MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by neom | 2025-08-20 13:29:30+00:00
This is part of how DigitalOcean got going, Kingston gave a huge discount on a traditional HDD order if the order was switched to SSD instead because they wanted to kickstart scaled manufacturing. First time an SSD was put in and the IOPS was measured, the product direction was clear, at the time we thought it might be a CDN tho, but eventually landed on a "cloud hosting provider".
by dahcryn | 2025-08-20 13:30:20+00:00
I don't think there is anything out there that really bundles everything exactly like databricks does.

There are better storage solutions, better compute and better AI/ML platforms, but once you start with databricks, you dig yourself a hole because the replacing it is hard because it has such a specific subset of features across multiple domains.

In our multinational environment, we have a few companies that are on different tech stacks (result of M&A). I can say Snowflake can do a lot of the things Databricks does, but not everything. Teradata is also great and somehow not gaining a lot of traction. But they are near impossible to get into as a startup, which does not attract new talent to give it a go.

On the ML side, Dataiku and Datarobot are great.

Tools like Talend, snaplogic, fivetran are also really good at replacing parts of databricks.

So you see, there are better alternatives for sure, cheaper at the same time too, but there is no drop-in replacement I can think of
Show HN: A browser extension that decodes food labels for healthy eating
by fredwu | 2025-08-20 13:31:20+00:00
Hi HN!

For the past while I've been building FeedBun, a browser extension that gives you health ratings and research summaries for food products while you shop online or while you look for cooking recipes.

I'm building this because I wanted this product and couldn't find anything similar - most tools I found either required barcode scanning or were limited to specific stores. I wanted something that works seamlessly across all websites. I even have some big features planned for the future.

Tech stack: Elixir/Phoenix via Petal Pro framework for the backend - this is my 3rd SaaS using Petal Pro which I'm also a contributor of.

What makes it unique in my opinion:

* Science-backed analysis: Our AI researches every ingredient against scientific databases and reputable sources and gives you plain English explanations

* Works anywhere: Amazon, Walmart, any grocery site - just click our extension while viewing a product (pages with ingredient info works better with more detailed research), no barcode scanning needed

* Health warning callouts on ingredients that might appear innocent but may have hidden risks

* A suite of personalisation features, such as allergy warnings, dietary preferences, with more to come

Looking for feedback on:

* Does the landing page resonate with you?

* Does the browser extension work well? Any bugs or glitches?

* How useful would this be for your grocery shopping or recipe hunting?

* What features would make this a must-have for you?

* Would you pay for this? If so, and assume the personalisation features mentioned on the landing page (such as allergy alerts, dietary preferences, etc.) are implemented, how much would you be willing to pay per month?

Any comments or feedback are appreciated!
by al_borland | 2025-08-20 13:31:25+00:00
I’ve subscribed to Scott’s Cheap Flight (now called Going) for several years now and have saved thousands.

This looks like a nice tool. Going is great, but there is a randomness to it… just wait for something to hit your email that goes somewhere interesting at a time that works.

I’ve been waiting to take some shorter trips, and coming up with ideas for where to go, while looking for flight deals, has been a bit of a pain. With this, I just put in a general idea and got 5 seemingly good ideas with flights under $200, and some others that are a bit more.

After getting some deals on trips to Europe for under $300, I have a really hard time justifying domestic flights for $300+, especially when the places are within a day’s drive.
by jopsen | 2025-08-20 13:32:33+00:00
It's never just running commands in a container.

Don't get me wrong, it's a fantastic primitive.

But eventually you need to conditionally run some tests (to save compute).

For some benchmarks you might have limited hardware, so you need to coalesce jobs, and only run every 5 or 10 commits. You might want to keep the hardware hot, but also the queue small. So ideally you want to coalesce dynamically.

You also want result reporting, comparisons to previous results. Oh, and since you're coalescing some jobs and doing others conditionally you'll need ways to manually trigger skipped jobs later, maybe bisect too.

It's when you need to economize your compute that CI can get really complex. Especially, if you have fragile benchmark that or flaky tests.

Yes, in theory you can enforce a culture that removes flaky tests, but doing so often requires tooling support -- statistics, etc.
by nerflad | 2025-08-20 13:32:37+00:00
Checking out the initial request on github for this feature I wonder why is this necessary? What access to the local network does the browser provide, or need to provide, and why isn't this something developers are more concerned about? I had a feeling this was possible as I see lots of mdns requests when I connect to certain things running sockets.

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/4318
by b_llc | 2025-08-20 13:32:42+00:00
I'd like to thank everyone for the feedback.

I'm going to reflect on the feedback, rewrite the article with better explanations of the problem domain, and its limitations. I've clearly failed to articulate the core capability: dynamic file bundling via query parameters into a unified multipart stream.

I'll check back over the next few days but won't be monitoring constantly. If you want to discuss this project privately, I’m available by email.
by dahcryn | 2025-08-20 13:33:25+00:00
because it's recommended by nearly all consultants and Microsoft.

Simple as that, it's consulting Heaven. Much like SAS and SAP. Everybody happy. Now to be far to databricks, if used properly and ignore the cost, it does actually function pretty well. Compared to Synapse, PowerBI Tabular, Fabric, Azure ML, ... that's already a big big big step forward.
by gus_massa | 2025-08-20 13:33:34+00:00
I agree. It's just a tiny parasite archea. It's common for parasites to get smaller and lose features over time. So it's clearly alive, and the title is linkbait (or totaly wrong).

I made a similar comment in an old thread about this but I can't find it. My biology is not good enough to give details about the phylum (or whatever, I never remember the classification), but I have the same annoyment in many posts about math or physics.
by maxxen | 2025-08-20 13:33:36+00:00
This is cool. My only worry is that the implementation complexity will prevent widespread adoption outside of maplibre. Although getting write support upstreamed into PostGIS might be all thats needed to make sure it trickles down into all the different tile servers. MVT is not the most efficient, but everything speaks protobuf and you can hack together a parser in an afternoon.

I've experimented a lot with vectorized encodings of geometries in DuckDB-spatial using the different nested types. You definitely do get very good compression out of the box if you already support a bunch of specialized lightweight compression algorithms. Simpler geometric properties are very fast to compute (e.g. area, length), but for anything more complex you usually need to do some pre-processing or conversion into an intermediate data structure (like creating a line-segment index for intersection checks, or a node graph for clipping) which dominates the processing time anyway. The cost of materializing the columnar format into a row-wise format and back again when doing joins or sorting is absolutely brutal on performance too, compared to just keeping geometries as serialized blobs that are easy to slice and memcpy.

That said, I do expect columnar encoding to work really well for rendering in the browser, where transfer speed is the big bottleneck. The paper mentions Arrow as an inspiration, but I wonder why the format isn't just based on (compressed) arrow in its entirety? Im not super up to speed on the arrow ecosystem but I know there's a couple of query engines that don't just use it internally on the CPU, but also to execute on the GPU. If you are going to decode and send over the data to WebGL, you might as well do the filtering/expression evaluation there too no? (and leverage the existing techniques/code/interop in the arrow world)
If a microbe can redefine life, what's the startup equivalent?
by Davidon4 | 2025-08-20 13:34:47+00:00
The Nautilus piece on a “rogue microbe” redefining what counts as life got me thinking: Startups have the same problem most of us operate with rigid definitions of “growth” and “marketing channels.”

We tend to think: . Ads = a channel . SEO = a channel . Social = a channel

But then someone posts a casual comment on Reddit or drops your link in a Slack group or mentions your product in a small Telegram chat and suddenly that’s the thing driving real traction.

It feels like the “rogue microbes” of growth are hiding in plain sight. Maybe we’ve been defining channels too narrowly.

So my question is: What’s the strangest, smallest or most “unexpected” channel that ended up driving meaningful growth for you?
by mikasjp | 2025-08-20 13:35:06+00:00
Hangfire is primarily a job scheduler. It is designed for running jobs at specific times or intervals, and it persists jobs in a database so they survive restarts. It comes with a dashboard, retries, and a lot of infrastructure around long‑term job management. That makes it powerful, but also heavier in terms of setup and overhead.

BusyBee is focused on lightweight background processing. Everything is in‑memory, with no external storage required. It is designed for scenarios where you want to enqueue a task and have it executed immediately in the background, without scheduling or persistence.

A practical example: if you are building an API that accepts file uploads and you want to process the file asynchronously after the request returns, BusyBee is a good fit. You just enqueue the job and it runs in the background right away. If instead you need to schedule a nightly cleanup job or ensure jobs survive application restarts, Hangfire would be the better choice.
by rescripting | 2025-08-20 13:35:08+00:00
Its unfair to compare Databricks to OpenAI because they're at very different points in the enshittification[1] process.

OpenAI is still early, burning VC money to acquire customers by operating at a loss. This makes it appear cheap.

DataBricks is further along, attempting to claw back the value they provided to customers by raising prices.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
Ask HN: Implementing instruction in a two-address machine?
by shivajikobardan | 2025-08-20 13:35:11+00:00
I am trying to implement X:=AB+CC in a two-address machine.

I implemented shorter than John P. Hayes in his textbook of Computer Organization and Architecture. So, I suspect I am doing something wrong.

Here's my implementation:

MUL A,B //A=AB

MUL C,C //C=CC

MOVE X,C //X=C

ADD X,A //X=X+A=CC+AB
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-08-20 13:35:20+00:00
https://phys.org/news/2025-08-freud-ai-narcissistic-insult-h...

What you just wrote about Kohut's therapeutic countertransference goes over my head atm.. (4th para especially)

If you have a specific citation in a book I might be able to check if Kohut has a workable and extensible model of the therapeutic process
by dahcryn | 2025-08-20 13:35:34+00:00
you kill off all open source pieces, in turn compliance is happy, and a CTO is happy because he has a maintenance contract and can blame other people if stuff goes wrong.

It's a way to get those pesky Python people to shut up

Oh, and a CTO is always valued more if he manages a 5 million Databricks budget, where he can prove his worth by showing a 5% discount het negotiated very well, than a 1 million whatever-else budget that would be best in class. Everybody wins.
by homefree | 2025-08-20 13:35:59+00:00
In SF non profits actively make the problems they’re attempting (in theory) to solve worse, while enriching themselves at (often gratuitous) cost to the tax payer.

I understand your argument, but in practice SF would benefit from these shutting down.

At a minimum they shouldn’t be tax payer funded. Even philanthropic non-profits are often funded by children (or spouses) via inherited wealth from the people that actually built things. This then funds actively harmful policy and orgs because the people throwing money around have no idea how to achieve what they want and there is a class of specialized NGO vultures that go after the money while accomplishing nothing.

This is anecdotal, but what I’ve seen of friends that work at these places is wild. People stealing money, extreme entitlement, stupid policy, enormous waste, no accountability. It’s bad.
by jeffbee | 2025-08-20 13:37:00+00:00
Unfortunately this level of incoherence is almost universal on HN and similar forums. You'd have to be completely out of your mind to install this extension, but people for some reason believe they can install privacy. They got whipped into fearing nebulous online actors so much that they'll download FSB rootkits dressed as VPNs. The minimal set of actions a rational person would take after realizing they've been tricked into installing this extension is setting their entire PC on fire and then running it over with their car, while moving all of their bank accounts to new accounts, in person, and changing all of their passwords using a brand new device.
by jeffparsons | 2025-08-20 13:39:10+00:00
> My goal here is to develop an intuitive sense of comfort with the behaviors of these stacks. If I succeed, you will not just understand that the physics allows the stacks to be stable, but you will feel that it is proper and just.

I love this kind of writing. It feels like the author is excited to bring me along on a journey — not to show off how smart they are. In this way it reminds me of Turing's original paper that introduced his "computing machine". It presents a fantastically deep topic in a way that is not just remarkably accessible but also conversational and _friendly_.

I wonder why so little modern academic writing is like this. Maybe people are afraid it won't seem adequately professional unless their writing is sterile?
by Hizonner | 2025-08-20 13:39:39+00:00
> You can only point to IPs in China from DNS servers in China - if you try to use, say, Route53 in the US and add an A record there, you'll get a nasty email (fail to comply, and your ports get blocked again, possibly for good).

Wait what? So I can DoS any Web site in China by creating a rogue DNS record that points to its IP address, even under a completely unrelated domain? How would they even find those records?
by kelipso | 2025-08-20 13:40:29+00:00
I was able to narrow a pain I had to a couple of causes using ChatGPT. Urgent care had no idea, but they don’t have time either. I gave chatgpt my symptoms, it gave me possible causes. I gave it additional possible causes as well, and I narrowed it down to a couple of causes after a few back and forths.

Maybe it’s right, maybe not, I do have an appointment scheduled with a doctor, but it was a much more informative conversation I had than with an actual doctor.
by Draiken | 2025-08-20 13:41:16+00:00
What a load of crap. CEOs are elites that were born into money in the majority of cases. They fail upwards while not doing any real work and reaping the benefits from the thousands that do.

Yes a CEO has an impact on the business but so does everyone else. Ultimately he's one more piece of the puzzle and absolutely nothing can justify this salary gap.

Anyone with any sliver of common sense knows they aren't worth 400x more than everyone else. Fire the CEO and the company continues. Fire all your workers and let's see what happens.

If anything the real reason they're paid so much is so the shareholders have an easy scapegoat to fire (with their golden parachutes) while pushing for short term profits as much as possible.
by gus_massa | 2025-08-20 13:41:22+00:00
There are a few weird cases of prokaryotes that don't have mitocondrias. Apparently they had mitocondrias, but they steeled the interesting parts and get rid of them (over gazillions of years). From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamonad

> These flagellates are unusual in lacking aerobic mitochondria. Originally they were considered among the most primitive eukaryotes, diverging from the others before mitochondria appeared. However, they are now known to have lost aerobic mitochondria secondarily, and retain both organelles and nuclear genes derived ultimately from the mitochondrial endosymbiont genome. Mitochondrial relics include hydrogenosomes, which produce hydrogen (and make ATP), and small structures called mitosomes.
by Sean-Der | 2025-08-20 13:41:54+00:00
I thought about your comment a lot. I worry that most people just say nice things (but think the opposite) so I appreciate you being direct.

-----

I don't expect you to know anything about me. It made me feel like you have written me off/dismissed me when you mention HomeAssistant + WebRTC. HomeAssistant uses Go2RTC and the WebRTC library it uses is Pion[0]. I created that and maintain it. Getting WebRTC on tiny devices is something I have been working on for years and always doing it Open Source/making it best for users.

-----

> comes off as doing things that have already been done before but presenting as if something novel was done.

I don't think 'Hardware AI Assistant' is a novel idea. What I hoped was a novel idea was putting it in an easy to use package for others to build upon and use. WebRTC + Hardware is something I have been trying to make easier for a long time https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-kinesis-video-streams-webr... [1] I wrote this code, but things still felt too difficult.

When ESP32s got powerful enough to do WebRTC I wrote [2]. Reflect inherits from that. So I am proud of that. I have been on this journey to make RTC + cheap hardware possible so that others can build upon that.

-----

Again I really appreciate your comment, and sorry to be so defensive. Someone I really respected (and I thought they respected me) said the same thing about my work not being novel. They said people have been building security cameras for years that use WebRTC, you are over inflating what you are doing. That has stuck with me. So part of me does fear that I am wasting my time trying to solve these problems.

I don't think what I am doing is novel. I do think that I am solving it differently because I make it accessible/Open Source. Most people solving these problems/building it just keep their code at work and don't try to help others use it.

If you are up for it shoot me an email sean@pion.ly and https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean-dubois/ I would love to have a friend that calls me out/is honest whats good work and what is just BS :)

-----

[0] https://github.com/pion/webrtc

[1] https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-kinesis-video-streams-webr...

[2] https://github.com/Sean-Der/embedded-sdk
by decentrality | 2025-08-20 13:42:47+00:00
DeltaDB sounds of being a >git innovation for coding itself, and would fulfill Zed's promises in Nathan Sobo's debate/discussion with Steve Yegge recently.

Seems to solve a real problem which is growing rapidly, both in the old way and in the new way ... if it can overcome _slop_ in LLM chats, and the sheer enormity of code/data ahead. Trying to picture how coherence will survive.

With claims/hype/concern floating around that >90% of code will be LLM-generated within 3-6 months, with the insinuation/tone [1] that the same amount of code will be written by humans as now ( at least at first ) but LLM code will radically grow to dilute the space ( as is happening ) ... seems like DeltaDB being done right/well is going to be do-or-die on whether coherence remains possible!

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-ai-90-percent-...
by gibbitz | 2025-08-20 13:42:52+00:00
To elaborate on this, the LLM is anonymous to the user and removes most social expectations from the interaction. Facing a person with expertise in a field one has little experience in is intimidating for many people. Here we see the drop of social awareness due to the anonymity of a text input actually as a benefit. It would be interesting to have a blind study where one person asks these questions answered by a professional and another gets answers from an AI and see if there's any difference in user satisfaction.
by mikasjp | 2025-08-20 13:43:38+00:00
This is exactly why I built BusyBee. My team found ourselves hand‑rolling something similar almost every time we started a new project. If we kept needing it, I figured there are probably more people in the same situation. So instead of duplicating the same background queue logic across multiple codebases, I decided to build it once, add proper OpenTelemetry support, and keep it simple without extra bloat. That way we can just reuse it and reduce the amount of similar code we have to maintain.
Show HN: Web MCP Free Tier – Web Access for Agents Without Getting Blocked
by meirk-brd | 2025-08-20 13:44:08+00:00
I’m the developer behind the Web MCP at Bright Data. We just launched a free tier so any AI Engineer/ Vibe coder can give their LLM real web access — 5,000 requests/month at no cost.

Unlike most MCP servers that wrap a single SaaS API (e.g. Gmail, GitHub), the Web MCP wraps the entire internet. It handles JS-heavy sites, auto-solves CAPTCHAs, and returns clean Markdown your model can use.

Free tier includes:

search_engine → search results from Google/Bing/Yandex

scrape_as_markdown → fetch any URL as clean, LLM-friendly Markdown (with CAPTCHA handling)

Quick start: https://docs.brightdata.com/mcp-server/quickstart/remote

I also wrote a blog post with the full background, challenges, and architecture:

Solving Web Access for Agents (For Free!):https://brightdata.com/blog/ai/web-mcp-free-tier

Would love feedback - what would you want to use live web access for in your agents?
by ecshafer | 2025-08-20 13:44:12+00:00
3-4 year timeline makes more sense for Greencard application to Naturalization, that was 4.5 years for my wife. But its not 3-4 years N400 to Naturalization, no way.

Timelines for USCIS depends heavily on where you are, since some offices just have more people to go through than others. So I have talked to people that one step might be 4 months for them and a year for another person.
by dcreater | 2025-08-20 13:44:27+00:00
This is a more advanced version of what I'm doing.

I was impressed that someone took it up to this level till I saw the tell tale signs of the AI generated content in the README. Now I have no faith that this is a system that was developed, iterated and tested to actually work and not just a prompt to an AI to dress up a more down to earth workflow like mine.

Evidence of results improvement using this system is needed.
by Sean-Der | 2025-08-20 13:44:36+00:00
I couldn't get on WiFi at the office at all. Corporate WiFi had a bunch of hoops to jump through that made ESP32 hard.

Once I got it working it felt really cool though. As a user I don't want to configure WiFi on the microcontroller at all. I would be really cool if I could walk up to a 'smart device' and set my phone next to it and do zero configuration.
by Propelloni | 2025-08-20 13:44:43+00:00
I think the premise is flawed. 1st, there is no evidence that programmers do invent worlds more or less often than anybody else. 2nd, while it is a cliché there is also no evidence that programmers have difficulties or don't want to integrate into their societies more or less than non-programmers.

World building may be escapism in some cases, but the common case of world building is contingency planning. Just look at investment banking or, more relatable, getting your kids to and fro school.