MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by trelane | 2025-09-02 18:33:13+00:00
If you install guix as a user, it augments or overrides the software available on your base system.

It helps a lot on Chromebooks, where it's not straightforward to get a recent release.

It also helps to get up-to-date packages if you're a regular user and your admin doesn't have them for some reason (maybe RHEL or Ubuntu LTS.)

Or even just if your admin doesn't have the packages installed.
by andres_comity | 2025-09-02 18:33:34+00:00
Comity Inc. | Platform Software Engineer | Hybrid (Brooklyn, NYC)| Full-time

Comity is on a mission to improve the reliability, transparency, and efficiency of our energy systems, fostering a future with sustainable and abundant energy. Our team is leveraging statistical learning and convex optimization methods to build the financial rails of our future energy systems that will accelerate the deployment of clean energy resources.

You can read the full JDs and apply here: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/comity?utm_source=hacker_news
by odo1242 | 2025-09-02 18:34:02+00:00
Google Play Services effectively has superuser access to Android devices - it can uninstall or update Android apps, access app data, change system settings, etc. (The only way around this is to sandbox Google Play Services like GrapheneOS does, use an open source reimplementation like microG, or remove it entirely (but a lot of Android APIs, most of the ones that are Internet-based, are actually just Google Play Services APIs).

Originally this design was out of necessity (device manufacturers refusing to give devices OS updates to fix security issues), but it can also be used to do nefarious stuff like this. It’s also one of the main reasons Android is less secure than iOS (most Android vulnerabilities are in Google Play Services).
by benmccann | 2025-09-02 18:34:05+00:00
The number 3, 4, and 5 contributors to SvelteKit in the past year work at Vercel: https://github.com/sveltejs/kit/graphs/contributors?from=8%2...

Rich and Simon are incredibly important, but they're in it for Svelte and the community more so than a paycheck from Vercel. Tee has been doing most of the maintenance on SvelteKit currently funded by community donations. And this isn't counting other infrastructure like vite-plugin-svelte or the Svelte CLI which are entirely maintained by volunteers. I don't think Vercel funds a majority of the work on Svelte even if it might be close to it.
by serf | 2025-09-02 18:34:14+00:00
>I think you're really bending over backwards to make this company seem non viable.

Having experienced Anthropic as a customer, I have a hard time thinking that their inevitable failure (something i'd bet on) will be model/capability-based, that's how bad they suck at every other customer-facing metric.

You think Amazon is frustrating to deal with? Get into a CSR-chat-loop with an uncaring LLM followed up on by an uncaring CSR.

My minimum response time with their customer service is 14 days -- 2 weeks -- while paying 200usd a month.

An LLM could be 'The Great Kreskin' and I would still try to avoid paying for that level of abuse.
by throw-qqqqq | 2025-09-02 18:34:21+00:00
First, I don’t mean to criticize anything or anyone. People value such things subjectively, but for me the async/sync split does no good.

Goroutines feel like old-school, threaded code to me. I spawn a goroutine and interact with other “threads” through well defined IPC. I can’t tell if I’m spawning a green thread or a “real” system thread.

C#’s async/await is different IMO and I prefer the other model. I think the async-concept gets overused (at my workplace at least).

If you know Haskell, I would compare it to overuse of laziness, when strictness would likely use fewer resources and be much easier to reason about. I see many of the same problems/bugs with async/await..
by danaris | 2025-09-02 18:34:46+00:00
Also worth noting that this is not the result of some kind of transient phenomenon: the Republican Party and its allies in the business sector have been deliberately laying the groundwork for much of this for decades.

Just as one example, the Fox News network has been providing propaganda that strays far too often into outright deception for something like 30 years now, and, as many of us can attest, there is a whole category of people who have been watching it for most of that time and believe everything it says. Because of the way it frames reality, that also means they will refuse to believe anything that disagrees with it, and deem it liberal propaganda trying to trick them. My wife recalls telling her parents to "stop watching that" during the 2000 election campaign; they did not, and now are fully down the Trump rabbit hole, with very little hope that we could get them to believe even simple things like "some of the people ICE is detaining are fully legal".
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-09-02 18:35:08+00:00
You don't need to apologize - HN needs to get their heads out of the sand that not everything is a tragedy of the commons, there's a reason why centralization exists, and the decentralized internet as it is now comes with serious drawbacks. We're never going to overcome the popularity of big tech if we can't be honest with the problems they solve.

Also, sue me, the cathedral has defeated the bazaar. This was predictable, as the bazaar is a bunch of stonecutters competing with each other to sell the best stone for building the cathedral with. We reinvented the farmer's market, and thought that if all the farmers united, they could take down Walmart. It's never happening.
by roscas | 2025-09-02 18:35:17+00:00
Amazing work. But this is just a small step. You do need to block many Mozilla domains on your firewall or Pi-Hole because most of the times even Firefox does not respect your privacy.

If you reading this still use Windows, I'm sorry for you. Really. If you are using Linux, please use OpenSnitch to block this abusive pattern.

I hope these guys will add those settings to their also amazing job like:

https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js https://github.com/pyllyukko/user.js

These are config lists that I also use and it would be great to have this on those lists.

Again, thank you for your amazing work. I will apply this for LibreWolf also.
by tracker1 | 2025-09-02 18:35:36+00:00
Bearing in mind, this was a decade ago, and the backing tech changed since then... but at the time, the site was mostly classified car ads. Each page delivery tended to have several dynamic SQL queries to deliver the page itself, but also related content, most popular content, etc.

There was no caching and really normalized data structures on the backend when I started. During my time there, crawlers/scrapers quickly became more than half the requests to the site. Going from about 1M page views per day to 30M was crushing the database servers... I took the time to denormalize and store most of the adverts, and some of the other data into MongoDB (later Elastic) in order to remove the query overhead in search results... It took a while to displace the rest as it meant changes to the onboarding/signup funnel to match. I also did a lot of query optimizations, added caching to various data requests and improved a lot of other things.

That said, at the time, the requests were knocking over a $10k/month database server. Not every site is setup as static content... even if a lot of that content can and should be cached. All to service a bunch of crawlers that delivered no eyes and no value to the site.
by WorldMaker | 2025-09-02 18:35:50+00:00
It is one of the things I like about Colemak that it takes into account QWERTY's dominance in computers and intentionally doesn't move a lot a shortcut keys and punctuation. Semicolon is the most obvious punctuation mark that does move, most of the rest stay where they are. The big list of shortcut keys that stay the same place includes AZXCVBMWQ. XCV not moving is especially a big deal, as you also mention copy and paste as key shortcut examples.

In general Colemak doesn't move keys to radically far from their QWERTY positions (many stay on the same finger, even), so I've heard using it and QWERTY together isn't too bad. In my personal case, I had a terrible QWERTY form and realized I don't have to do anything but "hunt-and-peck" in QWERTY when using other people's machines. I may feel a bit like an idiot doing it, but it turns out, most people don't even notice if you touch type or hunt and peck (partly because so many more people hunt and peck than you tend to realize; even in a world where QWERTY touch typing has to be taught in schools, I think it is still a skill like Cursive that you think everyone else uses once you learn it, but you forget how hard it was to learn in the first place). It's more "my guilt" that I "use QWERTY poorly" than anything anyone else actually cares about.
by popra | 2025-09-02 18:35:51+00:00
"which they aren't" ... OK, you seem oddly confused about what's actually being discussed.

Let me help: here's a passage from the paper itself "On one hand, some scholars argue that populism is inherently illiberal [...]. Populist movements embrace majoritarian politics and seek to suppress opposition, often through a charismatic strongman who pledges to dismantle institutional constraints in the name of executing the people’s will. Under this interpretation, populism becomes synonymous with authoritarianism."

So while you clearly don't perceive populism as anti-democratic ... because you're immune to "doublethink", or something — others, including some of the people actually cited in the paper clearly do. Also, famously: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/think/article/abs/po...

And oh BTW, no. The majority choice is not automatically a priori democratic, unless by "democratic" you mean the literal Greek etymology of the word and not its actual meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_democracy
by immibis | 2025-09-02 18:36:10+00:00
$500 for exceeding 1TB? The problem here isn't the crawlers, it's your price-gouging, extortionate hosting plan. Pick your favourite $5/month VPS platform - I suggest Hetzner with its 20TB limit (if their KYC process lets you in) or Digital Ocean if not (with only 1TB but overage is only a few bucks extra). Even freaking AWS, known for extremely high prices, is cheaper than that (but still too expensive so don't use it).
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-02 18:36:28+00:00
When you're training an AI, that "mere data" adds up. Random error averages out, getting closer to zero with every data point. Systematic error leaks information about the system that keeps making the error.

A Harry Potter book doesn't ruin an AI's world model by contaminating reality with fantasy. It gives it valuable data points on human culture and imagination and fiction tropes and commercially successful creative works. All of which is a part of the broader "reality" the AI is trying to grasp the shape of as it learns from the vast unstructured dataset.
by collingreen | 2025-09-02 18:36:50+00:00
Thanks for the anecdote (honestly; this isn't snark). I haven't used bluesky and I like to see people's perspectives. Do you have any links to the inoffensive stuff that people thought was fascist?

Also are these official lists or are you just saying "someone out there put my account on their own list of accounts they don't like"? I dont know how the platform works and if its the first then wow but if its the second then I'm reading your comment and subsequent actions differently.
by collibhoy | 2025-09-02 18:36:50+00:00
Epic Scale Platform – Coordinate AI Development Across Teams Link: https://epicscale.dev Hey HN! I built Epic Scale to solve AI coordination chaos when multiple developers use AI assistants on shared codebases. The Problem Your team uses AI tools (Cline, Cursor, GitHub Copilot), but:

Developer A's AI makes architectural changes Developer B's AI suggests conflicting patterns CI breaks because AI tools don't understand team conventions 40% of time spent coordinating instead of coding

Real issue: AI tools work in isolation, even when humans need to collaborate. The Solution Epic Scale uses MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers to create shared constraint intelligence across your team's AI tools. Instead of each AI working independently, they coordinate through understanding your project's patterns and team decisions. What this enables:

Sarah's AI modifies authentication → context propagates to entire team Mike's AI automatically follows new auth patterns Lisa's AI suggestions align with both changes New developers onboard 50-70% faster through shared AI knowledge

Early Results Teams report:

40-60% reduction in coordination overhead 70-80% fewer integration conflicts AI suggestions that follow team conventions automatically

Technical Details

MCP servers for real-time AI agent communication Constraint intelligence that learns team patterns PostgreSQL + pgvector for semantic project knowledge Works with any stack: Python, Node.js, Go, Rust, Java, etc.

Supported AI tools: Cline, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Continue.dev, GitHub Copilot Example: Database Migration Coordination Before: AI modifies schema → breaks APIs → frontend AI suggests outdated patterns → hours of manual fixes With Epic Scale: AI modifies schema → API updates coordinated automatically → frontend AI understands new schema → zero manual coordination Why I Built This Traditional methodologies assume humans coordinate naturally. AI tools can't do this—they optimize locally without team context. The insight: AI development needs coordination infrastructure. Make shared understanding explicit through constraint intelligence. Try it: 5-minute setup, free tier available. Would love feedback from teams dealing with AI coordination challenges!

FAQ: "Different from better documentation?" Documentation is passive. Epic Scale creates active intelligence that directly guides AI behavior in real-time.
by npteljes | 2025-09-02 18:37:00+00:00
I needed to pick up Ruby for a two year job, and RubyMine made my Ruby learning so much fun. I really appreciated the clever autocomplete and especially the suggestions. It would give recommendations like "this works, but it's not how people do things in Ruby. Try this instead" and the recommendation actually looked so slick and elegant (and Ruby-like, and not Java-like where I come from). I hope in my heart that sometime I'll have to use it again.
by thaumaturgy | 2025-09-02 18:37:13+00:00
People outside of a really small sysadmin niche really don't grasp the scale of this problem.

I run a small-but-growing boutique hosting infrastructure for agency clients. The AI bot crawler problem recently got severe enough that I couldn't just ignore it anymore.

I'm stuck between, on one end, crawlers from companies that absolutely have the engineering talent and resources to do things right but still aren't, and on the other end, resource-heavy WordPress installations where the client was told it was a build-it-and-forget-it kind of thing. I can't police their robots.txt files; meanwhile, each page load can take a full 1s round trip (most of that spent in MySQL), there are about 6 different pretty aggressive AI bots, and occasionally they'll get stuck on some site's product variants or categories pages and start hitting it at a 1r/s rate.

There's an invisible caching layer that does a pretty nice job with images and the like, so it's not really a bandwidth problem. The bots aren't even requesting images and other page resources very often; they're just doing tons and tons of page requests, and each of those is tying up a DB somewhere.

Cumulatively, it is close to having a site get Slashdotted every single day.

I finally started filtering out most bot and crawler traffic at nginx, before it gets passed off to a WP container. I spent a fair bit of time sampling traffic from logs, and at a rough guess, I'd say maybe 5% of web traffic is currently coming from actual humans. It's insane.

I've just wrapped up the first round of work for this problem, but that's just buying a little time. Now, I've gotta put together an IP intelligence system, because clearly these companies aren't gonna take "403" for an answer.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-09-02 18:37:22+00:00
It does feel AI, but Ebru Guleç is also a _very_ Turkish name. It could be somebody who doesn’t have the best English is using ai to put together a coherent sentence.

Regardless of the origin, I’d prefer if the comment make an actual claim, instead of just talking about “questions raised”. I wish they’d try to answer the question they detect lol
by unregistereddev | 2025-09-02 18:37:30+00:00
At my current (non-tech) company, someone in our C-suite has a very similarly controlled, low energy, slightly stilted vibe. If you get to know him, he's a ME with fantastic technical chops. He was pushed into a management role and simply isn't comfortable speaking in public. Of course he's had presentation training and speech coaching, but that just adds to the highly controlled, low energy vibe.

I'm told that when I give talks it sounds like a lecture from a college professor. That's ... probably a compliment, because I thought my public speaking skills were even worse than that.

Point is, I think part of the explanation is Satya coming from a technical background and still being uncomfortable and coming across as slightly forced as a result. Ballmer was a marketer first, an extroverted businessman, and quite comfortable on stage.
by ecshafer | 2025-09-02 18:38:39+00:00
I am not Chinese, my wife is though.

I think, at least from my interpretation of it from being in China and having Chinese family, that something like underage drinking is seen more as a family issue, than a legal issue. What stops the 16 year old from drinking? The fact that their friends / family will see them being drunk, and think less of the person and their family. A 16 year old being drunk in public is family issue. Sure, the cops will intervene at some point, but China has very little drunken / raucous public behavior than the west does.
by AlexandrB | 2025-09-02 18:38:54+00:00
The whole LLM era is horrible. All the innovation is coming "top-down" from very well funded companies - many of them tech incumbents, so you know the monetization is going to be awful. Since the models are expensive to run it's all subscription priced and has to run in the cloud where the user has no control. The hype is insane, and so usage is being pushed by C-suite folks who have no idea whether it's actually benefiting someone "on the ground" and decisions around which AI to use are often being made on the basis of existing vendor relationships. Basically it's the culmination of all the worst tech trends of the last 10 years.
by Jensson | 2025-09-02 18:39:01+00:00
Many engineers want to deliver good products, not many care about the bottom line of the business. So instead of wanting them to care about your money, try to make money out of good products and engineers will happily take money to help you deliver that.

This does mean that when engineers have to choose between company making more money or a better product for users they will pick the users almost every time, that isn't a bad thing, just try to work with that rather than say such engineers are unhireable.
by tptacek | 2025-09-02 18:39:13+00:00
They're about the same. The important factor is phishing resistance (neither TOTP nor email links have that), and an account that has lost its primary email account is 99% of the time already boned. I would use TOTP in preference to email backup, but that's mostly an affectation.

The reality is that TOTP has been obsolete for awhile now. It's a net negative for ordinary users that is kept front-of-mind for everyone because nerds like us are attached to it.
by b33j0r | 2025-09-02 18:39:16+00:00
For me, once I wanted to scale asyncio within one process (scaling horizontally on top of that), only two things made sense: rust with tokio or node.js.

Doing async in python has the same fundamental design. You have an executer, a scheduler, and event-driven wakers on futures or promises. But you’re doing it in a fundamentally hand-cuffed environment.

You don’t get benefits like static compilation, real work-stealing, a large library ecosystem, or crazy performance boosts. Except in certain places in the stack.

Using fastapi with async is a game-changer. Writing a cli to download a bunch of stuff in parallel is great.

But if you want to use async to parse faster or make a parallel-friendly GUI, you are more than likely wasting your time using python. The benefits will be bottlenecked by other language design features. Still the GIL mostly.

I guess there is no reason you can’t make tokio in python with multiprocessing or subinterpreters, but to my knowledge that hasn’t been done.

Learning tokio was way more fun, too.
by krisoft | 2025-09-02 18:39:19+00:00
> You are free to use it yourself.

Idk. That's not how I'm reading it. Someone reading my blog is a user of the blog software. So running the blog and letting people read it would fall under that limitation and therefore would be prohibited.

I understand that's probably not what they tried to write, but wouldn't want to defend that understanding in a courtroom.

> It's still OK to rent a VM from them and use the package manager to install it.

Do you open up port 80 to the world? Because then you are hosting the service that offers users access to substantial features or functionality.

> In any way, it is really confusing, in a way a license should not be.

On that we agree.
by dougmnuel | 2025-09-02 18:39:57+00:00
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by andrewla | 2025-09-02 18:40:02+00:00
Okay. If a given carton of eggs weighs 1201g, how much does 1/3 of that carton weigh? If the volume of the eggs in a dozen is 769ml, what is the volume of 1/3 of that carton?

Some eggs are smaller than others; some are more dense, etc. Yes, the "count" is maybe sort of interesting in some very specific contexts, but certainly not in any reductive physical context. It only works in an economic context because we have standards like what constitutes a "chicken egg large white grade AAA".
by xg15 | 2025-09-02 18:40:16+00:00
I learned about the concept of async/await from JS and back then was really amazed by the elegance of it.

By now, the downsides are well-known, but I think Python's implementation did a few things that made it particularly unpleasant to use.

There is the usual "colored functions" problem. Python has that too, but on steroids: There are sync and async functions, but then some of the sync functions can only be called from an async function, because they expect an event loop to be present, while others must not be called from an async function because they block the thread or take a lot of CPU to run or just refuse to run if an event loop is detected. That makes at least four colors.

The API has the same complexity: In JS, there are 3 primitives that you interact with in code: Sync functions, async functions and promises. (Understanding the event loop is needed to reason about the program, but it's never visible in the code).

Whereas Python has: Generators, Coroutines, Awaitables, Futures, Tasks, Event Loops, AsyncIterators and probably a few more.

All that for not much benefit in everyday situations. One of the biggest advantages of async/await was "fearless concurrency": The guarantee that your variables can only change at well-defined await points, and can only change "atomically". However, python can't actually give the first guarantee, because threaded code may run in parallel to your async code. The second guarantee already comes for free in all Python code, thanks to the GIL - you don't need async for that.