MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by packetlost | 2025-05-05 18:06:38+00:00
> "Userspace vs not" is a different argument from "consistency vs not" or "atomicity vs not" or "POSIX vs not". Someone still needs to solve that problem. Sure instead of SQLite over POSIX you could implement POSIX over SQLite over raw blocks. But you haven't gained anything meaningful.

This was an attempt to possibly explain the microkernel point GP made, which only really matters below the FS.

> I think this is reductive enough to be equivalent to "a key-value store is a thin wrapper over the block abstraction, as it already provides a key-value interface, which is just a thin layer over taking a magnet and pointing it at an offset".

I disagree with this premise. Key-value stores are an API, not an abstraction over block storage (though many are or can be configured to be so). File systems are essentially a superset of a KV API with a multitude of "backing stores". Saying KV stores are always backed by blocks is overly reductive, no?

> Atomicity requires write-ahead logging + flushing a cache. I fail to see why this needs to be mandatory, when it can be effectively implemented at a higher layer.

You're confusing durability for atomicity. You don't need a log to implement atomicity, you just need a way to lock one or more entities (whatever the unit of atomic updates are). A CoW filesystem in direct mode (zero page caching) would need neither but could still support atomic updates to file (names).

> A consistent networked API would require you to hit the metadata server for every operation. No caching. Your system would grind to a halt.

Sorry, I don't mean consistent in the ACID context, I mean consistent in the loosely defined API shape context. Think NFS or 9P.

I also disagree with this to some degree: pipelined operations would certainly still be possible and performant but would be rather clunky. End-to-end latency for get->update-write, the common mode of operation, would be pretty awful.

> Finally, nothing in the POSIX spec prohibits an atomic filesystem or consistency guarantees. It is just that no one wants to implement these things that way because it overprovisions for one property at the expense of others.

I didn't say it did, but it doesn't require it which means it effectively doesn't exist as far as the users of FS APIs are concerned. Rename operations are the only API that atomicity is required by POSIX. However without a CAS-like operation you can't safely implement a lock without several extra syscalls.
Ask HN: How Valuable Is Plug-and-Play Scoped Memory for AI SaaS Apps?
by designorbit | 2025-05-05 18:06:48+00:00
Hey HN, I’m working on a new tool called Recallio that aims to solve a problem I’ve personally hit while building AI-powered apps: LLMs (like GPT) are great, but they forget everything between sessions unless you custom-build a full memory layer.

We’re testing an API-first service that lets you:

- Scope memory per user, agent, or project - Write + recall data instantly via clean APIs - Set TTLs (auto-expiration) and export your data anytime (no lock-in) - Skip the infrastructure hassle of building your own DB + logic

We’re not trying to be an agent framework—just the memory brain you can easily plug in, so your AI can remember what matters.

I’m curious: - How are you solving memory for your AI agents or SaaS tools? - Do you rely on vector DBs like Pinecone/Faiss, or hack together custom solutions? - What’s missing in current solutions that’s been painful?

We’re in early access mode and would love feedback, ideas, or war stories. Here’s the landing page if curious: [recallio.ai]

Thanks in advance for any thoughts Andrew @ Recallio
by gbuk2013 | 2025-05-05 18:07:33+00:00
I’m a lead consultant on a gig where the CTO outright told us that he’s not really interested in growing their (frankly, under qualified) engineers, just wants them to get on with the job - it’s very short-sighted and sad.

That said, in my previous job in a startup we hired very junior engineers and gave them plenty of opportunity and support for growth and several people did stunningly well. Pity the company didn’t do very well (IMHO due to focusing more or this sort of thing rather than making money).

The truth is bound to be somewhere in the middle.
by simion314 | 2025-05-05 18:07:41+00:00
OK, so we name it something different, you transform inputs into smaller outputs. If I make a script without AI that transforms someones poems without permission so sometimes it outputs the exact poems but sometimes it does it wrong, when is my script fair to use and when what I did is illegal. say my script contains words and matrixes of numbers the original poems are not directly inside, the script transformed them into vectors.

maybe even simpler, I create a zip format where I randomly replace words with their synonym, or group of words with something equivalent. Would you defend this as original ? why my random transformations are not original while mathematical transformations you will defend ?

And how can you suggest putting output filters to protect only the giants for copyright and everyone else gets screwed.
by tptacek | 2025-05-05 18:07:43+00:00
Sure. But it's 2025 and however you want to get this feature, be it as something integrated into VSCode (Cursor, Windsurf, Copilot), or a command line Python thing (aider), or a command line Node thing (OpenAI codex and Claude Code), with a specific frontier coding model or with an abstracted multi-model thingy, even as an Emacs library, it's available now.

I see people getting LLMs to generate code in isolation and like pasting it into a text editor and trying it, and then getting frustrated, and it's like, that's not how you're supposed to be doing it anymore. That's 2024 praxis.
by drob518 | 2025-05-05 18:08:04+00:00
Yes, but a couple downsides:

1. For config, it spreads the config across a bunch of nested directories, making it hard to read and write it without some sort of special tool that shows it all to you at once. Sure, you can easily edit 50 files from all sorts of directories in your text editor, but that’s pretty painful.

2. For data storage is that lots of smaller files will waste partial storage blocks in many file systems. Some do coalesce small files, but many don’t.

3. For both, it’s often going to be higher performance to read a single file from start to finish than a bunch of files. Most file systems will try to keep file blocks in mostly sequential order (defrag’d), whereas they don’t typically do that for multiple files in different directories. SSD makes this mostly a non-issue these days, however. You still have the issue of openings, closings, and more read calls, however.
by topspin | 2025-05-05 18:09:14+00:00
The Thunderscope story had a comment about USB3 sampling as well. Here, you cite "check signal integrity," as a reason. I'm curious. Is USB3 signal integrity really an active area of research or troubleshooting? I would have figured this has all been well characterized and mostly solved by device manufacturers selling working USB3 components by the boat load for years now.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-05-05 18:09:31+00:00
> A very vocal group of people are convinced AI is a scheme by the evil capitalists to make you train your own replacement. The discussion gets very emotional very quickly because they feel personally threatened by the possibility that AI is actually useful

I read this like you are framing this as though it is irrational. However, history is littered with examples of capitalists replacing labour with automation and using any productivity gains of new technology to push salaries lower

Of course people who see this playing out again are personally threatened. If you aren't feeling personally threatened, you are either part of the wealthy class or for some reason you think this time will be different somehow

You may be thinking "Even if I lose my job to automation, there will be other work to do like piloting the LLMs", but you should know that the goal is to eventually pay LLM operators peanuts in comparison to what you currently make in whatever role you do
by didgetmaster | 2025-05-05 18:10:12+00:00
I built a local object store that was designed to replace file systems. You can create hundreds of millions of objects (e.g. files) and attach a variety of metadata tags to each one. A tag could be a number, string, or other data type (including vector info). Searches for objects with certain tags is exceptionally fast.

I invented it because I found searching conventional file systems that support extended attributes to be unbearably slow.
by WorldMaker | 2025-05-05 18:10:17+00:00
Sure, but Gateway Nasa can build a lot faster than Moon base using now institutional knowledge from ISS modules for bootstrap. Nasa and its collaborators have built one ISS already. To date no one has built a moon base yet.

Even in (harder) science fiction, a station like Gateway is almost always a first step towards building a first moon base, because orbiting in a bunch of cramped Apollo-style "command modules" is a bit silly if you can build a mini-hotel waystation with a shared orbit instead and in theory save on extra modules.

The Apollo-style was considered wasteful in the long term at the time, too, it was just easier and faster in the short term. The predictions that Apollo would not lead to a continued presence on or even near the Moon were rather right on the nose. We did the short term version once already, I can't fault Nasa for trying to do the real long term route if we're going back. (Because yeah, let's go back for good, this time.)
by xracy | 2025-05-05 18:10:21+00:00
Disclaimer: The below is not a complaint about the pi-hole itself, but the ways in which companies integrate ads into their online presence.

I've found my complaint about having a pi-hole is there are a number of services I use that expect/depend on ads existing in order to function. Things like, some shows on paramount+ (as an example) will fail to play (hang indefinitely) if an ad hasn't run before one of their shows, even though it theoretically shouldn't have ads?

Additionally, the other thing I run into, is that the first page of google is basically useless to me, even when the top result is an ad to the thing that I want, because when I click on the ad link, the pi-hole doesn't route me to the link I want. So I find I have to scroll down a half-page to get to the regular link I googled for.

If anyone has any workarounds for these issues, I've otherwise really enjoyed having a pi-hole. (Though my friends frequently tell me to stop talking about it, they'll say "shut your pi-hole", really weird).

Edit: Seems like they recommend tailoring the list of accepted domains for things in the article. (Will do this for paramount, I guess).

For Google, I separately stopped using an ad-blocker because it broke youtube when I did, even though I shouldn't get ads on youtube to begin with... God I hate the internet some days. But I imagine the easiest thing to do is to add that back so I can ignore those links.
by DemocracyFTW2 | 2025-05-05 18:10:29+00:00
> You opened a document on another person's computer and things were out-of-place, styling and spacing a bit different, page transitions not at same point etc.

When this happened to me on my job in the late 90s we were able to locate that problem in the printer driver that was visible in the Word print dialog. I don't remember the details but it looked like Word was adjusting font metrics to the metrics of the specific printer, and all the shifted pixels quickly added up to destroy the finely balanced lines of our print publication (yes, an official public health periodical by a European government was typeset with MS Word, and there was a lot of manual typographical work in each print). Given the technology at the time, it's not clear to me whether Word's behavior was a feature (in the sense of: automatically adjusts to your output device for best results) or a bug (automatically destroys your work without asking or telling you when not in its accustomed environment).
by xenodium | 2025-05-05 18:10:38+00:00
The UX itself is a unique strength. It feels more like a microblogging app. Easy to post, search, and browse your private feed.

Also, it feels much less like a journaling app and more of whatever you want it to be. Or as jcs from irreal puts it https://irreal.org/blog/?p=12908:

"As more and more users have started using the beta, I’ve come to realize that Journelly is a bit of a shape shifter that adapts itself to your needs."

Unlike Apple, Journelly is entirely offline by default (with optional iCloud syncing). It stores your data to a single plain text file (much friendlier for data preservation).

You can see it all in more detail at the blog post https://xenodium.com/journelly-like-tweeting-but-for-your-ey...

Hope that answers your question.
by throwaway348759 | 2025-05-05 18:11:03+00:00
As a fellow aphantasiac, I'd like to offer a contrasting view. I never felt the need to take a picture of an event in order to remember it in the future. Anything important, I can remember just fine, and the rest is naturally discarded. Aphantasia isn't a cognitive impairment, so chances are you'd struggle to remember events even without it.
by alganet | 2025-05-05 18:11:52+00:00
Remember when this idea bred those fake minimalist preachers? Mistaking constraint-based design for asceticism?

Too much constraints, you end up in a corner.

It reminds me of Windows Metro. That was good constraint-based design. Lots of clever thinking in the good direction. Windows 8 was great (hey, Apple copied some of it, the highest form of praise).

Eames was smart. Translating those things to tech is often a challenge. Keeping the thing human is difficult.
by ignoramous | 2025-05-05 18:12:28+00:00
> Could the ~430ms be startup time for a sleeping worker? Or is it the cost for a cache miss?

One won't really gain much insight for DoH / DoT resolver performance with one query per connection, I don't think.

For something as lightweight as domain name resolution, network latency / round-trip time dominate so much (for a public DNS resolver anyway) that the CPU-bound optimizations are almost always pointless if you don't first optimize your network deployment: For example, not running servers closer to your users wouldn't move the needle much regardless of how big your caches are, or the language your resolver is written in (C or Rust or hand-rolled assembly or SIMD/SIMT built-ins etc). A good indicator of performance of a pubic DNS resolver would be to monitor it over a period of time, to effectively rule out noise introduced by variances.
by aayush9029 | 2025-05-05 18:12:54+00:00
I launched Compose because I was tired of copying text into ChatGPT, waiting for responses, then pasting it back. Compose brings that power directly to where you're already writing with a simple keyboard shortcut.

Y'all are smart you will filter the bullshit so honestly it's free to try, do it and let me know if it's trash or not.

I will try to fix any issue you run into, because that will probably help me in the future (I use this a lot atm)
by danenania | 2025-05-05 18:13:07+00:00
You can read all of the prompts in Plandex (open source CLI coding agent focusing on larger projects): https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex/tree/main/app/server/m...

They're pretty long and extensive, and honestly could use some cleaning up and refactoring at this point, but they are being used heavily in production and work quite well, which took a fairly extreme amount of trial-and-error to achieve.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-05 18:13:45+00:00
There is a local taxicab provider here which uses a liveried fleet. All their cars have a customer-facing touchscreen mounted on the rear of the front passenger seat.

You would not believe the number of drivers who attempt to tamper directly with this screen, from their own seat, including while the vehicle is in operation. I have, at least once, terminated a ride early because of how unsafely the driver acted. There is never any reason for them to be interfering with a passenger control.

But drivers gonna drive, and more than a few are simply control freaks.
by wpm | 2025-05-05 18:14:18+00:00
We are at a point where exploration does not necessarily have to have a direct, clear, objective, obvious cost-benefit analysis in order for it to be a worthwhile endeavor.

Apollo also generated little science that couldn’t be done by machine. We have returned samples from comets, doing so from the Moon isn’t that hard comparatively aside from delta-v requirements.

The Space Shuttle? Massive waste of money just to put some satellites and telescopes up in orbit. A massively overcomplicated, and dangerous vehicle system that cost way more in the long run than the “disposable” rockets it was meant to replace.

None of it matters. The frontier on Earth is all but gone. There is no line to tow, no limit to push against and hang your ass over the ragged edge.

But doing so forces us to figure out solutions to problems we would’ve never faced otherwise, solutions that often have incredible utility back home. Artificial limbs. Insulin pumps. Camera phones. Aerogel and memory foam. Photovoltaics. CAT Scans. The list goes on. Innovations that either started or aided by the problem of making it lightweight/storable/safe for space flight, both manned and unmanned.

The list of problems that will need to be solved in materials science, computer science, rocketry, mechanical engineering, etc etc, of putting humans on the Moon for long term stays isn’t even written yet. It is the only worthy effort of our society to pursue it, after and during ensuring everyone is fed, housed, and educated here. Otherwise, what the hell are we doing here? Toiling away, making the funny numbers in the computer go up?

The universe has made it clear that if you aren’t busy growing, you’re busy dying.
by lsaferite | 2025-05-05 18:14:47+00:00
I would argue that as an individual, real person, obtaining content without a license and personally consuming that content is significantly different than a corporation doing the same. My rational is that distribution of that content is (or should be) the primary offense. If I work for a company and they direct me to collect a bunch of content without a license and then I pass that to other members in my team to train a model, I've now distributed that content at the direction of my employer. That should be the offense the company is tried for.

Using content to train an LLM is not copying the content. I'm ignoring the silly "but actually" arguments about the content being in RAM so it's "copying". It's using the content to generate a statistical model of token (word-ish) relationships and probabilities. If you write content that is so original in it's wording and I train an LLM against it, then there is certainly the possibility that the LLM could be provoked the recall the exact words you used. You'd have to set the parameters just right to make it happen and I think that proper training would drastically lower if not remove that possible scenario. But even if it doesn't, the LLM doesn't have a copy of that original content. All it has is weights representing those relationship probabilities. Yes, the minutia is more complex, but that is the essence. If my LLM were to generate enough of this essentially verbatim unique content and I tried to publish or copyright it, then I as the user should be on the hook. But then you get into a discussion about how many words in a unique sequence does it take to be infringement?

Obviously, I am not a lawyer.

My summation in all of this is that new laws need to be put into place to handle this stuff because the existing ones are sufficiently non-definitive and/or ill-suited such that every party is forming strong opinions about how old laws apply to new situations and causing massive friction.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-05-05 18:15:24+00:00
I think several orthogonal concepts are touched in this.

1. Students given bad incentives to be thrown into a system with a completely different purpose than their main goal. Then those jobs turning face to suddenly say "schools teach you nothing" and even refuse to hire the newest generation.

2. Students in general not being stimulated by primary school and given direction and vision on what to do in life. Simply being pushed by parents to "be successful".

3. The crippling reality as of late that a job doesn't even guarantee keeling a roof over your head anymore. Leading to discouragement to even bother trying.

4. Connected to #2, the decline of various apprenticeships, internships (which are now a college recruiting pipeline), and other ways to invest in employees. Even if they complain about new grad output, they are still content outsourcing such training instead of investing in their employees for a career.

There's a lot of systems failing which can arguably cause an entire collapse in the country. Then no one will get an opportunity to properly learn.
by stefan_ | 2025-05-05 18:16:10+00:00
Have you tried it? In my experience they just go off on a hallucination loop, or blow up the code base with terrible re-implementations.

Similarly Claude 3.5 was stuck on TensorRT 8, and not even pointing it at the documentation for the updated 10 APIs for RAG could ever get it to correctly use the new APIs (not that they were very complex; bind tensors, execute, retrieve results). The whole concept of the self-reinforcing Agent loop is more of a fantasy. I think someone else likened it to a lawnmower that will run rampage over your flower bed at the first hiccup.
by htrp | 2025-05-05 18:16:41+00:00
>That said, in my previous job in a startup we hired very junior engineers and gave them plenty of opportunity and support for growth and several people did stunningly well. Pity the company didn’t do very well (IMHO due to focusing more or this sort of thing rather than making money).

Mentoring is a key part of technical leadership, way easier to help the talent grow into your requirements (even if they are under-qualified, for now)
by agumonkey | 2025-05-05 18:17:10+00:00
I just had a day "off" because of some work on the 5G tower nearby. I can feel my brain chemistry change when the line is off. I don't feel the need to constantly check. There was a limited service bandwidth but it was too unreliable for my brain to want to wait for its dose of webpage refreshing. It sucks the long term / in-depth brain states .. it's so weird.
by dredmorbius | 2025-05-05 18:17:36+00:00
Even porous paywalls can have a marked effect on story performance on HN.

The New York Times tightened its paywall markedly in August 2019, with a net effect that appearances in the top-30 stories on HN's front-page archive (the "Past" links in the site header) fell to ~25% of their previous level.

I'd asked dang at the time if HN had changed any of its own processes at the time. Apparently not.

I suspect then that this reflects frustrations and/or inability to access posted articles behind the paywall.

See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36918251> (July 2023)
by dragontamer | 2025-05-05 18:17:55+00:00
Writing a bootloader in one file is easy enough and will avoid the need of a linker.

The issue is when you have two, three or four .c files that are compiled as separate units that then need to be combined together.

Today, AVR chips and assembly works perfectly fine with .elf objects. But you will likely need to mess with linker scripts to get your bootloader working across different setups.

Especially if you have an element of dynamic boot loading (ex: bootloader program that later continues to load more Application code off of a MicroSD card or UART or over I2C comms.

I'm really not sure how far you can get with this toy project without running into immediate linker issues (or linker scripts).