MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: In-Context Index for In-Context Retrieval
by mingtianzhang | 2025-10-09 16:23:20+00:00
RAG pipelines have become bloated: embeddings, vector DBs, rerankers, and ad-hoc pipelines everywhere.

Projects like Claude Code showed a simpler path: In-Context Retrieval — letting the LLM reason directly over context for retrieval instead of outsourcing search to external infrastructure.

PageIndex takes that one step further with In-Context Indexing.

If retrieval happens in-context, the index should live there too.

Each document is transformed into a hierarchical, human-readable tree structure (like a table-of-contents tree index) inside the model's context window.

The LLM reads the structure, identifies relevant branches, opens them, and reasons through for retrieval — no embeddings, no chunking, no opaque vector indexes the model can't interpret.

Retrieval and indexing, both inside the model.
by bko | 2025-10-09 16:23:23+00:00
How much of this is that children refuse to eat normal whole foods? I've heard stories from teachers that mention that children often would rather go without food than eat anything remotely healthy (e.g. apples from cafeteria). My own personal experience from places that are considered food desert is often seeing rotting fruit not being consumed.

Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to offer healthy option, but just that those would have a limited impact on obesity, expect for maybe calorie deficit if they choose to forgo breakfast or lunch
by floundy | 2025-10-09 16:23:52+00:00
>Today, to install even the simplest self-hosted software, one has to be effectively a professional software engineer.

I’m a regular engineer, non-software, my coding knowledge is very basic, I could never be employed even as a junior dev unless I wanted to spend evenings grinding and learning.

Still I was able to set up a NAS and a personal server using Docker. I think a basic and broad intro to programming class like Harvard’s CS50 is all that would be required to learn enough to be able to figure out self-hosting.
by dlcarrier | 2025-10-09 16:24:10+00:00
People have been developing neural networks since the 70's, and there's been two major hurdles to their usefulness for software development:

1. They require gigabytes to terabytes of training data.

2. A non-trivial percentage of output data is low confidence.

The first problem requires tens to hundreds of gigabytes of training data.

This first problem not only requires the slow but predictable increase in processing power and data storage capabilities that were unachievable until recently, but is also only possible because open-source software has majorly caught on, something that was hoped for but not a given early in AI development.

The second problem means that the output will be error prone, without significant procedural processing of the output data that is a lot of work to develop. I never would have thought that software writing by neural networks would be competitive, not because of effective error control, but because the entire field of software development would be so bad at what they do (https://xkcd.com/2030/) that error-prone output would be competitive.
by 317070 | 2025-10-09 16:25:00+00:00
The paper: `Rapid amyloid-β clearance and cognitive recovery through multivalent modulation of blood–brain barrier transport` https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-025-02426-1

"Cognitive assessments revealed that treated AD mice exhibited significant improvements in spatial learning and memory, with performance levels comparable to those of wild-type mice. These cognitive benefits persisted for up to 6 months post-treatment."

I'm curious if Derek Lowe will comment on this on his blog. I'll await his opinion on how much we ought to celebrate here. He's not a big fan of the amyloid hypothesis and has worked many years in this exact field, so I reckon he will point out why skepsis is warranted.
by georgemcbay | 2025-10-09 16:25:28+00:00
> The White House this week argued that the law that clearly and unambiguously requires this does not in fact do so

Interesting side note to this (to point out the hypocrisy and attempts at memory-holing): the law in question is the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019 which passed with extremely broad bipartisan support and was signed into law by Trump during his first term.
by m0llusk | 2025-10-09 16:25:34+00:00
> We believe the best of React is yet to come.

Oh, dear. Yet more ways of dealing with React that coders will be forced to deal with. But in a way this might be good for engineers because the quantity of foot guns available in various flavors and versions of React appears to have already scaled far beyond the capabilities of available LLMs to handle.

In one of my recent doomed interviews I explained that I had been following React for a while and was practiced at a number of ways of using it. Developers in the group then kindly informed me that the reason I had learned multiple ways of using React is that I had not yet found the one true way which of course they were using. Got no offer from them which is probably good for all of us.
by lukasschwab | 2025-10-09 16:25:36+00:00
Basically linkblogging. I'm not sure this needs to be a separate feed; JSON Feed has a dedicated `external_url` field:

> If `url` [optional] links to where you’re talking about a thing, then `external_url` links to the thing you’re talking about.

I'd be shocked if Atom/RSS didn't have equivalents.

This kind of "repost"-ish behavior may just be obscured in the tools people use to construct feeds, so they remain obscure features of the standards. The designers had syndication in mind, very much like what you're describing — ingesting feeds, reprocessing/mixing/extending them, and exposing the result as another feed.
by grafmax | 2025-10-09 16:25:54+00:00
That’s an issue of the front-end not the backend. The backend is where an open protocol is needed to break the parasitism of the social media companies. Whether users deal with spam depends on the moderation policies applied by this or that specific front-end.

Think of it as a filter. Reddit is a filter on a walled-in social network. What you post there isn’t visible on any other social network and vice versa. But because of that lock-in you are limited to whatever crappy moderation one specific front-end sticks you with, with no alternative if you still want to interact with that social network.
by clarkmoody | 2025-10-09 16:26:06+00:00
In one version I've seen, the active element is of a different type, offering enhanced functionality over the vectors of next and prev items:

struct List<T, A> { prev: Vec<T>, active: A, next: Vec<T>, }

This could be used for some active type that has ephemeral cache information or state associated with it (view state in a GUI app, for instance). The inactive type may be hydrated and converted to active, and the active type can be archived into an inactive type.
by citizenpaul | 2025-10-09 16:26:35+00:00
Hmm. Perhaps I've just never encountered a hairy enough situation with them? That's what the eternal thought tracker notepad on my desk is for though. Maybe people are trying to do it all in their head? Pen and paper are too old school for the cool new 1000x devs?

I still feel like this argument could be transferred to nearly any concept in CS though. Abstract enough anywhere and you will always start exceeding the brains working memory.
by gregsadetsky | 2025-10-09 16:26:38+00:00
To be fair to enum, the services they sell are around k8, an s3-equivalent, and devops. If they sold/promised self-hosting/sovereign email services, and then were "caught" using gmail, that might be a different story.

Your point stands - they're not fully completely independent. And maybe the language in the OP's article could have been different.. but the OP also specifically says "Oh no, I said the forbidden phrase: Self-hosted mail server. I was always told to never under any circumstances do that. But it's really not that deep."

They're aware of the issue, everyone is aware of the issue. It's an issue :-) But I get your point too.
by alansammarone | 2025-10-09 16:26:53+00:00
Just to make a small addition to my comment, which also addresses the sibling and child replies.

I 100% agree that any good professional still needs (with or without AI) the "design, engineer, and knowledge of your constraints". I'm not arguing against that. Those are, in fact, part of what I find most fun about programming, and the reason why I fought through the typing boredom since I was 13. I'm also not a vibe coder.

I'm just saying all of that is somewhat orthogonal to the typing of code itself. With strong typing (as in type theory - I still write the types, sometimes signatures for interfaces, etc) and other tooling, you really can get a lot done by delegating the bulk of the implementation to these tools.
by jonathanstrange | 2025-10-09 16:27:03+00:00
Bullshit anecdotal evidence. I'm on Reddit every day for the past 10 years and have never seen any call to violence. That's my anecdote.

By the way, the US government doesn't just want to regulate Reddit, they would like to take it over and and coerce it into becoming a political propaganda instrument, just like they are doing right now with TikTok. That's why officials use phrases like "deep, dark internet, Reddit culture" and that's why there are congressional hearings. Wikipedia is on their target list, too.

N.B.: This is about government censorship, intimidation, and takeovers of media companies and it's not as if the US government keep their anti-free-speech agenda a secret, they talk about this publicly all the time. I'm perfectly fine with private companies regulating and heavily moderating their forums (e.g. banning r/The_Donald, which was mental btw).
by username223 | 2025-10-09 16:27:07+00:00
I was a software developer, and have some idea where this comes from. Keeping track of multiple versions of software to separate bug fixes from new features is hard, but calling whatever is in version control on the first Friday of every month "version N+1" is easy. Back when users had to pay for a stack of floppies or CDs to get a new version, you had to give them a compelling reason to do so. When it's nearly impossible for them to prevent the new version from being auto-installed, you don't.
by bobbylarrybobby | 2025-10-09 16:27:09+00:00
Aside from better documentation (it would be quite nice if rustdoc automatically showed the computed variance for types where it mattered), what would writing it down in the type system get you?

Separately, if everything were invariant, you wouldn't be able to use a `&'static T` where a `&'non_static T` was expected, which would be quite unpleasant!
by troupo | 2025-10-09 16:27:11+00:00
> You could build a raspberry pi docker swarm cluster and get very far. Heck, a single Pi 5 with 4gb of memory will get you on your way.

No, you couldn't, and no, you wouldn't.

To build a swarm you need a lot of fiddling and tooling. Where are you keeping them? How are they all connected? What's the clustering software? How is this any better than an old PC with a few SSDs?

Raspberry Pi with any amount of RAM is an exercise in frustration: it's abysmally slow for any kind of work or experimentation.

Really, the only useful advice is to use an old PC or use a VPS or a dedicated server somewhere.
by cortesoft | 2025-10-09 16:27:48+00:00
If the alternative is each user has to patch together all of the different solutions into one, you are just increasing the number of parts that can go wrong, too. And when they do, it won't be immediately clear who the issue is with.

I do agree there are issues with a single provider for too many components, but I am not sure you get any decreased stability with that verse having a different provider for everything.
by nlawalker | 2025-10-09 16:28:01+00:00
I'm surprised to not see any mention of indirect TPMS anywhere in these comments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tire-pressure_monitoring_syste...

It has its own shortcomings, but in my opinion they're all relatively minor and it does the job of warning the driver of potential pressure problems without wireless or in-tire sensors that require replacement.

EDIT, never mind, I wasn't seeing "indirect" in the comments but now that I look I do see "ABS", which is what iTPMS depends on for determining wheel speed.
by resfirestar | 2025-10-09 16:28:17+00:00
From the NHTSA release [1]:

> ODI has identiﬁed six Standing General Order ("SGO") reports in which a Tesla vehicle, operating with FSD engaged, approached an intersection with a red traﬃc signal, continued to travel into the intersection against the red light and was subsequently involved in a crash with other motor vehicles in the intersection. Of these incidents, four crashes resulted in one or more reported injuries. At least some of the incidents appeared to involve FSD proceeding into the intersection after coming to a complete stop.

I've experienced this bug on every FSD 13.x version, including the current 13.2.9. When you're the first to pull up to a red light, the car stops and waits, then after a while it sometimes (maybe 1 time in 100 or so) just decides to go even if the light is still red. Horrifying because sitting at a red light doesn't seem like a dangerous situation, but in fact it might be the most dangerous place on FSD right now. Hopefully this forces them to fix it because my colorful language on the voice feedback apparently hasn't convinced them.

[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/?nhtsaId=PE25012
by prism56 | 2025-10-09 16:28:26+00:00
I selfhost only things that aren't critical, I'm not hosting passwords or photos. I'd rather pay for the redundancy offered by big datacentres. I do however choose platforms that are privacy first, ente.io/Proton for example.

I do however selfhost FreshRSS, Audiobooks, Readeck, Linkding, YoutubetoRSS... Useful services that individually hosted playforms want £5 or so per month to use. The redundancy is significantly less important with these services to me compared to losing £30+ extra a month.
by bix6 | 2025-10-09 16:28:58+00:00
> Founded in 2019, n8n helps companies automate repetitive computing tasks. As of March, it had more than 230,000 active users and reported annual recurring revenue of over $40 million. The focus for the fresh funding will be on expanding its engineering capabilities and hiring.

$40M rev makes this a 62.5x rev multiple. AI has been around 40x lately so it’s a bit high but it sounds like there was competition to lead and those are March numbers so it’s probably about on par.

Personally I find these multiples absurd but big VC needs to put money somewhere and AI is the new SaaS so here we are.

> The Series C comes less than a year after a $60 million Series B, which valued the German group at a reported $350 million.

That’s a huge step up so maybe their growth numbers are that good.

https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/ai-agent-startup-n8n-lan...
by indrora | 2025-10-09 16:29:14+00:00
There are more assembler dialects than I care to remember.

The 2A06 assembler that people who write NES code (and later on SNES/GB/etc) use has some real quirks: $ prefixes a literal hex value but % is binary, but # in front of that is an address, registers are baked into the opcode (ldx -> load into X), and more.

Playstation folks all just used MIPS dialects which are mostly AT&Tish but the PS2 used an Intel style assembler.
by thelastgallon | 2025-10-09 16:29:27+00:00
Anything doesn't work anymore because everything is owned by megacorps/super-rich/private-equity/govt. The focus on rent-seeking via monopoly/oligopoly and regulatory capture.

Consumers (of products and services)

(1) mostly have no alternatives, or choose between equally bad/worse

(2) are not discerning of quality.

(3) bombarded with ads/marketing and algorithms to buy, buy, buy!

(4) status seeking, look! i bought shiny new thing, here's a pic on my instagram to prove it!
by jdoe1337halo | 2025-10-09 16:29:50+00:00
Self hosting is awesome. I have been doing it for about a year since I quit my full time SWE job and pursued SaaS. I am using Coolify on a $20/month Hetzner server to host a wide variety of applications: Postgres, Minio (version before community neuter) for S3, Nuxt application, NextJs applications, Umami analytics, Open WebUI, and static sites. It was definitely a learning process, but now that I have everything set up, it really is just plug and play to get a new site/service up and running. I am not even using 1/4 of my server resources either (because I don't have many users xd). It is great.

https://coolify.io/docs/
by wvbdmp | 2025-10-09 16:29:52+00:00
Unfortunately, WebSmell-o-Vision has not yet been unilaterally pushed by the dudes at Google to do this news justice, but as a croissant connaisseur I would have at least appreciated a webp of the thing instead of some random archive image. It’s a stamp, for christ’s sake.

There is a pic here and it’s quite nice imo: https://www.wopa-plus.com/en/stamps/product/&pid=105515
by jerf | 2025-10-09 16:30:14+00:00
Are you thinking of some sort of annotation the compiler could read and handle?

Because if a compiler starts automatically padding all my structures to put all of the members on their own cache line I'm going to be quite peeved. It would be easy for it to do, yes, but it would be wrong 99%+ of the time.

A far more trenchant complaint is that Go won't automatically sort struct members if necessary to shrink them and you have to apply a linter to get that at linting time if you want it.
by alterom | 2025-10-09 16:30:17+00:00
>People just don't value it as highly as they claim they do.

Whatever.

Change it to "city infrastructure heavily incentivizing people to drive everywhere by heavily penalizing all other modes of transportation and prioritizing automobiles and accommodating the needs of car drivers above everything else".

When the cities are designed for cars with everything else being an afterthought, people are going to driver everywhere.
by IgorPartola | 2025-10-09 16:31:14+00:00
Negligible to none as of now. But take a look at this comment below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45528837

And I agree: it stifled what could have been a much nicer to work with set of protocols and who knows what could have been created had we not just said "well there is always UDP if you want to do your own thing".
by seanalltogether | 2025-10-09 16:31:23+00:00
One thing about bluetooth and phones that I really wish that apple/google/bluetooth group could resolve is a way for a device to advertise that it needs attention and then bubble that up to the nearest phone that is registered for that Service UUID.

The blog illustrates the feature of scanning bluetooth devices around you and pushing data to the cloud when needed, but right now that background scan is really not optimal for both ios and android. Android requires a manual scan process every 15 minutes or so based on background task intervals, and iOS only alerts you to ble scans when you turn on the screen of your phone. Android will cause you to burn battery constantly checking on devices, but iOS will cause you to miss them entirely unless you unlock your phone alot.

Right now we have a simple use case of updating the clocks on our devices that would be a whole lot easier if the devices could simply advertise they need attention after XX hours, and that ran a background service for our app to do it when needed, and avoid the whole periodic scanning.
by Yoric | 2025-10-09 16:31:24+00:00
I absolutely buy that theory.

I believe that we the normalization of catastrophe was a natural consequence of VC money: VC don't care about structurally sound companies, in particular structurally sound products, what they want is a unicorn that can produce a good enough prototype and exit at enormous profit.

Consequently, VC-backed companies invest in tools that make prototyping easier and in developers who are hopefully good at prototyping (or at least write code quickly), and ignore everything else. And since the surviving VC-backed companies become giants (or at least everybody believes that they will), everybody follows their lead. And of course, LLMs are the next stage of that.

I've seen this in various domains. I've seen this with IoT devices coded with the clear (but unsaid) assumption that they will never be upgraded. I've seen this with backends coded with the clear (but unsaid) assumption that the product will have failed before any security hole is exploited. I've seen software tools developed and shipped with the clear (but unsaid) assumption that they're meant to woo the investors, not to help the users.

We're going to pay for this, very hard. By doing this, we have turned cyber warfare – something that was a fantasy a few decades ago – into an actual reality. We have multiplied by several orders of magnitude the amount of resources we need to run basic tools.

And it's a shame, because there _is_ a path towards using LLMs to produce higher quality code. And I've seen a few teams invest in that, discreetly. But they're not making headlines and it's even possible that they need to be stealthy in their own orgs, because it's not "productive" enough.
by syncsynchalt | 2025-10-09 16:31:38+00:00
Renewables are a quarter of electricity generation now, and in some states are the majority of generation. They're also a decent chunk of all energy though that number's harder to pin down.

GDP is no longer tied to fuel consumption. You can't fight near-free "fuel" and near-zero opex, the renewables slice is only going to increase. I wouldn't trust any metric or rule of thumb tied to coal/oil/gas prices any longer.
by nasretdinov | 2025-10-09 16:31:39+00:00
Not necessarily: you can go quite far with Go alone. It also makes it trivial to run "green threads" code, so if you need both (decent) performance and easy async code then Go still might be a good fit. Despite Go being pretty high level GC language on the surface it actually allows you to control stuff like struct layout, CPU affinity, etc, which typically matter more for performance than just a programming language of choice. There's a reason why e.g. VictoriaMetrics is still in Go even though they could've easily chosen any other language too
by logankeenan | 2025-10-09 16:31:57+00:00
I’d really like to understand the total compute cost it takes to accomplish these tasks. I assume the compute is happening in a DC somewhere and not all onboard. Is the total cost of compute plus electricity to power the machine less than the cost of human labor to do the same task? At some point it’ll be less. If so, far out in the future until the prices make economic sense
by MyOutfitIsVague | 2025-10-09 16:32:05+00:00
I agree to a degree, but issue tracking being able to directly work with branches and PRs is natural enough, and then discussions can share a lot of code with the issue tracker.

Getting the same level of interoperability with a separate tool takes significantly more work on both sides, so the monolithic approaches tend to thrive because it can get out the door faster and better.

Forgejo is doing the same thing with its actions. Honestly, I'd prefer if something like Woodpecker became the blessed choice instead, and really good integration with diverse tools was the approach.
by vlovich123 | 2025-10-09 16:32:24+00:00
You misread the documentation. Reserve-exact is precisely that - the growth strategy is ignored and you are ensured that at least that many more elements can be inserted without a reallocation. Eg reserve_exact(100) on an empty Vec allocates space for 100 elements.

By contrast reserve will allocate space for the extra elements following the growth strategy. If you reserve(100) on an empty Vec the allocation will be able to actually insert 128 (assuming the growth strategy is pow(n))