MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jnsaff2 | 2025-12-07 13:32:06+00:00
And what he left out of this book (and included in the memoir or in some interview) was that there was a scientific study of women in the area at the time which discovered that a very high percentage of women had birthing complications serious enough for hospitalization that went untreated as they had to go back to their chores next day and there was no hospital anywhere close.
by spwa4 | 2025-12-07 13:33:26+00:00
WITH the option to make it mandatory by 5 different mechanisms, including options that do not involve lawmakers (but are not mentioned, essentially the executive (normally the chancellor) can also "activate" non-voluntary conscription under various conditions)

Also the Bundestag agreed in advance to activate conscription if not enough volunteers can be found (which, given the results in France, seems about as certain as the sun rising tomorrow)

In fact filling out the questionnaire at all seems risky.
Ask HN: Underrated music, books, movies? (2025)
by galfarragem | 2025-12-07 13:33:50+00:00
Ask HN: Underrated music, books, movies?

I asked this years ago, and it’s time to ask again: what underrated music, books, and movies should we discover? Biased or not, I’m sure this thread will uncover some gems for a lazy Sunday.

I keep an eclectic list of «interesting» stuff, and I'm always looking for new finds:

https://www.slowernews.com/s/downtime
by petetnt | 2025-12-07 13:35:30+00:00
Funny how the article states that "LLMs can be excellent editors" and then the post repeats all the mistakes that no editor would make:

1. Because reading posts like this 2. Is actually frustrating as hell 3. When everything gets dragged around and filled with useless anecdotes and 3 adjective mumbojumbos and endless emdashes — because somehow it's better than actually just writing something up.

Which just means that people in tech or in general have no understanding what an editor does.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-12-07 13:35:32+00:00
> And as former East German who then went the 'Kriegsdienstverweigerer' path in unified Germany during the 90's I cannot complain about any discrimination or incorrect behaviour, all communication was perfectly correct and respectful and I didn't even have to show up anywhere in person

In the 90s, the situation was already very different - doing alternative national service (Zivildienst) instead of compulsory military service got a lot easier (possible exception of which I heard: you were very athletic - it was rumored that then they still made it much more inconvenient to refuse to do military service).

For good reasons, my references were from older generations - the trauma that they had to endure if they wanted do alternative national service (Zivildienst) instead of compulsory military service exactly did lead to the situation that it got much easier in the 90s to do alternative national service instead.
by lurk2 | 2025-12-07 13:36:30+00:00
Instagram is still massive. Twitter was never that big, it just had an outsized cultural influence because the people who used it professionalized being terminally online.

Facebook is the one that baffles me because the only people I know that actively use it for anything besides Messenger and Marketplace are over the age of 60. The younger ones have never even had a Facebook account.

Threads is the other one; it’s supposedly huge but I only know one person who uses it. I’ve never heard it referenced in any conversation and don’t hear about it on other platforms the way you’ll see a Twitter screenshot on Reddit.
by jlaternman | 2025-12-07 13:36:36+00:00
Lots of things. “Could I have some sugar, please; two frappy mochachos? one with almond milk; can you explain what all these options are, please; what the hell is mushroom powder?” In today’s coffee shops this can lead to hours of complex social interaction at the counter, enriching our lives and ultimately extending our lifespans. — sorry, couldn’t resist. In seriousness, I actually find this conversation interesting. Some coffee shops do have quite a social culture around them, though I think they’re outliers on whole. Here in Spain it’s a mix, but in some it is like everyone’s friends with the barista.
by kachapopopow | 2025-12-07 13:36:40+00:00
well actually, you could build a network on top of that (expensive) database... hmm... it's kind of starting to sound like SWIFT.

but you have: no rollbacks, no refunds, no governance to stop bad actors you do gain: immunity from government decisions, theft by state and independence

as unpopular as it might sound like, bitcoin is great for criminals, yes you could say "who decides what is a criminal", well let's make this simple: people who murder and steal.

edit: by "murder and steal" I generally mean something that is "lawfully and/or morally disallowed"
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-07 13:37:09+00:00
Screens are cheaper than physical dials, and these days touch screens are cheaper than buttons. That's why car manufacturers have moved to screen dashboards; they've been trying that since the 80s with LED speed indicators, and I can't recall the last physical odometer I've seen in a car. Cars already have navigation consoles built in these days (whether they're Android Auto/CarPlay or something custom) so using those screens as a place to put cheap software buttons to replace expensive physical ones was a matter of time.

There is no cost advantage to putting a screen in front of a fridge.
by forgotpwd16 | 2025-12-07 13:37:15+00:00
An interesting project I stumbled upon recently is AirLoom[0], essentially a reverse literate programming tool. Rather having code and prose interweaved (either Knuth-style code-within-prose or doc-style/as-comments prose-within-code), you've them split in dedicated in segment-annotated code and prose referencing those segments. AirLoom can then produce a combined document with references replaced by the actual code segments. This allows using a normal programming environment (not possible in first approach) and being order independent (not possible in second approach).

[0]: https://github.com/eudoxia0/airloom
by class3shock | 2025-12-07 13:37:18+00:00
I think the interest in cottagecore and similar things is less about people finding them cute and more about people looking for meaning, something we've always struggled with as technology advanced. Look at the Arts & Crafts movement in the US and Art Nouveau in Europe in the early 1900s, both were a response to the industrialization and dehumanization of work and art. Read Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut from the 1950s which imagined a future where basically all work was automated and the terribleness of that path. History might only rhyme but this is one that has happened a number of times.
by mesrik | 2025-12-07 13:38:50+00:00
Well, that's about what happens in Sauna with electric stove.

In Finland we do it every day and have done decades already.

Those who may not know electric stoves have been about fifty years common use at least in urban environments. Stoves have anything from three, one in each of three phase current used heating elements (resistor coils) 400V 6-8 kW power draw commonly in small house stoves and 2-3 times that swimming baths saunas stoves.

While sitting topmost sauna benches bathing, we throw fresh water from bucket with a sauna laddle (saunakauha) water to stove(s) anything from small drippings to a pint with trying to little spread it out. This is to get steam and make it pleasant relaxing 'löyly' as we call it.

The stove is usually heated about an hour or so before starting bathing to get temperature somewhere 70°-100°C (158-212°F).

It's not advisable to have stove showing those red hot glowing elements peeking out behind stones, but it does happen if stones were not laid properly. But even if water gets directly to elements those will not break or get any damage as they are made intentionally to resist that.

So boiling water practically immediately does happen, it's not particularly dangerous when applied in circumstances where equipment is made to withstand that is nothing miraculous. And that really happens millions of times each day in Finland and some other places where that kind of sauna culture is practised both at people private homes and also public swimming baths saunas alike.

I will be observing it next time about in 14 hours from this writing as I'm going swimming as usual tomorrow morning at 6:00 am. when pool opens early tomorrow, and then likewise twice more (Wed, Fri). Also once more (Thu) evening sauna reservation slot i've got this flat I live.

There is a quite good english page about Finish sauna in Wikipedia, but to get a glimpse what modern sauna and stoves look Harvia a long time stove manufacturer web pages you get some sense what I'm writing about.

- https://www.harvia.com/en/
by skywhopper | 2025-12-07 13:39:08+00:00
“The gamblification of the economy” is the real story here. Crypto, prediction markets, and omnipresent instant gambling apps are poisoning more and more of our society and draining money from folks in an entirely unproductive way. These things promise a quick path to fortune but the only people making money are the fraudsters or the platform owners (often the same people). Serious regulation of these things is long overdue, and no, forcing them to advertise gambling hotlines is not sufficient.
by ffsm8 | 2025-12-07 13:39:23+00:00
Such a statement needs a citation, I don't believe you've got 20feet /6meter large trees being completely frozen like in the image of the article but I've never visited the area before.

I suspect you're just talking about small trees frozen over,which are indeed very common (1-3m). The habitat for trees being frozen like that just generally comes with strong winds all-year-round, which hampers their grows.

That's what made the Japanese ones special in the eyes of the people that were interviewed for this article - the gargantuan trees looking like monsters because of the size of the trees

> In the 1930s, we saw juhyo five to six metres [16-20ft] across," Yanagisawa says. "By the postwar decades, they were often two to three metres [7-10ft]. Since 2019, many are half a metre [1.6ft] or less. Some are barely columns."

> The cause is twofold, says Yanagisawa: a warming climate and a forest under attack. The host tree, Aomori todomatsu, suffered a moth outbreak in 2013 that stripped its needles. Bark beetles followed in 2015, boring into weakened trunks. Yamagata officials report that around 23,000 firs, about a fifth of the prefectural side's stands, have died. With fewer branches and leaves, there is little surface for snow and ice to cling to.
by jnsaff2 | 2025-12-07 13:39:23+00:00
UK power grid has the Eastenders effect. Where the ending credits of the Eastenders soap signals a large increase in power draw from the grid as people will put on the tea kettle at the end of the show. The grid operators have to dispatch enough power to cover for this.

While the amount of energy used to boil water at 2kW is not significantly different from 3kW (2kW has a tiny amount of more atmospheric losses I think), there is a difference for the impact on the grid. Same energy but more power generating and transmission line capacity needed.
by bell-cot | 2025-12-07 13:39:48+00:00
While it sounds cool, the history of would-be founders of cities / countries / societies shows an extremely high failure rate.

Obvious exceptions can be found in European colonialism, where the occupying power conceived of itself as a for-profit corporation.

One might note the grim human rights records of most of those successes. Not that the "tech elites" care much about that bit.
by 8organicbits | 2025-12-07 13:41:52+00:00
Author of Blog Quest here, good point, I'll track that as a feature request. I'm open to ideas on how the filtering should work. I could roll-up feeds for each domain (hello public suffix list), but I don't think that works well for home-dir style hosting (example.com/username). Maybe the user can set a policy to filter out or roll-up certain domains?

Deduplicating RSS and Atom makes a lot of sense too.

Thanks for trying it out!
by crote | 2025-12-07 13:41:58+00:00
I highly doubt that. Electric kettles are just about 100% efficient, and the only difference between a 3kW kettle and a 2kW one is how long it'll take to boil. The total energy consumed will be more-or-less the same.

Are you perhaps conflating it with the EU regulations on vacuum cleaners going in around 2017? As with all EU regulations, this of course resulted in a decent bunch of EU-bashing in UK media by the usual suspects - despite less-power-hungry vacuum cleaners being just as effective as the more power-hungry ones, and power consumption being inflated by manufacturers to market their vacuums, as plenty of people believed that "bigger number = more suck = more better".
by az09mugen | 2025-12-07 13:42:29+00:00
I will stop when the AI bubble will burst and people will stop throwing at my face everyday about statistical models. It is litterally everywhere I look, I did not ask for it even when I filter the inputs.

IMHO it would be nice to have an AI summarizer/filter (see the irony ?) for tech news (hn maybe ?) that filters out everything about AI, LLMs and company.
by jchw | 2025-12-07 13:42:39+00:00
If people are willing to rewire their homes for kettles, I guess a couple hundred bucks isn't that bad.

> limited by the battery's rated number of cycles

Obviously the battery should be replaceable. (It should be in most electronics, really...)

> The battery's proximity to the heat source wouldn't help.

That doesn't seem like a particularly tricky problem to me. The standard kettle already tries as hard as possible to insulate the heat. If you were really worried it'd be possible to put the battery on a separate power brick instead probably.

...

And I guess I could've solved my own problem by googling it. There are tons of battery kettles on the market, including a 1500W one by Cuisinart and a 2200W (apparently?) unit by Makita. The latter is predictably expensive but the Cuisinart is available for around $100 where I live, which is definitely pricey but seems plausible.
by spwa4 | 2025-12-07 13:42:48+00:00
> No. If I invest $1 in SpaceX and it invests that in Starlink, that’s $1 of fundraising.

Okay, I'll bite. And what if you "invest" $1 in Starlink, and Starlink immediately "invests" that $1 in SpaceX, while also giving SpaceX starlink shares?

I guess I don't get to make the "wait, isn't that Elon Musk paying Elon Musk" argument, despite it being true?

I mean I even wish you were correct, but by my estimates the most optimistic view of SpaceX is that they're still about 400% too expensive to get global satellite internet working, when launching at cost. That's a remarkable achievement ... but not good enough. It's so close it really sucks. On the other hand, I hate AT&T as much as the next guy but I also don't want a global mobile internet monopoly replacing them. And if Starlink is going to have competitors the value drops by half easily.

> They also pay other people peanuts ...

Well my point is, of course, that SpaceX pays very little compared to Amazon and Walmart for roles that pay a lot at Amazon and Walmart. SpaceX pays only a little better than NASA, and NASA pays about double what you get in an academic position.

Oh, and yes, double what you get in an academic position is pretty badly paid, especially considering what most NASA engineers are capable of.
by jongjong | 2025-12-07 13:43:03+00:00
I guarantee you that blockchain tech can solve a real, extremely important problem, though it's only a problem for some people. If you're connected to the money printers, then it's useless to you. Just like if you worked for a company like Enron which was cooking the books, 'honest accounting' would not be a solution for you; 'honest accounting' would be a problem for a company like Enron and everyone who works for Enron.

Proof of Work is highly inefficient and inconvenient. I agree to this.

Cryptocurrency sector is mostly a scam; or at the very least, a kind of casino. I Agree to this; though my understanding is that it has been corrupted by mainstream financial interests; just like Africa is kept corrupt and poor by some of those same interests. Then the plebs basically blame African people for 'choosing this'.

I've worked for some very successful crypto founders who became corrupt. I saw the change happening. The desire to improve things turned into self-sabotage. It was unlike any other company I ever worked for; nothing made sense. Yet I know for a fact that government regulators gave their approval. I witnessed the EU commission give grants to scam projects with nothing behind it, then these same founders got funding again and again after failed projects. It was all announced publicly though it took some time to understand that the projects were scams from the beginning... But like they got money from a government entity and they didn't build anything AT ALL. Then they got more funding on their next project... Weird right?

Proof of Stake is actually highly efficient; it's basically a ledger with dynamic runtime replication ability.

Unless you fully understand the current mechanism of how money is created globally; including the Eurodollar system and how stablecoins, derivatives and other financial constructs could be used for legal counterfeiting, you should not speak about the utility of blockchain.
by bayesianbot | 2025-12-07 13:43:32+00:00
I agree with the article and I hold 0 crypto right now. But I still think it's amazing that I can hold something limited, something I can exchange for real money, in my head, just based on math. Sure it is extremely inefficient database, and pretty much all the real value needs to be linked with real world banking, but it does have some really unique features that makes me sad that it (predictably) turned to just scams and speculation.

Edit: and the other feature I like is that I could just attach my code to the raw banking backend. People say that anyways everybody just uses exchanges, and that's true, but if you'd ever want to connect to banking backend, you'd get buried in paperwork. With crypto, you'd just run or connect to a node.
by timschmidt | 2025-12-07 13:43:34+00:00
Complete list of DNALC animations here: https://dnalc.cshl.edu/resources/animations/

Some favorites:

https://dnalc.cshl.edu/resources/3d/13-transcription-advance...

https://dnalc.cshl.edu/resources/3d/16-translation-advanced....

https://dnalc.cshl.edu/resources/3d/08-how-dna-is-packaged-a...

https://dnalc.cshl.edu/resources/3d/central-dogma.html
by kasey_junk | 2025-12-07 13:44:23+00:00
You’ve identified the real problem. This person’s preferences (and yours and mine) are guided by externalities being priced poorly.

If the consumer was responsible for the real cost of disposal and someone said “I don’t care about repairing it” then it wouldn’t be selfish at all.

But it’s extremely hard to do that. Because if you price proper disposal higher you’ll just get improperly disposed stuff.

A tax on the products to account for this is highly regressive. It’s a complicated muddle.
by hkpack | 2025-12-07 13:44:26+00:00
> You think Russia will attack Europe, I think the West is keen on fighting a war against Russia.

And the way it was keen on fighting a war is (check notes) _increase economic ties to the point that the whole of Germany's economic growth was dependent on Russian' gas_? Or to reduce military spending year over the year? Or to stop conscription in all countries?

It is completely a wild take for me to hear that the west was keen to fight a war with nuclear power by the means of reducing its fighting abilities to almost zero while the other side militarises? Am I having some crazy dream?
by antonvs | 2025-12-07 13:44:30+00:00
I’m not just talking about heavy use of slack, I’m talking about maximalism as described in the article. Larger organizations will typically have several different systems to perform many of the functions described in the article, and it generally wouldn’t make sense to replicate that functionality, but worse, in slack. It would quickly become unmanageable, because slack simply isn’t designed for that. Heck, slack is barely designed for its own core functionality - e.g. its thread support is incredibly limited.
by taneq | 2025-12-07 13:44:50+00:00
We hear this refrain, that hunter-gatherers lived lives of relative ease while early agrarians lived lives of backbreaking labour, but honestly it's never made any sense to me. Outside of a few garden-of-Eden scenarios, life as a nomad seems far more precarious than life in an established village. Maybe the good days were better but the bad days were inevitable, and far more terrifying.
by dakn | 2025-12-07 13:44:53+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been developing MoodTrackMe, a structured mood and sleep tracking app designed to help people understand their mental health patterns more easily, particularly those dealing with mood cycles, stress, sleep issues, depression or bipolar symptoms.

Rather than using a traditional mood diary, the app follows a standardised protocol used in clinical psychology. Each day, you simply complete a quick check-in to record your mood, sleep duration, energy levels, thoughts, stress level and impulsivity. Over time, the app visualises patterns that would otherwise be difficult to remember or reconstruct (e.g. the effect of sleep on mood, how tension builds up, or the appearance of early warning signs before a depressive or manic shift).

Here are a few things that might be of interest to this community:

1. Privacy-first

All data stays on the device. Nothing is uploaded anywhere unless you explicitly export a PDF. There are no analytics SDKs, accounts or tracking.

2. Built with SwiftUI and Core Data.

The fully native app uses Core Data for local storage and integrates with Apple Health for optional sleep data. The UI is intentionally minimal.

3. Therapist-informed structure:

The tracking format is based on widely used self-observation worksheets from clinical psychology and has been adapted for use on mobile devices. Several therapists provided feedback to ensure that the fields are meaningful and not overwhelming.

4. Emergency Plan

There is a built-in 'Emergency Plan' section for trusted contacts, early warning signs and coping strategies — something that many clinicians ask patients to maintain manually.

5. Coming soon: optional on-device ML

I am currently working on a lightweight local classifier (Core ML) that uses sleep, heart rate and mood patterns to estimate risk trends (e.g. elevated activation or depressive drift). The goal is not to diagnose anything, but to highlight patterns earlier.

6. TestFlight available

If you would like to try it or provide feedback, here is the public TestFlight link: https://testflight.apple.com/join/VnHpQmdg.

Why I built this Many people find it difficult to track their mood consistently because the tools available feel too simple or too vague. Traditional paper worksheets provide much more insight, but they are difficult to maintain. MoodTrackMe is my attempt to incorporate that clinical structure into an everyday app that is calm and private.
by bullen | 2025-12-07 13:45:08+00:00
This is my desktop 2025: http://ett.host.radiomesh.org/film/HL2%20on%203588%20uConsol... (controls are impossible at first on 3588 uConsole, this was me playing without the usual bindings just to prove the performance so don't judge the gameplay)

3588 (10W) plays HL2 at 300 FPS and streams it at 60 FPS to twitch.

Turns out 2025 was the year of the ARM linux desktop after all!

TWM + emacs + irssi + mpv(ytdl)