MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by harpiaharpyja | 2025-09-03 04:26:13+00:00
I've been working quite heavily with async Python for five and a half years now. I've been the principal developer of a control system framework for laboratory automation, written pretty much entirely in async Python. I say framework because it's a reusable engine that has gone on to become the foundation for three projects so far. Our organization is primarily involved in materials research.

At it's heart it's kind of like an asynchronous task execution engine that sits on top of an I/O layer which allows the high-level code to coordinate the activities of various equipment. Stuff like robot arms, furnace PID controllers, gantry systems, an automatic hydraulic press/spot welder (in one case), various kinds of pneumatic or stepper actuated mechanisms, and of course, measurement instruments. Often there might be a microcontroller intermediary, but the vast majority of the work is handled by Python.

My experience with async Python has been pretty positive, and I'm very happy with our choice to lean heavily into async. Contrary to some of the comments here I don't find the language's async facilities to be rough at all. Having cancellation work smoothly is also pretty important to us and I can't say I've experienced any pain points with exception-based cancellation. Maybe we've been lucky, but injecting an exception into a task to cancel it actually does work pretty reliably. Integrating dependencies that expose blocking APIs has never been a big deal either. Usually you want to have an interface layer for every third party dependency anyways, and it's no big to deal to just write an async wrapper that uses a threads or a thread pool to keep the blocking stuff off of the main thread.

I personally think that a lot of people's negative experiences here might have more to do with asyncio than the language's async features. Prior to stepping into my current role, I also had some rough experiences with asyncio, which is why we chose to build all of our async code on top of curio. There was some uncertainty at first about how well supported it would be compared to a package in the standard library, but honestly curio is a really well put together package that just works really smoothly.
by onecommentman | 2025-09-03 04:28:11+00:00
You buy home insurance by writing a check once a year. No impact on how you live your life every minute of your waking life. And I can choose to self-insure if I don’t have a mortgage…no mandate.

Masking affects every minute of your waking life, and those you physically interact with. That every-second transaction cost is too high for most, unless immunocompromised. Only ill-conceived mandates make it otherwise, and almost everyone hated them.

Using wheelchairs would prevent falls for young, healthy, normally abled people. The nuisance factor, efficiency, etc., though, imposes too high a cost for the marginal gain from reduced fall injuries.
by jMyles | 2025-09-03 04:30:16+00:00
"Fine" might be overstating things, but yes we need to move the conversation toward water ph, which is probably at least as important as heavy metal pipes. Municipal water supplies need to be from clean alkaline sources.

The smart money is on our finding, long-term, that PVC and PEX and all the rest of the final-mile water delivery materials are also dangerous in the presence of acidic water.

And yet, when you try to do a basic web search for alkaline water, overwhelmingly the results are crazy overpriced bottled water and/or con artists selling "water ionizer" or other such nonsense.
by willemlaurentz | 2025-09-03 04:32:02+00:00
More than 50% of the Apple Podcast app's homescreen is dedicated to content I didn't request, just look at it:

https://willem.com/en/2025-01-27_podcast-downloader/i_00_Lef...

I really wanted something simpler and following a simple podcast downloader script in bash I made a native Android app that plays these files.

Its party trick is that it remembers where you've left, useful if you like deep dives like the Lex Fridman podcast (multi hour listening).

Post on the player: https://willem.com/en/2025-08-29_auscultare-podcast-audioboo...

Post on the script: https://willem.com/en/2025-01-27_podcast-downloader/

I have written the app and the post by hand, for those who are curious, the original manuscript is available for download: https://willem.com/en/2025-08-29_auscultare-podcast-audioboo...
by Brajeshwar | 2025-09-03 04:32:53+00:00
I'm of the opinion that the marketing gimmicks that we see on some products but ends up either being acquired big or gets those big elusive contracts, is that they did those messaging on purpose to steer the general onlooker something else. However, their internals or when a customer talks to, say, the founders, they would narrate and then show such things that are 100x better than what we see in the open.
by all2 | 2025-09-03 04:35:14+00:00
> The code itself is basically disposable.

I'm finding this is the case for my work as well. The spec is the secret sauce, the code (and its many drafts) are disposable. Eventually I land on something serviceable, but until I do, I will easily drop a draft and start on a new one with a spec that is a little more refined.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-09-03 04:35:19+00:00
I'd argue that a user not having to click through is clearly a better result for the user, and that alone would be sufficient motivation to do it.

In terms of a single search, I don't think Google really benefits from preventing a click-through - the journey is over once the user has their information. If anything, making them click through to an ad-infested page would probably get a few fractions of a cent extra given how deeply Google is embedded in the ads ecosystem.

But giving the user the result faster means they're more likely to come back when they need the next piece of information, and give them more time to search for the next information. That benefits Google, but only because it benefits the user.
by antif | 2025-09-03 04:36:03+00:00
Seems like continuous edge testing would be a critical first step.

End users seeing water content in real time would absolutely motivate fixes.

Via ChatGPT, some groups of Chicago children are average 6-8 µg/dL blood lead levels, guaranteeing they’ll face challenges related cognitive disability. 100+ years of this—and all they need is good water filters.

This should be a class action to get fixed. No way the government can fix this alone in a reasonable time frame without focusing on end-users first.
by BrendanLong | 2025-09-03 04:36:21+00:00
Fun data point though, I just ran three data points of the Phoronix nginx benchmark and got these results:

- Pinned to 6 cores: 28k QPS

- Pinned to 12 cores: 56k QPS

- All 24 cores: 62k QPS

I'm not sure how this applies to realistic workloads where you're using all of the cores but not maxing them out, but it looks like hyperthreading only adds ~10% performance in this case.
by enoent | 2025-09-03 04:36:49+00:00
Besides the implementation effort in building from scratch, it also opens you up to unknown unknowns, while the limitations of mature software are better defined. Just because Jepsen didn't test other alternatives doesn't mean they are free from issues.

Regarding the Kafka issues pointed out:

* 2 only affect you if you are using transactions (and I would be interested in knowing of alternatives that better handle exactly-once semantics);

* Consumer.close() is likely off the critical path of your applications (personally I never encountered these hangs);

* Aborted reads and torn transactions were mentioned as being fixed by KIP-890, of which the mentioned ongoing work was completed since that article was published: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-14402
by ehsankia | 2025-09-03 04:37:45+00:00
1. It might not be the best across all metrics today, but it definitely was a few years ago.

2. While it's true that other browsers like Firefox have been catching up to Chrome in speed, it's still true that Chrome help lead the way and if not for it, the web would've likely been far slower today.

3. There has been an explosion in other browsers in the past few years, but admittedly they're all chromium-based, so even that wouldn't have been possible without Chrome
by blindriver | 2025-09-03 04:38:25+00:00
> That's a typical weekend in the US for a population the size of Chicago, nothing out of the ordinary for US fun culture.

This is an outright lie. Why don't you care about the lives being lost in Chicago?

Chicago has double the rate of homicide relative to LA, double the amount of rapes and 50% more robberies.

Why are you okay with just letting Chicago live in such high levels of violence by trying to pooh pooh away the facts?
by k310 | 2025-09-03 04:38:44+00:00
How about this idea?

Since a great deal of mobile usage is at home, how about a firewall of the home network as an 80/20 kind of solution? (YMMV) You might include a VPN.

This does not help away from home.

I have asked friends to use Signal for its many features, but I'm in low-tech company lately. They need a kick. Signal might address your messaging needs, and TBH, is better than imessage or FaceTime in mixed company. "Green people". Mainly because it is entirely crosds-platform.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-09-03 04:40:03+00:00
All my stackoverflow-style queries are now going to whatever AI chatbot is most accessible when I need my answer.

They tend to provide answers that are at least as correct as StackOverflow (i.e. not perfect but good enough to be useful in most cases), generally more specific (the first/only answer is the one I want, I don't have to find the right one first), and the examples are tailored to my use case to the point where even if I know the exact command/syntax, it's often easier to have one of the chatbots "refactor" it for me.

You still want to only use them when you can verify the answer and verifying won't take more time. I recently asked a bot to explain a rsync command line, then finding myself verifying the answers against the man page anyways (i.e. I could have used the manpage instead from the start) - and while the first half of the answer was spot on, the second contained complete hallucinations about what the arguments meant.
by g42gregory | 2025-09-03 04:41:53+00:00
I don't understand. The leaders are telling us that, with the advent of AI, we are going to need a smaller workforce. Including in Agriculture, where robotics will play a role in force reduction.

You can't have it both ways: you can't be telling us that AI will force people of of jobs and we will need UBI, while decrying reduction in population.
by oblio | 2025-09-03 04:42:24+00:00
Because the competition hasn't gone out of business (at least outside the US where tons of other ride hailing apps are available in most major locales) and because 16 (SIXTEEN!!!) years after founding Uber is still net profit negative: over its lifetime it has lost more money than it made.

The only people that really benefited from Uber are:

- Uber executives

- early investors that saw the share price go up

- early customers that got VC subsidized rides
by Scoundreller | 2025-09-03 04:43:41+00:00
It’s taken quite a few public transit infrastructure improvements to make Toronto’s more reliable in snowfall.

Trams used relatively unreliable trolley poles instead of pantographs until ~10 years ago.

Most of the tram network “street runs”, so slow automobile traffic slows them down.

Bicycle lanes become snow dumps when it snows a lot. There has at least been a more recent push to clear them of snow somewhat regularly at least instead of abandoning them entirely for maintenance.

The metro/subway still runs largely above-ground.

Lots of gas/electric train switch heaters installed on the regional train network but it can still fall apart in a snowstorm.
by petesergeant | 2025-09-03 04:44:20+00:00
gpt-oss-120b has cost OpenAI virtually all of my revenue, because I can pay Cerebras and Groq a fraction of what I was paying for o4-mini and get dramatically faster inference, for a model that passes my eval suite. This is to say, I think high-quality "open" models that are _good enough_ are a much bigger threat. Even more so since OpenRouter has essentially commoditized generation.

Each new commercial model needs to not just be better than the previous version, it needs to be significantly better than the SOTA open models for the bread-and-butter generation that I'm willing to pay the developer a premium to use their resources for generation.
by AllenM999 | 2025-09-03 04:44:56+00:00
I think this framing is exactly right: once you cross the threshold of intelligence and work ethic, “best” stops being a single axis and starts becoming contextual.

In practice, the engineers who end up being game-changers aren’t necessarily the ones with the cleanest codebases or the fastest prototype cycles — they’re the ones whose strengths match the moment.

A few real-world examples come to mind:

Linus Torvalds didn’t just write code; he created a system of distributed collaboration (Git) because the scale of Linux demanded it. His engineering contribution was partly social architecture.

Margaret Hamilton at NASA defined entire disciplines of software reliability and safety at a time when “software engineering” wasn’t even a recognized field. Her context required meticulousness and systems thinking over speed.

James Gosling’s creation of Java wasn’t just about syntax, but about building a portable runtime when fragmentation was the biggest pain point in the industry. He solved the problem the world cared about most at that time.

Guido van Rossum intentionally designed Python to be simple and approachable, betting on readability over performance. That “engineer as teacher” quality ended up seeding one of the most important ecosystems today.

The “best” engineer isn’t universal; it’s the one whose particular strengths — whether speed, rigor, clarity, or community-building — align with the bottleneck you’re facing.

So maybe the hiring question isn’t “Who’s the best engineer we can find?” but rather: “What kind of engineering excellence will unblock us right now?”
by kittoes | 2025-09-03 04:46:37+00:00
This just isn't true... none of the available data backs up these claims. Go back 10, 20, even 30 years and the trend has only lowered. Crime peaked in the early nineties and even the COVID spike didn't come close to that peak. If you're going to make such outlandish claims, then you'd better have something other than feels backing you.
by dhx | 2025-09-03 04:47:46+00:00
Windows has AppContainers which is for the most part a wrapper around the Windows Kernel Mandatory Integrity Level (MIL) feature.[1][2] MIL restricts certain API calls of processes depending on the integrity level of the current process vs. integrity level of a target process for the API call. The idea being a process with a low integrity level wouldn't be able to read or write via IPC to a process with a high integrity level. The process with a high integrity level would instead need to read or write via IPC to the process with a low integrity level.[3]

Because there are obvious architectural limitations of having a linear scale of privilege levels which one places all processes on, Windows has tried implementing "Windows Sandbox" as an alternative sandboxing mechanism that executes a process in a Hyper-V virtual machine that has restrictions placed on the interfaces exposed into the virtual machine.

I believe Windows Kernel still doesn't have any similar functionality to Linux's namespaces that are much more capable and flexible with sandboxing applications. The reason I recall is Windows' GDI subsystem (painting/drawing) being implemented within the Windows Kernel, not a userspace process as you see with Wayland compositors on Linux systems. This GDI subsystem I believe was the main problem holding back the Windows Kernel from implementing Linux-like namespace and sandboxing functionality.

Linux and common desktop environments such as Gnome also offer sandboxing out-of-the-box in more ways than a typical Windows installation, including as examples:

- very granular seccomp filters implemented for system processes (typically via the simple and accessible method of systemd service configuration) to only permit a process to make certain syscalls or access only specific system resources (files, network interfaces, etc)

- seccomp filters for revoking permissions on processes once they've started up and no longer need certain permissions. See for example OpenSSH and how it forks into less privileged processes once ports have been opened, keyfiles read, etc.

- Use of multi-process application architectures where each process is individually sandboxed, where a Windows equivalent would be a monolithic application. See for example use of "glycin" in Gnome applications for parsing and loading images in separate sandboxed processes from other parts of the application[4], or "tracker" again in Gnome applications which sandboxes the processes for metadata extraction from each file.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/book/appl...

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/windows-app-s...

[3] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/dotnet/a...

[4] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glycin

edit: some references added
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-09-03 04:47:55+00:00
Just doesn't seem very democratic, very American, very value based to go around blowing up people rather than, say, letting the coast guard do their job (interdict or track then arrest), which they do very well.

Also it's gruesome as fuck & deeply below us for the Secretary of State / National Security Advisor / Archivist of the USA to be posting snuff flicks. It's highly disturbing that Americans would be tuning in to extrajudicial murder by the government, that the administration is sending a message that just killing whomever you want to is fine, not just fine, but evening entertainment & something to cheer about. (So long as your president makes a national emergency declaration to declare whomever you want enemy combatants first. See: Designating Cartels And Other Organizations As Foreign Terrorist Organizations And Specially Designated Global Terrorists https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/desi... ).

This is all a particularly low point, that removes a lot of basic stops in America & cuts the standard for the rest of the world a whole lot for just killing whomever is in power feels like killing. Have some fucking morals & respect. There's no practical limits here, this is all made up. Way way way down the priority list, this is also absurdly ghastly expensive, and wasting our military doing more pointless shit instead of actually preparing for useful defense of the nation.
by vova_hn | 2025-09-03 04:48:39+00:00
What a strange webpage, it almost feels like the author deliberately avoids describing the game in any way and talks literally about anything else.

In case anyone else is curious, here is the description (one click away from the main page):

> LOVE is a cooperative online first person adventiure game. You play as a scavanger on a small planet who together with other scvangers will build a settlement by placeing a Monolith some where in the world. This Monolith makes the ground lose so that you can shape the environment around it in to what ever you want. Build walls, catacoms, houses and shape your settlement any way you want.
by kelseydh | 2025-09-03 04:49:29+00:00
When I was young I had a weird cognitive bias where I would think that if something tasted curious or different, that it must be good for you in some way.

E.g. the odd taste of licorice. Must mean that it was healthy or good right? Turns out licorice really isn't good for you. https://www.heart.org/en/news/2022/10/28/black-licorice-is-a...
by felipelalli | 2025-09-03 04:49:48+00:00
[REMOTE] Expert Software Architect (Core & Reliability)

At Eulen Labs, we build products for the sovereign individual, with a focus on security, privacy, and technical excellence. We are looking for a battle-tested, hands-on architect to become the guardian of our core production systems.

The Role

This is a deeply technical, hands-on position for a master craftsperson who prefers architecting and shipping brilliant code to attending meetings. As the technical owner of our high-volume core services, you will be the gatekeeper of quality, the champion of reliability, and the calm voice of reason during a crisis. Your mission: to ensure our systems run with unwavering stability and speed, enabling us to deploy frequently and safely.

Who We're Looking For

We are seeking an expert with 15+ years of software engineering experience in critical, high-volume environments. You are a pragmatist who lives and breathes automated testing, resilient architecture, and the relentless pursuit of improvement. You have a history of leading incident responses and a passion for mentoring others through exemplary code and rigorous reviews.

More info: https://jobs.eulen.app/announcement.html
by tim-- | 2025-09-03 04:49:52+00:00
I am guessing a business analyst (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_analyst). Basically, someone who facilitates creating and communicating stakeholder analysis across a business. The idea is that a BA would have a thorough understanding of everything across a business. Think of them as a product owner in scrum, except there is a bit more overlap working with different parties both internal and external to the business.

You will likely find a BA (or someone with a similar role under a different name) in most large organisations (and likely in quite a lot of medium ones, too).
by wakawaka28 | 2025-09-03 04:50:16+00:00
>Yes - that means regardless of seniority, I expect you to know CAP theorem. Sure, knowing CAP theorem does not imply you are a good engineer, but being a good engineer DOES imply you know CAP theorem.

There are lots of good engineers who don't encounter this, but who will understand the CAP theorem to the same level you and most other people you consider "good engineers" do, after simply reading the top of the Wikipedia article about it. Ultimately you need to be the kind of person who can understand such a thing to be a good engineer, not someone who knows any particular random thing. On the other hand I would like to know that the candidate knows the CAP theorem if we are working on a distributed database or massive web service. In that case it is actually relevant.

>Every few weeks, someone posts an article about how broken tech interviews are, and the articles always follow the same formula: but I’m really good at REAL engineering… it’s the INTERVIEWS that are wrong!

Interviewing is mostly a different skillset from day to day work. That is why everyone complains about it. Knowing that you are good at the job you're applying for, perhaps better than the smug interviewer, yet blocked because you can't produce an optimal solution to their puzzle (that they probably stole from someone else and/or could not solve themselves in an interview), is hella frustrating. If you urgently need a job, it is even worse.