MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wild_egg | 2025-08-23 13:06:34+00:00
What? Why are you backing up the WAL?

sqlite3 source_database.db ".backup backup_database.db"

Now the WAL content is rolled into your new backup file. Stick a timestamp in the backup file name and run this as a cron job every N minutes and you have all the recovery you need. Another one-liner to sync to S3 and you're all set.

Edit: And just to clarify, that command can be run on a live DB as it's being used by your app server. SQLite handles external concurrent readers just fine.
Show HN: IconLab – AI-Powered App Icon Generator by a 13-Year-Old Dev
by supermarios | 2025-08-23 13:06:59+00:00
Hey HN, I'm a 13-year-old full-stack dev and ML engineer who built IconLab, an AI-powered tool to generate app icons for indie developers. I know how tough it is to create professional icons without hiring a designer or spending hours in Photoshop, so I made this to help devs like me get polished icons fast and cheap.

It’s a production-ready MVP, and I’d love your feedback! Try it out here: https://www.iconlab.site

What do you think—useful for your projects? Any features you’d want added?
by archi42 | 2025-08-23 13:07:20+00:00
You can monitor https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php - they have a "Great Deals" and a "For Sale/..." section. There is a 'Enterprise SSD "small deals"' topic with recent activity. That's relevant for both EU and US: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/enterprise...

I got my enterprise SSDs (1.6TB, 3DWPD, drawback: SAS3) from our Craigslist-equivalent. First I got 2 for 150€ and had a nice chat with the seller, who seems to had a big box of these. A week later he offered me his remaining 3 disks for another 150€. On eBay it seems you have to make offers.

Some local info: I also noticed on the German eBay getting Chinese cards to be much more expensive than on eBay in the US. The same seller asking 80€ or 100€ for the same LSI 9400. However, finding the article on eBay.com and then using the item ID on eBay.de allowed me to get it for the better price.
by quotemstr | 2025-08-23 13:07:20+00:00
What options do gamers have?

1. No games

2. Inscrutable rootkit

3. Piracy

4. Attestation, i.e. partial Tivoization

Of these, #4 seems least awful and maximally user freedom preserving. Unlike regular Tivoization, also, we're not talking about locking down the whole machine. No need. You basically just need to attest the kernel and some binary signing infrastructure. You can run custom builds of whatever else you want otherwise.

I mean, or you can run a trusted VM, as some others have suggested. Is that really any worse?
by CalRobert | 2025-08-23 13:07:54+00:00
I am embarrassed to admit I always thought people focused too much on protein and it was bro science but I also never managed to get stronger despite resistance training. Then in my forties I finally started eating 150-180 g of protein a day and doing resistance training to exhaustion a couple days a week and the difference has been huge. I wish I’d done this 20 years ago.
by morkalork | 2025-08-23 13:08:14+00:00
The universal healthcare system in many countries is like they said, a publicly funded and operated insurer. I can look in the government portal and see what each healthcare provider billed to the public system for example. One can also have their private insurance cover services or just pay out of pocket. But copying that part blindly in the USA is doomed to fail because along with the universal coverage, there are also strict regulations on what services can be offered privately, how much can be charged for services and what must be covered by private insurance (a fun example I experienced recently was my private insurance not wanting to cover a certain drug treatment; if one doesn't have insurance, the government will pay 100% for the drugs but if you do, they force the private insurer to cover the cost). All areas where there USA is lacking.
Show HN: Create a clone of your old self from your old iOS backup; talk to it
by gabriel666smith | 2025-08-23 13:08:30+00:00
These scripts take an iOS backup, look through it for your sent messages, and their context, and then - via guided LLM analysis - build character profiles of yourself for use in an LLM roleplay app like SillyTavern.

There are all sorts of ethical problems with this, I think. Probably legal problems, too.

It also feels grossly inevitable; I'm surprised I couldn't find an existing version of this.

When I first talked to 'myself', from an iPhone backup aged ~19, I felt a very very strong surge of complex emotions.

The LLM roleplaying as me, asking me knowledgeably about what its future life looked like, hopes and dreams and fears I'd forgotten, etc - that is a very strange feeling.
by thunky | 2025-08-23 13:09:47+00:00
So rather that someone auto-investing a slice of their paycheck into a s&p fund in their 401k, they should instead learn how to evaluate company financials so they can pick winners from a non tax advantaged account?

This is a losing strategy for the large majority, and it's been demonstrated repeatedly that even professional investors can't beat the market especially after considering fees.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/030916/buffe...
by JeremyNT | 2025-08-23 13:10:22+00:00
Some of these sample prompts in this blog post are extremely verbose:

If you are considering leveraging any of the documentation or examples, you need to validate that the documentation or example actually matches what is currently in the code.

I have better luck being more concise and avoiding anthropomorphizing. Something like:

"validate documentation against existing code before implementation"

Should accomplish the same thing!
by JW_00000 | 2025-08-23 13:10:43+00:00
When notpushkin said "the spec is still at XSLT 1.0", I think "the spec" is referring to the WHATWG HTML Living Standard spec, which only refers to XSLT 1.0. (It wouldn't make sense to say "the XSLT spec is at XSLT 1.0".)
by crote | 2025-08-23 13:11:36+00:00
On the other hand, not writing documentation also has a cost.

Code is rarely written from start to finish in a single session. Would you rather spend 5 minutes before you do a git commit to write down some very basic documentation, or spend an hour rediscovering it when you pick up development two weeks later?

Nobody is expecting extensive and well-polished documentation here, but is a "Flags X, Y, and Z are mandatory, buffer A is required: I tested with 10MB, smaller might be fine too" really too much to ask for?

Is the time you saved by not writing that one line worth someone else spending several hours figuring out how to do a "hello world"?
by matt_s | 2025-08-23 13:11:51+00:00
I think it comes down to quality of materials and manufacturing. It would be interesting if someone knew of failure rate data of laptop manufacturers. I bet Apple's is far lower than others, maybe this is because they control the OS and firmware, etc. I don't care enough to go research but an HN thread isn't likely representative of "normal" laptop users.

I'm not an Apple fanboi, I have a lot of linux experience, back in the day built a Tivo like linux PC with TV capture card as a DVR and had to mess with all sorts of X11 settings, etc. Used to build PCs for gaming and mess with settings. The whole It Just Works is true with Apple, everything hardware wise is smooth. The annoyances of Apple software to me don't bubble up to the level of wanting to switch, but articles like above make me think about getting a cheap Mini PC to play around and see if things like Omarchy make the level of messing with settings much lower than it used to be.
by bediger4000 | 2025-08-23 13:11:54+00:00
I think the affordances of Twitter contribute. It's easy to repost or quote post or "@" some user ID. This all makes it very easy to dogpile on some post or some user ID.

HN doesn't have reposts of any kind, and no "in universe" way to "@" someone. Much harder to dogpile.

HN down votes are limited as well. A post can get 5 downvotes and then it disappears for those who haven't turned on show dead. A user can only up vote replies to their posts, not down vote. This probably contributed as well.
by fmajid | 2025-08-23 13:12:26+00:00
The article is talking about the UK's RIPA and demanding backdoors into encryption. My comment was not in response to anyone else's, and I never mentioned OSA, although that is also problematic as a censorship vector.

As an aside, all this demonstrates the UK's lack of a Bill of Rights. And no, the ECHR is not one due to the pernicious doctrine of Parliamentary as opposed to popular sovereignty, and the lack of independence of the Judiciary. No Parliament can bind future Parliaments, which could abolish the Human Rights Act 1998 with a single vote, and indeed many UK politicians are calling for precisely this, versus the complex and deliberately cumbersome procedure the US Constitution has to amend itself. Any Bill of Rights that is subject to the forbearance of the legislative body it is supposed to protect you from is not worth the paper it is written on.

Obviously, if journalists cannot have encrypted conversations with their sources and whistleblowers don't have anonymous channels to blow the whistle, considering the draconian penalties of the Official Secrets Act (another OSA, coincidence much?) neither will happen, which is exactly by design. Ironically, when the boot was on the other foot like revelations about Boris Johnson or Rishi Sunak's own illegal use of WhatsApp to hide activities covered by public records laws, they backed off.
by jt2190 | 2025-08-23 13:13:05+00:00
The “client-side problems” Siebenmann is talking about are the various anti-bot measures (CAPTCHAs, rate limiters, etc.) that operators put in place that make the end user experience worse. Operators feel that they have no choice but to keep their servers available, thus they “don’t care”.

He makes a statement in an earlier article that I think sums things up nicely:

> One thing I've wound up feeling from all this is that the current web is surprisingly fragile. A significant amount of the web seems to have been held up by implicit understandings and bargains, not by technology. When LLM crawlers showed up and decided to ignore the social things that had kept those parts of the web going, things started coming down all over the place.

This social contract is, to me, built around the idea that a human will direct the operation of a computer in real time (largely by using a web browser and clicking links) but I think that this approach is extremely inefficient of both the computer’s and the human’s resources (cpu and time, respectively). The promise of technology should not be to put people behind desks staring at a screen all day, so this evolution toward automation must continue.

I do wonder what the new social contract will be: Perhaps access to the majority of servers will be gated by micropayments, but what will the “deal” be for those who don’t want to collect payments? How will they prevent abuse while keeping access free?

[1] “The current (2025) crawler plague and the fragility of the web”https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/WebIsKindOfFrag...
by sim7c00 | 2025-08-23 13:13:41+00:00
there are many ways to pretend to be an IP. that being said, things like 911S5 can show people can actually control that many machines, even though i suspect others comments about tracking pixels and such methods are likely more plausible.

you could also do like a resources lookup maybe in some games if you host the server (resources then being looked up on the client). games are full of weird design choices for performance, some can be abused. .another avenue is ads linking to different resources via scripts, maybe some smaller players still allows it.

also there are (gray are) businesses who offer residential proxies for things like scraping (sales lead generation companies oftenuse such services for example). so you could likely pay your way to millions of ips, relatively cheap if ud do only 1 request over each
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-23 13:13:43+00:00
I think you are confused about how LLMs train and store information. These models aren't archives of code and text, they are surprisingly small, especially relative to the training dataset.

A recent anthropic lawsuit decision also reaffirms that training on copyright is not a violation of copyright.[1]

However outputting copyright still would be a violation, the same as a person doing it.

Most artists can draw a batman symbol. Copyright means they can't monetize that ability. It doesn't mean they can't look at bat symbols.

[1]https://www.npr.org/2025/06/25/nx-s1-5445242/federal-rules-i...
by lapcat | 2025-08-23 13:14:57+00:00
Non-athletic adults can't do anything consistently. Which sports do you think are easier? Certainly not baseball or American football. Perhaps soccer, but only because soccer is more generous about inconsistency: play doesn't stop if you lose the ball or kick it inaccurately, as long as it doesn't go out of bounds. On the other hand, non-athletic adults are going to tire very quickly constantly running around the field with no stoppage.
by krapp | 2025-08-23 13:14:59+00:00
>It instructs people who happen to be slaves to obey their masters in the same way it instructs non slaves to obey their authorities.

First, no one "happens to be" a slave.

Second, this is an implicit endorsement of slavery. Especially where slaves obeying their masters is made analagous to Christians obeying God. This is an argument made by the New Testament that slavery is a reflection of the natural hierarchy of God's design - that slaves are to their masters as all men are to God.

Or read Luke:

Luke 17:7-10 7 ‘Who among you would say to your slave who has just come in from ploughing or tending sheep in the field, “Come here at once and take your place at the table”? 8 Would you not rather say to him, “Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink”? 9 Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded? 10 So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, “We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!”’

How deeply between the lines do we have to read to get to the part where slavery is seen as the problem, rather than slaves refusing to accept their lot? When you're using slaves as an object lesson for how Christians should view their relationship to God, you're endorsing slavery.

>He’s saying that the Christian response is not supposed to be rebellion (in most cases at least).

So if Christians aren't supposed to rebel against slavery, what should they rebel against? Were the abolitionist Christians who did rebel against slavery sinning against God in doing so?

Passive acceptance of the status quo in this regard is not what many would consider "extremely enlightened."
by nvarsj | 2025-08-23 13:15:45+00:00
I’ve never had 8h of battery life on a Thinkpad. More like 3h. Also my last two T series stopped working completely after ~4 years (dead motherboard / broken usb-c ports / cracking casing). The speakers, screen, touchpad all suck as well, let's be honest. The best thing about a Thinkpad is the keyboard and that it can run Linux.

I finally gave in and bought a MBP M3 Max 14" and the thing is a beast. Multiple days of battery life. Beautiful display. Indestructable casing and USB ports. Speaker quality is amazing - I can play music and podcasts in the background on it when traveling - I could never do this on any Thinkpad. The only thing it sucks at is the keyboard and OS X, but I've learned to live with both.

Doubt I'll ever go back to a Thinkpad or any non-macbook laptop until a company makes a similar quality one I can run Linux on.
by btbytes | 2025-08-23 13:16:07+00:00
Common things in all these Pro-Apple threads:

1. Macbook users who have/are using non-Apple laptops that find the average work-issued Intel laptops to be just meh or worse.

2. People that only buy some exclusive Lenovo, Framework laptops (that are not that common out in the real world (e.g: in US)) refuse to acknowledge the positive experience of Macbook owners.

I have had only 3 personal MacbookAir/MBPs since 2006 (and the previous i5 Mba is perfectly functional after a battery replacement and a HDD upgrade - sitting next to me running Mint Linux, that I plan to hand off to my 10yo.)

In the meantime, I've also had 4 other MBPs and 3 windows laptops through work.

In no way and form, the intel laptops were/are better than the macbooks on average.
by HocusLocus | 2025-08-23 13:16:09+00:00
Apple Lisa was priced way too high. We had an Apple store with one and people loved to play with it for a few minutes but at its price point no one made a connection with it. Not even people we knew to be independently wealthy and collected 'toys'.

Lisa had an early capacitance keyboard sensitive to EMF. Our building was next to an AM radio station transmitter and talking or music resulted in a steam of ghost characters when you held your hand over it. For demoing the machine I had a ground wire running to an elbow rest and chair bottom. To type comfortably with no ghost I had to have a bare foot resting on the chair legs.
by Jsttan | 2025-08-23 13:16:23+00:00
Hello everyone! I would like to introduce Side Project Hub, a new blog for everyone to discover amazing side projects by indie hackers and solo builders around the world.

I am currently building out this blog, that I hope to be a place where aspiring indie hackers and solo builders can make their side projects seen by people all around the world. I have many amazing plans for this project too, and I ensure you that it will be exciting.

I also just published my first weekly post on exciting side projects here too: https://sideprojecthub.substack.com/p/weekly-amazing-project...

If you are interested, please subscribe to the blog, it will help me a lot in getting this seen. The more people that subscribed and supported, the more people projects can be seen by others. I also love to heard any feedback from all members here on Hacker News, or if you want, feel free to message there on Substack or @jst-tan.com on Bluesky.
by reactordev | 2025-08-23 13:17:51+00:00
The birth of the ATX format made it so anyone could order parts online (with a little bit of knowledge) and it would fit. Would it be the best? Maybe not. But it fit.

Nothing sucked more than buying RAM in the wrong DIMM pin size. Was it 72, or 30 pin? Crap, let’s count them… This AGP card requires its own AGP slot, what? And IDE cables that couldn’t daisy chain. Man, those were the days. Cathode ray tube radiation straight to the retinas.
by supersparrow | 2025-08-23 13:18:43+00:00
If I’ve had a break, gone for a walk, left it overnight, worked on something else simple for a bit and tried the other usual ‘fixes’ and am still stuck then I find ‘just do it’ really helps me. I find if I just write some code even slightly related to the goal, even if it’s complete garbage that gets deleted later, then I get unstuck. Although unfortunately even getting to that point takes a couple of days sometimes. We can’t always perform immediately on demand.
by odo1242 | 2025-08-23 13:19:06+00:00
It’s true if you buy/compare a random MacBook and a random PC. A 5-year lifespan and good performance is basically guaranteed for all Macs, but you have to make sure you don’t have one of the crap Windows PCs (the ones that do stuff like spinning hard disk boot drives, motherboard attached to flimsy frame without reinforcements, 4GB RAM, etc.)

Even considering this most people still tend to underestimate the lifespan of Windows PCs lol
by jqpabc123 | 2025-08-23 13:20:29+00:00
a strong vibe of not being a good question for a LLM.

How is a user with a question supposed to determine if the question is "good"? What should he do if he is not sure? Shouldn't an "intelligent" LLM be responsible enough to tell him if there is a problem?

Being required to only ask "good" questions defeats much of the utility that LLMs tout as being provided.

Your response has a strong vibe of an AI apologist.
by riedel | 2025-08-23 13:20:29+00:00
Confidential computing is the straw for many people to overcome GDPR headaches in Europe. I know particularly medical researchers that hope that they get access to scalable infrastructure this way, because they can tick it as the only additional TOM on the processor side. As mentioned in the comments of OP though it is more a promise than a reality at the moment with very little actual benefit in term of reducing relevant attack vectors.
by sersi | 2025-08-23 13:20:40+00:00
Well I have a desktop running arch linux as my main computer at home. For my laptop though I use a mbp purely for the build quality because I have never found a laptop that is as good at the current generations of mbps for thermals, trackpad quality, sound quality, screen, battery life.

Now personally I'd be happier running linux and I'm looking forward to arch linux on asahi working on my laptop. But I will use macos (which I used to like but has become steadily worse over the years) just because of the hardware
by nathan_compton | 2025-08-23 13:21:08+00:00
Yes, much like an AI, we can arrange a series of tokens in any order we want to create the appearance of an argument. All I'm saying is that given that many, many people listen to hip hop (which is, incidentally, a much more expansive genre than Post Malone) and very, very, few people commit violent crimes, it is clear that hip hop is probably not the proximal cause of violent crime. The vast, vast, majority of people who listen to hip hop never commit a crime. Furthermore, to the extent that social science research means anything, correlations between media and criminality have been difficult to definitively find, for example: https://www.ucanmadison.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/2017_....

I should note that if Gwern's observations about correlations are true, then a negative result should be taken seriously, since positive correlations should be easy to find. Absence of strong correlations should reasonably be taken as a sign that a definitive connection is hard to come by. Of course, any good research in this field will attempt to control for confounds and if you ask me personally, I'm not optimistic about that prospect. But to the extent that this research says anything at all, the case isn't strong.

I'm not even saying you are per se wrong - it does seem reasonable that media that glorifies lawlessness might increase lawlessness. But if it does, it clearly only does so in a small population which also share a lot of other factors (like poverty, for example). Given that most humans enjoy hip hop without negative consequences, focusing on it as a potential intervention seems off base. A ban on hip-hop would be very unlikely to reduce crime, but a decrease in poverty would probably do so (accepting that we can't really figure out how to do that). A focus on hip hop is extremely flaccid.
by madamelic | 2025-08-23 13:21:20+00:00
I strongly believe that we are going to see many brands hit L4 and L5 before 2030.

Multiple manufacturers seem to be circling on the same advancements and leaps, they all seem to be working with each other to get regulations in place for them to deploy their cars.

I do believe we are about to see AV's version of "making reusable boosters being reused boring" moments with AVs where suddenly multiple companies are doing what others thought impossible years before. Even the much demeaned Tesla FSD is shockingly human-like and reliable on v13.

The issue that Waymo specifically is going to have is scalability. Unlike other brands who have AV, Waymo doesn't have manufacturing capabilities in-house currently nor logistic or a generalizable model. I think Waymo is definitely ahead of the pack but time will tell if the brands who went slower will pass them up due to Waymo not having a financial reason to push to financial viability on any timeline shorter than "after Google runs out of money".

If Waymo's plan is to have to map the entire US to be capable of driving in it, that's going to cost a lot of money and take a lot of time vs having cars that can roll out of the factory and drive straight to their assigned city unassisted.