MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Aurornis | 2025-05-01 20:09:00+00:00
> The problem with amphetamine is you pay for every benefit: focus now, lethargy later; energy now, anhedonia later.

> But taking a small, consistent dose. Does that work? Do you feel you net benefits in life from taking the drug, discounting for withdrawal and/or tolerance?

There's a reason these medications are supposed to be taken regularly at the same dose in clinical practice. Patients should not be going through cycles of taking stimulants and then withdrawing all of the time.

There's a disconnect between the way some people try to use stimulants ad-hoc versus the therapeutic modality. The initial burst of confidence, energy, and positive mood that comes from intermittent use is a side effect, but people confuse it with a primary effect. They can get into cycles of chasing it with dose escalations or taking it on random days while they exist below baseline on others. This isn't a winnable battle over time because the brain will adapt, not to mention all of those off-days start to add up and people around them notice the extremely inconsistent mood and performance.

Unfortunately, misinformation about ADHD is all over the internet. I recommend ignoring basically anything that comes out of Reddit, Twitter, or TikTok because it's really that bad. Take medications as directed and set yourself up for some stability. Resist the urge to play with doses, take excess doses on some days, or try to play tolerance games. These never work in the long term.

There's a simple heuristic: When you reach stability, you shouldn't really feel the medication. It should be background noise. There's a reason why young people who have been properly titrated on stimulant medications don't understand what the big deal is with their peers taking large doses (without tolerance) and then speeding around for a while. It's where the myth about ADHD people reacting differently to stimulants comes from. Proper treatment will settle to equilibrium and shouldn't produce overt feelings of being drugged or hyperfocused.
by everybodyknows | 2025-05-01 20:09:17+00:00
> I fear it may be too late for these authors and publishers to fix their embarrassing mistakes: they’ve already designed the cover art!

To the publishers it's not a mistake, it's just clever marketing. Consider which of these two jumps off that glossy cover and into the distracted eye of a Technical Program Manager most readily: AI-Assisted Programming, or Vibe Coding

Now consider whether either of those parties feels an obligation to help maintain coherence of the software community's technical discourse.
by sherdil2022 | 2025-05-01 20:09:27+00:00
Thanks for sharing.

Some - like me - who have TRD (treatment resistant depression) find no solace - either temporary or permanent.

Only those who have these issues can truly understand.

Some have a catalog of issues - and sometimes making peace with what you have and going through - and acknowledging sometimes there is no silver bullet or a panacea is better than feeling broken or something is wrong or you need to get ‘normal’. My 2 cents
by bcantrill | 2025-05-01 20:09:27+00:00
Happy to go into it in more detail, but the salient points are in the piece: sales folks are eligible to make more -- but can also make less. This is in keeping with the way enterprise sales is done more or less everywhere: sales is different from every other company activity in that it is very quantifiable. I don't think that there's a whole lot more to say about it?
by setheron | 2025-05-01 20:09:46+00:00
Good point.

The other aspect that I didn't buy too much was the original blog entry claims the salary is enough since the founders themselves have kids and are living in San Francisco.

They are coming from a point of economic safety from prior successful ventures and maybe are on multiple boards with other income streams.

Anyways. I like the intent so I won't be too critical.
by thomassmith65 | 2025-05-01 20:09:48+00:00
That really deserves its own post. It's too interesting to be left as a comment.

I have a lot of questions... who sells plots of land for that little money? Are there tax implications? Does anyone ever get on your case for upkeep?

You really should write a blog post. It definitely would hit the front page.

Edit

who sells plots of land for that little money?

Apparently: many people! I just did a web search. Little plots of land are much cheaper than I expected
by mcswell | 2025-05-01 20:09:50+00:00
Hieroglyphics are the opposite of "discoverable". That's why they became uninterpretable for almost two thousand years, until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. And even then it took considerable work to figure out how they functioned. In the Ribbon, in order to discover what some hieroglyph does, you have to mouse over it. Since there are lots of hieroglyphs there, that's a lot of mouse-over. And no, the Ribbon's images make no sense in 99% of the cases.
by condiment | 2025-05-01 20:10:26+00:00
So, what’s it gonna take for Waymo to start selling retrofit kits for existing cars?

If a $10,000 investment reduces the chances of a serious accident by 90%, the corresponding reduction in insurance rates might have a payoff within a few years. Especially if adoption starts to push rates up for customers who don’t automate. I can’t take a taxi everywhere, but I’d sure like it if my car drove me everywhere and did a better job than me at it too.
by hadlock | 2025-05-01 20:10:28+00:00
If you're doing a home lab voice assistant 1B is nice, because on a 12gb gpu you can run a moderately competent 7b LLM and two 1b models; 1 for speech to text and also text to speech, plus some for the wake word monitor. Maybe in a couple of years we can combine all this into a single ~8b model that runs efficiently on 12gb gpu. Nvidia doesn't seem very incentivized right now to sell consumer GPUs that can run all this on a single consumer grade chip when they're making so much money selling commercial grade 48gb cards.
by gilleain | 2025-05-01 20:10:30+00:00
Agreed. To put it another way, a few years ago, you could copy/paste from a similar code example you found online or elsewhere in the same repository, tweak it a bit then commit that.

Still bad. AI just makes it faster to make new bad code.

edit : to be clearer, the problem in both copy/paste and AI examples is the lack of thought or review.
by ordinaryradical | 2025-05-01 20:10:37+00:00
Literally riding in a Waymo right now in Los Angeles.

IMO they already won. The amount of stupid things you see people do here while driving is astonishing, so many people are not paying attention and looking at their phones.

I used an Uber on the way here and the car was dirtier while the service was identical (silent ride, got me where I needed to go.)

I’ve also been stuck in a Waymo that couldn’t figure out its way around parked buses, so they have edge cases to improve. But man does it feel like I’m living in the future…
by rsync | 2025-05-01 20:11:04+00:00
"For replicating sqlite databases safely there is (litestream) ..."

A reminder that litestream can run over plain old SFTP[1] which means you can stream database replication to just about any UNIX endpoint over SSH.

I have a favorite[2] but any SFTP server will do ...

[1] https://github.com/benbjohnson/litestream/issues/140

[2] https://www.rsync.net/resources/notes/2021-q3-rsync.net_tech...
Show HN: HN top 30 summarized by Gemini 2.5 Pro
by mbm | 2025-05-01 20:12:01+00:00
Fun little project, had Gemini 2.5 Pro summarize HN's top 30 each hour, both the stories and comment sections.

Pretty impressed with Gemini 2.5. It's probably the first model other than Claude 3.7 Sonnet where I actually find the output readable. I normally use 3.7 Sonnet for coding, but used Gemini for the codegen on this one as well. Was pretty impressed! Using Cursor, it seemed to instruction-follow better than Claude generally does, and remain lucid during very long agent sessions.

Thanks for your feedback!
by yorwba | 2025-05-01 20:12:19+00:00
I understood perfectly. You live in a society where parents beating their children is so normalized that even people whose job is ostensibly to protect children from harm fail to see anything wrong with it, and elaborate rituals have been constructed to justify continuing the tradition. Yet I suspect an employer exactly following the prescribed procedure when spanking his employees would nonetheless be charged with battery.

You might want to read about the time when a third of all men on Pitcairn Island were convicted of rape: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/01/pitcairn200801 If you had grown up on Pitcairn, would you have realized that something was wrong, or would you have justified the practice like the wife of an islander did? “It’s Polynesian to break your girls in at 12.”

Something to think about.
by mike_ivanov | 2025-05-01 20:12:45+00:00
Are all they same to you? The Soviets were as close to socialism as it gets. It WAS the socialism in its purest possible form. This is what you get when you take the ideal marxist socialism AND mix in the actual human nature.

See, to you these things are some abstract ideas, a beautiful theory. To me it is practice - this is what I lived in and lived by. So yes, I can tell the difference between SU and Laos. Laos has never been even close.
by nyeah | 2025-05-01 20:12:46+00:00
It has to be a completely ideal box. That's a very extreme condition, so it messes very badly with people's intuition. It can not be a metal box with a cat in it, for example.

"It's a thought experiment" means "we can specify a totally ideal box." It doesn't mean "a finite metal box on a table will actually behave this way."
by reaperducer | 2025-05-01 20:12:55+00:00
the co[s]t of every in person interview includes two way flights, per diem and a hotel room

So… you mean the way it's been done for the last hundred years?

If your company is so small that you can't afford to bring someone in, then you hire locally.

Also, $8-10k per hire is too much for an interview. We do ours for under $1,000 with round-trip airfare, hotel, and meals. It's always the last step before signing.

Personally, I wouldn't feel comfortable working for a company that didn't bring me in for an in-person interview, even for a remote job. It's just as important for me to evaluate the company as it is for them to evaluate me.
by sigmonsays | 2025-05-01 20:13:50+00:00
tilt might be nice but I do not develop in containers or kubernetes. Tilt to me looks like more glue on top to make updating kube fast. It might make sense for some but it seems pointless to me.

If I can run external dependencies in docker locally, I can setup my app to run entirely from my laptop. That's all docker-compose does, just runs dev deps like DBs and other services i'm not editing code of.

As far as code reloading goes, there is a million tools to do that already. Go already compiles locally much faster than seconds.

All that being said, why are people choosing to develop in containers/kubernetes?

Maybe apps that need to be more tightly integrated with kube would benefit from this?
by sneak | 2025-05-01 20:13:54+00:00
Not a differentiated one.

The AGPL, in its quest to be a EULA, violates free software Freedom 0 ("The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose").

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

The AGPL literally demands specific functionality be present in the software that cannot be removed without breaking the license. The anticapitalist FSF zealots got so in love with the idea of closing what they call "the ASP loophole" that they wrote themselves a EULA.
by ahl | 2025-05-01 20:14:07+00:00
Equity is mentioned in the previous post:

> Some will say that we should be talking about equity, not cash compensation. While it’s true that startup equity is important, it’s also true that startup equity doesn’t pay the orthodontist’s bill or get the basement repainted. We believe that every employee should have equity to give them a stake in the company’s future (and that an outsized return for investors should also be an outsized return for employees), but we also believe that the presence of equity can’t be used as an excuse for unsustainably low cash compensation. As for how equity is determined, it really deserves its own in-depth treatment, but in short, equity compensates for risk – and in a startup, risk reduces over time: the first employee takes much more risk than the hundredth.
Show HN: A Systematic, Modern AI Learning Roadmap (Starting with LLMs)
by zljdanceholic | 2025-05-01 20:14:41+00:00
Why Build Another AI Tutorial?

There is no shortage of AI tutorials available. Yet, through my personal learning journey, I found that many resources fell short in a few critical areas:

1. Comprehensive and Systematic: I wanted a structured roadmap to understand where I am, and where I’m going. 2. Up-to-Date: Some resources are reasonably comprehensive but cover only the basics. I needed something that reflects the latest techniques, so I would know what’s going on these days. 3. Practical: The content should be deep enough to help with papers, projects, or jobs — but not overwhelming. 4. Accessible Anywhere: I want something paperless, easy to browse whenever and wherever.

Rather than constantly piecing together scattered information, I’m consolidating my learning into a single, living document — complete with references (try to) and fact-checkable sources wherever possible.

What's on it?

Currently, the focus is on Large Language Models (LLMs), broken into multiple detailed sections. Each section introduces key concepts and dives deeper into technical details where necessary — especially when mathematics is essential for understanding. For example:

1.5 Positional Encoding: A section with a comprehensive tutorial that involves the most commonly used encoding methods nowadays: from absolute PE, relative PE, to current RoPE, and YaRN 3.2 Reinforcement Learning: A mathematically heavier section, covering concepts crucial for understanding methods like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). 5.3 Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): A practical section that ends with hands-on practices on Colab using LangChain and LangSmith.

There may be minimal ads in the future to help support the time and effort involved in maintaining and expanding the resource. My goal remains the same: to make advanced AI knowledge freely accessible and practical for anyone who needs it.

Thanks for reading — and I hope this resource can help you on your own AI journey!
by osigurdson | 2025-05-01 20:14:43+00:00
I think a project has to be Linux or Postgres big to really operate as open source. Why? Because cloud providers can easily sell your product and contribute nothing back. So, for anything < Postgres in size you need to create a new license to allow you to run a managed service. The problem is, with something like AGPL, companies that aren't selling your stuff (just using it), now need to release their stuff as AGPL as well. With so many things using Redis, it seems that millions of companies will now be in violation of the license agreement upon a given update in the future.

Personally, I think it is better just to call a spade a spade and release things with commercial licenses. Let all companies with < 1T market cap use your stuff for free. Companies that are making money will want a managed service or support anyway. Companies that want to host your stuff in their environment fall into the > $1T category.

The above is a bit of a strawman but what we really want is for valuable projects to continue to exist.
by charcircuit | 2025-05-01 20:15:01+00:00
>that's why you don't need to give a copyright license to Apple before storing your personal pictures to iCloud either

You do which is why it's a part of the terms of service for icloud.

https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/icloud/en/terc....

>No, because sharing is what you'd get prosecuted for.

Copyright controls both reproduction and distribution.

>start learning the basis of stuff before arguing on the internet about it

You are being unnecessarily smug and condescending.
by tim333 | 2025-05-01 20:15:06+00:00
Maybe we could do with a new term. I mean "general intelligence" is pretty vague and could apply to all sorts of stuff.

Re "momentous milestone, ... obvious when it has been built" personally I think a major point is when the AIs could keep running the world without us, including building energy plants, chip factories and so on. AI independence maybe?

I think they are wrong on "AGI won't be a shock to the economy because diffusion takes decades" - ChatGPT reached 100m users in 2 months. These things can happen quickly.
by vlovich123 | 2025-05-01 20:15:08+00:00
Yup, these results are pretty consistent with what I'd expect (& why I noted the impact of indices) cause even string data has a lot of superfluous information when expressed in the DDL ("INSERT INTO foo ...") - I would expect all of that to exceed any bookkeeping within the btree. And non-string values like blobs or numbers are going to be stored more efficiently than in the dump which is a text encoding (or even hex for blobs) which is going to blow things up further.
by mattlondon | 2025-05-01 20:15:11+00:00
Do you really think Apple can catch up with and then surpass all these SOTA AI labs?

They bet big and got distracted on VR. It was obviously the wrong choice at the time, and even more so now. They're going to have to abandon all that VR crap and pivot hard to AI to try and catch up. I think the more likely case is they can't catch up now and will just have to end up licensing Gemini from Google/Google paying them to use Gemini as the default AI.
by FuriouslyAdrift | 2025-05-01 20:15:22+00:00
That's how Elizabeth Holmes went from a rando Stanford drop out to a "billionaire"

Her father was head of a Federal govt agency at one point and a VP at Enron (I know, I know).

Also, a direct descendant of the Fleischmann yeast family.

Her mother also had worked as a Congressional aide.
by ziddoap | 2025-05-01 20:15:23+00:00
In short, they pay everyone the same as they pay themselves.

"We decided to do something outlandishly simple: take the salary that Steve, Jess, and I were going to pay ourselves, and pay that to everyone. The three of us live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Steve and I each have three kids; we knew that the dollar figure that would allow us to live without financial distress – which we put at $175,000 a year – would be at least universally adequate for the team we wanted to build. And we mean everyone literally: as of this writing we have 23 employees, and that’s what we all make."

Later update:

"Since originally writing this blog entry in 2021, we have increased our salary a few times, and it now stands at $207,264. We have also added some sales positions that have variable compensation, consisting of a lower base salary and a commission component."
by steveklabnik | 2025-05-01 20:15:23+00:00
I forget the details, but the rough shape of it is that sales makes a lower base salary, but with a commission component that can lead to a higher salary than the standard one. I can't remember if there's also some sort of cap.

You could take it as undermining those other points, but I don't. (I am, of course, biased.) We didn't do this because we needed to address some failing of these other things, we did it because sales has an incredibly strong culture of this compensation model, to the degree that it would be difficult to hire otherwise. That isn't an issue with other staff.

Additionally, some of the points don't work the same way with sales, that is, the variability is easily measured and objective. Sales people don't write promo packets, you count up the amount they sold.
by Veserv | 2025-05-01 20:15:33+00:00
I think I was pretty clear.

> You do not get to counter-argue: “What matters is the rate of cases per mile driven” without actually presenting that number with supporting evidence. Otherwise the only sound conclusion is the default presumption of non-safety.

I then pointed out how Waymo does present such evidence. But, if you applied that argument to Cruise you would be wrong. That demonstrates how that argument (when not presenting the numbers) can be used to support both good and bad and is thus a bad argument.

The correct argument when somebody points to anecdotes of bad outcomes is to present statistically sound data of good outcomes, not argue they did not present statistically sound data of bad outcomes thus you get to assume it is good.
by mbm | 2025-05-01 20:15:49+00:00
Tech stack:

- Rails 8

- Embedded React frontend w/ Tailwind

- Sidekiq for cron jobs

- Perplexity API for story info extraction via URL

- Gemini 2.5 Pro for classifying story extraction results as valid/invalid

- Gemini 2.5 Pro for summarizing stories and HN comment threads (tried Claude but preferred the personality of Gemini surprisingly)

- Cursor with Gemini 2.5 Pro + Claude 3.7 Sonnet for codegen
by thewebguyd | 2025-05-01 20:15:50+00:00
IMO, no. The open source definition says nothing about requiring outside contributions, and IMO the spirit of it in the beginning was never about that.

It was about being able to have access to, fork/modify, and redistribute the software. That's the important thing - that the software I use can be modified by me, and if I wish to do so, the license allows me to then redistribute those changes vs. proprietary software, which cannot be modified nor redistributed.

I'm not sure why the zeitgeist went from the above and turned into "all open source must be community software and engage with users and accept contributions" because that was never what it was about. It was a benefit of some projects, sure, but at the end of the day the important thing isn't whether or not the project accepts contributions but whether I have the power and license to modify something to my liking, fork it if I wash, and/or redistribute my changes.
by matttproud | 2025-05-01 20:15:54+00:00
Don't think for a minute I want human drivers anywhere near bicyclists or pedestrians or assume they are anywhere better for general-purpose driving. Human drivers are awful, but I'd posit the behavior of these automated vehicles isn't much better toward making a welcoming road environment as they are programmed. The laws — particularly for California and what is treated as standard in North America — don't help matters at all.
by rorylaitila | 2025-05-01 20:16:22+00:00
I'm universally the asker. I can hang out with a non-asker for about an hour, then I run out of things to ask about. But its not just a problem of reciprocity. It's more generally they don't elaborate or carry forward the conversation in any way, so it feels very laborious. I notice that two friends I feel closest too and never tire of hanging out reciprocate very evenly in conversation.
by techpineapple | 2025-05-01 20:16:23+00:00
I wonder if one of the reasons thought leaders like and are bullish on AI is that one of your jobs is to simplify things. Act at high levels of abstraction. The details don’t matter. Anyone who has ever worked with an executive knows that you’re trained to talk to them almost like kids (especially outside of their domain expertise) because they’re trying to manage so broad a context.

And so AI is great at this.

So the things that may bother an expert, like the fact that AI hallucinates, often seems to have no idea what it’s talking about and lacks nuance doesn’t bother them. In fact the things that bother most experts about AI are anti-patterns to like VCs. They literally can’t see how AI may be exceptional at helping them but not others.

Like the story about how SBF hated reading books, everything should be a like 5 bullet point blog post