MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gavinray | 2025-10-25 20:08:46+00:00
> JSON functions to return nested results. The database itself contains no JSON; just a well-normalised data model. However, the queries return nested JSON in the format required by the application

Entirely valid usecase, since the client application is likely going to parse some cartesian product of tabular relationship data into "normalized" JSON array of objects anyways.

Generally, generating the JSON response directly for consumption in the DB is faster.
by mikeiz404 | 2025-10-25 20:08:46+00:00
- The IOC is a cleared shutdown log.

- The update now clears the shutdown log each boot.

> This led to the conclusion that a cleared shutdown.log could serve as a good heuristic for identifying suspicious devices.

> With iOS 26 Apple introduced a change—either an intentional design decision or an unforeseen bug—that causes the shutdown.log to be overwritten on every device reboot instead of appended with a new entry every time, preserving each as its own snapshot. This means that any user who updates to iOS 26 and subsequently restarts their device will inadvertently erase all evidence of older Pegasus and Predator detections that might have been present in their shutdown.log.
by bee_rider | 2025-10-25 20:09:07+00:00
It comes up in every thread about this sort of thing. It is basically true, although keep in mind that the UK is basically a “friendly” country to most of the other countries that are in the sort of… liberal/capitalist/democracy clique, so hypothetically it wouldn’t be that surprising if some of our countries ended up with some reciprocity some day for the fines or whatever.
by epakai | 2025-10-25 20:09:17+00:00
There are ST Micro parts with two USB ports that can can both be devices. I'm not sure the implications of powering them both at once. Look at STM32F407/417.

It might be simpler to get 2 microcontrollers and establish a communication link between them. Something like Arduino (Nano or even smaller third party boards), or Teensy would be suitable for this kind of setup.
by noir_lord | 2025-10-25 20:10:00+00:00
> I restart my computer every 3 months

Funny how habits stick, I still shut my primary desktop down at the end of every day because for all of my youth that was just what you did.

They boot so damn fast it doesn't really matter and I kinda like starting the day with a "fresh" desktop (same reason I clean my desk every night - starting work with a neat desk is great - I trash it through the day and repeat).
by jll29 | 2025-10-25 20:10:18+00:00
There have always been fanboy "camps" feuding each other, from "What's the best programming language?" to the never-ending "What's the best text editor?".

Brian Kernighan tried to port his famous software tools (the code to go with the likewise famous book) to Pascal and failed, which led to a write-up, in which he identified 9 shortcomings of Pascal that C doesn't have. https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pas...

But needless to say, there exist also many strenghs of Pascal over C, which he does not address. I find his claim that Pascal is only a toy language in which serious software can be written unprofessional and empirically untrue: for over a decade, PC software development in Pascal was thriving thanks to TurboPascal. Now admittedly that is not standard ISO Pascal, but at the same time, it is a well-known fact that it existed, and that it fixed some of the criticisms of Kernighan's paper, so it is regrettable he still elected to use such strongly negative language regardless. (And for the record, his paper was written 1981, when Pascal's successor Modula-2 was already available.)

I like C and Pascal, each in their own way, but Pascal is arguably much more readable, and perhaps it is fair to say many Pascal programmers were comfortable in the language and would not have bothered to learn/struggle with C.
by Spivak | 2025-10-25 20:12:08+00:00
You might be right, I'm just talking about "last mile" efficiency. I get electricity at $/kWh and gas at $/therm and then an electric heater is x% at converting that electricity into hotter water and a gas heater is %y. From what I can find y < x for water heaters on the market. But even despite that my $/therm is so low that it still comes out ahead.
by mantas | 2025-10-25 20:13:09+00:00
Some people have friends/family/etc in Russia too yet it does not make it less of a shitty country. Here in Lithuania we there’s at least one or two sob stories every year about somebody visiting relatives in (bela)rus and ending up in prison there.

I’m more afraid that anglosphere is showing the way for the rest of west-y world. Looking at chat control stuff and all that jazz, it’s matter of time same stuff becomes a thing in the rest „free“ world.
Show HN: Circalify – 10KB circular timeline library for annual planning
by Matooize | 2025-10-25 20:14:12+00:00
Hey HN! I built Circalify for visualizing cyclical data (annual plans, seasonal patterns) after struggling with linear timeline libraries.

Tech: Pure vanilla JS, zero dependencies, 10KB gzipped

- Live demo: https://codepen.io/mahmoodseoud/pen/ByjJOVE

- GitHub: https://github.com/MahmoodSeoud/circalify

The interesting technical bit was handling multi-scale time (quarters/months/weeks/days) in concentric rings with proper year-boundary handling.

Currently beta. Core library stays MIT/free forever. Building premium templates for sustainability.

Looking for feedback on use cases I'm missing!
by amarant | 2025-10-25 20:14:24+00:00
I profoundly disagree with the dismissive people on this thread in all but a few very extreme edge cases. There are heatpumps rated for down to -30°C. If you live somewhere where it gets colder than that, then yes, you'll need a backup system. In all other cases it's just a matter of getting a heatpump that can handle your local climate (I'd argue it's a good idea to get one that can handle at least a couple of degrees below the coldest recorded temperature in your area, just to be safe)

I realise it might sound hollow to say that I don't think you need a backup, given that I myself actually do have a backup in the form of a fireplace. Well, my house is old, even by Swedish standards. A letter I found in a jar under the floor when I was redoing the ground insulation a couple of years back claims the house was built in 1840. I have of course updated the fireplace to be compliant with modern fire safety standards, but the original construction predates heatpumps by some margin. If not for that I probably wouldn't have had a backup. I might have gotten a second pump to help with my chilly office, but that's really more about my house being too big for the pump I have than it is about heatpumps not being able to "hack it".
by lisbbb | 2025-10-25 20:14:37+00:00
My beef with SaaS is that every client I went to just wanted developers who would glue together these solutions and they would invariably have puzzling overlaps in the products they purchased, particularly around CI/CD pipelines. I would be like "why does this go to this other service then deploy? You know it can just deploy from there, right?" And they would invariably say that "so and so made us buy that other service for their department so we're all standardizing around it, end of story." So you can never consolidate anything and it all just ends up as madness glued together with some Python. And writing that "glue" is shitty work and I can't believe how much they paid for me to do it.

I very much resent the subscription model--it is terrible for the consumer and it's crept into everything and it's just disgusting.
by rogerbinns | 2025-10-25 20:15:15+00:00
This has already been done. There is a 't' suffix in the ABI tag.

You have to explicitly compile the extension against a free threaded interpreter in order to get that ABI tag in your extension and even be able to load the extension. The extension then has to opt-in to free threading in its initialization.

If it does not opt-in then a message appears saying the GIL has been enabled, and the interpreter continues to run with the GIL.

This may seem a little strange but is helpful. It means the person running Python doesn't have to keep regular and free threaded Python around, and duplicate sets of extensions etc. They can just have the free threaded one, anything loaded that requires the GIL gives you the normal Python behaviour.

What is a little more problematic is that some of the standard library is marked as supporting free threading, even though they still have the audit and update work outstanding.

Also the last time I checked, the compiler thread sanitizers can't work with free threaded Python.
by geor9e | 2025-10-25 20:15:23+00:00
I don't know, man. I'm just now hearing about this, but after quickly looking it up, I've concluded that I can't legally buy it, I can't install it as a straightforward upgrade, and some of my games won't run on it. So, if I'm going to be breaking the law anyway, I might as well use the hack to install Windows 11 for free.

Here's the info I skimmed

"Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC is designed for devices that need to run a single task consistently and securely for many years, with minimal changes. Examples include ATMs, medical devices, point-of-sale terminals, and industrial control systems. This Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) version intentionally omits modern features and frequent updates to ensure a highly stable, unchanging operating system."

"The IoT version is sold exclusively through authorized Microsoft partners and has a different licensing model. It is not for internal use on general-purpose PCs and purchasing it from third-party resellers is likely to involve an illegitimate or stolen key."

"Microsoft does not officially support or recommend a transition from Windows Home or Pro to a Windows IoT Enterprise LTSC version for regular users. "

"Some game anti-cheat software has been known to have issues with LTSC versions of Windows, leading to potential game compatibility or stability problems. Dependency on the Xbox app: Games distributed via the Xbox app or Game Pass would be inaccessible. Many newer games also rely on components from the Xbox app for proper functionality, potentially leaving you locked out of a title even if you owned it on a different platform."
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-10-25 20:15:54+00:00
$500B is future projections for total spending (a lot of that decently far into the future).

The revenues are already in the high tens of billions per year.

Models will get better from here, especially on the low end.

Costs will eventually approach peanuts for current capabilities.

Given enough time, this will pay for existing investments. If growth slows, future spending will slow as well.
by vacuity | 2025-10-25 20:16:20+00:00
I did say that simple doesn't mean easy. I don't know how to judge whether something is many or few without a fixed norm, nor how to measure it without reference to the environment it exists within. Simplicity does not mean having so little to the point of unease.

"Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler"

- Einstein (probably[0])

Brainfuck is a simple language. A Brainfuck program written to parity with an existing non-Brainfuck program is likely complex. A musical note is simple, but a musical score may be highly complex.

I think your objections are misplaced.

[0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/05/13/einstein-simple/
by vlovich123 | 2025-10-25 20:16:43+00:00
Again you’re talking about decisions that C suite will decidedly care about and be their purview to make. First the App Store stuff wasn’t a privacy or security thing - this is Apple deciding how to navigate the EU regulatory environment. A CEO exists precisely to make these kinds of decisions.

I’ll point you to Apple developing the privacy-preserving CSAM scanning feature which got approved at lower levels and then got pulled back when it actually started hurting their brand. They respond to this stuff and I don’t think perfection is a reasonable bar.

> And the iOS 26 removal of Pegasus/Predator detection artifacts right as ICE activates Paragon spyware contracts? Maybe a coincidental bug, maybe what happens when keeping Trump happy is worth tens of billions.

And if iOS 26.1 or 27 restores previous behavior or does that change the narrative you’ve built in your head and you’ll just say “of course - they just got caught”? If you can’t falsify your narrative there’s no point having a constructive argument - I can’t factually argue you out of a position you didn’t argue yourself factually into.
by geor9e | 2025-10-25 20:18:37+00:00
Honestly, big tech companies have screwed me enough times that I just sort of plan for it. So, I'll cross that bridge when it comes to it. My running policy is to keep all the files I care about on a Synology NAS that syncs to a backup cloud over my Wi‑Fi, and then have all my laptops and PCs just have easily replaceable common downloads on them.
by pessimizer | 2025-10-25 20:19:22+00:00
Is it, really, when the claims look to be true?

As somebody not aware of the claims or that they were dropped, what it makes me think is that no matter how wealthy and famous you are, or how legitimate your claim, you're doomed when going against powerful interests in the US medical industry.

Even worse, people will comment under the study that says that you were probably right, under the comment of the child of the only doctor at the FDA to vote no on the treatment you were suing over, about how people listen too much to what celebrities say.
by throwaway894345 | 2025-10-25 20:19:28+00:00
Yeah, I say this as someone who likes the idea of self-hosting, especially for the privacy implications, but the economics of software just benefit SaaS for the time being. There are just too many efficiencies to keeping the backend in the control of the software developers. Schema changes are far, far easier (if you're not sure whether a schema change is going to stomp on real user data, you can pretty easily find out). Similarly, when all of the data is colocated with the backend service, multiple stacked roundtrip latencies are often fine.

And when you release a new feature, it benefits new users right away and you get paid for those features right away. You don't have to wait for a new version to ship. And consequently, you get feedback right away, which means you don't stack bugs on bugs only to find out at release time (this is basically agile vs waterfall).

Subscriptions are essentially the only sensible pricing model for anything with regular, frequent upgrades, and until we can make self-hosted software as easy and reliable as SaaS software (for the same cost) then we aren't going to see very much software distributed to end users (lots of software has gone the other direction though--e.g., office suites).
by jonas21 | 2025-10-25 20:19:40+00:00
I feel like it was all pretty obvious by late 2017. Prototyping and development in PyTorch was so much easier - it felt just like writing normal Python code. And the supposed performance benefits of the static computation graph in TensorFlow didn't materialize for most workloads. Nobody wanted to use TensorFlow - though you often had to when working on existing codebases.

I think the only thing that could have saved TensorFlow at that point would have been some sort of enormous performance boost that would only work with their computation model. I'm assuming Google's plan was make it easy to run the same TensorFlow code on GPUs and TPUs, and then swoop in with TPUs that massively outperformed GPUs (at least on a performance per dollar basis). But that never really happened.
by tomnipotent | 2025-10-25 20:20:40+00:00
I always thought it was about developer velocity, in this particular case front-end. With a traditional REST API the front-end team needed to coordinate with the back-end team on specific UX features to determine what needed to be done, which was further exasperated when API's needed to be specialized for iPhone vs. Android vs. Web UI.

GraphQL was supposed to help front-end and back-end meet in the middle by letting front-end write specific queries to satisfy specific UX while back-end could still constrain and optimize performance. Front-end could do their work without having to coordinate with back-end, and back-end could focus on more important things than adding fields to some JSON output.

I think it's important to keep this context in mind to appreciate what problem GraphQL is solving.
by brudgers | 2025-10-25 20:21:03+00:00
Intuitively, connecting two computers over USB seems like it should be easy.

The reason it is not simple is USB is asymmetric. There’s one host and multiple clients. And computers are approximately always built as hosts.

But if you are going to add hardware, a pair of usb network adapters (wired (or wireless)) has the same architecture.

And you won’t have custom software below the application layer. Good luck.
by Supermancho | 2025-10-25 20:22:58+00:00
> Personally I hate it when people just leave comments on my PR without explicitly blocking or approving it. To me it comes across as indecisive. Either you are fine with the changes -> approve.

I point out things that aren't functional blockers all the time. If I see there's a gap from the code itself, but maybe weren't considered (is there a ticket to deal with this? I'm not going to guess what it's named or where it is), I'll point it out. If it's not blocking, it's an approval from me, but someone else may disagree when they read it as well.

Not sorry that you think it's indecisive. This is technical feedback, which is separate from product feedback. You should still read your review comments and other people's review comments. If I was in charge of things to the point only my approval matters AND I was sure the author would respond, it would be an approval. Generally, this is not the case.
by malux85 | 2025-10-25 20:23:18+00:00
AI is probably the worst offender at this (killing mental model diversity) but there’s lots of other things that do it too, the internet enabled rapid sharing of ideas, but it did homogenise human mental models a lot more.

Of course the benefits of the internet far outweigh the negatives but it’s still worth being aware of the negatives so we might mitigate them.

I’m in favour of radical ideas at the edge, I love conspiracy theories, I love fringe scientists, I love the crazy ones, because we need them.

All ideals should be surrounded by a moat of tolerance, that way, the crazy ones can exist in the moats
by whatevertrevor | 2025-10-25 20:23:43+00:00
> That's true for most mass market crap but that's a low bar because it's all just escapism in a different format.

Well one could make the same argument for other sources of media.

As far as SNR goes, I think you're overextended there too. A good science video on YouTube can communicate information through diagrams and animations that only textbooks even try, and animations often work better for me than long winded paragraphs of explaining something.

I think arguing whether one spends time reading a book vs watching a YouTube video is a silly exercise. The more important question is what book/video one is reading/watching.

So from the perspective the GP's point that books have a more than deserved reputation for being a better way to spend your time has some validity imo.
by wiml | 2025-10-25 20:24:33+00:00
Would a KVM switch do what you need? Or virtualizing the second machine's usb port in some way? Is there any kind of existing IPMI/ILO/etc functionality in the target machine that you could use?

If not: You need something that can act as a usb "device" (the "host" and "device" sides of a usb connection are very different). A search for "usb keyboard emulator" turns up a lot of projects in that area. I'm not sure you're going to get much simpler than a pi-zero or teensy, unless you can find someone selling a pre built device that meets your needs.

If you're lucky, your laptop has a usb port that can be configured to take the "device" role instead of the usual "host" role. In that case you could probably build a software-only solution using the Linux usb "gadget" framework to make that port act like a keyboard when attached to the target's usb port.
by bee_rider | 2025-10-25 20:24:52+00:00
I think the goal is not to provide confidence (at least not artificially so). The situation is just not great. This letter:

* At least reassures their users that they are doing their best, at least, even though that might not be much.

* Emphasizes the difficulty of the situation that the UK created.

* Shares, at least, a description of the advice they got (properly caveated that they or their lawyers weren’t giving anybody actual legal advice).
by deaux | 2025-10-25 20:25:26+00:00
> I do not use AI for engineering work and never will

> Once someone outsources their brain they are unlikely to keep learning or evolving from that point

It doesn't piss me off, it makes me feel sorry for you. Sorry that you're incapable of imagining those with curiosity who use AI to do exactly what you're claiming they don't - learning. The uncurious were uncurious before AI and remain so. They never asked why, they still don't. Similarly, the curious still ask why as much as ever. Rather than Google though, they now have a more reliable source to ask things to, that explains things much better and more quickly.

I hear you grunt! Reliable? Hah! It's a stochastic parrot hallucinating half the time!

Note that I said more reliable than Google, which was the status quo. Google is unreliable. Yes, even when consulting three separate sources. Not that one has the time for that, not in reality.

You've got it the wrong way around. LLMs do the exact opposite - they increase the gap between the curious and the nots. It accelerates the learning rate gap between them. The nots.. they're in for a tough time. LLMs are so convenient, they'll cruise through life copypasting their answers, until they are asked to demonstrate competence in a setting where none are available and everything falls apart.

If you still find this hard to imagine, here's how it goes. In your mind LLM usage by definition goes like this - and for the uncurious, this is indeed how it would go.

User: Question. LLM: Answer. End of conversation.

By the curious, it's used like this.

User: Question. LLM: Answer. User: Why A? Why B? LLM: Answer. User: But C. What's the tradeoff? LLM: Answer. User: Couldn't also X? LLM: Answer. User: I'm not familiar with Y, explain.
by dang | 2025-10-25 20:25:36+00:00
Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Against SQL (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43777515 - April 2025 (1 comment)

Against SQL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40454627 - May 2024 (1 comment)

Against SQL (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39777515 - March 2024 (1 comment)

Against SQL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27791539 - July 2021 (339 comments)
by franga2000 | 2025-10-25 20:25:37+00:00
Postman has over 600 employees and has raised several hundred million dollars in venture captial. The reason Postman is this expensive isn't because it's very expensive to develop and maintain, it's because you're paying off the VCs.

If they took a reasonable investment and kept a reasonably sized team, they wouldn't have to charge for a curl GUI what Adobe charges for their entire suite of industry-leading creative tools.
by 29athrowaway | 2025-10-25 20:26:57+00:00
You can be the chief officer of a 1 person organization, or a 100,000 organization. Or pick another dimension such as SLOC, number of projects/products, teams, DAU, etc.

CTO has a different meaning at different levels of scale.

With a headcount of around 250 employees, you can still work directly on implementation. But with a headcount of 100,000, it doesn't make sense.
by jmkni | 2025-10-25 20:27:38+00:00
A slight left-field suggestion, but have you tried asking this 'competent jerk' if he wants to go for a coffee (or pint, depending on your culture)?

He might just not be aware he's being a jerk, have you tried having a casual, non-confrontational chat with him and raising your concerns?

ie "I respect you as an engineer but you can be difficult to work with sometimes"

Maybe he just isn't aware?

Sometimes you just need to communicate more and build alliances