MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by noisy_boy | 2025-09-26 12:14:07+00:00
I have dealt with an abomination of a bespoke setup on Redis that was neither simple key/value nor an RDBMS but a grotesque attempt to simulate tables using key prefix with value being a hash containing "references" to entries in other "tables" (with some "special condition" edge cases thrown in to make it spicy). All with next to no documentation. It took adding many unit tests with generous logging to expose the logic and the underlying structure. That complete madness could have been handled in a bog standard way in PostgreSQL with minimal fuss. All for something that didn't even need to be "real-time".

If you see yourself starting with simple key/value setup and then feature requests come in that make you considering having "references" to other keys, it is time to re-consider Redis, not double down on it. Even if you insist on continuing, at the very least, add a service to manage it with some clean abstractions instead of raw-dogging it.
by countrpt | 2025-09-26 12:14:40+00:00
Maybe some might feel that way at first, but it’s also an opportunity and responsibility to educate.

This problem is why enterprise contractual agreements and large compliance systems exist for companies at this scale. Large hosting providers like AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. provide an ability to scale and assurances about risk mitigation, privacy, and availability that are much more viable than each company having to maintain their own private in-house fleets just to create an additional illusion of privacy/security that’s actually no better than tight contractual controls to begin with.

Maybe they need to explain this properly, but servers don’t magically have a lower level of risk just because they’re behind your four walls. In fact, if you lack the experience and expertise, the risk is almost certainly higher depending on your threat model. (And for Apple, their threat model is at the nationstate level. They don’t choose their hosting providers lightly.)
by Implicated | 2025-09-26 12:15:09+00:00
> I’m not sure what the best pattern is for this.

> You can put the relevant docs in your prompt

I've done a lot of experimenting with these various options for how to get the LLM to reference docs. IMO it's almost always best to include in prompt where appropriate.

For a UI lib that I use that's rather new, specifically there's a new version that the LLMs aren't aware of yet, I had the LLM write me a quick python script that just crawls the docs site for the lib and feeds the entire page content back into itself with a prompt describing what it's supposed to do (basically telling it to generate a .md document with the specifics about that thing, whether it's a component or whatever, ie: properties, variants, etc in an extremely brief manner) as well as build an 'index.md' that includes a short paragraph about what the library is and a list of each component/page document that is generated. So in about 60 seconds it spits out a directory full of .md files and I then tell my project-specific LLM (ie: Claude Code or Opencode within the project) to review those files with the intention of updating the CLAUDE.md in the project to instruct that any time we're building UI elements we should refer to the index.md for the library to understand what components are available and when appropriate to use one of them we _must_ review the correlating document first.

Works very very very well. Much better than an MCP server specifically built for that same lib. (Huge waste of tokens, LLM doesn't always use it, etc) Well enough that I just copy/paste this directory of docs into my active projects using that library - if I wasn't lazy I'd package it up but too busy building stuff.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-09-26 12:15:40+00:00
> I just think it's weird that it comes up in an OS thread

The only connection is that writing custom encryption is a thing that smart people like to try their hand at, but its success is defined by the long tail of failure cases not by the cleverness of the happy path. I agree 100% with what rmunn said.

As I said I'm not a filesystem person, but my sense is that filesystem difficulty is also dominated by the long tail of failure cases and for similar reasons. Failure in encryption means you lose control of your data, failure in filesystems mean you lose your data (or maybe you lose liveness/performance) [0]

But really I just meant it in the sense that it's a journey people often go down underestimating just how long it takes. So it's a sort of trap from the project management perspective.

> I'm confused about what 'rolling your own encryption' means at an abstraction level

It cuts through many abstractions. You should definitely not define your own crypto primitives. You also shouldn't define your own login flow. You shouldn't design a custom JWT system, etc. You probably shouldn't write your own crypto library unless there's not one in your language, in which case you should probably be wrapping a trusted library in C or C++, etc. The higher you go in abstraction, the more it's okay to design an alternative. But any abstraction can introduce a weakness so the risk is always there.

[0] Ordinarily you still have backups, which makes file system failures potentially less final than encryption failures. But what if the filesystem holding your backup root keys fails. Then the encryption wasn't a failure but you've potentially crypto shredded your entire infrastructure.
by sestep | 2025-09-26 12:16:11+00:00
It's similar to the Rust example from my post: there are no anonymous records, so in order to be able to construct something with named fields, you need to first define those record types outside. In contrast, my proposed syntax depends on already having anonymous record types like OCaml and TypeScript do, but avoids the extra boilerplate required by separating types from binding forms as shown in my TypeScript example.
by surgical_fire | 2025-09-26 12:16:34+00:00
This is HN, it is unsurprising that you will find complaints of people who think governments are icky. You know, the usual libertarian bullshit.

I lived in countries that have mandatory unique IDs, and countries that don't. Typically the countries that do not are more a pain in the ass to deal with, because institutions will proxy to the next best thing in the absense of an actual ID, typically documents that are not mandatory and not supposed to be used as ID, but end up being used like that anyway.
by chromatin | 2025-09-26 12:17:23+00:00
Partially true, and the answer to that is runway -- it will be a very long time before all the other specialties are fully augmented. With respect to "non-surgical" you may be underestimating the number and variety of procedures performed by non-surgeons (e.g. Internal Medicine physicians) -- thyroid biopsy, bronchoscopy, endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography, liquid nitrogen ablation of skin lesion, bone marrow aspiration, etc.

The other answer is that AI will not hold your hand in the ICU, or share with you how their mother felt when on the same chemo regimen that you are prescribing.
by pavlov | 2025-09-26 12:18:12+00:00
The two-column layout is quite confusing here.

You're supposed to read the entire left-hand column first, then scroll back up where it continues with "Presage had an excellent, seasoned lead Mac programmer..."

This works in print where you can guarantee that both columns fit on the page, but on the web it's just weird.

The columns are responsive, so a quick usability to fix is to make your browser window narrow enough that the other column goes away.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-09-26 12:18:32+00:00
> Britannica, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries, as well as the etymology of the word agree that «violence» means the use of «physical force».

Interestingly, some of those also agree that it does not require the use of force. That some descriptions say physical force does not mean other descriptions are wrong. Here are some cherry-picked descriptions of what the word violence is used to mean:

> Extreme or powerful emotion or expression.

> Highly excited feeling or action; impetuosity; vehemence; eagerness.

> Injury done to that which is entitled to respect, reverence, or observance; profanation; infringement; unjust force; outrage; assault.

> Action intended to cause destruction, pain, or suffering.

> an act of aggression (as one against a person who resists)

Each of these can pertain to speech. If one says that speech can't be violence, then they must be ignoring these definitions.
by pjc50 | 2025-09-26 12:18:40+00:00
> its required to have some sort of ID for renting, job or voting _already_ the difference here is there is a digital version of it

It's strange how last time I campaigned against ID cards 25 years ago, none of those requirements were in place. Voter ID in particular is a very recent idea imported from the US (and of course doesn't apply to postal votes, where there are actually real concerns about security and diversion).
by astrobe_ | 2025-09-26 12:18:53+00:00
This was on HN's frontpage previously too; I immediately thought that this comic would say more or less the same thing. Perhaps both came from an AI? :D

But in another paragraph, the article says that the teacher and the students also failed to detect an AI-generated piece.

The ending of the comic is a bit anti-climatic (aside from the fact that one can see it coming), as similarities between creations are not uncommon. Endings, guitar riffs, styles being invented twice independently is not uncommon. For instance, the mystery genre was apparently created independently by Doyle and Poe (Poe, BTW, in Philosophy of composition [1], also claims that good authors start from the ending).

Two pieces being similar because they come from same AI versus because two authors were inspired and influenced by the same things and didn't know about each other's works, the difference is thin. An extrapolation of this topic is the sci-fi trope ( e.g. Beatless [2] ) about whether or not the emotions that an android simulates are real. But this is still sci-fi though, current AIs are good con artists at best.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philosophy_of_Composition

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatless
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-09-26 12:19:12+00:00
<< The point of a coffee shop isn't to provide you with a nice space to work but to sell coffee.

Sure, but a coffee cup is not exactly expensive or difficult to make. The reason why companies tried so hard to make it inviting or 'third space' or whatever corporate types call it these days is that it helps sell severely overpriced sugar drinks of added caffeine.

This is not a shot at Starbucks. I love me some creme brulee, but it is important to recognize it for what it is.

Similarly, if it indeed is user entitlement that caused patrons to visit coffee shop and enjoy their drink in a nice space, then it was very much encouraged by corps for a good while ( for good reasons too -- apart from the historical ).
by KaiserPro | 2025-09-26 12:19:15+00:00
I am in two minds on this.

1) I don't like centralised ID, its ripe for abuse.

2) I don't like the idea of crapita/accenture/G4S/some other dipshit company designing and running this.

However

if its an extension of the government gateway, then actually the only "innovation" here is the presumable fine for not keeping it up to date. (that and the smartphone integration, which I suspect is largely symbolic)

So long as its GDS rolling it out, and its properly designed (two big ifs) then in principle it could be a useful as the original GDS scheme to make government services "digital"

But, the problems of authoritarianism are not to be ignored. starmer doesn't have the bollocks to be a dictator, but jenrick and farage do. Our constitution has no guards against authoritarian capture, its just "good men" doing "good deeds". That was easily overridden with Boris. A decent majority in the House of commons gives you alomst unlimited power of the state.
by Beestie | 2025-09-26 12:20:27+00:00
The syntax kind of does mimic the rhythm of AI generated text but the ideas and flow appear original to me. I thought it was a good article and appreciate the points you make which I would not have otherwise known about.

I also think it bears pointing out that you chose not to refer readers to your podcast which is the exact opposite of what an AI bot would have done.
by celticninja | 2025-09-26 12:20:28+00:00
No but it makes prosecution easier..right now you can provide a copy of a document, which can be digitally altered, but the employer can say 'i accepted it in good faith' and they have done their due diligence. Having scanned a digital ID and for example that does not match the worker you have employed makes it harder to claim you did due diligence
by ForHackernews | 2025-09-26 12:20:52+00:00
One of my favorite libraries to work from was the Cudahy Library at the University of Loyola in Chicago. It's a stunning glass building looking out directly on Lake Michigan. I'm not sure if this is still the case, but it used to be that anyone who lived in the neighborhood could get a "community" library card without being a student.

https://chriswolak.com/2020/05/31/library-visit-loyola-unive...
by bluedino | 2025-09-26 12:20:59+00:00
My friends parents used to clean a business on the weekends, and as kids we got dragged along, but we had permission to play games on one of the office computers.

It was an unassuming 286 running DOS, but it had a modem and a couple bulletin boards in the phonebook.

Prince of Persia was one of the games we played the most. Paired with a Soundblaster and a small set of speakers, playing that game in a dark office was a great experience.
by pjc50 | 2025-09-26 12:22:01+00:00
Exactly, as I said in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45385512 it's a question of trust and purpose; I don't trust these people, the companies behind them, the public opinion they choose to pander to, and the stated purpose of immigration enforcement.

Something similar to Estonia would be much less controversial.
by didntcheck | 2025-09-26 12:22:27+00:00
> This was the very first time I heard anyone even suggest that storing data in Postgres was a concern in terms of reliability

You seem to be reading "reliability" as "durability", when I believe the parent post meant "availability" in this context

> Do you actually have any concrete scenario in mind? Because anyone can make any system "considerably degrading", even Redis

And even Postgres. It can also happen due to seemingly random events like unusual load or network issues. What do you find outlandish about the scenario of a database server being unavailable/degraded and the cache service not being?
by auggierose | 2025-09-26 12:22:42+00:00
> Well, a green apple had better be equal to itself. So if you've got a green apple and another green apple that isn't equal to the first, you're already in trouble and going to have to resort to hacks like numbering them.

Nope, no trouble at all. Those troubles only exist in your type-infested mind.

> What if you want to manipulate it in a context where you only care about the number of apples, not their colour?

Then I'll do just that. Lol, you can't make this shit up.
by pera | 2025-09-26 12:23:08+00:00
I am quite confused by this point:

> A new digital ID scheme will help combat illegal working

If you are an immigrant you already have to prove your right to work with a share code:

https://www.gov.uk/prove-right-to-work/get-a-share-code-onli...

And if you claim to be a citizen you must show a passport or birth certificate:

https://www.gov.uk/prove-right-to-work

So how exactly will this new digital ID help "stop those with no right to be here from being able to find work"?
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-26 12:23:12+00:00
That is not actually a simple fix. You're proposing a 15.3% tax increase -- on top of all existing taxes -- on everyone who makes more than that amount of money. They're obviously going to lobby against that or otherwise take measures to thwart it using tax avoidance strategies etc., making it both less effective than anticipated and no easier to pass than actually reforming the programs.

On top of that, tax incidence is more complicated than "well the people paying it have higher incomes". Federal revenue has been a stable percentage of GDP since WWII, whereas that's an enormous increase in government collections exceeding all historical precedent, and the money had previously been going somewhere else, and the somewhere else (investment markets) would notice it going away. In other words, a tax hike that big would crash the stock market and the housing market etc.

There is no simple fix for this. People voted for a government willing to write them a check it couldn't cash and your only real choices are "don't give that much to wealthy retirees" or "take it from the economy at the expense of the kids".
by danwills | 2025-09-26 12:23:25+00:00
One suprising thing that seems to work with video/footage (a shot) once you've watched it a few hundred times and can't really 'see' it naturally any more, is to 'flip' it (horizontal mirror (or negation)) the result is usually surprising at least and can reveal things you couldn't see before! Or, if flipping has run out of juice too, even flopping (vertical mirror or negation, yes the shot is upside-down now, so not as helpful as flipping) but either/or and their combinations can definitely provide some extremely useful new perspective on the visual content one is trying to produce (VFX day job as Pipeline TD now, FX artist previously and this idea helped me numerous times!)
by forntentacl | 2025-09-26 12:23:55+00:00
This paper ignores 50+ years of research in the domain of quantized networks, quantized training algorithms, and reaches wrong conclusions out of sheer ignorance.

TLDR abstract of a draft paper I wrote years ago, for those interested in the real limits of quantized networks:

We investigate the storage capacity of single‐layer threshold neurons under three synaptic precision regimes—binary (1‐bit), ternary (≈1.585‐bit), and quaternary (2‐bit)—from both information‐theoretic and algorithmic standpoints. While the Gardner bound stipulates maximal loads of α=0.83, 1.5 and 2.0 patterns per weight for the three regimes, practical algorithms only reach α_alg≈0.72, 1.0 and 2.0, respectively. By converting these densities into storage‐efficiency metrics—bits of synaptic memory per stored pattern—we demonstrate that only quaternary weights achieve the theoretical optimum in realistic settings, requiring exactly 1 bit of memory per pattern. Binary and ternary schemes incur 39 % and 58 % overheads, respectively.
Show HN: I ditched restful API conventions and built this
by HusseinKizz | 2025-09-26 12:24:57+00:00
Nile is a TypeScript-first, service-oriented backend framework for building modern, AI-ready backends with simplest developer experience and speed. It doesn't use usual rest-api coventions and breaks a lot of rules hahaha, but its made in a way that makes sense to today's development, why would you go on writing over 100 routes just so as you be in terms with rest api conventions, or why try do things in a way not simple to you because that's how everyone thinks they should be done, anyways takes on the framework are welcome, but more or less it does a lot of things differently!
by pesoneto | 2025-09-26 12:25:36+00:00
After I posted this, I checked the definition of grok to make sure of my usage. Grok is a word invented by Robert Heinlein to describe the experience of a person moving from Mars to Earth and the subtle cultural shocks experienced. This word fits this situation exactly.

I was born in California and moved to Utah as an adult. The addressing system was incomprehensible at first. In Los Angeles when I was young, my father, a salesman, kept several huge map books in his car. The usage of these was first to look up a street name in an index section and then go to the correct page in the book. Then hunt for the street in the square specified in the index.

There were no such books in Utah. The geography is desert and mostly flat. The Cartesian system mostly works. There are some exceptions particularly as you get close to the mountains. In these cases, one would have to do the California thing. The map you would need used to be in the phone book. So typically you would hunt first for a phone booth.

But this was a long time ago. There are no phone books anymore. And certainly no phone booths. So this is a cultural shift in multiple dimensions.

Salt Lake City is a royal mess. What started out like LA with separate cities have now merged into a contiguous urban area. The origin in cases like this is the county center. So sometimes you can reference the original city coordinates or go with the newer unified system.

But still there is this disconnect in the ways that people think about street addresses. There are deep thought patterns that depend on where you were born.
by bonsai_spool | 2025-09-26 12:25:43+00:00
> Can a human reliably carefully study for hours on end imaging from screening tests

This is actually very common in radiology where some positions have shifts of 8-12 hours, where one isn't done until all the studies on the list have been read.

> think of a future world where whole-body MRI scanning for asymptomatic people becomes affordable and routine thanks to AI processing) and not miss subtle anomalies?

The bottleneck in MRI is not reading but instead the very long acquisition times paired with the unavailability of the expensive machinery.

If we charitably assume that you're thinking of CT scans, some studies on indiscriminate imaging indicate that most findings will be false positives:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6850647/
by jibal | 2025-09-26 12:27:38+00:00
The caption on the first position is "Reachable chess position with 218 moves for White, published by Petrović in 1964."

And the title is unambiguous: "There is no reachable chess position with more than 218 moves" -- that cannot possibly mean "There is no reachable chess position that it takes more than 218 moves to reach". Also, lichess is a chess site, where people are certain to know that chess games can go way beyond 218 moves.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-26 12:27:47+00:00
Yeah I've just been burned too many times.

Just in the past six months I bought an air filter and a 12" skillet directly from manufacturers instead of Amazon. The air filter was nowhere near the claimed performance, but still required a 15% restocking fee. The skillet, they sent me the wrong model. But because while the title of the listing was wrong, but the correct model name was in the description text, they refused to pay for return shipping and it cost $25 to ship it back because it was 5 lbs to the other side of the country.

Amazon is never an issue. I just drop it off at Whole Foods and it's easy. Buying direct from manufacturer is just too risky. By now I'm willing to pay even more at Amazon just for the peace of mind of returns.
Ask HN: Accessibility tools for knowledge workers with low vision
by kjellsbells | 2025-09-26 12:28:45+00:00
I spend my days in classic knowledge worker apps: Office 365, Teams, Google docs, Confluence, Salesforce, PowerBI etc. I'm also slowly losing my eyesight, and I want to use the time to adapt. The end state will be a sort of fuzzy frosted glass vision rather than total blindness.

What tools should I be looking at to make the transition to a low vision future?

To date, I've been experimenting with voice control and keyboard shortcuts on Mac and Windows. Mac seems quite bad, or perhaps more kindly, it can't do much with modern browser web apps like PowerBI or Salesforce because they have no keybindings. I wonder if Windows would be any better? Overall the transition from standalone desktop apps to web apps seems to have been bad for accessibility, but maybe I'm missing something.

I use Android for my cellphone and with magnification and simple mode I can get by, but maybe iPhone is better. I do notice that many Android apps do not work well when blown up with large type, etc.

What coaching, tools, and tips would you give someone who is trying to get ready for the low vision future?