MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Opinions on latest crop of "nootropic" compounds – TrkB agonist etc.?
by fnord77 | 2025-06-26 15:48:18+00:00
I know about 5 years ago Scott Alexander did a survey of nootropic compounds and found unsurprisingly that stimulants and caffeine were the only things that moved the needle when it came to learning and cognition.

Now there's a bunch more products going around the biohacking community, some of them research drugs for alheizmers, depression, etc. that are still being tested by pharmas, or stuff from Russian neuroscience.

I won't name specific products, but these are the areas and why they supposedly work:

- TrkB positive allosteric modulators: Boosts BDNF signalling leading to LTP & memory formation; "plasticity"

- PDE4D NAMs: boosts cAMP signaling

- 5-HT4 partial agonist: Fast cAMP/CREB lift for mood & motivation

- AMPA receptor PAM: Rapid attention/focus bump and next-day consolidation

- M1 muscarinic PAM: cholinergic memory enhancement

- A2A receptor inverse agonist: “Caffeine without crash”

- CCK-B receptor antagonist peptide: anti-anxiety peptide

- α7-nAChR co-agonist: Nicotine-like sensory clarity

- non-hallucinogenic 5-HT2A "Psychoplastogens": Ketamine-like synaptic growth minus trip

- NMDA glycine-site PAM: clear thinking without jitters

I consider the classic nootropics (racetams) to be pretty much bunk. Is there any reason to think these might actually work?
by colechristensen | 2025-06-26 15:49:01+00:00
USB parallel ports, data acquisition peripherals, or modern boards that run linux and have GPIO pins are already a thing and don't need to be created.

What I'm talking about is a whole computer system + systems programming language + OS which is as simple to understand and program as computers were in the 80s. With modern speedups, without modern layers of abstraction.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-06-26 15:49:03+00:00
Before buying a "glamping battery", you'll want to ensure that it can be run unattended in your desired configuration.

I previously had a Bluetti EB70S and while it almost did what I wanted, it could only charge from AC or Solar, but not both and didn't have a way to set desired levels.

Now I have a Bluetti Apex 300, and I can set it to charge to X% off AC during overnight off-peak rates, and never drop below Y%.
by mariano54 | 2025-06-26 15:49:31+00:00
Multiple reasons (which also apply to openAIs realtime API): - it's less intelligent than the non voice apis - intelligence degrades even further with lots of context - more expensive - latency is not a free lunch, it comes at the cost of more interruptions from the tutor, which is a really bad UX. We prefer to interrupt less and have higher latency

Also, we prefer the eleven labs voices, but there is definitely varying quality. I'm guessing later this year or next, the voice to voice models will become good enough, and we will switch over.
by winter_blue | 2025-06-26 15:50:16+00:00
> Alright Geoff, thanks, but you are 54 and do zero exercise, have a diet of eating out at fast food and fast casual restaurants, a body type that would be described as "meatball", and a list of medical conditions which all scream lifestyle change.

> Meanwhile at trail running meets, I bump into 60 year olds still giving some 35 year olds a run for their money.

Yup, this is very much key.
by rsynnott | 2025-06-26 15:50:29+00:00
> Even if you never go to McDonalds at home, visit the McDonalds on your travels.

Eh?

> If you detect slightly more people moving in one direction over another, follow them. If you keep following this “gradient” of human movement, you will eventually land on something interesting—a market, a parade, a birthday party, an outdoor dance, a festival.

Or, y'know, a train station or something.

I'm slightly unsure whether this is parody or not.
by WorldMaker | 2025-06-26 15:50:48+00:00
It's funny because one of the OG draws to Steam back in the day was because Counter-Strike (et al) had the superior Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) in Steam copies than the myriad of raw CD installs of HL1 plus the mods to run Counter-Strike.

This missing piece is sort of a fun "whatever happened to VAC and why hasn't it kept up with the times?"

It seems like Linux would be a good excuse to reinvest in VAC and make it a bigger competitor to the current favorites like Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC).
by itake | 2025-06-26 15:51:11+00:00
I'm trying to learn vietnamese, but the lessons are really really rough and borderline bad advice.

---

AI: Anh mệt is good if bạn are a man speaking about yourself. You can also say, “Em mệt” if you’re a woman.

this isn't correct. If you are of "older brother" age and are male, you say Anh. Em is for if you are "younger person" (does not matter the gender). Women tend to prefer being called "em" (even if they are older), because women prefer to be identified as younger than their true age... But that doesn't mean you can't call younger men em.

A good tutor would know your age relative to theirs and explain this context.

---

It would say english phrases with a vietnamese accent.

---

It also would give me really complex vietnamese phrases that I am not ready for. when I prompt for an explaination or translation, it would get off track from the original thing we were learning.

---

Way more people in Vietnam (and the globe) speak southern Vietnamese, but the tutors seem to be from north Vietnam.

---

The STT also was very forgiving if I pronounced things incorrectly. Or it would confuse english and vietnamese. I would say, "Phai", but it heard "bye"

---

I was ready to pull out my credit card, but I can't trust it to teach me the right information. I pay $160/mo for Vietnamese tutoring ($20 per class). This would be way cheaper and I don't have to schedule my classes.
by kiitos | 2025-06-26 15:52:08+00:00
> “unconventional” or “fancy” is in the eye of the beholder.

Literally not: a language defines its own conventions, they're not defined in terms of individual users/readers/maintainers subjective opinions.

> Whose conventions are we talking about?

The conventions defined by the language.

> Code is bad when it doesn't look the way you want it to?

No -- when it doesn't satisfy the conventions established by the language.

> I may find code hard to read because it's formatted “conventionally”,

If you did this then you'd be wrong, and that'd be a problem with your personal evaluation process/criteria, that you would need to fix.
by mritchie712 | 2025-06-26 15:52:29+00:00
I use this prompt to spin up demos for customers at https://www.definite.app/:

@Web Do some research on https://somecompany.com and write up a detailed overview of what the company does. What might their database schema look like? I need you to build a mock database for them in duckdb for a demo

Then:

Create a uv project and write a python script to add demo data. Use Faker. @Web research how many customers they have. Make the database to appropriate scale.

Only takes a few minutes in Cursor, should work just as well in Claude Code. It works really well for the companies core business, but I still need to create one to populate 3rd party sources (e.g. Stripe, Salesforce, Hubspot, etc.).
by FireBeyond | 2025-06-26 15:52:33+00:00
I admit I went to Hims a while ago. I filled out the questionnaire and had a "physican interview" where I was literally told "You need to change this answer from this to that, and this answer to this" if I wanted to get medicine, and "would [I] like a chance to review my questionnaires and we could discuss again in a few minutes?"

That's not medical care.
by ilc | 2025-06-26 15:52:34+00:00
The GPL doesn't do anything when the project is just used internally by another company.

They never trigger the distribution clauses, and they own the copyrights of all the work being done. So if you NEVER distribute binaries outside your company's walls. The GPL is a giant nothing, for most practical cases.

That's why we're starting to see the AGPL more now. But even then, for INTERNAL applications. It's still a nothing.

The GPL doesn't cure people being greedy. It just changes how they are allowed to be greedy.
by rajc111 | 2025-06-26 15:53:19+00:00
Why spend 10 hours building an AI agent when someone else already did it better?

I curated 175+ n8n templates used in real $500–$5,000 projects:

AI agents (GPT, Claude, RAG) Cold email automation Lead gen + scraping flows Client onboarding systems

1 template = your next paying client.
by rbanffy | 2025-06-26 15:53:24+00:00
> It's far easier to reach, has free unlimited oxygen and water, and gets more solar radiation also for power! It's luxurious compared to the colder, dryer deserts of Mars where there's only dry rocks and near-vacuum.

You miss the whole point. The point of becoming an interplanetary civilization is not to fill every barren rock you see (and there are plenty on Earth, and, if climate change isn't controlled, there'll soon be more). The point is to put just enough humankind on all the places we can easily reach (at that given time) so we can expand from there with in-situ resources rather than only expand from here, using only Earth resources (which WILL run out).

Some humans seem to have evolved a motivation to explore their surroundings. At first we walked, then we learned to ride animals, wheels, boats, airplanes, and, recently, spacecraft. We travel to learn both about other places as we do to learn about ourselves. Some people might feel content with our current reach, but I feel constrained.
by uragur27754 | 2025-06-26 15:53:26+00:00
Most of the time when I hear about a new and interesting Google thing like in a Google I/O keynote, its only available in a limited preview for some secret or randomly selected group of people. Then by the time its generally available I've forgotten about it, there is a better competitor, or just as likely the project has been canceled (see https://killedbygoogle.com/).

Whenever some enthusiastic developer suggests a new google service at work they are quickly dissuaded by senior developers that have been through their churn before.
by boogieknite | 2025-06-26 15:54:01+00:00
> Go to church (I'm serious, even if you are an atheist)

heard people say church is about community more than religion so i tried engaging earnestly with 3 churches as a normy adult with a spouse. at nondenominational it was about the show and egos of performers and at catholic church it was about the tradition. of course it was all very clearly about the money too

id say going to church as a non-churchgoer is mostly an exercise in seeing how weird and bad church is but not in the same ways it was weird and bad as a kid

> Go to your HOA/City/County board/commissioners meetings

i go to these so my spouse doesnt have to and recommend others to only go in order to spare the ones they love from these meetings as well

Edit: the roller skate community is incredibly inclusive. my experience is that there are hotshots, but many more welcoming and friendly people who want to share their joy of skating and are just looking to spend time relaxing with others. my experience going a few times in an earnest attempt to check out the scene as an adult
by zahlman | 2025-06-26 15:54:45+00:00
> "start_mode: Specify mode of detection of silence end at start": start_mode end at start?

In "start_mode", "start" means "initial", and "mode" means "method". But specifically, it's a method of figuring out where the silence ends.

> In the end, naming things is famously one of the two hard problems in computer science

It's also one of the hard problems in English.
by pasc1878 | 2025-06-26 15:54:46+00:00
I don't think that is correct re football. Football is an English invention. It then split into Association Football and Rugby football.

From Association Football we get soccer. So Football was first then soccer.

e.g. The Football Association was formed in 1863 and the first international match in 1872 was billed as International Foot-ball Match and then in small writing (Association Rules) before the term soccer was used.
by bobjordan | 2025-06-26 15:55:40+00:00
I see where you're coming from, and I appreciate your perspective. The "con artist" analogy is plausible, for the fear of inauthenticity this technology creates. However, I’d like to offer a different view from someone who has been deep in the trenches of full-stack software development.

I’m someone who put in my "+10,000 hours" programming complex applications, before useful LLMs were released. I spent years diving into documentation and other people's source code every night, completely focused on full-stack mastery. Eventually, that commitment led to severe burnout. My health was bad, my marriage was suffering. I released my application and then I immediately had to walk away from it for three years just to recover. I was convinced I’d never pick it up again.

It was hearing many reports that LLMs had gotten good at code that cautiously brought me back to my computer. That’s where my experience diverges so strongly from your concerns. You say, “No one who uses AI can claim ‘this is my work.’” I have to disagree. When I use an LLM, I am the architect and the final inspector. I direct the vision, design the system, and use a diff tool to review every single line of code it produces. Just recently, I used it as a partner to build a complex optimization model for my business's quote engine. Using a true optimization model was always the "right" way to do it but would have taken me months of grueling work before, learning all details of the library, reading other people’s code, etc. We got it done in a week. Do I feel like it’s my work? Absolutely. I just had a tireless and brilliant, if sometimes flawed, assistant.

You also claim the user won't "thoroughly understand it." I’ve found the opposite. To use an LLM effectively for anything non-trivial, you need a deeper understanding of the fundamentals to guide it and to catch its frequent, subtle mistakes. Without my years of experience, I would be unable to steer it for complex multi-module development, debug its output, or know that the "plausibly good work" it produced was actually wrong in some ways (like N+1 problems).

I can sympathize with your experience as a teacher. The problem of students using these tools to fake comprehension is real and difficult. In academia, the process of learning, getting some real fraction of the +10,000hrs is the goal. But in the professional world, the result is the goal, and this is a new, powerful tool to achieve better results. I’m not sure how a teacher should instruct students in this new reality, but demonizing LLM use is probably not the best approach.

For me, it didn't make bad work look good. It made great work possible again, all while allowing me to have my life back. It brought the joy back to my software development craft without killing me or my family to do it. My life is a lot more balanced now and for that, I’m thankful.
by skydhash | 2025-06-26 15:55:43+00:00
> Imagine the ease of a single ".targz" or so that includes the correct python version, all pips, all ENV vars, config files, and is executable. If you distribute that - what do you still need pip for?

pip is there so you don't need to do that. In the deployment world, you really want one version per system for everything and know that everything is in sync. To get that the solution was a distribution of software and a tool to manage them. We then extended that to programming language ecosystem and pip is part of the result.

But for workstation, a lot of people wants the latest, so the next solution was to be able to abstract the programming language ecosystem from the distribution (And you may not have a choice in the case of macOS), so what we get is directory-restricted interactions (go, npm,..) or doing shell magic so that the tooling think it's the system (virtual env,...).

It's a neat trick, but the only reason to do so is if you want to distribute compiled version of a software to customer. But if the user have access to the code, It's better to adapt the software to the system (repositories, flatpak...) or build a system around it (VM, containers, ...).
by drakonka | 2025-06-26 15:56:24+00:00
Do you mean that the experience is meant to have more structure if you pick the intermediate or advanced level? (fwiw I did pick intermediate for my Swedish level in the app).

My thinking is - I can have unstructured conversations with Advanced Voice Mode or in real life here in Sweden. What I'd really appreciate is a guided learning experience taking me up from intermediate/slightly above intermediate to fluent in the most efficient possible way (as opposed to just having us 'ramble' about random topics of my own choosing).
by hinkley | 2025-06-26 15:57:38+00:00
I have some hope that rotating detonation engines will make aerospikes viable. But I don’t even see them mentioned in this paper.

The idea with the constantly moving flame front is that it spreads the heat out. The limitation with aerospikes is getting enough coolant through the spike. Bells are simpler to cool, which as I understand more than makes up for them needing more cooling.
by slt2021 | 2025-06-26 15:57:43+00:00
your argument was about Iran being a danger because they were "spreading fundamentalism".

I just proved that USA and its despotic monarchy allies/vassals in the middle east are the one spreading fundamentalism.

So the real purpose is just colonial control by the USA over the last more or less independent country in the middle east.

Same as Cuba: Cuba represents no danger as far as military or socialism. It is still being sanctioned to the detriment of its population, just because it has not submitted fully to be taken over by the US capital and military
by ge96 | 2025-06-26 15:58:31+00:00
It is funny (ego) I remember when React was new and I refused to learn it, had I learned it earlier I probably would have entered the market years earlier.

Even now I have this refusal to use GPT where as my coworkers lately have been saying "ChatGPT says" or this code was created by chatGPT idk, for me I take pride writing code myself/not using GPT but I also still use google/stackoverflow which you could say is a slower version of GPT.
by nilamo | 2025-06-26 15:58:53+00:00
My experience, as someone who is also new and trying to figure things out, is that langchain works great as long as everything you want to do has an adapter. Try to step off the path, and things get really complex really fast. After hitting that several times, I've found it's easier to just do things directly instead of trying to figure out the langchain way of doing things.

I've found dspy to work closer to how I think, which has made working with pipelines so much easier for me.
by whatevsmate | 2025-06-26 15:58:58+00:00
I understand. When I came to the realization that my own brain was now operating against me I decided to head for the exits.

I assumed it was unlikely I’d be able to do the self-work needed while still suffering all the indignities of the employment.

It’s fucking hard work to dig out of that place mate but keep at it. You can and will get there.
by mjr00 | 2025-06-26 15:58:58+00:00
> It seems that LLMs, as they work today, make developers more productive.

Think this strongly depends on the developer and what they're attempting to accomplish.

In my experience, most people who swear LLMs make them 10x more productive are relatively junior front-end developers or serial startup devs who are constantly greenfielding new apps. These are totally valid use cases, to be clear, but it means a junior front-end dev and a senior embedded C dev tend to talk past each other when they're discussing AI productivity gains.

> Working with the technology and mitigating it's weaknesses is the only rational path forward.

Or just using it more sensibly. As an example: is the idea of an AI "agent" even a good one? The recent incident with Copilot[0] made MS and AI look like a laughingstock. It's possible that trying to let AI autonomously do work just isn't very smart.

As a recent analogy, we can look at blockchain and cryptocurrency. Love it or hate it, it's clear from the success of Coinbase and others that blockchain has found some real, if niche, use cases. But during peak crypto hype, you had people saying stuff like "we're going to track the coffee bean supply chain using blockchain". In 2025 that sounds like an exaggerated joke from Twitter, but in 2020 it was IBM legitimately trying to sell this stuff[1].

It's possible we'll look back and see AI agents, or other current applications of generative AI, as the coffee blockchain of this bubble.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1krttqo/my...

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertanzalone/2020/07/15/big-c...
by reify | 2025-06-26 15:58:59+00:00
another experimental jab sold as being safe and effective.

10 deaths too many, thats not including the 82 from February

even worse back in February 82 deaths.

British medical jounal

BMJ 2025; 388 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.r390 (Published 25 February 2025)

GLP-1 agonists: 82 deaths linked to adverse reactions, UK data show

https://www.bmj.com/content/388/bmj.r390

Data from the yellow card scheme for reporting adverse events to the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) show that up to 31 January 2025 there were 22 deaths from adverse reactions associated with use of GLP-1 agonists for weight loss and 60 linked to use for treating type 2 diabetes.
by mariano54 | 2025-06-26 15:59:27+00:00
We transcribe after 400ms of silence in 200ms chunks. 3 voice chunks (VAD) automatically interrupts, unless it's a back channel like "yeah" or "right" or something like that.

Whisper can transcribe in <100ms. We then wait for the turn detection model, LLM, and tts to trigger a streamed response back to eh client.
by bigbuppo | 2025-06-26 15:59:43+00:00
I have been told that is the wrong metric to use. You're supposed to look at how much faster it's getting better, and then just draw a line and assume it's always going to continue that trend. Okay, so it took them 70 years to get to this point. Imagine what they can do with another 70 years of development. It might even generate comments that are proper for the programming language you think it's supposed to be generating.
by eagerpace | 2025-06-26 15:59:59+00:00
I would love to have just enough solar to flatten my peak usage on the hottest days of the summer. They naturally coincide with tons of sun. I don't need a huge system to be all solar all the time or even care about credits from the power company. I just don't want a $300 bill in the summer and a $50 bill in the winter. Has anyone designed a good solution for this?
by reverendsteveii | 2025-06-26 16:01:12+00:00
Failure to meet work standards isn't disqualifying but changes to time and location like that aren't written up as failure to meet standards, they're written up as job abandonment, which itself is considered a type of voluntary resignation and is therefore disqualifying. The law differentiates between showing up but being bad at the job and not showing up at all, and constructive dismissal laws exist to prevent employers from manufacturing job abandonment in order to disqualify an employee.

One thing I learned in researching this is that constructive dismissal only applies where the employee has resigned rather than being terminated. It's not a non-voluntary resignation, it's a voluntary resignation that is coerced and is therefore an exception to the unemployment laws that would normally disqualify you for resigning voluntarily.
by lawrencechen | 2025-06-26 16:01:40+00:00
Congrats on the launch!

I tried the Japanese track. I'm a total beginner and the first lesson wasn't helpful at all. The AI asked about maybe mixing up Japanese<>English, but it didn't actually follow through. It either spoke fully in Japanese or fully in English. Maybe this is a standard practice for language lessons? I remember going to the first day of French class in a community college, and the teacher only spoke French, which was extremely overwhelming. Perhaps it's the standard way of teaching? Even if it is, I'm not sure if it works when compressed down to the shorter times I see myself opening the app.