MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by km | 2025-11-28 13:08:06+00:00
After running uptime.is for 12+ years, I finally built a monitoring service I always wished existed. It's powered by pyng, a monitoring system that started with just using Python standard library but now uses a bit more (mostly Twisted, though). It's still all boring tech, though, and mostly usable without JavaScript.

Key features:

* Powerful DNS monitoring (traces NS/DS records from root, DNSSEC validation, DNS-based blacklists)

* HTTP checks with full control (GET/HEAD/PUT/POST, custom headers, JSON parsing, multi-location via Mullvad)

* Tor network monitoring

* Push checks (inverted monitoring for cron jobs/batch tasks)

* Multiple integrations (Atom feeds, JSON data, DNS-queryable status, ntfy.sh push alerts)

The tech stack is boring: Python + Twisted + SQLite, boring CLI tools (ping, drill, curl, nc), no containers, no exotic dependencies. The setup runs on a mix of OpenBSD/FreeBSD/Alpine Linux.

Pricing is simple: $15/year for basic checks, $20/year for checks that notify on output changes. No account creation – configure your check, pay, and it starts running.

This is still a proof-of-concept, but it's been monitoring my own infrastructure reliably. I realise that there are probably that many potential users, but the 'net is big, so I might get some anyway.

I'd love feedback from the HN community.
by throwaway77385 | 2025-11-28 13:08:52+00:00
Ah yes, the joy of maintaining open source software. I have seen many devs burn out over the requests made of them.

I didn't know it was just one maintainer. That can both be a good thing for keeping the product focused, but it is also worrying, as that's a single point of failure. Anything could happen and then the whole project might fall into disrepair.

That factor alone would make me weary of overly relying on Pocketbase. I would hope that if he runs out of time, the project could be handed over to the community, but often the problem is then that we end up with 50 forks, all at different stages of development. I wonder what the best solution to this issue is.
Show HN: I Curated Premium Black Friday Deals for SaaS and Apps
by bfdd | 2025-11-28 13:09:37+00:00
Last Week, I was tired of hunting through scattered sources to find the best Black Friday deals on premium apps and software so I decided to create a centralized directory myself.

Using Claude Code, I vibe coded the entire Black Friday deals directory in just 2 days, and the results have been incredible.

Stack:

Nextjs for Frontend Convex for Database Umami and Posthog for analytics Dodopayment for Payment

In less than a week, it’s attracted 4,000+ visitors, with 500+ coming in just the last 24 hours (Analytic is public on website, so you can verify the traffic yourself :))

The directory features lifetime deals and product bundles on premium apps and tools, curated specifically for developers, creators, and entrepreneurs looking for genuine value.

If you’re hunting for Black Friday deals on premium software, check it out And if I’ve missed any great deals, drop them in the comments.
by 4bpp | 2025-11-28 13:09:43+00:00
If the end result is going to be that the EU turns into Russia or China under the pretext of standing up to them (because apparently building an opaque process that civil society can't keep up with to ram through authoritarian laws is what it takes to be competitive?), then I'd rather they cut out the extra steps and let the Russians/Chinese take over. At least then nobody would be telling me that what I got is the outcome of some sacred democratic process I am obliged to respect.
by anal_reactor | 2025-11-28 13:09:43+00:00
> However, as well as we could go out and play in the street without much concern some years ago and now the streets are for cars that can injure/kill you + other stuff

Tell this to teenagers regularly standing on the street corner in front of my house and being loud.

> the Internet is no longer the same either

Yes, but again, the real danger is having your brain turned into mush by algorithms, not pEdOpHiLeS. And the current social trend is to have even more walled gardens with algorithms.

> but now parents are also people who grew up with the Internet and no longer see it as something new or weird, so they are not as afraid as previous parents were. That means that children are raised without or with much less fear to online dangers.

The opposite. When I was a kid parents had zero knowledge about how computer works and what the internet is, I could browse shady or straight-up illegal websites all I wanted and nobody cared. Nowadays there's huge panic "my child saw a picture of a titty!" because parents are at least somewhat aware that there's shit on the internet. Otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion in the first place.

> But I wanted to point out that using "Nothing bad ever happened to me" is specially dangerous here because we are not even talking about the same scenario.

Okay. Can you point me to some statistics that fear-mongering is beneficial to the society at large? Because news usually paint a picture of the world getting more and more dangerous despite crime in general falling in most developed countries.
by seszett | 2025-11-28 13:09:50+00:00
You don't have to run your own server.

My parents have a domain bought from OVH (they had to move away from their ancient ISP email address) and just use the free email service that goes with it. OVH is big enough that its email servers don't get blocked by the other main providers (it's a different matter if you host your own mail server on OVH servers) and they have not had any delivery problem.

For myself, I run my own mail server and have not had delivery problems for years now (even changing servers, so it's not just a case of IP reputation improving over time).

We do sometimes have delivery problems at work (also running our own mail servers, hosted at Scaleway) but it's to be expected at the kind of volume we have, it stays within quite acceptable levels.
by patcon | 2025-11-28 13:10:19+00:00
LOVE this question! Thanks for asking.

I also like toying with variants of where "essential elements" can live, sometimes in odd places :)

https://x.com/patcon_/status/1963648801962369358

> I have an idea for a quirky event experimenting with the "minimum viable feeling of community", but need to explain some context first. Bear with me...

> [...]

> So here's the event idea: what if someone ran an event where the 2nd rule was "NO INTRODUCTIONS", but only because the 1st rule was "you must arrive having fully memorized ONLY everyone's name and face". Beyond the strange entry requirement, what would such an event feel like?

> And what strange sorts of intimacy might be created by this minimal scaffold of "knowing everyone"... & being in community together? I suspect it might feel like a warm event full of friends, but where everyone had mysteriously forgotten everything they knew about one another :)
by lenkite | 2025-11-28 13:10:32+00:00
In 2010, Africa’s total population was estimated at about ~1.07 billion.

By 2025, the population is estimated at roughly ~1.53 billion.

That means the continent has seen an increase of abou 450-500 million people over merely 15 years! (~44% increase!)

No wonder the forests are disappearing. Without strict birth control and population planning, things will continue to become worse.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314546723_Populatio...

PS: Projected population is over 2.5 billion by 2050!
by qudat | 2025-11-28 13:10:33+00:00
I do the same thing for libraries I’m using in project. It’s a huge power up for code agents.

Like you mentioned, agents are insanely good at grep. So much so that I’ve been trying to figure out how to create an llmgrep tool because it’s so good at it. Like, I want to learn how to be that good at grep, hah.
by pfdietz | 2025-11-28 13:10:37+00:00
If long term storage (like Standard Thermal) comes into play, I could see industrial users decide to just decouple from the grid too (or, use the threat to do so as a means to drive down what they are charged.)

We may see industrial users preposition themselves in locations with ample nearby PV potential. If I were building a factory in the US (or a data center) I would think twice before putting it in a higher population density area.

We may also see local microgrids develop. This would still have distribution costs, but not transmission.
by mschuster91 | 2025-11-28 13:12:56+00:00
> Batteries are easily replacable.

Not in most phones. You always have to mess with glue and unless you take extreme care and caution to remove _all_ pieces of it you will end up with compromised water-tightness, not to mention risking the screen cracking or being exposed to air (ruining OLEDs).

> my main desktop monitor

We were talking about phones. Phones get dropped, scratched by keys, ... the list why phone LCDs/OLEDs can get broken is loooong.
by pradeeproark | 2025-11-28 13:13:05+00:00
Ha, I was working on the same problem and updating my article when this hit. My focus is on making the agent integration more seamless with the tool. Claude offers a fantastic way for this using "skills" and now a "marketplace"

[1] Demo with Claude - https://pradeeproark.github.io/pensieve/demos/

[2] Article about it - https://pradeeproark.com/posts/agentic-scratch-memory-using-...

[3] https://github.com/cittamaya/cittamaya - Claude Code Skills Marketplace for Pensieve

[4] https://claude.com/blog/skills
by throwaway77385 | 2025-11-28 13:13:10+00:00
The most substantial one is a local business directory. It's exactly the right level of medium complexity where Pocketbase shines. It's all the standard stuff:

- User signups and auth

- Stripe subscriptions using different subscription levels

- Business listings with image galleries, editable images

- Map with markers for business locations, tags, filterable business categories & tags

I'd say that the way Pocketbase handles collections, you probably don't want data that is too nested (even though there's a JSON type field, which then allows much deeper nesting).

If you're coming from Firebase, you might be used to infinitely nestable collections, but that's not how it works in Pocketbase. So you could either have a ton of collections or use nested data.

But, if for example, you had multiple clients which then need to hold a bunch of nested data, you couldn't have a 'clients' collections which then holds a bunch of collections within it. It's just one level of 'collections' within which each item then has fields.

This works well at medium complexity, but could get complicated if you had, say, a CMS where you'd want a few levels of nesting.
by saubeidl | 2025-11-28 13:13:14+00:00
The Council is a meeting of the heads of state, all of which are elected in their respective countries.

Your problem is with the leadership of countries, not with the EU as an institution. I agree that it is a problem btw, but I think you got the wrong culprit. This isn't pushed on the states by the EU, this is the states using the EU to push it and launder the bad publicity.
Help Needed: Creating Nano Banana Pro Prompt Library
by krishna-vakx | 2025-11-28 13:13:16+00:00
Hi guy,

I am currently creating a Nano Banana Pro library on https://vakpixel.com. I have just launched it today with a few presets here : https://vakpixel.com/nano-banana-pro-gallery

My main goal is to create a comprehensive library for prompts. Let me know if you have any good prompts I should add to the library. Thanks!
by nuuuwan | 2025-11-28 13:15:25+00:00
# #SriLanka - Flood Map

This is a schematic diagram of river water levels across gauging stations in Sri Lanka.

Data from [@dmc_lk](https://www.dmc.gov.lk/index.php).

Updated whenever new information is released by the DMC, usually every 3 hours.

REAL-TIME MAP: https://github.com/nuuuwan/lk_dmc_vis
by reliablereason | 2025-11-28 13:16:21+00:00
I did some basic calculations to compare the energy in the radiation vs the energy required to grow 10% extra.

- If we assume they are working in the reactor we get radiation levels of something like 1 mGy/hour. But we can prop this up to mabye 500 mGy/hour since i dont know how they grew their culture

- That leads to 0.05 J of extra energy per gram of microbial bio material.

- Energy needed to grow 1g of microbial biomaterial ≈ 3.15 kJ 10% of that is 315 J per gram

The result is that:

The amount of radiation energy available is 4 orders of magnitude too small to power even a 10% growth boost.

Edit: updated with more accurate estimations.
by ghc | 2025-11-28 13:17:11+00:00
There's a pretty long waiting period before it does this. I'm not sure what the time required is, but I think it's at least 3 months. And it only does this if you don't interact with the newsletter at all.

Just speculation, but it's possible if you also use a non-web/non-gmail-app client it might suppress these notifications.
by eladwf | 2025-11-28 13:17:28+00:00
I’ve been experimenting with adding DSP-inspired multirate + LFO modules around GPT blocks and learning the DSP hyperparameters during training. This is only tested on small character-level GPTs (enwik8/text8), so it’s not a SOTA claim, just an exploratory result. In this setting I see ~12-19% lower best val loss and roughly 55-70% fewer FLOPs to reach fixed loss targets vs the same GPT baselines (5 seeds, FLOPs-to-target analysis).

The repo has a detailed README (with math and ablations) plus scripts to reproduce the experiments.
by pfdietz | 2025-11-28 13:17:36+00:00
Well, yes. But the point is that random sampling lets you do it without thinking. Even better, it can sample over multiple spaces at the same time, and over spaces we haven't even yet formalized. "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them." (Whitehead)

An example is something like "pairwise testing" of arguments to a function. Just randomly generating values will hit all possible pairs of values to arguments, again with a logarithmic penalty.
by Anamon | 2025-11-28 13:18:15+00:00
As a lifelong Swiss, I also wanted to post that :)

Direct democracy has been working out pretty darn well for us, for a pretty long time now. The system may seem slow and tedious sometimes, but it's probably mainly responsible for why it seems much less susceptible to the polarisation, demagoguery and authoritarianism we see rising all around us. It's not perfect and a constant work in progress, but I don't know of any other system that has a better track record of ensuring long-term social cohesion and stability.

As for medieval life, I keep remembering an interview with a medical historian. They said that you could imagine it a bit as the reverse of today's mode where most people are usually fine, but occasionally get sick. Back in those days, having some sort of ailment was pretty much the default, and people felt exceedingly lucky to be genuinely healthy for a few weeks.
by tromp | 2025-11-28 13:19:00+00:00
I think it's a little preposterous to conjecture that the inverse of the fine structure constant is "governed" by the expression N^2+C^2 + ((1+sqrt(5))/2)^(N-C) with N=11 and C=4. You can probably find hundreds more approximations by other arbitrary formula of similar complexity, all lacking in explanatory power of why the formula should look like that.
by whizzter | 2025-11-28 13:20:48+00:00
Those "10 year" winters seems to appear every year with producers falling back to burning fossil fuels to keep the grid working.

Now part of that problem is that we more or less constantly export electricity to Germany (but that was because they closed their nuclear plants).

The main problem domestically in Sweden is that 30% of current electricity generation in Sweden is nuclear, but the _newest_ plants are 40 years old, on top of that the electricity generation needs to increase, steel mills de-carbonizing, more electric cars and so on.
by cubefox | 2025-11-28 13:21:17+00:00
The fear-mongering tone is likely due to the fact that this was posted (though probably not written) by a company promoting quantum-safe cloud storage.

Anyway, here is what Scott Aaronson recently said about quantum computing progress:

> Indeed, given the current staggering rate of hardware progress, I now think it’s a live possibility that we’ll have a fault-tolerant quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm before the next US presidential election. And I say that not only because of the possibility of the next US presidential election getting cancelled, or preempted by runaway superintelligence! (...)

> To clarify — if, before the 2028 presidential election, a fully fault-tolerant Shor’s algorithm was used even just to factor 15 into 3×5, I would view the “live possibility” here as having come to pass.

> The point is, from that point forward, it seems like mostly a predictable matter of adding more fault-tolerant qubits and scaling up, and I find it hard to understand what the showstopper would be.

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9325
by benjiro | 2025-11-28 13:22:40+00:00
I assume he is referring to master's holding all the primary data, and you threat replica's as backups. So if a master goes down, a replica becomes the master that handles all the data. You never get inconstancies between write and read data, as its all in the same node.

Issue is that you give up 1x, 2x ... extra read capability, depending on your RF=x. But you gain strong consistency without the overhead of dealing with eventual consistency or full consistency over multiple nodes (with stuff like raft).

1.

If you use something like Raft to ensure that you get full consistency, your writes slow down as its multiple trips of network communication per write (insert/update/delete). That takes 2 network operations (send data, receive acknowledgement, send confirm to commit, receive confirm it committed).

2.

if you use eventual consistency you have fast writes, and only 1 hop ((send data, receive acknowledgement). But like the article talked about, if you write something and at also try to read that data... It can happen that the server writing is slower, then the next part in your code that is reading. So you write X = X + 1, it goes to server A, but your connection now ready from server B = 1 because the change has not yet been committed on Server B.

3.

the above mentioned comment simply assume there is one master over your data, its server A. You write AND read from server A all the time. Any changes to the data are send to Server B, but only as a hot standby. Advantage is that writes are fast, and very consistent. Disadvantage is that you can not scale your reads beyond server A.

----

Now imagine that your data is cut int smaller pieces, or you do not write sequentially like 1 2 3 ... but write with hash distribution, where a goes to server 2, b goes to server 3, f goes to server 2 ...

It really depends on your workload what is better in the combination of what server setup your running, single node, sharded, replicated sharded, distributed seq, ...

The DB field is complex ...
by georgehopkin | 2025-11-28 13:22:57+00:00
The world’s most advanced artificial intelligence systems are being easily manipulated into generating malware and bomb-making instructions simply by asking them to rhyme.

A new study by DEXAI – Icaro Lab and Sapienza University of Rome reveals that “adversarial poetry” functions as a universal master key against AI safety filters, successfully bypassing guardrails in 62 per cent of cases across 25 frontier models.
by qudat | 2025-11-28 13:23:05+00:00
I’m curious, how do you know it was inspired by tiger beetles impl?

They look very similar so that makes sense, just curious on the order of events.

Also I tried using libxev for a project of mine and found it really broke the zig way of doing things. All these callbacks needed to return disarm/rearm instead of error unions so I had to catch every single error instead of being able to use try.

I could have reworked it further to make try work but found the entire thing very verbose and difficult to use with 6 params for all the callback functions.

Thankfully my use case was such that poll() was more than sufficient and that is part of zigs posix namespace so that was what I went with.
by EdwardCoffin | 2025-11-28 13:23:09+00:00
Even if that's the intended meaning of literally, it is still a reckless exaggeration. I'm pretty sure that Stephenson's endings are no more abrupt than some of Shakespeare's (check out Hamlet and Macbeth) or some of Frank Herbert's (see Dune and Children of Dune), and I never hear anyone go out of their way to describe either of them as being unable to write endings.
by lan321 | 2025-11-28 13:23:15+00:00
This gets me wondering, who does the cleaning at data centers and such? Do you need to do background checks to swing the mop in there? Is there a market for high clearance cleaning personnel? (like with the extended PSP in CH)

My hunch is telling me there could be a couple positions with decent money (by normal person standards) for little work in that direction. Wouldn't be the first time I've been wrong though.
by xpe | 2025-11-28 13:24:47+00:00
> The observation on these oligopolies, that are now larger than some states is, that they seem to lack in their strategic reasoning and are more built on vibes of their leader…

Yes, there are several problems with oligopolies and monopolies. You referred to one: a kind of blinkered irrationality. Also, capable and strategic self-interest can threaten free markets.

I don’t expect readers here to have the equivalent of a US bachelor degree in economics (though I think this is likely to be a valuable skillset to learn in one’s free time).

Still, I’m hoping they can recognize when they’re stepping into an unfamiliar realm and pay attention to the feeling of “seems like economists are using certain words in particular ways that I should dig into rather than treat them as known vocabulary.” Achieving this level of self-awareness is probably hard for many. To build a deep sense of intellectual honesty and self-awareness of one’s cognitive limitations, I think one can do worse than working closely and intensely with others who also care about these traits. Mentorship helps.

Back to Econ… It also helps to remember in much of economists, these terms are founded in mathematical models. So the interpretation might be subjective, but the mathematical model (the operations) are formalized.
by jswelker | 2025-11-28 13:25:04+00:00
Dude I don't know what mental foe you are arguing against here. I am not saying porn is evil or whatever you think.

I _am_ ready to discuss banning Facebook and Twitter and TikTok. I just extend that to Pornhub and OnlyFans too. Not saying you shouldn't be able to buy videos of whatever your heart desires. Just the free ad driven platforms and the parasocial OF type platforms.
by Amezarak | 2025-11-28 13:25:16+00:00
This is often the case. In the absence of clear, overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I find it best to accept what ancient writers say. In this case, Herodotus wrote about cats in Egypt and clearly thought them a fascinating novelty. If a well-traveled Greek from Halicarnassus thought that cats required several paragraphs of description and were something he specially associated with Egypt, it would seem pretty likely that a) cat domestication occurred in Egypt based on his full description and b) domesticated cats did not spread out of Egypt until quite late.

This happens again and again because nobody can make a career out of saying "yes, Herodotus/Thucydides/Polybius/etc were right." Well, at least not until many other people spend their careers writing about how they were wrong.

One fascinating passage in Herodotus's description mentions that cats were attracted to fire and would sometimes run into them and die. My edition describes this in a footnote as a ludicrous embellishment. I agreed...until I dated a girl who told me (unprompted, never having heard this) how her pet cat had done exactly this.