MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JoelJacobson | 2025-11-17 06:39:53+00:00
> If you call pg_notify or NOTIFY inside a trigger, it will get called 100,000 times and send out 100,000 notifications if you change 100,000 rows in a single transaction which from a performance perspective is ... not ideal.

This is only true if those notifications are different; if they are identical, such as in the same the notification is to alert listeners some table has new data (for cache invalidation), they are sent out as one notification only. See source code comment in async.c:

* Duplicate notifications from the same transaction are sent out as one * notification only. This is done to save work when for example a trigger * on a 2 million row table fires a notification for each row that has been * changed. If the application needs to receive every single notification * that has been sent, it can easily add some unique string into the extra * payload parameter.
by Zetaphor | 2025-11-17 06:40:09+00:00
Isn't that the point they are making? MCP is useful because everyone is using it, not because it has a technical advantage over rolling your own solution. It won mindshare because of marketing and a large company pushing it.

I've actually taken to both approaches recently, using the mcp-client package to give me an interface to a wide array of prebuilt tools in my non-LLM application. I could have written or sourced 10 different connectors, or I can write one client interface and any tool I plug in shares the same standard interface as all the others.
by frfl | 2025-11-17 06:42:10+00:00
My usage of "handheld" was vague. I meant any portable device (laptops, but also including phones/tablets).

If you're finding it hard to imagine what you can do with a device that _does not_ restrict what you can do with it, then you're likely fine in the Apple ecosystem, that's fair and okay. Some people aren't, you'll just have to take my word for it, I don't wanna write an essay here and you're probably not interesting in reading all that.

Security risk is a common one that comes up. Google used that to justify locking down sideloading recently. Let me take the risk. I bought this device, I should be allowed to make adult decisions right? I'm not downloading stuff off Limewire or a shady website. I'm downloading stuff off of Linux distro repos or F-Droid.

There's a lot more to be said about all this. Including the amount of e-waste created because a device is too old to be supported by manufacturers, yet people run decade(s) old laptops/desktops using free OSs because they can.

Just my 1AM rambling thoughts. Hope some of it makes some sense.
by somenameforme | 2025-11-17 06:42:51+00:00
> The farm 200 years ago would have been unlikely to make its own critical tools...

Yes they would have! There's a huge slew of great YouTube shows basically recreating how people did things in the past and it's rather stupidly amazing. For instance you probably think iron mining is some complex process where you need to go dig into a mountain in some specific place or whatever, which naturally leads to your worldview.

In reality? Let me introduce you to bog iron. [1] It's stupidly common, and naturally recycles. Depending on where you live, and how often you step outside, you've probably even seen it! That orange gunk in boggy type waters? Maybe a shining shimmer on the surface? That's not pollution as many think, at least not usually - it's iron hydroxide - good by itself and often a clue of bigger deposits just below it.

Gather it all up, smelt it down, and you now have iron. And now here [2] is a video of a guy making a homemade bellows capable of iron working. A bit of skill and you can build basically whatever you want. You can even make steel. The big gap from the stone age to the iron age and beyond was mostly one of knowledge rather than requiring any sort of large scale industrialization or associated technologies.

I also strongly disagree on the agrarian:urban divide. If urban outputs disappeared, society would change a lot but still continue along just fine for the most part. If agrarian outputs disappeared, everybody would die. The fact that socially worthless, if not harmful, work is economically rewarded more than socially critical work is mostly because we swapped to economic systems that no longer value anything except money, and the closer somebody is to the flow of money, the easier it is to take a bit more for themselves - and farmers are about as far away from the flow of money as you can get.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/UuwGukUavW0

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wVNOEU_-Es
by ballpug | 2025-11-17 06:42:55+00:00
Closest peripheral aspect is transforming integrals according to Fourier, which extricates 1 cycle in f(x)=sin(x). A synchronization may take place in transient sine coefficient, where "Mag" and L2(R) column specify individual polar coordinates.

For example, the Fourier transform of Ly is. F[L(2)y] = L(2)˜y(k), where y(k) is the factor from L(2)y's distribution.
by inferiorhuman | 2025-11-17 06:43:06+00:00
"here's the type of message that the author of this page is trying to convey" is not what most people think is a simple question

It's also not the question I asked. I'm literally trying to parse out what question was asked. That's what makes AI slop so infuriating: it's entirely orthogonal to the information I'm after.

Asking Google "what is the flag for persevering Metadata using scp" and getting the flag name instead of a SEO article with the a misleading title go on about so third party program that you can download that does exactly that and never actually tell you the answer is ridiculous and I am happy AI has help reduce the click bait

Except that the AI slop Google and Microsoft and DDG use for summaries masks whether or not a result is SEO nonsense. Instead of using excerpts of the page the AI summary simply suggests that the SEO garbage is answering the question you asked. These bullshit AI summaries make it infinitely harder to parse out what's actually useful. I suppose that's the goal though. Hide that most of the results are low quality and force you to click through to more pages (ad views) to find something relevant. AI slop changes the summaries from "garbage in, garbage out" to simply "garbage out".
by eduction | 2025-11-17 06:43:35+00:00
I completely agree with the insight that full text search has been complexified. People seem to want to jump straight to clustering or other enterprise level things.

I also appreciate the moxie of getting in there and building it yourself.

Myself, I reach for Lucene. Then you don’t need to build all this yourself if you don’t want. It lives in a dir on disk. True, it’s a separate database, but one optimized for this problem.
by Frannky | 2025-11-17 06:45:01+00:00
Trusted Execution Environments are interesting technology. There are a few research papers detailing how they can be attacked—aside from the obvious risk that the TEE manufacturer holds the keys and could, if compelled or willing, share access with others.

In practice, TEEs represent strong privacy guarantees. For businesses handling sensitive data, TEEs allow you to credibly claim that the data is protected during processing, even when computation happens in the cloud.
by Vera_Wilde | 2025-11-17 06:45:32+00:00
The directional‐ablation approach in Heretic is clever: by identifying residual “refusal directions” and ablating them, they shift the trade-off frontier for the model. In rare‐event screening terms: they’re effectively changing the detection threshold geometry rather than trying just to get better data. It resonates with how improving a test’s accuracy in low-prevalence settings often fails unless you address threshold + base rate.
by valyala | 2025-11-17 06:47:21+00:00
> lack of a promise of full PromQL compatibility (too many PromQL dashboards built by too many teams)

This is a classical FUD. VictoriaMetrics is used as a drop-in replacement for Prometheus, Thanos and Mimir. It works perfectly across all the existing dashboards in Grafana, and across all the existing recording and alerting rules. I'm unaware of VictoriaMetrics users who hit PromQL compatibility issues during the migration from Prometheus, Thanos and Mimir to VictoriaMetrics. There are a few deliberate incompatibilities aimed towards improving user experience. See https://medium.com/@romanhavronenko/victoriametrics-promql-c...

> seeing features locked behind the Enterprise version (Mimir Enterprise had features added on top, not features locked away)

All the VictoriaMetrics features, which are useful across the majority of practical use cases, are included in open-source version. The main Enterprise feature - high-quality technical support by VictoriaMetrics engineers. Other Enterprise features are needed only for large enterprise companies. See https://docs.victoriametrics.com/victoriametrics/enterprise/

I recommend reading real-world case studies from happy users, who migrated from other systems (including Prometheus, Thanos and Mimir) to VictoriaMetrics - https://docs.victoriametrics.com/victoriametrics/casestudies...
by cycomanic | 2025-11-17 06:47:48+00:00
Just seeing your reply now and wanted to say that I really appreciate your humorous self-reflection. Too often we just argue aggressively against the others standpoint without any self-reflection of our own (I've certainly been guilty of it).

Also the idea of smaller units for creating a closer feeling of belonging is something I've been thinking about quite a few times. I think countries/nations etc. try to use patriotism and a us vs them (because there is often not enough real connection otherwise) mentality to artificially create this.
by tlavoie | 2025-11-17 06:49:28+00:00
I had (maybe still have somewhere?) a book I'd ordered online as a youth, on how to do exactly that. They were somewhat fiddly, in the sense of being slightly lower-impulse, with clay nozzles and a hollow fuel grain. Never quite got around to making any. I should look for that book though. In any case, it's likely harder than it used to be to get saltpeter, which they just carried in the pharmacy.
by budro | 2025-11-17 06:51:38+00:00
I think it mostly comes down to the standard library guiding you down this path explicitly. The C stdlib is quite outdated and is full of bad design that affects both performance and ergonomics. It certainly doesn't guide you down the path of smart design.

Zig _the language_ barely does any of the heavy lifting on this front. The allocator and io stories are both just stdlib interfaces. Really the language just exists to facilitate the great toolchain and stdlib. From my experience the stdlib seems to make all the right choices, and the only time it doesn't is when the API was quickly created to get things working, but hasn't been revisited since.

A great case study of the stdlib being almost perfect is SinglyLinkedList [1]. Many other languages implement it as a container, but Zig has opted to implement it as an intrusively embedded element. This might confuse a beginner who would expect SinglyLinkedList(T) instead, but it has implications surrounding allocation and it turns out that embedding it gives you a more powerful API. And of course all operations are defined with performance in mind. prepend is given to you since it's cheap, but if you want postpend you have to implement it yourself (it's a one liner, but clearly more expensive to the reader).

Little decisions add up to make the language feel great to use and genuinely impressive for learning new things.

[1] https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/std/#std.SinglyLink...
by whatevertrevor | 2025-11-17 06:51:50+00:00
I don't understand this position, do you have direct evidence that Google actively made search worse? Before I'm misunderstood I do want to clarify that IMO, the end user experience for web searching on Google is much worse in 2025 than it was in say 2000. But, the web was also much much smaller, less commercial and the SNR was much better in general.

Sure, web search companies moved away from direct keyword matching to much more complex "semantics-adjacent" matching algorithms. But we don't have the counterfactual keyword-based Google search algorithm from 2000 on data from 2025 to claim that it's just search getting worse, or the problem simply getting much harder over time and Google failing to keep up with it.

In light of that, I'm much more inclined to believe that it's SEO spam becoming an industry that killed web search instead of companies "nerfing their own search engines".
by evanelias | 2025-11-17 06:53:27+00:00
Using pennies has long been recommended by reputable cookbooks. Is there really a risk at 375 degrees F? I would think the everyday fumes from an unventilated gas oven are a much more significant problem, and that's fairly common in many parts of the US.

Anyway, I've done it a hundred times, and my brain and lungs still work good-ish?
by Razengan | 2025-11-17 06:54:14+00:00
> I can't imagine trying to do that on an iPhone. Surely it's useless.

When there's a will you'll be glad there's a way.

People used to make do with "tiny" screens throughout the 1980s and 1990s: Bigger displays sure but smaller resolutions Han the iPhone. Doom came out in 320x200 ffs

When traveling I've had to do all sorts of tricks to use various services while away from home. Like my bank app which set an OTP to email or SMS, but if you swiped out of the app to go check the message, it would generate a new OTP when you switched back to the bank app. So I had to check my mail/messages on the minuscule Apple Watch screen. And that was the only time I ever used email on the Watch but I was infinitely glad that it had that option.
by austin-cheney | 2025-11-17 06:54:31+00:00
You mention that you don’t see how this could result in developers that write code. Then you immediately follow that with fixing bugs.

Yes, use of LLMs is still developers not writing original code, but it’s still an improvement (a minor one) of the copy/paste of micro dependencies.

Ultimately developers aren’t going to figure out writing original code until they are forced to do so from changed conditions within their employer.
by bradley13 | 2025-11-17 06:55:19+00:00
I remember a study from many years ago: people want to be better off than their immediate peers, regardless of where this puts them on an absolute scale.

The study went something like this. Which do you prefer? 1. You earn $250k but all your friends earn $500k. 2. You earn $125k, but all your friends earn $75k.

It was more refined then that, but anyway: most people picked (2).
by JoelJacobson | 2025-11-17 06:55:42+00:00
> The problem with Postgres' NOTIFY is that all notifications go through a single queue!

> Even if you have 20 database connections making 20 transactions in parallel, all of them need to wait for their turn to lock the notification queue, add their notification, and unlock the queue again. This creates a bottleneck especially in high-throughput databases.

We're currently working hard on optimizing LISTEN/NOTIFY: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/6899c044-4a82-49b...

If you have any experiences of actual workload where you are currently experiencing performance/scalability problems, I would be interested in hearing from you, to better understand the actual workload. In some workloads, you might only listen to a single channel. For such single-channel workloads, the current implementation seems hard to tweak further, given the semantics and in-commit-order guarantees. However, for multi-channel workloads, we could do a lot better, which is what the linked patch is about. The main problem with the current implementation for multi-channel workloads, is that we currently signal and wake all listening backends (a backend is the PostgreSQL processes your client is connected to), even if they are not interested in the specific channels being notified in the current commit. This means that if you have 100 connections open in which each connect client has made a LISTEN on a different channel, then when someone does a NOTIFY on one of those channels, instead of just signaling the backend that listen on that channel, all 100 backends will be signaled. For multi-channel workloads, this could mean an enormous extra cost coming from the context-switching due to the signaling.

I would greatly appreciate if you could please reply to this comment and share your different workloads when you've had problems with LISTEN/NOTIFY, to better understand approximately how many listening backends you had, and how many channels you had, and the mix of volume on such channels. Anything that could help us do better realistic simulations of such workloads, to improve the benchmark tests we're working on. Thank you.
by somenameforme | 2025-11-17 06:57:06+00:00
What do you want out of life? Personally I am striving to have a large family, plenty of social relations, and would really like to have some ability to play a role in shaping the future of society. As a medieval king you have these to the point of absurdity.

In modern times? The median personal income (US only) is $45k. [1] That's something that's very easy to forget, especially on a forum like this. And at that income, doing anything, besides accumulating meaningless gadgets, will be a challenge. Even having children, the most fundamentally critical responsibility for a society to sustain itself, is a challenge. I don't think the skyrocketing rates of psychological, mental, and other disorders is simply a coincidence.

We've created a dysfunctional and unsustainable society. This can still be quite a nice place when you're way above the median, but the median lifestyle is going to be quite unpleasant. It's certainly not a lifestyle I would ever even consider preferring over that of a medieval king.

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
by obviouslynotme | 2025-11-17 06:57:35+00:00
There is nothing new under the Sun. However, some languages manifest as good rewrites of older languages. Rust is that for C++. Zig is that for C.

Rust is the small, beautiful language hiding inside of Modern C++. Ownership isn't new. It's the core tenet of RAII. Rust just pulls it out of the backwards-compatible kitchen sink and builds it into the type system. Rust is worth learning just so that you can fully experience that lens of software development.

Zig is Modern C development encapsulated in a new language. Most importantly, it dodges Rust and C++'s biggest mistake, not passing allocators into containers and functions. All realtime development has to rewrite their entire standard libraries, like with the EASTL.

On top of the great standard library design, you get comptime, native build scripts, (err)defer, error sets, builtin simd, and tons of other small but important ideas. It's just a really good language that knows exactly what it is and who its audience is.
by globular-toast | 2025-11-17 06:57:57+00:00
The main reason why your mock breaks later is because you refactored the code. You did the one thing tests are supposed to help you do, and the tests broke. If code was never modified, you wouldn't need automated tests. You'd just test it manually one time and never touch it again. The whole point of tests is you probably will rewrite internals later as you add new features, improve performance or just figure out better ways to write things. Mock-heavy tests are completely pointless in this respect. You end up rewriting the code and the test every time you touch it.

There are really only a few reasons to use mocks at all. Like avoiding network services, nondeterminism, or performance reasons. If you need to do a lot of mocking in your tests this is a red flag and a sign that you could write your code differently. In this case you could just make the config file location an optional argument and set up one in a temp location in the tests. No mocking required and you're testing the real API of the config file module.
by tombert | 2025-11-17 07:01:46+00:00
I did an awful lot with my GPD Win 2, which was running vanilla desktop Ubuntu. The tiny display did require a bit of getting used to, but it was a lot of fun to have a tiny little thing that could fit in my pocket that I could write code while on the train.

Screen isn't much bigger than an iPhone Pro Max, if at all, but I was able to adapt to the desktop GUIs without much trouble.
by Zetaphor | 2025-11-17 07:03:07+00:00
The obvious solution would be to report the lowest number, as multiple replies to you have already proposed, but you again chose to ignore because it doesn't serve your agenda.

This entire thread started with you claiming Apple was somehow trying to prevent issues by hiding these features, and you've twice tried to move the goalposts to irrelevant points when given evidence to the contrary.

If you can't even defend your original position then I have no interest in continuing a discussion with Apple's most useful idiot.
by nine_k | 2025-11-17 07:04:20+00:00
Speaking as a big fan and avid user of public transit, I say: not gonna happen in many places.

Public transit works in densely populated areas, like in NYC where I live. Digging and operating a tunnel costs a lot, and only pays for itself if you can run many trains with many passengers, who live close enough to their nearest station. Buses are less expensive (though still are expensive), and require a driver per 50-100 passengers, not per 2000.

As long as many people prefer to live in suburbia (which may technically be considered a part of a city, like in Houston), they are going to use cars (or technically trucks), because it's the most economical way to get around. As long as the destination of their travel is not an utterly dense area that does not require a car (like commuting from NJ to lower Manhattan), people won't leave their cars mid-way and change for a train or a bus.

It's not the car lobby. It's people wanting to live quite separately from their neighbors, in detached houses that they fully own. Or maybe cities that enforce low density for a number of reasons (mostly NIMBYs who want to keep the price of their house and land high).
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-11-17 07:04:42+00:00
Wouldn’t ice trucking be in that long tail? I mean, ya, there are lot of niche cases that companies like Waymo haven’t worked on yet, but…the money is in the cities so that’s where they start. Interstate trucking might come next, ice trucking might be one of the last use cases covered.

Anyways we’ve gone from “this won’t happen in our lifetime!” to “it doesn’t handle X niche use case yet.”
by PaulKeeble | 2025-11-17 07:07:33+00:00
One thing I hadn't groked about Sodium Ion was the enormous Voltage range leads to a bit of an issue when it comes to current. You have a 4x voltage from top to bottom of the battery and this also means your current is 4x as well for the same power output. This becomes a bit of an issue and it is part of the efficiency equation, not just externally to the battery where wires have to be much larger than LFP or LI but internally due to internal resistance.
by lrvick | 2025-11-17 07:07:50+00:00
At least strong evidence it happened once: https://niconiconi.neocities.org/posts/ken-thompson-really-d...

With careful planning though, with the ability to rootkit any linux kernel it compiles that in turn hot-patches any gcc compilations and so on, with the ability to re-route system calls to hide itself... it could be very very hard to detect.

Even moreso if such was deployed in a couple target CI/CD systems.

bootstrappable builds are the only path to prove such an attack did not happen.
by happymellon | 2025-11-17 07:08:04+00:00
There are a few ways to turn off Copilot and protect your data from Microsoft.

What we have in this article unfortunately is wishful thinking that anything will last longer than the current quarter.

https://www.apple.com/imac/

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/d/linux-laptops-desktops/