MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by merelysounds | 2025-10-21 21:56:58+00:00
The article's title seems inaccurate - as far as I understood there never was a $3000/mo bill; there was a $500/(mo,instance) staging setup that has been rightly optimized to $55/mo before running six instances.

> Critically, all staging environments would share a single "good enough" Postgres instance directly on the server, eliminating the need for expensive managed database add-ons that, on Heroku, often cost more than the dynos themselves.

Heroku also has cheaper managed database add-ons, why not use something like that for staging? The move to self hosting might still make sense, my point is that perhaps the original staging costs of $500/mo could have been lower from the start.
by alganet | 2025-10-21 21:57:40+00:00
That is database schema. The post asks for opinions on database contents. They are related though, so it's a valid question.

> I suppose you include a script to update staging

Essentially, yes. But if I write a script to do it on staging, why don't I write one for prod as well? Maybe I could even go beyond that. Make a simple tool to handle those scripts for me (that's migrations).

It requires some version control and deployment discipline, which is something you probably wouldn't have if you're adding columns directly on the prod db.

I learned very early that no developer should have access to prod db. Not even read access. No writing, definitely. Schema changes by a single developer outside version control should be impossible.
by ofalkaed | 2025-10-21 21:57:47+00:00
My point was not about myths either. Literacy created a new tradition, it did not replace the old. The oral tradition will be with us for as long as people can communicate. Also the idea of a myth having no connection to reality is rather narrow especially in context of the oral tradition where myth and mythology often carried everything a well rounded person needed to know to get by in life, things like what plants can cure various ailments and the law.
by aeblyve | 2025-10-21 21:58:23+00:00
Agree, and well said. There are no points for hard work, only results -- this is an extremely liberating principle when taken to the limit and we should be happy to say goodbye to an era of manual software-writing being the norm, even if it costs the ego of some guy who spent the last 20 years being told SWE made him a demi-god.
by FaradayRotation | 2025-10-21 21:58:46+00:00
Caveats: My understanding of the Raptor Lake mess is pretty limited, mostly because Intel has been fairly closed lipped on what specific issue caused that. My personal suspicion is that it was a pareto plot's worth of issues. Also, while I do know a few things about this particular topic, I am far from the final authority on it.

My understanding is that point/local resistive heating problems out in the wild tend to drive different failure modes vs the global heating techniques used on the manufacturing line, mostly because the CPU is in active operation, which changes the defect physics. Put another way, likely any particular structure in the CPU would not need to reach 400C to fail - even the small voltages used in these chips coupled with elevated temperature can drive a lot of difficult-to-catch, slow-to-manifest failure modes. Copper metal migration is the classic example of this type of problem, where copper ions slowly migrate under voltage+temperature, causing/propagating voids until finally an open circuit is made. Surprise! your chip no longer works after seeming perfectly fine! Manufacturers try to catch such problems with simulated aging through aggressive temperature and voltage experiments. Intel must have discovered a big gap in their visibility, and then discovered their CPU specs were incompatible with the stated product lifetime without a major re-spec of already sold product. Ouch.

The chip manufacturer also has some capability to make repairs and adjustments ahead of end of line, which should encompass managing some of the issues you refer to. Some big customers might have their own repair capabilities.

Edit: Clarity, trying to better address the question
by joe_the_user | 2025-10-21 21:59:45+00:00
No individual is going to have the resources to respond to an alien signal unless it comes from Proxima Centari (very maybe) or not much further. No current earth broad would be easily recognizable from Proxima Centari with earth technology - a factor to consider when thinking about why entities aren't being easily detected. A powerful and very carefully aimed laser might work for greater distances but that wouldn't be something that can assembled in someone's garage.

But oppositely, if naturally defusing radio waves could be somehow detected from some further away location, the aliens would know already we're here and indeed lots about us so hand wringing about responding seems dumb there too.
by Stevvo | 2025-10-21 22:00:31+00:00
2) Artemis II is sitting on the pad ready to go. It will launch in a few months. But actually it's not relevant; the article makes no mention of SLS. There is suggestion of SLS getting the contract.

SpaceX doesn't even have a timeline for Starship; they have no idea when it will be ready, but the one thing that is clear is it wont be ready to take humans to the moon in 2027.
by JambalayaJimbo | 2025-10-21 22:00:56+00:00
What if you want to be a better problem solver (in the tech domain)? Where should you focus your efforts? That's what is confusing to me. There is a massive war between the LLM optimists and pessimists. Whenever I personally use LLM tools, they are disappointing albeit still useful. The optimists tell me I should be learning how to prompt better, that I should be spending time learning about agentic patterns. The pessimists tell me that I should be focusing on fundamentals.
by ianbutler | 2025-10-21 22:00:57+00:00
Sure so the maintainers set the boundary themselves.

I dont know what world you live in where you can be entitled to something you dont pay or contribute to.

They can do whatever they want to ensure their project works and frankly once again the projects dont need people like you. You’re not that important or special at all, certainly less so than the people building things. Like I get that you really think you are it’s dripping from your comments, but you’re not.

And to be clear this was a discussion among their community it wasnt a sudden thing so your entire premise is wrong.
Show HN: Asimov – Context Manager for Coding Agents
by Ihmzf | 2025-10-21 22:01:03+00:00
Hey HN, I built https://asimov.mov. an MCP for coding agents to search from latest docs of APIs, repos or basically anything.

It can index and retrieve docs + repos very fast to search from them and can do it on-the-go (like something launched yesterday and you indexed it right away, from your agent).

The indexed docs would only be available to you and would be stored on your own little server (we manage that!)

Hope Asimov can make your Coding Agents hallucinate less (by not implementing 1000-year old Stripe API or Cloudfare) :)

Happy to chat about the features and feedback + giving some Pro tiers (for free!) if anyone wants to try more!
by Bender | 2025-10-21 22:01:17+00:00
Something being open source does not mean anyone has even the slightest clue how it is running. People would have to see a read-only view of the active production run-time in trace/debug in real time to have a clue which of course would not be permitted. All code can be live-patched without leaving a trace by custom firmware or a thumb drive in production to conditionally change behavior on the fly to achieve any means or results. All electronic voting equipment can be tinkered with and any news stories about engineers testifying to congress will be erased for fear of reducing confidence in voting systems. Bribed developers take bigger risks for smaller gains all the time such as wireless front-line support selling or changing SIM information in SIM swaps.

Paper trails on the other hand can be verified and secured physically with chain of custody and proper attestation. Paper output can still be designed to be easy scan, verify and re-tabulate. I would like to see the paper trails scanned and uploaded to a centralized block chain so we can see if one of these things is not like the other. I would also like to see higher definition CCTV cameras monitoring the entire voting process and more of those cameras. That should also be uploaded somewhere they can not be tampered with and if a camera goes offline oopsie doopsie it's all hands on deck. Ballot drop-off boxes and mail in votes need to be outlawed and every state needs voter ID.
by xorcist | 2025-10-21 22:01:36+00:00
Having elections is in no way enough to have a democracy. You also need a functioning justice system and free media. What you describe is not part of the election system but of the justice system.

If the police does not uphold the laws that guarantee just elections, if they allow intimidations or treat citizens differently, or if the military tries to influence election results, then you do not have a democracy.
by cantalopes | 2025-10-21 22:02:10+00:00
I don't mean to hate but i find it incredibly alarming that i'm lately seeing all the seemingly seniorly positioned people writing articles about how they just realized that you can actually just buy a vps, setup a deployment workflow and write a revealing blog about "drastically cutting costs".

It's like juniors who did not recieve a proper training/education got hired into companies where someone told them to go serverless on some heroku or vercel, or use some incredibly expensive aws service because that's a "modern correct way" to do it, except now they were a developer for long enough to get a "senior" title in their job title now are in positions of actually modelling this architecture themselves
by inopinatus | 2025-10-21 22:02:33+00:00
Sounds more like you chose to ignore it. My family was wearing medical-grade disposable facemasks and socially distancing from February 2020 on the basis of healthcare advice.

Hunting for a bogeyman in retrospect is the bad-faith narrative of the mediocre culture warrior. Good luck with your undifferentiated rage or whatever.
by lproven | 2025-10-21 22:02:46+00:00
> Just false nostalgia memory.

No, I don't think that's right, because:

> 20 years ago things werent any better.

I think you have the timeframe wrong.

20Y ago, no.

30Y ago, yes, somewhat. Win NT came out 32 years ago.

40Y ago, yes, very much.

No public internet, very slow point-to-point dialup comms for a tiny %age of users, and tiny simple software for very limited hardware meant better quality software.

I installed multiple Novell Netware servers on company networks, both Netware 2.15 and Netware 3.1. They never ever got updated, and ran flawlessly for years on end.

I installed dozens, hundreds, of machines with DOS 3.3 and they ran it until they were scrapped.

I put in multiuser systems based around SCO Xenix: Unix boxes, but with no networking, no GUI or X11, no comms, no compiler. They had uptimes in years: zero crashes.

Stuff was more reliable because it had to be because shipping an updated meant posting media to thousands of users and sending a human to install it. Nobody could afford it.

Software and hardware should be subject to the same laws as vehicles: if it fails in standard use, the maker is liable. So make it safe.

If that means it has to be 0.1% of the size and 0.1% of the functionality that it was 20Y ago, fine: so be it.

Because that's still huge and rich compared to the DOS stuff I started my career on. It is not some savage brutal unimaginable limitation, utterly unrealistic. It was the reality of end-20th century software around the time that the PC industry moved to 32-bit hardware at the end of the 1980s.
by zorgster | 2025-10-21 22:02:51+00:00
PCR is central to short read sequencing... as well as Roche 454, and can also be used in some protocols in Nanopore.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3849550/

You can sequence a human genome on a MinION - but you need to purchase 5 flow cells to reach 11X (if they are used correctly).. https://nanoporetech.com/news/news-human-genome-minion
by naasking | 2025-10-21 22:02:57+00:00
> And doing it like you suggest would mean overview grids would have to do 50+ subqueries for each row, and loading a record would mean hundreds of queries.

Only if you insist on loading the data into a flat record type with all of those fields. You have a dynamically evolving datatype, so your class should also be dynamic:

public enum FieldId { Field1, Field2, //... } public class YourRecord { public Dictionary<FieldId, string> TextValues { get; set; } public Dictionary<FieldId, int> IntValues { get; set; } public Dictionary<FieldId, DateTime> DateValues { get; set; } // ... }

At most the number of subqueries increases by the number types your class needs. SQL has a fixed number of datatypes, and most apps use a small subset of these (dates, text, integral, floating point and decimal types, that's typically 5 at most). You could collapse these all into a single table with optional columns for each value too and then it's only one query.

> And insertion performance would crater I assume, since the DB now needs to do hundreds of inserts per record rather than a single row. We do have some cases where we get 100k inserts per hour once a day or so.

That's a fairly small amount of data, I don't really see an issue here.

Also, you're neglecting the fact that since the fields are independent, adding a field value doesn't involve locking and rewriting a large 400 column row to disk, but only appending a tiny 4 column row to a separate distinct table.
by alwa | 2025-10-21 22:02:59+00:00
Flour, salt, and water are exceedingly cheap. I have to imagine the loaf of bread I buy from my baker reflects considerably more than a 50x markup compared to baking my own.

It’s a lot cheaper than me learning to bake as well as he does—not to mention dedicating the time every day to get my daily bread—and I’ll never need bread on the kind of scale that would make it worth my time to do so.
by verdverm | 2025-10-21 22:03:08+00:00
Adopting technology produced by startups always comes with risk.

Advocating for using startup tech is an evaluation, risk calculation, and politics.

Is the potential benefit worth the risk? You have to decide that for yourself and then convince others. That involves presenting the problem and evidence this solution is worth investing time in, despite coming from a startup. Pilots, POCs, and presentations are helpful here, but you have to start from a problem or pain they hopefully already voice themselves. (In my experience)

I did this recently and spent a lot of political capital, adpinting Dagger to replace Docker for our image builds and CI, but also a custom CLI that wraps more of our CI process beyond just builds. We started with a POC approved by the CTO and then made a presentation to the managers of the other teams. That presentation centered around the many small paper cuts they complained about infrequently, but when shown together painted a bigger picture, to which we offered a solution that addressed many of those pains.

I still hear complaints about the move from Docker to Dagger, though it was only a piece of a larger problem and solution. Needless to say, I am unlikely to have sufficient political capital to spend on similar endeavors (which I don't foresee at this point)
by xmprt | 2025-10-21 22:03:24+00:00
Not the best comment but I agree with the sentiment. I fear far too often, people complain about price when there are competitors/other cheaper options that could be used with a little more effort. If people cared so much then they should just use the alternative.

No one gets hurt if someone else chooses to waste their money on Heroku so why are people complaining? Of course it applies in cases where there aren't a lot of competitors but there are literally hundreds of different of different options for deploying applications and at least a dozen of them are just as reliable and cheaper than Heroku.
by echelon | 2025-10-21 22:03:28+00:00
> enough to have a continuity

Who said continuity mattered? How would a copy or original know which they were? Does it even matter?

How would you even know you were in a simulation? We seemingly don't have the tools to know.

Whatever the case, if you're the copy in the hell simulator getting thrown into the meat grinder, I don't really think the distinction of "original vs copy" is the most pressing issue.

> while maybe in 2025 we'd be thinking in terms of electron clouds or quarks.

We can't fathom what level of control over the physical world an advanced intelligence might have. Maybe they can create entire universes. Maybe there are structures and dimensions beyond our understanding. I don't know and can't reason about them, but I'm willing to prescribe them god powers on account of the fact I have no idea.

Maybe our logic and intuition, tools like Occam's Razor, are fixed to an artificial distribution of event occurrences that is entirely constructed. Perhaps not unlike the fundamental constants of the universe. We wouldn't know any differently.

None of this is not measurable. Indistinguishable from fantasy.
by bawolff | 2025-10-21 22:04:00+00:00
In person meetings move things forward.

Paying the travel for a bunch of highly active volunteer contributors to meet up ocassionally and hash out complex community issues pays massive dividends. It keeps the site moving forward. Its also pretty cheap when you consider how much free labour those volunteers provide.

Whenever people criticize wikimedia finances, i think they miss the forest for the trees. I actually think there is a lot to potentially crticize, but in my opinion everyone goes for the wrong things.
by gchamonlive | 2025-10-21 22:04:23+00:00
How programs use ram also changed from the 90s. Back then they were written targeting machines that they knew would have a hard time fitting all their data in memory, so hitting swap wouldn't hurt perceived performance too drastically since many operations were already optimized to balance data load between memory and disk.

Nowadays when a program hits swap it's not going to fallback to a different memory usage profile that prioritises disk access. It's going to use swap as if it were actual ram, so you get to see the program choking the entire system.
by numpad0 | 2025-10-21 22:04:29+00:00
I think the point is that GP red flagging all MS shops, which is more or less just sorting companies by headcount and flagging all from top, implies incompetency at GP's side than at the company side.

Like, if a fighter jet pilot came and told all American jets are equally weak and overcomplicated and ineffective, it probably tells more about that pilot than about the jets.

I don't know if that's the case, but that would be the idea.
by lproven | 2025-10-21 22:04:41+00:00
> My Kubuntu 24.04 LTS box

Bad news... only the GNOME edition is a true LTS. All the flavours are not.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NobleNumbat/ReleaseNotes/Kubuntu:

Support lifespan

Kubuntu 24.04 will be supported for 3 years.
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-21 22:05:23+00:00
These are combined as if they go together, but:

(1) California does not require party preference to vote in primaries generally;

(2) California primaries are not (except for the Presidential primary) party nominating elections, they are essentially the open first-round of a two-round general election. (Basically, it is majority/runoff except that there is always a runoff even with a first-round majority.)

(3) For the Presidential primary, California does not require party registration to vote, but does prohibit party-registered voters from voting in cross-party primaries; it is the party (not the state) the decides whether their primaries are open to “no party preference" voters (of the six parties with permanent ballot access in California, the Republican, Green, and Peace & Freedom parties do not allow NPP voters in their presidential primaries, while the Democratic, Libertarian, and American Independent parties do allow them.)
by spelk | 2025-10-21 22:05:28+00:00
>Shouldn't it be minimized? I think it's increasing on Wikipedia. I think there's too high of a barrier for actual experts to write/edit. What's left is primarily idealogues with a certain leanings resulting in a positive feedback loop to more bias. I don't think anyone should want an echo chamber where an encyclopedia is supposed to exist. It's not there yet, but this is exactly how they form - see reddit.

I find this kind of a fascinating social phenomena.

I guess to give a personal example, I was trying to update a few pages about a country's Olympic history - that is, their Olympic bids, a few athletes, etc.

Unknowingly, I had stumbled across a particular power-editor's fiefdom, because they created all these pages and they were very aggressive in policing their articles to meet a certain style, tone and their beliefs.

Searching this person's username up (they went by their real name), they were closely related to that country's Olympic committee and an employee of a Ministry of Sport of sorts. The articles had lots of anonymous IP address edits from an university network this person was affiliated with in their program portfolio.

There was a clear conflict of interest, and I tried to point that out when they mass-reverted my edits, but they seemed committed to accusing me of edit warring by not sandboxing my changes and waiting for their personal review and approval, and quoted at least 12 different Wikipedia policies on notability, style, acceptable citations, etc. I still feel I was in the right, but I didn't have the willpower or stamina to fight against several requests for comments, speedy deletions, etc. They did get a warning from an administrator and some detractors in the discussion threads, but they weren't willing to let it go and at that point, it wasn't fun anymore for me. I have better things to do than to fight factual and nitpicky disputes on Wikipedia.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-10-21 22:05:47+00:00
Most high-performance workloads are limited by memory-bandwidth these days. Even in HPC that became the primary bottleneck for a large percentage of workloads in the 2000s. High-performance data infrastructure is largely the same. You can drive 200 GB/s of I/O on a server in real systems today.

The memory-bandwidth bound cases is where thread-per-core tends to shine. It was the problem in HPC that thread-per-core was invented to solve and it empirically had significant performance benefits. Today we use it in high-scale databases and other I/O intensive infrastructure if performance and scalability are paramount.

That said, it is an architecture that does not degrade gracefully. I've seen more thread-per-core implementations in the wild that were broken by design than ones that were implemented correctly. It requires a commitment to rigor and thoroughness in the architecture that most software devs are not used to.
by anon291 | 2025-10-21 22:05:47+00:00
Consider that, if the time separation is long enough via light then physical limits make it such that we do not ever have a chance of contact in which case this exchange is essentially indistinguishable from communication with supernatural beings.

Not that I believe they are the same, but many people will come to this conclusion and they would not be probably wrong. Causality is strange.
by vrinsd | 2025-10-21 22:06:26+00:00
As a happy user of many KDE based programs (konsole, kate, dolphin, etc) it's great to see another KDE piece evangelized.

But can someone state conclusively if Bluetooth-base connectivty in KDE Connect actually works in 2025? I looked into this a few weeks ago and it seemed liked from mailing list posts until Bluetooth functionality in KDE Connect equals WiFi connectivity the feature is not enabled?

When traveling it's much easier to do "point to point" between laptop and phone and in theory Bluetooth can support this easier than WiFi via third-party access-point or having to mess with WiFi direct.