MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by geysersam | 2025-10-25 23:26:45+00:00
> So I guess the author is trying to help a decision maker to make a decision when faced with a question of whether to use SQL or not.

That's not my impression. A decision maker today should typically make the decision to use SQL. I'm pretty sure the author would agree with that.

I think the target audience is language designers and tool builders. The author is urging people to envision and build new better interfaces to interact with relational data.
by strogonoff | 2025-10-25 23:26:50+00:00
Wikipedia editors is among the many communities that have for a long time mostly successfully relied on the tendency of relatively superficial, easy to validate capabilities (such as being able to use a website, write something resembling real language, and handle basic communication) to correlate with more valuable but harder to validate qualities (such as ability to write reasonably well and follow rules/guidelines, and generally being a well-intentioned person) as one of their main barriers to entry. Attributable to the deluge of commercial LLMs[0] available at such low prices that their operators lose millions to billions of dollars in order to gain market share and ultimately profit, such communities may not be able to continue to exist as is for long, I suspect: either they would be forced to institute more intrusive barriers (be that ID verification, invite-only memberships, or something else) while the deluge lasts, or they may be effectively destroyed when members secretly lacking the requisite qualities and act in bad faith become a majority, damage community’s reputation, and drive out the existing members.

[0] Which paradoxically to a significant degree exist thanks to the unpaid work of volunteers in many of such communities.
by 29athrowaway | 2025-10-25 23:28:03+00:00
I try as much as possible to stay out of politics and believe in merit. If someone advances their career through merit, I will be the first to celebrate with them.

But at the same time, I do not believe in the power of "let's have a coffee" in a situation like this. There are core beliefs that a cup of coffee will not change.

If someone believes in playing dirty, believes in that basic respect is earned not given, and other rotten beliefs... that person was a bad hire, and needs to have an expedited firing.
by rickcarlino | 2025-10-25 23:28:26+00:00
There is a lot to be learned from reading historical CS texts. It helps us see how developers worked under constraint of historical hardware and it also helps us find commonalities to modern problems. There is a lot to be said about software engineering challenges that are a problem today and a problem decades ago. This creates a clearer picture of blind spots in the industry and reading outdated texts can be a fruitful endeavor despite seeming counterintuitive. I have a small collection of CS books that I have purchased from a used bookstore and I always walk away with new insights when I read them even if the information is outdated.
by omosubi | 2025-10-25 23:30:21+00:00
a few ideas:

- see if he can be put on a project that he has complete autonomy over that is separate from the normal work that you are doing. or try and come up with something that he could do separately and doesn't need to be in meetings.

- split the team up so that he leads his own team. if he's that bad the people on his team will leave and his behavior will be that much more obvious. if he's a good engineer maybe he can actually get stuff done with him separately. if he's bad it's an easy case to make. if you make the decisions about who works on what give him the work you don't want to do. you're two levels higher and it sounds like he doesn't have much leadership experience.

- you said in one of your comments that your manager doesn't want to look bad to his manager. what could you do to make him look good and also get rid of this guy?

- can the bad guy move teams to something he likes more? where could he go that doesn't necessitate him working with you?

- make the business case that this guy is bad and not worth keeping. if he's already gotten rid of one good lead and burning out other people, I'm sure you can make the case that keeping him is not worth the cost. if his behavior is preventing you from shipping x% faster or higher quality or whatever it shouldn't be that hard a sell to management.

- whatever route you take document everything that he does that is preventing the team from accomplishing more.

- are the other people on your team reporting this behavior to your manager? if enough people are complaining and your manager doesn't do anything, he's clearly not doing his job.

- the skip level talk is also a good route. see if people that he interacts with that aren't your manager or teammates have difficulty with him. if he's that toxic you have more ammo with your skiplevel or anyone else with influence.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-10-25 23:30:54+00:00
> The US is, objectively, extremely corrupt, and is transitioning to authoritarianism to protect that corruption.

You have no idea what extreme corruption looks like if you think the US is it. (I will admit that it is becoming more corrupt, and that the corruption is tied to the authoritarianism.)

> Their population is sick and stupid.

Yeah... you're just ranting.
by marcellus23 | 2025-10-25 23:31:48+00:00
Entirely AppKit? Do you have a source? I'm skeptical because it seems to behave like an iOS app ported to the Mac and has the exact same interface layout as the iOS app. Beside that, maintaining a separate AppKit implementation would be a lot of extra work that doesn't seem worth it (though of course, if anyone has money to burn on that, it's OpenAI).

I suppose it's more likely that the main chat interface and other highly custom views have separate implementations on macOS and iOS, while the Settings view is shared SwiftUI code (since it's just a lot of buttons and toggles).
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-25 23:31:58+00:00
And if when you sat for a behavioral interview at a company of any size and they leveled you based on “scope” and “impact”, you would be leveled as a senior engineer or a team lead.

And the “two parts” of your responsibility were those of senior/lead devs at the last 60 person company I worked for in 2020.

Equity in private companies is statistically meaningless and will be worthless. I’m at a point in my career where I only care about cash and RSUs in public companies that I can easily sell when they vest
by ahartmetz | 2025-10-25 23:32:02+00:00
These things are engineering marvels as fuel-burning engines go. From what I know, there is actually not that much that can be done to make gas turbines more efficient if weight is no object. Fuel weight and cost are very important for commercial turbofans, and engine manufacturers have been doing a huge amount of R&D in efficiency and are using some very advanced manufacturing techniques for certain parts. Turbine inlet temperatures are well into the white-hot range. A mechanical engineer described it to me as "A hundred degrees hotter and they'd melt and spill their internals out the back" - that is with exotic metals and active cooling. The main problem with these turbines is that they are somewhat old and will probably run at less than maximum power for longevity reasons. Turbines are terrible at less than full power efficiency. They also won't have a steam turbine added to use the exhaust heat like with stationary engines.

According to this article, the best current commercial turbofans can reach over 50% thermodynamic efficiency. I remember thinking that 50% seem like an unreachable holy grail when first reading about thermodynamic efficiency of common engines. https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/23490/chapter/6#36
by bignerd_95 | 2025-10-25 23:32:12+00:00
As someone who teaches this stuff at university, I see students getting confused every single year by how textbooks draw memory. The problem is mostly visual, not conceptual.

Most diagrams in books and slides use an old hardware-centric convention: they draw higher addresses at the top of the page and lower addresses at the bottom. People sometimes justify this with an analogy like “floors in a building go up,” so address 0x7fffffffe000 is drawn “higher” than 0x400000.

But this is backwards from how humans read almost everything today. When you look at code in VS Code or any other IDE, line 1 is at the top, then line 2 is below it, then 3, 4, etc. Numbers go up as you go down. Your brain learns: “down = bigger index.”

Memory in a real Linux process actually matches the VS Code model much more closely than the textbook diagrams suggest.

You can see it yourself with:

cat /proc/$$/maps

(pick any PID instead of $$).

...

[0x00000000] lower addresses

...

[0x00620000] HEAP start

[0x00643000] HEAP extended ↓ (more allocations => higher addresses)

...

[0x7ffd8c3f7000] STACK top (<- stack pointer)

↑ the stack pointer starts here and moves upward (toward lower addresses) when you push

[0x7ffd8c418000] STACK start

...

[0xffffffffff600000] higher addresses

...

The output is printed from low addresses to high addresses. At the top of the output you'll usually see the binary, shared libs, heap, etc. Those all live at lower virtual addresses. Farther down in the output you'll eventually see the stack, which lives at a higher virtual address. In other words: as you scroll down, the addresses get bigger. Exactly like scrolling down in an editor gives you bigger line numbers.

The phrases “the heap grows up” and “the stack grows down” aren't wrong. They're just describing what happens to the numeric addresses: the heap expands toward higher addresses, and the stack moves into lower addresses.

The real problem is how we draw it. We label “up” on the page as “higher address,” which is the opposite of how people read code or even how /proc/<pid>/maps is printed. So students have to mentally flip the diagram before they can even think about what the stack and heap are doing.

If we just drew memory like an editor (low addresses at the top, high addresses further down) it would click instantly. Scroll down, addresses go up, and the stack sits at the bottom. At that point it’s no longer “the stack grows down”: it’s just the stack pointer being decremented, moving to lower addresses (which, in the diagram, means moving upward).
by Gigachad | 2025-10-25 23:33:16+00:00
Adelaide, Australia used to have constant rolling blackouts, including a state wide blackout once. After that, Tesla (pre insanity era) built a grid battery storage system which essentially fixed the problem. I'm sure there were other improvements to the grid at the same time. But these days the grid is incredibly stable while also being majority solar and wind powered. The battery is able to buy and sell power daily and profit on the difference between high and low demand times. And if there's an equipment fault somewhere, it can respond fast enough to cover the time between a generator going offline, and the backup ones starting up.
by mtlynch | 2025-10-25 23:33:38+00:00
Sorry for the offtopic comment, but it's bizarre to me that Google is hosting their book on Github with a github.io domain. Their previous two SRE books are hosted at https://sre.google on Google-owned IPs.[0]

What was that decision process? "We're Google, and we're literally writing a book about how good we are at hosting services. But hosting some static HTML files that are almost entirely text? That's a tough one. We'd better outsource that to one of our competitors."

[0] https://sre.google/books/
by WJW | 2025-10-25 23:34:09+00:00
I don't think we are talking about the same type of software? The type I was talking about will only ever run on Linux because it's a (HTTP-ish) server that will only ever run on Linux.

Probably a server that is only ever run by a single company on a single CPU type. That company will have complete control of the OS stack, so if it says no Windows, then no Windows has to be supported.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-10-25 23:36:18+00:00
It sounds like you're saying that they are not vulnerable. But that's just defeatist. Just because they have tanks doesn't mean they don't have vulnerabilities. When they go home from work they shop at the same grocery stores that we do, walk in the same parks, etc... There are plenty of opportunities to make them feel uncomfortable about what they're doing that we can and should be taking advantage of.

Whether they deserve legal protections from such activity is a totally orthogonal issue. I don't think they should--not in excess of any protections that the law offers anyone else. But that assessment has nothing to do with whether they drive a tank when they're at work.
by Gigachad | 2025-10-25 23:36:46+00:00
MIE is preventing an entire exploit category permanently. Blastdoor is just being more careful in a specific area of the code. It's also not just a case of is it possible to exploit or not, but how much does it cost to develop an exploit, and how long do they last for.

If it costs you millions of dollars for an exploit that gets patched a week after it's deployed, you can't use that for mass surveillance. If it costs you hundreds of millions, you can hardly use it for targeted attacks either. The cost of exploiting phones is constantly going up. It used to be within the ability of a single hobbyist developing a jailbreak. Now it's only in reach of the most well funded hacking groups for highly targeted attacks.
by tooltalk | 2025-10-25 23:37:09+00:00
China is adding new coal capacity roughly equal to America's entire coal capacity by the end of next year, or 180GW. These new installations don't replace old coal plants -- in H1 2025, China decomissioned only about 1GW.

China is also increasing their coal footprint outside China despite their pledge not to[1].

1. China Helped Indonesia Build One of the World’s Biggest, Youngest Coal Fleets. It’s Still Growing, Nicholas Kusnetz, data analysis by Peter Aldhous, Inside Climate News, Oct 19, 2025
by prewett | 2025-10-25 23:37:23+00:00
The article pointedly does not go into why the decrease happened, or what the trend has been. It would be consistent with the facts in the article if the City of Seattle saw Trump's actions with other cities and said, "we don't want that, maybe we should re-fund the police." Or perhaps Seattle never actually de-funded them in the first place, and has just focused efforts on reducing violent crime, because they were wanting to do that anyway and/or because they wanted to avoid giving Trump any excuse to send troops to Seattle. I am appalled at Trump, but this article does not necessarily prove him wrong.
by kbrkbr | 2025-10-25 23:37:34+00:00
A detective board inspired by https://github.com/Fungeey/detectiveboard.

I was looking for one on the internet.

The mentioned one is great, and I love the features. It uses node however, is a bit heavy and has dependencies. I am afraid of node after all the security incidents we had recently.

This one is just JS + HTML on one page. No tracking, no cookies, no data send over the internet.

Why might I (and you) need a detective board?

Let me quote the README:

"For me it is a simple way of wandering around thoughts that are naturally interconnected, but appear in a sequential fashion.

A detective board appears to give you a way of layering though upon thought, grouping them, reflecting on them as they are layed and layered out before you without vanishing and fleeting into each other and then working with the grouped and reflected whole.

I find it immensely useful for learning, analyzing, explaining, structuring problems and a lot of other related mental activities.

The option to use images is additionally helpful for me, as I can barely see anything with imagination (I am largely an aphantast). So I can keep visual clues next to my discursive thoughts."

Features:

- Double-click to create a note.

- Right-click and drag to connect pins with threads.

- Paste images with Ctrl + V.

- Scroll to zoom.

- Ctrl + Click to delete.

Save / Load buttons for persistence.

Try it here in Github pages: https://stefankober.github.io/detective-board/

Comments and suggestion welcome!
by SpikeDad | 2025-10-25 23:38:26+00:00
So The NY Times aids and abets the Trump administration in spreading false and unverified information about a tiny, infinitesimal number of slightly unusually cases.

What could the Trump administration and The NY Times possibly have as gain? I'm being sarcastic of course. We know why the Trump administration wants it - to throw another bone to their base and to placate the religious right and The NY Times to, well, I'm not sure - more clicks?

There's nothing the Trump administration won't lie about to further their power.
by woodruffw | 2025-10-25 23:39:19+00:00
I think the null hypothesis would be that they’re no more common in Rust, but that Rust’s low-friction packaging ecosystem makes them more apparent to you than they would be in C or C++.

(Think about the last time you checked whether the stack of GNU libraries on your Linux desktop were actively maintained. I don’t think anybody thinks about it too hard, because the ecosystem discourages thinking about it!)
Show HN: Persistent Mind Model – AI that develops its own identity
by HimTortons | 2025-10-25 23:41:14+00:00
Hi HN!

I’ve been building something called the Persistent Mind Model (PMM).

It started as a side project on my home rig (i7-10700K / RTX 3080 / 32 GB RAM) because I was frustrated that every local AI chat starts from zero. I wanted a system that could remember its own development and be studied like a living mind.

So I decided to try building one. I mean, why not? :)

Basically, if I could describe the Persistent Mind Model, I would describe it as an event-sourced cognitive architecture for language models.

It’s model-agnostic, meaning you can use local models through Ollama or connect to OpenAI’s API, and the system keeps the same “identity” regardless of backend.

Everything it says or decides, reflections, commitments, personality drifts, is stored as hash-chained events in a local SQLite ledger. That ledger becomes the model’s memory and identity. It is reproducible, auditable, and portable.

A few things that make it different from the usual LLM setup:

Model-agnostic: works with OpenAI, Ollama, or other backends, and you can swap models without losing identity.

Emergent memory: episodic, semantic, and working memory appear naturally from structure, not extra code.

Architectural honesty: a validator loop catches hallucinations in real time and logs corrections.

Deterministic growth: replaying the same ledger reproduces the same “mind.” Move the DB to another machine and it picks up where it left off.

Fully local: runs on your own system, no accounts or cloud services required, but you can connect them if you want. Right now it’s wired up for OpenAI and Ollama Cloud, with plans to add xAI, Google, and Anthropic.

This version is a complete rewrite of what I posted here a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45055443

It’s released under a dual license (free non-commercial, paid commercial) so anyone can experiment locally and maintain their own AI persona as they see fit.

A bit of a heads-up: I’m not a professional engineer. I’m just a curious, self-taught builder who wanted to see if an AI could remember itself, and somehow ended up building this thing that actually works.

I’d love feedback from anyone interested in interpretable AI, cognitive architectures, or model-agnostic systems.

Repo: https://github.com/scottonanski/persistent-mind-model-v1.0

I really hope a few people check it out. It’s pretty wild to watch it develop over time.
by jchw | 2025-10-25 23:41:37+00:00
> Running sys calls on the host means there is approximately 1µs overhead per syscall from exiting and entering KVM so I'm not sure how well that would work for GUI applications.

That made me rather curious how many syscalls a complex GUI application might issue. I wanted to see how many syscalls were happening across my entire system. Thanks to StackOverflow I have a snippet that seems correct[1]:

> perf stat -e raw_syscalls:sys_enter -a -I 1000 sleep 5

Using this, it seems that most programs (as you would probably guess) don't execute a whole lot of syscalls when they're idle. However, starting a complex GUI program definitely causes a pretty massive flurry of syscalls. Starting winecfg without an already-existing wineserver spews a lot of syscalls, somewhere in the neighborhood of 500,000. If we assume that each syscall takes on average around 2µs including the overhead and that they're all serial, I guess that would add up to about 1 second spent on syscalls. That's probably making way too many assumptions, but it does make me feel like it's not completely infeasible to run GUI applications inside of a sandbox like this, though it may very not be compelling when the overhead is factored in.

And of course, just because it could be done does not mean it should, anyway. Even if this is a good idea, I doubt it makes any sense for TinyKVM to be attempting to do it. What TinyKVM does do is already very interesting and probably a lot more practical anyways. It'd probably be better to fork off or build an entire purpose-built sandbox for GUI software, realistically.

Still, pretty interesting stuff to think about.

> And we currently only have very rudimentary support for threads, enough for a server program with ancillary threads to boot up but the expectation is currently that the call into TinyKVM only runs a single thread and we fork multiple copies of the VM to handle requests in parallel.

BTW, I think this design is really cool. This is something I have wanted to exist for a while, even though I don't practically need it.

[1]: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/591299
by potato3732842 | 2025-10-25 23:41:39+00:00
CA also shoots itself in the foot by having all its wealth and population in mild areas so those places run the show and nobody takes it seriously until it's a hot-summer, everyone cranks the AC, the grid keels over and then "how could this have happened". It's literally the stick in spokes meme. Sure there's some guy in the desert who's been screaming about how this stuff matters, but nobody listens to him because they were calling him a dumb yokel the other 364 days of the year.
by jiggawatts | 2025-10-25 23:42:16+00:00
As an immigrant to an anglophone country, I noticed a few things:

When people have varying levels of capability with languages, they’ll switch to whatever is the lowest common denominator — the language that the group can best communicate in. This tended to be English, even amongst a bunch of native speakers of a common foreign language.

Moreover, this is context dependent: when talking about technical matters (especially computing), the Lingua Franca (pun intended) is English. You’ll hear “locals” switch to either mixed or pure English, even if they’re not great at it. Science, aviation, etc… is the same.

Before English it was French that had this role, and before then it was Latin and Greek.

The thing is, when the whole world speaks one common language like Latin or English, this is a tiny bit sad for some Gaelic tribe that got wiped out culturally, but incredibly valuable for everybody everywhere. International commerce becomes practical. Students can study overseas, spreading ideas further and wider. Books have a bigger market, attracting smarter and better authors. There’s a bigger pool of talented authors to begin with, some of which write educational textbooks of exceptional sparkling quality. These all compound to create a more educated, vibrant, and varied culture… because of, not despite the single language.