MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bArray | 2025-08-12 16:16:34+00:00
> Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.

Let's ignore that most emails will be in semi-cold storage. Let's ignore that energy usage per email would be absolutely minimum. Did they not consider that thousands of people hitting the email servers requesting to view and then subsequently delete emails, wouldn't be an issue?

What I (tongue-in-cheek) suspect is that GCHQ and the like are having difficulty in searching so many emails. Maybe by reviewing the email it triggers a filter policy which aids in searching them. After all, the Online Safety Act mostly seems to be targetting data in transit.
by pjc50 | 2025-08-12 16:16:37+00:00
Not really, because you're pumping it against the thermal gradient to start with. Low temperature difference heat is one of the more worthless things in the universe.

The only way you could make this viable would be to change silicon processes to those capable of running at significantly over 100C. This incurs a big efficiency penalty, but then you can start boiling water directly off the die and letting the steam move itself, perhaps to some sort of Stirling engine condenser cycle, with a lot less pumping losses.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-12 16:17:29+00:00
If you don't need any features beyond a backup location for git, all you need is an SSH server with FS support. All you need is git on the remote server to initialize a server directory, and you can target that with git+ssh directly. Works well enough as a backup/mirror repository.

If you want to self-host for more features (CI/CD, PRs, etc.) there's GitLab, Gitea, and forgejo that I'm aware of. I think GitLab is a bit heavy duty for most self-hosting usage myself though. I actually appreciate the online/cloud and commercial options.

When you self-host, it becomes your job to fix it when it breaks.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-12 16:17:51+00:00
Not only do I care about performance, the languages I use, are able to delivery both safety and performace at the level required for project delivery.

Unfortunely too many folks still pretend C is some kind of magic portable Assembly language that no other language on Earth is able to achieve the same.

Also if I care enough about ultimate performace, like anyone that actually cares about performance, I dust off my Assembly programming skills, alongside algorithms, datastructures and computer organisation.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-08-12 16:18:33+00:00
I've never quite understood URL shorteners. They seem like a way of opting into link rot and sending tracking data to third parties who aren't necessary for the client-server connection.

Is there a major benefit I'm missing? I could kind of see them if you have a character limit, want to hide the URL, or have to type a URL manually. But manual typing is rare, and even microblogging services are expanding character limits. Hiding the URL seems slightly sketchy, but you can achieve it without a shorter URL so maybe that's not a real benefit.

Anyway, I'm actually curious about this because people seem to love them.

(and this is aside from all the very valid issues and concerns people have with Google shutting down a widely used service).
by pxc | 2025-08-12 16:18:35+00:00
The reality is obvious. The only way not to see it when looking at research like this is to not want to see it. The idea that this critique is somehow more confusing than the use of the word "reasoning" itself is farcical.

LLMs are cool and some of the things they can do now are useful, even surprising. But when it comes to AI, business leaders are talking their books and many people are swept up by that breathless talk and their own misleading intuitions, frequently parroted by the media.

The "but human reasoning is also flawed, so I can't possibly understand what you mean!" objection cannot be sustained in good faith short of delusion.
by Fervicus | 2025-08-12 16:18:42+00:00
> if you're primary role is to write software which interacts with a SQL database you should understand how to interact directly with that database.

I agree that there should be a general understanding one should be able to interact with it when needed. But at the same time I don't think devs need to be able to spit out queries with the right syntax on the spot in an interview setting.
by codegeek | 2025-08-12 16:18:48+00:00
There are 3 types of people that are active on Product Hunt:

1. Promoters who just like being there and upvote "cool" things. Or they were asked by "a friend" to come and upvote the post.

2. Users of the potential tool. They could use the tool but don't have real power to buy.

3. Actual potential buyers.

#3 is mostly non-existent on PH especially for dev tools.
by evanjrowley | 2025-08-12 16:19:06+00:00
FreeBSD has lots of AMD graphics code because Sony Playstation 4 and 5 are both based on FreeBSD. I'm not sure how much, but some of OpenBSD's AMD graphics code comes from FreeBSD[0]. Considering the prolific success of the PS4/PS5, it would make sense that FreeBSD's AMD graphics code is a considerable size. If OpenBSD is using parts of it, then we should expect those parts to be large.

[0] https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTQzNjI
by pjc50 | 2025-08-12 16:19:10+00:00
> Why can't we ask why we just treat this as an engineering issue.

Neither the public, nor the politicians, nor the newspapers to whom they are accountable, understand engineering.

> If there is some issue with public water supplies, how can the government build infrastructure to mitigate those issues?

The "public" water supplies have been privatized, and the government doesn't want to spend any money.

The privatization may eventually solve itself with the bankruptcy of Thames water, but the problem of money remains.
by gambiting | 2025-08-12 16:19:42+00:00
>>The UK didn't want unlimited immigration from the EU,

It was never unlimited and it's yet another lie peddled by Farage and the Brexit campaign.

UK could have always at the very least enforced the basic of the EU free movement principles in terms of limitations - namely that anyone without a job or means to provide for themselves for over 3 months can be kicked out. That would have solved most of the discontent around the issue. Similarily, UK not being in the schoengen zone could have interviewed everyone arriving from the EU - why are they coming here, do they have funds, do they have a job and turn around people it suspected are coming for benefits etc. It chose not to do that. It was entirely legal at the time and it could have been done. But instead politicians lied about UK being "forced" to accept unlimited immigration, which was never true.

It's not even about exceptions - it could have just used the existing laws that were there.

>>Cameron did a tour around Europe directly visiting member states, begging them to grant such an exception

You and I have a very different understanding of how that visit worked.

>> it was an insult to the concerns of the voters.

It's just really funny to me how after Brexit yes, migration from EU has gone down but it was replaced entirely by migration from former British Empire instead. So I'm not sure if the "concerns of voters" was really respected here either way.
by anonymars | 2025-08-12 16:19:46+00:00
My context was that, independent of any actual backup solution, in Vista and 7 shadow copy gave you file history across pretty much the whole drive (this was separate from "System Restore"). This made it trivial to deal with restoring some previous version of a file or folder even days later. If you ever had that problem, shadow copy would have solved it*

* I think it was not in Home Edition, so yes, thumbs down on that
by bazzargh | 2025-08-12 16:19:52+00:00
The limit given in the article is 360KB (on floppy). At that size, you can't use Tries, you need lossy compression. A Bloom filter can get you 1 in 359 false positives with the size of word list given https://hur.st/bloomfilter/?n=234936&p=&m=360KB&k=

The error rate goes up to 1 in 66 for 256KB (in memory only);
by psygn89 | 2025-08-12 16:20:31+00:00
I liked the UI of BitBucket more. Stuff I accessed frequently like commits and branches were tabs across the top, easy to reach from any page. Branch dropdown sort order was by most recently updated unlike GitHub where I have to search for it. Easy to diff files. This was like 4 or 5 years ago though, maybe it has gone through modernization/enshittification. GitHub feels a bit fragmented and it tries to be more performant by virtualizing some things but while BitBucket in some sense was more rudimentary and showed it all (bogging my machine down some), it allowed me to CTRL + F easily with more confidence whereas with virtualization I've had issues with it finding things and I couldn't 100% trust it.
by NoGravitas | 2025-08-12 16:20:43+00:00
Capital-R Rationalism also encourages you to think you can outperform it, by being smart and reasoning from first principles. That was the idea behind MetaMed, founded by LessWronger Michael Vassar - that being trained in rationalism made you better at medical research and consulting than medical school or clinical experience. Fortunately they went out of business before racking up a body count.
by switchbak | 2025-08-12 16:21:09+00:00
One of the things that taught me the most about SQL is trying to use Hibernate (There's not enough expletives in the english language to describe that thing).

It's one thing to have a query language (DDL and DML no less) that was built for a different use case than how it's used today (eg: it's not really composable). But then you stack a completely different layer on top that tries to abstract across many relational DBs - and it multiplies the cognitive surface area significantly. It makes you become an expert at Hibernate (JPA), then learn a lot about SQL, then learn even more about how it maps into a particular dialect of SQL.

After a while you realize that the damn ORM isn't really buying you very much, and that you're often just better off writing that non-composable boring SQL by hand.

- assuming you have a decent testing infrastructure in place. Much of the supposed benefit of ORMs is about a form of psuedo-type safety, and making it easier to add more fields. If you have fast running tests that exercise the SQL layer, you might find those benefits aren't very compelling since you have such rapid feedback for your plain SQL anyway.

I've almost never changed the vendor of DB in a project, so that's another supposed benefit that doesn't buy me much. I have often wanted to use vendor-specific functionality however, and often find an ORM gets in the way of that.

To sum it up - I agree completely. If it's your job to wrangle an SQL DB - you ought to learn some SQL.
by torium | 2025-08-12 16:21:14+00:00
Since you're old enough, here's a question for you. Do you remember if at the time the first spellcheckers were invented, people were negative on spellcheckers, because that would mean that soon people would stop learning how to spell and just general dumbing down?

It seems that anything that helps people gets this reaction these days. On the one hand, the argument 100% resonates with me. On the other hand, spelling isn't really the end, is it? It's just a means to an end, so what's wrong with making the mean easier? Did people worry that you'd stop knowing how to plant potatoes when trading was invented? EDIT: The example doesn't make sense because agriculture is newer than trading, but you got the idea.
by jmmv | 2025-08-12 16:21:14+00:00
Hah, same. I recently started getting many more back to back meetings than usual and, by lunchtime, I had a headache most days. It took me a while to realize that, while I’m at my desk, I keep drinking from the huge water bottle that I keep there, but when I go to meetings, I don’t. I started carrying the bottle with me (when I remember) and the headaches are gone.
by shaftway | 2025-08-12 16:21:35+00:00
Every game is easier to learn when you start with simple rules and then add new ones as you go.

We teach people Liar's Dice. It's a very simple game, especially if you build it up like this. Everyone gets five Dice. You roll them and look at your own, and then take turns guessing how many of a given number are on the table. Guesses have to "go up" (either the number of dice stays the same and the number of pips goes up, or the number of dice goes up). Instead of guessing you can challenge the person before you. Whoever is wrong loses a die and game play repeats.

After a few rounds, dice showing a one are wild.

After a few more rounds, if anyone in a round bids 1's, then ones are not wild for that round.

After a few more rounds we start discussing the probabilities and strategies.

The challenge is not breaking the game fundamentally while you add rules.
by agalunar | 2025-08-12 16:21:36+00:00
A small nit: the development of Unix began on the PDP-7 in assembly, not the PDP-11.

(The B language was implemented for the PDP-7 before the PDP-11, which are rather different machines. It’s sometimes suggested that the increment and decrement operators in C, which were inherited from B, are due to the instruction set architecture of the PDP-11, but this could not have been the case. Per Dennis Ritchie:¹

> Thompson went a step further by inventing the ++ and -- operators, which increment or decrement; their prefix or postfix position determines whether the alteration occurs before or after noting the value of the operand. They were not in the earliest versions of B, but appeared along the way. People often guess that they were created to use the auto-increment and auto-decrement address modes provided by the DEC PDP-11 on which C and Unix first became popular. This is historically impossible, since there was no PDP-11 when B was developed. The PDP-7, however, did have a few “auto-increment” memory cells, with the property that an indirect memory reference through them incremented the cell. This feature probably suggested such operators to Thompson; the generalization to make them both prefix and postfix was his own.

Another person puts it this way:²

> It's a myth to suggest C’s design is based on the PDP-11. People often quote, for example, the increment and decrement operators because they have an analogue in the PDP-11 instruction set. This is, however, a coincidence. Those operators were invented before the language [i.e. B] was ported to the PDP-11.

In any case, the PDP-11 usually gets all the love, but I want to make sure the other PDPs get some too!)

[1] https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html

[2] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/8869
by jandrewrogers | 2025-08-12 16:21:47+00:00
The irony is that deletion is one of the most expensive operations in data infrastructure at a pretty fundamental level. It is likely going to consume far more power upon deletion than it would if you just left the data alone. Ignoring that deleting emails would have no consequential impact on water consumption, technically the advice is likely to make the situation worse.

The distasteful part of all this is that this is the government transparently deflecting responsibility for their incompetence. Instead of addressing their chronic mismanagement of the water supply they've decided the better course of action is to sell the narrative that this will all go away if you delete your vacation photos.
by tankenmate | 2025-08-12 16:21:54+00:00
This is definitely good to have this as an option but at the same time having more context reduces the quality of the output because it's easier for the LLM to get "distracted". So, I wonder what will happen to the quality of code produced by tools like Claude Code if users don't properly understand the trade off being made (if they leave it in auto mode of coding right up to the auto compact).
by quesera | 2025-08-12 16:22:30+00:00
Interesting. I might live in a lower-trust society than you do.

I'd greatly prefer to lose keys forever, anonymously, than to trust that a random human who is presented with a key and instructions for finding the lock it fits, will not be the sort to take advantage of the situation.

In the latter case, I'm changing my locks anyway, which is far more onerous than just making a new copy of the key.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-12 16:22:49+00:00
A recent studied shows that Garmin watches like the one I have give HRV stress readings that don't correlate well to self-reports of stress

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/08/smartwatc...

The stress paradigm is probably the most holistic idea in medicine and I think any attempt to break it down to a number is reductivist.
by runsWphotons | 2025-08-12 16:22:50+00:00
You can see my comment below for some facts about the Netherlands. They do, literally, have a militarized police (the gendarmerie) which has civilian duties while operating under the defense ministry (and having military duties as well). They operate at airports, do border control, protect state assets (especially in capitol), do crowd control at major events, contain riots etc. You will see them if you go and even try to look.

Their normal police is very similar to America's in number and capability. They may be trained better, which seems like an argument for better training.

I have the opposite hypothesis: I think more police, even from the NG, will help. I think if our society is more criminal, for whatever reasons, it should be policed more. I do not see any good arguments for how having a few hundred NG deployed will strip me of any important liberty, and I think it is much better than tech solutions in that regard.

We now have a test case, and we can come back and see.
by ryandrake | 2025-08-12 16:23:04+00:00
> It's always entertaining to play poker with 1 friend who is very skilled at a table full of novices. They often get frustrated and crash out due to their read on other people's behavior being miscalibrated to the situation.

The most frustrating poker game I play is the monthly Saturday Night game with the bros where they're mostly drinking and watching sports, and none of them are very good or play regularly in casinos.

You can usually get a good read on people who are decent-to-good players, playing in a casino. Their bets will generally make sense and tell a believable story (whether or not they are bluffing). You can mostly tell when they are playing ABC poker vs. getting out of line or making moves. People's bet sizing, their approach to pot management, their ranges, their play style, tight vs. loose, passive vs. aggressive, tend to be identifiable. In other words, players tend to act in ways you'd expect from poker players who have played 10,000 hands.

The Saturday Night amateur gang don't play in ways that make sense or are classifiable. You can't tell what their range is, because they don't even know what a range is. Their betting lines don't make sense because they aren't poker players, and often aren't even paying attention to the current hand. You really have to play these kinds of games differently, and/or just relax and consider it a night of drinking and random bingo instead of poker.
by jszymborski | 2025-08-12 16:23:10+00:00
> Over 99% of the links had no recent activity.

"Recent" is defined within the last year. If the Wayback Machine adopted this logic, it would be useless.

The security concerns were largely addressed by not accepting new links. This was a cost cutting measure, plain and simple. I think we all agree that a goo.gl shortener was a terrible idea to begin with, and my blog post even shows evidence that folks knew this was a bad idea at launch.
by nudgeOrnurture | 2025-08-12 16:23:14+00:00
there's too many good licks in this one.

the issue is, of course, the lying:

from the article:

> We Don’t Participate in Pre-marital or Extra-marital Sex

Yeah, people say that a lot but if you know church people, you know that they are, on average, pretty much like all the other liars.

Except they might hope to get punished for their sins, which does make for some nice and regular kinky evenings, I guess, but that would only be true for people further to the right of the bell curve, if you believe.

Also: the suspense and excitement in fantasies definitely improves the experience. And living free of bullshit other than the classics in the Bible and the consequences of a virtuous and communal life don't sound too bad of a foreplay at all.
by Twisol | 2025-08-12 16:24:12+00:00
"Hypo", meaning low; "glyc-", meaning sugar; and "emia", meaning of the blood. "Low sugar of the blood". (With apologies to chubbyemu.)

Since "typo" comes from "typography", it roughly means "symbolic". So "typoglycemia" should mean "symbolic sugar of the blood". Low typos in your blood would be "hypotypemia".

I have no idea why "typoglycemia" refers to a human ability to autocorrect, but it brings me joy, so I'm not going to question it ^_^
by brianswichkow | 2025-08-12 16:24:38+00:00
While preparing my divorce property disclosures, an unusual line item made it clear I’d need defensible, consistent fair market values for everything I owned. I built an AI-powered workflow using Gemini for real-time inventory, Make to parse receipts, and Clay to unify data and apply valuation logic. The result is a scalable system that could be applied to insurance claims, estate planning, or any large-scale asset valuation.
by nyeah | 2025-08-12 16:24:50+00:00
I'm feeling a little frustrated by the derail. My complaint is about some small group claiming to have a monopoly on a normal human faculty, in this case rationality. The small group might well go on to claim that people outside the group lack rationality. That would be absurd. The mental health profession do not claim to be immune from mental illness themselves, they do not claim that people outside their circle are mentally unhealthy, and they do not claim that their particular treatment is necessary for mental health.

I guess it's possible you might be doing some deep ironic thing by providing a seemingly sincere example of what I'm complaining about. If so it was over my head but in that case I withdraw "derail"!
by lazide | 2025-08-12 16:24:52+00:00
Eh, it’s kind of the opposite for me. I’ve never seen any legitimate vote in a democracy > 90%. Even if you put ‘we agree that puppies are cute and fluffy and deserve all the pets’, > 10% will vote the other way purely out contrarian ness. Or because they’re cat people. Or because fuck you, that’s why.

And there is no way you can convince me 91% of New Zealand voters, where this is the common policy stance [https://www.mbie.govt.nz/business-and-employment/employment-...], had any clue they were voting for forced hard labor for prisoners. Especially considering how relatively cushy the current standards are for prisoners.

I’m sure with enough lawyers and PR folks could also write (and pass) a CA popular thingy which calls for all males to be kicked in the groin too.

That said, I’m also a big believer in voters getting what they voted for - only way they’ll learn. Besides, a few kicks to the groin might teach them a lesson!
by beders | 2025-08-12 16:24:52+00:00
They are hallucinating word finding algorithms.

They are not "empathetic". There isn't even a "they".

We need to do better educating people about what a chatbot is and isn't and what data was used to train it.

The real danger of LLMs is not that they secretly take over the world.

The danger is that people think they are conscious beings.
by anthonyronning | 2025-08-12 16:25:01+00:00
I see. Yeah I'm not against usage-based in general. Just specific to database's, especially in my instance where it feels like I'm paying more for the luxury of having a scale-to-zero feature that I've quickly grown beyond.

I'll reiterate that it's not the only reason why I'm moving off of them. Reliability, performance, insights, etc.

It just happens to be a lot more affordable too.