MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pavel_lishin | 2025-08-25 16:20:22+00:00
Anyone immediately think of Pump Six, by Paolo Bacigalupi, when they got to this part of the story?

> Salina Pacheco, who is the manager of the town water district and training to become a water system operator, knew it was coming. She had been talking to the five-member water board about it for two years and had helped secure a $105,000 grant from the Colorado Department of Local Affairs to upgrade the water system, which was suffering from “extreme water hammer” because water traveling through the pipes in opposite directions was colliding.

> The pump failed in June, before the system’s planned overhaul.*
by kentonv | 2025-08-25 16:20:51+00:00
D1 is built on Durable Objects, where SQLite is used on top of a custom distributed storage layer. This blog post describes in detail how the system works:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/sqlite-in-durable-objects/

In short, while we don't technically fsync, we do much better. If the local disk suddenly explodes, we won't lose confirmed writes.

(I wrote much of said storage layer.)
by MisterTea | 2025-08-25 16:20:54+00:00
Inferno was a commercial attempt at competing with Sun's Java. The plan 9 folks had to shift gears so they took Plan 9 and built a smaller portable version of it in about a year. Both the Plan 9 kernel and Inferno kernel share a lot of code and build system so moving code between them is pretty simple.

The real interesting magic behind Plan 9 is 9P and its VFS design so that leaves Inferno with one thing going for it: Dis, its user space VM. However, Dis does not protect memory as it was developed for mmu-less embedded use. It implicitly trusts the programmer not to clobber other programs memory. It is also hopelessly stuck in 32bit land.

These days Inferno is not actively maintained by anyone. There are a few forks in various states and a few attempts to make inferno 64 bit but so far no one has succeeded. You can check: https://github.com/henesy/awesome-inferno

Alef was abandoned because they needed to build a compiler for each arch and they already had a full C compiler suite. So they took the ideas from Alef and made the thread(2) C library. If you're curious about the history of Alef and how it influenced thread(2), Limbo and Go: https://seh.dev/go-legacy/

These days Plan 9 is still alive and well in the form of 9front, an actively developed fork. I know a lot of the devs and some of them daily drive their work via 9front running on actual hardware. I also daily drive 9front via drawterm to a physical CPU sever that also serves DNS and DHCP so my network is managed via ndb. Super simple to setup vs other clunky operating systems.

And lastly, I would like to see a better Inferno but it would be a lot of work. 64 bit support and memory protection would be key along with other languages. It would make a better drawterm and a good platform for web applications.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-08-25 16:20:55+00:00
This thread is getting weird and with a lack of understanding; There's absolutely no reason to have a negative attitude to people wanting to buy water. I grew up 5mins from the largest shopping center in the southern hemisphere and we still had to occasionally buy water when there was a drought since we were on a rural stretch of road just off the main highway.

You don't have to live far out of town to have no town water. The pipes don't go far out of city/town limits at all.

You always get periods of prolonged drought even in otherwise perfectly reasonable self-sustainable properties.

This isn't some "HAHAHA suck it libertarians" attitude. This is a "anyone who lives slightly outside of town wanting to buy water and being told no" type of situation.
by jacob2161 | 2025-08-25 16:21:28+00:00
Thanks for pointing this out. I don't think it's something this little helper library should try to do. This kind of thing belongs in whatever database abstraction you're building/using, if any. It's also a little trickier than it seems at first glance (RETURNING, etc).

And for many no/low concurrency situations there's no/little benefit.

Added this example to the README.

rwdb, err := sqlitebp.OpenReadWriteCreate("app.db") if err != nil { log.Fatal(err) } rwdb.SetMaxOpenConns(1) rwdb.SetMaxIdleConns(1) // Read-only with default adaptive pool size (2-8 based on GOMAXPROCS) rodb, err := sqlitebp.OpenReadOnly("app.db") if err != nil { log.Fatal(err) }
by const_cast | 2025-08-25 16:21:41+00:00
Yes, exactly.

We already have largely decentralized speech in the US via the internet. And much like how the printing press gave everyone a voice or how radio created Hitler, the internet is the modern age vehicle of populist messaging.

The reason someone like Trump can rise to power and consolidate said power is because he speaks simple and lies work in a decentralized system. Populist messaging is built on the fact that humans are naturally drawn to simple solutions and emotional responses. 90% of the time throughout American and European history, if you just tell people "this is ethnic/racial group X's fault!", that works.
by jcuenod | 2025-08-25 16:21:44+00:00
I would _love_ to see more DIY mouse options. I feel like the mechanical keyboard crowd has so many options.

I've been dreaming of a set of lego-style bits of a mouse that can be assembled together... want another button? here you go. Want it on the side? Modify the 3D print file. Want bluetooth? Use this board... Want USB-C? Use that board... Want both? We've got you covered... Want a hyper-scroll wheel? Well, Logitech has a patent on that one, but here's the closest thing you can get on a DIY mouse. Now click these buttons in the configurator and hit "upload", and the firmware is installed to use your new mouse on any machine.
Show HN: Knowdeck,an Advanced Visualisation Tool
by maskeen | 2025-08-25 16:22:00+00:00
Hey everyone, i'm building knowdeck.me which helps you simplify complex topics into clear, cited slides.

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you can ask it anything, and you will get slides with clear theory and our Ai models works with web search to provide you with most accurate explanation with citation of sources too, if you don't like any particular generated slide, then you can update that too.

if you still don't understand, every slide has an option where you can ask question for that slide, that will generate a slide, explain your question wrt context of that slide.

also you can create follow up decks too. knowdeck isn't just about creating presentations, it's about learning and presenting better.

The platform is completely free to use as of now, so you can use it and generate as many as deck you want. and we will keep the pricing as low as possible!

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by lproven | 2025-08-25 16:22:35+00:00
Your comment is correct but it's a response to an entirely different and orthogonal point which I did not propose and wouldn't try to.

As such I can answer in several different ways which try to approach the point you're making, but they can only do it by trying to nudge your comment slightly back in the direction of "how things really are".

Point 1:

Why what you're saying does not address the real situation.

The thing is that about 99% of Linux distributions are not products.

They are the collaborative efforts of many small teams of volunteers. In rare instances, a few of them are collaborative efforts of large teams of paid engineers. However most of those are server OSes where UI is not a factor.

(The real competitive criteria of paid server distros are things like "what certifications do you have?" and "how long will you provide patches for?" They're nothing to do with its technical capabilities. That's why the paid enterprise distros are much smaller, much simpler, and technologically far inferior to free ones.)

They are not products, and they are definitely not CONSUMER products.

Point 2:

How to do easy end user 3rd party apps on Linux: prohibit them.

There is an easy answer to the question of "software installation on a consumer Linux desktop." There's only one consumer Linux desktop. It's ChromeOS. And you can't install native software. There is no native software.

(Some ChromeBooks can run Android apps but they are not native.)

Note, this product outsells all free distros by, conservatively, 10-20x over.

So this is clearly not a handicap.

Point 3:

Docs are really hard and don't pay.

I've written product documentation as my paid full-time job for 4-5 years.

Nobody reads it by choice, and it's expensive to produce, which is why consumer products mostly don't come with any now. You may get a quick-start guide and most customers ignore that.

This is why the only desktop Linux with users in the hundreds of millions is so stripped-down you can't install apps on it.

Point 4:

The real context here.

Given these aren't products and aren't for consumers, what we get is sub-optimal but it really is not bad these days.
by ryandrake | 2025-08-25 16:23:21+00:00
It's almost like every recent silicon valley product is designed by multi-millionaires whose problems are so out of touch with regular-people problems. "I have so much money and don't know what to spend it on, it would be great if AI could shop for me!" Or "I have so little time, it would be great if an app could chauffeur me around and deliver food for me." Or "It's Christmas again, I need to write heartfelt, personalized letters to 1,000 important clients, partners, friends, and relatives. Why not have an AI write them?"
by throwaway0123_5 | 2025-08-25 16:24:01+00:00
I don't know much about the science of colors and I imagine this is going to be very subjective but I would at "worst" describe the rightmost OKLCH color as blue-green (but probably just "light blue"). Meanwhile the two rightmost HSL colors I would not describe as blue at all. Second from right I would call "light purple" and the rightmost honestly looks grey to me (which is weird because the caption says the darker HSL values "muddy out towards greyish" but the leftmost values for OKLCH and HSL both look pretty blue to me).

Also if I use the macOS app "Digital Color Meter" I get essentially the same green value for the rightmost OKLCH and HSL colors (226 and 227 for "display native values" and 228 and 227 for sRGB).
by uz3snolc3t6fnrq | 2025-08-25 16:24:14+00:00
there is no way you aren't able to discern the obvious differences between physical labor such as digging a hole and something as innate to human nature as creativity. you realize just how hollow a set of matrix multiplications are when you try to "talk to it" for more than 3 minutes. the whole point of language is to talk to other people and to communicate ideas to them. that is something that requires a human factor, otherwise the ideas are simply regurgitations of whatever the training set happened to contain. there are no original ideas in there. a steam shovel, on the other hand, does not need to be creative or to have human factor, it's simply digging a hole in the ground
by CodingJeebus | 2025-08-25 16:24:24+00:00
> Is that possible to have no right to vote because you live in the wrong place?

You don't have the right to vote in a city that you do not live in, and the water system is controlled by the city in this case. I assume they can vote for county offices, and the county is now determining how best they can serve their residents now that the city is unable to.
by jeffcox | 2025-08-25 16:24:25+00:00
Logitech held out on moving some of their more niche products to USB-C until they were forced by the EU. I'm sure when the author _started_ their journey they had not released the Ergo S yet, looks like it came out September '24.

I also gave up on waiting for the Ergo S and grabbed a Kensington TB550. The name is awful, but the trackball is excellent.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-08-25 16:24:55+00:00
> How is agent buying groceries superior to have a grocery list set as a recurring purchase?

I could see an interesting use case for something like "Check my calendar and a plan meals for all but one dinners I have free this week. One night, choose a new-to-me recipe, for the others select from my 15 most commonly made dishes. Include at least one but at most 3 pasta dishes. Consider the contents of my pantry, trying to use ingredients I have on hand. Place an order for pickup from my usual grocery store for any ingredients necessary that are not already in the pantry"
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-25 16:25:00+00:00
A few years ago I thought long and hard, tried quite a few different things, and ended up settling on that sequence. And with this in my ~/.XCompose:

<Multi_key> <h> <r> : "—⁂—"

… I can get it by typing `Compose h r`. (“hr” as in <hr>, HTML’s Horizontal Rule.)

At one point since then I came across another person on HN that had independently settled on the same three characters (em dash, asterism, em dash).

In my personal dialect of the lightweight markup language I’ve been making, —⁂— is even the syntax for a horizontal rule. :-)
by Jensson | 2025-08-25 16:25:31+00:00
Why is it silly? Cars haven't fundamentally changed in the past 50 years, they have gotten a lot better but not in a game changing way, society still functions the same with cars as 50 years ago.

I see the same thing with text models, you can say they improve but not in a game changing way, and you have the same scenario as cars. It wouldn't be wrong for a person to say "cars are as good as they ever going to get" 50 years ago, in his lifetime he was right, nothing happened with cars that would force him to change his habits during his life.

But up to 50 years ago cars changed quite quickly, so you could say it is weird to say cars wouldn't start flying or such in 50 years, but here we are, nothing dramatically changed.
Show HN: 'Message Me Now' QR Codes to easily share contact info
by jacobn | 2025-08-25 16:25:38+00:00
Create "Message Me Now" QR Codes to conveniently connect with people you meet: have them scan a QR code to immediately send you a message (SMS, email, WhatsApp) without having to go through the typo-prone verbal exchange.

Free, works on any modern phone, no app installation, and no more messages going to the wrong number / email.

https://qr.clv.ws/
by 827a | 2025-08-25 16:25:43+00:00
The first example of buying an Apple Watch on a fake walmart site feels extremely disingenuous to me. Their marketing screenshot says that their query was "buy me an apple watch on walmart", implying that the AI navigated to the scam website, but in reality their query was "I found this walmart shopping website. Can you buy an apple watch..." the experimenters poisoned the well by giving it the site to shop on.

"No clicks, No Typing, your AI just got you scammed" you navigated to a scam site and typed out the whole prompt. It did what you told it to do.

The Wells Fargo email is similar; the instructions you gave the AI explicitly told it to follow the instructions in the email. Maybe adding some level of coherent check between what the email says and the domain name could be a good use-case for LLMs, but you're basically just saying "I told the LLM to delete my entire filesystem and then it actually did it! Why didn't it stop? Claude Code is a scam!" This raises to the level of "interesting directions these products should develop toward"; its entirely unjustified to title the article "Scamplexity".

An embarrassing article for whoever Guard.io is tbh.
by ucarion | 2025-08-25 16:26:23+00:00
For others, I'm sure parent knows: OKLCH is largely a bugfix for CILEAB. Both try to make a color space where even steps feel evenly spaced to a human. But CIELAB had procedural flaws in its creation.

See slide 19: https://www.w3.org/Graphics/Color/Workshop/slides/talk/lille... -- if you ask CIELAB to make "pure blue" (RGB 0 0 100%) become grayscale, the intermediate colors become purple to the human eye. The entire point of a perceptual color space is that that doesn't happen. OKLCH fixes that.

BTW, credit to Björn Ottosson, who basically side-projected a color space into the web standards and more: https://bottosson.github.io/posts/oklab/ ... folks like him are why we sometimes have nice things!
by flavio81 | 2025-08-25 16:27:05+00:00
>SmallJS is file based, not image based, so you can develop in your favorite IDE

This project is nice, however if we don't have a specific, client-side IDE for interactive development, 70% of the power of Smalltalk is gone (one of the criticisms I give to Ruby)

How would one do to push changes to the web frontend (browser) without stopping the program ?
by Bender | 2025-08-25 16:27:30+00:00
Slang history. In the US BFE is well established as Bum-Fuck-Egypt to mean in the middle of nowhere. Explicitly stating Butt-Fuck-Egypt leans towards sexual imagery and is not part of the slang. I completely understand the confusion as bum is commonly used in the UK to mean butt. Someone on the linked site even got it wrong.

As an example of communication differences, in the US it is not uncommon for someone to say "Pardon me" when they are getting the way whereas people in England might assume they farted. Or another example where communications go wrong, someone in the US or the UK might give a thumbs-up when they agree with results or an idea but in some parts of Africa that is a death threat.
by menensito | 2025-08-25 16:27:38+00:00
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by mrinterweb | 2025-08-25 16:27:43+00:00
(CMD|CTRL)+TAB is all I usually all I need. I know this may sound wasteful considering that I have two eyes, but I have only ever been able to focus my eyes on a single thing at a time. I usually make the window take up the full window, and I just switch between windows. It is fast to do this. I tried multi-monitors, but it wasn't for me.
by syphia | 2025-08-25 16:28:27+00:00
Cheating might break tournament or social rules, but it doesn't break the game. So yes.

And any online game can be "cheated" by having someone better play in your place, or abusing the ranking system, but again that is breaking a social/meta-game rule, not a game rule.

Cheats in FPS games effectively break the rules of the game (wallhacks), or do things that are entirely impossible for a human (instant-lock aimbot). Chess and Go don't have that problem.

I suppose the difference is moot when everyone imagines that they're in a tournament playing for clout, and not playing to learn strategy.
by flavio81 | 2025-08-25 16:28:28+00:00
>It’s really interesting reading about LISP machines but no-one’s building a new one

There have been two open source Lisp Machine OS created in the last 15 or 10 years.

However a big part of the power of the Symbolics/LMI machines was in the software itself (applications), and this is still propietary code.

To reimplement the Lisp Machine applications would take quite a big effort.
by Pet_Ant | 2025-08-25 16:28:46+00:00
I wonder if there is a way to crowdfund actually producing a batch of these? I mean you'd need to redesign the shell and a few more things, but ought to be doable. Either as printable STLs in TEP or as a group-buy.

Also, I think it's criminal for any USB chargeable mouse to not just work as a regular corded mouse when plugged directly into a PC.

PS - would it be possible to make a mouse use Cherry MX hotswap switches so that people could customise their clicks?
by qualeed | 2025-08-25 16:29:30+00:00
For the purposes of what this post is communicating, I don't think the exact sizes of adobe prior to 2000 or the exact size of sumatrapdf matters at all.

The linear graph instantly communicates:

- sumatrapdf has barely changed size in the same time that adobe's size has grown exponentially - adobe's crazy growth spike started ~6 years ago

Maybe I'm just dumb, but I didn't realize the graph had a log y-axis at first. Then, once I realized that, I had to spend a bit of time parsing the graph to figure out what it was saying (I don't work with log graphs often at all). And once that was done, the only thing I came away with was "wow, adobe grew a hell of a lot when sumatra didnt", which is the same thing the linear graph told me instantly.

Being able to see that sumatras size remains relatively flat while adobes size growth is practically vertical is all the granularity I care about at a glance. If I want to know exact sizes, I'll dive in deeper.
by dang | 2025-08-25 16:29:42+00:00
Edit: when I replied to the parent comment, it consisted of the text "she?" and nothing else. (If you're going to edit a comment once it has replies, please do it in a way that allows the replies to preserve their original context. For example, you can always add "Edit" and then post additional text.)

---- original reply: ----

Can you please not post like this? We want substantive, thoughtful discussion on this site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: the top text had this bit which I've replaced now:

“she” (sorry, I can’t help anthropomorphizing) can
by VWWHFSfQ | 2025-08-25 16:30:03+00:00
> Debi and John Marks moved from Florida to build their dream home in the high desert of Costilla County. They bought property in the ranches two years ago with plans to build a retirement home and live off the grid among the pines

...

> “We wanted to be as independent as possible, and so we searched all over the state for property that would fit our needs, and this fit the bill,” Debi Marks said.

...

> Amanda Ellis bought a house in Costilla County five years ago to live off the grid.

These are people specifically moving to this unincorporated county in order to live "off the grid". This sounds ideological to me.
by andrepd | 2025-08-25 16:30:12+00:00
>Netanyahu in a narcissistic and tyrannical move tried to seize control of the judicial system as part of his ongoing attempts to subvert democracy and justice. He's corrupt and if he's found guilty he'll go to prison so he's trying to control the process. But the brave protestors are speaking out and not allowing him and his far right government from destroying Israeli democracy and society.

Well yes this, but unironically.

Of course, add commission of genocide to that list.
by pmdr | 2025-08-25 16:30:28+00:00
I've been using Linux on and off since 2005. I've mostly stuck with Ubuntu after briefly using Slackware, but found myself using Windows like 95% of the time in the last few years.

Then DHH launched Omakub and, for me, it's been a game changer. It's not like he invented anything revolutionary, but he did something I hadn't had the time to do: customize it in a sensible way that, for me, is now superior to using Windows 10/11. Also caught the Lazyvim/neovim bug thanks to him, which led to other improvements such as Vimium in browsers.

I haven't tried Omarchy yet, but I will as soon as I find the time to tinker with it.
by mnky9800n | 2025-08-25 16:30:30+00:00
I met a guy on the airplane the other day whose job is to vibe code for people who can't vibe code. He showed me his discord server (he paid for plane wifi), where he charges people 50$/month to be in the server and he helps them unfuck their vibe coded projects. He had around 1000 people in the server.