MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-15 21:48:12+00:00
> The question seems to be when Stack Overflow will wind down operations, or the owner sells the site for comparative pennies, not if it will happen.

I see the latter option, but the former? SO, at least judging by their hardware posts, was running on nine servers two years ago [1]. That's barely anything in costs - electricity, uplink and occasional rotation of the hardware, but probably a single person working a decent job can afford to run the entire hardware for the site.

Truly shows how far a tight budget can go when you don't waste untold amounts of money and energy on layers upon layers of complexity.

> I'm sure we'll see spaces where developers hang out and help each other continue to be popular – whether they are in the form of Discord servers, WhatsApp or Telegram groups, or something else.

Yeah fuuuuck that. It's so annoying that everyone and their dog moved to these walled gardens. Google can't pierce them, unlike IRC of ye olde days where it was common to let a bouncer publish logs, WA/Telegram come with privacy risks and Discord is a hellscape.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34950843
by foxglacier | 2025-05-15 21:48:12+00:00
I'm not sure experts in education are really doing anything important. Even when they do discover effective ways of educating students, they're rarely implemented. It's getting further from the core issue. If you go even further still, you could say we need to fund, say, car salesmen, because they're enabling experts to drive to work or some other very indirect benefit. Sure car salesmen are useful but, like education researchers, only a tiny portion of their work goes towards creating top scientists.
by ok_dad | 2025-05-15 21:48:18+00:00
Yea, it's not perfect, and for some it is probably very bad to be in a collective culture where they can't stretch their boundaries or do something too differently than is socially acceptable.

Personally: I have mostly lived in a super-individualistic culture which, perhaps weirdly, feels more oppressive to me than a fully collective culture might. I now live in a place that straddles the two, and it works well for me so far. I think that it would be a dream if everyone could move to the place that feels most at-home for them, but until the world learns to share and support each other more, that is just a dream.
by coolhand2120 | 2025-05-15 21:48:23+00:00
If you're hesitating to use YJS take the word of someone who took the plunge, it's totally worth it on the other side.

I've written several apps now with it now. Very easy to use and quite robust to failures. It's a bit of a mental load to take on at first but it's totally worth it for the problems it solves out of the box. I've tried other things too from rolling my own ES stack to OT and more.

Lately I've got it running on AWS API Gateway V2 over websockets to lambdas + DynamoDB with a small army of daily users. The only expensive part is the event audit logs I keep due to my inherent mistrust of all computers.
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-15 21:50:17+00:00
I'd take just a 'scrape' of the text content of an article. Some sites take ridicilously long to load, don't work / display anything, or cause MBs of traffic for a few paragraphs of text (if that).

Separate that small % of content from the big % of overhead, for (almost) any site (news sites, in particular), and you have a winner.
by scheme271 | 2025-05-15 21:50:33+00:00
Forget long range drones, the Chinese have worked on a ballistic anti-ship missile (DF-21D) that can credibly threaten or destroy a carrier from 1000 miles/1600km away. It uses a conventional warhead and would limit carrier operations. Or at the very least, would make the US Navy think very hard about the risk/reward ratio of deploying a carrier group.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-05-15 21:50:44+00:00
When you're using Python the type of performance characteristics you're usually thinking of are "can i call an external library that runs this on the GPU" or "is this log(n) or n^2 complexity?" and such language translations shouldn't change those parts.

As in the language is regularly benchmarked at 10-100x slower than other languages. It's not a languages for caring about subtle performance characteristics outside "am i calling the external library correctly or not?" (as in this article) or "is this algorithm exponential time?".
by gleenn | 2025-05-15 21:50:57+00:00
In general, it's a dream to test and refactor Clojure IMHO. Working with mostly static top-level functions, immutability by default, and mocking when necessary with the use of "with-redefs" makes writing tests easy. Also, the immutability makes it hard to break shared copies of memory which seemed to plague my earlier tangos with large Java code bases and standard OOP practices.
by FrasiertheLion | 2025-05-15 21:51:12+00:00
>Since you rightly open-sourced the code (AGPL) is there anything stopping the cloud vendors from running and selling access to their own instances of your server-side magic?

Sure they can do that. Despite being open source, CC-mode on GPUs is quite difficult to work with especially when you start thinking about secrets management, observability etc, so we’d actually like to work with smaller cloud providers who want to provide this as a service and become competitive with the big clouds.

>Is your secret sauce the tooling to spin up and manage instances and ease customer UX?

Pretty much. Confidential computing has been around a while, and we still don’t see widespread adoption of it, largely because of the difficulty. If we're successful, we absolutely expect there to be a healthy ecosystem of competitors both cloud provider and startup.

>Do you envision an exit strategy that sells that secret sauce to a cloud provider or confidential computing middleware provider?

We’re not really trying to be a confidential computing provider, but more so, a verifiably private layer for AI. Which means we will try to make integration points as seamless as possible. For inference, that meant OpenAI API compatible client SDKs, we will eventually do the same for training/post-training, or MCP/OpenAI Agents SDK, etc. We want our integration points to be closely compatible with existing pipelines.
by makeitdouble | 2025-05-15 21:51:35+00:00
It could be the most impacting aspect IMHO.

This, and first party developer forums. iOS questions will go directly to Apple's community forums. Same for SalesForce, or Elastic search etc.

There's just a higher noise/signal ratio, a real chance to get answers from experts, and it makes for a stepping stone if the issues needs to be bumped to paid support.
by boroboro4 | 2025-05-15 21:51:38+00:00
> Now take this idea and average it across a large number of different items and you arrive at inflation statistics

If only it was as simple: you will need to introduce weights between different items, and account to the change of those weights too. Also gold isn't just commodity, it's monetary commodity.

If you use official inflation dollars you get 1$ 1940 ~= 23$ 2025. You can see how magnitude wrong it is for housing or cars in the example above.

Here's food prices from 1940 diner: > A 25-cent platter, 5-cent hotdog, and 10-cent hamburger. Also doesn't really work with official inflation dollars either. And again works much better with gold prices.
by coolcase | 2025-05-15 21:52:12+00:00
I thought it was going to be old old tech. Typewriters meet the requirements. As do tables, vases and vacuum cleaners.

If you want a chip then older personal computers. Like Acorn Electron or ZX Spectrum that boot immediately, and the only telemetry is the telly you connected it to to behold the 8 colour glory.
by derektank | 2025-05-15 21:53:13+00:00
I hate to break it to you, but it will be substantially more difficult to target other organ systems. The liver is uniquely easy to target with our current vectors.

Right off the bat, the liver receives roughly a quarter of all cardiac output, either directly or second hand from the digestive organs. Additionally, the liver has a fenestrated endothelium which, while not completely unique in the body, uniquely allows molecules like lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) to access liver cells. Finally, the liver is the site of most lipoprotein processing, and LNPs can be designed to take advantage of the existing pathways to get the gene editing mRNA into the hepatocytes. All this is to say that if you have a genetic condition that primarily effects the liver, there's a lot more hope for treatment in the near term than for others.

Good lecture on the difficulties of finding appropriate platforms for delivering gene therapies to cells for anyone interested [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/6URTjoK58Yc
by IshKebab | 2025-05-15 21:54:08+00:00
They really only have themselves to blame. Yeah AI has massively accelerated the decline but I think it's mainly provided an option that isn't so frustrating to use. ChatGPT never says your question is unclear or off topic.

I think if they had actually fixed moderation they may have had a chance of surviving, but I think they got trapped by relying on volunteer moderators who thought that it was good that so many valid questions were closed.

They did actually make some attempts to fix things, e.g. I remember one suggestion from the company that users could reopen a closed question at least once (which is a great thing to try!) and mods downvoted that to hell so they chickened out.

Definitely some shadenfreude, and I say that as someone with 100k reputation.
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-15 21:54:26+00:00
Set up StackOverflow according to "cloud native" recommendations and whoops, that's gonna be quite the bill, which is my point. You'll have Cloudfront for global load balancing, ELB to provide a bridge between Cloudfront and Kubernetes, EFS for storage, RDS for the database, EKS and EC2 for compute, ElastiCache for KV cache, add in CodeBuild for build/deploy pipelines... AWS has quite the hefty overhead.
by aaroninsf | 2025-05-15 21:55:31+00:00
I stand by my description, my assertions about Watt's own personal investment, and more to the point, the appropriateness of a warning.

As in another example of otherwise memorable and contemporary scifi, _Accelerando_,

the BDSM slash sex & violence slash misogyny tropes are utterly unnecessary to the plot.

They're an indulgence, and they narrow the prospective audience to those unbothered by, or excited by, such things. Everyone else deserves fair warning.
by that_guy_iain | 2025-05-15 21:56:09+00:00
> I mean, I’d personally tell them that I wasn’t going to leave the room, but surely it worked a lot?

I'm not sure if this is they told them or he thinks he would tell them that he wouldn't give up a meeting room they had booked. If I had a meeting room booked and it was just an internal team they wouldn't leave they would quickly be learning what me and my team did the day before and what we plan to do today.
by geysersam | 2025-05-15 21:56:14+00:00
You're right but if you want `y` to have the same shape as `x` I think you also need to slice it after

y = linalg.solve(A, x[..., None])[..., 0]

I don't really mind numpy syntax much, it gets the job done in most scenarios. Numba complements it really well when the code is easier to express like a couple of nested loops.

I used Julia for a while, but found it easier to predict the performance of python+numpy+numba, Julia has a few footguns and the python ecosystem is just insanely polished.
by jsbisviewtiful | 2025-05-15 21:56:24+00:00
> And there's very little to do with it.

My household grabbed an Oculus Quest 2 in late 2020. We used it for maybe 6 months tops and since then it has gathered dust. The games are either too expensive for a short experience or exhaustively immersive to the point they require too much activation and sustained energy. The library at the time was also very small so I would be curious to charge up the headset and see what has changed.

I think our headset was around $500 USD... Fortunately the Quest 2 experience taught us that $3500 USD for the Vision Pro was _absolutely_ not going to be worth the cost.
by Sharlin | 2025-05-15 21:56:28+00:00
I certainly agree with the point about post-hoc justifications – but isn't it amazing that it's also something very familiar to humans who do that all the time and manage to lie to ourselves about it very convincingly?! The more you read about neuropsychology the more you're forced to assume a view where the conscious self, whatever it is, has only a very tenuous grasp of what is going on and how much it actually has control over things.

In any case, you don't need accurate understanding of how your mind works (hello humans, again!) to be able to converge on

INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER

when there's no other uniquely good local optimum in the search space.
by sfink | 2025-05-15 21:56:54+00:00
Careful with qualifiers there. I genuinely believe that vaccines can spread illness to the non-vaccinated, since it has happened many times and is well-documented. For example, it's why only the inactivated (aka "dead" virus) polio vaccine has been used in the US since 2000.

I'm not arguing about whether the risks of the attenuated virus outweigh the benefits. I think the data are very clear there. (Heh -- and I'm sure the vast majority of people will agree with that statement, even if they disagree on what the clear answer is....)

It's just that one shouldn't mock a belief without including the necessary qualifiers, as otherwise you're setting up an argument that can be invalidated by being shown to be factually incorrect.

As for genetic modification of humans, IMO there are a lot of very good reasons to be wary, most of them social. Fatal hereditary conditions are obviously an easy call. What about autism (not saying there's a genetic link there to use, just a what if)? Or other neurodivergence? Like being a troublemaker in class? Or voting for the party that doesn't control the medical incentive structure? Heck, let's stick with the fatal hereditary conditions, and say the editing does not affect germ cells. Is it ok if the human race gradually becomes dependent on gene editing to produce viable offspring? Or let's say it does extend to germ cells. The population with resources becomes genetically superior (eg in the sense of natural lifespan and lower medical costs) to those without, creating a solid scientific rationale for eugenics. Think of it as redlining carved into our blood.

I don't think discrimination against the genetically modified is the only potential problem here.

As humans, we'll deal with these problems the way we've dealt with everything else transformational. Namely: very, very badly.
Show HN: Long Running Claude Code Remotely
by sean_ | 2025-05-15 21:57:12+00:00
Today I'm releasing Cloud Code: A way to prompt claude code from the cloud.

It lets you select a repo, a template of messages (or you can create your own) and you can then create your queries which runs through claude code synchronously to complete your task.

Our system is set up for long running tasks and is so new that it doesn't even support streaming yet, we just send the final message at the end of the run.

To test its effectiveness, I used it to create the mobile view for the cloudcoding site itself which works really well, meaning you can use it through your phone!
by benoau | 2025-05-15 21:57:14+00:00
Personally my usage of S.O. was significantly reduced just by sticking to the same stack and tools for the last 7 or 8 years and letting depth accumulate instead of always being in the midst of learning a new framework / language / whatever that necessitated googling how to do x in y or z.

And while that was happening VS Code started integrating MDN as well, so when I come across something I don't recognize I have a lot of extra information right at my fingertips anyway.
by bawolff | 2025-05-15 21:57:18+00:00
I think these sorts of things are just an unfortunate side effect of scaling. The bigger you get the more people get lost in the bureaucracy. However if you don't build up the bureaucracy the system collapses under its own popularity.

Wikipedia has a similar issue where editing declined around 2007, which is often blamed on stricter enforcement of rules, more complex rules, etc. I think its just a natural stage of growth. You can't be a free for all forever.
by techpineapple | 2025-05-15 21:57:24+00:00
Not sure what to think about this, but often (as in the linked discussion) it always starts out with the very fair "everyone should get to choose, you can use supplements", and then they start banning supplements:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/13/health/fluoride-supplement-ba...

Which makes me just feel like these debates are always hard to have anymore because you never know what debate you're having.
by chneu | 2025-05-15 21:57:46+00:00
https://awesome-selfhosted.net/

Huge list of self hosted stuff.

I personally run Plex(TV/Movie/music), Audiobookshelf(podcasts), Immich(Google photos), along with a bunch of other unrelated stuff like Home Assistant, Apache, etc.

It's all run off an beelink n100 and some NAS drives. Super cheap and useful.
by okanat | 2025-05-15 21:57:46+00:00
R sucks for any real programming tasks that you don't hardcode every single thing. It sucks at loading modules from your own project. It sucks to find the path of the script you're executing.

Bacially everything is stateful in R. You call standard library functions to install third party libraries ffs. And that operation can invoke your C compiler.

Putting R and a repo in a docker container to run it in a pipeline where nothing is hardcoded (unlike our datascience guy's workspace) was the worst nightmare we had to deal with.
by cosmojg | 2025-05-15 21:59:27+00:00
They are related by Landauer's Principle: E=k×T×ln(2), where E is the energy required to erase 1 bit of information, k is the Boltzmann constant, and T is the temperature of the system storing that 1 bit of information.

Information is physical. It is inextricably tied to the physical degrees of freedom of the system storing it. Per Landauer's Principle, erasing information is an irreversible process that increases the entropy of the environment, and this increase in entropy is the dissipation of energy. With that in mind, I would argue that you are correct, energy and information are in fact two sides of the same coin.
by epistasis | 2025-05-15 21:59:53+00:00
I have the same rage. But it extends equally to those who voted them in and donated to their campaigns, including my own family members.

They have created a huge rift in this country and I am still trying to figure out if I will forgive my family members and what they'd have to do to set us on a path towards reconciliation.

When there's a contract in place to conduct pediatric cancer research, and the government decides one day to break that contract, and it takes courts to rectify the situation, and then the government defies the courts, and the voters are cheering on the illegal actions of the politicians, well, rage is a mild word for what I feel.
by enriquto | 2025-05-15 22:00:14+00:00
Interestingly, the site stopped growing at about the same time when the "fun killers" [0] took hand of it. Notably, when they deleted the all-time highest voting question "New programming jargon you coined?".

This blatantly undemocratic and destructive behavior was of course duely punished by the (former) users of the site.

[0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/
by dbg31415 | 2025-05-15 22:00:32+00:00
> June 2021: Stack Overflow sold for $1.8B to private equity investor, Prosus. In hindsight, the founders – Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky – sold with near-perfect timing, before terminal decline.

Hey, if it all crashes and burns, at least it’s the so-called smartest guys in the room going down with the ship. Just a bunch of VCs learning the hard way that they had no idea how to actually run or grow the company they bought. “Look at how well we optimized it!” Yeah — right into the ground.
by wontonaroo | 2025-05-15 22:00:40+00:00
Firstly congratulations on your effort.

How does the graph component of your database perform compared to Kuzu? Do you have any benchmarks.

For RAG I've tried Qdrant, Meilisearch, and Kuzu. At the moment I wouldn't consider HelixDB because of HelixQL. Wondering why you didn't use OpenCypher?

At the moment you have this system which is aimed to support AI/LLM systems but by creating HelixQL you do not have an AI coding friendly query language.

With OpenCypher even older cheap models can generate queries. Or maybe some GraphQL layer.
by Balgair | 2025-05-15 22:01:35+00:00
Yeah, it's not a drama.

The reason that the body doesn't alarm as much to Pseudouridine, is that it's not a 'natural' RNA base. Meaning that, for the most part, nature really never uses it and so we haven't evolved to look out for it. Nature uses Uridine and so immune systems have evolved to look out for random bits of RNA in the body that use it and then clean that all up.

It's like if you're looking to clean up legos in you house with a romba that only cleans up legos. And all of a sudden it finds a duplo. It's going to take a hot second to figure out what to do with the duplo. And in that time, you can sneak by and build a duplo fort. (Look, I know this analogy is bad, but it's the best I can come up with on the fly, sorry. If anyone else wnats to come up with a better one, please do!).

The Pseudouridine is used up and degraded very quickly inside the cell, minutes at the very very longest, more like microseconds. It's just part of a messenger (the 'm' in 'mRNA') to tell the cell to do things.

You might see mRNA gene editing in factory farms, but it would just be easier to do germline editing instead and skip spraying animals, plants, and fungi. Why waste the equipment, right?
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-05-15 22:03:54+00:00
> Does AI finally enable truly humane interfaces?

This is something I keep tossing over in my head. Multimodal capabilities of frontier models right now are fantastic. Rather than locking into a desktop with peripherals or hunching over a tiny screen and tapping with thumbs we finally have an easy way to create apps that interact "natively" through audio. We can finally try to decipher a user's intent rather than forcing the user to interact through an interface designed to provide precise inputs to an algorithm. I'm excited to see what we build with these things.
by tqwhite | 2025-05-15 22:04:03+00:00
I've been using Claude Code, ie, a terminal interface to Sonnet 3.7 since the day it came out in mid March. I have done substantial CLI apps, full stack web systems and a ton of utility crap. I am much more ambitious because of it, much as I was in the past when I was running a programming team.

I'm sure it is much the same as this under the hood though Anthropic has added many insanely useful features.

Nothing is perfect. Producing good code requires about the same effort as it did when I was running said team. It is possible to get complicated things working and find oneself in a mess where adding the next feature is really problematic. As I have learned to drive it, I have to do much less remediation and refactoring. That will never go away.

I cannot imagine what happened to poor kgeist. I have had Claude make choices I wouldn't and do some stupid stuff, never enough that I would even think about giving up on it. Almost always, it does a decent job and, for a most stuff, the amount of work it takes off of my brain is IMMENSE.

And, for good measure, it does a wonderful job of refactoring. Periodically, I have a session where I look at the code, decide how it could be better and instruct Claude. Huge amounts of complexity, done. "Change this data structure", done. It's amazingly cool.

And, just for fun, I opened it in a non-code archive directory. It was a junk drawer that I've been filling for thirty years. "What's in this directory?" "Read the old resumes and write a new one." "What are my children's names?" Also amazing.

And this is still early days. I am so happy.