MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bluGill | 2025-06-24 16:13:47+00:00
Depends on how long the not yet homeowener will live there. If you live in the same house for the next 40 years you are almost certainly better off owning it. However if you have to move after a year (which might not be in your control) you probably will lose money. 7 years is a good rule of thumb for minimum time you need to live in a house before it is better than renting, but exact circumstances can be very different.
by tptacek | 2025-06-24 16:13:58+00:00
The important bit of this article is the graph labeled "Varied Causes". Factor COVID-19 out, and everything but social causes (overdoses, traffic fatalities, homicide) is practically a rounding error. The one significant distinctive contributor is CVD, and CVD is extremely unevenly distributed in the United States; the northern states have CVD death rates akin to those of Europe, the southern states less so.
by didip | 2025-06-24 16:14:07+00:00
Big time! Almost all of my interesting knowledge came from toy projects I made to solve my own problems (or zero problem solved but it was fun so I did it anyway).

For example, I wanted to know if I can make 1 Kubernetes cluster span multi region, multi cloud. So I slapped TailScale for networking, replaced etcd with multi-region PostgreSQL Aurora, and span the Kubelets between my Raspberry Pi, Digital Ocean VMs, and AWS EC2. And then as the "customer app", I run CockroachDB, rqlite, and tiDB on it (one at a time, I don't want to burn money for this).

It was janky, zero SLA, I likely mis-tuned all the databases, and cost a bit of money :(. But it totally worked, all the db nodes can discover each other. I was satisfied and that's enough.

Another example would be writing my own Raft-backed database, similar to the ToyDB Rust project posted here. Is the DB useful? No. But it is so much fun and I learned a lot.

My AWS S3 bucket and private Git repo are a graveyard full of toy projects. My own Dropbox clone, Pinterest clone, Delicious clone, subset of Google Maps clone, etc. etc. are all RIP in there.
by Someone | 2025-06-24 16:14:14+00:00
> So it's at least 2.5 GB of AI models alone. Crazy

I don’t think 2.5 GB is a lot nowadays. Xcode is over 12 GB, iMovie over 4 GB, MS Word 2 over GB

> having to waste 1% on AI alone

Is that ‘having to’? I thought those models only get downloaded after you give permission to do so.

Same for some other stuff, I think. /Library/Printers is 12 MB on my system, for example and /Library/Audio 584 kB.
by stego-tech | 2025-06-24 16:14:18+00:00
This is spot-on, and a comment I wish I could pin for others to see.

GenAI is such a boon at present because it occasionally delivers acceptable mediocrity to PMs and Stakeholders who will accept said mediocrity because they have no real clue what they (or their customers) actually want. It’s a system of roles and output that delivers based on patterns in incomprehensively large data sets, provided to humans who cannot hope to validate that information is accurate or legitimate (and not just random patterns in a large enough data set), but passed along as gospel from digital machinegods. To a withering empire obsessed with nostalgia and whose institutions are crumbling beneath them, GenAI appears as a savior; to those confident in their position in the world order, it is merely a thin tool in a larger toolbox, to be used toward greater ends rather than middling output.

Those who understand the specification problems are in a position to capitalize off such monumental shifts, while those blindly chasing get-rich-quick schemes, grifts, and fads will be left behind.
by nottorp | 2025-06-24 16:14:31+00:00
Are we philosophising?

> "Services open to the Internet" is more of a 2000s problem than a modern problem.

Then why does Windows need a firewall that's on by default, if it has no open services?

> Mandatory code signing for web sites would go a long way to addressing some of the most common types of exploits we see today

All the spam I'm filtering today has their DKIM and domain whatever and and and ... in order. I'm sure it would be the same for $random_phishing_site. They do have legit looking SSL certs don't they?

> it too could become user-hostile (e.g., you can't block ads, because that would change the code)

Or even worse, you'd need to submit your site to a review from some authority, App Store style. Pay for the signature. Pay for the review process.

Can you spell barrier to entry and speech that's restricted via financial means?
by notjoemama | 2025-06-24 16:14:36+00:00
Why?

> The biggest difference in death rates has been in people aged 15–49 (see ‘Early deaths’). Among these younger people, the death rate has been falling much more slowly in the United States than in peer countries — and it spiked drastically owing to COVID-19. “More people die younger,” says Lynne Cotter, a senior health-policy researcher at KFF. And because young deaths erase more years of life than do older ones, they drag down overall life expectancy.

> Overall, chronic conditions — heart disease, cancer, stroke and respiratory disease — take up four out of five spots on the country’s list of biggest killers.

> As of 2022, about 42% of adults were considered obese in the United States, compared with 27% in the United Kingdom and 5.5% in Japan. Obesity increases the risks of developing diabetes, heart disease, cancer and many other conditions.

> Research supports Kennedy’s argument that ultra-processed foods might be partly to blame for poor health. Their consumption has been linked to increased risks of obesity and some other chronic diseases, and is relatively high in the United States. Such foods comprise an estimated 58% of US daily energy intake — similar to that in the United Kingdom, but greater than the 48% in Canada and 31% in France3.

> Deaths from substance misuse are explained mainly by overdoses of synthetic opioids such as fentanyl — part of the US opioid crisis. Many Americans are killed in traffic accidents, partly because they tend to spend proportionately more time driving, and in bigger cars, than people in many other nations.

It looks like obesity promotes chronic disease and the younger demographic is dragging the life expectancy down.

Where?

https://hdpulse.nimhd.nih.gov/data-portal/mortality/map?cod=...

A higher concentration occurs in the south eastern quadrant of the US. This as I recall coincides with obesity rates.

What can I do personally? I guess eat less processed food, cook more at home, walk more, or engage in fun phisically active time. Even cleaning the house, yard care, home gardening, simple hikes, or walking while shopping can help. Chosing stairs over elevators, that kind of thing.

What can the government do to help? Maybe regulating sugar additives and plastic use in food containers? Limiting the use of seed oils in convenience foods, in favor of healthier options? Build back a strong middle class would go a long way towards preventing the other causes too. Drugs and gun deaths are linked to poverty. The closer the middle class is pushed to the poverty line the more those things increase. I suppose there's some merit to preventing the illegal import (smuggling?) of drugs like fentanyl, which in that case requires a harder stance on import from China. I dunno guys. I'm throwing darts at a wall here...
by logicchains | 2025-06-24 16:14:45+00:00
We can be sure via analysis based on computational theory, e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.03961 and https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07923 . This lets us know what classes of problems a model is able to solve, and sufficiently deep transformers with chain of thought have been shown to be theoretically capable of solving a very large class of problems.
by grep_name | 2025-06-24 16:15:03+00:00
I'm aware! I used emacs exclusively in professional development roles for years. I still use it for a handful of things that nothing else can touch emacs' workflows for.

That said, there is something nice about composing simple programs and keeping things small. With vim + tmux, I have terminal multiplexing and text editing done and haven't touched that configuration in at least 5 years for vim, over 12 for tmux. I know they offer 'less functionality' out of the box, but after years of tweaking and tons of installed packages I was never able to get that same functionality in Emacs, try as I might.

The main pain points were: - Not having tmux's <c-b z> functionality. You can kinda-sorta-almost jerryrig it with some custom bindings and winner-undo, but you'll still have weird edge cases to think about because you're technically doing a weird undo-tree thing, and all the context (projects, windows, buffers, etc) that emacs maintains will have something to say about that. - ACTUAL vim emulation. Evil mode is really not good enough, and I never had a package that was so hard to integrate without bugs, and when it breaks you have to usually peel back a massive layer cake of competing configurations to try to make it work. Even then, evil-magit has tons of issues, the dot operator doesn't work correctly, and none of the ctrl-i/ctrl-o plugins work across enough contexts to make it make sense like it does in vim. That's a killer feature for me - Embedded terminals that feel anything like tmux in wezterm. In the emacs terminals, there was always so much shit going on navigating in them (and again the layer of evil there) that it felt like walking on egshells using them, they tended to have performance issues and usually couldn't run TUI programs properly. I ended up having a separate drop-down terminal I used in tandem with emacs - Process management. It was always a huge headache for me keeping track of the processes Emacs was spinning up / down through its various plugins and debugging them.

I'd say most tmux+vim setups have something more like 0.00001% of emacs implemented, but sometimes that's a good thing. And again, I love and use both setups for various things.
by rchaves | 2025-06-24 16:15:50+00:00
Hello HN!

tl;dr: We built Scenario, an open-source testing library for AI agents. It simulates real conversations with your agent, its code-driven, and lets you assert anything mid-dialogue. Repo: https://github.com/langwatch/scenario Docs: https://scenario.langwatch.ai/

I'm Rogerio, founder of LangWatch, I've been helping many customers building LLM applications in this past two years and worked with Alex on this.

Most of the efforts for LLM quality so far were about evaluations, single-turn, there was nothing actually good to test agents, it all felt forced, but we believe we cracked it now, we have built an agent testing library that test your agent by simulating a user and playing a conversation back and forth with it.

One of the key challenges there was that we had to make it compatible with all the 273+ AI frameworks (and counting) there are. Luckliy AG-UI protocol popped up recently, standardizing agents frameworks and UI interactions, this is perfect, because at the end of the day, we want our user simulator to "see" just the same that the user sees.

So we made Scenario in a way that is really easy to connect to any agent no matter the tech stack, from a simple string <-> string connection, to openai standard messages format, to AG-UI.

The other key challenge was to balance testing the open-endedness of agents vs having reliable cases you want to test, so we worked a lot on thinking through the autopilot simulation vs the fully scripted one, and here again, the goal was complete interoperability. At the end of the day, the design we achieved was simply having lambdas, that you can call at any point of the test, so it's just code, where you can connect any other evaluation or assertion tool you want, we are not restrictive.

Check out the repo and the docs, we would love to get some feedback in here!

Repo: https://github.com/langwatch/scenario Docs: https://scenario.langwatch.ai/
by jandrewrogers | 2025-06-24 16:16:11+00:00
In the case of the US it is somewhat unhelpful to look at the "United States" as a unit of measurement. There is ~10 year life expectancy difference between individual States and most of the risk factors mentioned are a function of State policy, not Federal. It also maps to large differences in population genetics across regions e.g. the famous observation that "the only person that lives longer than a Japanese woman is a Japanese woman in America" is doing a lot of work in Hawaii. There is a well-known inverse correlation between obesity and elevation which is doing work in the Mountain West.

While the lifestyle of many Americans leaves a lot to be desired, I do recognize that many parts of the US have weather/climate that is prohibitive for outdoor activity much of the year and these places tend to be fat. If you look at the life expectancies in parts of the US that are known for having human friendly weather and outdoor activity, they tend to be among the highest in the country with low obesity rates to match, but this is confounded by geography and genetics.

It is complicated. The causes are sufficiently diverse and regional that the solutions need to be local.
by kevingadd | 2025-06-24 16:16:19+00:00
It seems like you're assuming that models are trying to predict the next token. Is that really how they work? I would have assumed that tokenization is an input-only measure, so you have perhaps up to 50k unique input tokens available, but output is raw text or synthesized speech or an image. The output is not tokens so there are no limitations on the output.
by myrmidon | 2025-06-24 16:16:35+00:00
I agree that detection is a very helpful first step and almost enough on its own. But I'm unsure how far this can be pushed-- I think impact certainty for a century or more might be physically impossible, because of uncertainty in orbital parameters and chaotic behavior of the whole system.

I also believe the approximate bounds we have on impact probability are good enough for this estimate and quite unlikely to be off by a factor of 100, because we can guess at both size distribution and impact likelihood from craters (on earth and moon), and if the >10km object impact likelihood was over 1/million years we would expect to see a hundred times more craters of the corresponding size...
by tucnak | 2025-06-24 16:16:40+00:00
> Yes, the savings in labour translates to savings in time. This should be obvious.

Under some circumstances; arguably, in only a handful of circumstances. The colloquial 10xer may as well as get the job done at a fraction of the labour cost associated with a 10-man senior (but really, comparatively junior) team, whereas the latter would spend months rewriting, refactoring, troubleshooting, triaging, bug-hunting, what-have-you...

Much can be said about inefficiencies of engineering teams.
by margalabargala | 2025-06-24 16:16:51+00:00
They are about what you expect. Durable yes, long battery life yes, small screen, crappy camera, bad modem.

The one gigantic downside is that the software gets updated never. They launch with the bugs they launch with and those are the bugs you get forever. They have no interest in allowing any sort of custom rom support, so you get what you get.
by dwroberts | 2025-06-24 16:16:57+00:00
This is a really cool project thank you for sharing.

I'm prototyping my own similar kind of thing right now - an enclosure for growing culinary mushrooms - so seeing how you've used and attached the humidifier discs is really useful inspiration.

On humidification - have you considered decontamination for the water? I think bacteria and scum build up is an issue, and I've seen heavy duty equipment incorporate e.g. a submerged UVC light for trying to keep it clean. I wonder whether it's possible to do similar on a small scale by using a UVC LED (obviously need to be careful with safety though)
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-06-24 16:17:04+00:00
Mint is prehistoric.

I can't imagine recommending anyone run a distro that is effectively 10 years old & not really changing. It's still X11 and (mostly) gtk3!

It was a good option in 2015. And for some people I get that never changing never ever doing anything different is a huge value add for them. But I can't recommend starting your Linux experience by rusting in place, by using entirely backwards looking systems. Trying to ignore the broader ecosystem is a bad first Linux start.

Debian KDE is my go-to recommendation these days. Gnome is also fine but much less familiar, and most users I've found tend to like having options where-as gnome seemingly went to war with settings & customization. Debian isn't the most supportive but it's solid & amazing. Trixie is gonna be great, can't wait for release!
by mandevil | 2025-06-24 16:17:16+00:00
In 2019 per-capita alcohol consumption, the US came in 35th, behind most countries in Europe (1). Latvia, Czechia, Lithuania and Austria all consumed about 25% more pure alcohol per capita than the US did, by this measure. Latvia and Lithuania, in common with most fUSSR countries, have a lower life expectancy than the US, but Czechia and Austria both have higher life expectancy than the US, despite that notably higher per-capita consumption of pure alcohol. So I don't think that has much to do with it.

1: https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/alcohol-consump...
by tacticalturtle | 2025-06-24 16:17:34+00:00
We’re waaay down the list of per capita consumption, especially compared to Europe.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol...

And anecdotally, any corporate event I’ve attended in the US is dry or 1 drink. Which is a pretty stark difference from when I’ve visited European colleagues.
by rTX5CMRXIfFG | 2025-06-24 16:17:38+00:00
I'm still getting the hang of this but Apple's Foundation Models framework [1] (the one recently announced in WWDC) follows this protocol, correct? Does this mean that MCP, as a protocol, can actually take on different forms depending on how platforms/OSes want to allow their users to integrate with LLMs?

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundationmodels
by oconnor663 | 2025-06-24 16:17:40+00:00
> Perhaps you’re a user of LLMs. I get it, they’re neat tools. They’re useful for certain kinds of learning. But I might suggest resisting the temptation to use them for projects like this. Knowledge is not supposed to be fed to you on a plate.

I get where this is coming from, and I even agree with it today, but I also want to tag it as "don't cache this opinion too hard". It's interesting to notice when and how our advice for getting help from AI is different from our advice for getting help from other humans. It would be kind of odd, wouldn't it, to put a paragraph at the bottom of a blog post that said "by the way if you have friends who are expert programmers, I don't recommend asking them for help." I think there are two clear reasons that feels odd: 1) expert friends can actually answer your questions and get you personally unstuck, which is huge, and 2) expert friends usually understand why you're doing what you're doing and that they're supposed to help do it yourself instead of just doing it for you.

One thing I bet few people have tried (because I haven't tried it myself) is actually asking an LLM to guide you like an expert friend would, instead of just spitting out code to solve your problem. Maybe they're bad at that, I wouldn't be surprised. But if so, I bet in a year or two they'll be amazing at it. It might be good to build the habit of clarifying what sort of help you need, instead of assuming an LLM will give you the wrong kind of help?
by ecesena | 2025-06-24 16:17:43+00:00
I’m getting downvoted!? The author wants a low code system that’s not that expensive and cites hubspot & salesforce. There’s no mention to what he wants to do with it.

Shopify lets you build sites to sell pretty much anything (physical or digital), with a variety of models including recurring subscriptions. There’s a ton you can learn just with Shopify itself.

Then there’s the whole apps ecosystem where you can build connectors for sites to pretty much anything, from digital services to logistic.

And it’s all very cheap. I think it fits the request?
by nottorp | 2025-06-24 16:17:54+00:00
I forgot the details already but i got a wizard style setup screen pushing extra services, then a pop up and an update screen both showed up, one wanting to upgrade me to the next LTS (i used 22.04 for reproducibility reasons) and one informing me there are package updates, in spite of the installer allegedly installing updates just 2 minutes before.

Suspiciously like Windows.
by lihanc111 | 2025-06-24 16:18:07+00:00
Our team has built this open source project, LMCache, to reduce repetitive computation in LLM inference and make systems serve more people (3x more throughput in chat applications) and it has been used in IBM's open source LLM inference stack.

In LLM serving, the input is computed into intermediate states called KV cache to further provide answers. These data are relatively large (~1-2GB for long context) and are often evicted when GPU memory is not enough. In these cases, when users ask a follow up question, the software needs to recompute for the same KV Cache. LMCache is designed to combat that by efficiently offloading and loading these KV cache to and from DRAM and disk.

Ask us anything!
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-06-24 16:18:18+00:00
Turo is a pretty different product than ridesharing. Much closer to traditional rental cars than robotaxis.

For fun, I went to Turo's site to see the shortest interval I could rent - looks like 1 hour. Prices are day-based, like rental cars, and thus are pretty expensive vs what you'd expect to pay for a rideshare. They have very different use cases.

The liability questions are clearer for Turo - you are renting the vehicle to someone for a set period of time and they're responsible for the operation and condition of the vehicle while it's in their possession. That looks completely different in the context of a rideshare customer. The customer is not in control of the vehicle. The customer is only accountable for their own actions.

A robotaxi is going to do rideshare-like behaviors. It will be picking people up and dropping them off from popular spots, and doing it often. A rented car from Turo or anywhere else will have different patterns of usage, many of which will look pretty similar to someone just going about their day. This means robotaxis are easier to identify and target.

IMO they don't look much alike at all.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-06-24 16:18:20+00:00
I would just add that gen AI can actually be a fantastic aid when you're building some toy projects just for yourself.

I am primarily a backend engineer, though I am capable on the front end, just not particularly fast. I am especially slow at the voodoo that is CSS. In the past, I would have been turned off from doing some end-to-end personal projects because I know I would have been bogged down just battling CSS for hours and hours (it's particularly problematic that I'm slow at CSS but also a stickler for how I want things to look). With AI tools I can literally just say "make it pretty". It gets me about 85% of the way there, but importantly it gets me to the point where it puts in all the styling framework and then I just have to fix bugs/edit/tweak it, which goes very quickly.

So now I've found myself much more likely to build personal projects because I know I can get past things that in the past felt a bit like quicksand to me.
by vinceguidry | 2025-06-24 16:18:22+00:00
I'm writing a shell right now in ruby after seeing a few other folks doing so and looking at the current state of shell development and not finding anything I really liked. It is indeed, a lot of fun. Using Vidar's really quite nice text editor to do so is equally pleasurable.

https://github.com/vidarh/re

Got a few PRs for you when you get to this, friend.