MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Nursie | 2025-12-11 03:58:26+00:00
I mean, your source there is telling us that cannabis and hallucinogen use are up, vaping (weed and nicotine) is up and smoking is in decline.

Hallucinogens are generally considered not very addictive, they are drugs that people use infrequently and their direct health effects are usually pretty minimal - LSD for instance is a mild stimulant and vasoconstrictor, but that's no real health worry for younger users. There are mental side effects in a minority of users (HPPD etc).

Compare this to tobacco which is well known to be one of the world's most addictive substances and kills fully half of lifetime users, I'd say a society in which people 9% of people used hallucinogens in the last year is preferable to one in which (like the US was in 1965) 42% of people smoke daily.

Cannabis consumption doesn't have to involve your lungs, people consume all sorts of edibles and drinks these days. Vaping cannabis is definitely worse for your health than abstaining from both vaping and smoking, but it doesn't contain the combustion products from burning plant material. Smoking cannabis; well I honestly don't know how that compares to smoking tobacco in terms of health risk, but it is less addictive and users are less likely to be "pack a day" types than they are with cigarettes AFAICT.

Vaping nicotine, similarly, is widely considered worse than not vaping nicotine and users may be more prone to respiratory infections, plus there is often poor quality control on ingredients. But again, tobacco kills half of lifetime users.

So yeah, if I had to choose whether to have higher smoking rates or higher hallucinogen and weed use rates in society, based on expected health outcomes, I'd go with the hallucinogens and weed.

If you want to read about the comparative risks of drug use (including tobacco and alcohol, but written prior to the explosion of vapes) I highly recommend "Drugs without the hot air", a book by Prof. David Nutt, one of the UK's foremost experts on the topic. The general takeaway is that heroin, cocaine, tobacco and alcohol are the worst, and that most other drugs slot in below there somewhere.
by dang | 2025-12-11 03:58:59+00:00
We've specifically protected, carefully moderated, and kept open many threads about this topic, at considerable cost, because each time one of these appears on HN, the mods can kiss the rest of their day goodbye, not to mention look forward to streams of abuse [1]. Forgive me therefore if I dispute your claim of "censored aggressively". To me that feels like not taking yes for an answer.

That's understandable, because the people who feel passionately about any topic (call it X) always feel like X is vastly underrepresented, and even "censored aggressively", on HN. We can say things like "frontpage space is the scarcest resource" and "we can't have too much repetition" till the cows come home, but it won't take this feeling away. Even when X is literally the most discussed topic on HN, we get people claiming that X is being censored aggressively—it's not even uncommon [2]. This is a function of how people feel and nothing else.

[1] I'm not comparing this to the suffering of the people in the actual situation. That is obvious of course, but since someone will accuse me of doing that if I don't say this, I'm saying this.

[2] If you want an example, this one is engraved in my memory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624916. How someone could turn the most-discussed topic on the entire site into "not any mention" and "censored aggressively" still zaps me with pain and anger every time it comes back to me, which fortunately is not all that often.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-11 03:59:16+00:00
“record and record”, if you mean the verb for persisting something and the noun for the thing persisted, are heteronyms (homographs which are not homophones), which incidentally is also what you would probably want to test what you are talking about here (distinguishing homophones would test use of context to understand meaning, but wouldn’t test anything about whether or not logic was working directly on audio or only working on text processed from audio, failing to distinguish heteronyms is suggestive of processing occurring on text, not audio directly.)
by rixed | 2025-12-11 04:01:09+00:00
Both the most vulgar and selfish interest, and the most principled passions, seems to play a role in history at different times. The most important contributing factor, though, is selfish interest of large groups of people, because the sun of it's many little influences do not cancel out, unlike the actions of principled actors. In exceptional times, good intends are allowed to take the front seat just as long as necessary, by the many behind the scene who will silently weight toward the prompt reestablishment of "business as usual".
by Full_Clark | 2025-12-11 04:01:23+00:00
> Western shows are all about the "you don't have to sacrifice anything to win" and Eastern shows are all about the "you're the chosen one" but this one was "the establishment is the establishment and most of the time it wins".

I think this is why The Wire captivated me. I'd been raised on a steady diet of hero's journey stories and then suddenly I ran into David Simon's buzzsaw of contravening those expectations.

In those years I'd just I started my working life and unfortunately the parallels were uncannily accurate.
by Nevermark | 2025-12-11 04:01:51+00:00
Without commenting specifically on Australia's approach, I think it does make sense to have some laws for children.

But I would prefer that surveillance-manipulation based practices be made illegal first. That would remove a lot of the means, and a lot of profits, from manipulating people via feeds, warped searches, and a host of other ways and uses for digging into, and leveraging, people's idiosyncrasies and vulnerabilities against them.

Dossier's on children, resulting in manipulative feeds for them are bad. But it is a bad practice for everyone. One of those deceptive business practices, that gets claimed to be not deceptive, because the deception is "out in the open".

Fraud doesn't have an "everyone is doing it" defense. Neither should surveillance-manipulation practices.

It isn't just a case of individuals, who need to be "saved from themselves". Our society, as permeated with surveillance and manipulation, has become permeated with "personalized" media driven dysfunction. We all have to put up with the bullshit it creates, and divisiveness it magnifies. Dystopian.

AI slop would be less effective, and less promoted, if there wasn't a surveillance dossier to customize who saw what. People don't like it now. Getting non-"personalized" slop? That would create exactly the intense pushback that is needed.

--

My ad free life, and ad-funded media free life, has left me utterly disgusted with manipulative social media. When people mount a defense of keeping it legal, it makes me very sad for their quite visibly slowly boiling brains. The practices are clearly both highly unethical and toxic.

(I am all for social media as a service/resource. I don't even mind ads (too much), when they are placed to match content, not the consumer. Just not when both are irreversibly compromised by massive tech scaled conflicts of interest.)
by Syzygies | 2025-12-11 04:01:52+00:00
When I was a senior at Swarthmore College, Herb Wilf came over from U Penn to teach a course in combinatorial algorithms. I was encouraged to attend.

He claimed that choosing a subset of k integers at random from {1..n} should have a log in its complexity, because one needs to sort to detect duplicates. I realized that if one divided [1..n] into k bins, one could detect duplicates within each bin, for a linear algorithm. I chose bubble sort because the average occupancy was 1, so bubble sort gave the best constant.

I described this algorithm to him around 5pm, end of his office hours as he was facing horrendous traffic home. I looked like George Harrison post-Beatles, and probably smelled of pot smoke. Understandably, he didn't recognize a future mathematician.

Around 10pm the dorm hall phone rang, one of my professors relaying an apology for brushing me off. He got it, and credited me with many ideas in the next edition of his book.

Of course, I eventually found all of this and more in Knuth's books. I was disillusioned, imagining that adults read everything. Later I came to understand that this was unrealistic.
by culi | 2025-12-11 04:03:52+00:00
Not quite the same thing, but there's this incredible (open source) project called The Component Gallery that is basically just a repository of UI components across 93 (currently) different design systems. It's an incredible resource if you're building a component from scratch and either want some design inspo or technical advice. Many of the design systems have thorough guidelines for a11y/ARIA best practices that I've learned a ton from

https://component.gallery/
by FreakLegion | 2025-12-11 04:04:34+00:00
> "Till this moment I never knew myself." - Sense and Sensibility again? I can't remember off the dome. That's a gorgeous strict Iambic.

"Till this moment I" and "I never knew myself" would be trochaic and iambic, respectively, but they don't strictly scan when you overlay the 'I's. You can of course get them to by e.g. eliding 'moment', or adding a line break and taking '-ment' as a feminine ending, or just scanning according to the writer's idiosyncrasies.

And individual writers can be very idiosyncratic here. Shakespeare, for example, if I remember right, lets monosyllabic words occur in almost any position. Disyllabic words on the other hand can have any combination of stresses (iamb, trochee, spondee, or pyrrhic), but only if they're foot-aligned. And so on.

The field has probably evolved since I was last part of it, but I'll still recommend Kristin Hanson's work in this area: https://linguistica.sns.it/RdL/9.1/Hanson.pdf. (Actually the second time I've recommended Hanson on HN. The last time was, let's see, 6 years ago!)
by rkerno | 2025-12-11 04:04:52+00:00
I think the overall sentiment with this post is sound, but arenas aren't the answer to Go's performance challenges. From my perspective, possibly in an effort to keep the language simple, Go's designers didn't care about performance. 'let the GC handle it' was the philosophy and as a result you see poor design choices all the way through the standard library. And the abstracting everything through interfaces then compounds the issue because the escape compiler can't see through the interface. The standard library is just riddled with unnecessary allocations. Just look at the JSON parser for instance and the recent work to improve it.

There is some interesting proposals on short term allocations, being able to specify that a local allocation will not leak.

Most recently, I've been fighting with the ChaCha20-Poly1305 implementation because someone in their 'wisdom' added a requirement for contiguous memory for the implementation, including extra space for a tag. Both ChaCha20 and Poly1305 are streaming algorithms, but the go authors decide 'you cannot be trusted' - here's a safe one-shot interface for you to use.

Go really needs a complete overhaul of their Standard Library to fix this, but I can't see this ever getting traction due to the focus on not breaking anything.

Go really is a great language, but should include performance / minimise the GC burden as a key design consideration for it's APIs.
by tokioyoyo | 2025-12-11 04:04:55+00:00
Totally. We’re definitely lucky over here. From my talks with people in restaurant industry in NA, it’s just extremely expensive to start a business, on top of the regulatory restrictions that you’ve mentioned. And obviously the holy grail of money making - liquor. I can get beer in almost every random ramen shop near me. It takes months/years of approval to open a place with a liquor license in Vancouver, Canada. Margins on alcohol are huge, that gives breathing room to little margins places make from food.
by denkmoon | 2025-12-11 04:05:14+00:00
Ooh ya got me.

Not. The problem is not even about which font is actually more accessible. It's the self proclaimed reasoning. Rubio, by his own words, states that the change is about aesthetics and anti DEIA politics.

However, if you want to argue about actual accessibility, which is not what is happening in the Dept. of State, the US government's own accessibility guidelines contradict the idea that Serif fonts are more accessible; https://www.section508.gov/develop/fonts-typography/

Do you happen to know anyone with a reading disability at all? A dear friend of mine has dyslexia, and I've seen first hand how important this stuff is for his comprehension.
by quaverquaver | 2025-12-11 04:05:26+00:00
I got my start programming in Forth - we were making PC games for the Japanese market in the early 80s - Epson and Sharp machines... and Forth was just magic - I've missed it - must check Factor out!ppl interested in a concatenate audio synthesis DSL should check out SAPF https://github.com/lfnoise/sapf
by h4ny | 2025-12-11 04:05:27+00:00
> I'm being a bit facetious here...

Maybe just don't do that? It's never helpful in good-faith discussions and just indicates a lack of empathy and maybe a lack of understanding of the actual issue being discussed.

> So, you haven't identified any actual problems with them being on social media though.

The problems GP raised seem pretty clear to me. Could gives us some examples of what you would consider to be "actual problems" in this context?

> Just that kids are doing something new and sometimes scary...

Any sane parent wouldn't send their kids to learn to ride a bicycle on the open road and without any supervision. You'd find a park or an empty lot somewhere, let them test it out, assess their ability to deal with potential dangers and avoid harming others at the same time, and let them be on their own once they are able to give you enough confidence that they can handle themselves most of the time without your help.

The problem with today's social media for children is that that there is no direct supervision or moderation of any kind. Like many have pointed out, social media extends to things like online games as well, and the chance that you will see content that are implicitly or explicitly unsuitable for children is extremely high. Just try joining the Discord channels of guilds of any online game to see for yourself.

Not all things new and scary come with a moderate to high risk of irreparable harm.
by hogehoge51 | 2025-12-11 04:06:07+00:00
I have personally ported a usb c usbpd stack from 8051 to cortex m0 to rv32ec. I can’t talk for gate count, it for code size the biggest factor was the compiler, with ARMCC giving the smallest code. As the rom was larger than the core, that was a bigger factor in gate count.
by heavyset_go | 2025-12-11 04:07:06+00:00
To comply with the law, platforms are gatekeeping content they deem controversial/NSFW/inappropriate/inconvenient behind age verification walls.

Everyone who wants to view, interact with or share that content has to verify their age to do so.

> I suspect that companies will not want to deal with the data security issues (very illegal to share pictures of underage people without consent), and will not be "sharing" with 3rd parties.

There are countless instances of exactly this happening, over and over again, not to mention that it's the way age verification's implemented now nearly everywhere lol
by nmilo | 2025-12-11 04:07:34+00:00
Implicit context [1] was one of the coolest features of a programming language I’ve ever seen that no one has ever implemented. And I’m really not sure why. Not just Go but most languages have this context passing problem with varying degrees of solution quality, making this implicit and built in could have opened up so many possibilities, more than just arenas.

[1]: https://youtu.be/ciGQCP6HgqI
by interstice | 2025-12-11 04:09:17+00:00
> I beginning to think most "advanced" programmers are just poor communicators.

This is a interesting take take considering that programmers are experts in communicating what someone has asked for (however vaguely) into code.

I think you're referring to is the transition from 'write code that does X' which is very concrete to 'trick an AI into writing the code I would have written, only faster', which feels like work that's somewhere between an art form and asking a magic box to fix things over and over again until it stops being broken (in obvious ways, at least).

Understandably people that prefer engineered solutions do not like the idea of working this way very much.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-12-11 04:09:52+00:00
This seems as if it could be really cool.

But the 100% jargon level means that as an extremely computer-aware person but also someone totally outside whichever "field" this originates in, I have absolutely no idea what it is, how you would or could use it, or get it ready for use, or anything else really.
by hokumguru | 2025-12-11 04:10:04+00:00
Off the top of my head, rails (currentattributes), Laravel (facades) especially, and most iOS apps use singletons quite well. It’s all in moderation and depends highly on how it’s used, much like every other design pattern.

I think people just don’t like Singletons because they’ve been especially misused in the past but I guarantee the same argument stands for any other design pattern.
by btheunissen | 2025-12-11 04:13:07+00:00
> The first clues started when a client, who I thought was a software developer, starts merging his own code through the main branch, without warning. No pull request, just straight git push --force origin main ... Last time, I checked this Xcode project did not compiled. Or anything close to it.

This doesn't read like a vibe-coding problem, and more of a client boundaries problem. Surely you could point out they are paying you for your expertise, and to supersede your best practices with whatever AI churns out is making the job they are paying you to do even harder, and frankly a little disrespectful ("I know better").
by therobots927 | 2025-12-11 04:13:29+00:00
As someone who is extremely online and often bored at work, I spend a lot of time checking the top ~100 or so posts here. Any article related to Israel was getting rapidly flagged and taken down. It’s possible that these posts are being mass-flagged by users and automatically taken down, but if that’s the case it appears to be an abuse of the flag function. I understand it’s difficult to moderate these threads and that Israel/Palestine is a contentious topic, but that just doesn’t explain the rapid (~10 minute latency) take downs prior to ANY inflammatory comments. Again, I don’t know exactly how your system works, but maybe some additional transparency would be helpful. It’s clearly already being gamed so it wouldn’t hurt.

Edit: I think it’s also important to be conscious of the central role that Y combinator and Silicon Valley in general have played both in the Israel / Palestine “conflict” and domestic US politics. “Hackernews” is not a neutral zone. It is directly associated with the most powerful forces in the world today. I’m not casting judgment because I work in this industry to. But it undoubtedly raises serious questions about the moderation (automated or otherwise) of speech around these topics on here.
by _carbyau_ | 2025-12-11 04:13:53+00:00
The many Gundam series are not a historical account obviously.

From what I gather - having never actually watched any - there are anti-war themes (IE armies are commanded by people who don't have to sacrifice, how that corrupts), sacrifice vs outcomes and more. It's a thematic experience rather than an education in robotics or history.

I like stompy robots. I have to yet to start on Gundam because I am hesitant as to where to start and which path to follow in watching it all and I know it would consume me once I start.

Maybe after Xmas, in my break, I'll "waste" some time with it.
by cryptoz | 2025-12-11 04:13:53+00:00
Been writing software for like 20 years now and I love it. I am also a fan of AI-assisted coding, but I only just started using Cursor. Gosh I do not like it at all for a simple reason: since I didn't write the code, in order to understand it I have to read it. But gaining understanding that way takes longer than writing it myself does.

When you write the code, you understand it. When you read the code produced by an agent, you may eventually feel like you understand it, but it's not at the same deep level as if your own brain created it.

I'll keep using new tools, I'll keep writing my own code too. Just venting my frustrations with agentic coding because it's only going to get worse.
by ctime | 2025-12-11 04:14:50+00:00
We’re in the geocities phase of LLM, mostly trash, very basic, but eventually, people will either get bored and go back to whatever it is they were doing or actually use the tools for useful and productive work.

As for the feelings that using LLM has when it one shots your project start (and does a pretty good job), have a German word:

Automatisierungskummer

(automation sorrow) • Kummer is emotional heaviness, a mild-to-deep sadness.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-11 04:14:51+00:00
> This is quite literally "printing money", right?

No, its not literally printing money. (That’a what happens in the big presses run by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.)

It is arguably figuratively printing money, but that’s exactly one of the Fed’s primary tools to acheive its job, by design.

> Wasn't the Fed not supposed to be allowed to do that?

What gave you that idea?
by thewisenerd | 2025-12-11 04:15:52+00:00
> Hey! I asked AI for this code, do you think this will work? I think you should use it.

unfortunately this problem preceeds AI, and has been worsened by it.

i've seen instances of one-file, in-memory hashmap proof-of-concept implementations been requested to be integrated in semi-large evolving codebases with "it took me 1 day to build this, how long will it take to integrate" questions
by dang | 2025-12-11 04:18:15+00:00
The key word in your comment is "any". If you really mean that "any", I propose consing an 'm' onto it, because HN has hosted dozens of threads totalling many thousands of comments, probably tens of thousands by now, about this topic. That shouldn't be hard to verify. One could start here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

> maybe some additional transparency would be helpful.

No amount of transparency will help, alas, for two reasons: (1) people decide these things based on how they feel, and (2) the measure-zero internet law: no matter how often you repeat something, the set of users who receive the information has measure zero (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

> the central role that Y combinator and Silicon Valley in general have played both in the Israel / Palestine “conflict” and domestic US politics.

I don't remotely believe that YC has played a "central role" in any of that, but even if it had, Hacker News is moderated by me and tomhow, and no one at YC has ever put any political pressure on us. If you're talking about HN moderation, that's who you're talking about—and we're quite accessible and willing to answer questions and address objections. (That's why I've posted 81k comments over the last 10+ years, what-am-i-doing-with-my-life-god-help-me.)

p.s. I've always felt that people being bored at work are HN's core constituency, so thank you!