MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jchw | 2025-07-09 13:55:05+00:00
> Think about all the problems associated with process life cycle - is a process stalled? Should I restart it? Why is that process using so much memory? How should my process count change with demand? All of those go away when the lifecycle is tied to the request.

So the upshot of writing CGI scripts is that you can... ship broken, buggy code that leaks memory to your webserver and have it work mostly alright. I mean look, everyone makes mistakes, but if you are routinely running into problems shipping basic FastCGI or HTTP servers in the modern era you really need to introspect what's going wrong. I am no stranger to writing one-off Go servers for things and this is not a serious concern.

Plus, realistically, this only gives a little bit of insulation anyway. You can definitely still write CGI scripts that explode violently if you want to. The only way you can really prevent that is by having complete isolation between processes, which is not something you traditionally do with CGI.

> It’s also more secure because each request is isolated at the process level. Long lived processes leak information to other requests.

What information does this leak, and why should I be concerned?

> Or you know not every site is about scaling requests. It’s another way you can simplify.

> > but it is an outdated execution model

> Not an argument.

Correct. That's not the argument, it's the conclusion.

For some reason you ignored the imperative parts,

> It's cool that you can fork+exec 5000 times per second, but if you don't have to, isn't that significantly better?

> Plus, with FastCGI, it's trivial to have separate privileges for the application server and the webserver.

> [Having] the web server execute stuff in a specific folder inside the document root just seems like a recipe for problems.

Those are the primary reasons why I believe the CGI model of execution is outdated.

> The opposite trend of ignoring OS level security and hoping your language lib does it right seems like the wrong direction.

CGI is in the opposite direction, though. With CGI, the default behavior is that your CGI process is going to run with similar privileges to the web server itself, under the same user. On a modern Linux server it's relatively easy to set up a separate user with more specifically-tuned privileges and with various isolation options and resource limits (e.g. cgroups.)
by ivan_gammel | 2025-07-09 13:55:27+00:00
If you really want this idiomatically correct, put the data in JSON or other suitable format, zip it and encode in Base64 to pass via GET as a single parameter. To hit the browser limits you will need so big query that you may hit UX constraints earlier in many cases (2048 bytes is 50+ UUIDs or 100+ polygon points etc).

Pros: the search query is a link that can be shared, the result can be cached. Cons: harder to debug, may not work in some cases due to URI length limits.
by setr | 2025-07-09 13:55:27+00:00
Only the first strategy shoves it into the same table? The fundamental problem is record A can have type X Y or Z, with each type having additional metadata. You could flatten the model and have a table for each type X Y Z and query them independently, and pay the cost of duplicate schema structure and having to ensure they’re always synchronized manually (including any dependent tables), or you pluck out the common core and run into the article’s problem
by fn-mote | 2025-07-09 13:55:31+00:00
A short search lead to this SE post [1], which doesn't answer the "why" but says "if" is just syntactic sugar that turns into `ifThenElse`...

[1]: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1957...

The post claims that this is done in such a basic way that if you have managed to rebind `ifThenElse`, your rebound function gets called. I didn't confirm this, but I believed it.
by devilbunny | 2025-07-09 13:55:40+00:00
“Duzbuns Hopsit pfarmerrsc”

(For today’s 10000, that’s Terry Pratchett. The autocrat of the city of Ankh-Morpork amuses himself, at times, by figuring out where unreadably-addressed mail should go - in this case, a baker (“duzbuns” == does buns) across the street (“hopsit” == opposite) from a pharmacy, which in his extremely detailed knowledge of the city means only one place.)
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-07-09 13:56:30+00:00
The standard capitalist response would be, it serves the consumer of a service who wouldn't be willing to pay more for the additional guarantee of click-to-cancel.

It doesn't seem that farfetched to me to imagine two sites offering equivalent services, one at $5/month and the other at $6/month, with the only difference being the $6/month site offers click to cancel. This dollar price difference is often the difference between the life and death of a company.

A harsher way of phrasing it would be this serves the consumer who actually pays attention to their bills. I've had a cheap gym membership sitting around for a few months that I haven't gone to. I don't want to go to the effort of cancelling it, because that's hard. My sloth subsidizes the gym goers who actually do use the service every day and pay less than they otherwise would for the privilege. Poor, lazy, stupid people like me should still be given the option to spend our money in poor, lazy, stupid ways.
by nunez | 2025-07-09 13:56:30+00:00
I'm siding with OP.

Yes, LLMs hallucinating is a well-known bug (or feature, depending on who you ask).

We also know that people _will_ use LLM output before doing their own research _because that is how they are designed to be used._

OP should have manually confirmed the LLM outputs. But therein lies the rub. These services are designed to authoritatively provide answers to whatever you ask it, but there is *almost zero* point in using these tools if you have to manually verify everything it says because nothing it says can be trusted.

Given that OP is paying for Claude, there should be partial compensation for losses incurred due to hallucinations. Something's gotta give.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-07-09 13:56:40+00:00
I'm not unsympathetic to those who need to cancel a gym membership or whatever. But Congress is too lazy or cowardly to do it themselves, so they delegated, and the courts have been reluctant to allow delegation lately... Congress knows that too.

Really though, our banks should be the ones fixing this problem. Do they not work for us? We're more like fee cattle than we are customers. It should be simple to cancel through the bank itself, disallowing further payments. In fact though, the opposite happens. Once one of these vampire scams gets your card number, they can put through payments that you have disallowed and the bank will side with them rather than you. Had an incident with a cell phone company a few years back and the bank decided that they had more say over my money than I did. None of this can be or will be fixed, because you're all distracted by the news media telling you that the evil courts have cheated the heroic FTC bureaucracy, and that you need to vote for the other team to restore balance to the force.

If purchasing a service requires your account/routing number, or the card number + cvs code, you really just need to go without.
by jl6 | 2025-07-09 13:56:46+00:00
English is evolving as a hieroglyphic language. That floppy disk icon stands a good chance of becoming simply the glyph meaning "save". The UK still uses an icon of an 1840s-era bellows camera for its speed camera road signs. The origin story will be filed away neatly and only its residual meaning will be salient.
by ddesposito | 2025-07-09 13:56:57+00:00
We just launched Org360, a platform that generates AI-powered 360° feedback and organizational health reports — designed for mission-driven teams, nonprofits, and leadership coaches.

We offer three AI engines (Gemini, GPT-4, and Claude) so users can choose their preferred LLM. The leadership 360 includes not just feedback summaries, but a personalized development plan (~2500 words) crafted by the AI based on survey results.

Why build this? Most 360 tools are either overpriced, overly corporate, or lack useful AI integration. Org360 makes 360 feedback simple, coach-friendly, and affordable for changemakers and small teams.

Would love your thoughts — especially from other builders working with LLMs or doing org design work.

Live at: https://org360.app
by pradn | 2025-07-09 13:57:13+00:00
Yes, the field is littered with imperfection.

One thing though - if you do take the time to learn the original "perfect" versions of these things, it helps you become a much better system designer. I'm constantly worried about API design because it has such large and hard-to-change consequences.

On the other hand, we as an industry have also succeeded quite a bit! So many of our abstractions work really well.
by llm_nerd | 2025-07-09 13:57:26+00:00
What you described is RAG. Inefficient RAG, but still RAG.

And it's inefficient in two ways-

-you're using extra tokens for every query, which adds up.

-you're making the LLM less precise by overloading it with potentially irrelevant extra info making it harder for it to needle in a haystack the specific relevant answer.

Filtering (e.g. embedding similarity & BM25) and re-ranking/pruning what you provide to RAG is an optimization. It optimizes the tokens, the processing time, and optimizes the answer in an ideal world. Most LLMs are far more effective if your RAG is limited to what is relevant to the question.
Ember Cold Tumbler marketing and design strategy
by NarcisMirandes | 2025-07-09 13:57:53+00:00
Ember recently launched a Cold Tumbler—a $150 smart cup that keeps drinks cold for hours. I like the concept but am surprised by its plasticky look and feel.

At this price, I expected premium materials: ceramic, stainless steel, or even glass. But after looking deeper, I realized there are technical reasons for Ember’s material choice—especially around wireless charging, signal interference, insulation, and safety.

For example: - Metal can block inductive charging and Bluetooth - Glass is risky for portable use - Stainless steel conducts cold (bad for lips), adds weight - Plastic (especially Tritan) is safer, lighter, and non-conductive

Ember actually does use ceramic coating in other products (like their Mug²), so the downgrade in feel here is noticeable. Still, it seems they optimized for function, not feel.

Strangely, there’s almost no competition at the premium level in this category. Most smart drinkware goes cheap and gimmicky. Ember is nearly alone in combining tech + aesthetics—yet even they didn’t go all the way with materials here.

To see the product: www.ember.com

Curious what others think: Is there room for a truly premium, materials-first smart cup? Or is this the necessary tradeoff when combining tech, insulation, and portability?
by miki123211 | 2025-07-09 13:57:57+00:00
Theoretically, if one of the carriers you were using were to be hacked, the attackers could extract all your keys, including for other carrier profiles.

It's an interesting attack vector for intelligence agencies. Imagine you're going to China and install a Chinese eSim profile as secondary to get cheaper data. The Chinese govt, in collaboration with the carrier, could then use that profile to dump your American AT&T keys.

In the telecom world, there's no forward secrecy (there can't be with symmetric crypto, which is what it's all based on), so such an attack would let the Chinese intercept all your communications.
by alittlebee | 2025-07-09 13:57:59+00:00
As someone that has tried and failed at many attempts over a decade, I just wanted to take a moment to congratulate you. This is so wonderful, and I couldn’t be happier for you. Thank you for sharing your journey, and lessons learned .

I’m now a single working mom supporting 2 young kiddos on my own, so my time has become limited; but I’ll be back :)
by adrian_b | 2025-07-09 13:58:14+00:00
No, the 5-10% mass was not mostly carbon. It was also mostly oxygen with smaller amounts of iron, silicon and magnesium, like in any parts of the Solar System where the gravity is not so strong as to retain most of the hydrogen and helium.

That mass has come from bodies which have collided with Earth and which had a chemical composition similar to that of "carbonaceous chondrites". (That is a kind of meteorites; most of the Earth had a composition similar to "enstatite chondrites", another kind of meteorites.)

The carbonaceous chondrites are not made of carbon, they only have more carbon than the Earth and similar planets, because in the early Solar System the carbon was present mostly as carbon dioxide, which is volatile so that most of it does not condense into the planets at the higher temperatures of the zones closer to the Sun, where the inner planets have condensed, but only at lower temperatures, farther from the Sun, where it reacts with metallic oxides, forming solid carbonates, like limestone.
by coldspoon95 | 2025-07-09 13:58:19+00:00
So get government out of the space here. Keep essential regulations for ensuring safety and so that insurance companies can cover liabilities. Let the free market play it out.

If the profit incentives are there(which there are as higher EROI = lowest cost per kWh), then it is a race to who can provide the product(energy) at the lowest cost more reliably.

Government unfortunately has a monopoly here as traditional reactors had proliferations concerns, needed much large capital, and political will. But if reactors can be modular and costs low that a city could afford it, then you can also have decentralized reactors just like you have with solar.
by al_borland | 2025-07-09 13:58:44+00:00
The big issue, regardless of the platform, has been getting people to care about documentation. Those who are most qualified to write it, are usually the ones least likely to care about, because they don’t need it. I tried to buck this trend, as up-skilling others, in ways that didn’t require my constant time, seemed like a win. I tried to lead my example, but no one else ever joined in. I tried putting something together to formalize the process of reviews and got nothing but lazy rubber stamps, even from people who typically did excellent work. Getting people to care is the hardest part, in my experience. The bigger the organization, the worse this problems seems to get.

After seeing some people delete some big docs I wrote, which I think were still good, and changing documentation platforms so many times (usually to platforms with higher friction), my motivation to be a champion for good documentation has waned significantly. I still do write good readme files for my code, and end user docs for its use, but all the other little nice to have stuff I mostly just keep to myself in my own system. I’m sick of the changes, the friction, and people blindly deleting my work out of ignorance.
Ask HN: How do you "replay" a costly user mistake in your internal software?
by kirthi35 | 2025-07-09 13:58:58+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm trying to solve a problem that seems to exist in many companies. A team member makes a costly error while using an internal tool (like your CRM, claims software, etc.).

You know the outcome—money was lost, a customer is angry—but you have no way to see exactly what they did. You can't "replay the tape" to understand the sequence of clicks and decisions that led to the mistake.

This makes it incredibly difficult to do a real post-mortem, train people effectively, or fix broken processes.

So, how do you handle this now?

When a user error happens, what's your process for finding out what went wrong?

Do you have any tools that give you visibility into these user workflows?

Have you ever wished you could just watch a recording of what a user did to cause an issue?

I'd be fascinated to hear your stories or frustrations with this.
by hasanhaja | 2025-07-09 13:59:27+00:00
What about DX in terms of template execution speed? There are many implementations of template fragments on various platforms like Go and Rust [1], which might arguably perform better than their JavaScript counterparts. Wouldn't quicker execution give you a faster feedback loop when developing, and also give you a faster UX?

[1] https://htmx.org/essays/template-fragments/#known-template-f...
by optymizer | 2025-07-09 13:59:55+00:00
> Your passion side project needs to be fueled by passion

Maybe he's in that valley of despair right now that the article shows occurs many times. Passion is fleeting and at times you just need a little inspirational jolt to get back into it and regain some of that passion.

Also, to share a personal experience, passion is not sufficient. You need favorable conditions as well (or the ability to create them). For example, the article talks about working nights and weekends. I'm not sure if the author has kids or what the arrangement is in his family, but personally, as much as I wanted to work whole weekends on my passion project, I would feel like a shitty father if I ignored my kids over the weekend for months, so the project gets put on the back burner a lot while I'm biking with my kids outside and having fun.
by mcswell | 2025-07-09 14:00:04+00:00
I wonder whether the reason carriage making was viable on the small scale is that there weren't any (many? Studebaker was an exception) large carriage makers. Had Henry Ford's assembly line technology been applied earlier to making carriages, would all of those small carriage makers have been put out of business sooner?

Of course the other part of this is distribution. If you had a large carriage factory in Ohio, could you have profitably shipped your product to Kansas? Or would a small Kansas carriage maker have undercut you? Seen in this way, part of the reason for the success of a few large auto makers might have been the more or less simultaneous rise of the means of transporting large products by railroad.
by thinkindie | 2025-07-09 14:00:07+00:00
What I don't understand from these conversation is the main selling proposition for Astro: if you have a content-heavy website, you should ship zero Javascript. And I agree with that, most of the websites heavy in content will at most have a couple of pages consumed in a single session.

But if my "website" is an application, Javascript makes the whole user experience better, if implemented well. It doesn't matter that the user will wait for 1 more second if they will have to spend the entire day working on it.
by deltarholamda | 2025-07-09 14:00:24+00:00
Write some straight HTML pages and serve it from bog standard Apache. Heck, get really fancy and do some server-side includes for your CSS or something.

It's really fast, you can edit it with Notepad, and you can probably saturate your bandwidth with a consumer level PC.

It's fluff because, well, our expectations are so unbelievably low. By the time you've bolted on every whizbang dingus leveraging four different languages (two of which are some flavor of Javascript), your twelve page site takes a couple of minutes to compile (what?), and it chokes your three load-balanced AWS compute nodes.

Web applications are hard. I get that. Web sites? They were, by design, incredibly simple. We make them complicated for often unclear reasons.

I appreciate what the Astro folks are trying to do, and it's very clever. But your basic Web site need not require freaking npm in order to "return to the fundamentals of the Web".
by WindyMiller | 2025-07-09 14:00:28+00:00
On the other hand, I think short-scale millions and billions are used far more often than the larger numbers, and the starts of words tend to be more salient than the ends, so it's useful to have them distinguished by the first letter instead of the last syllable.

(Plus, "milliard, with an 'ard'" doesn't have the same ring to it.)
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-09 14:00:29+00:00
> intolerance was a point of pride for them

Literally no party ever, not even the Nazis, Stalinists, Maoists, ever thought "we're the bad intolerant guys and we're proud of it".

On the contrary, they all thought they were on the right side of history and that all the atrocities they were doing, they were the right thing, done for the greater good.

Nazi literally means "national" and "socialist" as in for the country and the working people, both words with good meaning behind them on their own, up until WW2.

>Your behavior suggests either deep ignorance or malicious attempts at distorting the conversation in a right wing extremist way. Either way is not a good look.

What behavior? Correcting your wrong takes with facts and arguments? Every point you brought up here I have disproved with arguments.
by red-iron-pine | 2025-07-09 14:00:43+00:00
only one that i've seen that wasn't 100% borked was a doku wiki at the niche MSP I started at in IT.

literally every manager had "documentation accuracy" as a metric for their domain and they were generally good about things like "did you check the wiki?" when asked questions -- which usually led to a "okay, once you find it, add it"

every single company with confluence was a disaster of unreadable garbage. one place got so bad the ops / support had their own "secret server" of internal docs which were mostly links to text files
by pydry | 2025-07-09 14:00:48+00:00
Let's start with privatizing the risk of it going kaboom. Why do we need red tape that pushes the cleanup costs onto taxpayer shoulders? It's so safe!

Sophisticated private insurers being willing to shoulder the full financial downside of nuclear power plants going fukushima (not < 1% as it is now!) will give everybody confidence that they're not just pushing propaganda exaggerating how safe they are to an unsophisticated public.

Assuming you are correct, there will be less red tape, the sophisticated insurers will happily take on the additional risks and unsophisticated taxpayers dont have to worry about being on the hook for one of those ~$800 billion Fukushima style cleanup events.

I wont hold my breath though.... after all, they know the nuclear industry would stop existing if insurance were actually priced according to the risk even if the consumers of their expensive public relations campaigns dont.
by yamatokaneko | 2025-07-09 14:01:02+00:00
It’s not a perfect analogy, but I think there’s a parallel to coding.

Thanks to LLMs, I actually enjoy writing more than before. I spend less time typing and more time thinking about the core idea. Every time AI rewrites my messy draft, I find myself saying, “Yes—that’s exactly what I meant.” Then I get to fine-tune it and add my own voice, which makes the process fun.

I also love this quote from Paul Graham, "Writing, Briefly": “Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.”
by dotancohen | 2025-07-09 14:01:06+00:00
I realized this too, and it led me to the conclusion that LLMs really can't program. I did some experiments to find what a programming language would look like, instead of e.g. python, if it were designed to be written and edited by an LLM. It turns out that it's extremely verbose, especially in variable names, function names, class names, etc. Actually, it turned out that classes were very redundant. But the real insight was that LLMs are great at naming things, and performing small operations on the little things they named. They're really not good at any logic that they can't copy paste from something they found on the web.
by sturza | 2025-07-09 14:01:35+00:00
There are several steps missing from:

A startup founder uses AI to create an MVP

to

They secure funding based on the demo

to

They find themselves unable to move beyond that initial prototype

I have trouble believing tech investors throwing money towards a founder that shows a vibe coded product without anything else. The product might be vibe coded, BUT the founder show some traction or discovered a new market or something besides a demo. It does not really matter how a founder did the MVP, they did not create google. They just showed, through the MVP, something to investors. What happens next, after money, i doubt it's vibe coded.