MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Okapi – a metrics engine based on open data formats
by kushal2048 | 2025-08-20 16:22:59+00:00
Hi All I wanted to share an early preview of Okapi an in-memory metrics engine that also integrates with existing datalakes. Modern software systems produce a mammoth amount of telemetry. While we can discuss whether or not this is necessary, we can all agree that it happens.

Most metrics engines today use proprietary formats to store data and don’t use disaggregated storage and compute. Okapi changes that by leveraging open data formats and integrating with existing data lakes. This makes it possible to use standard OLAP tools like Snowflake, Databricks, DuckDB or even Jupyter / Polars to run analysis workflows (such as anomaly detection) while avoiding vendor lock-in in two ways - you can bring your own workflows and have a swappable compute engine. Disaggregation also reduces Ops burden of maintaining your own storage and the compute engine can be scaled up and down on demand.

Not all data can reside in a data-lake/object store though - this doesn’t work for recent data. To ease realtime queries Okapi first writes all metrics data to an in memory store and reads on recent data are served from this store. Metrics are rolled up as they arrive which helps ease memory pressure. Metrics are held in-memory for a configurable retention period after which it gets shipped out to object storage/datalake (currently only Parquet export is supported). This allows fast reads on recent data while offloading query-processing for older data. On benchmarks queries on in-memory data finish in under a millisecond while having write throughput of ~280k samples per second. On a real deployment, there’d be network delays so YMMV.

Okapi it is still early — feedback, critiques, and contributions welcome. Cheers !
by randcraw | 2025-08-20 16:23:09+00:00
I'm reading "The Swerve", Stephen Greenblatt's marvelous book on the discovery of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things"), a Roman-era scroll on Epicurus' philosophy, by Poggio Bracciolini in 1417. The work was copied by hand repeatedly since 50 BCE by monks and other scripturae, despite its essential refutation of both faith and religion.

In his day, Poggio, like Petrarch, was famous for the elegant beauty of his penmanship. Like the best of his craft, Poggio wrote not for speed but for beauty and timeless legibility.

While I have no plans to write in latin, this has convinced me that I want to learn how to write (and print) with style. (My cursive has always been horrific.) Since reading-to-learn is best done by taking notes by hand of whatever you want to remember, I'm hoping this pursuit will not only improve my retention but also my attention to detail since it will give me time to think out more fully what I think is important and how best to say it.
by bluGill | 2025-08-20 16:23:31+00:00
True, at the expense of being even harder to write than pen/ink.

I'm no expert, but my understanding is most of the tables survive because the town brunt - otherwise the clay was erased and we lost what was on it. It is really hard to write something book length on clay because of thickness, but for lists you will erase when done (think shopping lists - which is of great interest to archaeology because it is insights that wouldn't have been put in books) clay is easier than making more paper.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-08-20 16:23:38+00:00
Gernsback Continuum is still my favorite story since Borges' Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Physical reality seems pretty solid, but social reality is certainly "flexible." And all the tech I work with is a continuum of different ages smushed together; javascript client apps embedding COBOL apps complied to wasm bytecodes. SQL databases whose schemas predate some of the developers working on the apps that use them. Instruction Set Architectures that were invented when we still thought Raymond Lowey-esque fins and gills were the height of material design.

In a bit of synchronicity, I found my copy of Islands in the Net last week and am re-reading it after 35 years. It's pretty interesting to see which bits Bruce Sterling accurately predicted and which were a bit off the mark.
Show HN: HealthChain – Python framework for healthcare data that doesn't suck
by jjiangkells | 2025-08-20 16:23:46+00:00
Hey HN! After 4 years building NLP systems in the NHS, I got tired of writing endless wrapper code just to work with healthcare data. One of the core issues is most AI development happens in Python, but hospital systems speak healthcare standards like HL7 and FHIR with steep learning curves.

To confirm my experience, I looked through 402 open source healthcare AI repos on GitHub and found that almost half the infrastructure tools are just trying to solve interoperability problems.

So I built HealthChain to make working with healthcare data less painful. It lets you connect AI pipelines to data sources like FHIR APIs with built-in data converters and validation in a few lines of Python.

For more context and some pretty graphs on the Github survey results: https://jenniferjiangkells.substack.com/p/healthchain-buildi...

Happy to answer any questions and would love to hear from anyone working in healthcare AI or just curious about the space!
by braza | 2025-08-20 16:24:40+00:00
Not a Ponzi, but definitely some markup and valuation engineering.

Let’s say that Databricks has 100B valuation (just for the sake of simplicity).

They do this round, and due to this markup they can do acquisitions via stock option exchange. For instance, let’s say that you’re Neon, and you as a founder wants some sort of exit.

It’s preferable to get acquired for 1B with let’s say, 100Mi in cash and 900Mi in Databricks paper valuation shares; than to wait for a long process for an IPO.

If the mothership company (Databricks) goes public, you have liquidation and a good payday, or in meanwhile you can sell secondaries at a discount.
by HiroshiSan | 2025-08-20 16:24:40+00:00
At my Walmart there is roughly 10-15 self checkouts vs 3 cashiers where people with full carts are waiting in line. Self checkout is great if you have a few items. Also cashiers aren’t that fast considering they have to scan, bag (in some places) and then take your payment.

Some self checkouts are better than others the worst ones are the ones that don’t let you take your items off the scale after scanning and then they throw an error for you to put them back.

I’ve also never felt treated like cattle but I’d figure a checkout with a cashier is more cattle like since you are being funneled through a tight space one after the other vs an open space like self checkouts.
by afandian | 2025-08-20 16:24:42+00:00
Having experienced the joy of setting up VPC, subnets and PrivateLink endpoints the whole thing just seems absurd.

They spent the effort of branding private VPC endpoints "PrivateLink". Maybe it took some engineering effort on their part, but it should be the default out of the box, and an entirely unremarkable feature.

In fact, I think if you have private subnets, the only way to use S3 etc is Private Link (correct me if I'm wrong).

It's just baffling.
by kayodelycaon | 2025-08-20 16:25:05+00:00
Neat. It automates the same kind of optimization I’ve done with ERB before (pre-compiled templates in constants). It means I don’t have to teach people were and how to optimize ERB.

To get faster this, you need to get out your profiling tools and your notebook.

Builder::XmlMarkup and strings are significantly more flexible and have many optimization points. (E.g. not escaping numbers.) They have the potential to be an order of magnitude faster. But you’ll be using that notebook to diagram where everything goes.
by Atlas667 | 2025-08-20 16:25:13+00:00
The Khmer Rouge were not communists.

China, the CIA, and MI6 backed them solely because they were against the NVA. They were tools. And they severely lacked an ideological backbone which is why shit go so bad in Cambodia. It was fascism.

Like I said before Wikipedia is average tier knowledge, but sometimes it compounds sources well, so follow the sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_United_States_s...

And it would be inline with what it has been proved the US did in that same time frame in Indonesia as well, and for very similar reasons too.
by spudlyo | 2025-08-20 16:25:26+00:00
The problem with accepting VC money is they will eventually demand a return on their investment, which means that the forces that drive enshitification will eventually come for Zed in some form. I suspect that we'll see more and more features locked behind a paid subscription and the open core of the editor will become neglected over time.

Here I am on my free-as-in-freedom operating system, making commits with my free DVCS tool in my free programmable text editor, building it with my free language toolchain, using my free terminal emulator/multiplexer with my free UNIX shell. VC backed tools like Warp and Zed that seek to innovate in this space are of zero interest to me as a developer.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-20 16:25:35+00:00
Kind of my first thought... seems to me this could be part of README.md, or as another suggested CONTRIBUTING.md

I tend to put a lot of this type of info into the readme anyway... for more complex projects, I'll include a docs/ directory with more markdown, images as needed, etc.

For that matter, I think context hints from the likes of Dockerfile(s), compose, and .github/workflows also can serve a dual-purpose here.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-20 16:26:27+00:00
>They can choose to not pay for theft coverage.

A mere six or seven figures spend on lobbying and/or wining and dining the legislature will plug that loophole.

The legislature will spew some grandiose bullshit about how in an effort to reduce the cost theft coverage is now one of the mandatory parts and half of the population will eat it up.

>would have to be a collaboration as it wouldn’t be able to lower only one

Which will never happen because reducing costs across the board is bad for insurers. Even if their margins are thin a thin margin on a big number gets you more money. They don't care how high costs go as long as they're uniformly distributed and/or predictable.
by verdverm | 2025-08-20 16:26:35+00:00
Copilot does globs too, but if you dig into the actual prompt sent out...

They are not doing this mechanically (read file, compare to globs to add more context), they try to rely on the model to notice and do another read. It has been unreliable. I have had better results by adding instructions like...

"If the user asks about X, Read `./path/to/inst.md`"

Still lots of DX to do in this space
Show HN: StrangerMeet – A Modern Omegle Alternative for Text and Video Chat
by Stranger_X | 2025-08-20 16:27:54+00:00
Hey HN,

I’ve been building StrangerMeet , a lightweight text and video chat platform inspired by Omegle but rebuilt with a modern stack. Omegle shut down last year, leaving a lot of people looking for real-time anonymous chat options. StrangerMeet tries to fill that gap with a cleaner design and some improvements:

Video + Text Chat – One-click random connections

Continue Chat – Option to reconnect with someone if both users agree

Group Rooms – Public or private rooms for shared conversations

Temporary Media & Voice – Share images, voice notes, or short videos that auto-expire

Mobile-Friendly UI – Fullscreen, app-like experience on phones

The backend is Node.js with WebSockets + Redis for matchmaking, and the frontend is React + Tailwind. I’ve tried to keep it fast, simple, and privacy-conscious.

I’d love your feedback on:

Scalability of the architecture

Ideas for keeping moderation effective but lightweight

Features you think an Omegle-style platform should (or shouldn’t) have in 2025

It’s live here: https://stranger-meet.com

Thanks!
by mgfist | 2025-08-20 16:28:05+00:00
Both have benefits. Staying private means a lot less distractions, less investor scrutiny (good and bad), and the general ability to do whatever you want (good and bad).

It's a lot easier to stay long-term focused without investors breathing down your neck. As a private company you're not dealing with shortsellers, retail memers, institutional capital that wants good earnings now, etc..

Of course, the bad side is that if the company gets mismanaged, there's far less accountability and thus it could continue until it's too late. In the public markets it's far easier to oust the C-suite if things go south.

It's a shame that the trend of staying private longer means retail gets shut out from companies like this.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-20 16:28:22+00:00
Many use free Google, Yahoo, Microsoft email accounts; I would trust them about the same as a government provided service. Microsoft especially has a proven track record of garbage security posture.

Importantly, we need to be mindful of the lowest common denominator citizen who might have nothing but still be entitled to government services. Governments exist to service their constituents. The USPS is required to serve every US address (including mail delivery by mule into the Grand Canyon) [1], it is straightforward to provide ~1GB of email to everyone who needs it.

[1] https://about.usps.com/who/profile/
by gmueckl | 2025-08-20 16:28:43+00:00
I had to deal with the DS-160 multiple times over the year. I don't think you give justice to how bad this website really is. I have started to notice that these "timeouts" are very random. At the worst times, the session "times out" immediately after login.

These random logouts happens more frequently during certain times of the day and seems to follow a semi-predictable pattern. It is almost certainly tied to system load in some way.

Also, the site's HTML and JavaScript are bloated beyond hope for what should be a fairly simple set of web forms. And itnhas been thisnway since at least 2018 with exactly zero improvements.
by scrollaway | 2025-08-20 16:29:36+00:00
There's a lot of smart people on HN who are good coders and would do well to stop listening to this BS.

Great engineers who pick up vibe coding without adopting the ridiculous "it's AI so it can't be better than me" attitude are the ones who are able to turn into incredibly proficient people able to move mountains in very little time.

People stuck in the "AI can only produce garbage" mindset are unknowingly saying something about themselves. AI is mainly a reflection of how you use it. It's a tool, and learning how to use that tool proficiently is part of your job.

Of course, some people have the mistaken belief that by taking the worst examples of bullshit-coding and painting all vibe coders with that same brush, they'll delay the day they lose their job a a tiny bit more. I've seen many of those takes by now. They're all blind and they get upvoted by people who either haven't had the experience (or correct setup) yet, or they're in pure denial.

The secret? The secret is that just as before you had a large amount of "bad coders", now you also have a large amount of "bad vibe coders". I don't think it's news to anyone that most people tend to be bad or mediocre at their job. And there's this mistaken thinking that the AI is the one doing the work, so the user cannot be blamed… but yes they absolutely can. The prompting & the tooling set up around the use of that tool, knowing when to use it, the active review cycle, etc - all of it is also part of the work, and if you don't know how to do it, tough.

I think one of the best skills you can have today is to be really good at "glance-reviews" in order to be able to actively review code as it's being written by AI, and be able to interrupt it when it goes sideways. This is stuff non-technical people and juniors (and even mediors) cannot do. Readers who have been in tech for 10+ years and have the capacity to do that would do better to use it than to stuff their head in the sand pretending only bad code can come out of Claude or something.
by xenodium | 2025-08-20 16:30:13+00:00
> Author needs money from you but lives in London. Maybe he should move somewhere cheaper

Wow. Is this because I wrote the following on my blog?

"Find video-trimmer-mode useful? Want me to publish to MELPA? Enjoying this blog or my projects? I am an indie dev. Help make my work sustainable by sponsoring.

Need a blog? I can help with that. Maybe buy my macOS/iOS apps too ;)"
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-20 16:30:19+00:00
PS5 sales would be challenging no matter what.

I was looking to replace a trash Sony Blu-Ray player and a failing NVIDIA Shield (I'd leave the controller plugged in for a month and then when I tried to use it it wouldn't be charged) for use as a media player with a game console. My motto is overpowered is better than underpowered so I decided to get a game console, I got a used PS4 Pro because I already have an XBOX, the used PS4 Pro was comparably affordable, but the PS5 was much more expensive. The worst of it is that the PS5 has only 15 or so exclusive games

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:PlayStation_5-only_ga...

One of those is from my favorite game studio but it's a remake of a remake. Almost everything gets released on Steam these days, so what's the point of a dedicated console?

There still are people who think playing PC games is like putting your hand in a toilet, but they're wrong. It used to be PC games had terrible keyboard and mouse interfaces that would have you leaning forward for hours and hurting your back but now you can buy an XBOX controller for $50 at Gamestop and install Steam and have a lean-back console gaming experience, play many games from your library on a Mac for no extra cost, play many games from your library on a Steam Deck or other handheld, stream games from a PC to an older generation console, etc. PC gaming is no longer flight simulators with terrible analog controllers that require 15 minutes of calibration for 5 minutes of play, unfun games like SimCity, Civilization, etc. [1]

The PS5 would look too expensive to me if they took $50 or even $100 off the cost, not so much in an absolute sense but in how it fits into the alternatives.

[1] the fact that Steam is not for sale must drive all the failing companies in the industry like GameStop and Microsoft crazy because they can’t buy into success but instead double-down into failure with crypto or acquisitions like Activision will will ultimately end with record-setting writedowns.
by delichon | 2025-08-20 16:32:59+00:00
Living in London isn't as much of a luxury as living on a personal yacht, but it is something of a luxury for a dev who has choices. I could see weighing it in my sponsorship decisions. As a dev living in a very low density, inexpensive rural area I have more resources for my side projects than otherwise.

If I were buying rather than donating, it wouldn't factor in at all.
by nlawalker | 2025-08-20 16:33:12+00:00
>CI offerings like GitHub Actions and GitLab Pipelines are more products than platforms because they tightly couple an opinionated configuration mechanism (YAML files) and web UI (and corresponding APIs) on top of a theoretically generic remote execute as a service offering. For me to consider these offerings as platforms, they need to grow the ability to schedule arbitrary compute via an API, without being constrained by the YAML officially supported out of the box.

I wish the author gave more concrete examples about what kinds of workflows they want to dynamically construct and remotely execute (and why a separate step of registering the workflow up front with the service before running it is such a dealbreaker), and what a sufficiently generic and unopinionated definition schema for workflows and tasks would look like as opposed to what a service like GitHub Actions defines.

Generally, registering a workflow with the service (putting it in your repo, in the case of GHA) makes sense because you're running the same workflows over and over. In terms of task definitions, GHA is workflows -> jobs -> tasks -> actions, where jobs are tied to runners and can have dependencies defined between them. If you want to use those primitives to do something generic like run some scripts, you can do that in a very bare-bones way. When I look at the Taskcluster task definition they linked, I see pretty much the same thing.
by mgfist | 2025-08-20 16:33:27+00:00
Yes, but usage is not uniform even when you have millions of users. It smooths the usage lines, but the peaks and troughs become more extreme the more users you have. At 3am usage in the US goes down to effectively 0. Maybe you can use the compute for Asia customers, but then you compete with local compute that has far better latency.

Then you have seasonal peaks/troughs, such as the school year vs summer.

When you want 4 9s of uptime and good latency, you either have to overprovision hardware and eat idling costs, or rent compute and pay overhead. Both cost a lot.
by redwall_hp | 2025-08-20 16:33:57+00:00
This is also more or less a requirement to own a cellphone, as every free major email now does SMS verification to cut down on spam accounts.

Never mind that having an undamaged internet connected device and functioning internet service after a natural disaster is a big if.

This has major "poll test" energy: a transparent attempt to deny people their rights with an intentional bureaucratic hurdle.
by StellaMary | 2025-08-20 16:34:34+00:00
I built Brahma-JS to bridge the gap between Rust's performance and the ease of JavaScript. It's an ultra-low latency runtime written in Rust on top of Tokio and Hyper.

The idea is to give developers a way to get Rust's speed and memory safety without having to rewrite their application logic. It's a plug-and-play engine that works across Node, Deno, and Bun.

All the heavy lifting—like parsing request bodies and headers—happens in Rust. The benchmarks are promising: on a tiny AWS t2.micro instance, I hit 33.2k requests per second during a load test.

I haven't shared the full codebase yet but will soon. You can find the repo here:

https://github.com/Shyam20001/rsjs
by dataviz1000 | 2025-08-20 16:34:51+00:00
I made this comment yesterday but really applies to this conversation.

> In the past 3 weeks I ported Playwright to run completely inside a Chrome extension without Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) using purely DOM APIs and Chrome extension APIs, I ported a TypeScript port of Browser Use to run in a Chrome extension side panel using my port of Playwright, in 2 days I ported Selenium ChromeDriver to run inside a Chrome Extension using chrome.debugger APIs which I call ChromeExtensionDriver, and today I'm porting Stagehand to also run in a Chrome extension using the Playwright port. This is following using VSCode's core libraries in a Chrome extension and having them drive a Chrome extension instead of an electron app.

The most difficult part is managing the lifecycle of Windows, Pages, and Frames and handling race conditions, in the case of automating a user's browser, where, for example, the user switches to another tab or closes the tab.
by glenstein | 2025-08-20 16:35:05+00:00
This, in my opinion, is the most important point in the thread and the clearest expression of it. For purposes of this argument, meat is conceived of essentially as a single ingredient, and the raising of the animal in artificial conditions, on hormones, fed on processed food with its associated environmental footprints are kind of sidestepped, while alternatives have to answer for every step in the chain of production.

That mapping seems correct to me, as a lot of the objections here are free-floating one-offs that presume these background assumptions more so than they are apples to apples comparisons intent on clearly comparing them in totality.
by randcraw | 2025-08-20 16:35:12+00:00
Apparently the inks used in antiquity were not waterproof either. Even though vellum or high quality parchment could last several centuries (if not eaten by moths or other bugs), a single slip of a beverage could erase an entire scroll. Perhaps that's a primary reason that 90% of the works written before the fall of Rome have been lost.