MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Book to help you build a PostgreSQL-like database server from scratch
by zetter | 2025-06-06 11:12:12+00:00
I just finished writing my book that guides you through building your own SQL database server from scratch.

The software engineering books I've enjoyed the most are the ones that let you learn through writing code and experimentation, which is why I wanted to create a practical book.

More details and a preview at https://technicaldeft.com/build-a-database-server

In summary:

+ Learn how parse and type check SQL

+ Execute complex queries that use JOIN and GROUP BY

+ Challenge yourself with suggested extensions

+ Comparisons with real databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite and DuckDB

+ Pick a what language you want to build your implementation in

+ Test suite to help you build and refactor your project

You can use the code CREATE to get 20% off the price.
by Affric | 2025-06-06 11:12:38+00:00
Then SAP, SUSE, odoo, Canonical, Elastic, Jetbrains appear in the next 10.

Europe is not in a strong position in hardware (NVIDIA, AMD, Intel) and that would take a long time to get closer.

But it’s fundamentally because the EU has until recently had a very cooperative relationship with the US.
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-06-06 11:12:43+00:00
I can't imagine a wasm running inside nodejs being faster than native code that's been optimised for decades.

> No PostgreSQL install needed—just Node.js

postgres is 32MB, nodejs is 63MB. I know that 31MB isn't a huge deal for most folks, but it's hard to see as "doesn't require postgres" as a selling point when you need something else that's twice the size instead.
by shortsunblack | 2025-06-06 11:13:58+00:00
The legal obligation has to come from relevant member state or EU law. Not third party countries' laws.

This at best is force majeure that prohibits OpenAI with satisfying its contractual obligations that are there to comply with EU law. But contractual obligations are not the only control organizations have to ensure compliance with EU law, so this is not a defense.
by mattigames | 2025-06-06 11:14:11+00:00
So we are to believe evolutionary paths are free? A stronger homosapiens could have done much more in their lifetime than an equal specimen with the same brain matter but less muscles, even with all the niceties of common era I very frequently find myself in scenarios where being stronger would have helped, I had to move to a building without an elevator and had to carry the freezer, the washing machine and other stuff to the fifth floor, having more muscles certainly would have helped, more recently I found a screw I couldn't unscrew just because I lacked enough force (not because it was a stripped screw), just imagine the amount of scenarios I would find myself if we didn't had all this technology and kitchen appliances that we have this days? You think our manual farming ancestors didn't need all the extra help they could get? To me it's almost preposterous to suggest we gave up our muscles just because we didn't use them because we lacked reasons to use them.
by david-gpu | 2025-06-06 11:14:35+00:00
Spaniard here as well. What we call "ataque de nervios" (a nervous breakdown) in Spain may not match the usage of that term in Puerto Rico, as it is discussed in the Wikipedia article.

Just because Puerto Ricans and Spaniards speak dialects of the same language doesn't make our culture all that similar, as you surely know. I would even say there is little in common culturally.
by gus_massa | 2025-06-06 11:14:53+00:00
I forgot about the 100°C.

If you put the thermometer inside the kettle inside the water, it should be at exactly 100°C, assuming 1atm of pressure, pure water and and a few more technical details. Also, is you put the thermometer inside the kettle inside the vapor it should be at exactly 100°C, assuming 1atm of pressure, pure water and and a few more technical details.

All those 100°C assume equilibrium or near equilibrium, so the very hot bottom of the kettle, the cold top, and the flowing stream may cause some problems.

For some reason it's easier to visualize with water+ice instead of water+vapor, perhaps because it's easier to play with the mix.

If you put water in the freezer, the temperature goes down to exactly 0°C, then it starts to freeze and both the water and the ice are at 0°C until you have a solid block of ice at 0°C and then, only then, the temperature continue to go down.

The same happens in the oposite direction, from ice to liquid water. And the same happens with ice to vapor transition.
by shakna | 2025-06-06 11:15:26+00:00
Herd immunity, for some definitions of a debated term, is absolutely achievable - and lasting. [0]

> Technically, then, a population can reach herd immunity even with low levels of the pathogen still circulating, which means it hasn't necessarily been eradicated for good. The point, ultimately, is that herd immunity may not be the right shorthand to refer to the end of the pandemic. It’s been bandied about incorrectly, certainly imprecisely, Fine says. “I think people often haven’t a clue what they’re saying.”

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8166024/
by elpocko | 2025-06-06 11:16:09+00:00
I'm using Firefox with UBO and for quite a while now every YT video stops playing after 45 seconds with an error message. So I made a bookmarklet that opens the embed link instead, which does not error out, but some videos can't be played that way at all.

No one else seems to have that specific problem. Am I the only one with this issue?
by LiKao | 2025-06-06 11:17:42+00:00
Both is true depending on who you ask. That distinction between "men care about objects while women care about people" can be researched at early childhood.

There are very vocal feminists who claim this is a direct sign of strong socialization beginning at early childhood and who claim this effect would completely disappear once we stop socializing gender roles in our society this way.

There are also very vocal feminists who claim that these are two different gendered perspectives and we should have both perspectives.

Yes, this might seem contradictory at first, but it really isn't as much. Feminism advocates for both woman who have grown up under the current socialization as well as new born children, and tries to find ways to do a more fair socialization.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-06-06 11:17:52+00:00
Isn’t it a meme? Like in the literal sense. The spat was dramatic and rather sudden, coming from two public figures who are known showboaters. It seems like kayfabe and it’s a bit amusing to call it that, especially when it’s not. That’s a perfect meme, meaning “idea that spreads naturally”.
by rubit_xxx19 | 2025-06-06 11:18:22+00:00
You could work within their parameters but continually communicate an enormous amount of garbage that is not illegal but would be flagged, it would be an interesting experiment, and then they could decide whether or not they’d wish to continue.

Personally, I think that privacy is a losing game, like gambling. The best case is that we all work within the parameters. But in any case, the amount of time and effort that is dedicated to privacy is keeping humanity from more important things.

The main annoyance I have with companies and organizations that engage in working with our private data is that eventually they will lose control of the data, and if bad things come because of that, we are the victims. This may be our physical and mental health data, and we could lose our jobs or have to pay higher insurance. This may be our financial data, and we lose our savings for retirement. This may be our personal historical thoughts that we don’t wish to broadcast, and we lose relationships and our jobs.

Privacy at one level is a luxury but at other levels are not, unless society as a whole embraces that we’re all unhealthy and we’re all flawed, but at that point perhaps things become too flexible and very bad things happen.
by atombender | 2025-06-06 11:18:33+00:00
I'm less concerned about the wire format than reducing complexity and bottlenecks in a high-volume, high-throughput system. Needing an intermediate API just to ingest into ClickHouse adds another step where things can slow down or break, not to mention that a gRPC API just to convert JSON payloads into INSERTs is quite wasteful if you can just insert directly.
by Tyr42 | 2025-06-06 11:19:18+00:00
So, I do not have aphantasia, but I do have an impossible time recalling tastes. Kinda like how you describe your lack of memory of glass.

I can tell apart a strawberry from a pineapple, but I can't re-experience a taste later. If I want to compare two things, I need to taste them back to back. Or I need to write down what I think to compare with next time.

But I have no problem remembering things like: how crunchy or floppy the pizza was. That's not taste.
by smeej | 2025-06-06 11:19:24+00:00
Consciousness? That seems...arbitrary? How do we know when that even was? I get we can know it wasn't right at fertilization, but when was it? And what level of consciousness matters? There are severely disabled adults who have never been as "conscious" as some of the more advanced other animals. Do they just not count?

I don't think we are talking about a difference of degrees. That's what makes me viscerally uncomfortable about it. If this tech had been commonplace when my parents decided they wanted to have a baby and conceived me, they would have had to look at this graded set of their offspring, one of which was me, and pick me out of the group--the group of...what? The group of other embryos basically just like me. Genetically speaking, my brothers and sisters. And then they pick me (or don't pick me!) and the rest just...die. Or languish, frozen, in case they chose one that didn't work out, or they want more later.

The ordinary process of IVF is weird enough to me. Adding this dystopian layer of trying to select for the best of your offspring based on genetic hypotheses about their future and disposing of the rest makes my skin crawl.
by rainonmoon | 2025-06-06 11:19:49+00:00
What's especially frustrating about all of these "Signal could flip a switch and steal everybody texts!" histrionics is that if they were interested in doing that they... wouldn't work at Signal. They'd go join/start the hundreds of other companies we've heard of in the past few years that have stored/leaked incredibly sensitive data with an insignificant fraction of the effort Signal have put in to establishing their credibility (the TeleMessage scandal being just the latest). People should hold Signal accountable, constantly, forever. But the baseless FUD is frankly hysterical from a forum of ostensible technologists.
by spaniard89277 | 2025-06-06 11:22:27+00:00
I would say smaller companies such as scaleway are catching up. Slowly, but surely they are.

There are about 6-7 euro companies that seem to have this long term plan of becoming the euro AWS (including OVH) but the problem is always the capital available.

I use AWS at work and it can become insanely complex to work with, or to have estimates or what's going to cost you.

I did use scaleway in my previous work (they didn't have as many services as they have now) and it was much easier.

Anyway, there's still a long way to go because these services need to catch up with the AWS offering and pretty much everyone knows AWS, it's the default now.

If I had to start a business now I would probably go with Scaleway.
by sillyfluke | 2025-06-06 11:22:29+00:00
It's amusing how they unironically continue to do this so plainly even after dystopian shows like black mirror and others mock this tactic aggressively in their latest outings. In the past, companies would try harder to hide a highly publicized bait and switch scam if they continued to make use of it. Subscription monetization schemes have truly hit a dead end if they can't bother even hiding it anymore.
by piva00 | 2025-06-06 11:23:02+00:00
> Consider the implications of AI knowing everything about you, even down to your biometric behavior. Think about the threat of disinformation campaigns targeting democracies. I know my stance may seem weak in terms of ideals, and I feel a bitter regret toward my former self. But shouldn’t we, as humans, try to honor our shared values and act accordingly?

I don't understand this train of thought, what exactly are you saying?

I can interpret it as "it's wise to end online anonymity and feed all personal information (including biometrics) to AIs to enforce social rules" which is, frankly, an absurd proposal even if you are extremely naïve, not even considering one single negative aspect of the loss of all privacy, being managed by a machine in a societal level.

Or I can try to interpret it as feeding all of this into AIs create insurmountable threats, to democracy, to the individual, etc. which is somewhat what I'd expect to logically follow from feeding all this personal data into AI models.

But none of these interpretations are actually possible for me to land at based on what and how you wrote, I can't make sense of it.
by Bengalilol | 2025-06-06 11:23:39+00:00
You may be right and I beg a pardon for my words then.

I still have to dig the current law proposal (my shame).

The conclusion I came to a few years ago is that anonymity in Switzerland is not something useful. Switzerland is not a police state, it mainly copes up with trying to get its citizens to being responsible. Whenever you make something wrong IRL, you have to assume the consequences. Same with online. I concur that my words are messed up.
by Lio | 2025-06-06 11:25:23+00:00
I kind of agree with you that as a public statement it shouldn't be banned but it's not the burning of the koran, or any book, that should be protected but the where and when of it.

I feel similar to how I feel about fans who taunt opposition fans at football matches.

Some off colour jokes are funny, even when they're in bad taste. They aren't and shouldn't be banned. You hear a commedian saying them on stage and you'd laugh.

Making those same jokes at a football match though has the potential to cause a riot because people's passions are already raised.

I'm not talking about normal banter[1] related to the game or the teams but the dark stuff that crosses the line. I'm sure you can google it if you want examples.

Where the lines are I'm glad I'm not the one to decide.

1. The crumble based memes are some of the best.
by smeej | 2025-06-06 11:25:37+00:00
Do you really see these as equivalent in a biological sense? Like, it's not in dispute that every adult human was originally a specific embryo, with the same DNA the adult has. It is truly universal scientific consensus that it is the same organism at every point from fertilization until adulthood, just at different stages of development.

I find it hard to believe you really aren't familiar with this basic truth of biology, which makes the rest of your argument seem disingenuous.
by enopod_ | 2025-06-06 11:25:40+00:00
In other news, Proton VPN and probably email are also subject to surveillance by the Swiss Federal Intelligence Agency NDB, including decryption of VPN traffic and data retention for up to 6 months. Switzerland is no save haven for your communication needs.

https://steigerlegal.ch/2025/03/29/proton-ueberwachung-keine... (German)
by solarwindy | 2025-06-06 11:26:42+00:00
Then again...

Our brains only developed their abstract reasoning capabilities after we already possessed a cognitive ‘platform’ for learning in a very physical context. Or rather, our cognitive capabilities for things that may seem totally extraneous to reasoning in fact developed in tandem with it. Think, fine motor control over our fingers and opposable thumbs, and the corresponding development of spatial and physical reasoning and hierarchical planning, that allows us to analyse a problem and build a tool with our hands to solve it.

The ‘bitter lesson’ [0] seems to be that we humans are not very good at designing the algorithmic machinery for cognition—better we let the machine discover its own mechanisms. Take the case of AlphaGo, the performance of which greatly improved when the human data was thrown away.

So, perhaps there is a pathway to artificial reasoning that shortcuts past many functions of an artificial brain, as you put it, but it also looks quite like we’re not ourselves going to be able to architect it, and that reasoning has not emerged from the current LLM paradigm of digesting the written knowledge of all humanity.

Where human general-purpose abstract reasoning naturally arose from concrete, goal-directed interaction with the physical world, perhaps we need to recreate that environment for machines to learn to learn and reason themselves.

That need not necessarily be physically embodied, which would surely be heavily constrained in numbers of learning trials. Quickly searching turned up this [1] example of reinforcement learning to walk in a sim, which is then transferred to physical.

I wonder how far the approach can go... Could agents learn to talk to each other? Looks like there’s some recent research in that direction too [2].

[0]: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson...

[1]: https://www.figure.ai/news/reinforcement-learning-walking

[2]: https://www.ifaamas.org/Proceedings/aamas2024/pdfs/p2725.pdf
by rco8786 | 2025-06-06 11:27:24+00:00
Eh, it's exactly the Johnny Depp movie that would simplify this into "just flip the power switch".

LLM code already runs on millions of servers and other devices, across thousands of racks, hundreds of data centers, distributed across the globe under dozens of different governments, etc. The open source models are globally distributed and impossible to delete. The underlying math is public domain for anyone to read.
by ptero | 2025-06-06 11:27:51+00:00
Because historically it has never been done. The closest we got is when a group (religious or political) finds something most people somewhat agree with, declares it a universal value and proceeds to suppress, drive away or eliminate those evil people who do not share it.

It is much better to define acceptable boundaries on actions and let people believe what they want if their actions do not violate those agreed on boundaries.
by basfo | 2025-06-06 11:27:53+00:00
Specially since Model 2 was a complete revolution years ahead of anything existing on the gaming namespace (or almost anywhere really). Daytona USA was made in 1993 and still looks kind of acceptable in 2025. At the time was a complete revolution, nothing compared to it.

I agree that Military Companies are nasty thingys, but there is nothing INFAMOUS about SEGA model 2.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-06-06 11:28:02+00:00
Well, just to give you context on my position, because I don't feel I fit into any of those molds:

I was already a very high performer before AI, leading teams, aligning product vision and technical capabilities, architecting systems and implementing at top-of-stack velocity. I have been involved in engineering around AI/ML since 2008, so I have pretty good understanding of the complexities/inconsistencies of model behavior. When I observed the ability of GPT3.5 to often generate working (if poorly written, in general) code, I knew this was a powerful tool that would eventually totally reshape development once it matured, but that I had to understand its capabilities and non-uniform expertise boundary to take advantage of its strengths without having to suffer its weaknesses. I basically threw myself fully into mastering the "art" of using LLMs, both in terms of prompting and knowing when/how to use them, and while I saw immediate gains, it wasn't until Gemini Pro 2.5 that I saw the capabilities in place for a fully agentic workflow. I've been actively polishing my agentic workflow since Gemini 2.5's release, and now I'm at the point where I write less than 10% of my own code. Overall my hand written code is still significantly "neater/tighter" than that produced by LLMs, but I'm ok with the LLM nailing the high level patterns I outline and being "good enough" (which I encourage via detailed system prompts and enforce via code review, though I often have AI rewrite its own code given my feedback rather than manually edit it).

I liken it to assembly devs who could crush the compiler in performance (not as much of a thing now in general, but it used to be), who still choose to write most of the system in c/c++ and only implement the really hot loops in assembly because that's just the most efficient way to work.
by 34679 | 2025-06-06 11:28:25+00:00
Yeah, for sure. That's why I tried Cursor for a month. But as soon as I ran out of fast requests it became unusable. It had me waiting several minutes for the first token. I didn't realize how bad the experience was, fast requests included, until I used Void. It makes Cursor fast requests seem slow, and I tend to need fewer of them. The differences being that Void requests go straight to the provider instead of their own server first, and their system prompts seem to keep the models more on task.
by aa-jv | 2025-06-06 11:30:50+00:00
In the 80's we used to get our software from 'floppy disk warehouses' ("Softbank") that often featured "$1 / floppy" specials, well worth the hassle.

I had a lot of fun by just picking up 20 random floppies, paying my $20, and walking off with a digital surprise or two waiting for me once I got home and found out what was actually on the things. 80% of the time it was some nonsense recipe database or the other, but other times it was simply wonderful, like PC-Write (best DOS editor ever), or a "7-in-1" pack of 'shareware' games and the like. And even if it was just another recipe database, at least I'd get some extra floppies to use when needed.

I quite miss those days, and I feel like this "smorgasbord" effect is definitely an interesting way of gaining customers. I kind of wonder what it'd be like to have that effect in the modern era - $20 "random app purchase" days would be kind of interesting, and I wonder if we'd ever see this used as a way of re-invigorating the app stores, which to my eyes these days seem quite inaccessible for random browsing/shopping ...
by hliyan | 2025-06-06 11:30:55+00:00
These platforms are still relatively young. We need to roll the clocks foward another 10-20 years to truly understand what level of control they will be able to exert on public knowledge and speech, either at the behest of their investors or through government pressure.

I wonder whether one solution is for everyone to own a "personal cloud computer" (a relatively cheap VM) on which they install software much like they did in the pre-SaaS era. They might also be able to open up file system and SQL interfaces for certified external providers.

Theoretically, the same arguments that apply to a cloud service provider would apply to a cloud infrastructure provider too, but if the contract were to define the infrastructure as leased property, and all data stored on it as belonging to the user, then it might be somewhat harder to control.
by kotaKat | 2025-06-06 11:31:04+00:00
> If you're on iOS, consider switching to an OS where a big corp doesn't control what software you can run.

Sure! I literally just picked up a new Razr 2025 last night.

Out of the box, its built in “device pulse” application sideloaded another 15 apps out of the box I never asked for, consented for, or wanted, ranging from scammy games to garbage like Tiktok and Pintrest.

I didn’t get to say “no” to those applications… sounds like a big corp controlled what software I can run. They even put the application installer into the ‘nodisable’ list so I can’t kill it, and I can’t unlock the bootloader or any of that other great stuff everyone says Androids can do.

What now?