MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Bjartr | 2025-08-20 12:51:44+00:00
I started writing another comment and after looking at your links and was about to quote the definition at the top of "The Rise of the Semantic Layer" as a suggestion, but I realized that it actually isn't that far off, information-wise from the definition youve provided here.

So I took a step back and tried to think about why one "feels" to a reader more like a definition than the other. I think it comes down to phrasing more than informational content. The definition you provide in your comment comes off, for lack of a better term, too much like a sales pitch.

Less is more when it comes to definitions, at least for defining terms in articles/blog posts like these.

Here's my attempt at a better (for this use case) definition:

A semantic layer is an interface to data stores that is designed to be queryable in terms relevant and familiar to those with knowledge of the business domain.
by griffzhowl | 2025-08-20 12:52:13+00:00
It's not saying that modern science and technology are necessary for saying that humans are exceptional, only that it's sufficient.

We could also point out the fact that no other animals write books (or even come close), and that arguably takes us back to about 3000BC. That doesn't mean that humans before then weren't exceptional, only that it's enough (sufficient) to point out this feature as one example in which humans are exceptional. We haven't really changed biologically since then - these are cultural developments - but there are features of humans that allow these cultural features to manifest and to build upon previous ones.

Of course as we go back in time towards our last common ancestor with chimps and bonobos there are fewer features of human behaviour that make us exceptional, pretty much by definition. The interesting questions are what those features were and when they emerged that allow the later and obviously exceptional developments to occur.

As an aside, I'm not sure what you mean by measuring an outcome - to me, outcomes are all that we measure. Roughly, outcomes=observations. So I think you're using the word "outcome" in a different way
by martindbp | 2025-08-20 12:52:22+00:00
We are also all made of atoms, not sure what you're trying to say here. We are different from the other animals on Earth, we are clearly special. That doesn't mean we're chosen by God or anything like that, but I don't see the sense in downplaying humanity either. We may be the only intelligent species capable of science and space flight in the universe for all we know.
by palmfacehn | 2025-08-20 12:52:53+00:00
Without wading into the debate over the content of the mantra-like-claim, "safe and effective", I hope we can all acknowledge how much we are marketed to in our everyday lives. There's also a distinct lack of trust in media, especially institutional, "legacy" media. From that point it shouldn't be difficult to empathize with the skeptics. The outcome is predetermined when sources you naturally distrust are intent on making you believe the "safe and effective" narrative, or any other narrative.

Think of how many times you've heard a sales or marketing term and thought, "If that were true, they wouldn't be so desperate to convince me". Marketing is the realm of private actors selling products. When the state is desperate to make you believe their truths, that is propaganda. Doubling down on try-hard marketing or state propaganda will likely backfire.

Even acknowledging the trust deficit is a difficult position. "Yes, the public distrusted us previously, but that was all a misunderstanding. This time is different. We're much more trustworthy now." It is a bit like going to a restaurant that proudly proclaims how they have remedied their rat and cockroach issues.
by franga2000 | 2025-08-20 12:53:03+00:00
I'm definitely curious about alternatives for getting these features without k8s. Frankly, I don't like it, but I use it because it's the easiest way I've found to get all of these features. Every deployment I've seen that didn't use containers and something like k8s either didn't have a lot of these features, implemented them with a bespoke pile of shell scripts, or a mix of both.

For context, I work in exactly that kind of "everyone in one time zone" situation and none of our customers would be losing thousands by the minute if something went down for a few hours or even a day. But I still like all the benefits of a "modern devops" approach because they don't really cost much at all and it means if I screw something up, I don't have to spend too much time unscrewing it. It took a bit more time to set up compared to a basic debian server, but then again, I was only learning it at the time and I've seen friends spin up fully production-grade Kubernetes clusters in minutes. The compute costs are also negligible in the grand scheme of things.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-08-20 12:53:26+00:00
Having two different programs that are almost the same except for one or two differences, is actually better than trying to combine them.

Why do you even have a "build system"? Why not just a shell script that runs 'cc -o foo foo.c' ? Because there are more complicated things you want to do, and it would be annoying to write out a long shell script to do them all. So you have a program ('build system') that does the complicated things for you. That program then needs a config file so you can tell the program what to do.

But you want to run that 'build system' remotely when someone does a git-push. That requires a daemon on a hosted server, authentication/authorization, a git server that triggers the job when it receives a push, it needs to store secrets and pass them to the job, it needs to run it all in a container for reliability, it needs to run the job multiple times at once for parallelism, it needs to cache to speed up the jobs, it needs to store artifacts and let you browse the results or be notified of them. So you take all that complexity, put it in its own little system ('CI system'). And you make a config file so you can tell the 'CI system' how to do all that.

Could you shove both separate sets of complex features into one tool? Sure you can. But it would make it harder to develop and maintain them, change them, replace them. Much simpler to use individual smaller components to compose a larger system, than to try to build one big, complex, perfect, all-in-one-system.

Don't believe me? There's a reason most living creatures aren't 6-foot-tall amoebas. We're systems-on-systems-on-systems-on-systems (many of which have similar features) and it works pretty well. Our biggest problem is often that our individual parts aren't composeable/replaceable enough.
by techcode | 2025-08-20 12:53:36+00:00
It's not clear to me.

Perhaps we have different ideas about what "taxpayer resources" and/or "public infrastructure" is?

I was highly skilled migrant/expat, now "naturalized Dutch", and work for Booking.com - so I know a thing or two about tourism (beyond just traveling myself).

Tourists least, digital nomads a bit more, and expats even more - use public infrastructure.

But over lifetime, locals use order of magnitude more than expats.
by lazide | 2025-08-20 12:53:58+00:00
Their point is if you’re served within China (aka hosted off a chinese IP, or accessing anything from a Chinese IP) it doesn’t matter if the other company interacts or complies with China’s rules - the other half of the transaction will be blocked.

So using DNS hosted outside won’t matter, because the destination Chinese IP will get blocked. Or if using outside hosting, it won’t matter, because anyone in China trying to access it will get blocked. Or anyone trying to publish anything to it the CCP doesn’t like. Presumably also with some follow up in-person ‘check-ins’.

The GFW is a pretty massive and actually impressively effective piece of technology, even if we don’t agree with it’s purpose.
by conductr | 2025-08-20 12:54:06+00:00
What happens to stock market when everyone is given 100k to invest? The inflation adjustment is likely understated as you’re basing on historical factors and this is large macro shock to the system that needs to be adjusted for as well.

I also still don’t think this helps most people during the bulk of their lives. Most people in this cohort don’t save now, having knowledge of a more secure retirement wouldn’t change much for them. It’s not like they can turn off 401k contributions and have extra pocket money today.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-20 12:54:08+00:00
Not sure if this is the case for India, but I've experienced similar situations for other countries, but the 'scam websites' actually provided a real service - if you needed some ultra-urgent processing (like you only realized you needed a visa to this country before boarding a flight, once you were already at the airport check-in...) they were able to provide 30 minute approval, whereas the official site's accelerated processing was 24 hours.

So obviously the only way they could to this is with government contacts meaning the government themselves could already do it, but a lot of immigration stuff everywhere is full of people taking kickbacks.
by spicyusername | 2025-08-20 12:54:19+00:00
"Good" handwriting is just not a skill that is needed by everyone.

Legible handwriting, sure, but it's not some social tragedy that kids don't learn cursive or that most adults communicate through keyboard.

The kids who grow into adults who need handwriting as a skill, whether they become architects or just like to write their thoughts down, will learn to write legibly by virtue of the fact that they need the skill. Simple as.
by haswell | 2025-08-20 12:54:38+00:00
I completely disagree.

Constructive criticism and healthy debate is entirely possible without violating the guidelines, and happens quite a bit.

If people can’t figure out how to have conversations that aren’t “boring, pointless, fawning” while honoring the community guidelines, they:

1. Need to try harder

2. Or they should probably not be commenting here

The rules/ethos are not perfect, nor does the community always succeed in its goals. But I’ll take the dynamic here every day vs. sliding into the kind of toxic sludge fest that has infiltrated just about every social network.

This place is barely holding the hordes at bay as it is. I’m grateful for the guidelines and the collective will to abide by them as much as possible.
by arnon | 2025-08-20 12:55:05+00:00
He's setting a dangerous trap for others - just like they did when they said they were firing all human support and then rehired them later.

Yes, Klarna can rebuild everything because they have hundreds of engineers and effectively infinite runway - but they're pretty much saying "just rip out your entire tech stack and rebuild it from scratch", cool, but most founders can't make that choice.
by neogodless | 2025-08-20 12:55:19+00:00
Have you heard of AMD? You know... the company with about 25% of CPU market share (at least in PCs) these days?

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/amds-desktop...

They have 17% overall according to this chart which includes Apple.

https://www.accio.com/business/best-selling-cpus

Read up on this young startup, as I think they are going places!
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-20 12:55:25+00:00
There is also "concrete and mounting evidence" for the unacceptable dangers of mass vaccination - according to anti-vaxxers.

If you set out on a mission to find evidence of something, and put in enough effort, you'll find it. The quality of that "evidence" is another matter entirely.

If handwriting is increasingly useless by itself - and we are already in a world where the vast majority of writing is digital - then for it to be worthwhile, the "side benefits" of learning and practicing handwriting must outweigh the benefits of literally any other thing you could be doing instead.

That's a very high bar to clear - and I don't think that the janky evidence we have supports this.
by nbadg | 2025-08-20 12:57:20+00:00
"As of January 2025, implementation has started for MapLibre GL JS and MapLibre Native." [1]

Github shows java, js, rust, and typescript folders, though I didn't poke any further beyond literally just looking at the folder names. [2]

[1] https://maplibre.org/roadmap/maplibre-tiles/

[2] https://github.com/maplibre/maplibre-tile-spec
by conductr | 2025-08-20 12:57:41+00:00
Yeah sorry to make it sound easy. I learned all this on YouTube and tailored those lessons to my needs, so just a nod to the fact that tons of much better resources already exist. I have no official training, if a finance bro like me can figure it out I have a lot of hope for anyone else on HN :)

Granted I have built a few robots prior to this one as a hobby hacker, so this one felt pretty easy for me. If it’s your first, it will probably take you 6 months LOL. In almost all cases, you’re better off buying unless you just like the maker aspect of the project, which was true for me.
by Telaneo | 2025-08-20 12:59:00+00:00
The ability to update whenever I feel like it and not whenever Windows felt like it, is one of the nicest things about Linux these days. Sure, you can disable automatic updates on Windows, but it's clunky and never stuck for me. After some major update, that setting is reset, and you're back to automatic updates. The system is dishonest and hostile to you from the start.

Meanwhile, Mint's update manager has a tickbox which just disables automatic updates, and let's you schedule them if you want that. And if you just tick that box, it'll never get unticked, and you can go about your life, even opting to not update certain packages if you don't want them. It's your computer, so do what you want. No 'I'm altering the deal' shenanigans or coming back to your PC with it at the login screen and a 'we decided you need more AI in your life' full screen message since an update was pushed while you were gone.

I get why this happened. Microsoft started to force automatic updates since Grandma and everybody else would just end up never manually updating their PC, and thus got pwned. So they took the sledgehammer approach instead and started forcing updates from that happening. But the fact that updates constantly mess with the UI and even end up removing features, it's not like people don't have good reasons to be mad. If it were only security updates that were forced, I doubt that the cultural phenomenon of 'fuck updates' would even exist.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-08-20 12:59:08+00:00
The debate is, indeed, pretty pointless. The data is pretty clear. Human activity is driving global warming.

I'm not hungry for alternatives. I'm hungry for the debate to end and us to move forward towards less polluting energy sources and transportation means.

As we agree there is no true debate to be had about the causes, we should move on to solutions.

Time for another metaphor!

Let's say you live in a big house with a bunch of other people. There's a problem, someone keeps shitting on the floor. You even know who the floor-shitter is!

You could ignore what you know about the cause of the situation and just focus on after-the-fact mitigation. You could put down absorbent pads and hope the floor-shitter chooses to use them. You could establish a shit-watch rotation that attempts to detect and clean up the turds as soon as possible after they're laid. You could remove all carpet and rugs to make the cleanup easier. You could install air filters and fresheners to help with the smell.

Or you could address the cause, and seek ways to stop the floor-shitter from shitting on the floor in the first place.
by onlinereadme | 2025-08-20 12:59:21+00:00
This post introduces pyghidra-mcp, a new headless Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for Ghidra designed for automation. It exposes an entire Ghidra project for analysis, enabling an LLM to trace function calls across multiple interdependent binaries in a single session. This moves beyond single-file analysis to ecosystem-aware reverse engineering.
Ask HN: Are programmers more likely to ignore society as they did not invent it?
by amichail | 2025-08-20 13:00:20+00:00
Programmers often invent their own worlds, so they may resist integrating into an existing one — namely, the society in which they live.

By contrast, a medical doctor works within the existing world and is therefore more likely to find it easier to integrate into a society they did not invent.

Do you think this is the case?
by bayindirh | 2025-08-20 13:02:01+00:00
I understand. In the comments there are already links to high quality research, plus experiences of the users.

But as you say, if you set out on a mission to find (or equally ignore) evidence of something, and put in enough effort, you'll find (or ignore) it.

So good luck. What you think might be very different from the reality.

I'll leave it here because it's pretty evident that even if I lie tomes in front of you on that particular subject, your mind is already set in stone on that matter.
by giamma | 2025-08-20 13:02:08+00:00
I believe most vector databases allow you to annotate vectors with additional metadata. Why not simply add as metadata the list of principals (roles/groups) who have access to the information (e.g. HR, executives) ? Then when a user makes a request to the chatbot, you expand the user identity to his/her principals (e.g. HR) and use those as implicit filtering criteria for finding the closest vectors in the database.

In this way you exclude up-front the documents that the current user cannot see.

Of course, this requires you to update the vector metadata any time the permissions change at the document level (e.g. a given document originally visible only to HR is now also visibile to executives -> you need to add the principal executives to the metadata of the vector resulting from the document in your vector database)
by d1sxeyes | 2025-08-20 13:02:18+00:00
What's 'legitimate' and what isn't is up for interpretation, but the question of whose interests is clear in the text of the GDPR itself, and it's the controller's (or a third party's) interests which could form the basis of lawful processing.

Interestingly, the GDPR specifically does not include 'benevolent' processing (i.e. processing for legitimate interests of the user) as a lawful basis.
by usui | 2025-08-20 13:02:47+00:00
I could care less about your explanation!

> When I moved to the US in my teens, I was surprised at the sheer disregard of English grammar rules in common vernacular here, to the point that some folks (though not my English teachers) think their incorrect use is correct.

You noted a common feature of incorrect Americanisms, which is that many of its speakers proudly and ignorantly proclaim their usage is correct. Disregarding descriptive linguistics, all it takes is one second of logic to realize why an incorrect saying doesn't make sense at all, but even that is asking for too much without getting into an argument sometimes.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-20 13:03:57+00:00
Meh, at this point what the ceo of klarna says is irrelevant, and it's clear it's just for attention.

The underlying discussion is interesting, IMO: what's the future of SaaS solutions? That is not so certain. There are some companies that will continue to lead, but there are also lots of solutions that are either too bloated, or too expensive, or too captive to make sense in the mid-long term. With the help of AI assisted coding, I could see companies investing in a small team of dedicated SaaS replication, in-house, for much better fit, feature parity and lower cost overall.
by aroussi | 2025-08-20 13:04:27+00:00
Yeah, I agree. I never let the AI make any architectural decisions (and I also watch Claude Code like a hawk lol). That being said, since we started using this system, we noticed that our PRDs and implementation plans (epics) became more detailed, giving the AI a lot less wiggle room.

Essentially, I'm treating Claude Code as a very fast junior developer who needs to be spoon-fed with the architecture.
Ask HN: Do you rely on ChatGPT when the system fails you?
by 7stepreasoning | 2025-08-20 13:04:33+00:00
Recently I had an experience that left me unsettled. I went to a doctor with a pretty standard problem and walked out with a bag of prescriptions but very little explanation. Out of frustration, I pasted everything into ChatGPT. Surprisingly, it not only explained each medication and side effect, but also helped me connect the dots with how my lifestyle and symptoms fit together.

The strange part is: I left the clinic more confused, but left the chatbot session feeling more informed. That shouldn’t be the case.

I’m not expecting AI to replace professionals, but it feels like there’s a widening gap between how institutions communicate and how much people actually want to understand. Tools like ChatGPT (and other LLMs) end up filling the gap, even though they weren’t designed for that role.

My questions for HN:

· Have you had similar experiences, not just in healthcare but in any domain (law, finance, even tech support) where the “official channel” gave you less clarity than a chatbot? · If so, how do you think about trusting or double-checking what the model says? · Do you think this is a temporary bridge until institutions adapt, or will LLMs permanently become the "first line of explanation" for many of us?
by dzogchen | 2025-08-20 13:04:54+00:00
We are finishing up the CLI for encoding tiles for public release: https://github.com/maplibre/maplibre-tile-spec/pull/504 Likely a project like Planetiler will integrate this.

Still needs some work on the documentation side. There will be a separate announcement when it is done. We have a newsletter that we share on all the common social networks. https://maplibre.org/news/

Aside from getting the encoding side ready so tile providers can start to make MapLibre Tiles available, we are focussed on integrating the decoder in MapLibre GL JS (MapLibre for the web) and MapLibre Native (Android, iOS and other platforms). ETA is sometime near the end of 2025.

I work as a maintainer for MapLibre, let me know if you have any other questions about the project!
by zamadatix | 2025-08-20 13:05:24+00:00
The points are are the same specific topic. A distro is a superset of the OS bit and the latter is rarely distributed without the additional software, documentation, and configuration that make up a distro so, to me, it's more than fine to me to include OS in the name. Even to switch between one Debian derivative to another it's extraordinarily rare to not reinstall the OS as part of that swap, so why not name the whole solution according to what it includes?
by codingdave | 2025-08-20 13:06:08+00:00
I've always tried to include the "why" in the documentation/task/ticket that hits the developers eyes.

When I was an engineer, most PMs/POs would just dictate "what" needed to be built, and give us the standard Agile mantra of telling us to choose "how". But if you also include the "why" of it, not only are you constantly communicating additional information about the customer, but you give more opportunities to get different ideas from different people. In my processes, I always have the engineers look over incoming tasks before they get assigned to be done, and it was common to have some iteration on implementation based on the engineer's reactions and ideas. Of course, not all their ideas were good, but in general the additional collaboration was appreciated, and resulted in additional customer understanding, so it was worth the extra time and effort to bake the customer info into the tasking process.
by vipulag | 2025-08-20 13:06:12+00:00
Do you often struggle with feedback on your website/app which doesnt add value??: "Great product" "This is terrible. I dont like anything." "Atleast get a better homepage"

Ok great, but what do i do with all these opinions? I got this feedback as well for my product. And could only guess and make changes and hope something makes a difference.

Do you also face this challenge? I am trying to solve this with my new product Feedbak.dev and would love to hear more from others if this resonates with you!