MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anon84873628 | 2025-08-26 15:30:39+00:00
Let's look at the text!

>There are a few startups these days peddling a newfangled technology called “incremental view maintenance” or “differential dataflow”. Basically the way it works is you just say “hey, I’d like to keep track of how many tasks each project has” by writing any SQL query you want:

>[query]

>The “magic” is actually really cool. Basically the SQL query is analyzed to produce a DAG of the data flow with different nodes for filters, groups, joins, etc, and then each node “knows” how to map any change in its input to the appropriate change in the output.

So the person who calls the technology "magic" (with emoji sparkles around it!) and "really cool" and generally spent all this time writing an article about this particular annoying problem and all of the other bad solutions about it, and then mention these startups at the end... Is being denigrating and dismissive.

Which one of these companies do you work for that causes you to feel so hurt? Because the author didn't mention them by name?
by bwfan123 | 2025-08-26 15:30:40+00:00
> focus it on more industry-geared education

I was told that a student can now get a CS degree without courses in OS, Compilers, Programming Languages, theory of computing etc. The argument being that a vast majority of jobs do not ever use the above. That may have caused a flood of grads with a shaky knowledge of the basics. The idea that software engineering is not really a science but more of a trade for which anyone could be trained without a formal degree has some shades of truth.

But in my experience, technology changes so fast that someone with a better grasp of the basics can evolve with the tech since they understand the fundamentals better. LLMs really separate those who can critique and correct its output, and those that blindly follow it, and the former will continue to have jobs.
by danans | 2025-08-26 15:31:01+00:00
Someone once explained to me that the "high end" farmed catfish you get in the US doesn't taste muddy because they feed them from the top of the water rather than having scavenge the bottom of the pond.

I've definitely had some good catfish in the US. Sourcing matters, and also probably how you prepare it. Breaded and deep fried is of course tasty, if not healthy.

Southeast Asian cuisines are generally very good at preparing catfish - they have a native variety called Basa which is very mild.
by bee_rider | 2025-08-26 15:31:16+00:00
I definitely agree with your last paragraph here.

One thing specifically about arborists—it is a sort of weird job, right? Homeowners can handle most normal trees. The arborist’s job is specifically to handle troublesome trees in weird environments. The problems look similar to ones that homeowners have, but they are more difficult (because nobody calls in the tree guys for an easy tree, right?). So I wouldn’t be surprised if they are uniquely prone to some extent, to wanting consumer gear with (some specific) guardrails removed, or used in creative ways.

By the numbers, I suspect the vast majority of trees that get chopped down get chopped down by loggers in specialized environments, with hyper-specialized equipment (that looks nothing like modified consumer gear). I suspect most engineers think of themselves as more like the loggers: cultivating that environment is a big part of it, and their tools are just different from consumer ones. If riskier, only because bigger moving parts involve greater energies.
by TrueDuality | 2025-08-26 15:32:02+00:00
Speaking as someone who has worked in tightly regulated environment, certificates are kind of a nasty problem and there are a couple of requirements that are in conflict for going to full automation of certificates.

- Rotation of all certificates and authentication material must be renewed at regular intervals (no conflict here, this is the goal)

- All infrastructure changes need to have the commands executed and contents of files inspected and approved in writing by the change control board before being applied to the environment

That explicit approval of any changes being made within the environment go against these being automated in any way shape or form. These boards usually meet monthly or ad-hoc for time-sensitive security updates and usually have very long lists of changes to review causing the agenda to constantly overflow to the next meeting.

You could probably still make it work as a priority standing agenda idea but its going to still involve manual process and review every month. I wouldn't want to manually rotate and approve certificates every month and many of these requirements have been signed into law (at least in the US).

Starting to see another round of modernization initiatives so maybe in the next few years something could be done...
by glenstein | 2025-08-26 15:32:16+00:00
Apologies in advance if I'm missing your point (I might be!) but... If it turns out that the laws are not constant, our present understanding would be retained as a special case of a broader theory and the local predictive capabilities would still be real in their scope. And leveraging a "we don't know" to cash out as affirmative skepticism tries to make the absence of data do more than it can.

As you noted, the degree of uncertainty we're currently wrestling with is also what we would see if it was true that the laws were constant. Kind of like an anthropic principle but on behalf of the constancy of the universe's laws.

This may all be restating what you said in a different way, but for me the important upshot is that I don't come out of it with an attitude that our current physical understanding is a tenuous house of cards and that I need to watch my step because, who knows, the strong nuclear force could change at any moment.
by wmaxlees | 2025-08-26 15:32:46+00:00
Hi HN, author here.

In my last post, I found a critical bug in my PPO agent. Fixing it was the "right" thing to do, but it tanked my agent's performance from a score of 84 all the way down to 9.

This post is the forensic investigation into why that bug was so helpful. I started with a simple hypothesis that it was just adding random noise for exploration, which turned out to be partially correct but didn't explain the whole story.

The real "secret sauce" was that the bug was adding correlated noise, creating a consistent optimistic or pessimistic bias for an entire trajectory. I managed to reverse-engineer this effect into a new, principled technique that successfully reproduced the 84 score.

The post is the full deep dive, from visualizing the original bug's signal to designing a new form of state-dependent exploration from scratch. Happy to answer any questions about the process or the JAX/Flax implementation.
by dismalaf | 2025-08-26 15:32:56+00:00
Apple designs their laptops to throttle power when they warm up too much. Framework gives theirs a fan.

It's a design choice.

Also, different Linux distros/DEs prioritize different things. Generally they prioritize performance over battery life.

That being said, I find Debian GNOME to be the best on battery life. I get 6 hours on an MSI laptop that has an 11th gen Intel processor and a battery with only 70% capacity left. It also stays cool most of the time (except gaming while being plugged in) but it does have a fan...
Show HN: Legal Eyes – Turn casual text into legalese with one click
by jamsey | 2025-08-26 15:33:07+00:00
Hey HN, I built a Chrome extension called Legal Eyes that rewrites your casual messages into sharp, professional legal language.

Use cases: - Freelancers chasing late invoices - Founders dealing with vague contract terms - Anyone trying to sound more serious or formal (without being a lawyer)

No prompt engineering, no copy-pasting. It sits in your browser, and converts selected text with a click. I built it using React, Supabase (for auth and usage tracking), OpenAI (for the rewriting), and deployed via Vercel.

I launched this to help the little guys when they need a stronger voice. I hope this goes out into the world and helps someone :)

Would love your feedback on: - Features you'd expect in v2 - Thoughts on monetizing vs keeping it free - Weird or niche use cases I haven’t thought of

You can try it here (free version available): [https://legaleyes.uk](https://legaleyes.uk)

Thanks! Happy to answer anything.
by qwytw | 2025-08-26 15:33:57+00:00
Mobile CPUs are almost a commodity these days and fairly low margin especially compared to server chips. Most people really don't care what chip does their phone has and its almost always "good enough" relative to the price.

IMO that's much less of a case for laptop and desktop (let alone server). Even if people don't understand the technical details e.g. Apple's superior performance per watt (or its implications at least) is something a lot more people notice.
by iberator | 2025-08-26 15:34:12+00:00
2.0, 3.x - my favourite versions... I could run Linux on 2MB of ram at 386SX 16mhz, thanks to a.out format of binaries instead of ELF.

It was really really great. Then everything went downhill with glibc/eglibc split and mandatory ELF binary format. [same stuff could no longer boot at 2MB of RAM].

Although, I run it around 1999/2000 :P [then Slackware 7.1, 8.1, and NetBSD 1.6.1].

Shitty times but great software and hardware. [it was fun to try boot/install system at 4MB of ram :) ]

I once installed 7.1 at a modern machine and I was able to compile the default kernel in like 14 seconds instead of 45 minutes with 486DX2.
by righthand | 2025-08-26 15:34:20+00:00
Bailouts are different from the CHIPS act you’ll just have to accept that those other bailout agreements didn’t have a profit-sharing clause attached.

Emotionally you call it a bailout but it is not and by trying to enforce that fact you are ignoring the truth and pressing a lie.

Plain and simple the CHIPS Act is not a bailout. [0]

[0] “Biden to require chips companies winning subsidies to share excess profits” >> https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-require-companies-winn...

> Recipients who receive more than $150 million in direct funding "will be required to share with the U.S. government a portion of any cash flows or returns that exceed the applicant’s projections by an agreed-upon threshold," the department said.

> Companies winning funding are also prohibited from using chips funds for dividends or stock buybacks, and must provide details of any plans to buy back their own shares over five years. The department will consider an "applicant’s commitments to refrain from stock buybacks."
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-08-26 15:34:49+00:00
> which leads to political pressure to bring in MAID and chop tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical liability off the end of many patient's lives

So this is an assertion that requires some evidence. The political pressure was instead from a majority of Canadians (across political lines) who want there to an an end-of-life option in situations when life becomes intolerable. People do not want to be forced by the state to stay alive and suffering via extensive medical interventions. Nor do they want to have to suffer through the alternative of slow and debilitating conditions that science is powerless to stop. This is the where MAID came from. Thinking of it in purely economic terms is already acting in bad faith.

> compensating the MAID recipient's estates for forgoing treatment

If you paid for private medical insurance, would you expect the same from them? To compensate your estate if you choose to end your life early rather that receive invasive and expensive treatment to temporarily forgo the inevitable? Even if you did expect that, insurance companies would never go for it. An even by the widest stretch they did then you're back to the same economic incentive but now with private industry. This is even worse I would say, because now people would be given a cash bonus to commit suicide (either by the government or private insurance, the same applies if people were compensated for foregone treatments). People with families in financial trouble may even consider this a way out to help loved ones. That is a crazy perverse incentive if you ask me.

On the side of offering better services, you have my whole-hearted agreement. Even something as simple as mandating an increase in the number of available seats at medical schools that corresponds with the population growth would be a start. Lots more to that list.
Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
by chromy | 2025-08-26 15:34:55+00:00
A while ago I was looking for information on a obscure and short lived British computer.

I found an article[1] in the archives of BYTE magazine[2] - and was captivated immediately by the tech adverts of bygone eras.

This led to a long side project to be able to see all 100k pages of BYTE in a single searchable place.

[1]: https://byte.tsundoku.io/#198502-381

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17683184
by jandrese | 2025-08-26 15:34:57+00:00
I still think Intel missed the boat when they had the dominant process in focusing entirely on their own chips and not taking customers for third party fabbing. Samsung and especially TSMC have demonstrated conclusively that the real money is in producing chips for other companies. It might be lower margin, but the volume is undeniable and it keeps your company on its toes with node improvements.

Intel switched to a "service the stockholders before the customers" mode and they have never recovered.
by bayindirh | 2025-08-26 15:35:06+00:00
> If people have refused to do the right thing for 20 years...

From what I have seen, not every human being is same. Categorizing them as clones of each other is falling into a false dichotomy.

> they're not about to start now just because you say so.

There's a quote I'm quite fond of: "You don't have to cut with the sword of truth, you can point with it, too". I don't "say what to do" to people and expect them to obey me. I produce examples, and put them out, and tell them politely. If they take the example, that's good. If they leapfrog me and show me a better one, that's great. If they ignore me, that's OK.

Not everyone will follow, and that's OK. Even I get upset by some people who doesn't do the correct thing. That's OK too.

We should be different, try different things, and find the correct way by mistake, or reach dead ends by doing everything right. My experience says both is possible, and even though the process is infuriating, that's OK too. This is called life. We can't control and know everything.

> A mature technologist must be pragmatic if he wants to get anything done.

There are places to be pragmatic, and there are places to experiment. Again, another false dichotomy. I did go great lengths by mixing the two, for example.

> Isolation technologies work.

Yeah, I also use them in various use cases, but never to sweep my incompetence under a proverbial rug. Instead, I skill up, do better. Surpassing myself in every iteration is the best dopamine hit I can get.

> Scolding doesn't.

You shouldn't be scolding anyone over any mortal matter like programming though. There are better ways to communicate, again from my experience. YMMV, IANAL.

> We tried.

You may have tried and I deeply respect that. But I'm a dense person who doesn't understand sometimes and do as I please, and apparently it helped me go places. So, I'll continue to be a dense person.
by noisy_boy | 2025-08-26 15:35:37+00:00
And I'm happy to keep my heart/money away from the junk of social media and similar trivial shit. To give an example: I have two email ids, one for banking/government stuff and such and other for general purpose (sometimes I use those throwaway ones too for one-time things). If Google pulls this shit, I'm pretty much willing to go two-device - it would be actually more secure. I don't consider this some sort of RMS-idealogy, it is just the sensible next step.
by kube-system | 2025-08-26 15:35:44+00:00
> President Donald Trump’s announcement on Friday that the U.S. government will take a 10 percent stake in long-struggling Intel marks a dangerous turn in American industrial policy. Decades of market-oriented principles have been abandoned in favor of unprecedented government ownership of private enterprise.

Really? A decade and a half ago the US government owned a 60.8% of GM and none less than Barack Obama was directing management changes.

The US has a long and well established history of being a mixed-market economy to varying degrees.
by general1726 | 2025-08-26 15:35:48+00:00
Which EU cloud providers can easily create knock offs and then let EU services migrate without changing anything on companies side, except just endpoints.

Furthermore EU equivalents of Yandex do exist - https://www.seznam.cz/ (Do you see the Yahoo in it?) or French Google: https://www.qwant.com/?l=en or equivalent of Google Maps https://mapy.com/en/ just have a look here: https://european-alternatives.eu/

They are small, sure, but the moment competition is gone, there is no reason for them not to scale
by icedchai | 2025-08-26 15:36:21+00:00
The domain system needs at least some central control at the top, or it literally won't work. Do you remember the various "alternate root" projects in the 90's? I've stopped following them.

The cert situation has vastly improved over the past 30 years. I remember paying $100's of dollars for certificates in the 90's, faxing in forms, etc.
by ak217 | 2025-08-26 15:36:39+00:00
This is wrong by at least three orders of magnitude. Very roughly, a human requires 2000 kcal a day = 2 kWh a day so 75 kWh is enough to cover about a month, putting aside the upstream losses in the energy supply chain (which are far greater for humans).

In general, saying that biological systems are "wildly efficient" is... wildly wrong. Some biological processes are optimized by evolution... most are not. There are no bicycles in nature.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-08-26 15:36:51+00:00
Just off the cuff I'm not sure a MCP manager has got quite the scope for a SAAS offering, at least not if you're just managing config. There might be a play at the enterprise level if you can integrate deeply with domain policy.

Mostly I find working with MCPs pretty easy, but there is some minor benefit to hosting mcp servers that are more involved to set up. The thing that I would pay a small amount for (which is why I'm building it myself) is a MCP oracle that configures the MCP server set for an agent based on the task it's working on.
by scal | 2025-08-26 15:37:15+00:00
Thanks for your feedback. I’m currently making the necessary adjustments to keep Milo focused on travel. As for the results, at the moment the AI model being used is not the most advanced, mainly for cost reasons since the app is free and still in beta.

Regarding privacy (if that’s what you meant), when an error is logged, the content of the last exchanges is indeed included so that we can better understand the source of the problem. That said, you’re right — this point should be mentioned clearly under the chat modal, and it will be implemented in a future update.

Thanks again for the constructive criticism, it’s always appreciated.
by Lio | 2025-08-26 15:37:28+00:00
> Ruby is such an elegant language, but the strong and ongoing hostility to any sort of sensible gradual typing

I'm not sure what you're basing that on, gradual typing has been built into Ruby since 3.0 (2020). Sorbet can around a bit earlier in 2019.

There is on going work to improve both with RBS-Inline support now in Sorbet with runtime support hopefully on the way.

IRB uses RBS for autocompletion and Solargraph and Ruby-LSP both support it.

I would say there is no hostility to gradual typing in the Ruby community. Quite the opposite, people are being paid to work on it.
by duxup | 2025-08-26 15:37:55+00:00
While the idea of the post "I want to make as much X as possible with Y amount of ingredient" is interesting, I don't ever do that.

I generally either make the exact recipe, half, or double. All those are easily done with the same recipe and I even use the same measuring cups and do it twice or half ... and I'm good.

I really don't do 1/3rd or other proportions.
by glenstein | 2025-08-26 15:37:58+00:00
For a second I thought this was an invocation of one of those informal "laws" (like a Murphys Law or Sturgeons Law), describing the feeling of finding one great thing and lamenting that there's no more like it.

So the hope of it being your discovery of a rich genre turns into the lament that it's one of one (how I feel about the Three Body Problem). But no, it's a real book. And looks like a great suggestion from what I can tell on wiki.
by nate | 2025-08-26 15:38:13+00:00
We killed growth too when we had one of these generous trials.

I worked on a (once) popular Saas app :) We were losing customers when I came in. But then started growing again (slowly) when we started shipping a bunch of great things.

But then the owner wanted to get rid of the "free trial" and was adamant we offer a free version. That would boost our growth to an incredible new level he promised. I could see the reasoning. Our free trial still required you give us a credit card up front. We just wouldn't charge you for 30 days. Asking for a credit card has to be bad for growth, right? People want to kick the tires before they become our customers, and there's a lot more of those folks.

So we ditched the collection of credit cards up front and went to a totally free plan. You could upgrade to a paid plan of course.

Growth started tanking again and we never got it back.

One theory was collecting the credit card just got the really eager shoppers and now our growth was from zombie, forgetful, monthly Saas payments. And that's valid of course. But I wonder too, if just asking for a credit card gets you to be more serious too about trying a product. If you have to put in a credit card, you'll probably focus in here for a bit and not sign up for 10 other things the same day to try. And successfully collecting a credit card while someone is in the process of choosing anything, is probably always going to be easier than trying to convince them in 30 days to come back and get into a buyers mindset again. Unless you really are selling something so deeply crippling not to have it again after 30 days.
by nemothekid | 2025-08-26 15:38:53+00:00
I’ve always found that the default hacker advice is was a bit too complex for my taste. If I’m someone who hardly cares about archiving things - I’m not suddenly going to care about setting up a NAS/Ceph/Backblaze/S3.

The lowest friction tool for me for nearly a decade now has just been iCloud. It helps that I use Apple products everywhere (and I even have iCloud installed on my windows machine), but I just default to storing things in iCloud.

Searching is not the best but I’m confident the files are there
by Aurornis | 2025-08-26 15:39:12+00:00
I’d go further and say the advice in this blog is rarely the right move. It’s written for a context where everyone else is wrong except you, dear reader, who can see the true path forward.

It also appeals to people who think in false dichotomies, where your only two options are to do strong-headed moves like this or become a passive sheep who fails because your boss is bad.

In real businesses it’s rarely that simple. Using “dangerous advice” or becoming the “scary professional” as another influencer words similar advice sounds best when you’re imagining how the interaction will go and how much you’ll be winning when it’s done, but in a real business where things get done through relationships and trust it’s very easy to find yourself moving backward and being pushed out when using advice like this.