MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-12-02 09:51:48+00:00
> The problem wasn’t the masks. It was scientific institutions flip- flopping instead of saying “we don’t know”.

Actually, this is an area where I would criticize the CDC, though I understand why they did what they did. The first thing is that the US was desperately short on N95 masks, and not even medical staff who were treating Covid patients had reliable access to masks. Public health authorities were afraid of a run on masks (which happened anyways), which would make that situation even worse. The government should have explained the situation to people, appealed to their civic duty (which probably wouldn't work in the US), and taken emergency measures like commandeering stocks of N95 masks from retailers.

The other aspect of this, which one could see as "bad science," was that various studies had found that laypeople don't know how to wear masks properly, so their real-world effectiveness was in doubt. I think the correct response to that is to teach people how to wear them, not to say they don't work. But before the pandemic, there was genuinely dispute in the literature about what the best mask recommendation in a flu pandemic (which was what everyone was planning for) would be.

> Initial studies did not test for transmission.

Initial studies tested for signs of infection. If your chance of getting infected is dramatically reduced (which it was in the first few months after vaccination), then of course you are less likely to transmit the virus. If you don't get infected, you don't transmit.

> Yes, schools are often centers of viral spread — but this was never the case for Covid. Good science requires evidence before jumping to conclusions, not merely relying on what has “long been known”.

It absolutely was the case for Covid, as it is for pretty much every respiratory disease on Earth. In the middle of a pandemic, you don't have time to run a months-long study with thousands of children to determine if schools are centers of transmission. The virus spreads by people breathing near one another. A room full of children running around slobbering on each other is obviously going to be a perfect environment for the virus to spread. One parent gets sick. Their child gets sick. Then all the children get sick. Then all the parents get sick. It's like clockwork, as anyone who has children knows. Waiting for all the studies to come in to confirm the obvious in the middle of a pandemic would be completely irresponsible.

> I think that Americans just hate being told what to do, and when there isn’t really justification for it (I.e. the bad science), they’re gonna do the opposite. The lesson shouldn’t be that people are dumb, it should be that trying to force half-baked policies down everyone’s throats will backfire.

As opposed to what? Telling people not to vaccinate and not to mask? The issue of masks and vaccines were incredibly politicized in the US, and there were all sorts of people cynically using these issues to appear anti-establishment. The US has a long history of paranoid-style politics, and in a pandemic, that's basically poison.
by Aromasin | 2025-12-02 09:52:02+00:00
I think would diminish independent author rights. Quite often, a novel will become popular only decades after publishing, and I think the author should be able to profit on the fruits of their labour without wealthy corporations tarnishing their original IP, or creating TV shows and the link with no reperations to the creator.

Fantasy book are a good example. A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity. Good Omens main peak was ~15 years after release. Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985 but only reached their peak in 2010.

IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
by sg5421 | 2025-12-02 09:52:05+00:00
I think he refers to Gelephu Mindfulness City. I read it differently, not as a generic globalist city but very much a middle ground between Bhutanese culture (deep Buddhist presence, it will maintain vernacular architectures codes throughout, no skyscrapers) and global capital attractiveness (special economic zone, some tax benefits but not a tax haven in any way, crypto adoption, etc.)
by littlecranky67 | 2025-12-02 09:52:08+00:00
What OS do you use on it? I have a 2014 Macbook Pro and macOS with CoreLegacyPatcher on Ventura was almost unusably slow. Older versions had issues with Safari, no modern Browser support (I found some chromium fork patched for older macOS versions but slow and no full feature support) etc. I installed Linux on it recently and it works better, use it as a secondary machine with some home-network services but would never consider it usable as a working machine.
by yread | 2025-12-02 09:52:28+00:00
That is awesome. In my domain, images (TIFFs usually) are up to 1m x 1m pixels and scaling usually goes 4x so that if you need 2x scaling you can just read 4 times as many tiles from the higher resolution level and downscale. With 8x scaling you need to go a level further - reading 16 pixels from the image to create 1 pixel of output. Not great but it would work and 4096 scaling would make the lowest resolution image 256 x 256 which is just what you need.
by liampulles | 2025-12-02 09:52:48+00:00
I know that OpenAPI code gen support is spotty, and that protobuf codegen (in my experience) is quite good, but all of this starts from the idea that the SaaS I'm consuming has actually documented their API properly.

A sizable portion of the integrations I've built have had to be built by hand, because there are inevitable stupid quirks and/or failures I've had to work around. For these usecases, using JSON is preferable, because it is easy for me to see what I have actually been sent, not what the partially up to date spec says I should've been sent.

This is consistent with the idea that communication over the internet should consist of (encrypted and compressed) plain text. It's because human beings are going to have to deal with human reality at the end of the day.
by dakoosha | 2025-12-02 09:53:00+00:00
Unfortunately, such things happen more often than people realize, especially for semi-popular open source projects. You can do a few things about it. One of them is to report to GitHub about your repo being impersonated. Also, you can clarify ownership on GitHub, for example, by adding a note in your README or a dedicated .md file stating which accounts or websites are officially associated with your project
by pjmlp | 2025-12-02 09:53:45+00:00
> By 2035 I wonder if we'll be all running KDE or WindowMaker and the hell with modern OS GUI.

That is what I wished for back in the 2000's, eventually I went back to Windows starting with Windows 7, because I got fed up with laptop support.

As the main laptop OS, I never stopped having UNIX based systems on servers across many customer projects, or trying out the flavour of the month via local VMs, since hardware virtualization became a commodity.
by Tor3 | 2025-12-02 09:53:53+00:00
A digital ID is not doing all of that. The way it's implemented in Sweden, just to take an example already mentioned, is simply to identify you, and only for certain parts of society (mostly governmental services, banks, insurance and the like, and a few more). It's not about authorizing you for travel. If you need an ID for picking up your valuable shipment from the post office then you simply show your driver's license or passport, you don't use a digital ID for that. At all. If someone took away your digital ID then that would mean zero for your internet access, and zero for your ability to travel. It's not used for that at all. What would be a problem is paying the bills, because the ID identifies you for using network banking. However, alternative ways for identifying you for the latter are far worse concerns.
by asimovDev | 2025-12-02 09:54:26+00:00
If I am not scared for my life going over 120 km/h in a car, I don't want it

I love lightweight cars. They are harder and harder to make due to regulations so the options are older vehicles. Or motorcycles, but that's too scary.

I recently had the pleasure of finally driving a car on a track and it was so insanely fun even if I was driving a FWD hatchback with like 70 or 80 horsepower and a worn out shifter
by eitland | 2025-12-02 09:54:51+00:00
Especially when it happens at night.

But I'll not preted Google is any better. Last I used it would have call "CTO of the company I worked for" or "Send message to random friend-of-a-friend that I once helped" as suggested actions in the middle of the night. (Maybe it has improved now? I used to be comically bad, as was other large tech companies: https://erik.itland.no/tag:aifails)
by littlecranky67 | 2025-12-02 09:54:56+00:00
The 2019 MBP series had serious thermal issues, and a high failure rate. They became insanely hot. Mine died 3 weeks after falling out of AppleCare - just switched off and never on during usage. A friend with the same model had the same thing happending just a few months after. You hardly see any of those still in use (which might also be because people upgrade to M-Series chips which are way better).
by edelbitter | 2025-12-02 09:55:08+00:00
To be fair, Mozilla-affiliated developers have accomplished some serious cleanup in recent years. New & redesigned features are fake tabs with special permissions instead of that unholy intertwining of web standards and local UI in C++. Storage is almost-proper sqlite3. Dynamic linking against system libraries old&new just works(tm). Even the vendored Rust packages more or less build fine, now even across multiple compiler versions. Plus, AMDs new-ish CPUs with ginormous L3 brought recompile (and thus, bisect) times to almost reasonable levels, so that is not as pressing of an issue any more. I would guesstimate only 25 years left at the current speed till Firefox can be considered maintainable again.
by irusensei | 2025-12-02 09:56:31+00:00
> I was already not very happy having to go in, but you can imagine I now abhor it. Having to share desks with people who don't give a shit about office equipment, having to clean up the screens because they figure it's fine to stick their fingers on them and having to use shoddy peripherals... And it goes on and on, you've read it on every HN post on the subject.

The company I work for has a reservation system for desks.

More than not the desks are disgusting. I'm talking about some suspicious matter that might be food or nose bigger on the greasy keyboard. Keyboard and mouse are flimsy office staple crapware and we have to use Citrix even though we are within the company network.

For fuck sake either go back to the old days where a person had their own desk they can personalize or let me work from my place.
by bitfis | 2025-12-02 09:56:40+00:00
Generally it seems to be more related that if you are an immigrant, you more likely try to keep your heads down. This comes from a video about immigration in sweden. For which the first generation of immigrants want to contribute to society in most cases, while the second generation seems to be more open to crime. The second generation does of course has then the citizenship and are not considered to be immigrants anymore. But this does does not need to correlate with immigration and culture per se, but also can have todo about second generations being badly integrated and/or having less oportunities then other citizens. Just seems citizens generally accept less shit from the government then immigrants do.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-12-02 09:56:42+00:00
I feel this, but also, I am... anxious about reactions? I rarely / never go back on comments I've written on HN. I know it's actually a really bad thing to do because it means I won't allow my views to be challenged, don't engage in debate, just want to get my side out without actively defending it.

Years ago I had a blog and one time I wrote a post in response to another blog post about education vs experience, arguing in favor of formal education. And that one got a link back from the original article, leading people back to my blog. I got engagement, comments, feedback, etc... and it was very uh. Overwhelming? Like suddenly I had to defend my arguments. It made me very uncomfortable, even though it was probably a good thing, all in all.

I don't know how to break that trend. I think I'd rather have realtime communications / chat, but that's another thing that seems to have died, at least in the space I've been at for a long time now.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-02 09:57:24+00:00
True, I should have specified that the timing I was providing was the Western tradition; the Orthodox (both Eastern and Oriental, I believe) tradition has a 40-day Nativity Fast (in some, the name is different in others) mirroring the 40-day season of Lent, that is similar (in terms of being a preparatory season for the Feast of the Nativity) to the Western Advent.
by legsrunny | 2025-12-02 09:57:24+00:00
It will never cease being funny to me how Eurocrats/Anglocrats pout their chests, proclaim proudly how "free" and "democratic" they are, and then proceed to implement a police state and surveillance regime which the DDR could only dream of. Sure you have "nothing to hide", and "intentions are good". Was that also true for every decade in European history? Will that also be true in 10 years? In 20 years?
by petterroea | 2025-12-02 09:57:40+00:00
In general having a chief "order" employees sounds like a red flag to me. Isn't ordering a bit authoritarian and used in leau of being able to change things in a more civil manner? If you aren't able to get people to work more at the office through more civil manners, maybe you should reflect on why?

Surely this is just to get people to quit without needing to give them expensive severance packages, that seems pretty common nowadays?
by rjh29 | 2025-12-02 09:57:56+00:00
Never using a Samsung foldable again. I bought the 4th gen of ZFold thinking it would be out of the prototype stage, and it fell apart in less than a year. The Chinese makers seem like a better bet and invest in things like silicon carbide batteries, flagship-tier cameras and dual-screen stylus support. Samsung barely innovates while the price has continued to rise with each generation.
by tiborsaas | 2025-12-02 09:57:57+00:00
If you play it again, make sure not to miss the Blackwall gateway quickhack:

https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Blackwall_Gateway

Absolutely brutal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD5z3GmQRXQ

---

I also noticed how simple the "new web" is when interacting with it. Of course, that's a game mechanic, but also kinda makes sense.
by chownie | 2025-12-02 09:59:34+00:00
It's funny because this isn't even a hypothetical, you're actually just wrong!

The majority of people who play competitive matchmade games online didn't get consulted, the developers put anti-cheat in after the audience was already entrenched. The players didn't "decide" anything, Riot games decided it in like 2020 and the players have middling to negative feelings about it. You weren't talking about Riot Games? Well you said "majority of people who play competitive matchmade games online" and that's Riot Games, so yes you were.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-12-02 10:00:29+00:00
Starmer does not really care about not pissing off too many voters. He already has but he is also safe from them as the next election is far away. On the other hand, he is at risk, high risk, from his own party so he does what placates them. We've seen it before with private schools, now again with the 2-child cap, for instance.
by kouteiheika | 2025-12-02 10:00:32+00:00
This doesn't necessarily mean that it's Wan2.2. People often don't train their own VAEs and just reuse an existing one, because a VAE isn't really what's doing the image generation part.

A little bit more background for those who don't know what a VAE is (I'm simplifying here, so bear with me): it's essentially a model which turns raw RGB images into a something called a "latent space". You can think of it as a fancy "color" space, but on steroids.

There are two main reasons for this: one is to make the model which does the actual useful work more computationally efficient. VAEs usually downscale the spatial dimensions of the images they ingest, so your model now instead of having to process a 1024x1024 image needs to work on only a 256x256 image. (However they often do increase the number of channels to compensate, but I digress.)

The other reason is that, unlike raw RGB space, the latent space is actually a higher level representation of the image.

Training a VAE isn't the most interesting part of image models, and while it is tricky, it's done entirely in an unsupervised manner. You give the VAE an RGB image, have it convert it to latent space, then have it convert it back to RGB, you take a diff between the input RGB image and the output RGB image, and that's the signal you use when training them (in reality it's a little more complex, but, again, I'm simplifying here to make the explanation more clear). So it makes sense to reuse them, and concentrate on the actually interesting parts of an image generation model.
by krylon | 2025-12-02 10:01:11+00:00
Sleep by Max Richter is great (and very long)

Sunset Mission by Bohren & Der Club of Gore is very very sleepy Jazz (they have released more albums, but this one is my favorite by a wide margin)

Long Ambients 1 & 2 by Moby - he was kind enough to make them available for download free of charge, too

Under Wires and Search Lights by Marconi Union

In A Silent Way by Miles Davis

Pretty much anything by Sigur Rós. It's not strictly speaking instrumental, but the lyrics are Icelandic, which I don't speak, so it's close enough

Cocteau Twins recorded many very ambient-ish albums. Not instrumental, but the "lyrics" are mostly glossolalia, so not distracting (at least for me).
by w10-1 | 2025-12-02 10:01:17+00:00
> changing the habits of 800 million+ people who use ChatGPT every week, however, is a battle that can only be fought individual by individual

That's the basis for his conclusions about both OpenAI and Google, but is it true?

It's precisely because uptake has been so rapid that I believe it can change rapidly.

I also think worldwide consumers no longer view US tech as some savior of humanity that they need to join or be left behind. They're likely to jump to any local viable competitor.

Still the adtech/advertiser consumers who pay the bills are likely to stay even if users wander, so we're back to the battle of business models.
by windowshopping | 2025-12-02 10:01:29+00:00
See now while I love this play I don't find that exchange notable. It's very plain, no? The implication is that one thought the other was going to say something but he wasn't. This exact dialogue takes place in real life regularly.

The alternative reading, where an entire exchange cleverly takes place without any substance, seems almost mistaken to me? In context it seems very clear it's "I thought you...[were going to say something.]" "No." "Ah."
by edelbitter | 2025-12-02 10:02:15+00:00
Mozilla suggests policies [1] (which, in turn are capable of default-setting or enforcing most prefs and has proper release notes) and has removed a bunch of pages that previously recommended directly editing prefs.js or shipping user.js (which had been changed in backwards-incompatible ways before when the parser was swapped).

[1]: https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates/
by jakubmazanec | 2025-12-02 10:02:19+00:00
> Why ever change it.

Because e.g. 1) defining routes using React components isn't good idea, because then you have to first render the app before you know which routes are defined; 2) It's useful to be able to specify what data a route needs. 3) React moved to hooks because they compose better; Etc. The APIs were reworked (but only a few times over many years) so they could be better. Software design is iterative and that's what the major version number in SemVer is for.
by eitland | 2025-12-02 10:04:07+00:00
My understanding is they are just stubborn. They once did it this way and now it is "the Apple way".

Recent example: Apple used to hide "search in page" in the share menu in mobile safari. Far from obvious, but at some point one discovers it because there is no other place to look for it.

Now they have finally decided to make a standard fly dropping overflow menu and hide the share button there. But interestingly you still need to open the share menu from there to find the search button.

Meanwhile other buttons that weren't as obviously misplaced in "share" like "Add to Bookmarks" are now on the top level together with the share button.

Same goes for the arguments against things like cut and paste in finder: they didn't create it back in the day and now there is a complete mythology about why cut and paste in Finder would actually be stupid and almost evil.
by nephihaha | 2025-12-02 10:05:07+00:00
No, definitely not thinking in computer terms. I know the word from a completely different context. I think what they mean is sensitivity (which can be good or bad) and tenderness (which is generally good). But there are contexts in which it is not helpful. We have a problem with street violence where I live, and showing your emotional side to a potential attacker is not the best way of avoiding trouble.
by netcyrax | 2025-12-02 10:05:20+00:00
SEEKING WORK | REMOTE | Worldwide Availability (EU-based)

Technologies: Kotlin (Android), Python (Django), Java, Dart (Flutter), Stripe, FHIR, Compose Multiplatform

About Me: Formerly at Google and Amazon, driven by a deep passion for software and technology

Contact: myerou {at} paleblueapps.com

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/myerou
by CalRobert | 2025-12-02 10:05:31+00:00
"Why yes I know you're already scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to housing, but have you thought about finding something even worse?"

In all honesty, when was the last time you tried to rent a place to live? My brother makes decent money in his mid-20's and _still_ wound up living out of his car for a couple months when his attempt to find something cheaper backfired.
by bflesch | 2025-12-02 10:06:03+00:00
The anticheat will try to detect the VM and it will give a warning, so that's not a solution. Ideally keep leisure time devices and work devices separate. Consoles are a good solution because you are never tempted to use your emails on those.

But also you need to think about who your adversary is. Other countries have access to all your icloud mail and photos all the time. Something like dropbox and onedrive is scanned and catalogued in the background.

Hardware supply chain is a difficult topic and each layer of abstraction has their own mini operating system in the firmware, and past has shown many of them have backdoors.
by captn3m0 | 2025-12-02 10:06:36+00:00
For others: IFF (Internet Freedom Foundation) was born out of India's SaveTheInternet campaign for Net Neutrality, which helped save India from Facebook's Internet.org. They're currently fighting more than a dozen cases on a variety of matters, but mainly focused on digital rights, censorship, surveillance, and privacy.

If you are in India, you can donate to them at https://internetfreedom.in/donate/
Ask HN: Battling Depression
by server_man3000 | 2025-12-02 10:07:12+00:00
Hi HN. I’ve been battling depression for a few years now and have become pretty numb to most things.

I’ve tried exercise, sleep, drugs, social events.

I think a lot of it has to do with my job, feeling trapped and bound to the golden handcuffs to try and survive this expensive world while being forced to work on things I have little care for. Curious what folks have done to help escape this dark cloud.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-02 10:07:18+00:00
> "VAE: WAN2.2-VAE" so it's just a Wan2.2 edit

No, using the WAN 2.2 VAE does not mean it is a WAN 2.2 edit.

> compressed to 7B.

No, if it was an edit of the WAN model that uses the 2.2 VAE, it would be expanded to 7B, not compressed (the 14B models of WAN 2.2 use the WAN 2.1 VAE, the WAN 2.2 VAE is used by the 5B WAN 2.2 model.)