MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by agentcoops | 2025-08-29 10:37:44+00:00
I’ve been working on RAG systems a lot this year and I think one thing people miss is that often for internal RAG efficiency/latency is not the main concern. You want predictable, linear pricing of course, but sometimes you want to simply be able to get a predictably better response by throwing a bit more money/compute time at it.

It’s really hard to get to such a place with standard vector-based systems, even GraphRag. Because it relies on summaries of topic clusters that are pre-computed, if one of those summaries is inaccurate or none of the summaries deal with your exact question, that will never change during query processing. Moreover, GraphRag preprocessing is insanely expensive and precisely does not scale linearly with your dataset.

TLDR all the trade-offs in RAG system design are still being explored, but in practice I’ve found the main desired property to be “predictably better answer with predictably scaling cost” and I can see how similar concerns got OP to this design.
by lm28469 | 2025-08-29 10:37:51+00:00
> Many younger kids don’t view cars as the gateway to freedom and coming of age experiences. (Which is fine)

No shit...

> The average monthly car loan payment in the U.S. is $745 for new vehicles and $521 for used ones

> In the first quarter of 2025, the overall average auto loan interest rate was 6.73% for new cars and 11.87% for used cars.
by adrian_b | 2025-08-29 10:38:05+00:00
Unlike swapping, freeing code pages does no writing to HDD/SSD, but it only needs to reload the pages when they are needed again in the future, therefore it is more efficient than swapping.

I have stopped using swapping on all my Linux servers, desktops and laptops more than 20 years ago. At that time it was a great improvement and since then it has never caused any problems. However, I have been generous with the amount of RAM I install, for any computer having at least the NUC size there are many years since I have never used less than 32 GB, while for new computers I do not intend to use less than 64 GB.

With recent enough Linux kernels, using tmpfs for /tmp is perfectly fine. Nevertheless, for decades using tmpfs for /tmp had been dangerous, because copying a file through /tmp would lose metadata, e.g. by truncating file timestamps and by stripping the extended file attributes.

Copying files through /tmp was frequent between the users of multi-user computers where there was no other directory where all users had write access and the former behavior of Linux tmpfs was very surprising for them.
by motorest | 2025-08-29 10:38:32+00:00
> Free credentials temporarily do, but only until someone teachers crawlers to AI-automate signups. Forum spammers already figured this out a long time ago.

Forum spamming is a solved problem, isn't it? I mean, do you see any spam here on HN?

> The HN community view on their registration requirement suggests that free authentication does not work and has not for some time; has that viewpoint changed in recent years?

I don't think there is such a thing as a "HN community view". Are there meetings to agree on a consensus on important topics? Or were you trying to pull an appeal to authority?
by noisy_boy | 2025-08-29 10:38:43+00:00
For someone very comfortable with desktop Linux and NAS curious without much hardware skills, are there any good guides to get started? I use a HDD enclosure with two 2TB disks shoved in but the content availability is dependent on my laptop being on. I would rather have JellyFin running on my NAS/media server so that we can watch stuff on TV even when the laptop is off. Would be good to be able to access the network file system over NFS using WiFi to avoid being tethered to the desk.
by thatjoeoverthr | 2025-08-29 10:39:44+00:00
There's good reasons to do this. Embedding similarity is _not_ a reliable method of determining relevance.

I did some measurements and found you can't even really tell if two documents are "similar" or not. Here: https://joecooper.me/blog/redundancy/

One common way is to mix approaches. e.g. take a large top-K from ANN on embeddings as a preliminary shortlist, then run a tuned LLM or cross encoder to evaluate relevance.

I'll link here these guys' paper which you might find fun: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.08319

At the end of the day you just want a way to shortlist and focus information that's cheaper, computationally, and more reliable, than dumping your entire corpus into a very large context window.

So what we're doing is fitting the technique to the situation. Price of RAM; GPU price; size of dataset; etc. The "ideal" setup will evolve as the cost structure and model quality evolves, and will always depend on your activity.

But for sure, ANN-on-embedding as your RAG pipeline is a very blunt instrument and if you can afford to do better you can usually think of a way.
by lpil | 2025-08-29 10:39:48+00:00
It's all production ready and in use by businesses and open source projects today!

The language tour covers _the language_ rather than the concurrency framework, so you'd look to the Erlang and Gleam OTP documentation to learn about the framework. Erlang and Elixir have a similar documentation split, for example, the most popular book teaching Erlang, LYSE, has the first half about the language and the second half about the framework.

> it seems like it's mainly a statically typed language that just happens to be on the BEAM and that it isn't necessarily looking to solve the "static type the messages" in Erlang and Elixir. Is that correct?

Not quite! Gleam does have a type-safe derivate of the OTP framework, while maintaining full compatibility with the original untyped OTP. When writing a Gleam application that runs on the Erlang VM you will be using typed actors and messages.

> I'm just trying to get a sense of the language's origins and where it's going compared to Elixir and its gradual typing story.

Elixir and Gleam's respective type systems are about as different as you can get while still being type systems. The difference is so large that they offer completely distinct advantages and development experiences, so people who especially value and enjoy one are unlikely to find the other to their liking. I believe this is a real strength! It means that the BEAM ecosystem offers a wider range of programming styles, and so it can attract and serve a wider range of developers, growing the ecosystem as a whole. BEAM languages work together closely.

> if I know and like F#, Elixir, and Rust, what is the selling point of Gleam?

I could give you a list of technical benefits to picking Gleam, but really I think this sort of technology choice is very personal. You may find Gleam to be a language that you enjoy and are productive with, and if that's the case then it's a great tool for you! Your use of Rust, F# suggests you'll appreciate the programming style, and your use of Elixir suggests you'll appreciate using the same BEAM runtime, so perhaps give it a try.
by kypro | 2025-08-29 10:40:29+00:00
I have a controversial take that the only reason knowledge jobs have been well paid and fairly safe in the West was because for a while they've been difficult to outsource, not because the skills themselves are particularly rare or hard to acquire.

A few decades ago there was a focus in several low-cost economies (like China) to build out a manufacturing base and because of cheap global shipping it just made sense to outsource manufacturing. It's not that manufacturing is unskilled or "unproductive" as some claim.

Over the last few years hundreds of middles of people from countries like India have gotten online and in many of those countries today education and English is sufficient that with the internet knowledge jobs can be outsourced. And so obviously they will be.

This idea that there are jobs that require such high IQ and knowledge that only a Westerner can do them is kinda silly. We should assume a race to the bottom is the rule when it comes to labour. At the end of it the only jobs that will be safe are those which cannot be easily automated or easily outsourced. Those will probably be skilled manual labour jobs that require a physical presence – jobs like roofing or plumbing.
by metalman | 2025-08-29 10:40:40+00:00
the ∆v makes a sample return mission from an interstellar object currently impossible. 3l atlas is doing 63kilometers/second and anything even going whatever the minimum speed to qualify as interstellar will be goiing to fast to catch up to, and then have enough fuel to brake for a gravitational capture by the sun. our best chance to learn about interstellar objects is to blast them with ultra high powered laser beams and use telescopes to do remote spectrographic and visual analysis , this could likely be cobbled together right now.
by michaelt | 2025-08-29 10:40:45+00:00
> how scalable is it to do each connection peer to peer?

I can tell you roughly how it works for webrtc video calls.

If you're in a 5-person peer-to-peer webrtc video call where you receive 4 streams of video, you also need to send 4 streams of video. This is scalable in a sense; the uplink and downlink requirements are equal.

The problem comes if you're in a 100-person meeting, and the application logic has hidden 95 people's video to save on bandwidth. In that case, while you'd only receive 4 streams of video you'd have to send 99.

In practice, webrtc video calling often uses an 'SFU' or 'Selective Forwarding Unit' where you send one video stream to the vendor's cloud server and they forward it to the other people in the meeting. This also benefits people on asymmetric connections, and mobile users where uploading costs battery life, and users behind highly restrictive firewalls where webrtc's NAT traversal fails to work.
by general1726 | 2025-08-29 10:41:16+00:00
Permanent until Trump will talk to somebody else than Navarro about these tariffs and will be promptly lifted.

The problem with current setup is attempt to strongarm tariffs onto seller, who will then promptly either stop sending any packages (because that's not how the system works) or bill the tariff back to customer explicitly - Here is your invoice for shipment and here is your invoice for tariff. You are just creating more bureaucracy at this point for no benefit.
by eadmund | 2025-08-29 10:41:51+00:00
I prefer stable packages on my desktop and laptop, both for professional and for personal use. I hate the current Javascript/Python/Rust bleeding-edge, left-pad, if you haven updated to yesterday’s latest version which breaks compatibility with everything culture.

I like to build things which last. I like to craft a software system and then use it for decades, moving it from machine to machine and intentionally upgrading the components at my pace.
by spacephysics | 2025-08-29 10:42:13+00:00
Unfortunately i think many of those jobs can also be attributed to general economic health post low interest rates.

Companies now need to leave pre-revenue and turn a profit, or if you’re an established company you need to cut costs/increase margins from other economic headwinds (tariffs, inflation, gov policies etc)

A Junior dev (and most devs onboarding) will typically require 6-8 months to start being able to meaningfully contribute, then there’s a general oversight/mentorship for a few years after.

Yes they produce, however I think junior’s market salary plus the opportunity cost lost of the higher salaried mid and senior level in mentoring is a hard pill to swallow.

The team i work on is stretched very thin, and even after layoffs (which management agreed they went too far with) it’s pulling teeth to get another dev to build things companies are begging for and even willing to separately pay cash upfront for us to build

If you’re getting into the current job market as a junior, you’ll likely need to go heavy in the buzzword tech, accept a position from a smaller company that pays substantially less, then in 1-2 years job hop into a higher paying mid level role (not to say 1-2 years makes anyone mid level imo)
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-08-29 10:43:07+00:00
The question is always: Is this simply the effects of a recession or AI?

No one wants to hire juniors, but when the alternative is too expensive they are an acceptable solution.

Or if you have some incentive structure where you can get more work out of them like consultancies.

With a market flooded with senior people accepting a paycut for a job why even attempt hiring juniors?
by sjw987 | 2025-08-29 10:43:36+00:00
If general government policies adapted to a world with less available jobs, it wouldn't be an issue.

As it stands, our governments are continuing on as normal despite the introduction of a technology which has the capability to erase an enormous amount of jobs from the pool (certainly many standard office jobs).

A world with less work and no general change in policy (no UBI or similar scheme) is a world with more unemployed people, falling living standards, more crime, and more instability.
by bluenose69 | 2025-08-29 10:44:17+00:00
Yes, the noise (which I'd call "the sound") is a big factor.

I teach in a classroom that had blackboard that had stood the test of time for decades. When it was replaced with a whiteboard, things went downhill. The markers dry out quickly, without much notice, so that students often have trouble reading the material. And the whiteboards get harder to erase year after year.

I guess the advantage of whiteboards is that a variety of colours can be used. But some students have deficiencies of colour recognition, so that's not really helpful. (I never used coloured chalk, for the same reason. Maximal contrast is the key.)

And the noise. That click drag click of chalk. Students after the transition to whiteboards told me that they really missed that. It enlivened the lectures. And when students were writing down notes, they knew to look up when they heard the sound.

Back to the point about the "visual show" and doing slides in real time. Yes, yes, yes. Once in a while I need to show something on the projector. The moment I turn it one, I see students start to disengage.
by aurareturn | 2025-08-29 10:46:09+00:00
The problem is that it is hard to measure.

I feel it almost every day for myself and for my family in the US. I don't feel it at all when I visit China, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, etc. Does that help?

I recently saw someone say that in the US, you have freedom of speech but nothing changes. In China, you don't have freedom of speech but things change.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-08-29 10:46:45+00:00
Sorry, what can't I do? I'm not sure what "card" I'm playing.

I said there was instability in the region causing issues and the response was "but those issues were already there 1000 years ago." Your own link is about the conflict in the region at that time and your quote points to that conflict having already been quite entrenched for some time.
by RossBencina | 2025-08-29 10:47:00+00:00
For geometry, start with high-school algebra and coordinate geometry, and learn how to put the two together: equations representing geometry. By which I mean, being able to write down equations for geometric objects and manipulate the equations to get them into different useful forms, and to compute useful things. A first example would be studying different ways of writing down equations for the line [1], and then learn how each of the forms relate, how to use algebra to move between them, and what each for is useful for. For example finding the intersection of two lines involves simultaneously solving for (x,y) that satisfy both equations, and there's a particular form that is best suited to that. Another form is better if you want to "move along a line" say, parameterised by time. One form might be best for GPU rendering. Once you're comfortable with algebraic expressions for lines, then you can move on to the more complex curves that you listed -- the equations for these curves can be manipulated in analogous ways. EDIT: importantly you want to learn not how to "plug and chug" numbers, but instead how to use these equations in code: e.g. how would you use the equations to write code to draw a line/curve, and how to derive functions to intersect curves, connect curves at tangents, etc.

There's more to it than that of course. For example working out equations for tangents to curves will become important. But start with the above. You mention de casteljau algorithm, I am not familiar with that, but it looks like it might be heading more into algebra, in particular manipulating polynomials, which you learn to write down in high-school, study more in pre-calculus and calculus, but can get pretty complicated, for example if you want to solve a quintic equation.

Two elementary books:

McDougal, Little, "Geometry for Enjoyment and Challenge"

Joseph H. Kindle, "Theory and Problems of Plane and Solid Analytic Geometry (Shaum's outline)"

The following are approachable, but don't directly address your interest in curves:

Joseph O'Rourke, "Computational Geometry in C," second edition (basics everyone should know, starts with primitives like knowing the best way to compute the intersection of two line segments.

Christer Ericson, "Real-time collision detection" (a bit more specific, but a fantastic book, recommended to me here on HN in the past)

And of course I must reference Inigo Quilez' [2] "SDF of a ..." videos which give an illuminating perspective on using equations to describe geometry[3].

[1] https://math.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Applied_Mathematics/...

[2] https://iquilezles.org/

[3] SDF of a Line https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMltMdi1Wzg

EDIT: some of the IRC servers have #math channels, and some of those are open to drop ins asking questions like yours (others seem to be full of people studying for exams).
by antonios | 2025-08-29 10:47:18+00:00
As a quick solution before implementing the more sophisticated suggestions in this thread, you can try getting a small cheap VPS from somewhere outside and trafficking all your traffic through it via sshuttle[1]. For example, Vultr (not an endorsement) has some with ~$3/month that should be sufficient for your case.

[1] https://github.com/sshuttle/sshuttle
by spacephysics | 2025-08-29 10:48:39+00:00
I agree its a popular excuse, however unlike the blockchain craze there’s legitimate use cases of productivity improvements with AI.

And if you can (in some cases) substantially increase productivity, then logically you can reduce team size and be as productive with less.

With the right prompting, you can cut a copywriting team in half easily.

My business has one copywriter/strategist, who I’ve automated the writing part by collecting transcripts and brand guidelines from client meetings. Now she can focus on much higher quality edits, work with other parts of the strategy pipeline, and ultimately more clients than before.

I can easily imagine a corp with 100 junior copywriters quickly reducing headcount
by grishka | 2025-08-29 10:48:40+00:00
It very much depends on how the block is implemented technically.

I can only talk about Russia where I'm from — we have quite a lot of success with DPI bypass tools like GoodbyeDPI. If that fails, use VPN protocols specifically designed for censorship circumvention, like VLESS. Better yet, get yourself a VDS in another country and self-host your VPN there.
by lylo | 2025-08-29 10:48:45+00:00
Yes! I've been lovingly curating a set of RSS feeds for over 20 years. It's a wonderful gift from the internet.

I actually built a simple and free RSS reader because my needs are simple and I'm a sucker for punishment. You'd think websites would want bots to read their RSS feeds since that's the whole point of RSS, but apparently not! ツ

https://feedgrab.net
Show HN: TrustCheck AI – Real-time scam detection and analysis
by anthonyjg_sec | 2025-08-29 10:48:52+00:00
After my family and I were scammed, I built this app to help tackle the $1 trillion global fraud problem. Available on both App Store and Google Play. I don't have a tech background and used AI to help me build it. The objective was to use AI to help catch AI being used by scammers. Check it out if you're interested.
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-29 10:48:57+00:00
> The calling convention for C++ non-static member functions always includes a this pointer, even if the function does not use it.

Yes. Since we are not in C++ we can choose to get rid of this useless pointer.

> Removing it on member functions that do not use it would pose a problem if another class inherited from this class and overrode the function definition with one that did use it.

That problem has nothing to do with the this pointer specifically. When you change the method signature of an inherited method you always have this problem. This simply means, that the superclass prescribes limits to subclasses, which is why it's possible to use a subclass inplace of a superclass.

> Maybe in very special cases whole program optimization could safely remove the this pointer, but it is questionable whether any compiler author

Yes, that's why its not done in C++, but we can do it, if we handroll it.

> it would break ABI stability

It does not if it has always been like this.

> For static member functions, inheritance is irrelevant since they are tied to the class. Calls to static member functions go directly to the mangled function with no indirections

In other words, ->check_flags() can't be implemented as a static member functions in C++. It would simply have a this pointer, that it just wouldn't use, since C++ has no way to express non-static member functions, that just don't take a this pointer.

> thus can tell the linker to have calls there go to the function

In our case the linker can only resolve the call to the appropriate vtable, since the type isn't known until runtime.
by ryao | 2025-08-29 10:49:53+00:00
It is not the same theory, since it is an ADT, not anything object oriented. Different theories can and do overlap. The emitted code is also not the same, since there is no implicit this pointer. You are the one who posted a definition you found and then claimed that it agreed with you, when it did not and now are reneging on your use of it. You do not understand this topic as well as you think you do and this is a silly hill to die on.
by frumiousirc | 2025-08-29 10:52:16+00:00
> apt modernize-sources

What I lack with the "modern" `sources.list.d/` file schema is a command to perform common types of edits. Something like `extrepo` but generic and with knowledge of Debian repos/dists. It's a small thing but I want to be able to type commands like

apt-sources available # prints known dists, marked by their support status apt-sources list # prints all active dists apt-sources add trixie # or "testing", "unstable", "sid" apt-sources remove bookworm apt-sources dist-upgrade # combo of the previous two

Perhaps `extrepo` would be extended to include Debian-proper or this hypothetical `apt-sources` would be kept Debian-repo-only or perhaps it would cover extrepo's scope.
by kookamamie | 2025-08-29 10:52:16+00:00
> We are still figuring out how to use LLMs, and it will be some time before we have a decent idea of how to use them well

As per typical, Martin is so late to the party that he projects his own lack of understanding of the subject to be the general state of matters.

People are, and have been for a while, using LLMs as very effective accelerators or augmentations of themselves.

Claude Code, is a great example of something that can easily one-shot most trivial-to-average programming tasks.

While some wait for the "bubble to burst", a lot of people are gaining significant benefits from using LLMs to boost their speed in software development.

It's not a good idea to muddy the expectations for AI by mixing AGI and LLMs into the same bucket. LLMs are already useful for many purposes, even if they didn't lead to AGI, whatever the definition is.