MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by amitu | 2025-05-27 15:13:43+00:00
Unlike tailscale/ngrok, malai is completely open source, does not rely on any company provided infrastructure (we have a http bridge to bridge http/tcp with http/kulfi at *.kulfi.site, but you can run your own http bridge), and once Kulfi app is ready, you will not need the bridge at all and Kulfi app (which is also basically a browser that speaks http(s) over kulfi along with http(s) over tcp) can talk kulfi protocol directly.
by krapp | 2025-05-27 15:14:50+00:00
Unfortunately, it's becoming socially and culturally verboten not to use AI. Soon AI will be so ubiquitous that not using it will be as weird as not having an email address or a cellphone. AI will be one of those things you have to use to exist in modern society. And within the programming/tech sphere, this effect will be magnified significantly because AI isn't just a tool, it's practically a religion and an identity.

I agree with you that OP should just not use AI, and in a perfect world where AI was just a thing and not the nexus around which our entire technological civilization, culture and definition of humanity will be shaped, whether we like it or not, because Capitalism Über Alles, that would be an option. However if they want to remain employable and not be seen as a weird Luddite psychopath they'll have to choose how much of their soul to give over to the machine like the rest of us.
by WorldMaker | 2025-05-27 15:14:56+00:00
The story also included for many years that the collective investment was stronger than the individual investments could be. A hedge fund with a bigger wallet could have more options, could have more bargaining power, could have access to investment deals that are out of reach of one individual's savings. That's a powerful story. We saw so many of the things that can go wrong, especially in 2008, but the raw idea of a larger pension fund is cheaper to run and has more financial leverage is still a good story with some truth behind it.

(As an individual investor, I do often wonder what sort of bargains and better investment options I miss out on that investing together with two or three friends with similar retirement goals could gain me by investing together as a team. I realize that's the point of hedge funds/mutual funds, but today's hedge funds/mutual funds themselves have tiered fee structure pools based in staked investment and it never feels like an even playing field if I'm trying to manage my own investments even with the competition between hedge funds/mutual funds today.)
by username223 | 2025-05-27 15:15:26+00:00
Believe it or not, 300-person freshman lectures can be done well. They just need a talented instructor who's willing to put in the prep, and good TAs leading sections. And if the university fosters the right culture, the students mostly won't cheat.

But yeah, if the professor is clearly checked out and only interested in his research, and the students are being told that the only purpose of their education is to get a piece of paper to show to potential employers, you'll get a cynical death-spiral.

(I've been on both sides of this, though back when copy-pasting from Wikipedia was the way to cheat.)
Show HN: R00M 101 – I made a tool to scrape Reddit and hunt sockpuppets
by r00m101 | 2025-05-27 15:15:59+00:00
Hey HN,

I made R00M 101 to dig into Reddit’s public data (20B+ posts/comments indexed). It grabs user histories, scrapes subreddits, and does deep analysis with sources to spot stuff like sockpuppets or trends. I caught some accounts with identical phrasing across niche subs. Uses only public data, GDPR-compliant, with an opt-out. Built it for OSINT research, but what else could it do? any privacy gaps i missed? feedback welcome!
by vinceguidry | 2025-05-27 15:16:26+00:00
This article makes a fundamental mistake where the author thinks that business values quality. Business has never valued quality. Customers can value quality, but business only values profit margins. If customers will only buy quality, then that's what business will deliver. But customers don't value quality either, most of the time. They value bang-for-buck. They'll buy the cheapest tools on Amazon and happily vibe code their way into a hole, then throw the broke code out and vibe code some more.

The only people that value quality are engineers. Any predictions of the future by engineers that rely on other people suddenly valuing quality can safely be ignored.
by octo888 | 2025-05-27 15:16:27+00:00
At my company they're doubling down. Forcing us to use AI, and product and managers suddenly cosplaying architect and senior developer, attempting to muscle in on developers'/architects' roles. Ie trying to takeaway the thing the developers would have more time for if the AI tools achieved their aims. And to triple down, they're offshoring.

Which makes it really obvious their aim is to get rid of (expensive) developers, not to unlock our time to enable us to work on higher things
by squigz | 2025-05-27 15:16:31+00:00
Yeah, this is absurd. And if you have poor handwriting, the chances of "syntax errors" goes up.

My above comment is getting downvoted, and it's honestly a bit baffling. I'd be furious if I were paying tens of thousands of dollars to receive a university-level education in software engineering in 2025... and I had to write programs with pen and paper. It is so far detached from the reality of, not only the industry, but the practice itself, so as to be utterly absurd.
by toss1 | 2025-05-27 15:16:57+00:00
Interesting to hear another story how software was devalued at GE.

During that time my software company was brought in to bid on a project for GE. Cool project, making a repository for technical drawings going back a century; turns out they still maintain power plants that old! Anyway, it seemed to be going great until GE presented a term sheet, which included a maximum pay for SWEs under $30/hr, requirement to submit all data on hours worked and pay issued, maximum profit margin of 6%, etc. It was instantly obvious they considered software the same as sweatshop labor and wanted nothing to do with engineering real solutions. A big "Nevermind" and walked away.

Still shaking my head on how disconnected from reality the GE mgt was. Decided to never invest in the stock, but watched it continue to climb for years before it finally collapsed for good. Always surprising how long large orgs can survive on sheer inertia.

[Edit: typos]
by mdaniel | 2025-05-27 15:17:29+00:00
1. Go around pgcat/pgdog?

2. I have had good luck using pragma comments for that kind of thing: a way to communicate to the infrastructure without the target system seeing it

3. From the "malicious compliance department," I would also accept "include it but in a tautological way" (tenant_id = :ten_id or tenant_id <> :ten_id)
by electroly | 2025-05-27 15:17:35+00:00
Sure, I'm a power user with a monster codebase, never said that I wasn't. RAG is a power user feature.

The files are generated from external sources, pulling together as much information as I could collect. It's a script so I can keep it up to date. I think there is roughly no programmer out there who needs to be told that documentation needs to be up-to-date; this is obvious enough that I'm trying not to be offended by your strawman. You could have politely assumed, since I said I have it working, that it does actually work. I am doing productive work with this; it's not theoretical.
by lowercased | 2025-05-27 15:18:34+00:00
You're welcome. Thanks for the sponsorships! They DO work, but I imagine sometimes hard to quantify. I know I've been able to recommend geocodio first hand to folks in my user groups who a) hadn't heard of it and b) wouldn't have been able to attend conferences.

FWIW, first time I saw you was at LonghornPHP in Austin. 2021, IIRC.
by lloeki | 2025-05-27 15:18:59+00:00
> according to every source I've looked at in the last few minutes

I may be mistaken but that's what I found:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peregrine_falcon

> The peregrine falcon has a body length of 34 to 58 cm (13–23 in) and a wingspan from 74 to 120 cm (29–47 in)

> Males weigh 330 to 1,000 g (12–35 oz) and the noticeably larger females weigh 700 to 1,500 g (25–53 oz)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper%27s_hawk

> Total length of full-grown birds can vary from 35 to 46 cm (14 to 18 in) in males and 42 to 50 cm (17 to 20 in) in females. Wingspan may range from 62 to 99 cm (24 to 39 in), with an average of around 84 cm (33 in)

> In northern Florida, males averaged 288 g (10.2 oz) and females averaged 523 g (1.153 lb). In general, males may weigh anywhere from 215 to 390 g (7.6 to 13.8 oz) and females anywhere from 305.8 to 701 g (0.674 to 1.545 lb), the lightest hawks generally being juveniles recorded from the Goshutes of Nevada, the heaviest known being adults from Wisconsin

(not putting the full regional rundown, just the biggest entry)
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-05-27 15:19:19+00:00
Eh... I'm not convinced. I like cline, I've been using it here and there and I think it found a good mix between "vibesus take the wheel" and "hey, I'm still here and I enjoy doing this". I was particularly surprised that it worked pretty well with local models. A lot of that is on the model (tested w/ devstral) but a lot of it is on the cradle (e.g. aider is great at what it does, but local model support is hit and miss).

First, like some other comments have mentioned RAG is more than result = library.rag(). I get that a lot of people feel RAG is overhyped, but it's important to have the right mind model around it. It is a technique first. A pattern. Whenever you choose what to include in the context you are performing RAG. Retrieve something from somewhere and put it in context. Cline seems to delegate this task to the model via agentic flows, and that's OK. But it's still RAG. The model chooses (via tool calls) what to Retrieve.

I'm also not convinced that embedding can't be productive. I think nick is right to point out some flaws in the current implementations, but that doesn't mean the concept in itself is flawed. You can always improve the flows. I think there's a lot to gain from having embeddings, especially since they capture things that ASTs don't (comments, doc files, etc).

Another aspect is the overall efficiency. If you have somewhat repetitive tasks, you'll do this dance every time. Hey, fix that thing in auth. Well, let's see where's auth. Read file1. Read file2. Read fileN. OK, the issue is in ... You can RAG this whole process once and re-use (some) of this computation. Or you can do "graphRAG" and do this heavy lifting once per project and have AST + graph + model dump that can be RAGd. There's a lot of cool things you can do.

In general I don't think we know enough about the subject, best practices and useful flows to confidently say "NO, never, nuh-huuh". I think there might be value there, and efficiencies to be gained, and some of them seem like really low hanging fruit. Why not take them?
by joey_spaztard | 2025-05-27 15:19:44+00:00
There is dc4420 which is this evening near Euston and the last Tuesday of the month. They have talks and the people who attend are mostly corporate IT and infosec company people.

First friday of the month is London 2600, which is a bunch of geeks drinking and talking in the Angel pub.

I think thursday is electronic projects evening at South London Makerspace close to Herne Hill station.

There is an OWASP thing for website security and pubstandards which is webdevs and geeks drinking in a pub.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-27 15:19:51+00:00
I’d frame it a bit differently. LLMs are pretty good at generating the midwit solution to problems because that is the bulk of the available training corpus. It is a generic “best practices” generator. You would expect it to be better than a third of human architects almost by definition.

On the other hand, they are pretty poor at reasoning from first principles to solve problems that are far outside their training corpus. In some domains, like performance-sensitive platforms, the midwit solution is usually the wrong one and you need highly skilled people to do the design work using context and knowledge that isn’t always available to LLMs. You could probably use an LLM to design a database kernel but it will be a relatively naive one because the training data isn’t available to do anything close to the state-of-the-art.
by NalNezumi | 2025-05-27 15:19:57+00:00
Thank you for the reply!

Just for clarification, is the chart for their VR/AR (Reality Labs) Revenue/Cost or all of Meta or a subset? I would imagine that R&D such as this, there's an understanding that it won't be revenue-making for a foreseeable time. (although that long red for 4 years is ofc concerning)
by amitu | 2025-05-27 15:20:04+00:00
Kulfi is a network (peer to peer) which support http/https even tcp can be sent over kulfi.

Kulfi App is a web browser that talks kulfi protocol natively, so you can open kulfi://<id52> natively. malai is the server side part of this story, and can expose existing HTTP/TCP services over kulfi:// network.

For DNS, here is my initial deign/thought: https://github.com/kulfi-project/kulfi/discussions/55

For access control, we are working on a "what-to-do" service, which is an bunch HTTP/JSON APIs, that will be called by the malai (which runs on your server, or even as part of Django/Node/Golang once we wrap malai as a cffi library, and write corresponding Python/Node etc packages). You will be able to write the what-to-do in any framework you like, and we will maintain a general purpose open source what-to-do service.
by theturtle32 | 2025-05-27 15:20:49+00:00
Correct. RAG is a general term as you describe, but it has become inextricably linked with vector databases in the minds of a lot of people, to the extent that GP and even the blog post we're discussing use RAG specifically to mean the use of a vector database after chunking input to create embeddings.

I agree with you that RAG should be a generic term that is agnostic to the method of retrieval and augmentation. But at the moment, in a lot of people's minds, it specifically means using a vector database.
by wg0 | 2025-05-27 15:20:52+00:00
I have evaluated the local first landscape and few solutions are as neat as this one! The only other (more mature seems to be) is tinyBase but that's based on a different model (CRDTs vs Event sourcing)

Few questions:

Would it not be possible to store and rely on larger amount of data on SQLite and keeping it on disk as an option? I see that there's a limitation of 1 GB. So maybe just a config flip to change the mode of persistence?

Also - multi-tenancy could be an interesting scenario. Think JIRA but each organisation needs their own namespace and each user/client wouldn't need all the tickets from all the organisation but only of their own (or even more scoped to department and team) therefore the local database would alway be a subset of the whole universe.

An out of the box sync server that could be run directly on Bun/Node (without Cloudflare) could be a nice addition.

But overall, really elegant solution. I like it, might give it a try in an idea I am evaluating various tools for. Unfortunately, the multi-tenancy story is critical for that.
by salawat | 2025-05-27 15:21:12+00:00
>I know, because I'm working on secure embedded video codec hardware, and our customers are targeting this..

Why? Or more specifically, why you, doing that?

You can say no, you know. To solve your problem, you're making for some of the least scrupulous people on the planet, (Hollywood types), the primitives to a guaranteed technologically enforceable tyranny. Remember that just because someone says they won't do something with a thing, doesn't mean the heel turn isn't coming. Sometimes you just don't build things because people can't be trusted with them.

So, why are you doing it?

You might think it's just harmless bits now... But today's harmless bits are tomorrow's chain links. Seriously asking. Might help me out of a mental hang up I'm trying to work through.
by exceptione | 2025-05-27 15:21:46+00:00
> We interviewed a candidate ... didn't want to touch things like terminals ... they where looking for more of an architects role

I don't know whether you were actually looking for an architect? There are different types of architects. For example, you have got enterprise architects that indeed will never touch yaml, you have got solution architects who have a more narrow focus, and you have got engineers with a plate of overbearing work and team responsibilities. The latter are better called lead engineer. In my experience, being a good (lead) engineer doesn't make one a good architect, but companies try to make their job posting more sexy by titling it with "architect". One would imho do better by taking lead engineers seriously just in their own right.

Architects in general need to be very skilled in abstract reasoning, information processing & conceptual thinking. However, the people hiring for an "architect" often look for a 2x/nx engineer, who is able to code x widgets per hour. That is a stupid mismatch.

I would agree however that someone without previous practical experience would be rather unsuitable, especially "below" enterprise architect level.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-05-27 15:22:01+00:00
One thing that i don't see in automated horse betting is the work to look at the horses before the race.

You can get a sense of a horses energy and condition on the day (it can be different on different days). Horse racing even has a parade ring before the race for this reason. I don't gamble but i'm absolutely sure there's signal there in visually looking at the horse on the day that these systems don't take into account.

I wouldn't at all be surprised if a system could be far more successful by using vision of the parade ring (whether machine vision or expert human) as additional signal.

In fact given my experience with horses (grew up on a farm) and knowing the day to day differences i'd be surprised if any pure algorithmic system could beat the marker without the above since those who do bet on horses absolutely use this signal.
by trealira | 2025-05-27 15:22:29+00:00
Thanks for sharing your old compiler and the source code listing for it, though I can't read the documentation in German.

Out of curiosity, how did you deal with the fact that for a top-down parser, 1 token of lookahead isn't enough to know if, say, you're dealing with an if-statement (e.g. "if x > 0 then ...") or an assignment or procedure call using a variable named "if" (e.g. "if = 1", "if(x, y, z)")?

I feel like the best solution would be an LR parser that reduced to an if statement only when seeing "if <expr> then" (and I saw you mentioned LALR and LL parsers somehow in your documentation), but you could also maybe use a backtracking top down parser.

I realize could read the source code listing, but I think it would be easier just to ask, and I might misunderstand it.
by keiferski | 2025-05-27 15:22:32+00:00
Yeah at that level you’re basically optimizing for all around excellence, and it’s hard to be a leader in your field without also being deeply interested in it at all levels — and being reasonably charismatic.

I’ve only taken classes at state schools, and my experience was that I’d often get a professor that was clearly brilliant at publishing but lacked even the most rudimentary teaching skills. Which is insightful in its own way…just not optimal for teaching.
by ChrisGermano | 2025-05-27 15:23:08+00:00
Years back I wrote brainfuck in python to just use various A's and named it Screaming. It's dumb but fun. Hello World:

AAAAAAAAAAÁàAAAAAAAàAAAAAAAAAAàAAAàAááááaÀàAAâàAâAAAAAAAââAAAâàAAâááAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAâàâAAAâaaaaaaâaaaaaaaaâàAâàâ
by prpl | 2025-05-27 15:23:28+00:00
metadata bloat can be due to a few things, but it’s manageable.

* number of snapshots

* frequent large schema changes

* lots of small files/row level updates

* lots of stats

The last one IIRC used to be pretty bad especially with larger schemas.

Most engines have ways to help with this - compaction, snapshot exportation, etc… Though it can still be up to the user. S3 tables is supposed to do some of this for you.

If metadata is below 1-5MB it’s really not an issue. Your commit rate is effectively limited by the size of your metadata and the number of writers you have.

I’ve written scripts to fix 1GB+ metadata files in production. Usually it was pruning snapshots without deleting files (relying on bucket policy to later clean things up) or removing old schema versions.
by justin66 | 2025-05-27 15:23:36+00:00
I bet you'd probably see Klenk and Copi, both very old textbooks kept at least reasonably up to date, used in some of today's classes. "The Logic Book" (Bergmann, Moor, Nelson) is used around sometimes. I think there'd probably also be an appetite among some HN people to tackle the MIT OpenCourseware offerings, which at first glance look pretty good and challenging.

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/24-241-logic-i-fall-2009/

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/24-242-logic-ii-spring-2004/
by levkk | 2025-05-27 15:24:01+00:00
Everything is fine. You never have to release your code for anything that's not PgDog itself. If you're running PgDog as a service, anyone who connects to it can ask you for the source code of PgDog. That's what AGPL says.

In practice, if you use it internally, your teammates already have access to the code. Requirement fulfilled.

Your databases run on a private net typically, so your customers can't connect to PgDog directly: AGPL doesn't apply. That's internal use.

If you're running a DB cloud and using PgDog as a proxy, anyone who connects to it, i.e. your customers can ask for the code to PgDog. If you didn't modify it, just point them to my repo. Requirement fulfilled.

If you did modify it, e.g. added some cool feature or fixed a bug, you'll have to show your clients what you did. That's real open source. That's how GPL was supposed to work. Code is free, and so is knowledge and our ability as humans (and now machines, lol!) to learn from it. GPL stopped working because we stopped shipping software on CDs. AGPL is it's modern version.

I love open source and that's why I'm using AGPL. GPL and FSF is the reason why I can do what I do today: I learned from open code written by thousands of brilliant people who chose to share that with the world. Now it's my turn to give back.
Show HN: TikTok for TV
by pj4533 | 2025-05-27 15:24:07+00:00
I wanted a low effort way to revisit video content I knew and loved.

Tim & Eric Rick & Morty Parks & Rec UCB etc

I don't think anyone has really solved vertical video. I don't think clips is the answer.

So I built Surf. This is my implementation hooked up to the Plex media library. I built it modularly so it could hook to any media library.

- Random video - Random offset into the FULL video (not a clip)

Beta open now.