MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: ToplingDB - A Persistent Key-Value Store for External Storage
by rockeetterark | 2025-07-01 10:07:59+00:00
As the creator of TerarkDB (acquired by ByteDance in 2019), I have developed ToplingDB in recent years.

ToplingDB is forked from RocksDB, where we have replaced almost all components with more efficient alternatives(db_bench shows ToplingDB is about ~8x faster than RocksDB):

* MemTable: SkipList is replaced by CSPP(Crash Safe Parallel Patricia trie), which is 8x faster.

* SST: BlockBasedTable is replaced by ToplingZipTable, implemented by searchable compression algo, it is very small and fast, typically less than 1μs per lookup:

* Keys/Indexes are compressed using NestLoudsTrie(a multi-layer nesting LOUDS succinct trie). * Values in a SST are compressed together with better zip ratio than zstd, and can unzip by a single value at 1GB/sec. * BlockCache is no longer needed, double caching(BlockCache & PageCache) is avoided

Other hotspots are also improved:

* Flush MemTable to L0 is omited, greatly reducing write amp and is very friendly for large(GB) MemTable

* MemTable serves as the index of Key to "value position in WAL log" * Since WAL file content almost always in page cache, thus value content can be efficiently accessed by mmap * When Flush happens, MemTable is dumpped as an SST and WAL is treated as a blob file * CSPP MemTable use integer index instead of physical pointers, thus in-memory format is exactly same with in-file format

* Prefix cache for searching candidate SSTs and prefix cache for scanning by iterators

* Caching fixed len key prefix into an array, binary search it as an uint array

* Distributed compaction(superior replacement to rocksdb remote compaction)

* Gracefully support MergeOperator, CompactionFilter, PropertiesCollector... * Out of the box, development efforts are significantly reduced * Very easy to share compaction service on spot instances for many DB nodes

Useful Bonus Feature:

* Config by json/yaml: can config almost all features

* Optional embeded WebView: show db structures in web browser, refreshing pages like animation

* Online update db configs by http

MySQL integration, ToplingDB has integrated into MySQL by MyTopling, which is forked from MyRocks with great improvements, like improvements of ToplingDB on RocksDB:

* WBWI(WriteBatchWithIndex): like MemTable, SkipList is replace with CSPP, 20x faster(speedup is more than MemTable).

* LockManager & LockTracker: 10x faster

* Encoding & Decoding: 5x faster

* Others ....

MyRocks has many disadvantages compared to InnoDB, while MyTopling outperforms InnoDB at almost all aspect - excluding feature differences.

We have create ~100 PRs for RocksDB, in which ~40 were accepted. Our PRs are mostly "small" changes, since big changes are not likely accepted.

ToplingDB has been deployed in numerous production environments.

Welcome every one using ToplingDB & MyTopling, and discuss in https://github.com/topling/toplingdb/discussions
by ncruces | 2025-07-01 10:08:14+00:00
> and this trivially extends to constructing a fair N-sided die out of any arbitrarily biased die for any N

They wrote something interesting, even if it only tangentially matches the topic.

Pointing out that it doesn't exactly match the topic also adds to the conversation, I guess, but I think we've now exhausted any interest (so I won't be arguing further).
by jimlikeslimes | 2025-07-01 10:09:15+00:00
But in practice don't most people mean tofu when talking about soy beans for protein? That tends to come out at 10-13g per 100g. Same for cooked cans of soy/edamme beans and most other canned lentils/pulses? I've never seens 30g per 100g for cooked canned beans in reality.

I eat a high protein, vegetarian diet optimised for lifting weights, and "Approximately no additional grams, if you pick the right legumes." doesn't really add up for me. For the main sources of protein I usually try to eat daily:

Tofu 400g; eggs 3 large; cottage cheese (low-fat) 300g; greek yoghurt (0% fat) 250g; beans/lentils (mixed) 1-3 cans;

and then also supplement with whey protein powder to get to my daily protein target (~150g). To get there with just legumes I'd need to consume 15 cans of cooked lentils (i.e. not achieveable in reality).
by whyoh | 2025-07-01 10:09:35+00:00
I don't really agree with this framing. The fundamental issue is user ignorance, full stop. The fact is that our collective tech education is in a terrible state. Apple exploiting this to sell iPhones is just natural behavior for a profit-driven enterprise.

Instead of shaming Apple (which won't be very effective IMO), we should aim to improve education. Teach users how SMS/MMS/iMessage work. Tell them that they can install universal messaging apps and so on.
by dizhn | 2025-07-01 10:09:47+00:00
I get this a lot in restaurant menus nowadays. My phone is set to English because I am more familiar with techy terms in English than my native language with its weird translations. I go to a restaurant, open the QR menu and tell them what I want. But they don't understand what I want because the menu is set to English because of my phone settings. A lot of places have English names in their regular menu (because cool) so I am not talking about speaking English to a nonspeaker. Like sometimes a wrap is called a wrap and sometimes it's called whatever the native thing is. That kind of thing.
by fwn | 2025-07-01 10:11:05+00:00
I currently use Ente.io as a secondary photo syncing service in addition to Google Photos.

While I really like it — snappy and encrypted — I was surprised by how much the missing Ultra HDR implementation affects me. Photos are currently uploaded with brightness information but not displayed with it. Therefore, my photos look great in Google Photos but far less vivid in Ente.

For what it's worth, I found a discussion about Ultra HDR. It doesn't seem to be a priority right now, though: https://github.com/ente-io/ente/discussions/779
by badpun | 2025-07-01 10:11:11+00:00
People give to charity what they don't need. If all businesses are expected to be charities, they cease to be profitable and thus cease to function, as no one will bankroll the initial investment required to set up a business without the prospect of making money on it.

Let's look at an example. In order to produce e.g. wind turbines, a large factory is needed, full of expensive machines. Let's assume that the buldings plus the machines all costs $500 million altogether. Where would that $500m come from, if the factory will never be profitable, so entities with money will never bankroll it? The only alternative I can think of is 100% socialism and centrally managed economy, where all businesses are owned and bankrolled by the state. However, in practice all such implementations so far (over probably at least a dozen different countries) has been terribly inefficient and corrupt.
by b112 | 2025-07-01 10:11:14+00:00
The model train setup Daniel Xu found beneath the home he just purchased is impressive, but it has proven an even greater delight, given he is a train engineer and train enthusiast. Source: SBS News

Uh huh... fortunate indeed.

My immediate thought was, his wife discovered his hobby, and the money spent, and "No, it was here when we moved in!"

Then the news shows up, and of course, he can't tell them different, or busted!
by Ragnarork | 2025-07-01 10:11:52+00:00
I've finally come around to set on a journey to develop my first game. It followed a read on Gamedev in 2025 that actually popped on HN a few months ago[0].

I've mostly scribbled notes on paper for now, trying to be exhaustive about all that before scoping MVP (maybe SLC[1] would be better but I'm first doing that for myself so I'm not really pressuring myself for now).

I'm using modern C++, and will probably start from SDL3, plus a couple other libraries, but nothing too big or framework-y beyond that.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44038209 [1] https://longform.asmartbear.com/slc/
by ekunazanu | 2025-07-01 10:13:10+00:00
> Why is your (failed, btw) idea of infrastructure is called "human-centric"? What makes it _human_?

Great question. No strict definition as such for me, but in the context of transportation, it loosely means that it must be 'easy' for most people to get from point A to point B, using the least amount of time. Ideally it must must be accessible for all people (so teens without a licenses, legally blind people, or anyone without the means to get a car etc). From a non-transportation context (just adding, not very relevant to the answer), places with no loud traffic noise and just a nice general atmosphere of people around. Think streets with trees, and lively public spaces for people to hang out.

> If cars lead to better outcomes (and they do, once self-driving is deployed), then why not? Why force people into densified anti-human hellscapes?

No one is being forced. If anything, these measures only makes the cities with high urban density more livable for people. The 'hellscapes' have more to do with the housing crisis and zoning laws than transit infrastructure.

Idk why most people think urban density is a problem to be solved (using tech like self driving for eg), because it ultimately always circles back to the fact that density is the only sustainable way for cities to develop and grow in the long run. Even if it is not perfect.

> I fail to see anything human in dense cities like Tokyo or Manhattan.

It would be even more dystopian if Tokyo didn't have a great metro and people had to wait in traffic for hours. Imagine the increased stress, lesser free time, and lower quality of life from all the noise and pollution.

> Yes. And once people can, they opt out of transit as well.

When exactly will most people have the option to opt-out, and how likely and how exactly will it happen?

I also feel like you're arguing just for the argument's sake. If not, we probably have fundamentally different views on what's 'better' and I don't think any amount of convincing will change either of our minds.
by silveraxe93 | 2025-07-01 10:15:23+00:00
It's ironic how people write this without a shred of reasoning. This is just _wrong_. LLMs are not simply token prediction machines since GPT-3.

During pre-training, yeah they are. But there's a ton of RL being done on top after that.

If you want to argue that they can't reason, hey fair be my guest. But this argument keeps getting repeated as a central reason and it's just not true for years.
by encom | 2025-07-01 10:16:06+00:00
Danskjævel here, and I feel your pain. MS Windows has always had a pretty terrible danish translation. Partly because a lot of tech language translates poorly to danish, and partly because MS are lazy and incompetent. Back in Windows 2000 days, I found instances where "Windows" the product name was translated to "vinduer", the danish word for an actual window. I actually found a ~25 year old screenshot I took --> https://0x0.st/80r5.png

Worse than that is, as you say, software that makes dumb assumptions about my language preferences. It gets especially interesting when graphic drivers translate strings like ambient occlusion, screen space reflections, temporal anti-aliasing, subsurface scattering. The result is incomprehensible gibberish - I mean levels far beyond the baseline gibberish danish already is :D

Win10 regional settings are so terrible, and it's pretty much impossible to set keyboard, date/number formatting and basically everything but display language to danish, while keeping the display language english (The King's English, thankyouverymuch). Thankfully Linux has the locale "en_DK.UTF-8" which instantly makes everything show like I want it.
by megalord | 2025-07-01 10:17:00+00:00
I agree with everything in the blog post. What I'm struggling with right now is the correct way of executing things the most safe way but also I want flexibility for LLM. Execute/choose function from list of available fns is okay for most use cases, but when there is something more complex, we need to somehow execute more things from allowed list, do some computations in between calls etc.
by amiga386 | 2025-07-01 10:17:09+00:00
> separate language, not a dialect of English

Of all the languages spoken in the UK and Ireland that argument attracts, I've never heard anyone claim that about Irish - an actual Gaelic language.

> The vast majority of graduates, after about 13 years of mandatory Irish classes, cannot functionally speak it.

They just need to get out their word book - that's right, their focal leabhair

♫ oh get out your focal leabhair, get out your focal leabhair

and we'll have you speaking Irish in a half-an-hour

Sea means yes and Níl means no

get out your focal leabhair and we'll all have a go ♫

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYNZbmrMg7M
by izacus | 2025-07-01 10:17:16+00:00
Your freezer doesn't ask for 30% of every grocery you buy and doesn't forbid you from storing a broccoli in it just because the broccoli company didn't pay the tax to the fridge maker.

Every time you make those comparisons it becomes much clearer just how much of an overreach and danger to market capitalism Apples behaviour is.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-01 10:17:47+00:00
Also from the guidelines, HN is not primarily for (self) promo. This isn’t a Show HN, though, so it’s not necessary for us to have something we can hold and play with. Look with your eyes and enjoy OP’s thing vicariously.

In the vibe code era, is it gauche to ask for code?

Considering that OP hasn’t made any other posts or comments in any other threads, it’s fair to assume that they are like 90% of users who don’t post or comment, but they did in this thread about their stuff, so it is sort of a legitimate criticism.
by Kaibeezy | 2025-07-01 10:18:37+00:00
ADHD-supportive notepad. A distraction-reduced space for writing quick thoughts. I have two huge monitors covered with dozens of windows and hundreds of tabs. Notepad text goes to the edges of its window and is black on white, way too visually noisy, so I open a sticky behind it and give myself an inch of buffer. But then I need to look at something else and the layers get upended.

I’m a non-technical manager of a development team and couldn’t conscionably ask one of my devs to do it, so I downloaded Delphi (we are very old school) and got to work with ChatGPT. It’s been fussier than I ever imagined, but now I’ve got the minimal functions, autosave, buffer zones and color options I’ve been dreaming of, plus new insight into what my devs go through when I ask “how hard can it be to just…” Mopping up some issues with resizing. I’ll post a free version soon.
by noobermin | 2025-07-01 10:19:57+00:00
Once again, all the hypsters need to explain to me how than just programming yourself. I don't need to (re-)craft my context, it's already in my head.

pg said a few months ago on twitter that ai coding is just proof we need better abstract interfaces, perhaps, not necessarily that ai coding is the future. The "conversation is shifting from blah blah to bloo bloo" makes me suspicious that people are trying just to salvage things. The provided examples are neither convincing nor enlightening to me at all. If anything, it just provides more evidence for "just doing it yourself is easier."
by simongray | 2025-07-01 10:20:00+00:00
Maybe you can argue why it's not most countries? It seems obvious to me that it is, but I also come from a country where everyone is bilingual.

Many former European colonies are mostly bilingual, e.g. Africa is highly multilingual out of necessity. Much of Europe itself is also mostly bilingual. If you want to communicate outside your own little region and your native language isn't a lingua franca, you need to be bilingual in this world.

The main holdouts when it comes to bilingualism are former imperial powers who managed to both kill domestic language diversity (e.g. France, UK, Russia) while also spreading their national language as a lingua Franca. Another group of holdouts are settler colonies such as the US, which didn't have a dominant native population after the arrival of Europeans.

But even if e.g. Russia itself isn't super bilingual, the rest of the former Soviet Union certainly is, since that is just the reality if you live in a small and/or formerly colonised country.
by Yizahi | 2025-07-01 10:20:16+00:00
Our company is relatively old (20+ years), mid size, hardware oriented and has a lot of people of all ages. For now neural network use is carefully allowed and encouraged to try out of a list of allowed LLMs only, but it's not mandatory and not forced (yet). There is also an internal project based on NNs to automate log analysis, but it is very early from possibly becoming a useful product, too many noise and useless non-actionable results.
by onetom | 2025-07-01 10:21:26+00:00
i'm not from the US, but i did work on forms related to government workflows.

it bugged me for a long time why a person can't store facts about themselves and let some software figure out which of those facts are needed for filling out any form, which needs the usual personal facts.

then one can review the required facts and decide which ones are they willing to share.

in fact governments could even standardize the kind of info they are dealing with usually and when a citizen wants the government to do something, instead of filling out forms, they could provide their own, self-hosted fact db, run the govt's query and provide the results (after review)
by justanotherjoe | 2025-07-01 10:22:26+00:00
Yeah and in another 5 years he'd probably be at nobel laureate level in AI. I don't think that's how it works. What do you mean? Even a phd program can take 5 years sometimes. Also the man started saying he'd bring about AGI right at the gate. He wasn't being exactly humble.

God I hate sounding like this. I swear I'm not too good for John Carmack, as he's infinitely smarter than me. But I just find it a bit weird.

I'm not against his discovery, just against the vibe and framing of the op.
by ainiriand | 2025-07-01 10:22:31+00:00
I tried to make an app in claude code like they so much fanfare it could do, and it failed. It was obvious it will fail, I wanted something that I think it was not done before, using the Youtube api. But it failed nonetheless.

I am tired of pretending that this can actually pull any meaningful work besides a debug companion or a slightly enhanced google/stackoverflow.
by noirscape | 2025-07-01 10:23:12+00:00
> Except it’s not. That argument would be much stronger if the App Store weren’t full of scammy predatory apps which regularly top the top grossing charts.

Not just that - they also actively interfere with search results for essential apps people need. Looking up government or banking apps in the iOS app store will always surface either dodgy insurance sellers or dodgy banks that aren't the one you want to use before the actual app you want to download.

The App Store's curation is absolutely horrendous - these are also bought/sponsored placements, meaning Apple is actively profiting off of people being led to these sorts of misleading apps.
by oblio | 2025-07-01 10:24:24+00:00
From our perspective as users. From the company's perspective? Net positive, they don't need to hire people.

We're going to be so messed up in a decade or so when only 10-20-30% of the population is employable in decent jobs.

People keep harping on about people moving on with their lives, but people don't. Many industrial heartlands in the developed world are wastelands compared to what they were: Walloonia in Belgium, Scotland in the UK, the Rust Belt in the US.

People don't really move on, they suffer, sometimes for generations.
by al_borland | 2025-07-01 10:26:30+00:00
> I certainly hope Apple aspires to keep the quality of their hardware and software high. They should however never control user data or choice of third party services.

These two things are often at odds with each other. If people bought into the Apple ecosystem because of the walled garden, the regulators want to rip down those walls and turn it into a fundamentally different product. Bad 3rd party experiences can break the illusion of the perfect walled garden, which is why Apple has many of its rules. Though, I’d say that illusion has already been broken for many, due to a bunch of apps with timed ad pop-ups and other such nonsense. I won’t allow any of that on my phone, but most people do.

I’ve read articles from developers that say they offer options on iOS to go ad-free, while similar options don’t exist on Android for the same app, since not enough people do it and they can make more on ads (I believe I read this from the Angry Birds devs years ago). I would find this unacceptable as a user. I don’t think this is a rule from Apple, but rather differences in the types of users that gravitate to the various platforms; or maybe it’s simply comfort and trust in Apple to process all the payments. I think it should be a rule that any app with ads has the ability to remove them for a price. For smaller apps, I would have a lot less comfort doing this if it didn’t go through Apple (or some similarly large company). I would be very sad if the monkey paw from this lawsuit was that I end up with apps full of ads that I can’t remove, or don’t feel safe removing. This would fly in the face of Proton’s goals as well.

There is also the registration side of things. Today, I can get an app without an account for it, buy it, delete it, and if I re-download it, I can restore that purchase. Going through the developer means yet another account to manage, track, and entrusting another 3rd party.

I paid $30 a couple weeks ago for lifetime access to the “pro” version of an app I’ve been using. I don’t think I would have done that if I would have had to make an account and all that. It would be too much friction and I don’t know enough about the dev. So the dev got $21-25 from me, instead of the alternative, which would have been 0. And that’s what starts the downward spiral toward ads everywhere, which degrades the whole experience.
by mgh2536545z | 2025-07-01 10:26:39+00:00
Hey everyone! I’m a product designer (and a girl in tech ) who’s always wanted to bring my own ideas to life. A few months ago I decided to seriously learn Tailwind and started to use vibe coding.

As a skincare enthusiast, I always struggled to find clean products and filter out ingredients that are hormone-disrupting, irritating, or just not a good fit for my skin. Creating a skin care routine felt really overwhelming.

So I built a simple tool to make that easier: https://myskinroutine.com It’s a one-click skincare routine builder that filters out things (tags you choose) like hormone-disrupting or irritating ingredients and helps you find clean, simple routines that fit your skin type.

It's the first version and free to try. Would love your thoughts — on the idea, the UI, or the vibe overall :) Any constructive feedback is welcome. Thank you so much!
by encom | 2025-07-01 10:27:03+00:00
>client settings

But even setting the client right is not really possible. I'm danish. I understand english and german. Norwegian and swedish are similar enough to danish that I can read it without too much trouble. Websites, if they're translated at all, usually offer their native language plus an english translation. So if I visit a website in any language I understand, I'd prefer the original. But for any other language I want the english version.

If I set my accept-language to "da,en", I get a lot of horrible machine translated danish on a lot of websites. If I set it to "en,da", all danish government websites are now english. I can't win.
by jjani | 2025-07-01 10:27:08+00:00
A point we're still lightyears away from. The lengths they go to in order to operate in China are magnitudes greater than to operate in the EU, yet EU makes them $10+ billion more profit than China.

What would actually happen is that the US would start seriously threatening (blackmailing) the EU to a degree where it's forced to relent long before Apple would pull out.

Apple's estimated operating profit from the EU is around $40 billion dollars. If the US government wouldn't get involved, they could force Tim Apple himself to live on top of the Alps and he'd happily do it rather than lose that $40 billion, or shareholders would vote him out ASAP.