MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by RickJWagner | 2026-01-10 22:52:49+00:00
Not the boats for this study (though they may help also ).

From the article:

“About 70% of American overdose deaths are caused by fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. Networks shift, but currently most American street fentanyl starts as building-block chemicals produced in China. Those are shipped to Mexico, where drug gangs formulate them into fentanyl and smuggle it across the border.”
by halostatue | 2026-01-10 22:53:19+00:00
Compared to what and for what purpose?

Olive oil? Peanut oil? No and (mostly) no.

Compared to hydrogenated margarine that was pushed a couple of decades ago before we learned about trans-fats? Of course.

If you use it when cooking for guests, you should disclose that you're using it (especially for non-meat dishes) because it may add extra fat that they're not OK with or consider inappropriate for personal dietary consumption (they're vegetarian, don't eat beef products, whatever).

I have a friend for whom we can't use anything that has sunflower oil in it, which is _really hard to avoid_ in surprising ways (there are spice blends that I use which have a bit of sunflower oil in the mixes).
by MangoCoffee | 2026-01-10 22:53:40+00:00
>Open Source was never the commercial product. It's the conduit to something else.

this is correct. If you open source your software, then why are you mad when companies like AWS, OpenAI, etc. make tons of money?

Open Source software is always a bridge that leads to something else to commercialize on. If you want to sell software, then pick Microsoft's model and sell your software as closed source. If you get mad and cry about making money to sustain your open source project, then pick the right license for your business.
by notatoad | 2026-01-10 22:54:45+00:00
We got taught to be helpless by the industry, so they can help us out.

industry is pretty damn good at figuring out what customers actually want, instead of just what customer say they want and then don't actually buy.

cars are the way they are because that's what the overwhelming majority of car buyers actually want. The average driver doesn't want their car spitting out error codes, they want a check engine light to tell them to take it to a mechanic, and any information beyond that is confusing.
by tombert | 2026-01-10 22:54:47+00:00
He's almost the perfect example of the colloquial stereotype of "Dunning Kruger Syndrome", which is why he's so dangerous.

I've made this example before, but it bears repeating.

I know absolutely nothing about chemistry, medicine, or healthcare policy. I am wholly unqualifed to be in charge of anything involving healthcare. Suppose that, despite all reasons, I am appointed into a HHS secretary anyway. This would be bad, but because I know that I know nothing, my potential for damage is actually pretty limited. I would have to defer a lot of decisions to advisors, who would likely be doctors and chemists and data scientists. I probably wouldn't make a lot of "progress", and I would likely more or less just maintain the status quo, but I probably wouldn't make things much worse.

RFK Jr. is the worst, because he doesn't know any more about health or medicine than I do, but because he's read a bunch of idiotic blogs and Facebook pages he thinks he knows better than the entire medical establishment, and because he thinks he knows everything he feels qualified to start cutting funding for American medical research and blame everything on people not eating enough beef fat.

People have been (understandably) focusing on Trump's descent into authoritarianism, but it's possible that that gets somewhat fixed once he's out of office, but I think that the damage that RFK Jr. has done to our medical research establishment might be irreparable. He is uniquely dangerous.
by shinycode | 2026-01-10 22:54:54+00:00
In what way does MacOS feels like garbage ? I use it everyday on a +5y MacBook and it’s an absolute blast. Powered on for weeks without reboot, 3x4K 32inch screens, hundred of chrome pages and apps opened and it’s all smooth. Ofc I don’t even hear a fan but the software is amazing for me. It all works, all the time.
by verdverm | 2026-01-10 22:55:36+00:00
Newbies started on 2 node docker compose setup and went to production with a system they didn't understand and then had a bad time, blame the tool first... color me surprised?

Kubernetes solves problems, but you have to know your tools instead of saying they are not good or are overkill. Compose won't take you to scale, spend time learning an industry standard before you run it in production
by dchuk | 2026-01-10 22:55:49+00:00
I’ve been using Agent OS (https://buildermethods.com/agent-os) with Claude code’s $100 plan and it is pretty darn great. I usually ideate with Claude and ChatGPT back and forth on an idea to get to a prd for the whole product/project idea, with a high level roadmap, then go through agent os to bootstrap the core artifacts and then it’s just a loop of shaping specs, break into tasks, implement, then I manually test it out.
Using the “standards” concept to produce skills in CC seems to help a lot. I’m currently working on a Mac SwiftUI app (a language I’ve never built anything in) and it’s progressing nicely, has good test coverage, and I haven’t looked at a line of code. I found a couple SwiftUI skills repos online, had Claude adapt them to the agent os approach, and then hit the ground running.
Also, it basically functions like the really popular Ralph wiggum concept everyone is raving about lately. Implementation basically just runs on its own with a bunch of parallel agents, sometimes I have to nudge the model after my smoke testing to clean up some stuff. But overall, it just works, and is immensely productive. And this agent os thing adds just enough structure to tame complexity and variability.
I highly recommend it and have no other connection to it. I have some thoughts on some enhancements to it I’ll probably issue a few PRs for or fork the repo and implement.
by kisama | 2026-01-10 22:55:49+00:00
The claim that elements beyond 94 are only human-made is speculative and probably false. Transuranic elements up to ~100 are believed to be made in, for example, natural fission reactors and extreme stellar conditions. However, it is accurate to say that none of those exist in bulk. They’re more like astatine and francium: so rare that natural occurrence is on the scale of atoms.
by asadjb | 2026-01-10 22:56:00+00:00
I've been an oh-my-zsh user for many years now, being very happy with the very small set of features I use from it. Previously I could never think of trying to figure out how to replicate the features I need without the other features from oh-my-zsh, which does make the shell noticeably slower.

Just now, after reading this article, I used Claude code and have removed the OMZ config within 5 minutes. Here's my prompt - maybe others could find it useful. I ran this from `~/.oh-my-zsh`.

```
Here's my zsh config - I'd like to remove oh-my-zsh and replace the provided functionality with just raw zsh. i use starship for my prompt so i don't need
any help there.

can you explore the oh-my-zsh codebae and see what it would take to replicate the features it currently provides me in the shell?

my zsh config below:

export ZSH="$HOME/.oh-my-zsh"
ZSH_THEME=""
DISABLE_AUTO_TITLE="true"
plugins=(direnv fzf)
source $ZSH/oh-my-zsh.sh

--- CLAUDE RESPONSE ---
Minimal Raw Zsh Replacement

Since you use starship and have DISABLE_AUTO_TITLE=true, you can skip prompt and title-related code. Here's what you'd need:

# Completions
autoload -Uz compinit
compinit

zstyle ':completion:*' menu select
zstyle ':completion:*' matcher-list 'm:{a-zA-Z}={A-Za-z}' # case insensitive

# History
HISTFILE=~/.zsh_history
HISTSIZE=50000
SAVEHIST=10000
setopt extended_history hist_expire_dups_first hist_ignore_dups
setopt hist_ignore_space hist_verify share_history

# Directory navigation
setopt auto_cd auto_pushd pushd_ignore_dups pushdminus

# Key bindings (emacs mode)
bindkey -e
bindkey '^[[H' beginning-of-line # Home
bindkey '^[[F' end-of-line # End
bindkey '^[[1;5C' forward-word # Ctrl-Right
bindkey '^[[1;5D' backward-word # Ctrl-Left
bindkey '^[[3~' delete-char # Delete

# Colors
autoload -Uz colors && colors
export CLICOLOR=1 # macOS ls colors

# Plugins replacement
eval "$(direnv hook zsh)"
eval "$(fzf --zsh)"

```

Granted I've only done this like 5 minutes ago and might be missing functionality I'll realise later, but a quick few checks give me hope I have all the functionality I want.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-10 22:57:09+00:00
> our population is, at this time, growing exponentially

Not in advanced (i.e. materially intensive) economies. And global population models are currently all aiming towards stabilization.

> this is an argument that sustainability is a prerequisite for space travel and not the other way around

How so? Without space travel, there is no near-term incentive to develop those technologies. (The terrestrial incentives are all long term.)

> Are these hypothetical civilizations on the brink of unlocking space travel? Or are they 100 years away?

China and America are technologically within a decade of establishing Moon and Mars bases. Not permanent, independent settlements. But settlements that need to be as self-sustaining as possible nevertheless on account of launch costs and travel time.

> that's a natural experiment which roughly addresses this question

I see a different reading. We got a lot of sustainability-progressing technology out of the space race.

Alignment with the goal of human colonization wasn’t yet there. But there are reasons to be optimistic with modern materials, bioengineering and computational methods. Methods that could very easily also yield literal fruits that make our economies more sustainable at home.
by wwfn | 2026-01-10 22:58:02+00:00
If looking for local email, why not a traditional client (thunderbird, claws, even outlook) or the more flexible/cli friendly maildir and notmuch? There are a bunch of front ends, including WebUIs https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/

Is what you're looking for a pretty good fit for how email was originally used? Or am missing something obvious
by zopa | 2026-01-10 22:59:05+00:00
Usually there's one or two job responsibilities among many, that you can do, but not the way everyone else does them. The ADA requires employers to make reasonable accommodations, and some employers don't want to.

So less, the job requires you to stand all day, and more, once a week or so they ask you make a binder of materials, and the hole puncher they want you to use dislocates your hands (true story). Or, it's a desk job, but you can't get from your desk to the bathroom in your wheelchair unless they widen the aisles between desks (hypothetical).
by sgarland | 2026-01-10 22:59:11+00:00
I am personally offended by [0]. Maybe you should spend some time doing proper data modeling when you design your app, and maybe adding a new column should be a painful exercise.

Haphazard schema is the quickest way to develop terrible performance, loss of referential integrity, and insane queries. Well, outside of sticking everything into a JSON column.

0: https://worstofbreed.net/patterns/schema-bureaucracy/
by rmunn | 2026-01-10 22:59:15+00:00
The other tricky part is emojis made up of multiple codepoints with zero-width joiner characters and variation selectors, or other symbols. E.g. is made up of U+1F1FA REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER U followed by U+1F1F8 REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER S, or (which should render as a single symbol, a burning heart / heart on fire), which is made up of the four-codepoint sequence U+2764 HEAVY BLACK HEART, U+FE0F VARIATION SELECTOR-16, U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER, and U+1F525 FIRE but should only render in one double-width block. Then there are even more complicated sequences like , which again should render in a single block but are made up of six(!) codepoints: U+1F469 WOMAN, U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER, U+2764 HEAVY BLACK HEART, U+FE0F VARIATION SELECTOR-16, U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER, and U+1F468 MAN.

The number of codepoints never did correspond exactly to the number of fixed-width blocks a character should take up (U+00E9 é is the same as U+0065 e plus U+0301 COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT, so it should be rendered in a single block but it might be one or two codepoints depending on whether the text was composed or decomposed before reaching the rendering engine). But with emojis in play, the number of possibilities jumps dramatically, and it's no longer sufficient to just count base characters and ignore diacritics: you have to actually compute the renderings (or pre-calculate them in a good lookup table, which IIRC is what Ghostty does) of all those valid emoji combinations.
by liamconnell | 2026-01-10 23:00:14+00:00
Not mentioned in the article, but one interesting area where OpenAI could play is in participant identification and recruitment for clinical trials. In fact, ChatGPT could also help operate the clinical trials which is a highly paperwork intensive business, and therefore something that AI could add value to.

Ultimately pharmaceutical companies pay up to $100,000 per participant to hospital networks these charges must be itemized as expenses from the hospital on the most part (bounties are illegal usually.) open AI would provide a cheap way in for pharmaceutical companies to identify participants given that OpenAI has an incredible perspective into the physical and psychological state of their users. Imagine how much more is shared with OpenAI compared to a clinical trial coordinator at a hospital when a psychiatric drug is being tested.

This would also give OpenAI leverage in partnering with pharmaceutical companies. OpenAI executives have stated this is a goal, but otherwise they’ve made little progress on it.

It’s wild to imagine - someone with borderline personality disorder having delusional conversations with an AI chat Bot for six months, receiving an offer to participate in a clinical trial, and then having their subsequent AI conversations used as evidence to analyze the efficacy of the drug. The ironic thing is if that person had delusions about hidden forces listening to them…they’d be RIGHT!
by throwup238 | 2026-01-10 23:00:21+00:00
> I believe existing laws carve out exceptions for medical fitness for certain positions for this very reason. If I may, stepping back for a second: the reason privacy laws exist, is to protect people from bad behavior from employers, health insurance, etc.

It’s not just medical but a broad carve out called “bona fide occupational qualifications”. If there’s a good reason for it, hiring antidiscrimination laws allow exceptions.
by ls612 | 2026-01-10 23:00:38+00:00
I remember reading about all of the foibles of Apollo 7 and how that was caused by the astronauts all getting a head cold and being miserable and irritable, or how Frank Borman got so space sick on Apollo 8 he recorded a secret message in the data dump for the doctor to bypass the capcom, and I’m curious how this now became a pseudo-political issue.
by bigbadfeline | 2026-01-10 23:00:41+00:00
One-handed, gangsta-style shooting while on the phone... DHC head says, "acted according to training". I totally believe it, these agents are being purposefully miss-trained and agitated in order to create situations which incite anger and violence, to destabilize via provocations.

I can't believe the governor of MN isn't in on it, what kind of reaction is "Get the F out of Minnesota?" It's both extremely weak and inflammatory.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-10 23:01:18+00:00
> This is also equal to the percentage of Americans who wanted to forcefully depose Maduro

It’s not. Maduro’s removal is supported by roughly a third of Americans [1].

It’s vastly more popular than a military engagement over Greenland.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/only-33-americans-app...
by skybrian | 2026-01-10 23:01:21+00:00
Writing CSS manually was never all that pleasant for me, mostly the part about debugging it when it doesn't do what I want.

So I tried Tailwind and it seemed to help.

But now that Claude Opus 4.5 is writing all my code, it can write and debug CSS better than I can use Tailwind. So, CSS it is.
by bitshiftfaced | 2026-01-10 23:01:22+00:00
> certain groups of online warriors are convinced she is the one who is sick because of the "women are weak and can't do man work" trope.

Care to point to anything specific that leads you to believe this?

> So keep that in mind when people are demanding transparency.

Why should the (possible?) existence of online groups have any bearing on public policy like this? Probably for many policy decisions, we can find some online group that would spin it a certain way in their minds. That doesn't mean we let it influence our decisions one way or the other. Or to be precise, not any more than what the proportion of the voting population they make up would imply.
by pmaze | 2026-01-10 23:01:42+00:00
The connections are meaningful to me in so far as they get me thinking about the topics, another lens to look at these books through. It's a fine balance between being trivial and being so out there that it seems arbitrary.

A trail that hits that balance well IMO is https://trails.pieterma.es/trail/pacemaker-principle/.
I find the system theory topics the most interesting. In this one, I like how it pulled in a section from Kitchen Confidential in between oil trade bottlenecks and software team constraints to illustrate the general principle.
by azangru | 2026-01-10 23:02:25+00:00
I meant the CSS modules that are implemented by a build tool. And yes, mea culpa, they are probably a js-only solution, requiring a build tool to correctly interpret a css import (.module.css in the file name is a common convention; but it is tweakable), and the author to use the imported object instead of plain strings, when referring to the class names. But I don't know if having to write `class="styles.foo"` as opposed to `class="foo"` counts as learning. And apart from that, there isn't anything else to learn.

But, given that one would need build tools for tailwind as well, the requirement for build tools couldn't have played a role in the choice between the two.
Ask HN: If AI wins, don't AI companies lose?
by SuboptimalEng | 2026-01-10 23:02:48+00:00
Let's play it out in the case of software engineers.

100 SWEs all running Claude Code. Okay, company is 10x more productive than before.

Now, company cuts 90% of SWEs because AI makes 10 engineers as productive as 100 engineers.

Yay, company saves 90% of engineering costs.

But now, 10 engineers run Claude Code. And now Claude revenue drops by 10x multiple?

So if AI gets good, it will reduce the very engineering headcount that AI companies depend on, right?
by woodruffw | 2026-01-10 23:03:18+00:00
You’ll probably be waiting a long time, since Rust very explicitly doesn’t have “leak safety” as a constructive property. Safe Rust programs are allowed to leak memory, because memory leaks themselves don’t cause safety issues.

There’s even a standard, non-unsafe API for leaking memory[1].

(What Rust does do is make it harder to construct programs that leak memory unintentionally. It’s possible but not guaranteed that a similar leak would be difficult to express idiomatically in Rust.)

[1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/boxed/struct.Box.html#method.l...
by TZubiri | 2026-01-10 23:03:35+00:00
If you are interested in this space, you can check out NovaSolver.com

It's mostly a ChatGPT conversational interface over a classic Solver (Monte-Carlo simulation based), but that ease of use makes it very convenient for quick post-game analysis of hands.

I'm sure if you hook a Solver to a hud, it might be even simpler, but it's quite burdensome for amateurs, and it might be too close to cheating.
by hahahahhaah | 2026-01-10 23:05:09+00:00
I was too subtle but the issue is less understanding CSS and more collaborating in a team where someone decides to add a specific rule that fixes something applies on every page but makes no sense semantically.

Then do that 100 times to create spaghetti. CSS rule anywhere can affect anything whereas tailwind is more local.

You can also bricklay it along lines of components in React, so you know how X component renders always and it wont look like a pig when tranplanted to the legacy billing screen.

I now recall why I like tailwind! Been backending for a while now (zero regrets lol)
by mythrwy | 2026-01-10 23:05:17+00:00
"Supply shock" might not be the only, or even primary cause. As far as I know fentanyl is still widely available and inexpensive.

My guess is only a subset of the population is willing to both A) Use a substance like street fentanyl with known lethality. and B) Do so in a risky and unsafe manner (alone, no narcan, shooting instead of smoking, etc. etc.).

That subset of the population has already been decimated to the point we are seeing a decrease, and survivors have become more educated on how to use without dying.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-01-10 23:05:28+00:00
Exactly what am I suppose to do? I vote for politicians who talk about universal healthcare, universal child care, public funding of college education and trade schools etc.

But the country and the people who could most benefit from it are more concerned with whatever fake outrage Fox News comes up with an anti woke something or the other.

So yeah, if this is the country America wants, I’m over it. I’ve done my bid.

While other people talk about leaving the country, we are seriously doing research and we are going to spend a month and a half outside of the US this year and I’ve already looked at residency requirements in a couple of countries after retirement including the one we are going to in a month and a half.
by jeroenhd | 2026-01-10 23:06:28+00:00
> then pick the right license for your business

That's one of the issues with AI, though; strongly copylefted software suddenly finds itself unable to enforce its license because "AI" gets a free pass on copyright for some reason.

Dual-licensing open source with business-unfriendly licensing used to be a pretty good way to sell software, but thanks to the absurd legal position AI models have managed to squeeze themselves into, that stopped in an instant.
by Animats | 2026-01-10 23:08:28+00:00
> More than 1 million people died in the US from the COVID pandemic so it seemed reasonable to work hard to get herd immunity but the backfire effect made that counter productive.

There is no herd immunity for COVID, because you can get it more than once. Vaccination only protects for a few months, and doesn't reduce spreading much.
It's not a "sterilizing vaccine".

There are sterilizing vaccines for many childhood diseases. Measles, diphtheria, polio, etc. Can't get the disease at all if vaccinated. Those vaccines can almost eliminate a disease. With smallpox, this was taken past "almost" all the way to eradication.
Here's a list of 14 almost forgotten diseases, eliminated by vaccination.[1]
The current generation of parents has not seen most of them.

[1] https://www.healthychildren.org/English/safety-prevention/im...