MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by astrange | 2025-12-04 23:48:09+00:00
You get addicted to modafinil? I've tried it. It doesn't cure ADHD but it is remarkably like if those boomer newspaper comic jokes about coffee were actually real.

But… it's not addictive at all. Taking it made me not want to take it again. I was just like damn, I kind of smell like sulfur now.
by kace91 | 2025-12-04 23:48:13+00:00
Fair, but how common were Macs in 2006 for newcomers?

At least in my corner of the world they were practically non existing. The first time I saw macOS at all was in 2012, and it was on my pc after managing to turn it into a hackintosh with help from some random Eastern European guy from a message board.
by danfunk | 2025-12-04 23:48:39+00:00
All these comments are from the standpoint of being managed, with a derogatory view of someone who would stoop so low as to take a management role. I liked the article. Managing people is ass hard. Doing so is a way to make peoples working lives better, anf to tackle problems larger than a single person can accomplish. Thinking about how to do it better is good thing. It takes courage.
by meesles | 2025-12-04 23:49:43+00:00
My point was that these features that are considered new and exciting have been standard in Rails for many, many years. There are many _other_ features that Django still lacks!

I don't understand your point about the workers, since you argue it doesn't belong in Django, but then in your edit mention they have been added. To be clear I'm talking about a worker abstraction, not actually running the workers pods themselves.
by taurath | 2025-12-04 23:49:49+00:00
AI is busy quietly convincing every executive that uses it that they have no use for people to work out the details of their ideas anymore. It’s so frustrating to have these drive by executives come into a space you’re working in, drop in a 15 page deep think report they got from a 2 sentence prompt and call that contributing. Bonus points if the report is from an AI platform your company doesn’t have approved so you as a line employee can get written up for.
by mh2266 | 2025-12-04 23:50:12+00:00
This just skips the:

> First, if you aren't writing device drivers/kernels or something very low level there is a high probability your program will have zero unsafe usages in it.

from the original comment. Meanwhile all C code is implicitly “unsafe”. Rust at least makes it explicit!

But even if you ignore memory safety issues bypassed by unsafe, Rust forces you to handle errors, it doesn’t let you blow up on null pointers with no compiler protection, it allows you to represent your data exhaustively with sum types, etc etc etc
by stuaxo | 2025-12-04 23:50:25+00:00
Now I've been dabbling outside of Django, I realised some of those things come from bits people don't think about much:

INSTALLED_APPS and other bits in the settings provide a central registration point, from there the system where a project is made up of apps is enabled.

Each app, has it's own migrations, models, templates and static files.

This enables the whole ecosystem of parts that's easy to add, and makes it easy to toggle things (e.g. enabling the django-debug-toolbar only on your dev and local instance).

In the outside world of Flask, Fast API etc - things hang together much more loosely and it means the integration just isn't as complete.

This manifests itself in 1,000 little papercuts that make things take longer.
by lukev | 2025-12-04 23:50:39+00:00
Super interesting data.

I do question this finding:

> the small model category as a whole is seeing its share of usage decline.

It's important to remember that this data is from OpenRouter... a API service. Small models are exactly those that can be self-hosted.

It could be the case that total small model usage has actually grown, but people are self-hosting rather than using an API. OpenRouter would not be in a position to determine this.
by 10000truths | 2025-12-04 23:50:54+00:00
Sure, but you can do the next best thing, which is to control precisely when and where those allocations occur. Even if the possibility of crashing is unavoidable, there is still huge operational benefit in making it predictable.

Simplest example is to allocate and pin all your resources on startup. If it crashes, it does so immediately and with a clear error message, so the solution is as straightforward as "pass bigger number to --memory flag" or "spec out larger machine".
by tshaddox | 2025-12-04 23:51:22+00:00
> It would almost be more interesting to specifically train the model on half the available market data, then test it on another half.

Yes, ideally you’d have a model trained only on data up to some date, say January 1, 2010, and then start running the agents in a simulation where you give them each day’s new data (news, stock prices, etc.) one day at a time.
by jrflowers | 2025-12-04 23:51:23+00:00
Imagine posting “sorry that the facts bother you” and then linking to

- A study with a sample a size < 50

- A study that says that medication improves outcomes over CBT

- A study that says that evidence for CBT improving ADHD symptoms comes from studies with such small sample sizes that the conclusions could be the result of bias

The only way someone could conclude “CBT has the same outcome as medication” from the studies you linked to would be to not read them. The first two don’t really say that and the third one literally refutes that position.
by tzs | 2025-12-04 23:51:40+00:00
> The CDC says 4,000 underage drinkers die in the US every year

That's not quite correct. They count both deaths where the decedent had a high blood alcohol level and deaths where someone else who was responsible for the death had a high blood alcohol level. Because of this many of those in the count were underage but were not drinkers.

For example if I'm driving drunk and you are my sober passenger and I drive us off a tall cliff killing you your death will be included in their count because I was drunk and responsible for it. It also works the other way. If I'm sober and you are drunk, and I drive us off the cliff and you die it counts because you died drunk.
by barrkel | 2025-12-04 23:51:59+00:00
A little over 20k CHF. I delegated building (and ensuring the parts work together and testing) to Dalco, a Swiss company that specializes in academic compute clusters and the like. The price was competitive with building it myself.

The CPU is more expensive than the workstation blackwell card. 8x 96GB DIMMs - 96GB was at a corner in the price per GB, 128GB was more expensive per GB - is also more expensive now than the GPU. In fact the prices for that kind of package on ebay seem to be approaching the price of the entire box.
by timschmidt | 2025-12-04 23:52:02+00:00
Agreed. In practice Rust feels very much like a rationalized C++ in which 30 years of cruft have been shrugged off. The core concepts have been reduced to a minimum and reinforced. The compiler error messages are wildly better. And the tooling is helpful and starts with opinionated defaults. Which all leads to the knock-on effect of the library ecosystem feeling much more modular, interoperable, and useful.
by CodeMage | 2025-12-04 23:52:08+00:00
First, let me make one thing clear: my comment was in no way meant to be a substitute for reading the post. I was not writing some kind of a review for people to decide whether they should read the post, or presenting a summary. I was commenting on what I disliked about it and everyone should read the post to form their own opinions.

That said, I disagree with you about the context. Yes, what you quoted is the immediate context, but I think the bigger context -- the one I described in the rest of my comment -- is the more important one.

Managers are welcome to try to integrate IC activities into their job. In fact, I wish more of them did it, so I didn't have to deal with managers who equate coding to "typing" and can't wait for the AI to replace those of us who have spent years honing that particular skill.

But the IC work should not come at the cost of doing what the manager is supposed to do in the first place: provide a higher level of integration and problem solving for their ICs. By "higher", I mean in the hierarchical sense. A manager is higher on the ladder than I am, and that means they should be able to see a wider perspective and help me integrate it into my work. And their manager should do that for them, so that they can pass it on to me, etc.

The author doesn't want to be a "paper-shuffler"? Guess what, that's one of the most important aspects of their job and, incidentally, one of the reasons why I didn't pick management as my career.

I can relate to the feeling of frustration one occasionally gets when a core aspect of one's job becomes unpleasant, but that's no excuse for straw man arguments.
by kenjackson | 2025-12-04 23:52:32+00:00
"I mean.. if you can finish a task for a client in a day, and someone else needs two days, isn't that a huge difference?"

I've never seen that come down to processing speed. Even as a programmer -- I can program probably 10x faster than most of my peers in straight programming contest style programs. But in terms of actual real work -- I'm probably slightly faster. But my value is really I spend a lot of time really understanding the ask and impact of the work I'm doing -- asking good questions, articulating what I'm delivering, etc...

That is, my faster processing speed results in very little added benefit. That is, time to deliver results can matter. Processing speed typically is a very small percentage of that time. And for these tests processing speed is often the main distinction. It's not like they're distinguishing one kid who can't solve this equation and another kid who can. It's generally more likely one kid can finish all 25 questions in 32 minutes and the other would take 38 minutes so they only finish 23 of them in the allotted 32. I don't think that ends up mattering in any real way.
by sroerick | 2025-12-04 23:52:49+00:00
Can you explain to me what is being exploited here? I had to do KYC for Hetzner, for anything crypto related in the last decade, and a number of other things.

Age-gating porn doesnt seem problematic to at all. In fact it's far less worrisome than any of the former, which are kind of important for commerce. What am I missing?
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-12-04 23:53:02+00:00
And I for one welcome our new AI overlords!

Seriously though... I think most uses of LLMs are pretty stupid, but it seems like we're in the bubble and the only way people can continue to make money is by doubling down on AI spending. Or at least that's the only way they think they can make money.

So... sorry for leaving you with that impression. Maybe the only way to get to the post AI hype world is to give AI companies everything they want so they fail faster.

"Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders!" ( see https://economicsociology.org/2014/10/07/yes-the-planet-got-... )

Does anyone deserve RAM though?
by WalterBright | 2025-12-04 23:53:12+00:00
If I'm paying a professional by the hour, yes, it matters if he can do it in one hour rather than two.

I once hired a civil engineer to do a job for me, and he started billing me for time spent learning how to do it. I refused to pay him. (There was nothing unusual about the job, it was a simple repair task.)
by estimator7292 | 2025-12-04 23:53:56+00:00
Every hair grows to a maximal length before stopping or falling out. It varies wildly based on genetics, location on the body, and body chemistry.

Animals evolved specialized hairs for different uses. Protection, warmth, display, your armpit hairs wick sweat and keeps your skin from rubbing. It's beneficial to have a system that keeps the specialized hairs in their optimal(ish) configuration and to replace hairs as they become worn and damaged.
by vkou | 2025-12-04 23:54:01+00:00
> I've never felt more physically repulsed by an individual before

> His lack of inhibition, decency and compassion is disturbing

Yes, but none of that has anything to do with his age. These criticisms would land just as well a decade ago. He's always been, and has always acted like a pig, and in the most charitable interpretation of their behavior, half the country still thought that he's an 'outsider' or 'the lesser of two evils'. (Don't ask them for their definition of evil...)
by Xeronate | 2025-12-04 23:54:04+00:00
Regarding your concerns about tutor emulation, your argument seems to be students use chatbots as a way to cheat rather than as a tutor.

My pushback is its very easy to tell a chatbot to give you hints that lead to the answer and to get deeper understanding by asking follow up questions if that's what you want. Cheating vs putting in work has always been something students have to choose between though and I don't think AI is going to change the amount of students making each choice (or if it does it won't be by a huge percentage). The gap in skills between the groups will grow, but there will still be a group of people that became skilled because they valued education and a group that cheated and didn't learn anything.
by HiPhish | 2025-12-04 23:54:11+00:00
That's just for the HTML content though. What if you want to add some non-trivial Javascript or generated CSS? Or maybe you want to integrate a frontend tool like Storybook[0] even if your HTML is rendered server-side? Maybe add some tests for your frontend code? There is much more between raw hand-rolled HTML/CSS/JS and a full-blown SPA.

At my day job we use Django with HTMX and Alpine, but we also generate the custom CSS from Pico[1] and use JinjaX[2] to define server-side components which we then render in Storybook. We use Vue as our bundler to compile the JS and CSS as well as to run Storybook. The project has to live in both the Python ecosystem and the Node.js ecosystem.

Even with just HTMX and Alpine you might want to compile a custom version of those with certain plugins, or you might want to load them as libraries in your own scripts.

[0] https://storybook.js.org/ [1] https://picocss.com/ [2] https://jinjax.scaletti.dev/
by sroerick | 2025-12-04 23:54:48+00:00
Can you explain to me what loopholes that opponents believe this law will exploit?

Is it just "more ID is bad"? Or is there a specific concern that this bill is a targeted overreach to increase censorship and surveillance.

It genuinely doesn't seem like any more of a threat than age-gating Playboy at the bookstore. What have I missed?
by reidkimball | 2025-12-04 23:55:04+00:00
I recently built an ingredient analysis feature for a health app (Meadow Mentor). During the design phase, I tested two architectural approaches to handle the complexity of identifying unsafe ingredients.

The Hypothesis: Could a lower-cost "Lite" model with a highly structured system prompt match the accuracy of a "Thinking" model (Reasoning), but with better unit economics?

*The Experiment: I built and tested two configurations against the same validation set:

Configuration A: The "Brain" Approach

- Stack: Gemini 2.5 Flash (Thinking Mode enabled).

- Logic: Relied on the model's internal reasoning loop to process the image and determine safety.

Configuration B: The "Structure" Approach

- Stack: Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite.

- Logic: Disabled reasoning. Used a 4-step System Prompt to force a linear path (Extract -> Normalize -> Verify -> Format).

The Results: Configuration B (Structured) outperformed Configuration A significantly in efficiency, while maintaining 100% accuracy on the test set.

- Tokens: Reduced by 61% (3,595 -> 1,396). The "Thinking" model generated massive internal token overhead.

- Latency: Reduced by 43% (21s -> 12s).

Conclusion: For defined business logic, "Thinking" models introduce unnecessary cost and latency. "Dumb" models with smart prompts are still the superior engineering choice for production reliability.

I wrote up the full case study on the design process here: https://reidkimball.com/case-studies/cutting-ai-feature-cost...
by copypaper | 2025-12-04 23:55:35+00:00
>Each model gets access to market data, news APIs, company financials...

The article is very very vague on their methodology (unless I missed it somewhere else?). All I read was, "we gave AI access to market data and forced it to make trades". How often did these models run? Once a day? In a loop continuously? Did it have access to indicators (such as RSI)? Could it do arbitrary calculations with raw data? Etc...

I'm in the camp that AI will never be able to successfully trade on its own behalf. I know a couple of successful traders (and many unsuccessful!), and it took them years of learning and understanding before breaking even. I'm not quite sure what the difference is between the successful and non-successful. Some sort of subconscious knowledge from staring at charts all day? A level of intuition? Regardless, it's more than just market data and news.

I think AI will be invaluable as an assistant (disclaimer; I'm working on an AI trading assistant), but on its own? Never. Some things simply simply can't be solved with AI and I think this is one of them. I'm open to being wrong, but nothing has convinced me otherwise.
by zenoprax | 2025-12-04 23:56:29+00:00
This works if you can connect your actions directly with the outcomes. How would would you assess the efficacy of preventative actions whose consequences are delayed and uncertain?

"I think we should X because it will probably contribute to Y."

What if Z happens? You could say "Doing X was pointless - Z happened anyway!" but then you are discounting at least two things:

1. the possibility that the magnitude of Z would be much higher

2. that it's a numbers game: sometimes you lose despite making the right decision

I don't really understand your examples in the context of decision making - they feel more like execution lapses than strategic choices.
by XenophileJKO | 2025-12-04 23:56:42+00:00
So.. I have been using an LLM to make 30 day buy and hold portfolios. And the results are "ok". (Like 8% vs 6% for the S&P 500 over the last 90 days)

What you ask the model to do is super important. Just like writing or coding.. the default "behavior" is likely to be "average".. you need to very careful of what you are asking for.

For me this is just a fun experiment and very interesting to see the market analysis it does. I started with o3 and now I'm using 5.1 Thinking (set to max).

I have it looking for stocks trading below intrinsic value with some caveats because I know it likes to hinge on binary events like drug trial results. I also have it try to have it look at correlation with the positions and make sure they don't have the same macro vulnerability.

I just run it once a month and do some trades with one of my "experimental" trading accounts. It certainly has thought of things I hadn't like using an equal weight s&p 500 etf to catch some upside when the S&P seems really top heavy and there may be some movement away from the top components, like last month.
by reissbaker | 2025-12-04 23:57:19+00:00
I think everyone has quibbles about the CPI. Ultimately though, it would take a lot of cherry-picking to make it seem like overall cost of living has gone up 3x while wages have gone up less. As a counterexample, an NES game in 1990 cost $50 new (in 1990 dollars! Not adjusted for inflation). Battlefield 6 cost $70 new this year (in 2025 dollars), and there were widespread complaints about games getting "too expensive." In real terms games have become massively less expensive — especially considering that the budget for Battlefield 6 was $400MM, and the budget for Super Mario World in 1990 was less than $2MM.

There are a zillion examples like this. Housing has gone way up adjusted for inflation, but many other things have gone way, way down adjusted for inflation. I think it's hard to make a case that overall cost of living has gone up faster than median wages, and the federal reports indicate the opposite: median real income has been going up steadily for decades.

Housing cost is visible and (of course, since it's gone up so much) painful. But real median income is not underwater relative to the 90s. And there's always outrage when something costs more than it used to, even if that's actually cheaper adjusted for inflation: for example, the constant outrage about videogame prices, which have in fact massively declined despite requiring massively more labor to make and sell.
by ErrantX | 2025-12-04 23:57:48+00:00
You may not mean it but I do think sometimes framing it this way implies leading and managing is something that requires less ability (it's a skill in its own right).

What I think is true is people cap out their technical competency, and look to shift their skillset and, globally, we are bad at a) training them to be good managers (because there is a wrong assumption it's an innate skill) and b) weeding out the many who also lack the ability to be a manager.
by zie | 2025-12-04 23:59:11+00:00
OH I think I finally understand your comment... I think you are confusing FreeBSD jails/Solaris Zones with containers. They are not the same things. Containers for instance exist on FreeBSD now, as a totally different thing than FreeBSD Jails.

Jails/Zones are definitely security features. That's not the case for Containers(popularized via Docker).
by nomel | 2025-12-04 23:59:46+00:00
> person needs to tell you their life story to get an answer to a question is absolutely bonkers.

The problem is that the answer, for a given question, in any reasonably complex solution space, is entirely dependent on the very local problem space that you're forcing them to guess where it is in a much larger problem space area. If you're asking someone that's familiar with the broader view of each, they're probably asking because their guess of where you are is close to some "trivial" type solution. Or, they have a bunch of answers that depends on what you're doing, and you're forcing them to guess.

The goal is very clear in your head. The way to achieve that might be a web of possibilities. You asking suggests they can see the web and you can't.
by estimator7292 | 2025-12-04 23:59:52+00:00
Humans in their "free time" will make and create things of great value to society.

We should have a system whereby you don't die of pneumonia homeless on the street if you don't have a job. The things OSS developers do for free are of value completely incomparable with what almost all of us do in our day jobs.

People should be free to make art and music and anything else they want. People should be free to contribute to our culture and society.

Alas, someone wants to take 99% of the value of your work for themselves and give you only the barest minimum they can get away with. And if you don't comply, you don't deserve to live.