MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lelanthran | 2025-11-27 13:00:57+00:00
> But that doesn't change the fact you are explicitly choosing to use long running transactions, which adds to table bloat and eats active connections to your DB as mentioned.

TBH, I'm not too worried about that either - my understanding from the content is that you'd have a few tasks running in the background that service the queue; even one is enough.

I'd just consider that to be always-active, and turn the knobs accordingly.

> It also hurts things like reindexing.

I dunno about this one - does re-indexing on the queue occur often enough to matter? After all, this is a queue of items to process. I'd be surprised if it needed to be re-indexed at all.
by ucha | 2025-11-27 13:01:16+00:00
n=56 doesn't give you much information regarding the margin of error, unless you practice Tarot Reader's cat science. The standard deviation of outcomes and the difference between both outcomes matter just as much.

If I flip a coin 56 times and it always falls on head, I can be pretty much certain that it's not a fair coin. I wouldn't need to flip it 1000 times. We are all someone else's "know-nothing hack"...
by FridayoLeary | 2025-11-27 13:02:28+00:00
I feel like this article is revisionism. The author is making a wild assumption that no male, no matter the circumstances was presented with having issues or trauma in victorian literature. Being nice and sympathetic is also not a concept which was only discovered recently. The article just throws in key words like mental health to make it sound relevant for today.

Maybe the only interesting part is that drug use was considered (barely) socially acceptable and holmes was still respectable. Note that he wasn't an alcoholic.

Shout out to the bbc adaptation which does a fantastic and hilarious job of portraying holmes as an erratic drug addict.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-27 13:02:46+00:00
You don't need to use words like "slop", it's pejorative and has nothing to do with the issue at hand.

And the link you use is just different people getting different discount coupons in the app. Companies also mail different coupons to different people based on their purchase history. I can't really find myself getting worked up about different people getting different promotions.

And it's illegal for health insurance to offer customized pricing like that. And the credit card companies already know I eat at McDonald's or wherever else. Using the app isn't adding any new data.

And it's not $0.20 off. It's usually more like $5 off a $15 meal that brings it down to $10. And those numbers add up over the course of a year -- across a few apps, it adds up to hundreds of dollars of savings a year.
by donkey_brains | 2025-11-27 13:03:43+00:00
How did this make it to the top of HN? It’s an extremely facile work and reads exactly like a high school essay: “In having his character consider execution to protect his and his family’s reputation, Doyle explored the societal expectations of Victorian masculinity and how men struggled with such pressures.”

It’s an interesting topic, but the paper makes no revelatory statements and provides a very superficial analysis of Doyle’s work. Hell, it doesn’t even provide a single quote from Holmes to illustrate the mental anguish or “battles with drug addiction” which the author claims that he experiences in the books. Holmes’ 7% “solution of cocaine” usage was never presented as rising to the level of addiction in the books, by the way. Nor does the paper delve into the repressive nature of the Victorian society in which these stories were written and released to show us what was so novel about Doyle allegedly tackling these subjects and why he might have had to merely allude to them rather than discussing them frankly.

All in all, this essay is a poor showing and would have earned the author a C at best in high school English for failing to provide adequate supporting evidence for her assertions.
by wltr | 2025-11-27 13:03:50+00:00
Perhaps my bad. I just don’t know Clojure at all, and honestly it might be the first time I’m seeing it, hence the mistake. My quick search prior to my posting returned this:

>Clojure is a dynamic and functional dialect of the programming language Lisp on the Java platform.

So I thought this is built on Java, or like that. I’d love if someone could explain it in simple terms, as I’d love to drop the ‘Java = bad’ attitude. It’s just that my prior experience taught me to stay away from Java.
by kburman | 2025-11-27 13:04:02+00:00
I don't know why you would say juniors handle this better. From what I've seen, juniors who ship fast often do so by ignoring domain complexity and testing against a single "happy path" prompt.

Seniors take longer because they are actually trying to understand the domain and cover edge cases. Speed isn't a metric of success if the feature is half-baked and breaks the moment a user deviates from the test case.
AI-First Web:Practical guidelines for making your site readable by AI assistants
by kure256 | 2025-11-27 13:04:05+00:00
Most people still design websites only for browsers — not for the world we actually live in now, where a huge portion of users ask AI assistants first (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) instead of navigating the web manually.

I’ve started a small open guide called AI-First Web: https://ai-first-guides.github.io/first.ai/

The idea is simple:

AI assistants need structure, clarity and semantics, not heavy JS

Clean HTML, good metadata, proper JSON-LD

Content designed to be understandable, interpretable and citable by LLMs

Think of it like “SEO, but for AI assistants”

It’s a living document and I’d love feedback or contributions from devs who build modern web apps, static sites, docs, or content platforms.

If you have thoughts on AI-readable markup, JSON-LD best practices, or examples of sites that are already “AI-first”, jump in.
by gambiting | 2025-11-27 13:04:12+00:00
>>Who's realistically going to use a laptop/desktop with a Core 2 Duo (2006), for instance?

I was literally still using a Core2Duo Macbook Pro as a kitchen laptop just for looking up recipes and watching youtube videos etc until last year. Worked absolutely fine until Chrome decided that it's not going to update itself anymore and since I'm on an old version of chrome I can't use google sync. That's what killed it for me - the hardware itself was still perfectly functional.
by GhostDrift | 2025-11-27 13:05:54+00:00
Floating-point numerics rot. Hardware changes, libraries drift, and “verified” results become impossible to reproduce years later.

ADIC (Arithmetic Digital Integrity Certificate) freezes numerical proofs by converting any computation into a finite ledger of integer operations — additions/multiplications only — that anyone can re-verify forever.

It’s a reproducibility layer for mathematics and scientific computing, sitting above hardware and compilers. Think “CI/CD for proofs.”

Here’s a readable intro: https://medium.com/@hide.pollini.kenkou/freezing-chaos-for-e...

And an application to IUT (the world’s hardest math): https://medium.com/@hide.pollini.kenkou/inter-universal-teic...

If you care about numerical stability, proof reproducibility, or long-term scientific memory, this might be interesting.
by gambiting | 2025-11-27 13:06:00+00:00
It's the same as with cars - companies want brand new because then you get a full warranty and theoretically you don't need to worry about it. So that $400 you saved would be spent in IT support for your old failing hardware.

But the thing is.....old PCs are really not that unreliable. If they survived the last 5-10 years then they are probably still chugging along just fine and for a small business there is literally nothing wrong with using them.
by jacquesm | 2025-11-27 13:06:15+00:00
Exactly, but that is kind of the point here. An Erlang 'halt' is something that most Erlang programmers would twig is not what you want in most cases, in most cases you want your process to crash and for the supervisor to restart it if the error is recoverable.

What happened here is systemic: the config file contained an issue severe enough that it precluded the system from running in the first place and unfortunately that caused a runtime error when in fact that validation should have been separate from the actual use. This is where I see the problem with this particular outage. And that makes it an engineering issue much more than a language issue.

Bad configuration files can and do happen, so you take that eventuality into account during systems design.
by jmclnx | 2025-11-27 13:06:31+00:00
I would not call these people "nerds", many are entitled bros (gals?) with rather rich parents. If you look at many of their family history, their parents are well into the upper middle class, borderline rich. In most cases, they went to the best schools.

It just so happens, tech is were the real money is now. If this was 40+ years ago, they would have ended up on Wall Street or Madison Avenue.
by moritzwarhier | 2025-11-27 13:07:50+00:00
Sure. But I'm not sure if I wanted to burden their package registry maintainers with maintaining all kinds of JS/TS packages?

And if you go for custom registries, what's the big difference to npm registry?

I don't understand it :)

One good thing about npm ecosystem IMO is that it's frowned upon to depend on system globals.
by waterhouse | 2025-11-27 13:08:06+00:00
> Its primary outcome is a modest reduction in propofol and fentanyl dose under a very specific anaesthetic protocol.

Ooh, that sounds like p-hacking. How many other protocols, and other potential outcomes in general, did they look at before picking the one to publish? If it's on the order of 20, then we can expect they'd encounter such a result by pure chance.
by MyFirstSass | 2025-11-27 13:08:30+00:00
"Why senior developers just don't get how blockchain is going to change the world economy"

Yeah no, this angle is offensive.

I use LLM's daily as a search engine and syntax help - but this bizarre meta-meta-meta now if you just abstract even more it'l work, maybe invent an entire universe, or hey why not invent a cluster of universes that'l turn off the lights in eastern europe so you can vibecode... no, no, no.

I don't think this crazy energy wasting hell is getting us anywhere useful when someone's going to wade through the bullshit and the energy needs will go exponential on an already strained energy infrastructure not to mention the state of climate.

I still believe LLM's are helpful but in the other direction, more focused, smaller scaled and with less abstraction and magic happening.
by Spare_account | 2025-11-27 13:09:00+00:00
Yes, my understanding is that the 600 year figure was arrived at assuming that there is iterative progress in propulsion technology throughout the intervening years. But at the end of the day, it is just some number that some dude on YouTube said one time (although Fraser Cain is in fact not just some dude, he's a reliable space journalist (and you can take that from me, some dude on the Internet))
by WickyNilliams | 2025-11-27 13:09:21+00:00
Are you familiar with Curtis Yarvin, and his influence with Thiel, JD Vance etc? He absolutely advocates for monarchy and dismantling democracy. He's also, if we are to judge his extensive writing, very much a racist

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right...
by dreamcompiler | 2025-11-27 13:10:23+00:00
I'm tempted to call this yet another example of enshittification, but I don't think that's right: It's not a money-making platform being squeezed to maximize revenue.

Rather, it seems like a bog-standard example of some product designer trying to impress his vice president with dancing monkeys in the hopes of getting promoted (or at least justifying a large expenditure) during a 15-minute rollout presentation. The guy who signs the checks is the only person who matters, he has a short attention span, and he likes shiny stuff. Therefore we get fiascoes like this.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-27 13:10:31+00:00
It's not a strawman, please don't be insulting. But OK, let's tussle:

> most of those apps require you give your pound of data upfront, or they won't work correctly until you grant permissions.

That's false. I've never seen an app that required any permissions data upfront, except sometimes my location data while using the app if I wanted to be able to find the nearest restaurant.

> plus a ton of extra data that I've been forced to grant.

Again, there's no extra data. E.g. when I install the McDonald's app, it's not asking for my contacts or my photos or anything like that. This is not common practice among any major brands I've ever seen.

> but overall you're worse off because some data broker managed to have all airlines raise your flight prices by $500

That's not a thing. And it's really easy to check prices anonymously.

As for arbitration, sure check the ToS. The Disney case is the famous one and it's the only one I've heard of, but that was for a paid streaming service, not even an app. Arbitration is a separate problem to do with ToS's... and most of these apps don't even have ToS's you have to scroll through and accept, because that causes friction. So it seems like a different conversation.
by Timon3 | 2025-11-27 13:10:52+00:00
You're forgetting that Musk is trying to influence national politics the world over. He's injecting money into far right movements in multiple European nations and keeps commenting on legal and judicial decisions in many countries, often complaining if things don't go the way the far right wants - all while using his influence over his companies to spread his views, like when he desperately wanted people to believe in the "white genocide".

I don't think the Toyota CEO is trying to have anywhere close to this much influence over most European countries, and I'm honestly not aware of anyone else doing so. For years, Musk has been behaving like a literal Bond villain.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-11-27 13:10:57+00:00
I am not super technical (blue collar electrician) but I use a PiHole (/r/PiHole or Pi-Hole.net) to block the majority of online tracking/advertising.

Extremely intuitive, relatively inexpensive... you can even force your entire network to obey ad-blocking lists (I tell my DHCP router to issue DNS lookups to PiHole; if individual machines need to be un-filtered they manually set DNS to 192.168.0.1 [router] instead of default PiHole) .

I don't carry a cell phone / use apps, but I know there is a method to make your on-the-go queries also filter through your home network's PiHole .
by dublin_grumbler | 2025-11-27 13:11:23+00:00
I think the issue is that senior engineers often have a better understanding of where a system will fail up front and that non determinism is inappropriate for most use cases we encounter.

In my experience junior engineers fail to understand (from lack of experience) that optimising their agent flow will be a gigantic time sink with N-dimensional edge cases the burden of which is pushed onto other parts of the org unintentionally.

Often building a 95% deterministic flow with 5% agent handling is much more reliable in production but takes more time up front (shocker). I've had to go on the same journey at least five times this year alone where my team have to convert "vibe coded" agents into production features and we've ended up pulling all but one. The investment it takes to actually get these things performing well often isn't worth it.
by yetihehe | 2025-11-27 13:11:31+00:00
> Tech already has a bad reputation in this respect and HN really isn't helping.

You are part of HN, now is your chance at helping.

Discussion means that you will see opinions that are plainly wrong. That's a good place to argue and present better opinions. If you don't present better opinions, no one will be convinced. If you don't voice your opinions, you might not known that they are wrong or harmful. I've voiced a lot of opinions on HN, which after correcting by others, helped me become a slightly better human.
by joseda-hg | 2025-11-27 13:12:04+00:00
The problem being, one of the biggest hurdles for any office suite that isn't Google's or Microsoft's is adoption, and one way to mitigate that is making a clone

The nerds will send you a PDF generated from a LATEX file, but most office workers in the world don't care enough to figure out why the shortcuts they memorized 20 years ago don't work in 'weird word' or their formulas break on 'weird excel'
by dmit | 2025-11-27 13:12:27+00:00
> You can have a stable OS version but still have rolling packages. Somehow most Linux distros can't manage that.

inputs = { nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-25.05"; nixpkgs-unstable.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable"

:)
by tyleo | 2025-11-27 13:12:54+00:00
I like the closing:

> The transition from deterministic systems to probabilistic agents is uncomfortable. It requires us to trade certainty for semantic flexibility. We no longer know and own the exact execution path. We effectively hand over the control flow to a non-deterministic model and store our application state in natural language.

But I don't think it supports the overall point. After working on some AI products that shipped to retail, the issue wasn't that senior engineers struggled... it was more that the non-determinism made the products shitty.

As real-world prompts drift from the ones in your test environment, you end up with something that appears to work but collapses when customers use it. It's impossible to account for all of the variation the customer population throws into your agents so you end up dealing with a large failure %. Then you try to tune it to fix one customer and end up breaking others.

We found AI genuinely useful in cases where non-determinism was expected or desired, usually closer to the final output. For example, we built a game called ^MakeItReal where players draw an object and we use AI to turn it into a 3D mesh. This works because people are delighted when the output varies in surprising ways:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfQ6YOCxsRs
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-11-27 13:14:21+00:00
I love the casette futurism aesthetics, I just wish I had a practial application for physical buttons and the like, and / or that the higher interest products in those collections were still available outside of museums.

I'm sure there's some modern day reproductions (Filo's products [0] come to mind), but they won't have the same feel due to different switching mechanisms and materials being used.

[0] https://www.fiio.com/echomini
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-11-27 13:14:58+00:00
Compared to 40 minutes for a charge? Have you used wireless CarPlay? There is a noticeable delay from pressing a button on the display in your car and your phone reacting.

Also the iPhone Pro models support up to 10Gbps wired for data transfer. Now let’s talk about using external video. I don’t need a special dongle. I can use a standard USB 3 cable just like I use with my computer.

https://imgur.com/a/SC6WDri

Or if I need HDMI, again I can use the same USB 3 to HDMI cable that works with Mac or the God awful Microsoft Surface (not the convertible) I had to use for a year at a prior job.

Then we can get into simple things like how do you connect mass storage devices to your phone or audio equipment?
by JKCalhoun | 2025-11-27 13:15:14+00:00
Not from Doyle, but the film, "The Seven-Per-Cent Solution", presents Holmes as very vulnerable. Especially given the amazing cast, it is an excellent portrayal.

That Holmes would encounter Sigmund Freud seemed to me at the time as a wild use of artistic license. Since then though I have come to believe that there were a lot fewer people on the Earth in general than I could really appreciate at the time, and some of these luminaries may well have shared a drink together. (So why not a fictional luminary as well?)
by forgetfulness | 2025-11-27 13:15:29+00:00
The biggest downsides of working with people, like ambiguity when asking and imprecision when receiving an answer, but without the upsides like sharing food or gossiping about people you both know

Oh and the errors can compound dozens of times per minute (your favorite inference API isn’t fast enough for dozens per second), but I imagine that this is seen as efficiency.
by geomcentral | 2025-11-27 13:16:51+00:00
The article gives an example of agent friendly APIs:

{ "plan_id": "123", "text": "This plan looks good, but please focus on the US market." }

> By preserving the text, the downstream agent can read the feedback ("Approved, but focus on US market") and adjust its behavior dynamically.

I imagine it could be useful for systems to communicate using rich dialogue. But looking at the API, it struck me as a security risk. Couldn't a 'bad' agent try to adjust the behaviour of the downstream agent in a malicious way? Or am I out of touch - is this how it's usually done?
by fifticon | 2025-11-27 13:17:19+00:00
That is awesome. I'm currently down a similar rabbit hole, having found Eightyone zx81 emulator, and z88dk c compiler dev kit for Z80. Trying to make interesting programs that run acceptably fast/slow on those old computers, has a nostalgic haiku feel to it, that i really miss with modern computers. Suddenly you start to care about how you loop and assign in your C program, because doing it the 'wrong' way makes the compiler emit inefficient assembly; it's 'roguelike programming', in the sense that all your choices suddenly have consequences.
by DrierCycle | 2025-11-27 13:17:44+00:00
Yes! I saw that and read it but didn't favorite in time. And I'd heard some friends talking about these papers a year ago and we'd brought them up in our lunchtime chats, So when I found the link notes, I posted them.

The first one was flagged, here it is. This post here was a more specific study.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46065113
by twoodfin | 2025-11-27 13:19:17+00:00
I’m guessing this is less about average latency / throughput tradeoffs and more about providing predictable performance (all else being equal) for both.

Plenty of legacy software out there that a) will never be optimized for NUMA b) scales via more cores touching more shared memory c) needs to hit SLAs & performance beyond that is effectively wasted.
by dredmorbius | 2025-11-27 13:19:45+00:00
That article (and the more general article on viruses) both pointedly avoid referring to viruses as organisms, "any living thing that functions as an individual".

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organism>

Which specifically addresses edge cases including viruses, which "are not typically considered to be organisms, because they are incapable of autonomous reproduction, growth, metabolism, or homeostasis".

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organism#Viruses>

Specifically, viruses have no innate metabolism, or energy-producing chemical reactions.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolism>

The terms "live" and "killed" have historical origins, but would better be read as "active" or "deactivated", and the immediately succeeding sentence clarifies this: "Live vaccines contain weakened forms of the virus, but these vaccines can be dangerous when given to people with weak immunity."

For more on the distinction see: <https://www.biologynotes.in/2024/03/difference-between-live-...>.

And yes, there are infectious agents which also happen to be organisms, such as bacteria, amoebas, funguses, etc. Tuberculosis (Mycobacterium tuberculosis), many stomach ulcers (Helicobacter pylori), botulism (Clostridium botulinum), and e. coli poisoning (Escherichia coli) are all infectious disease caused by bacteria. Giardiasis is a G-I infection of the Giardia amoeba. There are numerous fungal infections (many UTI infections, athlete's foot, jock itch, nail infections).

Further down the non-life infectious agent chain are prion diseases such as Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy ("mad cow" disease in cattle, "Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease", amongst others). These are literally misfolded proteins, which lack not only metabolism but any genetic material (DNA, RNA), but still propagate.

More on infectious agents, a/k/a pathogens: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathogen>.