MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zdragnar | 2025-12-31 02:45:20+00:00
Benzene is toxic, but it still has industrial uses. From the article:

> The reactor used by the researchers consists of an undivided electrolysis cell in which dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) is used as a solvent

They remove the DDT from the soil into the solvent (itself quite unpleasant). From there, it's pretty easy to filter out the soil and clean it up. Add water and boil or freeze dry to extract it back out, preferably capturing it to be reused.
by lucb1e | 2025-12-31 02:46:01+00:00
That's what it does, but if I'm not mistaken (at least in my experience with MariaDB) it'll also return immediately once it ran up to the limit and not try to process further rows. If you have an expensive subquery in the SELECT (...) AS `column_name`, it won't run that for every row before returning the first 10 (when using LIMIT 10) unless you ORDERed BY that column_name. Other components like the WHERE clause might also require that it reads every row before finding the ten matches. So mostly yes but not necessarily
by tingletech | 2025-12-31 02:47:05+00:00
When I worked for Bill Atkinson's sister, Dr. Kathy Atkinson, at UCR in high school, I was involved in a DMSO leak. Dr. A. was a microbiologist, but botanists worked upstairs. I guess DMSO is used a lot in botany, and they let an experiment boil over and DMSO got into the HVAC air return and then into the whole building. Smelled like garlic, and I turned bright pink. We had to evacuate. I also tasted garlic for a day or so. Nowadays you have to be 18 to get a job in a UC Lab.

You could get DMSO and ketamine at the vet supply store back then in the 80s. I heard of people ingesting acid via DMSO in that time frame, but it could have been an urban legend. It was a horse area and DMSO was used with horses to get stuff deep into their legs or something like that.
by owenvanvooren | 2025-12-31 02:47:43+00:00
hi hn, i'm owen and i design apps, websites, and user interfaces.
over christmas break, i thought it'd be fun to build a throwback to the original aol instant messenger (aim), with the (semi) recent events of aol dial-up being shut down, and aim being shut down in 2017. so i jumped into vscode and started work on a little project i call "pingPong".

although i'm 15 (not old enough to experience nostalgia that aim brings to so many ppl), i still had an awesome time building it! plus, it has a windows 98 theme to be period-accurate.

i didn't want pingPong to be an exact carbon copy of aim, so i designed it to have both a familiar and unique user interface. it's already been featured on howtogeek today thanks to Joe Fedewa (https://www.howtogeek.com/pretend-its-1998-with-this-functio...), and i hope that it might bring a smile to the faces of those lucky enough to experience the magic of the early-2000s internet.

some notable features:
- chat is only available if both users are online to keep with the og aol vibe
- limited color/text styled away messages
- friends list + requests, simple chat windows
- original (and optional) aol sound effects
- secure messaging
- not-for-profit (no ads, tracking, or data collection)

p.s. i'm totally new to hn so plz forgive me for any posting errors/conventions/unwritten rules i broke :/
by byb | 2025-12-31 02:48:35+00:00
What a story. This brings back memories and ties directly into my life.

In fall of 1999, I built my first PC with an Abit BE6 to use with an Intel Pentium 3 'Coppermine' 500 MHz. I was a fifteen year old kid working at pizzeria in the midwest making minimum wage to feed my computer hobby. At the time I was reading hardocp, and compiled a list of "good" BX motherboards to try and find at computer show that was organized on a semi-regular basis at the local fairgrounds. This event saw numerous mom&pop computer stores travel from hours away to sell custom PCs, software, and hardware. I remember having a bit of buyer's remorse because I actually wanted the BE6-II which featured the ability to change the front side bus in 1 MHz steps, while the older BE6, only had a set of fixed multiplers and PCI dividers. My 500 MHz coppemine (5 x 100 MHz) didn't post at 750 MHz (5 x 150 MHz) and was unstable above 667 MHz (5 x 133 MHz). This overclock still 'saved' me a considerable amount of money by allowing me to purchase the cheapest part and squeeze performance out of it. That computer hobby led me down a path of studying computer engineering and my eventual departure (escape) from the Midwest.

Years later, in 2015 I moved to Taipei, and remember walking around Neihu seeing all the headquarters of the computer part manufacturers I used in my childhood (Liteon, ECS, Nvidia). I didn't realize that Abit's former headquarters on 陽光街 is right next to many of the places I've been living and working next to for the past decade.

Another memory from that time was buying 128 MB of SD-RAM from Crucial (Micron). I remember being a little pissed because the price had gone up 50% due to the 921 earthquake, which killed thousands and left many homeless, and knocked the fabs offline which led to a supply shortage.
by zdragnar | 2025-12-31 02:49:33+00:00
DMSO is a pretty common solvent. It's still nasty stuff, but easy to clean from a sample.

Take a bunch of contaminated soil, wash with DMSO, filter out soil, wash again, take all of that and electrolyze it.

Take the soil, dilute with lots of water and boil in a chamber with a fractionating column / distillation setup to reclaim the last of the DMSO.

I'd be surprised if this was in any way economical, but it's the cheapest way to permanently get rid of DDT, and the production of benzene and other hydrocarbons is a nice side benefit to reclaim some of the cost.
by DannyBee | 2025-12-31 02:50:27+00:00
FWIW - mupdf is simply not fast. I've done lots of pdf indexing apps, and mupdf is by far the slowest and least able to open valid pdfs when it came to text extraction.

a better speed comparison would either be multi-process pdfium (since pdfium was forked from foxit before multi-thread support, you can't thread it), multi-threaded foxit, or something like syncfusion (which is quite fast and supports multiple threads).

These were always the fastest/best options. I can (and do) achieve 41k pages/sec or better on these options.

The other thing it doesn't appear you mention is whether you handle putting the words in appearance order (IE how they appear on the page), or only stream order (which varies in its relation to apperance order) .

If it's only stream order, sure, that's really fast to do. But also not anywhere near as helpful as appearance order, which is what other text-extraction engines do.
by dheera | 2025-12-31 02:51:25+00:00
People seem to have the assumption that OpenAI and Anthropic dying would be synonymous with AI dying, and that's not the case. OpenAI and Anthropic spent a lot of capital on important research, and if the shareholders and equity markets cannot learn to value and respect that and instead let these companies die, new companies will be formed with the same tech, possibly by the same general group of people, thrive, and conveniently leave out the said shareholders.

Google was built on the shoulders of a lot of infrastructure tech developed by former search engine giants. Unfortunately the equity markets decided to devalue those giants instead of applaud them for their contributions to society.
by EvansWilson | 2025-12-31 02:52:02+00:00
As 2025 draws to a close, the "Queen of Innovation" isn't backing down. After a year of aggressive rebalancing and navigating a volatile tech landscape, ARK Invest has solidified its core positions. The latest portfolio updates reveal a strategy that doubles down on artificial intelligence, genomic editing, and the future of autonomous transport.

For investors tracking the smart money in disruptive tech, the Cathie Wood top 10 stocks offer a roadmap to her highest-conviction bets for the year ahead.

Cathie Wood top 10 stocks: A Blueprint for Disruption

Analyzing the flagship ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK) as of late December 2025, the concentration is stark. Wood has trimmed winners to feed her "highest conviction" plays, resulting in a top-heavy portfolio designed for maximum exposure to innovation.

Here is the snapshot of the top positions heading into 2026:

Tesla Inc. (TSLA)
Roku Inc. (ROKU)
CRISPR Therapeutics (CRSP)
Coinbase Global (COIN)
Shopify (SHOP)
Robinhood Markets (HOOD)
Tempus AI (TEM)
Palantir Technologies (PLTR)
Roblox Corp (RBLX)
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)

The Unshakable Tesla Bet

The most screaming signal from the data is the massive wager on Tesla (TSLA). With a portfolio weight significantly higher than the rest, it remains the anchor of the fund. Despite market debates over EV demand, the strategy remains steadfast in the belief that Tesla’s robotaxi network and autonomous software will unlock trillions in value, treating recent dips as buying opportunities.

The Rise of Biotech and AI "New Blood"

While Fintech staples like Coinbase and Shopify remain pillars, the portfolio is seeing a rotation into pure-play science and data.

CRISPR Therapeutics (CRSP) has climbed the ranks, signaling confidence that gene-editing therapies are moving from "experimental" to "commercial" revenue drivers.
Tempus AI (TEM) has emerged as a breakout holding. ARK has aggressively accumulated shares, underscoring a pivot toward AI applications in healthcare—specifically using data to personalize cancer treatment.

The Data Edge: Palantir and AMD

Rounding out the list are Palantir (PLTR) and AMD. The inclusion of AMD highlights a need for "pick-and-shovel" hardware plays to support the AI boom, while Palantir’s presence confirms a bullish stance on enterprise software that can synthesize massive datasets.

For investors, the message is clear: The Cathie Wood top 10 stocks are no longer just about internet hype—they are a targeted bet on the convergence of AI, biology, and robotics.
by oooyay | 2025-12-31 02:52:29+00:00
I worked at Slack earlier this year. Slack adopted Cursor as an option in December of 2024 if memory serves correctly. I had just had a project cut due to a lot of unfortunate reasons so I was working on it with one other engineer. It was a rewrite of a massive and old Python code base that ran Slack's internal service catalog. The only reason I was able to finish rewrites of the backend, frontend, and build an SLO sub-system is because of coding agents. Up until December I'd been doing that entire rewrite through sixteen hour days and just pure sweat equity.

Again, that codebase is millions of lines of Python code and frankly the agents weren't as good then as they are now. I carefully used globbing rules in Cursor to navigate coding and testing standards. I had a rule that functioned as how people use agents.md now, which was put on every prompt. That honestly got me a lot more mileage than you'd think. A lot of the outcomes of these tools are how you use them and how good your developer experience is. If professional software engineers have to think about how to navigate and iterate on different parts of your code, then an LLM will find it doubly difficult.
by rokob | 2025-12-31 02:52:30+00:00
This is not true. I’ve seen x-rays of a child’s mouth with clearly no adult teeth visible below the gums. Later I’ve seen X-rays of the same mouth with one or two adult teeth below the gums where baby teeth are about to fall out. The adult teeth are there underneath once the baby teeth fall out but they are not there “from the start”. That isn’t even to mention the size problem.
by xarope | 2025-12-31 02:54:02+00:00
Airline Water Safety Scores At-a-Glance (5.00 = highest rating, 0.00 = lowest):

Major Airlines

Delta Air Lines: 5.00 (Grade A)

Frontier Airlines: 4.80 (Grade A)

Alaska Airlines: 3.85 (Grade B)

Allegiant Air: 3.65 (Grade B)

Southwest Airlines: 3.30 (Grade C)

Hawaiian Airlines: 3.15 (Grade C)

United Airlines: 2.70 (Grade C)

Spirit Airlines: 2.05 (Grade D)

JetBlue: 1.80 (Grade D)

American Airlines: 1.75 (Grade D)

Regional Airlines

GoJet Airlines: 3.85 (Grade B)

Piedmont Airlines: 3.05 (Grade C)

Sun Country Airlines: 3.00 (Grade C)

Endeavor Air: 2.95 (Grade C)

SkyWest Airlines: 2.40 (Grade D)

Envoy Air: 2.30 (Grade D)

PSA Airlines: 2.25 (Grade D)

Air Wisconsin Airlines: 2.15 (Grade D)

Republic Airways: 2.05 (Grade D)

CommuteAir: 1.60 (Grade D)

Mesa Airlines: 1.35 (Grade F)

[edit: formatting]
I curated 25GB of video assets so you don't have to use Stock sites
by BeyondWalk | 2025-12-31 02:54:04+00:00
I got tired of paying $30/month for Envato, so I spent 3 years curating my own local library of motion graphics and overlays. I'm releasing it today.

It's $5 for the pack, or $49 if you want the Resell Rights to start your own shop."
by threethirtytwo | 2025-12-31 02:56:30+00:00
>This is nonsense. No AI is going to produce what someone wants without telling it exactly what to do and how to do it, so yes, it will always need hand holding, unless you like slurping up slop. I don't know you, if you aren't a bot, you might just be satisfied with slop? It's a race to the bottom, and it's not going to end up the way you think it will.

You're not thinking clearly. A couple years ago we didn't even have AI who could do this, then chatGPT came out we had AI who could barely do it, then we had AI who could do simple tasks with A lot of hand holding, now we have AI who can do complex human tasks with minimal hand holding. Where do you think the trendline is pointing.

Your hypothesis is going against all evidence. It's more wishful thinking and irrational. It's a race to the bottom because you wish it will be a race to the bottom, and we both know the trendline is pointing in the opposite direction.

>We've seen what social media and every-waking-hour access to tablets and the internet has done to kids - so much harm that some countries have banned social media for people under a certain age. I can see a future where "AI" will also be banned for minors to use, probably pretty soon too. The harms from "AI" being able to placate instead of create should be obvious, and children shouldn't be able to use it without adult supervision.

I agree AI is bad for us. My claim is it's going to change the world and it is already replacing human tasks. That's all. Whether that's good or bad for us is an ORTHOGANOL argument.
by nl | 2025-12-31 02:56:38+00:00
> It's also worth noting that OpenAI has not trained a new model since gpt4o (all subsequent models are routing systems and prompt chains built on top of 4), so the idea of OpenAI being stuck in some kind of runaway training expense is not real.

This isn't really accurate.

Firstly, GPT4.5 was a new training run, and it is unclear how many other failed training runs they did.

Secondly "all subsequent models are routing systems and prompt chains built on top of 4" is completely wrong. The models after gpt4o were all post-trained differently using reinforcement learning. That is a substantial expense.

Finally, it seems like GPT5.2 is a new training run - or at least the training cut off date is different. Even if they didn't do a full run it must have been a very large run.
by cmiles8 | 2025-12-31 02:57:24+00:00
AI is turning into the worst possible business setup for AI startups. A commodity that requires huge capital investment and ongoing innovation to stay relevant. There’s no room for someone to run a small but profitable gold mine on the side. The only path to survival is investing crazy sums just to stay relevant and keep up. Meanwhile customers have virtually zero brand loyalty so if you slip behind just a bit folks will swap API endpoints and leave you in the dust. It’s a terrible setup business wise.

There’s also no real moat with all the major models converging to be “good enough” for nearly all use cases. Far beyond a typical race to the bottom.

Those like Google with other products will just add AI features and everyone else trying to make AI their product will just get completely crushed financially.
by xuechen006 | 2025-12-31 02:58:53+00:00
I’m an indie builder working on app-related data for a long time.
Appark is a free tool that helps you quickly explore app market signals like downloads, revenue estimates, rankings, keywords, and competitor trends across App Store and Google Play.

The original goal was simple: make early-stage market research easier before building or scaling an app — without relying on expensive enterprise tools.
It’s still evolving, and I’d really appreciate feedback from other developers and founders who care about data-driven decisions.
by gottorf | 2025-12-31 03:00:34+00:00
Right, but you won't receive 8x the benefits that your payroll taxes will eventually pay for, either. In fact, your wife will probably receive a higher percentage of her FICA contributions in eventual SS benefits than you, because there's a slight element of redistribution built in; it's not a straightforward "you get back what you paid into".

For me, the much more concerning part of Social Security is the demographic challenge: the program started out with over 10 workers per retiree and is down to less than three[0]. It doesn't matter how you play with the sliding scales of who pays how much and what the earnings cap is, when in the end it's two to three working people's wages being taxed to support one retiree.

[0]: https://www.ssa.gov/history/ratios.html
by Aurornis | 2025-12-31 03:00:51+00:00
Be careful when comparing core counts across providers. Those ultra cheap providers are using servers that can be many generations old. They might also be heavily oversubscribed. 4 vCPU on one of the cheap providers could be slower than 2 vCPU or even 1 vCPU on a newer generation server. You really have to test or look at benchmarks.

If you have a RAM-constrained application where CPU and RAM speed are less of a priority, they can be great deals though.
by jgavris | 2025-12-31 03:03:55+00:00
I still feel like Swift 5 (5.2?) was the sweet spot. Right now there are just way too many keywords, making C++ look easy again.

Similarly, I find Combine / GCD code far easier to write and read and understand, and the semantics are better than structured concurrency. I have plenty of production Combine code in use by (hundreds of) millions of people and it hasn't needed to be touched in years.
by brooke2k | 2025-12-31 03:03:58+00:00
I don't have many issues with wayland itself, the problem is that I frequently use software that doesn't support wayland or has buggy wayland support. In some instances, I can file bugs with the maintainers of that software, but sometimes (especially with older games) you are just stuck with something that wasn't designed for wayland and there's not much to do about it. Xwayland helps sometimes, but it can only do so much.

To be clear, I don't want or expect KDE to have full first-class X11 support forever. But right now, I can launch an X11 KDE session that's pretty janky and doesn't support things like HiDPI properly and etc if I need to get something running. If they remove that, then I'm unfortunately forced to move elsewhere.
by madeofpalk | 2025-12-31 03:04:21+00:00
Apple's always had great potential. They've struggled to execute on it.

But really, so has everyone else. There's two "races" for AI - creating models, and finding a consumer use case for them. Apple just isn't competing in creating models similar to the likes of OpenAI or Google. They also haven't really done much with using AI technology to deliver 'revolutionary' general purpose user-facing features using LLMs, but neither has anyone else beyond chat bots.

I'm not convinced ChatGPT as a consumer product can sustain current valuations, and everyone is still clamouring to find another way to present this tech to consumers.
by EnPissant | 2025-12-31 03:05:00+00:00
The Christian Church is probably mostly responsible for this shift in Europe. First by banning cousin marriage, and then by being a large land holder that accelerated Manorialism. It's probably more than just culture too, those who could not play nicely with those outside their extended family probably didn't reproduce much. The high rates of capital punishment for criminals (which you would not see in extended kinship networks) probably played a part too.

Hbdchick on twitter has written a lot about this subject, but also the culture only argument is semi-mainstream as parts of it are espoused by Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich.
by iamnothere | 2025-12-31 03:05:22+00:00
> The core management problem is demands on resources always exceed resources. So perhaps the single salient aspect of management is the strategy and parameters which yields a procedure on what demand to reject leaving YES to remaining demands.

True and important. One reason the US did so well after WWII was that resources were abundant, and the technology to exploit those resources improved rapidly until the middle of the century. Although I think industrial policy and infrastructure helped as well.

> Perhaps one change post 1980 is prices may have to go up to trade for longer term stability and jobs in the US.

I definitely think so. It’s strange how luxuries have become so cheap while essentials (food, transportation, and shelter) keep becoming more expensive. As a society I think we could afford to pay a little more for things like smartphones and TVs if that money could be moved towards lowering the cost of essentials. Tariffs and state investment (Intel) may have actually opened the door to thinking about things like this, but we’re a long way from a coherent strategy. I also worry that the bungling of these things may lead the next administration to return to business as usual, if that’s even possible at this point.
by galkk | 2025-12-31 03:06:03+00:00
Unrelated to the growth topic, but related to teeth.

5 or something years ago I read here, on hn, about novamin/biomin and started to buy toothpaste with it.

Since that I had 0 cavities, even if my toothcare routine isn’t the best: most of the time I brush only in evening and when I had severe clinical depression episode I could go weeks without brushing.
by esalman | 2025-12-31 03:06:15+00:00
I bought a not too expensive TCL qm6k with game master mode. Whenever it detects Xbox series S input, it turns on the mode by default. On menu it stays at 1440p but when I start a game, it switches to 4k 120hz- and the input lag becomes horrible!

Turns out it does not even care if I set lower resolution in Xbox display settings. So I had to just disable game master mode. And I don't miss anything.
by throwaway3060 | 2025-12-31 03:06:47+00:00
Why is that a double standard? The US position is that recognized nations have sovereignty, and are the supreme law within their jurisdiction. If there is no recognized legitimate sovereign power, then the US is fine with an international body substituting.

That this standard is complicated, and different from those that argue that international law should be the supreme law, doesn't make it a double standard. It's also not what is meant by universal jurisdiction, as it does not depend on overriding sovereignty.

Edit: Seeing your other comment, it's also worth noting this was a large reason why the US didn't sign the Rome statute, since as you note, the US isn't inherently opposed to the idea of international courts, only the supremacy of their jurisdiction.