MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xwowsersx | 2025-11-15 04:58:36+00:00
I think what PG meant by "do things that don't scale" is earnest effort in service of building a real product: talking to users, manually onboarding, hand-holding early customers so you can learn fast and iterate toward something that eventually does scale.

What this startup did isn't that, AFAICT. It wasn't manual work in service of learning...it was just fraud as a business model, no? Like, they were pretending the technology existed before it actually did. There's a bright line between unscalable hustle and misleading customers about what your product actually is.

Doing unscalable things is about being scrappy and close to the problem. Pretending humans are AI is just straight up deceiving people.
by barremian | 2025-11-15 04:58:57+00:00
> it codes fully functioning Windows and Apple OS clones, 3D design software, Nintendo emulators, and productivity suites from single prompts

> As is so often the case with AI, that is exciting and frightening all at once

> we need to extrapolate from this small example to think more broadly: if this holds the models are about to make similar leaps in any field where visual precision and skilled reasoning must work together required

> this will be a big deal when it’s released

> What appears to be happening here is a form of emergent, implicit reasoning, the spontaneous combination of perception, memory, and logic inside a statistical model

> model’s ability to make a correct, contextually grounded inference that requires several layers of symbolic reasoning suggests that something new may be happening inside these systems—an emergent form of abstract reasoning that arises not from explicit programming but from scale and complexity itself

Just another post with extreme hyperbolic wording to blow up another model release. How many times have we seen such non-realistic build up in the past couple of years.
by anon291 | 2025-11-15 04:59:14+00:00
Everything makes sense when you see I for what it is -- an escape from the number line rotated by ninety degrees.

Even the roots of a parabola that doesn't hit the z axis are actually the roots of the ninety degree rotated inverse analogue hitting the imaginary plane. Since the apex of such a parabola is always centered at 0i, the imaginary places it hits are symmetric, explaining why if a + bi is one imaginary root, then a - bi is as well.

https://teaching-math.com/unlock-the-secrets-of-complex-root...

Again... There is nothing weird about imaginary numbers. They actually make a lot of sense. It's actually insane to only do math in one dimension when our world has three.
by gtrealejandro | 2025-11-15 04:59:42+00:00
As someone who runs SaaS products, this post resonates painfully well.

The author is 100% correct: Monitoring should be the most boring tool in the stack. Its one and only job is to be more reliable than the thing it's monitoring.

The moment your monitoring stack requires a complex dependency like Kafka, or changes its entire agent flow every 18 months, it has failed its primary purpose. It has become the problem.

This sounds less like a technical evolution and more like the classic VC-funded push to get everyone onto a high-margin cloud product, even at the cost of the open-source soul.
by Mathnerd314 | 2025-11-15 05:01:44+00:00
Tell it to the papers: https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~csg63/publications/onward24/onwar... https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.03916 As vague analogies go, much more ridiculous and vague things have been published and peer reviewed and even gotten significant citations. Like ecological niches and invasive species, DNA as genetic blueprints, selfish genes, ... About all that can be said about these is that they are closer to the truth than what came before, and that if you actually learn the field then you can appreciate how they kind of get it right.
by mickeyp | 2025-11-15 05:01:51+00:00
That is literally how it is supposed to work. Prometheus grabs metrics --- that is how it works. If you for some reason find yourself unable to host an endpoint with metrics, you can use the fallback pushgateway to push metrics where yes they will stay until restarted. Ask yourself how it could ever work if they are subsequently deleted after read. How would multiple prometheus agents be able to read from the same source?
by James_K | 2025-11-15 05:04:57+00:00
This assessment is not based in historical reality. The last famine in the Soviet Union ended in 1947, more than 40 years before its dissolution, and with World War 2 being a major contributing factor.

The broader economic situation of the USSR is a very different question to whether or not they were able to progress beyond subsistence farming. One is a relatively nuanced topic, the other is a question that can be answered trivially by someone with the most basic historical knowledge, or even knowledge of modern Russia which clearly has not developed from subsistence farming to a developed economy in the time between 1991 and today.
by kbenson | 2025-11-15 05:06:17+00:00
Munin was what we used for a while, along with a smattering of smokeping.

We're using a combination of Zabbix (alerting) and local Grafana/Prometheus/Loki (observability) at this point, but I've been worried about when Grafana will rug-pull for a while now. Hopefully enough people using their cloud offering sates their appetite and they leave the people running locally alone.
by wormius | 2025-11-15 05:06:26+00:00
The ads on 11 were enough to keep me away, at least til 10 expired.

The AI guaranteed I will never touch MS again, and recently switched when it did expire.

"No ethical consumption" under capitalism or whatever; every tech company has their finger in the pie. sigh

I'm slightly worried about the Linux Kernel and whether AI features pushed by NVidia, and MS in particular, will get brought in.
by glenstein | 2025-11-15 05:07:40+00:00
I agree that I don't think there was anything wrong with Firefox Focus, and the hostile reaction to the Mr. Robot thing I find completely inexplicable. It didn't involve telemetry, sinister industry collaboration, compromise performance, or implicate Mozilla as a bad industry actor in any meaningful way. It all hinges on buying into a very idiosyncratic attempt at moral equivalence to egregious breaches of trust that never really made sense to me.

Of the list, I would grant that Firefox OS has a credible case for siphoning non-trivial resources away from the browser at a time that coincided with their period of market share loss.

The others I don't love, because again I could compare this to what I consider the peak of Opera before it went to Chromium, I considered it to push truly mind-blowing user beneficial innovation (Opera Unite was truly mind blowing to me, and I fully buy the hype about its revolutionary potential, though I suspect in our present environment, perhaps an unsustainable security nightmare).

So clearly there are ways to do it better, and I accept them as falling outside the 2020 to 2025 window. But their invocation on behalf of a tragic narrative of Mozilla misjudgment strikes me more as containing a pound of irresponsible rhetorical excess for every ounce of truth. Though I'm heartened that it seems the tide has turned against this narrative on HN.
by rramadass | 2025-11-15 05:09:17+00:00
You have misunderstood what the author meant.

It is that Mathematics is far more general and uses a myriad of notations developed over hundreds of years and adapted to various sub-fields/domains/models as necessary. This makes it far more flexible and powerful than any programming language. That is why Multi-Paradigm languages became a thing i.e. there is a need for programming languages to provide a larger set of computation models which can then be exploited by the programmer to map his domain models (mathematical or not).

For example; why do many(most?) programmers have difficulty in transcribing algorithms given in pseudocode to their favourite language? Simply because they have not understood the algorithm at the fundamental mathematical level but have only picked up the patterns through which it is expressed in their language. Note that this is the default way our brain works and how we manage real-world complexity without really understanding everything (satirically phrased as "monkey see, monkey do"). But we can use mathematical methods and reasoning to minimize going off the rails because it forces us to make explicit our assumptions, definitions and proofs which is at the heart of problem-solving. So we use all the mathematical tools we have at hand to structure and solve a problem and only later map it to our programming language. But note that as we gain more experience this mapping becomes intuitive and we can directly think and express it in our favourite programming language.

See also my comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45934301

Some References:

Notation as a tool of thought by Kenneth Iverson - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/358896.358899

Predicate Logic as Programming Language by Robert Kowalski - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221330242_Predicate...
by cbracketdash | 2025-11-15 05:10:01+00:00
Totally agree with this point. There are several advice that pg and similar roles give which are not universally true. I reiterate your point that "doing things that don't scale" is meant specifically for searching for 1-1 user experience advice.

A similar exmaple is "Make something people want". This is generally true advice in focusing your efforts on solving customer's problems. Yet, this is disastrous advice if taking literally to the fullest extent (you can only imagine).
by zer00eyz | 2025-11-15 05:11:53+00:00
FTA > "I know for a fact that that pace is partially driven by career-driven development."

This isn't a Grafana problem, this is an industry wide problem. Resume driven product design, resume driven engineering, resume driven marketing. DO your 2-3 years, pump out something big to inflate your resume. Apply elsewhere to get the pay bump that almost no company is handing out. After the departures there is no one left who knows the system and the next people in want to replace the things they don't understand to pad their resume for the next job.

Wash, rinse, repete.

Loyalty, simply goes unrewarded in a lot of places in our industry (and at a many corporations). And the people who do stay... in many cases they turn into furniture that ends up holding potential good evolution back. They loose out to the technological magpies the bring shiny things to management because it will "move the needle".

Sadly this is just one facet of the problems we are facing, from how we interview to how we run (or rent) our infrastructure things have gotten rather silly...
by Xenograph | 2025-11-15 05:11:57+00:00
In "yiwei"/"creer" case, Juan believes that they are going to promote him (but his belief is not very well calibrated and is likely false). yiwei/creerse asserts something about the truth value of the belief, in addition to what the belief is.

In the "doubts" case, Juan believes that they are not going to promote him. There is no assertion regarding the truth value of that belief.
by nneonneo | 2025-11-15 05:12:10+00:00
If I read this correctly, they’re “bypassing ASLR” because the binary isn’t PIE, so it’s loaded at a static address.

I would not consider this actually bypassing ASLR, because ASLR is already turned off for a critically important block of code. Practically any large-enough binary has gadgets that can be useful for ROP exploitation, even if chaining them together is somewhat painful. For ASLR to be a reasonably effective mitigation, every memory region needs to be randomized.
by bradlys | 2025-11-15 05:13:09+00:00
> And more to the point, now that you're "successful", do you think society should pay for more/better systems to help people like you achieve what you did?

Yes. I'm very far left. Landlords going under the guillotine wouldn't be a bad thing in my book.

> I don't think anyone is seriously arguing that what you did is impossible, merely unlikely.

In some woke circles, a lot will say it's impossible. Also, I don't know anyone who has managed something similar as to what I've done, especially from where I grew up or similar. I hear of random stories online but random stories online come with a lot of missing details.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-11-15 05:13:55+00:00
no it's not I work on AI and what these things do are much much more then a search engine or an autocomplete. If an autocomplete passed the turing test you'd dismiss it because it's still an autocomplete.

The characterization you are regurgitating here is from laymen who do not understand AI. You are not just mildly wrong but wildly uninformed.
by bix6 | 2025-11-15 05:14:10+00:00
From LI

> this was for our first few beta customers from 2017 and we made it clear that there was a human in the loop of the service. LLMs didn't exist yet. It was like offering an EA for $100/mo - several other startups did that as well, but obviously it doesn't scale.

So not necessarily fraud unless they deceived investors. Or he’s covering up his mistake. Getting the popcorn!!
by efortis | 2025-11-15 05:15:01+00:00
To me, Nginx. I remember seeing this file structure and saying: "ohh, that's how it should be done"

src/os/win32/ngx_alloc.c src/os/unix/ngx_alloc.c

---

A few years later I stumbled upon this refactoring video by Uncle Bob and that was my second aha! moment.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150905163826/https://www.youtu...

---

Many people here recommend Redis as an inspiring example.
by card_zero | 2025-11-15 05:17:10+00:00
> English doesn’t really have a verb for “think” with the connotation that the belief is false

Really? Huh, maybe. I suppose, guess, imagine, assume, opine, claim, that none of these verbs carry a strong enough connotation of falsehood. There's take for granted, but it's unwieldy. I fancy that the verb fancy would be very suitable for the job, but it makes one sound like an 1850s Southern Belle.
by decimalenough | 2025-11-15 05:17:52+00:00
上京 jōkyō is less a regular word and more a form of written shorthand. It would not be used in speech, and even in writing it's ambiguous: not only does 京 kyō simply mean "capital", but there's a district of Kyoto that's also 上京, only read Kamigyō.

The closest English equivalent is abbreviations like "PC". They're perfectly usable in context, but if you see one standing alone it's not clear if it's personal computer, politically correct, Peace Corps, etc etc.
by jeremycarter | 2025-11-15 05:18:52+00:00
Last year I wrote a simple system using Semantic Kernel, backed by functions inside Microsoft Orleans, which for the most part was a business logic DSL processor by LLM. Your business logic was just text, and you gave it the operation as text.

Nothing could be relied upon to be deterministic, it was so funny to see it try to do operations.

Recently I re-ran it with newer models and was drastically better, especially with temperature tweaks.
by marc_abonce | 2025-11-15 05:19:24+00:00
Oh yeah, "creerse" and "creérsela" definitely have different connotations from "creer" even if they're technically conjugations of the same verb.

I found an article that offers "fall for it" as a translation for "creérsela" (te la creíste/se la creyó) and I agree.

https://www.tellmeinspanish.com/grammar/creer-vs-creerse/

In the form of "creerse" it can also mean "believe in yourself" which used to have the same connotation of being mistakenly overconfident, although in the last couple of years I've started to see more "debes de creértela" Linkedin memes which have the opposite (true belief) connotation, more like "fake it till you make it".

If anyone's confused, don't worry. This verb always means "believe", the only difference is in the subtle connotations but they never affect the actual meaning.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-11-15 05:19:44+00:00
It's a video of the "ghostwriter" reading it with oratorical flair.

It pokes fun at the disgusting grift economy of sociopolitical trend exploitation where public figures throw their opinions into the world to stir, manufacture, or manipulate sentiment for approbation, visibility, and coin.

I'm still unsure if the prominent Ayn Rand book is a Colbert Report-like sarcastic prop or a literal celebration. Could be both.
by refurb | 2025-11-15 05:19:46+00:00
Huh, I've been pretty happy with them. I live in a country where IPs are often blocked entirely by US and European websites (presumably due to hacking issues and lack of government action). So my major use is being able to access websites.

It's true that servers are flagged, but every VPN has that issue. Usually switching to a new server resolves it and I've noticed some servers aren't use much and are very fast and not flagged by many websites.

What I like about Mullvad is not only the commitment to privacy, but also the VPN speeds. I get 300-500MB/s pretty regularly. Some servers get congested during peak times, but switching to another I'll usually find a fast one in a desirable country very quickly.
by pksebben | 2025-11-15 05:21:01+00:00
I don't think it's about public opinion so much as pushing the goalposts. The whole erosion of privacy since the 60s (maybe further but at least since then) has been a 'boiled frogs' situation.

What I think the endgame is here is to be able to do surveillance out in the open, so you can have more human resources doing it, and so you can use that surveillance legally more often. If you have a clandestine surveillance operation, you can only employ people you trust not to squeal and you have to engage in parallel construction (or resort to extralegal execution of force).

A lot easier if you can just point to a piece of paper and say "but you said we could"
by simianwords | 2025-11-15 05:21:04+00:00
How exactly would tax payers end up with the build? Literally everything into the bubble was private capital like SoftBank, Microsoft.

Big players subsidising AI in hopes they can make profit later. Same as with Uber.

So why is it tax payers who would end up with billions? It’s pretty clear that if bubble bursts it is Microsoft, SoftBank etc that would lose the most money.
by aeternum | 2025-11-15 05:22:10+00:00
So why not reform it? It seems like an easy way to get bipartisan support and compromise. To put the numbers in perspective, the US only had 3000 deaths due to starvation (almost all of which are mental health issues rather than lack of access to food). This is compared to 280k-500k deaths due to overeating.

Cut the 25% and keep the 75% that is spent on normal food. By the other comments you can see that even that seems quite unpopular as it is seen as policing food for poor people?
by dzink | 2025-11-15 05:22:25+00:00
The easiest way to miss the joker is to trust in confidence. Dunning Krueger is alive and well and the worst professionals and founders run in and pose with bravado. Real passion goes into the details and with persistance. Real passionate people have initiative to do more and will be happy to tell you about it. The key is to have someone in the room who knows what they are talking about and can separate the BS from the truth.
by kqr | 2025-11-15 05:23:18+00:00
> it's definitely the case for Niri

No, it doesn't seem that way. The Niri manual says each monitor has an independent set of workspaces. In XMonad there is one shared set for all monitors, but each monitor independently shows one of those workspaces.

(If the user tries to show on monitor A the workspace currently visible on monitor B the two monitors swap their workspaces.)
by bccdee | 2025-11-15 05:23:43+00:00
I don't think you've even thought about this for 30 seconds.

> If it could easily fetch more money, it would have been bid higher than £50.

Have you ever been to one of these auctions? I haven't. If I want a used vehicle, I go to a trusted dealership. Few people attend auctions, hence demand is low, hence prices are low. When there's no incentive to sell something for what it's worth, the seller will put in less effort and sell it below market price.

> Then did the debtor not sell the motorbike to pay the debt?

They probably needed it. You try doing food deliveries without a vehicle. Now their job's gone.

> it seems that people always assume they're totally incapable of helping themselves.

Well obviously. Being poor is excruciating; nobody would choose to be poor. The ones who are capable of helping themselves do—in fact, they help themselves when they're broke, and they never become truly poor in the first place (per the article's definitions).
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-11-15 05:23:44+00:00
To my ears that just sounds like a mind trick.

If you convince yourselves $250k is practically nothing, you might be able to psychologically push yourself that extra bit harder to get to $500k.

But if you look around and say "Gee, objectively speaking I am one of the richest people who has ever lived" you might be inclined to actually enjoy that money, which involves spending more time enjoying the money and less time working, which lowers your chances of eventually getting to $500k.

I imagine similar strats are employed by relative high earners in e.g. Albania, trying to go from $25k to $50k, or Pakistan trying to go from $2.5k to $5.0k.
Show HN: Group, compare and track health of GitHub repos you use
by zendai | 2025-11-15 05:24:02+00:00
Hello,

Created this simple website where you can group existing GitHub repos and track their health based on their public data. The idea came from working as a Sr SRE/DevOps on mostly Kubernetes/Cloud environments with tons of CNCF open source products, and usually there are many competing alternatives for the same task, so I started to create static markdown docs about these GitHub groups with basic health data (how old the tool is, how many stars it has, language it was written in), so I can compare them and have a mental map of their quality, lifecycle and where's what.

Over time whenever I hear about a new tool I can use for my job, I update my markdown docs. I found this categorization/grouping useful for mapping the tool landscape, comparing tools in the same category and see trends as certain projects are getting abandoned while others catching attention.

The challenge I had that the doc I created was static and the data I recorded were point in time manual snapshots, so I thought I'll create an automated, dynamic version of this tool which keeps the health stats up to date. This tool became www.gitfitcheck.com. Later I realized that I can have further aspects as well, not just comparison within the same category, for example I have a group for my core Python packages that I bootstrap all of my Django projects. Using this tool I can see when a project is getting less love lately and can search for an alternative, maybe a fork or a completely new project. Also, all groups we/you create are public, so whenever we search for a topic/repo, we'll see how others grouped them as well, which can help discoverability too.

I found this process useful in the frontend and ML space as well, as both are depending on open source GitHub projects a lot.

Feedback are welcome, thank you for taking the time reading this and giving a try!

Thank you, sendai
by jamesblonde | 2025-11-15 05:24:07+00:00
I still haven't got my head around how OTEL fits into a good open-source monitoring stack. Afaik, it is a protocol for metrics, traces, and logs. And we want our open-source monitoring services/dbs to support it, so they become pluggable. But, afaik, there's no one good DB for logs and metrics, so most of us use Prometheus for metrics and OpenSearch for logs.

Does OTEL mean we just need to replace all our collectors (like logstash for logs and all the native metrics collectors and pushgateway crap) and then reconfigure Prometheus and OpenSearch?