MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by m4rtink | 2025-05-27 14:54:35+00:00
I kinda had this sentiment until I actually started working - quite often an issue only manifests at an obscure customer system or is a race condition that it too rare to catch reliably, yet happens often enough so you can't just ignore it.

To solve those in a reasonable amount of time, you need to form a mental model of what is going on & how to fix it. Having access to a computer by itself won't really help for those.

In that context paper exams for computer science make much more sense to me now - they want you to understand the problem and provide a solution, with pen and paper being the output format.
by techright75 | 2025-05-27 14:54:36+00:00
Nope. The only problem America has is that it let so many people in illegally for so many years. The fact is that almost none (probably none but Im sure there is some weird exception you'll try to spin) of the people criticizing Israel are being arrested - only the ones who break laws while tangentially criticizing American allies. The fact is, you can go to X and see millions of anti-Trump and anti-Israel posts. Im sure it's far worse on Bluecry. The only ones getting arrested are those who violently threaten, break into buildings, hold up traffic etc. I know that the resisters think are some kind of bad ass outlaws, but in reality they are a bunch of nobodies whom no one cares about and no law enforcement is visiting - because it is still very legal to criticize the president and his policies no matter what nonsense you make up.
by ramesh31 | 2025-05-27 14:54:50+00:00
Cline is, hands down, the most effective agentic coding tool out there. I've extensively daily driven any one of them you can name, and there's nothing even close. The reality is that no one knows how any of this stuff should work, and RAG is just a term that was made up a few years ago; it has no strict formal definition. There's a long way to go before anyone knows what the correct way to do things should be, but they are clearly on the right path from direct experience.
by incomingpain | 2025-05-27 14:54:53+00:00
Our IOS XR chassis' have gotten some of these packets. Corresponding with high bgp route advertisements. No idea what equipment upstream uses tbh.

Makes me wonder if the BGP protocol is properly fuzzed. Perhaps its one of those things that everyone is scared to try to knock over given it's so important.

I suppose it would be easy to write a fuzzer for bgp but very hard to diagnose crashes?
by snickerbockers | 2025-05-27 14:55:03+00:00
i was actually trying to accuse the 10% of lying to themselves on a subconscious level, because the portion of undergraduates who actually came there to learn and not just because it's a roadblock in the way of gainful employment is a rounding error.

More to the point, the universities need to realize they're more like job certification centers and stop pretending their students aren't just there to take tests and get certified. Ideally they'd stop co-operating with employers that want to use them as a filter for their hiring process instead but even I'm not dumb enough to think that could ever happen, they'd be cutting off a massive source of revenue and putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage.

Like I said I don't actually have a viable solution to any of this but as long we all lie to ourselves about education being some noble institution that it clearly isn't (i mean for undergrad and masters, it might actually still be that at the phd level) then nobody will ever solve anything.
by margotli | 2025-05-27 14:55:19+00:00
This isn't another dull "what's your data stack" survey. We want to dive deep into the real reasons behind the choices data teams make, when they make them, and whether they're truly happy with their decisions. We're still collecting responses, but so far, the average satisfaction score for current data stacks is only 7. Where do you stand?

Once we have the full results, we'll create a no-marketing, no-BS guide and open-source everything: the results, dataset, and report. No gates, no fluff, just facts.
by joshsm5 | 2025-05-27 14:55:35+00:00
Sorry, holiday, but I was referring to having a separate region for failover, which is called "Geo redundant backup" in Azure Database for Postgres. Whereas with Exadata you need an entirely separate Exadata rack in a different region with the licensing of DataGuard on top of it.

There are a lot of extensions that most cloud providers support, auto range partitioning isn't built into Postgres like Oracle but it's supported with an extension for example. Azure Database supports more than AWS last I checked. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/postgresql/extension...

I will have to check with our DBAs if we use the scan feature or not, appreciate you pointing it out.
by hakunin | 2025-05-27 14:55:39+00:00
In 2010 I built a small HTPC[1] in an Antec ISK300-150[2]. Started out with 500GB HDD + 8GB RAM, then replaced with 2TB SSD, then added another 4TB SSD and another 8GB of RAM recently. Started out TV-connected, but for years now it's been running Ubuntu headlessly in my basement, hosting containers, automations, TimeMachines, etc. Not sure if you'd call it a homelab. Wonder what do people do with their multi-PC racks that can't be done with one small machine like this? (besides running LLMs of course)

[1]: https://notes.max.engineer/htpc-hardware-specs

[2]: https://www.antec.com/product/case/isk300-150
by tschumacher | 2025-05-27 14:55:40+00:00
I'm kind of happy that I did my maths courses just about before LLMs did become available. The math homework was the only thing in my CS studies where I sat sometimes 6+ hours on the weekly exercises and I always allocated one day for them. I sometimes felt really tempted to look stuff up and also rarely found an answer on Metroid Mathplanet forums. But it's really hard to Google math exercises and if the teachers are motivated enough to write new slightly altered questions each year they are practically impossible to Google. With LLMs I'm sure that I would have looked up a lot more. In the end getting 90% of the points and really struggling for it was rewarding and taught me a lot - although I'll probably never need these skills.
by aantix | 2025-05-27 14:55:41+00:00
It's a web app. I'm developing it as a PWA for easy installation on mobile devices. No app or app store required. Installation is like adding a bookmark.

https://www.bitcot.com/how-to-install-a-pwa-to-your-device/

Since it's a web app, I don't see why it couldn't be installed on any TV with a built-in web browser.
Ask HN: Can any LLM one-shot a Markdown viewer with automatic indentation?
by prmph | 2025-05-27 14:55:54+00:00
Here a test for the LLM believers:

I have been frustrated that most markdown viewers don't do automatic indentation of section levels. It makes a world of difference in being able to scan larger documents and pick out what you want easily. The next step would be to allow section folding, but for now just indentation would be very useful.

Word processors do it, and it seems like a pretty simple to implement for markdown, so I don't know why most MD editor don't have it.

Anyway, I thought, this is a perfect test of LLMs and AI code assistants. The problem and solution is straightforward conceptually, and I don't even care about the platform and architecture used to accomplish it.

Here's my prompt:

> Implement a simple markdown viewer web application, maybe using the file API, that allows one to open a local .MD file, and displays it with automatic indentation of sections based on their level. Use Typescript, on Node or Bun or similar. I intend to run the app on MacOS

So far (last tested a month or two ago) all the major models fall flat. Some even give me code that will not run; of the rest, none has provided code that basically does the thing I've asked for.
by cdelsolar | 2025-05-27 14:56:03+00:00
Cline is the most impressive agentic coder tool I’ve used and it seems to be getting better. I’ve learned to work with it to the extent where I can plan with it for 10-15 minutes, set it loose on my codebase, go get lunch, and then its diff is almost always completely on the money. You should commit often for those rare cases where it goes off the rails (which seems to happen less frequently now).

Using Gemini 2.5 pro is also pretty cheap, I think they figured out prompt caching because it definitely was not cheap when it came out.
by nathan_compton | 2025-05-27 14:56:21+00:00
The goal isn't work - its simply that I acknowledge that AI can perform a lot of labor that students previously had to spend a lot of time on. Because they have more time, my ambitions for what they can accomplish are higher.

I teach data science, which involves a lot of relatively unimportant glueing together of libraries. Yes, I want the students to know how to program, but the key skills are actually coming to grips with data, applying methods correctly, etc. The AI can make writing out the actual code substantially more efficient for them and I expect them to use that saved time to understand higher level skills.
by bob1029 | 2025-05-27 14:56:26+00:00
I strongly agree with the architecture piece.

Seeing the difference in complexity between a distributed "monolith" and an actual one makes me wonder how serious some of us are about serving the customer. The speed with which you can build a rails or PHP app makes everything proposed since 2016 seem kind of pointless from a business standpoint. Many SaaS B2B products could be refactored into a single powershell/bash script.

It can take a very firm hand to guide a team away from the shiny distractions. There is no way in hell an obsequious AI contraption will be able to fill this role. I know for a fact the LLMs are guiding developers towards more complexity because I have to constantly prompt things like "do not use 3rd party dependencies" and "demonstrate using pseudocode first" to avoid getting sucked into npm Narnia.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-05-27 14:57:14+00:00
Realistically, it was probably graduating high school. It's step one in the so-called 'success sequence' for a reason:

1. Finish high school.

2. Get a full-time job once you finish school.

3. Get married before you have children.

97% of millennials who followed that sequence avoided poverty by the time we hit age 30 or so, so it's got a pretty good success rate. #2 has the most immediate impact here, but #1 makes #2 much easier, and not following #3 sadly makes #2 moderately harder (juggling childcare is tough even in the best of circumstances).

Finishing college would be a somewhat distant second, as it makes the entry pathway into a lot of white collar jobs a lot easier, even internationally. This was especially important when I realized pretty soon after finishing college that I had good reason to leave the US.

I'm now happily married with kids and full time employed in a senior position here in Finland, all by 30, so I'd say I've done pretty well for myself.
by quesera | 2025-05-27 14:57:32+00:00
I am guessing that the data feed requirements of ATC telemetry are fairly modest, well within the range that a pair of analog modems could handle. You don't have to send a raw radar feed to the airport, just put the intelligence (object detection, delta computation, etc) at the endpoints and transmit the results.

I'm also guessing that they do this every day at hundreds of other airports, and it works just fine.

Moving to fiber gives you greater bandwidth, reliability, multipath redundancy, etc. But I bet the real motivation is access to newer and more general communications equipment. Maintaining the old, perfectly adequate but increasingly unusual hardware/software is more of a pain than replacing with new stuff that exceeds requirements but is maintained just like all the other modern stuff everywhere.

All guesses. I do not work in ATC, but I've seen the pattern in other industries with similarish requirements.
by formalreconfirm | 2025-05-27 14:57:40+00:00
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but from my understanding, DuckDB will always be the query engine, thus I suppose you will have access to DuckDB query parallelism (single node but multithreaded with disk spilling etc) + statistics-based optimizations like file pruning, predicate pushdown etc offered by DuckLake. I think DuckLake is heavily coupled to DuckDB (Which is good for our use case). Again, this is my understanding, correct me if wrong.
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-27 14:58:03+00:00
Well, it reinforces the hypothetical argument that sites like this have a mechanisms whic promotes settling into some kind of self-reinforcing content patterns. You’d have to actually show what the common patterns were for each site (and particularly whether they were share substance of argument or shared style, or both) to make the “groupthink” argument.

(I think the best argument against the groupthing argument here is how inconsistent the positions are that are claimed to be the “groupthink” position by those claiming that.)
by virgilp | 2025-05-27 14:58:08+00:00
Thank you. While admittedly lazy, I wasn't trying to make a point with "here's what ChatGPT says" - I looked up the economics of BTC for the first time and I was shocked that its demise is built into the protocol (I didn't use ChatGPT to prove a point, I was more trying to find out where it is wrong).

Seems that if nothing changes, mining may become uneconomical as soon as 2028. If that's the case I'm kinda' shocked that there's no panic among BTC holders.
by noisy_boy | 2025-05-27 14:58:30+00:00
> Yeah, I've had teachers like that, who tell you that you're a "waste of life" and "what are you doing here?" and "you're dumb", so motivational.

I'm sure GP isn't calling them dum-dum to their face. If they can't even do basic stuff, which seems to be their criteria here for the name calling, maybe a politely given reality-check isn't that bad. Some will wake up to the gravity of their situation and put in the hard work and surprise their teacher.

> Yeah you can call them names, call them lazy or whatever, but that's kinda like pointing at poor people and saying they should invest more.

They _should_ invest more because in this case, the "investment' is something that the curriculum simply demands - dedication and effort. I mean unless one is a genius, since when that demand is unreasonable? You want to work with people who got their degree without knowing their shit? (not saying that everyone who doesn't have a degree isn't knowledgeable - I've worked with very smart self-taught people).
by potato-peeler | 2025-05-27 14:58:39+00:00
I think this point is moot without recognising that the online platforms are all western market focused.

Even on Reddit, r/popular promotes subreddits which have a large western audience.

Since their voice is promoted more, you have this kind of discussion taking more prevalence in the media, which in turn fuels more discussion on these social platforms.

If the OP wants to find balanced opinions, questioning these platforms is the first step.

Why do seemingly global companies like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, etc promote opinions disproportionately more from a certain geography to everyone else?
by dragontamer | 2025-05-27 14:58:47+00:00
Freescale PowerQUICC fans say whaaaaaat?

Power ISA absolutely was used in embedded contexts for years. Decades even.

---------

Instruction sets aren't very important actually. Like yeah, compiler infrastructure helps but a lot of embedded decision making is about peripherals.

PowerQUICC had powerful and extendable I/O that could be customized to many different needs. And I believe the bulk of those benefits stay over to the updated ARM chip QorIQ (as NXP bought FreeScale and seems to have prioritized ARM).
by blacklion | 2025-05-27 14:58:48+00:00
AFAIR, LMDB is very buggy. There was one person who showed that and maintained fork of LMDB with many bugs fixed, but he is very opinionated and think that world outside Russia is "evil" and forbid to use his fork for evil...

Oh, license was changed to Apache 2.0! But still github account has note which equals Hitler to Soros...

Why should SQLite backend be replaced with LMDB?

UPD: Ooops, LMDB was forked a long time ago, so, maybe, LMDB can be fixed already!
by mjrpes | 2025-05-27 15:00:15+00:00
> A study published in Nature Communications highlights how the technique could lead to processing speeds in the petahertz range – over 1,000 times faster than modern computer chips.

A 1 petahertz chip would be 200,000 faster than a 5 gigahertz chip. You've skipped past the terahertz range.
by dowager_dan99 | 2025-05-27 15:00:26+00:00
honest question to all: how do you keep pushing boundaries once you've been successful enough to transition from a scrappy activist with nothing to lose to foundational infrastructure? I get the simple answer is reduced risks, stop doing the things that made you successful, but is there another path? Surely if OpenAI can somehow go from benevolent saviour of humanity to naked profit megacorp we can find a way for the IA to keep taking big risks?
Ask HN: Is it currently a bad time to join Meta?
by NalNezumi | 2025-05-27 15:00:43+00:00
Hi HN folks,

Many years ago I asked for career advice here on HN[1] as a junior, and I got many good advice, many that later proved to be profound/true.

I recently finished the technical interview processes at Meta, and to my surprise, I passed it (although with IC4 role, one level below the job posting). The position is in Europe & more towards their VR/AR stuff.

I'm very glad that I passed it, but my current concern about it is how reliable this job offer is. I guess I'm a bit worried given the trend at FAANG/Meta of "layoff waves", the seeming introduction/refocus on stack-ranking and identifying under-performers, (according to a friend working there), and recent statements from the CEO on a podcast[2] seeming to want to do a Klarna 2.0 (replacing workers with AI). I work(ed) in AI so I'm not buying into the hype of AI coding being able to take the kind of jobs I do yet (R&D, Robotics, AI) but if higher-up believes in it, it doesn't matter what I believe.

I've been very lucky in that I also right now have another job offer in a Defense company. Less paid (since it's local, and higher taxes) but the team/manager seemed very nice and it seems like a pretty stable team.

My biggest concern is I guess that I'll go for the FAANG job, and then end up being caught by a job offer being rescinded or some lay-off wave just hitting when I join, after relocating. (usually firing follows FIFO so).

I wanted to see if someone had some insight about FAANG/Meta hiring practices & how things looks like at the moment.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30115078

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYXeQbTuVl0
by kragen | 2025-05-27 15:00:46+00:00
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59675-5 is the paper, claiming "~1.6 petahertz speed." That would be 190-nanometer wavelength, which is into the so-called "far ultraviolet" band of germicidal UVC, 6.6eV photon energy, on the edge of vacuum ultraviolet. And they're switching it with light. So, I wonder how long these devices will last if you keep using them?

They say the light pulse is 6.5fs FWHM, so they weren't able to switch it on and off 1.6 quadrillion times per second; it's just that the transition from on (29nA) to off (<1nA) was only 630 attoseconds long, which is what they're describing as "petahertz". But "petahertz" implies a whole cycle time under a femtosecond, a cycle which would involve two transitions, which would presumably be 1.26 femtoseconds at this speed. (If they measured the speed of the off-to-on transition, I missed it skimming the paper.) And the actual light they're making the 6.5fs pulse out of is a "supercontinuum laser beam that spans over 400–1000 nm". That's still blue enough to raise some concerns about device longevity (though maybe graphene will prove tougher than certain other semiconductors which shall not be named here), but not to the same degree as if they were using actual petahertz light.

I think the 2× exaggeration is sort of forgivable, and nothing else seems to be intentionally misleading, but it would still be easy to draw incorrect conclusions from the headline.
by timemct | 2025-05-27 15:00:54+00:00
>Our school converted a computer lab to a programming lab. Computers in the lab have editors/compilers/interpreters, and whitelist documentation, plus an internal server for grading and submission. No internet access otherwise. We've used it for one course so far with good results, and extending it to more courses in the fall.

As an higher education (university) IT admin who is responsible for the CS program's computer labs and is also enrolled in this CS program, I would love to hear more about this setup, please & thank you. As recently as last semester, CS professors have been doing pen'n paper exams and group projects. This setup sounds great!
by schickling | 2025-05-27 15:01:08+00:00
Great questions!

> Handling compaction for long lived apps/pages?

That's a very common question and something I'm planning to ship a solution for soon. The basic idea is to give each event some more semantic "meaning" by annotating the event definition which allows you to express which events "semantically overlap". For example in a todo app you could express that the "todoCompleted" event for a given task id can compact other "todoCompleted" / "todoUncompleted" events for the same task id.

You can track the progress of this topic here: https://github.com/livestorejs/livestore/issues/254

> IMO events are nice, but also require discipline and good design w.r.t code

Yes, I agree with that. When it comes to data there is "no free lunch" - it's all about tradeoffs. I prefer the tradeoffs of event sourcing though for my own use cases such as Overtone.

That being said for many situations (like older client versions etc) there are pretty straightforward ways to address those concerns. Always depends on your application use case and possible tradeoffs though.

> Overtone looks sick. I've been using Spotify less and less because of janky UI and constant UI changes, would love a replacement. I see that it supports multiple sources, will it offer offline playback?

Very excited to hear! I'm sharing your frustrations which is why I'm building Overtone (next to many other reasons). Re "offline playback": That will depend on where your music is coming from. e.g. for your own music collection in Dropbox (or similar) it will be supported. For music streaming services like Spotify it will depend on their terms.

Hope that all makes sense?
by palmotea | 2025-05-27 15:02:22+00:00
Before AI takes your job, it will degrade your job:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/business/amazon-ai-coders...:

> But when technology transformed auto-making, meatpacking and even secretarial work, the response typically wasn’t to slash jobs and reduce the number of workers. It was to “degrade” the jobs, breaking them into simpler tasks to be performed over and over at a rapid clip. Small shops of skilled mechanics gave way to hundreds of workers spread across an assembly line. The personal secretary gave way to pools of typists and data-entry clerks.

> The workers “complained of speed-up, work intensification, and work degradation,” as the labor historian Jason Resnikoff described it.

> Something similar appears to be happening with artificial intelligence in one of the fields where it has been most widely adopted: coding.
by rtfeldman | 2025-05-27 15:02:23+00:00
A better argument against vector embeddings for AI code agents is that model performance degrades with number of tokens used (even when well below the context window limit), and vector chunks are more prone to bloating the context window with unhelpful noise than more targeted search techniques.

Claude Code doesn't do vector indexing, and neither does Zed. There aren't any rigorous studies comparing these tools, but you can find plenty of anecdotes of people preferring the output of Claude Code and/or Zed to Cursor's, and search technique is certainly a factor there!