MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I made a tool that tells you if your dietary supplements work
by richarlidad | 2025-06-08 22:46:12+00:00
I made a tool that tells you if your supplements work.

Some features:

A table of RCTs you can sort by effectiveness & condition.

Study breakdowns of each study in the table (summarised by me, not AI). Dose, effectiveness, participants & study details. https://inspectsupplement.com/supplements/

Mechanisms of action for each supplement.

Commercial product data table for data nerds. https://inspectsupplement.com/demo-commercial-products/

Table of lab tested products. https://inspectsupplement.com/labdb-lab-tested-supplements/

I've removed the paywall so anyone with an account (no payment required) can view all paywalled content.
by chasil | 2025-06-08 22:46:45+00:00
This article asserts that white blood cells are the target, but we also know that (within the brain) astrocytes and [iirc] microglia can bear latent infection.

Is such a carrier capable of addressing latent reservoirs inside the blood-brain barrier? Can it cross the barrier, pervade the cerebrospinal fluid, then penetrate all infected cells?

White blood cells are a fantastic achievement, but far from the whole story.
by Jach | 2025-06-08 22:47:24+00:00
I would hope it actually is more known among developers. Even big titles like Tekken 7 used it. Insistence on crossplay with consoles causes a stumbling block, but still, that's not most games.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/sdk/api/example provides a good example, too. Steam has all sorts of extra functionality to justify their 30% cut on sales, they're not just taking it while doing nothing.
by jordemort | 2025-06-08 22:48:30+00:00
I wrote this after a bad week at a previous job trying to get an Android device to work with a CDC Ethernet adapter.

Since writing this, a couple people have let me know that there is a particular bit in the MAC address, that if flipped, will cause the kernel to assign an `ethX` name instead of `usbX` name. I haven't tried it myself or updated the post with that information because I moved on to a different job, and Android devices are no longer a large part of my life.

Of course, that only helps if you have a CDC device where you're in control of the MAC address (i.e. maybe another Linux device pretending to be a CDC adapter)
by aucisson_masque | 2025-06-08 22:48:43+00:00
In Europe, media and politicians are openly stating how you got to watch what you say to Mr Trump, be nice to him to get favored in deals.

Like the trade tax, if you’re nice to trump he may decrease your country tax.

It was made very clear in France that we invited him to 14 juillet, notre dame ceremony and other ceremony only to get favor from him.

People of the United States pay the price for his favors, he gets the benefits.

That’s just one step before handling him bags of money.

Of course all of that matters with previous presidents, they are humans before all, but it was marginal. With him, that’s the first time it’s openly spoken about on national tv and by politicians like it’s nothing, like what we did with dictator from middle eastern except it’s the president of the USA.
by hapali | 2025-06-08 22:49:11+00:00
More accurately:

Modern chat-oriented LLMs are not simply statistical models trained on web scale datasets. Instead, they are the result of a two-stage process: first, large-scale pretraining on internet data, and then extensive fine-tuning through human feedback. Much of what makes these models feel responsive, safe, or emotionally intelligent is the outcome of thousands of hours of human annotation, often performed by outsourced data labelers around the world. The emotional skill and nuance attributed to these systems is, in large part, a reflection of the preferences and judgments of these human annotators, not merely the accumulation of web text.

So, when you interact with an advanced LLM, you’re not just engaging with a statistical model, nor are you simply seeing the unfiltered internet regurgitated back to you. Rather, you’re interacting with a system whose responses have been shaped and constrained by large-scale human feedback—sometimes from workers in places like Kenya—generalized through a neural network to handle any topic you bring up.
by leereeves | 2025-06-08 22:51:27+00:00
My grandmother died because of an FDA approved therapy that was later pulled from the market. One of many [1].

Given that experience, I think the process we have in place to greenlight medical therapies is not perfect, and I don't think it's unreasonable to be more cautious than the FDA is.

Especially when the treatment is mandatory.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_withdrawn_drugs
by russellbeattie | 2025-06-08 22:52:58+00:00
OMG, I had totally forgotten about the Leonard Nimoy intro!!

I read your response and was like, "Huh?", then it hit me. That's easily a 30 year old memory sitting in deep storage. I haven't been there, or thought about it since college. The human brain is amazing.

And since we live in the future, I can easily find a clip of it online:

https://youtu.be/MHK2-BVfUzs
by morleytj | 2025-06-08 22:53:02+00:00
One of the classic emergent behaviors (which I loved) that came from Dwarf Fortress was the cats dying of alcohol poisoning.

There was a patch note years and years ago about a bugfix that had to happen because all the cats were mysteriously dying in people's fortresses -- it was tracked down to the fact that cats would walk through the taverns, in which visitors would be drinking and occasionally spilling alcohol (There was a feature that had been added at one point for spilled liquids to form pools which could get on entities passing through, like getting mud on you by walking through a large puddle).

The cats also had a piece of functionality where they could self clean by licking after they became dirty with something, and would ingest some amount of it due to using their tongue to clean themselves.

The cats' fur would become damp with the alcohol as they stepped through the spills, and the cats self cleaning meant they would regularly get extremely drunk and die from the alcohol poisoning trying to clean themselves. Not intended at all, but two completely different systems colliding in an emergent behavior of interest.

I also always loved the behavior of undead zones. In them, any dead creature could be revived by dark magic in the area. It leads to the question though, what counts as a dead creature? Well, it would be anything with a tag indicating that it came from something that died. This does in fact include small bones though, or hair from a butchered animal. Fortresses in these areas would have quite the casualty rate trying to butcher a pack mule as its hair would come to life and kill the butcher.
by mmooss | 2025-06-08 22:56:19+00:00
> this looks like trading one problem for another.

Every choice trades one problem for another. At a minimum, the new problem is the cost in resources - time, money, personal energy (and in business, usually reputation risk and political capital) - but usually the cost is much more than that, especially when looking at alternative technical solutions. In advice to clients I always present the options as the minimum trade-off (it's my job to minimize it).

More generally, the question is, which scenario of outcomes do you want? It could be the scenario with 1% yttrium is far better than the one with oxygen, or that the ytrrium scenario has a very different set of costs and benefits which make it valuable for certain needs that the oxygen scenario doesn't fulfill. It could be that methods for removing yttrium are already mature and only need to be applied to this case.

But especially in this case, the report is about research & development. If there were no more problems to solve then it wouldn't be R&D. It's really self-defeating to criticize progress in R&D because some problems remain. 'We scored a goal, but that's just trading one problem for another - the other team has the ball!'
by ofalkaed | 2025-06-08 22:56:35+00:00
I completely expected the free email provider from the 90s and I got Gravity's Rainbow. Unexpected surprise.

Will it? Far to the east, down in the pink sky, something has just sparked, very brightly. A new star, nothing less noticeable. He leans on the parapet to watch. The brilliant point has already become a short vertical white line. It must be somewhere out over the North Sea . . . at least that far . . . icefields below and a cold smear of sun. . . .

What is it? Nothing like this ever happens. But Pirate knows it, after all. He has seen it in a film, just in the last fortnight. . . it’s a vapor trail. Already a finger’s width higher now. But not from an airplane. Airplanes are not launched vertically. This is the new, and still Most Secret, German rocket bomb.

“Incoming mail.” Did he whisper that, or only think it? He tightens the ragged belt of his robe. Well, the range of these things is supposed to be over 200 miles. You can’t see a vapor trail 200 miles, now, can you. Oh. Oh, yes: around the curve of the Earth, farther east, the sun over there, just risen over in Holland, is striking the rocket’s exhaust, drops and crystals, making them blaze clear across the sea. . . .

The white line, abruptly, has stopped its climb. That would be fuel cutoff, end of burning, what’s their word . . . Brennschluss. We don’t have one. Or else it’s classified. The bottom of the line, the original star, has already begun to vanish in red daybreak. But the rocket will be here before Pirate sees the sun rise.
by irthomasthomas | 2025-06-08 22:57:19+00:00
The best pelicans come from running a consortium of models. I use pelicans as evals now. https://x.com/xundecidability/status/1921009133077053462 Test it using VibeLab (wip) https://x.com/xundecidability/status/1926779393633857715
by rcxdude | 2025-06-08 22:58:37+00:00
It also, very annoyingly, can't connect to multiple networks at once. e.g. connecting to a wifi network which doesn't have internet access (and doesn't even advertise a default route) and a cell phone network at the same time. Linux can do it, Windows can do it, Android stubbornly refuses (and indeed many variants will refuse to stay connected to a wifi network without internet, if not just make you jump through confusing hoops). There are some APIs which mean that if you write an app, you can do it just in the app, but there's no way as a user to get it to do so.
by byoung2 | 2025-06-08 22:58:40+00:00
You should talk to users...in this case users are not just the people who put their CV/resume on your site, but also the recruiters, hiring managers, and interview committees who will be looking at the CV/resume. Their applicant tracking systems expect a file to be uploaded, pasted, or entered manually so that they can run it through a scanner to match keywords or whatever. As an interviewer, I get the resume attached to calendar invites, so it needs to be uploaded for that to work.

So go talk to the users and ask them what they need to make their jobs easier. For applicants, maybe they need a way to submit a basic resume, and then for each job, they can paste a link to the job description, and you can have generative AI revise the resume to match the job being applied for, and then they can download the PDF and use it to apply to that job.
by GolfPopper | 2025-06-08 22:58:50+00:00
I expect, or at least hope, that this exactly what will happen... eventually. But, I've been expecting that since I decided I wanted nothing to do with Facebook about two decades ago, and it's still not here (though Mastadon is nice). As the quote from Keynes goes, "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."
by flurie | 2025-06-08 22:59:48+00:00
A lot of work about packaging specifics reads like inside baseball because it is. Most people manage to avoid getting into the specifics of packaging because it’s stuff that mostly gets in the way of the problem they’re trying to solve. But for blessed few packaging is either critical to the problem or is the problem itself. If you never had to learn the inside baseball terminology, it is likely that packaging is not critical to problems that you solve, and I say that without judgment. If you need to get into Nix, you will. There are lots of reasonable ways to manage personal infrastructure that don’t involve Nix. For the problem you describe, I’m not even sure Nix is a preferable solution unless you already use it.

That said, I agree with the original comment. I’m willing to believe that they had these problems and that moving away from Nix was the right decision, but there is little detail in the explanation. They’ve been pretty closed users of Nix to my knowledge, building proprietary tools on top of it without contributing back significantly, and it feels like orgs such as repl.it are contributing back more actively, but this may be a marketing difference as well.
by bradlys | 2025-06-08 23:00:12+00:00
> If you join an early stage company and you have a decent amount of excess capital, early exercise everything and file an 83(b) election. The reasons for doing this: starting the QSBS clock, starting the long term capital gains clock, not needing to worry about your options expiring.

I don't think this is ever worth the risk. If you're even thinking of doing this for QSBS purposes... the amount of tax you'd incur is way too much. Even if you have "excess" capital, you may as well put the $50k+ into a shitcoin and you'd see a much quicker return (or lack thereof). For most people where $50-100k+ in tax is a trivial amount to worry about, why are you joining as an employee? Clearly you've made a lot of money in the past... Just be a founder instead. You're taking on just as much risk.

> If you join an early stage company and you don’t have much capital, don’t do anything just yet. Try to negotiate for an extended post termination exercise window.

For 99%+ of people joining startups as regular employees, this is what you should be doing. If you leave the company before it becomes liquid, exercising the shares can be super risky. We've been waiting on several very well known companies to go public for a long time now. Who knows when they'll go public. At that point, you've spent possibly hundreds of thousands to exercise your shares, hundreds of thousands more in taxes... and they might be worthless and you can maybe deduct $3,000/yr for who knows how long.

> If you can get liquidity at some point, and you think liquidity would improve your life, you probably should.

It is unlikely though.

IMO, until tax law (and especially market conditions) changes - I do not believe in joining any private company unless you are convinced they will IPO within the year. This is assuming you care about compensation significantly.
by protocolture | 2025-06-08 23:00:18+00:00
>That was also my thought. How does the world behave 100 hours into the simulation? If half the town residents have managed to get themselves killed by guards and some of the shopkeepers are gone, it's a bad outcome. Complex sims have emergent behaviors that are hard to tune.

Thats why its a management sim. Dwarves take care of themselves up to a point, and that point is making adjustments to their environment to meet needs. Generally speaking the more successful you are, the deeper dwarves will reach to find needs and wants that arent fulfilled.

100 hours in you have hit population cap, and have dwarves demanding bigger and bigger churches and guildhalls.

I used to rely heavily on the "Danger room" concept, where spears are thrust up and down training dwarves in dodging. The issue is that dwarves will quite often carry their young with them, even while in the military. So you quickly end up with splattered babies, which sets off a depressive spiral in the fort.
by thrance | 2025-06-08 23:01:14+00:00
I don't believe there's anything the democrats could have been that wouldn't have been twisted by the massive propaganda apparatus in service of the GOP. If they abandoned their ever ill-defined "wokeness", Fox News would have found something else to scapegoat all the ills of America on.

There are legitimate critics of the democratic party, like their abandon of class matters, or how hollow their social militantism feels because of it. None of those are the reasons the dems are bad mouthed in conservative media.

Democrats can't win by appealing to an ever-elusive and shifting "center". They will forever be the party of child-eating degenerates to the people that voted for Trump, no matter how many causes they drop.

> That said, if you can offer a counter explanation of the forces at play, I am all ears. Believe it or not, I am actually listening now.

I didn't invent most of my ideas on fascism. I look into history books and attempt to apply the lessons of the past on our current situation. Here's a summary of what I think I have learned:

While fascism is an internally inconsistent ideology, it does exhibit consistent aspects. One of them is support from the capitalist class. For example, this connects Mussolini, Hitler, Putin, Trump...

Once the current liberal-democratic model starts malfunctioning because of its internal contradictions* (and it always does), the mask slips and the wealthy start supporting far right populism.

This is the only way for them to prevent the rise of socialism (by redirecting the middle class' anger toward minorities) while keeping on deregulating and privatizing the economy.

Evidently, this doesn't fix anything and only makes things worse, which is part of why fascism always fails in the end, although that can take a relatively long time.

I don't believe there's anything to be done but wait, once the cogs of the terrible machine are set in motion. Wether we're here yet, I do not claim to know.

* Imbalance of power between classes. Capital always gets his ways, and so the material conditions of the rest of the population are left to slowly degrade.

---

Last time, America got lucky in the person of FDR (and what he represented). Through the New Deal, he was able to rekindle the flailing economy by essentially pumping money to the working class, curbing discontent. At least for a time. The wealthy of the time absolutely didn't like that, and attempts on his life were made.

He didn't actually fix the underlying issues though, and 80 years later, we're back to square one.
by Arainach | 2025-06-08 23:01:33+00:00
>When we forget that, we get nonsense like "the chatbot told him he was the messiah," as though language could be blamed for the projection.

Words have power, and those that create words - or create machines that create words - have responsibility and liability.

It is not enough to say "the reader is responsible for meaning and their actions". When people or planet-burning random matrix multipliers say things and influence the thoughts and behaviors of others there is blame and there should be liability.

Those who spread lies that caused people to storm the Capitol on January 6th believing an election to be stolen are absolutely partially responsible even if they themselves did not go to DC on that day. Those who train machines that spit out lies which have driven people to racism and genocide in the past are responsible for the consequences.
by graeme | 2025-06-08 23:03:06+00:00
The USSR was terrible. Remarkably, the Nazis still managed to be substantially worse.

As one example there's the Hunger Plan. Hitler's defeat stopped him from executing it, though they had started. He planned to kill 35-41 million people in eastern europe via starvation and take the land for Germany.

The USSR equivalent, Holomodor, killed 3-5 million, and was fully executed. Horrendous. Not as bad as the hunger plan.

And that was not the only Nazi mass death plan....

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-06-08 23:03:16+00:00
All debates leading to the laws are public with transcript available and it’s the EU so you have access to dozens of translation.

It’s not about a comma. It’s Apple trying to argue they can breach a law because look we might twist it if we mistreat despite the law being clear and on the way to be slapped in the face because there is nothing the EU hates more than companies trying to play clever tricks with legislation.

The only surprising thing is that Apple has still to understand that despite all the fines. Apple keeps acting like the EU is the US and lose most of the time. You have to wonder if they plainly refuse to hire good counsels or the American executives are just to proud to listen to them.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-06-08 23:04:09+00:00
>Would love to hear from others who’ve tried to strike this balance

I think it's exactly that - balance.

In my experience the most important aspect is avoiding recommendation feeds. They are hyper optimized to be dopamine driven feedback loops. In a parallel universe these feeds would be customizable (sort for great discussions, thoughtful or uplifting content as the user sees fit, but most feeds are black boxes that are explicitly designed to maximize engagement, which means of course to maximize addiction.

The second most important aspect is turning off the notifications.

Another angle to attack is the hardware itself. It isn't for everyone, but there is a little corner of the tech universe with minimal phones like, well, Minimal Phone, and Light Phone. Unihertz is also coming out with a BlackBerry Passport keyboard phone soon (Kickstarter campaign coming later this month) that looks quite promising. Again the hardware is just badly suited for feed doom scrolling.

Then carefully choose the services you interact with. HN rather than Reddit home feeds, etc. Tildes is another good small one, as is Discuit.

Now if you're seeking visibility, perhaps there is a devil's bargain that you have to submit to to some degree. That said, one half of the equation is the presence that you are providing, and you can control that. For example choose to host a minimalist blog rather than a swarm of social media engagement. I like Blot.im, although there are many like it that can make simple markup style pages.

Also instead of freeform constant engagement with social media, try and use formats to your advantage. In a world with endless noise on social media a great weekly newsletter can actually get quite a following (I've noticed that I love simple weekly newsletters that curate thoughts and content for me). I would imagine that if you were trying to pursue an online following, it's probably healthier to cultivate a following through something like this rather than brute forcing engagement metrics.

Lastly, be creative! The social media space is bounded in a tight box, where black box recommendation engines optimized for engagement are considered the norm, despite there being a world of possibility out there. Don't be afraid to be a bit silly either. Sometimes that can help with taking a stand against what can otherwise look like a bit of a dystopian nightmare at times in the digital space. Those minimal phones are silly. Twitter's 160 character limit was silly. Hosting a blog that looks like it's from 1999 is silly. But it's also a bit rebellious which can actually bring more value to the table, even when it comes to things like building a following, then you lose by refusing to engage with the hyper dopamine hacking landscape.