MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Walrus: A High Performance Storage Engine built from first principles
by nubskr | 2025-10-21 12:30:03+00:00
Hi, Recently I've been working on a high performance storage engine in Rust called Walrus

A little bit of intro, Walrus is an embedded in-process storage engine built from first principles and can be used as a building block to build these things right out of the box like Timeseries Event Logs, Database WAL, Message Queue, mini Kafka, key value stores, task queues, and much more..

the recent release outperforms single node apache kafka and rocksdb at the workloads of their choice (benchmarks in the repo)

repo: https://github.com/nubskr/walrus

If you're interested in learning about walrus's internals, these two release posts will give you all you need:

1. v0.1.0 release post:https://nubskr.com/2025/10/06/walrus (it was just supposed to be a write ahead log in the beginning..) 2. v0.2.0 release post: https://nubskr.com/2025/10/20/walrus_v0.2.0

I'm looking forward to hearing feedback from the community and the works of a 'distributed' version of walrus are in progress.

(it wouldn't let me post the links at the top for some reason)
by EvgeniyZh | 2025-10-21 12:30:06+00:00
I've played one game of ransom. This is fun but I have some comments/suggestions.

1. Letters are sometimes barely shuffled 2. Sometimes same clue with different redacted words come one after another so you know which words are redacted 3. Sometimes (foreign names for example) the answer is not redacted due to accents. Same for similar words (complexity uncensored for "complex system"). Sometimes picture or video contains answer. 4. I guess you use some popularity metric for articles? I got Greece, ancient Greece and archaic Greece, though the topic is allegedly physics? Maybe filtering a bit more would be better 5. Before I started game I didn't know how long it is supposed to last. Apparently it's indefinite, and I lost on purpose to verify it. 6. Some feeling of progression with harder tasks would also feel nice.
by TheTaytay | 2025-10-21 12:30:18+00:00
For any label it generates, he uses an embedding model to generate the embedding vector for it. (You could say that "embeds the label in a vector space") Then, he looks at that generated embedding for that label and asks if there is another previously-generated embedding that had a _very_ similar embedding generated for it. If you set some sort of "how close is close enough" threshold for that, you are "clustering" all generated labels, by saying "These 10 labels have slightly different words, but essentially mean the same thing.
by t1234s | 2025-10-21 12:30:22+00:00
I would think the hw3 to hw4 retrofit would be easy. just swap out the FSD computer under the front and swap out the cameras. I'm sure they could make a kit that is compatible with the existing camera harnesses (if they are different). Also they would need to make a way to retrofit the bumper cam housing on older models.

If they offered this for sale for $8k including the FSD license for older hw3 teslas that don't have FSD it might offset some of the cost to bring up the people who already paid the $8k on HW3.
by friendzis | 2025-10-21 12:30:49+00:00
> You say this as though it's trivial to just see that Tesla is a scam.

You don't need any particularly deep due diligence to see that, in fact, not living under a rock is more than enough.

> There's multiple decades of fawning articles and reviews of Tesla to the point where the average person can't be blamed for assuming they're a reputable company.

There's multiple decades of articles highlighting, in various levels of detail, how exactly bad Tesla is and Teslas are. Checking for bad reviews and deciding how applicable they are to you in particular is part of rudimentary check

Sorry, but knowingly and deliberately buying a Tesla vehicle is entirely on the customer and they get in some sense even more than what they had ordered. Similarly, if you buy a ${brand-you-don't-like} you have no right to complain about ${common-problem}, because that's the state vehicles leave the factory.
by chris_wot | 2025-10-21 12:30:55+00:00
“ Believe me that some of us understood this: I worked extensively on both Solaris x86 and with the SPARC microprocessor teams -- and I never hesitated to tell anyone that was listening that our x86 boxes were starting to smoke the hell out of UltraSPARC.”

Was that before or after you realised the Linux kernel devs were better at squeezing performance efficiencies out of x86 than you guys were?
by crazygringo | 2025-10-21 12:30:58+00:00
No it's not. It's the primary medium by which they get their entertainment.

TikTok replaces YouTube and Tumblr before that. It's not like people are watching it instead of reading history books or the New Yorker.

And just because you use TikTok doesn't mean you don't check actual news headlines or listen to two-hour-long podcasts.
by Brendinooo | 2025-10-21 12:31:38+00:00
In this thread: many people missing the points being made in the article.

>The ‘tyranny of literacy’ makes us sceptical of knowledge being retained in oral societies for such a long time

This is actually not what I thought this would be about from the headline: I thought someone would pull the Plato quote from Phaedrus about how literacy was inferior because it forced us to engage with views from dead men who were not able to answer for what they wrote.

It's just making the point that if you have a society that's entirely dependent on memory, it's going to have a better memory. This seems logical; their example about remembering phone numbers is simple and relatable.

And Plato made this point as well: "They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."

I'd imagine there's a fair amount of motivated reasoning behind rejecting this point.
by jimbo808 | 2025-10-21 12:32:43+00:00
This is kinda a hilarious coincidence, because I just watched a podcast with Andrej Karpathy, the guy who was running their autopilot program back when the sage "fully autonomous in one year" predictions kicked of their 15+ year long run (and counting).

These days he's moved on to predicting 10 years for AGI and is, I shit you not, citing his 15 year track record of making accurate predictions (timestamped link below if you want have a laugh).

https://youtu.be/lXUZvyajciY?si=3PyVM476W6k3n-DR&t=181
by rkomorn | 2025-10-21 12:33:47+00:00
> Even if we do not have binocular depth perception, we actually perceive depth irl just fine.

I don't think it's everyone of us because I struggle somewhat with pouring things into small openings (eg refilling a small bottle from a bigger one) and most ball games (tennis, table tennis) are difficult.

I don't think it makes depth perception a problem, but I think it's unarguable mine isn't as good as the people I know with binocular vision.
by JohnFen | 2025-10-21 12:34:20+00:00
> The availability of healthcare is the favorite talking point of those with socialized medicine programs because.... the quality sucks.

Well, this isn't universally true. But regardless, the quality of care in the US sucks just as much if you aren't financially well-off. When you can get it.

> How many hundreds of NHS horror-stories are produced a year?

And how many thousands of horror stories are produced by the US healthcare system every year?
by marshfarm | 2025-10-21 12:34:35+00:00
The effect is easy to grasp, we're moving away from Pleistocene communication technology, which is benchmarked in dated tools like reading, math, SAT/ACT scores. Human intelligence isn't going away, another form of expression that measures intelligence that isn't text or numbers based is arriving, we simply don't have the capability to measure that, though, here clearly are markets for that intelligence.
by froobius | 2025-10-21 12:34:48+00:00
I think the main thing to clarify is:

It's not a uniform distribution after the first measurement, t_obs. That enables us to update the distribution, and it becomes a decaying one.

I think you mistakenly believe the distribution is still uniform after that measurement.

The best guess, that it will last for as long as it already survived for, is actually the "median" of that distribution. The median isn't the highest point on the probability curve, but the point where half the area under the curve is before it, and half the area under the curve is after it.

And the above equation is consistent with that.
by kragen | 2025-10-21 12:34:56+00:00
This essay is amazing and delightful, but it is rather densely allusive, like classical Chinese literature; ultimately it is more allusion than plain language. I suspect that most people will find it somewhat impenetrable. But if you want to see Emacs explained by references to Dune, Harry Potter, Gormenghast, Star Wars, A Rape in Cyberspace, Neuromancer, The Matrix, Crowleyian magick, and so on, this essay is for you.

Ultimately such storytelling seems to be the best means that we as humans have to convey our subjective experiences, which purely objective descriptions are not very good at. (This is one of the weak points of the engineering mindset that I was criticizing in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45650941.) So I sympathize with the project. But I wonder if it may end up preaching to the choir a bit: if you remember the intoxication of reading Barlow's Declaration of Independence, probably you already have a settled relationship with Emacs, whether intimate or traumatic, or both?
by ____mr____ | 2025-10-21 12:35:25+00:00
Remember seeing the news of the nationalization a few days back and combined with the newly imposed limits on mineral exports towards the US it feels like the EU will finally have to fully decide if their allegiance will lie with China (BRICS) or the US going forward.

I think the Ukraine war is going to be the thing that tips the scale unless peace and return of land is negotiated as part of EU aligning itself with BRICS. Makes me think that the US could purposefully delay peace talks to win over EU?

The future will be really interesting. With the AWS outage yesterday the reliance on US for infrastructure is once again called into question. Could a new subspace within the internet be formed as the EU tries to break away?
by riffraff | 2025-10-21 12:36:01+00:00
but the whole self driving shtick is what gave it the insane valuation, isn't it?

"we're general motors, but better" is not the same as "we'll have self driving taxis that make money to our customers while they sleep".

Musk's 2018 Pay Package had a lot of market cap-based targets[0].

[0] https://www.equilar.com/elon-musk-2018-tesla-pay-package-ana...
by bob1029 | 2025-10-21 12:37:26+00:00
I feel like Tesla would have been significantly more competitive with the non-EV market if they had gone in a completely opposite direction with regard to fancy technology.

Give me a boring ass 90s control layout with the electric drive train and I'm much more interested. Make the car kind of ugly too. On purpose. I don't need a GPU farm inside my car. I'm not running a robotic taxi company. I just want to go get some groceries.

I've worked on cars long enough to realize I don't want a chip using a leading edge semiconductor node in my vehicle somewhere. I live in a pretty nasty climate. A car sitting in a Texas parking lot in July will get to temperatures that the engineers probably didn't think possible. There's always something that starts to break once you cross into that 150F temperature level. I want semiconductors that were engineered to run in the basement of hell 24/7/365. 28nm and thicker sizes. I don't want 3nm gates in my car. There's no way these chips would last 10 years.
by mylifeandtimes | 2025-10-21 12:37:47+00:00
the way they smelled and the way the world smelled when the knowledge was shared.

smell, of course, being one of the oldest and strongest senses. And one which incorporates a vast amount of knowledge. True, most of this knowledge is non-verbalizable, but that's true for many many forms of knowledge.

I can think of a number of other things which would also be lost by video, but smell was an obvious choice.

As for practical, let's say I was teaching you to cook, or to hunt, or to practice medicine. Several areas where smell gives really rich information.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-10-21 12:37:47+00:00
As far as Wall Street is concerned, none of this really matters.

Tesla stock (P/E over 250) is priced as if Telsa is the largest auto manufacturer, the biggest robotaxi company, the dominant robot producer and the leading AI service provider.

Meanhile; back in reality, none of this is even close to being true.

Logic simply cannot explain it --- so the fallback is a conspiracy of some sort. One that Wall Street must have a stake in.
by kragen | 2025-10-21 12:38:30+00:00
I've never used grep-find or LSP, despite using Emacs for 32 years. Maybe I should; is grep-find better than M-x grep?

Apparently I've sometimes improvised an equivalent: "Run grep via find, with user-specified args COMMAND-ARGS. ... This command uses a special history list for its arguments, so you can easily repeat a find command."

My out-of-the-box autocomplete is M-/, which works in environments where LSP doesn't, like writing English. It works sort of poorly in all of them, but I write production code slowly enough that my typing speed isn't close to being a bottleneck. It's more of a bottleneck when writing English, but even there, generally any of my good writing was good rewriting.

Where I've found LSP-like functionality really useful in the past in IDEA and later Eclipse was not autocomplete, which is mostly an annoyance, but in automated refactoring (extract variable, extract method, inline method) and in rapidly iterating through the implementors of a method whose semantics I'm changing.
Prehistoric "default devices" list in Chrome Devtools
by adrianvoica | 2025-10-21 12:39:19+00:00
The default list of devices in Chrome Devtools is so out of date. Some of these devices are long gone / forgotten, while newer ones are missing. Google, please fix this! Just, please, give us the up-to-market-reality list. Nobody cares about S3, Kindle Fire, Nexus 5, etc. This is 2025 (almost 2026!). Just add the latest 3 generations of Pixels, iPhones, iPads, Samsung flagships. :(
by xiphias2 | 2025-10-21 12:40:24+00:00
I'm sure he said bad things about Danya, and even now he's protecting himself when he should be just sorry for what terrible thing has happened, but generally Danya was more liked than Kramnik, so he can't be responsible / accountable for something he doesn't have power over (Danya's life).

If you are famous, you will have haters, it's part of the deal.

I agree with the crowd who say that mental health issues should be taken seriously instead of kept under the rug.
by Zufriedenheit | 2025-10-21 12:40:56+00:00
Somebody sued Tesla at a UK consumer court because FSD was advertised as delivering fully automatic driving soon. It was based on Consumer Rights Act, which states that goods must match their advertised description. Tesla ended up paying back the full purchase price + interest and legal fees in return for him dropping the case. It seems Tesla lawyers know they are in a bad position with this. The company has just promised way to much to early. Which was totally unnecessary imo. The car were pretty cool products and would have sold well if they just called it driver assist system or something similar.
by 13years | 2025-10-21 12:41:06+00:00
> We suck at measuring ourselves.

That is a certainty. I was once asked to calculate how much time we would save through our companies code reuse program. I read all the material on estimating savings, but then proved it was all ridiculous.

I came across a study that attempted to estimate how long it took to build libraries that had already been built. In this case, there were no unknowns, you had the entire code. Estimates were off by orders of magnitude. If we can't estimate the work when the work is already done, how could we ever estimate the work when we know less?
by holowoodman | 2025-10-21 12:41:40+00:00
Even so. Current first-line treatment for pancreatic cancer is surgery, because chemo doesn't really help a lot. Chemo alone is useless in this case. So any kind of treatment that does have a hope of treating anything involves removing the pancreas.

Take those 99% false positives. If you just remove the pancreas from everyone, you remove 20 years of lifetime through severe diabetes. In terms of lost life expectancy, you killed up to 25 people. Surgery complications might kill one more. In all, totally not worth it, because even if you manage to save everyone of those 1% true positives, you still killed more than 20 (statistical) people.

And the detection rate might be increased by more testing. But it needs to be a whole lot more, and it won't help. Usually pancreatic cancer is detected in stage 3 or 4, when it becomes symptomatic, 5 year survival rate below 10% (let's make it 5% for easier maths). The progression from stage 1 to stage 3 takes less than a year if untreated. So you would need to test everyone every 6 months to get detections into the stage 1 and stage 2 cases, that are more treatable. Let's assume you get everyone down to stage 1, with a survival rate of roughly 50% at 5 years, 15% at 10 years. We get a miracle cure developed after 10 years where everyone who is treated survives. So basically we get those 15% 10-year-survivors all to survive to their normal life expectancy (minus 20 because no more pancreas). Averaging they get an extra 10 years each.

Pancreatic cancer is diagnosed in 0.025% of the population each year. In the US at 300Mio., thats 750k in 10 years. With our theoretical miracle cure after 10 years for 15%, that is a gain of 1.125Mio years lifetime. A 1 hour time needed for testing per each of 300Mio people twice a year for 10 years already wastes 685k years of lifetime, so half the gain already. That calculation is already in "not worth it" territory if the waiting time for the blood-draw appointment is increased. That calculation is already off if you calculate the additional strain on the healthcare system, and the additional deaths that will cause.
by rsynnott | 2025-10-21 12:41:49+00:00
> Logic simply cannot explain it --- so the fallback is a conspiracy of some sort. One that Wall Street must have a stake in.

... Wait, is your contention that every time the markets price something incorrectly, there must be a conspiracy? Tesla is a meme stock, one of hundreds, albeit the biggest. There's no need for a conspiracy; the markets are just actually not all that great at pricing, especially where there's significant retail involvement.
by nickgray | 2025-10-21 12:42:05+00:00
I attended a presentation by Cloudflare last week about how they helped X (formerly Twitter) improve their reliability and network performance.

To my knowledge, you will not find this information anywhere else online.

It was presented by Alex Krivit (PM), David Huber (Director, Product Management), and Sachin Fernandes (Engineering Manager) at the Cloudflare Connect 2025 partner and customer summit.

Here are my detailed notes from the session for anyone who might find it helpful.

X deployed several Cloudflare products as part of their infrastructure modernization:

* CDN and content delivery as the primary focus

* Argo for dynamic performance optimization and congestion solutions (with custom tuning)

* PNI and CNI (Private Network Interconnect and Cloudflare Network Interconnect) for direct connectivity

* Extensive peering work to improve global connectivity

* Security tools though these were mentioned as being outside the scope of this particular presentation and possibly under NDA

The engagement discussed in the presentation focused heavily on both network-level products and CDN delivery optimization.
by zozbot234 | 2025-10-21 12:42:19+00:00
> A car sitting in a Texas parking lot in July will get to temperatures that the engineers probably didn't think possible.

AIUI, the car can run its cooling/AC system to keep itself cool, even when powered off. I'd imagine that this is actually a bigger concern for the battery's health and safety, not the chips. You're not supposed to let a battery get that hot.
by crazygringo | 2025-10-21 12:42:24+00:00
I don't know -- the 40+ columns feels simple and maintainable.

Having a bunch of grouped optional values in other tables adds a ton of maintenance and query complexity.

The "clear constraints" belong in business logic, whether in triggers at the database level or before queries get executed at the application level.

Now, splitting up tables can produce performance optimizations. I'm not saying to never do it. But it's a tradeoff that increases complexity.
by anovikov | 2025-10-21 12:42:36+00:00
Whole cities are built in Southeast Asia to facilitate scams. Moreover, if the problem is fixed, hundreds of thousands will probably die: both of hunger, because they've been doing it for like 15+ years and now their population won't be sustained without scam cash, and simply for being killed by their owners for no longer being needed.

Solution? The West needs to radically reduce levels of trust. Or, have its internet enclosed within itself, like in North Korea, just in reverse. Which will be difficult because how do you go about countries like Hungary that has no physical borders with 'good' countries and at the same time, will be happy to help 'bad' ones?
by pjmlp | 2025-10-21 12:42:39+00:00
I bet they will still be using Android and iOS devices, accessing those systems from Windows and macOS desktops and laptops, developing the bulk of the applications in Java (Oracle), C# (Microsoft), Go (Google),....

The solution isn't going for a few cloud products, or Libre Office, the solution has to be the whole stack like during cold war days when almost every nation had their own computing stack.
by dathinab | 2025-10-21 12:43:17+00:00
yesn't

both are forms of cooperative multi tasking/threading

but there are a many differences about what you expect how exactly it is implemented

and most relevantly you run the cooperative tasks on a pool of OS threads which are preempted, so a single thread hanging won't hang your whole application. And dev tooling has gotten much better since then, that helps a lot too.

also Windows 3.1 kinda predates me, so no not really

PS: And JS in the browser still uses cooperative multi tasking and the whole website hanging isn't exactly the norm ;) Partially because you can opt for preempted threads (worker) which also happend to not be good at handling termination. And partially because a lot of iff overhead logic is moved outside of web apps and into the browser itself (e.g. layout, rendering etc.). It's pretty common to setup one such worker and then use message passing to send work to it, but this means that between concurrent tasks there is no preemption and on way to handle arbitrary numbers concurrent requests with a very limited number of workers is to make each worker internally use cooperative multi tasking. So we are kind back at cooperative multi tasking on top of preempted OS threads.
by mystraline | 2025-10-21 12:43:45+00:00
Pity that BYD is banned in this country, thanks to Biden, and now Turnip.

But as for Musk, I always thought something was absolutely not right with him. I thought of him as a pandering populist with feudalistic tendencies. And I lost what little credibility with him back in 2015/6 with him screaming from Twitter about the flooded cave rescuer was a pedophile.

I also remember him launching the first starlink SATs, without any permission. Flooded the LEO with thousands of space junk. I'm just waiting for a Kessler syndrome event.

And come to find out, he also defrauded customers on FSD on teslas.

Basically, stay as far away as you can from anything musk. It will come toppling down. And when it does, all the devices will come with it. (Think of when IoT companies shut down, and equipment is now landfill)