MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-02 17:34:02+00:00
I went through a phase of writing asyncio servers for my side projects. Probably the most fun I had was writing things that were responsive in complex ways, such as a websockets server that was also listening on message queues or on a TCP connection to a Denon HEOS music player.

Eventually I wrote an "image sorter" that I found was hanging up when the browser was trying to download images in parallel, the image serving should not have been CPU bound, I was even using sendfile(), but I think other requests would hold up the CPU and would be block the tiny amount of CPU needed to set up that sendfile.

So I switched from aiohttp to the flask API and serve with either Flask or Gunicorn, I even front it with Microsoft IIS or nginx to handle the images so Python doesn't have to. It is a minor hassle because I develop on Windows so I have to run Gunicorn inside WSL2 but it works great and I don't have to think about server performance anymore.
by haleem123 | 2025-09-02 17:34:16+00:00
>> 70's Boeing used to do things like hire up people with no immediate experience, teach them C for three months, and then hire them into roles as programmers

In the 70's we didnt have NAFTA, so you couldnt just send the jobs to Mexico

In the 70's we didnt have the H1B program, where you could have a permanent "shortage of workers" and re-direct jobs to immigrants

In the 70's we didnt have Zoom, so you couldnt just send the jobs offshore
by goku12 | 2025-09-02 17:34:42+00:00
We in India use the same system for dates as you described, for obvious reasons. But I really don't like the pattern of switching directions multiple times when reading a date and time.

And as for numbers, perhaps it isn't too late to set it right once and for all. The French did that with the SI system after all.

> So apparently the original Hindu scripts were LTR

I can confirm. All Indian scripts are LTR (Though there are quite a few of them. I'm not aware of any exceptions). All of them seem to have evolved from an ancient and now extinct script named Brahmi. That one was LTR. It's unlikely to have switched direction any time during subsequent evolution into modern scripts.
by creer | 2025-09-02 17:34:55+00:00
Not mentioned enough: watch out for engineers (or any hires) who will take zero interest in helping the business succeed.

You can try and hire for brains and experience, say. And have your business constantly undermined by empire building, "just collecting a salary", resume building, and other popular nuisances. Attitude and alignment matters.

If you are yourself "empire or resume building", nevermind, carry on.
by KaiserPro | 2025-09-02 17:35:02+00:00
context:

> I do NOT want to be "protected".

to which you replied:

> Installing an encrypted chat app,

on a thread about developers making sure that user data is safe.

I want to install an app, I don't want to scout around and make a value judgement to see if its going to steal all my data. In the same way that victorians had to work out if the local baker is cutting cheap flour with chalk or worse[1].

we are "qualified" to make that value judgement, the vast majority of people outside of this forum are not. This means that the longer we let predatory spyware run our ecosystem (lets be honest, most of the "internet" is paid for by google, facebook and apple et al) the longer we ingrain in people to expect to be exploited.

The solution is not only opensource, because frankly thats even more user hostile. (oh you lost your entire history? lol you should have done x,y,z and not pressed the "make it awesome" button, as if you'd read the code you know its in. alpha) The solution is as "the people" to demand safe software. This won't happen because the current tech giants are the only reason why US GDP is growing.

The solution is tackling the tech behemoths. But that wont happen with current US system.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25259505
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-09-02 17:35:02+00:00
Why are they bothering with billions of dollars when crypto coins already delivered, right on schedule, the new foundation of global currency? Why aren't these previous investors pouring all of their BTC into Anthropic as fast as possible? Isn't $183,000,000,000 a massive signal that this next leap for Silicon Valley will be as solid as their previous revolution?
by alphazard | 2025-09-02 17:35:12+00:00
There are multiple solutions to this, with tradeoffs. Doesn't change the fact that the service should only want a public key, and you should only give the service a public key. That's where this new complexity is being forced on users and developers. You need to be able to sign in, or let your users sign in, but you can choose how complicated of a key management strategy to have.

You can either have 1 key pair per service and sync them with something like 1password. Or you can have 1 key per service per device. Keys that never leave the device is usually considered more secure (and I agree for what I consider my threat model to be).

Important services like primary email, your bank, or cloud platform should probably do 1 key per device. Everything else benefits from the simplicity of 1 key per service with the keys synced.
by ryukoposting | 2025-09-02 17:35:12+00:00
This is roughly where I am on the matter. If the energy costs stay massive, your investment in AI is really just a bet that energy production will get cheaper. If the energy costs fall, so does the moat that keeps valuations like this one afloat.

If there's a step-function breakthrough in efficiency, it's far more likely to be on the model side than on the semiconductor side. Even then, investing in the model companies only makes sense if you think one of them is going to be able to keep that innovation within their walls. Otherwise, you run into the same moat-draining problem.
by dragonwriter | 2025-09-02 17:35:30+00:00
> Palestine is currently not meeting the Montevideo criteria

Yes, not that it necessarily matters (for reasons I’ll get to later), it does, and while you don't present any argument for your claim that it does not, I suspect that rests on inverting the Montevideo conventions explicit statement on territory acquired by force.

> Of course you can say "to hell with the Montevideo criteria, it's just a convention"

More to the point, it is a convention binding some countries (of which Belgium is not one) to one extreme pole on the question theory of statehood, and it should not be surprising that other nations have views ranging from the opposing pole through a range of positions which balance the considerations of the two poles, informed by various pragmatic and legal factors, including some which were not not norms of international law at the time of the Convention, like the right of self-determination under the UN Charter.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-09-02 17:35:34+00:00
The Western system has roots in the Norman conquest of England. After 1066, land wasn’t held communally or with meaningful checks on aristocracy, as under the Anglo-Saxons. Instead, William the Conqueror carved up the country and handed it to his allies, creating a feudal landlord class that had no attachment to 'their' conquered peasants/community and whose only mandate was to extract maximum rent, so long as the higher lords and the crown got their cut. Instead of vanishing that rentier system evolved. Over centuries, the same logic of conquest and extraction was repackaged as “the market,” and eventually exported to the world through finance, trade, and empire.

What began as feudal rent-seeking in England scaled into global capitalism, a system where those at the top still practice Norman-style exploitation for maximum extraction with no care about those being extracted from. It's all Norman-style exploitation for maximum extraction, stripped of any sense of community, obligation, or service.
by nialv7 | 2025-09-02 17:36:10+00:00
Ha, the "I pay taxes" type I see. Paying taxes doesn't necessarily mean you care. For example part of the taxes I pay will go into the Military Industrial Complex, but yet I wish they don't exist.

One way to reduce the chance of meeting "unpleasant" people (are they really unpleasant or has your perception just changed as you age?), is to just have more of public transportation! Besides pure statistics, it also makes people's lives better and will reduce poverty.
by derefr | 2025-09-02 17:36:25+00:00
Espressif calls the ESP32 an MCU, and at least 1/3 of ESP32 models have >1MiB of onboard PS ("pseudo-static") RAM (i.e. DRAM with its own refresh circuit.) At least 20 of the ESP32 models do have 16MiB.

(And I would argue that the ESP32 is an MCU even in this configuration — mostly because it satisfies ultra-low-power-on-idle requirements that most people expect for "pick up, use, put down, holds a charge until you pick it up again" devices.)

So, sure, if you mean the kind of $0.07 MCU IC you'd stuff in a keyboard or mouse, that's definitely not going to be running Nerves (or any other kind of dynamic runtime. You need to go full bare-metal on these.)

But if you mean the kind of $2–$8 MCU IC you'd stuff in a webcam, or a managed switch, or a battery-powered soldering iron, or a stick vacuum cleaner with auto suction-level detection, or a kitchen range/microwave/etc with soft-touch controls and an LCD — use-cases where there's more-than-enough profit margin to go around — then yeah, those'll run Nerves just fine.
by imiric | 2025-09-02 17:36:27+00:00
> The concern is not about the access to source code.

That is a big part of the concern, yes. That anyone can copy your work, setup a competitor, and never give anything back. Copyleft licenses, and the AGPL in particular, ensure that those changes are made public, which benefits everyone, including the original project.

> When a big player swoops in, they can completely decimate your business because of shear scale advantages, they can undercut you into bankruptcy.

That's not a guarantee. In fact, many businesses built around copyleft licensed products can thrive, in ways that their competitors cannot. The original authors understand the code base, the product, and their users much better. They have first-mover advantage on any new features, and have full control over the project's direction. They can use these advantages to build a business that is difficult to compete with, even for much larger and more powerful competitors.

In the open source world, the value of a company hinges on the quality of its product and the community around it, not on market hype, speculative valuations, and venture capital. It is more difficult to build unicorns and make investors rich with this approach, but focusing on the user avoids many of the wrong incentives that make most companies user hostile. Many companies fail because the leadership doesn't understand this, nor the philosophy behind open source, and they simply want to use it as a marketing tactic.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-09-02 17:36:32+00:00
I think part of it is historical. WSGI has been around a while before async became relevant. The industry now has had ASGI for a while, but if your WSGI deployed web application doesn't need to squeeze out all the juice it can with async, you might not be phased by not using it or bothered at all.

Reminds me of how long it took some to go from Python 2 to Python 3.
by nedwin | 2025-09-02 17:36:39+00:00
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We use Ruby on Rails, React, Postgres. We run on AWS.

We're looking for our first non-founder engineering leader to help us keep the trains running on time.

We've built an awesome team + culture at the company, high candor + EQ environment and we ship. We also welcome applicants who have previously run their own startups, with a bunch ex-founders on the team from the likes of Respondent and Indiegogo.

Check out our careers page here: https://greatquestion.co/about/careers Or email me: ned@greatquestion.co
by baq | 2025-09-02 17:36:58+00:00
async, parallelism, concurrency, why not all three? JS, the canonical async (at least today) language, has had neither parallelism nor concurrency primitives for a good decade or so after its inception.

I personally blame low async adoption in Python on 1) general reduction in its popularity vs Typescript+node, which is driven by the desire to have a single stack on the frontend and backend, not by bad or good async implementations in Python (see also: Rails, once the poster child of the Web, now nearly forgotten) 2) lack of good async stdlib. parallelism and concurrency are distant thirds.
by sokoloff | 2025-09-02 17:37:02+00:00
This is under-appreciated, very rarely talked about, and spot on!

I am personally guilty of being far too lenient and tolerant in overlooking "hard to work with". Bluntly, as an engineer, I enjoyed working with a few particular "brilliant assholes" (as their brilliance was often but their AH nature rarely directed at me) and so I tended to tolerate them too much when I transitioned into leadership roles. I don't know if that was biggest mistake as a leader, but it was for sure in the top five.
by cldcntrl | 2025-09-02 17:37:36+00:00
I've been working on production-grade AWS deployments for over 10 years, so it's a bit hard to frame my experience/skill set. That being said, if you need help with almost anything AWS - architecture, infrastructure, performance, scale - feel free to reach out. Although versed in Well-Architected/multi-region/multi-account, I strive to supply the simplest solution for your particular scenario.

Location: US EST

Remote: Only

Technologies: IAM, VPC, Cloudwatch, EC2/ASG/ELB, Lambda, API Gateway, RDS, Redshift, DynamoDB, CodeDeploy, Cognito, Athena, S3, Cloudfront, Kinesis, SQS, SNS, IoT Core, Sagemaker, ElastiCache, MediaConvert

Email: hn@cldcntrl.com
by Terr_ | 2025-09-02 17:37:43+00:00
> The main thing about "social score bad" takes is that the government will use that scoring. It's not private <-> private.

No: The dystopia comes from helplessness and inability to appeal injustice, regardless of who/what manages the system or how it is legally constructed.

We must take care to distinguish between the problem we want to avoid versus the mechanism we hope will avoid it... especially when there are reasons to believe that mechanism is not a reliable defense.

> But the same does not extend to a private bakery. Or a bar. Or any private property. Tell them their boss sux, and you might not get service.

The difference here isn't because they're "private", but because you implicitly assume you will have alternatives, other local bakeries or bars which are reliably neutral to the spat.

Things become very different if they're all owned by Omni Consumer Products or subscribed to Blacklist as a Service.
by dapperdrake | 2025-09-02 17:37:55+00:00
Python's async is very difficult to use and debug. It seems to get stuck randomly, read like race conditions. And Python cannot work around this nicely with their lambdas only permitting a single expression in their body.

Not worth the trouble. Shell pipelines are way easier to use. Or simply waiting —no pun intended— for the synchronous to finish.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-09-02 17:37:57+00:00
I wish some of these cooking competition reality shows would declare this kind of thing. One recent competition one "Is It Cake?" constantly trucks out these sort of demonstration items where some true wizard behind the scenes is making a ton of lifelike items that the actual contestants have to guess about just to determine their own order/ranking in the competition. I always wonder what happens to all of the cake from just that portion of the show (and some other segments). The 'Kraft services table' in the back much be epic etc
by agwa | 2025-09-02 17:38:26+00:00
The simplicity of SSH's public key authentication comes with a significant privacy downside: https://www.agwa.name/blog/post/whoarethey https://words.filippo.io/whoami-updated/

This isn't such a big deal in the SSH ecosystem, but it would be a disaster on the Web where there is an enormous incentive to track users. Part of WebAuthn's complexity comes from addressing that.
by rurp | 2025-09-02 17:38:26+00:00
Your point is undercut by the vastly lower effective tax rates rich Americans pay vs middle class workers. It's the norm in this country for someone making millions of dollars/year to pay a significantly lower tax rate on that income than anyone working a decent paying job.

A horseshoe shaped tax graph by income is clearly against the intent and spirit of a progressive tax code so something is very much broken and has been so for decades.
by vlark | 2025-09-02 17:38:35+00:00
This article references how grade inflation has boomed since 2013 (when the authors were in school). Here's an article from 2013 bemoaning grade inflation:

https://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/economic-intelligence/2...

Here's a whole book about the issue, published in 2003: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b97309

And here's one from 1991: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.5.1.159

Folks, this is an annual grouching point among folks who care about or work in academia. Nothing to see here.

-- Edited to add that I am a community college English professor. Most people pass my class because the college has set the final drop date one month before the end of the semester, so students have plenty of time to avoid a bad final grade.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-09-02 17:38:43+00:00
>Mostly this is inside-baseball stuff to "make the model better as a tool for enhancing the model"

Last week I put GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 in a conversation with each other about a topic of GPT-5's choosing. What did it pick?

Improving LLMs.

The conversation was far over my head, but the two seemed to be readily able to get deep into the weeds on it.

I took it as a pretty strong signal that they have an extensive training set of transformer/LLM tech.
by marginalia_nu | 2025-09-02 17:39:12+00:00
Webmasters are really kinda stuck between a rock and a hard place with this one.

At least with what I'm doing poorly configured or outright malicious bots consume about 5000x the resources than human visitors, so having no bot mitigation means I've basically given up and decided I should try to make it as a vegetable farmer instead of doing stuff online.

Bot mitigation in practice is a tradeoff between what's enough of an obstacle to keep most of the bots out, while at the same time not annoying the users so much they leave.

I think right now Anubis is one of the less bad options. Some users are annoyed by it (and it is annoying), but it's less annoying than clicking fire hydrants 35 times and as long as you configure right it seems to keep most of the bots out, or at least drives them to behave in a more identifiable manner.

Probably won't last forever, but I don't know what would besides like going full anacap special needs kid and doing crypto microtransactions for each page request. Would unfortunately drive off not only the bots, but the human visitors as well.
by bediger4000 | 2025-09-02 17:39:17+00:00
Vanishingly few crypto boosters have a grip on the mathematics or software engineering. They clearly sense (or believe they sense) a money making opportunity because cryptocurrency is new. Bluster, a hearty handshake or the projection of confidence and hard work is all they think is necessary to make a fortune before the normies figure it all out.

I think the same sort of "peaked in highschool" folks would be dazzled by LLMs, so that overlap seems natural to me.
by sokoloff | 2025-09-02 17:40:28+00:00
I think most significant sized operations are built and succeed or fail based on the quality and leadership of the B players. You just can't find enough A players to build an entire [large] company of them and hopefully the C players contribute in a steady, no-drama fashion, leaving the B players* as the differentiating aspect of your particular company.

* - and the focus/determination/consistency with which you part ways with the D and F players.
by hamza_q_ | 2025-09-02 17:40:31+00:00
1 hour of audio processed in 5 seconds (RTX 4090, Ryzen 9 7950X). ~17x faster than Pyannote 3.1.

On M3 MacBook Air, 1 hour in 23.5 seconds (~14x faster).

This is a custom speaker diarization pipeline I've developed; it's a modified version of the pipeline found in the excellent 3D-Speaker project by Alibaba Research.

My optimizations/modifications were the following:

- changed VAD model

- multi-threaded Fbank feature extraction

- batched inference of CAM++ embeddings model

- clustering is accelerated by RAPIDS, when NVIDIA GPU available

Optimizations aside, massive credit needs to be given to the CAM++ speaker embeddings model, whose efficiency is where the majority of the speed comes from.

This pipeline powers the Zanshin media player, which is an attempt at a usable integration of diarization in a media player. Check it out here: https://zanshin.sh And discuss here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45104866

Let me know what you think! Were you also frustrated by how slow speaker diarization is? Does Senko's speed unlock new use cases for you? Cheers, everyone.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-09-02 17:40:36+00:00
Uh, I don't think you have any idea what you're talking about.

Firstly, SSL never contributed to the codebase.

Secondly, Ardour's capabilities in 2025 vastly exceed what it was in 2008 when SSL paid me to work on it, and development continues today, arguably faster than ever before.
by myko | 2025-09-02 17:40:58+00:00
I haven't earnestly used Bazel but my limited experience with it is that it does work fairly well and if your project is multiplatform it might be a better choice than Tuist for the Apple specific pieces. But if your project is all Apple and you're deeply into the ecosystem Tuist would be my recommendation - instead of Bazel's DSL you just write Swift to describe your project.
by atomicnumber3 | 2025-09-02 17:41:21+00:00
The author gets close to what I think the root problem is, but doesn't call it out.

The truth is that in python, async was too little, too late. By the time it was introduced, most people who actually needed to do lots of io concurrently had their own workarounds (forking, etc) and people who didn't actually need it had found out how to get by without it (multiprocessing etc).

Meanwhile, go showed us what good green threads can look like. Then java did it too. Meanwhile, js had better async support the whole time. But all it did was show us that async code just plain sucks compared to green thread code that can just block, instead of having to do the async dances.

So, why engage with it when you already had good solutions?
by coronapl | 2025-09-02 17:41:42+00:00
That’s the paradox of Next.js: it can feel extremely simple and extremely complex at the same time. For a small hobby project hosted on Vercel, I’d recommend it. For building a full SaaS product, I often regret it.

I’ve run into this myself. I tried middleware, AsyncLocalStorage, even wrapping layouts and pages in HOCs. After plenty of research, it still feels over-engineered for such a trivial task. Ironically, my understanding is that Next.js on Vercel already provides a requestId by default.

Another recurring issue is the documentation. The moment you hit anything even slightly advanced, it becomes too simplified to be useful, and the only guidance you find is a handful of open GitHub issues.