MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sausagefeet | 2025-06-06 10:27:23+00:00
I do not have ADHD but also struggle to "sell myself". It's something I had to work on. My view is that the industry can be kind of obsessed with these kind of stories. It's kind of like the "great man of history" world view, but in the small. A common challenge for me is in companies that have a "cultural" interview where they want you to talk about some conflict that happened and how you resolved this, either I'm incredibly naive or I just don't see conflict in this way that makes it a story. I just try to treat people with respect, I try to talk to them in a way that makes them feel open to talk to me. If I have hit conflict it didn't strike me as a moment where I had to think about it in that or it never escalated to being a problem. And it can be the same for programming. I don't have a cool story about the "hardest bug I ever solved" because it's just the same iterative process as any other challenge I have and it feels the same to me in the moment and after, just sometimes it takes longer. And I am no way trying to imply this represents some exceptional behaviour on my part, it's just by nature or nurture how things work, I didn't choose it.
by DavidPiper | 2025-06-06 10:28:01+00:00
I'm not sure how accurate the dot-graph is at the bottom of the Tree, but anyone notice that 1880 to 1980 has a huge density, and since about 1980 we seem to be stagnating?

Data collection bias? Goalpost/definition change maybe (many recent advances are in "better" software and hardware)? Less research/exploration investment vs. business/exploitation investment?

Interesting to think about "what if my whole life has actually been in a period of global exploratory slowdown?"
by handoflixue | 2025-06-06 10:29:35+00:00
Amazon.com currently carries the "Anarchist's Cookbook", including the Author's Footnote saying that the publication of this book is a terrible and dangerous idea. My local library also carries this book.

Is this disinformation really more dangerous than that book? Is there some reason YouTube should be more liable for user-uploaded content, versus a bookstore being liable for content they deliberately choose to carry?
by zanfr | 2025-06-06 10:29:42+00:00
there is no long term herd immunity with coronaviruses; which is why they are often use in disaster prevention scenarios...

what you call "herd immunity" is merely letting people die and then go "we have herd immunity" as part of your survivor bias

only solution that works most of the time, regardless of pathogen (including covid): air filtration (respirators and/or whole room)
by Tallain | 2025-06-06 10:29:57+00:00
That's another fair point that specifically tomato-based products often have sugar, but also kind of missing the forest for the trees. For various reasons, we have a slew of foods that one might not expect to have added sugar (like lunch meat, ham notwithstanding, or applesauce which is already sweet without extra sugar, to pick from my short list above), that do because of reasons. In any case it does pay to still look, because if you're not careful you could pick one random tomato sauce that has double the amount of sugar compared to the jar right next to it on the shelf (Bertolli Tomato & Basil, 11g per serving; Newton's Own Marinara, 6g per serving).

These choices add up, which is the point I was trying to make originally (though I agree I did not do a good job of it); I understand I was being pedantic so I understand the nature of the responses to me. The point is that small differences, isolated, don't matter, but in aggregate they absolutely do. We make arguments like this all the time in software when trying to write correct, performative code -- the milliseconds add up, and so do the grams of sugar.

The anti-HFCS movement, despite having its targets aimed for wrong reasons, is still aiming at the right thing: being more mindful of what's in the things we put in our bodies.
by eru | 2025-06-06 10:30:28+00:00
GPL only forces you to contribute back a modification you make and publish.

> In a world without copyright, companies would be free to make their own modifications and keep them secret, making it more or less impossible to integrate them into a cohesive whole the way they are more or less forced to do today.

Private modifications that are never shared with a third party are fine with the GPL. Eg Google doesn't have to share whatever kernel they are using on their internal servers with you.
by stuartjohnson12 | 2025-06-06 10:31:42+00:00
When people talk about how sophisticated hierarchical agent swarms will be built up that perfectly reflect existing human social structures I'm reminded distinctly of all the attempts to build DDD frameworks for modeling software, and then the actual result is that software went in the opposite direction - towards flattening.

As native LLM task completion horizons increase another order of magnitude, so much of this falls out of the window.
by numeri | 2025-06-06 10:32:09+00:00
That's a bold claim! Actually, there are plenty of scientific experiments that show actual differences between people who report aphantasia and those who don't, including different stress responses to frightening non-visual descriptions, different susceptibility to something called image priming, lower "cortical excitability in the primary visual cortex", and more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

So we know that at least the people who claim to see nothing act differently. Could it just be that people who act differently describe the sensation differently, you might ask?

No, because there are actual cases of acquired aphantasia after neurological damage. These people used to belong to the group that claimed to be able to imagine visual images, got sick, then sought medical help when they could no longer visualize. For me, at least, that's pretty cut and dry evidence that it's not just differing descriptions of the same (or similar) sensations.
by AngryData | 2025-06-06 10:33:27+00:00
If you don't trust your employee, you can fire them. Don't hire people you don't trust. If a company doesn't even know what kind of traffic, output, or variation in work an employee will have in their job then they are a bad business. Business takes on liability of the people they hire, and they should not be shielded from their own ineptitude in hiring and training them.
by eru | 2025-06-06 10:33:43+00:00
Linux is both a kernel (which is under GPL), and an operating system, whose other components are under a variety of licenses (and you can pick and match which components you want).

That's why some people like to call it 'Gnu/Linux', but thanks to recent advances we can make Gnu-free Linuxes today, too.

> There are far fewer success stories of artworks being made in this style. (E.g. there are successful multiplayer open-source games or clones of existing games, but very few original single-player games, and those that there are are largely the work of a single individual)

Humans have made art since forever. Large collaborative efforts like eg a cathedral are a more recent invention. But by these standards copyright was practically invented yesterday.
by lelanthran | 2025-06-06 10:34:02+00:00
> For any professional SWE 1/200 a month is basically nothing in terms of the value it delivers.

If it is delivering that value indeed, then 100-200 dollars each month is exactly what that professional SWE is worth.

That SWE is going to have to pivot into something adjacent to provide value-add, and if the only value-add is "I can review and approve/reject", then it's only a matter of time[1] that there are no SWEs who can review and then approve/reject.

And that is assuming that the LLM coding performance remains where it is now, and does not improve to the review, orchestration, design and planning levels.

-------------------------

[1] Due to attrition
by jiggawatts | 2025-06-06 10:34:14+00:00
How could people possibly be this bad at drawing a bicycle!?

Was this study done on aboriginals living in a rainforest that have never gone to a paved part of the world where people use bicycles?

Sure, I'd get a bit flustered if asked to draw a modern mountain bike with rear suspension. Err... there's a spring back there... somewhere?

But an ordinary road bike? How could you get that wrong?
by jonathanleane | 2025-06-06 10:34:56+00:00
Hey HN! I built Partycles because I needed lightweight celebration animations for a React project and couldn't find anything that wasn't bloated with dependencies.

It's just one hook - useReward() - that gives you 11 different particle effects: confetti, fireworks, sparkles, hearts, stars, bubbles, snow, emoji, coins, lightning, and flower petals. The whole thing is under 10KB gzipped with zero dependencies.

Demo: https://jonathanleane.github.io/partycles

The library is MIT licensed and on GitHub. Would love contributions - especially new animation types or performance improvements. The codebase is pretty straightforward, each animation is its own module.

I'm using it in production for success notifications and user achievements. Works great on mobile too.

Tech: TypeScript, React 16.8+, rollup for bundling. No canvas - just DOM elements with CSS transforms, which keeps it simple and performant.

Happy to answer any questions!
by ivape | 2025-06-06 10:35:25+00:00
That API was already reasonable before he took over Twitter. It was prohibitively priced afterward. You are making arguments out of things where there is objective proof otherwise. Anyways, I think he cut aid programs and fired a bunch of people too. That's a whole nother' matter though (I'll drop the whole holistic argument).

For example the firehose/streaming API more or less require 5 grand a month, so off limits to a indie dev. Does he not even have solidarity with developers?
by molf | 2025-06-06 10:36:36+00:00
It would help tremendously if OpenAI would make it possible to apply for zero data retention (ZDR). For many business needs there is no reason to store or log any request at all.

In theory it is possible to apply (it's mentioned on multiple locations in the documentation), but in practice requests are just being ignored. I get that approval needs to be given, and that there are barriers to entry. But it seems to me they mention zero-data retention only for marketing purposes.

We have applied multiple times and have yet to receive ANY response. Reading through the forums this seems very common.
by throwaway1482 | 2025-06-06 10:37:14+00:00
Well-known developer Enrico Weigelt just forked the X server from freedesktop.org after getting the boot [0].

[0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...

[1] https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/commits/xlibre/prepare/
by jiggawatts | 2025-06-06 10:37:39+00:00
Did you see the pictures in the link? The chain was going between the front and back wheel! The pedals were where the seat goes! Basically, a bunch of nonsense. There are chat-bots now that can do better.

I couldn't draw a detailed 3D technical drawing of a derailleur, but I can draw a sketch of a bicycle without needing a photo reference!
by cassepipe | 2025-06-06 10:39:45+00:00
> The US is not a functioning democracy and therefore effectively not a democracy at all, either.

It's a weird statement because you are jumping from a descriptive statement ("not a functioning democracy") to a normative one (if it's not at least 80% democratic then I have decided that it's not a democracy)

I am getting too old not to notice such rhetorical tricks. Do better.
by bmacho | 2025-06-06 10:39:57+00:00
Fun fact: when it is cold, and you need more heat inside you, it doesn't take any energy at all. In fact nothing takes energy, except physical work.

The same is true for households, if it's winter, and you have the heating on, washing clothes, cooking, mining bitcoin, they are all free, since every Joule metered in the electricity meter converts to heat.
by Defletter | 2025-06-06 10:40:31+00:00
Not to be glib, but yes, that's what Public Order Offences are. Society and law exists so that we can co-exist, and people going out of their way to be offensive and provocative by, say, setting things on fire in a public space and saying hateful things... yeah, that's eminently antisocial. If you want to frame this as criminality coming from mere knowledge, you can do that, but you're obscuring context... you're literally doing the thing. Cringe.
Show HN: Personalized AI in Email
by doriandoru | 2025-06-06 10:40:44+00:00
Hey All,

I've been working on Talaria, an AI email client. My goal was to make email more productive, not just add AI on top.

I'm strongly influenced by Koomen's "AI Horseless Carriages" essay (https://koomen.dev/essays/horseless-carriages/).

With Talaria, I tried to make a client with a different approach. Building AI deep into the core to give you:

Smart summaries: Quickly get the main points of long emails. Contextual replies: The AI drafts responses that actually make sense, learning from your past emails and writing style. Actionable insights: Talaria helps you organize and manage tasks right from your inbox.

But it's not just about speed. It's about making email less of a chore and more helpful.

I'd love for you to try Talaria and tell me what you think. I'll be here to answer any questions.

Link: https://talaria.email
by Xmd5a | 2025-06-06 10:41:18+00:00
https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1bmp1vk/very_salty_mo...

Lot of gems in this thread. My favorite:

>>>After Mochizuki said that Scholze-Stix were “profoundly ignorant,” I’m starting to think that this phrase is a weird form of high praise from Mochizuki.

>>I feel like the most logical strategy for Mochizuki right now is to diss. Due to the currently prevalent (and not altogether unjustified) attitude towards Mochizuki and his "cult", any praise from him will condemn what he praises to oblivion, because anyone that he praises is guilty of being part of his "fan club" simply by association. In a way, this helps to give the perception that Joshi is "independent" and still worthy of being taken seriously, though Scholze has already been dismissive of Joshi's work from the beginning.

>Wow the implications of this perspective. Theatrical and operatic. If/when Joshi’s work is vindicated, Mochizuki comes out of the shadows and says “I’m sorry son I completely raked you through the coals so that you would gain sympathy and some credibility in the eyes of the wider mathematical community, so that eventually your ideas would be recognized and hence mine as well”. I would watch the fuck out of this movie.
by sReinwald | 2025-06-06 10:42:34+00:00
I can relate to this very strongly. The difficulty in 'selling yourself' by recalling specific achievements for interviews or performance reviews is a challenge I know all too well.

Like you and the author, I have aphantasia (and possibly SDAM), but through self-reflection and quite a bit of therapy, I've come to believe this specific issue lies more firmly in the domain of ADHD. For me, the problem isn't just an inability to recall achievements, but a failure to feel a sense of achievement for almost anything in the first place.

A very recent example from my own life illustrates this perfectly: For context, I struggled through university for about 12 years without a degree before receiving my ADHD diagnosis. Afterwards, I decided to switch careers and applied for an apprenticeship as an IT specialist for system integration, essentially a helpdesk/support role. Because of my self-taught skills, I was hired directly, skipping the apprenticeship. Intellectually, I know this was a very good outcome. In the 8 months since, I've taken on tasks far beyond my initial role - automating reports, working on internal tooling and a local AI solution, and developing customer-facing tools. Just yesterday, I was officially promoted to Test Automation Engineer with a 50% salary increase.

And I know intellectually that going from applying for an apprenticeship to an engineering role in 8 months is a significant achievement. But I don't feel it as such. My dominant feeling is that, at 35, I'm finally just starting to catch up to my peers. To an outside observer, that probably sounds absurd.

My working theory for this is that it's a mechanism very similar to the common ADHD experience of misplacing keys. The issue isn't a failure to recall the memory of where you put them. The problem is that the memory was never properly encoded in the first place, because your attention was already split between several other thoughts at that moment. You can't retrieve a memory that was never saved.

I suspect something similar happens with achievements. If an event doesn't register emotionally as an "achievement" at the moment it happens, the brain doesn't file it under that tag. It just gets stored as another factual event - 'a thing that happened' - which makes it incredibly difficult to retrieve when a prompt like "tell me about a time you solved a hard problem" specifically asks for something from the 'achievements' file.
by btreecat | 2025-06-06 10:42:44+00:00
> Distillation, when done improperly, can result in very toxic substances.

You're talking methanol right? That's a byproduct of fermentation of fruit.

>It requires care and craft

It really doesn't, it's a very basic process.

>and since alcohol is not only a drug but a transformed product (like LSD or meth),

Not sure what that means, could you clarify?

>it is perfectly fine that some state-level supervision apply: anything ranging from plain interdiction to controlled production.

It's really no different than brewing beer or wine, then discarding the water. For personal consumption it shouldn't be an issue.
by smeej | 2025-06-06 10:44:57+00:00
Perhaps, but I have hyperphantasia and could easily assemble/visualize a bike in my head without a clue what many of the parts are called. I know the big ones like "handlebars" or "pedals," but I haven't spent more than a few hours on bikes since childhood because of a deformity in my neck that makes my hands go numb in a riding position.

In some cases, it very well may be familiarity, but for some of us, it's just memory and visualization.
by potato3732842 | 2025-06-06 10:46:25+00:00
>We also suppress videos on the correct manufacturing process for plastic explosives. Not because doing it safely is a bad idea, but because proliferating bomb making materials is.

>Covid disinformation got people killed. It will continue to get people killed, especially with a proponent of it leading the US health service.

>Things likely to lead to death, are likely things you do not want on your platform.

Proliferating attitudes about the restriction of communication like you are doing and advocating for is bad and gets people killed. The history books are chock f-ing full of the recipe and the steps.

I'll take my chances with the plastic explosives and the health quackery.

Even though people may spew falsehoods the truth "just is" and will keep coming back up.
by hello_computer | 2025-06-06 10:46:57+00:00
The good news is that LLMs + growth in storage & bandwidth will eventually put Google in its place. The full texts of stack exchange and wikipedia (kiwix) are only a few gigs. Same for offline models like llama/gemma/qwen. As the wizards keep finding new ways to pack more bits on metal plates, we will be able to store more video than we will ever watch, just as we now store more text than we will ever read.
by constantcrying | 2025-06-06 10:46:57+00:00
I think the principles behind this are very good, nevertheless the ideas here have been around for a long time and the EU and Germany have funded that direction for quite a while. The questions which haven't been answered are:

- How do you create a competitor to US companies. You can not expect industry or even governments to switch to a worse alternative, which requires more personal, causes more issue and causes more costs. How do you develop such a competitor, where will it come from?

- How do you ensure that these open standards are good. As of right now basically all funding was distributed to small projects, who created their own niche software for some use case. Microsoft or Google are so valuable because they offer everything together creating a cohesive structure and not just a wide array of thrown together software.

- Where are the people to create this? A simple comparison of US and German SW dev salaries will tell you how much more valued SW Developers are in the US. Where do the Legions of people to make a project like this happen come from? Where would they even go? Microsoft and Google are great places to work at, but such places do not exist in Germany.
by atemerev | 2025-06-06 10:47:36+00:00
That was their voluntary decision supported by the population of both states.

A closer analogy would have been some proposals to dissolve the German state forever after WW2, and get its parts annexed by other states. But that didn't happen.

Not to mention that Nazi Germany was actually doing an actual genocide. But that wasn't sufficient to warrant the same fate for them as a nation.
by btreecat | 2025-06-06 10:47:46+00:00
> But is it always pure when amateurs do it?

Yes. Arguably, because amateurs are not cost bound, they tend to make a less "containinated" product due to the way the collection and blending works.

You discard the foul flavors and harse volatiles that commercial folks keep for cost.

>Can you guarrantee that nothing goes wrong, that the product is tested for contaminations every time?

Life isn't about that kind of guarantee. You don't practice the same level of food safety at home as you're required to maintain in a professional environment.

Life, is about risk acceptance.
by cassepipe | 2025-06-06 10:48:17+00:00
He is so dishonest that he has a page listing his old mistakes: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mistakes

Do you know anyone else doing that ? But he is also capable of changing his mind if he presented with contradcitions or a better rationale ?

It's crazy that even though you are considerate, honest, try to argument and avoid culture war, you will end with some haters no matter what
by naikrovek | 2025-06-06 10:50:19+00:00
The problem here is that people make videos for money.

If you make videos for money you are highly interested in following googles rules, no matter how insane they get.

Maybe don’t make a career out of videos? If everyone just stopped doing that, Google would have a lot less muscle when telling people what they could do in their videos.

Life pro tip: never do things solely for money.

People seem to get mad when I say that but they also seem to misunderstand what I mean when I say “solely for money”. If you have a job that pays the bills, don’t make YouTube videos solely because you will have more money. Doing so will put you in Googles mercy, and you will be scared to death to do anything that removes that income. Instead, make videos to help your career, or simply for fun, and don’t monetize them. Google can’t threaten your income if you don’t get income from them.
by btreecat | 2025-06-06 10:50:23+00:00
> Rather you discard the heads and the tails from a fractioning still because that's where stuff that isn't ethanol comes out.

This is also incorrect. It comes out throughout the distillation process, with a higher % concentration in the tails, but an over all reduced volume due to lower % distillate.

> Someone suffering methanol poisoning from DIY distillation is equivalent to someone landing in the hospital after failing to cook his chicken all the way through.

It's more like taking raw packs of chicken and rubbing your eyes. That has to be intentional.
by greybox | 2025-06-06 10:51:24+00:00
The BEAM VM is generally terrible at any computationally heavy task. But what it lacks in performance, it makes up for in stability built-in to Erlang's OTP framework.

It's also "difficult" to integrate with existing C programs such as system drivers due to BEAM's execution model. It's possible to do, but there are a lot of foot guns & you have to be careful.