MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nosianu | 2025-11-19 09:39:12+00:00
I think that in general the plain linear format is bad for debate. You always end up with one or two - often barely on topic! - threads dominating, and everything else below gets barely any attention.

For submissions with lots of comments the majority of comments are all under the top comment, branching off into all kinds of places.

It only works when there is not a lot of participation, unless you count participation itself as the goal.

There is also the limit of usefulness of longer comments, a few paragraphs - not too little, but also not too much - and everything unstructured severely limits the quality of the information.

You have many layers but it is all pressed into the linear format. You usually have less than a handful of actually on topic posts that really add significantly to the OP submission, but you may also have a lot of great discussion that is adjacent. Now, it is hard to find those few great on-topic posts, and people who may have something interesting to say may not even do so when they see they are comment #200+ because they know they won't be read far down the list.

There is also no connection in time. Every single comment only gets a brief moment in space (the submission's comment space) and time (a few hours at most before nobody will ever see it again). You can't build something up over time, it's all quite superficial.

That is not HN specific, all comments sections are the same everywhere. I am disappointed by the lack of innovation in this space. It reminds me of how many everyday things are not improving, for example, bad public toilets. I see the same ones clogged again and again, and dirty and stinking. And yet, they never make any changes, and the new constructions all have the same problems. For example, why does cleaning them remain such a disgusting chore? They could just have better surfaces, a hose and a drain so that the cleaner or even a user can just use the hose to clean a stall or the entire room. I saw that in a sausage factory when I worked there while in school, hot water hoses you could use any- and everywhere, and indeed everything was very clean because everybody just used a hot water hose a lot.

I no longer believe in automatic improvements, and it has nothing to do with whatever system society uses. There is just a lot of inertia, things just continue and nobody really spends much effort to improve many easily improvable things. Part of it is not just starting something, it's also the (correct) expectation that even if you provide something better it will be shutdown, and it has nothing to do with price (cleaning and unclogging those toilets must add up over time, never mind that e.g. the big 10 theatre cinema owner should have the idea that maybe customers always having to go into stinking restrooms is bad for business long-term?).

Back to comment systems, we have TONS of comment systems, but they all do pretty much the same. I don't believe for a second that there is no other way and we have a global maximum. We have a local maximum, and we cannot seem to get out of it.
by 0xEF | 2025-11-19 09:39:22+00:00
Not really a difference for those of us who are not medicated, though. Everything around us, especially the stuff served up on the screen you are looking at now, is all clamoring for our attention, burning out our reward centers with reckless abandon in the process. Jumping from app to app has us chasing dopamine crumbs just like cigarettes did when I smoked them for 15 years of my life. The lesson is if you want to hack a human, make them feel something.
by column | 2025-11-19 09:39:48+00:00
"[a photoshopped picture of a dog with 5 legs]...please count the legs"

Meanwhile you could benchmark for something actually useful. If you're about to say "But that means it won't work for my use case of identifying a person on a live feed" or whatever, then why don't you test that? I really don't understand the kick people get of successfully tricking LLMs on non productive task with no real world application. Just like the "how many r in strawberry?", "uh uh uh it says two urh urh".. ok but so what? What good is a benchmark that is so far from a real use case?
by graemep | 2025-11-19 09:41:38+00:00
> I thought we were talking about the country, where things are not built up.

Where there are houses its a built up area. Even a hamlet. If its nota built up area there are virtually no kids playing in "front yards". There will be the odd isolated house, of course, not to many.

> While the original article is about the UK, it seems very clear that the HN discussion is about car headlights everywhere

Nothing in the thread I replied to says that. Most people discussing other countries say so. I am discussing the UK which should be the default and nothing above me in the thread suggests otherwise.

> I don't know why you're continuing to insist on things we all know are not true.

So "we" know better than someone who actually lives at the edge of a small town in England and drives through the countryside all regularly.
by fithisux | 2025-11-19 09:42:02+00:00
They don't reduce complexity. They translate C++ (static complexity) to JS (dynamic complexity).

Also it is not complexity if XSLT lives in a third-party library with a well defined interface.

Thei problem is control. They gain control in 2 ways. They will get more involved in xml code base and the bad actors run in the JS sandbox.

That is why we have standards though. To relinquish control through interoperability.
by Pilottwave | 2025-11-19 09:44:17+00:00
I was just recently talking to my fellow ADHD friends on the benefits that i felt when i started vaping this summer. It was like i was medicating away my ADHD. I turned to AI to investigate further, its response seemed to underwrite this observation

Gemini output: Research is exploring nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR) agonists as a potential non-stimulant treatment for ADHD, sidestepping the issues of pure nicotine's high addiction liability.

The mechanism focuses on boosting dopamine (DA) and acetylcholine (ACh) release in brain areas governing attention and executive function, primarily by targeting the alpha4beta2 and alpha7 nAChR subtypes.

The goal is highly selective compounds that target the cognitive benefits (linked to alpha4beta2) while avoiding undesirable side effects and addiction pathways.

Selective alpha4beta2 Agonists (e.g., ABT-418, ABT-894/Sofinicline): These were developed to strongly activate the receptor most associated with DA release. Pilot and Phase II studies showed a signal of efficacy in adults with ADHD, with effect sizes similar to non-stimulant medications like atomoxetine.

Varenicline (Chantix/Champix): This is a partial alpha4beta2 agonist, FDA-approved for smoking cessation. Smaller trials suggested improvements in ADHD symptoms, but large-scale development for ADHD has been limited or terminated, and it is not approved for this indication.

Bupropion (Wellbutrin/Zyban): An established non-stimulant ADHD treatment (NDRI) and smoking cessation aid. While its main action is norepinephrine-dopamine reuptake inhibition, it also acts as a nicotinic receptor antagonist (blocking it), which is believed to help reduce nicotine craving. It is an approved non-stimulant option for ADHD.
by Numerlor | 2025-11-19 09:44:19+00:00
I recently found out I've been banned from all of their repositories on GitHub, while as far as I'm aware our only interaction was on a duplicated bug issue I created, as I didn't manage to find the original with GitHub's search like in the linked issue from the OP.

I've been moving away from their tools with this and the resistance to implement/merge useful things that basically everyone wants
by michelpp | 2025-11-19 09:45:05+00:00
I caught covid for the first time in jan of 2024, the illness itself wasn't that bad for me, like a common cold, but the aftereffects lingered for months. Eventually my ability to smell and taste came back in a few weeks, but the mental brain fog would not let go. I would sleep over 12 hours a night and still be tired. According to my fitness tracker my daily step and energy burn counts were cut in half. It was so bad I forgot my own phone number at one point and my gmail password. Looking at a screen of code was impossible, I couldn't focus for more than a few seconds. My friends commented on the noticeable changes in my acuity and behavior.

Based on some online anecdotal evidence, I decided to try nicotine "therapy". I bought 4mg smoking cessation mints, cut them in half with a pill cutter, and took 10-12 2mg doses per day at roughly one hour intervals. The effect was immediate and brain fog lifted in less than a week. It was like coming out of a long dream, or like I had been stoned for six months and then suddenly I was sober again. My fitness stats have exceeded where I was before I got sick.

This is just my own anecdotal experience, and there have definitely been some downsides. The mints are about $50/month. My dosage has ticked up a bit and I'm certainly addicted, at least once a day I take a full mint instead of a half for an extra kick. I'd like to taper off, but I'm not sure if I do how to know if any effects are withdrawal or resumption of the covid brain fog. I have a light caffeine habit (2 cups every morning) and I don't see the mints being any more harmful than the coffee, so I think I'm just going to stick with it.
by agentifysh | 2025-11-19 09:45:12+00:00
i always felt that emotions, instincts, fear, greed, courage, pain are elements of a self-aware conscious loop system that can't be replicated accurately in a digital system and that a seasoned successful traders realize and utilize that the activity is largely is a psychological one. I'm not talking about neutral plays where you can absorb market fluctuations in the short term to extract 1~2% a week but directional trades that almost all traders play (regardless of how what exotic option strategies they are employing).

also the other curious nature of the markets is its ability to destroy any persistent trading system by reverting to its core stochastic properties and its constant ebb and flow from stability to instability that crescendos into systematic instability that rewrite the rules all over again.

ive tried all sorts of ways to do this and without being a large institution and being able to absorb the noise for neutral or legal quasi insider trading via proximity, for the average joe the emotional/psychological hardness you need to survive and be in the <1% of traders is simply too much, its not unlike any other sports or arts, many dream the dream but only few get interviewed and written about.

rather i think to myself the best trade is the simplest one: buy shares or invest in a business with money or time (strongly recommend against using this unless you have no other means) and sell it at a higher price or maintain a long term DCF from a business you own as leverage/collateral to arbitrage whatever rate your central bank sets on assets in demand or will be in demand.

to me its clear where LLM fits and doesn't but ultimately it cannot, will not, must not replace your own agency.
by ponyous | 2025-11-19 09:45:33+00:00
Thanks for clarifying. I'm just getting into this field.

If Blender can export a .3mf file format and slicer gets it ready for 3D printing (gcode that actually instructs the printer head). Is the slicer actually CAD software?

And if you can export many formats that work with some manufacturing devices and you built a model in blender, did blender not help you with CAD?
by donperignon | 2025-11-19 09:45:50+00:00
Google cannot ignore LLMs, I don’t remember last time I used Google to search instead of using ChatGPT.maybe a combination of factors, one being Google destroying their own search engine in order to milk advertisers money, the other the LLMs being so good at synthesizing information. Anyways either they improve or surf the AI wave, otherwise they are doomed
by big-and-small | 2025-11-19 09:45:54+00:00
Even before recent "AI improvements" for us tech nerds Google search was broken ad invaded something. But for average Joe up until recently it's was still okay because it served purpose of whatever normal people use search for: find some rumors about their favorite celebs, find some car parts information or just "buy X".

Problem for Google is that for a good chunk of normal non-techy people LLM chats looks like talking to genius super intelligence and they was not burned by it yet. So they trust it.

And now good chunk of non-tech people now go and ask ChatGPT instead of using google search. And they do it simply because it's less enshittified than Google search.
by gorgoiler | 2025-11-19 09:46:07+00:00
I didn’t realize something until I used this simulation: with three bodies you can eject one body in one direction and the barycentre of the remaining two in another. This means that compared to the original frame of reference you have an orbiting pair that moves.

It’s one of those things that seems so obvious and yet actually seeing it is a really important step in understanding.
by smokel | 2025-11-19 09:46:09+00:00
Google Antigravity is subject to these additional terms of service. Under "Use restrictions" it states:

You may not use the Services to develop machine-learning models or related technology.

Taken literally, this appears to prohibit exactly what most users are doing today.

I assume the intent is to forbid using Gemini outputs to train models directly (e.g. via distillation or similar techniques), rather than to forbid anyone from working on new ML applications in Google Antigravity. However, in its current wording, the clause comes across as unnecessarily broad and somewhat silly. Am I misunderstanding this?
by vladvasiliu | 2025-11-19 09:47:46+00:00
What other widespread way of consuming nicotine was there before patches and vapes?

I'm all for measures looking to curb smoking, but the issue is that nicotine seems to be put in the same category, at least judging by PSAs in France. Every nicotine-containing product has scary messages on it, although not to the point of actual cigarettes.

I think it's the general trend of losing nuance in public discourse. Things are either all bad or all good. This only confuses to public who can't be reasonably expected to peruse PubMed and build their own understanding of the subject.
by polack | 2025-11-19 09:47:57+00:00
They failed on so many levels here.

How can you write the proxy without handling the config containing more than the maximum features limit you set yourself?

How can the database export query not have a limit set if there is a hard limit on number of features?

Why do they do non-critical changes in production before testing in a stage environment?

Why did they think this was a cyberattack and only after two hours realize it was the config file?

Why are they that afraid of a botnet? Does not leave me confident that they will handle the next Aisuru attack.

I'm migrating my customers off Cloudflare. I don't think they can swallow the next botnet attacks and everyone on Cloudflare go down with the ship, so it will be safer to not be behind Cloudflare when it hits.
by ramon156 | 2025-11-19 09:48:01+00:00
Brain fog for me became a lot less prevalent recently. I got no idea what it is but I don't want it to stop.

I honestly think brain fog is mostly a mentality thing, but I have no evidence to back this up. It doesn't really matter what I eat. The only thing I changed was I started gymming again and I'm taking creatine. I still eat garbage food
by hollowturtle | 2025-11-19 09:48:10+00:00
non impressive at all to me, visuals are bad not even a student starting in animations would produce that slop. You're glorifying slop, as for the code quality that's not about styling or semantics the tecniques used are BAD and won't scale at all, eg setTimeout is not designed to be run at exactly that interval, it's just a timeout suggestion. And no it cannot be good or bad as you desire it's just bad, I have YET to see something better than an animation student on the first year would do. You're destroying the software industry with this mentality
by falcor84 | 2025-11-19 09:48:24+00:00
20 years ago NNs were considered toys and it was "extremely obvious" to CS professors that AI can't be made to reliably distinguish between arbitrary photos of cats and dogs. But then in 2007 Microsoft released Asirra as a captcha problem [0], which prompted research, and we had an AI solving it not that long after.

Edit - additional detail: The original Asirra paper from October 2007 claimed "Barring a major advance in machine vision, we expect computers will have no better than a 1/54,000 chance of solving it" [0]. It took Philippe Golle from Palo Alto a bit under a year to get "a classifier which is 82.7% accurate in telling apart the images of cats and dogs used in Asirra" and "solve a 12-image Asirra challenge automatically with probability 10.3%" [1].

Edit 2: History is chock-full of examples of human ingenuity solving problems for very little external gain. And here we have a problem where the incentive is almost literally a money printing machine. I expect progress to be very rapid.

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/asirra-...

[1] https://xenon.stanford.edu/~pgolle/papers/dogcat.pdf
by tromp | 2025-11-19 09:49:52+00:00
This should not (so much) be compared with Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) but with a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). It is a very elegant and minimal way to implement TEEs, but suffers from the same drawbacks: a data owner has to trust the service provider to publish the public keys of actual properly constructed Mojo-V hardware rather than arbitrary public keys or public keys of maliciously constructed Mojo-V hardware.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_execution_environment
by cm2187 | 2025-11-19 09:50:07+00:00
The economy has never worked like that. When you increase productivity, you create wealth and you enable other industries to appear. We have gone through numbers of those cycles. The industrialisation of agriculture, then machines in manufacturing, then introduction of computers (think of all the secretarial jobs, computers - as in engineers making calculations, accountants that have disappeared), then outsourcing of the industry to China. But somehow unemployment is low in most western countries. So what makes you think this time it will be different?
by lm28469 | 2025-11-19 09:50:27+00:00
75%+ of all batteries/panels/windmill blades are made in China. And if you decide to make them locally they'll be 5-10x more expensive and much less competitive because you don't have:

- super low wages and borderline slave labor

- easy and cheap access to rare earth

- the CCP boosting your industries to flood the world
by throwaway290 | 2025-11-19 09:50:28+00:00
Money is not dangerous, it is necessary for life, that's the point

Some people have a lot of it and who has more can gang up and influence markets meaning anyone who tries to prove a point to you by shorting a legitimately overpriced stock will be holding a bag

So that's why forums exist and it is good to be able to say what you think and not get bullied into shutting up

if you want economic information then why are you in this forum, just go to the market and let people discuss things;) if you participate in that discussion then that's your choice
by imtringued | 2025-11-19 09:51:44+00:00
I'm pretty sure the problem with the shuttle was that it had too many (possibly conflicting) goals instead of one large goal.

It's manned, even though most launches probably could be done without crew. The deadly Challenger launch was risking human crew for something as mundane as launching two satellites into space.

Because it's manned, it has to be able to land at airports, because retrieving astronauts at sea is an unreasonable complication for launching a satellite. Damage to the wings will cause loss of the entire aircraft, something that is unlikely to happen to a capsule.

Because it is a horizontal landing system, the aerodynamics favor putting the shuttle on the same level as the external fuel tank, which exposes the wing to debris from the top of the external fuel tank. If you try building a vertical shuttle in KSP, you will notice that the wings give you too much control authority during launch. Fins are best placed near the bottom of the rocket.

It's reusable, which means wear and tear can secretly accumulate without you noticing. This significantly increases the design requirements for the critical components, like the SRB that had a poor "tang" design, which, as it turns out, was definitively not fit for reuse.
by pk-protect-ai | 2025-11-19 09:52:02+00:00
It is pointless to ask an LLM to draw an ASCII unicorn these days. Gemini 3 draws one of these (depending on the prompt):

https://www.ascii-art.de/ascii/uvw/unicorn.txt

However, it is amazing how far spatial comprehension has improved in multimodal models.

I'm not sure the below would be properly displayed on HN; you'll probably need to cut and paste it into a text editor.

Prompt: Draw me an ASCII world map with tags or markings for the areas and special places.

Temperature: 1.85

Top-P 0.98

Answer: Edit (replaced with URL) https://justpaste.it/kpow3
by nandomrumber | 2025-11-19 09:53:36+00:00
My experience parallels yours. I’ve been intermittently using cutdown patches, and B vitamins + magnesium, in an effort to have fewer complete nut-job breaks from reality.

Nicotine is a CNS stimulant, and cigarettes are somewhat of a fidget spinner, and social lubricant. What’s not to like.

For most people, long term nicotine use is probably less deleterious than long term amphetamine use.

More recently I starting testosterone, and that’s made me feel heaps less like a histrionic toddler.
Ask HN: Why does a messaging app need so many updates?
by truakon89 | 2025-11-19 09:53:44+00:00
Like why are they making so many updates to a simple messaging application that eventually it leads to enshittification? WhatsApp desktop latest update has made it so much slow and consuming an intensive amount of RAM. What the Hell?

We had a good thing, You stupid son of a Bitch!

All you need to do was this: - Send and receive messages - Make and receive calls

That's it, no more other silly features like screen sharing, emojis, stickers, icons, status, no no NO! none of this load of crap is needed.

You don't even need that many developers to maintain this kind of app which is already working! only a handful are required for just maintenance.
by jovial_cavalier | 2025-11-19 09:55:24+00:00
I have a similar average intake to you, and I've been on it much longer, about 3.5 years. I have had periods where I go off the stuff entirely, including a whole month and a half earlier this year. I've also had periods where my intake has spiked much higher.

The withdrawal symptoms are actually strangely pleasant to me as long as I'm in the right mood and have something interesting to focus on. You will get irritable at things you shouldn't, but as long as you keep that in mind, you should be able to stop yourself from totally flying off the handle. In terms of "fogginess," I find that it's actually mostly in your head. As in, I feel like my mind is dulled, yet when I present myself with a task I somehow find it solved to about the same standard that I'm used to. If you end up feeling foggy coming off of the stuff, give yourself at least a week or two to adjust.
by f1shy | 2025-11-19 09:56:19+00:00
A decent Flat in Germany, for example near Stuttgart, with good connections with train is about 300k. There are credit lines for 25 years with relative low interest rates. For that you are way lower than 3k per month (assuming 0 downpayment). With 2 people working in a household, you can afford that. Granted, you will not be the "typical" german doing 3 times a year nice vacations. But doing a "real" 1 or 2 week vacation once every 2 years is pretty much standard outside Germany, I think.