MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by KronisLV | 2025-06-02 14:08:47+00:00
> How do you keep hitting that publish button, over and over again, knowing there’s no one on the other side?

> I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure it out.

Realistically, by just writing something and hitting the publish button.

There are things I do to put food on the table, where reputation matters, at least within the org (e.g. "that person who shipped code that works and is maintainable" vs "that person who keeps shipping code that breaks prod"), where things often take a lot of time, effort and planning, and where I expect a specific payoff.

Everything else I do in my free time is not that. If I want to do silly things like write a blog post about how Docker is supposed to lead to mostly reproducible builds but sometimes defies reason and how Spring DI is evil, or maybe a blog post about how the Windows bootloader is actually pretty swanky despite me doing some rocket surgery on my drives, or maybe a blog post about how a dual GPU setup is almost good but not quite and how we can't have nice things despite offloading things to a dedicated device being the rational thing to do, then I can do that.

It doesn't even matter if I have all of the details down correctly, whether there is a lot of polish in the thing I'm making, or if anyone bothers to read or interact with it. All of that is ego stuff. Chasing after that validation and obsessing over the details will only give you writer's block or keep worrying about things that matter less than you'd think in the grand scheme of things.

It's not about building a brand, it's not about revenue, it's not about reputation, I write because I feel like it and sometimes even to "rebel" against the status quo because sharing my experiences and my own lived truth feels good in of itself. Furthermore, if they ever become relevant, I can reference my findings with a link. A bit like writing a diary would be like, but in a more public setting.
by ttul | 2025-06-02 14:09:04+00:00
I had kids when I was pretty young and, in parallel with that, also spent two years earning nothing at all to start a company. I spend a very long time feeling quite poor, since it took a while for the company to be big enough to pay me a real salary. And if you have kids on a low salary, all of your money goes to absolutely the most basic necessities.

In recent years, I have had just a little bit extra, and I found satisfaction in paying off debts and contributing to a retirement fund for the first time. I also bought ski passes for myself and my kids and we had many enjoyable days on the mountain.

I have rich friends who own three houses and make over a million a year just from investments. They’re quite content, but the extra money doesn’t seem to buy them much extra satisfaction.
by Jeremy1026 | 2025-06-02 14:09:43+00:00
Using a 11 year old laptop isn't the reason you're able to spend $30k+ on travel over an 18 month period. Including that is like when people say "stop buying Starbucks if you want to buy a house." There are typically other circumstances are involved, even a $8 coffee every day is only $3,000 a year. That isn't make or break for getting a mortgage.
by strken | 2025-06-02 14:09:49+00:00
Sometimes you're an investment, sometimes you're insurance, and other times you're a luxury or even an impulse buy.

I think this is a better framing because it explains some behaviours that are otherwise baffling: if I'm hurting for cash, I'm going to stop adding to my savings before I cancel all my insurance, even if the expected rate of return is higher.
by 7thaccount | 2025-06-02 14:10:22+00:00
I like to figure skate. I'm not competitive at all, just like putting on some headphones and gliding around and working on new moves. It can be a bit expensive. I like that it's a bit social too as you see the same adults all the time and it's also great if you have kids as they can do their own thing and socialize. It's good for exercise and balance.

It's prob over $200/month on group and private lessons when put together for me (I skate for 3-6 hours a week). Skates vary in cost from $150 for beginner skates (both boot and blades) to $400 for intermediate. At the upper end, boots are $1k by themselves and blades are $500+. Your skates last a good while though assuming you're not an Olympian. Hockey has similar costs, but you also have to spend ~$1500 on gear as an adult.
by constantcrying | 2025-06-02 14:11:00+00:00
I bought a 110 Euro Boox eReader, it is great. It has the size of a slightly larger, but very thin, paperback, the display is extremely crisp and I can easily use alternative software on it. It has Bluetooth, wifi, USB-C and basically everything you can expect from an android tablet of that size.

Sure, 110 Euros isn't 10 or 30 Euros, but it is obviously very affordable to anyone living in the west.

I do not know what the point of these cheap readers would be? To create throwaway trash? If you read somewhat regularly a 110 Euro eReader is a very good investment.
by devilbunny | 2025-06-02 14:11:45+00:00
Probably "20% of readers..."

I can say that out of the people I saw reading during my last beach vacation, almost all were using an e-Ink reader. They used to keep a small library of "beach books" you could read; that's gone. Casual readers have moved on to something else; people who read a lot have moved to e-Ink for outdoors.
by schiffern | 2025-06-02 14:11:59+00:00
Having used all three, the neatest system IMO is to everyday carry a spray bottle of 70% isopropanol. Beyond just convenient hand sanitizer, this lets your wet the paper so you can finish with 2-3 wet wipes (typ. 2x dry + 2x wet). If the paper's thin, double it over a couple more times if needed.

It breaks down like TP (because it is TP), so this won't create a 100+ ton 'fatberg' in the sewer like commercial wet wipes can do.[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drljNVrA4_k
by joshstrange | 2025-06-02 14:12:47+00:00
I think this is great advice and something I have to keep re-learning over and over.

I have the same problem with programming side projects. Almost every personal project of mine that failed was because I tried to make it "scalable" or solve silly problems (like potential abuse) before I had even 1 customer (myself).

Similarly I can get very hamstrung when I start writing a blog post then get caught up in how it will be received, how I can make it more interesting for others, what if I'm wrong, etc. Not that those things aren't important, they are, but I get hung up on that way too early in the process. The number of blog post drafts that are 2-3 paragraphs long before I gave up because I was swamped with trying to make it "perfect" is high.

I know I'm not a great writer, and that's not really my goal, but I'll never get better without practice and that include publishing.

I know how many of my projects and blog post never saw the light of day because I was too scared to show off what I had done, I'm sure there are many other people out there in the same boat. It's sad to think of how many great ideas or projects exist on a single hard drive (or maybe in a private repo) all because someone is scared to put it out into the world.
by dcminter | 2025-06-02 14:13:09+00:00
> if people wanted magazines on topics they care about ... they’d buy ’em.

I do wonder if this is entirely true. Some print magazines I would have liked to subscribe to made it unpalatable in one way or another (dubious cancellation mechanisms etc.)

I looked at subscribing to several magazines within the last few months. One had no explicit cancellation mechanism, one would have been delivered to a courier office several miles away and this one was no longer accepting subscriptions.

I'm sure it's hard to make this work - but perhaps there are self-inflicted speedbumps here as well?
by Daril | 2025-06-02 14:13:10+00:00
Very good news that the Freepascal version compiles and works correctly also on Windows. As you said, Delphi was a huge barrier to prevent other developers to contribute, but if we can use Lazarus, Heidi can receive a lot of help not only for Linux version but also for Windows one. Probably, thanks to Freepascal / Lazarus, it can be ported easily also to Mac OS now.
by hliyan | 2025-06-02 14:13:35+00:00
I think what the industry is missing is some sort of interoperability standard/format for task management. I say this as someone who has been jumping from task tracker to task tracker since the early 2000's -- Trac, Jira, Redmine, Github Tasks, Trello, ClickUp, Linear, and several tools I developed myself. In each case, we rediscover/reinvent/redefine the same things: tasks, subtasks, summaries, descriptions, due dates, statuses, comments, milestones, dependencies etc. If there was some interoperability standard for task trackers, the tool churn wouldn't feel so tedious.
by exoverito | 2025-06-02 14:13:48+00:00
I was curious too, and it seems feasible. Assuming at least 2 other roommates, you can find a 3 bed for less than 3600/mo. Here's a small 4 bd/1.5 ba for 3350/mo, so about 1120/mo.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/216-E-93rd-St-2L-Brooklyn...

Obviously not the most ideal circumstances, but it can be done.
by bguberfain | 2025-06-02 14:14:19+00:00
So they used a LLM with knowledge cut in mid 2023 to evaluate 2023? Seems like a classic leakage problem.

From paper: "testing set: January 1, 2023, to December 31, 2023"

From the Llama 2 doc: "(...) some tuning data is more recent, up to July 2023."
by jebarker | 2025-06-02 14:14:20+00:00
In my 20s and early 30s I was very frugal. I had a relatively low income as a civil servant, was paying down student debt and spent any spare cash on backpacking. Fast-forward 15 years and I lucked into a high income about 10 years ago, am married and have two kids. We still enjoy spending on travel but we live in a high COL area, have a big mortgage, a couple of nice cars and buy too much non-essential stuff online. We do also try to give a good amount to causes we believe in and save well for retirement.

I think saying "money doesn't buy happiness" is too reductive. The crap from Amazon certainly makes no meaningful difference and actually I feel slightly embarrassed when I see a new package arrive. But the relief from stress of having no debt, living in a good area for schools, having a large runway and not worrying about the cost of groceries is a real life improvement that I would be sad to give up. Having said that, none of the great memories from life so far involve spending huge amounts of money.
by phkahler | 2025-06-02 14:14:38+00:00
There's a distinction the author was making. If we ignore the words used "useful" and "valuable", can you see the distinction in the way a company may view people? I'm not sure you even think beyond "useful" and "even more useful". I'm not sure you see it as more than a difference in degree, when the author is claiming it's a difference in kind.
by Caelus9 | 2025-06-02 14:14:51+00:00
I’m not sure “useful” or “valued” really captures how things work at most jobs. In my experience, whether you get promoted or paid well has more to do with things like: how much money you help the company make whether your role is hard to replace and honestly, how well you get along with others But there's another layer too. The people who really stand out often: think ahead of their manager and get things done before being asked know how to make the right call in stressful moments and are just genuinely good to work with That last one is underrated. In a crisis, the person everyone quietly turns to that's usually the real MVP, no matter their title.
by spmurrayzzz | 2025-06-02 14:14:54+00:00
I think the fact that spurious rewards were predominantly only effective for Qwen may suggest that it was triggering some shift in its language distribution. If you use those models long enough you'll see a ton of mandarin that makes its way into your outputs, and their logits tend to look more "confident" than the ones for english tokens.

So the reward value shifting may act as a sort of unintentional regularization technique (similar to adding noise to the discriminator input in GAN archs).
by wijwp | 2025-06-02 14:15:31+00:00
That's pretty reductive.

Having enough money to buy "almost whatever" allows for real happiness to happen. Money doesn't buy happiness, but it opens the door for it.

Family, friends, love, hobbies.

- Financial hardships are one of the top reasons for divorce.

- Building and keeping loving relationships and friends is a lot harder when you have to work 60-80 hours a week.

- Funds to have hobbies so you can do what you truly want to do rather than what pays the bills.

A good fulfilling life is simple (but usually not easy).
by hamburga | 2025-06-02 14:15:55+00:00
I’m still waiting for somebody to explain to me how a model with a million+ parameters can ever be interpretable in a useful way. You can’t actually understand the model state, so you’re just making very coarse statistical associations between some parameters and some kinds of responses. Or relying on another AI (itself not interpretable) to do your interpretation for you. What am I missing?
by _fat_santa | 2025-06-02 14:16:13+00:00
This is why any DB connections should be "air-gapped" with an API. I use PG on a side project and I don't have RLS enabled but as the time time, a user cannot get/set anything in the DB unless it goes through an API endpoint and the endpoint + middleware ensures that a user has access to whatever they are modifying / reading.
by joshstrange | 2025-06-02 14:16:23+00:00
Writing gives me a great way to organize my thoughts. I've lost track of how many times I went to write something down and changed my opinion or was forced to dig deeper into something.

"X things always happens"

Hmm, does it actually always happen? What about if I try doing X+Y? What about....

And the questions go on. I feel like I take a lot of shortcuts in my brain or have established "facts" that don't hold up under scrutiny. It's the same idea as rubber ducking a problem, or for me when I get 2 paragraphs into a slack message and realize I've identified the problem and just clear out chat box without ever messaging for help.
by stared | 2025-06-02 14:16:58+00:00
I would argue that e-readers are cheap. My Kindle has been the single most value-per-dollar device purchase in my life.

Nine years ago, I bought a Kindle Paperwhite 3 for $259.49. It still works. It still does just one job—and does it really well. Unlike many other devices, I'm not tempted (or pushed) to get a new one every few years.

Apart from reading books, I send longer articles (using https://www.pushtokindle.com/) to read on eink, in a distraction-free, eye-friendly mode.

However, what does bother me is that eink displays are expensive in general. I had considered getting a few for my home, for dashboards (e.g., my quantified self health stats) and my favorite web strips. But these are really expensive. And, in this scenario, I'd ideally want to have more than just one display.
by AdmiralAsshat | 2025-06-02 14:17:10+00:00
> … in the UK. From what I’ve heard, Tolino devices are decently popular in Germany, they are made by an alliance of booksellers.

Pretty sure that, these days, Tolino devices are literally just Kobo hardware with Tolino firmware loaded onto them.

Which admittedly has made some of us regular Kobo users a bit envious, because Tolino devices somehow support sideloaded cloud syncing, while standard Kobo does not. So Kobo clearly knows how to do it, they just choose not to. :(
by ofjcihen | 2025-06-02 14:17:44+00:00
It’s interesting that your point about wasting time makes a second point in your favor as well.

If you don’t have the knowledge that begets the skills to do this work then you would never have known you were wasting your time or at least how to stop wasting time.

LLM fanboys don’t want to hear this but you can’t successfully use these tools without also having the skills.
by larrled | 2025-06-02 14:19:32+00:00
Toxic people and environments are not uncommon. It sounds like you’ve not experienced that too much, which is good. But there are sociopaths, liars, ladder climbers, manipulators, narcissists, and lots of other imperfect people who care more about their own title and compensation than the product or coworker harmony. As an autistic person, you might invest in learning how to spot such people to protect yourself.
by quesera | 2025-06-02 14:19:35+00:00
The configuration of the settlement bank account happens at the processor. If you want to change it, you need to talk to customer service and fill out a PDF form, with signatures and other human verification processes.

If it were possible to change the settlement account via an online portal or similar, then you'd need the user login credentials for that portal. In which case, compromising the card reader has no additional value.
by ajkjk | 2025-06-02 14:20:31+00:00
Data point for you: Asteroid City is my favorite, I've watched it like eight times now? and I could barely get through Rushmore.

All the commenters in here complaining that new Wes doesn't have what old Wes had.. Maybe they're missing what new Wes is doing? The newer movies are full of emotion, they're not monotone at all.
by karn97 | 2025-06-02 14:20:56+00:00
I use ai myself as stack exchange but this sentiment is extremely common on HN where you have people trying to force ai to do things it's clearly shit for. Not to mention the rust your brain gathers by not doing these little 'mundane' things. LLMS are a useless dead end anyway all these billion dollar corpos building over it, even worse hype than crypto.
by vikramkr | 2025-06-02 14:21:41+00:00
That's not remotely correct- how would you be able to ignore tokens? That's literally what defines the context size of an llm, the larger the more memory. Generating each token is literally the compute you're doing. Your hardware limits how many tokens per second you can produce with a particular model. It's literally what you're consuming electricity to produce. That's like saying you can drive your own car for free without worrying about how many miles you've driven.
by Spivak | 2025-06-02 14:21:43+00:00
I think the article is better without the pearl clutching of how could our righteous and holy OpenAI promote such sinful language— like yeah this is a hilarious blunder for them but the incel world itself the far more interesting part. Even the author spends more time talking about incels after presumably falling down the inevitable research rabbit hole than the fact it is the #6 lifestyle AI or whatever. The actual bot uses so much in-group language that anyone not already in the world isn't going to get sucked in. I have yearned to be able to put their brains under a microscope and having an AI convincingly mimic someone deep into inceldom I can actually talk to directly is probably the closest I'll ever get.

If you haven't fallen down the rabbit hole you're missing out. The incel world is genuinely fascinating— they really push the boundary of just how disconnected from reality a subculture can get without the gravity of just how stupid it all sounds causing it to collapse in on itself. There's a group of them that really believed that Donald Trump was going to create a government mandated girlfriend program.
by steveBK123 | 2025-06-02 14:22:02+00:00
Precisely - AI getting better or not has nothing to do with my burning cycles using it. My juniors do improve based on my effort. I can free ride on AI getting good enough later (wait) whereas I cannot with my own team of juniors.

> 1 technical founder and a team of contract labor, trying to build that first MVP or cranking out early features in a huge rush

Having worked in environments with a large number of junior contractors... this is generally a recipe for a lot of effort with resulting output that neither works technically nor actually delivers features.
by victorantos | 2025-06-02 14:23:12+00:00
I recently coined the term Vibe Marketing to describe a fast, fun, and surprisingly effective way of promoting side projects by building in sync with trending topics. Instead of writing long content or doing traditional marketing, I built a real-time SpaceX Starship IFT-9 countdown page in under 10 minutes — using AI tools, rapid deployment, and a little timing.

It got 500+ visitors in just a few days. No ads. No SEO hacks. Just riding the wave of relevance.

Here’s the 2-minute read: https://victorantos.com/posts/vibe-marketing-building-hype-b...

Curious to hear what others think. Have you tried something similar?
by borjah | 2025-06-02 14:23:22+00:00
Do this course https://github.com/henki-robotics/robotics_essentials_ros2

Totally free, don't need to buy anything just a computer.

I've been designing electrical hardware for robots for the last 4 years for a big corporation and I can tell you, the fun and money is in the software but having another skill is awesome. Robotics is a place where multiple fields converge and if you find a good team they will help you to grow.

Embedded is the adjacent field after you complete the course. Maybe something like zephyr project.

If you want to get you feet wet with mechanical. Buy a A1 mini and play with onshape (www.onshape.com) to design your first pieces, supports for the motors or the board, try create you own gripper.

As for the electrical engineering, is the one with most pitfalls and the most expensive. A wrong voltage will release the magical smoke and is another 30$ for a board. Tread carefully. Start with the RP2040 or the RP2350, they are cheap and well documented. This skill will evolve hand by hand with the embedded coding. Start small. Learn about H-bridge and brushed motors before doing the jump to the bigboys and FOC control with brushless. Get a cheap soldering iron. If you can, a clone of the JBC C245 tips. Is the most versatile and you can find stuff in alie xpress for 45 or 50$ and would be similar to the tools you will find in the field without breaking the bank.

Search for ROS meetups. I could point you to some depending where in the world you are.

And above all, it will be a long journey. Don't dispear, do at your own time but don't forget the objective.
by gregorywegory | 2025-06-02 14:24:54+00:00
From the readme: This library (including the schema documentation) was largely written with the help of Claude, the AI model by Anthropic. Claude's output was thoroughly reviewed by Cloudflare engineers with careful attention paid to security and compliance with standards. Many improvements were made on the initial output, mostly again by prompting Claude (and reviewing the results). Check out the commit history to see how Claude was prompted and what code it produced.

"NOOOOOOOO!!!! You can't just use an LLM to write an auth library!"

"haha gpus go brrr"

In all seriousness, two months ago (January 2025), I (@kentonv) would have agreed. I was an AI skeptic. I thoughts LLMs were glorified Markov chain generators that didn't actually understand code and couldn't produce anything novel. I started this project on a lark, fully expecting the AI to produce terrible code for me to laugh at. And then, uh... the code actually looked pretty good. Not perfect, but I just told the AI to fix things, and it did. I was shocked.

To emphasize, this is not "vibe coded". Every line was thoroughly reviewed and cross-referenced with relevant RFCs, by security experts with previous experience with those RFCs. I was trying to validate my skepticism. I ended up proving myself wrong.

Again, please check out the commit history -- especially early commits -- to understand how this went.
by rowanG077 | 2025-06-02 14:24:58+00:00
Drivers? No. Audio config? Most definitely. I would actually say the same on linux. By a significant margin no audio linux person is out there developing custom drivers for their stuff. Stuff just works OOB. It's more the userspace stuff that is problematic on either platform. With the caveat that latency issues have spiked A LOT on OSX in more recent years. Whereas on linux this mostly solved.