Hacker News: stephenheron

New comment by stephenheron in "Hamming Distance for Hybrid Search in SQLite"

stephenheron — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 16:00:27 +0000

I've had good success in using this: https://github.com/sqliteai/sqlite-vector if you want something a bit more "off the shelf" if you are using SQLite.

New comment by stephenheron in "Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team"

stephenheron — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 16:29:52 +0000

We bought Tailwind UI and it was very good and I learned a lot of nice tricks from it.

Real shame, and I fear it is just the start of the impacts of AI on our industry.

Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

stephenheron — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 21:50:41 +0000

Hi,

My daily workhorse is a M1 Pro that I purchased on release date, It has been one of the best tech purchases I have made, even now it really deals with anything I throw at it. My daily work load is regularly having a Android emulator, iOS simulator and a number of Dockers containers running simultaneously and I never hear the fans, battery life has taken a bit of a hit but it is still very respectable.

I wanted a new personal laptop, and I was debating between a MacBook Air or going for a Framework 13 with Linux. I wanted to lean into learning something new so went with the Framework and I must admit I am regretting it a bit.

The M1 was released back in 2020 and I bought the Ryzen AI 340 which is one of the newest 2025 chips from AMD, so AMD has 5 years of extra development and I had expected them to get close to the M1 in terms of battery efficiency and thermals.

The Ryzen is using a TSMC N4P process compared to the older N5 process, I managed to find a TSMC press release showing the performance/efficiency gains from the newer process: “When compared to N5, N4P offers users a reported +11% performance boost or a 22% reduction in power consumption. Beyond that, N4P can offer users a 6% increase in transistor density over N5”

I am sorely disappointed, using the Framework feels like using an older Intel based Mac. If I open too many tabs in Chrome I can feel the bottom of the laptop getting hot, open a YouTube video and the fans will often spin up.

Why haven’t AMD/Intel been able to catch up? Is x86 just not able to keep up with the ARM architecture? When can we expect a x86 laptop chip to match the M1 in efficiency/thermals?!

To be fair I haven’t tried Windows on the Framework yet it might be my Linux setup being inefficient.

Cheers, Stephen

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45019483

Points: 452

# Comments: 620

Elon Musk's AI Company Acquires X in $45B Deal

stephenheron — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 22:08:25 +0000

Article URL: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/x-sold-elon-musk-ai-company-xai-1236175325/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43510348

Points: 10

# Comments: 1

New comment by stephenheron in "OpenAI Audio Models"

stephenheron — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 17:38:57 +0000

Quite disappointing their speech to text models are not open source. Whisper was really good and it was great it was open to play around with. I guess this continues OpenAI's approach of not really being open!

KBLaM: Bringing plug-and-play external knowledge to LLMs

stephenheron — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 16:43:26 +0000

Article URL: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/introducing-kblam-bringing-plug-and-play-external-knowledge-to-llms/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43414338

Points: 14

# Comments: 0

New comment by stephenheron in "Google Play adding permissions we don't use, then failing us for lacking reason"

stephenheron — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 22:47:20 +0000

One thing to checkout is perhaps some plugin/module you have might be adding this permission without you knowing about it.

Trying using the 'Merged Manifest' in Android Studio (https://developer.android.com/build/manage-manifests#inspect...) to see if you can see coming from anywhere.

Ask HN: Limitations of LLMs?

stephenheron — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 22:48:31 +0000

I have been thinking about LLMs just like everyone else, I guess! The prevailing sentiment seems to be they are going to change the world, from jobs to politics and everything in between. However, I have been wondering if we are perhaps reaching “peak” LLM and we will see a dramatic reduction in progress.

I am a casual observer of this space so I may be barking up the totally wrong tree, but I thought I would put these ideas out anyway to see if anyone has any thoughts.

Lack of quality training data: Is there a possibility that all the good quality training data has already been used? I would argue that most of the internet doesn’t actually contain good content, and increasing the amount of training data from the internet might actually make these models produce worse output. Moreover, organisations with valuable content could begin to restrict data access, presenting further challenges for training.

AI generated content polluting training data: This is somewhat related to the previous point, but is there a risk that with LLMs generating so much content that the training data becomes polluted with AI generated text. How would this effect the model output? Is it like taking a photocopy of a photocopy over and over again?

Compute Resources: We continually hear that Moore’s Law is dead, are we going to start running into compute/memory issues? Without dramatic increases in both compute/memory are we going to hit scaling issues where it simply takes too long or we don’t have the memory to train larger models?

Architecture Limitations: From my understanding so far adding more and more parameters to a transformer increases its performance. Are we sure that this scales? Or at some point does this performance increase stop or even perhaps go into reverse?

Hopefully these points are not totally off the wall!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38184172

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Ask HN: Google Load Balancer / Cloudflare Issues

stephenheron — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 23:25:41 +0000

Hi HN,

I am a bit of a loss so I am coming to Hacker News in the hopes someone has seen anything like this.

Approximately 6 hours ago we started getting a very strange error back from our site, that appears intermittently:

"Error 500 (Internal Server Error)!"

This error is a little bit strange, with only an HTML title and no body and a '!' being used. From a Google we can find no other references to this error, I did a search on Twitter and found 1 other reference to it, which is from a users complaining they can't get access to "https://beta.character.ai/". We verified that they are also seeing the same issue. The interesting this is that our site, also has the word beta in it which seems a bit suspicious.

We are running our site behind Cloudflare which is pointing to a Google Cloud Load balancer, from investigating the headers on "https://beta.character.ai/" we can see they are running a similar setup.

We have struggled to 100% identify if the issue is sitting with Cloudflare or Google but my current suspicion is Google.

If anyone has seen anything like this before, or can provide any assistance I would be very grateful.

Thanks, Stephen

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36608680

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by stephenheron in "Ask HN: How to Deal with ChatGPT Anxiety?"

stephenheron — Sun, 29 Jan 2023 11:48:15 +0000

I am glad people are talking about this. I have been feeling like this for the past couple of weeks. It's a difficult thing as I really enjoy coding but it feels like that part of the job will be changing in the future.

I think it's all about being adaptable, being here on HN and thinking about these things will put you ahead of others who simply don't see the change coming. Unfortunately we can't put the AI genie back in the bottle and we just have to be ready to adapt.

New comment by stephenheron in "Ask HN: How to learn about Linux system internals?"

stephenheron — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 11:37:21 +0000

I have never applied at Google so I don't know what they are looking for exactly, however I read "Linux Kernel Development" by Robert Love a few years ago and I really enjoyed it. It might be the best technical book I have ever read now that I think about it.

New comment by stephenheron in "Huawei 5G kit must be removed from UK by 2027"

stephenheron — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 12:59:00 +0000

I would encourage people to read the NCSC blog post on this as it goes into technical detail on why the decision was made.

https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/a-different-future-for-tel...

Facebook iOS SDK causing crashes on startup

stephenheron — Fri, 10 Jul 2020 10:42:35 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/facebook/facebook-ios-sdk/issues/1430

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23790089

Points: 19

# Comments: 11

New comment by stephenheron in "[dead]"

stephenheron — Fri, 10 Jul 2020 10:39:55 +0000

A fair few apps are crashing for me. I wonder if it is a similar problem to the Facebook SDK issues a few months ago.

New comment by stephenheron in "92 of top 500 subreddits controlled by same 5 people"

stephenheron — Thu, 14 May 2020 13:41:49 +0000

I quite like the Autosport forums: https://forums.autosport.com/forum/2-racing-comments/

Or if you are more into the technical side of things: https://www.f1technical.net/forum/

New comment by stephenheron in "NHS open-sources contract tracing iOS and Android apps"

stephenheron — Thu, 07 May 2020 21:34:56 +0000

Some quite interesting stuff around how they might be getting around the background iOS restrictions[1] can be found in the Android source.

Looking at the Apple documentation on background peripheral bluetooth, they state "All service UUIDs contained in the value of the CBAdvertisementDataServiceUUIDsKey advertisement key are placed in a special “overflow” area; they can be discovered only by an iOS device that is explicitly scanning for them"[2]

I wonder if they have managed to reverse engineer this overflow area so it is accessible via Android.

Someone did some looking into this and it seems at least feasible[3]

[1]: https://github.com/nhsx/COVID-19-app-Android-BETA/blob/maste...

[2]: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ne...

[3]: https://crownstone.rocks/2018/06/27/ios-advertisements-in-th...

The source code for the NHSX Covid-19 BETA Apps

stephenheron — Thu, 07 May 2020 18:36:11 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/NHSX/status/1258453749691027465

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23106480

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by stephenheron in "How Apple And Google Are Going To Enable Contact Tracing"

stephenheron — Mon, 13 Apr 2020 12:14:29 +0000

I wonder if they could reduce the power to the Bluetooth chipset to artificially reduce the range?

Might be possible with iOS devices as it's pretty easy to test each of them. Harder to do with the 1000s of Android devices that exist.

New comment by stephenheron in "Apple acquires Dark Sky"

stephenheron — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 18:42:55 +0000

Good for them but at the same time it is a shame for non Apple Users.

We use their embed widget quite heavily. Anyone know of any equivalents? I had a quick Google but can't find anything that looks totally equal in feature set.

New comment by stephenheron in "Ask HN: React Native or Flutter?"

stephenheron — Mon, 16 Sep 2019 08:42:37 +0000

We picked React Native and while it's not without its problems in general we quite like it. The community around it is pretty good and being able to use a wide range of JS/React packages is really handy.