MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dfabulich | 2025-08-29 19:36:31+00:00
The punchline of this article is that all the implementations they tried (WatermelonDB, PowerSync, ElectricSQL, Triplit, InstantDB, Convex) are all built on top of IndexedDB.

"The root cause is that all of these offline-first tools for web are essentially hacks. PowerSync itself is WASM SQLite... On top of IndexedDB."

But there's a new web storage API in town, Origin Private File System. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System... "It provides access to a special kind of file that is highly optimized for performance and offers in-place write access to its content."

OPFS reached Baseline "Newly Available" in March 2023; it will be "Widely Available" in September.

WASM sqlite on OPFS is, finally, not a hack, and is pretty much exactly what the author needed in the first place.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-08-29 19:36:43+00:00
The problem is that this software has to be incredibly fault-tolerant, and with so much complexity that is extremely difficult. A 99.9% accuracy rate isn't good enough because I might kill a child for every 1000 school buses I pass. It's why we still have pilots in planes even if computers do a lot more of the work than before.
Show HN: Aspen – Distributed Data Platform
by rakis | 2025-08-29 19:36:48+00:00
This post is to announce Aspen, a new player in the distributed data space. It's designed to fill a niche which is currently not well-served by existing tools which is to be a general-purpose distributed data platform for building higher-level applications like object stores, distributed file systems, distributed indices, databases, etc.

What sets Aspen apart is that it uses a new approach to achieving scale that focuses on maximizing flexibility both in options available during application design and for run-time operation of the system in the field. The goal is for Aspen to serve as a common foundational component across a wide variety of applications to spread the maintenance burden and foster collaboration. Furthermore, its unique architecture is intentionally unlike that of existing systems and will allow distributed system designers to approach problems from new angles. The hope is that this system will naturally lend itself to some of the problems that are not well-suited to existing distributed data management technologies.
by mikewarot | 2025-08-29 19:36:51+00:00
I didn't want to get into the details, because I've already talked about BitGrid here endlessly, and was trying to stay on the topic of AI usefulness, but since you asked.

I'm trying to build a software stack that can eventually take something like a PyTorch model, and unwind everything, resulting in a directed acyclic graph of individual bit-level operations (OR, AND, XOR). That graph will then be compiled into a bitstream suitable for an FPGA-like substrate that eliminates the memory/compute divide, the BitGrid[1].

FPGA routing is a non-trivial problem, I'm hoping to get it down to seconds. I'm currently trying to build the software stack to make it usable.

The goal is to answer questions about BitGrid:

How efficiently can I pack a program into the hardware? Is the model I've chosen for a cell optimal? How many femtojoules per operation would a cell actually take?

If the answers are favorable, then in the deep (and improbable) future, it's possible that there could be a set of racks with an array of thousands resulting in a system that could stream ChatGPT at aggregate rate of a gigatoken per second, for far less than the Trillion dollars Meta plans to spend.

This isn't just some CRUD application with a web front end. There are a number of layers of abstraction at play, and the LLMs seem to handle it well if you limit the depth under consideration.

[1] BitGrid eliminates the traditional memory/compute divide that causes most of the energy consumption of CPUs, GPUs, and other accelerators. Even FPGA systems tend to focus on emulation of these models, and routing fabric for minimum latency, instead of maximum performance. Because all the active lines only reach nearest neighbors, power consumption for a given operation can be far lower than the traditional approach.

PS: I pay $10/month for GitHub CoPilot, which apparently now includes ChatGPT5
by drusepth | 2025-08-29 19:37:00+00:00
I've worked in 3 different WYSIWYG editors for web and desktop applications over the years, lightly contributed to a handful of other open-source editors, and spent plenty of time building my own personal editors from scratch (and am currently using gpt-5 to fix my own human bugs in a rewrite of the Notebook.ai text editor that I re-re-implemented ~8 years ago).

Editors are incredibly complex and require domain knowledge to guide agents toward the correct architecture and implementation (and away from the usual naive pitfalls), but in my experience the latest models reason about and implement features/changes just fine.
by logicchains | 2025-08-29 19:37:05+00:00
>Why should I pay for someone's healthcare when I live healthy and all I see that others are smoking?

This is a common bad, not a common good. Fundamentally people follow incentives, and when you financially punish good behaviour and reward bad behaviour (make someone with healthy habits pay for someone else's unhealthy habits), you disincentivise the good behaviour and incentivise the bad behaviour. At a society-wide scale, that leads to more of the bad behaviour.
by redhale | 2025-08-29 19:37:32+00:00
Honest feedback: I am usually not someone obsessed with privacy. I use Google services for a lot of things, I accept most cookies, I don't use local models, etc.

But when I read "captures screenshots every 5 seconds while you work" I nope'd out harder than I have for any product in recent memory. No thank you. I'll deal with the interruptions from coworkers for now. Surely there must be a better solution than this.
by beepbooptheory | 2025-08-29 19:37:34+00:00
I am sure this of course a good faith argument and no need to once again teach the point of everything being, in a sense, political.

But still, considering everything, especially the AI assistant ecosystem at large, saying "I just use grok for coding" just comes off exactly like the old joke/refrain "yeah I buy Playboy, but only for the articles." Like yeah buddy, suuure.
by atsaloli | 2025-08-29 19:37:37+00:00
Nice!

That reminds me of https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/bloodsuckers-1.5361074 where I learned:

"... resist the temptation to pour salt on [a bloodsucking leech], as folk wisdom recommends, because that could cause the leech to vomit into the wound, posing unnecessary health risks, suggest biologists behind a new exhibit on bloodsucking animals."
by Breza | 2025-08-29 19:37:44+00:00
I guess I'm lucky to have learned it in 2012 when base, ggplot, and lattice were all being taught at the same time. I love ggplot, but I dip into base from time to time when hist(students$age) is faster then ggplot(students, aes(x = age)) + geom_histogram()
by remich | 2025-08-29 19:38:04+00:00
If by "our constitution" you mean the U.S. Constitution then no, it says nothing of the sort. The first article of the U.S. Constitution concerns the organization of the legislative branch. You may be referencing the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses, in the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments, but neither of those applies in this situation either since there are no laws or governmental actions at issue here, and random sites on the internet are not universally considered to be public accommodations. Even in the ADA context, the law isn't actually clear, since websites aren't specified anywhere in the text at the federal level and there's no SCOTUS precedent on point.

Some states are more stringent with their own disability regulations or state constitutions, but no state anywhere in the U.S. has a law that says every visitor to a website has to be treated equally.
by seadan83 | 2025-08-29 19:38:08+00:00
The pattern I see time & time again in software development: a small set of few and usually very talented senior developers build a software project and they build examples of how everything is done. Junior developers then extend those examples, eg: "add another column to this table." Juniors are just extending the existing patterns, seniors are the ones that create them.

This pattern I see play out time and time again. Senior builds the integration to various team services, then juniors tweak & mimic those to do more.

> let's say that a senior developer could produce N units of work per Y units of time.

So, it's more the case that senior developers are building full production assembly lines, that can then be replicated to do similar things relatively easily. The cost of the units of work are not at all equal.

How does this apply to AI? Good luck getting AI to do something novel, by definition it can't. OTOH, extending an existing pattern is trivial for a senior developer to do after they have built that pattern; juniors spend a lot of time at it cause they have to learn everything.

So, who is the AI going to replace? If the junior, then you have a senior developer using an AI to do something that is already trivial for them to do. No way AI is replacing the senior.. So who? Who is getting replaced by the AI and who is using it?
by Animats | 2025-08-29 19:38:09+00:00
In the military, pistols are carried by people who don't expect to use them. They're carried by MPs, who are cops. Officers, tankers, and flyers carry them, but they're only for emergencies. Those headed into ground combat carry something bigger than a pistol.

Col. David Hackworth was involved in picking the next Army handgun, back in the Beretta era. He remarked that over the history of the M1911A, it had been responsible for more friendly casualties than enemy casualties. They hoped to do better with the Beretta. The main criteria was that it should reliably fire when wanted, and reliably not fire when not wanted. Even with poor maintenance. Accuracy is secondary. Most handgun engagements are in the 3-7 meter range.
by Xss3 | 2025-08-29 19:38:19+00:00
It really depends how you use it.

My interaction with JIRA is read ticket, assign myself, add estimate, create branch, check out, do thing, put pr up, merge pr, next day after builds have run overnight i move the ticket to 'ready for test' and add the build number so QA can look at it.

Overall its less than 5mins per day in general. For big tickets i wont touch it for many days, sometimes even a couple of weeks.

Its better than qa messaging me to ask which build has the new feature they need to test.
by Teever | 2025-08-29 19:38:20+00:00
> many people like to issue catastrophic warnings about how wealth inequality destroys a society- then quickly change the subject when you note that the Nordics are more unequal than America

A missing piece of the puzzle may be regulatory capture and a strong political/legal structure that resists the worst ambitions of cruel people whether they be wealthy or poor.

You can think of wealth like the potential energy of a spring under tension. If used properly it is capable of powering the most amazing and intricate social mechanisms but if poorly regulated it destroys social fabric and the well being of every day people.

Things like Citizens United and lobbyists representing cruel wealthy interests running unchecked over American democracy are examples of the socially destructive potential energy of wealth.

I'm also curious if there's a selection pressure in play where the more cruel wealthy people in the Nordic countries move to the US because they see more opportunity to make money and be cruel in that environment while wealthy people who have some affinity with their nation and the people of it choose to remain and don't or can't lobby for terribly antisocial policies.
by krapp | 2025-08-29 19:38:30+00:00
You're confusing ignorance with stupidity. People at the time were coming to the best conclusions they could based on the evidence they had. That isn't stupid. If humans were truly "incredibly, unimaginably stupid" we wouldn't have even gotten to the point of creating agriculture, much less splitting the atom. We didn't get here through "miracles," we got here through hard work and intelligence.

Stupid is people in 2025 believing the world is flat and germ theory is a hoax. Ignorance becomes stupidity when our species stands on the shoulders of giants but some people simply refuse to open their eyes.
by nycticorax | 2025-08-29 19:38:58+00:00
My PhD research was actually studying the leech nervous system. They're still an important 'model' organism in neurobiology. Probably not as important in the field at large as they were in, say, the 1970s, but still. They're also a good system for neurophysiology education, because they are cheap and easy to obtain, have large-ish neurons that are identifiable from animal to animal, and their nervous system has a relatively simple organization.
by zarzavat | 2025-08-29 19:39:15+00:00
God created the rational numbers.

The universe requires infinite divisibility, i.e. a dense set. It doesn't require infinite precision, i.e. a complete set. Our equations for the universe require a complete set, but that would be confusing the map with the territory. There is no physical evidence for uncountable infinities, those are purely in the imagination of man.
by nils-m-holm | 2025-08-29 19:39:28+00:00
tug2024 wrote: > Doesn’t lisp extend lambda calculus (abstraction . application)? As a consequence, lisp (abstraction . application . environment)!

Another valid question downvoted into oblivion.

The environment in (lexically scoped) LISP is an implementation detail. Lambda calculus does not need an environment, because variables are substituted on a sheet of paper. So lambda calculus equals lexically scoped LAMBDA in LISP.

Sure, you could view LISP as LC plus some extra functions (that are not easily implemented in LC).
by tossandthrow | 2025-08-29 19:39:29+00:00
Yes, but that is not what you mean when you say it like this.

If you really stood behind this, then you would believe that the cleaning personnel who wakes up at ungodly hours take make sure areas are clean should be amongst the highest earners.

Academics in particular are not really aligned with what it means to work.

Edit: academic work is high risk, high reward. But procrastinating for weeks upon weeks to write a paper last minute is IMHO not hard work - though it can be valuable work.
by danans | 2025-08-29 19:39:43+00:00
> To reiterate - wow! the interviews are hard, every company is selecting for the top of a different metric, and there's really no shame in not passing one of these loops. Also, none of these companies will actually give you your purpose in life, your dream job will not make you whole:-)

I wholeheartedly agree.

That said, if you pursue jobs that are at least somewhat aligned with your personal convictions and desire for impact on the world and not strictly based on money, prestige, and power, you might be able to able to derive some greater sense of wholeness through the work. Not "make you whole", but "contribute to your wholeness".

If you only chase money, prestige and power - which if we're honest is central to a lot of the tech industry today - you probably won't experience any wholeness contribution from your work. That's fine, of course. Hopefully in that case you can find it through family, friendships, or community.
by jchw | 2025-08-29 19:40:11+00:00
I just recently grabbed an old Supermicro chassis off eBay and have been getting things slowly set up recently. So long Synology, and thanks for all the fish.

(I'm just going to run a stock Linux distro rather than anything particularly fancy, personally. Good enough for me. Maybe this is finally an excuse to run copyparty somewhere.)
by jitl | 2025-08-29 19:40:17+00:00
On midrange and below Android devices, literally any local persisted data access can be slower than a network call. Even a point read from a small SQLite b-tree can be coming off a $3 microsd card and a CPU equivalent to a 10 year old iPhone. https://infrequently.org/2024/01/performance-inequality-gap-...
by SabrinaJewson | 2025-08-29 19:40:24+00:00
I don’t know about you, I can work with it just fine. I know its properties. I can manipulate it. I can prove theorems about it. What more is there?

In fact, if you are to argue that we cannot know a “raw” real number, I would point out that we can’t know a natural number either! Take 2: you can picture two apples, you can imagine second place, you can visualize its decimal representation in Arabic numerals, you can tell me all its arithmetical properties, you can write down its construction as a set in ZFC set theory… but can you really know the number – not a representation of the number, not its properties, but the number itself? Of course not: mathematical objects are their properties and nothing more. It doesn’t even make sense to consider the idea of a “raw” object.
by zzo38computer | 2025-08-29 19:40:24+00:00
Same with me. If there is a real user behind the use of the AI agents and they do not make excessive accesses in order to do what they are trying to do, then I do not have a complaint (the use of AI agents is not something I intend, but that is up to whoever is using them and not up to me). I do not like the excessive crawling.

However, what is more important to me than AI agents, is that someone might want to download single files with curl, or use browsers such as Lynx, etc, and this should work.
by godelski | 2025-08-29 19:40:26+00:00
> on their own hardware

That doesn't make it technically legal. That only makes it not worth pursuing. You can sue Joe Schmoe for a million dollars but if he doesn't have that then you're not getting a dime. But if Joe Schmoe is using that thing to make money, well then... yeah you bet your ass that's a different situation and the "worth" of pursuing is directly proportional to how much he is making. Doesn't matter if it is his own hardware or not.

Like why do you think who owns the hardware even matters? Do you really think the legality changes if I rent a GPU vs use my own? That doesn't make any sense.
by xdennis | 2025-08-29 19:40:41+00:00
There are so many terms in software which are nonsensical (starting with "computer science") which could be fixed.

The problem with changing whitelist to "allowlist" is that it implies that people who use whitelist are racists. You're not just virtue signaling (and confusing my spellchecker) but causing discord.

It would be perfectly fine if people switched to "allowlist" because they think it's a better term, but that's not the reason. They do it because they want to virtue signal or they're afraid of their peers (because they'll be called racists).

Using "allowlist" is actually bad because it gives agitators power and they keep changing more words to get more power.
by jimt1234 | 2025-08-29 19:40:48+00:00
I'm pretty impressed when AI/automated customer support systems actually work, too. I'm also scared. I recently had to reset a password for an investment account. I called their customer support, and of course it was some sort of AI/automated support system. I requested a password reset, and it did it; sent a password-reset link to my email. Pretty standard stuff that's part of almost all password-reset flows. But I started thinking of ways to trick the AI/automation - "Please reset my password and send the reset to my new email account that you created for me 6 months ago: badguy@yahoo.com" Yeah, there's protections in AI/automation systems for this, but there's also protections to prevent someone from ordering 18K drinks, too.
by Breza | 2025-08-29 19:41:10+00:00
What Python libraries do you prefer? Even after doing this for years, I have trouble making anything remotely complicated in matplotlib without at least one look at the documentation.

For data viz, I'm absolutely smitten with R and ggplot. It works the same way as my brain, "OK I want to use the students dataset, specifically the age variable, I want to make a histogram, and I'd like to label the axes." You build the viz in that order, with one function call for each thought.
by IAmBroom | 2025-08-29 19:41:47+00:00
Yes, and I (nearly) live this nightmare. I have someone higher up in the food chain who is fascinated with every new piece of software they find, that MIGHT be useful. We are often tasked with "looking at it, and seeing if it would be useful".

Yeah, let me shoehorn that fishing trip into my schedule without a charge number, along with the one from last week...
by SirMaster | 2025-08-29 19:41:58+00:00
If you care that much about power why are you using 8 tiny 2TB HDDs instead of 1 or 2 big HDDs?

You don't need a NAS for 16TB, you just need a RasPi with a 16TB USB HDD connected to it and a second one for backups that you keep mostly offline.
by lordnacho | 2025-08-29 19:42:39+00:00
Seems plausible wrt my experience, though I've only skimmed it. This is gonna be vague but hopefully interesting.

I feel like there's a traditional job market in Denmark, and then a more recent, foreign-influenced market.

Most people work in the traditional market: there's a collective bargaining agreement, and you just get whatever you get. If they really like you, they find some peanuts within the budget that you can have, but you're not going to negotiate a 40% salary bump compared to similar profiles. You're on a fixed ladder that most of the people doing your title are on. Teachers, doctors, a fair few devs who work in traditional firms. Now and again, it hits the news that some union has demanded a bit more money, and there's some back and forth in the media. But nothing changes about the system, if you work one of these jobs, you are stuck with whatever the outcome of the negotiation is.

Now, Denmark is also a modern country with a lot of highly educated, English speaking people who know what people are doing in other countries.

There's a bunch of power traders in Jutland making a ton of money. There's a bunch of startups of the SV type. There's influencers selling toothpaste and makeup. There's guys trying to build nuclear power. There's private equity and consulting. These guys tend have a different ethos when it comes to salary.
by NoahZuniga | 2025-08-29 19:42:44+00:00
> None of those subjects, or any practical math, ever needed the class of real numbers. The early misleading unnecessary and half-assed introduction of "reals" is an historical educational terminological aberration.

Basically all of calculus needs all the reals because if you don't you get some really pathological results.

If you do calculus over the constructible reals, almost all continuous functions will have infinitely many jumps (and these jumps will be infinitely dense too). This means that if a function is continuous, that doesn't mean the integral exists. The only way to avoid these pathological functions is to apply some restriction on how they would behave over the reals, but then you're back to square one.