MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by to11mtm | 2025-07-20 20:30:56+00:00
I feel like you can try to FAFO with that on a distributed log like Kafka (although also... eww, but also I wonder whether NATS does the same thing or not...)

I would think for something like a database, at most you'd want to have something like the io_uring_prep_fsync others mentioned with flags set to just not update the metadata.

To be clear, in my head I'm envisioning this case to be a WAL type scenario; in my head you can get away with just having a separate thread or threads pulling from WAL and writing to main DB files... but also I've never written a real database so maybe those thoughts are off base.
by Arrowmaster | 2025-07-20 20:31:18+00:00
That's what ZSH has turned into. Every new user installs OMZ because that's what the Internet tells them to do. Then their shell config turns into a huge mess.

So half the users are using OMZ with a bloated slow config and the other half are reinventing new config managers every year because of how terrible OMZ has become. And constantly churning through them as they keep getting abandoned.

I've been happily using zsh4humans for years but will need to find a replacement at some point as it's now going unmaintained too.
by wskinner | 2025-07-20 20:31:34+00:00
Amazon’s capex is not funded by venture capital. It is funded by people buying things from Amazon or services from AWS.

Uber hasn’t raised from VCs in years, and their business is far bigger than it was back when they were losing money.

The idea that SF residents choose to use Uber rather than BART because Uber is cheaper is simply wrong - Uber is much more expensive than BART, and with some notable exceptions for shared rides, that was true during the VC funded growth period as well.
by zeristor | 2025-07-20 20:31:35+00:00
This tantalisingly claims to be THe cure for cancer.

Sounds encouraging, and I’ll keep an eye out for it, but expect it to fall at some hurdle.

I don’t mean to be gloomy, but we’re all going to die of something.

A cure for cancer helps you get along, cures for dementia are more urgently being worked on.

It seems to be after anti-biotic, and heart attack medication, huge cohorts of the elderly come up against an ailment that hadn’t much thought out into it.

Will we just end up being picked off by the thousands of rare diseases that have been too rare to earn funding?
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-20 20:32:07+00:00
> It’s not failed: it’s the only language used in the ePub standard.

"XHTML" can refer to both a failed series of standards intended to replace HTML (XHTML 1.0, XHMTL 1.1, and XHMTL 2.0) and the XML syntax of HTML that is part of the HTML living standard, which itself resulted from the failure of the XHMTL series of standards. EPUB 3's "XHTML" is the latter, not the former.
by bnchrch | 2025-07-20 20:32:14+00:00
I can share my experience as a canadian who's been working remotely for US companies since 2016.

Typically I would either find a warm intro from a past colleague, or I would specifically find someone involved in the hiring pipeline at the company on Linkedin and say "Hey im so and so, and blah blah blah, im thinking of applying but would love if you could tell me more about the role and the culture before I commit"

From here, so long as you baseline can stand out as a solid engineer and communicator those US only barriers fall down.

This is why to someone elses point > if they’d hire you, why wouldn’t they hire someone much cheaper.

They'd hire someone cheaper certainly, provided they could find a person with identical quality, similar culture, and near PST timezones. Which is a fairly tall order in reality.

Its also why its not too uncommon to find Canadians pulling in near SF salaries while not having to relocate
by buu700 | 2025-07-20 20:32:39+00:00
My thoughts exactly. I don't want ultraprocessed junk food that more or less feels and tastes like meat. I want a whole food protein source that's comparably healthful to meat.

Products like Beyond and Impossible seem to be designed with the unspoken assumption that meat is junk food that meat-eaters simply lack the self-control to stop eating. Maybe that does represent a common relationship with meat, but for me it's just off-putting when I see things like canola oil in place of a saturated fat like coconut oil so they can market it as "healthier". (But again, all else being equal, I'll still prefer non-UPF.)

That's why I'm continually surprised at how little attention Meati seems to get. It's been my go-to protein for a little while now. It doesn't have high saturated fat (or high fat in general) like meat, but that's easy to fix with a little butter. What it does have is high-quality complete protein with high micronutrition, low carbs, and minimal processing. It's a form of mycelium that's fairly similar to lean chicken meat. Not quite as nice as a fatty steak, but it does the job with a lower mortality rate.
by oblio | 2025-07-20 20:33:11+00:00
Yeah, I just asked Gemini and apparently some older estimates put a relatively filtered dataset of Github source code at around 21TB in 2018, and some more recent estimates could put it in the low hundreds of TB.

Considering as you said, that LLMs are doing a form of compression, and assuming generously that you add extra compression on top, yeah, now I understand a bit more. Even if you focus on non-similar code to get the most coverage, I wouldn't be shocked if a modern, representative source code training data from Github weighed 1TB, which obviously is a lot more than consumer grade hardware can bear.

I guess we need to ramp up RAM production a bunch more :-(

Speaking of which, what's the next bottle neck except for storing the damned things? Training needs a ton of resources but that part can be pooled, even for OSS models, it "just" need to be done "once", and then the entire community can use the data set. So I guess inference is the scaling cost, what's the most used resource there? Data bandwidth for RAM?
by ramses0 | 2025-07-20 20:33:12+00:00
Also "market for lemons"- a friend told me she used to go to Macys/Dillards to buy $50 bath towels b/c they were better, nicer, more durable than the $20 ones from Walmart.

Now she goes and still pays $50 for them, but they have been stealthily replaced by the equivalent of the inferior $20 ones.

It becomes a market for lemons: you can't trust that paying more for a product gets you a better product so game theory says you have to pursue price minimization at all costs.
by kleiba | 2025-07-20 20:33:33+00:00
> The Toniebox needing an active internet connection also means that the company behind the Toniebox – Tonies SE – can theoretically track anything and everything my kids are doing with the box.

The toniebox can be put into an offline mode, plus I'm blocking the Mac address on my router. The box works fine, you can download new content (for which, of course, you must temporarily remove the above restrictions) and all my kids are doing with the box is put a tonie on top.

I'm all for privacy, especially wrt. to my kids, but I find this box less intrusive than their grandmother with her WhatsApp account.
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-07-20 20:34:22+00:00
So you're saying because people like diverse and good tasting food, that includes meats, that we can waste bandiwdth and energy or crappy websites? Yes, beans taste good, especially baked with barbecued meats... people want that, buy that, order that, pay that. People also want 5kB of news, they don't need or want the crap that comes with it, autplaying ads included.
by asdff | 2025-07-20 20:34:26+00:00
One of these days Europeans will realize they are also part of the American empire just in a bit of a dominion status. If you host an American military installation, you are part of the empire with a fig leaf of domestic policy control that keep the bulk of the populace from realizing this. Take a look at a map of American military installations. The sun never sets on this latest roman empire.
by kiicia | 2025-07-20 20:34:30+00:00
If you can get crypto currency, maybe yes in some cases. Currently available currencies are not anonymous, but pseudonymous. You can track who transacts with whom.

To help with that new laws were passed.

If you want to buy crypto for fiat currency legally, like on some well known crypto exchange, newest laws require naming recipient of crypto you are sending and if that wallet is self hosted or exchange hosted (and which exchange). You either need to provide full name of person or company, or confirm it’s your other account you are sending crypto to.

There is one actually private crypto, it’s monero, but - surprise - it’s nor available on legal crypto exchanges so you cannot buy it by any official means.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-07-20 20:34:31+00:00
Really? Feel like specifying so in an informed and rational way?

I mean, you claim a system of voluntary, consensual payments that people can decide or not to use vs. formal channels depending on their need for avoiding politically charged bullshittery and financial censorship of all sorts is somehow worse than... the long arm of major governments and their corporate partners to restrict whatever they please for whatever political reasons they please at any time?

Truly, the irrational crypto hatred by some on this site is the stuff of idiot parody.
by maxbond | 2025-07-20 20:34:38+00:00
According to the thread, the unit tests weren't passing, so the LLM reran the migration script, and the migration script blew out the tables. The "upstream encouragement" is a failing test.

Is this a hoax for attention? It's possible, but the scenario is plausible, so I don't see reason to doubt it. Should I receive information indicating it's a hoax, I'll reassess.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-07-20 20:35:40+00:00
Sounds like they were honest about lying, less confusion than lying about lying and helps prevent the unwanted outcome of accidentally succeeding. Not succeeding helps with job security, the problem justifying your job will continue to exist. Since such skills are in demand at all levels of bureaucracy successfully failing to deliver at a lower level will open up opportunities to fail at a higher level.
by oblio | 2025-07-20 20:37:22+00:00
Honesty doesn't look like this:

> [...] get lost [...]

> [..] We don't want you to be a part of it either. [...]

He's being rude.

Honesty would be, something like:

> I (and probably many others) like programming a lot. Even if you're frustrated with it, I think a great deal of people will be sad if somehow programming disappeared completely. It might be best for you if you just found a job that you love more, instead.

Also the original comment makes a point that's SUPER valid and anyone working as a professional programmer for 10+ years can't really deny:

> poorly if at all maintained libraries, tools, frameworks

Most commercial code just sucks due to misaligned incentives. Open Source is better, but not always, as a lot of Open Source code is just commercial code opened up after the fact.
by zer00eyz | 2025-07-20 20:37:34+00:00
> Why wouldn’t 3rd party hardware vendors continue to work on reducing costs of running models locally?

Every one wants this to happen they are all trying but...

EUV, what has gotten us down to 3nm and less is HARD. Reduction in chip size has lead to increases in density and lower costs. But now yields are DOWN and the design concessions to make the processes work are hurting costs and performance. There are a lot of hopes and prayers in the 1.8 nodes but things look grim.

Power is a massive problem for everyone. It is a MASSIVE a problem IN the data center and it is a problem for GPU's at home. Considering that locally is a PHONE for most people it's an even bigger problem. With all this power comes cooling issues. The industry is starting to look at all sorts of interesting ways to move heat away from cores... ones that don't involve air.

Design has hit a wall as well. If you look at NVIDIA's latest offering its IPC, (thats Instructions Per Clock cycle) you will find they are flat. The only gains between the latest generation and previous have come from small frequency upticks. These gains came from using "more power!!!", and thats a problem because...

Memory is a problem. There is a reason that the chips for GPU's are soldered on to the boards next to the processors. There is a reason that laptops have them soldered on too. CAMM try's to fix some of this but the results are, to say the least, disappointing thus far.

All of this has been hitting cpu's slowly, but we have also had the luxury of "more cores" to throw at things. If you go back 10-15 years a top end server is about the same as a top end desktop today (core count, single core perf). Because of all of the above issues I don't think you are going to get 700+ core consumer desktops in a decade (current high end for server CPU)... because of power, costs etc.

Unless we see some foundational breakthrough in hardware (it could happen), you wont see the normal generational lift in performance that you have in the past (and I would argue that we already haven't been seeing that). Someone is going to have to make MAJOR investments in the software side, and there is NO MOAT by doing so. Simply put it's a bad investment... and if we can't lower the cost of compute (and it looks like we can't) its going to be hard for small players to get in and innovate.

It's likely you're seeing a very real wall.
by shagie | 2025-07-20 20:37:35+00:00
Consider a different approach then.

Instead of (what I consider would be) breaking the H-1B for everything that isn't tech, create another H-1 category visa. The Immigration act of 1990 split the H-1 visa into the H-1A (nurses) and H-1B (everything else). In 1999, the H-1C was created for nurses shortages (which expired in 2009).

Would having a H-1D visa that is limited to jobs that are classified under the BLS 15-xxxx ( https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes_stru.htm#15-0000 ) and have a different criteria (compare how the TN visa limits to specific occupations that align with the BLS occupational profiles - https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-2-part-p-chapter-... - which means that the classification is either a computer system analyst or engineer for someone from Canada or Mexico to get a technical job in the US). This would change the the other H visas to prohibit people from getting a visa for a position that would otherwise require a H-1D visa to be authorized to work.

At that point, one could have an auction for those candidates and highest wage compensation wins. Might want to have something with a US masters degree again (as that's an important part of many graduate program income for universities). I still believe there are a number of second order effects that need to be considered in this suggestion (this would likely exacerbate the "immigrants are getting paid more than me" problems that one also sees with "juniors are getting paid more than me" - and yes, those are problems, but I think that this may make it worse).

The thing is to not break the rest of the H-1B visas when trying to fix the problems caused by H-1B-dependent employers.
by refulgentis | 2025-07-20 20:37:50+00:00
I'm curious, not talking down: would you be interested in sharing your age and/or years of experience coding, and if you're feeling very generous, the languages youve written code in for more than 2+ years?

I'm 37, 17 years full-time-ish, VB6, ObjC, Java, Dart.

I'm asking, I guess, because I feel like I've seen these concepts before in pre-iOS ObjC, and Java, and IIRC a good chunk of the late 90s and early 00s was obsessed with doing this stuff in XML.

I barely remember, in my hobbled, probably incorrect, perception the ideas are old enough to that I am a bit flummoxed at how to interlocute with the idea that they're novel breakthroughs.

I'm ashamed to admit I thought the page was parodying this concept from back then of anything + XML = awesome. Im admitting it to give a concrete sense of how my subconscious processed this as settled territory.
by mike_hearn | 2025-07-20 20:38:00+00:00
That's just Android though. A good example of doing this well is JavaFX with Scene Builder. The XML corresponds to the UI tree 1:1 and the designer makes XML that looks hand written (or vice-versa). FXML is also a pretty intuitive schema and there's a dialect of CSS intended for UI that I find more intuitive than web CSS.
by duskwuff | 2025-07-20 20:38:07+00:00
> I've wondered what became of the tech.

Remember that Peltier coolers don't make heat disappear - they just move it from one side of the cooler to the other, and produce a lot of additional waste heat in the process. There are better ways of transferring heat from a hot IC to a heat sink nowadays - like liquid cooling for really high-performance systems, or capillary-action heat pipes for more typical needs.
by ComplexSystems | 2025-07-20 20:39:43+00:00
Is this just my device, or is there no way to use this roll-your-own SVG generator to actually roll your own? I can only pick from a tiny subset of preset colors, most of which seem super random and desaturated and not what I want. There's no FFFF00 yellow, for instance. Is there some way to enter an arbitrary RGB color that I am not seeing? If not, why on Earth write such an interesting article, advertise this custom SVG generator and then build the interface that way? :/
by blueblueue | 2025-07-20 20:39:55+00:00
What imo doesn’t get mentioned enough about the music on the (German, can’t speak for English) Tonies is the recordings themselves: They are recorded with real musicians and natural postproduction, not like most kids songs found on YouTube nowadays which are heavily compressed and edited. My kids love using the Toniebox and I am happy they do. For me the quality of content outweighs the negative aspects.
by codys | 2025-07-20 20:40:16+00:00
From the update added to the post:

> This is tracked through io_uring's completion queue - we only send a success response after receiving confirmation that the completion record has been persisted to stable storage.

Which completion queue event(s) are you examining here? I ask because the way this is worded makes it sound like you're waiting solely for the completion queue event for the _write_ to the "completion wal".

Doing that (waiting only on the "completion wal" write CQE)

1. doesn't ensure that the "intent wal" has been written (because it's a different io_uring and a different submission queue event used to do the "intent wal" write from the "completion wal" write), and

2. doesn't indicate the "intent wal" data or the "completion wal" data has made it to durable storage (one needs fsync for that, the completion queue events for writes don't make that promise. The CQE for an fsync opcode would indicate that data has made it to durable storage if the fsync has the right ordering wrt the writes and refers to the appropriate fd and data ranges. Alternatively, there are some flags that have the effect of implying an fsync following a write that could be used, but those aren't mentioned)
by nzoschke | 2025-07-20 20:41:15+00:00
Looks neat!

As humans augmented with agents write more code, solutions that require less context shifting to get stuff done will win.

A common web stack may include API handlers, OpenAPI spec, generated TypeScript definitions, generated TypeScript client, React logic and effects code, TSX code, HTML, and CSS.

This generally needs filesystem watchers, code generators, transpilers, compilers to get stuff done.

Something that can go from a backend handlers straight to terse markup for reactive UI would be a massive simplification to all this, and a big productivity boost.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-07-20 20:41:37+00:00
Disagree. Panasonic's Inverter technology is definitely superior in my book. Everybody else's units only operate at full power no matter what you select--20% power is really 100% power with a 20% duty cycle. This can produce uneven heat for short runs and means that the load on the circuit is the full draw of the machine--doesn't share a circuit with other power-hungry devices very well. But at low power the Panasonic is much more friendly with other devices.
Show HN: I built Realer Estate to find apartment renters the best deals in NYC
by realerestate | 2025-07-20 20:41:45+00:00
Hey HN!

After spending years watching my community get pushed out of my neighborhood in NYC due to rising rents, I built Realer Estate to find the undervalued homes that actually exist in NYC's impossible housing market so people can find the homes that they can actually afford.

The platform uses AI to: - Detect rent-stabilized listings even when landlords don't label them (using NLP + pricing anomalies) - Score properties on price-to-market ratios using real-time comps - Filter out investor-targeted flips to prioritize real people - Scrape live data from StreetEasy/Redfin and update daily

I'm a high school student who got tired of seeing everyday New Yorkers get priced out while the good deals disappear in hours or never get listed publicly. The proprietary scoring engine has already helped surface hundreds of undervalued properties.

The core platform is free, with $3/month alerts for early access to the best deals. No realtor fees or hidden costs.

Built with custom ML models, hosted on Railway with Supabase for fast filtering. The hardest part was building scrapers that don't get blocked while staying respectful of rate limits.

Try it out: https://www.realerestate.org

What other data points would help you spot good rental deals that landlords try to hide?
Show HN: Duende: Web UX for guiding Gemini as it improves your source code
by afc | 2025-07-20 20:41:57+00:00
I wrote a simple web UX in Python/JavaScript that spawns a conversation with Google Gemini with MCP commands that let it work on a specific coding task that you specify: http://github.com/alefore/duende

The UX lets you observe the conversation and provide guidance (e.g. "don't implement Foo through Bar, that's suboptimal; instead …").

It supports a `--review` mode, where once the main conversation says "I'm done with the task", various "evaluation" conversations are spawned, each focusing on reviewing the change from a very specific angle (e.g. "does it introduce useless comments?"). In the future, I'm considering adding other workflows.

I've used it mostly to develop itself (I started with a super rudimentary manual implementation and then mostly used Duende to extend its own implementation) as well as (with moderate success) to add a few new features to [my C++ text editor](http://github.com/alefore/edge).

It's been a lot of fun. I'm still developing my intuitions for what works and what doesn't, but I've already had plenty of experiences where I've been WOW'ed by what LLMs can already accomplish (as well as, to be honest, plenty of very disappointing cases where it struggles significantly on tasks that I expected would have been trivial). It's a learning experience, seeing things like how to avoid hallucinations; developing an intuition for how much to break down large tasks into smaller ones; or knowing when to abort a conversation and restart it with an improved prompt (vs continue to steer it in the right direction).

I think investing up-front in setting up a good context (e.g., good validation logic, useful constant contexts, a good set of "review evaluators" that can push-back against sloppy code) can go a long way to increase the odds of success.

It has changed my perception on the applicability of AI for developing software. While I've reviewed all the outputs (and often rewrite parts of them manually), I'm already incorporating it into (some parts) of my development life-cycle.

I have many ideas for improvements, but figured I'd share this early and ask for feedback. Hopefully others find it interesting; would love to hear your thoughts.