MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bb88 | 2025-07-21 22:08:59+00:00
This is spot on. GIL-less python will be a thing, and when it happens, there will still be no reason to combine asyncIO with thread primitives. Waiting for IO can be spun off into a new thread, and it will work as you expect it would.

Trying to combine mental models of asyncio and threading is a model for pure insanity.
by heliographe | 2025-07-21 22:09:37+00:00
Yes, that matches my observations. I develop photography software and in early versions of iOS 18, sometimes saving a large image to the camera roll would fail because the daemon in charge of carrying out the photo library transactions would get killed due to low memory. This only happened on devices that ran Apple intelligence. Fortunately they seemed to have fixed that bug around 18.1 or 18.2 if I recall.
by joecool1029 | 2025-07-21 22:09:38+00:00
> if they are LiFePO

No phones use this chemistry. I have no idea what you're on about.

>Wouldn't be the first time I've seen something with no over or undervolt protection whatsoever.

Even the cheapest lithium ion charge controllers have overvolt protection by the nature of how they work. What can happen however is a controller could be specced to charge to 4.3V per cell and a 4.2V cell is instead installed. This is a problem.
by tolien | 2025-07-21 22:10:03+00:00
Do expand on that point then.

Edit: If I remove the reference to Brandenburg, I'm not sure my point substantially changes:

Incitement is an offence in the UK and also in other countries. You can argue whether that should be the case or not but that's completely orthogonal.

Gathering a whole lot of offenses which happened to include online activity to produce a big number of people who you can claim were prosecuted for something that you can claim is as innocuous as "online posts" is dishonest.
by jlarocco | 2025-07-21 22:11:45+00:00
I think that argument is begging the question.

Media consumption habits changed because that's how the internet was foisted on people - not necesarily because anybody made a choice or were asked what their preferences were.

After 30 years on the internet, I've gone full circle. I don't want (and won't) pay per article. 99% of the news articles I read come from a handful of trusted websites (a couple of major news outlets, a couple of local news outlets, etc.) and I don't have any problem subscribing to them. There's too much garbage on the internet, and I want the gatekeeping.

I guess that puts sites like HN in an awkward position, though. Some of the content posted here is interesting, but rarely enough that I would pay to read it on some random site. If it's important enough, it'll show up on one of the news sites I pay for.
by neom | 2025-07-21 22:12:14+00:00
Posts like this kinda-sorta grind my gears, like... I get it, but also... accounting, like many real world tasks, is fundamentally a chain of precise and constrained and auditable operations. Humans approach these tasks through structured processes... we use roles, and we have checkpoints precisely because complexity compounds quickly and becomes unmanageable if tackled as one giant block. Expecting a single AI model to handle an e2e workflow seamlessly without similarly explicit segmentation and oversight misunderstands not only the model but also the nature of the workflow itself.

I wanna see someone take long horizon tasks, recongnize they're not linear, and design and test a better system: structured orchestration, transparent auditability, and disciplined modularity, I think that would be considerably more interesting personally.
by potatolicious | 2025-07-21 22:12:37+00:00
A key tip that wasn't in the blog post: be extremely judicious about taking on new code dependencies.

For many apps the main source of memory usage isn't stack or heap memory consumed during runtime, it's the loading of the binary itself into memory. I've seen some wild app binary sizes (200MB+ for relatively modest apps without that much functionality).

One thing that's endlessly frustrating about mobile dev is that the vast majority of devs are thoughtless about dependencies, how they are built/linked, and how that impacts memory use. Far and away the dominant mode of dependencies in mobile-land is just "statically link it and forget about it".

This is the singular biggest contributor to app size bloat, and pretty up there for runtime memory consumption as well.

A double whammy here is that modern iOS apps are actually multiple binaries (main app, watch extensions, widget extensions, etc.), and if you heavily use static linking you're carrying multiple copies of the bloat.

A few actionable things:

- Be very, very judicious about taking on new dependencies. Is a library offering enough value and marginal functionality to be worth the weight? (e.g., I don't think AFNetworking in 2025 meets the bar for the vast majority of people, but yet it's still everywhere?)

- Dynamically link, especially if you're a complex app with multiple targets.

- Deadstrip aggressively. I cannot emphasize this enough. The default compiler settings will not deadstrip unused public symbols in static libraries. Fix this.
Ask HN: Why is Gmail so incompetent at basic search?
by sn9 | 2025-07-21 22:12:41+00:00
I'm South Asian and my personal email reflects that, so I get spam from India despite never having lived there.

I tried searching for one specific character to mass delete spam, "₹" (quoted in the literal query), and the search returned a few matches and then the rest were extremely obviously not remotely matches.

Why has a search company compromised a flagship product's ability to search?

Has anyone developed a workaround so that they can actually search their inbox and act on the results? Should I download Thunderbird or something?
by NewJazz | 2025-07-21 22:13:04+00:00
You can rotate them, although admittedly it can be more or less complicated depending on how your tooling compares to that of the secrets management system you are comparing against.

You can't necessarily revoke a secret just because it is in Hashicorp Vault or AWS Secrets Manager. Revocation is a function of the system that provisions and/or uses the secret for authentication, not the system that stores the secret. E.g. if you generate a certificate and store the private key with vault or sops, the revocation procedure is identical and has nothing to do with the secrets storage system.

Auditing access can be done coarsely by auditing access to the encryption key. Admittedly, this is an area where a more sophisticated system offers benefits. Although it isn't exactly iron clad -- a service may access a secret then leak or transfer the secret without that being visible in the audit log.
by smackeyacky | 2025-07-21 22:13:40+00:00
I'll give you a concrete example of how it goes so very wrong.

I worked for a bank for a short period of time, where the development team had gone a bit far with a shotgun approach to moving their systems to Azure. It was pretty hard to find things and as their approach evolved, the older conversions weren't revisited. Most of that team quit. New team is brought in (including me) which had some excellent engineers with years of experience in system architecture, how to make Azure work better. So we tried to homogenise things around a more reasonable approach.

This caused operational problems to worsen (understandably) but it was a short term pain, long term gain thing we couldn't be allowed time to do. So the CIO decided to take all the sysadmin/devops type work and give it exclusively to the system administrators. Who weren't developers. They fixated on one particularly narrow solution for deployment. To make it easier for themselves, but one that didn't really address the bigger picture of how to make it easy to monitor and deploy etc.

Anyway it ended up a disaster. The development team in their newly narrowed roles struggled to make their systems fit in the rigidly defined holes. Operationally it was no better and sometimes worse, but there was absolutely no compromise on how things should work or any consultation with the devs at all, ever.

I no longer work there. If you're going to do devops you have to listen to your experienced engineers, not the snotty kids who think clickops is engineering.
by eitland | 2025-07-21 22:13:54+00:00
At some point Microsoft tried to sell some automatic DRM system based on SharePoint to some company that I worked for.

The sales pitch was that they could upload documents to SharePoint and when people downloaded the documents SharePoint would automatically apply DRM so the documents could only be opened by that person on authorised machines for a specified number of days.

Well, it turned out depending on how you logged in (using the same account, just different login forms) on the SharePoint server it would either give you the files with DRM applied - or the completely unrestricted files.

We got some senior Microsoft consultant working directly for Microsoft to look at it but in the end they were just as confused as us.
by api | 2025-07-21 22:14:47+00:00
Housing market financialization can only "work" if housing tends to go up over time, which results from housing scarcity. If housing is not scarce a long position on housing will lose money.

Blaming housing investors for housing affordability is like blaming gold market speculators for gold being expensive. If the price of gold comes down, the speculators lose money. Same with housing.
by gronglo | 2025-07-21 22:15:46+00:00
Yes they do. It quite literally happened to me, which is why I wrote that comment.

I had to wait at the gate in the hopes there would be a no show. I wasn't the only one waiting, either. There were two of us. "Good news", they told us after everyone else had boarded. "We have seats for both of you."

They hand-wrote me a ticket and I walked onto the plane, only to find that the seat they'd assigned me was already taken. I stood in the aisle for about 10 minutes, clutching my bags, the only person still standing, until a flight attendant came and told me there wasn't actually a seat for me and that I needed to leave the plane.
by FpUser | 2025-07-21 22:15:54+00:00
>"Americans will happily cheat you as well."

I did not have too much experience with US manufacturers. I however can talk about Canada and Brasil. My experience with Brasil was stellar. Canada - you better fucking watch. As for China - I did order directly high power DC/DC converters. Those were available in the US and China. China came 10 times cheaper ($25 vs $250 apiece). The devices where we have installed those still work like a charm more than a decade after.
by kvirani | 2025-07-21 22:16:21+00:00
Nice to see an attempt at disrupting consolidated marketplaces.

My 2c: The open standard is great for creators in the long run but it doesn't solve their today problem: distribution. Creators won't leave predatory marketplaces despite higher costs because that's where they get distribution. The only way to truly convince established creators to consider Inkverse is by showing compelling readership numbers. It doesn't have to match the same number, but it should be in the top.

The more direct way to truly get viewers in today's internet is to buy them via ads.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-07-21 22:17:53+00:00
Back on the iPhone 3G, PNG decoding alone was slow enough that I had to cache pre-rendered bitmap representations into SQLite blobs to achieve "glassy" scrolling of image-heavy grids; I'd do the SQLite loading on a worker thread and dump the pre-rendered bitmap representation right back into a CGImage wrapper. I recall there being some inline NEON assembly involved as well.

Within 1-2 years, those optimizations were totally unnecessary.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-07-21 22:18:06+00:00
My first exposure to politicization of a purely tech issue was when net neutrality was hijacked and disingenuously recast as government control over the internet.

Two decades later we have the psychosis-like absurdity that "fiber is woke".

Including and between the above has been a steady stream of lobbying cash by US telcos - yielding captured regulators, captured legislators and telco-written, anti-consumer laws.

And while the degree of corruption is somewhat uneven between the two parties (regarding this), both are far too complicit to withhold contempt. The list of who hasn't been selling us out (fed, state and local) is much easier to keep track of.
by jsnell | 2025-07-21 22:18:58+00:00
Ah, a new entry in the "throw every possible AI criticism at the wall, and see what sticks" genre. As always, going for quantity rather than quality undermines the entire endeavor, as the article gets dominated by the stale and mostly invalid talking points.

"I'm tired about talking about AI, so here's 2000 words about AI" will appear on the surface to be a novel twist, but actually what the author seems to mean is that they don't want to be talked to about AI, have written this, and are now filtering out all rebuttals. It's just the classic fake win of a forum poster claiming this will be their last message on a subject, followed by three pages of text.

Like, of course if talking about AI is causing you distress, stop doing it. But then just stop doing it, don't try to get in the last word some pretense of it being "absolution".

It's a bit of a shame, because I think slightly expanding the last section and cutting out basically all the rest would have worked way better. There has been some discourse on what the skill set for somebody using AI for creating software could look like in the future (it'll change over time, obviously). There hasn't been very much written on who would enjoy that job, and it's something where nobody can rebut the author. They're the #1 expert in the world on their own preferences.
by pessimizer | 2025-07-21 22:19:44+00:00
You can't afford a 1 square foot lot anywhere near Times Square for four bedroom house in the Midwest money. Luckily, no one was talking about raising a family in Times Square, which in 1970 was adjacent to one of the most notoriously degenerate and crime ridden neighborhoods in the Western world. People understand that's out of their reach now.
by anonymars | 2025-07-21 22:20:00+00:00
I don't think this is nearly as crazy as you may think at first glance

Imagine if it was just a hidden (special) folder in an Exchange mailbox.

Voila, you already have a well-known and widely implemented and tested message syncing solution both for content and status (read/unread)

I assume Windows Phone worked the same way with its text message backup. When you'd set up a new phone it would take a while for your Microsoft account to finish syncing during which new messages would trickle into the Messaging app in real time. In fact if your old phone was still on WiFi new messages would show up on both. Still more advanced 15(?!) years ago than my Android today
by yesco | 2025-07-21 22:20:00+00:00
You're playing a shell game with definitions to justify authoritarian speech laws.

> lumping together arrests for stalking, incitement to violence and other forms of harassment to produce a big scary number

But that's exactly the problem - the UK defines "incitement" and "harassment" so broadly that ordinary political speech becomes criminal:

UK "Harassment" includes:

- Misgendering someone online

- Posting offensive jokes

- Retweeting protest footage

- Criticizing immigration policy "grossly"

UK "Incitement" includes:

- Lucy Connolly's Facebook post (31 months)

- Jordan Parlour's "every man and their dog should smash [hotel] up" (20 months)

- Tyler Kay's "set fire to all the hotels" retweet (38 months)

NONE of these would meet Brandenburg's standard in the US. They lack:

- Directed at specific individuals

- Imminent timeframe

- Likelihood of producing immediate action

> if the stated number is true, there should be thousands of examples every year

There ARE thousands. In 2023:

- 3,537 arrested for online speech

- 1,991 convicted under Section 127 Communications Act

- Hundreds more under Public Order Act

You don't hear about most because "UK citizen arrested for offensive tweet" stopped being newsworthy years ago.

You're using the word "incitement" to equate UK thought policing with legitimate US restrictions on speech that creates immediate danger. That's like defending China's censorship because "every country bans fraud."

The definitions matter. The UK criminalizes hurt feelings. The US criminalizes immediate threats to public safety.
by Rodeoclash | 2025-07-21 22:20:21+00:00
I've owned the domain name richardson.co.nz for some 25 years now and since then someone started a Richardson's realestate and registered richardsons.co.nz (note the additional "s").

I left the catch-all on my domains email going for a year or two before I had to disable it. The sheer amount of house blueprints, sensitive information about transfers etc was overwhelming.
by timewizard | 2025-07-21 22:21:01+00:00
No. It goes back to the 1990s when we used Data Entry Operators to key mail details that could not be read by OCR. This is all so the mail goes into the truck sorted. That is the most important part of the mail delivery operation.

The fact that you can get pictures from this system is the innovation but imaging has existed for much longer than this product.
by const_cast | 2025-07-21 22:21:38+00:00
> It’s violence against human dignity

You can't just call things violence. We need to stop doing this. If nobody is getting physically harmed, it's not violence.

And no, your stupid bullshit about harming one's soul doesn't count. I mean leg chopped off type of thing. Then, you can call it violent.

Otherwise, you're just dishonest and manipulative.
by Jtsummers | 2025-07-21 22:21:54+00:00
Yes, false flags. That's usually used to motivate people to go attack someone or to garner sympathy or support for a cause. MS's products being subject to attacks because they have numerous vulnerabilities does not encourage anyone to go out and buy other MS products.

You sink one of your own naval vessels (or it sinks due to an accident and you take advantage of the situation) and blame it on an enemy. That enemy is now the target of your military and your population approves.

A shipbuilder hires someone to poke a hole in 1000 of their ships that are so badly designed and manufactured that it only takes a rubber ducky bouncing off the hull to sink them does not encourage anyone to go back to that shipbuilder.

False flags (particularly of the "let's kill or maim hundreds of our own people and other innocent people" variety) push into evil territory. They aren't dumb on their own, they're calculated risks predicated on the willingness of the masses to fall in line after a catastrophe.

Deliberately hurting your own customers by using weaknesses in your own systems in order to motivate them to go buy your other products or services is dumb.
by mystraline | 2025-07-21 22:22:08+00:00
You can solve this.

Contact your federal senators and/or federal house reps, and tell them that USPS is sending pictures of other peoples' mail.

Or if you dont want to do that, then contact USPS Office of Inspector General. uspsoig.gov/

The IG's are absolutely terrifying if you're on the wrong side. And you're 100% in the right, and they're in the wrong.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-21 22:22:26+00:00
I find the "vibe coding" idea offensive because I've often been on projects where somebody junior thought he did 80% of the work and then I have to do the other 80% of the work and it's been a very expensive and extensive project of figuring out all the little things and sometimes all of the big things they did wrong.

I really like working with the AI Assistant in IntelliJ IDEA in that it's like pair programming with a junior who is really smart in some ways but weak in other ways. I get back an answer within seconds and can make up my mind whether it is right or wrong or somewhere in between.

Things like Windsurf and Junie on the other hand seem to be mostly a waste of time as they go off and do stuff for 5-20 minutes and when they get back it is usually pretty screwed up an a lot of effort to understand what's wrong with it and fix it... It's very much that "do the last 20% that is 80% of the work" experience.

There is a lot of discourse around creativity and LLMs that I find really annoying on lots of levels.

There are the people who don't have any idea of what creativity is which leads to ideas like: "LLMs (by definition) can't be creative" (comes across way too much like Robert Penrose saying he can do math because he's a thetan) or the many people who don't get that "genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration." There are also the people who are afraid of getting "ripped off" who don't get it that if they got a fair settlement for what was stolen from then it would probably be about $50, not a living wage. [1] They also don't seem to get it that Google's web crawler has been ripping people off since 2001, and just now they're worried. Maybe I have 50% sympathy for the ideas that visual art is devalued by LLMs since I feel that my work is devalued when people are seduced into thinking that the job is 80% done, not 20% done by the LLM.

[1] arrived by dividing some quantity of money that is input or output from the AI machine by the number of content pieces that are put in to it
by smsm42 | 2025-07-21 22:23:02+00:00
So you are saying "dismantling" is actually Trump speaking about what he's going to do rather than actual actions on the ground? In this case, the federal government has been "dismantled" by pretty much every President since FDR, they all promised to implement cuts and fight "waste and abuse" and the federal spending only grew. In fact, if Trump cuts all government spending in half (including mandatory spending, which is nearly impossible to do, but let's assume for a second he can do that) he'll just go to the size of the government as it was in 2008, and that's not exactly a tiny government, let alone a "dismantled" one. The actual cuts, of course, are way smaller than that, and will always remain so. And I am willing to bet that once Trump retires, not only the federal government will be alive and well, it likely would be spending a lot more than it had been when he first became President. And there's more than even chance it will also be spending more than when he took the oath of office for the second time.

It is quite discouraging though that people are now openly calling to ignore politician's actions and only take their words into account, even if not supported by any actual action. There was a time, not so long ago, where it was considered smart to do the opposite.
by ArnavAgrawal03 | 2025-07-21 22:23:05+00:00
You can add OCR with Gemini, and presumably that would lead to better results than the OCR model we compared against. However, it's important to note that then you're guaranteeing that the entire corpus of documents you're processing will go through a large VLM. That can be prohibitively expensive and slow.

Definitely trade-offs to be made here, we found this to be the most effective in most cases.
by zamadatix | 2025-07-21 22:23:05+00:00
In zero trust "exposed to the internet" is a bit of a misnomer compared to how traditional security would use the term. A better description might be "you're allowed to form a session to it from over the internet but only after your identity and set of rights have been verified". From this view: "zero trust" < "vpn" < "wide open" (in terms of exposure).
by dbmikus | 2025-07-21 22:24:00+00:00
This is cool. A bunch of interesting things here:

1. Agent can create its own tools and save them to memory 2. You create a SQL (and web app?) workbench per agent run 3. Grok fell off a cliff in the last month. Was this consistent over multiple runs? 4. Agents have a difficult time backtracking. Would unwinding system state and agent context make backtracking better? (Harder to implement this, though) 5. Since each new month only uses final state from previous month, agent has no way to understand why error occurred in previous month

Cool experiment! Was it difficult building the observable SQL workbench? And how many humans-in-the-loop did you have?