MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bonsai_spool | 2025-10-18 23:44:55+00:00
I’m referring to the experiment done in the OP - the most I’ve read about from an minION flow cell is 8 Gb (and this is from cell line preps with tons of DNA, so the coverage isn’t great).

You need multiple flow cells or a higher capacity flow cell to get anything close to 1X on an unselected genome prep.

Shotgun sequencing isn’t probably what you meant to say - this is all enzymatic or, if it’s sonicated, gets size selected.
by ModernMech | 2025-10-18 23:45:40+00:00
> Quite a wide variety of people find AI deeply ego threatening to the point of being brainwormed into spouting absolute nonsense, but why?

It makes sense when you look at this as a wider conversation. Every time Sam Altman, Elon Musk and co. predict that AGI is just around the corner, and their products will be smarter than all of humanity combined, and they are like having an expert in everything in your pocket; people like Gary Marcus are going to respond in just as extreme way in the opposite direction. Maybe if the AI billionaires with the planet-wide megaphones weren't so bombastic about their claims, certain other people wouldn't be so bombastic in their pushback.
by datameta | 2025-10-18 23:46:02+00:00
Another point about Soviet scientists: it was very often a career-ending move to accept a Nobel prize unless you were a truly untouchable cult of personality and/or direct friend of those in power. See Andrey Sakharov, who first invented the soviet hydrogen bomb and later dedicated himself to non-proliferation which earned him a Nobel Peace prize. He was however barred from traveling to Oslo to accept in 1975, having already been blacklisted from classified work since 1968.

I wonder to what extent that lead to the curbing of consideration of those behind the iron curtain.
by jonah-archive | 2025-10-18 23:46:45+00:00
It's kinda gimmicky but I found this thing on clearance at a local hardware store and it works fairly well (gets most weeds out without me having to bend over, which is nice): https://grampasweeder.com/collections/grampas-gardenware/pro...

It doesn't get everything but I can do more work on the tough ones when so many come right out.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-10-18 23:46:52+00:00
Maybe I’m off the mark here but considering the state Facebook was in until AI put some wind back in its sales I would not say 20 years is a safe bet.

Remember how much time and money they burned on Metaverse? They’ve got nothing to show for it. And wasn’t only like 1-2 years ago they stopped publishing DAU’s in favor of a more favorable metric?

Someone feel free to correct me but they seemed to be just dipping their toes into a bit of a house of cards situation just a couple of years ago.
by mkl | 2025-10-18 23:47:04+00:00
> I think such a IDE for Python would really be helpful for beginners. Not text-based, but more like Visual Basic. But everything integrated, everything easily discoverable (that's very important!). Maybe also with such a GUI builder as in VB. And a built-in debugger.

That was Boa Constructor, starting in 2000: https://boa-constructor.sourceforge.net/. It seemed good at the time, but never caught on.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-10-18 23:49:40+00:00
Huge amount of drivers, all for 6.12, which is already pretty old. https://github.com/synaptics-astra/linux_6_12-drivers-synapt...

Agreed that that no hardware video encode is pretty damned deflating.

Having such a low power device is incredibly enticing. Thanks for the good details. One random thing I'm kind of excited over, there's 3x I2S audio connections, which has some weird fun use cases (ideally a little field recorder?).

One curious thing, Google's post says they are still trying to finalize the matrix extensions for RISC-V. I'm assuming those simply aren't on these Synaptics chips?
by johncolanduoni | 2025-10-18 23:50:32+00:00
I think a large part of what people are responding to here is the title, which comes off as something someone who doesn't actually understand the nature of a database workload would write. It may be a simple typo, but "Is YOUR Postgres Read Heavy or Write Heavy?" is the question that can have an answer. "Is Postgres More Appropriate for Read Heavy or Write Heavy workloads?" would also be fine, but it would be a totally different article from the written one.
by ModernMech | 2025-10-18 23:51:22+00:00
> diseases cured

Why bother? We cured polio and measles yet they are resurging because people are morons. What's the point of curing diseases when they charge $300 for insulin? You think the billionaires are going to allow their AIs to tell us the solution to that riddle? You think they'll listen to the AI if it correctly surmises that the way to solve that problem is to simply stop charging $300? Most of our problems are social, not technical.
by econ | 2025-10-18 23:52:43+00:00
I was thinking of discussion platforms but for general government I had a great idea: we know how to write and publish new laws but we are terrible at unpublishing outdated garbage laws. AI would be great for finding all laws that it thinks are dubious, impractical or otherwise undesirable in today's context and zeitgeist. There can be various manual deletion processes for different categories of absurdity.
by ipsum2 | 2025-10-18 23:54:31+00:00
They were completely sold out for 2-3 years (2020 onwards), and Google wiped documentation (https://coral.ai/products/accelerator/ redirects to the main page, which has no reference to the original Coral). I can't tell where there's an official place to buy this. I see some on Amazon, but that might be resold.
Ask HN: What growth experiments have worked for your early SaaS?
by TractionTales | 2025-10-18 23:55:51+00:00
I’ve been running a small community of solo founders and marketers where we share what’s actually working to get early users.

It’s been interesting to see how different the reality is from the usual advice. Most people find traction through a few scrappy experiments rather than polished funnels or big launches.

I’d love to hear from others here. What channels or tactics helped you get your first paying customers? What did you try that surprised you by working better than expected?

I’ll share some of the patterns I’ve seen in the comments. Always curious to compare notes with people who are figuring this out in the trenches.
by cormacrelf | 2025-10-19 00:01:14+00:00
How about -F -regexthatlookslikeaflag? Verbatim, that errors out as the command line parsing tries to interpret it as a flag. If you don’t have -F, then you can escape the leading hyphen with a backslash in a single quoted string: '\-regex…', but then you don’t get fixed string search. And -F '\-regex…' is a fixed string search for “backslash hyphen r e g e x”. The only way is to manually escape the regex and not use -F.

I think maybe a syntax like -F=-regex would work.
by giardini | 2025-10-19 00:01:33+00:00
There are plenty of mathematicians, psychologists, philosophers, physicists et al that are listening in. Perhaps one day, one or more of these will drop the (probably math) that will achieve critical mass (AGI).

There are two periods in history that "feel" like this time to me: - prior to Einstein's theory of relativity and - the uncovering of quantum mechanics.

In both cases bits and pieces of math and science were floating in the air but no one could connect them. It took teams of people/individuals and years of arduous effort to pull it all together.

Today there are a lot more participants. Main difference seems that a lot of them seem to be capitalists!8-))
by jcgrillo | 2025-10-19 00:01:48+00:00
Every time I set up a new machine--work, personal, whatever--the first thing I do is set up my rust toolchain and the second is 'cargo install ripgrep'. I really enjoyed your talk at the Boston Rust meetup a few years back on finite state transducers. Thanks for these (among many more) contributions you've made both to software and my education as a programmer.
by cgijoe | 2025-10-19 00:02:38+00:00
Fun Fact: This same sort of thing also happened on the Classic Macintosh Quadra 840AV, when running in 8-bit (256 color) mode. Playback of realtime video capture reserved color index #243 (a very dark green in the system palette), and ANYWHERE that color was used, it would be replaced with the live video. I created some cool effects using this back in the 90s.
by acscott | 2025-10-19 00:05:40+00:00
A little context may be of help. Maybe a better headline for the article would have been, "How Can You Determine if your PostgreSQL Instance's Workload is Read-Heavy or Write-Heavy?" It's useful to know to help optimize settings and hardware for your workload as well as to nkow whether an index might be useful or not. Most major DBMSs will have some way to answer this question, the article is aimed at PostgreSQL only.
by jsrcout | 2025-10-19 00:06:16+00:00
From my own experience, Think Pascal was fantastic for the time. MPW was serious and high-powered stuff for pro development on a late 80s/early 90s microcomputer; used it professionally for 2 or 3 years and loved it. Never tried the other ones you mentioned.

As you say, it's incredible how slick and sophisticated those systems were, given the hardware of the day. I mean sure current IDEs may be preferable but we're also using 4 Ghz systems these days instead of 40 Mhz or whatever.
by gus_massa | 2025-10-19 00:06:16+00:00
Usually the subtitle is fine:

> A video about all forms of equalizers. From one-click bass buttons to advanced studio correction.

That can be reduced to:

"Equalizers: From bass buttons to advanced studio correction."

PS: I'd try to keep the original title too, but in this case it doesn't look nice

"EQ: Equalizers - From bass buttons to advanced studio correction."
by hinkley | 2025-10-19 00:06:18+00:00
I think read replicas disagree with that pretty strongly.

The write traffic may be very write heavy, but then you have many, many users who need to see that data. The question is whether the database or a copy of the data from the database is what services that interest.

If you mediate all reads through a cache, then you have split the source of truth from the system of record. And then the read traffic on the system of record is a much lower ratio.
by Rochus | 2025-10-19 00:06:34+00:00
If ChatGPT generated the text, participants weren't encoding it into memory through the cognitive processes normally involved in writing; they were essentially passive recipients of AI output. Isn't it a trivial finding then, that participants could barely recall a text they didn't write? Also, the study is small (54 participants), not peer-reviewed, and conflates two different issues: the cognitive effort during task completion versus memory retention afterwards.

Doesn't the decline of IQ rather correlate with smartphone ubiquity, particularly after 2010, and the steepest declines appear in 18-22 year-olds—the heaviest smartphone users? Multiple studies link smartphone addiction specifically to reduced cognitive abilities, not technology broadly.
by optionalsquid | 2025-10-19 00:06:50+00:00
What the person you replied to described read like short read sequencing with PCR amplification to me ("each segment of DNA is read many times over"), rather than nanopore sequencing. My reply to you was written based on that (possibly false) assumption.

But if we are talking nanopore sequencing, then yes, you need multiple flowcells. Which is not a problem if you are not a private person attempting to sequence your own genome on the cheap
by esbranson | 2025-10-19 00:07:02+00:00
Most expect Five Eyes to share with the US, especially now the UK has abandoned the EU. No one expects the EU to, they are unable (or unwilling, hard to tell) to even defend their prospective member states like Ukraine. What could the EU possibly provide the US or Five Eyes outside European affairs? No one talks about the security blunders of the EU so neither I, nor anyone else, would know, not because they don't happen but because no one cares.
by etalazz | 2025-10-19 00:07:49+00:00
I built a small open-source rate limiter in Go that doesn’t write every hit to storage. It uses a pattern I call the Vector–Scalar Accumulator (VSA): keep the latest committed allowance as a scalar in storage (S) and track recent flux in RAM as a vector (A_net). Availability is computed in O(1) as S - |A_net|. We only persist when the net drift matters (e.g., |A_net| >= threshold), then apply the delta once and reset. In traffic with back-and-forth or retries, this cuts datastore writes by ~95–99% because opposing ops cancel in memory.

Why this is different from batching: batching still ships every event later; VSA collapses commutative updates into their net now. I/O scales with information (signal), not with transactional volume (noise).

What you get

O(1) reads and O(1) memory per key (HashMap<Key, VSA>) Dramatically fewer writes, locks, and round-trips under high churn Concurrency-safe TryConsume(n) to prevent oversubscription Background worker that commits only when a threshold is crossed, plus final flush on shutdown Pluggable persistence (mock included); keep your DB/Redis calm, or pair with a durable log if you need every event Trade-offs

Uncommitted in-RAM flux can be lost on crash (tune the threshold to your risk, or mirror raw events to a log) Best for commutative counters and volatile limits (rate limiting, edge quotas, hot counters, inventory holds)

Why you might care

Running distributed rate limiters, API gateways, or edge caches Hotspot keys causing write amplification/lock contention You want durability without paying the price of writing every micro-op How it works (tiny sketch)

// Always read availability in O(1) Available = S - |A_net|

// Persist only when signal matters if |A_net| >= threshold { S = S - A_net A_net = 0 }

Repo, docs, and a reference API demo are included. Curious to hear feedback from folks building distributed limiters or edge caches—especially around crash semantics, threshold tuning, and production anecdotes. If you need every event, I recommend pairing VSA with a durable log while keeping the hot path net-based.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-10-19 00:08:30+00:00
I think the point Andrej was making here is that in some areas, such as self driving, the cost of failure is extremely high (maybe death), so 99.9% reliable doesn't cut it, and therefore doesn't mean you are almost done, or have done 99.9% of the work. It's "The last 10% is 90% of the work" recursively applied.

He was also pointing out that the same high cost of failure consideration applies to many software systems (depending on what they are doing/controlling). We may already be at the level where AI coding agents are adequate for some less critical applications, but yet far away from them being a general developer replacement. I see software development as something that uses closer to 100% of your brain than 10% - we may well not see AI coding agents approach human reliability levels until we have human level AGI.

The AI snake oil salesmen/CEOs like to throw out competitive coding or math olympiad benchmarks as if they are somehow indicative of the readiness of AI for other tasks, but reliability matters. Nobody dies or loses millions of dollars if you get a math problem wrong.
by da_chicken | 2025-10-19 00:08:33+00:00
I am thinking about that. I don't think most data is read that often in an OLTP system.

I think a very small amount of data is read very often. However, until your DB gets very large, that data is going to end up as data pages cached in memory. So that data is extremely cheap to read.

I also think a significant amount of data that is generated in an OLTP system is written and never read, but you still had to pay the cost to write it. If you have an audit log, chances are you never need to look at it for any one piece of data. But you definitely had to write all the metadata for it.

But I'm also assuming that writes are at least 10 times as expensive as reads. More so if what you're modifying has indexes, since indexes are often functionally identical to a partial copy of the entire table. Indeed, I think that 10 times mark is conservative. Most RDBMSs use transaction logging and some kind of locking on writes. There's data validation and integrity checks on inserts and updates (and deletes if you have foreign keys).

I think 1 write to 10 reads is still write-heavy.
by int_19h | 2025-10-19 00:09:17+00:00
> And the second is that you're not the one flying the plane. You thought you were going to Charles de Gaulle but the weather in Paris is worse than expected or some drunk driver crashed the gate and drove out onto the runway and they're diverting all the planes, so after you're already in the air you find out you're actually going to Heathrow.

Such a system would presumably account for possible diversions and plot your flight accordingly.

And yes, that is a thing that some of us do actually need. For example, while I have lived in the West for the past 18 years, I'm still a Russian citizen, and if I ever set foot there again they will likely have some questions for me regarding all the money for the war effort in Ukraine (see Ksenia Karelina for an example). Thus I would very much appreciate the ability to book a flight that is guaranteed to not be diverted to Russia or to any country that is likely to extradite to Russia, and I would pay money for such a service.
by crvbnmd | 2025-10-19 00:09:52+00:00
You can tell people that they should take the time to read books, watch documentaries, play long strategy board games, watch C-SPAN, go on long walks or hikes, etc.

But It’s baked into our brains to want to eliminate additional work when it comes to getting information and feeling validated, and this won’t get any better as long as there are devices and substances that keep making the dopamine hits coming faster.
by alpinisme | 2025-10-19 00:10:39+00:00
Most languages have a way to represent a blob of bytes that you don’t care about the internal shape or meaning of. The point of parsing is to validate the stuff that you want to use. To use the Zod example from up-thread, you can use z.unknown() or use z.looseObject() if you care about some keys but not others (while wanting to propagate the whole object).
by Neywiny | 2025-10-19 00:11:44+00:00
I'll admit I only watched a video on it not the report, but it had pictures reportedly redacted at manufacturer request. It showed a teensy 3 and some adafruit qwiic board in there. Obviously the real engineering is in the enclosure. Otherwise it could just be a webcam. But still, it's clearly not a very in depth electrical design. I'm all for SoMs if you can but they don't guarantee you the adventure of custom hardware bringing moving through all the software stacks and whatnot.
by xg15 | 2025-10-19 00:12:09+00:00
How nice of neoliberals to finally notice that the livelihoods destroyed in the name of "disruption" were in fact actual human livelihoods - it just took several years after the average life expectancy in the US started to go down again and people became so unhappy they elected a wannabe autocrat for the second time.

Better late than never, I guess...
by baobun | 2025-10-19 00:12:39+00:00
Watching the video it seems that Dwarkesh doesn't really have a clue what he's confidently talking about yet running fast with his personal half-baked ideas, to the points where it gets both confusing and cringe when Karpathy apparently manages to make sense of it and yes-anding the word salad AK. Karpathy is supposedly there to clear up misunderstanding yet lets all the nonsense Dwarkesh is putting before him slide.

"ludicrous" sure but I wouldn't be so certain about "strawman" or that Dwarkesh has a consistent view.
by clintonb | 2025-10-19 00:13:18+00:00
Client-generated IDs are necessary for distributed or offline-first systems. My company, Vori, builds a POS for grocery stores. The POS generates UUIDv7 IDs for all data it creates and that data is eventually synced to our backend. The sync time can range from less than 1 second for a store with fast Internet to hours if a store is offline.

Is a collision possible? Yes, but the likelihood of a collision is so low that it's not worth agonizing over (although I did when I was designing the system).
by int_19h | 2025-10-19 00:14:31+00:00
As someone who has travelled a fair bit across the border between Canada and US, CBP agents have always tended to be dicks drunk on their power. I've seen plenty of blatant abuse at the border. So really the only thing that needs to happen for CBP to ruin your day is for an agent to have a bad day for their own. The only difference between then and now is that they're given more tools to do so and actively encouraged to use them.
by mmorse1217 | 2025-10-19 00:16:33+00:00
The trick is that you only solve Newton on a single subcurve: you recursively find the closest control point on all subcurves, split that subcurve and repeat until the closest control point doesn’t move much, or just however many subdivision steps work in practice. So the last curve that you apply Newton to should be smooth enough to succeed. I think there are edge cases with cusps, but I can’t exactly remember the theoretical guarantees anymore.

I think this is the main reference for this algorithm (should be able to search for the pdf): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01678...
by jerf | 2025-10-19 00:16:49+00:00
The tech is hitting the market now: https://www.bluettipower.com/products/sodium-ion-battery-pio...

YouTube has some reviews if you're interested. They're out in the wild now. Not being in the industry, I was a bit surprised when YouTube randomly popped up some recommendation about that. I didn't realize it was that far along.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-10-19 00:16:57+00:00
Grok had a moment where it was perfect, for some things for me, then a few months ago Elon wanted to do a major overhaul to Grok 3 and its been downhill since.

Too many LLMs be scolding you over miniscule things. Like say a perfectly sane request: give me a regex that filters out the nword in an exhaustive fashion. Most LLMs will cry to me about how I am a terrible human and it will not say racist things. Meanwhile I'm trying to get a regex to stop others from saying awful things.
by estimator7292 | 2025-10-19 00:18:18+00:00
Ish. Our level of technology is limited to mixing a small set of base compounds on demand. That gives a range of possible scents about as small as you'd think. The problem is that your sense of smell is a complex chemical detector. There are a lot of unique molecules that you can detect.

We'd have to synthesize molecules on demand to get any reasonable range of scents, basically.
by zerd | 2025-10-19 00:19:22+00:00
I've had issues in a database with billions of rows where the PKs were a UUID. Indices on PK, and also foreign keys from other tables pointing to that table were pretty big, so much so that the indices themselves didn't all fit in memory. Like we would have an index on customer_id, document_id, both UUIDv4. DB didn't have UUID support, so they were stored as strings, so just 1 billion rows took ~30 GiB memory for PK index, 60GiB for the composite indices etc. So eventually the indices would not fit in memory. If we had UUID support or stored as bytes it might have halved it, but eventually become too big.

If you needed to look up say the 100 most recent documents, that would require ~100+ disk seeks at random locations just to look up the index due to the random nature of UUIDv4. If they were sequential or even just semi-sequential that would reduce the number of lookups to just a few, and they would be more likely to be cached since most hits would be to more recent rows. Having it roughly ordered by time would also help with e.g. partitioning. With no partitioning, as the table grows, it'll still have to traverse the B-Tree that has lots of entries from 5 years ago. With partitioning by year or year-month it only has to look at a small subset of that, which could fit easily in memory.