MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Bender | 2025-07-20 12:47:08+00:00
Scientists Say This Supplement Reversed Heart Damage

On Amazon Tricaprin is sold as a prescription drug not a supplement. As usual they also have unlabelled bottles CAS 621-71-6 for really high prices 500ml @ $115 with a single 5 star vote. There should also be a review of the potential side effects. [1] Perhaps four thieves vinegar could be a way around the RX for this one.

[1] - https://cancercenterforhealing.com/tricaprin-side-effects/
by kerkeslager | 2025-07-20 12:48:27+00:00
> I know that you are equating things that are not equatable, since I have personally been affected by businesses relying on "datasets" to claim that my real world address, which definitely existed, did not exist.

It sounds like people at those businesses equated a dataset to the real world, not me. You're an adult, direct your frustrations appropriately.

> Data is not the same as reality.

That glosses over a lot of nuance.

Obviously, no dataset perfectly represents reality. But, this fact is often used to dismiss data entirely, resulting in people making decisions with absolutely no evidence whatsoever.

An appropriate use of an address database might be: when the user enters an address not in the database, do a fuzzy search and suggest the best match you can find, asking "Did you mean X?" At that point, if the user says, "No, I really meant what I put in," then you accept the data they gave you. This catches most mistakes while allowing users to put in addresses that aren't in your dataset.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-07-20 12:48:32+00:00
Seems to me like a basic AI portfolio wouldn't be a bad idea for a young person entering the workforce, perhaps even regardless of the industry they are pursuing.

Something simple like "I built a tool chain using x/y/z, fed it this RAG data related to the project requirements, and produced that output." Showing that they understand how to properly use the tools, I can do something relevant and useful with it.
by belter | 2025-07-20 12:48:56+00:00
"...Model outputs were sensitive to modest temperature changes and prompt wording, which underscores the remaining necessity of expert oversight. Future work should target logical consistency, robust multimodality, and adaptive prompting to approach human-level patent proficiency. In summary, despite the outstanding performance of recent large models, the general public might overestimate their performance. The field has a long way to go to develop a virtual patent attorney. This paper wants to point out several specific limitations that need solutions..."
by credit_guy | 2025-07-20 12:49:01+00:00
If you try to ride a bicycle, do you expect to succeed at the first try? Getting AI code assistants to help you write high quality code takes time. Little by little you start having a feel for what prompts work, what don't, what type of tasks the LLMs are likely to perform well, which ones are likely to result in hallucinations. It's a learning curve. A lot of people try once or twice, get bad results, and conclude that LLMs are useless. But few people conclude that bicycles are useless if they can't ride them after trying once or twice.
by spwa4 | 2025-07-20 12:50:02+00:00
Putin controls the entire Russian economy. In other words, by today's valuations for companies his net worth would be something like 40*GDP(Russia). Which works out to about 80 Trillion USD.

You could say that number is artificial. But you could say the same about any stock market valuation. Even that ignores that even 80 Trillion wouldn't buy the power Putin has. It would, for example, not buy 8000 nukes. I'm 100% sure that if Elon Musk threatened to nuke Washington he'd be in prison within the hour, and if his wealth was 1600 times bigger than it is (which would bring him near Putin), that wouldn't change things. Reality is not a superman movie.

The grand duke of Luxembourg is worth about 400 billion USD by the same measure, or a bit more than Elon Musk (although that ignores that the risk to Luxenburg as a country is MUCH less than the risk to Elon Musks' companies)
by lambdaone | 2025-07-20 12:50:06+00:00
Delicious vegetarian food is already a thing, and doesn't require new technology, and it's not necessary to completely eliminate meat-eating to significantly reduce your ethical-harm footprint. It's a matter of changing food culture. Once you adapt to an omnivore diet that contains tasty meals from both meat and non-meat cuisine, it's actually quite easy to reduce your meat intake further.
by Isofarro | 2025-07-20 12:50:16+00:00
> And a lot of these people do employ a lot of people so they just start companies elsewhere.

Great, do that! Go start companies in other countries, and trickle down their wealth to employees in the form of wages and salaries.

If only they thought of doing that in the UK! Instead of the rich buying up properties turning them into buy-to-lets, both pricing out working people of their first home, and then taking their income as rent.
by amluto | 2025-07-20 12:50:41+00:00
The author is also suggesting that a data structure consisting of a sea of objects referencing each other works perfectly in Python. It doesn’t — Python’s GC can only collect it as a cycle, and this path is not immediate the way the refcount is. And you’re paying for refcounts. Even in a language with full tracing GC (Java, etc), you’re not winning any performance points by making a ton of objects all referencing each other.

Indices or arenas or such will result in better code in all these languages.
by calrain | 2025-07-20 12:50:49+00:00
Everyone has their own way of measuring quality.

Mine is that a Billy bookcase that I bought from Ikea 25 years ago is must stronger and more stable than a Billy bookcase I bought from Ikea 5 years ago.

And, when looking at what Ikea is selling in 2025 as a Billy bookcase, it's worse yet again.

But, with the cost of living increasing, companies have to cut corners to keep pricing down.

I wonder where the inflection point is where used items become more valuable than the new items being made at current quality levels, including degradation due to age.
by II2II | 2025-07-20 12:50:51+00:00
I remember a number of years back when people were equating the feeling of sturdy and heft with quality. Just feelings. No actual metrics. I would constantly look down at my beaten up plastic junk and shake my head. At least my junk still worked. Everyone else seemed to be replacing their stuff all the time because their favourite products were only designed to give the illusion of quality. In reality, the very things that gave those products the illusion of quality were diminishing the longevity of the product or ensuring that it could not withstand any abuse.
by Anon1096 | 2025-07-20 12:51:23+00:00
I disagree with the OP that AI coding can't be taught. My answer to why so many people have trouble would be that they refuse to learn. I see tons of people who are insanely biased against AI and then when they try and use it they give up after the first go (having tried a horrible application of AI like making a functioning production app with 1 single prompt, no one using AI for work is using it like that). They also don't take any suggestions on using it better because "I've tried it before and it sucked."

If you asked me months ago whether "prompt engineering" was a skill I'd have said absolutely not, it's no different than using stack overflow and writing tickets, but having watched otherwise skilled devs flounder I might have to admit there is some sort of skill needed.
by benrutter | 2025-07-20 12:51:40+00:00
From the intro:

> Airplane seats are getting smaller and smaller, clothes are unrecognizable after the second wash, and machines now answer our calls.

The author talks about a range of motivations behind these, but it seems like there's an obvious one we're missing. All these changes make products more profitable.

I would love to live in a society that prioritises sustainability and quality of life for its citizens. We currently only achieve those things if they're a byproduct of profit for coorporations.

Maybe I'm being overly cynical, but I definitely don't see these changes as bewildering. Quality has been intentionally lowered when it conflicts with profit since at least the Phoebus cartel[0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
by pityJuke | 2025-07-20 12:52:05+00:00
It is incredible how Minecraft, and the soundtrack in particular, was created by unknown part timers.

A remix of Mice on Venus [0] is one of the few things that can make me cry on cue. There is something so powerful about it.

Doesn’t help it is often used in Technoblade tributes because of this video. [1]

[0]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=v1wMBrkUEFE

[1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=pPmo21gkETU
by brewdad | 2025-07-20 12:52:49+00:00
There is truth to this and it has certainly been true of women’s sizing for many years where everyone wants to be a size 2 (or whatever your number is) but no size 2 is the same across brands.

It’s an entirely different problem when I buy two pairs of presumably the same pair of jeans in the same style and size yet one can barely be buttoned up and the other requires a belt at all times.
by Aeolos | 2025-07-20 12:53:05+00:00
Or when you enable optimizations and since accessing an object with invalid state is UB, the compiler helpfully decides it is now permitted to format your hard drive.

https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2016-02/msg00381.html

"The fact is, undefined compiler behavior is never a good idea. Not for serious projects."
by scarface_74 | 2025-07-20 12:53:31+00:00
I only listen to “The Indicator” and “Planet Money” podcasts from NPR now. Even those I only listen to occasionally. The “two podcast hosts having a fake scripted conversation with fake laughter” format is irritating.

As a mostly liberal but not leftist, I find that other podcasts I tried to listen to can be a bit much when it comes to race (I’m Black FWIW). I haven’t come across all of the trans topics that the X thread is complaining about it.

And maybe I’m just over discussions about race issues because I know what a large part of America is about and I’m just over it.
by Aardwolf | 2025-07-20 12:53:35+00:00
Which types of processing exactly is implied by that, and which are not?

Where's the line drawn, is ground beef ultra processed or not? how about a chicken schnitzel? canned sardines? dark chocolate?

Which part of the ultra-processing is making the foot unhealthy, is it chemicals they add? the fact that they heat it up (but at home when you cook you also heat up stuff)? something else they do with it?

If you bake fries yourself from potatoes with olive oil, is it ultra processed?
by jebarker | 2025-07-20 12:54:20+00:00
I would guess the primary target market is ex meat eaters that are trying to go vegetarian but have been raised to enjoy the taste/texture of meat. I am in this group. I agree it’s not a very large market for the reasons you stated above. However, maybe BM hoped they could grow that market, I.e. convince more meat eaters to give it up for ethical reasons.
by bell-cot | 2025-07-20 12:54:25+00:00
Meh. I dumped them ~23 years ago. Post-9/11, their format seem to jump from "music with some decent news" to "endless so-called news for you to obsess to in your personal Fear Bunker". Also, their notion of "balanced" shifted to reporting that Senator Slime(D) said "2+2=3", and Senator Sleaze(R) said "2+2=5" - with their reporter carefully avoiding any mention of "4".
by hliyan | 2025-07-20 12:54:41+00:00
Here's how I see it: in the absence of growth in market share or cost-reducing innovation, the only remaining strategy for profit maximization is the delivering of progressively lower quality products for progressively higher prices. This obviously destroys the brand over time, but brands can be recycled/reinvented.

A purely rational and self-interested (i.e. unencumbered by moral sentiment or empathy) economic agent would, in this case, calculate the longest time period a brand could be sustained at the highest price and the lowest production cost, before the brand is lost. If the ROI during that period justifies the investment, such an agent would execute the strategy.
by torginus | 2025-07-20 12:54:49+00:00
Ahh finally someone has said it. Unfortunately I can't seem to voice this opinion without getting the critique of you're just not smart enough to get it.

While I like the language, threads in Go are not any easier than any other language (which is to say, most devs can't use them correctly, and your program will have bugs), and suffer from a ton of ergonomic issues, like being hard to keep track of, difficult(ish) cancellation(how do you cancel a big synchronous I/O operation), and channels suffer from backpressure related hard-to-debug issues.
by phil21 | 2025-07-20 12:55:33+00:00
It does seem to take some more effort these days to find quality, but it’s mostly out there - even for clothing.

For jeans I’ve settled on Duluth Trading for the time being, found a style and size that fits well and is easily cared for. Many washes later and they are just fine!

Levi’s still seems fine to me as well, but you have to get them from their “high end” retail channel - such as their own storefronts. I’ve definitely noticed a wide difference between that channel and the “low end” retail channels like Amazon and mass market retailers. Seems many brands are doing this weird “channel segmentation” thing recently.

That said, you’re not gonna find a decent pair of jeans for less than around $80 today, unless you get rather lucky with a clearance sale. This makes sense to me, despite my formative years price anchoring being 20 years ago and the initial sticker shock.

I’ve found decent clothing for all my needs really - the most annoying thing is a brand discontinuing and item I started to rely on being there.
by interloxia | 2025-07-20 12:55:33+00:00
having stable software - yeah that wasn't my experience. I used early and late Series 40 phones and they had plenty of problems. Mostly minor but not clearly getting better. And then it got worse. My N97 mini was a good phone with pretty terrible software. It was bad. And then it didn't matter anymore.

I'm not excited about the current duopoly, but a decent mid-range phone from either is better now that in was five years ago.
by mtlmtlmtlmtl | 2025-07-20 12:55:43+00:00
I spent some time* working on the firmware side of developing custom electronics based on various AVR chips, ATmega328 among them. Arduinos are not good for much more than babby's first microcontroller project. They're not even that great for prototyping. Besides the aforementioned hardware design issues, the "arduino" language(really just C++) and core library had several problems both in terms of code quality and abstracting over things that shouldn't be abstracted over when working with such a limited chip(8bit, 2k SRAM...), like significant memory allocations and interactions with SREG.

My EE partner in crime ended up designing a prototyping board himself, with various creature comforts included that we needed shields for with Arduino, and I ended up writing just C with avr-libc instead of using any of the arduino library/tooling, developing a set of core modules to use the things we added to our boards, in a more flexible manner than the Arduino library. It took some time, but it saved us a lot of time and friction in our future prototyping efforts.

All that being said, there's nothing wrong with Arduino as a platform for learning and personal tinkering. I do think they could've done a better job bridging the gap between that and prototyping though.

* Ten years ago, so my memory of specifics is very fuzzy and only reflects the state of things back then.
by infecto | 2025-07-20 12:55:50+00:00
That’s a bit reductive and misses the core issue. Of course companies want to reduce headcount or boost productivity, but many are pursuing these initiatives without a clear problem in mind. If the mandate were, say, “we’re building X to reduce customer support staff by 20%,” that would be a different story. Instead, it often feels like solution-first thinking without a clear target.

Edit: not even going to reply to comments below as they continue down a singular path of oh you ought to know what they are trying to do. The only point I was making is orgs are going solution-first without a real problem they are trying to solve and I don’t think that is the right approach.
by MITSardine | 2025-07-20 12:56:23+00:00
If I may play the devil's advocate, nothing is deterministic. A neutrino could cause a bit flip in your calculator. More commonly, the lower abstractions we build upon without knowing their innards can have bugs. Even the most popular compilers (say, g++) have bugs, for instance. I am personally incapable of fixing a bug within gcc, despite the tool being a vital requirement of my work.

IMO the dichotomy should not be deterministic/stochastic, but proved/unproved reliable. gcc has been shown reliable, for instance, so I don't need to know whether it was built by deterministic (clever engineers) or stochastic (typewriting monkeys) processes. I'm certain the former are more efficient, but this is ultimately not what makes the tool valuable.

As a bit of an artificial example, there's stochastic processes that can be proved to converge to a desired result (say, a stochastic gradient descent, or Monte-Carlo integration), in the same way that deterministic methods can (say a classic gradient descent or quadrature rules).

In practical cases, the only proof that matters is empirical. I write (deterministic) mathematical algorithms for a living, yet they very rarely come out correct on first iteration. The fact there is a mathematical proof that a certain algorithm yields certain results lets me arrive at a working program much faster than if I left it to typewriting monkeys, but it is ultimately not what guarantees a valid program. I could just as well, given enough time, let a random text file generator write the programs, and do the same testing I do currently, it would just be very inefficient (an understatement).
by benjiro | 2025-07-20 12:57:25+00:00
fsync waits for the drive to report back the success write. When you do a ton of small writes, fsync becomes a bottleneck. Its a issue of context switching and pipelining with fsync.

When you async write data, you do not need to wait for this confirmation. So by double writing two async requests, you are better using all your system CPU cores as they are not being stalled waiting for that I/O response. Seeing a 10x performance gain is not uncommon using a method like this.

Yes, you do need to check if both records are written and then report it back to the client. But that is a non-fsync request and does not tax your system the same as fsync writes.

It has literally the same durability as a fsync write. You need to take in account, that most databases are written 30, 40 ... years ago. In the time when HDDs ruled and stuff like NVME drives was a pipedream. But most DBs still work the same, and threat NVME drives like they are HDDs.

Doing this above operation on a HDD, will cost you 2x the performance because you barely have like 80 to 120 IOPS/s. But a cheap NVME drive easily does 100.000 like its nothing.

If you even monitored a NVME drive with a database write usage, you will noticed that those NVME drives are just underutilized. This is why you see a lot more work in trying new data storage layers being developed for Databases that better utilize NVME capabilities (and trying to bypass old HDD era bottlenecks).
by timschmidt | 2025-07-20 12:57:38+00:00
> Like all historical accounts it's just a story.

Narrative and fact are two distinct aspects of history which work together. Portraying the heavily referenced and fact-laden linked article / talk as "just story" borders on dishonesty by intentionally ignoring the facts presented - the most interesting part. Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How.

> Steve's version isn't some transcendental truth

I don't see anywhere I make such a claim. "Silicon Valley" is a narrative. My point has been that the facts paint a deeper and more complex history than that narrative provides. Have a nice day!
by amluto | 2025-07-20 12:58:21+00:00
> They might argue that the snippets don't show there is any real ergonomic problem, because the solutions to make the snippets compile are completely trivial. In the last example, I could just derive Clone + Copy for Id.

I’ll bite a little bit. If I write:

struct Thing(u32);

Then I need to make a choice: is Thing a plain value that its holders can freely clone or is Thing an affine object that is gone when consumed? I think it’s great that Rust makes this explicit, even if it’s a tiny bit odd that one option is a default and the other option is rather verbose. If I could have a unicorn, too, I’d also like to be able to request “linear” behavior, i.e. disallow code that fails to consume the object.

Sure, I suppose someone could invent a language where an LLM reads the type definitions and fills in the blanks as to what uses are valid, but this seems like a terrible idea. Or one could use a language without affine types (most languages, and even C++’s move feature entirely fails to enforce any sort of good behavior).
by jebarker | 2025-07-20 12:58:22+00:00
I was raised as a meat eater and ate it for 30 years. I’ve been vegetarian for about a decade for ethical reasons that I do believe are incompatible with eating any meat. I consider myself a good cook and make vegetarian/vegan meals for my family every night. However: I will never stop thinking that the taste of chicken, pork, beef and lamb are desirable. The conditioning is too strong. Sticking with vegetarianism is still an act of willpower for me. This is why I like meat alternatives.
by queenkjuul | 2025-07-20 12:58:33+00:00
An example:

I updated a svelte component at work, and while i could test it in the browser and see it worked fine, the existing unit test suddenly started failing. I spent about an hour trying to figure out why the results logged in the test didn't match the results in the browser.

I got frustrated, gave in and asked Claude Code, an AI agent. The tool call loop is something like: it reads my code, then looks up the documentation, then proposed a change to the test which i approve, then it re-runs the test, feeds the output back into the AI, re-checks the documentation, and then proposes another change.

It's all quite impressive, or it would be if at one point it didn't randomly say "we fixed it! The first element is now active" -- except it wasn't, Claude thought the first element was element [1], when of course the first element in an array is [0]. The test hadn't even actually passed.

An hour and a few thousand Claude tokens my company paid for and got nothing back for lol.
by skc | 2025-07-20 12:59:39+00:00
This is a feeling that definitely becomes more acute the older one gets.

Try shopping for toys for your kids today. Every time I'm with my 7 year old browsing the toy aisles I fondly remember my Tonka truck from when I was his age.

I outgrew it and it was still in perfect condition. My sons toys barely last a month.
by brewdad | 2025-07-20 12:59:42+00:00
I’m glad IKEA exists but it really only serves very specific use cases these days. They are great for the moves apartments every 12 months crowd and the needs a piece for the spare bedroom that will rarely get used crowd. They are also great for young kids furniture that will get trashed no matter what quality you buy.

I appreciate it for what it is but consumers really need to understand what they are buying.