MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by catlifeonmars | 2026-02-08 18:30:49+00:00
> As an example, in the UK in 2013 the cost of standard TB treatment was estimated at £5,000 while the cost of treating MDR-TB was estimated to be more than 10 times greater, ranging from £50,000 to £70,000 per case.

I pulled this from Wikipedia. It does not look like TB treatment is “plenty affordable”.

If the issue is with the semantics of the word “cure” that’s not a hill I’ll die on, but can you see how knowing how to cure something and actually curing something are two vastly different things?
by staticassertion | 2026-02-08 18:30:50+00:00
This feels like a series of completely disconnected statements. The underlying theme seems to be that "living" is something that can only be realized by isolating behaviors to those that developed under specific niche conditions that applied pressure to our ancestors, and that this is good, and that deviating is bad. The word "living" and "alive" seems to be a proxy word for something like "happy" or "fulfilled"?

So many hoops to jump through to understand what the hell you're talking about, just to land on what could charitably be called the dumbest thing I'll read today if I'm lucky.
by zer00eyz | 2026-02-08 18:31:23+00:00
> My pet peeve with AI is that it just accelerates whatever has already been automated or can be automated easily ....

> I’m just a frustrated old man I guess.

I think this is a great summary of the failure of vision that a lot of tech people are having right now.

> automate anything that already has an endpoint or whatever

Facebook used to have API's, Reddit used to have API's, amazon used to have API's

They are gone.

Enshitification and dark patterns have taken over.

"Hey open claw, cancel service xxx" where XXX is something that is 17 steps and purposely hard to cancel so they keep your money.

What's going to happen when your AI tool can go to a website and strip the ad's off and return you just the text? What happens when it can build a customized news feed that looks less like Facebook and more like HN? Aren't we just gaining back function we lost with the death of RSS?

Consumers are mad about the hype of AI but the moment that it can cut through the bullshit we keep putting in their way it's going to wreck business MODELS, and the choice will be adapt or die. Start asking your "AI" tools to do all the basic, tedious bullshit tasks that are low risk (you have a ton of them) and if it gets 1/4 of them done your going to free up a ton of your own time.
by ck2 | 2026-02-08 18:32:28+00:00
Studies also show you do NOT need DHA and DHA can be detrimental, you want pure EPA or very high EPA to DHA ratio

if you want the purest Omega3 EPA without all the contaminants that are in OTC supplement nonsense (they are completely unregulated and untested by batch)

ask your doctor for a script of generic VASCEPA

CostPlusDrugs has the cheapest generic Vascepa that I've found

The dose is usually two pills a day but trust me on this, start with one for a long time, it takes your GI a long time to handle it without bathroom urgency

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5282870/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uoQUM30Ess
by mathisfun123 | 2026-02-08 18:33:35+00:00
> What is your point?

Holy Spiderman what is your point? That if someone says something dumb I can never challenge them nor ask them to substantiate/commit?

> tone down the snark

It's amazing to me that the neutral observation "thinking happens in your head" is snarky. Have you ever heard the phrase "tone police"?
by re-thc | 2026-02-08 18:34:06+00:00
> For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long.

That's rewriting history especially in terms of software and hardware.

Appliances like Microwaves, etc were revolutionary for its time. Only problem: they lasted forever (>20 years). No 1 needed to buy it again = no business. It was deliberately not made to last as long and possibly not exactly cheaper both in cost and retail price.

> Software is the same way. Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things.

They don't want to know. They assume it is there. Most people have inherit trust with for example big companies.

> In fact, lots of capitalistic activity is basically a search for the cheapest and fastest way to accomplish a minimum set of requirements.

This is a rewrite of history to. In search? No. More like self create. Was Uber for example searching for the cheapest way? Well, yes, by throwing so much money to have a monopoly. We're currently throwing trillions at AI to find the "cheapest" way. Just like with the dot com era, we might not even recover 1% wasted. Are you sure it is the cheapest?
by djoldman | 2026-02-08 18:35:06+00:00
There is an interesting counter balance to this consumer tendency: the business.

Businesses/organizations in a lot of ways act much more "rationally" than the individual consumer. So you'll see generally better car/truck maintenance in fleets than by consumers.

Then there is a cool feedback/blowoff valve where more expensive + higher quality "pro" tools get discovered by consumers, drive up demand, the price falls, and then the features become common.
by HiPhish | 2026-02-08 18:35:40+00:00
Not sure about this one. I understand the need and the idea behind it is well-intentioned, but I can easily see denouncelists turn into a weapon against wrongthinkers. Said something double-plus-ungood on Twitter? Denounced. Accepted contribution from someone on a prominent denouncelist? Denouced. Not that it was not possible to create such lists before, but it was all informal.

The real problem are reputation-farmers. They open hundreds of low-effort PRs on GitHub in the hope that some of them get merged. This will increase the reputation of their accounts, which they hope will help them stand out when applying for a job. So the solution would be for GitHub to implement a system to punish bad PRs. Here is my idea:

- The owner of a repo can close a PR either neutrally (e.g. an earnest but misguided effort was made), positively (a valuable contribution was made) or negatively (worthless slop)

- Depending on how the PR was closed the reputation rises or drops

- Reputation can only be raised or lowered when interacting with another repo

The last point should prevent brigading, I have to make contact with someone before he can judge me, and he can only judge me once per interaction. People could still farm reputation by making lots of quality PRs, but that's actually a good thing. The only bad way I can see this being gamed is if a bunch of buddies get together and merge each other's garbage PRs, but people can already do that sort of thing. Maybe the reputation should not be a total sum, but per project? Anyway, the idea is for there to be some negative consequences for people opening junk PRs.
by ogig | 2026-02-08 18:36:06+00:00
What timing. I used the whole weekend building a CI agentic workflow where I can let CC run wild with skip-permissions in isolated vms while working async on a gitea repo. I leave the CC instance with a decent sized mission and it will iterate until CI is green and then create a PR for me to merge. I'm moving from talking synchronously to one Clade Code to manage a small group of collaborating Claudes.
by loeg | 2026-02-08 18:37:17+00:00
Nothing in the article really substantiates the headline (currently "The First Sodium-Ion Battery EV IS a Winter Range Monster").

The EV described in the article has a standardized range of 250 miles. This isn't a range monster in any condition. There is some gesturing that Sodium batteries don't require as much active heating in cold conditions. But nothing is quantified.

As usual with sci-tech broadly and batteries specifically: it's exciting that sodium batteries are coming to market; we can be optimistic that maybe in the future they will provide lots of range, or be less expensive, or maybe less flammable than today's lithium batteries. But the marketing hype is running miles ahead of reality.
by runjake | 2026-02-08 18:37:34+00:00
If you have Face ID enabled, you can put your iPhone in hard-lock mode and require a passcode by pressing and holding the side (aka power) button and either of the volume buttons for a couple seconds.

It will pop up an emergency screen, but just tap the power button once more to cancel it.

I'm fortunate to be in a position where I don't attract negative attention from law enforcement, but this is still muscle memory to me.

Edit: You can also do the same thing by quickly pressing the side button alone five times.

Edit 2: mcc1ane beat me while I was editing!
by boston_clone | 2026-02-08 18:37:51+00:00
I like to get my omegas from the following sources, no fish needed!

- hemp hearts (complete protein, goes best with oatmeal for breakfast, on salads, or in soups for an extra bit of nutty / fatty flavor)

- pumpkin seeds (also good source of iron, iirc)

- algae-based supplement (currently taking an omega3 + vit D + vit K combo capsule from nordic naturals)
by belter | 2026-02-08 18:38:14+00:00
>> The next day, the PM of the other team responded with a _screenshot of an AI conversation_ saying the issue was on my end for misusing a standard CLI tool.

You are still on time, to coach a model to create a reply saying the are completely wrong, and send back a print screen of that reply :-)) Bonus points for having the model include disparaging comments...
by jancsika | 2026-02-08 18:39:02+00:00
> Intelligent listeners then correctly infer what the doctor recommends and act accordingly.

I feel like if the author were really committed to this position, they would have stated it in the other direction. I.e., 6% to 20% of these intelligent listeners incorrectly infer that the doctor is conveying information through the framing of the question.

Something like the academic version of dogfooding. :)
by moshest | 2026-02-08 18:39:22+00:00
I got tired of my AI agent hitting rate limits right when I was actually getting work done. I’d be using an MCP server for docs, and suddenly the assistant would start hallucinating old API patterns because the cloud service I was using hit its cap or was lagging.

It felt kind of ridiculous that we’re paying monthly subscriptions and dealing with network latency just to query markdown files. These docs don't change every five minutes—they change per version.

So I spent the last week building a local-first version called Context.

The idea is pretty simple: you "build" a library's docs into a local SQLite file once. From then on, your AI can query it in under 10ms with zero internet.

A few things I realized while building it:

- FTS5 is underrated: Everyone wants to jump straight to Vector DBs and embeddings, but for docs, simple full-text search with BM25 ranking is incredible. I weighted headings higher than body text, and it's been snappier and more accurate for me than the cloud RAG stuff I was using before.

- The "Build Once" approach: Since the output is just a `.db` file, you can actually share it. I’ve started just sending the database file to my teammates so they don't have to clone or index anything themselves.

- Parsing is the hard part: Getting the chunking right - especially stripping out MDX-specific junk and keeping code blocks together—took way more effort than the actual search engine part.

I built the whole thing using Claude Code as a partner. It’s definitely not perfect, but it’s been a massive quality-of-life upgrade for my own workflow.

If you're sick of rate limits or just want your agent to stop lagging, check it out: https://github.com/neuledge/context
by adiabatichottub | 2026-02-08 18:39:41+00:00
If everything is operating correctly then yes it's wonderful. If conditions are poor then you are in for a bad time. There are a lot of things that can cause poor gas quality, often having to do with things like biomass moisture content, mineral content, and material feed. You can get into regimes where pyrolysis and reduction are incomplete and the tar content of the gas is high enough to stick valves and acidify the oil. Gasification is a fickle lover.
by mjr00 | 2026-02-08 18:39:54+00:00
> Leave it to us nerds to try and solve a human problem with a technical solution...

Honestly, my view is that this is a technical solution for a cultural problem. Particularly in the last ~10 years, open source has really been pushed into a "corporate dress rehearsal" culture. All communication is expected to be highly professional. Talk to everyone who opens an issue or PR with the respect you would a coworker. Say nothing that might offend anyone anywhere, keep it PG-13. Even Linus had to pull back on his famously virtiolic responses to shitty code in PRs.

Being open and inclusive is great, but bad actors have really exploited this. The proper response to an obviously AI-generated slop PR should be "fuck off", closing the PR, and banning them from the repo. But maintainers are uncomfortable with doing this directly since it violates the corporate dress rehearsal kayfabe, so vouch is a roundabout way of accomplishing this.
by mrskitch | 2026-02-08 18:40:18+00:00
I enjoyed reading the first few chapters, but wanted a PDF as well. I run browserless.io, so threw a quick script together to PDF-ify this. Gist is here: https://gist.github.com/joelgriffith/0e6a2a774317e845206ca8d....

You can pretty much just create a free plan and run this in our debugger, which will compile the chapters and return PDF. Pretty fun little challenge.
by adeebshihadeh | 2026-02-08 18:41:03+00:00
"Open source has always worked on a system of trust and verify"

Not sure about the trust part. Ideally, you can evaluate the change on its own.

In my experience, I immediately know whether I want to close or merge a PR within a few seconds, and the hard part is writing the response to close it such that they don't come back again with the same stuff.

(I review a lot of PRs for openpilot - https://github.com/commaai/openpilot)
by autoexec | 2026-02-08 18:41:11+00:00
The overall trend is that things are getting much more expensive while the quality is declining. It's inevitable when companies insist on endlessly increasing profits.

Even the things that are "good enough" and cheap tend to come with massive hidden costs. For example, good looking clothing can be inexpensive enough for a person to wear everything once and throw it away, but behind the scenes there are child slaves, microplastics/PFAS contamination, and a textile waste crisis.
by mjevans | 2026-02-08 18:41:17+00:00
Empowering the 'User' (hardware owner) should have always been the focus.

From that mindset what makes sense are hardware vendors including a cache of trusted third party root certificates from known other vendors. Today this would include Microsoft, the same said hardware vendor, probably various respected Linux organizations/groups (Offhand, Linux Foundation, ArchLinux, Debian, IBM/RedHat, Oracle, SUSE, etc), similar for BSD...

Crucially the end user should then be ASKED which to enable. None should be enrolled out of the box. They might also be enabled only for specific things. E.G. HW vendor could be enabled only for new system firmware signatures (load using the existing software) rather than generic UEFI boot targets. The user should also be able to enroll their own CA certs as well; multiple of them. Useful for Organization, Division Unit, and system local signatures.

It would also, really, be nice if UEFI mandated a uniform access API (maybe it does) for local blobs stored in non mass-storage space. This would be a great place to stash things like UEFI drivers for accessing additional types of hardware drivers, OS boot bits + small related files, etc. I would have said 1GB of storage would be more than sufficient for this - however Microsoft has proven that assumption incorrect. Still it'd be nice to have a standard place and a feature that says the system ships with this much reliable secondary storage included (or maybe 1-2 micro-SD card slots, etc).
by MarkMarine | 2026-02-08 18:41:38+00:00
I agree with this analogy, as someone who professionally codes and someone who pulls out the power tools to build things around my house but uses hand tools for furniture and chairs.

No job site would tolerate someone bringing a hand saw to cut rafters when you could use a circular saw, the outcome is what matters. In the same vein, if you’re too sloppy cutting with the circular saw, you’re going to get kicked off the site too. Just keep in mind a home made from dimensional lumber is on the bottom of the precision scale. The software equivalent of a rapper’s website announcing a new album.

There are places where precision matters, building a nuclear power plant, software that runs an airplane or an insulin pump. There will still be a place for the real craftsman.
by rexpop | 2026-02-08 18:41:52+00:00
Most people on earth still live in social and political environments where the core thought experiment of “The Left Hand of Darkness” – a human society without fixed male/female sexes – is not just unfamiliar but fundamentally unintuitive or threatening, which implies the book’s work is far from done.

In most countries, law, bureaucracy, language, and daily life remain built on a binary model of “men” and “women,” from ID documents to restrooms to family law. Surveys show that even where support for protecting transgender people from discrimination is relatively high, recognition of nonbinary identities and comfort with nonbinary social roles remains much weaker and highly contested. For a majority of readers shaped by these institutions, a society like Gethen, where nobody is permanently male or female and where gender roles have never crystallized, is not a recognizable extension of their world; it is a radical negation of how their societies are organized.

Globally, anti‑“gender ideology” movements and laws frame challenges to binary gender as dangerous Western imports, and they coordinate across borders from the US to Eastern Europe to parts of Africa and Asia. In places where same‑sex relationships are criminalized or where public discussion of queerness is suppressed, the premise of ambisexual humans would not just be controversial but literally unspeakable in mainstream forums. Even in regions that are relatively accepting of LGBT+ rights, polls show large minorities resistant to full legal and social recognition for trans and nonbinary people, indicating that the novel’s underlying claim – that gender categories themselves are contingent – remains outside everyday common sense.

Many major languages encode gender in grammar so deeply that even translating a gender‑ambiguous society is difficult, nudging readers back toward familiar male/female categories. This structural bias means that, for a majority of non‑English readers, the book’s attempt to erase stable gender can be partially blunted or reframed, underscoring just how far their linguistic and cultural worlds are from Gethen’s premise.

Research on nonbinary people repeatedly highlights “binary normativity”: the assumption that only two genders exist and are socially real, leading to erasure, misgendering, and lack of legal recognition. That everyday experience maps directly onto what Le Guin tried to imagine away on Gethen, showing that the novel’s central question – what happens to society when the binary disappears – still addresses a world that overwhelmingly cannot yet imagine such a disappearance. If most readers still inhabit strongly binary, often anti‑“gender ideology” cultures, then the book’s themes remain provocations from the margins rather than reflections of the mainstream, and its work of unsettling those assumptions is clearly not finished.
by ilamont | 2026-02-08 18:41:52+00:00
> He recognized how she transcended genre and belongs alongside (or perhaps, above) writers of highbrow literary fiction.

In the 70s and 80s, Le Guin and other SFF authors were very aware of the literary divide that often regarded most science fiction and fantasy as little better than pulp fiction. Gene Wolfe's essays and speeches in Castle of Days touch on this several times.

What changed was the arrival of a new generation of literary critics, researchers, and readers who knew greatness in some of the SFF works of the era.
by boznz | 2026-02-08 18:43:16+00:00
On one particular project from 1995 where the hardware was very cost optimised, the C program compiled to 1800 bytes which meant we could save nearly a dollar by buying micro-controllers with 2KB flash rather than 4KB flash. We manufactured 20,000 units with this cheaper chip. 2 years down the line we needed a simple code change to increase the UART baud rate to the host, a change that should have resulted in the same sized binary, but instead increased it to 2300 bytes due to a newer C compiler. We ended up tweaking the assembly file and running an assembler, then praying there would be no more changes!

I have always over specified the micro-controllers a little from that point, and kept a copy of the original dev environment, luckily all my projects are now EOL as I am retired.
by svara | 2026-02-08 18:43:28+00:00
It's really unclear unfortunately.

The correlative effect is quite clear, i.e people who have high omega 3 levels (eat a lot of fish) have health benefits.

But in random controlled trials Omega 3 supplements have not had convincing effects.

It might be because the supplements aren't very good, or because there's actually something completely different going on, like fish displaces less healthy foods from the diet.
Show HN: AI Cost Board – Track LLM Cost, Requests, and Errors Across Providers
by tkrenn06 | 2026-02-08 18:43:57+00:00
Hi HN,

I just launched AI Cost Board, a small project I built to make multi-provider AI usage easier to operate in production.

It gives you a unified dashboard for:

total spend
token usage
request volume
latency and error rates
What it enables:

one proxy layer for multiple providers
request logs for debugging and visibility
budgets + alerts for cost control
workspace/project structure for teams
pricing + subscription flow for Free/Pro plans
The goal is simple: make AI costs and performance observable in real time, without stitching together multiple tools.

I’d really appreciate feedback on:

product usefulness
onboarding flow
pricing model
missing features you’d expect for production use
Thanks for checking it out.
by Bielefelder | 2026-02-08 18:44:31+00:00
I am a mathematician in retirement. Starting on Friday afternoon, I have investigated problem 6 of the "First Proof" paper. Already yesterday, with the help of ChatGPT and Gemini, I was pretty sure that constant c=1/4 would do the job. And even for the more ambigious c=1/2, if offered a 1:1-bet, I would take the side that claims "c=1/2 works". However, a proof is still not in reach for me. In several random examples with medium size graphs c=1/2 was always fine. So, someone finding a G which requires c < 1/2, would be interesting for me.
by leetbulb | 2026-02-08 18:45:12+00:00
Thank you for adding color. This is the exact reason why I want to get in to management. Sadly, I am just not cut out to manage people. Nowadays, my role is more of a hybrid between Principal and EM, which may be awkward at times. If it weren't for excellent PM & PgM, I'd be stretching myself too thin.
by ahepp | 2026-02-08 18:45:46+00:00
I think you're bringing up a great question here. If you ask a random person on the street "is your laptop fast", the answer probably has more to do with what software that person is running, than what hardware.

My Apple silicon laptop feels super fast because I just open the lid and it's running. That's not because the CPU ran instructions super fast, it's because I can just close the lid and the battery lasts forever.