MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bitpush | 2025-08-15 16:11:13+00:00
The person I replied to didn't say they'll boycott a website, but rather "world wide web", as in the internet.

If you take a quick look at their activity on HN, you can see they are a prolific submitter/commenter. I find it a bit amusing that someone's whos active than 99% of the people who frequent HN can just simply quit internet (and not an ad-ridden website).
by 2c2c2c | 2025-08-15 16:11:44+00:00
Curious if anyone has gone through the process of an adult adhd diagnosis at Kaiser SF.

Through my attempts, I've been told they don't really do adult adhd diagnoses without documentation of issues as a kid. I was recommended Wellbutrin to deal with symptoms in 2017. Got onto adderall when I moved health insurance in 2021. Back to Kaiser in 2024, I was routed to the same psychiatrist who once again wouldn't budge on adderall and once again recommended Welbutrin.

I used an online clinic to get my assessment (which I understand isn't taken seriously) which is what she cited. I asked what aspect of the assessment documentation did she think left me unqualified and she cited marijuana use in 2016. I asked her how she squares the fact that I'm an adult professional that makes comparable money to her, I have experience using both wellbutrin and adderall and see the former doing nothing and the latter helping, there's hundreds of times more evidence for adderall efficacy vs the flakey data on wellbutrin... She responded with something like: "I believe in my heart of hearts that what I am doing is right".

I thought the entire situation was kind of insane. Further research into the person makes me think they're a bit of a loon.
by sidgriciouus | 2025-08-15 16:11:58+00:00
Great comment. This quote from Hunter S Thompson comes to mind (although he is referring to middle sixties so Woz would have been a teenager, not quite the 70s young adult)

> “Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-08-15 16:12:17+00:00
Do you think I'm advocating for inflation as an institution?

History is history. Maybe you think AI is going to herald in some era of non-inflation and free people from the control of the ultra rich.

It's pretty apparent to me that AI isn't going to do that. It's going to do very very very very very much the opposite.

I agree that disruption of trade leads to wars. Usually of very large scale but we haven't had one of those since the advent of nuclear weapons.

And people keep misinterpreting my comment that I believe Donald Trump has good policy. I absolutely don't. That's why I said the tariffs are insane. Theoretically what Donald Trump wants to do is bring manufacturing back to his white voters in the former middle class, and bring the US into an isolationist stance.

Biden did not put troops on the ground in Ukraine. I believe bush II would have enthusiastically. Biden did not roll back the tarriffs Trump imposed in his first term either.

So generally the overall political trend in the United States is to be like this.

Ask the rest of your comment. You could ignore history if you want and hope for something different. But.... Well you should know the quote about history, and I don't want to have to repeat it:-)
by Isamu | 2025-08-15 16:12:22+00:00
You can compare the current state of LLMs to the days of chess machines when they first approached grandmaster level play. The machine approach was very brute force, and there was a lot of work done to improve the sheer amount of look ahead that was required to complete at the grandmaster level.

As opposed to what grandmasters actually did, which was less look ahead and more pattern matching to strengthen the position.

Now LLMs successfully leverage pattern matching, but interestingly it is still a kind of brute force pattern matching, requiring the statistical absorption of all available texts, far more than a human absorbs in a lifetime.

This enables the LLM to interpolate an answer from the structure of the absorbed texts with reasonable statistical relevance. This is still not quite “what humans do” as it still requires brute force statistical analysis of vast amounts of text to achieve pretty good results. For example training on all available Python sources in github and elsewhere (curated to avoid bad examples) yields pretty good results, not how a human would do it, but statistically likely to be pertinent and correct.
by sartorially | 2025-08-15 16:13:09+00:00
> Even in the summer, when it was scorching hot?

I have high-twist wool(!) trousers that are comfortable up to 90 F. Most people couldn't tell they're not normal wool dress trousers. I have linen trousers that aren't really any warmer than shorts (and they keep the sun off you). Ditto for shirts. I'd rather be in long sleeves and trousers, all light-woven linen, in high heat, than in shorts and a T. Doesn't really insulate more, does keep the sun off.

I have an unlined wool navy blazer in a Summer weight that breaths so well it's basically totally ineffective at warming a person up, LOL. Put it on, take it off, makes basically no difference, aside from the color being dark enough that it does absorb heat from the sun. If I wore that kind of stuff more, I'd have other options that're even better in the heat.

I have some sweaters that're completely comfortable into the high 70s F (50/50 silk/linen blend, thin) and one that won't make you feel like your clothes are making you warmer up to at least 85F (that one's 100% linen and open-weave).

I dunno where people got the idea that you have to be uncomfortable if you're wearing much more than a swimsuit, in the heat.
Ask HN: What problem would you solve with unlimited resources? (August 2025)
by hedayet | 2025-08-15 16:13:16+00:00
I love the innovative ideas and unexpected insights from the HN community. Let's go deep - what challenge would you tackle if you had unlimited resources? Guaranteed funding, access to top talent, or freedom from your day job? Why would you choose to solve it? Do you actually need unlimited resources to start?
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-08-15 16:13:24+00:00
These gotcha questions are a waste of time. "If I close my eyes whenever I see an ad will I go to jail?"

Obviously the one-click effortless and mainstream availability of adblocking is what they care about, not laborious methods accessible to just a few people with the ability and wherewithal.

If tooling is written around curl for this purpose that becomes accessible and mainstream and popular, yes that tooling would be treated like this.
by hackyhacky | 2025-08-15 16:13:57+00:00
> Why do critics of LLM intelligence need to provide a definition when people who believe LLMs are intelligent only take it on faith, not having such a definition of their own?

Because advocates of LLMs don't use their alleged intelligence as a defense; but opponents of LLMs do use their alleged non-intelligence as an attack.

Really, whether or not the machine is "intelligent", by whatever definition, shouldn't matter. What matters is whether it is a useful tool.
by entropie | 2025-08-15 16:14:00+00:00
> Now I'm incredibly burned out

My SO has severe ADHS from early childhood on and gets medicated (first ritalin, now elvanse). She is always stressed because she has a guilty conscience; she does more things every day than she has time for. She has sleeping problems.

It's such a fast-paced lifestyle that it quickly takes its toll, and it's not as if it gets better with age. Its very hard to maintain a healthy lifestyle while permanently being "all-in" into something.
by zevon | 2025-08-15 16:14:00+00:00
You don't care how expensive and complicated it is to repair and maintain your mountain bike (especially if you plan to eat gravel a lot)? And your take on machines is that you better throw away a bunch of working 3D printers and replace them instead of upgrading the old ones and adding new ones as needed? Hope you have a lot of money to burn in your personal and business life. ;)
by xg15 | 2025-08-15 16:14:36+00:00
I feel this article should be paired with this other one [1] that was on the frontpage a few days ago.

My impression is, there is currently one tendency to "over-anthropomorphize" LLMs and treat them like conscious or even superhuman entities (encouraged by AI tech leaders and AGI/Singularity folks) and another to oversimplify them and view them as literal Markov chains that just got lots of training data.

Maybe those articles could help guarding against both extremes.

[1] https://www.verysane.ai/p/do-we-understand-how-neural-networ...
by neitsa | 2025-08-15 16:15:46+00:00
Thanks a lot! I love programming games. I'm just writing a simple client in python, and when sending a HELP packet, I'm receiving a packet with byte 0x82 as the header, which if I'm not mistaken is packet type 0x10 (0x82 >> 3 = 0x10), rather than 2. Am I missing something?

Sending HELP packet (5 bytes): OFFS DUMP ASCII 0000 00 58 52 32 4B .XR2K Receiving response... OFFS DUMP ASCII 0000 82 58 52 32 4B 96 23 53 - 50 41 43 45 20 54 45 52 .XR2K.#SPACE TER ...
by notfromhere | 2025-08-15 16:15:50+00:00
Too many psychiatrists do very little continuing education in their practice. I have heard more than a few try to asset that ADHD can only be diagnosed for children.

As if a neurodevelopmental disorder just magically vanishes when you hit age of majority.

It's pretty wild that despite it being a disorder that has been documented for hundreds of years, people still make the argument that people are just lying.
by emchammer | 2025-08-15 16:16:10+00:00
The context on this site is often assumed to be American. I consider myself to be multicultural and I'm definitely guilty of that in some of my posts.

There's a lot of misinformation and conspiracy theories about vaccines in the USA in addition to the valid questions which are equally serious. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is currently run by an individual who has superstitions about them, and is actively dismantling the professional efforts which further vaccination. Even if there was a vaccine available on the medical market in the US, because that is what we have in this country, a market for medical care, it's not clear that it would be accessible to everybody or the people who need it. The reason for this is because Americans do not have universal healthcare, and in fact, the President has recently enacted a law that cuts public healthcare for many millions of Americans, which would provide such a vaccine.
by lettergram | 2025-08-15 16:16:16+00:00
I run a company in this space...

First, China patents ~5-10x more than the US does currently on a given month. Further, China has made it required for companies to patent.

The US definitely could not respect the Chinese patents, or they could treat Chinese patent's differently. IMO there's a ~1% chance of that happening. Patent law is pretty well defined, there are a multitude of treaties and if the US wants their patents to be respected, they have to respect the worlds.

That said, I will say, I suspect a lot of these patents can be invalidated. My company works heavily in this space and we work with some of the top US law firms. We sell a service that's used to identify prior art and invalidate patents in ~15 minutes -- https://search.ipcopilot.ai/

There's a lot of prior art in the open source community that can be used to attack these patents. Further, if folks publish their innovation it'll provide a solid layer of prior art.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-08-15 16:16:26+00:00
Now been three years since source hut threatened to ban Go for this behavior. For this to still be an issue is incredible.

Guess the author should send a pleading note to be added to the “Please don’t hammer my server list”.

Relevant story (2022!) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31508000
by ngriffiths | 2025-08-15 16:16:41+00:00
For me the appeal is less that tidyverse is great and more that the R standard library is horrible. It's full of esoteric names, inconsistent use and order of parameters, unreasonable default behavior, behavior that surprises you coming from other programming experience. It's all in a couple massive packages instead of broken up into manageable pieces.

Tidyverse is imperfect and it feels heavy-handed and awkward to replace all the major standard library functions, but Tidyverse stuff is way more ergonomic.
by danudey | 2025-08-15 16:16:47+00:00
I would be in favor of some kind of vetting program, where you (the ad network) commit to ensuring your (customers') ads aren't scammy, e.g. advertising on software download sites with an ad that looks like a download button. Much like spam, if your ads get reported and they're verified as being in violation, you get taken off the whitelist.

Unfortunately, the main use case I have for 'ad blockers' isn't just blocking visual ads; it's blocking sometimes tens of megabytes of third-party javascript, tracking, analytics, etc., which is not just a huge privacy issue but also slows the page down tremendously.

I remember working at a company which hosted and maintained, for a client, a forum for A-level testing students in the UK, or something of the sort. Over the years, they had insisted on us adding more and more to the site; third-party widgets, trackers, analytics, etc. Each time, we pushed back because of the impact to page loads, which leads to increased bounce rate, lower time-on-site, and so on, but they were the customer and had the final say.

Then, suddenly, Google announced that it was going to start factoring page load times into pages' search ratings and, overnight, the client was frantically asking us how we could improve their page times because they were absolutely atrocious.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, a lot of techniques came around to improve page load times while still letting you load your page full of noisy cruft and garbage, so now we have pages that load nice and quick and then, over the next few seconds, ruin themselves with trash that ruins the experience. "Articles" where every paragraph break is punctuated with another ad, pages with pop-up after pop-up asking if you want to join the site, sign up for a newsletter, check out our substack.

This is the sort of reason why people gravitate towards a site's app, I suspect, but that just solves the loading time issue and prevents you from blocking trackers and ads.
by ravenstine | 2025-08-15 16:16:50+00:00
Not saying it can't be the methylphenidate, but I would suspect it likely has more to do with your career than you might be giving it credit for. I don't know what your background is but, since you're on HN, I can make an educated guess and say you work in tech, which can both be a highly rewarding career but also one that can really drain the soul. The worst part about the soul-sucking is that our jobs are superficially very comfortable, so it's easy to talk yourself into just appreciating what one has and ignore your feelings.

I recommend giving up caffeine if you haven't done so. That alone had a much greater impact on my daily functioning than taking breaks from my medication. It took my body a week to recalibrate, but my mentality and my energy has been way more even throughout my days. The nice thing too is I can sometimes have caffeine when I feel like I can benefit from it and it actually has a positive effect rather than just keeping you barely at baseline for a few hours.
by jwr | 2025-08-15 16:16:56+00:00
I don't even care much about cost, but the Bambu Lab printers are simply better. I have been selling my Prusas (MK3S+ and XL), because they are just too much of a hassle. Prusa has fallen behind in R&D, the Bambu Lab printers work better, are more automated, have more nicely engineered features (having to babysit my XL and wipe the dripping filament off the print heads was such a disappointment).

And yes, I have had to fix both brands. The repairability of the Prusa is largely a myth, you still need to order replacement parts from Prusa, just as with other brands.

I wish Prusa would catch up with their R&D.
by belter | 2025-08-15 16:18:15+00:00
Cherry-picks winners: Uses only successful examples like Stripe or Airbnb while ignoring thousands of failed startups that tried identical manual tactics.

False choices: Presents manual work vs. scalable strategy as either/or when most successful companies do both simultaneously.

Has a One size fits all: Claims all startups must recruit manually, ignoring that enterprise products need fundamentally different approaches.

Instead, do the following...

- Interview failed founders, not successful ones: They will tell you why things actually break (co-founder fights, cash flow, timing) instead of survivorship bias fairy tales.

- Optimize for "no," not "yes": Ruthlessly eliminate wrong customers instead of trying to delight everyone. False positives kill more startups than missed opportunities.

- Plan your failure modes first: Map exactly how you could die (regulation, key person risk, moats) and build defenses. Most founders only plan for unicorn outcomes.

- Copy boring businesses, because that is the secret of sucess. Dont copy sexy startups: Uber is just taxis with an app, Airbnb is hotels with no real estate, Netflix is just video rental with better logistics. The biggest "innovative" companies are doing boring businesses better, not inventing new categories.
by ljf | 2025-08-15 16:18:28+00:00
Worrying for many reasons. Quote:

Beyond surface darkening lies a second threat: methane. In many parts of the Arctic, glaciers and permafrost cap vast underground stores of this potent greenhouse gas, preventing its release. Recent studies have also revealed that microbes thriving in the cold, dark, high-pressure world underneath glaciers can produce large volumes of fresh methane. Thawing permafrost and receding glaciers can trigger previously unanticipated methane emissions from deep underground.
by JCM9 | 2025-08-15 16:18:39+00:00
Web design has gotten too complicated. I really enjoy a simple site that focuses on content and readability vs fancy frameworks. There are sites still online from the 90s that looks better than much of the stuff produced today. Plus keeping it basic means your site will work well and look good forever.

Remember all those nonsense Flash intros sites used to have? For whatever reason restaurants were the worst at this (probably because consultants building these sites impressed the owner with “fancy stuff”). They were horrible… like just show me your friggin menu and don’t make we watch a 30 second nonsense intro to your website.

The modern version of that are these horrible single page templates that everyone uses where you just keep scrolling and scrolling and the “menu” is just taking you to different parts of this scroll-o-rama nonsense. I’ll take basic with good content over fancy design all day long.
by neutronicus | 2025-08-15 16:18:48+00:00
> Imagine the DVR being invented today. A commercial device that helps you skip ads. It would never be allowed to happen.

That's arguably what AI is - it compressed the internet so that you can extract StackOverflow answers without clicking through all the fucking ads that await you on the journey from search bar to the answer you were looking for.

You can of course expect it, over the next decade or so, to interpose ads between you and your goal in the same way that Google and StackOverflow did from 2010-now.

But for the moment I think it's the exact opposite of your thesis. The AI companies are in cut-throat capture-market-share mode so they're purposely skipping opportunities to cram ads down your throat.
by ohdeargodno | 2025-08-15 16:18:53+00:00
"Capitalism good, but state capitalism bad".

Not only are US VCs dumping billions in shitty Bluetooth connected dog collars and other kinds of crap, apparently according to you because that's "what the market wants", it's also an incredibly stupid reading of how the Chinese government works.

They target specific industries that are important, according to them, like solar panels, batteries, cars, etc. They then dump billions into a bunch of companies, and see which ones come out alive and on top.

As it stands, it's been pretty accurate for many things, and has made them market leaders on many, many things. But sure, jerk off the VC model, after all YC thinks the market wants... AIs and ERPs. Woo.
by floor2 | 2025-08-15 16:19:18+00:00
> they are free to do anything and everything they like with their lawns

In this case, what they're doing is clearly going beyond their lawn and negatively impacting you.

It's weird to suggest that "spraying poison on your neighbors" is deemed acceptable, as long as you're standing on your own property when you do it. If they were standing on their lawn throwing rocks at your apple trees, or shooting a gun at your apples, we wouldn't say they're free to do whatever they like. Heck, we don't even let people play loud music if it disturbs their neighbors.

We really need to update our mental models of harm and violence to account for modern possibilities. We should treat harm from pollution exactly as seriously as we treat harm from projectiles. Dying from cancer from your neighbors incidental pollution is just as bad as dying from a bullet from your neighbors errant gunshot.
by kergonath | 2025-08-15 16:19:18+00:00
I am sure that those people exist, by how many are they and what kind of power do they have? To me it seems that they are convenient boogeymen every time someone suggests a sensible reform that would make gun circulation less of a problem (like restrictions for criminals and mentally unstable people or background checks). I don’t doubt your sincerity, but this is just too simple a point of view for such a complex and nuanced situation.