MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rich_sasha | 2025-09-03 03:27:05+00:00
What the article and the comments don't seem to mention is also that the documentation is an outlier on the poor side. Most Python documentation is at least decent. asyncio hides a lot of the complexity behind a tutorial style "just do this" prose, only obliquely mentions the foot guns and gives little guidance on how to actually structure async code.

IME writing an asyncio Python application is a bit like fixing a broken Linux boot. You frantically Google things, the documentation doesn't mention it, and eventually you find a rant on a forgotten Finnish embedded electronics forum where someone has the same problem as you, and is kindly sharing a solution. After 30 mins of C&P of random commands from a stranger on the web, it works, for no reason you can decipher. Thank goodness for the Finns and Google Translate.
by thanhhaimai | 2025-09-03 03:28:16+00:00
Depending on the information Google knows about the incoming phone call:

- If Google is confident the source is spam (e.g. known spam center). The call is blocked outright. It still has a log that a call from this has been blocked.

- If it only suspects spam, Google will answer the call using AI bot, something like "Hi, I'm Google Assistant on behalf of XYZ, what's the call for?". The phone shows that it's screening a phone call, but doesn't ring. Only after the caller gives the reason, and it passes the spam check, then it rings the phone. You can always pick up the call early if you recognize what they talks about (from the transcript)

- If it's known good source (contact list, doctors,...), then it rings directly.

So far, the rate of spam I got is 0, and it screens about 20 calls a month.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-09-03 03:28:43+00:00
My small army of old android devices are plugged into a USB 'charging station' (multiple USB charging ports off a single plastic device) which in plugged into a smart switch. The smart switch turns on for a couple of hours overnight, to keep the phones charged at least minimally.

Most of the devices also have a custom ROM and are rooted, and using the ACCA app I restrict charging to a maximum of 80% battery capacity.

I had a Samsung Note 5 (released in 2015) that only went spicy maybe 6 months ago. I have a Samsung S9 and a Nokia 6.1 that are both still going strong with fairly recent versions of LineageOS. Both are 2018 phones, so around 6.5 years old (old for phones, but shouldn't be 'electronically' old).
by hakunin | 2025-09-03 03:29:04+00:00
I guess the “hard work = gains” sentiment is showing something, but since it’s literally a misnomer on its face, and people take it way too literally, I think it doesn't show what many think it does.

I think the problem is that work changed too fast. This shift is much harder to navigate. A lot of 20th century career conveyer belts have been disrupted in the last 30 years. A lot of schools are still setting traditional expectations that no longer match reality. This is why people think their work doesn’t lead to gains: job requirements have been swapped from under US workers, and everyone is struggling to keep up. That said, opportunities are larger than ever, but we have to become more "entrepreneurial" again, perhaps more akin to the way we were during Industrial Revolution. Take that English major and use it to become an excellent YouTuber rather than a writer, type shit.

> In fact, I'd go so far as to say everything about capitalism trends towards pre-made paths.

How do you explain every new innovation? Cars during the time of horses? Twitter during the time of Facebook and MySpace, family medicine during the time of hospitalists and experts (fairly new field), Amazon during the times of Sears, framework laptop during the times of Apple, etc, etc. People don’t always know what they want, and America is incredibly well catered towards starting businesses (at least until a certain guy in a certain white building does permanent damage). Saying that we’re all constrained to market is very reductive. We are more empowered to find new ways to be useful than ever before. Doing economically unviable things has never been ok.

I just want to make it clear that very specifically “hard work means economic gains” is ridiculous on its face, and a lot of people take it literally, without the caveat that you have to do something useful.
by CCs | 2025-09-03 03:29:36+00:00
Uses stress-ng for benchmarking, even though the stress-ng documentation says it is not suitable for benchmarking. It was written to max out one component until it burns. Using a real app, like Memcached or Postgres would show more realistic numbers, closer to what people use in production. The difference is not major, 50% utilization is closer to 80% in real load, but it breaks down faster. Stress-ng is nicely linear until 100%, memcached will have a hockey stick curve at the end.
by tzs | 2025-09-03 03:29:38+00:00
Per capita is relevant because while nature only cares about the total, it is people doing the emissions.

If everyone could emit each year as much as they wanted the total would go over whatever cap we need to keep it under to prevent catastrophic warming and sea level rise. Since only the total matters to nature then every ton of CO2 one person emits anywhere in the world has exactly the same impact as every ton of CO2 any other person emits anywhere else in the world.

In effect whatever cap we decide on for annual emissions act like a finite consumable for the year that is shared by everyone on Earth.

Unless you can come up with a good argument why some people should have a right to bigger share of that consumable than others, each person should get the total annual emission cap divided by the population Earth. Let's call this amount 1 share.

A government is doing its fair share to address climate change if it can get the emissions of the people under its jurisdiction down to 1 share per person.

Since nature doesn't care where emissions come it is OK if some people use more more than 1 share as long as others use less to balance it. A government just needs to get the average from the people under its jurisdiction down to 1 share per person.
by runjake | 2025-09-03 03:30:25+00:00
This guide for iPhone and Android is a good start. Not all their recommendations are obvious.

https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/guidance-mo...

For a deeper guide, check out the CISecurity benchmarks for your smartphone. They go a bit deeper. But the CISA guide will get you most of the way there.

https://www.cisecurity.org/cis-benchmarks
by bravura | 2025-09-03 03:32:20+00:00
An old bit in Harper's Index quoted that the average number of time you have to taste something you have an aversion to and develop a taste for it is 12. Like most statistics in Harper's Index, the veracity of that number is questionable and amusing. However, the idea that you might just need to try more than you think is what's thought provoking about citing this probably fallacious statistic. (Harper's Index was basically a nicely arranged list of thought-provoking cited statistics you weren't supposed to take at face value, arranged in a way to create a narrative arc.)

Another piece I read on this topic was aimed at foodies. The thrust was basically: "You're trying to broaden your horizons by trying different obscure dishes from other cuisines. Why not revisit the foods you hated as a child? I used to hate eggplant and thought it was slimy and now I love eggplant."

There's something compelling, in matters of taste, about addressing a huge blind spot you have been avoiding tackling instead of hyper-specializing in your chosen niche.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-09-03 03:32:50+00:00
You think like an engineer, so you're in good company here. I had a brief skim of the rest of your blog and there's definitely content that's interesting to me at least, and as I said in a comment above, the site design is beautifully easy to read and navigate. I plan on returning.

Others seem to agree, given your "I want to be left alone" post also got some HN love.
by safety1st | 2025-09-03 03:32:56+00:00
What's so mind boggling about this decision is that if there's one thing virtually all of America agrees upon, it's that Google needs to be reined in.

The Trump administration initiated this lawsuit. The Biden administration took it over and won the case. It's back on the Trump administration now and they wanted structural remedies.

The majority of Americans when polled express concerns about data privacy, security and monopoly in relation to Google - things Americans generally don't get that worked up about, but with Google, they know there's a problem.

Amit Mehta sold them all out with the most favorable outcome for Google that one could imagine. This guy, literally sold everyone in America out, the left, the right and the middle, except for Google management of course.

(This decision probably isn't even good for Google shareholders -- historically breakups of monopolies create shareholder value!)

I think Amit Mehta's impartiality here needs to be the subject of a Congressional investigation. I personally don't feel this guy should be a judge anymore after this.

If his decision stands this is going to be a landmark in American history, one of the points where historians look back and say "this is when American democracy really died and got replaced with a kleptocratic state." The will of everyone, people, the Congress, the Executive branch, all defied by one judge who sold out.
by abustamam | 2025-09-03 03:35:57+00:00
I would argue that social media banning is much different than Google/Apple banning. If I got banned from Facebook or reddit or even HN then I'm not really missing out on much. Of course, for people who actually do business on these platforms, like Jones, then it sucks to lose a platform, but I don't think anyone has a fundamental right to post whatever they want on these platforms.

If I got banned from Google, then almost 20 years of emails, 1TB of files on Google Drive, are gone. Many of the services I use that use email as a second factor, I'd be locked out of. (And before you ask, yes, I use an authenticator whenever I can, but for some reason some services decide to still only let me use email as a second factor). If I forgot my password at any site, can't reset it. Not to mention that I can't use my Android phone out of the box without installing custom de-Googled firmware.

I suppose the same argument could be made that I don't have a fundamental right to use Gmails mail servers, but as I pointed out above, it is more than just an inconvenience, it could actively be harmful to my digital life, because Google has its hands on almost all things digital.
by ajxs | 2025-09-03 03:36:02+00:00
When Instagram introduced reels, I started to get exposed to these weird and horrible clips of people 'rescuing' sick and abused animals, and begging for donations. I don't know for certain, but there's lots of clues that these accounts are engineering these encounters. Seeing these clips is genuinely distressing, and it's hard to make Instagram stop showing them. Just another way social media is causing real harm to add to the list, I guess.
by coro_1 | 2025-09-03 03:36:23+00:00
> Ironically this is also why there is so much existential fear about AI in the media. LLMs will do to them what they do to primary sources (and more likely just cut them out of the loop).

Maybe.. not. LLMs may just flow where the money goes. Open AI has a deal with the FT, etc.

The AI platforms haven't touched any UI devolution at all because they're a hot commodity.
by stingraycharles | 2025-09-03 03:36:25+00:00
Of course it’s probably credits, but it’s still beneficial to both of them — having such huge customers is ideal to stress test your product offering.

Also, just yesterday, they appear to have raised $13B from actual investors, so it seems like they’re going to be fine.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-raises-series-f-at-...
Tell HN: I kinda want to go back to Java
by throwmeaway222 | 2025-09-03 03:37:16+00:00
I left Java behind after using it for 20 years around 2018 or so. I've been using Python, Typescript since.

I think Python has made huge strides in recent times... but now with LLMs and Agentic programming - I feel like Java would absolutely be worth it again. Python helped us invent LLMs - it's quite possible if it didn't exist we would never had invented them. But my life has always been in systems, backends, etc..

Java was too verbose. Too many things to NAME. Now, agents can name shit for us. I feel like the verbosity would be absolutely worth it now - and put this compressed code life in Python behind me.

Anyone else feel this way, or are you Go/Rust/Python 4 life now?

I'm only hoping to discuss this with ex-Java's.
by ijk | 2025-09-03 03:37:54+00:00
Oh, OpenAI finally added it? Structured generation has been available in things like llama.cpp and Instructor for a while, so I was wondering if they were going to get around to adding it.

In the examples I've seen, it's not something you can define an entire world model in, but you can sure constrain the immediate action space so the model does something sensible.
by ryukafalz | 2025-09-03 03:37:56+00:00
This is one of the longstanding issues with Android, yeah. Pixel 5 went EOL in 2023, though did get some extra (probably security) updates last year.

OEMs and SoC manufacturers have been getting better about upstreaming stuff recently from what I've heard (thank you Qualcomm!), but as far as stock OS images go I wouldn't expect manufacturers to support them for one moment longer than they have to.

This is part of why efforts like PostmarketOS are so helpful. Ironically, if this was an even older Pixel 3a, you could run it with modern software: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Google_Pixel_3a_(google-s...
by epistasis | 2025-09-03 03:38:45+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.

The abhorrent level of crime is spread across the country, largely perpetuated by those who refuse to consider gun control. There were 16,576 gun deaths in the US in 2024, excluding suicides. 45 every day. About a third of those are children.

Chicago is close to 1% of the population of the US. Looking at three days, seeing a cluster of shootings, and not having the stats or basic business experience to understand the basic Possion distribution of events, is malpractice.

Whoever told you to be upset at Chicago, but not about the mass gun violence every day, tricked you. You got fooled.
by tdb7893 | 2025-09-03 03:40:07+00:00
Crime is down just based on the actual numbers (also anecdotally from someone who has spent the majority of their life in/around the city) and for most people the city is pretty safe right now. While there is violence this sort of pearl clutching historically hurts those exact communities you're talking about (and also is not how the people I've met from those communities described their experiences anyway).
by keiferski | 2025-09-03 03:40:24+00:00
It is mostly just proximity and framing. A hurt wild animal is alive and right in front of you. Meat from the grocery store is a prepackaged product that isn’t mentally associated with the bloody process behind the scenes required to get it there. The commercial aspect is pretty dependent on this distancing.

Case-in-point: I once stayed in a small town in Morocco for a few weeks. There wasn’t a grocery store nearby, just a market, and if you wanted chicken, they killed it in front of you. Needless to say, being directly confronted with the process…I didn’t eat meat the entire time.
by onecommentman | 2025-09-03 03:40:57+00:00
Xi is having his neighbors over for a BBQ. Showing off his kids. Which is great in a way, better regional stability for 3B+ people than the alternative.

Is he celebrating his administration? Are 1.4B Chinese happier than they were at the start of his administration? Well, they’re not in a hot war, there is no nationwide famine nor one on the horizon, no evidence of a civil war, no pandemic nor the initiation of one, continuous improvement of Quality of Life for most citizens (modulo looming real estate collapse)…so a big win by Chinese historical standards. At the expense of censorship, control and oppression unacceptable by Western (and perhaps global) standards, which his biggest neighbors don’t care about a bit themselves.

Doesn’t sound like this party is for “the West”, nor do they care what “the West” thinks…so it’s not really a “world stage” thing. If Mao is prominently positioned and this is a grand military parade, it sounds like a mid century retro themed celebration, appropriate for celebrating the 80th anniversary of the Chinese “defeat” of Japan. A sock hop for the CCP, with a dose of historical revisionism. But Xi’s big moment? Eh.
by MBCook | 2025-09-03 03:42:03+00:00
At the same time, it takes a certain amount of time for a CPU to switch power levels, and I remember it being surprisingly slow on some (older?) processors.

So in Linux (and I assume elsewhere) there were attempts to figure out if the cost in time/power to move up to a higher power state would be worth the faster processing, or if staying lower power but slower would end up using less power because it was a short task.

I think the last chips I remember seeing numbers for were some of the older Apple M-series chips, and they were lightning fast to switch power levels. That would certainly make it easier to figure out if it was worth going up to a higher power state, if I’m remembering correctly.
by altcognito | 2025-09-03 03:42:50+00:00
Can I ask a stupid question? Why is this so much worse than what they were doing to gather articles for traditional search engines? I assume that they are gathering pretty much the same data? It is the same articles, no?

— I just realized these are callouts from the LLM on behalf of the client. I can see how this is problematic but it does seem like there should be a way to cache that
by mleonhard | 2025-09-03 03:43:55+00:00
Location: San Francisco, CA Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: Rust, TypeScript, Golang, Java, Ruby, Python, Postgres, htmx, GitHub Actions, CircleCI, AWS, ECS, Kubernetes, Datadog, Sentry, React, HTML/CSS, Linux, Snowflake, and many others. Résumé/CV: https://joblin.app/profile/409373959 Email: michael206@gmail.com

I'm a generalist software engineer with strong opinions on how to build and maintain software while balancing quality, speed, and cost. I've worked at FAANG and startups. I'm a fan of design docs, lunch&learns, clarity, and deleting code. I care a lot about doing a good job and making things meet user needs. I also love unblocking teammates & other teams.

I've published a lot of code online, mostly Rust libraries, with good tests. I like working in the office, feeling camaraderie with my teammates.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-09-03 03:44:49+00:00
The benchmark is basically application performance testing, which is the most accurate representation you can get. Test the specific app(s) your server is running, with real-world data/scenarios, and keep cranking up the requests, until the server falls over. Nothing else will give you as accurate an indication of your server's actual maximum performance with that app. Do that for every variable that's relevant (# requests/s, payload size, # parameters, etc), so you have multiple real-world maximum-performance indicators to configure your observability monitors for.

One way to get closer to reliable performance is to apply cpu scheduler limits to what runs your applications to keep them below a given threshold. This way you can better ensure you can sustain a given amount of performance. You don't want to run at 100% cpu for long, especially if disk i/o becomes hampered, system load skyrockets, and availability starts to plummet. Two thousand servers with 5000ms ping times due to system load is not a fun day at the office.

(And actually you'll never get a completely accurate view, as performance can change per-server. Rack two identical servers in two different racks, run the same app on each, and you may see different real-world performance. One rack may be hotter than the other, there could be hidden hardware or firmware differences, etc. Even within a server, if one CPU is just nearer a hotter component than on another server, for reasons)
by jeyzolo | 2025-09-03 03:45:27+00:00
Recently I heard a lot of people talk about nano banana and they did lots of image generations. Maybe there should be tons of tools to make one. I follow them and also find one to make the image generation. Why did I choose it? because it has edit and more than one model to choose from. I can try the most recently popular image models. I think it's useful. And also it has a free limit per day.
by ankit219 | 2025-09-03 03:45:41+00:00
In Jan, when deepseek launched, Dario Amodei had to disclose they spent about $10M to train the last generation of models (his arguments was deepseek was on the curve, not breaking it).

They earned $250M in May based on ARR, and about $400M in july. Model training is going to be amortized over multiple years anyway. I am not privy to how much they spent, not going to comment on that. GM was public news, and hence I got that.

Re Zitron's analysis, I don't find them to be reliable or compelling.
by colechristensen | 2025-09-03 03:45:50+00:00
Coffee is an example, but there are plenty of others:

There's a pretty basic problem that a coffee grinder is a motor, the actual grinding surfaces, and the tubes that connect where the beans come from and grounds go to. Maybe add a scale and a little bit of electronics, but still, what does a $1000 grinder have that a $200 doesn't?

Indeed you have to get a lot of things precisely right to get a desired grind particle size distribution and that takes science and study and precision but the end product is still only a few simple parts that meet a specification. The problem is volume and just charging large amounts of money because that's how you attract customers in the "quality" space where having very good taste for quality is itself quite hard.

Coffee grinders are ripe for disruption with a low cost high quality product, but in order to pay for the engineering time to make one you have to have confidence in pretty high volume so picking a price point is hard.
by ath3nd | 2025-09-03 03:47:36+00:00
> There is no evidence to indicate this is the case

Burden of proof is on those trying to convince us to buy into the idea of LLMs as being "intelligence".

There is no evidence of the Flying Spaghetti monster or Zeus or God not existing either, but we don't take seriously the people who claim they do exist (and there isn't proof because these concepts are made up).

Why should we take seriously the tolks claiming LLMs are intelligence without proof (there can't be proof, of course, because LLMs are not intelligence)?
by tzs | 2025-09-03 03:48:39+00:00
President Trump apparently thinks that they have killed every state and country that has tried to use them. He posted this on Truth Social yesterday (2025-09-01):

> Prices are ‘WAY DOWN' in the USA, with virtually no inflation. With the exception of ridiculous, corrupt politician-approved ‘Windmills,' which are killing every State and Country that uses them, Energy prices are falling, ‘big time.' Gasoline is at many-year lows. All of this despite magnificent Tariffs, which are bringing in Trillions of Dollars from Countries that took total advantage of us, for decades, and are making America STRONG and RESPECTED AGAIN!!!