MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: An Open-Source Eval Suite That Helps You Fix Postgres-Based Text-to-SQL
by cevian | 2025-08-28 15:41:46+00:00
We've been building text-to-SQL at TigerData and kept hitting the same problem: evaluation tools that tell you your accuracy score but nothing about how to improve it.

Getting a 60% pass rate is meaningless if you don't know whether failures are from bad schema retrieval or poor SQL generation. It's the difference between actionable insights and meaningless benchmarketing.

So we built, and are now open-sourcing, text-to-sql-eval with a simple insight: run every query three different ways:

- Normal mode - let the system retrieve schema and generate SQL - Full schema mode - provide all tables to test upper bound accuracy - Golden tables mode - give it the right tables to isolate reasoning issues

The performance delta between modes tells you exactly what's broken.

PostgreSQL-specific because database quirks matter for correctness. Works with any LLM or text-to-SQL system. Includes an LLM-as-judge option because deterministic matching produces too many false negatives on complex queries.

We've been using this internally to improve our (also open-sourced) text-to-sql system.

Open sourcing both the eval suite and a companion tool for generating test datasets from your production schema.

Built with uv for easy setup. TimescaleDB for tracking results over time. Simple Flask UI for exploring failures.

Try it, break it, tell us what's missing.
by jorvi | 2025-08-28 15:41:47+00:00
Ah, I should have perhaps formulated it better. What I meant with vile is the sensation of having put effort in to write pleasantly only to then have the effort misattributed to a machine and to be seen like a hack.

It's as if you reaped a field by hand for the skill of it and to then have everyone's first remark be "well, you certainly know how to operate a combine. Now show me some real effort!"
by jmount | 2025-08-28 15:41:52+00:00
Puzzles are definitely odd birds. I myself have gotten into a literal screaming match try to push my belief that they never should be used in interviews. The bulk of that was an interviewer said the interviewee was "clearly confused when they were asked a puzzle" yet refused to agree that may evidence the presentation of the puzzle may in fact be confusing (and not measuring anything).

I can't speak for Winkler, but both he and Jaynes implicitly separate the reading of the puzzle from the work. Winkler start his book with a few awful "reading trick ones", but in the explanations gives a few reading directions to try and avoid that going forward. I happen to know he meant "on a Tuesday." But a correct solution to a different read would be a correct solution even if it doesn't match the book text. I don't think he was trying to set a text trap, it is just hard to be clear, concise, and unambiguous at the same time. (Even "on a Tuesday" isn't completely clear if it means "all I am telling you was the day of week was Tuesday" versus "it was a very specific Tuesday, that I am not telling.")
by CamperBob2 | 2025-08-28 15:41:56+00:00
probably shouldn't have pushed equally retarded rhetoric leading up to his most recent election.

Really? About the only comparable example I can think of was the Democrats' assurance that Biden was still fit to serve. Sure, they should have ditched him much earlier -- that much seems obvious -- but what "equally retarded rhetoric" can you stack up against "They're eating the dogs?"

A voter could justify an assumption that Biden was still a viable candidate simply because they hadn't been told otherwise by those in a position to know. But you actually had to be stupid to fall for "They're eating the dogs," along with countless other Trump lies backed by zero evidence.

It was a simple exercise in pattern recognition. No one who failed that exercise in 2024 should be allowed to vote in 2028. But of course, we have Trump's word that the matter is moot, given that voting won't be necessary.
by rbanffy | 2025-08-28 15:42:10+00:00
Plus, there are designs where the internal combustion engine is not a goal, but the best tech available at the time - those designs can only be fully realized with technology that wasn't available when the original design came out.

Thinking of the Bizzarrini Manta, the Ferrari Modulo, the Maserati Boomerang, or the Citroen Karin.
by mikeyouse | 2025-08-28 15:42:13+00:00
Unfortunately Nuscale (and the other SMR companies) aren't going to work.. they keep missing all their deadlines and earlier announced plans/contracts have all fallen through when they start to try and build the things. Nuscale is instructive in that they announced a plant in 2015 that would provide energy in 2023 cost $3 billion in 'overnight' dollars. In 2018, they increased the cost estimate to $4.8 billion. In 2020, they increased it to $6.1 billion. In 2023, they increased the estimate to $9.3 billion -- before a single shovel had hit the ground. Needless to say, the utilities who would be on the hook for these costs walked away. Why in the world would anyone spend well over $10 billion on an "SMR"?

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/nuscale-uamps-project-small...
by aresant | 2025-08-28 15:42:16+00:00
The real "genie is not going back in the bottle" moment is that both sides have decided that power - at any cost - is a valid strategy.

And that's very apparent even in this article which leads with the logical fallacy of moral equivalence

". . . and America’s preeminent real estate fraudster who bankrupted six rigged businesses is all of a sudden concerned with supposed mortgage fraud"

BOTH are guilty, BOTH are crooked!

This directly leads to a lot of "the whole system is broken, may as well get mine"
by DanielHB | 2025-08-28 15:42:30+00:00
> In fact it's more of a two-personalities system at this point

Yes, well put. This is what I meant that the current president is not making things better. But it is still fundamentally different from how the US works, centrist parties get a decent amount of votes. You almost never see elections where there is not a 2nd round of votes because no one got >50% on the first one.
by obblekk | 2025-08-28 15:42:30+00:00
These critiques of zirp never explain what should have been done differently.

It's very unlikely the Fed kept rates too low because inflation didn't exceed 2% for 12 years from 2008 to 2021. If the Fed had actually made money "too cheap" inflation would have kicked in much earlier.

More likely, we made it very hard to do new stuff in the country, which made the value of borrowed money low.

Congress spent decades adding regulations (often for good reason) that ultimately resulted in it being too expensive to do most things inside the US. If a business is banned from investing in most new things, it won't need to borrow more money.

The Fed just responded to the market's appraisal of money value. You can even see this in the long term charts - interest rates declined almost continuously from 1984 to 2022.

The entire time, inflation stayed at or below 2%. If the Fed had kept rates higher, theory would predict they would have caused a recession (and Scott Sumner has spent more than a decade arguing this is actually what caused the long deep recession of 2008 - money was too expensive, even at 0%).

Ultimately money is neutral in the long run. The things that truly matter for growth are laws, culture, natural resources and education. These are the causes of our present social dysfunction. These are the issues we should focus on fixing. Not fiddling with interest rates.
by j1elo | 2025-08-28 15:42:57+00:00
The warning about death of three SSDs doesn't inspire too much confidence to be honest... do you think it was due to the usage patterns of Proxmox default settings for ZFS?

Over time and lots of reading random information sources, I got notes about disabling several settings that are cool for datacenter-levels of storage, but useless for the kinds of "Raspberry-pi tied with a couple USB disks" that I was interested in.
by eadwu | 2025-08-28 15:43:12+00:00
People have done more with less for a long time (basically with the Jetson counterparts).

The only likely difference with DGX Spark is that it'll be a more desktop-centered platform, what people can do with it, not sure, but say for VR, the DGX Spark is basically the best compute puck for one right now.
by geerlingguy | 2025-08-28 15:43:52+00:00
That's addressed in the second section of the article:

> I've found numerous times, running modern applications on slower hardware is an excellent way to expose little configuration flaws and misconceptions that lead to learning how to run the applications much better on more capable machines.

It's less about the why, and more about the 'why not?' :)

I explicitly don't recommend running TrueNAS on a Pi currently, at the end (though I don't see a problem with anyone doing it for the fun, or if they need an absolutely tiny build and want to try Arm):

> Because of the current UEFI limitations, I would still recommend running TrueNAS on higher-end Arm hardware (like Ampere servers).
by softwaredoug | 2025-08-28 15:44:15+00:00
Because of regulatory capture. The interests of the largest companies align with a government that over regulates and over taxes. It punishes their less sophisticated, smaller competition that can’t cope with the regulation and supply chain disruption. Meanwhile billionaires can call up Trump, flatter him, and ask for exceptions to policies.

It’s good for them in the near term and absolutely sucks for the competiveness of the US economy longer term
by bpt3 | 2025-08-28 15:44:25+00:00
There isn't one. The entire article (as with nearly every one on that site) is a very long shitpost.

That said, I do actually agree with the risks outlined in the article (if the Fed is no longer seen as independent, the global investment/financial system is likely to lose faith in the stability of the US dollar, which is likely to be a very bad thing) and I suspect the author and I share the same general opinion of Trump.

However, the writing is almost unreadable because the author is trying too hard to be REALLY PISSED OFF at the right and edgy IMO, resulting in weird tangents like the one you pointed out.
by wat10000 | 2025-08-28 15:44:46+00:00
The current Mac Pro offers upgradeable storage, and PCIe slots (but they don't support video cards). The CPU and RAM can no longer be upgraded. It's also tremendously expensive, $7,000 for the base model. (That 2007 model started at $2,200!)

I miss it a little. I have a 16GB MacBook Pro that I wouldn't mind adding more RAM to. But I think it's a worthwhile tradeoff for better performance, size, and power consumption.
by breadwinner | 2025-08-28 15:44:47+00:00
I have been using a Raspberry Pi 4 (8 GB RAM) as my NAS for nearly 5 years. It is incredibly reliable. I run the following software on it: Ubuntu 64-bit, Samba, Jenkins, Postgres and MariaDB. I have attached external hard drives through a USB hub (because Pi does not necessarily have enough power for the external hard drive). I git push to public Samba folders on the Pi, and trigger Jenkins, which builds and installs my server using docker in the Pi.
by muldvarp | 2025-08-28 15:44:52+00:00
Intelligence doesn't matter. To quote "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies":

> There is an important sense, however, in which chess-playing AI turned out to be a lesser triumph than many imagined it would be. It was once supposed, perhaps not unreasonably, that in order for a computer to play chess at grandmaster level, it would have to be endowed with a high degree of general intelligence.

The same thing might happen with LLMs and software engineering: LLMs will not be considered "intelligent" and software engineering will no longer be thought of as something requiring "actual intelligence".

Yes, current models can't replace software engineers. But they are getting better at it with every release. And they don't need to be as good as actual software engineers to replace them.
by bccdee | 2025-08-28 15:45:11+00:00
> scalable by increasing the frequency, power or duplicating it

Well there's your problem. Very few things scale like that. Two people are not twice as smart as one person, nor are two instances of ChatGPT are twice as smart as one. One instance of ChatGPT running twice as fast isn't significantly smarter, and in fact, ChatGPT can never outrun its own hallucinations no matter how fast you overclock it.

Intelligence is the most complex phenomenon in the universe. Why would it ever scale geometrically with anything?

> When humans were capable of producing this, then this will be capable of improving itself and optimizing until the limit of information density.

This doesn't follow. After all, humans are as smart as humans, and we can't really optimize ourselves beyond a superficial level (good nutrition, education, etc). Increasingly, AI is a black box. Assuming we do create a machine as smart as we are, why would it understand itself any better than we understand ourselves?

And why wouldn't we hit some sort of technical roadblock at (arbitrarily) 1.5x human intelligence? Why do we assume that every problem becomes tractable once a computer is solving it? Imagine we applied this reasoning to cars: Over a matter of a century, cars went from 10 km/h to 100km/h to 500km/h to (in special vehicles) 1000km/h. Can we expect to see a 5000km/h car within the next century? No, that's unlikely; at such high speeds, you begin to hit intractable technical limits. Why should scaling intelligence just be smooth sailing forever?
by geerlingguy | 2025-08-28 15:46:16+00:00
Quite true; raw configuration isn't as flashy so you can't make glitzy videos or blog posts about it (well, outside of the HNsphere at least).

But that's how 99% of the services I run are set up, just a bunch of configuration files managed by Ansible.

The only servers I run in production with a UI are two NASes at home, and the only reason for that is I want to run off the shelf units so I never have to think about them, since my wife and kids rely on them for Jellyfin and file storage.
by dlisboa | 2025-08-28 15:46:18+00:00
You’re underselling the power and importance of other parties to democracy. To compare it to a two party system because some parties are stronger at times is incorrect.

Like you said, PSDB is a dead party today. PT has had only 20 years of presidential power, interrupted by a far right party. PL seems likely to split up in the next few years due to Bolsonaro.

There's no such thing as 60 years of two parties having mostly the same views and locked in one against the other, in every region of the country, like the US. That is incredibly harmful to democracy.

I’m old enough to have seen changes in our political system. The center parties, while mostly not center and corrupt, give our system a sort of chaotic nature where compromises and alliances are necessary. That in itself has value in a democracy.
by just-the-wrk | 2025-08-28 15:46:24+00:00
I would like it if the NYT was willing to be this plain about the news. They have real journalists who do real work searching for the truth and lose our trust with the delivery. Its infuriating to watch Trump use the Cohn, Moses, and fascist playbook and watch the media pretend like his words are anything but a tool toward those ends.

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
by somenameforme | 2025-08-28 15:46:27+00:00
Genuine apologies if my post came off condescending. I do work to stay above the usual emotive trash on internet debates and you've certainly been a perfectly good and respectful 'debate partner.' That said, you have to also see things from my perspective here. You repeatedly referenced this person as somebody who was deported for a marijuana conviction. And you are likely looking for the worst of the worst stories. And so for the worst of the worst to include things like somebody being briefly detained, let alone after lying to immigration officers, it is an anti-climax, to say the least.

The reason the Venezuelans were deported to CECOT is because Venezuela refused to accept them. They needed to be deported but no country wanted them. So they ended up in CECOT with the US paying a tidy sum of money for that. They were eventually transferred from CECOT back to Venezuela in exchange for Venezuela releasing a number of political prisoners. Obviously there's some classified behind the scenes stuff going on beyond that, but it's a pretty good ending to the story there.

And once again the treatment of illegal immigrants and being for or against legal immigration are two very different things. In those 0.1% of cases where something goes awry obviously I absolutely hope they improve their systems to do a better job. But, by and large, they seem to be doing a phenomenal job of dealing with a problem that never should have been allowed to reach its current magnitude.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-28 15:47:00+00:00
I'm in a similar position on my storage... though mostly that I bought a new nas with the intent of storing for Chia, but after 3 days, I decided it was a total waste as I'd never catch up to the bigger miners... So I repurposed it for long term and retired my older nas.

older nas was 4x 4tb drives when I retired it and passed it to a friend.

Current nas is a 6-bay synology with ram and nvme upgraded, along with a 5-bay expansion. All with 12tb drives in a 6drive 2-parity and 5-drive 2-parity arrays. I'm just under 40tb used mostly media.
by DanielHB | 2025-08-28 15:47:19+00:00
You overestimate how much people remember of the dictatorship, my parents were very much pro-Bolsonaro and they lived through the dictatorship.

Fact is for most of the population, especially the poorest, the dictatorship was not as oppressive directly against them. The secret police was going after intellectuals and universities. And censoring media of course. The average person only cared because the dictatorship was running the country economy into the ground.
by tombert | 2025-08-28 15:47:32+00:00
> I can setup Samba, NFS, and ZFS manually myself, but why would I want to? Configuring samba users & shares via SSH sucks. It's tedious. It's error prone. It's boring.

I agree for the most part, though even vanilla Ubuntu has Cockpit if you need a GUI.

Personally I find that getting it set up with NixOS is pretty straightforward and it's "set and forget", and generally it's not too hard to find configurations you can just copypaste done "correctly". And of course, if you break something you can just reboot and choose a previous generation. Of course restarting still requires SSHing in and `systemctl restart myapp`, so YMMV.
by coolKid721 | 2025-08-28 15:47:50+00:00
that rando's one looks like fucking garbage like a bunch of shitty B roll footage from an AI generated advertisement for some kind of pharmaceutical, the space and layout of the world clearly is constantly shifting and makes no sense. just generate a fucking map we already know how to do this, tracking geometry is an EASY problem for computers, don't force some AI shit to try to do it for some reason.
by rsynnott | 2025-08-28 15:47:54+00:00
My mum had a Dell laptop whose power supply died after a few years. This was during the era when seemingly every model had a different supply. Dell essentially said "sorry, we don't make those anymore or have any remaining in stock, you're on your own".

It was a low-end one (their now-dead 'Vostro' brand), which may explain the service difference, I suppose.
by coolKid721 | 2025-08-28 15:48:05+00:00
Compared to just coming up with and having solid systems for generating game assets? Actually having decent quality style consistent 3d models, texture work, animation, sound effects, etc (especially if it were built into say a game engine or something) would actually revolutionize indie game dev. Games are fundamentally artistic works so yes anything decent will actually require tailoring and crafting, AI set up to serve those people actually makes sense and is totally technically feasible are way easier problems to solve.

And no if you heavily visually modify something with AI models to the extent it significantly alters the appearance it simply has no way of being consistent unless you include the previously generated thing somehow which then has the huge problem of how do you maintain that over an 80 hour game? How do you inform the AI what visual elements (say text, interactive elements) are significant and can be modified and which can't? (You can't)

Actually using AI to generate assets, having a person go in to make sure they look good together and make sure they match then just saving them as textures so they function like normal game assets makes 10000x more sense then generating a user image then trying to extract "hey what did the wrapper of this candy bar look like" from one ai generated image and figuring out how to make sure that is consistent across that type of candy bar in the world and maintains that consistency throughout the entire game, instead of just you know, generating a texture of a candybar?
by notepad0x90 | 2025-08-28 15:48:46+00:00
You're still freely publishing any apps you want. You want anonymous speech which isn't the same as free speech. And the benefits of that certainly doesn't outweigh harm caused against even one innocent person.

"There's many ways to combat crime" - name one effective way to combat sideloading of apps, that is anywhere as effective as id verification of devs?
by sensanaty | 2025-08-28 15:48:52+00:00
I mean by your logic self driving cars were invented back when we put a steam engine on some tracks in the 1800s. Of course the goalposts shift when the hypesters are trying to sell you on an idea like "AI will be able to do literally everything next week".

Yes, Waymo can today drive around extremely dense car-friendly cities that are scanned and mapped in great detail weekly... They also still have to have remote human intervention all the time, and are freaked out by traffic cones being placed on the hood. I grew up in Indonesia and that's where I learned to drive, and trust me, if Waymo is ever able to navigate 100 meters on any road in Jakarta I'll happily concede and consider self-driving to be a solved problem.
by SR2Z | 2025-08-28 15:48:52+00:00
> Wouldn't that create an enormous hole in the market for other less-scummier companies to jump in, albeit at perhaps lower margins?

A certain amount of margin is required for the company to even try to do business. Unfortunately, when the "let's turn the screws on this company" discourse starts getting Old Testament, people stop considering that.

If you want a good real life example of this, look at CA insurance companies. The state limited the rates they could charge to the point where many of them simply stopped signing up new customers and started dropping old ones.

There were no new insurers to take their place because it wasn't profitable for them either.

Companies ALWAYS pretend that this will be the result of regulation, but that doesn't change the fact that they're sometimes right.
by universesquid | 2025-08-28 15:49:33+00:00
cool thanks for that comment, I might update this in a couple weeks time since it seems to interest people but general feedback that it's too shallow. Wanted to give some high level intuition I gained after working on document processing for a while now as many people are still surprised that e.g. layouts aren't a real problem anymore but will take the hint that hn is a crowd that wants more depth! :)
Show HN: VAERS DuckDB Database
by yehosef | 2025-08-28 15:50:18+00:00
I've been playing with the VAERS database for a while and I just got through importing it into duckdb for local analytics. The data set has various problems that I try to fix to improve the quality of the dataset.

The import scripts are https://github.com/yehosef/vaers-duckdb

A ready data file is available here (~3GB) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1d3wRRr2UFvCYR9r7J5XBym2dYKT...

I'm planning to add some dashboards like my original elasticsearch project. I would also like to add some embeddings for vector search. WIP

I'd love to hear what you think!