MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Aurornis | 2026-01-29 15:21:05+00:00
> Researchers have noticed it for 13 years! From the linked Ghaemi et al 2024 meta-analysis

You’re cherry picking papers. Others have already shared other studies showing no significant effects of Vitamin D intervention.

For any popular supplement you can find someone publishing papers with miraculous results, showing huge effect sizes and significant outcomes. This has been going on for decades.

With Omega-3s the larger the trial size, the smaller the outcome. The largest trials have shown very little to no detectable effect.

I think a lot of people are skeptical about pharmaceuticals because they see the profit motive, but they let their guard down when researchers and supplement pushers who have their own motives start pushing flawed studies and cherry picked results.

> In other words, if the effect on antidepressants vs placebo is ~0.4, and the effect of a placebo vs no placebo (just time) is ~0.7, that means the majority of the effect of antidepressants & OTC pain meds is due to placebo.

You keep getting closer to understanding why these effect size studies are so popular with alternative medicine and supplement sellers: They’re so easy to misinterpret or to take out of context.

According your numbers, taking Tylenol would be worse than placebo alone! 0.4 vs 0.7

Does this make any sense to you? It should make you pause and think that maybe this is more complicated than picking singular numbers and comparing them.

In this domain of cherry picking studies and comparing effect sizes, you’ve reached a conclusion where Vitamin D is far and away more effective than anything, placebo is better than OTC pain medicines, and OTC pain meds are worse than placebo.

It’s time for a reality check that maybe this methodology isn’t actually representative of reality. You’re writing at length as if these studies you picked are definitive and your numeric comparisons tell the whole story, but I don’t think you’ve stopped to consider if this is even realistic.
by bunderbunder | 2026-01-29 15:21:06+00:00
I think this is another of those spots where the difference between agile with a little an and Agile with a big À comes to the forefront.

Little a agile is about pushing back against dysfunctional business dynamics for the sake of humanistic goals like employees’ mental health and doing right by customers.

Big À Agile co-opts that, and is more about squeezing as much money out of everyone as possible while wearing the trappings of agile values to make it seem more palatable.
by digiown | 2026-01-29 15:21:12+00:00
There is a massive over-buying of compute, much beyond what is actually needed for the current level of AI development and products, paid for by investor money. When the bubble pops the investor money will dry up, and the extra demand will vanish. OpenAI buys memory chips to stop competitors from getting them, and Amazon owns datacenters they can't power.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-10/data-cent...
by horsawlarway | 2026-01-29 15:21:16+00:00
While I also don't mind manufacturers trying a new look, and I like the vague "halo warthog" look of the thing, the Cybertruck seems to have ended up a very bad spot.

It's just not a good truck.

It's also suffered from being insanely overhyped, and then underdelivering on basically every front.

---

Part of my problem with modern Tesla is that they seem to have really jumped the shark on delivering products that are functional. Across the board - from autonomous driving, solar roofs, power walls, Cybertruck, Semi, etc... Even the mass manufactured lines like the Y get staggeringly bad reliability ratings and reviews.

Good form is great! Good form at the expense of good function is not.
by roncesvalles | 2026-01-29 15:21:25+00:00
1. Mass hysteria.

2. Central banks rotating into gold to de-risk from USD combined with their usual slow bureaucratic processes. By the time they've decided that gold needs to be bought, the price has already run up by 50% and it's no longer a good idea to buy, but they still need to execute on their decisions anyway.

The USD isn't going anywhere for the simple reason that the USA can simply counterfeit any non-USD currency and there's nothing the issuer can do about it, whereas if anyone tries to counterfeit USD, they should expect a nice little missile to land inside their room no matter where they are in the world. "Reserve currency" status is entirely based on how effective the issuing entity is at taking care of counterfeiting.
by Roark66 | 2026-01-29 15:21:26+00:00
I used to take a supplement with 10k vit D units. Made by a reputable company here in Europe.

I did a blood test for vit D metabolites (oh 25 or something). It turned out I was deficient.

The doc gave me 8k units as a prescription drug. In theory weaker. After 2 months I was no longer defiecient (kinda borderline). After 4 months the doc decided to go down to 4k iu.

Now I wonder why some experts are telling people to take 10k iu? Is it because the supplements are crap and contain 10% of what they claim? (I've been taking vit K as well)
by 1970-01-01 | 2026-01-29 15:21:47+00:00
Let's look at reality. In reality, warfare, k-shaped economic growth, and influential social media tantrums from Elon, POTUS, and other big billionaires are the más problemas stifling our job market. Go ahead and sit AI in last place as 'reasons' why the tech market isn't improving, but do not call it a scapegoat. We have many distinct problems here. A lot of them are not financial. It's a dumpster fire getting free heat, free fuel, and the oxygen supply has never been more pure. AI is simply the dumpster vessel putting it all together.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_triangle
by notanastronaut | 2026-01-29 15:22:08+00:00
>The internet by comparison feels like a clear net positive to me, even with all the bad it enables.

When I think of the internet, I think of malware, porn, social media manipulating people, flame wars, "influencers", and more.

It is also used to scam the elderly, sharing photoshopped sexually explicit pictures of men, women, and children, without their consent, stealing all kinds of copyrighted material, and definitely sucking the joy out of everything. Revenge porn wasn't started in 2023 with OpenAI. And just look at META's current case about Instagram being addicting and harmful to children. If "AI" is a tech carcinogen, then the internet is a nuclear reactor, spewing radioactive material every which way. But hey, it keeps the lights on! Clearly, a net positive.

Let's just be intellectually consistent, that's all I'm saying.
by hybrid_study | 2026-01-29 15:22:15+00:00
The post leans too hard on “we have no idea.” Population numbers are estimates with error bars, especially in places with weak census infrastructure, but that’s not the same as ignorance. Most countries run censuses (sometimes badly) and use births/deaths/migration accounting to update totals. Calling them “fake” is misleading — it’s uneven data quality, not numerology. “Large uncertainty” ≠ “no idea.”
by pantalaimon | 2026-01-29 15:23:35+00:00
lame, with GOES-18 you can just download the latest full disk image in real time.
Makes for a nifty desktop background when combined with a systemd user timer that fetches the current picture of the earth every 15 minutes.

https://www.goes-r.gov/multimedia/dataAndImageryImagesGoes-1...
by Havoc | 2026-01-29 15:23:45+00:00
> there are countless opportunities for valuable revenue-generating products that aren't based on dopamine addiction and/or ad tech.

Perhaps a bit of a hot take but I’d be inclined to disagree. The boom in big tech is I think almost exclusive driven by dopamine, brain rot and ad tech either directly or indirectly. Meta and Google - almost entirely ad funded. Netflix - binge watching and they’re trying hard to force more ads in. Apple makes the black rectangle to watch the content and ads - without the iPhone 1 doomscrolling wouldn’t be a thing. Amazon runs an ad empire, produces video content for binge watching and has a store designed to maximise consumerism and retail therapy.

Even the portions that are more infra like AWS - I’d bet a large portion of that fulfilling demand by things that are part of the attention/dopamine economy. All those TikTok dances aren’t served off a raspberry pi.

Don’t get me wrong not trying to discount tech as not having genuine ethical value or opportunities not existing. But the explosive growth seen in tech over past 20 years specifically is I think almost exclusively driven by adtech and attention economy.

And if that reaches saturation either this changes tracks to similar on AI or the growth plateaus. Other value creation certainly exists and is valid but I don’t see it filling the shoes of adtech.

Google and meta indirectly acknowledged the problem years ago already with their balloons over Africa to connect more eyeballs to the internet plan. If you can’t force feed more ads to current user base then you need more users. It’s telling I think that a wild plan like balloons in Africa was the plan selected, rather than going for the countless other valuable opportunities as you say. Speaks to the relative profitability
by kwanbix | 2026-01-29 15:23:46+00:00
All Windows OSes improve with time, so that point is moot.

> You're also comparing the usage of an OS which was rebranded after 2.5 years, with the peak reached years later by OSes that kept their name for longer. After 2.5-3 years XP had ~40% and Win7 ~45%, better but far from the peak numbers you wave. If MS kept the Vista name Win7 might as well have been Vista SP2/3, and people would have upgraded just like they always did. But between the bad image and antitrust lawsuits based on promises MS made linked to the Vista name, they rebranded.

With that line of reasoning, it's very hard to have a productive discussion. By that logic, one could just as well say that Windows 10 is simply "Windows Vista SP15".

If Vista had really been as successful and great as you claim, why didn't Microsoft just keep iterating on it? Why didn't they continue releasing service packs instead of effectively replacing it? If it was "great", that would have been the obvious path.

And again, the numbers support my argument, not yours. Vista remains the least adopted and least liked Windows version by market share. By far.
by postsantum | 2026-01-29 15:23:48+00:00
Link is dead but I think the population number of DRC (Congo) can't be right

Look at the size of the country (around 1/3 of USA) and the number of people living there (112M according to wikipedia), also 1/3 of USA. So the density should be about the same but when you look at satellite photos it's one giant city (18M), several smaller cities and the endless forest. Can it support other 90M people?
by mikestew | 2026-01-29 15:24:15+00:00
A high-level athlete doesn’t need to see a sports doctor. Why is that?

If one wishes to observe “begging the question” in the true definition of the phrase, there ya go. Many high-level runners struggle with constant injury. And those are the ones you’ve heard of. The ones you haven’t heard of? They couldn’t stay healthy at the level of training required. At high levels, athletes are pushing themselves right up to the brink of injury, and hopefully not past that point. It’s an otherwise okay article, but that sentence is a swing and a miss.
by rsync | 2026-01-29 15:24:17+00:00
“I always wonder why those robots have to be humanoid.“

You are correct to wonder this and almost every use case for a robot will be optimized to a non-human form factor.

Certainly there are tasks - like BJJ training partner - that require a human form factor. Almost everything else, including general, purpose, helper, robot, will be cheaper and more extensible in a non-human form factor.

One of your children remarked that nature has experimented with form factors and humans have won… To which I would point out that the upright, bipedal, form factor arose from the limits of oxygen processing, and heat dissipation… Neither limitation will be encountered in the same way with a robot…

… or perhaps I would point out that nature has, indeed, experimented with form factors and ants won - by a very large margin.
by jmyeet | 2026-01-29 15:24:28+00:00
I love stories like this because there are still allegedly tech-savvy people who will insist that AIs don't lie, don't hallucinate and rarely if ever make errors.

At the end of the day, LLMs are a statistical approximation or projection.

A good example of this is how LLMs struggle with multiplication, particularly multipolcation of large numbers. It's not just that they make mistakes but the nature of the results.

Tell ChatGPT to multiply 129348723423 and 2987892342424 and it'll probably get it wrong because nowhere on Reddit is that exact question for it to copy. But what's interesting is it'll tend to get the first and large digits correct (more often than not) but the middle is just noise.

Someone will probably say "this is a solved problem" because somebody, somewhere has added this capability to a given LLM but these kinds of edge cases I think will constantly expose the fundamental limits of transformers, just like the famous "how many r's in strawberry?" example that di the rounds.

All this comes up when you tell LLMs to write legal briefs. They completely make up a precedent because they learn what a precedent looks like and generate something similar. Lawyers have been caught submitting fake precedents in court filings due to this.
by zadkey | 2026-01-29 15:24:35+00:00
I don't trust China's population numbers at all.
Officially before the one child policy they were at 800 million.
After 30 years of 1 child policy somehow they were at 1.2 billion.
The math isn't mathing. How do you have explosive population growth when birth control is brutally enforced?

The official fertility rates for that period was 1.3. For reference: 2.1 is the replacement rate.

If anything their total population went down during one child policy.
by somenameforme | 2026-01-29 15:25:11+00:00
There's a great analog with this in chess as well.

~1200 - omg chess is so amazing and hard. this is great.

~1500 - i'm really starting to get it! i can beat most people i know easily. i love studying this complex game!

~1800 - this game really isn't that hard. i can beat most people at the club without trying. really I think the only thing separating me from Kasparov is just a lot of opening prep and study

~2300 - omg this game is so friggin hard. 2600s are on an entirely different plane, let alone a Kasparov or a Carlsen.

Magnus Carlsen - "Wow, I really have no understanding of chess." - Said without irony after playing some game and going over it with a computer on stream. A fairly frequent happening.
by cbolton | 2026-01-29 15:25:19+00:00
Yeah there's no reason it should be a linear function, but it's a moot point anyway until we define what it would mean to have "X times more abilities".

My point is that having tycoons with 1,000,000 times the wealth of the median person is not a fair distribution, no matter which reasonable function you choose.

If you think superficially of "fair" like in a game, then yes a winner-take-all system can be fair. But when talking about socioeconomics, I think fairness goes a bit deeper. For example I would say a society with a lottery that picks one winner and tortures all others is not fair to those who lose (even though it's game-fair).
by webdevver | 2026-01-29 15:25:40+00:00
well, the split is both ways. lets not forget that depite a lot of talk and wish-casting, the EU is still largely impotent. I know for sure that I am envious of my colleagues in the US. but europe? hmm...

regarding the Russian kleptocrat situation, you can't knock London for having a Profitable Business Arrangement. The biggest enemy of any Russian oligarch are other Russian oligarchs. it makes sense then, to keep your dragon hoard where none of them can touch it (possibly not even you!)

ofcourse it becomes even funnier when all of them get the same idea, converging on the same optimal strategy...

indeed any and all mafiosos are welcome to safeguard their assets in London banks (for a price, and not neccesarily monetary.) whatever happened to the venezuelan gold? if that then serves to subsidize the rest of the UK ordinary citizenry, hey, you could say the UK in the business of karmic repayment.
by rpdillon | 2026-01-29 15:26:06+00:00
Just to ground the discussion in Apple's criminal behavior a bit, here's some excerpts from a 2025 ruling about Apple's behavior in this regard:

> Apple’s response to the Injunction strains credulity. After two sets of evidentiary hearings, the truth emerged. Apple, despite knowing its obligations thereunder, thwarted the Injunction’s goals, and continued its anticompetitive conduct solely to maintain its revenue stream. Remarkably, Apple believed that this Court would not see through its obvious cover-up (the 2024 evidentiary hearing). To unveil Apple’s actual decision-making process, not the one tailor-made for litigation, the Court ordered production of real-time documents and ultimately held a second set of hearings in 2025.

> To summarize: One, after trial, the Court found that Apple’s 30 percent commission “allowed it to reap supracompetitive operating margins” and was not tied to the value of its intellectual property, and thus, was anticompetitive. Apple’s response: charge a 27 percent commission (again tied to nothing) on off-app purchases, where it had previously charged nothing,and extend the commission for a period of seven days after the consumer linked-out of the app. Apple’s goal: maintain its anticompetitive revenue stream. Two, the Court had prohibited Apple from denying developers the ability to communicate with, and direct consumers to, other purchasing mechanisms. Apple’s response: impose new barriers and new requirements to increase friction and increase breakage rates with full page “scare” screens, static URLs, and generic statements. Apple’s goal: to dissuade customer usage of alternative purchase opportunities and maintain its anticompetitive revenue stream. In the end, Apple sought to maintain a revenue stream worth billions in direct defiance of this Court’s Injunction.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...
by Aurornis | 2026-01-29 15:26:09+00:00
Chris Masterjohn is a noted quack. He takes bits of actual science and research and weaves them together into narratives that make it sound like he has everything figured out with his unique protocols, but it doesn’t hold up to actual scrutiny. People spend years following his ever changing protocols without getting anywhere (beyond placebo effect and a large bill for supplements)

I know I won’t convince the parent commenter but hopefully I can convince other readers not to go down this road or invest any money in anything related to him.
by kube-system | 2026-01-29 15:27:03+00:00
To the extent that millions of customers use them every month to move around NYC. In reading this thread it appears you may have some narrower definition of "compete" than everyone else here.

Typically this word means that the product or service broadly serves same market in some way that overlaps. It isn't typically used so narrowly to imply that the products/services are directly replaceable in all ways.
by usagisushi | 2026-01-29 15:27:12+00:00
Actually, it's the Android 16 Linux Terminal (pKVM) [1], so it's 100% on-device.
Since this is a full VM, unlike Termux, you can run Docker too!
(Though Termux is more stable and lightweight for daily use.)

[1]: https://www.androidauthority.com/android-16-linux-terminal-d...
by 112233 | 2026-01-29 15:27:50+00:00
But why is there no such pushback agains linux kernel? What makes that monolith you cannot customize different enough from systemd? What if I don't want to use in-kernel usb stack, or audit, or key management, or LSM modules, or ELF binfmt support, or filesystems — you are forced by the distro to use all those features. Yet with systemd it's somehow different. I'm genuinely curious
by matthewcford | 2026-01-29 15:28:08+00:00
Once you've done gov procurement, you can easily see why things like this cost this much. This is nothing.

I've heard of large SIs charging millions for discovery work, only for the report to say the budget is not enough to build the project.

Never mind the standards orgs tendering needs to meet (ISO 27001, Cyber Essentials Plus). It's not for the faint-hearted.
by esseph | 2026-01-29 15:28:13+00:00
There are now multiple ones, and they are spreading through more than just ADSBExchange for this attempt.

It is on Airplanes.live ADSB,FI,and TheAirTraffic.com. Isn't on adsb.lol or FlightRadar24.

https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=adfdf8
by BugsJustFindMe | 2026-01-29 15:28:22+00:00
From the Waymo blog...

> the pedestrian suddenly entered the roadway from behind a tall SUV, moving directly into our vehicle's path. Our technology immediately detected the individual as soon as they began to emerge from behind the stopped vehicle. The Waymo Driver braked hard, reducing speed from approximately 17 mph to under 6 mph before contact was made.

> Following contact, the pedestrian stood up immediately, walked to the sidewalk, and we called 911. The vehicle remained stopped, moved to the side of the road, and stayed there until law enforcement cleared the vehicle to leave the scene.

> Following the event, we voluntarily contacted the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) that same day.

I honestly cannot imagine a better outcome or handling of the situation.
by nish__ | 2026-01-29 15:28:45+00:00
I learned recently that one of the killer apps for Scala seems to be in hardware design. Chisel [0] is the core technology of the best open source RISC-V chips. Chipyard [1] is designing leading edge type OOE and AI chips and all of the code is written in Scala. Personally, I can't wait for some of these designs to start being mass produced and put in laptops and phones.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chisel_(programming_language)

[1] https://github.com/ucb-bar/chipyard
by WarmWash | 2026-01-29 15:29:03+00:00
No I hate disinformation that makes people on my side look uninformed and stupid.

On a deeper level, I hate bandwagons because they are invariably full of idiotic parrots.

Elon has done a enough demonstrably stupid and bad shit that we don't need to play deception to drum up resistance. Especially when that deception plays on "government subsides in the green sector have been a colossal waste of money".
by Geee | 2026-01-29 15:29:18+00:00
You might want to take magnesium with Vitamin D, because taking vitamin D depletes magnesium. Not sure if it's strictly necessary, but if you're already low on magnesium it might be an issue. I once got tinnitus (which lasted a few months) when supplementing Vitamin D, the only explanation I've figured is that my magnesium was very low, which can cause tinnitus. Might be something else too, who knows.
by rich_sasha | 2026-01-29 15:29:27+00:00
It's weird. I would say politically, the UK has no aspirations towards authoritarianism. ANPR has been around for ages, but the state can barely enforce road tax payment. The police have no ambitions for a brutalised US style culture. Reform is a bit of an unknown, but even they started making murmurs about how Trump is taking it a bit too far.

And yet undoubtedly the UK keeps introducing these privacy-hostile mechanisms, and it's not even clear what for. There is no obvious reason, not a pragmatic one, not a nefarious one (IMO).
by pton_xd | 2026-01-29 15:29:32+00:00
I had a similar experience with running, including terrible shin splints that took me out for weeks at a time.

I went to a "run clinic" where they observed my gait. I'm paraphrasing here since this was many years ago, but basically they said that my stride was slightly too large and that my knees were behind my feet during the foot strike. My cadence was around 150-155 steps per minute and they suggested increasing it to 170-180, basically meaning my steps would be smaller but more frequent.

I downloaded a metronome app on my phone and set it to 172 to make sure that I maintained the proper rhythm while running. Worked immediately and I never had shin splints again.