MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by burkaman | 2026-01-08 14:42:33+00:00
Some direct, in-context quotes:

> There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective. [interviewer pushes back, brings up polio vaccine] So if you say to me, “The polio vaccine, was it effective against polio?” I’m going to say, “Yes.” And if say to me, “Did it cause more death than avert?” I would say, “I don’t know, because we don’t have the data on that.”

> The most popular vaccine in the world is the DTP vaccine. [...] That vaccine caused so many injuries that Wyeth, which was the manufacturer, said to the Reagan administration, “We are now paying $20 in downstream liabilities for every dollar that we’re making in profits, and we are getting out of the business unless you give us permanent immunity from liability.” And by the way, Reagan said at that time, “Why don’t you just make the vaccine safe?” And why is that? Because vaccines are inherently unsafe. They said, “Unavoidably unsafe, you cannot make them safe.”

Not going quote the whole thing because it's long, but he repeatedly drives home his point that all vaccines are inherently unsafe, and the injuries and deaths they cause always outweigh their effectiveness against disease.

- https://lexfridman.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr-transcript/

Note: As far as I can tell this "unavoidably unsafe" quote in the preamble of the law (the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act) is a lie. Unfortunately the full text of the law is not available online so I can't fully confirm.

> I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated.’ And he heard that from me. If he hears it from 10 other people, maybe he won’t do it, you know, maybe he will save that child.

> If you’re one of 10 people that goes up to a guy, a man or a woman, who’s carrying a baby, and says, ‘Don’t vaccinate that baby,’ when they hear that from 10 people, it’ll make an impression on ‘em, you know. And we all kept our mouth shut. Don’t keep your mouth shut anymore. Confront everybody on it.

- https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/the-way-forward/hffh-th... timestamp 11:54, 13:30

This one is interesting because the interviewer prompts him with something like "we aren't anti-vaccine, we just want to make sure they're safe" and he does not agree, he repeatedly says, with no qualification, "tell everyone not to vaccinate their children".

I don't believe he has ever voluntarily made a positive public comment about any vaccine. He did during his confirmation hearing, but he was obviously heavily incentivized to do so. During that hearing he did not say his opinion had changed, he simply lied about all past comments and claimed they never happened.
by DangitBobby | 2026-01-08 14:43:05+00:00
The null hypothesis could just as easily be if they get a 1:1 dollar exchange rate versus a 1:2 rate on their food stamps, they can afford to buy drugs AND food instead of just drugs. Guess which one they buy if they can only buy one? Guess what they are incentivized to do if they have less cash than they need on hand to do both? I'll give you a hint, it rhymes with teal.
by Ancapistani | 2026-01-08 14:43:21+00:00
You jest, but I'm trying to decide if I want to convert an exploratory project I'm working on to work in Claude Code rather than Cursor, where I started.

I've been using AI codegen for months now, but on large projects. Turns out, the productivity multiplier that agentic AI can be scales at least partially in proportion to project size. Read that again, because I don't mean "inverse proportion".

When a codebase is small, every change touches a majority of the codebase, making parallel work difficult or impossible. Once it gets large enough to have functional areas, you can have multiple tasks running at once with little or no merge conflicts.

I was giving Cursor a shot because it's the tool that's most popular at my new company. Prior to this, I was using OpenHands. I've used Claude Code quite a bit for my personal stuff, but I wanted some hands-on experience with local tooling and Cursor was the default choice.

Now that I've got this app to the point where frontend and backend concerns are separate and the interfaces are defined I'm realizing that Cursor doesn't seem to have anything approaching Claude Code's parallel subagent support. That's... limiting.

So now I get to decide if the improvement in velocity I'll get from switching to CC will offset the time it'll take me to make the change before I have a deadline to meet.
by SecretDreams | 2026-01-08 14:43:22+00:00
> sure, although if tribal differences are always experienced as fundamentally morally repugnant one might think the moral calibration is screwed a bit too tight.

They're not always experienced this way. But that's the trend in America.

> but even at my most contemptuous of a culture and a people I will at times be forced to admit, honestly, that they have behaviors that can also be considered admirable

Ya, I think it's something along the lines of "even a broken clock is right twice a day".

Do I need to give out a cookie when the clock tells me the correct time if it's fucking me on the time the rest of the day?
by EvanAnderson | 2026-01-08 14:43:31+00:00
I'm assuming it's a function of building the devices down to a price point. Fewer atoms makes for lower cost.

I look at some large TVs of 2016 vintage being sold for surplus and I was shocked at how heavy they were. I don't have the specific numbers handy, but I recall they were >40 lbs heavier than I expected them to be compared to today's TVs.
by everfrustrated | 2026-01-08 14:44:06+00:00
The only reason the wind farms got built was because they got guaranteed a high price of electricity that took the risk out of it. This changed more recently which is why building stopped.

Another factor is in the UK everything below the average tide line is owned by the Crown (as in the King not the government) who were very happy to get lease income. The Govt was also happy so it didn't look like the people were funding the King (which they are).

Also the public are very against wind turbines on land which is reasonable in England where there isn't much isolated land to put them.

At least they got built, which is more than can be said for the nuclear plants.
by radpanda | 2026-01-08 14:44:07+00:00
It seems to me that moving to lower cost-of-living cities did have a remote work boom, but it wasn’t evenly distributed. People from HCOL areas still wanted a high level of services (restaurant, airport, healthcare, recreation opportunities, etc) and probably a cool “vibe”. So the people fleeing SF and LA didn’t move to Dayton and Topeka and Duluth, but they did go to Boise and Bozeman and Asheville.
by eertami | 2026-01-08 14:44:08+00:00
I somewhat suspect our difference here is cultural divide - I've never been to the US, but none of the things you mentioned have involved salespeople in my experience in Europe.

I live in a city, have a car (bought second hand), buy things in person, go to restaurants. We have no tipping or gratuity, apartments have a fairly standard application process and often it's a previous tenant showing you around because they want you to take over their lease, unless the apartment is empty.
by jonhohle | 2026-01-08 14:44:21+00:00
The largest CRT had a 43” viewable screen and had a volume of 0.75m³. A 43” LCD TV has a volume around 0.025m³. I’m not saying you could fit 30 packaged LCD TVs in the space of one CRT, but the volume is completely different. If you don’t think LCDs are less bulky, you probably never had a CRT.
by irishcoffee | 2026-01-08 14:44:44+00:00
> It’s hilarious that you feel the need to preemptively take control of the narrative in anticipation of the Rust people that you fear so much.

> Is this an irrational fear, I wonder? Reminds me of methods used in the political discourse.

In a sad sort of way, I think its hilarious that hn users have been so completely conditioned to expect rust evangelism any time a topic like this comes up that they wanted to get ahead of it.

Not sure who it says more about, but it sure does say a whole lot.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-01-08 14:45:02+00:00
I mean I get where they are coming from. It doesn’t strike you as a little odd that people have to protect themselves from dangerous individuals stalking them by setting up businesses? That’s not a little circuitous/indirect? Is that really in line with the purpose of setting up a business in the first place?

It’s not like that’s the only way to hide your identity, it’s just one currently available. Plus it’s a very trivial to look up who owns an LLC at least in my state. Not the best solution IMO

Either way I think you’re being a little uncharitable towards them. I don’t think they’re trivializing it, I think they’re asking a very legitimate question.
by yoaviram | 2026-01-08 14:45:10+00:00
This thread reads like an advertisement for ChatGPT Health.

I came to share a blog post I just posted titled: "ChatGPT Health is a Marketplace, Guess Who is the Product?"

OpenAI is building ChatGPT Health as a healthcare marketplace where providers and insurers can reach users with detailed health profiles, powered by a partner whose primary clients are insurance companies. Despite the privacy reassurances, your health data sits outside HIPAA protection, in the hands of a company facing massive financial pressure to monetize everything it can.

https://consciousdigital.org/chatgpt-health-is-a-marketplace...
by ibejoeb | 2026-01-08 14:45:30+00:00
Regardless of the fact that they can simply lie to you, it doesn't say that. The question is "Does TSA protect all data (e.g., photos)...?" What does protect mean? The stated common case is that a photo is ephemeral and is removed (from where?) after it is used. Now, they're using it for facial recognition. They didn't get a facial recognition system by deleting photos, so we know based on the premise that some representation of the data in the photo (your likeness) exists in persistent form.

But that's just generous reading, anyway. There are so many ambiguities that it's not really worth the trouble to attempt any rigorous analysis of it.

"In rare instances TSA will collect and temporarily retain photos and data..." How rare? Doesn't matter: then what happens?

"...data collection mode events are limited in time and place..." Damn unrelenting spacetime.

"TSA’s facial comparison technologies adhere to DHS and TSA cybersecurity requirements." Restatement of the problem.
by omgJustTest | 2026-01-08 14:45:36+00:00
Your beef is with wiki or facts :

"high scores: braised eye-of-round steak 40.62; broiled t-bone steak (porterhouse) 32.11; grilled lean steak 31.0
"
numbers are grams per hundred grams or wiki also reports 25% as the average, thus your factor of 2 error in weight (400 instead of 200).

Sincerely,

You-cannot-read-or-convert-units-or-gather-info-correctly

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_foods_by_protein_conte...
by nikhizzle | 2026-01-08 14:45:39+00:00
I would start playing with these - https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/solutions/autonomous-vehicles/a...

You don’t need to be an AI engineer if you don’t want to. There is a lot of work in deploying these models, managing them etc. See https://tangerinefeed.net/job/b6tx1/similar
by Applejinx | 2026-01-08 14:46:01+00:00
Wait, what? I lift weights and chicken breast is a fundamental part of my diet but I'm eating 1/3 to 1/2 a single chicken breast a day, and an egg for breakfast. That CAN'T be right.

I get that I include some rice, peanuts etc. in there, but even if I quit EVERYTHING else there's no way 4 to 5 chicken breasts a day is accurate.
by glenstein | 2026-01-08 14:46:26+00:00
Again, the whole premise of the article is that there really is such a thing as disproportionate beef eaters (DBE), and it spends time talking about this group explicitly. So the wording doesn't suggest otherwise, it explicitly suggests this is a real group.

Regarding the study this is a both can be true situation. There can be (1) a population who is disproportionate in their beef eating, and (2) a study about 12% doing the most on any given day can count in favor of that group being real and (3) not everyone from the daily 12% is part of the DBE group. It's more likely a venn diagram overlap, and where it doesn't overlap, people who aren't part of the DBE are incidentally in that 12% while being closer to average in the aggregate over the longer term. Those facts can all sit together comfortably without amounting to a contradiction.
by wang_li | 2026-01-08 14:46:34+00:00
When a coworker pastes a screenshot of their syntax highlighted code with a black background into chat it is functionally 50% blank as my 55 year old eyes are not good at low contrast. Regular blue, purples and reds are often unreadable against a black background.

Fortunately syntax highlighting isn’t part of the code, it’s just how it’s displayed. There comes a point where pasting images of code, to preserve syntax highlighting, into chats, email, and documentation it’s not only a waste of space, it becomes an ADA issue. Use whatever fonts and themes in your editor, but keep those to yourself.
by lovlar | 2026-01-08 14:46:48+00:00
What about exploring new, AI-native ways to monetize?

For example, creators behind libraries like Tailwind could sell Claude skills or MCP server solutions.

If I could pay $20 to make my AI agents significantly better at writing state-of-the-art Tailwind code — while knowing that my purchase directly supports the Tailwind community and its long-term sustainability — I would happily do so.
by 306bobby | 2026-01-08 14:47:13+00:00
Half the people in that thread have this mentality that just using tailwind is enough contribution, so therefore GiVe mY oPuS MoRe InFo

I thought we learned years ago that exposure doesn't keep the lights on. That mentality is nothing but entitlement

One comment stated that "it's not our fault the founder was unable to manage his finances to pay his people" well if open source worked the way people try to act like it does, he shouldn't have to pay anyone, right? But here we are
by Tagbert | 2026-01-08 14:47:15+00:00
I've been using the Claudi.ai website for a project and that is pretty much what I do, though I have uploaded all of the source files to Claude so I only need to upload anything that I changed. I don't need to reupload the whole code base each time, of course. Claude provides a zip file of any changed files that I download and copy to my code file system.
by wilkolbrzym | 2026-01-08 14:47:18+00:00
Hi HN,

I have spent the last few months diving deep into SIMD and x86-64 assembly to see if I could push JSON parsing throughput to the absolute limits of modern hardware. The result is Tachyon (v0.7.2), a solo project built around a dual-engine architecture for AVX2 and AVX-512.

Key technical highlights:

Vectorized Depth Skipping: Uses structural bitmasks to skip over nested objects and arrays at memory-bus speeds.

Direct-Key-Jump (Apex Mode): Maps JSON fields directly to C++ structures, avoiding DOM materialization overhead.

AVX-512 "God Mode": Leverages 64-byte registers and k-masking for branchless filtering.

In my benchmarks, Tachyon consistently outperforms standard parsers on AVX2 (reaching ~6 GB/s on Canada.json). On AVX-512, it enters extreme parity with simdjson, trading blows at around 10-11 GB/s. On large 256MB datasets, they are within 1-2% of each other, essentially limited by memory bandwidth and CPU jitter.

It is still a very fresh project, so I expect there might be some bugs in edge cases. I am currently looking for feedback on the skipping logic and the proprietary license model (which I’ve kept free for anyone with <$1M revenue).

I would be happy to answer any technical questions about the SIMD kernels or the optimization techniques used.
by kentonv | 2026-01-08 14:47:21+00:00
Hey! I created Jeff Dean Facts! Not the jokes themselves, but the site that collected them.

It was in 2008 I think (give or take a year, can't remember). I worked at Google at the time. Chunk Norris Facts was a popular Internet meme (which I think later faded when he came out as MAGA, but I digress...). A colleague (who wishes to remain anonymous) thought the idea of Jeff Dean Facts would be funny, and April 1st was coming up.

At the time, there was a team working on an experimental web app hosting platform code named Prometheus -- it was later released as App Engine. Using an early, internal build I put together a web site where people could submit "facts" about Jeff Dean, rate each other's facts on a five-star scale, and see the top-rated facts. Everything was anonymous. I had a few coworkers who are funnier than me populate some initial facts.

I found a few bugs in Prometheus in the process, which the team rapidly fixed to meet my "launch date" of April 1st. :)

On the day, which I think was a Sunday, early in the morning, I sent an email to the company-wide "misc" mailing list (or maybe it was eng-misc?) from a fake email address (a google group alias with private membership), and got the mailing list moderator to approve it.

It only took Jeff an hour or two to hack his way through the back-end servers (using various internal-facing status pages, Borg logs, etc.) to figure out my identity.

But everyone enjoyed it!

My only regret is that I targeted the site specifically at Jeff and not Sanjay Ghemawat. Back then, Jeff & Sanjay did everything together, and were responsible for inventing a huge number of core technologies at Google (I have no idea to what extent they still work together today). The site was a joke, but I think it had the side effect of elevating Jeff above Sanjay, which is not what I intended. Really the only reason I targeted Jeff is because he's a bit easier to make fun of personality-wise, and because "Jeff Dean Facts" sort of rolls off the tongue easier that "Sanjay Ghemawat Facts" -- but in retrospect this feels a little racist. :(

My personal favorite joke is: Jeff Dean puts his pants on one leg at a time, but if he had more than two legs, you'd see his approach is actually O(log n).
by ericmay | 2026-01-08 14:47:56+00:00
I think this is fundamentally incorrect, and the way we live today and the problems we experience bear this out. It's not about individual choices you make to engage with a cashier at Costco, it's about the opportunities to engage and where they occur. You're still talking about a forced connection you have to decide to make at the checkout line, and ignoring that you never see that person again in a different context, like in your own neighborhood or at your local restaurant.

Socialization isn't a choice one makes, it's supposed to be organic. The fact that you have to choose and make decisions around interacting with other people proves my point.
by Fiveplus | 2026-01-08 14:48:51+00:00
While these are hilarious (the gcc -O4 one is a classic), the wildest part is that the actual engineering reality is not that far off from the myths. When you look at the Spanner paper, they literally deployed GPS receivers and atomic clocks in data centers just to flatten the consistency window for global transactions (truetime). At a time when everyone else was struggling with basic eventual consistency, his team was effectively bullying physics into behaving.

It really makes me wonder that with the current shift toward AI and specialized hardware, are we seeing the end of the general purpose distributed systems era that people like Dean defined, or is it just evolving?
by everfrustrated | 2026-01-08 14:49:08+00:00
>Pretty much all electricity markets worldwide set the unit price based on the the cost of the "marginal" (most expensive) generator running during each time period

Indeed. This is inherent failing of the use of auctions for setting price. While using auctions is a laudable goal, in reality it is not very efficient and easily gamed. Having a central purchaser model is not idea from a ideological standpoint but clearly more efficient allowing correctly controlling for more variables than can (crudely) be transmitted through a 30 minute auction period.
by 0xFEE1DEAD | 2026-01-08 14:49:13+00:00
I recommend purelymail.com (not affiliated in any way, just a happy customer).

I've been a customer for 4-5 years, ever since I saw a hn post about them, and I have zero complaints.

It's dirt cheap ($10 per year for unlimited amount of users).

They allow wildcard addresses and I've set up my own "trash mail" so I can register an account at e.g. LinkedIn with linkedin@my-domain.com.

I've set up 4 different domains and 3 accounts and all of this for $10 a year.

Sorry if this reads like an ad, but I think it's super cool to offer such a great service for a fair price.
by misja111 | 2026-01-08 14:49:17+00:00
> it's holding prices steady at some point without the concurrent pressure to sell

Earlier you were arguing that investors were acting as marketmakers and now you say this. Marketmakers make their profit from the difference between buying and selling some asset. They don't want to hold prices, they want turnover.
If investors really are acting as marketmakers it's actually a good thing because marketmakers have the effect of adding liquidity to a market.
by cestith | 2026-01-08 14:49:28+00:00
This I think is one of the many wrongs perpetrated by “business speak”. People say “invite” for “invitation”, then instead of using “invite” as a verb they say they “sent an invite”. They don’t say “installation” and say rather “install” as a noun. They say silly trite things like “circle back”. They load up conversations with sports metaphors and military jargon. A layoff or staff reduction is now a “reduction in force”. A couple of decades ago it might have been known instead as “resizing”. “Taking point” on a project has become as common or more common than “leading” it. I think you’ll also find more “utilization” in use than “usage” - which in some contexts has a slightly different connotation but usually the shorter word will work just fine.
by voisin | 2026-01-08 14:49:36+00:00
I get 3-5 email requests a day for meetings. Those meetings are at various locations (so options like Calendly which are more focused on people doing meetings from a single location don’t work). I need to reply with times that I am available. Often they get back to me and say they aren’t available at those times so how about these times. We iterate until we find a time that works.

All of this is manual right now. I’ve spoken to a lot of colleagues in my industry who have the same pain points. A lot of time is wasted on this.

Something intelligent could take into account where I am going to be right before the time I offer and make sure there is enough time for transit in between. It could warn me if I have a few meetings back to back and might need a break.

I love Fastmail and don’t regret ditching the Gmail backend at all, but I do wish I could have something intelligent like this integrated.
by drnick1 | 2026-01-08 14:49:39+00:00
> Thank god i started hosting my own mail (and other stuff)

Same thing here. If you can at all (have access to a "quality" IPv4 with open ports), self-hosting your email is the best thing you can do for your privacy and convenience. No spyware analyzing emails and contacts, no annoying webmail interface (use any IMAP client), no constant reminders to provide a phone number or recovery email, no annoying 2FA requests, no "suspicious logins" reminders if you use a VPN, unlimited mailboxes, attachments, and aliases.

Once you start hosting your email then moving away entirely from Google is pretty easy.
by Dezmo | 2026-01-08 14:49:45+00:00
Hello, quick note about trying out awfl.us:

If you create a project and start a session without running awfl locally, it will spin up a cloud consumer. This takes a little time, but it provides a safe, isolated environment where your agents can run commands and make file updates.

My main motivation for building the Scala DSL was to have a clean, functional orchestration core. The Node services then extend functionality by handling the more procedural logic that LLMs are better at implementing.

Feedback on the API design, DSL ergonomics, and overall architecture would be much appreciated.