MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PoshBreeze | 2025-07-04 14:49:01+00:00
You can compare them because they overlap in use cases especially as lite-desktop/emulation/media/home-server.

The PC ecosystem is more open so of course you are going to find lots of no name brands on amazon/ebay/ali-express or wherever you are looking. These N100/N150 piece of kit have 1000s of reviews on youtube. There are a few brands that seem dominate and seem to be reasonably well built.

A lot of the mini-pcs / nuc you find on ebay are Dell/Lenovo/HP decommissioned stuff that you can put 16/32gb of ram in and a proper NVME. To do something similar with a PI you need to buy a PI5 and some additional hardware, it about two/three times more expensive. Yes they do consume more power but typically it isn't crazy.

The ARM ecosystem isn't just RPi either. There are other manufacturers offering small credit sized arms boards but their drivers/software/firmware isn't nearly as good as the RPi.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-07-04 14:49:04+00:00
Not sure what your direct experience is, but the difference I've experienced first hand is that C-suite are INTENSELY focused on the single company but only for a relatively short period of time. They're not spread too thin; they're motivated solely by short-term incentives. An OE engineer is both, and we can agree they all suck for people who want to do meaningful work and build an awesome team - but they seem very different to me.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-07-04 14:49:12+00:00
How are you going to release an LLM eval paper in mid-2025 using

ChatGPT 3.5

Yes, if you are wondering why they don't clarify the model, it because all this was done back in early 2023 (the chat logs are dated). Back then it was only 3.5 and 4 was just freshly released.

Advancement in this space has been so rapid that this is almost like releasing a paper today titled "Video streaming on Mobile Devices" and only using a 3G connection in 2013.

The authors should have held back a few more months and turned the paper into a 3.5 to O3 or any other 2025 SOTA improvement analysis.
by benreesman | 2025-07-04 14:50:02+00:00
This is the most important comment I've read in a while. It has become really easy to feel trapped in software as a trade even though I love working on software as much or more than ever in the details of the work. I'm fortunate that my current gig doesn't involve doing anything that I find directly objectionable in a Hippocratic Oath sense (though some might, its trading stuff which I long ago decided is about a 1.01 out of Meta on a scale of 1 to OpenAI).

The thing is that the software business has discovered its Three Big Lies:

- Everything is Exponential (Sigmoids are For The Small Thinkers)

- Breaking The Law is Progress if You Do It With a Computer

- Computer People Know What's Best

Other industries that have become tentacled over the years have had similar Big Lies (High Finance has Price Movements are Gaussian Distributed for example, and Bailouts are The Business Cycle).

I'm at the age both in life and career terms where its like, this could be a cyclic thing and these assholes are going to get thrown out soon, or it could be I came of age in an aberrant exceptionally good time, this is how it always ends up.

What I do know is that that software is an effective tool for mitigating the damage of malware, excellent computers are cheap now, and so it might be possible to fund an effective resistance doing rewarding work for the greater good with frugality and some creativity about paying the bills, I'm still figuring out the details.
by scottbez1 | 2025-07-04 14:51:11+00:00
Clamp meters are completely safe. The only risk is if you DIY your power cable so you can clamp one lead, but that's not necessary if you just buy an AC line splitter plug. And those often come with the hot looped around so you can get a 10x reading for better fidelity at lower current draw.

But these days I just skip the clamp meter and throw Ikea Inspelning zigbee plugs anywhere I want power measurement.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-04 14:51:38+00:00
> Western medicine “can’t treat stress”

This is false. Therapy is designed to do just this and it’s readily available in different modalities that have been trialed and studied. You can book an appointment with a therapist today and start working on techniques to build stress resilience and stress handling techniques

> but Eastern medicine definitely claims to be able to. But then so do various nebulous “alternative medicines”.

Much of the allure of so-called Eastern medicines is the feeling that it’s ancient, semi-secret knowledge that is mysteriously superior to modern medicine. There are a lot of herbal medicines that kind of do something, but the effects are small and often prone to rapid tolerance build up and side effects. A large part of the efficacy is getting the patient to believe that the medicine and/or practices are a cure for their ills. Feeling like you’re tapping in to a mysterious ancient solution to stress will encourage a very strong placebo effect, which can actually reduce the stress.

Similarly, when we do randomized trials of medicines for depressive disorder it’s incredible how much the placebo group improves. When people have been told they’re receiving a treatment, it usually helps to some extent even if the treatment does nothing at all!
by AndyKelley | 2025-07-04 14:52:02+00:00
I'm definitely looking at the example set by hare with interest[0]. Also unironically love Shrek. I once hosted a viewing party of Shrek Retold[1] in my tiny NYC apartment :D

[0] https://harelang.org/blog/2025-06-11-hare-update/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM70TROZQsI
by tomhow | 2025-07-04 14:52:08+00:00
I’m not saying that at all. I just can’t explain the disparity in our responses when I don’t know exactly what the comparison is. I’m not surprised to hear you’ve seen worse things. As you concede, we can’t see everything and we don’t respond to everything and there are all kinds of reasons for handling things differently, a major one being randomness.

But in the context of this thread, it has largely been the free-for-all that people want it to be but I’ve drawn a line at one point where things crossed over into being personally nasty and I haven’t yet seen a reason why what was a wrong call. I know some people will criticize me for that and I’m comfortable with that.
by genewitch | 2025-07-04 14:52:18+00:00
i wonder if there's a market for pre-made cables with a "loop" in the hot wire, for using clamp ammeters, or a cable where in addition to the choke ferrule, there's another "ferrule" - current transformer - on the hot wire with "test points", where those test points are to a transformer winding around the hot wire. That way you could just put those cables on things you want to know the power consumption of, rather than having to move a kill-a-watt or whatever.

I could make either, but they wouldn't be "certified", as i'd be either replacing plugs or cutting into the wire itself to add a pigtail.
by jnettome | 2025-07-04 14:52:20+00:00
I just love this project! BunkerWeb was a huge help when I was self-hosting my products with Docker Swarm. It offers tons of configuration options—especially useful for those needing a WAF and dealing with heavy bot traffic.

Since moving to Kubernetes, I haven’t used or evaluated it there yet, but kudos to the team for continuing to update and improve the project. Keep up the great work!
by Velorivox | 2025-07-04 14:52:37+00:00
I wasn’t surprised by the pushback. This isn’t like responding to a pseudonymous HN comment opting into a discussion, they are talking about specific people and posting pointedly mean-spirited remarks towards a party that has not opted to discuss their provenance.

The response could’ve been better worded but you can see how no one would want to moderate a community that makes it a habit to disparage specific people outside of a good faith discussion.
by conception | 2025-07-04 14:52:38+00:00
This is maybe the best instructional article on how to use llms I’ve seen yet.

It illustrates their strengths and weaknesses and how to take advantage and overcome both. All prompt code is provided and explained. The amount of effort needed for good results is realistically portrayed as well as the benefits. It’s specific to claude code but it’s a moderately simple example so jumping to your work isnt complex. 10/10 must read.
touchgrass.fm, a website that helps you get off your devices
by softservo | 2025-07-04 14:52:45+00:00
https://www.touchgrass.fm/

Backstory: About one month ago while visiting us from overseas, my wife’s parents were in a terrible car accident. Everyone involved is alive and going to be okay. But what followed was a series of emotional, physical and logistical challenges that pushed my wife and her family to their limits.

For the first week we were practically glued to our phones, contacting family members, insurance companies and air ambulance services. I found myself obsessively checking my phone for updates, sending empty messages and mindlessly scrolling feeds. My screen time reached all time highs. I was spending 12 of my 16 waking hours staring at a screen instead of being there for my wife and her parents. It felt like I was hiding on my phone.

I don’t have a particularly addictive personality, but I am undeniably addicted to my phone. And this was the week I finally needed to deal with it.

I tried Apple Screen Time and a few popular screen time management apps, but found the blocks were too easy to bypass. I also realised that most apps (e.g. YouTube) were as useful as they were distracting depending on the context. I didn’t necessarily want to use my phone less: it’s an incredibly useful tool, and the distractions were sometimes helpful.

What I really needed was intentional stretches of time spent away from my phone. I built touchgrass.fm as a simple way to record and incentivize those stretches of time. It’s not quite finished (built in a few hours of downtime), but it helped me stay present during hospital visits, meals and important conversations. I decided to share it on the off chance it helps others get some control back and be a bit more present in their day to day lives!

What Are You Working On (June 2025): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44416093#44427955 reply
by PixelForg | 2025-07-04 14:53:01+00:00
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9550520/

This exercise fixed it for me. I was diagnosed with GERD last year, I already had it for 2-3 years before that, but it got worse last year. I got ppis for a couple of months and when I finished all of them it came back worse. Fortunately I found this article, and I started doing the exercise daily morning after I woke up(and still do it). I can now eat tomatoes, food with mint, spicy food etc etc :) I have shared my experience with others and it helped them too

Edit - Changed the link, had posted something else by mistake
by zwnow | 2025-07-04 14:53:08+00:00
Humans are entitled to live wherever they want. Capitalists destroying rural regions with false promises (prosperous jobs) is a thing since the industrialization. Should all people move to overrun big cities? Small once established markets are getting destroyed by big discounters or stuff like Amazon. Also adapting is and never was a thing for most people. I dont know where you got that from but this isn't the wild west anymore. People are trying to set up a life for themselves without moving every 2 years. Entitled city person viewpoint.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-07-04 14:53:12+00:00
Why do you need to draw a line? Can there be good cults and bad teams?

Both have implicit contracts, and a contract requires consideration on both sides. The parties define the value of the consideration, so you can have a junior cult member who feels they are getting good value for what they pay, or a SW dev at an insurance company who feels they don't. I also don't see much difference in your ability to affect your situation if you are unhappy with the current state.
by 0x445442 | 2025-07-04 14:53:48+00:00
Yep, there are so many options one couldn't list them all. I spent the first 10 years of my career in defense contracting and got out because I didn't want to contribute at all to that. Since then I've worked for companies whose products are tangible and needed by everyone. The downside is, not being tech companies per se, you're not working on anything that will change the world. The upside is, your work generally helps the company provide needed products more efficiently.
by ethbr1 | 2025-07-04 14:54:06+00:00
Devaluing the dollar is 100% the goal. It's literally noted as a key component in what the people running US trade policy now said they wanted to do, before joining government.

It has the side effect of boosting nominal investment value (even if real value stays flat or decreases), maintaining political support from people who can't do math. The numbers continue to look good, but outcomes worsen.

There are two flies in this ointment: international capital response and inflation.

The latter is why Trump has been spending political capital on demonizing the Fed and Powell. The house of cards collapses if actual inflation bites and reveals the game.

As to the former, it's tough to look at the situation and see US debt / equities as attractive as they once were:

1. Unsustainable US budget deficits

2. Political threats against the US central bank

3. Tariffs

4. Decreased immigration and worsening demographics
by stpedgwdgfhgdd | 2025-07-04 14:54:13+00:00
It definitely takes a lot of experience writing code with a LLM. Like a junior engineer it makes tons of (small) mistakes. It takes years of practice to detect the LLM is introducing small bugs that will reveal themselves only after extensive testing or running in prod.

It will be interesting to see how beginning developers will deal with these bugs as they did not write the code and do not have a mental model of the code. Will quality drop? Perhaps some can be compensated by letting the LLM do extensive testing.
by pydry | 2025-07-04 14:54:26+00:00
one of the reasons I find it hard to leave a high paying job is because "underpaid" has always been the best predictor of job toxicity.

In general (with a few exceptions like finance that are generally up front about what they are), the chillest, sanest jobs with the most accomodating environments tended to pay the best and vice versa.

I also have too many friends who tried sacrificing pay for better working conditions and more meaningful work and ended up bitter because they were sold a hollow dream.
by cgriswald | 2025-07-04 14:55:20+00:00
This post was interesting to me because I also have a lot of programming experience but other than hunt the wumpus high school I haven’t programmed a game and recently started using AI to help with a new game.

AI has become three things for me:

(1) A learning tool. What it is really great at is understanding my questions when I don’t have the proper terminology. Because of this it can give me a starting point for answers. It is also really fantastic for exposing me to unknown unknowns; probably the most important thing it does for me.

(2) A tool to do boring or tedious things that I can do but slow me down. I’ve found it good enough at a variety of things like commenting code, writing a config file (that I usually edit), or other text-based adventures.

(3) Search. Just like (1), because it understands what I’m actually after, it is irrelevant if I know what a thing is actually called. I also let it filter things for me, make recommendations, etc.

I think you can let it think for you, but… why would you? It’s not as smart as you. It’s just faster and knows more things. It’s like an FPU for the CPU of your brain.
by immibis | 2025-07-04 14:56:32+00:00
Having currency is only meaningful if the amount of currency someone has correlates, at least loosely, to some kind of merit or work.

Let's say me and my friends agree to carve off 0.00002 BTC supply and pretend that is the whole world of currency. We could run a whole country using that 0.00002 BTC as money. Except that anyone who has 1 BTC can break into our walled garden and, with a tiny fraction of their holdings, buy the entire walled garden, and there's no way to prevent this as long as our money is fungible with theirs. It's the same reason you wouldn't use immibiscoins as a currency: I could just grant myself a zillion of them and buy everything you have. Except that in the case of bitcoin the grant is pre-existing.

Deflationary currencies are fundamentally unstable, just like currencies that one guy can print at will, because they decorrelate quantity and merit.
by j_bum | 2025-07-04 14:56:35+00:00
Hi Dan, I wanted to share a few links to articles on pain and circadian rhythms that I wrote during my PhD. Would love to connect if you have any questions.

[0] Circadian rhythms and pain: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01497...

[1] The disruptive relationship among circadian rhythms, pain, and opioids: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/1...

[2] Circadian rhythm disruption exacerbates pain behavior in male mice: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03064...
by throw0101d | 2025-07-04 14:56:39+00:00
For those unaware, "PHK" is:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poul-Henning_Kamp

Amongst other things (including jails), he invented the MD5crypt algorithm (originally for FreeBSD) as an alternative to the original DEScrypt of Unix:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypt_(C)#MD5-based_scheme

Nowadays probably most well-known for creating Varnish:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varnish_(software)
by cb321 | 2025-07-04 14:56:43+00:00
Even back in the 1990s, CGI programs written in C were lightning fast. It just was (is) an error prone environment. Any safer modern alternative like the article's Go program or Nim or whatever not making database connections will be very fast & low latency to localhost - really similar to a CLI utility where you fork & exec. It's not free, but it's not that expensive compared to network latencies then or now.

People/orgs do tend to get kind of addicted to certain technologies that can interact poorly with the one-shot model, though. E.g., high start up cost Python interpreters with a lot of imports are still pretty slow, and people get addicted to that ecosystem and so need multi-shot/persistent alternatives.

The one-shot model in early HTTP was itself a pendulum swing from other concerns, e.g. ftp servers not having enough RAM for 100s of long-lived, often mostly idle logins.
by tootie | 2025-07-04 14:57:12+00:00
Almost every complaint I see about working in tech is 90% applicable to any industry. The problem in every company is other people. Some are greedy, selfish, dishonest. Some mean well but market forces demand unsavory practices. You won't escape it by trading a keyboard for a hammer or a pastry bag or whatever.

You have to either have a specific target in mind. Like you actually love doing some other thing and want it to be your career. Or, as the article lays out, just keep doing tech someplace more fulfilling.

Having spent time in tech in both government and nonprofit space, I can tell you the organizations are not very different from corporate ones. Day-to-day frustrations are very similar. You have to just take heart in doing something constructive for the public good.
by glasscannon | 2025-07-04 14:57:15+00:00
> and making comments implying that they know better than doctors about chronic pain (while putting an obligatory “not a doctor” disclaimer juxtaposed to their comments complaining that doctors don’t know what they know).

I am not claiming to know better than doctors whom are proficient in pain science/medicine.

Rather, that most doctors are not adequately educated on this topic. If you ask the average doctor they will tell you how little it is taught in most medical education programs. Case in point, most pain sufferers will tell you how many doctors they had to bounce between before they finally got some answers/direction (if they were lucky).

FWIW I was preparing for two months this year after I left my job to sit the Australian med school entry exam. Ultimately, I decided I would be able to help more people today, with tools readily available (including a computer and substack) than spending the next decade of my life preparing for a medical career.

I would consider amending that part of my post to say something more narrow like "Not a pain doctor", but it seems more straightforward as it is now.
by quicktemp42 | 2025-07-04 14:57:15+00:00
I’ve been struggling with chronic pain for almost eight months. It started when my orthodontic treatment caused the root of one of my teeth to break—it had already been weakened from a previous injury. The extraction was straightforward and only took 10 minutes, and I had an implant placed (with a temporary crown attached to my braces). Healing went smoothly, and the CT scans looked fine.

But soon after, I developed constant headaches that never went away. At first, I assumed they were related to the procedure, but everything had healed well, and multiple check-ups didn’t reveal anything. Since then, my braces have been removed, but the daily headaches persist. Occasionally, I also feel a strange “foreign object” sensation around the implant site.

A follow-up CT scan of the implant showed perfect integration with the bone. I’ve also had other tests done, including a head MRI. Medically, everything appears normal.

It’s getting really hard to manage—painkillers don’t help at all. Has anyone experienced something similar or have any idea what to try next? I’m even considering having the implant removed, despite there being no medical reason for it.
by lofaszvanitt | 2025-07-04 14:59:40+00:00
And Hollywood couldn't write shit for him since ages... of course now everyone was best friends with him. The hypocrisy of this is stellar level bs.

This is what they do. Elevate someone into the stratosphere and then let him fall and splatter on the concrete or just wath him wither away. That's why David Lynch eloquently said that Hollywood is H E L L itself.

Yuck.
by kianN | 2025-07-04 14:59:42+00:00
“As pain becomes chronic, it is increasingly associated with activity in the affective and motivational systems tied to avoidance and less closely tied to systems encoding nociceptive input” [1]

I’ve been on the slippery slope of chronic pain. Minor post surgery issues caused me to change my routine and avoid certain activities which only exacerbated the issues, which led to more avoidance. Eventually I couldn’t walk.

The American medical system is very focused on avoiding health issues that show up on mri, rather than quality of life health. But quality of life issues quickly become serious.

I think the middle ground of activity: not all out intense as if you are healthy, but also not avoiding movement is so challenging to find for many people but also so crucial. A lot of chronic pain for myself and I suspect for many others could be avoided with short and quick combination of therapy and daily movement. So simple but so challenging to effectively identify and allocate resources.

Not suggesting this is the total solution but it’s the pathway that I took to return to activity and I’ve seen it help a number of my friends as well.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8482298/
by sigmoid10 | 2025-07-04 15:00:15+00:00
I think the problem is the "dream ones" part. Yes, everyone would love to make tons of money with very little work. But that almost guarantees high risks or very high capital exposure. There are countless small business opportunities that you could operate from home with almost no risk or exposure if you have a car and can afford some basic tools. But you won't get rich - or at least you'll have to work your ass off for a while.
by anonymars | 2025-07-04 15:00:25+00:00
Most people are familiar with the Peter Principle where it talks about people rising to their level of incompetence.

But I think there's still plenty more that makes it worth a read. For example, something along the lines of, sometimes a man will pop an antacid and lament that their illness is negatively affecting their work, when in fact the causality is exactly reversed