MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tcmart14 | 2025-10-29 18:57:41+00:00
You can, but it's all about risk mitigation. Most processors have some form of store and forward (and it can have limitations like only X number of transactions). Some even have controls to limit the amount you can store-and-forward (for instance, only charges under $50). But ultimately, it's still risk mitigation. You can store-and-forward, but you're trusting that the card/account has the funds. If it doesn't, you loose and ain't shit you can do about it. If you can't tolerate any risk, you don't turn on store and forward systems and then you can't process cards offline.

Its not the we are not capable. Its, is the business willing to assume the risk?
by ivape | 2025-10-29 18:57:41+00:00
Nothing can be stopped. All that can be done is make clear where everyone stands. We're very early in all of this, and it's important to make clear what liability is. You want to sail out to the new world with everyone else, accept the terms, which includes death. You cannot just let your kid touch AI without both eyes open.

The universe of " I didn't know the kids would make deep fakes of their classmates ", is yet to come. Some parents going straight to fucking jail. Talk to your kids, things are moving at a dangerous pace.
by Yeroc | 2025-10-29 18:58:07+00:00
My experience has been the opposite. Oracle (the database) is actually a really solid product for the most part. Oracle (the company) is a different story. My eyes were really opened to some of the technical shortcomings in Postgres when we migrated from Oracle to Postgres a few years ago at $DAYJOB. Things like: a) global temp tables (there's an open source extension we had to use to fake this out), b) RLS (exists in PG but most functions that you might need to build on top perform badly), c) crashes in PG take out the whole database and a host of other smaller items. I'm not saying it wasn't worth it, but I wouldn't pretend Postgres is the best database either.
by codethief | 2025-10-29 18:58:18+00:00
> to make tailscale's server better?

While I don't think that's accurate, I, too, am surprised that this feature isn't¹ completely free. After all, it will make it easier (or possible at all) for many people to use Tailscale.

¹) s/isn't/might not end up being. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45751253
by hagbard_c | 2025-10-29 18:58:26+00:00
You calling these individuals 'nazis' devalues the term and ridicules those who fought and died to defeat the Nazis. It devalues the threat the Nazis were to those around them.

You using terms like 'nazi' and 'far right extremist' so easily to indicate those who you happen to dislike tells me you need to either grow up or need to touch grass, for real. Drop that applePhone and go outside, meet some people. Meet some of those you would call nazis and right wing extremists as well just like they meet people like you all the time.

Grow up.
by jcynix | 2025-10-29 18:58:42+00:00
> Curious what you've been using it to search for?

For starters I've done some trivial things, like "emacs elisp" on HackerNews and now "git tutorial" on AcademicSearch. The later is still running and organizing results. But the results don't have relevance for "git" as it seems.

I'll do some searches in French and German later to see how it works with foreign languages (not searching on HackerNews, obviously ;-)
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-10-29 18:59:02+00:00
An old concept indeed! I think about this Ed Fredkin story a lot... In his words:

"Just a funny story about random numbers: in the early days of computers people wanted to have random numbers for Monte Carlo simulations and stuff like that and so a great big wonderful computer was being designed at MIT’s Lincoln laboratory. It was the largest fastest computer in the world called TX2 and was to have every bell and whistle possible: a display screen that was very fancy and stuff like that. And they decided they were going to solve the random number problem, so they included a register that always yielded a random number; this was really done carefully with radioactive material and Geiger counters, and so on. And so whenever you read this register you got a truly random number, and they thought: “This is a great advance in random numbers for computers!” But the experience was contrary to their expectations! Which was that it turned into a great disaster and everyone ended up hating it: no one writing a program could debug it, because it never ran the same way twice, so ... This was a bit of an exaggeration, but as a result everybody decided that the random number generators of the traditional kind, i.e., shift register sequence generated type and so on, were much better. So that idea got abandoned, and I don’t think it has ever reappeared."

RIP Ed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Fredkin
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-29 18:59:13+00:00
> Corporations are applications of government power and have no natural rights

Sure. Whatever. The people who own and work at OpenAI have no obligation to remain in California.

(I’d also argue that global norms are currently walking back from the notion of natural rights pretty much everywhere except for in some parts of Europe. The concept doesn’t work without an appeal to divinity.)
by burnte | 2025-10-29 18:59:18+00:00
> Who gets to decide on the exact definition of a “Torment Nexus”?

It's a joke that is intentionally vague so that the reader could come up with their own definition. Hopefully no one tries to make one so we don't need to define it.

> Presupposing whether everyone reading HN likes or dislkkes something not even agreed on yet seems silly.

Jokes tend to be on the silly side.
by letrix | 2025-10-29 18:59:48+00:00
LeanCreator:

- Unzip archive

- Try double-click, security error

- Go to Privacy & Security and click "Open anyway"

- Try double-click again, it opens fine.

ObreonSystem:

- Open DMG and copy all the files to a folder

- Try double-click, program opens fine but errors because missing files.

- Uses instructions given in README, running with './ObreonSystem', and program opens without errors.

macOS 26.0.1
by lubujackson | 2025-10-29 18:59:49+00:00
This is just a completely different use of LLMs and has little to do with working at a real business with a live site and users. Cursor is great when you want to gain understanding of an issue quickly, or resolve something clear and specific quickly.

I'm not against YOLO vibe coding, but being against tab completion is just insane to me. At the end of the day, LLMs help you achieve goals quicker. You still need to know what goal you want to achieve, and tab completion basically let's me complete a focused goal nearly as soon as I determine what my goal is.
by ElevenLathe | 2025-10-29 19:00:01+00:00
It's more than that. When you file to incorporate, there is a birth. A new person is created, one that can potentially never die. Yes, it's routine, but it wasn't always, and it doesn't need to be forever. The ability to create a new, fake, person in order to shield yourself and your business partners from liability is a not a right. It is a deliberate policy that some sovereign jurisdictions allow their citizens.
by seligman99 | 2025-10-29 19:00:58+00:00
Indeed, I lost the history in a shuffle, but a similar use case broke in some Firefox update, and it's the exact reason behind this comment:

https://github.com/seligman/podcast_to_text/blob/master/sear...

In my case, loading the entire file is loading a tiny bit more data, so this fallback doesn't hurt, but it's still annoying, and broke any hope I had of doing something more clever with the dataset.
by otterdude | 2025-10-29 19:00:59+00:00
What Amazon, Azure, and Google are showing with their platform crashes amid layoffs, while they supports governments that are Oppressing's Citizens and Ignoring the Law, is that they do not care about anything other than the bottom line.

They think they have the market captured, but I think what their dwindling quality and ethics are really going to drive is adoption of self hosting, distributed computing frameworks. Nerds are the ones who drove adoption of these platforms, and we can eventually end if we put in the work.

Seriously with container technology, and a bit more work / adoption on distributed compute systems and file storage (IPFS,FileCoin) there is a future where we dont have to use big brothers compute platform. Fuck these guys.
by cubefox | 2025-10-29 19:01:26+00:00
There isn't yet a game that involves all the players in one huge level, without shards, but there might be eventually. Current game engines don't support levels with that many players simultaneously. There is an interview with Neal Stephenson and Tim Sweeney on the Metaverse where Sweeney says supporting massive multiplayer is what he plans for Unreal Engine 6: https://www.matthewball.co/all/sweeneystephenson

> So one of the big efforts that we're making for Unreal Engine 6 is improving the networking model, where we both have servers supporting lots of players, but also the ability to seamlessly move players between servers and to enable all the servers in a data center or in multiple data centers, to talk to each other and coordinate a simulation of the scale of millions or in the future, perhaps even a billion concurrent players. That's got to be one of the goals of the technology. Otherwise, many genres of games just can never exist because the technology isn't there to support them. And further, we've seen massively multiplayer online games that have built parts of this kind of server technology. They've done it by imposing enormous costs on every programmer who writes code for the system. As a programmer you would write your code twice, one version for doing the thing locally when the player's on your server and another for negotiating across the network when the player's on another server. Every interaction in the game devolves into this complicated networking protocol every programmer has to make work. And when they have any bugs, you see item duplication bugs and cheating and all kinds of exploits. Our aim is to build a networking model that retains the really simple Verse programming model that we have in Fortnite today using technology that was made practical in the early 2000's by Simon Marlow, Simon Peyton Jones and others called Software Transactional Memory.
by pjdesno | 2025-10-29 19:01:36+00:00
I'm involved in a fairly large academic cloud deployment, sited in a 15MW data center built and shared by a few large universities.

There are huge advantages of scale to computer operations in a few areas:

- facility: the capital and running cost of a purpose-built datacenter is far cheaper per rack than putting machines in existing office-class buildings, as long as it's a reasonable size - ours is ~1000 racks, but you might get decent scale at a quarter of that. (also one fat network pipe instead of a bunch of slow ones)

- purchasing: unlike consumer PCs, low-volume prices for major vendor servers are wildly inflated, and you don't get decent prices until you buy quite a few of them.

- operations: people come in integer units, and (assuming your salary ranges are bounded) are only competent in small number of technical areas each. Whether you have one machine or 1000s you need someone who can handle each technology your deployment depends on, from Kubernetes to network ops; multiply 4x for those requiring 24/7 coverage, or accept long response times for off-hours failures.

That last one is probably the kicker. To keep salary costs below 50% of your total, assuming US pay rates and 5-year depreciation since machines aren't getting faster as quickly as they used to, you probably need to be running tens of millions of dollars in hardware.

Note that a tiny deployment of a few machines in a tech company is an exception, since you have existing technical staff who can run them in their spare time. (and you have other interesting work for them to do, so recruiting and retention isn't the same problem as if their only job was to babysit a micro-deployment)

That's why it can be simultaneously true that (a) profit margins on AWS-like services are very high, and (b) AWS is cheaper than running your own machines for a large number of companies.
by neom | 2025-10-29 19:01:43+00:00
For folks curious, In terms of IPO, rule of 40 was common when I was involved in thinking about IPOs. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-tel...

Depends how you look at it but at DO we shot for 50, ended around 55. (25 % growth + 30 % profitability)
by wanderingbit | 2025-10-29 19:01:58+00:00
There are a couple big problems with this type of digital and decentralized type of authentication (I say this as a long time cryptocurrency professional who wants this to succeed):

1. backups and account recovery: We’re working with humans here. They will lose their keys in great numbers, sometimes into the hands of malicious actors. How do users then recover their credentials in a quick and reliable manner?

2. Fragmentation: let’s be optimistic and say digital credentials for drivers licenses are given out by _only_ 50 entities (one per State). Assuming we don’t have a single federal format for them (read: politically infeasible national id) how does facebook, let alone some rando startup, handle parsing and authenticating all these different credential formats? Oh and they can change at any time, due to some rando political issue in the given state.

OP, you clearly know all this, so I’m just reminding you as someone down in the identity trenches.
by kiitos | 2025-10-29 19:02:42+00:00
> Is this incorrect?

yep

because "life-saving" isn't a single well-defined boolean condition that can be determined by ER staff as part of triage

> I can't imagine a hospital waiting for an insurance company's approval to pay for a procedure to schedule a child's life saving surgery.

then I guess you've never dealt with major health issues like cancer, blood disease, etc. etc. because what you're describing here happens all the time
by ck2 | 2025-10-29 19:02:42+00:00
When I saw them do iris scanning during Iraq War I instantly knew that was coming to US police sooner or later, I guess this is the new easier method

The crazy thing is though these people don't even have an identifying badge number and their license plates are often fake, zero repercussions for anything and they know it

Imagine by 2028 what's going down if this is still the first year
by monocularvision | 2025-10-29 19:02:44+00:00
This is heavily dependent on whether the app is using a WKWebView, in which the app developer has almost total control over the experience or SFSafariViewController, which essentially provides a mini-Safari with back/forward/reload/reader mode buttons with a button in the lower right hander corner that takes you to full Safari. In the latter case, the app developer has very little customization and cannot see or really control what is happening inside of the web view.
by NewJazz | 2025-10-29 19:03:15+00:00
Idk, for me ruff was more of a game changer. No more explaining why we need both flake8 and pylint (and isort), no more flake8 plugins... Just one command that does it all.

UV is great but I use it as a more convenient pip+venv. Maybe I'm not using it to it's full potential.
by bob1029 | 2025-10-29 19:03:26+00:00
I moved a 100% MS shop to AWS circa 2015. We ran our DCs on EC2 instances just as if they were on prem. At some point we installed the AAD connector and bridged some stuff to Azure for office/mail/etc., but it was all effectively in AWS. We were selling software to banks so we had a lot of due diligence to suffer. AWS Artifact did much of the heavy lifting for us. We started with Amazon's compliance documentation and provided our own feedback on top where needed.

I feel like compliance is the entire point of using these cloud providers. You get a huge head start. Maintaining something like PCI-DSS when you own the real estate is a much bigger headache than if it's hosted in a provider who is already compliant up through the physical/hardware/networking layers. Getting application-layer checkboxes ticked off is trivial compared to "oops we forgot to hire an armed security team". I just took a look and there are currently 316 certifications and attestations listed under my account.

https://aws.amazon.com/artifact/faq/
by vlovich123 | 2025-10-29 19:03:45+00:00
I’ve been wondering how long it would take for someone to try probabilistic computing for AI workloads - the imprecision inherent in the workload makes it ideally suited for AI matrix math with a significant power reduction. My professor in university was researching this space and it seemed very interesting. I never thought it could supplant CPUs necessarily but certainly massive computer applications that don’t require precise math like 3D rendering (and now AI) always seemed like a natural fit.
by munchbunny | 2025-10-29 19:03:56+00:00
> I had assumed that Kafka would give me things like decoupling, retry, dead-lettering, logging, schema validation, schema versioning, exactly once processing.

If you don't need a lot of perf but you place a premium on ergonomics and correctness, this sounds more like you want a workflow engine? https://github.com/meirwah/awesome-workflow-engines
by buellerbueller | 2025-10-29 19:04:06+00:00
> invasion

Don't think this meets either the common or legal definition of "invasion"

>you decided it was "racist" and threw a fit every time anyone suggested it was a problem.

I decided nothing, buddy.

>If you hadn't let it become an issue,

Interesting, because the last time it was about to be taken up by congress, DJT said not to do anything about it, for political advantage. Neither side has its hands clean here.

> it wouldn't require this response.

This is the only possible response? How unimaginitive.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-10-29 19:04:27+00:00
I recommend BrowserOS if you're looking for alternatives.

Open-source agentic browser that uses any LLM provider (including local / Ollama).

That being said... I tried it, and while it was fun and cool, I didn't get enough value out of it to use it regularly (I think this would go for any agentic browser).
by gf000 | 2025-10-29 19:04:40+00:00
I like to think of grammar rules and the accompanying tests that make you remember them as.. rules you can use to generate any number of examples to better the language.

You learn a language by being exposed to it countless times, but most of us doesn't have the opportunity to be immersed 100% into a foreign language. Simple rules let us try out new sentences and do some self-checks to cull out the definitely wrong ones.

This makes your "training set" significantly larger without having to "collect that data". Of course it doesn't replace anything, but it is a useful part of the language learning journey, especially the early part. Later on, nothing can replace simple exposure.
by burnte | 2025-10-29 19:04:45+00:00
> I don't think I've ever encountered a technology pushed quite as hard on unwilling users as AI.

That's why they have to push it so hard. They spent a lot of money on it and they NEED us to buy it so they don't take a loss, so their tactic is to try to force it on us.

It happens to many companies, you start a disruptor and get huge because you did what the market wanted and competitors didn't. Then, later, you don't want the market to go in a direction, so you try to stack the market, never once realizing that another disruptor will come along to upset your apple cart.

You can control some of the market all of the time, and all of the market some of the time, but you can't control all of the market all of the time.
by thewebguyd | 2025-10-29 19:05:20+00:00
People feel it, but usually not general consumers like they do when AWS goes down.

If Azure goes down, it's mostly affecting internal stuff at big old enterprises. Jane in accounting might notice, but the customers don't. Contrast with AWS which runs most of the world's SaaS products.

People not being able to do their jobs internally for a day tends not to make headlines like "100 popular internet services down for everyone" does.
by saurik | 2025-10-29 19:05:23+00:00
If I have my hardware under lock and key in my house, this lets me only trust the CPU vendor and not the software stack running on my computer when I try to verify that it is running exactly the workload that I intended. With a third party, if I trust you to not tamper with your hardware, this let's both of us remove the people who wrote the hypervisor from our trust base.
by jemmyw | 2025-10-29 19:05:25+00:00
I read an article a few years ago about what brushing actually does for your teeth and why it works. The premise was that brushing applies fluoride and removes the bacterial film that eventually turns into plaque - and that about 2 minutes of brushing a day would be sufficient if we were perfect at brushing. Doing it twice a day ensures that you get good coverage. It also went into the best brushing technique etc.

Since reading that I've not stressed about missing the odd brush here and there. I've also been more conscious how I brush. I stopped flossing because my gums seem quite sensitive to it and it doesn't have great evidence of effectiveness. I use a inter-denture pick/brush occasionally when needed. This all seems to have improved things for my teeth considerably, my dentist now saying they're really clean - and ironically stopped suggesting I floss more.

I wasn't joking in my previous post about the cycling accident that destroyed my front teeth, except that it happened 20 years ago. This year the crowns I had fitted failed so I've had those removed and implants installed. It's been very painful, I left replacing them probably 10 years longer than I should have. Yesterday I got a temporary bridge on the implants, which I can't use for biting. Still 2-3 months away from having the permanent new crowns fitted.
by flohofwoe | 2025-10-29 19:05:31+00:00
> I'm much more comfortable with threads

The example code shown in the first few minutes of the video is actually using regular OS threads for running the async code ;)

The whole thing is quite similar to the Zig allocator philosophy. Just like an application already picks a root allocator to pass down into libraries, it now also picks an IO implementation and passes it down. A library in turn doesn't care about how async is implemented by the IO system, it just calls into the IO implementation it got handed from the application.
Show HN: Kavim – Open-source, local-first AI brainstorming
by staskaufman | 2025-10-29 19:05:38+00:00
Hey HN!

We built Kavim, a local-first, open-source AI brainstorming canvas for visual thinking and collaboration. It lets you chat with AI, branch ideas without losing context, and collaborate in real time — all without relying on the cloud.

Core ideas:

Visual branching that preserves context across conversations

Real-time, peer-to-peer collaboration (built on Yjs + WebRTC)

Local storage and offline-first workflows; no cloud required

Bring-your-own AI: plug in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or others

Fully open source (AGPL-3.0) and free to download

No subscriptions — you only pay your AI provider if applicable

Why we built it:

We were building an AI QA tool before realizing how hard it is to think visually with AI while keeping ownership of your data. So we pivoted to create Kavim — a tool where ideas evolve like conversations, not documents.

Tech:

React + Electron + Yjs + WebRTC + OpenAI/Anthropic APIs.

Everything runs locally — no central server required.

Status:

MVP is live: https://kavim.deepelegant.com/

GitHub: https://github.com/deep-elegant/kavim

Releases (download the app): https://github.com/deep-elegant/kavim/releases

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/c99hvZMJda

We’d love your thoughts on:

Local-first architecture (Yjs + WebRTC challenges) UI/UX for branching AI chats Any use cases you’d like to see supported

Thanks for reading and testing!