MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pyfan878 | 2025-05-04 12:28:51+00:00
I'm a backend engineer and my professional interests lie in backend development, distributed systems, cloud computing, and building data-intensive applications. I enjoy tackling complex technical challenges and designing scalable solutions that can handle large amounts of data efficiently.

Location: UK

Remote: Prefer Remote and Hybrid

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Backend, data pipelines, Python, Java, Scala, some Typescript, Kubernetes, Kafka, Postgres, GCP, AWS

Résumé/CV: https://blog.ammar.blue/about/

Email: ammarali121x AT gmail.com
by Rochus | 2025-05-04 12:28:57+00:00
It wasn't a complaint, just a fact. Btw. instead of natively porting the Oberon system, it's also possible to just transpile the Oberon code to C and then natively (cross-)compile the C code to the target architecture. That would even work with a bare-bone system. I have two Oberon system versions based on this approach (https://github.com/rochus-keller/OberonSystem and https://github.com/rochus-keller/OberonSystem3). Replacing the PAL/SDL adapter to a plain frame buffer and serial input seems feasible. Using a framework like https://github.com/rsta2/circle would make the task even easier. Of course the Oberon compiler does still generate code for the original architecture (one could replace it by a compiler using e.g. TCC as a backend).
by sanderjd | 2025-05-04 12:30:07+00:00
Yeah I think I do already see this happening in my work. It's clearly very beneficial, but its benefit is also overestimated. This can lead to some disenchantment and even backlash where people conclude it's all useless.

But it isn't! It's very useful. Even if it isn't eliminating 90% of work, eliminating 40% is a huge benefit!
by metalman | 2025-05-04 12:30:10+00:00
without a constitution that is the absolute definition of peoples rights and government power in an easily understood and brief document, you have nothing to govern, there is no law, just deciders, chosen in a popularity contest, each hopeing for a chance at dynastic power. the current situation highlights exactly what you get with an "amended" constitution the fundamental question is do we want a world where indivuals have very strong personal rights to themselves and there property, or do we want to meddle, pick, and choose, deciding this way and that....since the answer is very, very , clearly that most wish to meddle and decide about every little thing, then they can only complain about what they,have done, can do, will do again. It is impossible to meddle ,choose and decide our way into a prosperous, sustainable, just, and happy civilisation. pick a lane......
by isaacremuant | 2025-05-04 12:31:25+00:00
The idea is very fun and kudos on the author but it definitely feels lacking on the actual game commentary itself. My perception, is that it throws random fillers that don't quite feel like apt commentary.

If you're jokingly imitating filler from bad commentary I understand but I think I'd like more play by play and less color, but of course pong has a limited amount of inputs to work with for that commentary.

One thing that could very well work for the latency issue some commenters post is to just send the events and receive commentary outside of the rendering and playback so that it, within some max delay, can look more immediate and in sync.

Very fun idea. Hope to see it with more complex things with more inputs.
by amos-burton | 2025-05-04 12:32:03+00:00
> Unless you're a big fan of cosmology, there is no sign of our universe doing anything particularly interesting at a "the whole universe" scale.

to me it happens at such scales that i simply cannot fathom about it, only invent some story to myself.

To put a metaphor to it, it is like being a microbe within the gazillions of an human body. Those two world views operate at such different scales that they are appearing as different dimensions to both protagonists, IE, hardly visible to their eyes unless they produce a massive amount of intelligence.

gravity is a clue that what matters is that the experiment is actually going on, we are free falling, and because of my bias for survival, i feel like it must not stop, even though that seems counter intuitive...
by osmandinc | 2025-05-04 12:32:09+00:00
Recent Oracle Data Pump patches (19.17 and later — involving bug fix 33517865) have modified the behavior of DBMS_METADATA.GET_DDL, removing hashed passwords from its output as a security enhancement. Previously, users with the EXP_FULL_DATABASE role could easily access this data. Now, even with that privilege, hashed passwords are inaccessible unless explicit access to SYS.USER$ is granted. Oracle has introduced a fix (bug fix 35018026) that allows access to hashed passwords under strict conditions. Alternatively, a definer-rights PL/SQL function can be used to provide controlled access to this information.
by sanderjd | 2025-05-04 12:33:17+00:00
Honestly I hope this is true. I recognize this is a risky thing to say, for my own employment prospects as a software engineer. But if companies like Facebook could run their operations with fewer engineers, and those people could instead start or join a larger diversity of smaller businesses, that would be a positive development.

I do think we're going to see less employment for "coding" but I remain optimistic that we're going to see more employment for "creating useful software".
by DemocracyFTW2 | 2025-05-04 12:33:35+00:00
I feel like most of your answer is invalidated by

* the actual existence of frames (although those are deprecated)

* iframes (which are not deprecated, so seemingly doing declarative inclusion of HTML in HTML was not what was wrong with frames)

* imports in CSS, which share some of the same problems / concerns as HTML imports

* the existence of JavaScript with its ability to change anything on the page, including the ability to issue HTTP requests and be written arbitrarily obfuscated ways.
by tomhow | 2025-05-04 12:33:38+00:00
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer...

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by Jare | 2025-05-04 12:33:40+00:00
> The idea of "vibe coding" seems completely unrealistic to me.

That's what happens to "AI art" too. Anyone as a non-artist can create images in seconds, and they will look kind of valid or even good to them, much like those "vibe coded" things look to CEOs.

AI is great at generating crap really fast and efficiently. Not so good at generating stuff that anyone actually needs and which must actually work. But we're also discovering that a lot of what we consume can be crap and be acceptable. An endless stream of generated synthwave in the background while I work is pretty decent. People wanting to decorate their podcasts or tiktoks with something that nobody is going to pay attention to, AI art can do that.

For vibe coding, right now it seems that prototyping and functional mockups seems to be quite a viable use.
by Svip | 2025-05-04 12:34:28+00:00
Unfortunately, I cannot find an actual source for this ban. So many sites repeat the claim, but with no citation. So now I am not even sure it's true. I tried searching NHTSA's website, but it's kind of a mess. I do know, that Citroën pulled out in 1974 from the US. The CX, released the year after, was never sold in the US, and the last year of the SM, which was popular in the US, only saw sales in Europe.
by incomingpain | 2025-05-04 12:34:59+00:00
Already here; already in use.

If you had this, you wouldnt make it public. You would use it for as long as you can get away with it.

I very much doubt any government is the one to achieve it. It's not a cold war type issue.

OpenAI for example with stargate, 500 billion $ with softbank, oracle, and mgx. 10 datacenters all over the world.

But for what? They already have datacenters processing their load. What exactly is this new capacity for? That's an awful lot of power and silicon for no perceivable need.

It's for their AGI or whatever you want to call it.
by nkurz | 2025-05-04 12:36:56+00:00
The comment I referred to is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43881065#43882771. It links to https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9403981/. Looking at the abstract now (I hadn't before) it claims that injected doramectin was fully effective while ivermectin had limited effectiveness (29% of cases not treated). It doesn't seem to give a comparison between types of screwworm.
by apelapan | 2025-05-04 12:37:24+00:00
Not in any parts of northern Europe where I drive. You are usually (exceptions exist) supposed to reduce speed very much below posted speed limit before passing the bump. For example, posted speed is 50kmh but speed bump is designed to be crossed at no more than 20kmh. If you drive a less comfort oriented car, make that 5kmh instead of 20kmh.
by sanderjd | 2025-05-04 12:38:02+00:00
Yeah, I similarly have not had great success for creating entire systems / applications for exactly this reason. I have had no success at all in not needing to go in and understand what it wrote, and when I do that, I find it largely needs to be rewritten. But I have a lot more success when I'm integrating it into the work I'm doing.

I do know people who seem to be having more success with the "vibecoding" workflow on the front end though.
by DemocracyFTW2 | 2025-05-04 12:40:16+00:00
My guess is that some or maybe all of your concerns should have been solved by CSS @import (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@import) although, as I'm reading the first few lines of the linked article, those must appear near the top of a CSS file, so are significantly more restricted than an import that can appear in the middle of a document.
by celltalk | 2025-05-04 12:40:32+00:00
My best friend and I had been trying to learn Dutch for a while. About a month ago, we picked up some Donald Duck books in Dutch, thinking they'd be fun and simple to start with. But soon enough, we found ourselves constantly switching between the book and our phones, struggling to follow the story—definitely not the immersive experience we had hoped for...

That’s when I remembered those books with one language on one page and the translation on the opposite page. Inspired by that concept, I thought, why not use AI to create something similar, but even more interactive?

So, we built DuoBook.

Here's how it works:

1) Start writing your story in your language.

2) Select the language you want to learn.

3) AI helps complete the story, side-by-side with your native language.

It’s still early days, and it might not be perfect, but it's genuinely helping us—and we hope it helps you too!

Check it out: duobook.co
by chongli | 2025-05-04 12:41:22+00:00
Someone asked on the previous discussion why there's no heap but no one answered and replies are locked out, so I'll answer here:

There's no heap on the SNES because the system has only one program running at all times (the game). There's no point using dynamic memory allocation when all of the memory on the system is available to the program, so you can just start writing to any valid, writeable address you want. Some addresses are, of course, not writeable (such as ROM space), and some addresses are not memory (memory-mapped IO) but that's not a problem.

The really nice thing about the SNES is that it uses a 24-bit address space instead of the 16-bit address space of the NES. Most NES games needed to use mapper chips to swap between different ROM banks since with 16 bits you can only address 64KB of memory at a time and many NES games were larger than that. Having 24 bits allows you to fit your game into far fewer ROM banks, greatly simplifying the programming model and making it much more realistic to use a high-level language like C#.
by r-johnv | 2025-05-04 12:41:39+00:00
It was a fun browse through. I actually went through all 50.

I think you might have a bug in the counter though. It counts the number that you get right (I think), and loops back to repeat the first question until you have 50 correct answers.

The ad popup felt way too frequent though. It broke the flow. Once would have been enough IMHO.
by lxgr | 2025-05-04 12:42:15+00:00
GPS uses DSSS, not FHSS. The military version has a higher processing gain than the civilian signal, but it can still be overpowered by sheer signal strength.

I'm not saying that that's trivial against moving targets in a large area (especially if they can use directional antennas), but it's still very possible. GNSS jamming is a big concern of the militaries of the world, and there's currently somewhat of a renaissance of high-precision inertial navigation systems as a result.

Jamming a stationary satellite terminal, if you can get reasonably close, doesn't seem harder than cutting a fiber (although as a sibling comment has mentioned, jammers have the nice property that communication is restored once they're disabled, unlike damaged cables, so maybe the two can complement each other?)
by _1tem | 2025-05-04 12:42:57+00:00
With an SPA you're writing two apps that talk to each other instead of one. That is, by definition, more complex.

> You still have to deal with all the tooling you are talking about, right? You’ve just moved the goalpost to the BE.

Now you're dealing with 2 sets of tooling instead of 1.

> And just like the specific use cases you mentioned for client routing I can also argue that many sites don’t care about SEO or first paint so those are non features.

There is no app which would not care about first paint. It's literally the first part of any user experience.

> So honestly I would argue for SPA over a server framework as it can dramatically reduce complexity. I think this is especially true when you must have an API because of multiple clients.

So SEO and first paint are not necessary features, but an API for multiple clients is? Most apps I've worked with for over 15 years of web dev never needed to have an API.

> I think the DX is significantly better as well with fast reload where I don’t have to reload the page to see my changes.

With backend apps the reload IS fast. SPA's have to invent tooling like fast reload and optimistic updates to solve problems they created. With server apps, you just don't have these problems in the first place.
by skoodge | 2025-05-04 12:45:01+00:00
Are there any "guided" walkthroughs for someone who has never used Oberon (or any of its later versions like Bluebottle or A2) that demonstrate its most unique UI/UX aspects? Something along the lines of Russ Cox' Tour of the Acme Editor[0] but for Oberon?

Oberon seems fascinating and I would like to eventually play around with it in an emulator, but any resources that show how it's being used (as opposed to a description of its design like in Wirth's book for example) would be appreciated.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M
by magicalhippo | 2025-05-04 12:45:08+00:00
Yeah seems likely but haven't had time to really dig into it. For now our workaround works.

So my point was that if they want to keep parameter sniffing as default then short cache expiration can at the very least mitigate the performance cliffs that can occur. Better to have a slow query for 10-15 minutes than for hours. Recompiling once in a while shouldn't have a significant performance impact.

In general though I think in many cases Carmack's approach when he made Quake's renderer is a good one.

That is, it's often better to use an algorithm which is on average slightly slower but has much lower variance in execution time, than one which is on average slightly faster but has much greater variance. Parameter sniffing seems to fall into the latter category.
by sshine | 2025-05-04 12:45:41+00:00
I'm in this boat also.

Being able to migrate at low cost (and in little time) should be a high priority for any software infrastructure with availability expectations.

Especially with providers with very reasonable bandwidth costs (~€1.19/TB at Hetzner) beyond the first 20TB.

I also use Terraform, and it does lock you to one provider. Switching provider means switching the complete set of resources. They probably have the fundamental concepts in place (a DNS record, a VPS), but things diverge somewhat quickly, e.g. when it comes to virtual networking, SSH key management, external storage.

Keeping a redeployment script to a secondary cloud in your back hand means you don't have to sit and translate Terraform once the shit hits the fan.

I'm currently migrating my Terraform to Terranix, which just replaces the HCL with Nix expressions; since they both compile to JSON, using Nix lets you generalise across providers at the cost of a more complex language. But you also get things like arbitrary conditionals, e.g. "if X then provision Y else provision Z".

Ansible sounds neat for bootstrapping the servers, but it runs a little short on the ongoing maintenance because it isn't declarative, so you get runaway state divergences.

Also, sorry for hijacking this thread to talk about our lord and savior. :-D
by walleeee | 2025-05-04 12:46:04+00:00
I think it might be more urgent for the star-AI'd (ha) programmers to go out and touch grass. Do we really need more people in that pile right now? There is a lot of mundane but interesting/challenging work out there, humming along beneath the hype cycle of the day. It may not pay 300k or satisfy utopian urges, but then again, you should probably be suspicious if someone hands you fistfuls of money and tells you you're saving the world
by bramhaag | 2025-05-04 12:46:28+00:00
Some things are difficult to do with a Bluetooth keyboard: you cannot do anything before the OS is booted, such as changing BIOS settings, installing an OS, or choosing a GRUB boot entry. There are workarounds (buying a Bluetooth adapter that can act as a HID proxy) but for me this is enough of a reason to not want to rely on Bluetooth.
by Gigamegs | 2025-05-04 12:46:45+00:00
Algorithm for the open capacitated vehicle routing problem.

It takes the geographic coordinates of a depot and the locations clients with orders to be delivered by a fleet of trucks.

The class for solving the open capacitated vehicle routing problem.

It tries to minimize the total route cost by trying all possible combinations. The trucks are not required to return to the depot.

Website+git: https://tetramatrix.github.io/ocvrp/
Ask HN: I'm a New PostgreSQL Hacker – What Problems Do You Face with Postgres?
by DumBthInker007 | 2025-05-04 12:46:51+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm a developer diving deep into PostgreSQL internals, aiming to contribute meaningfully to the project. I have a strong grasp of core components like the internal architecture, physical replication, WAL (Write-Ahead Logging), and buffer management. I'm now expanding into areas like logical replication, asynchronous I/O (AIO), the optimizer, and beyond.

To learn and grow as a Postgres hacker, I want to hear directly from you—PostgreSQL users—about the problems you face, big or small. These could be operational challenges, performance bottlenecks, confusing behaviors, missing features, or friction points in your workflows.

For me, it's a win-win: you get a contributor trying to tackle real problems, and I get to deepen my understanding by working on issues that matter in the real world. If a problem resonates with me, I’ll do my best to investigate, learn, and potentially create a patch to address it.

Thanks—and I look forward to hearing from you!
by seba_dos1 | 2025-05-04 12:47:43+00:00
What I responded to was "wirelessly transferring files between a phone and a computer", assuming that I am the user at both ends of the transfer.

If I want to share something with someone else, there's a "File Sharing" section in phone's settings that enables anonymous WebDAV sharing, and it works fine too. There's Bluetooth OBEX too, but that one's fiddly.
by ses1984 | 2025-05-04 12:48:17+00:00
It’s not mostly free of censorship, you can find many examples of mild left opinions being censored. Harsh epithets against the out group are allowed, up to and including death threats, but mild epithets against the right are removed and often result in bans.

Free speech on Twitter is a joke, and you either are arguing in bad faith or you have no idea what you’re talking about.
by timcobb | 2025-05-04 12:48:19+00:00
I caught what must have been the last itty bitty tail of that. I was a 3rd grader in 1993 and were taught all about the card catalog and the Dewey decimal system and taking notes on note cards and organizing them in notecard boxes and how important it all was for research. I'm glad we moved on from that. For me, it was a drag.
by qudat | 2025-05-04 12:50:41+00:00
If you employ a "preload then rehydrate" data sync paradigm then you should never see a blank page -- except on initial JS load. This is just an improper data sync strat and has nothing to do with SPA.

I built a lib specifically designed for this strat: https://starfx.bower.sh/learn#data-strategy-preload-then-ref...
by skoodge | 2025-05-04 12:50:54+00:00
The linked pdfs on that page are wonderful. I reread Wirth's Plea for Lean Software and it still holds up remarkably well. It reminded me of Alan Kay's VPRI and the STEPS Toward the Reinvention of Programming which unfortunately ended in 2012. Oberon also doesn't seem to be actively developed anymore as far as I can tell. Are there any similar projects that are still being actively worked on?
by atoav | 2025-05-04 12:52:07+00:00
Never worked in customer support huh? Sometimes the first thing you ever hear from a person is them cursing at you. Some people don't even greet you and act downright uncivilized, yelling, aggressive, assuming you not magically only know their problem without them telling you, no you also somehow caused it, on purpose, because you're evil. They haven't even given you a passing chance of helping them.

As someone who grew up in the EU I believe that human dignity is an fundamental right, and that treating a person in a support role with basic manners is in the spirit of that right.
by znpy | 2025-05-04 12:52:14+00:00
I'd like to see something like MySQL's Group Replication in PostgreSQL.

HA is still a wheel you have to re-invent yourself every time with PostgreSQL.

References for what i'm talking about:

- Group Replication: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.4/en/group-replication.ht...
by lmm | 2025-05-04 12:52:47+00:00
> If my blog went down I wouldn't lose a sleepless night over it. I'd figure it out later.

And if your blog was serving malware, or really nasty porn, or taking part in a DDoS?

> Also, if all these were so much concern, I doubt so much of the web would run on Wordpress.

What is it that gives you that kind of faith in the industry's decision-making processes?
by sebastiennight | 2025-05-04 12:52:55+00:00
Or maybe "optimizing for the most personal wealth over anything else" and "optimizing for the longest healthy lifespan over anything else" are two different goals, pursued by different people.

As a result, extreme results in one or the other are not usually attained by people who do not have extreme prioritization of just one.

It is totally possible that a rare talented unicorn pursuing (and succeeding at) both goals simultaneously is needed for us to achieve radical life extension.