MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mtlmtlmtlmtl | 2025-08-06 08:54:27+00:00
Amphetamine is actually a very effective weight loss drug. And it's sort of orthogonal to the fact that it's a stimulant. Stimulants in general can cause an acute reduction in appetite and temporary weight loss. This tends to stabilise with tolerance, however. As someone with obesity and ADHD, thus was my experience with methylphenidate treatment. And I used to think the weight loss effects of amphetamine were analogous until recently.

Amphetamine and methyphenidate(MPH) have very different ways of acting as stimulants. MPH is an inhibitor of the dopamine transporter(DAT) and the norepinehrine transporter(NET). These cross-membrane proteins essentially "suck up" the dopamine or norepinehrine after neurotransmission, thus regulating the effect. MPH inhibits this process, increasing the effect. This is called a norepinephrine/dopamine reuptake inhibitor(NDRI). Cocaine also works like this, as well as the antidepressant wellbutrin(bupropion).

Amphetamine on the other hand, is a bit more complicated. It interacts with DAT/NET as well, as a substrate, actually passing through them into the neuron. Inside the neuron, it has a complex series of interactions with TAAR1, VMAT2, and ion concentrations, causing signaling cascades that lead to DAT reversal. Essentially, enzymes are activated that modify DAT in such a way that it pumps dopamine out of the neuron instead of sucking it up. How that happens is very complicated and beyond the scope of this comment, but amphetamine's activity at TAAR1 is an important contributor. As such, amphetamine is a norepinephrine-dopamine releasing agent(NDRA). Methamphetamine, MDMA, and cathinone(from khat) also work like this.

Anyway, recently I was reading about TAAR1 and learned something new, namely that TAAR1, besides being and internal receptor in monoaminergic neurons, is also expressed in the pancreas, the duodenum, the stomach, and intestines and in these tissues, TAAR1 activation will increase release of GLP-1, PYY, and insulin, as well as slow gastric emptying.

So in essence, there may be some pharmacological overlap between ozempic and amphetamine(I'm still looking for data on how significantly amphetamine reaches TAAR1 in these tissues, so unclear what the relevance is. But amohetamine is known to diffuse across cellular membranes, so it's likely there is an effect).

Also interesting, amphetamine was recently approved as a treatment for binge eating disorder. Not only because it causes weight loss, but because it improves functioning in the prefrontal cortex(crucial to its efficacy in ADHD), which is apparently implicated in the neuropsychological aspects of BED as well.
by lynx97 | 2025-08-06 08:54:28+00:00
Well, speech synthesizers are pretty much famous for speaking all sorts of things wrong. But what I find very concerning about LLM based TTS is that some of them cant really speak numbers greater then 100. They try, but fail a lot. At least tts-1-hd was pretty much doing this for almost every 3 or 4 digit number. Especially noticeable when it is supposed to read a year number.
by nicksbg | 2025-08-06 08:55:21+00:00
I think that old departments (personnel departments) should have been just modernized in reality. To be frank, in some cases a mix of HR/Legal department is cost saving too.

What it really comes to is that a lot of people love to micromanage everything. If you hire someone that has integrity and educational background in subject, he/she will warn you if the decision you are making will have consequences in the long run. If you have someone that does not have relevant education, that simply does not happen. The managers micromanage, those people receive salaries and if they step out of the line even when they are right, they are reminded that they do not have relevant knowledge in said department (law/economy). This in turn leads to a lot of people gaining something called shallow experience which then in turns leads those people to hire someone that des not pose the risk to their position further down the line.

The problem being in this case is that there are a lot of misses that happen when the HR is organized like that; from illegal hirings, not knowing key economic factors, not having a clue about the business itself, no clue about laws and procedures and so on. Which in turn does not really protect the company because the company loses both the money and employees.
by ivanstepanovftw | 2025-08-06 08:55:49+00:00
My worst experience is to submit two decent PR that was ignored by maintainers. I had burden to support them for a month, solving merge conflicts, solving new bugs in the main branch that were merged without testing, and to adapt test system to prove my changes are solving something.

And then I saw that maintainer not just ignores but closes every else PR with these words:

> your contributions are too undisciplined and difficult to review. please just make sure there are issues filed for the problems and let a core team member or other contributor solve it. [1]

I have directly asked maintainers to merge at least one PR [2], because I see someone is in the middle of refactoring whole backend, but got ignored.

I have rage closed all my contributions and made most of my projects private. I think I will never go open ever again.

[1]: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/21426#issuecomment-30823...

[2]: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/24317
by porridgeraisin | 2025-08-06 08:56:20+00:00
- English-medium education.

- H1B visa share: 70% india, 10% china (2022). So that's 7x more Indians meaning even a random choice will likely end up with an Indian.

This is 80% of the reason. Remaining 20%:

- Assorted cultural reasons

People make a huge deal about how making "broad cultural assumptions" is wrong but the fact is they play a role contextually. "As broad as the context, and no broader". Here's the logic behind it. Most of the things people do in their life they do not do because they innately want to do it, rather it is because they are expected, or incentivised to. Culture, when it is strong, sets a lot of incentives and expectations. Broad cultural assumptions in $CONTEXT work accurately when(and only when) said culture sets expectations and incentives that result in behaviours overlapping with those displayed in $CONTEXT.

What I have heard from someone with 1st hand experience: For Indian/chinese culture, set CONTEXT=board_room, you will find a difference.

Edit: it's important to add that these cultural differences are observable at the population level and not the individual level. i.e Akash Patel won't necessarily get the CEO position more often than Lee Wei. However, in a population of 100 Akash Patels and 100 Lee Weis, a larger fraction of Akash Patels will end up as CEO. Stereotypes are probabilistic information and thus lose their error bars as you take more and more samples.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-06 08:56:44+00:00
> January 6 involved a multiracial band of wackjobs storming the capitol for reasons that had nothing to do with race or racism. Framing J6 as involving “multiracial white supremacy” is a great example of how NPR tries to make everything about white people being racist.

Yes, there are dumb people and there are even dumber people. Even the KKK ha(d/s) black people in it. But who needs the KKK when you can just join the republican party.

But let's see you determine the ratio of 'white people' (without saying whether they're racist or not) and people of color in this nice overview picture of the protests:

https://dims.apnews.com/dims4/default/5625233/2147483647/str...

I don't think that you're going to come to the conclusion that this was a 'multi racial band of wackjobs' and race and racism is more than likely a connecting factor between these people in spite of what you - against all available evidence - seem to want to continue to believe. A large majority of these people would most likely be happy to see you and your kids deported.

> In this case, NPR’s ideological blinders caused them to miss the real story.

It's not NPR whose ideological blinders caused them to miss the real story here.

> The GOP is becoming an increasingly multiracial coalition united by distrust of institutions and experts, conspiracy theories, and memes.

Experts are probably better to be trusted than distrusted. That includes such experts as Fauci and Powell.

Conspiracy theories are just tools to get people riled up over bullshit that pushes their emotional buttons. Meanwhile, it is not a conspiracy theory that a bunch of people went pretty much all-in on trying to destroy democracy in the USA and for some weird reason you are cheering them on.
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-06 08:57:17+00:00
Graphene is right if you're afraid someone is trying to hack your phone with an RCE in some form of drive-by exploit to hijack your browser.

While RCE attacks and Firefox 0days do exist, I think the privacy improvements outweighs the anti-exploit benefits provided extra layers of sandboxing.

That said, Firefox does seem to be rolling out Fission on Android, which brings hope that site isolation may come soon so that we can have both benefits at the same time.
by jjani | 2025-08-06 08:57:28+00:00
All those teachers should indeed be banned from using AI. But that's not because LLMs are incapable of the things they're using them for, in a way that would be an improvement over how those same teachers were doing those tasks pre-LLMs.

The majority of times I see things like this it turns out that it's either:

- The "they've built it wrong" case; this one is the most common. People using - or in this case being made to use at work - tools that behind the scenes all use very cheap models (e.g. 4o-mini) with little context, half vibe-coded up, to save costs. The company making "MagicSchool" doesn't care, they want to maximize those profit margins and they're selling to school administration, not teachers, who only look at the costs and don't ever actually use the products themselves. Just like classic enterprise software in traditional companies. They need to tick boxes, show features that only show the happy path/case. It is perfectly possible to make it high quality, in a way that adds value, doesn't make shit up, and is properly validated. But especially in this niche, sales trumps everything. The hope is that at some point, this will change. We've seen the same play out with enterprise software to an extent; new such software does tend to be more usable on average than it used to be. It has taken a long time to get there though.

- The "you're holding it wrong" meme; users themselves directly using tools like Microsoft Copilot, 4o and friends (very outdated, free tiers, miles behind Claude/Gemini 2.5 pro/o3/etc.), along with having zero idea about what LLMs can and can't do, and obviously even less of an idea about inherent biases and prompting to prevent those. This combined with a complete lack of caring, along with a lack of competency - people lacking the basic critical thinking skills necessary to spot issues - is a deadly combo.

Of the problems with tasks and outcomes named in that thread, the large majority can indeed be done already with LLMs in a manner that both saves time and provides better quality than the level of those teachers rightly being criticized there. Teachers who are not even checking the output obviously don't give a single damn anyway, and that tells you enough about what the quality of their teaching would've been like pre-LLMs.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-08-06 08:58:00+00:00
ZKP still needs a provider I trust. Sure, the same is true for the web of trust, but it doesn't consist of shitty ID providers. And companies currently jumping on that train for bucks certainly aren't really convincing.

And even then data leakage is entirely possibe, perhaps even very likely.

There is plenty of justification. It allows government to put up and demand arbitrary walls. A single legislative change and any criticism is illegal. It is not a power government should have. I don't think people supporting such efforts really thought about implications.

What about bots accessing content? The good ones I mean. You would cement knowledge to large data hoarders. You give big tech power with that. I could write whole pages...
by eru | 2025-08-06 08:58:06+00:00
Why are you so pessimistic? Just because something is hard and you get big error bars doesn't mean we can't do it at all.

If you wanted to, you could look at eg black market prices for kidneys to get an estimate for how much your kidney is worth. Or, less macabre, you can look at how much you'd have to pay a gardener to mow your lawn to see what the labour of your son is worth.
by that_guy_iain | 2025-08-06 08:59:48+00:00
I think we need to compare our industry with other industries. No other industry relies on free labour from random people, which comes with no support or promises.

I once told some non-techie folk about some code I wrote. It did something super simple and wasn't that big. They were all asking why I didn't sell it and thought it was crazy I would give it away for free with the BSD license. It was 900 lines of code... For us, that's nothing but for an average person they just think "I built it, I'll sell it"
by tecleandor | 2025-08-06 09:00:54+00:00
I think there are a lot more sides to this. I also think the mentioned paper has been extrapolated a bit too much for this substack article. It's from almost 10 years ago, and it's mostly centered in India's population.

For reference, it's titled "Boomers Like to Confront, Generation Y Is Okay with Withdrawal, But They All Love to Negotiate in India" in March 2016 "Conflict Resolution Quarterly". DOI:10.1002/crq.21163

But I'm surprised how it just passes over the language (English is an official language in India), that also have lead to India having lots of business relations with the USA due to offshoring. And, of course, how Chinese nationals are seen as a risk in any meaningful position in American companies, specially in the last ten years.
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-08-06 09:01:22+00:00
I think people take the idea that birth rates will stay low for granted. It’s entirely reasonable as a hypothesis that people are simply responding to environmental pressures against having children, and that these pressures will subside as the population shrinks. Not factoring in technological change, I think we’re just responding to our planet’s comfortable carrying capacity without really realizing it. This makes me think we’ll eventually see birthrates stabilize as space and resources become less scarce to future generations.
by ml-anon | 2025-08-06 09:02:20+00:00
This is bullshit. It would be partly valid if it were just about "information hostility" but its not. People are making choices not just due to ignorance or misinformation, but based actively on spite, hatred and "fuck you got mine". People are deciding not to necessarily better their own situation but to harm others. It is selfish, myopic and yes, utterly fucking stupid.

Normalising this way of behaving means that yes, if you're in the group that benefits from today's decision you're ok, but nothing stops you from being in the out-group tomorrow. And if your goal is inflicting harm, well tomorrow that harm will be inflicted upon you.
by CJefferson | 2025-08-06 09:02:29+00:00
I agree, but think it's worse.

It's easy to get a superficial understanding of the problem, and then very easy to subtly mis-understand it.

I've reviewed published papers by respectable people where they've made one of several easy mistakes:

* Be careful about how you encode your problem, it's easy to make it "too large", at which point your problem can be solved in P in the input size. For example, don't represent a sudoku as triples "x-pos,y-pos,value", where those 3 numbers are encoded in binary, because now if I give you a problem with only 2 filled in values, you can't take the solution as your 'certificate', as your input is about size 6 * log(n), but the solution will be n * n * log(n).

* It's also easy if you write your problem as a little language to accidentally make it impossible to check in P time.

* When proving a reduction (say turning SAT into a Sudoku, to prove Sudoku is NP-complete), it's (usually) easy to show how solutions map to solutions (so you show how the SAT instance's solution turns into a particular solution to the Sudoku). It's usually much harder, and easy to make mistakes, showing the Sudoku can't possible have any other solutions.
by eru | 2025-08-06 09:03:38+00:00
Oh, that's what they say in the abstract. But have a look at the actual experiment and analysis.

All they found was a statistical artefact.

You can just have a look at the big picture at the top of the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

> Relation between average self-perceived performance and average actual performance on a college exam.[1] The red area shows the tendency of low performers to overestimate their abilities. Nevertheless, low performers' self-assessment is lower than that of high performers.

So regression towards the mean explain the entire effect.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect#...
by kgeist | 2025-08-06 09:04:22+00:00
>I think OpenAI may have taken the medal for best available open weight model back from the Chinese AI labs

I have a bunch of scripts that use tool calling. Qwen-3-32B handles everything flawlessly at 60 tok/sec. Gpt-oss-120B breaks in some cases and runs at mere 35 tok/sec (doesn't fit on the GPU).

But I hope there's still some ironing out to do in llama.cpp and in the quants. So far it feels lackluster compared to Qwen3-32B and GLM-4.5-Air
by jacquesm | 2025-08-06 09:04:31+00:00
Education has a left leaning bias, in spite of some prime examples to the contrary in this thread (it's statistics, after all, and not about particular individuals). So given that to become a federal employee (rather than, say, an elected official) you need to have some education and some skills it should be no surprise that they would skew left leaning as well. If there is an argument to be made that the 'deep state' exists and is democratic leaning that would be the one. But it isn't a bad thing and has - until recently - kept the USA from devolving even faster. But now the brakes are off and the train is gaining momentum. Whether it is too late to stop it or not I do not know.

There is an interesting concept in chemistry: activation energy. If there is a fuel/oxidizer mixture it takes a certain amount of energy to get the chain reaction started. Too little and the proto-fire will burn out by itself. But pass the threshold and it will continue to blaze until there is nothing left to burn. There is a good chance that we have passed the threshold as a society even though the fire has really only properly begun to burn a few months ago. Maybe it is not too late. But I wouldn't bet on that, too many people are spoiling for a fight, they'd harm their own interests happily if they believed it harms the other guy more.
by adornKey | 2025-08-06 09:05:33+00:00
To me it's quite simple:

* If there's no clear way to get the raw-data * If it's unclear how the data was gathered -> the results are most likely fabricated

One strange psychological effect I've seen is that especially in medicine some people themselves spend a lot of time rigging data to get to their PhD, but in the end they absolutely trust in anything published in the field. "The science nowadays is so good - medical scandals today are completely impossible"
by mola | 2025-08-06 09:06:13+00:00
So averages and social dynamics map exactly to individuals?

"Race" is so undefined it's just silly to argue about. We are tremendously more similar than different. We have a visual bias, so a difference in skin color will dominate all other similarities. Then we go and theorize about other differences when we start our division from this arbitrary difference. This is lazy thinking. And a lot of the time is used for hate mongering against some "other".

Of course cultures have different set of values, and this influences the aggregate decisions of the individuals, but taking the next step and forecasting and analyzing a single individual by projecting sociatal bias on them is dehumanizing, and as recent history taught us, is dangerous.
by cbeach | 2025-08-06 09:06:17+00:00
We are restoring the straightforward principle of merit-based hiring. This is not a "right wing" concept. It is simply fair.

We are moving away from a cultural Marxist leftwing ideology ("equity"), which meant discriminatory hiring as a kind of "eye-for-an-eye" collective punishment against a mostly innocent group of people based on their immutable birth characteristics. Retaliatory justice against a population for perceived historic unfairness. That is an extremist policy.

It's only because the Overton Window shifted to the left that some people don't consider "equity" policies as extreme.

We are moving from the extreme left towards the centre.
by redat00 | 2025-08-06 09:06:18+00:00
No, you're not.

If consumer spending decreases, everything goes down. For example if you take ads shown on blog post, news media.. What happens tomorrow once human traffic decrease, and it's mostly crawlers.. How can those website still keep up ? Crawlers don't click ads.

Either rich people are just trying to surf the wave of AI and we've got to endure this for a few years. Or if it's not a wave, it could deeply change our society, beyond everything we've seen.
by tecleandor | 2025-08-06 09:07:18+00:00
Is there any tool like Claude Code that can go into the same "automatic feedback and coding loop" (I don't know if it has an official name) but compatible with using different LLMs.

I've used Aider for a while, and I kind of liked if, but it felt like it needed way more manual work, and I also want to use different models, probably locally hosted. Haven't used Aider in 2 or 3 months, so I don't know if it already has evolved in that way...

edit: in the other hand, the automatic feedback loop means it sometimes go very crazy and the API costs skyrocket easily. But maybe that's another reason to run it locally.
by eru | 2025-08-06 09:07:43+00:00
You know that there's lots and lots of different Indian people, and even just going by skin colour, they have a lots of variation?

What the 'East Asian personality'?

And when you say 'whites' do you include Irish and Italians? They only recently became 'white'. (And a bit earlier Benjamin Franklin didn't even include Germans amongst the properly 'white' people.)
by qwertox | 2025-08-06 09:08:08+00:00
I copy-pasted the front page into ChatGPT and told it to "Explain some usecases", and it's pretty useful.

A city planning department tracks changes to zoning boundaries over time. Staff can: See who changed what, when, and why. Roll back or compare versions. Create branches for "proposed" zoning plans without touching main data. Citizens can access a cloned version of planning data. Changes or suggestions (e.g., new bike paths) can be proposed via pull requests. Keeps public and internal data separate but linkable.

or

Farm fields are polygons; each year’s crop type is stored as tabular data. Each season gets committed with metadata and satellite imagery.

and many others