MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How can I test FTS5 engine in SQLite3?
by mysh | 2025-09-16 09:19:48+00:00
I'm working on a fairly long article about me trying to find a combination of PRAGMAs for fastest INSERT/SELECT queries that specifically target the FTS5 engine. However, the more testing and benchmarking I do, the more unsure I am of the results and how I should word things.

---

For example, there's "threads = N" PRAGMA in SQLite3, it sets an upper bound on the number of auxiliary threads that a prepared statement is allowed to launch to assist with a query. My instinct is that more is better, but:

```

Value, Insert Time (s), StdDev, Rows/Second, Degradation, Query Avg (ms)

1, 2.68, ±0.08, 3732, 1.43x, 0.8

0, 2.72, ±0.18, 3689, 1.51x, 0.8

2, 2.85, ±0.03, 3515, 1.30x, 0.8

```

So it's not always the case.

('Degradation' checks the timings of the first N inserts and compares them with the latest N inserts to determine how much slower they have become (varies by configs, too). I should probably rename Rows/Second to something else and show N rows/s at start and the end of the run)

---

And for the second example, you can set a "synchronous" PRAGMA to OFF, NORMAL, FULL or EXTRA: https://www.sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_synchronous

However, sometimes in specific configurations, EXTRA outperforms NORMAL, which makes no sense to me (even after multiple runs; every benchmark is performed 3 times). Though there is some randomness introduced by CPU vs. I/O bound transitions and etc.

---

I feel that if I publish my findings as they are, it might give people the wrong idea. Additionally, my results vary for HDD-only and SSD-only systems, as well as for 86 and ARM differences in random places. So:

- How can I ensure that, if I publish my findings, people won't be misled by the idea that "THIS – pointing at the most unsafe configuration possible – is absolute best configuration and we should use always use it"?

- How can I find out why, for example, synchronous configurations that are doing more work are sometimes faster than the ones that do less?

- Currently, I test 94 configurations three times each. So even though it is plenty, I still feel I need to have more, but at the same time who will read results of 94 benchmarks?

p.s. Oh I also made this image for the article that will be shown on link previews, thoughts? :) https://i.imgur.com/04Mvx5Q.png
by bambax | 2025-09-16 09:19:56+00:00
For some reason, I really hate when websites use "my" or "I" instead of "your" and "you"; it feels patronizing, like they're trying to help us understand what's happening.

Also the example given at the end of the article has a simple solution:

> Do you want to share your profile photo?

=> YES / NO

Why would we need to repeat the question in that case? This is not ambiguous.

Ambiguities sometimes exist, though; my favorite is this one (not related to what's discussed here):

Do you want to cancel?

=> Ok / Cancel
by aredox | 2025-09-16 09:20:12+00:00
The Reichtag fire was caused by a Communist militant- at the time where "Communist" meant litterally "Stalinist".

Even if the Charlie Kirk murderer was a crimson red trans gay pedophilic crypto scammer and card-carrying Democrat personally instructed and paid by Obama, the point here is "using him as a pretext to destroy all opposition under false pretense".
by takluyver | 2025-09-16 09:20:28+00:00
I think governments funding software development could be a useful counterweight in an industry dominated by a few giant corporations, similar to how lots of countries have state funded media alongside commercial options.

But the EU forking Android is not a remotely realistic starting point. How do you persuade manufacturers to use it? Would Google license its proprietary apps to run on it? How will the small team of devs cope with whatever changes are coming in hardware next year? Forking Android is easy, making your fork a viable alternative is almost impossible.

In theory the EU could throw its weight around and demand that Google & OEMs work with 'EUdroid' if they want to sell phones in Europe. But that would be a massive political fight, much bigger than funding a few developers.
by ojr | 2025-09-16 09:20:34+00:00
Thats why it won over the more popular Angular 1 at the time. Angular was introducing directives as a new way to handle dependencies, React chose to stay close to the new ES6 syntax with imports, of course I was going to chose the language that was closer to ES6. I have a feeling React will be closer to the EcmaScript/Javascript standard than Svelte in the future as well ES7/ES8/ES9. Also React Native and React is very easy with LLMs. I am able to build cross platform apps with feature parity which is important because some of us need to make programs for the most popular form factor, mobile, instead of a desktop website.
by WA | 2025-09-16 09:20:40+00:00
Web components are an implementation detail. They don't bring anything framework-like to the table. The most important being: reactivity. You have to write DOM manipulations imperatively like you did 15 years ago with jQuery. If you don't want that, you gotta bring a wrapper or another reactivity library/framework.

For many use cases, there's not much difference between writing a Web component or an IIFE (Immediately Invoked Function Expression) that attaches your JS functionality to a div somewhere like we wrote JS without jQuery 15 years ago, although Web components are more elegant. But still, they are mostly packaging.

I say this as someone who likes Web components and who created several ones that are used in production. But just yesterday, when I added a new attribute to one of my Web components and wondered for a moment why the new attribute wouldn't get rendered, I realized that I forgot to add the code that imperatively tells the DOM how to update itself. Which is okay, because this is just a small component and it's pretty lightweight. I'd never use a framework for stuff that can be achieved without much effort in vanilla JS.

My point is: selling Web components as a way out of this trap is disingenuous. They don't offer anything at all that is important for modern frontend dev.
by roelschroeven | 2025-09-16 09:20:43+00:00
Software in Dutch has a bit of a tension between je/jouw and u/uw too. Je/jouw sometimes seems to familiar, u/uw too formal. And I feel the balance between the two is different in Flanders vs the Netherlands.

For something like Facebook, it's OK to use je/jouw. But for something like a government website, or perhaps things like banks or insurance companies, je/jouw is not appropriate and u/uw should be used.

I just checked some samples: Facebook uses je/jouw, LinkedIn uses u/uw, government website MyMinfin uses u/uw. That all seems appropriate, so the choice is perhaps not as delicate as I first thought.
by Embeddable | 2025-09-16 09:20:52+00:00
You can still load dashboards in under a second, even if your database takes 30s to respond with the data. Here's how:

Customer-facing dashboards load ok when a handful of people open a dashboard. But with thousands of concurrent users, your database takes a huge hit - and everything loads slow.

This is where pre-aggregation caching comes in.

Instead of scanning raw events on every click, the work is done once, stored in an aggregated form, and served instantly. That’s what makes our embedded dashboards feel fast at scale, not fragile.

Here’s the full breakdown of how it works (with examples).
by fawkesalbus | 2025-09-16 09:20:55+00:00
@zahlman your responses here are amazing and really articulate. I sincerely appreciate the effort. Thanks!

Most people around the world who are criticizing Charlie’s philosophy and beliefs have never watched a long form interview with him. Probably picked up a few sound bites or clips from here and there. Also there are many who are blinded by hatred towards him, to the point that they are drawing comparisons between him and Hitler. So it is hard to get through to such people. As someone with Jewish ancestry it is difficult and saddening to see this dilution.

Nevertheless once again I appreciate your responses in this thread!
by plainOldText | 2025-09-16 09:21:00+00:00
From the article:

> In summary:

> Use “your” when communicating to the user

> Use “my” when the user is communicating to us

I could see how this makes sense with dialogs.

But for UI elements? Should I name say a tab “My Pictures” and not “Your Pictures” because clicking on said tab I’m communicating to the system I want to see my pictures?
by tialaramex | 2025-09-16 09:21:11+00:00
> "Overall, 340/350 cases of primary cervical cancer confirmed by surgical staging tested HC2 positive (97.2%)." Ie 2.8% (~3%) were considered true HPV negative by this testing.

That study literally explains each of the ten excess you say are "true negative", and only puts one in that bucket. You've made the same error as the author you cited previously. You're conflating HC2 negative ("it wasn't seen in this common test") with HPV negative ("it wasn't present")

They start with 371 smears and access to the patients, in all 371 cases there was also surgical biopsy.

* 340 of the smears say HPV with HC2. So we're agreed those are HPV positive.

* 21 of the biopsies aren't Cervical cancer. If cancer cells from other nearby tissues spread and and we find that in a cervical biopsy that's extremely bad news but it is NOT cervical cancer.

* 5 have non high-risk HPV. HPV-53, HPV-70, HPV-73

* 4 do have high-risk HPV even though the HC2 assay was negative

* Which leaves just one true negative case.

Now the 5 aren't proof of anything, and you can (and doubtless will) argue that it's just a coincidence. Uncleared infections with HPV aren't rare, so we can't rule that out, but equally it is wrong to insist it must be a coincidence. You'd need a mechanism, present only in the high risk variants to explain why these are innocent bystanders or else that's correlation.

The four high risk cases are even more clear cut, that's simply a false negative. Insisting you get to count these as true negative is crazy. HC2 was not adequate to detect the virus here, these patients were HC2-negative but they had high risk HPV anyway, the HC2 assay just didn't see it.
by jeroenhd | 2025-09-16 09:21:11+00:00
UBports (the maintained fork of the dead Ubuntu Touch project) runs fine with systemd/upstart/wayland.

Hell, my watch runs Tizen and that's running a bog standard Wayland + PulseAudio + systemd setup: https://docs.tizen.org/platform/porting/system/#systemd

With the right kernel drivers, configuration, and tweaks, with a well-configured userland on top of that, you can run the "normal" Linux stack in a mobile device.

Getting applications to conform with an API that won't let them drain the battery in the background to make sure notifications don't arrive two seconds too late is much harder. Desktop applications don't really like being suspended/resumed the way mobile applications do.
by kabouseng | 2025-09-16 09:21:17+00:00
Its because "reality has a surprising amount of detail". It is actually the rare occurrence where a simple solution solves a complex problem. I link an excellent article that has been posted on HN multiple times, that explains exactly this.[1] (not mine)

[1] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
by mschuster91 | 2025-09-16 09:22:11+00:00
> The simple alternative is just around the corner: sprinkle vanilla JavaScript where it’s needed and don’t build your identity around a framework. That mindset is hard to swallow, though (especially when companies have spent millions convincing developers their stack is the only way forward).

A few things to note here:

1. Given anything more complex than showing a blog post... eventually the complexity of your homebrew vanilla JS will grow until you re-invent React, but unlike React, your implementation hasn't had millions of users ironing out the kinks over well over a decade.

2. using an industry-standard framework makes developers fungible, and that is why companies push so hard for it. You need to develop something because marketing wants it, at best finished yesterday? Hire a freelancer, as long as you keep your code reasonable they won't have much onboarding time, and your own staff can pick up from there.

And that's not just valid for React, it's valid for a bunch more things. Wordpress comes to my mind first and foremost - yes it's PHP of questionable quality and with loads of legacy garbage, but even in the most remote outback village you'll be able to find some college kid doing wordpress stuff for local businesses as a side hustle. Symfony and Laravel for more complex applications. And for anything Java, there's a reason Spring + Tomcat have grown to where they are, it's just the same.
by Fraterkes | 2025-09-16 09:23:02+00:00
This is a point that's probably very obvious to many Americans, but something I hadn't really considered about the second amendment and the like is that freedom is kind of zero-sum: a consequence of the right to bear arms is that armed guards might have to be stationed at schools, and that cops treat everyone like a potential armed criminal.

This last shooting will probably not lead to a meaningful change in gun-control, but it will create pretexts for this administration to crack down on certain political movements.
by patates | 2025-09-16 09:23:11+00:00
Javascript has warts, React has warts, Svelte has warts, Python has warts... It's easy to shoot yourself in the foot in any tech - it's leaky abstractions all the way down after all.

useEffect usage needs to die, yes. I don't think it's a case against React, given its age.

Otherwise, using React is straightforward. I started coding in it without reading any docs. As someone who used Dojo, prototype, ext.js, jQuery (+UI), Backbone.js, knockout (still has a special place), Mithril, the classic angular, vue (2), svelte, Marko and even Solid (I'm not totally sold on signals), React is the most straightforward by a mile.

Is it the most performant? Hell no. Is it the one with the least gotchas/warts? Nope. Concise? A giant no. Batteries included? It depends on what you're looking for...

But I can just be productive with it, and it makes sense.
by raverbashing | 2025-09-16 09:23:42+00:00
> Meanwhile, frameworks with real innovations struggle for adoption. Svelte compiles away framework overhead. Solid delivers fine-grained reactivity without virtual-DOM tax. Qwik achieves instant startup via resumability.

Yes, very cool

But if you pick any of them you risk running into gotchas that few people know about (and their developers ignore or handwave), into possible lack of documentation, into a lack of ecosystem
by tsimionescu | 2025-09-16 09:23:43+00:00
Windows has been calling it Documents (and has had separate Pictures and Videos top-level folders) since Windows Vista, in 2007. So you're almost 20 years late with your complaint. And the "My Documents" name was introduced in Windows 95 SP2 (according to Wikipedia, at least), so by now Windows has had separate Documents, Pictures, and Videos folders for the majority of its lifetime.
by cleartext412 | 2025-09-16 09:23:53+00:00
Note that I didn't say "cheap". If price difference comes from manufacturer's hope of selling its cloud service, then the time and effort required to set it up is not worth the money.

If I were to solve one-time task of keeping an eye on someone indoors I would go with USB camera (if lighting conditions allows even the laptop's build in), which is going to be cheaper than ones with IP and WiFi support.
by zarzavat | 2025-09-16 09:24:19+00:00
> I have literally never heard an argument made for react that included merits of the framework itself.

That doesn't mean that those merits don't exist. Most of the new React competitors are just reinventions of HTML templating done client-side. React has been dominant for so long that there's a whole generation of frontend devs who don't remember why it was invented in the first place. Writing loops in HTML? We tried that, it sucks!

It's telling that the "new" frameworks have no ideas other than to revert to ideas that were tried in the past. React is so modern it makes its replacements feel dated.
by randomtoast | 2025-09-16 09:24:44+00:00
The name comes from Latin "gemini" meaning "twins," referring to the mythological Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, sons of Leda. In mythology, Pollux was immortal, Castor mortal; their story is connected with themes of brotherhood and sacrifice.

Project Gemini was NASA's second human spaceflight program (1961-1966), preceding Apollo. It developed spaceflight techniques such as orbital rendezvous and docking, essential for the Moon landing.

Gemini is also a lightweight internet protocol and associated ecosystem (the Gemini Protocol), designed as a middle ground between Gopher and the modern web (HTTP/HTTPS), emphasizing simplicity and privacy.

It is also the name of Google's multimodal AI model, successor to Bard (announced 2023).
by somedude895 | 2025-09-16 09:24:48+00:00
Holy wow, where do you spend your time to arrive at that narrative? I read both right and left wing media to get a balanced view, but I haven't seen anyone that far off the deep end yet. The most reasonable actual fact from this whole thing that I've read is that the guy was terminally online and that's what drove him crazy. Some people could learn from that.
by tdeck | 2025-09-16 09:24:51+00:00
The era of making money from blogging was about 18-20 years ago unfortunately. Perhaps making videos on YouTube could yield better results, although unfortunately I don't know much about the Nepalese audience.

Another option would be to build a mini SaaS like the folks on IndieHackers. Find something business focused you can launch in some kind of add-on app store (e.g. Shopify app). The most important thing is to have a plan to find customers in that case.
by lelanthran | 2025-09-16 09:25:34+00:00
> How about a backend-supporting combobox,

Interesting. How would this specification look, in context of browser standards?

> a standardized date picker across browsers

Not possible for the majority of use cases. Too much variation in what the date is used for and how the display must be constrained.

For example the lack of constraining the dates makes it unusable in most contexts (flights, hotels, meetings, etc).

Then those constraints need to interact with other elements on the page, like a checkbox for "weekends only" or similar.

Even without constraints, sometimes you want the user to go next/previous by years, sometimes by hours, etc

Date picking is just not general enough to have as a single component.
by card_zero | 2025-09-16 09:26:11+00:00
> HIG

Thing is, the Human Interface Guidelines were a sort of contract with the user, and the same goes for the ethos or culture or principles a big company has, if any. So in a sense they do have a connection with customers, via "community", if they choose to do so (and choose to be sincere about it instead of faking). I mean a business can be bigger than a local handyman and still go down the friendly path, for years potentially, until it decides that the friendly strategy was wasteful and streamlines it away.
by natmaka | 2025-09-16 09:27:29+00:00
> China currently builds more renewables than nuclear. I said it is irrelevant. Those are different things

No: nuclear and renewables are electricity-generating equipment types, and all the debate is about the proportion of renewables and nuclear in the final system. Seeing them as disconnected (in different universes) is not even funny. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udJJ7n_Ryjg

> unless you don't understand the irrelevance of nameplate capacity with intermittent renewables.

This perspective dates back a time when transporting electricity was expensive (lines, losses...), storing it also was expensive ( ), fossil fuels and nuclear were the only way to obtain gridpower... all this is obsolete. Explanations: https://cleantechnica.com/2022/07/25/will-renewable-energy-d...

> China is also currently seeing the bottom drop out of their renewables industry

Source? (I lived in China from mid-2017 to mid-2025) The renewables industry there is, as in nearly every nation, in much better state than nearly any other one.

> The EPR2 projects could not even have started in 2022, because he law that prohibits increasing nuclear capacity beyond the currently installed 63.2GW was only repealed in March 2023

Nope. This law stated about active production capacity, and never forbade any reactor-building project. The very first EPR (Flamanville-3) project was running while this law was instated (2015) and did not stop. It simply forbade it to start without other reactor with at least a total equivalent powerplate value to be shutdown.

Recent news: https://www.usinenouvelle.com/article/pas-d-epr2-en-service-...

> they still have to deal with a lot of the fallout of the failed "soft exit" policy.

No such thing as a "fallout": France was waiting for its first EPR since work started on the field (2007), it was due to launch a series, after being delivered in 2012, and albeit the project is a huge failure (12 years late, 23.7+ billion € spent with a budget of 3.3) it was not canceled. Moreover the huge 'Grand Carénage' project was not reduced. No reduction either on R&D budgets either (https://www.ecologie.gouv.fr/politiques-publiques/energie-re... ) .

No "fallout", simply a massive failure (EPR Flamanville-3).

I already asked: who did hurt the nuclear industry, when, by doing (or not doing) what, what were the effects?

> Here's a long look: > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isgu-VrD0oM

Which part (a few minutes only, please) of this unsubstantiated rant seems the most convincing to you?
by tomp | 2025-09-16 09:27:33+00:00
This is what I return to every time when someone confuses morality and laws.

100% of Hitler's reign was legal. Everything he did was 100% legal.

Morality is and must be above laws.

(Edit: ChatGPT reminds me that Hitler's post-1933 actions were legal; the earlier (and failed) "Beer Hall Putsch" was illegal.)
by DaiPlusPlus | 2025-09-16 09:29:00+00:00
> The AI and quantum roadmaps are an albatross for a company like this.

I compare those (long-term roadmaps) with automakers showing-off concept-cars, and I like what John Gruber wrote about those[1]:

> Concept designs (and worse, concept videos) are a sign of dysfunction and incompetence at a company. It’s playing make-believe while fooling yourself and your audience into thinking you’re doing something real. Concepts allow designers to ignore real-world constraints: engineering, pricing, manufacturing, legal regulations, sometimes even physics. But dealing with real-world constraints is the hard work of true design. Concepts don’t stem from a lack of confidence. They stem from a dereliction of the actual duties of design.

Similarly, this vacuous concept-of-a roadmap from IBM is clearly free from real-world constraints; constraints like AI telling people to eat rocks...

[1] https://daringfireball.net/2020/01/concept_electronics_show
by warp | 2025-09-16 09:29:52+00:00
I have a tiny HDMI screen which I can power from a USB port which I can plug into a computer if for some reason it is unreachable over the network. (this one: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B1L935ZT ), and a tiny keyboard with built-in track pad (something like https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B9996LA ).

They're stored together in a small box with all needed cables, so they're easy to take with me to whichever computer is having issues. In practice I only use them a few times per year.