they are the same distinction.
by MisterTea | 2025-12-10 15:58:38+00:00
> Truckers were using lower manhattan as a cut-through route to other places

Popular truck route from Queens->Bronx was 59th st bridge, left onto 2nd then immediate left onto 59th, and another left onto 1st and take 1st all the way to Willis Ave bridge to beat the RFK bridge (formerly the Triborough) tolls.
by WXLCKNO | 2025-12-10 15:58:48+00:00
Unfortunate that hacker news doesn't have reply notifications but I'm curious what you did when retiring it.

Just recycle the parts? Was it your main and only server?

I have that server running Truenas, I have another PC I had built for friends and family for Plex only, and I have a third one running an ethereum validator which is the most powerful but only does that.

It's not stuff that would sell for any price i'd care to get and just throwing it away / recyling it feels bad since it still works.
by vnorilo | 2025-12-10 15:59:02+00:00
>I seriously doubt anyone who has written projects in assembly would make such comparisons...

With genuine respect, I believe this type of insinuation is rarely productive.

Someone might still have silly opinions, even if they have been paid to write assembly for 8-24-64 bit cisc, risc, ordered and out of order ISAs, and maybe compilers too. Peace :)
by IAmBroom | 2025-12-10 15:59:16+00:00
OMG! The song is literally called "The Most Terrible Time of the Year"!

They managed to say something disheartening to everyone on Earth except first-act Scrooges and Grinches. Doubt Ebenezier ever set foot in a McDonald's, and Grinch never left his mountaintop home, so... [Yes, I know not everyone celebrates Christmas, but that song title is just a massive dump on your day, regardless.]

What's their next marketing step? "Everything causes cancer, so you might as well get it from McDonald's!"
by 46218725 | 2025-12-10 15:59:24+00:00
"A Tesla Model 3 has a greater curb weight than a Chevy Suburban" -- what? Source?

Suburban - 6,051 lbs Model 3 - 3,891 lbs

https://www.edmunds.com/chevrolet/suburban/2025/features-spe... https://www.edmunds.com/tesla/model-3/2025/features-specs/
by lkbm | 2025-12-10 15:59:31+00:00
Laws are different in different counties, and I can't speak to all of them, but in the US, the law said you could only sue people, and the courts realized this was a problem. Rather than saying "I guess corporations get are exempt from all liability until Congress gets around to fixing it", they came up with a weird workaround that lives with us to this day.

EDIT: Note that ianal, nor a historian. The specifics of how this came about are best learned from a more authoritative source.
by mewse-hn | 2025-12-10 15:59:40+00:00
Ted T'so: "Here’s the thing: you’re not going to force all of us to learn Rust."

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/rust-in-linux-lead-r...

https://youtu.be/WiPp9YEBV0Q?t=1529
by zamadatix | 2025-12-10 16:00:02+00:00
> It’s easy to forget how awful TLS was before Let’s Encrypt: you’d pay per-hostname, file tickets, manually validate domains, and then babysit a 1-year cert renewal calendar.

I remember getting a 10(I think?) year wildcard cert in ~2009. I get why that changed and, while it's not great for my personal usage, I see the value for the majority of the web, but the story definitely looked more like "we decided to make TLS so difficult you have no choice but to automate" when it came time to finally replace it.

If there were two things which would make me happier with it all it'd be 10x rate limits on Let's Encrypt (so you don't have to even think of it when you screw something up/test different things for a week) and some more extension/standardisation of ACME on an internal facing service talking with an external DNS server to do the DNS challenge more easily in this scenario.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-12-10 16:00:13+00:00
That's very witty, but not really accurate. I think in any market where you're the seller, you will complain (or at least be grumpy) when your competitors slash prices. Especially when you're not sure the sale is temporary, and the market price is now below your cost basis on your inventory. And especially if your accountants are forced to write down your inventory value to the new, lower price.

Even when people are only buying with no intent to sell, they'll often complain if prices fall right after they've bought an item, and ask for a rebate for the difference, because they feel they deserve the new lower price. Many retailers are aware of this psychology and do offer some sort of forward-looking price match, both to help buyers overcome that hesitation, and to avoid going through the paperwork of returning and refunding a used item just to sell the same thing again anyway. But the stock market offers no such buyer protections.