MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alterom | 2025-11-18 21:48:01+00:00
>I would hazard to suggest that it can make many people much more productive though

That suggestion is disproved by the research I linked, particularly when it comes to mental tasks.

>the answer is broadly “yes, for some tasks

For mindless tasks, like long-haul driving, where staying awake is pretty much all that's required ? Sure.

Anything else, citation needed.

>The historical and continued use by various militaries of stimulants seems to suggest that at least many very highly motivated big spenders seem to expect the same to apply to the general population.

Military use is more commonly to increase stamina (e.g. for pilots on 48 hour bombing missions), not efficiency.

And military scenarios simply don't transfer to civilian life.

Staying awake without sleep when you're a bomber pilot is a matter of life and death, so adverse health consequences and even decrease in mental capacity can be tolerated, because being dumb and awake is better than being smart and asleep in that context.

...to an extent. Until you end up shooting some Canadians dead [1].

Which is why the "historical" use by militaries is not continuous. It's been abandoned by militaries that tried it; particularly by the USAF after that incident.

As for use by the military in general, note that the average lifespan of a Russian soldier on the front line in the Ukraine war is measured in hours[2].

That's a very different context than anyone talking here is facing. And one where the ability to stay alert matters more than anything else.

That doesn't translate to efficient or productive in any normal sense. A solider is waiting most of the time. Then something happens, fast. Any delay in reaction, and you're dead.

We can discuss the effectiveness of amphetamines in such scenarios, but that has nothing to do with Huxley's description (or productivity, efficiency, etc).

As I said in my top comment: Adderall is for helping people act without delay. This translates well to military use.

Sometimes.

A delay would've saved those Canadians.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jan/04/afghanistan.ri...

[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/average-life-expectancy-front-lin...
by noir_lord | 2025-11-18 21:48:30+00:00
Depends on the org, the big ones I've worked for regular Devs even seniors don't have anything like the level of access to be able to pull a stunt like that.

At the largest place I did have prod creds for everything because sometimes they are necessary and I had the seniority (sometimes you do need them in a "oh crap" scenario).

They where all setup on a second account in my work Mac which had a danger will Robinson wallpaper because I know myself, far far too easy to mentally fat finger when you have two sets of creds.
by hungariantoast | 2025-11-18 21:49:02+00:00
"Replicated across peers in a decentralized manner" could just as easily be written about regular Git. Radicle just seems to add a peer-to-peer protocol on top that makes it less annoying to distribute a repository.

So I don't get why the project has "lost you", but I also suspect you're the kind of person any project could readily afford to lose as a user.
by ben_w | 2025-11-18 21:49:04+00:00
Depends how absolute one takes the statement "no-one has money to throw around".

Taken loosely, we have seen previous developments which make a large fraction of a population redundant in short periods, and it goes really badly, even though the examples I know of are nowhere near the entire population.

I'm not at all sure how much LLMs or other GenAI are "it" for any given profession: while they impress me a lot, they are fragile and weird and I assume that if all development stopped today the current shinyness would tarnish fast enough.

But on the other hand, I just vibe coded 95% of a game that would have taken me a few months back when I was a fresh graduate, in a few days, using free credit. Similar for the art assets.

How much money can I keep earning for that last 5% the LLM sucks at?
by susam | 2025-11-18 21:49:34+00:00
> That assumes associativity, but that's a nitpick, not a real objection.

I don't think that is a valid nitpick. My earlier comments assume associativity because a group operation is associative by definition. If we do not allow associativity, then the algebraic structure we are working with is no longer a group at all. It would just be a loop (which is a quasigroup which in turn is magma).

> Thanks for taking the time for the thoughtful, and non-snarky, response. Sorry if I was abrupt before.

No worries at all. I'm glad to have a place on the Internet where I can talk about these things now and then. Thank you for engaging in the discussion.
by lutoma | 2025-11-18 21:50:06+00:00
This comment is a great illustration of the needlessly hostile interactions mentioned in the blog post.

There's a nuanced technical discussion about the merits of adding this to Mastodon and whether the effort would really be worth it. Eugen made some reasonable points against it.

But instead of engaging with the discussion in good faith, people like you automatically assume the worst intentions and claim Eugen personally is "blocking progress" like there's some grand conspiracy (Instead of the much more boring reality of limited dev time and having to prioritize things).
by nomel | 2025-11-18 21:50:24+00:00
If they're memory/reference constrained systems that can't directly "store" every solution, then doing well on benchmarks should result in better real world/reasoning performance, since lack of memorized answer requires understanding.

Like with humans [1], generalized reasoning ability lets you skip the direct storage of that solution, and many many others, completely! You can just synthesize a solution when a problem is presented.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f58kEHx6AQ8
by nightski | 2025-11-18 21:50:26+00:00
I mean yes. We've hosted internal apps that have four nines reliability for over a decade without much trouble. It depends on your scale of course, but for a small team it's pretty easy. I'd argue it is easier than it has ever been because now you have open source software that is containerized and trivial to spin up/maintain.

The downtime we do have each year is typically also on our terms, not in the middle of a work day or at a critical moment.
by mojoe | 2025-11-18 21:50:54+00:00
Thanks, you're completely correct, rights acquisition was the most difficult part!

The absolute hardest story in the anthology to get rights for was "Stars Don't Dream" by Chi Hui. It's a translation of a story that won an award in China, but Chi Hui doesn't speak English, and her contact info was extremely hard to obtain (I had to get help from the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine). We did the entire contract discussion via a combination of Google Translate and my very weak Mandarin I learned in college.

(I'm a huge Peter Watts fan, btw)
by watwut | 2025-11-18 21:51:06+00:00
I think there is something to be valued about historical accuracy.

> Like the statistics on plummeting mental health and happiness, an obesity epidemic, increases in "deaths of despair", and plateauing or decreasing life expectancy?

In the 60ties, suicide rates went UP. Peaked around 1970 and we did not reached their levels.

Long terms statistics about alcoholism rates and drug use are also a real exiting thing. We know that cirrhosis death rate was going up in the 60ties up to 70ties, peaked and went down. It was the time when drinking and driving campaigns started.

Current drug use is nowhere near what it was a generation ago.
by cube2222 | 2025-11-18 21:51:09+00:00
See my setup detailed in another sibling comment of yours, jj is just a small part of it, and you can probably get that with git too.

I’m already at full mental capacity planning and reviewing the work of two agents (one foreground which almost never asks for approval, and one background which never asks for approval).

I don’t really need the ability to juggle more of them, and noticing their messages is not a bottleneck for me, while I’m happy with the customizability and adaptability of my raw’er workflow.

Maybe if they’re as slow as codex…
by deathanatos | 2025-11-18 21:51:16+00:00
I think it's more the keming of the domain portion of the HN title, especially combined with HN's rather small font size choice (it's a meager 8pt¹!) there, and that it just happens that the mis-kemed result ends up with "John Mastodon", and is thus not trivially noticeable as "wrong"…

(I read it the same way, too.)

(¹I personally have a browser override for HN's tiny font choice; I thought that 12pt was the universally agreed upon "base text" point size, and "10pt" was "small text", but HN's "normal" is 9pt.)
by arjie | 2025-11-18 21:52:23+00:00
> I steer clear of showing vulnerability online, but there was a particularly bad interaction with a user last summer that made me realise that I need to take a step back and find a healthier relationship with the project, ultimately serving as the impetus to begin this restructuring process.

Many of these microblogging sites seem to be populated by people with extreme views. One of the pleasant things about old Internet forums is that they were like a local bar: there's some kind of community with some local code there. Reddit etc. function like forum aggregators and get halfway there, but the microblogging sites seem like a completely flat layer. There isn't really a community sense there.

Twitter used to have SimClusters[0] but either they decided against that or the tech as it was no longer functions to prevent context escape.

Personally, I've found that I end up being 'infected' by these angry people and I also post outrageous nonsense in response - so there's some sort of virality to this behaviour. I stopped using Twitter around the time of the Charlie Kirk killing because I figured that everything was going to get twice as inflamed as it already was and it was honestly worse than I actually wanted anyway.

The other day I went to the For You tab and I was struck by how insane it seemed to me. A few days away and suddenly everything looks ridiculous. I have noticed that I do have these interactions on Hacker News as well, so I wrote up a quick server and Chrome extension to filter out people who comment things that infuriate me and HN has gotten so much better (and consequently I am better too).

I do like microblogging. It scratches a different itch. But I haven't figured out whether I should run my own Mastodon server or my own ATProto PDS and, to be honest, when I browse those sites the front page makes me not feel like I want to be part of those communities.

Mastodon has [1][2][3] as the top few posts. Blue Sky is better but among the top five are these [4][5] and I really am not that interested in all this outrage-mongering.

0: https://blog.x.com/engineering/en_us/topics/open-source/2023...

1: https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/115572086526058545

2: https://tech.lgbt/@Natasha_Jay/115572233358693165

3: https://universeodon.com/@georgetakei/115572239317649349

4: https://bsky.app/profile/wendyjfox.bsky.social/post/3m5tz3fa...

5: https://bsky.app/profile/forbes.com/post/3m5tlsetevz2t
by keepamovin | 2025-11-18 21:53:02+00:00
I don't wan't to shit on the much anticipated G3 model, but I have been using it for a complex single page task and find it underwhelming. Pro 2.5 level, beneath GPT 5.1. Maybe it's launch jitters. It struggles to produce more than 700 lines of code in a single file (aistudio). It struggles to follow instructions. Revisions omit previous gains. I feel cheated! 2.5 Pro has been clearly smarter than everything else for a long time, but now 3 seems not even as good as that, in comparison to the latest releases (5.1 etc). What is going on?
by lateforwork | 2025-11-18 21:53:08+00:00
What is the cost of delivering regular search results vs. answering an AI chat question? How do you sell ads through each of these channels?

If you consider those angles you'll see that Google does not want AI chat to replace Google search any time soon. Google is being dragged into this kicking and screaming. They are damned if they do, and damned if they don't.
by infotainment | 2025-11-18 21:53:13+00:00
Agreed -- While I admire their work in keeping the lights on, Rebble doesn't necessarily make sense in a world where the "real" Pebble company has returned.

Keep in mind that this is their goal statement (straight from their FAQ):

> Our goal is to maintain and advance Pebble functionality, in the absence of Pebble Technology Corp.

Eric's new company, by effectively re-creating Pebble Technology Corp, is an existential threat to that mission: If there is someone else maintaining and advancing Pebble functionality, then what is the purpose of Rebble? It does seem unfortunate though -- I hope they can all work something out.
by Retric | 2025-11-18 21:53:13+00:00
People do make it work in the US with tiny incomes and a better standard of living than you’d see in a typical 1960’s household.

I know people raising a family of 4 on 1 income well below the median wage without a collage degree. They do get significant help from government assistance programs for healthcare, but their lifestyle is way better off than what was typical in the 1960’s.

Granted they aren’t doing this in a ultra expensive US city, but on the flip side they’re living in a huge for 1960’s 3 bedroom house with a massive backyard.
by bombcar | 2025-11-18 21:53:49+00:00
Even when people had dial-up, a huge majority were using portal-dialers like AOL or Compuserve, and it took extra steps to use those to "get" the Internet directly as opposed to within the walled garden.

And even then they'd often just use the bundled browser.

I remember the first friend who got a cable modem, that shit was insane compared to dial-up.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-11-18 21:54:16+00:00
If it was the people actually investing in AI all saying it's a bubble, implying that they are holding back, not all-in, for fear of it crashing, then it'd have room to run further (until they were all-in, and leveraged to the eyeballs, cf subprime housing crash liar loans, dot-com crash investor margin accounts).

However, it seems more like the people pumping billions into AI are all still "this is going to the moon" gung-ho, and unless they are investing billions of CASH, then I guess they are borrowing to do so.

I don't know how this financing works - maybe no fear of having it pulled like a foreclosure on a subprime mortgage holder, or a broker margin call, but it's not going to end well if these investments start to fail and the investors start running for the door.

Peter Thiel's recent exit from NVidia should be a bit concerning given his good record on macro bets and timing.
by daks1597 | 2025-11-18 21:54:44+00:00
LinqHive is a smarter, simpler way to unify your digital presence. Unlike basic link-in-bio tools, it gives you a customizable mini-website that showcases everything you do in one link. No code, no clutter—just a clean, branded hub designed to drive action, highlight your work, and simplify how people discover, connect, and engage with your brand. Perfect for creators, professionals, and businesses who need a fast, modern online identity.
by wlesieutre | 2025-11-18 21:54:55+00:00
The opposite, Pebble is tethered to a phone, has Bluetooth but no cellular. Not even its own wifi connection, any data that a watch app needs is requested over bluetooth from the companion app on the phone, which fetches it from the internet.

Battery life was great, upwards of a week between charges, because connectivity features were very limited. It gets notifications, but you're not taking phone calls or checking email through it.
by jakewins | 2025-11-18 21:55:27+00:00
“Your own solution” should be that CI isn’t doing anything you can’t do on developer machines. CI is a convenience that runs your Make or Bazel or Just or whatever you prefer builds, that your production systems work fine without.

I’ve seen that work first hand to keep critical stuff deployable through several CI outages, and also has the upside of making it trivial to debug “CI issues”, since it’s trivial to run the same target locally
by ahmedfromtunis | 2025-11-18 21:55:32+00:00
Yeah. The new challenge seems easier to solve since it basically is hand-holding the LLMs into what the result should look like.

I think a more challenging, well, challenge, would be to offer an even more absurd scenario and see how the model handles it.

Example: generate an svg of a pelican and a mongoose eating popcorn inside a pyramid-shaped vehicle flying around Jupiter. Result: https://imgur.com/a/TBGYChc
by kragen | 2025-11-18 21:55:46+00:00
The 01925 dime is worth about US$3 as bullion (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45907742) even without getting into collectors' value, so a couple of dimes or a quarter will pay for a hamburger. You may just have to stop by a jeweler or a pawn shop first.
by tingletech | 2025-11-18 21:56:18+00:00
Years ago on hackernews I saw a link about probability describing a statistical technique that one could use to answer a question about if a specific type of event was becoming more common or not. Maybe related to the birthday paradox? The gist that I remember is that sometimes a rare event will seem to be happening more often, when in reality there is some cognitive bias that makes it non-intuitive to make that decision without running the numbers. I think it was a blog post that went through a few different examples, and maybe only one of them was actually happening more often.
by alterom | 2025-11-18 21:56:21+00:00
Thanks for the comment, and pointing this out!

>It's downright insulting when people think pharmaceuticals are some kind of shortcut to avoid some more disciplined approach.

That's the exact problem I have with the article and the title.

Nobody is talking about "championing alternatives" to antihistamines, the way this author (not Huxley! The title is misleading) talks about Adderall.
by whalesalad | 2025-11-18 21:57:24+00:00
Somewhere, at a floating desk behind a wall of lava lamps, in a nyancatified ghostty terminal with 32 different shader plugins installed:

You're absolutely right! I shouldn't have force pushed that change to master. Let me try and roll it back. * Confrobulating* Oh no! Cloudflare appears to be down and I cannot revert the change. Why don't you go make a cup of coffee until that comes back. This code is production ready, it's probably just a blip.
by alterom | 2025-11-18 21:57:31+00:00
Take a person, put them somewhere near equator in January, they're fine. Take them to Finland, they're freezing.

The only thing that changed is the environment. The person is fine.

So all this "winter clothing" scam exists only to enrich clothes makers.

The world simply should be warm everywhere, then none of that stuff would be necessary.

Winter clothes aren't a solution to feeling cold, because they don't address the root problem of Finland being on the map.

People simply shouldn't be subjected to such conditions.

...see how you sound like?

======

>societal amphetamines are about as supportive as me handing you a set of crutches after i broke your legs

Well, the common ground here is that the crutches would indeed be helpful in this scenario.

>if you took an adhd cunt and threw him in the bush he would be fine

I get your point, but nobody would be fine like that. People are social animals.

Sure, the society sucks. But we literally can't live without it.

And while we're fixing it, well, we better have the meds.

> eg. maybe if we didn't get forced into a 9-5 schedule and instead had a bit more freedom , people would be more happy to devote energy to their work ...

100%.

> "here, take this speed and wreck your heart so that you fit better into the box we designed for you"

Counterpoint: stimulants are still useful and helpful even when you take the society away.

I can be living on my own and on my own terms, and still be upset that it took me literally 11 (eleven) years to mail a gift to a friend [1].

Sure, there could be ways mailing a package could be easier. But I really can't blame the 11 year delay on society trying to fit me in a box.

>the only way forward is to through honest questioning as to why adhd diagnoses are thousands of times greater in the west,

Citation needed. But availability and quality of mental healthcare is one big factor here in any cases.

Saying this as some born in the USSR.

My mother got an ADHD diagnosis in her 50s, long after moving to the US.

It's not like she didn't struggle with ADHD in the USSR, it just wasn't an option to get an ADHD diagnosis there.

[1] https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Eleven%20Years%20To%20Mail%20A%...
by jitix | 2025-11-18 21:57:57+00:00
Cheaper education, free/subsidized healthcare, free/subsidized childcare, cultural norms around family support, etc.

Things that let workers focus on innovation. IT workers in cheaper countries have it much easier while we have to juggle rising cost of living and cyclical layoffs here. And ever since companies started hiring workers directly and paying 30-50% (compared to 10-15% during the GCC era) the quality is almost at par with US.
by kragen | 2025-11-18 21:59:08+00:00
The open internet, open-source software, and federated protocols allow people to manage their own affairs without any experts in the state. You may have to pay a capitalist firm for access to the internet to run your Mastodon server, but you don't have to run the server itself as a capitalist activity. Open-source software and money are two alternative ways to collaborate successfully with people you don't trust.
by scotty79 | 2025-11-18 22:00:16+00:00
I remember reading about the idea of putting polarizer on the windshield and on the headlights at 45 deg angle so that the lights from oncomming car get blocked while yours are still visible to you. That was more than 30 years ago. It would have to be mandatory though.

I wonder why it didn't pan out. I know polarizers block some light either way, but with modern, strong headlights maybe it's time to revisit the idea?
by bombcar | 2025-11-18 22:00:20+00:00
Apparently they sell 613 variations (mostly different lengths and heights and widths, probably four parts total).

https://www.menards.com/main/outdoors/sheds-accessories/carp...

Of course, Menards sells entire houses (in kit form): https://www.menards.com/main/building-materials/the-project-...

And milk. https://www.menards.com/main/grocery-home/grocery/dairy-eggs...
by thangalin | 2025-11-18 22:00:22+00:00
I developed my Markdown editor, KeenWrite[0], to replace the shell scripts described in the Typesetting Markdown series[1]. KeenWrite takes in YAML document metadata (for variables), (R) Markdown documents, and generates XHTML. The XHTML is passed to ConTeXt[2] for PDF typesetting.

A feature matrix[3] compares various text formats and ecosystems for generating PDF files.

[0]: https://keenwrite.com/

[1]: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/05/22/typesetting-markdow...

[2]: https://wiki.contextgarden.net

[3]: https://keenwrite.com/blog/2025/09/08/feature-matrix/
by s1mplicissimus | 2025-11-18 22:00:25+00:00
I'm glad you had positive experiences using this specific technology.

Personally, I had the exact opposite experience: Wrong, deceitful responses, hallucinations, arbitrary pointless changes to code... It's like that one junior I requested to be removed from the team after they peed in the codebase one too many times.

On the slop i have 2 sentiments: Lots of slop = higher demand for my skills to clean it up. But also lots of slop = worse software on probably most things, impacting not just me, but also friends, family and the rest of humanity. At least it's not only a downside :/