MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Volant– spin up real microVMs in 10 seconds(Docker images or initramfs)
by ccheshirecat | 2025-10-05 22:54:37+00:00
I’ve been building Volant, a modular microVM orchestration engine that makes running microVMs feel as simple as Docker.

It supports cloud-init, GPU/VFIO passthrough (yes, you can run AI/ML workloads in isolated microVMs), booting Docker images via a plugin system, and Kubernetes-style deployments with replication, all from a single CLI(soon to be web UI, see next)

Coming soon: a built-in PaaS mode with snapshot-based cold start elimination, sort of like Dokploy, but designed for serverless workloads that boot from memory snapshots instead of containers.

Volant is intentionally a bit opinionated to make microVMs more accessible, but it’s fully extensible for power users.

Check out the README and the docs for more details.

It’s free and open source (under BSL), would love to hear feedback or thoughts from anyone!

tl;dr: 6-second GIF in the README shows the full flow: install → create VM → get HTTP 200.
by bitwize | 2025-10-05 22:54:59+00:00
Ask around on Hackernews. Post on the "Who wants to be hired?" thread at the top of each month. See what the local job scene is like in a city whose major industries are not "tech". Use Craigslist, Indeed, etc. as guides.You will find that they need software and automation in all sorts of industries and many would love to hire someone who'd proven themself in the SV world.

Oh, and uh, get used to boredom. Java and .NET, maybe some Python if you're lucky. If you love Rust, get comfortable loving it on your own time. Most of the world out there runs on time-honored technology that's been proven to work, and what you'll find is... that's not really a bad thing. Knowing you have a stable foundation on which to build lets you focus on the things that matter to your business.
by dang | 2025-10-05 22:57:18+00:00
Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Like Oil Leads to Global Warming, Data Leads to Social Cooling - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38482582 - Dec 2023 (15 comments)

The reputation economy is turning us into conformists (2017) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28744471 - Oct 2021 (204 comments)

What Is Social Cooling? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25746131 - Jan 2021 (246 comments)

Social Cooling (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24627363 - Sept 2020 (1058 comments)

Social Cooling – How big data is increasing pressure to conform - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14585882 - June 2017 (185 comments)
by DonHopkins | 2025-10-05 22:59:20+00:00
Here is some email between Ben Shneiderman and Mark Andreessen about it that I posted to the Internet History mailing list archive with their permission:

https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2020-Apri...

And a couple of relevant papers:

Embedded menus: Selecting Items in Context; Larry Koved and Ben Shneiderman; Communications of the ACM, Computing Practices, April 1986, Volume 29, Number 4, p. 312-318:

https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/Koved-Embedded%20Menue...

An experimental comparison of a mouse and arrow-jump keys for an interactive encyclopedia; John Ewing, Simin Mehrabanzad, Scott Sheck, Dan Ostroff and Ben Shneiderman; International Journal of Man Machine Studies (1986) 24, p. 29-45:

https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/Ewing-Ostroff-mouse-ar...
by brucehoult | 2025-10-05 22:59:26+00:00
Yes yes that's the other widely quoted criticism of RISC-V, from a GNU MP maintainer.

At the time there was no widely-available RISC-V hardware. There is now, and earlier this year I tested it.

It turns out that the GNU MP project's own benchmark runs better on SiFive RISC-V cores than on comparable µarch Arm cores, specifically better on U74 than on A53, and better on P550 than on A72, despite (obviously) the Arm cores having carry flags and ADC instructions and the RISC-V cores not having those.

The ensuing discussion also came to a consensus that once you get to very wide cores e.g. 8+ like Apple's M1 and several upcoming RISC-V cores, carry flags are ACTIVELY BAD because they serialise the computation (even with OoO, renaming the flags register etc) while only one 64 bit A + 64 bit B + 1 bit carry-in limb computation in 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 has an actual carry-out dependency on the carry-in, so you can almost always simply add all the limbs in parallel. The carry-in only affects carry-out when A+B is exactly 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF.

Full thread here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/RISCV/comments/1jsnbdr/gnu_mp_bignu...
by tredre3 | 2025-10-05 22:59:56+00:00
FYI all major C compilers have flags to enforce the usual two's-complement rollover, even if you enable all optimizations. I always enable at least fwrapv, even when I know that the underlying CPU has well defined overflow behavior (gcc knows this so the flag presumably becomes a no-op, but I've never validated that thought).

gcc has -fwrapv and -f[no-]strict-overflow, clang copied both, and MSVC has had a plethora of flags over the years (UndefIntOverflow, for example) so your guess is as good as mine which one still works as expected.
by dang | 2025-10-05 23:00:12+00:00
Related ongoing thread:

Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45483386 - Oct 2025 (321 comments)

The link https://phrack.org/issues/72/7_md#article is being discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45484582.
by jogjayr | 2025-10-05 23:00:13+00:00
If you buy MSFT specifically you'll get regular, fairly predictable dividend payments and not just an unknown amount of money in the future.

MSFT goes up a tiny fraction when you buy. That means MSFT employees with stock grants get a tiny "raise" courtesy of you and with no cost to the company. Microsoft can also use their more expensive stock to make acquisitions. So you are contributing to the company's productive use in at least 2 ways if you buy its stock.

Buying MSFT doesn't meet the criteria to be called gambling, for me.
by daft_pink | 2025-10-05 23:00:23+00:00
Just want to re-iterate that car companies tend to be terrible investments with their cyclical nature, high fixed costs and high capital intensity.

The only reason you would invest in a company like Tesla at this price is because they have a CEO capable of 10x that is aggressively moving into other markets and not because you think they should become a docile car company and fix a few small things here and there.

I’m an investor because I want to see them go into semi’s and automation etc.
by gerdesj | 2025-10-05 23:03:04+00:00
A fair few things want blob object storage like S3. NFS does not scale to ridiculous levels horizontally or vertically. S3 does things like de-duplication and other funky tricks.

So if you want to use an app that needs S3 then you need to deploy S3 and not NFS.

I run a minio cluster (S3) for Veeam backups at work. I also run multiple NFS for Veeam and VMware datastores.

Tools for the job mate!
by jacquesm | 2025-10-05 23:03:15+00:00
> Permanently losing data at a given store point isn't relevant to losing data overall.

I can't reveal any details but it was a lot more than just a given storage point. The interesting thing is that there were multiple points along the way where the damage would have been recoverable but their absolute incompetence made matters much worse to the point where there were no options left.

> FWIW there's no "simply" about that though at large scale. I'm not saying it's undoable at all but it's not trivial. As is literally the subject here.

If you can't do the job you should get out of the kitchen.
by Gabriel54 | 2025-10-05 23:03:25+00:00
I wonder, have you personally been in a university environment recently? Within the past ten or fifteen years? I ask because, as someone who attended a supposedly "good" university in the USA, before going I had an interest in the humanities but was quickly discouraged by the number of individuals who seemed to be possessed by propaganda. I mentioned in another comment, for example, that I saw another student have as their desktop background a photo of Mao and the cultural revolution. So this is the backdrop against which Jordan Peterson is saying, you know, there actually are Western intellectuals worth reading and listening to and thinking about. And yes, on a personal level, I did get to read some of those writers you mentioned. It did not surprise me that they turn out to be much deeper than Jordon Peterson himself, but I don't think he ever claimed to be a revolutionary thinker? I consider him more of an evangelist than anything else. How many intellectuals can we say have truly had an impact with their ideas? The number is small. I think the reason Jordan Peterson suddenly became a phenomenon is because he was at least brave enough to call out ridiculousness when he saw it (at least at the very beginning of his celebrity, I cannot speak for his recent comments because I stopped paying attention once he started going into politics).
by ben_w | 2025-10-05 23:04:48+00:00
> I wish we had a constitutional amendment that opensourced all AI commercial AI models and requires documentation and links to all training data and base prompts.

> They are trained on public data at our expense so We The People should own them.

The people who appear to have been trained off for the interesting parts of the blog post are mostly, like me, not American.

> AI should be free. Overhyped and Overpriced. I would love this setup for privacy and security.

Also, this entire blog post only exists because they're curious about a specific free open-weights model.

The "source" being ~"the internet", which we've got as much access to as most of the model makers (i.e. where you don't, they've got explicit licensing rights anyway), and possibly also some explicitly* pirated content (I've not been keeping track of which model makers have or have not done that).

* as in: not just incidentally
by lwhi | 2025-10-05 23:05:19+00:00
Witness A said, “It appears that the fire started when a spark flew during the process of replacing the uninterruptible power supply,” and added, “Firefighters are currently out there putting out the fire. I hope that this does not lead to any disruption to the national intelligence network, including the government’s 24 channel.”[1]

[1] https://mbiz.heraldcorp.com/article/10584693
by hopelite | 2025-10-05 23:06:32+00:00
If the Chinese are/were smart they will not attempt an overreaching subterfuge, but rather simply provide access to the truth, reality, and freedom from the western governments, whose house of lies are starting to wobble and teeter.

If they were to do some kind of overreaching subterfuge with some kind of manipulation or lie, it could and would likely easily backfire if and when it is exposed as a clownish fraud. Subtlety would pay far more effectively. If you’re expecting a subterfuge, I would far sooner expect some psyop from the western nations at the very least upon their own populations to animate for war or maybe just to control them and maybe suppress them.

The smarter play for the Chinese would be to work on simply facilitating the populations of the West understanding the fraud, lies, manipulation and con job that has been perpetrated upon them for far longer than most people have the conscience to realize.

If anything, the western governments have a very long history of lies, manipulations, false flag/fraud operations, clandestine coups, etc. that they would be the first suspect in anything like using AI for “subversions”. Frankly, I don’t even think the Chinese are ready or capable of engaging in the kind of narrative and information control that the likes of America is with its long history of Hollywood and war lies and fake revolutions run by national sabotage operations.
MKJFGFI.nrw is not a captcha but a German government ministry
by mfiro | 2025-10-05 23:07:11+00:00
I came across mkjfgfi.nrw and assumed it was a random or suspicious domain. It turns out to be the Ministerium für Kinder, Jugend, Familie, Gleichstellung, Flucht und Integration of North Rhine-Westphalia.
by Groxx | 2025-10-05 23:07:43+00:00
I never had a device+apps that really made use of anything but "back" and "home" and... while I kinda like the idea, they're just not usable in most screens in most apps. The current three buttons (well. previous, given how hard they're pushing gesture nav and how often three-button is broken nowadays) are nearly all useful all the time, I think I prefer it this way. Even if it would be nice to kill the hamburger menu, or get nigh-universal support for "find text on screen/in list".

But yes 100%, buttons are great. They respond much much faster too.
by bonoboTP | 2025-10-05 23:07:54+00:00
> but I kind of do carry the opinion that the literary humanities, while not devoid of complexity or rigor, are completely incomparable to STEM in this regard.

Yes, I think humanities people are having STEM-envy and it's bad. They should not frame it in terms of rigor and complexity. The humanities are much closer to art, and that's fine. We need art and culture. As commonly said, politics is downstream of culture. Storytelling and myths and fables and parables form a bedrock and a platform for living together. In its ideal form it is more like holistic wisdom, not a narrow rigorous specialization like designing more efficient internal combustion engines or something.

And humanities should indeed relate to the experience of humans. Normal humans. Because that's why it's humanities. If normal, well-read and educated humans can't do anything with it then it's a pathological version of it.

Also, essentially fake fields exist in abundance. A lot of business management stuff is like that. Basically someone makes up cute acronyms and bullet lists (what are the 5 characteristics of XY, what are the 7 criteria for Z), and definitions and the actual content behind it is super thin. I had classes like that in college and all STEM students learned the whole thing on the day before the exam. Also, the more real knowledge there is in a field, the more informal and conversational and relaxed the researchers tend to present it. While those in insecure fields tend to use lots of jargon to say even simple things.

There's nothing wrong with opinion pieces. I like them, if they are written well. But it's not rigor.

It would be great to hear the opinion on this from someone who thinks the humanities research (eg. literary criticism journals) are rigorous AND have also passed a college-level serious STEM course like Electromagnetic Fields or Graph Theory or Linear Algebra with a good grade. I think most humanities people just don't really understand what rigor actually means. It's not just about using words that have special definitions for more efficient communication or something.

-----

> If you ask "but what is the result?", you get told that you're asking the wrong question, that you're trapped in logocentric thinking, or that the point is precisely the undecidability. And sure, maybe! But it leaves me unable to distinguish between a profound insight and an emperor's new clothes.

Yes, it's on purpose. It's the statement itself. The content of the message is reflected in the form it is presented. It's in the same lineage as Dadaism, or the empty-canvas-as-painting etc. His philosophy is literally called "deconstruction". And if you ask "but what is the result?", well it's the influence on other academics and thinkers. Surely you heard a lot in recent years that X or Y thing is just a construct and should be deconstructed or dismantled etc. That's the result.
by 725686 | 2025-10-05 23:10:06+00:00
In my twenties I worked for a "company" in Mexico that was the official QNX ditribuitor for Mexico and LatAm. I guess the only reason was that Mexico City's Metro used QNX, and every year they bought a new license, I don't know why. We also did a couple of sales in Colombia I think, but was a complete shit show. We really just sent them the software by mail, and they had all sorts of issues getting it out of customs. I did get to go to a QNX training in Canada, which was really cool. Never got to use it though.
by bitwize | 2025-10-05 23:11:38+00:00
I find it fascinating that the fact that NFS mounts hang the process when they don't work is due to the broken I/O model Unix historically employed.

See, unlike some other more advanced, contemporary operating systems like VMS, Unix (and early versions of POSIX) did not support async I/O; only nonblocking I/O. Furthermore, it assumed that disk-based I/O was "fast" (I/O operations could always be completed, or fail, in a reasonably brief period of time, because if the disks weren't connected and working you had much bigger problems than the failure of one process) and network-based or piped I/O was "slow" (operations could take arbitrarily long or even fail completely altogether after a long wait); so nonblocking I/O was not supported for file system access in the general case. Well, when you mount your file system over a network, you get the characteristics of "slow" I/O with the lack of nonblocking support of "fast" I/O.

A sibling comment mentions that FreeBSD has some clever workarounds for this. And of course it's largely not a concern for modern software because Linux has io_uring and even the POSIX standard library has async I/O primitives (which few seem to use) these days.

And this is one of those things that VMS (and Windows NT) got right, right from the jump, with I/O completion ports,

But issues like this, and the unfortunate proliferation of the C programming language, underscore the price we've paid as a result of the Unix developers' decision to build an OS that was easy and fun to hack, rather than one that encouraged correctness of the solutions built on top of it.
by DonHopkins | 2025-10-05 23:11:45+00:00
Yes, or maybe he didn't know or remember what influenced Tim Berners Lee to make them blue, so he just took credit for himself decades later, so yes.

Ben Shneiderman and his students originally performed experiments that determined that blue was the best color, then Ben developed and ACM distributed HyperTIES with blue links as "Hypertext on Hypertext", which Tim saw, and years later Tim told Ben that it influenced him to make the links blue.

Here is some email between Ben Shneiderman and Mark Andreessen about it that I posted to the Internet History mailing list archive with their permission:

https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2020-Apri...

Hypertext on Hypertext CACM1988 - Ben demonstrating HyperTIES with blue hyperlinks, the system that influenced Tim:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29b4O2xxeqg

And a couple of relevant papers:

Embedded menus: Selecting Items in Context; Larry Koved and Ben Shneiderman; Communications of the ACM, Computing Practices, April 1986, Volume 29, Number 4, p. 312-318:

https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/Koved-Embedded%20Menue...

An experimental comparison of a mouse and arrow-jump keys for an interactive encyclopedia; John Ewing, Simin Mehrabanzad, Scott Sheck, Dan Ostroff and Ben Shneiderman; International Journal of Man Machine Studies (1986) 24, p. 29-45:

https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/Ewing-Ostroff-mouse-ar...
by iamnothere | 2025-10-05 23:12:19+00:00
Feel free to move to China or the UK if you prefer to be constantly watched over. I prefer freedom, thanks.

For all the problems that existed in the pre-mobile era, widespread loneliness wasn’t one of them. You don’t need 24/7 connectivity to everyone to have real relationships. You’re in here accusing people of having a mental illness because they want some privacy, yet you’re the one who seemingly needs a digital leash tying you to all your friends and family. What kind of insecurity and/or codependence is that?
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-10-05 23:13:05+00:00
Ohh side note but this was the journalist group which was blocked by proton

The timing as well is very suspicious and I think that there can be a lot of discussion about this

Right now, I am wondering about the name most tbh which might seem silly but "APT down - The North Korean files"

It seems that APT means in this case advanced persistent threat but I am not sure what they mean by Apt Down, like the fact that it got shut down by their journalism or-? I am sorry if this may seem naive and on a serious note this raises so many questions...
by silisili | 2025-10-05 23:13:46+00:00
I was so disappointed my first and only time visiting a casino. I thought it'd be full of show girls, rich people, James Bond types in tuxes...you know, the way they are often portrayed in movies.

Nope. 99% slovenly dressed elderly banging lifelessly away at slots. The other 1% lonely, middle aged men.
by jkrejcha | 2025-10-05 23:14:00+00:00
I can't say I've seen that many examples of APIs that use them richly. You see a little bit of in in specs that require something be done a certain way (WHEP in particular requires you send ICE information in ice-server link relations). Part of it probably stems from the fact that a lot of the tooling was built on top of OpenAPI (which had discriminators built in and so people used that for implementing "sum types"), etc, and part of that comes from the fact that a lot of HTTP-based APIs basically only take the content portion of the response, ignoring the headers basically entirely (outside of maybe redirects).

Relatively speaking I think there aren't that many people that know that it is even really a possibility, let alone use it.

(You even see discussions on even whether the status codes are to be used at all, when they were really purpose-built to be generalizable.)

This partially is self-reinforcing: the server libraries don't do anything with media types generally outside of maybe a "FileResponse"-ish class or function and the client libraries don't tend to implement it because it's not supported.

Part of it too may be that interoperability isn't necessarily an underlying goal.

> one other thought, I'm starting to see how the semantic web fits into this vision. Too bad it was too brittle in practice (though the SOLID folks are doing some exciting stuff).

Indeed! There's a lot of similar ideas with this and you definitely have things you can fit in there. :)
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-10-05 23:14:03+00:00
I think for packaging it's okay to "have" lots of things that individually "do" one thing.

The important part is that the user controls the entry points. It's more Unixy to allow someone to decode audio from one pipe to another than to only allow them to play a file to a speaker.

Consider that Debian "does" lots of things because it has a kernel, hardware abstractions, a userland, a package manager, and often a GUI and web browser. But it also "does" none of those because it's just a convenient and useful wrapper to publish all the other tools, which you can still call upon individually
by xpe | 2025-10-05 23:14:41+00:00
I can understand why people would find `ut` convenient. That said, I would caution against trying to include too much functionality. What is too much? I don't have a clear idea on this yet.

But I would probably argue that including HTTP functionality is going too far. Why? Because there are already amazing tools dedicated to this already. On the client side, see `xh` [1]. On the server side, see `miniserve` [2]. Both have approximately 7K stars on GitHub.

It seems wiser to let specialized projects focus on a particular functional area; this is better for users and less work for maintainers.

[1]: https://github.com/ducaale/xh

[2]: https://github.com/svenstaro/miniserve