skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are a few studies out which say fluoride is bad. But as is often the case with these health idiots, the studies actually refer to places where fluoride is naturally way too high in the water. The entire debate is dumb.
Themes vs. Categories
This is a wonderful idea and could succeed if the creator could rally the right devs and users. What it really needs is Ubuntu tier branding and UX work. This has been a rarity in the Linux desktop space.

I am hopeful SteamOS will bring us something very similar.
> should software with a server-side component that needs to keep working be counted as "buy once"

If they release the server side component so it is self-hostable, yes.
But unions don't negotiate with their actual value; they negotiate by holding hostage the entire value chain in which their labor is a link. This results in the extraction of value from the public, who ultimately bear all such rents, and especially from displaced would-be employees, who the unions call “scabs” to justify denying them jobs.
That's just not true. Most of the studies simply compared areas with different amounts of natural fluoride in their local water supply, and applied some basic statistics comparing dental health. There have also been some A/B studies possible in areas that stopped or started using fluoride in their water.

Multiple such studies have been done, globally, over many decades.
Surely one could design a library in Linux which makes syscalls and dynamically link to it.
The suckless project gave us stali linux, a statically compiled linux distribution.

Doesn't static compilation solve quite a few of the problems states here?

https://sta.li/
This is one benefit of growing up with awful well water. Literally anywhere tastes pretty darn good by comparison!
Maybe invert that? Seems like everything "needs" to be online now. Either from DRM activation servers to always-online-for-telemetry-or-lootbox reasons.
There are workarounds for a lot of those things, though, and some of them work out to be pretty cheap in the long run. You will have to get used to using older equipment in a lot of cases and doing some of your own maintenance.
Yes, and you can do this application specific tweaking but it’s largely less required now than it was in the past.
Show HN: Pmpn – A Typosafe Wrapper for Pnpm
For some reason my muscle memory is messed up and I almost always type "pmpn" instead of "pnpm".

So, inspired by tools like gti (for git) and sl (for ls), here's pmpn, my gift to the Typoscript community.

Enjoy!
> I can pull down a 20 year old exe and still run it today on Windows.

Sure, but for how much longer will Microsoft allow this unsigned ancient binary?

Using Linux for runing Windows programs is going to be desperately needed as Microsoft enshittifies Windows going forward.
Fluoride rapidly forms a highly insoluble calcium fluoride salt. So you won't find a lot of it in blood or other easily accessible body fluids.
Every Application should be it's own 'user' (sub user) while the login-user / manager should be the group leader of all those 'sub users' / 'agents'.

A change in security model from the 1970s/1980s might help with security and isolation. However that same security would also generally be a pain without really smooth management in the desktop environment / shell.
Elizabeth II was Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland which means she was Queen of each constituent part of it too. She was the Queen of England. Quite apart from that, it is a very common phrase, in part because the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is quite a mouthful.

The Treaty of Waitangi (1840) was a treaty between Queen Victoria and various native chiefs in New Zealand. It refers to her as the Queen of England. It was drafted by well educated people. Many other well educated people make the same "mistake". Maybe it is time to accept that it is perfectly reasonable, unambiguous usage.
I use LLM in my workflow a lot, however it never occurred to me there's any vibe until this online running joke.

And no, the vibe is largely the same as before, there was google, then stackoverflow, and then now here's an AI that would most likely take care of the specific question and generate boilerplate if you frame the question correctly.

Framing the question correctly isn't a vibe, it requires logical thinking that feels almost like coding, and results need to be checked. Even then, I usually don't go a day without spotting some sort of hallucination (correcting obvious wrongs during prompting doesn't count). And testing is essential because sometimes that's how you can catch this kind of hallucination.

I do find learning in terms of project and even coding itself improves a lot faster with a capable LLM. It introduces a lot of idiomatic ways to code, and provides a lot of practice to fix whatever didn't work or add things that are just easier to type then asking it to fix.
I've been maintaining Espionage (macOS folder encryption + plausible deniability) since 2008 as part of a small Mac shareware business.

$29.99 w/o lifetime updates, and $49.98 with.

As appreciation for this thread, here's $10 off for HN readers (expires April fools): HNONCE

https://www.espionageapp.com/order/?code=HNONCE
Again, it was in response to an (mis)unanswered question for that specific information. I don't get what the issue is.
4x48GB Corsair DDR5 sticks is about $500.*

Which is pretty cheap compared to the cost of my whole build and whatever other things I've spent on. Cheap is relative, but I'm just saying that if you're going to spend $3000+ on a build, and you love to work with massive datasets, VMs, and things, $500 for a metric fuckton of RAM so that your system is never, ever swapping, is a very worthwhile thing to spend on.

192GB worth of GPU will cost you about $40000, for reference, and will be less performant if your goal is just a vramfs for CPU tasks.

* Beware that using 4 DDR5 slots will cut your memory bandwidth in half on consumer motherboards and CPUs. But I willingly made that tradeoff. Maybe at some point I'll upgrade to a server motherboard and CPU.
Austin of austinsnerdythings.com here - that article does use PPS but there is a different writeup that does use USB that I refer to as my "millisecond accurate" guide - https://austinsnerdythings.com/2021/09/29/millisecond-accura...
This is one of the things I wished I came up with... excellent and useful idea. For a moment I thought it was started by Basecamp people, I am sure they would support this.

I think idea is good, maybe execution is lacking and could use someone else to do it...
I have avoided posting a how-to on YouTube, in part because tech like this could be used to impersonate me. By creating a fake persona with fake voice (this one doesn't do that) we can make those videos.

So the way to not be impersonated is to use the same tools to be a fake person!
> Serious question, because I'm not sure how I feel about it... should software with a server-side component that needs to keep working be counted as "buy once"?

No, and this is a valid reason for a subscription pricing model.

However, if the software does not need its base / local functionality to reach out to servers, then it should have a one-time (per version, more for major upgrades) price and a separate subscription price.

Personal example: I purchased YNAB4 and was happy with it. Would gladly have purchased YNAB5, but 5 had all sorts of cloud-y functionality that I had no interest or use for. I just wanted a decent local app for expense tracking and 4 had that but 5 did not.

In a similar vein there is a whole bunch of tax-filing software in Canada available , but all (?) of the free stuff is online, which I have no interesting in doing:

* https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/e-services/...

So I pay about CA$ 20 for Studio Tax so that I can have things completely local (CRA is piloting their free tax filing system, we'll see if third-party stuff will be needed in the future).
> It matters because your statement of "Here’s a list of the most convincing studies or meta analyses." assumes some kind of curating.

Agreed
Typst is Apache licensed. I install it with "cargo install --locked typst-cli". The subscription model is for their web interface with storage. I write simple worksheets for a living, so I've been using it instead of TeX lately. (I've use LaTeX or plain TeX since around 1990.)
>civic institutions provide the safety net instead of the government

Now that the internet has destroyed local community and trust in institutions, what will conservatism do?
For m = 1, the gradient is a "vector" (a column vector). The Jacobian is a functional/a linear map (a row vector, dual to a column vector). They're transposes of one another. For m > 1, I would normally just define the Jacobian as a linear map in the usual way and define the gradient to be its transpose. Remember that these are all just definitions at the end of the day and a little bit arbitrary.
ToolsAI – One AI Toolbox for all your favorite models
> but Elm allowed me to eject out of the javascript churn for the past 7 years while still building some slick UIs that basically never fall over.

Thats the real tragedy. Elm was a good language but the culture around it means it could never achieve critical adoption. It is great technology for building frontends but how easily will I be able to maintain that app as the web changes over the years?
I use SQLite in a similar manner, but I'll have to check this out.
No, that is completely wrong and would be nuts. The only way the whole session gets elevated is if you'd launch explorer.exe with an admin token.

The way privilege escalation works on Windows is that pretty much everything gets launched with a standard user access token by default, and processes can request an admin access token in a few ways, UAC being the main one. When a process is supplied that token, that process is elevated.

It is more akin to 'sudo' rather than 'su', which makes sense because its progenitor is 'runas' from Windows 2000.
People object to this approach, but Apple does this, and they seem to be doing fine.
Intent filters can be for domains. It's how deeplinks work. But with querying being locked down you can't know what apps can handle a deeplink.
Java already solved this problem, for the most part. This whole ABI nonsense really grinds my gears. It's essentially just a result of the silly decision to compile software into dubious blobs and ship those to users. You could get rid of an awful lot of malware and massively simplify software distribution if you were to distribute a platform agnostic intermediary representation of source code that preserves enough semantic meaning to eliminate ABI issues, then leaves the last step of compilation to the operating system. Shipping binary files is just plain bad in every way.
https://docs.flathub.org/docs/for-app-authors/requirements says,

> Windows application submissions that are using Wine or any submissions that aren't native to Linux desktop and is using some emulation or translation layer will only be accepted if they are submitted officially by upstream with the intention of maintaining it in official capacity.

Although, I am curious why; they don't seem to have a general problem with unofficial packages, so I'm not sure why a translation layer makes any difference. It doesn't seem different than happening to use any other runtime (ex. nothing is said about Java or .net).
Yeah, I’ve been pretty disappointed to see the indie hacker community mostly remain there. Not sure what event would finally trigger the exodus at this point.
Just like Google or Stackoverflow.

There was a time when I felt my greatest programming ability is googling, I think that transferred well to LLMs since googling and asking question on stackoverflow required a very similar skill set.
The Japanese Military Has a People Problem
Austin from austinsnerdythings.com here - thanks for the shoutout! Four years later these posts continue to be some of the top posts people read on my blog.

Top hits from the past 30 days -

* 3441 hits - https://austinsnerdythings.com/2021/04/19/microsecond-accura...

* 2415 hits - https://austinsnerdythings.com/2021/09/01/how-to-deploy-vms-...

* 1990 hits - https://austinsnerdythings.com/2021/08/30/how-to-create-a-pr...

* 1870 hits - https://austinsnerdythings.com/2025/02/14/revisiting-microse...

so with the combined original post and the revisit post, easily the top topic
Getting PDF up to WCAG standards is a painful and arduous task.
Are you still using YNAB 4? If not, what did you replace it with?
I had an interesting experience with the google search AI yesterday.

note: nerdy stuff ahead I was playing MTG with my son.

I asked google search a MTG question "Does the commander come in with summoning sickness"

The AI answered NO, but the link below suggested it did.
I accidentally clicked back which means I had to ask the question again if i wanted to look at those links.. so i did

This time the AI answered YES to exactly the same question I just asked a moment ago and got a NO answer for.
It was worded EXACTLY the same way.

This really highlights the lying bullshit factor to AI. You just cant trust it.
Okay, but then you could also keep it running on an old OS. Fork out the money for a RHEL license, and just never upgrade.
Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43489136
Is Grammarly hiring?
Agree, my biggest issue is often where they source the fluoride and whether they test it. We found out in my (liberal) hometown that they were actually sourcing some derivative which has no human studies.

Given that everyone gets enough in toothpaste I just don’t see the reason to keep doing it, too much can go wrong. It’s kind of a strange mass medication that I’m not sure the government needs to be involved in.
A windows95 compatibility layer would have been feasible if OS/2 had more sales volume.

The latest multi-platform packaging systems like Nix or Flatpak have largely solved the binary compatibility problem but providing some guarantees of library versions. This approach makes more sense in modern contexts with cheap storage and fast bandwidth.
You can’t be serious right now. Your teeth aren’t in your digestive tract.
Less required in general or by the user? I sort of had it in my head that part of what Proton did was to just bundle all of those tweaks so you didn't have to think about it, but I haven't actually looked under the hood.
End of the day I don't care if it's same binary or not, i just want my apps and tooling to work the way they have always worked.
> They even promise it won’t turn itself back on after an update

The cynic in me thinks that they've tried that and only after it backfired they created the promise (and they'll silently revoke their promise in the future)
Yeah, reproducible builds are meaningless for users without a reference to reproduce.
Which changes the calculus

Was that intentional? (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dental_calculus for those who didn't get the reference.)
There's a ton of shovelware in here and there's currently no good method of filtering it out without manual comprehension. For example, there's an LLM interface that "Lets you access multiple LLM models" (https://buyoncesoftware.com/fridaygpt) But you obviously will not have access to these and it's clear self-promotion spam of over-eager people looking for exposure for their commonplace apps.
I am an American and I'm speaking about America, where we have an all-time high 40%+ obesity rate and a 14% food insecurity rate at the same time. Both are overrepresented for people with low incomes. For reference, obesity and food insecurity in Germany (which has one of the highest obesity rates in the EU) appear to be ~23% and 4%, respectively.

For reasons we don't fully understand (but probably have something to do with the ubiquity of highly processed, low nutrition, low fiber, high calorie density foods -- plus the lack of time to cook and the breaking-up of family & community fabrics among lower income communities), we've created a society that makes more of us fat, more than our first world peers, even while dangling many Americans (especially children and the poor) over the precipice of starvation. This is a broken food system.

We have similar issues with health care: we spend more on healthcare than any other country in the world, by a mile. The US spends about 1.5x to 3x per capita on healthcare (adjusted for PPP) compared to most of the other OECD countries. However, our health outcomes are... not great. We hover around 50th place in the world on most metrics, close to Panama. Additionally, our healthcare system is byzantine and deeply, deeply painful to interact with.

If people in countries with high-performing health and food systems are getting infected with America's particular brand of brain worms, all I have to say is: you really don't understand how good y'all have it in this particular respect, and consider that mistrust of government regulation may worsen the situation, not improve it.
There is some crazy stat that apple could stop selling everything they make and still run operations for another 25 years or something wild like that.
Ah, okay. Yes, if that's your reference point then just buying more RAM to plug into the motherboard is an excellent deal.
I'd like to point out that fluoride was previously very much a liberal stance until the rise in MAGA/Qanon conservatives.

I grew up in the PNW of the USA and lots of small hippie towns have been removing fluoride for decades. It comes up on city ballots every year in Oregon.
Maybe, but these types of complaints have a very long history. Photographs are an invasion of privacy. And many forms of technology. We are embedded in complex societies. The idea of being a sacrosanct private silo is a Western mode of thinking, and not an old one either.
> I'd actually just like to see more money put into public dental assistance. And education.

I would want to see that in anti fluoride campaigns and laws as well, but have not see that happen in the laws and campaigns I have followed. Or in the HN comments I have responded to on the subject, most focus on banning and provide no follow, or no structured follow up like - free toothpaste, required educations, and follow up studies, reassess in X years.
Games are a mixed bag on that front nowadays, yeah, but GOG.com at least makes a point of only selling DRM-free games where the installer and all singleplayer content are guaranteed to work offline.
Retro Games Online
Where "main concern" means not a practical concern at all. You are adopting the talking points of cranks when what is of actual concern is things like drinking sugar, negligent parents or basic access to dental healthcare or even just dental education.

The CDC tracks some key indicators like mean decayed, missing or filled teeth (DMFT) and in critical age groups like 12-15 there has been no progress made in the past 20 years and the US continue lagging behind European countries: https://www.cdc.gov/oral-health/media/pdfs/Oral-Health-Surve...

And none of that has anything to do with fluoride in the water or not.
From a self-promotion-only account no less, breaking HN's rule on self promotion.
Also others have pointed out that some of the listings are bullshit, but why let that get in the way of collecting the fee. What a grifter.
These people have been around forever but the pivotal point in my opinion is when the Lancet retracted the article on the link between MMR and autism.

Suddenly everything was up for debate.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_MMR_autism_fraud
I am definitely taking a stand that you can be pro democracy and also reference twitter. Especially in posts that were made five years ago.

Note that I didn't say they're "unrelated". But it's quite a weak relation in this case.

You're reducing things to a extreme level of binary thinking and taint by association. Insisting that people take a position "one way or the other" is too reductive. I also stand against the things Twitter has now come to represent, despite not expressing it the exact same way you do.
The point being ignored is that the editing software is also running on Macs [1]. The local and remote machines are both Macs. To the general public, and the purpose of their story, the fact that you could replace the local one with any dumb client is irrelevant [2].

[1] I don't know about the software they're using in particular (Avid?), but there is a chance the Macs are actually faster than what you can currently get from PCs regardless of GPU - nothing atm matches the bandwidth you can get from Apple Silicon, ProRes hardware encoders, power consumption, noise

[2] it's not even actually irrelevant as the overall experience of owning a Mac, outside of the remote desktop client, will be substantially different.
Literally 1984, in that it's functionally recreating the Two-Minute Hate.
Currently Apple has 54 billion in cash and cash equivalents (down $100B since 2023 in dividends, stock buybacks, and capex). They can keep this going for a while.
> Orwell

There's a little about Eric's son here:

"George Orwell and me: Richard Blair on life with his extraordinary father": https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/19/george-orwell-...
Great points all, admittedly!

I think I'm scarred by having churned too many man-hours supporting spagetti ASP code and Ruby "magic" behavior.
I used an IBM keypunch machine in ~1985 to write COBOL programs in high school. We would wrap our completed deck of cards in a rubber band and drop the deck in a cardboard box. We would get the deck back with greenbar output the next day.

I don't see keypunch machines here.

Edit: The 029 looks familiar, but it's been a lot of years.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keypunch

I also regularly use a Model M when I tether my laptop.

This is also missing the Selectric typewriters. I used a Datamaster with an accounting package a couple years after high school.
Some people like text which they can reformat easily (increase font size, change to different screens dimensions).

What is generally bad about the PDFs that Latex produces (and is a problem with latex, not a problem with PDF) is that they are very inaccessible, they don't work with screen readers.

The reason it's so hard to make latex output HTML (although people are working on it) is that latex is actually a programming language, which is executed to decide where things go on in the PDF.

Make latex output HTML is a bit like trying to take (say) a game engine like Unity, and change it's rendering engine to output HTML instead of graphics -- in the worst case it's basically impossible, as the game just generates commands like "draw triangle here", without context or semantics.
Are these services not simply piracy?
I'm amazed at all this discussion upon a misinterpretation when, exactly as you say, he clarified what he meant by struggle in the same sentence and it is not life struggle, it is creative struggle (to create music, poetry, etc).

(Of course, pretty much everyone experiences hardship in life and some artists have experienced very harsh hardships and drawn upon that in their later art but he is very clearly not saying that that is an essential part of creating art.)
> I judge them the same way I judge anyone that drinks that crap: harshly. Don't tell others they shouldn't judge people for their misdeeds.

Good job ignoring absolutely everything in the comment except the part that offended you. Nothing more American than having a hard-on for being judgemental and then defending the right instead of actually trying to solve the underlying problem.
How much for lifetime feature?
There is not real debate, just some people who don't understand how chemistry works.
> They’re not going to run public health campaigns stressing the importance of regular brushing. They’re just willing to let people’s teeth rot to score points.

Do you really think there are sizable native born populations that are not aware of tooth brushing?

There’s plenty of people that don’t bother with it, but I don’t see a PR campaign being particularly effective at changing that.
Wisconsin tap water tastes fine. Waco, Texas tap water is really nasty.