MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DrewADesign | 2025-10-19 12:02:58+00:00
Assuming you’re earnestly not seeing how this works rather than seeking an argument:

I work in an industry where accountability is the norm. Individual people perform well-known, but difficult-to-execute steps of various processes; strict metrics define success and failure; close calls are not ideal; and the distance between success and failure is usually not revealed without precisely calibrated equipment. The ways to measure the outcomes are legally codified. Everything can be checked and double-checked, and people can, and often do, check those checks. Even then, sometimes the person that determined the metrics got them wrong. Sometimes it was measured wrong. Sometimes the person that said it was wrong turns out to be wrong. My primary professional function is to determine adherence to those standards. Potentially thousands of lives are at stake if we get the wrong thing wrong enough.

With a sane commit history and code reviews, this is a lot easier in software than it is in most realms. It’s definitely easier than mine.

Accountability isn’t just about failure— it’s about owning outcomes and giving an account of what you did to contribute to that outcome, good or bad.

> answerability, culpability, liability

You left off the end of the sentence.

> equated with answerability, culpability, liability, and the expectation of account-giving.

Account-giving is the key, here.

Since we’re focusing on problems: mistakes have different causes: being careless, having outdated knowledge, having the wrong requirements, physical or mental problems, equipment malfunctioning, bad processes… to identify the root problem, you need an account of what happened. To get that, you need to identify the person or people involved, and figure out what went wrong. That’s the only way you’re going to mature enough organizationally to have any semblance of quality. As the saying goes: if everybody’s responsible for something, then nobody’s responsible for it. The distinction is accountability.

So you don’t need to fire someone to hold them accountable— even being ‘in trouble’ every time someone does something wrong is counterproductive if it makes people hide or shirk responsibility for their mistakes. If someone fucks up badly or frequently enough, then maybe they are in trouble, and maybe they do get fired? But there’s a whole hell of a lot accountability that happens before that.

People make mistakes, and any organization that does not tolerate mistakes is run by people without the emotional maturity required to properly run an organization. The same is true of people unwilling to identify those mistakes and figure out either how they can be avoided in the future, or if they can’t be reliably avoided, mitigate their effects. Some of the leadership’s primary responsibilities involve defining the desired outcome, measuring the difference between it and the actual outcome, determining if/how it matters, and figuring out why it’s different. Those that refuse to address, or even acknowledge problems (and again, it doesn’t have to be punitive,) are masking their own laziness or incompetence.
by phoe-krk | 2025-10-19 12:03:05+00:00
> Are you saying a person who is accountable may not be held responsible for the outcomes?

No, please re-read what I said. I said that it's not about finding a scapegoat to fire, but about understanding what, where, and why happened. If you don't have an account of a problem, then you don't know where the problem is located; even if it should be solved by firing someone, then you don't have the tools to figure out who and why needs to be fired.
by _heimdall | 2025-10-19 12:03:20+00:00
Media outlets are often one-way though. I can't message news networks on TV and at best their sites may have a comment section enabled. They're still media, and if I can similar see content from my peers that seems to check the "social" box at least in my opinion.

Something like RSS doesn't work for direct messages, but it does still allow for you and I to post to our feeds. Nothing stops it from going a step further and acting much like twitter, we all post to our own site but they can be short messages and they can reference a post on someone else's site as "replying to" or similar.
Show HN: RIHU – Beyond RAG: Retrieval as Geometry, Not Vectors
by shinmaruko1997 | 2025-10-19 12:03:32+00:00
I built RIHU (Retrieval In the Hypothetical Universe) while wondering: how could we represent the world we live in as data? RIHU is a small open-source prototype that explores what retrieval might look like beyond RAG — when knowledge becomes geometry, not just vectors. Instead of embedding similarity search, RIHU constructs a geometric “universe” of Hypothetical Facts, Classes, and Instances. Each concept exists along interpretable spatial axes (like time, location, or semantics), and retrieval becomes wayfinding in that space.

Key ideas: - Geometry over similarity: proximity = relevance, density = salience, containment = context - Two retrieval modes: - Objective (global): find centroids and influence regions - Subjective (observer-centric): retrieve from a vantage point - Metrics: centroid, radius, volume, power (instances per volume)

RIHU comes with a small Python implementation and a demo universe built from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. You can explore it through sample code or visualize it in 3D.

This project is a small step toward more interpretable, observer-aware, and geometric forms of retrieval. Questions, criticism, and forks are all welcome!
by BirAdam | 2025-10-19 12:04:48+00:00
Since 1971. The world economic system became what I term financialism, where money is simply a debt instrument. The Treasury issues a debt note, in exchange for which they receive Fed Notes, and that debt obligation becomes the backing for more loans issued by the Fed to member banks. The Fed Notes handed to banks are then loaned too. Thus, debts in a single sector (if large enough) can crash the entire system.

The issue is, things that are tied to debt will go up first: housing, cars, etc. Stock inflation occurs because inflation forces people to speculate to stay ahead of the inflation rate.

To fix inflation when using a debt based currency, you’d need high interest rates (a high price of money), or you’d need the government to pay off debt which takes money out of circulation. Neither of these will happen as the politicians in power would cause serious short term pain. They all have an incentive to kick the can and hope the next guy is in power when it all falls apart.

What we are seeing now is the result of the price of money having been lower than the inflation rate for over 20 years. Effectively free money. This subtly skews the perception of risk, and therefore increases dollar velocity and drives inflation even higher.
by mritchie712 | 2025-10-19 12:07:40+00:00
Really excited about the future of DuckDB:

1. DuckLake is the best datalake spec and their team is improving on the extension rapidly.

2. With DuckDB WASM, you can make apps that would normally have 2 to 3 second latency for network calls work in < 200ms.

We use it as our built-in datalake at Definite and couldn't be happier with it.

0 - https://ducklake.select/

1 - https://www.definite.app/blog/ducklake
by crazygringo | 2025-10-19 12:07:59+00:00
Or maybe NULLs are actually a great solution here, and it's fine.

The idea that having a separate table for every optional field is too unworkable isn't an issue with SQL. It's a fundamentally overcomplicated idea. It's like a programming language where every variable that could be null had to be put in its own file. It would be terrible design.
by ezst | 2025-10-19 12:08:21+00:00
> It is the simplest and fastest way to get it done right now.

or the fastest way to get a confidently wrong words-salad. This stuff is niche AND indexed in search-engines, which makes LLMs generally not the best-suited (as proven by Gemini's answer being inferior than the search results lower down on the same search page).

> I was not trying to be inflammatory

You were not. I was just catching you at "use the right tool for the job", which often LLM is not. On a tech venue such as this, I would indeed expect this to come across as non-controversial.
by PeterisP | 2025-10-19 12:08:39+00:00
This shouldn't be a major issue because of Forward Secrecy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_secrecy) principles built into modern TLS protocols, which ensure that even if the public/private key scheme is vulnerable to (for example) quantum attacks, the attacks have to be done now, as a MITM for the handshake, or otherwise the full traffic capture is useless for future decryption without getting some secrets from one of the endpoints.

That being said, it's not 100% used everywhere yet (Wikipedia mentions 92.6% of websites), and various means of tricking devices into downgrading to an older protocol would result in traffic that might be decrypted later.
by gus_massa | 2025-10-19 12:10:21+00:00
The ears are also extrange, but quite incorrect in shape and size, but they are not horse ears. Is it possible that they saw some tusks IRL, but no elephant ear?

About the size, one elephant is smaller than a horse but has 4 small guys standing on it. Is it possible that it was a standard convention to get everyone in the drawing, instead of tying to make a photorealistic image.
by prisenco | 2025-10-19 12:10:34+00:00
Right and I'm not a fan of algorithmic feeds at all. Social media users broadly are happiest with a basic chronological feed composed only of who they follow. That's why every social media platform starts with that, then adds algorithmic feeds when they want to attract advertisers and after they feel their users are "locked in" enough.

Especially when engagement is the primary metric, which incentivizes our worst attention-seeking behavior. Well thought out, nuanced posts get lost in the ether. Hot takes, trolling and extreme positions get pushed to the top.

Reddit and HN mitigate this somewhat with the downvote system, which is hardly perfect, but at least means negative feedback is not given a positive weight in rankings.
by firesteelrain | 2025-10-19 12:11:12+00:00
In all of these types of stories, it is always the CEO or CTOs fault the way it is framed. There is never any accountability on the engineers part.

CEO/CTO sets the vision. They are not the ones developing the UI or developing the API or writing documentation etc

CEO determined there was a market fit or vision for a product, convinced an investor or shareholder to invest based on multiple reviews of this vision then hired a set of people to execute on this vision.

Yes, there are plenty of bullshit artists out there. But, the product itself is developed by people below the CEO.
by WhereIsTheTruth | 2025-10-19 12:11:20+00:00
Pledging blind allegiance to a single system is stupid

A smarter approach is to cherry pick the best elements from every model and redesign the parts that don't serve us

Not everything should be for profit, if you don't value society and collective welfare, it's meaningless:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/2...

You'll be forced to rethink that model anyway once post-scarcity hits

Abundance breaks capitalism, profit cannot thrive when there's plenty for everyone

Capitalism is a dead end, don't get too attached to it, it served us well, time to move on
by k310 | 2025-10-19 12:13:35+00:00
At the time, companies were moving to Pleasanton etc. but later pulled back or cancelled. Tech had barely begun to take over SF from south bay roots. And WFH was only for a consulting gig I had in Campbell 32 miles away.

I'd have to ask my son in law about current conditions, and I'll pass this thread along to him for comment.

East Bay homes were more affordable than either SF or SB.

I can't say why the apparent migration was to SF and not eastward. While working at the Sun office in Pleasanton, it was a reverse commute, only hampered by sun angles. But we visited customers, so it was a split between flex office (with Sunrays) and NorCal travel.

Passing this along. Kids live in the East Bay.
by crazygringo | 2025-10-19 12:14:58+00:00
I'm really curious, what communities use that word?

I've been working with SQL for 20+ years, and have literally never come across that word a single time in any documentation, tutorial, Stack Overflow answer, or here on HN. Working in Postgres, MySQL and SQLite.

Is it used at some particular company, or open source community, or with a particular database, or something?
by MaxBarraclough | 2025-10-19 12:16:35+00:00
Right, Date's idea didn't catch on. I'm not aware of any industry-strength RDBMS prohibiting storing null.

Agreed that queries would tend be longer as you'd need joins, although views could help, especially for read operations.

Regarding storage-efficiency and query speed, agreed that it could well hurt both, but it's going to depend. If a column holds null in almost all rows, we would expect it to be more space-efficient to use a separate table and a left outer join. Query speed could also improve for queries that don't reference the nullable column, as the 'main' table would be smaller in storage. (I'm assuming a rowstore here.)
by meander_water | 2025-10-19 12:16:39+00:00
A couple of examples I have seen recently which makes me agree with OP:

- PaddleOCR, a 0.9B model that reaches SOTA accuracy across text, tables, formulas, charts & handwriting. [0]

- A 3B and 8B model which performs HTML to json extraction at GPT-5 level accuracy at 40-80x less cost, and faster inference. [1]

I think it makes sense to fine tune when you're optimizing for a specific task.

[0] https://huggingface.co/papers/2510.14528

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1o8m0ti/we_buil...
by dovlaurn | 2025-10-19 12:20:20+00:00
I’ve been working on my landing page template and would love to hear some constructive feedback.

About the template:

It’s a basic React and TypeScript template built with Tailwind and Shadcn UI components. Users just need to download the files and run it in any IDE to start developing. The reason I made it is that I was building landing pages from scratch every time I started a new project. Since I’m building in public, I needed a fast way to create a good-looking landing page.
by mapmeld | 2025-10-19 12:21:53+00:00
An annual 0.1% chance of one casualty (so: a passenger jet less than 1 in 1,000 years) doesn't become significantly more likely in two years. Also I assume the FAA actuaries would have forward projections of Starlink launches.

Maybe this is space shuttle math where real-world accidents tell us that the risk is significantly higher. But it'd be the first documented case of a meteor or space debris, so I'd guess it's still unlikely.
by mopenstein | 2025-10-19 12:23:15+00:00
Mine came on when I was about 12 years old and I'm convinced it was brought on by severe anxiety.

At the time my life had changed dramatically. My parents split. Moved to an area adjacent to government housing projects, through which I had to travel everyday to school, and I was, by virtue of unfortunately being wrong color, beaten daily by gangs of hooligans. I ended up sneaking through a slightly wooded area like a South American guerilla until they caught me there.

I couldn't handle it as I was already a sensitive kid and, the parent I ended up with, the other having gone to jail, was compassionless due to their own horrific upbringing. So I had no way of coping which led to total breakdowns and anxiety attacks.

Tinnitus reared it's ugly head soon after which further exacerbated the anxiety.

But the correlation is all speculation on my part because my parent only took me to the doctor a year or so later after much complaining. And only for the tinnitus, not the crippling anxiety.
by jodrellblank | 2025-10-19 12:24:42+00:00
Here; the title focusing on the price is implying that the cheap SD card survived ocean floor environment alone. A surprising amount of stress for its price.

Instead, a pressure-proof deep sea camera module was found at the wreckage site. It’s less interesting that an expensive thing rated for ocean depths was intact at ocean depths.

Its like “missing child found after 4 days in Alaska temperatures!”

gasp! How did they survive!

“The child was on holiday in their grandparents’ holiday log cabin, with their grandparents, a log fire, food, water..”

Oh. Clickbait. Hiding the boring bit to make the story appear more of a tease.
by burntsushi | 2025-10-19 12:24:49+00:00
Yes, I agree, `git ls-files` can indeed be faster than just `rg --files`. On my Chromium checkout:

$ hyperfine --output pipe 'rg --files' 'git ls-files' Benchmark 1: rg --files Time (mean ± σ): 141.2 ms ± 7.1 ms [User: 1134.5 ms, System: 376.3 ms] Range (min … max): 128.7 ms … 154.8 ms 20 runs Benchmark 2: git ls-files Time (mean ± σ): 54.9 ms ± 1.7 ms [User: 41.7 ms, System: 13.1 ms] Range (min … max): 52.2 ms … 62.0 ms 54 runs Summary git ls-files ran 2.57 ± 0.15 times faster than rg --files

But the semantics here are important, because ripgrep doesn't only try to approximate `git ls-files`. It also needs to deal with `.rgignore` and `.ignore`. And no git repository state will help there. ripgrep also supports respecting `.gitignore` even when it isn't inside a git repository.
by dav43 | 2025-10-19 12:24:54+00:00
possible, seems this is done in other modes.

quote - google ai mode:

"DuckDB offers robust capabilities for querying data stored partially on S3, particularly when dealing with Parquet files. This is achieved through several optimization techniques:

Predicate Pushdown: When you apply a WHERE clause to filter data, DuckDB can "push down" this filter directly into the Parquet file scan. If the Parquet file contains zonemaps (metadata about value ranges within columns), DuckDB can use this information to skip reading entire sections of the file that do not contain relevant data, significantly reducing the amount of data transferred from S3.

Projection Pushdown: When you select only specific columns in your SELECT statement, DuckDB automatically reads only those required columns from the Parquet file. This means you avoid downloading and processing unnecessary data, leading to faster queries and reduced S3 transfer costs.

HTTP Range Reads: DuckDB leverages HTTP range headers when interacting with S3 (or other object storage supporting range reads). This allows it to fetch only the necessary parts of the Parquet file, such as metadata or specific column chunks, rather than downloading the entire file."
by skydhash | 2025-10-19 12:25:56+00:00
> it is always the CEO or CTOs fault the way it is framed. There is never any accountability on the engineers part.

If we're going with the military analogy in TFA, it's always the general fault for loosing a war. Especially if the soldiers did all they were told to do. He's the one in control making all the major decision.

> CEO/CTO sets the vision. They are not the ones developing the UI or developing the API or writing documentation etc

That's why you need a feedback loop. If a general only stays in a bunker, deciding things based on map and single line reports, then it's a poor general. You have to also have a clear sense of what the product is (dogfooding it if it's necessary) so that you can adjust its course. Vision is all bell and whistle. People wants to pay for solutions, not nice ideas. They may even be willing to invest in such solutions. But you have to deliver it.
by sailingparrot | 2025-10-19 12:26:24+00:00
The issue isn’t so much scheduling as it is stability.

More clusters means one more layer of things that can crash your (very expensive) training.

You also then still need to write tooling to manage cross cluster trainings correctly just as starting/stopping roughly at the same time, resuming from checkpoints, node health monitoring etc.

Nothing dealbreaking, but if it could just work in a single cluster that would be nicer.
by potato3732842 | 2025-10-19 12:28:38+00:00
This. All this.

And it's not some law of reality or the goodness of the CCP or some raced based bullshit that underpins is. The US was like this too, 75yr ago.

But for several generations we've been throwing more power behind both public and private institutions that reduce the tempo of economic activity and it sure fucking shows.
Ask HN: Why put a HAProxy in front of Nginx?
by rvitorper | 2025-10-19 12:28:45+00:00
Hey, thanks for your time in advance.

I saw in a few comments people talking about having a HAProxy in front of a Nginx, which in turn acts as the reverse proxy to the app instances.

I wanted to understand what use-cases is this architecture viable and recommended, if you could just remove the HAProxy and have Nginx as the public facing server or maybe remove the Nginx altogether, and if there are other factors to use the HAProxy and the Nginx, such as pairing them with a few Varnish instances.

Thanks a lot for your time
by anenefan | 2025-10-19 12:30:50+00:00
The biggest thing for what plagues the net, society in general, did occurred in 2007 / 8 - it was not the phones - it was what the US govt did in response to Facebook's rather dire lack of real mods over "bullying" ... the move to ban anonymous people arguing and flaming - this flowed though eventually via the new terms of service US based software for forums, boards, and hosting sites required to abide by the new laws. Many forums I used to frequent slowly disappeared being unable to adapt to different software and hosting sites that were happy to ignore US laws.

A real name when challenging the status quo unfortunately attaches the risk of retaliation from either the intended organisation or person, or their fanboys, via direct or creative sets of problems designed to waste time and / or money. Sadly the internet is a bit more fuzzy when it comes to trouble and those dishing it out. Social media of course, had welcomed the new rules, and any anonymous account speaking out against a popular idea could be quickly reported and thus indirectly permanently banned until they complied with real life details.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-10-19 12:31:06+00:00
Why would you choose a model where the trained in priors don't match your use case? Also, keep in mind that RL'd in behavior includes things like reasoning and how to answer questions correctly, so you're literally taking smart models and making them dumber by doing SFT. To top it off, SFT only produces really good results when you have traces that closely model the actual behavior you're trying to get the model to display. If you're just trying to fine tune in a knowledge base, a well tuned RAG setup + better prompts win every time.
by ffsm8 | 2025-10-19 12:31:12+00:00
Nobody argued that it was impossible before. Nor did I claim that there were no cameras before 2005.

Cameras just weren't as ubiquitous as today. Unironically arguing that point is silly. They just weren't (I know you didn't, but we're in a comment chain that made that argument).

Yes, in most groups of people, there were a few of them that had cameras readily available, but it wasn't the norm for everyone.

What was available (not just cameras, but ocr etc pp) was a lot less accessable then it is today - where you just point your phone at it and it transparently extracts you the full text of whatever is on screen/lens, consequently the issue got a lot more problematic and widespread, which was the only thing what was put forward here.