MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jandrewrogers | 2026-02-11 21:18:53+00:00
I can't speak for the OP but it is well-established that there are significant genetic adaptations to the amount of meat in the diet, or a loss of genetic adaptation for metabolizing some plant staples. This is no different than the genetics that cause significant variation in the ability to metabolize legumes, lactose, alcohol, etc. Local optimizations.

There are ethnic populations that have reduced capacity to efficiently metabolize some plant-based diets due to thousands of years of selection pressure (or lack thereof). A diverse plant-based diet won't kill them, they simply lack the enzymes to have a good experience with it because for thousands of years they had little use for those genes.

It is a relatively small population globally, as it tends to coincide with regions that weren't conducive to supporting large populations thousands of years ago. The current distribution has significant overlap with the developed world though.

I have to imagine that someone with meat-adapted genetics is going to suffer quality of life issues on a purely plant-based diet. Everyone has a set of foods like that.
by Schmerika | 2026-02-11 21:19:03+00:00
> So again, I ask: what is your concrete alternative to Fourth Estate?

Sorry, you think the choice is between people doing their own research or having a 4th estate?

How odd. I don't know if I've ever met anyone with such a binary.

To be as clear as I possibly can, though I did already answer this: doing your own research and having actual journalism exist are not mutually exclusive things. They go very well together.

However, as the quality of media falls, the necessity to do your own research to get an accurate worldview increases.
by ecshafer | 2026-02-11 21:19:04+00:00
Feynman's ability to give an off the cuff lecture is astounding and probably an area where he is world class. I think of the one recorded interview with him, and his shockingly deep answers to simple questions that were off the cuff. His response to "why do magnets push/pull eachother" and what the issue is with asking "why" requires a lot of introspection is stellar.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-11 21:19:12+00:00
> Why wouldn't those same techniques be useful for more general object tracking?

These demos use machine learning to train against a known environment.

Basically, pattern matching changes in the signals against a very controlled set of training data.

You can use WiFi signals to detect that something is changing in the environment, but without the machine learning with controlled input data you don't know what it actually means. This is how WiFi presence detection works, but it won't tell you if it's a person moving through the house or your cat walked in front of the router.
by bhouston | 2026-02-11 21:19:35+00:00
Your statement is ignoring the systematic growing inequality in the US between the ultra wealthy and everyone else. And the use of those funds to influence politics (because of Citizens United, etc) to create polices that benefit themselves - it is for the ultra wealthy a virtuous circle:

https://inequality.org/facts/wealth-inequality/

This is not a normal state of affairs.
by the__alchemist | 2026-02-11 21:19:37+00:00
Hey... I have been experimenting with Claude for a few days, and am not thrilled with it compared to web chatbots. I suspect this is partly me being new and unskilled with it, but this is a general summary.

ChatGPT or Gemini: I ask it what I wish to do, and show it the relevant code. It gives me a often-correct answer, and I paste it into my program.

Claude: I do the same, and it spends a lot of time thinking. When I check the window for the result, it's stalled with a question... asking to access a project or file that has nothing to do with the problem, and I didn't ask it to look for. Repeat several times until it solves the problem, or I give up with the questions.
by filoeleven | 2026-02-11 21:19:39+00:00
The government is failing to control the problem because it got bought out by the capitalists who run the companies that continue to cause the damage. The law in the US explicitly allows this, though it's "decent" enough to hide it in a paper bag.

It's certainly a governance failure, but I'm not sure what the fix for it is, and I don't see how capitalism gets off scot-free.
by rbanffy | 2026-02-11 21:19:50+00:00
As a member of a prominent Transylvanian family, I am appalled, and profoundly offended, by the idea of someone even as much as suspecting Peter Thiel could be a vampire. He might be an evil bloodsucking parasite, but he lacks the sophistication mortals have come to associate with vampires over the centuries. It's shocking, really, that some people might confuse him with one.
by FarmerPotato | 2026-02-11 21:19:51+00:00
iOS also flickers every time I exit an app back to the Home Screen.

Weird green tints for no reason.. bubbles that take so long to inflate, you think your tap was dropped. Round edges that no longer fit the text content. Stupid ellipses at the edges of wrapped text. And all the functions that now take two taps when one used to do it. Text rendered on top of text for crying out loud! Whole view panes clobberin* each other. WebKit is a mess of wasted black bars where menus were hidden. Multiple flashes of white and black between content changes. It hits Apple apps as well as trashing third party layout.

Too many defects to list.

Headline:
Apple celebrates 50th anniversary by burning down 40 years of human interface knowledge.
by hinkley | 2026-02-11 21:20:00+00:00
Something often left out of fiction about war is how easily a moving army can overwhelm a local ecosystem, particularly if its supply lines sag. You might not even be their target, and yet you will be pillaged. No more easy hunting for you for years. No more quick trips for firewood, or tinder.

It stands to reason that if an occupying force doesn’t stay long in an area, and its animals die along the way, that the now destitute locals will take the “road kill” and scrounge every possible calorie from it. And marrow was a dish rather than something for soup stock up until the modern era. The Illiad basically won’t shut up about it.

So I have no doubt that every dead elephant anyone could find was 100% rendered down into food and leather by the beleaguered locals. And probably every cousin from one village over got told about the find too. (I suspect elephant leather would make amazing peasant shoes)
by RupertSalt | 2026-02-11 21:20:28+00:00
Well this is weird.

You talk about me, my, mine, my network, my computer. But you're promoting a "distro". That means you're distributing software. It's not yours anymore.

Attackers on a network will use techniques to "pivot". Once a "foothold" is established then they scan for other places to attack. They will indeed get inside "your" computer, or router, and then compromise your telnetd.

It comes back to the liberty of swinging your arms vs. the proximity to my nose. If your distro is connected to a network, then you're responsible and accountable for security issues that result. There are thousands of distro kiddies sending out their favorite flavor of Linux, but how many audited it like Theo de Raadt?

You don't seem to understand the CVE under discussion. It doesn't even affect telnet(1). Practically nobody runs telnetd(8) anymore since the introduction of encryption, ssh, and the like. MUD players use MUD clients. Network admins use nc(1). The reason "telnet" was deprecated is: it's just not really useful anymore without its complementary service. telnet(1) isn't inherently dangerous, it's just superfluous, and distros pretty much evaluated that it wasn't worth hanging on to.

As for "traceroute", I'm not sure it's "useless or dangerous", but it can be misleading and definitely superfluous. It is widely misinterpreted by novices trying to prove something about their WAN connectivity. It misrepresents network topology and doesn't work real good with modern equipment or protocols. It was a judicious decision to bundle it with network debugging tools, because not everyone needs to debug networks. Especially the ones who believe that they can.

I would say that any network debugging tool available is also useful to your attackers with a foothold. A "living off the land" attack will leverage your telnet client, will run traceroutes on your network, and they will use all the software cruft that you didn't uninstall! I am pretty sure there are distros that simply don't come with development environments, C compilers, or various interpreters anymore, and it is for this reason: they are not inherently insecure or vulnerable, but "living off the land" will weaponize them every time.

However, I must concede that your temperament and tone is well-suited to being a distro administrator. You remind me of Linus Torvalds vs. Andrew Tanenbaum, or Theo de Raadt vs. FreeBSD. Perhaps Scott Adams vs. the world. Carry on, good sir.
by yongjik | 2026-02-11 21:20:43+00:00
If you are a US citizen, voting Trump out might be unironically the most significant decision your country could make for the next 100 years of mankind.

Not because the alternative is so great, but because Trump is so horrible that it's not even a question. We really don't need someone who doesn't even acknowledge climate change in charge of the world's biggest economy.
by Animats | 2026-02-11 21:20:46+00:00
They don't have a lost-kid feature?

In China, kids are accustomed to face recognition early.[1] The kids are checking into school via fare gates with face recognition.
Here's an ad for Hikvision surveillance systems showing the whole system.[2]
Hikvision has a whole series of videos presenting their concept of a kindly, gentler Big Brother. This is probably the most amusing.[3]

Amazon's concept is in some ways more powerful. They don't need full coverage. Just sparse, but widespread coverage. Anything that moves around will pass through the view of cameras at some point.
Suspicious behavior can be detected in the back end cloud processing, which improves over time.

Flock has the same concept. Flock coverage is sparse in terms of area, but widespread.

"1984" was so last cen.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SMKG8aLTJ38

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnHFJz-u85A

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otAuH6FDhgw
by stickfigure | 2026-02-11 21:21:02+00:00
It sounds like you're looking for the field of psychology. And like the field of psychology, any predictive abstraction around systems this complicated will be tenuous, statistical, and full of bad science.

You may never get a scientific answer to "how should I prompt the model to achieve <x>", just like you may never get a capital-S scientific answer to "how should I convince people to do X". What would it even mean to "understand people" like this?

You demand too much.
by maybelsyrup | 2026-02-11 21:21:02+00:00
Yes, I know it's a Saudi quote. They're also far right. They're bosom buddies with the same right-wing (Democratic) and far-right (Republican) US economic and governmental elites for decades. I don't think anyone would dispute this. In fact, it's so humdrum a set of facts that I think the burden would be on someone else to show that "no, actually, US elites are not into the whole 'every molecule of hydrocarbon' thing". But their behavior doesn't indicate that they disagree.

It's thus, yes, the correct impression for readers.
by Ashutosh0019 | 2026-02-11 21:21:50+00:00
Location: Remote (IST timezone, flexible hours for US/EU overlap)
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No (open to short visits)
Technologies: React, Next.js, NestJS, TypeScript, Python, PostgreSQL, Tesseract.js (OCR), REST APIs
Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lOrmYQZjewD8l6xQN-Nx5mSgyoe...
Email: ashutoshpandey23june2005@gmail.com
Portfolio: portfolio-phi-red-69.vercel.app
GitHub: github.com/ashutoshpandey18

Hi HN,

I'm Ashutosh, a full-stack engineer looking for early-stage opportunities (founding engineer / first technical hire preferred).

What I've shipped:
- Email SaaS with Tesseract.js OCR that extracts data from ID cards at 85% accuracy—cut processing from 15 min to 30 sec. Handled edge cases (blurry/rotated/weird fonts).
- When Railway killed SMTP mid-launch, rebuilt entire delivery pipeline with Brevo API + retries over a weekend—98% success, zero downtime since.
- Voice AI booking system handling 800+ reservations with custom NLP (95% accuracy).
- Real estate platform serving 300+ users—optimized DB queries by 75%.

I ship fast, own features end-to-end (UI → backend → integrations), and thrive in high-ownership remote environments. Excited about AI agents, document processing, workflows, data extraction, or anything that needs reliable systems built quickly.

Looking for: Remote pre-seed/seed roles where I can make founding-level impact.

DMs open or email me directly.

Ashutosh
by femiagbabiaka | 2026-02-11 21:22:34+00:00
This is an underrated point because the U.S. failure to rein in the excesses of the ultra-wealthy is not just impacting our domestic politics but actually the politics of every country on earth. Imagine if Jack Ma had eventually personally intervened in U.S. congressional elections? That's pretty much exactly what U.S. oligarchs do to other countries regularly.
by mym1990 | 2026-02-11 21:23:11+00:00
There will most definitely be much more of it, maybe machines are doing this on purpose to increase dependency on them haha. Ultimately, wagging a finger at someone will have no outcome, allowing someone to make real mistakes while vibe coding will be a much better learning experience. Someone that drops a prod database using Claude will have a very lasting memory of that(not saying that should be the goal, critical thinking obviously matters A LOT). Cars didn't used to have seatbelts, a lot of people died, then they got seatbelts and now the world is a better place.
by robocat | 2026-02-11 21:23:15+00:00
The issue is what to do about aging demographics?

My few paragraphs or your few paragraphs can only encompass trite answers.

There is no obviously good solution. We can only hope our glorious leaders find good compromises.

I am mostly trying to suggest you look at how different countries manage (positively and negatively) their "demographic time bomb".

It is unclear whether immigration is a strongly beneficial solution since it does cause friction.

> Australians online > same sentiments

Please take care with your arguments because anecdotal evidence generalises poorly (especially for topics that are common in echo chambers - it is difficult to avoid ones own biases).

It is clear that immigration is broadly unpopular. The question is whether the rewards are worth the risks?

https://www.amp.com.au/resources/insights-hub/the-economics-...

Immigration is an economic response to aging demographics. It is a very imperfect response.

> Japan

"South Korea is over" is a response to that: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk

I predict Australia and particularly New Zealand will continue to use immigration to help their economies, despite pitfalls.

I don't feel confident to predict anything about the US. The government there (either party) continues to surprise me with its recklessness; however systematically it surprises me with its resilience.

Last year I was in New Orleans for a month and as an in person snapshot I saw a lot of negative signals for the future.

I try to care about economics as a topic because for retirement investment I kinda have to invest overseas. However, this year I've withdrawn from the US stock market (later I will learn if that was a mistake).

Your link is irrelevant because (a) New Zealand already has that specific problem in spades - it isn't a scare tactic here, and (b) while it is difficult to find unbiased links - you can try to avoid obviously biased links
by smcleod | 2026-02-11 21:23:31+00:00
> That’s it. “Read 3 files.” Which files? Doesn’t matter.

It doesn't say "Read 3 files." though - it says "Read 3 files (ctrl+o to expand)" and you press ctrl+o and it expands the output to give you the detail.

It's a really useful feature to increase the signal to noise ratio where it's usually safe to do so.

I suspect the author simply needs to enable verbose mode output.
by vardalab | 2026-02-11 21:23:55+00:00
This is really just a meme. People don't know how to use these tools.

Here is the response from Gpt-5.2 using my default custom instructions in the mac desktop app.

OBJECTIVE: Decide whether to drive or walk to a car wash ~50 meters from home, given typical constraints (car must be present for wash).

APPROACH: Use common car-wash workflows + short-distance driving considerations (warm engine, time, parking/queue). No web sources needed (stable, local decision).

OUTPUT:
• Default choice: Drive.
A car wash generally requires the car on-site, and 50 meters of driving is trivial.
• When walking makes sense:
• You’re going to drop the car off (hand-wash/detail) and pick it up later.
• You want to avoid moving the car now (ice, tight parking, you’ve been drinking, etc.) and someone else will handle the car.
• Micro-guidance:
• If it’s an automatic wash you stay in, drive.
• If it’s detail/hand wash with a wait, drive there, then walk home (or just wait).

CONFIDENCE: 92/100
Assumptions: It’s a normal car wash that requires your car to be there; conditions are safe to drive 50 meters.
by RC_ITR | 2026-02-11 21:23:55+00:00
The bird not having wings, but all of us calling it a 'solid bird' is one of the most telling examples of the AI expectations gap yet. We even see its own reasoning say it needs 'webbed feet' which are nowhere to be found in the image.

This pattern of considering 90% accuracy (like the level we've seemingly we've stalled out on for the MMLU and AIME) to be 'solved' is really concerning for me.

AGI has to be 100% right 100% of the time to be AGI and we aren't being tough enough on these systems in our evaluations. We're moving on to new and impressive tasks toward some imagined AGI goal without even trying to find out if we can make true Artificial Niche Intelligence.
by b-man | 2026-02-11 21:23:57+00:00
Location: EST Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes (US preferred)

Technologies: PostgreSQL (partitioning, performance, OLTP architecture), SQL, F#, C#, C, Java, Clojure, Common Lisp, Scheme, Emacs Lisp, Python, Ruby, AWS, Linux

Email: ebellani at gmail

I work on high-throughput PostgreSQL systems, especially when they’ve grown into a state where migrations, performance, or schema design have become limiting factors.

Recent work:

Re-architected two multi-terabyte OLTP tables (~2TB and ~1TB) receiving 200+ writes/sec. I focus on “rescue architecture” work: fixing dangerous schemas, stabilizing hot paths, removing app-level complexity, and making Postgres scale without rewriting the product.

Open to consulting or full-time roles where Postgres is core to the business and performance/architecture matters.

Résumé: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eduardo-bellani/ https://ebellani.github.io/
by CGMthrowaway | 2026-02-11 21:24:00+00:00
Where does the chain end? I burn diesel in my tractor to harvest corn. Should the feedlot that buys my corn pay for the tractor’s emissions? Should the slaughterhouse that processes the cattle pay? Should the supermarket that stocks the beef pay? Should the family who grills the steak on Sunday pay? Or just the one who eats the largest portion?
by derefr | 2026-02-11 21:24:08+00:00
A-frames are often used in snowy climates as a vacation home, park ranger patrol station, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilderness_hut. Such buildings are un-lived-in for much of the year, if not "indefinitely until needed." The building needs to survive, not being crushed by snow, without any human supervision.

As TFA emphasizes, grid electricity is unstable in rural places in winter; which means that even if such a building were able to be grid-connected (often not), and even if the building's owner was willing to spend electricity heating the building year-round in their absence (almost certainly not), the building would be likely to lose electricity at the worst possible moment: when there's tons of snow piling up and no humans there to shovel it.
by nix0n | 2026-02-11 21:24:10+00:00
> people who have never used the product and don't think like or accurately represent our users

I agree completely that these are the important qualifications to be setting direction for a product.

> Find your most socially competent engineer, and have them talk to users a couple times a month.

This doesn't necessarily follow from the above, but in Anthropic's case specifically, where the users are software engineers, it probably would have worked better than whatever they have going on now.

In general, it's probably better to have domain experts doing product management, as opposed to someone who is trained in product management.
by throw310822 | 2026-02-11 21:24:13+00:00
> if you drive the most energy inefficient truck ever produced

Sorry, but how was that truck produced? Where did the energy to make it come from? How was your home built, where did the energy come from? Where did the materials come from? How did the workers come to the job? What did they eat, and what do you eat? Do you go to an office? How was it built? How do you and your colleagues get there? Do your children go to school? Do you go to hospitals when you're sick? Etc.
by Der_Einzige | 2026-02-11 21:24:29+00:00
Skyrim is one of the most over-rated games of all time. Dark Messiah Might and Magic did everything except music and exploration/scale better, and I mean a LOT better. It's from 2006.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p3zj0YKKYE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeRUHzYJwNE
by rimunroe | 2026-02-11 21:24:40+00:00
No worries! That makes sense. I got tripped up by "just came up with the unique arguments [...] and gave the lectures" and "Leighton and Sands [did] most of the work of knitting it into a cohesive, coherent book". It felt like glossing over the degree to which the books' contents match the words he spoke.

> Yes, this is one of the areas of significant challenges in reproduction.

I feel this deeply. I'm very slow at writing by hand and have trouble paying attention to what someone's saying if I'm also trying to simultaneously summarize it. In college I solved this by becoming very, very swift with LaTeX. My pure math notes were easiest, but I struggled with physics notes the most. I settled on a middle ground of learning TikZ and making a bunch of LaTeX macros for common stuff. This did well enough for most simple diagrams. I'd fall back to hand-copying more complicated ones and just typing the text. I'd either scan the drawings afterward and add annotations as needed or convert fully into LaTeX. Converting these hand-drawn ones into LaTeX was a ton of work. After doing this for a short bit, I realized that I was remembering the more complicated diagrams better than the easier ones. I figured out that being able to take almost verbatim notes easily wasn't making me absorb the material at all, so I started spending more time afterward tidying everything up to make things stick a bit better.

> Even more impressive is what the Goodsteins did with the "Lost Lecture" to recreate the figures from just a few pages of surviving notes that looked like this: https://i.imgur.com/zQessy9.png

That's really cool. That note looks about as inscrutable as the ones I have from when I was being taught a crash course in QCD.
by notahacker | 2026-02-11 21:24:42+00:00
I think the key difference between the Taliban and the cartels is that the Taliban were a bunch of ideologues who actually enjoyed being an insurgency and living under siege in caves, with making money from the drugs trade being a mere means to their real purpose of fighting infidels, whereas the cartel leadership sees wealth and power from controlling the drugs trade as an end, crushing local rivals as a means, and would really rather avoid the sort of conflict that's bad for their medium term business prospects.

I mean, some sort of cartels would bounce back after any "war on drugs" because supply and demand, but the people running them aren't hankering for martyrdom or glory over consolidating their territory and accumulating.