MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by techtalksweekly | 2025-12-11 06:17:09+00:00
that's a really cool project! I'm building something similar, but for conference talks and podcasts[1], but in a form of a newsletter.

I use semantic search ocasionally when building extra editions and use a sentence transformer with all-MiniLM-L6-v2 model.

How did you go about implementing semantic search in your app?

[1] https://techtalksweekly.io/
by Nursie | 2025-12-11 06:18:45+00:00
> The ban only targets ten services.

This is considered a startup phase AFAICT, with others being looked at as necessary.

> The ban applies only to actually logging into the service - everything can still be viewed when logged out. Users are still being tracked while logged out.

Sure, but it stops kids bullying each other, and a service you can't fully interact with is not very interesting, stops kids putting their pics/videos/whatever online.

> Reddit (and possibly other services) are complying simply by using heuristics to detect under-16 users - they're not even employing any reliable verification measures.

They are using heuristics and then an external verification service if the heuristics set off an alarm. It's not perfect at present, sure, but I don't think it has to be.

We'll see how effective it is over time I guess.
by intended | 2025-12-11 06:19:46+00:00
> While moderation teams are usually doing a stellar job,

This is an assumption, that I would argue, is more muddled in practice.

T&S teams largely want to do a good job, but they are a cost center, and currently they are being defunded or shifted into simple compliance.

The biggest weakness, and the current shift, is for the conversation to move towards talking about the benefits of moderation to community, rather than only reduction of harms.

That process has largely started since last year, and the defunding of teams is also underway.

All of that aside, we do not have any publicly available data, or independent third part assessment that gives us some estimated prevalence rate. (Not that prevalence is truly calculable)
by midnitewarrior | 2025-12-11 06:20:01+00:00
I don't think that much thought went into it. The change was initiated by the department's DEIA ("A" for Accessibility) office. Anything that office did was a priority for this administration.

Keep in mind that the transgenic mouse breeding program used to make lab mice for research got defined because the President claimed Democrats were so woke they were funding "trans" mice research.

Half of what they are doing is virtue signalling and posturing without any real understanding of what they are doing.
by brihati | 2025-12-11 06:21:47+00:00
I come to HN because it's one of the few places left where you can sill watch people think and present new ideas. The people in the world has done intellectual outsourcing, where instead of grappling with the idea themselves, they ask LLMs to predict the next sentence, which has hollowed the real curiosity.

What makes HN valuable to me is the opposite impulse: people trying to understand things for themselves from the community and in the process, maybe, discovering new ideas which LLMs can't supply. Because what LLMs don't know they don't know, LLMs think they know(that's why they predict next sentence) but we know they don't know and still some people think they know

Sometimes, I wish, there is no thinking tax: as a reminder of why this place exists & also to reward people who are still curious and thinkers

I WANT HN TO REMAIN A PLACE WHERE HUMAN CONVERSATIONS STILL HAPPENS.
by margalabargala | 2025-12-11 06:22:51+00:00
For those of us unclear why collecting air from passing cars to measure particulates is obviously flawed, could you elaborate?

EVs unfortunately do increase tire particulate, as well. Fairly significantly. It's not obvious to me that the decrease in brake dust isn't made up by the increase in tire dust.

The removal of the tailpipe emissions is really where EVs shine from a pollution standpoint. If you turn on your car in your garage, you don't die anymore.
by pseudalopex | 2025-12-11 06:23:44+00:00
> Would you say that the "free software" and "open source" movements are largely synonymous?

Would you say Canadians and Americans are largely synonymous? They have many shared interests. There are many dual citizens. The differences are subtle often.

> The best arguments I've seen in this thread revolve around the idea that you can trust that you can pull an "open source" library into your project without hesitation. That is a beautiful "free as in libre" building blocks vision.

Several people highlighted a key idea of open source and free software is you can run an open source program without hesitation. This was not beautiful? These arguments were inferior?

> But the software in question here is a completed end-user product. It's not ever intended to be used in another project.

Libraries used parts of programs. Programs became libraries. Programs evolved into different programs.

> But they want to make some kind of good-faith effort to share and be more "open" than normal proprietary SaaS. Instead of this being a good thing it's a huge drama because it's not enough. At least that's my read.

I don't know how the submitted article could have contradicted this more clearly.
by Groxx | 2025-12-11 06:23:57+00:00
which includes me / my parents, though we found a thankfully excellent primary care doctor while I was growing up who took the new information in stride and chased promising paths we managed to find. we learned a lot from each other in the process.

doctors don't generally have the time or inclination to spend unpaid time doing specialized research for one of their many patients. competent layman efforts are generally huge wastes of time compared to asking a specialist, but in the absence of a specialist they can still be extremely useful, and specialists don't know everything either. plus there aren't always specialists, whether affordable/accessible or sometimes existent at all.
by niwtsol | 2025-12-11 06:24:01+00:00
I agree that Google's console is slightly better, but a few of my gripes with AWS specifically: 1. input fields that lack basic validation so you do some action and then get an error message that is cryptic when simple "if this value selected in drop down, you can't do X". Another example of this is needing to get quota increase for your AWS account for an instance type, but nothing on the frontend tells you that, and you have to go through 3 or 4 weirdly linked support ticket/pages to figure out how to make a request for an instance. 2. As another commenter said, billing - so many pages and ways to cut the data but somehow it still seems complicated to find "which instance is attached to resource X that is costing me $Y per month" 3. Documentation not matching UI - so many PMs/TPMs over the years making resources that you find a blog/post that is a walk through, but then you find they redesigned or moved a button and that makes it difficult to follow. 4. I worked at Amazon for a bit and the internal tools feel like they were built in the early 2000s and I think I have PTSD from that which I still ascribe bad feelings towards AWS as there are similarities

I think as you use it, you start to understand the gotchas and the flows you need to do to get something working. I also appreciate there is a ton of stuff they are empowering users to do and the scale is incomprehensible, but just frustrated the UX is so poor.

I just started using Azure for another project and my goodness, I can't even login to that vs the microsoft ads account w/ the same email because of some weird MS365 permissions issue - by far the worst.
by DocTomoe | 2025-12-11 06:24:35+00:00
You know, I am in a country that allows alcohol for children (in different intensities, e.g. beer at age 14 with parents present, age 16 in the supermarket, age 18 for the hard stuff). As it turns out, our kids are alright.

Tobacco and porn have been more strongly regulated lately. In my teenage years, they were easily available to anyone with coins in their hands. Turns out: that didn't destroy us either.

The first beer, the first pack of strong tobacco (Rothändle, the dirtiest, hardest stuff), the first tiddie magazine from the railway station kiosk, those were rites of passages. It was a way for teenagers to push the envelope, realise alcohol makes you wobbly, tobacco causes diarrea (believe me, that Rothändle stuff was more chemical weapon than 'smooth'), and ultimately, all women look about the same undressed, so it is pointless to keep buying. They were small, recoverable mistakes that taught teenagers where their limits were.

Now we have banned all that away - but the teenage urge to self-realization and rebellion found a new way to social media. And: social media is safer: no-one got lung cancer from TikTok. No-one woke up in a hospital for facebook poisoning.

Ultimately, it is the rebellion the fascists dislike, not the fact that people earn money with it. So we ban that, driving teenagers to ever-more-destructive behaviour.

Teenagers need an outlet to be teenagers without living in a state sanctioned panopticum. If society pathologizes every form of adolescent experimentation, if you let control freaks raise your children, do not be surprised if they turn out to be either actual rebels, or something much, much darker.
by nmfisher | 2025-12-11 06:25:02+00:00
> they look at it and return it. The ID card doesn't get scanned

Actually in Australia, IDs usually do get scanned and stored. About the same time I was getting too old for clubs, they were starting to introduce ID scanners. You line up, hand over your driver's licence or passport, they slap it on a wall-mounted scanner, the scan goes into a database and in you go. No scan, no entry. Nowadays I think they just use phone/tablet scanners.
by rand17 | 2025-12-11 06:30:19+00:00
So you don't like writing "the boring code". What do you expect from writing a CRUD? What would you like to write? What "interesting problems" would you like to focus on? Great sadness will fall upon the industry when the last graybeard dies, who had this arcane knowledge of "writing code". I have bad Player Piano vibes nowdays.

Around me devs are beginning to warm up to the idea, that they are not coders (and neither should I be), but "prompt engineers". When I take too much time on a task, when I can't solve a problem with a push of a button, when I muse about copilot hallucinations in my PR - someone usually comes helpfully to tell me, I need better prompting skills. Have you tried this expression? Have you tried more context? Have you tried with this copy pasted magical formula?

No creative worker in human history was so overjoyed to devalue his or her work and knowledge in such haste.
by petesergeant | 2025-12-11 06:30:48+00:00
It’s Australia, it’s a nanny state and always has been, and much as the locals complain, they also love it, and keep voting for it.

The rest of the Anglo world is much less obsessed with government control than the US is; UK is absolutely fine with cameras everywhere, for example, and has almost no protection against parliament. Law enforcement is much more seen as by the people and for the people in these countries.
by biql | 2025-12-11 06:30:59+00:00
This. First I try it just a little to do a boring part. It feels great. The boring part that was holding me is gone and all it took was a little instruction. The dopamine hit is real. So of course I will try it again. But not so fast. It needs to be corrected to make everything aligned with the architecture. And as my requests get bigger, it needs more and more corrections. Eventually correcting everything becomes too tedious, and accepting is just too easy, and so I lower my standards, and soon enough lose track of all the decisions. The branch is now useless as I don't want to debug or own this code I no longer understand hence I start over. I want work to felt like a training session where you get fairly rewarded for your efforts with better understanding, not like a slot machine where you passively hope it gets it right next time.
by Sabinus | 2025-12-11 06:32:16+00:00
>Military might is the thing keeping the USD the world reserve currency instead of the GBP, EUR or Yuan. It's literally the core keeping the US economy and prosperity.

No it's not. The size of the American economy, it's extensive trade, the independence of the Central Bank and the rule of law and commitment to paying debts do that. Americans do not force anyone to trade in USD.
by tgpc | 2025-12-11 06:35:20+00:00
location: london uk

remote: ok, have done so for many years

willing to relocate: too complicated

technologies: java (25 years), python (1 year, but it's fun)

resume: apple, google, startups, a bank, 20+ years of experience, 1st class degree from a good institution. email me for a pdf please

no 'growth mindset' places please

email: mail@tcox.org
by bicepjai | 2025-12-11 06:35:54+00:00
Great webapp. There is a similar app that I love to scroll through from time to time. Its free and needs no internet connection. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/universe-in-a-nutshell/id15263... The range of size in the universe, from the tiniest particles to the epic galaxies - we take you on a journey of size that lets you explore it all with a single swipe.
by smogmanus | 2025-12-11 06:36:20+00:00
How many bookmarks do you have that you'll never look at again? We've all been there. You find a great article, an important video, a recipe you want to try... you bookmark it, and it vanishes into the void. I got tired of: Scrolling through 500 bookmarks Copy-pasting the same links over and over Forgetting where I saved things Losing context about WHY I saved something So I built ContentCapture Pro - and I'm giving it away free. How it works:

Find something worth keeping → press Ctrl+Alt+P Give it a short name like "taxhelp" or "recipe" Later, type ::taxhelp:: anywhere and it instantly pastes the title, link, and your notes

That's it. No apps to open. No folders to dig through. Just type and it appears. I've captured over 7,000 articles, videos, and notes this way. It changed how I use the internet.
by coryrc | 2025-12-11 06:36:27+00:00
EV brake pads don't hardly wear down, so they obviously can't have nearly the same amount of brake dust, yet the "study" showed they did. I'm guessing there's brake dust on the ground being kicked up.

> EVs unfortunately do increase tire particulate, Fairly significantly

In the USA, mass of EV is not significantly different than the alternative choice. EVs do not have increased tire particulate. If in Europe extremely lightweight tiny cars are actually a likely substitution for nicer, heavier EVs, then it seems reasonable that tire wear will increase proportionally. There's a lot riding on that "if" though.
by intended | 2025-12-11 06:36:33+00:00
It is frustrating, to have this argument, when the current state of the art to mould speech, has already found ways around this defensive line.

Currently speech is shaped by producing a glut of speech, and then having the most useful narratives platformed by trusted personalities. Simultaneously, any counter views which do not support the goals of the media-party, do not get aired. Education, science, evidence and journalistic standards are eschewed and authoritarian techniques of loyalty and trust are used to take advantage of whatever story is currently most engaging.

The churn in anonymous forums is used to identify narratives that are the best evolved to spread and gain engagement.

Don’t mistake me for saying anonymity must be given up. Do recognize that worrying about anonymity today, is very much like people talking about the way things were back in their time.

If it helps - from a utilitarian perspective, free speech enables the free exchange of ideas in the service of debates to understand reality. The marketplace of ideas.

Currently the marketplace is captured, and it is not a fair fight between state actors, media teams, troll farms, A/B tested algorithms, and regular folk on the other side.

The invisible hand of the market IS working, ensuring the optimum outcome given the current constraints, or lack thereof.

If we want to defend speech for individuals, if we want a fair fight, we need to address the asymmetry of powers, and lack of recourse.
by inejge | 2025-12-11 06:37:00+00:00
> Capital "i"s without crossbars aren't capital "i"s. They're lower-case Ls. Any font that doesn't recognize this should be rejected.

You have asserted this at least thrice in the past thirty minutes. What makes you feel so strongly about it? "Rejected" for what purpose? Do you understand that you've just trashed Helvetica, to take a famous example?
by DeathArrow | 2025-12-11 06:37:19+00:00
>Because once you start looking at London’s restaurant scene through data, you stop seeing all those cute independents and hot new openings. You start seeing an algorithmic market - one where visibility compounds, demand snowballs, and who gets to survive is increasingly decided by code.

Seems a bit weird. That would mean most people in London would chose the restaurant based on Google maps reviews.
by tptacek | 2025-12-11 06:38:01+00:00
The pagers that were targeted were exclusively used by Hezbollah combatants, procured by Hezbollah, linked to an encrypted military network Hezbollah fought a civil war in Lebanon to established, triggered by a message encrypted to that network. The bombs consisted of 6 grams of PETN, yielding a 35kJ blast, approximately the size of 5-10 cherry bombs, or 2% of the raw explosive yield of an M67 grenade --- with the key difference that the pagers were just pagers, with no metal parts introduced (deliberately, to avoid detection by Hezbollah), unlike fragmentation grenades, whose lethality (at 5m) stems from the hardened steel shrapnel they project.

(The device and procurement details here are from Reuters).

So no, I don't think your point about doctors and medical workers is well taken.
by indigo945 | 2025-12-11 06:38:29+00:00
The N64's CPU, with pretty much every single game released on the platform, is just sitting there idling along at maybe 30% load tops, and usually less than that. It's a 64 bit CPU, but Nintendo's official SDK doesn't even support doubles or uint64!

Of course, Nintendo clearly cared about the CPU a lot for marketing purposes (it's in the console's name), but from a purely technological perspective, it is wasteful. Most of the actual compute is done on the RSP anyway. So, getting a much smaller CPU would have been a big corner to cut, that could have saved enough resources to increase the texture cache to a useful resolution like 128x128 or so.

It should be noted, though, that the N64 was designed with multitexturing capabilities, which would have helped with the mushy colors had games actually taken advantage of it (but they didn't, which here again, the Nintendo SDK is to blame for).
by mittensc | 2025-12-11 06:38:35+00:00
Other side of the equation:

I remember learning C++ with something like valgrind. I would write stupid code, validate, fix stupid issues.

Others before me learned the harder way.

With LLMs right now I'm learning frontend by just generating the UIs I want.

I'm getting the code/mocks and experimenting.

It's bad code, i will need to adjust, but it helps immensely as a starting point same as valgrind helped in the past.

Trying to learn via searching for info just doesn't work as well with all the flood of spam.
by logifail | 2025-12-11 06:38:43+00:00
> Calibri was supposedly easier to read by people with disabilities

I'd love to know how that was determined. Given that:

"If different fonts are best for different people, you might imagine that the solution to the fonts problem would be a preference setting to allow each user to select the font that’s best for them.

This solution will not work, for two reasons. First, previous research on user-interface customization has found that most users don’t use preference settings, but simply make do with the default.

Second, and worse, users don’t know what’s best for them, so they can’t choose the best font, even if they were given the option to customize their fonts. In this study, participants read 14% faster in their fastest font (314 WPM, on average) compared to their most preferred font (275 WPM, on average)"

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/best-font-for-online-readin...
by komali2 | 2025-12-11 06:38:51+00:00
Is that what happened with cigarettes?

Remember how pervasive cigarette ads used to be?

Human behavior is variable and can be influenced, even against our best interest.

At what point do we acknowledge advertising as a form of psychological attack that causes people to do harmful things they wouldn't otherwise do?

The government's role in this imo shouldn't be to allow corporations to try to convince people to hurt themselves and then to sell them things to hurt themselves with, but then turn around and restrict people's rights to slow down the self harm. Rather I believe the government should seek to annihilate corporations that try to harm the population.

Is not the implicit relationship between corporations, people, and government, such that corporations want to be allowed to exploit a population for profit in return for some nominal good, and the government allows that only so long as the good outweighs the harm?

Why not?
by kgwgk | 2025-12-11 06:39:40+00:00
The funny thing is that they were indeed funding “trans” mice research:

> To understand the effects of feminizing sex hormone therapy on vaccination, we propose to develop a mouse model of gender-affirming hormone therapy, assess its relevance to human medicine through singe-cell transcriptome studies, and test the immune responses of “cis” vs. “trans” mice to a HIV vaccine.

https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10849830#descriptio...
by bunderbunder | 2025-12-11 06:40:17+00:00
My PCP and I have a really good rapport, and so when I stated having weird confusing health problems they were quite happy to hear what I was finding in PubMed and then share their thoughts on it, and together we figured things out and got my situation handled. I thought it was a nicely complementary situation: they didn’t have the time to do a literature dive, and I didn’t have the expertise to fully understand what I was reading.

But I bet what happens more often is patients showing up with random unsubstantiated crap they found on Reddit or a content farm, and I can understand health care providers getting worn down by that sort of thing. I have a family member who believed he had Morgellon’s Disease, and talking to him about it was exhausting.
by friendzis | 2025-12-11 06:40:46+00:00
> If I add or remove a random element, the rest of the elements stay in the correct place.

This complaint highlights how absurdly not fit-for-purpose html+css actually is. Okay, you may want to do "responsive" design, but you have the semantic layout fixed, therefore you try and contort a styling engine into pretending to be a layout engine when in reality it is three stylesheets in a trenchoat.
by eru | 2025-12-11 06:41:25+00:00
You could have saved a lot of money by using CDs instead of cartridges.

If you sell games for roughly the same amount as before (or even a bit cheaper), you have extra surplus you can use to subsidise the cost of the console a bit.

Effectively, you'd be cutting a corner on worse load times, I guess?

Keep in mind that the above ignores questions of piracy. I don't know what the actual impact of a CD based solution would have been, but I can tell for sure that the officials at Nintendo thought it would have made a difference when they made their decision.