MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crdrost | 2025-11-09 19:21:20+00:00
PSA that melatonin use was way out of control before this study was even published.

Sleep aid melatonin is shipped in pills containing ridiculous amounts of the stuff—I’ve seen 10, 12, and 20mg myself, Amazon has a 40mg fast dissolve and 60mg gummies.

This spikes your blood amount with 100x-1000x of your natural cycle of melatonin. Why? Because melatonin is not, repeat not, the signaling molecule that makes you sleepy. It responds to light levels and triggers the cascade of other molecules that make you sleepy, several hours after it peaks. So that's why the 100x overdose—you are trying to kick those secondary mechanisms into overdrive, “hey everyone it is black as the abyss of hell I guess we gotta sleep!!”, because Americans taking melatonin want to pop one just before bed and have it knock them out.

And it does that for like 2 or 3 days before your body starts down-regulating all of its sensitivities to those melatonin byproducts. Nerve cells like to be tickled, not zapped, when you shock them like this they react angrily.

You want to use melatonin to reinforce circadian rhythm and fight jet lag, you do it with amounts in the ~100 micrograms range, slow release if you can find it, and you take that at sunset and let it reinforce your normal cycle. If you're looking for an acute sleep aid, take a walk, get fresh air, drink water, and if those don't help pop a Benadryl/Unisom (it's the same drug either way). If you have doctor’s orders of course follow those, but if you're just trying to self-medicate that’s how you do it.

Absolutely unsurprising that punching your sleep apparatus in the gut once every day for five years increases some sort of stress on your heart.
by gnabgib | 2025-11-09 19:22:57+00:00
From Australian Press (5 points, 3 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45829248

Related: Microsoft in court for allegedly misleading Australians over 365 subscriptions (301 points, 13 days ago, 132 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45721682
by viega | 2025-11-09 19:23:03+00:00
Oh, this is very good.

Some of the stuff you're doing in the library I've also been doing recently, and has been working well, like using the string of the type name to allow for run-time checking of, what I would called "mixed" data (your variadic type). I've also done the same basic thing as your option type in a way that's closer to your sum type than the maybe type.

But I'd had enough problems trying to get something like your vector actually working that I'd given up, but I think now I'll build something at some point over the holidays. I think as I'm coming up to speed on the history of changes to _Generic that's partially due to the attempts before I had a C23 compiler, but even then, your code there is impressive-- both clear and clever.

I also have enough stuff passed via pointer that the option type for me needed to handle pointers differently-- I basically just have run-time code that does the null check at run time when set. At that point, there doesn't really need to be an 'is_set' type flag.
by kivle | 2025-11-09 19:24:07+00:00
Bought one, and I have regrets... Every time I turn it on and start watching something, after about 10 minutes a nag screen modal pops up for me to activate AI voice features. At first I entered the wizard and hit cancel. But that's not good enough, It will just keep showing up until you hit accept and activate it. I have since then deleted the Bixby account. We'll see how long it takes until it starts nagging me again.

Also random features require you to be logged in to a Samsung account on the TV. Like picture-in-picture for instance.

I'm considering refunding it, but it has absolutely brilliant picture quality though.
by coltnz | 2025-11-09 19:24:47+00:00
I rue the day (in 2004/5?) I got my name as my gmail address. My first name is not rare and my surname very common. Since then I've collected an eclectic group of homonyms who I just can't get out my inbox. The list includes: the retired English nurse who races remote control yachts and never pays his telco bill, the South African gold miner whose best new spots I am privy too, the NZ sports shop chain owner with a large property portfolio linked to my identity, the English lad on probation who ignores my suggestions to improve his dire CV presentation, and the Perth member of an illegal motorcycle group who is called occasionally to ride outs for fallen members.
by com2kid | 2025-11-09 19:25:03+00:00
The regressive housing policies on the west coast are going to completely destroy our international competitiveness.

Salaries for tech are 2x what they should be just due to housing costs.

Seattle used to be where bay area companies relocated teams to because the cost of living here and salary expectations where 2/3rds the bay area, but that ship long since sailed.

Asinine short sighted city councils will be the death of all our jobs and also the death of the only remaining industry that America is competitive in on a large scale.
by incomingpain | 2025-11-09 19:25:40+00:00
What do you fear?

> worry about other students being lazy and just ripping my hard work and claiming it as their own.

First of all, the cheaters will never read you, they'll just use AI.

Good news, your code is likely to never be read by anyone but you.

"There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." — Oscar Wilde

By being private, you're just not being talked about.

>I was thinking the alternative would be just linking my demo on my portfolio site as a proof of concept that yes I made it, yes it works, and if you're curious , here's a link to the code u can request independently of github.

I'll give you an even better path. Use AI to make something of size. Build in public. Who cares, if someone steals it, they are only stealing from AI and could have just gone to AI to begin with. If you get criticized, they arent criticizing you, they are criticizing some version of an AI model.
by bobnarizes | 2025-11-09 19:25:58+00:00
Thanks for your interest! Currently, Floxtop is not available on the Mac App Store. I’m considering it for the future, but the high cut Apple takes makes it challenging for an independent app like this.

Out of curiosity, is your preference for the App Store mainly convenience (updates, trust, purchasing), or something else?

If you’d like to be notified when this feature becomes available, you can subscribe to our newsletter — it’s linked in the footer of our website or by sending an email to floxtop at proton.me
by bko | 2025-11-09 19:26:59+00:00
I thought the number of tokens per second doesn't matter until I used Grok Code Fast. I realized that it makes a huge difference. If it take more than 30s to run, I lose focus, and look at something else. I end up being a lot less productive. It also opens up the possibility to automate a lot more simple tasks. I would def recommend people try fast models
by Animats | 2025-11-09 19:27:12+00:00
The Mountain Pass mine is running again. There are deals with DoD and General Motors to establish a price floor, so they don't go bankrupt yet again when the price drops.

The current bottleneck in rare earths is separation. There are four steps - mining, beneficiation (mechanically sorting the good stuff from lots of unwanted rock, done at the mine), separation (sorting out the different rare earths chemically, can be done anywhere), and conversion to metals (smelting). The US doesn't have anywhere near enough separation capacity and Mountain Pass has been shipping ore after beneficiation to China for further processing. That's being fixed, but not fast enough.

Market price and availability swing wildly over about a 4:1 range, resulting in repeated gluts, shutdowns, and bankruptcies. Last big rare earth glut was in 2015, and most non-China production shut down.
by estimator7292 | 2025-11-09 19:27:35+00:00
Because capitalism can't accept the inevitable fact that infinite exponential growth is literally impossible. It's not a "service economy" it's a "rent extraction" economy.

Capitalists need more growth and more returns now and since innovating, producing goods, and providing customer service costs money, we simply charge people a monthly fee to use their heated car seats.

This is what the brutal, messy end of capitalism looks like. Relentless self-cannibalization, burning billions of dollars tomorrow to make one cent today.

If nothing makes sense, that's because it doesn't. There is no logic or reason or planning involved. It's more money now, period. Consequences don't matter because we get more money right this second.

Capitalists are apparently unaware of what happens when they've extracted all possible money from the economy.
by torginus | 2025-11-09 19:27:49+00:00
In my experience, if you're working on a green-field project, you're working long hours, making very little visible progress, you have to write a lot of code, make important decisions.

All the while management is breathing down your neck and asking 'why isn't it ready yet'.

Once the thing is shipped, then all the important people come out of the woodwork, who were surely there all along, 'supporting' you from behind the scenes, there are photo ops and important people shaking hands. If they feel particularly charitable, then you might get a seat at the table. There's talk of spinning up a team around the product, and people fall over each other to get to lead it.

But the thing is, most likely they don't need your expertise any more, not really, once everything works, you don't really have a negotiating position as a dev. They get some cheap juniors to fix the bugs and add the missing feature niggles - hiring 3 juniors might not even be cheaper, the point is management does not have to depend on you, they can play their human resource games.

'But only I can fix that complex race condition, that popped up half a year after development' - well if it was good enough with the bug for people not to notice it for half a year, it's going to be good enough for another half, until the new devs can fix it.

This applies to ambitious feature requests as well - if the code's good enough that the contract was signed, the business requirement was met, they can just kick the can down the road until they can fix it.
by asimpletune | 2025-11-09 19:27:57+00:00
Ok as soon as you start walking your are in the first block, I agree. So then where are you before that? What block were you at before you started moving, when you were giving directions?

What is the name of the block from which you left to enter the first block? Before you started walking I mean.

And mustn’t that block be before that other first? When we move from where we start we count up, so then mustn’t an earlier block be counting down? Counting down would mean a number smaller than one.

And are blocks not counted in units, as whole numbers?

So would it not be the case that one block less than 1 must be by necessity the zeroth block?

In other words if you agree that “as soon as you start walking, you are in the first block”, then you must also agree that before you left you began in the zeroth block.

How else could it be interpreted?
by riskable | 2025-11-09 19:27:59+00:00
The real lesson here: If you're successful, don't skimp on security/software! Also, don't abandon software/firmware security support for your products so quickly.

If I was in charge over at TP-Link, getting news that tens of thousands of MY company's routers were compromised would have me furious! I'd be freaking out, making sure that we take immediate steps to improve software/firmware quality and to make sure we're in a constant state of trying to compromise our own hardware... To ensure no one else finds vulnerabilities before we do.

Instead, TP-Link seems to have just laughed and focused strictly on profit margins.
by danans | 2025-11-09 19:28:45+00:00
> FWIW, I get on the order of $40/hour as a senior with almost 10 years experience, and it allows me not to worry too much about spending (with a wife earning about a third of my salary and two kids)

How much do you pay annually out of pocket for health insurance premiums and other healthcare expenses?

In the US that expense is very high, and is a major source of worry for working families.
Ask HN: How does AI understand what I write?
by deanebarker | 2025-11-09 19:28:56+00:00
I get generative AI. I understand the concept of an LLM and how it generates text. AI output processing seems relatively clear to me.

What I don't understand is how ChatGPT (or whatever) understands what I write. No matter how I phrase it, or how subtle or abstract the point or problem is, AI usually always figures out what I mean. I am mystified and constantly amazed at AI input processing.

What mechanism is at work here? If I want to deep dive on how AI understands meaning, what technology or concept do I need to research?
by pessimizer | 2025-11-09 19:29:13+00:00
The main thing current bull markets make you feel is far less subsidized by the government than you really are.

There are a lot of people playing at being upper middle class right now, living large paycheck to large paycheck, and they don't realize that the people whose lifestyles they're emulating are getting money for nothing. If the layoffs start getting deeper i.e. if AI takes off OR if AI does not take off, they'll be at the food banks in a year.

We'll see what happens in society when the comfortable middle class that makes all of the demands in our political system gets halved.
by assemblyman | 2025-11-09 19:30:05+00:00
As an aside, pigeons are deeply misunderstood. Here's a very nice article about it: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240620-why-do-people-pe...

From the article: "One study found that, between 1941 and 2004, there were just 207 reports of pathogens transmitted from pigeons to humans – anywhere in the world. In all, there were 13 recorded deaths. The true number may be higher, but it would have to be off by several orders of magnitude to compete with the scale of infections from other domesticated animals – particularly some of those with more favourable reputations."

I occasionally (2x per week per location) feed a group of pigeons both in my apartment building's garage as well as my grocery store's open parking lot. They love sunflower seed kernels (unsalted since salt can be really bad for them) which has led to me hoarding sunflower seeds every time I go food shopping. They now recognize my car and swoop in as soon as I drive up to a parking spot (which is not consistent at the grocery store). Hopefully, one day I'll convince myself to stop/slow working and dedicate my free time to studying animal communication and behavior with some ML involved.
by torginus | 2025-11-09 19:30:24+00:00
> In the UK a major retailer, Mark and Spencer got hacked after outsourcing work to India.

Does sound more like correllation than causation. Was there evidence that the Indian devs made the mistakes that led to the hack or was it just the good old 'let's fall back on racism to avoid blame' by management? I still remember the articles where Boeing tried to peg the 737 MAX crashes on Indian engineers who worked for $10 an hour.
by viega | 2025-11-09 19:30:26+00:00
By the way, the run-time type checking is one of the use cases where I really would like to have a tractable interface for hashing at compile time, preventing unbounded strcmps, and turning them into an integer compare (without having to manage caching such things at runtime).

Same thing would be for making it much easier to statically lay out fixed caches implemented via hashing, instead of inserting into them at start-up, etc.
by blackqueeriroh | 2025-11-09 19:30:36+00:00
Remote work and outsourcing are two very different beasts, and companies have outsourced long before remote work. In fact, remote work is rarely an option in countries where outsourcing happens because the quality of high-speed internet isn’t uniform enough for folks to be able to just work from home.

Additionally, companies can’t just hire individuals in other countries. They have to set up business entities and that costs significant money to do. It’s why they mostly work with outsourcing companies, who often do have offices where these people come in and work.
by phil21 | 2025-11-09 19:30:38+00:00
One of the most myopic self-owns by a certain segment of industry I can think of in my lifetime.

I guess folks really did think that location had nothing to do with Silicon Valley paying 4x or more the worldwide average. That there was simply no talent anywhere in the world who could even compete at their level. No project managers anywhere who could do the job for less than $200k/yr.

One the dam broke and it was clear that remote work could be productive it simply opened up a rather insular industry to extreme worldwide competition. Far more smart and talented folks out there in the world than many anticipated.

The hubris was (and is) crazy to me.
by Etheryte | 2025-11-09 19:31:04+00:00
I haven't managed to formulate the exact issue yet, but if I squint, I swear there's a path to track and/or deanonymize someone visiting your site. If you have any kind of previous information about the user, such as Meta, or Google or etc, you could easily try and see if the user holds any number of emails you think they might hold. From there on out we're practically back to third party cookie tracking.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-11-09 19:31:52+00:00
There was a collection of studies about a decade ago that seemed to determine the optimal use of Melatonin was about 350 micrograms taken about 1 hour before bed. The ideal was also slow release which was the best you could do to match the bodies process currently. The doses you can buy are far too high even the 1.5mg ones.
by ryandrake | 2025-11-09 19:32:16+00:00
I've also posted in the past about the joys and benefits of either leaving your phone uncharged in your drawer, or at least turning on DND mode 24/7 and turning off all calls and notifications, and for whatever reason, a lot of people here have this visceral reaction to the mere suggestion that it's possible and enjoyable to operate this way. People throw all the predictable excuses up as reasons why it's unmanageable: Kids, daycare, school, the office... all things they imagine are totally unworkable offline.

I think if you toss off the shackles and just try it for a week, you might find that things kind of take care of themselves, the world still turns and life finds a way. Nobody REALLY expects you to be online and reachable 24/7--we just have this weird phone FOMO that makes us think there is this expectation.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-11-09 19:32:30+00:00
I would have said this, but someone responded with a comment that stuck with me:

We’re on a forum of an incubator whose goal is investing in high risk startups to find the next unicorn. So there are probably people here who feel the same way about investing.

While the average outcome of indexes is probably better, the best case outcome of an individual stock is probably better.

It’s lower likelihood and not as repeatable, but for some people, that’s the strategy they want.
by lisbbb | 2025-11-09 19:32:56+00:00
Jeez--I was making $50/hr in 2004 in one of my first jobs after I finished my PhD and opted out of academia. That pay didn't go that far back then!

This is what upsets me about my career--that logistic pay curve. You initially grow fast and then it tops out and never gets better, but your costs keep rising, particularly as you have a family. I'm paying for one kid's college tuition right now, she has 1.5 years left, and will then enter a dubious job market. My son is 15, so if he goes to college, I won't be paying tuition for him until Fall 2028.

The problem is, I'm no longer a developer. I'm currently a nothing working on figuring out "something." I have a lot of skills and talents, but seemingly not many that will pay. I'm looking at any 2yr. training program that can get me certified to do something useful. It's so freaking bizarre to be sitting here with a degree in CS/Math, an MS in Computer Engineering from a very reputable university, and a doctorate in Information Management, also from a very reputable university, and looking at basically doing blue collar work! My nation has utterly failed me in every possible manner.

I should add that we are looking to move out of our fairly high-cost of living state for a possibly lower cost of living state, but there are complications to that plan, too. My wife doesn't really want to move our son out of the high school he is in. I'm saying that other imperatives need to be addressed before they become full-blown crises. I'm being taxed to death, and costs like insurance are rising fast.
by sys_64738 | 2025-11-09 19:33:10+00:00
I recall in a college programming course in the late 80s where the professor would humiliate those who wrote terrible code riddled with mistakes. The other students didn't appreciate that but it didn't make them work harder. They just tried copying each other and everybody else eventually realizing I could program better than most. So they'd sit next to me and try to get me to help them in class. Needless to say I gave them incorrect advice and they got screamed at by the woman Prof. Made me realize people will take the easy way out.
by IAmGraydon | 2025-11-09 19:33:35+00:00
I've been using Adobe design products on a daily basis for around 25 years. GIMP is simply not capable of what Photoshop is. Not even close. You cannot accomplish the same thing on it. As of right now, an alternative on Linux doesn't exist. I've certainly tried to find one because it's one of the major things stopping me from permanently switching.

As for the Ableton comment, I've been a user of Ableton Suite for around 15 years. Bitwig is catching up fast (no surprise - it was started by ex-Ableton developers who were frustrated with Ableton's slow progress), but there's a major problem in that most plugins and many audio interfaces are not compatible.
by fallat | 2025-11-09 19:33:55+00:00
I've read them all. While they are fun to read as their commentary come from a place of logic, there is a lot of emotion baked in and little room for being open minded about potential alternatives that could find their ways to reality. Dijkstra was very smart but you can tell thinking is a little closed, which is not objectively bad, but it happens a little too much for my taste.
by marttt | 2025-11-09 19:34:34+00:00
+1. I set up Fedora, openSUSE and later Arch for our son (then 10-11yo). He became instantly curious about typing those strange words in terminal (unix heritage all the way :), started to check internet availability with 'ping' by himself, etc.

Unfortunately, the laptop has a Nvidia GPU, which conflicted with some of his games, and the gaming experience was all in all not very smooth. Eventually I gave up and went with Windows 10 LTSC -- surprisingly usable and bullshit-free (!), but, well, I don't think he has ever touched the terminal in this Windows system. I'd say after switching to Windows, his progress in Actually Learning Stuff About Computers has more or less stalled. It's mostly mindless gaming and Youtube these days (luckily, he's interested in sports exercises, athletes etc - so there's at least some "real-world related" information included).

Contemporary Linux can be quite confusing, but it is still miles ahead of Windows in encouraging the child's hands-on experience and exploration of the system. The GUI inconsistencies of current Windows are simply horrible IMO; back in the Win2k/XP days, it was actually quite a usable -- and, hackable! -- system; these days it's just an insanely huge, impossible-to-grasp mess. Also, I have yet to find a simple, easily understandable and modifiable solution for setting daily computer time restrictions for our son on Windows -- surprisingly, while there are a gazillion of small single-purpose apps in the Windows world, there doesn't appear to be too many options for parental control if you wish to avoid a Windows account altogether.