Hacker News Reader

aznumericon 1910: The year the modern world lost its mind

Kinda like today. Europe is rearming in response to perceived risks from Russia. Then the “when you have a hammer…” effect: once capabilities exist, actors start seeing situations where using them seems rational—procurement begets posture, posture begets use-cases.

aznumericon Military grade sonic weapon is used against protesters in Serbia

Another video, from a different angle:

https://www.reddit.com/r/serbia/comments/1jchks6/novi_snimci...

Please take into account that this occurred during the fifteen-minute silence observed by the protesters in memory of the fifteen victims of the accident, which the protesters blame on the government corruption and which was the very reason for the start of the protests.

aznumericon Subsonic Weapon used on the crowd in Belgrade today

Another video, from a different angle:

https://www.reddit.com/r/serbia/comments/1jchks6/novi_snimci...

aznumericon TSMC execs allegedly dismissed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as 'podcasting bro'

If you like Cursor, you should definitely check out ClaudeDev (https://github.com/saoudrizwan/claude-dev) It's been a hit in the Ai dev community and I've noticed many folks prefer it over Cursor. It's free and open-source. You use your API credits instead of subscription and it supports other LLMs like DeepSeek too.

aznumericon Ask HN: Good Sites for/with AI Enthusiasts?

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA

https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity

https://paperswithcode.com

https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI

aznumericon Show HN: AnythingLLM – Open-Source, All-in-One Desktop AI Assistant

One way people keep costs down when using OpenAI with an offline RAG system is by limiting the number of text snippets sent to the API. Instead of sending the whole database, they'll typically retrieve only the top 10 (or so) most relevant snippets from the vector database and just send those to OpenAI for processing. This significantly reduces the amount of data being processed and billed by OpenAI.

aznumericon Some doctors moving away from ventilators for virus patients

I was under the impression that meat eaters generally aren't deficient in Zinc. What do you think ?

aznumericon Some doctors moving away from ventilators for virus patients

Can you share what's a high dose in this case, how many milligrams of zinc per day ? Also, with zinc it's important to increase the dose slowly or there might be some adverse effects, like hair loss.

aznumericon Nitric oxide inhibits the replication cycle of SARS coronavirus (2004)

L-Arginine

aznumericon U.S. airlines want a $50B bailout. They spent $45B buying back their stock

How about they invest that money in production instead of stock buybacks ?

Here's what Matt Stoller has to say about buybacks and bailouts in general:

Fundamentally, mergers, buybacks, and excessive executive compensation are about stripping out resiliency in return for cash, and the lobbying is the political machine to protect the ability to do that. So what to do? The answer is pretty simple. Stop hidden risk pooling.

Financialization and private equity is about loading up corporations with hidden risk. We cannot afford that anymore. So here are the conditions to put on large corporations who need cash from the government:

-No bailouts for shareholders. Shareholders took the risk and upside, they should get the downside too. A bailout means the stock value goes to zero.

-No more buybacks ever, and no more dividends for five years. It’s time to stop asset-stripping, and restore the cushion inside corporations so they can invest in production.

-Strict executive compensation limits. No more get rich quick schemes and golden parachutes. We need long-term leaders focused on building institutional strength.

-No more lobbying, as well as limit public relations spending. The Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 killed the ability of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to lobby, and that killed their political power. By contrast, Wall Street got bailouts with no strings attached, so they largely wrote the Dodd-Frank bill. (I was there, I saw it). Don’t repeat this.

-No more mergers and acquisitions for five years. If you get bailouts, you have to run your business as a business, not as an acquisition target. I can imagine an exception if the business fails as a stand-alone, but exceptions need to be very narrow.

aznumericon CDC considering recommending general public wear face coverings in public

As far as I know ear, nose, throat doctors (Otolaryngologists) don't treat eyes and they are called 'Ear, Nose, Throat' doctors, there's no eye in the name. Doctors that treat eyes are Ophthalmologists and Optometrists.

aznumericon Guidance against wearing masks for the coronavirus is wrong – cover your face

Here's a Reuters article about the experiment in question: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-study-...

aznumericon Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

Same thing happened with Tridef. The company went under, didn't release a free version of the software, and now people who bought it legally have to resort to using a crack.

aznumericon A brief history of government efforts to stop people from wearing masks

My idea for partially circumventing this is to carry a motorcycle helmet in my hands and to only put it on if the situation escalates. For other body parts, I would use protective motorcycle clothing. A gas mask is small enough for carrying in a backpack and if you find yourself in a situation where you need to put it on, I think worrying about the legalities of wearing a gas mask will be of a pretty low priority.

aznumericon If you must run Windows 10

Windows 10 October 2018 update (1809) deleting users files from the My Documents folder hardly counts as historical.

aznumericon Psytrance Guide

I've listened to most of the projects mentioned here and have been listening to Psytrance since 2005 but nowadays I mostly listen to 90s and early 2000s Trance and I must say that I find it better in general than the Psytrance stuff. I'd like to mention some of the legendary tracks here:

Quiteman - The Sleeper (Man With No Name Remix) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjOcSatGkmo

Li Kwan - Point Zero https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWIXkF_7JII

Electronic Arts - Need for Speed 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8CEJTPECxc

Blue Planet Corporation - Crystal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYtw6j1AHUw

Odyssey Of Noise - Firedance (The Sunrise) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPMZm2O8No

X-Cabs - Neuro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zy-tKoIE9C0

aznumericon Launch HN: Quirk (YC S19) – Open-Source Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

These kinds of apps should ideally be open source and with an option to completely turn off the telemetry. Also fully desktop and/or mobile native, without web backend of any kind.

aznumericon Man and man's best friend have both been experiencing declines in sperm quality

Also MRI is $100 and that's without insurance. While the cheapest MRI I could find in the US, with an individual insurance plan, is $500 out of pocket.

aznumericon Show HN: I trained a deep learning model to build sites for me

Sounds good. Regarding the no-framework output, I'm not against frameworks, I was just thinking for a moment from the perspective of a more traditional web designer who only incorporates bits of pre-made JS code in their design. Such a person might not even know what Vue.js is but may still greatly benefit from your service if it allowed them to convert their designs to just html/css.

aznumericon Show HN: I trained a deep learning model to build sites for me

Hi. I would like to have an option of using just the automated part of the service and do the developer part myself. If hypothetically you would include that option, how cheaper do you think it wold be compared to the current price ? Also one more option: convert design to just HTML and CSS, without javascript or framework of any kind. Would that make sense ?

aznumericon Partnering with publishers for a better journalism experience

Perhaps Javascript ads should be banned by law. It would be easier to enforce compared to investigating what the corporation actually does with the info that it collected from the user.

aznumericon The food industry’s new favorite protein source: peas

Basically, everything man-made which did not previously exist in nature is artificial. As for naturally occuring substances, everything that is synthesized is artificial as well.

aznumericon How to increase serotonin in the human brain without drugs (2007)

They are not suggesting a drug. 5-HTP is used by ravers to combat after effects of MDMA (Extasy), as MDMA depletes serotonin by releasing large amounts of it.

aznumericon An ex-YouTube whistleblower on their recommendation engine

'We designed YT’s AI to increase the time people spend online, because it leads to more ads'

Would you treat your friends like that ? Say, a friend asks you to recommend them a good video on software development. Are you going to optimize your recommendation as to make them take the longest time possible to achieve their goal ?

aznumericon An ex-YouTube whistleblower on their recommendation engine

Because the commenter did not add to the author's statement, but offered a different view on how YT's AI was designed. This particular comment section comments on the article, it is not a general discussion on YT's algorithm. Therefore if the author of the article, who is also one of the authors of the AI in question, writes a very clear statement on how the AI was designed, and the commenter then writes that it sounds like the AI is designed differently, then how can that mean anything else but questioning the correctness of the author's statement.

aznumericon An ex-YouTube whistleblower on their recommendation engine

In the article it clearly states: 'We designed YT’s AI to increase the time people spend online, because it leads to more ads'. They designed it to increase the time spent. It does not 'sound like' they designed it to 'recommend videos people might like', it clearly states 'time spent'. There is no room for speculation, unless you question the correctness of the author's statement.

aznumericon How Hacker News Stays Interesting

hckrnews.com is the exclusive way in which I read Hacker News.

aznumericon 50 Years Ago, the Sugar Industry Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)

Scientists lied about sugar, maybe they're also lying about anthropogenic global warming. They were also wrong about lead, mercury, asbestos, DDT.

aznumericon SF is so expensive that waiters can no longer afford to live in the city

Imagine a dark twist, where the people who are walking by the tents in that picture, actually live in those tents! The smiling guy with the phone just got out of his tent and is heading to his workplace at a tech startup.

aznumericon Bitcoin is tumbling – Off almost 40% from its high

It's UASF, not USAF :-)