MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by atombender | 2025-10-05 13:14:34+00:00
Postgres is smarter about that, too! It evaluates whether the prepared statement is sensitive to parameter changes, and will either use a "generic" plan that's shared across all invocations, or a custom one that is hardwired to the values. There's a setting that controls the behaviour.

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-prepare.html

I've not compared the actual behaviour in the codebases I work on, however.
by pavlov | 2025-10-05 13:15:00+00:00
> “Applying for a job or apartment or anything today means creating endless pointless copies of your pesonal information in databases across the world that will eventually be neglected, hacked, exploited, sold off etc”

This problem is practically fixed in the EU (to the extent that legislation can fix it). Data protection laws have enough teeth that real companies can’t afford to keep or sell customer information illegally.

But people only see the tip of the iceberg and think EU data protection is something to do with annoying cookie banners. We need to do a better job of celebrating Europe’s real achievements in making the digital world better for its citizens. Instant zero-fee bank transfers are another example.
by vacuity | 2025-10-05 13:15:24+00:00
Thank you for your insights. I think this comes down to a culture problem. Some people such as myself obsess over the low-level details, so every usage of Vec stands out immediately. At the same time, many people like to use Rust in areas where heap allocations and the like aren't as significant, where GC languages would typically be used too. Discussions of memory safe languages are flawed, as you point out, though I feel like Rust is just the poster child and not a unique instance. What I take away from Rust's philosophy usually comes from the Rust team who develop the language, and I find them to generally be levelheaded when it comes to discussing Rust's merits and drawbacks. I do think Rust is a highly promising language, for which its team tirelessly addresses its major flaws[0], but it doesn't excuse hype-induced bias.

[0] I can't say it'll ever compile as fast as, say, Go, but all the work on compile times is impressive
by Forgeties79 | 2025-10-05 13:15:29+00:00
I’ve always had this like 70% formed idea about Plex and how it’s indicative of how people want to self host more than we realize, but I’ve never quite been able to articulate what I’m thinking here and what the larger implications are.

Plex is obviously not true self hosting, but it’s a lot closer to it than a Netflix subscription, and the number of people who I do not consider very tech savvy who have not only been joining other people servers but trying to set up their own is staggering lately. And they’re not simply doing it because they want free movies or something. A lot of them have done it for the same reason I initially started: their kids.

I am concerned about the media that is put in front of my kids. I care about what shows they are watching. Kids are going to get their hands on screens there almost is no getting around it, so I would rather not trust YouTube et al with deciding what my kids do and don’t see. I can’t realistically be there to catch literally everything they watch, but if they’re using my server I know they only have access to a certain Library at all times so I can rest a lot easier. In a lot of ways I imagine this is how our parents felt when we were kids. On cable television growing up there were only so many “weird” or troubling things that could pop up, definitely nothing as extreme as we see today, and you could be reasonably aware of what most of those things were and know what channels to forbid/what times your kids should not have free access to the TV.

I found a lot of other parents feel the same way here. They’re just tired of feeling like the Internet is such an incredibly hostile place and want to find ways to take a little power back into their own hands.

I don’t know hopefully something useful popped up in that rant above. I have a lot of disjointed thoughts about this I really haven’t been able to bring together.
by thesz | 2025-10-05 13:15:54+00:00
> Highly unconstrained extensibility. While this is a goal of RISC-V, it is also a recipe for a fragmented, incompatible ecosystem and will have to be managed with extreme care.

This is taken straight from the ISA specification.

For example, Intel can brand their own chips as RISC-V-ZIntelx8664, if they want to, because RISC-V-Zxxx implementation can be as incompatible with any other RISC-V implementations (and even specification) as one wants.
by jhogervorst | 2025-10-05 13:16:31+00:00
> (If anyone knows of a tool that helps me rapidly clean up my gmail, please let me know).

I’ve used Leave Me Alone (leavemealone.com) for cleaning up my subscriptions. It scans your past messages for subscriptions, sorts them by most frequent messages, and allows to unsubscribe (and delete) with one click. It’s a nice tool for this purpose.
by hnlmorg | 2025-10-05 13:16:56+00:00
Honestly, that’s not been my experience. Granted the UK is less authoritarian than most. But the general attitude is people who care don’t even use Bluesky and those that don’t continue to use Meta services because why wouldn’t they if they don’t care.

I know the topic of mental health and social media is different from the topic of independence vs the monolithic web. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t significant overlap in terms of those who are willing to boycott Meta for privacy reasons are also the kinds of people who likely dislike social media for other societal reasons too.
by Towaway69 | 2025-10-05 13:16:58+00:00
Wasn't the idea of Yahoo! Pipes[1] the aggregration of RSS feeds? It actually did that and did a really good job of it. I would prefer something visual like Yahoo! Pipes for aggregating RSS feeds - everything else is just another list...

Then we could all share our pipes and build better ones on top of existing pipes. The thing with Pipes was that you could also filter feeds and use Pipes as feeds for other pipes ... Yahoo! Pipes was a great product that was way ahead of its time.

If anyone is interested in actually replicating this, then I would suggest using Node-RED[2] as a stand-in for Pipes.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Pipes

[2]: https://nodered.org
by ants_everywhere | 2025-10-05 13:17:55+00:00
VPS just means a rented VM right?

I only know a little bit about what Google does to secure the VMs and hypervisors and that the attitude several years ago was that even hardened VMs weren't really living up to their premise yet.

When using one of these cost-focused providers do people typically just assume the provider has root in the VM? I sometimes see them mentioned in the context of privacy but I haven't seen much about the threat model.
by pessimizer | 2025-10-05 13:18:00+00:00
> the point where it’s under threat from several authoritarian states.

This is a victim fantasy, and if being under intense attack from the state meant you were rebelling against the authoritarian system, then you would be capping for Parler, Gab, X and Tiktok. Bluesky, however, is only under attack from its own users, who are authoritarian trolls. At least the management seem to be getting sick of them, because it is actively inhibiting their growth* that they've been used as a base for the angriest, most entitled, least interesting people on the planet. It must be hell trying to manage a site filled with people demanding to speak to the manager.

It is also just a centralized twitter clone backed by VC looking for a return; not a revolution.

[*] Of course, it was their strategy to cater to that group because of all the free advertising they'd get from the media. But it had and has nothing to do with Dorsey's hopeful redemption arc, which was only about decentralization (i.e. not having speech under the control of people like him) and resilience. Bluesky was supposed to be bittorrent.
by ArcHound | 2025-10-05 13:18:15+00:00
Not OP, but I am self-hosting a bunch of things, like my blog. I am trying to move away from Google, my primary email for important things is under my domain (not purely self-hosted, but still). I am also creating backups so that I can recover if a service is gone for any reason.

So yea, some of us are practicing what we preach.
by isoprophlex | 2025-10-05 13:19:41+00:00
I'm fascinated by the thought process, or absence thereof, involved in such an image ending up in something that's obviously meant for consumption by others.

As the author, do you just don't see what ridiculous image the slop machine spewed out - a kind of visual dyslexia where you do not register problematic hallucinations?

I can go on for a while hypothesizing, and none of the reasons I can come up with warrant using obviously bad AI slop images.

Is it disdain for your users - they won't see it/they won't care/they don't deserve something put together with care? Is it a lack of self-respect? Do people just genuinely not care and think that an article must have visuals to support it, no matter how crappy?

The mind truly boggles.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-10-05 13:20:29+00:00
> It's not clear what you're suggesting in practice, we can all say Palestinians should be given equal rights in an ideal world but that doesn't really bring us any closer to resolving the conflict.

That is unnecessary, because Palestinians already have equal rights which are not legally alienable. israel is merely illegally violating them.

It's also not necessary for equal rights to bring us to any sort of resolution. Equal rights are more important than israel's unequal, unilateral safety, and a country whose existence depends on the violation of others' rights, must find a new, legal way to exist instead. Equal rights come first, and only then can we even begin to discuss a resolution. We tried the other way around, and it has failed to produce a resolution after decades of war.

> how Israeli elections(proportional representation) work you tend to get more extremist parties

This seems to be agreeing with me? Like yeah, israelis voted for terrorists, war criminals, criminals against humanity, and genociders. That is at least as bad as hamas. It's also kind of telling how you refer to a terrorist as an "extremist" when they're israeli. Why soften the language only for 1 ethnic group in the conflict while hardening it for another?

> There is a form of Palestinian rule in which the Palestinian Authority exercises a certain level of control in the West Bank

There is no Palestinian rule. They are ruled, dominated even, by israelis. They do not have freedom of choice, or freedom of trade, or freedom of speech, or freedom of press, or freedom of movement within their own land of Palestine, because israel denies them each and every one of those freedoms. Palestinians are frequently victims of israeli terrorist attacks in Palestine too. When the IDF shows up, they often participate in the terrorist attacks. israel does not even allow Palestinians to defend themselves from israeli terrorist attacks. That is not Palestinian rule.
by danparsonson | 2025-10-05 13:20:59+00:00
Well there's loads - Nextcloud/Syncthing to replace Dropbox, Forgejo to replace Github, Joplin on the back of Nextcloud or similar for note taking.... personal wiki, todo list, email with webmail (Roundcube), home video camera management, etc etc

Check out https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
by dzaima | 2025-10-05 13:21:53+00:00
Avoiding flags is indeed a decision backed by reason; but to do so, you don't necessarily need to have `beq a0, a1, label`, you can just do `xor t0, a0, a1; beqz t0, label`. Having full `beq` instead of just `beqz` is exactly as unnecessary as `sh3add` from Zba, except some mild difference in frequency of those, depending on codebase. Having just beqz would even have the benefit that the label could be 17-bit instead of 12-bit!

Indeed, most sane software doesn't need most extensions to be "reasonably performant"; in fact, most sane software is reasonably-performant even on two decades old hardware!

But, unfortunately, there's a ton of software doing things quite inefficiently, and it will continue to exist forever unless something crazy happens like a non-insignificant amount of humans starting to care (impossible) or LLMs becoming functional enough to rewrite entire codebases (more possible than humans caring, at least).

You're extremely-heavily underestimating software doing random garbage in floating point (using it to compute a square root or multiplying an integer by 0.4 or something; ad-hoc game logic/physics that isn't written in a vectorizable way; doing a bunch of things where integers would do in FP (esp. languages which expose floats as the main datatype, esp. JavaScript))

It may be neat to dream about a hypothetical world where none of that garbage exists, but that dream isn't coming true today, nor is there any sign that it will at any point in the future. Basing architecture/compiler/configuration decisions around this hypothetical is just purely entirely stupid.

And even in that dream world a lot of code would benefit from sh1add/sh2add/sh3add from Zba, Zbb's min/max is useful in a ton of places, memory managers might want clz for computing bucket from size, anything doing bitwise stuff would benefit from andn and much of Zbs. And of course ideally the vast majority of code would be running in RVV instead of scalar code.
by laserdancepony | 2025-10-05 13:22:04+00:00
Why should a country tolerate an information system designed to circumvent the enforcement of the law, no matter how you individually feel about that laws. We boot fraudulent or illegal apps all the time.

What about an app that reports every LEO (not just ICE) around you? What would that accomplish except benefit criminals?

"Rules for thee, not for me."
by immibis | 2025-10-05 13:22:11+00:00
HN has not just self-reinforcing consensus through karma, but also imposed false consensus through moderation decisions. I've just been informed that flagging and voting from my account have been disabled (they appear to work, but don't actually do anything) because I didn't flag all political sides in equal numbers. It seems my account has been identified as "a side", therefore is subject to equality requirements. Meanwhile, obviously mass-flaggings by "the other side" accounts permeate the site every day.
by Sharlin | 2025-10-05 13:22:12+00:00
> where accuracy is paramount

> accuracy: 60%

Not to mention that the least poorly performing format is probably the stupidest way to encode tabular data, beating even XML. But I guess that’s the new normal because we’re trying to shoehorn conversational AI models to every use case rather than, say, training finetunes that are better at particular tasks. (Yes, of course you can’t train finetunes when the model is a proprietary black box on someone else’s computer.) Something about hammers and nails…
by vgeek | 2025-10-05 13:22:21+00:00
The Logic of Sports Betting by Ed Miller is probably a good start.

Parimutuel vs house odds is probably a good start in seeing how odds change in different types of markets. Monte Carlo simulations will be useful in coming up with your own tissue odds. Then it is the matter of backtesting and comparing your derived odds versus the books' by looking at things like Closing Line Value, Margin of Error and Return on Investment.

For data, check out Kaggle. Learn how to scrape and circumvent platforms like PerimeterX, Recaptcha and Cloudflare. There are dozens of sites that provide historical odds data, even more basic sports statistic data.
Show HN: Pyscn – Python code quality analyzer for vibe coders
by d-yoda | 2025-10-05 13:22:31+00:00
Hi HN! I built pyscn for Python developers in the vibe coding era. If you're using Cursor, Claude, or ChatGPT to ship Python code fast, you know the feeling: features work, tests pass, but the codebase feels... messy.

Common vibe coding artifacts:

• Code duplication (from copy-pasted snippets)

• Dead code from quick iterations

• Over-engineered solutions for simple problems

• Inconsistent patterns across modules

pyscn performs structural analysis:

• APTED tree edit distance + LSH

• Control-Flow Graph (CFG) analysis

• Coupling Between Objects (CBO)

• Cyclomatic Complexity

Try it without installation:

uvx pyscn analyze . # Using uv (fastest) pipx run pyscn analyze . # Using pipx (Or install: pip install pyscn)

Built with Go + tree-sitter. Happy to dive into the implementation details!
by spwa4 | 2025-10-05 13:22:53+00:00
It's "loss leader", selling under the price to make your competitors go bankrupt, then use monopoly power.

It's illegal under German law, EU law, and I'm sure it's also explicitly called out as illegal in at least 5 trade treaties Germany signed.

Needless to say, like everything in the EU, it's only enforced against local companies, in this case German ones.
by CharlieDigital | 2025-10-05 13:23:51+00:00
Exactly what I've observed in practice because most devs have no background in writing functional code and will complain when asked to do so.

Passing or returning a function seems a foreign concept to many devs. They know how to use lambda expressions, but rarely write code that works this way.

We adopted ErrorOr[0] and have a rule that core code must return ErrorOr<T>. Devs have struggled with this and continue to misunderstand how to use the result type.

[0] https://github.com/amantinband/error-or
by birdalbrocum | 2025-10-05 13:25:07+00:00
> Asynchronous communication

> Rather than having flow and concentration interrupted by incoming message notifications, with email I can easily decide when to fetch and process messages.

Asynchronous communication describes the client-server-client model, and both chat and email fall into this category, especially since there are peer-to-peer chat programs. What the author states sounds to me like a problem with the notification model and fetching beyond the user's control. Chat is not inherently in "flow."
by willidiots | 2025-10-05 13:25:09+00:00
I'm a big fan of the MWCBTY keyboard format, it's especially efficient when you have to type a lot of G's.

Snark aside, I think it's laziness and the shotgun approach. The author writes some rough thoughts down, has an AI "polish" them and generate an image, and posts an article. Shares it on HN. Do it enough, especially on a slow Sunday morning, and you'll get some engagement despite the detractors like us in the comments. Eventually you've got some readers.
by matt-p | 2025-10-05 13:26:09+00:00
Yes I think you have to, to a extent the same also applies to dedicated servers. Even if you own a server that you place in a Colo, they can still pull your drives or plug in a KVM.

If you're data is sensitive encrypt it locally and send it. The reality is most people are running something like a website, API or a SAAS and basically just have to have a provider they trust somewhat and take reasonable security precautions themselves. Beyond that it's probably not as secure as it could be unless it's in a facility you own or control access to.
by dctoedt | 2025-10-05 13:26:28+00:00
> most of the things the OP likes about email make it a nightmare from a legal perspective

Former litigator here: The late Dr. Randy Pausch mentioned this in his Last Lecture; IIRC, he urged people to keep all their emails. [0] That can be a really good idea — keeping emails:

• will help your lawyer reconstruct a timeline of events, build a narrative to tell the jury that's supported by the documentary evidence, and avoid spinning a tale that's undermined by emails that you didn't keep but someone else did;

• will help make sure your people don't have private stashes of emails that have been deleted from your server but that resurface in response to subpoenas — or search warrants.

• will help corroborate the stories told by your witnesses: Judges and jurors tend to be skeptical of hindsight testimony because of faulty memory and the temptation to shade the truth or even lie — recall how the House's January 6 committee hearings made such extensive use of emails, and also texts. If you didn't keep copies of emails, you won't have that evidence available;

• will refresh your witnesses' memories so they don't testify incorrectly about something (whether in deposition or at trial) and have to correct their testimony — which hurts their credibility.

Moreover: Your opponent's lawyer will likely send you a "litigation hold" letter, meaning you have to suspend all document-deletion programs — and if you don't, "spoliation of evidence" is low-hanging fruit for the opposing counsel to attack you and maybe cause you to lose the case.

Back in the day of limited server storage capability, email "retention" policies (spelled: purging policies) had at least some business justification. That's far less the case now.

To be sure: Footgun emails documenting bad behavior can lead to problems. But the root cause is the bad behavior, not the emails — it's far better to face the facts than to delete the evidence .

[0] https://etc.cmu.edu/about/last-lecture
by harrisoned | 2025-10-05 13:26:46+00:00
That's something that drives me crazy as well. I don't actually use the big 'algorithmic social media' sites, only Telegram and Discord mostly, and seeing screenshots/memes with those words censored there made me wonder why, at first. Then i saw people auto-censoring themselves in those places where there's no such thing as algorithmic de-ranking. The social media generation already find it normal, acceptable, and is specially ironic to me that a lot of people who are vocal against those services have conformed to what they say to stand against.

That behavior also highlights how people within those services care so much about reach, clout, 'going viral', instead of communicating with other people.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-10-05 13:27:20+00:00
>And that's the thing: while this is the usual way, it doesn't have to be! But it does require a shift in mindset from the traditional way people partition components in React.

So I'm forced to follow the mindset of making the GUI less nested and less complex because data flow requires it? I don't like it.

I prefer to be able to do anything I want with the GUI. The complexity of GUI and the complexity of dataflow should be completely independent.

>All I'm saying it is possible to structure the component hierarchy in a way that is independent from what the GUI looks like. By not having a deep hierarchy, you don't have "deep hierarchy problems".

Isn't it better to have components also independent of logic and side effects? Why am I forced into some specific structure for the sake of data flow? I still don't like this option. I want these concepts decoupled.
by immibis | 2025-10-05 13:27:45+00:00
Can you be more concrete about this? How would you resolve this specific paradox without throwing out any obviously true axioms or introducing any obviously false ones? If it was easily resolved, it wouldn't be called a paradox.

Banach-Tarski is a paradox. You can resolve it by deleting the axiom of choice. But the axiom of choice is obviously true, at least as much as B-T is obviously false. That's why it's a "paradox" and not just "a proof that the axiom of choice is false"
by jorangreef | 2025-10-05 13:27:55+00:00
Fair question!

If you have any contention in your workload, which is typical for OLTP workloads [1], then, per Amdahl’s Law, that portion of the work will dominate, and TB will be orders faster.

For example, if your KV can do high throughput writes (and most can) at low latency then you should be looking at 20-50ms P100s all combined, per 8K transactions, when you’re running at 500K TPS, even with extreme contention up to 90%. Very hard if not impossible to do that if you don’t have TB as part of your stack. At least not with the durability and strict serializability guarantees that TB gives.

[1] Worth watching! https://youtu.be/yKgfk8lTQuE