MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
A reverse-delta backup strategy – obvious idea or bad idea?
by datastack | 2025-06-28 22:50:19+00:00
I recently came up with a backup strategy that seems so simple I assume it must already exist — but I haven’t seen it in any mainstream tools.

The idea is:

The latest backup (timestamped) always contains a full copy of the current source state.

Any previous backups are stored as deltas: files that were deleted or modified compared to the next (newer) version.

There are no version numbers — just timestamps. New versions can be inserted naturally.

Each time you back up:

1. Compare the current source with the latest backup.

2. For files that changed or were deleted: move them into a new delta folder (timestamped).

3. For new/changed files: copy them into the latest snapshot folder (only as needed).

4. Optionally rotate old deltas to keep history manageable.

This means:

The latest backup is always a usable full snapshot (fast restore).

Previous versions can be reconstructed by applying reverse deltas.

If the source is intact, the system self-heals: corrupted backups are replaced on the next run.

Only one full copy is needed, like a versioned rsync mirror.

As time goes by, losing old versions is low-impact.

It's user friendly since the latest backup can be browsed through with regular file explorers.

Example:

Initial backup:

latest/ a.txt # "Hello" b.txt # "World"

Next day, a.txt is changed and b.txt is deleted:

latest/ a.txt # "Hi" backup-2024-06-27T14:00:00/ a.txt # "Hello" b.txt # "World"

The newest version is always in latest/, and previous versions can be reconstructed by applying the deltas in reverse.

I'm curious: has this been done before under another name? Are there edge cases I’m overlooking that make it impractical in real-world tools?

Would love your thoughts.
by like_any_other | 2025-06-28 22:50:40+00:00
> Dropping staffing levels at the US copyright office doesn't change the law.

We see this at the patent office, where overworked patent examiners leads to more junk patents being granted. Which is utterly backwards, and stems from viewing patents as something the applicant has earned and needing a good justification to deny them the fruits of their labor, and not as what they are - an enormous restriction on everyone else.
by fragmede | 2025-06-28 22:51:30+00:00
Ning, Substack, OnlyFans, Nostr, mirror.xyz, Farcaster are paid social networks, among others. It's been tried, with varying degrees of success based on user base.

But people are cheap as fuck. Even here we post links to archive.is to get around paywalls (which rubs me the wrong way). Every time YouTube Premium come up the comments are full of people saying they won't pay up.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-06-28 22:52:36+00:00
For the record, the firebombing of Dresden was indefensible.

I say this as someone whose family endured 6 years of Nazi German and Soviet crimes, including genocide, violence, rape, large scale looting and destruction of cultural heritage, and mass destruction of cities (85% of Warsaw alone was reduced to rubble, intentionally and systematically).

Why do I mention that? I mention that to underscore that just war is not utilitarian. You cannot justify Dresden or Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It doesn't mean you can't take strong measures, or that circumstances don't make a difference, only that the circumstances did not morally justify these acts. And it seems that the behavior of the Allies in Dresden and Hiroshima serve as precedent that is used to justify crimes like the leveling of Gaza and treating its civilians like cattle.
by diskzero | 2025-06-28 22:55:06+00:00
Former Be employee here who ended up at Apple eventually. BeOS was way, way behind NeXTStep in so many ways. We also had fragile base class problems and had a lot of kernel issues. BeFS was cool but Dominic ended up at Apple (and is still there) so I feel Apple got generations of BeFS evolution. Jean Louis wanted an unrealistic price and Apple spent the smartest 400 million dollars that I can think of by buying NeXT. Apple got Steve, Avie, Bertrand and so many others. Many Be people ended up on board after journeys with Eazel and others. Some never made it to Apple due to their Danger/Android/Google paths. This saddens me even to this day.
by alexpotato | 2025-06-28 22:55:12+00:00
Reminds me of the days of Winsock.

For those that don't remember/don't know, everything network related in Windows used to use their own, proprietary setup.

Then one day, a bunch of vendors got together and decided to have a shared standard to the benefit of basically everyone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winsock
by DiscourseFan | 2025-06-28 22:55:13+00:00
It's like gang-stalking--its not that there's something being introduced, but rather that the subject sees relations that are not objective relations (like, for instance, the relation between temperature, pressure, and state change). Typically, however (and I can't imagine a case where this didn't happen), the relations are social in character--and since social relations are subjective to the extent that all the social world is not expressly a fact, it can be difficult to differentiate between an illusion and a reality: people imagine their partners are cheating on them, whether or not its true. And there are many things we do not know about the social world around us; but, statistically speaking, nobody has ever actually been gang-stalked.
by bdw5204 | 2025-06-28 22:55:18+00:00
The President can, in fact, recess appoint a Supreme Court justice per Article II, Section 2, Clause 3[0].

Since the George W. Bush administration, Congress has used pro forma sessions[1] to prevent recess appointments. Both the House and Senate would have to agree on a time to adjourn Congress per Article I, Section 5, Clause 4. If they disagree but one of them wants to adjourn, the President can adjourn them under Article II, Section 3. But no president has ever done this. President Trump talked about doing it to ram through his appointments both in 2020 and last year during the transition period. But so far it hasn't been deemed necessary because the Senate has, surprisingly to me, confirmed his cabinet in a timely manner and without significant pushback even on the less conventionally conservative choices like the DNI and the HHS Secretary. In all likelihood, the threat of adjourning Congress and of using his billion dollars plus of fundraising for 2026 to primary uncooperative Republican members of Congress has forced them to largely fall in line for now.

Recess appointments to the Supreme Court were common in the old days when the Court was less politically contentious. Justice William J. Brennan was recess appointed by Eisenhower and later confirmed by the Senate. A recess appointment who is not confirmed by the Senate would be null and void at the start of the next Congress on January 3rd of the next odd numbered year. I doubt any president would recess appoint a Supreme Court justice today both because it would be likely derail their nomination and also because a recess Justice might get to hear at most 1 term of cases depending on timing. Recess appointing somebody to run the FDA or the Justice Department or even to be a district court judge would be much more useful to a President's agenda.

[0]: "The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session."

[1]: These are sessions where they immediately adjourn by unanimous consent after doing the formalities to open the session. C-SPAN broadcasts them live and they only last a few minutes at most.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-06-28 22:56:06+00:00
There are two broad classes of software people write.

One is general purpose software used by significant numbers of people. This is the sort of software that could be, should be, and often already is open source. Enough people use it to sustain a community around maintaining it, and then you don't have to deal with the overhead and rent seeking incentives created by proprietary software. Obvious advantage: No more ads in the start menu.

The other is custom code. Here "IP protection" is pretty worthless, because the company employing you is the only one that wants or uses the thing, or they're a SaaS company not interested in publishing or licensing the code to anyone else anyway.

Neither of these has a strong need for IP laws and moreover either of them would do fine under a regime where copyright terms last 14 years, there is no extrajudicial DMCA takedown process or anti-circumvention law and software patents don't exist, but you can still sue a company that violates the GPL or fails to pay you for services rendered.
by like_any_other | 2025-06-28 22:56:40+00:00
> I'd probably be considered left (or even far-left) by Israeli standards, but I'm in the "pro-Israeli" camp as conventionally understood online.

Would you consider ethno-nationalists of other nations (far) left, based on (speculating) their economic/women's rights/LGBT/other social stances?

(Orthogonally, I can certainly empathize with being pro-something, but not pro-everything-that-something-does. There's certainly nothing intrinsic to a Jewish state that would require firing at unarmed crowds.)
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-06-28 22:56:46+00:00
I have family with that.

The most striking thing, is the absolute certainty of the thinking. They feel as if their thinking is crystal-clear, and that they are the only one that "sees the patterns."

Currently, they're doing well. I know of others, that are not so fortunate.

It seems that pot is about the worst thing that a schizoaffective/schizophrenic person can use. They are better off chewing tabs of acid. I've not used it in about 45 years, and I've heard that today's pot is a heck of a lot stronger than what I remember.
by ChadNauseam | 2025-06-28 22:57:07+00:00
That's not quite fair. The Mizrahi Jews the GP is referring to were kicked out of the country they were born in, and had nowhere else to go but Israel, the land for which was already "stolen" when the Mizrahi Jews got there. (Obviously settlements are ongoing so you can say that land theft is continuing to happen. If that's what you meant, ignore me.)
by kennywinker | 2025-06-28 22:57:13+00:00
“casus belli” is the stated reason to go to war. It says nothing about if those reasons are moral. Hamas had casus belli. The US has casus belli when bush invaded iraq based on lies about WMD. Hell, russia has it in ukraine (something something nato).

If you cannot conduct war against a guerilla force without murdering hundreds of thousands, destroying every piece of peaceful infrastructure, and blockading aid - then the truth is it’s wrong to conduct that war.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-06-28 22:57:25+00:00
> It is indeed spherical frictionless cow-ly possible if we spend a trillion dollars to increase ORNL's annual Pu production capacity so that it doesn't take 200 years to make 600kg of Pu-238.

Oh come on, we used to make so much more of it.

I see estimates that it costs 4 million dollars per pound, plus some scaling costs?

A trillion dollars is not even close to "spherical frictionless cow" when the benchmark is "humanity's current technological capabilities", and a few billion is basically nothing at that scale.

> When someone demonstrates a complex device (let's set aside power generation how about a valve? Or a capacitor?) that can last a century in space I'll agree that it is actually possible.

Is a bunch of stuff lasting 50 years not good evidence? What is your threshold for "demonstrate", do we have to wait 200 years before you can be convinced?
by mschuster91 | 2025-06-28 22:57:36+00:00
> A lot of the current AI products and stories are cost-competitive due to that bloat itself, so some amount of rightsizing will help the industry.

The problem is, any amount of rightsizing has the potential to tank the entire economy. Too big to fail, just that it isn't banks this time but a bunch of companies who went all in on "AI".
by kragen | 2025-06-28 22:58:02+00:00
Maybe, but I think MariaDB beats all of them at that.

Also, though, horizontal scaling is a lot less important now than it was 20 or 30 years ago. https://www.servethehome.com/2025-server-starting-point-inte... says AMD has 192 cores per socket, and you can get two-socket motherboards, so 384 cores total. And you can stick 12 128GiB DDR5-6000 DIMMs in it, so 1.5 tebibytes of RAM, and a single SSD is 30 terabytes, and SSDs can commit a transaction group durably in typically 0.1 milliseconds. And those 384 cores (EPYC 9005, so Zen 5c, https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-9005-turin-turns-trans...) are 2.25GHz and typically about 2.2 instructions per clock (https://chipsandcheese.com/p/zen-5-variants-and-more-clock-f...), and they support AVX512.

As one rough estimate, 2.25GHz with AVX512 (at 1 IPC) means you can do 36 billion column-oriented 32-bit integer operations per core per second, which with 384 cores means 13 trillion 32-bit integer operations per core per second. On one server. So if you have a query that needs to do a linear scan of a column in a 13-million-row table, the query might take 300μs, but you should be able to do a million such queries per second. But normally you index your tables so that most queries don't need to do such inefficient things, so you should be able to handle many more queries per second than that!

(Each socket has 12 DDR5 channels, totaling 576 gigabytes per second to DRAM per socket or 1.13 terabytes per second across the two of them, so you'll get worse performance if you're out of cache. And apparently you can use 512GiB DIMMs and get 6 tebibytes of RAM!)

So, if you need more than one server for your database, it's probably because it's tens or hundreds of terabytes, or because you're handling tens of millions of queries per second, or because your database software is designed for spinning rust. Spinning rust is still the best way to store large databases, but now the cutoff for "large" is approaching the petabyte scale.

I think the space of databases that are under ten terabytes and under ten million queries per second is large enough to cover almost everything that most people think of when they think of "databases".
by parpfish | 2025-06-28 22:58:39+00:00
How many financially self-sustaining musicians should there be? Streaming has caused the number to fall, but recorded music before that likely made it fall as well.

Should we stop thinking about music as a job and start thinking about it as a hobbyist art form? Nobody is out there lamenting that you can’t make a living off of landscape painting. It’s a fun form of self expression that people will do regardless of the economics, so maybe the problem was ever thinking you could make a profession out of it?
by mnettem21 | 2025-06-28 22:59:41+00:00
Who we're looking for:

Experience with frontend and backend (React, Node, Python, etc.)

Bonus if you’ve worked with basic OCR or document parsing

Self-starter who enjoys solving real-world problems

Entrepreneurial mindset, comfortable with ambiguity

You’ll be working closely with the founding team and credited for your work.

To apply, email megha@underight.ai with a short intro, resume, and links to your work.
by OgsyedIE | 2025-06-28 22:59:42+00:00
There's a lot to be gained from using the lens of push and pull factors. Device addiction notwithstanding there is a much higher expectation of parental time investment into modern childrearing than before and better advertising of childfree life trajectories, both of which are poor for natalism.

One thing I've never had the datasets to work with to do is to just make a scatterplot of US counties by fertility vs median home square footage, and I think analyzing such a relationship is a missed opportunity.
by bravesoul2 | 2025-06-28 22:59:43+00:00
Yes you can. Ergonomically that'll end up being harder sometimes. Sometimes it might be easier too! E.g. mostly loose data but you need a user_id field.

Not sure about performance. I imagine if that user_id field is a column you might get better performance. Not least because by choosing columns in a query you reduce the amount of data to be processed.

Another benefit of doing it the boring way is tooling. Orms, schema migrations and so on. I work in this space somewhat and think alot about the DX of both key value and relational stores!

Think of me as a "Just use postgres" and "Also just use dynamo" at the same time :)
by Twirrim | 2025-06-28 23:00:25+00:00
> I am seeing similar trends in arXiv submissions, as it seems it has become something of a means to inflate the value of one's own product(s) with a veneer of academic rigor

Unfortunately this isn't new. Almost as long as people have been publishing papers, people have been using them this way. arXiv, arguably, makes it even worse because the papers haven't even gone through the pretense of a peer review, that does serve to filter out at least some of them.
by ml- | 2025-06-28 23:00:46+00:00
The correct™ way is probably betting on what has the highest theoretical ROI, based on user cohort research and...

I'm not doing it the correct way, I don't want to do it the right way.. it doesn't give me any joy. I'd rather make a bunch of stuff no-one wants, and delete it later than spending time on figuring out what is the correct thing. The process is whatever I feel like doing that day. This is my main motivation for not going back to organized employment.

Of course, that's not the whole picture. The more paying users you get, the more you have to do the things that are burning.. those are usually pretty obvious from feedback from your systems and users. In this context I like to attempt to rank by opportunity costs or costs of delay to figure out what is important.

For my own goal setting I now rarely bother setting anything longer than "What can I incrementally improve in the next 2 hours". My backlogs are full, sort of sorted by some perceived importance (totally adhoc), and varied enough that I usually have something to do that works with my current mood. This definitely doesn't lend itself to moving in one coherent direction, but who cares.. the needle moves, just a bit slower than it would have with more focus.

In the end I think it very much depends what your goal is with going solo.. are you chasing unicorns, or just giving middle fingers to the industry living your best life.

tl;dr Whatever I feel like at any given hour
by perching_aix | 2025-06-28 23:01:43+00:00
> so I can't just store my prompts in git and know that I'll get the same behavior each time.

Yes you can, albeit it's pretty silly to do so. LLMs are not (inherently) nondeterministic, you're just not pinning the seed, or are using a remote, managed service for them with no reliability and consistency guarantees. [0]

Here, experiment with me [1]:

- download Ollama 0.9.3 (current latest)

- download the model gemma3n e4b (digest: 15cb39fd9394) using the command "ollama run gemma3n:e4b"

- pin the seed to some constant; let's use 42 as an example, by issuing the following command in the ollama interactive session started in the previous step: "/set parameter seed 42"

- prompt the model: "were the original macs really exactly 9 inch?"

It will respond with:

> You're right to question that! The original Macintosh (released in 1984) *was not exactly 9 inches*. It was marketed as having a *9-inch CRT display*, but the actual usable screen size was a bit smaller. (...)

Full response here: https://pastebin.com/PvFc4yH7

The response should be the same over time, across all devices, regardless of whether GPU-acceleration is available.

Bit of an aside, but the overall sentiment echoed in the article reminds me to how visual programming was going to revolutionize everything and take programmers' jobs. With the exception that AI I find actually useful, and was able to integrate it into my workflow.

[0] All of this is to say, to the extent LLM nondeterminism is currently a model trait, it is substituted using a PRNG. Actual nondeterminism is at most an inference engine trait typically instead, see e.g. batched inference.

[1] Details are for experiment reproduction purposes. You can substitute the listed inference engine, model, seed, and prompt with whatever your prefer for your own set of experiments.
by Nevermark | 2025-06-28 23:02:06+00:00
My guess, is that the people who could break protocol are too busy to deal with a request to break protocol. Too busy to give it a thought.

And anyone who is sympathetic to the request, knows that campaigning for the protocol break would require disrupting two or three levels of management above them, forcing powerful people to deal with something they don't care about. And that would be interpreted as wasting important people's time.

So the organization, as a decision making entity, is incapable of recognizing, much less considering, requests for an exception to default behavior.

I worked with a business that operated this way for many years. Even when there were overwhelming reasons to break process, the spark and tinder never got anywhere near each other.

Everyone between the spark and tinder empathized, talked to "somebody" to demonstrate they "tried", and to create an alibi for the inevitable "no" response that came next, while quietly doing everything they could to smother that spark, before it burned them.
by neonbrain | 2025-06-28 23:03:09+00:00
I believe Microsoft's usual "Embrace, Expand, Extinguish" strategy is at work here. For system stability and security reasons, you wouldn't actually want agents to dynamically discover tools without proper governance. Alternatives like PydanitcAI are lost in this steady MCP noise maintained by Microsoft - their "Embrace" phase for MCP, declared during Build 2025 event. Anthropic released this open standard with weak tooling and no governance for the specs, making it easy for Microsoft to dominate.

The next step would be Microsoft attempting to make their registry the de facto choice for developers and extending with Windows-specific verbs.

Then, by controlling what's considered "secure", they can marginalize competitors.
by YZF | 2025-06-28 23:03:41+00:00
I'm really surprised to hear another Jewish person speak about this in language that evokes the Nuremberg trials.

The article generally describes the IDF being asked to do crowd control with lethal weapons. For the most part it also described casualties (number unclear/unknown) as unintentional consequences.

I agree this does not look good but it's also not a matter of fact either. We don't know the facts, we don't know the scale, we don't know the intentions, we don't know who is making the allegations, we don't know the details.

War crimes in this war should be dealt with. Nuremberg trials is really not the right analogy.
by notahacker | 2025-06-28 23:03:45+00:00
tbh launch is at least as commoditised as space semiconductor packaging, especially when it's rideshares to LEO; the Exploration Company wouldn't struggle to get into space if the Falcon 9 wasn't a thing, it'd just have to pay someone else more[1], and no particular reason to doubt its ability to deliver on its longer term plan to develop its own launch capability either. Doubt that SpaceX would want to operate a Falcon 9 without any chips on board or locally-packaged COTS parts either!

[1]if Europeans wanting IODs of their reentry capsules for some reason couldn't use SpaceX, ArianeSpace absolutely has the technical ability to take the equivalent to Transporter mission payloads to the same orbits at the same launch cadence (this was the 14th Transporter rideshare mission since 2021), but obviously price-sensitive rideshare customers aren't going to use it whilst US and Indian launches are options, and much cheaper ones. Extra cost might be a dealbreaker for some less well funded space startups, but not for the company we're talking about here...