MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by felixnm | 2025-07-01 13:27:51+00:00
My single-parent Mom worked two jobs to support me and my two brothers, so she wasn't able to drive us very often. Fortunately, I had a pretty inexpensive bike that I used at least twice a day during the school year and 10x per day during summer vacations. During high school, I'd ride 7 miles each way to visit friends and sometimes had to ride through the forest (scary) at night, which is why I got my license as soon as I turned 16.
Show HN: High-performance Perforce file integrity verification
by fechols | 2025-07-01 13:27:59+00:00
While working remotely for a company making games with the Unreal engine, I ran into an issue with verifying builds on my home workstation: running "p4 clean" to verify the local copy of the repo was taking hours.

If my workstation blue-screened, or if there was any other reason to believe the files on disk might be corrupted or modified, I had to wait hours for the Perforce client to verify 400 GB of data each time.

So I created a tool called P4Sweep that does the same thing as "p4 clean" but 10x faster. And here's why:

* It downloads all of the MD5 hashes for all files at once, rather than one-at-a-time like "p4 clean". * It computes the MD5 hashes of all local files in parallel, based on the number of CPU cores available.

By eliminating the round-trip-latency of requesting the MD5 hash for each file over a VPN connection, plus the increased performance from hashing all files in parallel, we got a 10x performance improvement.

The result: P4Sweep verifies a 400 GB workspace in less than 3 minutes on a 16-core workstation!

So you can be sure you have a 1:1 bit-for-bit copy of what's on the Perforce server in the time it takes to get a cup of coffee!
by mlok | 2025-07-01 13:28:54+00:00
There is a very weird display bug on this site : when I access it in lanscape horizontal position, with my iPhone 8 on Brave or Safari : all the text is trembling, unable to settle on a size. Trapped in a resizing loop. If I rotate the phone verically it settles properly and then also horizontally. But if I reload the page (horizontally) it goes nuts again :)
by iamflimflam1 | 2025-07-01 13:29:12+00:00
> It's strange today to remember that playing chess well was seen as a great marker of AI, but today we consider it much less so.

It was seen as so difficult to do that research should be abandoned.

Projects in category B were held to be failures. One important project, that of "programming and building a robot that would mimic human ability in a combination of eye-hand co-ordination and common-sense problem solving", was considered entirely disappointing. Similarly, chess playing programs were no better than human amateurs. Due to the combinatorial explosion, the run-time of general algorithms quickly grew impractical, requiring detailed problem-specific heuristics.

The report stated that it was expected that within the next 25 years, category A would simply become applied technologies engineering, C would integrate with psychology and neurobiology, while category B would be abandoned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthill_report
by empath75 | 2025-07-01 13:29:14+00:00
> For example, large language models and other AI systems also appear to display creativity, but they don’t harness locality and equivariance.

"Next token" prediction is (primary) local, in the sense that the early layers are largely concerned with grammatical coherence, not semantics, and if you shifted the text input context window by a few paragraphs, it would adjust the output accordingly.

It's not _mathematically_ the same, but i do think the mechanics are similar.
by lukaszwojtow | 2025-07-01 13:29:31+00:00
I'm working on Alis Studio (https://github.com/alphatica/alis)- software to manage portfolios and research stock market ideas.

It's an MVP but perfectly usable. I needed features that I couldn't find anywhere else:

Parameter optimization with a genetic algorithm

Fuzzy optimization: randomly remove trades or whole markets and see what happens

Data mining: find rules how to exit trades sooner for better profit

Compare strategy results to random trading

Check current drawdown for statistical significance

Write trading systems in Java so I can test every idea under the sun and never be held back by some custom "scripting" language.

Of course, it's open-source. A GitHub star is much appreciated. Thanks!
by game_the0ry | 2025-07-01 13:30:00+00:00
Interesting. Sort of like HireVue? [1]

We use it at my company. Problem is that even when hiring managers get a bunch of video interviews but they would be too busy or too apathetic to even look at them.

I am convinced that the real problem in recruiting is lazy HMs. Which also explains why referrals are so effective - HMs don't need to think hard.

[1] https://www.hirevue.com/
by ryandrake | 2025-07-01 13:30:13+00:00
Yes, If you purposely turn off all notifications on your phone, and/or live on DND mode 24/7, you quickly learn to adapt to this world where using the internet is a deliberate action. Sanity sets in: you are deciding when to use your phone or computer, not an algorithm, or other people. You’re back in the driver’s seat, like it’s 2002 again! It’s very freeing.
by yungporko | 2025-07-01 13:30:22+00:00
i was expecting something dumb if i'm honest but it looks really nice, i would probably use this. it seems like the perfect extension of the "code vomit" speed of writing lua and moves it further in that direction imo.

the thing i like lua for is easily getting into that "flow state" of just writing code without having to think about "how should i approach this" but sometimes the lack of things which pluto addresses forces a level of verbosity that snaps me out of it. i often find myself hitting a mental roadblock where i think "like fuck am i gonna write that much code to do X, i'll just go work on a more fun part of the program and come back later".
by Lerc | 2025-07-01 13:31:10+00:00
I feel like good syntactic sugar should reduce cognitive load.

for example in JavaScript

let fish = 5 let cheese = 27 let nop = 0x4e71

being able to do

result = {fish,cheese,nop}

Is 'only' syntatic sugar but significantly reduces the cognitive load over

result = {fish:fish,cheese:cheese,nope:nop}

looking at the latter it is harder to take in the options at a glance, when reviewing you have to check if the names match. If they don't match was it intentional or accidental. Whereas if you encountered

result = {fish,cheese,nope:nop}

You are left with no doubt that the nope is not a typo but a explicit name specifier.
by maxerickson | 2025-07-01 13:31:31+00:00
Median student loan debt is about $25,000 dollars.

That's a lot, but not so much that it wouldn't be covered by a very modest increase in lifetime earnings.

The mean is closer to $40,000, which is still going to be covered by a modest improvement in earnings.

I think we should be working on changing things so that students graduate with less debt, and working on ensuring that time spent studying is worthwhile to the individual, but it's weird to treat extreme cases as if they are universal.
by joules77 | 2025-07-01 13:31:50+00:00
Back then Broadcast/Multicast (1 to all/1 to many) was expensive. It quite often resulted in routers and switches catching fire. The chips were too slow.

A side effect was we didn't have to deal with what Claude Shannon told us happens if everyone is broadcasting - noise increases - no one is really heard - people speak louder - people repeat messages - everyone is getting their energy drained.

Today Broadcast is free. And thats what we see happening.
Ask HN: Where to Find Kafka Folks?
by brd | 2025-07-01 13:32:15+00:00
Where are Kafka people congregating these days? I've come across an absolute mess of a Kafka deployment within the walls of a large customer. I expect I may find more if I start looking. Curious where I might find seasoned vets that can roll up sleeves and take ownership of wayward Kafka installs.
by ben_w | 2025-07-01 13:32:22+00:00
"A good many" is how many, exactly?

UK had a few million protest against the second Iraq war, and still didn't stop it. Do you think the percentage is higher or lower in Russia, with all its propaganda?

Worse, in the context of "picture myself working on something like this and sleeping well at night", consider sub-group modifiers: how many people in the UK resigned from defence companies due to agreement with the anti-Iraq-war protests?
by jerf | 2025-07-01 13:32:51+00:00
Yes, strong agree. A properly functioning economy, well, it's probably too strong to say it would never do this, but it shouldn't permit it for years at a time, with all the educated participants in the economy easily able to tell that's what is going on. That this is possible at all doesn't mean the system is broken, but that it is possible at this scale says there is something seriously wrong.
by Retric | 2025-07-01 13:33:05+00:00
The underlying biochemical problem would show up long before hunter gatherers, the equivalent of a 2-3% drop in IQ across billions of years is massive pressure to find a solution. Brains are a major calorie sink that’s a big enough difference to matter.

If it’s a 0.0001% drop then sure evolution would ignore that, but so should we.
by rtkwe | 2025-07-01 13:33:38+00:00
Yeah there are a couple that claim to be like this [0] one, and there are FDA standards to follow for that claim. I wouldn't use one on a cutting board or anything that gets scraped or cut on and you need to let it cure waaaay longer than normal but yeah there are options out there.

[0] https://www.artresin.com/blogs/artresin/food-safe-epoxy-a-gu...
by queenkjuul | 2025-07-01 13:33:53+00:00
Not being forced, but the peer pressure is getting pretty strong.

Claude Code i will admit i find occasionally useful, but the flood of overly verbose and lackingly meaningful "AI Summaries" I'm being forced to waste time reading is really grating on me. Copilot PR summaries turning a 20-line PR into a fifty-line unhelpful essay is driving me insane.
by ryandrake | 2025-07-01 13:34:08+00:00
True in real life, too. Whenever someone random comes up to me and tries to engage in a conversation, my guard goes up because 9 times out of 10, they are trying to sell me something or scam me. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a woman, where your “safety” alarms are also sounding.

Spontaneous, innocent chit chat is dead, both online and offline because everyone’s hustling now.
by njpatel | 2025-07-01 13:34:15+00:00
I'm not sure the log message v structured message comparison makes sense - most log and trace events are batched and compressed before being transported, and so the size difference isn't really an issue. On the receiving side most services have some kind of column store as their main datastore and so there's no issue there either. The benefits of structured logging are worth it.

Regarding pricing - there is an option for every kind of usage out there, it's mostly a solved problem that comes with choosing two of large scale, low cost, low latency. For instance we serve large scale and low cost.
by Arainach | 2025-07-01 13:34:31+00:00
The Discord of 2020 and before absolutely supported text channels, voice channels, multiple of the above, customizable notifications, and everything required here. Like OP and many others I found myself on a number of Discord servers during the pandemic for voice/video chat, gaming together, etc. and that app was the straightforward solution both for organizing and the actual event for groups of any size from 4-20.
by deltarholamda | 2025-07-01 13:35:06+00:00
I see where you're coming from, but I like the way the story is formatted.

There's plenty to doom and gloom about with the state of tech right now, but this is a good reminder that sometimes even Big Internet tools, with a little ingenuity, can sometimes be repurposed to serve the users and not some corporation's bottom line.

It's kind of a throwback to the olden days where you might stand up an IRC server or something similar just for your friend group. I like seeing people returning to the small internet where it serves as a substrate for real people doing real things.
by peterldowns | 2025-07-01 13:35:53+00:00
Fun story. This reminds me of the summer my friends and I were all still around our small town — we used the Yo! app the same way, as a bat signal to meet up and get into nonsense. Someone would start Yo!ing and then once there was a critical mass of return Yo!s we'd switch to text/phone and link up.

Good times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(app)
by dispencerrr | 2025-07-01 13:36:02+00:00
Good questions! You're right the 200 test runs limit is too low. I badly want to increase this, but currently each test costs $.05 to run so I need to get the costs down to enable that.

But my next update will fix that – and also answer your second question. What I've realized is we don't actually need to use the AI on every test run. We just need to use the AI on the initial run, then subsequent tests can just replay the playwright steps the AI chose.

And if a test fails, before throwing a failure we can re-run it with the AI assistance to see if the test truly failed from a user perspective. Hopefully when I add this functionality it can address your concerns around unpredictability :)
by mattlondon | 2025-07-01 13:36:24+00:00
This is where Google wins AI again - most people want the google-bot to crawl their site so they get traffic. There is benefit to both sides there, and Google will use it's crawl-index for AI training. Monopolistic? Perhaps.

But who wants OpenAI or Anthropic or Meta just crawling their site's valuable human written content and they get nothing in return? Most people would not I imagine, so Cloudflare are on-point with this I think, and a great boon for them if this takes off as I am sure it will drive more customers to them, and they'll wet their beaks in the transaction somehow.

Bravo Cloudflare.
by jerf | 2025-07-01 13:38:19+00:00
None of that matters in the slightest. If you think bitcoin is going to $1million each, and you have the choice of buying it from the market at $100k (or through several other market vehicles at similar valuation) or buying it through Strategy stock at an implicit valuation of $150k, which should you do?

Bitcoin just happens to be the medium the problem is manifesting on but it doesn't matter what it is. The failure is the market valuating acquisitions at grotesquely more than their market value, and especially for a commodity that has such an absolutely clear market value.

In a way, you're sort of demonstrating the problem. You're so stuck on Bitcoin and going gaga over it that you didn't even understand the actual problem. They're using the brightness of Bitcoin to cover over their dark schemes where you can't see it. It's people like you powering this market failure. Sorry, that's a bit direct, but it's actually healthy for you to hear this. You should understand how you're being jerked around so you can make better future decisions.

(Note that replying with more enthusiastic pitching of the future of Bitcoin would really, really prove my point.)
by 9283409232 | 2025-07-01 13:38:31+00:00
I don't trust Cloudflare but this is not a problem they created. They solved a real problem with DDoS protection in the beginning and now AI crawlers increasing server cost is not a negligible problem. The CEO of iFixit called out Anthropic publicly for hitting their site a million times in 24 hours to scrape it. We are passed the point of good faith action from these AI companies. They are adversarial and need to be treated as such.
by DebtDeflation | 2025-07-01 13:38:49+00:00
Likewise, we've been building conversational interfaces for stuff like this for over a decade using traditional NLP techniques and orchestration rather than LLMs. Intent classification, named entity extraction, slot filling, and API calling.

Processing returns is pretty standardized - identify the order and the item within it being returned, capture the reason for the return, check eligibility, capture whether they want a refund or a new item, and execute either. When you have a fully deterministic workflow with 5-6 steps, maybe 1 or 2 if-then branches, and then a single action at the end, I don't see the value of running an LLM in a loop, burning a crazy amount of tokens, and hoping it works at least 80% of the time when there are far simpler and cheaper ways of doing it that will work almost 100% of the time.
by nullify88 | 2025-07-01 13:39:03+00:00
I'm only now just starting out my on prem photo library and have a couple of thousand which sqlite with WAL seems to have no problems with.

Also considering the type of workload, I imagine photo albums to be write heavy upon photo imports but read heavy afterwards which sqlite should excel at. I'll mostly be syncing pictures from our phones, and it'll be me and the wife using it. Postgres is overkill for my needs.

What about having to do db migrations across major updates?
by Workaccount2 | 2025-07-01 13:39:24+00:00
My example was not that they try to get kids to spend more time on roblox, of course they do, my example was that they want kids to forgo school to spend more time on roblox. Rather than compete with netflix for engagement, compete with teachers and education.

I can assure you, with all my money bet on it, that no one in a roblox exec meeting ever said "We need to focus on lobbying schools to shorten the school day in key markets." No one at roblox is fantasizing about roblox replacing -all- (I mean this literally, not just entertainment time) facets of a child's life with roblox.

Whereas apple explicitly had their goal "Get kids using iphones, don't port imessage to android, families will be forced to buy iphones and stay on iphones to maintain familial communication."

That is evil.
by faizshah | 2025-07-01 13:39:39+00:00
It’s RocksDB but faster because data can be searched while still compressed allowing you to load more records in less cache/ram leading to up to 10x performance of RocksDB. It adds an embedded http control plane as well as supporting other extensions like MyRocks (MySQL) and Todis (redis compatibility).

Or at least thats what I got from it correct me if I am wrong rockeet.
by Scarblac | 2025-07-01 13:41:09+00:00
Humans are very different from computers. In particular there are some things that computers are vastly better at (computation, memory, etc), and humans are optimized for surviving in their biological environment, not necessarily for general intelligence.

I think asking of an AGI to do what humans do is asking a submarine to swim. It's not very useful.

So I think that when we have useful computer AGI, it will be much better at it than humans.

You already see that even with say ChatGPT -- it's not expert level, but the knowledge it does have is way way wider than any human's. If we get something that's as smart as humans, it will probably still be as widely applicable.

And why even try, otherwise? We already have human intelligence.
by ljm | 2025-07-01 13:41:10+00:00
I used to be quite fond of Datadog but after one or two completely surprising bills (thanks to their granular but unintuitive pricing model), I wouldn't recommend it to anybody any more. If I were more cynical I would say the pricing model is designed to be confusing so customers spend more than they need, and this is only made worse by the extreme breadth of the platform now.

These days I'd suggest to just suck it up, spin up a Grafana box, and wire up OpenTelemetry.
by maxsilver | 2025-07-01 13:41:51+00:00
> I wish academia were more rigorous about not taking sides. I feel like they’ve been injecting their own ideology unnecessarily for a while.

I don't think this is true. I think academia is still pretty good (not great, but pretty good) at not taking sides. I don't see a ton of overly-ideological academics (if anything, Academia skews unnaturally conservative, simply out of fear).

I think the 'problem' is that science is moving forward and settling debates that previously weren't settled, and therefore lived in the realm of "political opinion". But because people don't like the mostly-objective scientific results, and because it's being debated politically, they're simply accusing academia of 'taking sides', because that's how they picked their political views.

Examples exist with things like Global Warming, or Human Rights, or LGBTQ+, or Vaccines, or so on.

Global Warming is an obvious one -- while there's always more to learn, and we can't perfectly predict everything -- the base science has been 100% settled for decades now -- the earth is warming, human pollution is the primary cause, we know what we're doing to cause it, and our refusal to stop causing it is changing environments. We can argue about how much, or how long, or how badly, or the accuracy of models and projections and so on -- but there is no factual argument that Global Warming isn't happening, or that humanity isn't directly contributing to it.

But people simply don't like that answer, despite it being true, so they debate it anyway -- and then flip around and accuse academia of 'picking a side' when Academia didn't pick or choose anything.

If any academic could, in good faith, prove "yep, air pollution isn't causing global warming, in fact, Earth's orbit is falling into the Sun at a rapid rate, we can prove this with astrological/radiological measurements" or whatever, they'd be rushing to demonstrate this. They aren't, because they can't -- it's simply not true.

I'm not saying it never happens, or that no one abuses academia to push political views (it does sometimes happen). But most academics aren't "picking" their stance on these issues, science and research is uncovering facts or evidence on a continuous basis, and academics usually just stick to what's been discovered or observed (and -- for the parts still unknown or missing -- make theories or educated guesses that are supported by science and do not contradict the objective discoveries. If new results or evidence arrives, they revoke or adjust their theory to fit with the new discovery).

Some humans simply refuse to accept the things that have been discovered or learned through science. It requires a person to be willing to change their mind based on something they have learned, and a lot of people simply hate doing that ever (so much so, that their answer to hating objective results of science, is to simply defund all the science)
by prmoustache | 2025-07-01 13:42:20+00:00
> I wonder if you think the same of African Americans and your willingness to deny them of African heritage.

Having heritage is one thing, migrating there as well. But landing somewhere, installing a new flag and government and pushing people out of their land through force is completely out of line.

> What about eastern european Jews that actually look semitic, that have middle eastern features? Do you also negate them of heritage, or just white skinned Jews?

I am not negating heritage, I am negating the appropriation of a land at the expense of others.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-07-01 13:43:24+00:00
Children and being a parent being “good” or meaningful is an opinion, not an objective fact. Many can do better, as measured by their life happiness and expectations, without. The point of freedom and autonomy is to explore and experience the one life you have. Some people find meaning in children and parenting, but many do not, and are just fine.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/why-bad-looks-good/2...

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/complete-without-kid...

https://ifstudies.org/blog/does-having-children-make-people-...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2367106/