MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chrisfinazzo | 2025-10-08 15:15:09+00:00
I see the appeal of using Gmail to manage all of your mail, including the fact that you can still send through external SMTP servers, but it's just not for me.

Native clients continue to improve, and the mismatch between how I handle Gmail on iOS vs (for example) Fastmail shows that they're so wedded to this particular mindset that it's unlikely to ever be fully solved.

I look at people like my Dad -- early 70's, who spent most of his career as the "desktop infrastructure" manager at a midsize insurer -- who still wants to have Outlook available because he likes how Outlook does mail. It's just how his mind works. IMAP exists, but it's an implementation detail that's separate from the specific client features they add.

Wouldn't mind exploring something akin to a web-based, self-hosted Thunderbird mail client giving a server hosted web UI for multiple email and nntp services.

Self hosting your own mailserver is almost always a bad idea unless you're really a dyed-in-the-wool mail nerd - I worked for one at a small startup one summer during college, but they're a rare breed.
by j45 | 2025-10-08 15:15:36+00:00
I don't need my data offline when it doesn't have to be.

You don't need extra drives sitting around. When one fails, you buy one, Amazon can have it over in a day, or local shops. If it's not realistic for that, having one spare isn't a bad thing.

If you replace with a larger capacity drive, the existing raid only uses the same size to keep the raid.

Depending on the drives you are using, SMR technology can take much much longer to rebuild a raid than CMR.

Self-storage should be like a cloud - people need to rely on it like a cloud provider. Hot swap is a negligible cost over the 5-10 years you keep a NAS.

Hot swap chassis whether it's one you buy or a Synology/QNAP, etc is the way to go. Hot swap used to cost a ton, it's considerably come down market.

Storage is like a home appliance for me, just because I could build a stove doesn't mean I should. I've spent enough time swapping hard drives manually and powering off gear to know that I don't care for it if I don't have to anymore.
by Dxtros | 2025-10-08 15:16:58+00:00
I think this concept could be adapted to a wider audience. Personally I struggle with routine. Body Doubling (doing something with another human holding you accountable) helps me a ton.

I would definitely use this if instead of the parents as the reviewer it was possible to have a friend/multiple friends approve, rate and comment on tasks and vice versa. Like a sort of social media for mundane routines.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-10-08 15:17:10+00:00
> It's no longer the early 20th, there are other competitive & well-run jurisdictions for creditors to dump their money in if they lose faith in the US.

Where, pray tell are these competitive and well-run jurisdictions?

China has capital controls so that probably won't work. The EU might work if they ever get their sh*t together and centralise their bonds and markets, otherwise no.

Like, I too believe that the US is on an unsustainable path, but I just don't see where all that money is gonna go (specifically referring to the foreign investment in the US companies/markets here).
by paddleon | 2025-10-08 15:17:57+00:00
To address your concern-- if two people are fighting and one thinks "I won't hit below the belt" that person is at a tactical disadvantage. Even worse if they think the other side has also agreed to that rule.

So in that sense you are absolutely correct.

But I invite you to think bigger. If one side lays siege to another side's city, and offers terms of surrender, the city needs to believe that the terms will be honored otherwise they don't surrender.

Which is a large part of European history during the period from the middle ages up until Napoleon figured out how to use artillery, i.e. hundreds of years of examples where "fighting honorably" was the winning strategy.
by an0malous | 2025-10-08 15:18:33+00:00
I used to believe in AGI but the more AI has advanced the more I’ve come to realize that there’s no magic level of intelligence that can cure cancer and figure out warp drives. You need data, which requires experimentation, which requires labor and resources of which there is a finite supply. If you had AGI tomorrow and asked it to cure cancer, it would just ask for more experimental data and resources. Isn’t that what the greatest minds in cancer research would say as well? Why do we think that just being more rational or being able to compute better than humans would be sufficient to solve the problem?

It’s very possible that human beings today are already doing the most intelligent things they can given the data and resources they have available. This whole idea that there’s a magic property called intelligence that can solve every problem when it reaches a sufficient level, regardless of what data and resources it has to work with, increasingly just seems like the fantasy of people who think they’re very intelligent.
by coldtea | 2025-10-08 15:19:09+00:00
>you're just made it even easier for corpos to have free pickings of any given tool on the internet to incorporate into their own tools

So? That's allowed, they should do whatever they want with that code. I've preferred most MIT/Apache stuff over GNU alternatives even for personal use.

>Obviously the community wouldn't even be here to begin with if it wasn't for Linux going with a GPLv2 license. Going forward, with everything becoming more MIT/BSD licensed, I wonder to see how the community/ecosystem will fare.

There are tons of projects with MIT/BSD/Apache and decades of community participation. Including *BSD and Apache server themselves...

Linux being GNU didn't help it becoming driven by big companies paying all the core developers...
by terminalshort | 2025-10-08 15:19:41+00:00
Not really because anyone running a trading strategy that needs to worry about latency is already running their servers in the same datacenter as the exchange, so that just moves with it. What probably is an issue is that the datacenters required for a market don't look like AWS datacenters. I don't have any direct experience here, but I would be shocked if HFT software is something you could just deploy to a standard VM like on AWS.
by the_gipsy | 2025-10-08 15:19:45+00:00
> People who you don't get to your side by saying they're facists or other accusatory statements.

How do I get folks that literally vote fascists to "my side"?

Does it involve changing "my side" to be a little fascistic?

What is to be done with the overlaps, e.g. people that are homosexuals but are racists, people from racial minorities that are homophobic, and so on?

Like, realistically, what do you think should happen to the left? Just tone it down?
by warthog | 2025-10-08 15:20:01+00:00
imo it would be better to carry the whole memory outside of the inference time where you could use an LLM as a judge to track the output of the chat and the prompts submitted

it would sort of work like grammarly itself and you can use it to metaprompt

i find all the memory tooling, even native ones on claude and chatgpt to be too intrusive
by QuiEgo | 2025-10-08 15:21:20+00:00
The nightmare scenario is that Apple locks you out of your Apple ID for some reason.

Luckily, Apple also provides a pretty easy backup path that lets you have a local copy, if you have a Mac and a NAS:

- setup your Mac’s photos app and iCloud to download everything locally

- setup Time Machine backups from your Mac to a NAS

That’s it. You get 3-2-1 (your Mac, iCloud, and your NAS) and can get a copy of your data even if your Apple ID gets locked out.

Standard disclaimer, only the Time Machine copy is a true backup (ex if you delete a file by mistake, only Time Machine can help you restore it; iCloud is a sync, not a backup). That said, for me personally, this scheme (local copy + cloud copy + NAS backup via Time Machine) takes basically 0 work to maintain once setup and gives me peace of mind.
by rbanffy | 2025-10-08 15:21:34+00:00
Makes sense in batch environment - you can lock the volume, do your thing, and then freeing it to another task running on a different partition or host.

Still seems like a kludge - The One Right Way to do it would be to add that memory directly to a CPU addressable space rather than across a SCSI (or channel, or whatever) link. Might as well be added to the RAM in the storage server and let it manage the memory optimally (with hints from the host).
by dunham | 2025-10-08 15:21:56+00:00
It's not quite the same, but in the past I've written (in python) scrapers that run off of the cache. E.g. it would extract recipes from web pages that I had visited. The script would run through the cache and run an appropriate scraper based on the url. I think I also looked for json-ld and microdata.

The down sides were that it only works with cached data, and I had to tweak it a couple of times because they changed the format of the cache keys.
by noyonbond47 | 2025-10-08 15:22:05+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m a second-year college student, and honestly, I'm pretty nervous to share this.

I first learned SQL last year, and while I found it powerful, I noticed a gap. I wanted to create something that helps people without much experience manage their data without a steep learning curve. My idea was to make database power as simple and visual as a spreadsheet.

Over the past month, I built this entire application, FormPipeDB, from scratch, using AI tools for help. It’s been a challenging learning journey, and today I want to share what I made.

FormPipeDB allows you to:

- Visually create database tables without writing any SQL.

- Convert a CSV or an existing SQL file into a live database in seconds.

- Use a no-code query builder to run filters, sorts, and even joins, all while seeing the SQL generated (which is great for learning).

My goal was to build a tool I wish I had when I was just starting—something to make databases less intimidating for students, hobbyists, or anyone trying to get a project up quickly.

There’s a free tier that should be enough to get started. I’ve never done anything like this before, and I’d really appreciate any feedback, thoughts, or even criticisms.

Thanks for taking a look.
by blurbleblurble | 2025-10-08 15:22:35+00:00
Whole heartedly agree.

The violent overthrow stuff is reference to current attempts to send the US military into blue states against court orders, to drum up the insurrection act, to the violent arrests of children in their underwear as a publicity stunt, to ICE officers / bounty hunters ramming cars into pedestrians without recourse, to the slamming of non-violent bystanders into the ground, arresting elected officials violently for no reason, to the psychological violence of the rhetoric being broadcast ("Russ Vought is the reaper") along with Stephen Miller's rhetoric in general but specifically about how many 10s of millions of people don't belong in this country in his mind. Brown people is who he's talking about. They want ethnic cleansing and are openly blatant about it if you open your ears to exactly what they're saying. Sure they'll also deny it at other times, opportunistically, but if you listen to what they're saying in full, not just to denials, they're spelling it out.

Go listen to the leaked Russ Vought interview about his strategy and tell me that's not incredibly violent. Listen to Stephen Miller's rhetoric.

These guys are itching to arrest elected officials and political critics, and to go as far as they can to hurt and punish people who push back against the state that they're hell bent on forcing into existence.

If you haven't seen these things I urge you to pay attention.
by iamnothere | 2025-10-08 15:23:00+00:00
In both cases the aggressors were the first to engage in atrocities, and their atrocities were much more severe than those inflicted upon them. So both seem like a unique case. Additionally, both were part of a global conflict, which is uncommon. In a global conflict there aren’t many bystanders who can effectively implement sanctions or apply diplomatic pressure.

> I'm wondering if going back to an approach of "surrender or we'll kill you all" would save more lives than the current situation

This is just as likely to provoke a “fight to the death” response from the defender which is often enough to prevent you from achieving your objectives. There are very few large conflicts where the objective is simply “eliminate the defenders”.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-10-08 15:23:13+00:00
Agreed.

And, if you had AGI tomorrow and asked it to figure out FTL warp drives, it would just explain to you how it's not going to happen. It is impossible, the end. In fact the request is fantasy, nigh nonsensical and self-contradictory.

Isn’t that what the greatest minds in physics would say as well? Yes, yes it is.

No debate will be entered into on this topic by me today.
by floatrock | 2025-10-08 15:23:27+00:00
I've been meaning to try out some text-to-speech to see if that makes it a bit easier. Part of the difficulty of "spelling out in detail what I want" is the need for precise written language, which is high cognitive load, which makes the context switching difficult.

Been wondering if just natural speaking could both speed up typing. Maybe have an embedded transform/compaction that strips out all the ummms and gets to the point of what you were trying to say. Might have lower cognitive load, which could make it easier.
by pron | 2025-10-08 15:23:54+00:00
I'm well aware that LLMs are more than capable enough to successfully perform straightforward, boring tasks 90% of the time. The problem is that there's a small but significant enough portion of time where I think a problem is simple and straightforward, but it turns out not to be once you get into the weeds, and if I can't trust the tool to tell me if we're in the 90% problem or the 10% problem, then I have to carefully review everything.

I'm used to working with tools, such as SMT solvers, that may fail to perform a task, but they don't lie about their success or failure. Automation that doesn't either succeed or report a failure reliably is not really automation.

Again, I'm not saying that the work done by the LLM is useless, but the tradeoffs it requires make it dramatically different from how both tools and humans usually operate.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-10-08 15:24:12+00:00
No. Then you haven’t spotted a bubble.

You’ve just made a comment that “wow, things are going up!” That’s not spotting bubble, that’s my non-technical uncle commenting at a dinner party, “wow this bitcoin thing sure is crazy huh?”

Talk is cheap. You learn what someone really believes by what they put their money in. If you really believe we’re in a bubble, truly believe it based on your deep understanding of the market, then you surely have invested that way.

If not, it’s just idle talk.
by vcanales | 2025-10-08 15:24:31+00:00
I feel the opposite. I get to sit down and think about problems, expressing them in words as best I can, and then review the code, make sure that I understand it and it works as it should, all in a fraction of the time it used to take me. I like that I don't have to google APIs as much as I did before, and instead I can get a working thing much faster.

I can focus on actually solving problems rather than on writing clever and/or cute-looking code, which ironically also gives me more time later to over-optimize stuff at my leisure.
by robgibbons | 2025-10-08 15:24:39+00:00
When the flush of a newborn sun fell first on Eden's green and gold, Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mold; And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart, Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves: "It's pretty, but is it Art?"

— Rudyard Kipling, The Conundrum of the Workshops
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-10-08 15:24:45+00:00
> Human intelligence must be deterministic, any other conclusion is equivalent to the claim that there is some sort of "soul" for lack of better term.

No, not all processes follow deterministic Newtonian mechanics. It could also be random, unpredictable at times. Are the there random processes in the human brain? Yes, there are random quantum processes in every atom, and there are atoms in the brain.

Yes, this is no less materialistic: Humans are still proof that either you believe in souls or such, or that human level intelligence can be made from material atoms. But it's not deterministic.

But also, LLMs are not anywhere close to becoming human level intelligence.
by apsurd | 2025-10-08 15:24:51+00:00
I do think code-as-craft should be respected in its own right. I'm very much a craftsman coder. It makes sense how I could clock so many hours over all these years.

But what I do "at work" isn't the same as my personal pursuit and embracing that different framing positively has made me more at peace and also better at the work job.
by gosub100 | 2025-10-08 15:25:12+00:00
To me it's obvious why they initially chose to use validated hardware:

1) the unlabelled SMR debacle a few years ago probably wasted untold amounts of time and caused unwarranted damage to their brand from frustrated people who just paid $1k for their Synology, $1k for drives, and then couldn't build a working array with them, possibly even losing data and productivity in the process.

2) penny pinching cheapskates buying broken hdds on the used market and complaining that "their Synology doesn't work". Or swapping failed drives with garbage and again wasting time of support.

3) they are premium products, not intended for the hobbyist. Their customers generally are willing to spend more in exchange for a premium experience. In order to provide this, especially to less tech savvy people (you know, people who want to actually USE their NAS instead of just tinker with it every day), it made sense to control the quality of the drives.

However the Internet peanut gallery has been so used to being exploited that their scam detectors falsely activated and they all swarmed out of their (neckbeard) nests. So synology has no option than to backtrack and offer free tech support for the bottom quartile of "knows just enough to break it" techies.
by toss1 | 2025-10-08 15:25:13+00:00
Right. Just like all the autocratic Project 2025 plans, defunding healthcare to give tax breaks to billionaires, sending US military to police US cities, and all the other current actions were " tinfoil hat conspiracy thinking".

There is a party actively committed to implementing autocracy as fast as it can. To willfully ignore that and attempt to deflect from it as you are doing is wrong.

Moreover, if you don't think an autocracy will hurt YOU because you are in some protected group, you are wrong — it might not hurt you first, but it will hurt everyone, including you.
by leecarraher | 2025-10-08 15:25:13+00:00
for an interesting reversal of the "problem" of the speed of light, IEX is a stock exchange design to combat HFT by adding a physical speed bump by way of 38 miles of fiber optic cable. The general idea being to level the playing field and improve market liquidity using physical communication limits of light. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEX
by vvoruganti | 2025-10-08 15:25:20+00:00
Plastic Labs | DevRel, Summer Interns| NYC | https://plasticlabs.ai

Plastic Labs is building systems that map personal identity using AI-native memory & social cognition. This means individually-aligned agents that you can trust to act autonomously on your behalf & agents with rich identities all their own.

We're pursuing this with our flagship product Honcho (github.com/plastic-labs/honcho) a memory & identity layer for agentic applications. learn more at https://blog.plasticlabs.ai

We are looking for a Developer Relations Engineer to help us evangelize Honcho to the broader dev community. This involves engaging the community online & in-person, building demos, writing documentation & blog posts, and working with the dev team to communicate feedback from the community.

Check out the full requisition here: https://blog.plasticlabs.ai/careers/Developer-Relations-Engi...
by hopelite | 2025-10-08 15:25:31+00:00
Maybe I missed the mark, but the point is that just because China makes a claim does not mean it should be automatically dismissed because they have a supposed superiority complex. I mean there are many on this planet who have superiority complexes, and far more consequential and imposing ones at that...by far...but that does not mean we should/can just dismiss what comes out of China. Test it, challenge it in a truly scientific manner...sure...but don't just apply ones own superiority complex to project a superiority complex on others. What if they are correct and accurate in their claim?

It is simply not a fair, honest, or decent thing to do and often comes from a superiority complex itself that seems to be projected on others in direct correlation to the degree of intensity of the superiority complex.
by monknomo | 2025-10-08 15:25:59+00:00
The thing is though, when you look at actual autocrats, they aren't really even fast. They are perhaps fast at protecting themselves by enriching their friends and impoverishing their threats (ie anyone that is not their friend), but you can't tell me Idi Amin or Ghadaffi built out the trains to run on time. Not even Mussolini really did that (in fact, they became worse, and also Italy ran out of bread)
by elfenleid | 2025-10-08 15:26:04+00:00
I still do, but having this allows for strategies like memory decay for older information. It also allows for much more structured searching capabilities, instead of opening file which are less structured.

.md files work great for small projects. But they hit limits:

1. Size - 100KB context.md won't fit in the window 2. No search - Claude reads the whole file every time 3. Manual - You decide what to save, not Claude 4. Static - Doesn't evolve or learn

Recall fixes this: - Semantic search finds relevant memories only - Auto-captures context during conversations - Handles 10k+ memories, retrieves top 5 - Works across multiple projects

Real example: I have 2000 memories. That's 200KB in .md form. Recall retrieves 5 relevant ones = 2KB.

And of course, there's always the option to use both .md for docs, Recall for dynamic learning.

Does that help?
by DudeOpotomus | 2025-10-08 15:26:29+00:00
Hard to figure this one with busses costing millions to purchase and tens of thousands a year to maintain. Not too mention drivers, bus stops, paint, etc.

No way that using cheaply available vans and part time drivers would ever cost more over time.

In my city in SoCal, busses are mostly empty. They are rarely full, and only at special events.
by Rendello | 2025-10-08 15:27:41+00:00
Regex101 is always open when I'm doing regexes, what a great tool. Occasionally I use sites that build the graph so you can visualize the matching behaviour.

There are even tools to generate matching text from a regex pattern. Rust's Proptest (property-based testing) library uses this pattern to generate minimal failing counterexamples from a regex pattern. The tooling around Regex can be pretty awesome.