MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jeroenhd | 2025-09-01 12:14:22+00:00
AWS is useful for big business. Automatic multi region failover and hosted databases may be expensive, but they're a massive pain to manually configure and an easy footgun if you're not used to doing that sort of thing. Plus, with Amazon you already have public toolkits to use those features with all of your services, so you don't need to figure how to integrate/what open source system to use to accomplish all of that. Plus, if you go for your own physical server, you need to arrange parts and maintenance windows for any hardware that will eventually fail.

If all you need is "good enough" reliability and basic compute power (which I think is good enough for many businesses, considering AWS isn't exactly outage free either), you're probably better off getting a server or renting one from a cheap cloud host. If you're promising five nines of uptime for some reason, you may want to reconsider.
by jrimbault | 2025-09-01 12:14:26+00:00
I've been quite taken with Go these last few months and I wish the western world had more skilled players. The Asian servers do not do much (if any) i18n, they don't need to, they aren't many players outside Asia.

I've been fortunate that one of my high school friends is a 4 dan EGF player and that he has taken lots of time to play with me and teach me. But I can see other beginners struggling with the basics because they're only playing other low-skilled players.

I wish the western world paid Go more attention, it's a beautiful game with a really nice balance.
by adrian_b | 2025-09-01 12:14:30+00:00
Colossus did not influence ENIAC.

However, there is a connection between British electronics and ENIAC, which is the same, but happened in parallel, with the connection between earlier British electronics and Colossus.

During the decade before WWII, several fundamental circuits of digital electronics had been invented in UK, e.g. several kinds of electronic counters and the Schmitt trigger.

Those circuits have been invented mainly for use in experiments of nuclear physics and elementary particle physics, e.g. for counting events from radiation detectors, for which the existing mechanical counters and accumulators were too slow. The first digital electronic circuit, the Eccles-Jordan trigger, had also been invented by British physicists, but another decade earlier, at the end of WWI.

The British digital electronic circuits were a source of inspiration for the circuits used in the first (special-purpose) digital electronic computer, the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, which was built at Iowa State University immediately before WWII (the published British research papers were explicitly quoted in the ABC design documents).

In turn, the digital electronic circuits used in the Atanasoff-Berry Computer were a source of inspiration for those used in ENIAC, because a member of the Mauchly-Eckert team had visited the designers of ABC, inquiring about its components, even if later they did not credit any source of inspiration for the ENIAC design (the Mauchly-Eckert team founded a startup for making electronic computers, so they were wary of providing any information that would make their work appear as less original and not patentable and they were also extremely annoyed by the publication of the von Neumann report, which explained for everyone how to make an electronic computer, so it created very soon a great number of competitors for the company of Mauchly and Eckert).
by 986aignan | 2025-09-01 12:14:54+00:00
The problem is that if what "really counts" is too vaguely defined, then it's hard to pin down and argue the point.

Virtual memory probably isn't what you meant, but take something like user privilege separation. It's usually considered a good idea to not run software as root. To interpret the statement generously, privilege separation does restrict immediate freedom: you have to escalate whenever you want to do system-level changes. But I think josephg's statement:

> Sandboxing gives users more control. Not less. Even if they use that control to turn off sandboxing, they still have more freedom because they get to decide if sandboxing is enabled or disabled.

can be directly transposed to user privilege separation. While it's true that escalating to root is more of a hassle than just running everything as root, in another sense it does provide more control because the user can run arbitrary code without being afraid that it will nuke their OS; and more freedom because you could always just run everything as root anyway.

Maybe josephg's sense of freedom and control is what you're saying there is a trade-off between. But the case of privilege separation shows that some trade-offs are such that they provide a lot of security for only a little bit of inconvenience, and that's a trade-off most people are willing to make.

Sometimes the trade-off may seem unacceptable because OS or software support isn't there yet. Like Vista's constant UAC annoyances in the case of privilege separation/escalation. But that doesn't mean that the fundamental idea of privilege levels is bad or that it must necessarily trade off too much convenience for control.

I think that's also what josephg is suggesting about sandboxing. He says that the clipboard problem could probably be fixed; then you say, "but there are other examples". What remains to be shown is whether the examples are inherent to sandboxing and must degrade a capabilities/sandbox approach to a level where the trade-off is unacceptable to most.
by joshstrange | 2025-09-01 12:15:09+00:00
I know little about this space but the idea of “reverse-hyper-threading” (my favorite description from the article) is interesting for sure with so many workloads being single-core-bound. Kind of lets you have the best of both worlds with cores joining and splitting as needed to adjust to the current workload.

Of course I’m sure there are a ton of caveats but the idea alone is interesting, and somewhat surprising coming from Intel. Obviously filing a patent is way easier than shipping so Intel still has plenty of room to disappoint but cool idea nonetheless.
Ask HN: What are your struggles with tool-calling and local models?
by juanviera23 | 2025-09-01 12:15:39+00:00
Hey folks

I've been diving into tool-calling with some local models and honestly, it's been a bit of a grind. It feels like getting consistent, reliable tool use out of local models is a real challenge.

What is your experience?

Personally, I'm running into issues like models either not calling the right tool, or calling it correctly but then returning plain text instead of a properly formatted tool call.

It's frustrating when you know your prompting is solid because it works flawlessly with something like an OpenAI model.

I'm curious to hear about your experiences. What are your biggest headaches with tool-calling?

What models have you found to be surprisingly good (or bad) at it?

Are there any specific prompting techniques or libraries that have made a difference for you?

Is it just a matter of using specialized function-calling models?

How much does the client or inference engine impact success?

Just looking to hear experiences to see if it's worth the investment to build something that makes this easier for people!
by vel0city | 2025-09-01 12:15:49+00:00
I get that what is "pocketable" can change over time. After all, you go back in time to 2007 and show them an XL iPhone and they'd think you're insane to suggest people see these as pocketable.

But these handheld gaming consoles are huge. They're pretty thick since they have larger cooling systems. They have moulded grips that make these bulbous protrusions on the sides. They have joysticks that stick out and catch on things. Meanwhile they're much more fragile than most mass market phones out there.
by Zak | 2025-09-01 12:16:29+00:00
> Apples decision to ban sideloading is a huge part of how they became the most popular phone maker in the us

I'm skeptical. A robust permission model limiting the damage an ill-behaved app was surely part of it, as was the existence of a curated app store. The relative rarity of people directly installing apps on Android suggests Apple didn't really need to force the use of that curated store.
by hu3 | 2025-09-01 12:16:37+00:00
> Our final analysis showed a reduction of over 400 vCPU cores, leading to a projected annual infrastructure cost saving of over $300,000.

Dam those are some expensive vCPUs. $750 per vCPU per year. It probably accounts the memory savings too but still.

It would be nice to read about what they did try before rewritting. They mention flamegraphs but nothing specific.

In my Go experience while working with fintech, Go API services can become CPU bound with excessive context switching if GOMAXPROCS is not well tunned in hot services and also with things like string maps. These tend to be easy to catch with pprof. I've had some 2x speedups with those. Certainly they already checked those quick wins I presume.
by dazzawazza | 2025-09-01 12:17:18+00:00
I think you are correct. I work in game dev. Almost all code is in C/C++ (with some in Python and C#).

LLMs are nothing more than rubber ducking in game dev. The code they generate is often useful as a starting point or to lighten the mood because it's so bad you get a laugh. Beyond that it's broadly useless.

I put this down to the relatively small number of people who work in game dev resulting in relatively small number of blogs from which to "learn" game dev.

Game Dev is a conservative industry with a lot of magic sauce hidden inside companies for VERY good reasons.
by omnimus | 2025-09-01 12:17:25+00:00
I can't know whats Google plan nor do I care much. I am just saying that it is quite apparent that Google is trying to replace Search with LLMs because they are already trying to do it.

One would think that they have a plan why they are doing it. They are the ones seeing the numbers.

We can speculate here about their risks or the stupidity of the plan... but i wouldn't say Google zero is some conspiration theory - flawed strategy maybe. I don't think people would be surprised if google.com became big "ask gemini" field. Many users probably wouldn't even notice.
by ragebol | 2025-09-01 12:17:31+00:00
> This landmark 300MW battery storage site is capable of powering up to 680,000 homes with instantaneous power over two hours

Power is 300MW (300000000 Joules/second), which it can deliver for 2 hours, so capacity (energy contained in the device) is 600 MWh (or 2160000000000 Joules)
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-09-01 12:17:56+00:00
I made my bag and got out in 2023. I feel so lucky that I'm the exact age that I am, to have worked in the ~25 best years of this field. It was fun and there was the assumption that technology would empower people, before that evolved into just a hope that technology would empower people. And now it's inescapable to see that technology empowers business at the expense of people. I don't know how I would enjoy it or even do it anymore.
by peanutz454 | 2025-09-01 12:18:14+00:00
You are not wrong, and I am not trying to be pedantic. But I want to take this opportunity to bring up an interesting phenomenon.

While the Moon is tidally locked with Earth, a slight wobble in the Moon's motion (an effect called lunar libration) allows us to see more than 50% of its surface over time.

Therefore for an observer positioned on the Moon's limb (the boundary between the near and far sides), this wobble would cause the Earth to slowly rise just above the horizon and then dip back down. This movement would be extremely slow, taking place over many days, and would only involve a portion of the Earth's surface, not the entire planet rising completely into the sky. But it is the closest thing to earth-rise and set, you can get from the surface of the moon.

The wobble is caused by the moon speeding towards earth (on approach in its elliptical orbit) and then slowing down (on receding away) while still having a constant spin on it axis.
by Rendello | 2025-09-01 12:18:47+00:00
For the first time in months, I'm occupied enough to not even think of Youtube, and when I look at it in the evening nothing appeals to me (the opposite). When I scroll on shorts, I just feel dissatisfied and close them.

But generally, I'm on there hours a day, enjoying none of it. Shorts, long videos, etc. I do the same with the front page of Reddit, even though 99% of the posts there bother me. If I block those, it's Hacker News, Facebook, or even LinkedIn. Ultimately, I think a lot of compulsions and addictions, technology or otherwise, come from a lack of purpose or joy in life.
by rsynnott | 2025-09-01 12:19:14+00:00
> With a total capacity of 600MWh, Thurrock Storage is capable of powering up to 680,000 homes, and can help to balance supply and demand by soaking up surplus clean electricity and discharging it instantaneously when the grid needs it.

I mean, I get what they’re saying, but I’d certainly hope it is not capable of discharging 600MWh _instantaneously_!
by avianlyric | 2025-09-01 12:19:14+00:00
That’s a different kettle of fish, and to that I say, good luck.

Regulators are one of the entities pushing for these types of limitations. It’s a natural consequence of doing a risk assessment, very hard to justify not applying these limits when explaining to a regulator how you keep your customer funds safe. I’m speaking from experience here having worked with a team that attempted exactly that, but ultimately ended up adding jailbreak/rooting detection anyway.
by xtiansimon | 2025-09-01 12:19:22+00:00
I feel you. Personally, I just have too much going on. It’s making me feel tired mentally, and I just want to tune in and drop out. Come Monday, I regret having not done this or that, more productive, thing. I say go with the flow. When I’m ready, I’ll just not want to doom scroll Reddit. Haha.
by benjiro | 2025-09-01 12:20:24+00:00
> At Hetzner, you can rent a machine with 48 cores and 128GB of RAM for the same money.

The problem that Hetzner and a lot of hardware providing hosts have, is the lack of affordable flexibility.

Hetzner their design is based upon a base range of standardized products. This can only be upgraded within a pre-approved range of upgrade options (limited to storage/memory).

Upgrades are often a mixed bag of carefully designed "upgrade paths". As you can expect, upgrades are not cheap. Doubling the storage on a base server, often increases the price of your server by 50 to 75%. The typical customizing will cost you dearly.

This is where AWS wins a lot more. Yes, they are expensive as hell, but you often are not stuck to a base config and a limited upgrade path. The ability to scale beyond what Hetzner can offer is there, and your not forced to overbuy from the start. Transferring between servers is a few buttons and done. With Hetzner, if you did not overspec from the start, your going to do those fun server migrations.

The ironic part is, that buying your own hardware and running it yourself, often ends up paying back within a 8~12 month periode (not counting electricity / internet). And you maintain a lot more flexibility.

* You want to use bifurcation, go for it.

* You want to use consumer 4TB nvme's for second layer read storage (what hetzner refuses to offer as they limited those to 2TB and only one a few servers), go for it.

* You want a 10Gbit interlink between your server, go for it. No need to pay a monthly fee! No need to reserve "future space".

* O, you want a 25Gbit, go for it (hetzner = not possible).

* You want 50Gbit ...

* You want to chuck in a few LLM capable GPUs without breaking the bank...

Its ironic that we are 2025 and Hetzner is stil limited to 1Gbit connection on its hardware, when just about any consumer level hardware has 2.5Gbit by default for years.

Your own hardware gives you the flexibility of AWS and the cost saving beyond Hetzner. Maybe its just my environment, but i see more and more smaller to medium companies going back to their own locally run servers. Not even colocation.

The increase in consumer level fiber, what used to be expensive or not available, has opened the doors for businesses. Most companies do not need insane backbones.

The fact that you can get business fiber 10Gbit for a 100 Euro price in some EU countries (of course never the north), is insane. I even seen some folks combining fiber with starlink & 5G as backup in case their fiber fails/is out.

As long as you fit within a specific usage case that is being offered by Hetzner, they are cheap. But its the moment you step outside that comfort zone, ... This is one of Hetzner weaknesses and where AWS or Self hosted comes back.
by safety1st | 2025-09-01 12:20:36+00:00
> New technology doesn't change anything about social institutions

This is of course demonstrably untrue. Marshall McLuhan devoted his life to illuminating how technology changes society. The printing press, radio, television and the Internet have all undoubtedly changed our social institutions. It's hard to imagine secular democracy ever becoming a thing if we hadn't been able to mass produce books and newspapers, and writing manuscripts had remained mostly under the control of the Church. It seems less probable that the Nazis would have come to power if not for the immense skill Goebbels and Hitler had in the use of radio. And I doubt Trump would have been elected if he hadn't known how to press people's buttons so well on social media.

Let's not forget that more ancient things like fire, agriculture and accounting are also technology that irrevocably changed humanity and put new people in power. Or take a look at how railroads remade American society. Or how sufficiently advanced sailboats placed half the world under the thrall of colonialism...

Absolutely there can exist technologies which are anti-democracy, and surveillance technologies are exactly that. You become afraid to say or write the wrong thing in public, and then to say or write it in private, and then to even think it, and finally the thing is forgotten. I felt like Orwell made the point well enough in 1984.

All that said I don't see technology saving us from our current problems, it needs to be invented, it needs to mature, there needs to be adoption. One might imagine mesh networking and censorship proof distributed messaging or something having an influence on society but we simply aren't there yet.
by palata | 2025-09-01 12:20:55+00:00
I genuinely don't really get it. If someone tells me "here is an app I wrote, it is not open source, I won't tell you who I am and you need to sideload it", I most definitely won't install it. Who would do that?

If it is open source, then I can build and install it myself. If the developer gets verified, then I can sideload it.

I totally agree that device manufacturers should be forced by law to make it possible to run an alternative OS like GrapheneOS, but this topic gets virtually no attention. Whereas everybody seems very pissed about the sideloading story.
by p_l | 2025-09-01 12:21:16+00:00
People have rose-tinted glasses for BIOS, have no idea of all sorts of hidden complexity that was involved in it, assumptions, etc. Or all the broken ideas that vendors put into BIOS-era firmware [0].

People also rarely think of the complexity inherent in having an open platform where owner of a device does not need to build/acquire a custom OS build for their machine, and thus see cases of "enough to run something they care about" and think that's enough.

[0] I still remember BIOS config menus and PCI card option roms that effectively had stripped down windows 3.0 in them, or an approximation of it. And how it meant presence of Intel PCI hardware RAID controller in certain server meant I needed a full crash cart or remote KVM to fix RAID config.
by QuadmasterXLII | 2025-09-01 12:21:35+00:00
It is a little rough. On reflection, the scenario when apple would sell you a locked down phone and google would sell you a side-loadable phone was ideal- the locked down phone was in my opinion better for phone tasks, but apple couldn’t abuse that too much or I’d just switch to android. A scenario where everyone is selling locked phones could remove that necessary check.
by mmis1000 | 2025-09-01 12:23:19+00:00
Switch 1 require the charger to support pd2 12v to charge at all. Some changer may decide to skip that voltage, and support only 9v and 15v. So Switch is not happy about it.

Every device in my room except for switch supports more than one voltage config. Wondering why on the earth switch decided to handle voltage setting like this.

Usually, pd charger will label their supported voltage config. And you can read that label to find out whether a charger will work with switch or not.

Source: I do use my phone charger to charge switch during traveling
by stephen_g | 2025-09-01 12:25:12+00:00
A USB-A device obviously wouldn’t have been designed for anything more than 5V. But anything with a USB-C socket is living in a world where a faulty source could accidentally give it a higher voltage. At that point it’s just about your tolerance for risk - maybe for something worth $100 or less and not supporting PD you can skip out and if there’s a faulty charger that blows it up then whatever, but for something selling for a few hundred dollars (like the Switch, or phones, etc.) it’s worth the 50c in BOM cost for the extra protection…
by brnt | 2025-09-01 12:25:37+00:00
1. TOTP (the only 2F we could be discussing) is derived in a specific way by e.g. Keepass, which has been audited. There is an RFC for this. I don't see the vuln here. 2. But this info is transferred just once, so the method relies on either intercepted both (pw and TOTP seed) that one time. Far less likely than intercepting just the pw every time you login. With a compromised or insecure server: all bets were off already. 3. Even if you have safe service-dependent passwords, as one should, 2F renders it useless in certain scenario's, if all they have is the password. 4. Yes, factors to the keyfile. It does not have to be just a password.

While it seems a reasonable assumption that 2F seed and password are stored alongside eachother, the vuln does not need to expose both. We don't know. But we do know more factors means more opportunity for 1 factor to be accidentally safe.
by mlrtime | 2025-09-01 12:25:39+00:00
It's not theater, your IT department just isn't implementing it correctly. I recently switched jobs and gave up one macbook pro for another (work issued).

Company A gave me sudo access and I could do anything I wanted.

Company B locks down everything, no sudo, no brew, nothing. But I do get a big VM with root to do anything I want. There is an approved "appstore" of many different varieties of IDEs/tools.

TLDR: Not having brew is not a problem, and /can be/ a better experience if done right.

It took a couple weeks to shift the mental model but I have no problems. The dev experience is quite good because they provide all the libraries you need to do your job.
Show HN: Vulners Lookup – CVE highlights on any page (hover for CVSS/EPSS/PoCs)
by isox | 2025-09-01 12:25:47+00:00
We built a minimal browser extension for vulnerability readers: it highlights CVE IDs anywhere and on hover shows CVSS/EPSS, KEV, and references/exploits count. No login, no paywall. Looking for feedback on edge cases and data you want in the hover.