MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by adornKey | 2025-09-29 08:05:12+00:00
To those interested in numbers it was explained early - even on TV. Anyone interested saw that it was going like a seasonal flue wave. Numbers were following strict mathematics. My area was early - the numbers peaked right before people started to go crazy - the rest was censorship - There was a lot of fakery going on by using very soft numbers. Very often they used reporting date instead of infection date.. and some numbers were delayed 9 months... So most curves out there were seriously flawed. But if you were really interested you could see real epidemiological curves - but you had to do real work to find the numbers. Strict mathematics of a seasonal virus was something people didn't want to see - and this is still the consensus...
by user_7832 | 2025-09-29 08:06:04+00:00
> I don't really see how you can guarantee your Android phone doesn't have malware, I feel like you may be exaggerating here.

Can you do it on an iPhone? (You can't.)

Between android and ios, which platform is considered more secure or safer? It's not easy to find out directly, but bug bounty programs can be used as a heuristic. Guess which one it is, after both being the same for a long time? (It's android).

You can check out https://www.wired.com/story/android-zero-day-more-than-ios-z... and https://cyberscoop.com/ios-zero-day-zerodium-high-supply/

> I also don't mind the downvote, but if you would please tell me how you are able to guarantee your Android phone doesn't have malware, please tell me instead of hiding behind a downvote. Otherwise my solution is don't use an Android device.

The same way you guarantee it on any other OS, be it windows or macos or linux. You do your best, don't download sketchy apps, and don't be a political figure. Of course that doesn't guarantee it, just makes it 99% likely.

> Otherwise my solution is don't use an Android device.

Do you think you can guarantee this on an iPhone? May I ask you how you are able to guarantee this on iOS?

(I haven't downvoted you)
by empiko | 2025-09-29 08:07:34+00:00
The post suggests why review quality suffers. Because of the system, there is too much reviewing going on. People get tired and produce worse reviews. Those receiving these low-quality reviews become less motivated, and in turn put less effort into reviewing as well. Bad reviewing makes the system less predictable, so you have to spray and pray with as many papers as possible if you want to keep up with publication expectations. This adds even more papers into the system, making it worse.

There are just too many negative eventualities reinforcing each other in different ways.
by maxglute | 2025-09-29 08:07:49+00:00
As long as 4b in developing world slowly develops the pie will continue to grow and PRC going to be in position to capture most of it, even/especially if it steps on toes of western incumbants.

Also we're in 12g surveillance state era, central gov can soon monitor every production line and get granular metrics via variety of oblique indicators, we're a few years away from heaven is high and the emperor is far away, to camera and microphone is in your face and emperor is omnipresent because every thing a bureacrat says will be cross checked by sensors and llm. The thing about centralized power is it actually cares about truth (which is orthogonal to suppressing it) because ultimately their heads on the line.

VS US polity where polticians lie and no one really gives a shit, this is made easy by the fact that democracy basically means government by the people of the people for the people. But the people are retarded and fundmentally they don't care enough that higher ups have incredible incentive to lie about everything.
by Lutger | 2025-09-29 08:07:58+00:00
"mind-reading" is a really an unfortunate term though. Every algorithm is a strict and consistent set of rules that tries to serve the needs of its users. No magic is ever involved.

It is just that some users have conflicting needs and some sets of rules are more complex than others. So I think what this really is about is 'computer reading', the needs of some users to be able to predict with ease what the computer is going to do. Some people would rather be able to predict the computer doing something that they actually don't really need, and then make up for its shortcomings, than have something they feel they cannot predict and control, but is actually closer to what they want.

This is a bit like the term magic. Any sufficiently complex algorithm may indistinguishable from mind-reading, but it's still an algorithm. Mind-reading, like magic, depends on us being able to understand or not, which is highly subjective. But both are misleading terms.
by Theodores | 2025-09-29 08:09:04+00:00
You need a functioning community for this, with people knowing and interacting with their neighbours. Sadly, we live in an era of a somewhat atomised society. You can live in a city of ten million people to not know a soul, with workmates that are friendly but not friends, with those workmates commuting in from the opposite side of the city to yourself.

For a functioning community you need to have reason to know your neighbours. Maybe you need to borrow things or lend things, go into town together to share a vehicle, or spend time together in the local pub. The list is endless, however, nowadays, when everyone is car dependent, there is no need to ask a neighbour if you can borrow something, you can just hop in your car and get your own. Or you can just get Amazon to drop it off for you.

In a functioning neighbourhood, you might ask your direct next door neighbour about something such as needing a cleaner, and they might know that the other neighbours, a few doors down have one. You might merely be acquainted with that neighbour, but you would know them well enough to ask them to make the required introductions.

It actually requires a little bit of work to have relationships with neighbours, you also need a functioning street with chance encounters made on a regular basis. Being a pedestrian helps.

Another surprising factor is home ownership. If people are merely renting then they are not invested in the community in the same way.

In the olden days there were opportunities for teenagers to do work such as newspaper rounds, household cleaning, car washing, babysitting, gardening, dog walking and other jobs. But then we stopped having 'free range kids' due to 'stranger danger'. I am from the former times when I did the whole gamut of pocket money jobs for whomever in my village and my mother would know exactly where I was and if anything ever happened to me. If I was late delivering newspapers then someone would call and my 'last known sighting' could easily be ascertained. I could also always hitchhike into town because one of my newspaper customers would stop for me and give me a lift. My neighbours looked after me, and I did my best for them. I also did not do everything, for babysitting I could 'outsource' to my sister and her friends, for gardening gigs I could 'outsource' to some other kid in the village.

What I find interesting is how many of these teenage jobs have become professionalised. For example, washing cars. Nowadays that is 'detailing' and a very different deal with all kinds of potions. Saturday jobs also became professionalised, so you no longer see teenagers serving customers in shops. As for babysitting, you probably need full background checks nowadays.

All of my neighbours that I did things for gave me a little bit of mentoring, and Christmas was amazing due to the amount of tips and gifts that I received.

Oh, how I miss those days. Apologies for the reminiscing!
Show HN: Eigenarc – A Chrome extension that turns ChatGPT into study coach
by sridhar87 | 2025-09-29 08:11:16+00:00
Eigenarc is a chrome extension that makes learning with ChatGPT structured.

You can use the extension to create a step by step learning plan for your goal. The extension seamlessly integrates with ChatGPT to create learning materials for each step.

Please try out and let us know your feedback.

Here is a demo that shows how it works: https://youtu.be/YvL65pdc16U

Relevant previous posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45354754 - Demo video https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45190134 - launch of Eigenarc
by pornel | 2025-09-29 08:11:36+00:00
In Cloudflare's case, Rust is much more productive.

Rust modules can handle any traffic themselves, instead of a split between native code and Lua that is too slow to do more than config (Lua is relatively fast for a scripting language, but on the critical path it was a "peanut butter" slowdown adding latency).

At the size and complexity of a server serving 20% of the Web, Lua's dynamic typing was scary. Modules in Rust can enforce many more requirements.

Rust's solid dependency management also helps share implementations and config logic across modules and even different products, instead of everything having to go literally through the same server.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/20-percent-internet-upgrade/
by bfg_9k | 2025-09-29 08:11:41+00:00
> China will be satisfied with with increasing productivity at the expense of GDP

Yeah I don't think that's correct. They've got explicit GDP growth targets which implies they do care about GDP growth.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ywang/2025/03/04/china-sets-202...

Not only that, but they care about them so much that they feel the need to lie about GDP figures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Keqiang_index

Their own former VP had his own measurement he used as a proxy for GDP growth since he didn't believe the official figures.
by NathanaelRea | 2025-09-29 08:12:10+00:00
There will always be an adobe tax so to speak. Creatives want high quality and reliable tools to be able to produce high quality things.

I could imagine a world where a small team + AI creates an open source tool that is better than current day Photoshop. However if that small team has that power, so does adobe, and what we perceive as "good" or "high quality" will shift.
by epolanski | 2025-09-29 08:12:12+00:00
> Are functions relatively short and named well?

I was hoping we moved beyond this "clean code"-ish nonsense of functions having to be short.

Quality of a software design, maintainability, etc, have virtually no relation to length of functions and the most respectable software out there contain functions hundreds if not thousands of lines of code long without being impacted by its own weight.
by blub | 2025-09-29 08:12:16+00:00
Most engineers and technical persons don’t have good fashion taste, so they have a hard time understanding good taste in general.

The great majority of technical things are not cool to normal humans, they’re geeky. Programming languages are not cool. In programming one has to therefore start from “not cool” and move down the scale:

Uncool: Rust, C++, most languages

Painfully uncool: anything functional and weird. Bash, Linux, etc.
by samplifier | 2025-09-29 08:12:40+00:00
Thanks! That was fun. I think I got on top of most things with some glitch exploiting save for the green water tower next to the secret person. I got to the UFO but it didn't trigger a secret sequence with the sunbathing space-person. I also got into the sewer pipe but I didn't find any more secrets there. Maybe we need to combine our powers and do the secret emoji sequence. Or maybe spin the sigils in the title sequence to enable cheat mode. :-)
by imiric | 2025-09-29 08:12:41+00:00
I like the article. Most engineering decisions are indeed a tradeoff that should be carefully considered.

That said...

> I will always distrust engineers who justify decisions by saying “it’s best practice”. No engineering decision is “best practice” in all contexts! You have to make the right decision for the specific problem you’re facing.

There are indeed general best practices that are applicable to most, if not all, situations. E.g. version control and testing (arguably even the testing approach) are practices that every competent developer would agree are pretty much requirements.

Context does matter, but within specific contexts there are practices that can be generally considered "best", because applying them delivers more value than not, and their drawbacks are manageable.

For example, after a certain team size, implementing a CI pipeline is a best practice. Yes, it takes time and effort to implement and maintain, but the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks. After a certain scale, implementing a robust and efficient infrastructure management and deployment solution is pretty much a requirement. Relying on ClickOps to provision infrastructure, and deploying with shell scripts over SSH, while technically "simple", can only get you so far. And so on.

These practices become more evident with experience, and deciding when to vouch for them, even strongly, becomes more evident with wisdom. So I wouldn't necessarilly always distrust engineers who want to promote best practices. I would listen to them, discuss it with them, and make a decision along with the rest of the team. If they do push back after a decision has been made, that would be a bigger issue. Not necessarilly with that specific engineer―it could also be a sign of communication problems, egos, politics, etc. Unfortunately, there are many dysfunctional teams and companies with toxic environments, but I suppose that's just human nature.
by Scarblac | 2025-09-29 08:13:44+00:00
> I will add that I'm plenty "smart" enough to understand that "10" comes before "9" in a strictly alphabetical sense

Strictly speaking 9, 1 and 0 are not in the alphabet so can't be sorted alphabetically.

And I think most "normal users" wouldn't expect that programmers generalize the alphabet like we do.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-29 08:13:52+00:00
I was kind of curious if there was some specific failure with this outside of the general brokenness of US healthcare competition, but it's starting to sound like the classic one:

The biggest problem with US health insurance is that it's not actually insurance. The purpose of insurance is to cover major claims. If a storm does $30,000 in damage to your house, you file an insurance claim. If it does $30 in damage, you go to the hardware store and pay $30. But we expect health "insurance" to cover the little stuff. Health insurance should be for if you get cancer or need major surgery, not for a generic drug that ought to cost $30.

Which in turn is what messes up what could otherwise be a competitive market. Instead of picking who you want to buy the drug from, most people have insurance, and the insurance company picks. And then most people get insurance from their employer so they also don't get to pick their insurance which makes the insurance company unresponsive because the patient can't easily switch.

And then it sounds like what happened is that the manufacturers make nearly all of their sales through insurance, who only care about regulatory compliance, and there aren't enough people paying out of pocket to get them to compete on actual quality.

But the other problems shouldn't be there if we could get people actually buying what ought to be cheap generics themselves instead of through insurance:

> Plus, even in a functioning and truly competitive market, trying to experiment with different formulations to figure out which "gets better results" is a dangerous game for individuals; it's not like buying different Kleenex and deciding which holds together better. You have to do a lot of risky trial and error and get frequent blood tests.

This wouldn't be something most people would have to do themselves. If there are five companies making the same drug then forums for people with the condition it treats would have people already taking each of them, and if some of them are actually not right then aggregate data should show that, and then everybody would find out without each person having to do their own trials.

And somebody needs to be doing that anyway or you're going to have a lot of people whose medication is wrong who don't realize that it's because they're not getting what they paid for while the one that works is available from someone else.

> When we clearly end up paying dozens of times more than other countries (even for unpatented medicine) people raise the R&D issue to justify the costs.

But then we're back to, the trouble is that it's both.

And then people propose to have the government set prices, which is only trading one problem for another. Whereas what we ought to do is address the things causing the markets that are supposed to be competitive to not.
by bob1029 | 2025-09-29 08:14:08+00:00
The fact that there is an entire phenomenon known as "the unity look" points very strongly at some kind of exponential decay function in skill acquisition over time.

I'm having to fight for my life to avoid relying on the real-time lights in a relatively simple Unity project. I've written custom code to move chunks of scenes to origin to fix the light mapper range and sampling issues. This is the kind of thing where 99.99% of indie devs would throw their hands up and switch everything to real-time mode (resulting in "the look"). And, they might be right to do so. It could be the correct decision, but I worry a lot these days with how tight the market is. Steam sees a ton of new games every day. Having distinct visuals can make a really big difference. Selling <100 copies of something you spent >1000 hours on is probably the most catastrophic outcome for morale. Play testing and good mechanics can sadly only make you so much money if everything else is lacking. In 2015 you could get away with it. Not in 2025. The cheap ugly games happen inside places like Roblox now. You'll never compete with that.
by mrkeen | 2025-09-29 08:14:16+00:00
"Good taste" is just advice or guidance that you haven't thought through enough to turn into actionable principles.

Compare:

* I apply the dependency inversion principle to keep my code testable

* I minimise the scope and mutability of all my variables

With:

* These methods do what they say they do

* This code is good because it's declarative

* These functions have the right number of lines
by legacynl | 2025-09-29 08:14:29+00:00
I have a television hooked up to my PC that I use for watching series/movies sometimes. I notice that playing the sound through the television's speakers makes the dialogue much more clear, than using my regular speakers.

I think televisions have EQ'ing that makes dialogue (the mids mostly) much louder. The main usecase for TV was specifically films and shows (with dialogue) so they could justify adjusting the sound for that specific usecase. Now we watch films and shows on devices that also need to sound good playing music, podcasts, games, etc, so it makes less sense to EQ the sound to a specific usecase.
by zoobab | 2025-09-29 08:15:03+00:00
I contacted the European Commission DMA team on this gross abuse of power (Google just followed Apple in this regard, who reacted to the DMA by coming out with this notarization of developers), here is they flacky answer:

"Dear citizen,

Thank you for contacting us and sharing your concerns regarding the impact of Google’s plans to introduce a developer verification process on Android. We appreciate that you have chosen to contact us, as we welcome feedback from interested parties.

As you may be aware, the Digital Markets Act (‘DMA’) obliges gatekeepers like Google to effectively allow the distribution of apps on their operating system through third party app stores or the web. At the same time, the DMA also permits Google to introduce strictly necessary and proportionate measures to ensure that third-party software apps or app stores do not endanger the integrity of the hardware or operating system or to enable end users to effectively protect security.

We have taken note of your concerns and, while we cannot comment on ongoing dialogue with gatekeepers, these considerations will form part of our assessment going forward.

Kind regards, The DMA Team"

The DMA is in fact cementing their duopoly power, the opposite of the objective of the law.
by username332211 | 2025-09-29 08:16:28+00:00
I really doubt that. America's Congress seems to have very little difficulty in debanking people all across Europe, and obviously, they have no access to any European identity system. Canada infamously froze the bank accounts of anyone donating to anti-government protest movements and it's one of the nations without a comprehensive identification system.

KYC has already killed any financial privacy people may have had.
Show HN: Event-Driven Email Assistant with Node-Red and DeepSeek AI
by Judy-witch | 2025-09-29 08:16:56+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a small open-source email assistant out of pure laziness. My inbox is full of noisy notifications, handover chains, and long threads that make it hard to find the real intent of an email.

So I hacked together a system using Node-RED (for event-driven orchestration) and DeepSeek (for analysis).

It turned into a tiny full-stack hack: Node-RED orchestrates the flows, DeepSeek does the analysis, and a lightweight frontend shows the results.

New emails trigger a Node-RED flow automatically

A two-layer LLM setup: first generates ultra-short summaries (one glance readable), then ensures valid JSON output

Frontend parses the JSON to show key intent, info, and suggested reply

Supports separate Chinese and English flows from the prompt level

For my email volume, the AI API cost is minimal (roughly $0.2/day).

It turned my inbox chaos into something manageable, Save me much time, and I thought others might find it useful too.

npm: node-red-contrib-email-analysis-deepseek

Node-RED Flow Library: https://flows.nodered.org/flow/ad230f600644964156ffb18db2f16...

GitHub: https://github.com/witch-Judy/email-analysis-deepseek

Would love feedback from the community.
by Etheryte | 2025-09-29 08:17:21+00:00
Being a good fit for a given purpose doesn't mean that something is in good taste. That piece of code is very performant, yes, but I'm pretty sure none of us would want to meet it in code review, save for a few niche edge cases. To draw a parallel from fashion, for most part, arctic snow gear does not win fashion prizes, but it does keep you alive. There's a time and place for both, doesn't mean that everything useful is in good taste.
by jsnell | 2025-09-29 08:17:40+00:00
I thought the original article included the strongest objective data point on this: recent progress on the METR long task benchmark isn't just on the historical "task length doubling every 7 months" best fit, but is trending above it.

A year ago, would you have thought that a pure LLM with no tools could get a gold medal level score in the 2025 IMO finals? I would have thought that was crazy talk. Given the rates of progress over the previous few years, maybe 2027 would have been a realistic target.
by 8-prime | 2025-09-29 08:18:01+00:00
I may be misunderstanding what you're trying to say, but I feel like this still suffers from one of the mentioned issues - situationality.

Even the best actionable principles can be incorrect given a certain set of circumstances. If in those cases you choose to uphold your priciples, rather than choosing what is "right" for the project you would fall into the camp of "bad taste".

That is at least how I interpreted the article.
by arthurofbabylon | 2025-09-29 08:18:05+00:00
I am flabbergasted by the naivety around predicting the future. While we have hints and suggestions, our predictions are best expressed as ranges of possibilities with varying weights. The hyperbolic among us like to pretend that predictions come in the form of precise lines of predetermined direction and curve; how foolish!

Predicting exponential growth is exceptionally difficult. Asymptotes are ordinary, and they often are not obvious until circumstances make them appear (in other words, they are commonly unpredictable).

(I do agree with the author regarding the potential of LLM's remaining underestimated by much of the public, however I cannot hang around such abysmal reasoning.)