MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by analog31 | 2026-02-01 03:53:54+00:00
High capacitance, low voltage. Computers were somewhat unusual at the time in terms of requiring a lot of current at 5 Volts. The line frequency power supplies were inefficient enough even under optimal circumstances. I've seen some giant transformers from minicomputers of the day. And those huge blue capacitors the size of beer cans.

Apple II was one of the early PC's that used a switching power supply, and it wasn't particularly reliable. I worked at an Apple repair facility, and we replaced a lot of them. But our most common repairs were due to the huge number of chip sockets and low quality gold fingers on the disk controller board edge connector. We were a government agency (county run facility serving a bunch of semi rural school districts) and didn't charge a bench fee. If we could fix it on the spot by just pressing all of the chips back into their sockets, the repair was free and we didn't even log it.
by geraldog | 2026-02-01 03:56:05+00:00
The risk for Central Banks holding their own bullion is low, away from the almighty Dollar, and Gold has never ceased to hold value, while Silver is actually useful but seriously overbought.

We're actually paying a premium for risk-averseness in the very nature of Gold, an asset that produces no dividends other than holding its own intrinsic value.

This time the bullish-on-Gold news outlets are right: there are fundamentals driving the madness that is the Market.

Something about Japanese rice futures candlestick school of days past predicting sell-off after 8 to 10 sucessive record highs...

Summing it up, the volatility specially of Gold (Silver is a bubble may I remind you) doesn't discount the possibility of an overall upward trend of years for Gold and a respectable USD$4000 for the spot troy ounce does not seem crazy at all, as momentum builds for regime change in Iran.

It's a plain analysis. Trump may not TACO on this and after hell on Earth is unleashed, Gold will actually see action to unprecedented levels. Maybe. Maybe not, but USD$4000? I doubt very much it would break through that support level.
by dgacmu | 2026-02-01 03:58:07+00:00
It really is eradicated - it's the only human disease we've truly eradicated. There are literally no more cases of smallpox in the wild, period.

The problem is that there are samples of viable virus in the labs of the US and Russia. So - it's eradicated but we have to keep stockpiles of vaccine around anyway. But nobody gets vaccined for it any more; it has an unfavorable risk-benefit ratio when the virus simply does not circulate. Smallpox kills ~30% of people who get infected with it; the first-generation vaccine had a mortality rate of about 1 in 1,000,000.

(There are newer-generation vaccines developed and being developed that have an even better safety profile but we still wouldn't use them because the cost - the literal cost and the side effects and general "meh, why get another shot?"-ness outweighs the benefit of protection against something you don't need protection against.)
by jabwd | 2026-02-01 04:02:03+00:00
I'm sorry but what exactly are you doing? This is the first time I've ever heard any of this type of reasoning, and well, the fact that you're using AI makes me think you have no clue what you're actually talking about.

If its a reference cycle, instruments will find it. If it is a leak, instruments will find it. However, you seem to be worried about an implementation detail on how you get memory from your CPU which the mach kernel handles for you, and is something you don't quite grasp.

please don't reply with "I asked stupid generator", seriously, what is the actual issue you have?
by its_ubuntu | 2026-02-01 04:02:08+00:00
Screen tearing is due to single buffering. Double buffering fixes that. It's easily enabled. This is basic stuff.

Now thanks to Wayland you have increased latency on top of the screen tearing "fix." Plus all the other Wayland irritations and problems that we've been hearing about for decades (plural) even as we're told the whole time X11 is obsolete. lol.

Damn it feels good not being a 24/7/365 alpha tester of other people's shitware.

Enjoy reinventing the wheel, badly, over and over again.
by zahlman | 2026-02-01 04:02:48+00:00
> And it terrifies me that others aren’t quite as objective.

I have been reminded constantly throughout this that a very large fraction of people are easily impressed by such prose. Skill at detecting AI output (in any given endeavour), I think, correlates with skill at valuing the same kind of work generally.

Put more bluntly: slop is slop, and it has been with us for far longer than AI.
by m0llusk | 2026-02-01 04:04:19+00:00
You seem to be working from base principles without consulting the literature.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28991040/
Conclusions: Low muscle strength was independently associated with elevated risk of all-cause mortality, regardless of muscle mass, metabolic syndrome, ...

https://www.amjmed.com/article/s0002-9343(14)00138-7/fulltex...
Muscle mass is associated inversely with mortality risk in older adults independently of fat mass and cardiovascular and metabolic risk factors

And specifically GLP-1 usage is associated with significant loss of lean mass:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38937282/
In some studies, reductions in lean mass range between 40% and 60% as a proportion of total weight lost ...

This might be a good start. There is quite a bit of material here and as might be expected much of it is fairly recent and gets a lot of this kind of skinny equals long life feedback that isn't strongly supported by clinical data.
by nickthegreek | 2026-02-01 04:04:20+00:00
It’s a single app. several are open source. I recommend flauncher. Once again, you are overly complicating a process that you do not know and are arguing from a point of ignorance. As you point out, it’s a 10 year old platform. It’s very stable and known. I am done trying to let you see what you are not interested in.
by bossyTeacher | 2026-02-01 04:04:53+00:00
> Ex-WhatsApp engineer here. WhatsApp team makes so much effort to make this end to end encrypted messages possible. From the time I worked I know for sure it is not possible to read the encrypted messages.

None of this makes the point you want to make. Being a former engineer. The team making "so much effort". You "knowing for sure". Like many in security, a single hole is all it takes for your privacy to pour out of your metaphorical bag of sand.
by GCUMstlyHarmls | 2026-02-01 04:05:43+00:00
I use old.reddit on my desktop, new.reddit on my phone and new.reddit is constantly mashing in posts from a more niche "my-country" sub (eg: not the "main" /r/country) that's often got very baity posts (eg: guised "does anyone else hate immigrants??" posts).

Same account, same behaviour, but the new site is really pushing "gross" stuff at me.
by skissane | 2026-02-01 04:06:25+00:00
US obesity rates are around 40% of population.
Australia, Canada, UK, it is around 30% of population.
Canadian life expectancy is 3-4 years higher on average.
UK around 3 years higher on average.
Australia around 4-5 years higher

Does the gap in obesity rates fully explain the difference in life expectancy? Or are there other factors at play?

I don't think it actually does, because UK has lower obesity rates than Australia (26-29% versus 32%), yet also lower life expectancy (Australia is 81.1 male, 85.1 female; UK is 78.8 male, 82.8 female)
by dang | 2026-02-01 04:07:28+00:00
Let's assume you're right that going into details is redundant. In that case, however, so is the generic putdown.

Put differently: even if you don't owe megacorps that don't follow basic human decency better, you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Show HN: Licobox – Container runtime with Docker Engine on a macOS
by yunusefendi52 | 2026-02-01 04:07:39+00:00
Hi HN, I've been working on optimizing Docker Engine running on macOS. I know there are some free and open-source like Colima, but I've wanted to make it better.

So it has:
- Fast startup time, around 2-3 seconds on M3 Air
- Minimal idle CPU usage with dynamic memory usage
- Container debugging, built-in tools without modifying image
- Desktop app to manage containers

Currently it’s still in alpha, focusing on getting feedback and stabilizing performance.

Regarding the dynamic memory usage, if you found an issue related to memory like memory corruption, please do reach out. I've been testing this for months and has no issue so far.

In the future I might add feature to run linux or kubernetes.

Thank you. I hope you have a chance to try it out.
by bruce511 | 2026-02-01 04:08:25+00:00
I'll add that for small projects, (and I suppose large ones) it's also a "unwelcome" task. Kinda like docs is.

Open Source projects are typically done by people who like coding. Writing docs, reviewing PRs, "management" are all chores, not fun parts of the project.

I manage a couple of projects that get submissions. Handling that is really not the fun part of my day. Fortunately I get very few. I can understand why ones that get a lot see it as a burden, not as the great gift the submitter thinks it is.

Personally I don't want to spend hours each day reviewing PRs. That's not what I signed up for.
by nate_meurer | 2026-02-01 04:08:39+00:00
I appreciate it. My comment must have angered the mods because it got flagged and deleted. In case anyone want to see what I wrote, here it is:

---

It's true, the Democratic party found themselves in a bit of a pickle during the 2024 election. But it's because the party has been obsessed with the trans culture war for over a decade, culminating in the Biden admin's demands that all womens' spaces be opened up to men who self-identify as women. Prisons, college dorms, sports teams, school locker and shower rooms... there is no place or program that a male wouldn't be able to access the instant he said he was a woman. These principles of self-identification and gender identity as a protected characteristic were being enshrined in government rules and regs at all levels, from Title IX, HUD, Department of Corrections, to countless state and local rules.

Remember Kamala telling the ACLU in that she would provide taxpayer-funded gender affirming surgeries to illegal immigrants if elected president?

If Democrats really didn't want to have that debate you mention, why do they lean so heavily into the trans stuff to begin with?
by MisterMower | 2026-02-01 04:08:47+00:00
Just because the gold standard had flaws doesn’t mean the fiat system that replaced it is flawless or even better. There are tradeoffs involved in both systems.

In a fiat currency system there is no meaningful constraint on the supply of money. We’re experiencing the effects of that feature of the fiat system currently. Tying the supply of money to a rare commodity like gold may create other problems, but it completely solves the issue of currency devaluation.

For the record, the world was on the gold standard when the agricultural and industrial revolutions occurred. It’s not at all obvious to me that the gold standard prevents productivity growth.
by XJ6w9dTdM | 2026-02-01 04:11:12+00:00
I was very surprised to see the results for common lisp. As I scrolled down I just figured that the language was not included until I saw it down there. I would have guessed SBCL to be much faster. I checked it out locally and got: Rust 9ms, D: 16ms, and CL: 80ms.

Looking at the implementation, only adding type annotations, there was a ~10% improvement. Then the tag-map using vectors as values which is more appropriate than lists (imo) gave a 40% improvement over the initial version. By additionally cutting a few allocations, the total time is halved. I'm guessing other languages will have similar easy improvements.
by epistasis | 2026-02-01 04:11:57+00:00
Perhaps I'm overly an optimist, but I have a feeling we will develop the informational and psychological technology to combat the destructive misinformation campaigns that brainwash people into harming their children with anti-vaccine beliefs.

We are not there yet, because the destructive media forces are too new and we haven't developed defenses against information diseases like RFK Jr. But we will get there. Two steps forward, one step back.
by porjo | 2026-02-01 04:12:29+00:00
The traditional way of ordering a drink at a bar requires a small degree of engagement with your fellow patrons and bar staff. In my experience people under 30 just don't want to 'engage' with strangers: make eye contact, smile, make small talk. I've noticed this in the work place with younger colleagues and with hospitality staff in general. It's not surprising they would prefer to form a queue and take their turn before hurrying back to the safety of their group of friends.
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-02-01 04:12:39+00:00
I think it would depend on how the “weakest groups” are decided. If the weakest 10% of 2021 all died, then the weakest 10% of 2022 will be people who were stronger than 2021’s weakest 10%. All the groups would propagate up to be stronger than in previous years. Now i don’t know how these groups are drawn, percentiles is just what makes intuitive sense to me.

The linked quotes don’t seem to support your argument, unless I misunderstand? If the weakest people die, then the remaining people are expected to be more resilient to heart disease and cancer.

I think decreases in drug overdose and suicide are probably the most isolated from this effect, so I have higher confidence that those decreases are “real”. But I can imagine ways that even they might interact.
by hahahahhaah | 2026-02-01 04:13:00+00:00
Apple 1 launch price $600. Googles ai said 1k investment at 1980's IPO worth 2.5m today. So if you invested 600 that is 1.5m. It would have sat idle 1976 to 1980.

So board #0 beat the stock price but only just. And I am comparing board 0 to any old apple 1.
by noduerme | 2026-02-01 04:13:01+00:00
I see your point, but I'd say religion's main technological purpose is as a storage system for the encoding of other technologies (and social patterns) into rituals, the reasons for which don't need to be understood; to the point that it actively discourages examination of their reasons, as what we could call an error-checking protocol. So a religion tends to freeze those technologies in the time at the point of inception, and to treat any reexamining of them as heresy. Calendars are useful for iron age farming, but you can't get past a certain point as a civilization if you're unwilling to reconsider your position that the sun and stars revolve around the earth, for example.
by rramadass | 2026-02-01 04:13:27+00:00
Being easily affordable/available in those times was the initial "hook" but C's subsequent and sustained success was due to a happy confluence of various design decisions.

Not too high-level, Not too low-level, easy access to memory/ISA, simple abstract machine, being imperative procedural, spanning bare-metal/OS/app, adopted by free software movement producing free compilers/tools, becoming de-facto industry standard ABI etc. all were crucial in its rise to power.

Note that its main competitor at that time, Pascal; lost out in spite of being simpler, having clean high-level features, promoted by academia, safety focused etc.

As Dennis Ritchie himself said in "The Development of the C Language" (https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/chist...);

C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success. While accidents of history surely helped, it evidently satisfied a need for a system implementation language efficient enough to displace assembly language, yet sufficiently abstract and fluent to describe algorithms and interactions in a wide variety of environments.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2026-02-01 04:16:01+00:00
Not if the CIA has anything to say about it: CIA fake vaccination campaign in Pakistan[0]

...The program was ultimately unsuccessful in locating Osama bin Laden. It led to the arrest of a participating physician, Shakil Afridi, and was widely ridiculed as undermining public health.[2][3] The program is credited with increasing vaccine hesitancy in Pakistan[4][5][6][7] and a rise in violence against healthcare workers for being perceived as spies.[8] The rise in vaccine hesitancy following the program led to the re-emergence of polio in Pakistan, with Pakistan having by far the largest number of polio cases in the world by 2014.[8]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_fake_vaccination_campaign_...
by CamperBob2 | 2026-02-01 04:17:05+00:00
Why is copyright law more important than anything else? AI is likely to drive the next stage of humanity's intellectual evolution, while copyright is a leaky legal abstraction that we pulled out of our asses a couple hundred years ago.

One of these is much more important than the other. If the copyright cartels insist on fighting AI, then they must lose decisively.
by int_19h | 2026-02-01 04:17:27+00:00
Those Linux versions are generally not kernel-level. Do you know of any that are?

And yes, of course it's not fool-proof. It's not supposed to be. It's about probabilities: for a given online game, what is the chance that I end up in a match with someone who is obviously cheating and using that to ruin the game for everyone else? The harder you make cheating, the lower that is.
by jmye | 2026-02-01 04:17:33+00:00
The idea that people, aside from 12 pot-leftists who aren’t going to vote anyway, are going to vote for more of ICE deporting US citizens, more murder of US citizens in the streets by government agents, more economic failure and higher prices, because their politicians weren’t quite performative enough about a geopolitical issue the other side is demonstrably worse on in every way, is absolutely fucking asinine and not something anyone actually suggests with any remote degree of seriousness. Get a grip.
Show HN: Kindler: A declarative, Lua-based, build system
by ThatGuyRaion | 2026-02-01 04:18:13+00:00
Hey HN.

I created a purely declarative build system (currently running on Unix-likes including GNU/Linux, NetBSD, IRIX, with experimental support for FreeBSD).

It's not intended to replace other build systems. This was a fun project involving learning Lua and creating something materially useful to me.

Now I'm respectfully ready for all potential reactions. Good, bad, critical, WHY DOES THIS EXIST?

I tried to get my docs in order first before posting.

Thank you!
by mindcrime | 2026-02-01 04:18:40+00:00
Not really. OpenJDK is exactly what OpenJDK is, and there are plenty of builds provided by other vendors who have nothing to do with Oracle. All Oracle "owning" it really means is that they basically have unilateral ability to make changes to Java[1], where said changes will be reflected in their official binary releases. And they charge for their releases (and have some auditing / licensing terms which many find off-putting) which is only important if it's really important for you to use an Official Oracle Build for some reason, as opposed to Eclipse Temurin, Amazon Corretto, BellSoft Liberica, Red Hat's build, etc.

Personally I just use the OpenJDK builds provided by my linux distro and never give it a second thought.

[1]: And so far, Oracle haven't shown much, if any, propensity for abusing their control of Java. There's a process and they seem to mostly stick to it.
by porcoda | 2026-02-01 04:18:54+00:00
I’ve done both Swift and rust for Linux applications (symbolic analysis tools and compilers, not web stuff or other server apps). I have to say, I’m torn after building a couple moderate (10-30k SLOC) scale tools in both. I prefer swift since I feel like I’m working at the abstraction level I prefer and letting the ARC stuff take care of memory for me. Rust isn’t so bad, but it does make me think more about things that I don’t when I’m in Ocaml or Swift. Rust has better tooling: the LSP support makes life nice in emacs. Compiler feedback and clippy : super useful. Not a fan of the high usage of crates (I’m in the paranoid about supply chain camp). Swift felt like it shipped with more batteries included. I think the main factor is the people side: however much I like swift, I’m more likely to find rust people in my world. I’m rooting for swift though: the world has room for more than one memory safe C++ successor.
by Fire-Dragon-DoL | 2026-02-01 04:19:20+00:00
I'm ignorant on the matter, but "vastly" seems a bit too much, given that a good chunk of medicine applies to both.
They are different, no doubt, but not the difference between a human and a crab.

5 years life expectancy difference is a lot. As a man, it is frustrating and I want to make sure I get the most out of my life (which I enjoy)
by socalgal2 | 2026-02-01 04:20:51+00:00
I haven't seen static analyis cover the things I'm concerned with.

Examples, calculating something twice instead of pulling the calculation out of the loop (one case) or into a separate function so that 2 separated places where it's calculated don't get out of sync (a different case). Another might be using an let x; if (cond) x = v1 else x = v2 (which is 3-9 lines depending on your brace style) vs const x = cond ? v1 : v2. When v1 and v2 are relatively simple expressons. I haven't seen a checker that will find stuff like this.
by analog31 | 2026-02-01 04:21:35+00:00
I only remember the II+, but both were dense with chips. The IIe had fewer chips as I recall. That level of complexity wasn't unheard of at the time. When the IBM PC came out, only a few of the chips were in sockets (the CPU and RAM/ROM), and people were nervous about repairability, but IBM pointed out that they had studied it to death over the years, and that the chips were more reliable than the sockets.
by contrarian1234 | 2026-02-01 04:21:46+00:00
I mean I think people have been complaining about the KC-135 being too old for a very long time, and from what I heard the replacement was urgently needed. At least there I can see how there is really no good alternative - it's a very specialized plane. Here they just need a plane that can fly high and is easy to modify with new equipment. It feels like there should be plenty of other candidates. However, the other reply seems to imply it's not all that expensive to maintain
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-01 04:22:13+00:00
> Do you think the current anti-ICE movement would have happened without social media?

Yes. There is a reason Minnesota is effectively resisting in a way Los Angeles failed to.

Once you have a movement, social media mobilizes. But if you’re building a movement, you need footwork and commitment. Not profiteers turning your cause into clicks.

> Or Jan 6th, or all the Palestine protests

Case in point. Support for each of their underlying causes dipped with notoriety around their online activity.

If you want to drain a movement of effective energy, distract it online from its streets.