MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by isolli | 2025-12-05 16:30:57+00:00
We already know about social media companies (allegedly, at least):

> Meta buried 'causal' evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege [0]

> In a 2020 research project code-named “Project Mercury,” Meta scientists worked with survey firm Nielsen to gauge the effect of “deactivating” Facebook, according to Meta documents obtained via discovery. To the company’s disappointment, “people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison,” internal documents said.

> Rather than publishing those findings or pursuing additional research, the filing states, Meta called off further work and internally declared that the negative study findings were tainted by the “existing media narrative” around the company.

> Privately, however, a staffer insisted that the conclusions of the research were valid, according to the filing. “The Nielsen study does show causal impact on social comparison,” (unhappy face emoji), an unnamed staff researcher allegedly wrote. Another staffer worried that keeping quiet about negative findings would be akin to the tobacco industry “doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves.”

[0] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

Edit: it was discussed here a few days ago [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46019817
by JoshTriplett | 2025-12-05 16:31:16+00:00
Likewise; I had an N900, and I loved the idea of a physical keyboard, but now I figure I can pocket a folding keyboard for that.

What I would like is apps to pervasively support a keyboard. For instance, in most Android messaging apps, you can't even press "enter" to send a message, so if you want to use a physical keyboard, you have to type the message and then poke the screen to send.
by kennethwolters | 2025-12-05 16:31:20+00:00
for me it feels like: Everything is stateful by default/convenience. Building robust systems is in part about confining statefulness to as few parts as possible. To contain statefulness. It’s to buy you some time and capacity. Yet the toughest problems often arise in the stateful parts of the system as well as quasi-stateless parts which sometimes develop hidden statefulness (think of syncing webclient and server state). So being good at handling stateful systems is valuable. Maybe one should even embrace statefulness. However, the AWS Solution Architect will tell you otherwise.
by darth_avocado | 2025-12-05 16:31:46+00:00
> wouldn't it make more sense to combine HBO Max and Netflix into a single app

I currently pay $20 something for Netflix every month and $10 for HBO Max a couple of months through the year when I’m binging a show from HBO. I as a consumer would prefer to keep it that way. I absolutely do not have the appetite to pay $30+ a month if the two are combined.
by anechouapechou | 2025-12-05 16:31:54+00:00
There's a theory that at the very beginnings of the universe, as it cooled down, there was a period where the average temperature of the universe was between 0-100º C, meaning the whole universe was within a "habitable" temperature range, and this could have supercharged the creation of the building blocks of life. I think I learned about it on a Veritasium video... Maybe someone knows which one? :)
by 122506 | 2025-12-05 16:32:00+00:00
## About Z-Image

Z-Image is an efficient AI image generation platform developed by Alibaba's Tongyi-MAI team. Built on a 6-billion parameter foundation model, Z-Image combines cutting-edge efficiency with professional-quality output, making advanced AI image generation accessible to creators, developers, and businesses worldwide.

### Key Features

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*Consumer Hardware Ready*: Runs efficiently on accessible devices with just 16GB VRAM, eliminating expensive infrastructure requirements.

*Photorealistic Quality*: Professional-grade images with exceptional detail powered by Scalable Single-Stream DiT architecture.

### Technology Stack

- 6-billion parameter foundation model - Scalable Single-Stream DiT architecture - Decoupled-DMD distillation for optimal efficiency - Support for JPEG, PNG, WebP formats - Multiple aspect ratios (1:1, 16:9, 9:16, 4:3, 3:4, 21:9)

### Target Audience

Content creators seeking fast iteration, developers building AI-powered applications, businesses requiring multilingual visual content, and professionals who need production-ready quality without expensive GPU infrastructure.
by WorldMaker | 2025-12-05 16:32:16+00:00
`--update-refs` flag helps a lot in vanilla git. That and `--autosquash` should probably be default flags to `git rebase`. I also don't entirely trust rebase without `-i` (`--interactive`), personally. I hear there is talk about shaking up the out-of-the-box default flags in git 3, and I think rebase should especially get new defaults.
by cbolton | 2025-12-05 16:32:17+00:00
> the patent is expired, so the motivation to continue to defend it has waned. If anything, herbicide producers would now benefit if a cheap, public domain chemical were illegitimately banned in favor of more expensive chemicals still under patent protection

That doesn't square with the fact that Monsanto thought it worthwhile to commit scientific fraud to push the narrative that glyphosate is safe, in a scientific paper published the same year that the patent expired.
by myrmidon | 2025-12-05 16:32:35+00:00
This kind of shit happened before, is happening right now and is going to happen again. Something needs to be done.

IMO the best way to stop companies from messing with science and law is to hold them accountable for the actual damage, ideally both company leadership (CEO goes to prison) and shareholders (potentially lose everything) when it comes to light that companies prevented regulation or research into negative externalities that they caused.

We had the exact situation with leaded gas (paid shills, lawfare and discrediting campaigns against critical scientists), the exact same thing is happening right now with the fossil fuel industry and if we don't change anything it is invariably gonna happen again.
by Velofellow | 2025-12-05 16:32:41+00:00
HuFlixPrime was my portmanteau of choice in 2010-ish but mainly because I felt the coming dawn of cable company style pricing encroaching; more and more folks adding multiple streaming services to get close to what cable packages could offer.

I still like the name.

Edit: didn't Netflix have a feature called "Netflix Max" on the PS3 app? I remember it really liking it to find what to watch.
by jt2190 | 2025-12-05 16:32:45+00:00
> I am skeptical of the fact that even second generation seeds are that bad

Non-farmers really don't understand how human-engineered agriculture has been for the entire history of human civilization. For example, corn (maize) does not really exist in nature, it's a human-developed thing. Hybridized plants still carry the genetic code that allowed them to propagate through the ages before human agriculture, and these survival traits will very quickly express themselves in the offspring (seeds).
by semanticist | 2025-12-05 16:33:06+00:00
There's a difference between BMW ignoring their warranty and who gets found liable during the wrongful death lawsuit after the mechanic gets electrocuted due to poor/unsafe EV design.

I'm sure BMW would love to not be liable in those cases if they could just decide not to be liable, but inspections and fuses presumably turn out to be cheaper than the settlements they'd otherwise be paying.
by taylodl | 2025-12-05 16:33:12+00:00
Why are we still talking about “Quantum Mechanics” when Quantum Field Theory has been the foundation of quantum theory since the mid-20th century and eliminates those paradoxes? The Standard Model, one of the most successful theories in science, is built entirely on QFT. It’s time the conversation caught up and we stop obsessing over ‘wavefunction collapse’ and ‘observer’ nonsense.
by getpokedagain | 2025-12-05 16:33:15+00:00
Am I the only one who just feels burnt out on these type of projects? We have a plethora of raspberry pi and other arm mobile developer kits that all just fail to deliver. They make great pet projects but fail at what most mobile phones do great which is provide a computer I can reliably and safely take with me in life. This pilet thing has 7 hours of battery life, is huge and will probably explode if I put it in my bikes bag.

While it's not perfect I've been investing more time into learning to live with grapheneOS. I can run Emacs and clang on the go. It's a better start that won't turn into a paperweight.
Show HN: 7x faster Iceberg ingestion, how we redesigned OLake's writer
by rohankhameshra | 2025-12-05 16:34:12+00:00
OLake is our open-source tool for ingesting Database & Kafka data into Apache Iceberg. We recently redesigned the write pipeline and saw ~7x throughput improvements. Sharing the architecture decisions, trade-offs, and benchmarks.
by pygy_ | 2025-12-05 16:34:22+00:00
The vaccinnated group was 1 year older on average, and had mode cardiovascular risk factors.

Covid has long term health consequences, and these are proportional to the severity of the acute infection.

People who died of a stroke of a heart infarction 6 months down the line were not counted as "covid death", even though covid is known to increase their incidence in the next year.
Show HN: HTTP-network-relay: Tunnel TCP over HTTP using WebSockets
by elikoga | 2025-12-05 16:34:24+00:00
We're using this to enable connectivity to devices behind NAT or firewalls.

If you're using uv, you can use this project directly by running `uvx --from git+https://github.com/Thymis-io/http-network-relay <command> [args...]`. Where `<command>` is one of `network-relay`, `edge-agent` or `access-client`.
by hervature | 2025-12-05 16:34:43+00:00
You should read my statement again.

If COVID vaccines reduces COVID deaths by 100% and increase everything else by 0.01%, you will still have a reduction in "all-cause" mortality yet your chances of dying by anything else has increased. I already said Table 2 does not show this is happening and in fact vaccinated individuals have better outcomes across the board. However, people are drawing this conclusion (even though they are correct) incorrectly without looking at the data.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-05 16:34:58+00:00
To praise TikTok it has a highly effective recommendation engine precisely because it is showing you one piece of content at a time and registering your engagement on that.

YouTube's interface gives people a feeling of agency because it tempts you with 10 or so videos on the side and you can choose one, it also means YouTube does not get information about the 9 you didn't click, maybe you would have liked 5 of them and hated 4 of them but it can at best guess about that. I read about negative sampling in the recommender literature to address this issue and never felt I understood it or believed in it -- the literature clearly indicates that it sorta-kinda works but I think it does not work very well.

So far as hating on algorithmic feeds it is not the algorithms themselves that are bad but how they are chosen. If there is any characteristic of the content that can be quantified or evaluated a feed can be designed to privilege that. A feed could be designed to be highly prosocial, calming and such or designed to irritate you as much as possible. It's possible that people get bored with the first.

My own reader works like TikTok in that it shows one content piece of the time but it is basically the stuff that I submit to HN and it is scientific papers and articles about LLMs and programming languages and social psychology and political science and sports and and advanced manufacturing and biotech and such. You might say my world view is unusual or something but it is certainly not mindless lowest common denominator stuff or outrage (e.g. to be fair I post a few things to HN because YOShInOn thinks they are spicy -- YOShInOn has a model that can predict if y'all are going to comment on an article or not and I felt it was a problem that my comments/submission ratio was low before I had YOShInOn)
by harrall | 2025-12-05 16:35:04+00:00
Same.

Game writers need to learn about character development.

I never care about 99% of characters in video games. Characters need history that they don’t necessarily let up easily, deep seated fears that they don’t want to tell you, and subtle wants that they may be embarrassed to admit. Sure you’re still hacking and slashing but you’re also thinking “hey I wonder how this is going to affect so and so?”
by altcognito | 2025-12-05 16:35:31+00:00
> Covid has a mortality rate under 1%.

I hate it when blanket statements like this creep in.

Which Covid? The initial version was definitely more deadly than later versions.

What about future covids? Are you willing to guarantee every version of covid from here on out will be less deadly? It is the general case to be true, but it is not some sort of law.
by liampulles | 2025-12-05 16:35:49+00:00
The lesson presented by the last few big outages is that entropy is, in fact, inescapable. The comprehensibility of a system cannot keep up with its growing and aging complexity forever. The rate of unknown unknowns will increase.

The good news is that a more decentralized internet with human brain scoped components is better for innovation, progress, and freedom anyway.
by arp242 | 2025-12-05 16:35:57+00:00
Besides, homeopathy has been studied for ages with tons and tons of quality studies.

Did it get rid of all the homeopathic quackery?

They will always have an excuse. If all else fails it'll just be a vague generic "oh yeah, it's just something deeper your science can't measure yet" or something along those lines. The Queen was an amateur hand-waver in comparison.

Never mind it was never very likely to work in the first place, on account of defying basic logic on several levels: like cures like, the whole water memory business, the more you dilute the stronger it becomes – nothing about this makes any sense.

I miss the days when worry about the adverse effects of homeopathy was the top concern...
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-12-05 16:36:00+00:00
Disagree, I'd gladly go and watch movies in a cinema, the experience cannot be replicated at home, at least not unless you're very rich.. a 55" tv and a soundbar just doesn't do it.

For me, the price is killing it (80% of the reason) and bad movies (20%)... two tickets, drinks, popcorn/nachos/candy/something, and we're in the 50eur+ range. Then add the messy audiences, ads, trailer#1, more ads, trailer #2, another ad for some reason, and it's been 20 mintues of technially all ads for something that i paid money for. Then the movie is a total disappoint. I'm not into superheroes nor into pedro pascal, so most of the movies are out before i even buy the ticket and the rest are somehow... just 'bad'. Watching a bad movie at home is ok... you fall asleep, press stop, it doesn't matter... whatching a bad movie at an artsy film festival is also ok.. it was low budget, the ticket was 4 euros, no popcorn, had beer before you enter, so you can fall asleep in the cinema and hope not to snore. But 50 euros and all the ads for a bad movie is just too much.
by gsck | 2025-12-05 16:36:10+00:00
I have recently taken a job with an American based company and will need to complete a few weeks training in Miami. Based on the information they have given me I need a B1 visa and maybe an ESTA since I'm in the UK, and a C-1/D for moving through the US.

However they keep flip flopping between me needing a B1 and me just using my ESTA for the training, and their communication hasn't been the most straight forward. Which visa do I need to get to enter the US for the training?
by egorfine | 2025-12-05 16:36:27+00:00
> provides customers with protection against malicious payloads, allowing them to be detected and blocked. To do this, Cloudflare’s proxy buffers HTTP request body content in memory for analysis.

I have a mixed feeling about this.

On the other hand, I absolutely don't want a CDN to look inside my payloads and decide what's good for me or. Today it's protection, tomorrow it's censorship.

At the same time this is exactly what CloudFlare is good for - to protect sites from malicious requests.
by hnfong | 2025-12-05 16:36:30+00:00
I think you're misreading GP's point, which I think is probably also your point.

The comment they replied to was apparently suggesting that everyone struggles in some areas, so it's meaningless to highlight one group's struggle over another given that they all have reached a certain stable career.

GP main point (as I understand it) is: no, some people actually do struggle harder than others to make it.

I don't know why people get triggered and start comparing traumas but let's avoid doing it here.
by rdiddly | 2025-12-05 16:36:52+00:00
I realize this is about money, and it's 2025 right now, and I'm probably just old, but what will happen to quality? I actually laughed, twice, because they did this, twice:

> Beloved franchises, shows and movies such as [list of some of the greatest classics of all time] will join Netflix’s extensive portfolio including [list of laughable junk], creating an extraordinary entertainment offering for audiences worldwide.

And then just a few lines later (and I won't snarkily shorten this one):

> By combining Warner Bros.’ incredible library of shows and movies—from timeless classics like Casablanca and Citizen Kane to modern favorites like Harry Potter and Friends—with our culture-defining titles like Stranger Things, KPop Demon Hunters and Squid Game, we'll be able to do that even better.

Like did I really just see Citizen Kane in the same sentence as KPop Demon Hunters? Might as well add Ow, My Balls to the list, that's how jarring the contrast was for me.
by majormajor | 2025-12-05 16:38:08+00:00
> not lethal for all age groups, we already knew it well before the vaccine was introduced. People may have short memories, the vaccine came almost a year after the disease was out, and we knew very well by then that it did not kill everyone, broadly.

And the vaccine wasn't trialed or rolled out initially for all age groups. One major reason was because double-blind trials were done first.

For instance, here is the enrollment page for a double-blind study from 2020 for those between 18-55: https://studypages.com/s/join-a-covid-19-vaccine-research-st...

This one was was 18-59: https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT04582344 with two cohorts: "The first cohort will be healthcare workers in the high risk group (K-1) and the second cohort will be people at normal risk (K-2)"

If you look at case rates, hospitalization load, and death rates for summer/fall/winter 2020 pre-vaccine, and compare to the load on the system in summer-2021 and later when people were far more social and active, the economy was starting to recover, then the efficacy of the vaccine was pretty obvious in letting people get out of lockdown without killing hugely more people and overwhelming the healthcare system. And it was tested pre-rollout in double-blind fashion and rolled out in a phased way to the most needy groups first, with monitoring and study of those groups.

What, concretely, are you proposing should have been done differently?
by rohankhameshra | 2025-12-05 16:38:31+00:00
Hi everyone, I’m one of the founders of OLake. We’ve been working on a high-throughput, open-source ingestion path for Apache Iceberg, and I wanted to share the latest benchmark results and the architectural changes behind them. Here are the key numbers from the benchmark run:

- On a 4.01 billion-row dataset, OLake sustained around 319,562 rows/sec (full-load) from Postgres into Iceberg.

- The next-best ingestion tool we tested on the same dataset managed about 46,000 rows/sec, making OLake roughly 6.8× faster for full loads.

- For CDC workloads, OLake ingested change batches at around 41,390 rows/sec, compared to ~26,900 rows/sec for the closest alternative.

- Average memory usage was about 44 GB, peaking at ~59 GB on a 64-vCPU / 128 GB RAM VM.

- Parquet file output stabilized at ~300–400 MB per file (after compression), improving performance downstream and avoiding “small file” fragmentation.

How we got these improvements:

1. Rewrote the writer architecture: Parsing, schema evolution, buffering, and batch management now happen in Go. Only the final Parquet and Iceberg write path uses Java. This cut down huge amounts of serialization and JVM churn.

2. Introduced a new batching and buffering model: Instead of producing many small Parquet files, we buffer data in memory per thread and commit large chunks (roughly 4 GB before compression). This keeps throughput high and files uniform.

3. Optimized Iceberg metadata operations: Commits remain atomic even with large batches, and schema evolution happens fully in Go before any write, reducing cross-system coordination.

4. Improved operational stability: CPU, memory, and disk behaviour remained predictable even at multi-billion-row scales.

Benchmark setup:

- Dataset: ~4.01 billion rows from the NYC Taxi + FHV trips parquet sets (row width ~120–144 bytes).

- Test machine: Azure Standard D64ls v5 (64 vCPUs, 128 GB RAM).

Iceberg stored on local NVMe for the benchmark, same architecture works with S3/GCS/HDFS.

The full benchmark results, methodology, and configs are here: https://olake.io/docs/benchmarks/

And the deep-dive into how we got the ~7× speedup is here: https://olake.io/blog/how-olake-becomes-7x-faster/

I’d love feedback from the HN community, specifically around tuning (batch sizes, commit frequency, partitioning strategies), Iceberg best practices, and real-world constraints you’ve seen in high-volume pipelines.

Happy to answer questions or share configs. Thanks for taking a look!
by wslh | 2025-12-05 16:38:37+00:00
There are relatively few people whose work is truly integrated into their sense of self, where doing what they love is inherently self-fulfilling. Think of someone like Jensen Huang, he’s not operating alone: he surrounds himself with the greatest teams and focuses on what he does best.

By contrast, some people mask the absence of that self-fulfillment with grandiose narratives that their inner selves don't actually support. And I suspect many also turn to drugs (including prescription or medically supervised ones) in an attempt to maximize their potential or suppress feelings that undermine their performance.
by LudwigNagasena | 2025-12-05 16:38:41+00:00
The sentiment is shared with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Wilhelm von Ketteler, Louis Blanc and probably lots of other less known people. Marx's theory of alienation is far more developed and nuanced than the generic cog-in-the-machine critique that is explored by many other people of various political inclination, not only Marx.
by proberts | 2025-12-05 16:39:49+00:00
Whether you present a B-1 visa or ESTA for admission, you will be seeking admission as a business visitor. Under these circumstances, my advice is almost always not to risk a denial of a B-1 visa application (which happens all the time) and to travel on ESTA. The only relative downside is that ESTA limits admission to 90 days. But of course run this all by the company's immigration counsel.