MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by evantbyrne | 2025-10-29 15:32:53+00:00
Managed hosting is expensive to operate and self-managing kafka is a job in of itself. At my last employer they were spending six figures to run three low volume clusters before I did some work to get them off some enterprise features, which halved the cost, but it was still at least 5x the cost of running a mainstream queue. Don't use kafka if you just need queuing.
by loftsy | 2025-10-29 15:33:06+00:00
I am about to start a project. I know I want an event sourced architecture. That is, the system is designed around a queue, all actors push/pull into the queue. This article gives me some pause.

Performance isn't a big deal for me. I had assumed that Kafka would give me things like decoupling, retry, dead-lettering, logging, schema validation, schema versioning, exactly once processing.

I like Postgres, and obviously I can write a queue ontop of it, but it seems like quite a lot of effort?
by mpalmer | 2025-10-29 15:33:09+00:00
It's a bit weasel-y to refer to criticism as just "people being offended".

> thought this comparison was incredibly apt and also found it very funny

I'm happy for you, but I didn't.

To "read something with nuance" is to be open to nuance that is already present in the writing. This writing is not nuanced!

Perhaps you're asking us to make an effort to be more tolerant of weak writing. That's a fair request when the writer is acting in good faith. But to mock nerds for liking text adventures when you clearly do not like them yourself is not acting in good faith.
by Flere-Imsaho | 2025-10-29 15:33:10+00:00
I've not managed to read all the comments in this post, so apologies if I'm repeating other people, I also have only a passing understanding of how Google Play works, but couldn't we have:

Linux based phone, running Anbox to support Android apps running within containers. Effort would then have to put into support Play APIs within Anbox. Not a small amount of work, but I compare it to the state of Linux 20 years ago and how well Linux is doing today.
by andrewl-hn | 2025-10-29 15:33:26+00:00
From the list of features it is very similar / identical to JavaScript GC in V8 / Chrome, which honestly expected: browsers have been trying to one-up each other on benchmarks throughout all 2010s.

Go GC is incremental, concurrent, parallel, but it's not generational and not compacting. However, the way Go uses the memory internally is different from JavaScript, Java, C#, etc. Go data structures rely on pointers a lot less, and thus the process of inspecting the heap during garbage collection takes a lot less time, too. Many short-lived objects in Go remain on stack only, and do not need to be garbage-collected. So, their GC doesn't need to be as sophisticated as the ones in JVM, for example.
by altcognito | 2025-10-29 15:33:37+00:00
The article basically states unless you need a lot of throughput, you probably don't need Kafka. (my interpretation extends to say) You probably don't need offsets because you don't need multi-threaded support because you don't need multiple threads.

I don't know what kind of native support PG has for queue management, the assumption here is that a basic "kill the task as you see it" is usually good enough and the simplicity of writing and running a script far outweighs the development, infrastructure and devops costs of Kafka.

But obviously, whether you need stuff to happen in 15 seconds instead of 5 minutes, or 5 minutes instead of an hour is a business decision, along with understanding the growth pattern of the workload you happen to have.
by dllu | 2025-10-29 15:33:39+00:00
For those who are interested, the Will Evans course on graph drawing [1] covers a lot of cool graph drawing algorithms. Graph drawing is very interesting and many applications get it wrong. I once contributed [2] some small bugfixes to the Dot lexer for the Open Graph Drawing Framework, which has fast implementations of some amazing graph drawing algorithms, and my experience is that the OGDF draws graphs vastly better than the various algorithms in GraphViz (fewer crossings, faster, etc).

[1] https://www.cs.ubc.ca/~will/536E/

[2] https://github.com/ogdf/ogdf/pulls?q=is%3Apr%20author%3Adllu...
by throwaway-0001 | 2025-10-29 15:33:56+00:00
Someone just deleted a comment so I’ll put it again here “ Tether is backed by nothing, so it can presumably print without end. If it's suspected they've done this, it could lose its peg. If that happens, it could have consequences.”

There is no reason not to do an audit except when it’s a scam/all money gone. No accounting company wants to do their audit - guess why.
Show HN: GenOps AI – OSS (OpenTelemetry) runtime governance for AI workloads
by nordic_lion | 2025-10-29 15:34:07+00:00
We just open-sourced GenOps AI, a framework for standardizing runtime governance, cost tracing, and policy enforcement across AI workloads.

It builds alongside OpenLLMetry, extending the OpenTelemetry spec for LLM usage, FinOps alignment, and compliance reporting.

Repo: https://github.com/KoshiHQ/GenOps-AI

We’d love feedback from folks working on AI infrastructure, observability, and FinOps tooling, as well as contributors interested in evolving the open spec.
by joaohaas | 2025-10-29 15:34:38+00:00
Had the same thoughts, weird it didn't include Kafka numbers.

Never used Kafka myself, but we extensively use Redis queues with some scripts to ensure persistency, and we hit throughputs much higher than those in equivalent prod machines.

Same for Redis pubsubs, but those are just standard non-persistent pubsubs, so maybe that gives it an upper edge.
by hashkitly | 2025-10-29 15:34:41+00:00
You’re not alone—many teams pivoted fast to agent-written code, and it can feel like craftsmanship no longer matters. A few concrete moves:

- Have a candid 1:1: say you’re misaligned with the process, but propose owning guardrails leadership cares about—reliability, security, test coverage, CI policies, prompt/eval hygiene. Suggest measuring outcomes beyond velocity: defect escape rate, change failure rate, MTTR, SLOs, incident cost. - Differentiate where agents are weak: ambiguous requirements, system design, debugging gnarly prod issues, performance tuning, threat modeling, compliance. Volunteer for those areas. - Use AI defensively: generate tests, fuzzers, benchmarks, docs, migrations; prune agent output; write prompts/evals to reduce rework and incidents. - Protect yourself: keep a brag doc with quantified impact, network for internal transfers, and quietly explore roles that still value rigor (fintech, healthcare, infra, aerospace, devtools). - Set a 60–90 day window. If nothing changes, execute an exit plan rather than burn out.

It’s okay to be disillusioned. Your edge now is owning quality, risk, and outcomes—things the org can’t ignore even when throughput is cheap.
by wernsey | 2025-10-29 15:34:49+00:00
I see a lot of mention of ProtonDB in this thread, so I thought I'd take a look at which of my favourite games are supported.

Unfortunately, when I try to open it, it gives me a NS_ERROR_UNKNOWN_HOST when it tries to download the page's .js and CSS from a head.protondb.pages.dev domain.

I tried to add that to my /etc/hosts file, but then I got an error about a certificate.

Most strange, and the only clue I found online was this YouTube video[1] that suggests accessing it through Tor...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DY3snvH9Xc
by xivzgrev | 2025-10-29 15:35:00+00:00
lol. Money is used to allocate resources. Most people sell their time to earn money. So if people don't have job anymore, theyre screwed if they don't have money, and they're screwed if they get a "universal income" or something. Why? Because everyone gets it, so how do you allocate scarce resources?

Suppose 1000 people live in a town where half own homes and half rent. A home comes up for sale and assume all renters want to own a home. If every renter is receiving the same income, who gets the house?

In today's world, whoever pays the most money. In this future world, maybe still the same (so who has the saved the most and can pay cash), or maybe alternative payments / bartering on the side to sweeten the deal.

Either way it's not this utopia where suddenly everyone can afford scarce resources - the price will just go up to remain scarce
by cs702 | 2025-10-29 15:35:13+00:00
> the point was never "We're cheap" but "We let you scale faster for a premium"

Actually, it was more like "Scale faster, easier, more reliably, with proven hardware and software infrastructure, operated by a proven organization, at a price point that is competitive with the investment you'd have to make to get comparable hardware, software, and organizational infrastructure." But that was then. Today, things are different. Cloud services have become giant hairballs of complexity, with plenty of shoot-yourself-in-the-foot-by-default traps, at prices that can quickly spiral out of control if you're not on top of them.
by some_bird | 2025-10-29 15:35:22+00:00
We already knew that the poorer countries are impacted worse by the IPv4 shortages. CG-NAT didn't solve anything but only delayed long enough to do even more damage. Now these already poor countries also have to do CG-NAT, which is very expensive. They cannot afford this.

I guess that a poor country could go with only IPv6? Local services would be IPv6-only as well and most popular services already have IPv6. And everyone else would have to make this switch eventually, so there'd be benefits...
by misja111 | 2025-10-29 15:35:40+00:00
> One camp chases buzzwords .. the other common sense

How is it common sense to try to re-implement Kafka in Posgres? You probably need something similar but more simple. Then implement that! But if you really need something like Kafka, then .. use Kafka!

IMO the author is now making the same mistake as some Kafka evangelists that try to implement a database in Kafka.
by shikhar | 2025-10-29 15:35:45+00:00
Postgres is a way better fit than Kafka if you want a large number of durable streams. But a flexible OLTP database like PG is bound to require more resources and polling loops (not even long poll!) are not a great answer for following live updates.

Plug: If you need granular, durable streams in a serverless context, check out s2.dev
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-10-29 15:35:47+00:00
"childhood trauma to autism" pipeline

...is more accurate. The procedure you make jest at is among the most horrific "medical" surgeries I have ever witnessed (during my brief medical training, doctor dropout, myself "cut") — I have seen few adult humans express such similar pain (either facially or even with words). Absolutely barbaric, which few medical reasons immediately justify.
by temporallobe | 2025-10-29 15:36:25+00:00
Agree with this sentiment - it’s easy to be judgmental about these things, but project-level issues and decisions can be very complicated and engineers often have little to no visibility into them. We’re using Kafka for a gigantic pipeline where IMO any reasonably modern database would suffice (and may even be superior), but our performance requirements are unclear. At some point in the distant future, we may have a significant surge in data quantity and speed, requiring greater throughput and (de)serialization speed, but I am not convinced that Kafka ultimately helps us there. I imagine this is a case where the program leadership was sold a solution which we are now obligated to use. This happens a LOT, and I have seen unnecessary and unused products cost companies millions over the years. For example, my team was doing analysis on replacing our existing Atlassian Data Center with other solutions, and in doing so, we discovered several underused/unused Atlassian plugins for which we are paying very high license fees. At some point, users over the years had requested some functionality for a specific workflow and the plugins were purchased. The people and projects went away or otherwise processes became OBE, but the plugins happily hummed along while the bills were paid.
by kragen | 2025-10-29 15:36:30+00:00
UB was added to C when it was 15 years old, and the current understanding of UB is from about 10 years after that. It isn't essential to C; an implementation that defines all the undefined behavior would still be compliant and capable of running nearly all existing C.

> There is a perf penalty from GC.

Not really, no. There's a perf penalty from bounds checking and runtime type checking. GC takes a little time but saves you time on free(), although it only becomes a real performance win when you remove the other, less efficient ways of tracking lifetimes, such as reference counting.

> Plus you need all the original sources, right?

Yes, but from my point of view, loss of sources is not a significant problem. I know it happened historically, especially last millennium, but really only for proprietary software running on a single platform such as MS-DOS. Unix software, free software, and software using source control systems have suffered almost no source code loss, except for particular old versions.

> Declining usage of C is going to make you lose intellectual heritage

I think there are more C programmers today than there have ever been, and I doubt that that number will ever fall to zero while there are still humans.
by erelong | 2025-10-29 15:36:31+00:00
There's a lot of things to be said on these topics, it probably is worth trying to keep android "open" here, but there's also a lot of alternative routes to consider and in the long run I think maybe Android is a lost cause (?) to be abandoned

The big alternative is mobile linux or linux mobile, which is akin to desktop linux in the 2000s maybe in lagging behind the competing operating systems. An influx of interest in these operating systems and related hardware might make this discussion more moot (software like: postmarketos, mobian, ubuntu touch, and so on. hardware like: pinephone, raspberry pi used as a phone?, librem phones, and so on.)

Some progress has been made to have android phones run on linux with projects like postmarketos and mobian. Again, more people just focusing on building these projects, especially with the help of LLMs, might make this discussion less necessary.

F-Droid could also pivot a bit to promoting more linux mobile initiatives.

Apple should be called out as much as Google here for already being closed off.

Both platforms (ios and Android) could probably be appealed to through the incentive of "developer openness being good for business" - it probably helps both companies to make more money by making "sideloading" easy. If they both essentially become closed, this opens up a giant incentive for linux mobile to take over. (Maybe that is something we should root for?)

On the hardware side, we need some ios/android alternative phones. I've seen some people post that you can attach cell dongles to raspberry pis and use those as phones (?). Maybe more diy cell phone projects would be nice to see.

I guess the FSF is trying to create a Librephone; initiatives like this are overdue: https://liliputing.com/free-software-foundation-announces-a-...

Not sure what else to add, the writing has been on the wall that Google and Apple are trying to be closed source systems, so generally linux mobile (and/or *BSD mobile, if that's to be a thing in the future) need more attention.

This is probably a good moment to consider the alternatives and the seemingly predictable trajectory of where things are going.
LLMs Are Moving Local – So Why Are We Still Paying for Tokens?
by josephinepqt | 2025-10-29 15:36:50+00:00
Is anyone still using LLM APIs?

Open models like SmolLM3 (~3B) and Qwen2-1.5B are getting surprisingly capable - and they run fine on laptops or even phones. With Apple rolling out on-device LLMs in iOS 18, it feels like we’re entering a real local-first phase.

Small models already handle focused jobs: lightweight copilots, captioning, inspection.

And not just text - Gemma 2 2B Vision and Qwen2-VL can caption and reason about images locally.

Hardware’s there too: Apple’s M-series Neural Engine hits ~133 TOPS, and consumer GPUs chew through 4-8B models.

Tooling’s catching up fast: * Ollama for local runtimes (GGUF, simple CLI) * Cactus / RunLocal for mobile * ExecuTorch / LiteRT for on-device inference

Still some pain: iOS memory limits, packaging overhead, distillation quirks. Quantization helps, but 4-bit isn’t magic.

The upside’s clear: privacy by default, offline by design, zero latency, no token bills.

The cloud won’t die, but local compute finally feels fun again.

What’s keeping small models from going fully on-device?
by MisterTea | 2025-10-29 15:37:11+00:00
I have found that a fiber patch cable paired with two SFPs is cheaper and more power efficient than an equivalent UTP setup. This lead me to move to all fiber/DAC for 10Gb save for the 10Gb UTP link to my router that lacks SFP.

I have the 8 port 10Gb + 1 Gb from mikrotik and the UTP SFP's run stupid hot because they have to drive a cable at GHz speeds. The fiber and DAC (direct attach cable) SFPs are cool to the touch by comparison.
by Brett_Riverboat | 2025-10-29 15:37:12+00:00
A few typos were brought to my attention in my previous comment and as the time frame to edit it has passed I am replying with the required edits so that if anyone does want to attempt this they don't have to wonder what went wrong

I originally had “ net user Prefferedusername/active:yes” but there should have been no space before "net" and I should have put a space before the "/" after prefferedusername.

so the corrected instructions are below. (hopefully without typos this time)

at the first setup screen instead of answering any of the questions press Shift + F10

CMD will open

Type (no quotes) “net user Prefferedusername /add” (replacing Prefferedusername with the user name you wish to use) and press enter.

Next type “net localgroup administrators Prefferedusername /add” and press enter.

Next type “net user Prefferedusername /active:yes” and press enter.

Next type “net user Prefferedusername /expires:never” and press enter.

Next type “net user administrator /active:no” and press enter.

Next type “net user defaultUser0 /delete” (this is case sensitive make sure the "U" is capitalized) and press enter.

Next type "regedit" and press enter.

This opens registry editor, navigate to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OOBE"

Delete "DefaultAccountAction", "DefaultAccountSAMName", and "DefaultAccountSID"

Right click on "LaunchUserOOBE" and rename it to "SkipMachineOOBE" and make sure the value is set to "1".

Close registry editor and type "shutdown /r /t 0"
by jmaker | 2025-10-29 15:37:22+00:00
It’s a marketing trap. But also a job guarantee since everyone’s in the same trap. You got a couple cloud engineers or "DevOps" that lobby for AWS or any other hyperscaler, NaiveDate managers that write down some decision report littered with logical fallacies, and a few years in the sink cost is so high you can’t get off of it, and instead of doing productivity work you’re sitting in myriads of FinOps meetings, where even fewer understand what’s going on.

Engineering mangers are promised cost savings on the HR level. Corporate finance managers are promised OpEx for CapEx trade-off, the books look better immediately. Cloud engineers are embarking on their AWS journey of certification being promised an uptick to their salaries. It’s a win/win for everyone, in isolation, a local optimum for everyone, but the organization now has to pay way more than it—hypothetically—would have been paying for bare metal ops. And hypothetical arguments are futile.

And it lends itself well to overengineering and the microservices cargo cult. Your company ends up with a system distributed around the globe across multiple AZs per region of business operations, striving to shave off those 100ms latency off your clients’ RTT. But it’s outgrown your comprehension, and it’s slow anyway, and you can’t scale up because it’s expensive. And instead of having one problem, you now have 99 and your bill is one.
by j45 | 2025-10-29 15:37:30+00:00
100%

Postgres isn’t meant to be a guaranteed permanent replacement.

It’s a common starting point for a simpler stack which can retain a greater deal of flexibility out of the box and increased velocity.

Starting with Postgres lets the bottlenecks reveal themselves, and then optimize from there.

Maybe a tweak to Postgres or resources, or consider a jump to Kafka.
by can16358p | 2025-10-29 15:37:31+00:00
Cushions (yeah replacable but not super cheap), the cable that connects one earpiece to other, the bit connecting the earpieces, the hinges around the earpieces.

Literally everything. The sound is still great and battery is awesome. But I doubt it will last long.

(Just to be clear: I've used it A LOT over the years, and is already worth every penny I spent on it)
by MostlyStable | 2025-10-29 15:37:33+00:00
I tried to log into a banking website on a full desktop browser recently, one that I had previously used with a password. It literally would not let me login until I downloaded their app and set up a passkey. That is now the _only_ way for me to access those accounts. Presumably, I could call in, though I wouldn't be surprised if the person on the phone also asked that I download the app in order to verify my identity, and even if it wasn't the case, they didn't offer that option when I was trying to login. Many bank websites now also require the phone app.
by iluxonchik | 2025-10-29 15:37:49+00:00
FedNow is a real-time payment system for interbank transfers - it doesn't replace commercial banks.

Commercial banks are credit, lending, deposit-taking and risk management institutions. FedNow focuses on settlement. Replacing commercial banks would require public access to central bank accounts, which isn't allowed under virtually all jurisdictions.

Regarding fraud - automation won't remove fraud. Banks themselves heavily rely on automation.

Regarding bank failure handling - same question as above
by raeroumeliotis | 2025-10-29 15:37:54+00:00
Be afraid, be very afraid! It’s that time of year again, when all the horrors come out of the shadows, including those produced by GenAI! This Halloween, join us to hear about unexpected model drift, security breaches, miscommunication between agents, and much more!

*Agenda* Conjuring Code with AI (Thierry Damiba) The Phantom Protocol: How Robust System Error Analysis Could Have Averted Disaster (Kierra Dotson) Phantoms in the Network: Agent-to-Agent Exploitation (Deborah Dahl) Don't Answer the Door! It's GenAI Security Threats (Katherine Druckman) How AI Will Kill Us (Steven Pemberton) Horrors from the Past - How we're still making the same ML Mistakes from TEN YEARS AGO (David Aronchick)
by jijijijij | 2025-10-29 15:38:00+00:00
Or people genuinely believed to have a solid understanding of something, but later evidence changed that? I mean, most people are "misled" on every topic, if that boils down to being underinformed. School also misled you about biology, physics and chemistry. How do you feel about that?

But sure, it may be evidence of some grand conspiracy to genetically turn white people gay, or something.
by glitchc | 2025-10-29 15:38:07+00:00
The difference is hardware. A large part of the explosion around Linux in desktop computing is based on the fact that IBM's patents for desktop architecture expired and IBM clones proliferated in the marketplace. Also, busses like ISA/PCI/AGP and ports (serial, parallel, ethernet, USB) were all standardized.

In short, Linux was possible because the underlying hardware was open and standard.
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-29 15:38:16+00:00
> The purpose of secure enclave is to prevent administrator from accessing the data

Not only, it has many purposes. I'm also the administrator of my computer, and some things I want to be unchangable by software, unless I myself unlock it, like I don't want anyone to be able to boot or install other OSes than the ones I've installed myself. The secure enclave and secure boot is perfect for this, even if my computer gets malware they won't be able to access it, and even if someone gets physical access to my computer, they won't be able to boot their OS from a USB.