skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is no good evidence showing that masking slows the spread of SARS-COV-2 because wealthy nations like the USA failed to use the opportunity of the pandemic to conduct large scale randomized controlled trials testing their efficacy.

The positive studies that everyone is referencing are all observational studies subject to confounders. For instance, the people that comply with mask mandates probably do other things that slow the spread of the virus, like washing their hands. It's impossible to control for all confounders without a priori randomization. That is why RCTs were invented, why they are the "gold standard" of evidence, and why they are the only type of study included in the systematic reviews done by Cochrane.

When the RCTs are systematically reviewed the effect of masks disappears. This is the infamous "Cochrane study" you'll read about. This review is conducted periodically, it has been done six or seven times in the last 20 years, and has failed to find evidence of masks/respirators slowing the spread of any respiratory viruses. However, this same review shows that hand washing slows the spread of the COVID virus. [0]

Maybe masking works but there just isn't the evidence available to say that it does. All medical interventions have a cost and it shouldn't be paid by the public without good evidence that it will be worth it.

This video is an excellent discussion of the controversy with the lead author of the Cochrane review of physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses and another epidemiologist from the "Evidence Based Medicine" movement which discounts observational studies. They discuss the evidence including the "Bangladesh RCT," the precautionary principle, equipoise, the reaction to the latest review as compared to previous ones and the actions of Cochrane's director. [1]

[0] https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_JTBftjQuA
So asking it to write better code produces code with errors that can’t run?
The obvious bias of the US Judiciary has resulted in low public confidence - not sure where you've been?

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/01/03/opinion/scotus-ethics...
As climate warming impact from CO2 emissions was limited by SO2 emissions before?
I have no opinion about this particular case at hand, but decades of observations of how governments, esp. in Europe, "regulate" IT by targetting a few big players, and Google always first in line despite that company has been _historically_ the most careful with users data, have convinced me that this has little to do with protection of citizens privacy and much more to do with forcing those whole encompassing corporations to cooperate with governments own surveillance agendas.
“Before becoming rich, do the corporate grind. After becoming rich, do the corporate grind.”

I don’t know man.
I think basic definitions for LLMs are solidly within the bounds of what we would expect e.g. chatgpt to be competent at. The task (defining terms) is simple and the specific content (basic LLM stuff) is easy to check by anyone who works on the LLM.

I agree with the general sentiment that we should not just blindly trust LLMs though.
Show HN: Sagetalk.ai – I Built an AI Tool to Practice Job Interviews
Hi HN,

A few months ago, I lost my job. It wasn’t just a blow to my finances—it shook my confidence. I had to start interviewing for software engineering roles, but the process felt overwhelming. How do you practice for interviews when you don’t have someone to coach you, and you’re unsure if your answers are even good?

I tried using existing tools, but they didn’t really click with me. They either felt too generic or just didn’t simulate the pressure of a real interview. That’s when I decided to build something myself.

What started as a quick script to help organize my thoughts has turned into Sagetalk.ai. It’s an AI tool that helps you practice job interviews in a way that feels dynamic and interactive.

Here’s what it does:

It creates mock interview questions based on your role and industry.

As interviewer ask questions, it listens and provides live suggestions for improvement.

After each session, it gives feedback on things like tone, clarity, and whether your response really answers the question.

It’s not perfect. There are still rough edges, and I’m figuring out how to make it more useful. But for me, it made a difference. Practicing with this tool helped me feel more confident walking into real interviews, and I think it might help others too.

I’m sharing this here because I know many of you have faced similar challenges, whether as candidates or as builders trying to solve your own problems. I’d love for you to try it and tell me what you think—what works, what doesn’t, what could be better.

You can check it out at sagetalk.ai

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I’m here to answer questions or just chat about job hunting or building projects like this.

Cheers
Yes, of course I meant the basic S-exp syntax. They are indeed very different languages. The IMHO the biggest differences are scoping, and 1-Lisp and 2-Lisp; which makes different worlds.
I'm not sure how you came to this conclusion, when their comment stated in the very first line: "court rulings that rarely appear to be in favor of people over companies".

But answering your strawman: when you have a bipartisan system with both parties led by companies I don't really have a clue how one can seek to change companies-favoring status quo/laws, but I'm willing to be educated - please help.
I wouldn't count on true competition to last.
You can see that's what OP did: he watched a youtube video about robotics (door fixtures), immediately wrote to 70 people (bought a nice old house) to start working on it.

But then he realized it's not what he wants to spend his time on
Apple auto-opts everyone into having their photos analyzed by AI for landmarks
>What do you do though if you want to import code written in C++? Especially complex, dependency-heavy like CUDA/ML stuff?

No other CUDA software has to put it's claws deep into the os to function. I'm not even convinced Python does, seems it just dumps all the 500-900meg DLLs into the torch folder. It's more the insistence that the libraries have to exist in this place that isn't related to the project that's the issue.

Node also handles what you're talking about without issue and without thinking it needs to be part of the operating system like Python does.
Confirm, people are very open and kind
"AI" on a Calculator (2023)
It's a combination of three things, which have been in the making for some years.

1. I have a personal website + blog + YouTube and do some SEO & marketing there.

2. I often connect or interact with technical founders on LinkedIn and end up on good terms.

3. My existing network.

So from the 6 clients that I worked with, 3 reached out to me first.

In 2023, I did work with 2 clients (but long engagements) which found me through monthly YC posts.
4 Years Building an OS in the Browser [video]
We use the same setup, though we use PGBouncer so after switching primary we just force reconnect all clients from PGBouncer instead.

The clients will have to retry on-going transactions, but that's a basic fault tolerant requirement anyway.
Obscene enshittification

EBay annual/quarterly gross profit history and growth rate from 2021 to 2024.

Gross profit can be defined as the profit a company makes after deducting the variable costs directly associated with making and selling its products or providing its services.

EBay gross profit for the quarter ending September 30, 2024 was $1.849B, a 3.01% increase year-over-year.

Thats $1,849,000,000 profit Folks

EBay gross profit for the twelve months ending September 30, 2024 was $7.394B, a 1.9% increase year-over-year.

EBay annual gross profit for 2023 was $7.279B, a 2.3% increase from 2022.

EBay annual gross profit for 2022 was $7.115B, a 8.43% decline from 2021.

EBay annual gross profit for 2021 was $7.77B, a 9.48% increase from 2020.
At face value I was inclined to agree with you (SO2 causing acid rain and being generally impactful to health through cardiovascular and respiratory issues, damaging mammalian DNA, impacting hormones like testosterone etc.).

However given the strong role SO2 can play in reducing global warming, and that there are even proposals to introduce more SO2 to the atmosphere to achieve the Paris objectives, like most things in our complex interconnected world it gets a bit more complex.

Of course one hopes there are better responses to the changing climate than reactively doubling down on polluting contaminants into the atmosphere when that has contributed to the current mess and we clearly have narrow and incomplete understandings of systemic intervention.
Hire someone who knows and learn from them. Seriously.
> and would therefore prevent people from doing fingerprinting without ICO having to get involved (which is what the person you originally replied to was focussing on).

But that simply isn't true in the broad sense. It would stop some or even a large number of people from doing it in one area, but it doesn't stop it happening.

> but you seemed to not see a link between the ICO wanting Google to reinstate the ban and seeing that as Google policing that subject on their network.

I obviously see the link there.

The comment said several things, which really doesn't line up with the post. It accused the ICO of going after google rather than businesses and said that stopped businesses being able to test it in the courts.

However businesses can implement fingerprinting, the ICO can act and this can be tested.

The comment likened this to bullying companies into enforcing policies, and said it left them with no legal recourse. But there are no threats, no action from the ICO against google (except "will engage with google"), businesses can still implement these things and it can go to court.

Let's go through it and why I don't understand their point.

> One thing that strikes me reading this, is that the only thing that's changed is that Google won't disallow it.

Yep, this is right, google are changing a policy which will give a lot of businesses the ability to do something that the ICO thinks is extremely unlikely to be lawful.

> But I think it would make more sense if the ICO actually just went after the companies doing fingerprinting directly,

This is what they're saying they'll do

> instead of being angry at Google for not enforcing things for them.

Angry seems like an odd statement here. They call it irresponsible, and I think justify that. I think they could go further since this will likely result in google profiting

> There is a subtle but important difference here.

> If governments enforce policy by bullying HSBC/Google/E.ON to enforce policies for them, there is no legal opportunity for companies and individuals to argue for their sake. You'll just be shut out of your bank/advertising/electricity for doing something "wrong".

> If instead UK ICO would bring a legal case against an individual or company applying fingerprinting (and I'm no advocate of fingerprinting, but that's besides the point) then they can defend themselves in court.

And as I say there's nothing stopping this getting tested in court.

This is a pretty bland post. It's the ICO saying there's a change coming and a warning to businesses that this doesn't mean it's actually allowed, just that google will stop banning it on their network. They're saying they'll come after businesses breaking the rules.

What should they have done? Posted nothing? Not mentioned google?
Location: Honolulu
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: React, Rails, Three.js, React-Three-Fiber, Deck.gl, Leaflet
Résumé/CV: https://jpwhitaker.com
Email: https://www.linkedin.com/in/captainwhitaker/

10-years experience building large apps and APIs in Rails. Recently I've been making games, visualizations and experiences in Three.js and React-Three-Fiber.
I always found it interesting that the big tech firms are so adamant about internet "freedom" when they've pretty much done everything they could to govern people's experience of that internet. I'm sorry if the "think about the small businesses" defense coming out the most valuable companies in existence seems a little thin. This isn't a David and Goliath fight as much as it is Godzilla vs Mothra--big companies fighting over who gets a bigger share of the profits. The net hasn't been neutral in a long time, irrespective of what the FCC has been doing. This isn't "we the people" vs big business. it's big business vs big business. "We the people" lost the fight a long time ago.
How many politics, that made decisions that cost us billions, are investigated because of this? Do we really have democracy? That means equality under the law for everyone.

How many healthy people that died because of covid do you know personally?

How many healthy people that that suddenly got cancer or struggle with conception after 2021 you know personally?

Why is mortality in wealthy countries still rising?
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps

What is an origin of covid virus?
I'm not talking about using the "system python" I'm talking about how Python ideologically believes it's running as system python always.

Node loads packages from a subfolder within the project, Python loads packages from somewhere else in the operating system regardless of project so we have an entire ecosystem of wrappers to deal with the nightmare of that ideological choice that Node, Rust, etc just don't need to be usable.
This sounds an awful lot like you're generalising from your experiences to other people's.

I'm also in my mid 30s and I still find travelling eye opening in a way that books are not (and I do read a lot, including when I travel). And on my last trip I met a retired couple who spent three weeks traveling in their car and they told me they used to have a boat with which they'd sail around the world.
CoinTracker (YC W18) hiring product engineer to solve crypto accounting
I'm sharing a video created by the Kotzilla team showing you how to set up the Kotzilla Platform: https://youtu.be/4FNwp9W17zU

It's a new debugging tool made for Koin users by the Koin team. Here are the docs if you want to know more: https://doc.kotzilla.io/

In summary, the Kotzilla Platform integrates directly with your existing Koin container to give you the visibility you need into your app's behavior—with no instrumentation required. It will officially launch in February or March of this year.

Thanks
Somewhat related - I wonder if LLMs are trained with a compiler in the loop to ensure they understand the constraints of each language.
The OG open-source Kinesis Advantage (minus curved form) is Ergodox, released in 2011. Ergo S-1 re-introduces the curved form and adds wireless support (which Kinesis never had), but unfortunately has less keys then both Kinesis Advantage and Ergodox, which can be a deal-breaker for those who uses those keys on their Ergodox. Personally, I use only 2 keys on each thumb cluster, removed some keys in the bottom row, but use every extra key in left and right column on each half.
Only when there's a financial incentive.
Especially if you are in a call with sales and the client, hi2u D&B.
I believe some platforms like bolt.new do run generated code and even automatically detect and attempt to fix runtime errors.
You should get decent results by asking it to do that in the prompt. Just add "if you are uncertain, answer I don't know" or "give the answer or say I don't know" or something along those lines

LLM are far from perfect at knowing their limits, but they are better at it than most people give them credit for. They just never do it unless prompted for it.

Fine tuning can improve that ability. For example the thinking tokens paper [1] is at some level training the model to output a special token when it doesn't reach a good answer (and then try again, thus "thinking")

1: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.08644
Therapy = Exactly. He thinks he has freedom and agency but he's just being puppeteered by conflicting subconscious forces he doesn't understand and seems to have no insight into. This is a man who's in a self-driving car turning a steering wheel that's connected to nothing.
It is perhaps a pyramid scheme if you look at it in a certain way. Which doesn’t mean it is bad (unless you are anti-natalist). It’s just funny that it can be conceptualized like that.

You spend 20–40 years trying various things, living for yourself, finding nothing that sticks. Apparently being an idiot, but you’re just inexperienced. There’s some hole in your life. Then you have kids. Aha! It makes sense. Living for others! This is it! The irony being that now those people-you-live-for have to go through the same process, where 1/3 to half their life they spend in that apparently meaningless phase where they haven’t found their purpose yet.

This is totally void if you are the kind of person who cruised by and was happy without children but then the transition to having children made total sense as well.
That's cool, would be nice if you got a GitHub Action to build the binaries and publish them on Releases... or even publish to crates.io :)
I known at least one mainstream LLM that can write unit tests and run them right in the chat environment.
Unlike now, in the 90s the US had no competitors with equally strong industrial capacity.
This is used to represent number in the bruijn programming language [1] [2].

[1] https://text.marvinborner.de/2023-04-06-01.html

[2] https://bruijn.marvinborner.de/
I am probably the cynical here but when I read in the very first paragraph stuff like "the system we dream of" and "delighting the health professionals" I call it bullshit and move over. I don't know if it's AI generated bullshit or regular marketing bullshit (which trained the AI anyway) but I also don't care, because I'm sure if they actually had real stuff to show they wouldn't need that bullshit.
Not illegal, in so far as I don't believe it's been tested in court - but it is an explicit breach of the giant terms and conditions contract that they require you to sign, when purchasing the vehicle. There is an attempt to prevent you from doing so.
This. If you're funding your friends, think of yourself as a wealthy patron, not a lender or VC.
Show HN: DeepFace – A lightweight deep face recognition library for Python
DeepFace is a leading open-source library for facial recognition and facial attribute analysis, and the de facto standard in Python. It wraps multiple state-of-the-art models that have reached — and even surpassed — human-level accuracy in recognizing faces.

By the numbers (as of early 2025): 15,000+ stars on GitHub; ~4 million installations via pip; 800+ citations in academic papers

Whether you're building a cutting-edge AI project or simply exploring facial recognition, DeepFace makes advanced capabilities accessible with just a few lines of code.
>someone insert themselves into politics quite so loudly

Soros and Epstein did it quietly. I’d wager that most people have never heard anything from Soros himself or know what he has actually done, but merely have heard that he uses his wealth to influence politics. Usually as an attack against an idea or group. Epstein is certainly not known for influencing politics. And quite frankly, flew under the radar for the general public until the end of his life in 2019.

People outside tech or finance would not know who SBF is unless you told them exactly what he did and then maybe they’d remember a news article about it.

Bezos might be the best example you provide, but I don’t think he rises to the loudness of Musk.
Ask HN: Why do my "Ask HN" posts not show in the "Ask HN" feed?
Hello,

I am not incapable of missing the obvious, but I do not understand why my "Ask HN" posts remain exclusively in "New" and never reach the "Ask HN" feed.

Any explanation or conjecture on the reasons for this would be appreciated.

My latest "Ask HN" (and Tell HN) posts were regarding the current project to port wicd to python3. Is the culprit possibly the inclusion of the Devuan forum url?
A free, unlimited online PDF converter with Privacy focus
This is a side project I started nearly 2 months ago: an online PDF converter at https://quicklypdf.com. Over time, I’ve made various improvements, but I’m still looking for feedback and new users.

I’m aware there are many similar tools (e.g., smallpdf, ilovepdf) and competition is tough, but here’s what makes https://quicklypdf.com stand out:

1. Simplicity: No email sign-up, no user account needed. Just upload and convert.

2. Unlimited and Free: Unlike some services that require subscriptions or have daily limits, https://quicklypdf.com allows unlimited conversions, 100% free of charge.

3. High-Quality Output: Despite being free and straightforward, the conversion quality is intended to match or exceed that of paid alternatives.

4. Privacy-Focused: Uploaded files are deleted from the server within one hour for privacy. Additionally, certain features (like PDF merging or converting images to PDF) run locally in your browser—no upload needed—so you can even use them offline once the page is loaded.

I’d love any suggestions or feedback you might have. If you need an online PDF converter, please give https://quicklypdf.com a try. Thank you!
This was a bit tongue in cheek.

In the UK I would keep business emails for at least 6 years as that's the limit for lawsuits.
Wow, what a great post. I came in very skeptical but this changed a lot of misconceptions I'm holding.

One question: Claude seems very powerful for coding tasks, and now my attempts to use local LLMs seem misguided, at least when coding. Any disagreements from the hive mind on this? I really dislike sending my code into a for profit company if I can avoid it.

Second question: I really try to avoid VSCode (M$ concerns, etc.). I'm using Zed and really enjoying it. But the LLM coding experience is exactly as this post described, and I have been assuming that's because Zed isn't the best AI coding tool. The context switching makes it challenging to get into the flow, and that's been exactly my criticism of Zed this far. Does anyone have an antidote?

Third thought: this really feels like it could be an interesting way to collaborate across a code base with any range of developer experience. This post is like watching the evolution of a species in an hour rather than millions of years. Stunning.
A walled garden usually refers to a nice to use software ecosystem (the garden) with the twist that it stops users from escaping / communicating with the outside (the wall). Apple products tend to be the example for that.

The title properly refers to the fact that these sites aren't hosted on substack / medium / some other pre build environment.
That’s a deflection. The issue is school shootings that occur now, using guns, not time travelers perpetrating mass shootings.

What do all school shootings have in common? Guns.

Something has changed since then and now guns are a bigger problem.
> “Planning” is a long-used trick to help align LLM output for a first pass — the modern implementation of “let’s think step by step.”

I hadn't seen this before. Why is asking for planning better than asking it to think step by step?
positive for users of spotify, relative higher cost for users of other streaming services, cementing spotify's market position.
Their ancestors were citizens of Ottoman empire and their business exits because of Sultans patronage. Who knows how they feel about the connection, yours is only speculation.
I don't think his problem is money.

I think his problem is he might not be a very good person.
Would be interested to know the outcome later :)
At that point isn't it starting to become easier to just write the code yourself? If I somehow have to formulate how I want a problem solved, then I've already done all the hard work myself. Having the LLM just do the typing of the code means that now not only did I have to solve the problem, I also get to do a code review.
5 actually, 3 of those replying to followups to earlier posts. I'm not obligated to display patience with misinformation. Did you have anything factual you wanted to contribute here?