MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by galangalalgol | 2025-11-07 11:42:46+00:00
Someone, maybe Tolnay?, recently posted a short Go snippet that segfaults because the virtual function table pointer and data pointer aren't copied atomically or mutexed. The same thing works in swift, because neither is thread safe. Swift is also slower than go unless you pass unchecked making it even less safe than go. C#/f# are safer from that particular problem and more performant than either go or swift, but have suffered from the same deserialization attacks that java does. Right now if you want true memory and thread safety, you need to limit a GC language to zero concurrency, use a borrow checker, i.e. rust, or be purely functional which in production would mean haskell. None of those are effortless, and which is easiest depends on you and your problem. Rust is easiest for me, but I keep thinking if I justvwrite enough haskell it will all click. I'm worried if my brain starts working that way about the impacts on things other than writing Haskell.
by irthomasthomas | 2025-11-07 11:44:08+00:00
You can run them using my project llm-consortium. Something like this:

> uv tool install llm > llm install llm-consortium > llm consortium save cns-k2-n2 -m k2-thinking -n 2 --arbiter k2 --min-iterations 10 > llm -m cns-k2-n2 "Find a polynomial time solution for the traveling salesman problem"

This will run two parallel prompting threads, so two conversations with k2-thinking for 10 iterations.

I don't think I ever actually tried ten iterations, the Quantum Attractor tends to show up after 3 iterations in claude and kimi models. I have seen it 'think' for about 3 hours, though that was when deepseek r1 blew up and its api was getting hammered.

Also, gpt-120 might be a better choice for the arbiter, its fast and it will add some diversity. Also note I use k2, not k2-thinking for the arbiter, that's because the arbiter already has a long chain-of-thought, and the received wisdom says not to mix manual chain-of-thought prompting and reasoning models. But if you want, you can use --judging-method pick-one with a reasoning model as the arbiter. Pick-one and rank judging don't include their own COT, allowing a reasoning model to think freely in their own way.
by jjgreen | 2025-11-07 11:45:54+00:00
Great quote from Erdős after giving up amphetamines for a month to win a bet:

You've showed me I'm not an addict. But I didn't get any work done. I'd get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I'd have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You've set mathematics back a month.
by vasco | 2025-11-07 11:46:05+00:00
I find it's easier to prove that within a small company after you're in. You just fix a problem in the area you want to work in, then you fix another problem, and soon after people want you on their team or a team is created around you to fix that class of problem. But lots of engineers just wait to be picked while only doing the stories assigned to them. Or they are in big companies, of which I don't know about.
by LadyCailin | 2025-11-07 11:46:42+00:00
If this was true, the Miranda rights would read something like “anything you say will be used to obtain justice” rather than “anything you say can and WILL be used AGAINST you.” The police and justice system are never your friend. They are always your adversary, and should be treated as such. Under a different regime, they could be your ally if you’re innocent, (and this is the case in many countries) but in the US, they are always hostile to everyone, including innocent people. Even if individuals in that system don’t fancy themselves in that light.
by 1718627440 | 2025-11-07 11:50:18+00:00
A pointer derived from one allocation and a pointer from another allocation does not need to compare the same, even if the address is. And you will likely invoke UB. This is because C tries to be portable and also support segmented storage.

A pointer derived from only an integer was supposed to alias any allocation, but good luck discussing this with your optimizing C compiler.
by troupo | 2025-11-07 11:51:06+00:00
> But these days HTML and CSS are basically inseparable and go far beyond "text is primary".

That "inseparable" is building on top of a bunch of legacy cruft, hacks and workarounds for a system that is stilm barely suitable to layout some simple text.

Just because CSS is there it doesn't make the browser a UI framework.

> I don't see why a browser would need to re-layout for just a focus change.

Indeed. No one does. And yet you'd be surprised: https://gist.github.com/paulirish/5d52fb081b3570c81e3a (note: unfortunately there's no up-to-date list as some of these issues are fixed in all or some engines, and a bunch of other gotchas are introduced).

> There is fundamentally very few differences between HTML+CSS and other UI frameworks.

Lol. There's almost no other UI framework that struggles with as many trivial performance issues as HTML + CSS [1]. No other UI framework has so many gotchas and issues with even the simplest layouts and animations. No other UI framework has warnings of "you have 800 nodes, it's too big, and will cause issues". No other UI framework has so few ways of telling the framework "delay painting" or "I will take over painting" or "do these paints in batches" or...

Etc. etc.

[1] A good article that dives into just the animation side of things https://motion.dev/blog/web-animation-performance-tier-list
by cdoctorow | 2025-11-07 11:52:33+00:00
This is specifically what I've written on the subject (I quote this in the book):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toi...

> The fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.
by jacquesm | 2025-11-07 11:52:46+00:00
Degrees Kelvin has its place, just as leading zeros. The Farmer's Almanac may have a point but if they do I can't see it and to put a leading zero in front of a year is just annoying. Think about it: how would you pronounce the dates from now on, are you really going to say 'Today is the 7th of november of zero-two-zero-two-five'? And why stop at one zero, really forward thinking people should start counting from the big bang up, that's as close as you can get to the Kelvin analogy, might as well take it all the way then.
Unexpected drug interaction: GLP-1 medications and sedative duration
by haebom | 2025-11-07 11:53:29+00:00
I recently started tirzepatide (Mounjaro) for weight management, and I've noticed something unexpected that I'm curious if others have experienced or if there's research on this. Background: I've been prescribed zolpidem and benzodiazepines for severe insomnia by a different physician. After starting Mounjaro, I noticed the sedative effects lasting significantly longer than before - experiencing prolonged brain fog and grogginess that extends well into the next day. This wasn't something either prescribing physician warned me about, and it got me wondering about the mechanism. My understanding is that GLP-1 receptor agonists cause delayed gastric emptying, which could theoretically affect drug absorption and metabolism. But the degree of change I experienced seems substantial.

A few questions for the community:

1. Is there published research on GLP-1 medications affecting the pharmacokinetics of other drugs, particularly CNS depressants?

2. Has anyone else experienced similar interactions with medications while on semaglutide, tirzepatide, or other GLP-1 agonists?

3. If GLP-1 medications can slow the absorption of sedatives, could the same mechanism also influence — or even enhance — the effects of stimulants like ADHD meds or caffeine? I’m curious whether this could have implications for focus and productivity.

I'm sharing this because these medications are becoming extremely popular, and if there are significant drug interactions that aren't being routinely discussed, that seems like an important safety consideration. I'm particularly concerned that patients seeing multiple specialists might not have adequate oversight of potential interactions.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-07 11:53:48+00:00
I think that might be popular and common in the US, but outside the US and in the rest of the world, particularly in Ibero-America, "America" is the entire of South, Central and North America together. But again, what you say seem to be true inside the US, so understandable that many understand it as such.

I don't think anyone (outside the US at least) use "The Americas" in daily language, while "America" certainly is.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-11-07 11:54:03+00:00
There is an enormous gulf between research in general and the people who should be reading it from a professional point of view. Science communication is really broken and what makes the trade press or press generally is largely about whether a papers authors manage to write a good press release and effectively writes an article themselves.

We need more New Scientist type magazine like things that do decent round ups of scientific findings for various fields that do a good job of shuffling through the thousands of papers a month and finding the highest impact papers. The pipeline from research to use in professions can drastically be improved. At the moment you end up having a hosepipe of abstracts and its a lot of time to review that daily.
by Theodores | 2025-11-07 11:57:14+00:00
I am amazed at how much there is to know about QR codes, particularly if you want them to look pretty.

I want the super succinct QR code and I believe that to be optimal. However, I keep seeing massively complicated QR codes, as if going from 8 bit to 64 bit, and I assume these work well. Given the amount of megapixels in any camera made this century and the prevalence of over complicated URLs in QR form, I am not sure if minimised QR codes have any benefit whatsoever. By minimised, I mean 29 x 29.

On the QR topic, I don't understand how logos in the middle work. You are losing pixels and checks with the logo in the middle which is fine until you make the logo too big.

Also related, imagine you wanted a HN QR code with 'Hacker News' written in the middle. This would work as a box in the middle but would be hard to read. So you can make a line across the middle rather than a box in the middle. This will break the QR code but not if you rotate the QR code 90 degrees first.

Maybe my best option to fully understand the quirks is to start with the QR spec and then to make my own QR codes.
by miki123211 | 2025-11-07 11:57:38+00:00
You physically can't do any of this in a TUI.

There's no protocol that tells a screen reader to say something different than is actually displayed on the screen. The best you can do is having a whitelist of screen reader process names and changing how your TUI works if one of them is detected, but that's brittle and doesn't work over SSH. You'd also have to think about how to do container escaping and interfacing with the host system when you're running in WSL, as the screen reader is almost certainly on the host side.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-07 11:58:23+00:00
In general, my experience is "the more moving parts == less reliable", if I were to generalize across two decades of running web services. The most reliable platforms I've helped manage has been platforms that tried to avoid adding extra complexity until they really couldn't avoid it, and when I left still deployed applications by copy a built binary to a Linux host, reload the systemd service, switch the port in the proxy and let traffic hit the new service while healtchecking, and when green, switch over and stop the old service.

Deploys usually took minutes (unless something was broken), scaling worked the same as if you were using anything else, increase a number and redeploy, and no Kubernetes, Docker or even containers as far as the eye could see.
by elieteyssedou | 2025-11-07 11:59:40+00:00
I built this for myself, iterating on it over the years. I told myself that sharing it could bring some value to new comers or even to bring some other perspective to more experienced developers. I've included the Claude.md files I use, I've found that this architecture works great with code agents. There is some context around this boilerplate on the blog post. Enjoy!
by port11 | 2025-11-07 11:59:46+00:00
I struggle to see how these companies would be affected in the medium-term. The stock would dip for a few weeks? OAI has virtually no revenues when compared to their passive; good lord, every other of these companies has actual, profitable products, long-time customers, etc.

I don't see why you'd bail out a company that a) isn't a very large employer, or b) essential to the economy, or c) essential to the country. OAI is neither of these, its users can switch model/provider/APIs with little friction.

Yikes, if Altman keeps conning people the way Musk did/does, maybe these companies should tank so that we all learn to be more moderate in our investments.
Show HN: Dimension-DB – Time‑series/columnar DB for Java (local store and JDBC)
by akardapolov | 2025-11-07 12:00:04+00:00
I built an embedded, pure‑Java database for time‑series and dimensional analytics. It combines a columnar, block‑encoded local store (on top of Berkeley DB Java Edition) with a read API that can also target external SQL systems via JDBC using auto‑generated queries.

While powerful time-series databases like ClickHouse or InfluxDB exist, they are often heavyweight servers. I wanted something more like DuckDB but for the Java ecosystem: a library I could drop into any application to get fast, local analytical queries without managing a separate service.

Dimension-DB is designed for this niche. You can use it in embedded applications, IoT edge devices, or as a high-performance cache within a larger backend.

Key features that make it different:

- Embeddable Core: It's a library, not a server. It uses Berkeley DB JE as its local storage backend, making it trivial to integrate into any Java project with zero operational overhead.

- Adaptive Columnar Storage: It doesn't just store data in columns. It automatically analyzes data blocks and applies the best storage format (RAW, dictionary-encoded ENUM, or run-length-encoded HISTOGRAM) on-the-fly. This massively improves compression and query speed, especially for low-cardinality metrics.

- Hybrid Query Mode: Beyond local storage, it can act as a "read-only" query accelerator for existing databases. You can point it at a PostgreSQL, Oracle, or ClickHouse table, and it will auto-generate efficient SQL for time-series queries, acting as a smart analytical layer.

- Proven Performance: I've benchmarked it against the public NYC Taxi dataset (78 million rows). It achieves a sustained ingest rate of ~55,000 rows/sec and provides significant query acceleration, especially for complex aggregations.

This isn't just a side project; it's the core storage engine that powers Dimension-UI, the desktop monitoring tool I built. I needed a fast, local database to handle real-time visualization and analysis, and existing solutions were either too slow or too complex.

The project is open source and I'm actively looking for feedback. Let me know what you think!

Links:

- Dimension-DB (GitHub & Benchmarks): https://github.com/akardapolov/dimension-db

- Dimension-UI (The desktop app that uses Dimension-DB): https://github.com/akardapolov/dimension-ui

- Dimension-DI (The DI container used in Dimension-UI): https://github.com/akardapolov/dimension-di
by GistNoesis | 2025-11-07 12:01:00+00:00
> a lot of network lock-in that an upstart would have to overcome by being way better at something PyTorch can never be good at

Higher level code migration to the newer framework, is going to 0. You ask your favorite agent (or intern) to port and check that the migration is exact. We already see this in the multitude of deep-learning frameworks.

The day one optimization trick that PyTorch can't do but another framework can, which reduce your training cost 10x and PyTorch is going the way of the dodo.

The day one architecture which can't be implemented in PyTorch get superior performance, and it's bye bye python.

We see this with architectures which require real-time rendering like Gaussian Splatting (Instant Nerf), or the caching strategies for LLM sequence generation.

Pytorch's has 3 main selling point :

- Abstracting away the GPU (or device) specific code, which is due to nvidia's mess : custom optimized kernels, which you are forced to adapt to if you don't want to write custom kernels.

If you don't mind writing optimized kernels, because the machine write them. Or if you don't need Cuda because you can't use Nvidia hardware because for example you are in China. Or if you use custom silicon, like Grok and need your own kernels anyway.

- Automatic differentiation. It's one of its weak point, because they went for easy instead of optimal. They shut themselves off some architectures. Some language like Julia because of the dynamic low-level compilation can do things Pytorch won't even dream about, (but Julia has its own problems mainly related to memory allocations). Here with the pytorch's introduction of the "scan function"[2] we have made our way full circle to Theano, Tensorflow's/Keras ancestor, which is usually the pain point of the bad automatic differentiating strategy chosen by Pytorch.

The optimal solution like all physics Phds which wrote simulations know, is writing custom adjoint code with 'Source Code Transformation' or symbolically : it's not hard but very tedious so it's now a great fit for your LLM (or intern or Phd candidate running 'student gradient descent') if you prove or check your gradient calculation is ok.

- Cluster Orchestration and serialization : a model can be shared with less security risks than arbitrary source code, because you only share weights. A model can be splitted between machines dynamically. But this is also a big weakness because your code rust as you become dependent of versioning, you are locked with the specific version number your model was trained on.

[2] "https://docs.pytorch.org/xla/master/features/scan.html
by jacquesm | 2025-11-07 12:01:10+00:00
> I used to think ethics were a set of rules to follow. Now I think they're more like tests—constant ones—that you run against your own motivations.

Is the big one. And interestingly, single guys doing stuff that is ethically defensible are at a larger risk of ending up in trouble with the law than big corporations doing far worse stuff. So the lesson at a personal level is a completely different one than at the corporate level, there it is 'what we can get away with' versus 'what we should do to be good citizens'.
by dvt | 2025-11-07 12:01:45+00:00
> China is the only country that is not controlled by ideology and is increasing its electricity capacity in a scientific way.

Have recently noticed a lot of pro-CCP propaganda on social media (especially Instagram and TikTok), but strangely also on HN; kind of interesting. To anyone making the (trivially false) claim that China is not controlled by ideology, I'm not quite sure how you'd convince them of the opposite. I'm not a doomer, but as China ramps up their aggression towards Taiwan (and the US will inevitably have to intervene), this will likely not end well in the next 5-10 years.
by skarlso | 2025-11-07 12:01:51+00:00
Dear HackerNews community!

We are proud to announce that [external-secrets-operator](https://external-secrets.io) is now officially GA! We just released version [v1.0.0](https://github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets/release...).

This version is full of fixes and a couple of new features, however, the point is to go stable. Now, with v1.0.0 we can follow the semver guidelines in breaking changes and patch and minor releases. Hopefully, this provides users and organizations the confidence to invest into ESO and to invest into keeping it up and running. Does this mean the project is on maintenance? No! We are working today to improve ESO in a lot of ways.

One that has been highly requested for a while now and much anticipated. Generic target types for ExternalSecrets (ES) objects. ES objects are now able to create whatever object you want, not just Secrets. ConfigMaps, Deployments, Applications, etc. Anything goes as long as you configure the right RBAC settings. Please read the usage page carefully and note that this feature is in heavy _alpha_. Link to the documentation can be found [here](https://external-secrets.io/latest/guides/targeting-custom-r...).

We are also working hard on [Out-Of-Process](https://github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets/pull/55...) providers. One of the changes involved in that effort is introducing go modules for all providers. This means that eventually, people will be able to build their own ESO binary with _only_ selected provider(s). This will prevent other providers bleeding in their vulnerabilities into your provider. If you would like to have an ESO that only supports AWS you could build it with `go build -tag provider-aws` or something similar. We wanted to make sure these changes are understood by the community as the future of ESO - thus, nothing will change for the current APIs (SecretStores; ExternalSecrets). Expect this to be the v2 version of it ;)

Does this mean all `1.x` versions will be supported? While ESO is on 1.0 - our support policy did not change. We only support the latest minor version (1.x) currently released. Today, that will be 1.0.

How can I upgrade? The upgrade is instant from 0.20.x. There are no expected breaking changes as a part of this update .

Now to organizational things. We also changed our community meeting hours. We will have alternating times where once the meeting is at the same current time it is right now, but the other will be at UTC 21:00. Making sure that people from different continents might be also able to join our community meetings.

Thank you so much for everyone involved in this release and for all our supporters. Without you, this would not have been possible.

Gergely(Skarlso)
by dev_marcospimi | 2025-11-07 12:02:12+00:00
Wait, I think you misread the numbers?

In my tests: Original bitrate: 9,477 kb/s My compressed: 1,238 kb/s

That's 87% lower bitrate (7.6x reduction)

Maybe you meant absolute bitrate isn't impressively low? Fair - 1,238 kb/s is still higher than highly-Tuned AV1 (~400-600 kb/s).

But compared to what most people export (default OBS/ScreenFlow settings), this is a huge improvement for zero manual tuning.
by Jotalea | 2025-11-07 12:02:35+00:00
one thing that I immediately noticed is that this site has no mobile support at all.

that's why I will link this presentation I made, in just a few hours, for a school project. it has mobile support, automatic fullscreen, and is still lightweight. unfortunately, I lost the code for the engine alone, so I only have the "exported product".

https://jotalea.com.ar/tests/tpanticx
by enether | 2025-11-07 12:03:04+00:00
but most serious compute engines already speak Iceberg, what do they gain from interfacing with PG now?

My understanding is the opposite - PG cuts it as a compute layer for small amounts of data, and this is where it excels.

I also assume `pg_lake` was built mainly with the intention of creating/writing tables, and the ability to read comes "for free" as an extra, since Iceberg integration is already written.