MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-09-05 23:08:44+00:00
From what I can tell, gaming has mostly just embraced two language solutions. The big engines Unity, Unreal, and Godot have tight cores written in C/C++ and then scripting languages that are written on top. Hobby engines like Love2D often also have a tight, small core and are extensible with languages like Lua or Fennel.

Modern Common Lisp also seems to have given up its "one language to rule them all" mindset and is pretty okay with just dropping into CFFI to call into C libraries as needed. Over the years I've come to see that mindset as mostly a dead-end. Python, web browsers, game engines, emacs, these are all prominent living examples of two-language solutions that have come to dominate in their problem spaces.

One aspect of the "two language problem" that I find troubling though is that modern environments often ossify around the exact solution. For example, it's very difficult to have something like PyTorch in say Common Lisp even though libcuda and libdnn should be fairly straightforward to wrap in Common Lisp (see [1] for Common Lisp CUDA bindings.) JS/TS/WASM that runs in the browser often is dependent on Chrome's behavior. Emacs continues to be tied to its ancient, tech-debt ridden C runtime. There seems to be a lot of value tied into the glue between the two chosen languages and it's hard to recreate that value with other HLLs even if the "metal" language/runtime stays the same.

[1]: https://github.com/takagi/cl-cuda
by twotwotwo | 2025-09-05 23:08:45+00:00
[Edited to add: looking at comments from saisrirampur and SnooBananas6657, ClickHouse has worked some on joins recently, and there's a very recent a PR around optimizing join order. Cool!]

In playing a little with ClickHouse, issues with joins were one of the biggest things that jumped out at me.

It wouldn't change the join order to try to ensure the smaller side was in RAM. It wouldn't propagate WHERE conditions to the other side of a join, so "WHERE a.customer_id=3 AND b.customer_id=a.customer_id" wouldn't automatically filter the scan of b to blocks where b.customer_id=3. Projections could theoretically be used to speed joins on the projection's ORDER BY columns, but it didn't appear to happen. You'd sometimes need to manually set the join algo for best performance, when I'd rather the optimizer choose it, maybe adaptively based on whether it seemed to make sense to do a join in-RAM.

ClickHouse was also great at certain things, like scanning a ton of rows very efficiently and interfacing with lots of systems (its table functions could pull from lots of sources). It was easy to pick up and start playing with, and seems to have found use in a lot of organizations and at substantial scale. And there are a lot of features that look potentially quite powerful (incremental materialized views, aggregating/deduping merge tree variants, etc.). The best way I could process what I saw experimenting with it was that they'd focused on a providing really efficient low-level execution engine, but sometimes you needed to act as the query optimizer.
by papascrubs | 2025-09-05 23:09:48+00:00
I run Technitium DNS server at home in a container. It supports DoH, DoT, multiple upstream resolvers (and multiple upstream queries, adblock support and a sleep of other goodies (API). If you're self hosting an internal resolver I highly recommend checking it out. I prefer it to pihole.

https://technitium.com/dns/
by xoa | 2025-09-05 23:10:36+00:00
>Serious question: how long do you expect cloud hardware vendors to support the servers for their products? 10 years? 20? 30?

Serious answer: I do not expect any specific lifetime at all (though legal return period is an obvious floor), but at a bare minimum I do expect (and think should absolutely be mandated by law) that power be intimately tied to responsibility. Ie., it's fine if a hardware vendor decides to retire their cloud services (or OS updates or the like) in 1 year or 10 years or 20 or 30, but IF they cease to support it, THEN they must also remove any technical obstacles to hardware owners pointing it at another service of any kind. So any signing keys required, code, docs/APIs etc. Decide that a given product no longer makes commercial sense for you to produce or support? Sure, fine, it happens. The problem is then ensuring the hardware/software dies with that.

The basic issue is that these places generally want to have their cake and eat it too. They want all the financial power of a monopoly tie-in and feudal rent extraction, but no responsibilities to go with it and the ability to force customers onto new stuff (or nothing). That should be illegal. Honestly, I think any tie-in should be illegal, fully accessible local APIs should be required and any 1st party subscription should earn its place on its merits.

But at a minimum, no one should be able to have it both ways. If they want power over their customers, they should have responsibility proportional to that. And conversely if they go full open source community friendly hackable from day 1 (and are fully upfront about that), I'm fine saying they have very minimal long term responsibility. There can and should be room for many different approaches to the market, but not extractive lock-in.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-09-05 23:10:57+00:00
Darn, I was hoping you would focus on substance instead of again totally ignoring it and doubling down on the stylistic preference differences.

> if what you were doing was, in fact, actually stopping a genocide, or even communicating effectively.

It is! That's why I'm trying to discuss it in spite of deflections to purely stylistic differences. If you are interested in stopping the ongoing genocide too, please go back to the post you ignored the substance of and give a substantive, good-faith reply, if you are indeed interested in continuing the discussion you started and claim to want. Here is that post you ignored, for ease of navigation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45141607
by nirui | 2025-09-05 23:11:17+00:00
> Broadly speaking, the online platforms we use are not built for connection; they are built for engagement. This is universally true for all internet spaces, from stories to newsfeeds, for the intellectual and the plebian alike.

It wasn't always like this, and the I feel the whole "engagement" blame is misplaced.

You don't post comments for engagement, you post it for recognition. And people post selfies on social media not to farm engagement, but to attract attention.

The engagement part come after it. Someone welcomed the content you posted, it's positive feedback from there. The social media platforms wants to farm engagement for profit, you, or rather most people at least, don't.

The connection part on the other hand, is your own effort, it don't happen automatically. Platforms are just a place, a pub, for people to gather, you need to do the work to find friends.
by jongjong | 2025-09-05 23:11:38+00:00
Extreme Programming attempts to weave together several independently useful concepts into a single paradigm... For that to make sense, the amalgamation of ideas has to be greater than the sum of its parts individually, but it's not clear that this is the case.

TDD is useful in some situations, yep totally. Pair programming is useful in some situations, yes. Continuous integration; yes, much of the time. Frequent feedback; yes, sometimes, for some types of work which doesn't require deep focus...

It just doesn't work as a blanket 'XP' paradigm because you rarely need all these parts all the time, at the same time. IMO, this is why Extreme Programming lacks gumption as a concept. It feels like a bunch of good ideas thrown together. If there was some kind of synergy between those ideas and practices, the concept of XP would be more important.

As it stands today, everyone is implementing maybe 1 or 2 aspects of XP, but almost nobody is implementing ALL of XP... So nobody can claim that they're adhering to XP.

This is not the same as as 'Agile' because with Agile; the vast majority of big companies are implementing maybe 90% of agile practices, with 70% fidelity... This consistency is enough for companies to identify themselves as 'Agile'. I've worked for many companies which implemented ALL of the Agile practices but not one of them actually implemented them exactly as taught in the Agile Manifesto. I think the closest one I worked for was maybe 90% of the way there; they even followed the story point system exactly and used a packet of cards with numbers on them to allow people to vote during Sprint Planning meetings... but anyway, pretty much all the companies/projects I worked for identified themselves 'Agile' because all the practices fit into a single paradigm and there was value in adopting all of them. After a while, it became easier for project managers to just say "Let's switch to Agile" instead of saying "Let's time-box our development work into short increments, with a planning meeting, refinement meeting and retrospective meeting for each 2-week increment."
by esseph | 2025-09-05 23:12:17+00:00
Why would docker?

Because it's not very useful by itself for running production infra, but it's great for helping to develop it.

Otherwise you're going to see more and more move to podman (and podman desktop) / OCI containers over time, as corps won't have to pay the docker tax and will get better integration with their existing k8s platform.
by zamadatix | 2025-09-05 23:12:27+00:00
90% of the times Bind is deployed then named.conf probably could have been:

options { allow-recursion { localhost; localnets; }; forwarders { 1.1.1.1; 8.8.8.8; 4.2.2.2 }; forward only; };

And it would have done the same job the person was looking for. This binds to all interfaces, avoids explicitly respecifying the default paths as a lot of the config lines on the site do, logs what most people care to log to syslog, and forwards requests from any private subnet or the local machine. Alternatively, the distro probably comes with a default file with any distro specific customization you may wish to align to and just needs these 3 lines added.

For the next 8% where people operate "real" dns servers I agree the zone definition syntax is a bit verbose (especially if you're doing many domains or reverse lookup zones) but not necessarily that complicated. The last 2% probably care about all of the syntax that starts to look like mumbo-jumbo which bind documentation focuses on. Oh, I will complain about bind expecting you to manually increment serial numbers in your zonefiles though... but most deployments like this (or even ones acting as the nameserver for some domains) don't actually need that anyways.

No complaints about choosing PowerDNS though. Hard to go wrong with it for this either.
by rurp | 2025-09-05 23:12:27+00:00
Well my less optimistic observation is that Trump 1.0 broke a whole bunch of norms and was flagrantly incompetent, and the response was almost nothing. The opposition won a middling victory and made almost no structural changes to prevent what's currently happening.

The main response was a series of milquetoast foot-dragging prosecutions that accomplished little more than ralling the Republicans around him and giving him even more media attention.
by jrockway | 2025-09-05 23:12:41+00:00
We watched this happen again in New York where OMNY was supposed to be the region-wide fare system, but the Port Authority decided not to use it, all the bus systems decided not to use it, and the MTA's railroads decided not to use it. It is a mild disaster. (Hilariously, the Port Authority runs two rail system, PATH and the JFK Airtrain. The Airtrain does take OMNY.)

Does Caltrain still count entering the BART station at Milbrae as not tapping off? That was always my favorite quirk of the Clipper system.

(For those not familiar... Caltrain is a tap on / tap off "proof of payment" system. You're charged the full fare when you tap on, and refunded what you didn't use when you tap off. BART and Caltrain share a platform at Milbrae. You can get off Caltrain and be right at the gate to get into BART by tapping your Clipper card. Well. This taps you into BART, but doesn't tap you off of Caltrain. To get your refund, you had to know this was a thing and go find a fare validator before tapping on to BART. You also end up being inside Caltrain's proof of payment required area without proof of payment while you walk along the platform from Caltrain's fare validator to BART's entry turnstile. I am probably the only person to ever care about this, but...)
by throwway120385 | 2025-09-05 23:13:21+00:00
If you're VC-funded then the valuation is the most important thing. The only way to juice your valuation is to get recurring revenue, because it comes with an 8x to 10x multiple. So you don't want to be in the hardware game, you want to use hardware to get a foothold in someone's home and then get them to pay you a subscription to maintain that hardware.

I think the valuation thing is what drives 90% of this stuff. Whereas an established company like Honeywell is more interested in building products and selling a lot of them, so they're going to charge you 5-10x of the cost of a Nest for the same feature set but with a local-first implementation instead of a cloud-first implementation.

I don't think I would ever buy a hardware product from a company billing themselves as a VC-backed startup.

Also, FWIW the Nest is a perfectly functional thermostat even if you never hook it up to their app. We found the scheduling and learning features to be really annoying so we turned them all off and never connected ours to the cloud.
by deepsun | 2025-09-05 23:15:12+00:00
> If there was no director in the database then this query would return 0 rows.

Well, LEFT JOIN is the basic SQL knowledge, surprising the author doesn't know that.

> because sql wasn't designed to produce hierarchical data

Well, SQL was designed _because_ of the shortcomings of hierarchical DBMSes.

Also, author uses PostgreSQL, so could easily use ARRAY_AGG(), and Composite Types to get the exact answer they need in one query, no need for hacks. They can even make their own custom type for type safety, if needed.
by rchaud | 2025-09-05 23:15:22+00:00
> Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine.

But nobody was ever going to that, not when there are billions in VC dollars at stake for whoever moves fastest. Everybody will simply risk the fine, which tends to not be anywhere close to enough to have a deterrent effect in the future.

That is like saying Uber would have not had any problems if they just entered into a licensing contract with taxi medallion holders. It was faster to just put unlicensed taxis on the streets and use investor money to pay fines and lobby for favorable legislation. In the same way, it was faster for Anthropic to load up their models with un-DRM'd PDFs and ePUBs from wherever instead of licensing them publisher by publisher.
by dtagames | 2025-09-05 23:15:41+00:00
This is excellent news because it means that folks who pay for printed books and scan them also can train with their content. It's been said already that we've already trained on "the entire (public) internet." Printed books still hold a wealth of knowledge that could be useful in training models. And cheap, otherwise unwanted copies make great fodder for "destructive" scanning where you cut the spine off and feed it to a page scanner. There are online services that offer just that.
by mystraline | 2025-09-05 23:16:56+00:00
FDR was an appeasement to the business community in opposition to IWW, socialists, and communists.

Not too much later, is when you get 'National Day' or Labor day, as opposition to international workers day, or May 1.

FDR was just a moderate capitalist. But still a capitalist. Money/power gets more money/power.
by imjacobclark | 2025-09-05 23:17:07+00:00
Agreed, we’ve come a long way since the dogmatic agile of the 90s, and maybe I could be more explicit that this is about introspecting how you’re delivering software (now AI-enabled workflows are everywhere) to decrease the probability of only increasing output (rather than increasing the probability of outcomes) for your users… XP is a good place to start (but not necessarily end).
by knorker | 2025-09-05 23:17:08+00:00
Sorry, forgot to reply to this part:

> and what happens if something goes wrong?

If something goes wrong I have a chance to get my money back. Unlike with cryptocurrency, where it's just gone forever.

If fact things have gone wrong with fiat, and it's always been fixable.

Are you being sarcastic? That's literally the most broken thing about cryptocurrency.
by jchw | 2025-09-05 23:17:13+00:00
Social media exposes us to more viewpoints than we would normally see, but I think there is actually a such thing as too much. Online communities have the same kind of issue, they really need to strike a balance between being too much of a "circle jerk", and being too fractured and conflict-ridden to have productive discussion. What I think is interesting, though, is that due to the way social media platforms work, you can actually have both a massive circle jerk amongst people that agree with each-other, and constant, unending, vile conflict between people who do not, due to algorithmic feeds. (If anything, they both wind up feeding into each-other.)

IRL I think people are often more empathetic and sympathetic, and I think that this environment leads to less polarized opinions even when our exposure to viewpoints is relatively limited. That said, lately, IRL socialization has become quite limited, especially after the COVID-19 lockdowns. Online interactions are just not really the same... especially not limited to text, over heavily manipulated platforms like Twitter/Facebook/etc.

Seems a bit contradictory I'm sure, but if the problems of socializing on the Internet were simple and easy to understand, we wouldn't have to talk about it so much :)
by OJFord | 2025-09-05 23:17:33+00:00
Because people won't pay (or the companies(' research) don't think they'll pay) much for the hardware, so it's a loss leader or barely profitable promotion for the subscription service.

Not that straightforwardly in Nest's particular case to be fair, but a lead in to other products, and Nest was perhaps bought by Google before having to worry too much about profit margins(?).
by axisai | 2025-09-05 23:19:01+00:00
That’s a really sharp observation, and it’s something we’ve been intentional about from day one. You’re right, a lot of people equate “bias” with “facts they don’t like,” and if we’re not careful, a detector can slip into reinforcing that misunderstanding.

How we’re tackling it:

Model Training: We train Veritas on examples that draw a hard line between factual but unpopular truths and genuinely biased framing. For issues like climate change or evolution, the model is designed to recognize them as evidence-based consensus, not “opinions with two sides.” We also run expert reviews on edge cases so it doesn’t mistake denialism for a valid counterpoint.

User Education: Every analysis Veritas produces comes with context — not just a yes/no label. It explains why something is or isn’t bias, referencing categories like gendered language, academic elitism, or cultural assumptions. We’re also preparing orientation guides for testers, so they know up front this is an academic tool, not a political scorekeeper.

The Paradox of Tolerance is real, and our stance is this: Veritas doesn’t silence perspectives, but it will highlight when language is exclusionary, misrepresentative, or factually distorted.

Two things I’d love your input on:

What’s the most effective way to show users that “unpopular facts ≠ bias” — would examples, quick demos, or documentation be strongest?

Do you think it’s helpful for us to explicitly tag certain topics as “consensus facts,” or is it better to just let the model’s handling speak for itself?
by hodgehog11 | 2025-09-05 23:19:29+00:00
Nice, I like how you start out with the finite dimensional case here. Personally though, I don't think I really "got" quantum mechanics until I saw Bell's inequality, so I prefer to put that front and center.

Maybe a pointless nitpick, but is a PDF on GitHub really the best way to distribute this though? I guess you also didn't want to give away the .tex file? arXiv is usually the best place to upload these kinds of notes so they can be indexed and easily found.
by metalman | 2025-09-05 23:19:32+00:00
see my handle so where the fuck to start go to a bunch of scrap yards, someones "door yard", like mine, where as a matter of course, bits and chunks of most metals end up as part of building and repairing, to larger operations that are huge, fast paced with prices and markets changing by the hour, and cash is used as the entisement to get people to bring metal in on everything from bicycles to the biggest rigs on the road, a cacophany of heavy equipment like car shredders, that reduce a full sized car to hand sized bits, and seperate out the more valuable metals, and waste plastic, grrrrrank!, done it's a wild, dangerous madhouse populated by characters that will most defintly get your attention, which is a mistake, because you dont want thiers. then there are hundreds of thousands of small to medium sized businesses that generate several hundred tons of scrap per year in acompletly normal, organized, boring fashion, except for when it gets dropped, and the expected and tolerated losses to dumpster diving. I could go into much greater detail as to how it works, the safeguards to prevent theft that are in place, but as in the case of guardrails say, the problem is that, legitimatly scrapped guardrails come in every day, or hyway crews just leave crash damaged ones lay beside the hyway when they fix the rails, 1 they are too busy, and 2 they know the bent ones spontainoiusly disapear, the scraped one is worth $17.26......nobody is doing extra paper work for that, right we are talking millions of tons pe anum of material moved in a completly random ad hock manner, dont take it the wrong way, but... go the fuck ahead bub, you fix it I'll watch
by dataviz1000 | 2025-09-05 23:19:34+00:00
It is still a dangerous grey area. If Browser Use is acquired by Mega_Corp for the $10B its IP is worth, I would have to prove that my product isn't a derivative of Workflow Use, otherwise, I, or a company that contracts me, am obligated by law to link to Mega_Corp. If there is prior art as you say, I will be able to find and use that as long as it uses a less restrictive license like MIT.

deepwiki is awesome and my first time learning about it
by AceJohnny2 | 2025-09-05 23:20:28+00:00
I agree almost entirely, but I gotta quibble a point:

> so [companies like Honeywell] are going to charge you 5-10x of the cost of a Nest for the same feature set but with a local-first implementation

"Established" companies also see the long-term value of subscriptions and are also hopping on that bandwagon.

Additionally, customers are extremely sensitive to up-front price, so a product that's more expensive up-front but with no subscription fee and longer-term value will have trouble finding a foothold in the market compared to cheaper but subscription-based alternatives. Especially if the alternatives are "1 year free!" as they usually are.