MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jtrn | 2026-01-05 17:37:14+00:00
Given that you asked about this topic, I assume you are interested in it, so I apologize in advance if this comes across as negative.
I come at this as a ruthless pragmatist. My background is in Metacognitive Therapy (MCT) and long-term mindfulness, so I’ve read the literature. My only metric is: “What is your goal, and does this tool actually help you achieve it?”
From that perspective, I have four major issues with the modern "Jhana" movement:

There are currently no large-scale, randomized controlled trials (RCTs) proving the clinical effectiveness of the "Jhourney" method or "Sutta Jhanas" for mental health in the general population. Until we see data, this is experimental, not medical.

Then it strikes me as "Drug-Free Hedonism." It is a classic case of Spiritual Materialism: instead of buying a Ferrari to feel good, you "buy" a Jhana state. It is still the ego seeking gratification, just using a different currency. The marketing language ("ecstatic," "orgasmic," "dopamine hit") explicitly invites a consumerist mindset. You aren't dissolving the self; you are just consuming a peak experience.

The "State vs. Trait" Fallacy
In my observation, the people drawn to these niche practices are already optimizing/biohacking types. They are selecting a practice that reinforces their existing personality rather than transforming it. I see very little evidence that accessing these temporary states leads to permanent positive traits or behavioral changes once the "high" wears off.

On a personal moral level, I find the logic of extreme contemplative devotion flawed. Historically, the "true Buddhist" monastic model relies on others for food and sustenance. You can frame this as "spiritual focus," but a pragmatist could easily frame it as a lack of self-sufficiency—or even laziness. I rarely see a tangible improvement in productivity, self-sufficiency, or general functioning in people who dive deep into this mysticism.

That said, I do believe in the "software upgrade" of mindfulness—specifically the ability to step back, observe, and evaluate thoughts without engaging them (the core of Metacognitive Therapy). There is decent evidence for that. But that is a tool for functioning, which is very different from chasing bliss.
by Operyl | 2026-01-05 17:37:24+00:00
Hahaha, I love it. But also, a security tool you're going to be using against your core infrastructure should probably not be a random binary that you also tell users to strip quarantine off of to use: `sudo xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine`. Sigh at the state of running stuff on macOS sometimes.

All joking aside, this looks great. Is there a plan to allow for "custom checks" with custom rules users create? Think of "never should happen" access from a to z, etc.
by mmooss | 2026-01-05 17:37:29+00:00
The paper is here:

Gábor Domokos, Douglas J. Jerolmack. Plato’s cube and the natural geometry of fragmentation. PNAS (2020)

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2001037117

Abstract:

Plato envisioned Earth’s building blocks as cubes, a shape rarely found in nature. The solar system is littered, however, with distorted polyhedra—shards of rock and ice produced by ubiquitous fragmentation. We apply the theory of convex mosaics to show that the average geometry of natural two-dimensional (2D) fragments, from mud cracks to Earth’s tectonic plates, has two attractors: “Platonic” quadrangles and “Voronoi” hexagons. In three dimensions (3D), the Platonic attractor is dominant: Remarkably, the average shape of natural rock fragments is cuboid. When viewed through the lens of convex mosaics, natural fragments are indeed geometric shadows of Plato’s forms. Simulations show that generic binary breakup drives all mosaics toward the Platonic attractor, explaining the ubiquity of cuboid averages. Deviations from binary fracture produce more exotic patterns that are genetically linked to the formative stress field. We compute the universal pattern generator establishing this link, for 2D and 3D fragmentation.
by eszed | 2026-01-05 17:37:31+00:00
> Same thing happened with modern building architecture

Yes. Yes, it has. I'm currently in the midst of a building project that's ten months behind schedule (and I do not know how many millions of dollars over budget), and I'd blame every one of the problems on that. I - the IT guy - was involved in the design stage, and now in construction (as in, actually doing physical labor on-site), and I'm the only person who straddles the divide.

It's utterly bizarre, because everyone gets things wrong - architects and engineers don't appreciate physical constraints; construction crews don't understand functional or design considerations - so the only way to get things right is for someone to understand both, but (apart from me, in my area - which is why I make sure to participate at both stages) literally no one on the project does.

Seen from a perspective of incentives I guess I can understand how we got here: the architects and engineers don't have to leave their offices, and are more "productive" in that they can work on more projects per year, and the construction crews can keep on cashing their sweet overtime checks. Holy shit, though, is it dispiriting to watch from a somewhat detached perspective.
by mindslight | 2026-01-05 17:37:37+00:00
You were narrowly driving focus on "tax dollars". I was referencing costs beyond the monetary - the corrosive effect on what had remained of the rule of law, and consequently on individual liberty. The fish rots from the head - you can't throw away these things while imagining such actions are necessary to save them.

> political districts count illegal immigrants for purposes of representation (census)

> you can "buy" depressed wages for portion of society in need of the most help, House seats, electoral votes

Your first sentence implies that the problem is representation of such areas going up. Your second sentence implies that the problem is representation of such areas is going down. Which is it? Because really, it feels like this is the minimally-defensible remnant of the nonsense trope that illegible immigrants are voting - essentially handwaving implying "bad people" are responsible for creating our bad outcomes, rather than the reality that our political candidates are a race to the bottom and that our government has become wholly bought by corporate interests (open season under Trump). Reassigning a few House seats is rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic - we're going to be paying for this Trumpist tantrum for decades, assuming we can even right the ship afterwards.

(also I will note that you have tacitly agreed that the current regime is a massive criminal enterprise)
by caminante | 2026-01-05 17:37:37+00:00
Your prior comment:

>Those unaware of the statement's usage, and those who choose to interpret the poll question as asking only about the statement's direct literal meaning, would likely answer supportive of the statement.

Your new comment:

>Those that answer in support may be unaware of its usage, or aware but choosing to interpret the poll as asking about its literal meaning, or even aware and agreeing with the implicature/associations.

You lost me.

>it's not a sound argument to say that then implies the majority are admitting to being pro-death, or that it's a red flag for them being some kind of death cult.

"Death cult." I don't get it and presume most people wouldn't place that label either.
by badsectoracula | 2026-01-05 17:38:12+00:00
More than half of my YouTube subscriptions are channels that once posted neat stuff and stopped - and most of them are from years ago. And before that i was into webcomics back when they were a popular online trend, i was following the updates of several of them and most of them have disappeared these days (and i don't even remember their names).

People stop doing things all the time, i'm not sure that means much.
by almosthere | 2026-01-05 17:38:26+00:00
For clothing, for the most part is an Indian woman that is moving the cloth on a sewing machine still. We have not LLM'd making clothes yet. Nike and a few other companies are working on 3d printing shoes, but it's not comparable to hand made yet.

For the most part, the price of a shirt made in India vs USA is the cost of labor. The Indian woman will work for $3 per hour which is a decent wage for that area (don't fact check me, it's just a guess here). She can probably make 5 shirts an hour.

A woman in the United States will make $16 per hour and still make just 5 shirts (or less - more rules in the US about breaks, and probably streaming Netflix too)

Now the company that sells the shirt at Walmart for $10 will have a profit margin of probably $5 per shirt from the Indian labor, and $1 from the US labor.

Technically after the industry is built out more we may be able to squeeze more shirts per hour if we start doing technical innovations (for example we make a machine that pre-sews 5 of the seams because of innovation. This is something that won't happen if the center of gravity is in India, but may happen in the US. (Actually today that may happen in India as tech is taking on its own thing there now).
by james2doyle | 2026-01-05 17:38:36+00:00
I don’t think people realize how easy it is to make Sublime plugins. They can be as simple as a single .py file. No dependencies install step, no meta files, no rituals to go through. Just drop the .py file in the right directory. I’ve used Gemini to build about 3-4 plugins of various complexity and they all work great
by dathinab | 2026-01-05 17:38:51+00:00
testosterone doesn't make you suicidal

it hinders you long term decision making and in turn makes it more likely to do risky decisions which could end bad for you (because you are slightly less risk adverse)

but that is _very_ different to doing decisions with the intend to kill yourself

you always need an different source for this, which here seem to have been ChatGPT

also how do you think he ended up thinking he needs to take that levels of testosterone, or testosterone at all. Common source of that are absurdly body ideals, often propagated by doctored pictures. Or the kind of non-realistic pictures ChatGPT tends to produce for certain topics.

and we also know that people with mental health issues have gone basically psychotic due to AI chats without taking any additional drugs...

but overall this is irrelevant

what is relevant is that they are hiding evidence which makes them look bad in a (self) murder case, likely with the intend to avoid any form of legal liability/investigation

that tells a lot about a company, or about how likely the company thinks they might be found at least partially liable

if that really where a nothing burger they had nothing to risk, and could even profit from such a law suite by setting precedence in their favor
by WackyFighter | 2026-01-05 17:39:18+00:00
> Any time something is made easier and you get more of it, it becomes worth less.

That is only the case with commodities. Not creative works and/or entertainment.

> But it's sort of like amateurs at an open mic night telling memorized jokes that they didn't write compared to a comedian who has spent thousands of hours perfecting stories, jokes, punch lines, timing, and phrasing.

Often these amateurs are often funnier than the professionals. However that of course is subjective.
by krick | 2026-01-05 17:39:22+00:00
To be completely fair, I am not certain what it means for a track to be "virtually unplayed".

First off, it was striking to me how little of the "top 10 000" they published back on Christmas I recognize. I'm not sure what I expected, but 10 000 sounds like a big number, so it seemed likely to me, that if I get a random song from my playlist I could find it there. It turned out I hardly can find an artist I recognize. Ok, I can recall a song from Lady Gaga and even Billie Eilish, I've heard of Bruno Mars (cannot recall any song), but I have no idea what is "Bad Bunny", "Doechii", "Drake". I mean, I think I do have a pretty good idea what these things are (abstractly), and I probably wouldn't want to listen that. And while I knew that all this stuff is very popular, I didn't quite realize how little place in the top-10000 it leaves for the music I (and everyone I know) actually listen to.

I didn't download the metadata they released (it would be hard to process it on my laptop anyway), but now I wonder how much of my 3 TB music collection is in top 100 000, or heck, even top 1M Spotify, or on Spotify at all.

I also am sometimes surprised how little scrobbles some tracks get. I didn't bother to find out what this means, how many people still scrobble to Last.fm or ListenBrainz, but it is just surprising when I see that a track that I didn't consider to be obscure was scrobbled like 50 times this year.

So I'm saying that music worlds seems to be terribly fragmented, even more than I imagined. So the very premise of AA backing-up 97% of Spotify (by the number of plays) may be much lesser achievement at "preserving culture" than it may sound. And of course we are about 8 years too late to backup everything, since by now half of it must be generative NN bullshit. And I'm not even sure it's in those leftover 3% (bots listen to bot-generated music too, right)?
by bigbuppo | 2026-01-05 17:39:27+00:00
It's literally the definitive guide on CSS, and frankly, it's the gold standard for any book calling itself a definitive guide. An inordinate amount of work went into the book's 1126 pages. You will learn something every time you open the book. It will pay for itself the next time you wonder, "how do I do X with css?", because you don't have to search. It's right there in the book.
by marojejian | 2026-01-05 17:39:30+00:00
2000: "Don't be evil"

2025: Eric Schmidt: I'm “a licensed arms dealer.”

> He has framed his movement into the A.I. arms sector as implicitly humanitarian. “Now you sit there and you go, Why would a good liberal like me do that?” he said at Stanford. “The answer is that the whole theory of armies is tanks, artilleries and mortars, and we can eliminate all of them and we can make the penalty for invading a country, at least by land, essentially be impossible.” A.I.-powered weapons, he suggested, could end this kind of warfare.

O RLY?

>This is a prediction with precedent from when machines guns were poised to upend ground combat as people knew it. In 1877, Richard Gatling, inventor of the Gatling gun, a prominent forerunner of automatic fire, proposed that as an efficient multiplier of lethal violence his weapon might spare people the horrors of war. “It occurred to me,” he wrote, that “if I could invent a machine — a gun — which could by rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies.”

>Maybe the future will prove Eric Schmidt’s vision right. Whatever is coming will reveal itself in time. History shows Gatling was spectacularly wrong.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-05 17:39:38+00:00
yea x402 is nice.

one of the biggest issues to me feels like right now, its just not the time to buy hardware and colocate or create your own simply because of ramflation

I think one can probably get dedicated servers but some are more strict than others and can even shut down your services if abuse comes from downstream (hetzner's more strict, in my observation, most german providers usually are)

OVH and Upcloud are good solutions I can probably build upon but an aspect of me also wonders perhaps serverless (a more request focused and not hour focused) server thing might work as well?

My idea kind of came from the fact similar to the parent post itself about just frustrations regarding the fact that open source is so heavily underfunded and ways to probably get funding into it.

One of the biggest issues to me feels as if how would I even explain this idea and I want your opinion on it because I tried explaining it to my brother who works in CS and perhaps I didn't do a good job explaining it (I admit) but he basically said that what I wanted in the end was a more transparency focused saas/open source related but that itself is possible if saas themselves do it but the incentives in saas are to not be transparent so nobody really talks about the costs of server and transparency. So perhaps a paradigm where transparency is core becomes more suitable. Please let me know if you want to contact as honestly I'd like to hear some honest opinions/feedback about this.

Thank you and have a nice day!
by dllu | 2026-01-05 17:39:42+00:00
Yeah, you can generally "whiten" the problem by scaling it in each axis until the variance is the same in each dimension. What you describe is if x and y have a covariance matrix of like

[ σ², 0;
0, (nσ)² ]

but whitening also works in general for any arbitrary covariance matrix too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitening_transformation
by its-summertime | 2026-01-05 17:40:00+00:00
> Or it's indirectly harmful by training us to accept a synthetic reality where nothing can be trusted and everything must be questioned.

Good. Its beneficial, I'd think. Lies are not new, the amount of lies, probably not new either.

I don't think we have (yet) reached a level of badness compared to the prior point of tobacco companies telling people around the world that cigarettes have medical benefits.
by keleftheriou | 2026-01-05 17:40:21+00:00
I’m building a voice-first assistant for Apple Watch.

I feel the Apple Watch is a great form factor, and while other devices can complement it nicely, it’s currently way underutilized.

My app can be used to take notes, query them, look things up online, and a lot of things you’d use ChatGPT for, but from your wrist.

https://x.com/keleftheriou/status/1963399069646426341
by torginus | 2026-01-05 17:40:51+00:00
It has been a long-standing trend/belief/whatever that FP is just somehow better, it's kind of have been this belief that has endured for decades. Part of that belief is that exceptions are bad and option/result types are the way to go for proper error handling.

I don't think this is true at all, they are just different, with procedural programming being control-flow oriented and fp being dataflow oriented.

Monads are just dataflow oriented error handling, which is comes with its own set of tradeoffs and advantages, the key disadvantages being the necessity of an advanced type inference-system, to allow natural looking usage, and the function signatures having to support the notion that this function can indeed throw an error.

Implementation wise, the generated assembly is not more efficient, as the error passing plumbing needs to appear at every functions return site, even if no error happens.

I'm not saying Monads as error handling are an inherently bad concept, but neither are exceptions (as many usually suggest), and using both depend heavily on language support to make them ergonomic, which in the case of C# and monads, is missing.
by bluGill | 2026-01-05 17:40:52+00:00
What you think others should do it not relevant. The question is what will they do.

If someone wants a 5 day work week and a larger house instead of a 4 day work week who are you to force them to do otherwise? It is perfectly possible to get a 2 or 3 day work week if you want - most jobs won't offer it, but the possibility exists if you are willing for the sacrifices - most are not (though it isn't clear if they even realize the option exist)
by kcatskcolbdi | 2026-01-05 17:41:14+00:00
> Or it's indirectly harmful by training us to accept a synthetic reality where nothing can be trusted and everything must be questioned.

I do find myself questioning the premise that accepting a 'synthetic reality where nothing can be trusted' is automatically bad. I've long felt that everyone took what they saw on the internet at face value when they should not. I do hope that injecting enough chaos into the system can force people to question their intake more consistently.
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-05 17:41:33+00:00
I dunno. Over the last few weeks I've talked about practical aspects of Kitsune-tsuki [1] with Copilot (GPT-5 based) and Google's AI Mode which is a definite unconventional line of thought. Both of them seem to like anything if it is ego-syntonic (even like the word "ego-syntonic") with the exception of Copilot not wanting to talk about Ericksonian hypnosis [2] whereas AI mode is just fine about it.

Copilot in general seems to encourage reality testing and for me to be careful about attributing other people's reactions to my behaviors [3] and trained me to be proactive about that.

I have seen though that it's easy to bend copilot into looking at things through a particular framework and could reinforce a paranoid world view, on the other hand, the signs of paranoia are usually starkly obvious, for some reason delusions seem to run on rails, and it shouldn't be hard to train a system like that to push back or at least refuse to play along. On the other hand, the right answer for some people might be stop the steroids or see a doc and start on Aripiprazole or something.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsunetsuki -- I was really shocked to see that people responded positively to gekkering and pleased to find my name can be written out as "Scholarly Fox" in Chinese

[2] to "haunt" people as fox mediums in China do without having shrines everywhere and an extensive network of confederates

[3] like that time i went out as-a-fox on the bus and a woman who was wearing a hat that said "I'm emotionally exhausted" that day had a panda ears hat the next day so I wound up being the second kemonomimi to get off the bus
by 15155 | 2026-01-05 17:41:39+00:00
> If people are crossing the rivers and crawling through razor wire to get here then the policies make it too hard to enter the country

This is an opinion.

> not a criminal offense, btw

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1325

You were saying?

> Fine them

The law also says "jail them" - let's just deport them and save the cash.