MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AshamedCaptain | 2025-06-30 13:58:35+00:00
> Yes but the whole point is that it's moving the isolation of the VM's access from software to hardware. Yes you are giving direct access to a subset of hardware but that subset of hardware is configured from outside the VM's access to restrict the VM's access.

But who is actually gating access to this "subset" (which normally isn't a subset of functionality anyway) ? Answer: the hardware.

Before, it was software who was emulating hardware and implementing whatever checks you wanted. Now, the VM OS is directly accessing the hardware, banging its registers, and you literally depend on the hardware to enforce any kind of isolation between accesses from the VMs.

> This is true but the same is true of VT-x, VT-d, etc (i.e. the commonplace virtualisation extensions). It is no less true with S-IOV or SR-IOV other than by them being newer and less "battletested". ". If you use virtualisation extensions you are no longer doing pure software virtualisation anyways.

No, this is not the correct analogy. Even without VT-x, CPUs since the 386 era are already designed to execute untrusted code. Adding VT-x on it changes a bit the picture but it is almost an irrelevant change in global architecture overall, since the CPU is in any case is directly executing VM guest code (see early virtualizers which did plenty well without VT-x).

Here, you are allowing untrusted code direct access to hardware that has never even imagined the idea of being ever accessed by untrusted software, or even user level code to being with for most it (very few exceptions such as GPUs).

The difference in the size of the security boundary is gigantic, even hard to visualize.

The correct analogy would be to if you were switching from say a JavaScript VM generting native cpu code into directly executing native CPU code directly downloaded from the internet. On a 8086 level CPU with a haphazardly added MMU on top of it. Sure, works on theory. In practice, it will make everyone shiver (and with reason). That is the proper analogy.

The discussion about SRIOV is a red herring because these technologies are about allowing this direct hardware access. It is not that SRIOV is a firewall between the hardware and the VM (or whatever it is that you envision). They are technologies entirely designed to facilitate this direct hardware access, not prevent or constrain it in any way.
by SleepyMyroslav | 2025-06-30 13:58:37+00:00
(meta) I am probably wasting my time commenting on linked article here. Nobody does that /s.

I don't think the measurements support conclusion that well.

What I want to have when I see those measurements:

I want language abstract machine and compiler to not get in the way I want code on certain platforms to perform. This is currently not what I get at all. The language is actively working against me. For example, I can not read cache line from an address because my object may not span long enough. The compiler has its own direction at best. This means there is no way to specify things, and all I can do is test compiler output after each minor update. In a multi-year project such updates can happen dozens of times! The ergonomics of trying to specify things actually getting worse. The example with assembly is similar to my other experiences: the compiler ignores even intrinsics now. If it wants to optimize, it does.

I can't run to someone else for magic library solutions every time I need to write code. I need to be able to get things done in a reasonable amount of time. It is my organization development process that should decide if the solution I used should be part of some library or not. It usually means that efforts that cover only some platforms and only some libraries are not that universally applicable to my platforms and my libraries as folks at language conferences think /s.

Disclaimer. I work in gamedev.
by dakial1 | 2025-06-30 13:58:45+00:00
Brazil, with all the things it does wrong, has a very good Consumer Law and regulating agencies (for public interest services like utilities, health, etc..)

The regulating agencies have very user friendly digital channels for the population to complain about companies, specially if they use sludge tactics (which are specially forbidden by the consumer law).

My modus operanti is usually try to contact the company once to solve my problem, and if not possible, I'd open a complaint on the regulating agencias. Usually under 5 working days the company would call me with a very knowledgeable agent, a can-do attitude and the problem is solved quickly.

Each complaint got by the regulated companies will count towards substantial fines at the end of the year (usually into millions of USD).

And this is key, because decisions at companies are always driven by impact, by having those fines, the government gives them a very objective way of measuring the benefit of good service.
AR in Retail
by liliafane | 2025-06-30 13:59:02+00:00
Augmented reality is becoming more common in retail, especially for furniture and home goods. Web-based AR lets customers preview items in their space without needing to install an app. One example is Zolak AR Viewer in retail, which offers real-time material and color configuration and integrates with e-commerce platforms like Shopify. It’s an interesting direction for reducing returns and improving buyer confidence. Has anyone here experimented with AR in a retail context? Are there open standards or common pitfalls when building these kinds of tools?
by sfn42 | 2025-06-30 13:59:26+00:00
This is a bit different because C# is designed and implemented by industry experts - far above the average code monkey in terms of skill, understanding and experience, with added help from community experts, and the software in question is used by millions of systems all over the world.

Practically every part of C# is a hot path because it runs on probably billions of devices every minute of every day. This code is worth micro-optimizing. A 1% improvement in a popular C# library probably saves megawatts of electricity (not to mention the time saves) on a global scale.

Most code is not like that at all. Most code is not worth putting this kind of effort into. Most code is fine being 10% or even 500% slower than it technically could be because computers are lightning fast and can crunch numbers at an incredible speed. Even if the computer is doing 5 times as much work as it needs to it'll still be instant for most use cases. The problem for these kinds of applications arises when it's not doing 5 times as much work as it needs to but 5000 times or 5 million times. Or when the data is just really large and even the optimal solution would take a noticeable amount of time.
by yedidmh | 2025-06-30 13:59:35+00:00
Anyone have advise or links for how to dynamically run untrusted code in production? Specifically NodeJS.

It looks like the isolated-vm package is the go-to, but understandably it prevents things like fetch or being able to import packages.

I’m thinking to use docker and have a single base image that exposes an API that will take an arbitrary string, check for and install imports, then eval (eesh) the code, but before going down the road of implementing it myself and going crazy over properly securing the containers I’m thinking that there has got to be some prior art. How are Codesandbox et al doing it?
by bnferguson | 2025-06-30 13:59:48+00:00
Feels like Zig is starting to fill that role in some ways. Fewer sharp edges and a bit more safety than C, more modern approach, and even interops really well with C (even being possible to mix the two). Know a couple Rust devs that have said it seems to scratch that C itch while being more modern.

Of course it's still really nice to just have C itself being updated into something that's nicer to work with and easier to write safely, but Zig seems to be a decent other option.
by wsc981 | 2025-06-30 14:00:16+00:00
In 2024 Toyota in Thailand introduced a cheap pick-up that is a bit under 15.000 USD when THB is converted to USD. I think it's rather neat - the basic model is /very/ basic, but lots of options to customize.

https://www.toyota.co.th/en/model/hilux_champ?tab=commercial...
by trealira | 2025-06-30 14:00:22+00:00
I'm not who you asked, but I remember being one of the few quiet boys in my classes when I was a young kid in elementary school (in the US that's like ages 4-10, grades kindergarten through 5th grade). I was resentful of the ones who were always being loud and roughhousing in class and talking loud and not doing their work, and they were always boys.

But when I passed a test to get into a better school than my elementary school, that never happened. Everyone was respectful and followed the rules a whole lot better. There was loud talking sometimes, but everyone always got quiet and listened when the teachers spoke, always did their work, always cleaned up after themselves and were respectful. Meanwhile, I heard from my friends who had gone to another school that there were fistfights all the time and that that behavior I described never stopped.

Anyway, this is to say that I don't think this is a thing inherent to boys, maybe more like culture and social class.

On the other hand, this also isn't to say "Screw them, they just need to be better." If boys are doing worse in school now, then why? Maybe it's, like you said, a lack of physical activity. Recess has been getting cut at elementary schools.

I came across a comic that portrayed a study done on a town before it got television, and after it got television: https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/town-without-television...

With TV, people gave up more quickly on problems given to them, and children's acts of verbal and physical aggression per minute were doubled in boys and girls. Television also introduced more gender-stereotyped views than there were before. Children's reading performance suffered.

Anyway, I'm wondering if giving children unfettered access to YouTube and TikTok via their phones is like TV, but worse. At least TV only had a few channels in the 1970s and they weren't on it 24/7. This might impact lower-class families more, since they're more likely to just give their kids a tablet or a phone to pacify them, because they're busy. That might lead to an increase in aggression at school and worse performance on school assignments. Maybe it affects boys more, for some reason.
by Majromax | 2025-06-30 14:00:23+00:00
> Counterparty risk asks whether you'll collect on that bet.

You can make those bets on regulated exchanges, thanks to bitcoin-trust ETFs. IBIT is the largset of those, with $74bn assets under management, and it looks like options contracts are available. Correlated bets would also be easily available with companies like Microstrategy.

I think the biggest risk to such a move would be legal, since executing a demonstration 51% attack would plausibly result in a market manipulation investigation.
by qwerty456127 | 2025-06-30 14:00:35+00:00
32-hour workweek still is too much. For six-hour workdays would be a reasonable change. Specifically for the United States - also a mandatory 20-workday vacation (I live in the EU, heard Americans only have 2 weeks an that sounds nightmarish).

People need to have lives, not just jobs+recovery. Working for 5 consecutive days feels like living in the office and only coming home to sleep and do home chores - this doesn't even justify commuting.
by rel2thr | 2025-06-30 14:00:59+00:00
I was talking to the head of accounting for a small biz the other day, and they were talking about buying an AI accounts payable solution. And how typically they would hire a person for this but now they use the AI.

Now this solution might not even use an LLM , it existed pre-chatgpt , but I think the word of mouth of chatgpt and AI is causing business people to seek out automations where they would normally hire.
by h1fra | 2025-06-30 14:01:37+00:00
https://getstack.dev/

Repo: https://github.com/specfy/getstack

I'm building this website to track technology trends and usage across the most popular GitHub repositories. I parse 35K repos every week and find tech inside, aggregate it in Clickhouse, and show a summary on the website.

It was a good opportunity for me to finally learn more about Clickhouse, also trying to fully self-host on a VPS, which has its own challenges, especially regarding hosting frontend with SSR
by frabcus | 2025-06-30 14:02:26+00:00
It is different, because productive output does not go down by 20% when working hours go down by 20%.

e.g. See "Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19198649

The OP is arguing this is even more true when AI does routine tasks, and the remaining tasks are more creative, strategic, inspiration-based.
by vel0city | 2025-06-30 14:02:34+00:00
The pure ICE transmission is probably far more mechanically complicated than the transmission of a series hybrid.

The pure ICE engine and transmission has to deal with some of the most stressful times the motor can handle, extremely high torque demands coming from a stop. Its far less stressful for an electric motor to generate good torque at such low RPMs.

Just two quick examples.
Show HN: OntoCast – ontology-assisted KG generation
by acrostoic | 2025-06-30 14:02:37+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm excited to announce a new release of OntoCast — an open-source framework for extracting semantic triples and building knowledge graphs (KG) from unstructured documents (PDF, JSON, Markdown, and more).

Before extracting facts, OntoCast automatically selects or creates a relevant ontology and iteratively refines it, leading to much more accurate and context-aware fact extraction. This is especially valuable for cross-domain or complex documents where a static ontology falls short.

- Agentic workflow: Uses LLMs (OpenAI/Ollama) to drive the extraction and ontology refinement process.

- MCP-compatible API server: Easy to integrate into your stack.

- Flexible storage: Works with Jena Fuseki and Neo4j for knowledge graph storage.

- Open source: Apache licensed.

Uses cases include extracting structured knowledge from scientific papers, financial reports, or clinical trial documents — even when they span multiple domains.

Repo: https://github.com/growgraph/ontocast Docs: https://growgraph.github.io/ontocast

Would love feedback, questions, or suggestions!
by etothet | 2025-06-30 14:02:37+00:00
I recently needed to buy a car and my criteria was essentially I wanted least expensive new car on the market (I know I could have gone used but for this particular need I wanted a new car). The number of new vehicles that start under $20k is slim pickings. There are, what, maybe 3 in the US (if you don't count a couple that are discontinued)? And once you get into tax and title, you're going over $20k anyhow. Plus, with interest rates as they are, I don't know how the average person in Amercia affords a new vehicle these days.
How I turned $1 hockey puck into a payments network with Venmo rewards
by kp13 | 2025-06-30 14:02:52+00:00
I’ve been working on a way to help local businesses. Most are running on razor-thin margins. They either need to cut costs or drive more foot traffic. I’m trying to help them do both.

Here’s the problem:

Every time someone buys a $6 coffee, about 25¢ goes to payment middlemen. That’s a big hit for a café with 5–10% margins.

So I built something simple.

A small NFC puck sits by the checkout. A customer taps their phone → gets a Venmo reward (via USDC). No app to download. No pointless points to collect. Just: Tap. Ping. Reward.

Businesses pick the reward ($0.25–$1) and set the rules. They only pay when someone makes a purchase. It’s free, and they stay in control. Customers love it. Merchants get repeat visits.

The reward is just the start — it builds habit, trust, and a new kind of network.

As this network grows, customers can spend them back at any participating spot. The same puck becomes a payment point. It cuts out Visa/MC rails — no 3% swipe fees.

It runs on stablecoins, but no one has to touch crypto.

Here’s what’s under the hood:

- Hockey puck + NFC sticker (<$1)

- App clip w/ optional app download

- Solana onchain check-ins

- USDC as the reward rail

- Plaid for purchase verification

- Venmo as off-ramp UX

No POS integration. No merchant setup. Just plug and play.

I put all of it — the idea, roadmap, traction — into a short memo.

If you’re an investor, founder, merchant, potential co-founder or just curious — would love thoughts.

Open to intros, critiques, weird ideas. Email me — kunal@trykeychain.com
by o11c | 2025-06-30 14:03:03+00:00
Actually, there's one more trick I just remembered - you don't have to store an integer for `accept` at all, since you can arrange for the final state numbers to all be adjacent (usually, the first N positive integers; you probably want to save 0 as your fail state and use N+1 as your start state).

If you have splitting you'll have to duplicate accept states, so you can't just count your regexes. For example:

three_as = /aaa/ three_bs = /bba/ a_or_b = /[ab]/ accept_values = [error, a_or_b, a_or_b, three_as, three_bs] state 0: . -> 0; error state state 1: a -> 6, b -> 0; accept state after "a" state 2: a -> 0, b -> 7; accept state after "b" state 3: . -> 0; accept state after "aaa" state 4: . -> 0; accept state after "bba" state 5: a -> 1, b -> 2; start state state 6: a -> 3, b -> 0; intermediate state after "aa" state 7: a -> 0, b -> 4; intermediate state after "bb"

Due to the splitting you probably can't construct your state machine with the correct numbers in the first place. But it's always trivial to renumber states after the fact using an array:

Start with an array mapping each number to itself. [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] For each state that needs a specific number, swap the numbers at those indices: For example, if we need 5 and 7 to be accept states, we would have: [0, 5, 7, 3, 4, 1, 6, 2] Optionally, sort your non-accept states so your table still looks pretty: [0, 5, 7, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6] Walk the states updating their contents according to the array. Finally, apply the permutation to the states themselves according to the array, mutating the array as you go. Clearly, by performing the same operation on both arrays we get the intended effect once the index array is sorted again. (That said, if you find this confusing, you can just do it while copying instead of in-place)
by LanceH | 2025-06-30 14:03:22+00:00
The place to start would be enough basic bins and the grid itself for the Alex drawers from Ikea.

The cool things about gridfinity is not just the custom pieces, but also the exact fit that can be achieved. Since every drawer seems to be a slightly different size, exact fits with basic bins would never quite be achieved without targeting a specific drawer.

Also, I've turned down the fill and structural strength a lot without issues for most things. How strong does a bin for cotton swabs need to be?
by jeroenhd | 2025-06-30 14:03:29+00:00
Some VPS providers already provide free IPv4 solutions.

Setting up a server works fine for server stuff, but it'd get you blocked and banned everywhere for having a data center IP while just browsing or trying to watch Netflix.

For my servers I could do it the other way around and save a dollar per month, but then I'd be sending emails from a residential IPv4 address, which will never ever make it past any spam filter.
by sublimepulse819 | 2025-06-30 14:03:55+00:00
> I don't think that citizens care about how technologically frozen the government may or may not be. I think they care about whether or not the government is operating as it should. Those are two different things.

In theory yes. In practice, maybe you care to explain how a government can operate "as it should" where "should" is a target that seems to move with "not apparently dysfunctional as compared to private services I use every day?"

> Palantir represents the best path forward...

This got too washed by the LLM. I meant to say Palantir software is by far the best option for this. Palantir the company has worrying affiliations via Thiel. I think it would mitigate a lot of downside risk for the country for Thiel to be divested.

My comment shouldn't be interpreted as optimism. It is a call for citizens to demand their rights be encoded into statute instead of de facto protected by dysfunction because the dysfunction is a liability of its own.
by trinix912 | 2025-06-30 14:04:13+00:00
Nothing my family couldn't do with plain Honda Civics. If you want more space in the back, there are also long versions of VW Passat and various Skoda models. Heck, SUVs usually have way less trunk space than those - they're just taller than your average sedan, but not any longer. You can see outside just fine, and get around with 5-6L/100km efficiency.
by smikxy | 2025-06-30 14:04:13+00:00
Hey HN,

We all have that folder of abandoned projects. Good ideas and working code gathering digital dust. It feels like a waste.

I'm building IndiePhoenix to solve this: a marketplace to give those projects a second life. Sellers connect with buyers who want a head start, not a cold start.

It's currently a landing page to validate the idea: https://indiephoenix.com

The model is simple: Listing a project will always be free. For monetization, I'm thinking of offering paid boosts (e.g., more visibility).

My question for you: Is a marketplace like this something you'd use? What's the #1 piece of info you'd need to see before buying or listing a project?

Appreciate the feedback.
by alephnerd | 2025-06-30 14:04:22+00:00
You can use real median household income [0] and real median personal income [1] to gauge potential salary inflation (real meaning CPI adjusted).

The median American household and American has gotten significantly richer than in 2005, but in the 2020-23 period, income growth slowed due to the pandemic and the subsequent slow restart of the economy.

The last time we saw similar retractions were during recessions like the 1990-93 recession, the Dot Com Bust, and the Great Recession. Turns out the "vibe check" in the early 2020s were right.

Tl;dr - the median American feels poorer in the early 2020s than they did in 2019, but they have much more earning power than they ever did before 2018. I would not be surprised if this played an outsized role in voter dynamics in the 2024 election

[0] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
by legobmw99 | 2025-06-30 14:04:53+00:00
748 is not tight. As given in the article, k=643 is independent of ZFC, and the author speculates that it's possible that something as small as BB(9) could be as well.

The 748/745/643 numbers are just examples of actual machines people have written, using that many states, that halt iff a proof of "false" is found.

At any rate, given the precise k, I believe your intuition is correct. I've heard this called 'proof by simulation' -- if you know a bound on BB(N), you can run a machine for that many steps and then you know if it will run forever. But this property is exactly the intuition for why it grows so fast, and why we will likely never definitively know anything beyond BB(5). BB(6) seems like it might be equivalent to the Collatz conjecture, for example.
by TSiege | 2025-06-30 14:04:54+00:00
I am not asking this as a gotcha, but a genuine curiosity for you or other people who find AI is helping them in terms of multiples. What is your workflow like? Where do you lean on AI vs not? Is it agentic stuff is tab by cursor?

I find AI helpful but no where near a multiplier in my day to day development experience. Converting a csv to json or vis-versa great, but AI writing code for me has been less helpful. Beyond boiler plate, it introduces subtle bugs that are a pain in the ass to deal with. For complicated things, it struggles and does too much and because I didn't write it I don't know where the bad spots are. And AI code review often gets hung up on nits and misses real mistakes.

So what are you doing and what are the resources you'd recommend?