MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by spwa4 | 2025-11-26 19:34:01+00:00
* The step in front of this query created updates to policies. It should have been limited in the number of changes it would do at once (and ideally per hour and per day and so on), and if it goes over that limit, stop updating, alert and wait until explicitly unblocked. DO NOT generate invalid config and start using that invalid config, use the previous one that worked and alert.

If this happens during startup use a default one.

That would still create impact (customers and developers would not see updates propagate), but would avoid destroying the service. When it comes to outages, people need to learn to go over what happens in the case of violating an invariant and look at what gets sacrificed in those cases, to make sure the answer isn't "the whole service".

If I get to be impolite, you do this because software architects, as seems to be the case here, often choose "crash and destroy the service" when their invariants are violated instead of "stop doing shit and alert" when faced with an unknown problem, or a problem they can't deal with.

This also requires test-crashing. You introduce an assert? Great! The more the merrier, seriously, you should have lots of them. BUT you will be including a test that the world doesn't end when your assert is hit.
by borski | 2025-11-26 19:34:29+00:00
All of which is more theory. Of course nobody can predict the future. Your argument is essentially “they have enough money and enough ability to attract more that they’ll figure it out,” just like Amazon did, who were also famously unprofitable but could “turn it on at any time.”

FT’s argument is, essentially, “we’re in a bubble and OpenAI raised too much and may not make it out.”

Neither of us knows which is more correct. But it is certainly at least a very real possibility that the FT is more correct. Just like the Internet was a great “game changer” and “bubble maker,” so are LLMs/AI.

I think it’s quite obvious we’re in a bubble right now. At some point, those pop.

The question becomes: is OpenAI AOL? Or Yahoo? Or is it Google?

I don’t think anybody is arguing it’s Pets.com.
by sph | 2025-11-26 19:34:43+00:00
I fondly remember when your presence online was a nickname on IRC and no one cared nor wanted to know about your identity, least of all your sexual preferences. Show your code, who cares if you’re a dog at the keyboard.

Nowadays it’s the opposite. “Hello, I am X, my gender is Y, I am sexually attracted to Z, here is the list of my disorders off the DSM-5. Oh, my political affiliation is W, if you’re on the opposite side kindly sod off.”

Who gives a damn. The hacker ethos is truly dead and buried.
by inetknght | 2025-11-26 19:34:49+00:00
I personally (not professionally) also find the images distracting. But they're not offensive or derogatory.

Would you rather have images of cities, people smiling, and maybe a car or two? Or maybe you want a picture of a green forest or whatever? Those are the same pictures in many businesses' posts but they're also just as irrelevant and therefore just as unprofessional. The contrast is that the business should be professional while this blog post is a personal site.

God forbid someone add their own flair to their own personal opinions. Thankfully God doesn't exist, so it's not forbidden. You're just being rude.

It is a personal blog post. It's just an opinion, man. The topic could be professional, but it isn't. That doesn't make the topic any less interesting.
Show HN: AI-powered storytelling coach for kids (with auto-generated comics)
by 5inGularity | 2025-11-26 19:35:29+00:00
Hi HN - My name is Lalit. I'm a father of 2.

I started building this because my kids were constantly telling me stories, and I realized—they get almost no real feedback on how they're telling them. Storytelling is one of the most important developmental skills, but there's no practical tool that lets kids see their own progress.

The platform analyzes stories using research-backed metrics (narrative structure, vocabulary richness, emotional range, creativity) and generates a comic so kids want to keep telling more. The visualization is the engagement hook; the metrics are the actual value.

It's been live with real users. Early feedback: parents find the metrics reliable, but like most skill development, seeing real progress takes time—weeks/months of storytelling, not days.

I'd love HN's thoughts on whether this framework actually captures what matters in children's storytelling development. Website has a full example you can explore.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-26 19:36:04+00:00
Lots of more countries involved in sending stuff to space :) In 2025, 12 countries (so far): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_in_spaceflight#By_country

Seems like every month there is ~30 launches (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_in_spaceflight#Orbital_la...), November has mostly US and China, but also have (or will have) India, Turkey, Japan, Russia and Italy as countries with launches. Pretty great to see that more nations are getting involved.

Randomly, I stumbled upon the Shijian series of satellites, apparently featuring an arm that could tow other satellites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shijian
by seanw444 | 2025-11-26 19:36:37+00:00
My experience has been the same. Hard drives fail more gracefully than SSDs.

> The vast majority of my SSD failures have been disappear from the bus; lots of people say they should fail read only, but I've not seen it. If you don't have backups, your data is all gone.

I just recovered data a couple weeks ago from my boss's SATA SSD that gave out and went read-only.
by borski | 2025-11-26 19:36:46+00:00
I agree with you. My point was simply that most physicians only prescribe if the potential benefits are obvious and outweigh the potential risks / side effects. Doing nothing is something better than doing something without an obvious benefit.

If you’re obese, have metabolic syndrome, have T2D, or any other number of issues that we’ve seen GLP-1s (or metformin) help with - then the medications can be a godsend.
by moron4hire | 2025-11-26 19:36:47+00:00
This is a classic problem I identify across a wide variety of types of software. I call it "forcing a graph into a tree" and it comes up any time you have something that must be evaluated across multiple axises but the earliest assumptions (now invalidated) about the data restricted it to a tree, or the most really available tools to process it is with tree-like data structures and algorithms.

HTML is a tree. It's really great at trees. But defining a grid layout sometimes requires organizing data by both the rows and the columns. That can't fit into a tree.

I think a lot of people's complaints that "CSS is too complex, why can't we just do this in HTML" would go away if they could understand that CSS--being a rules-based system--can process the graph, but HTML can only ever define a tree. There are things that will just never work in just HTML.

This gets hard because trees are easy for people to understand. We have lots of examples of them: file systems (if you ignore symlinks). Family trees (if you ignore inbreeding). Tree of life taxonomies (if you ignore more than basic undergrad biology). You can probably guess by my caveats how much I feel it is important to study graphs. But graphs are "scary Computer Science" stuff to a lot of people, so they don't take the time to learn.
by alephnerd | 2025-11-26 19:37:14+00:00
Furry content is often deemed NSFW, and it can get annoying for it to be constantly flashed in your face.

Nothing wrong with it, but giving some sort of content warning isn't the worst thing in the world.

Personally, it does get annoying sometimes when two completely unrelated topics are fused into one - personally I'd find this kind of content equally as annoying as that cringe Gen X "Semiconductors with Brittany Spears" shtick, but to each their own.

There is nothing wrong with content flags or warnings, especially for stuff with a sensual or potentially sexual connotation.
Show HN: A daily cybersecurity newsletter that's fun to read
by levberg | 2025-11-26 19:38:12+00:00
Hey HN, I got tired of cybersecurity news reading like a compliance manual written by a sleep-deprived lawyer, so I built Threat Road — a daily, 5-minute, plain-English cybersecurity briefing that’s actually fun.

Would love your feedback, especially from people who do IR, AppSec, dev, ops, or just like watching the internet catch fire in slow motion.

(And if you hate it, tell me why so I can fix it before it becomes another abandoned Substack graveyard.)
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-11-26 19:38:18+00:00
That's a fabulous tale you've told (the notion that there's a bunch of Anthropic leaning sites is my personal favourite) but alas, the article is reporting on a GSBC report which they are justifiably sceptical if, and does not in any way, shape or form represent the FTs beliefs.

AI can both be a transformative technology and the economics may also not make sense.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-11-26 19:38:19+00:00
Nuclear pulse and fission fragment designs require no new physics in the same way that a Saturn 5 didn't require new physics when compared to a Goddard toy rocket.

It's easy until you try to actually build the damn thing. Then you discover it's not easy at all, and there's actually quite a bit of new physics required.

It's not New Physics™ in the warp drive and wormhole sense, but any practical interstellar design is going to need some wild and extreme advances in materials science and manufacturing, never mind politics, psychology, and the design of stable life support ecologies.

The same applies to the rest. Napkin sketches and attractive vintage art from the 70s are a long way from a practical design.

We've all been brainwashed by Hollywood. Unfortunately CGI and balsa models are not reality. Building very large objects that don't deform and break under extremes of radiation, temperature changes, and all kinds of physical stresses is not remotely trivial. And we are nowhere close to approaching it.
by theonething | 2025-11-26 19:38:45+00:00
> GP who is essentially betting on AI producing more jobs for hackers

I'm not clear on the point you're trying to make. My comment was in response to dugidugout's analogy.

If I understand their analogy correctly, developers are the well fed turkeys and one Thanksgiving day, we're all getting slaughtered.

That is not hyperbole and fear mongering to you?
by jononor | 2025-11-26 19:38:47+00:00
If you started with a deep neural network, one can't really use pruning to go all the way down to a parameter count that is directly intepretable (say under 100). One would at least have to try some techniques to get more disentangled representations. But local surrogate models are popular for explainability, see Shap and LIME. For interpretable time series I would encourage to construct features and transformations the old fashioned way, and then learn it all end to end as a differentiable program. Then you can get the best of both worlds.
by paddleon | 2025-11-26 19:39:31+00:00
Tech enabled the horrors of WWI and II, tech directly enabled the Holocast -- IBM built special computers to help the Nazi's more effectively round up the Jews.

Tech also gave us vaccines and indoor plumbing and the clothes I am wearing.

It's the morals and courage to live by those morals which creates good. Progress is by definition towards a goal. If that goal is say

> to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity

and ensure our basic inherent (not government-given) rights to

> life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness

then all good.

If it is to enrich me at the cost of thee, create a surveillance state that rounds up and kills undesirables at scale, destroys our basic inherent rights, then tech not good
by agentifysh | 2025-11-26 19:39:50+00:00
agentic coding seems like its not the top priority but more at capturing the search engine users which is understandable.

still i had high hopes for gemini 3.0 but was let down by the benchmarks i can barely use it in cli however in ai studio its been pretty valuable but not without quirks and bugs

lately it seems like all the agentic coders like claude, codex are starting to converge and differentiated only by latency and overall cli UX and usage.

i would like to use gemini cli more even grok if it was possible to use it like codex
by woolion | 2025-11-26 19:39:58+00:00
I didn't go very far with my own benchmarks because my results were just so bad. But for example, here's a line art with the instruction to color it (I can't remember the prompt, I didn't take notes).

https://woolion.art/assets/img/ai/ai_editing.webp

It's original, ChatGPT, Flux.

Still, you can see that ChatGPT just throw everything out and does not do a minimal attempt at respecting style. Flux is quite bad, but it follows the design much more (although it gets completely confused by it) that it seems that with a whole lot of work you could get something out of it.
by dheera | 2025-11-26 19:40:01+00:00
> It’s proof that humans will build absurdly long-horizon projects anyway

They used to. But these days the people who control the economy and funding for things like this are either politicians interested in 4 year cycles or VCs interested in 5-10 year cycles.

Nobody gives a damn about long horizon stuff anymore. We landed humans on the moon half a century ago, and we still haven't reached Mars. Instead we're building some stupid apps for people who are forced to work 7 days a week in the office on some boring ads optimization algorithm to have someone to walk their dog for them and deliver their groceries for them and monitor their health because they can't get enough exercise (that would solve their health problem the way the body intended) and don't get time to leave the confines of their <strike>jail</strike> office.
by dgunay | 2025-11-26 19:40:04+00:00
> I'm convinced that very few customers think face scanning is an improvement.

But it is. In fact, we were getting a much rawer deal before, as this was data the government already effectively had but we as travellers derived no convenience from it.

The last time I reentered the US though, it was just a quick face scan and I was on my way. I don't know if that was because of the government shutdown or if it's actually SOP now, but either way it was much faster than having a customs agent manually verify my papers.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-11-26 19:40:05+00:00
You're also getting pretty stale instances by the end of the 3 years.

At two difference companies, I've seen a big batch of committed instances finally go off contract, and we replaced them with more modern instances that improved performance significantly while not costing us anything more or even letting us shrink the pool, saving us money.

It's a pain, but auto scaling groups with a couple different spot instance types in it seems to be quasi necessary for getting an ok aws compute value.
by pkaye | 2025-11-26 19:40:08+00:00
I worked on SSD firmware for more than a decade from the early days of SLC memory to TLC memory. SLC memory was so rock solid that you hardly needed any ECC protection. You could go months of use without any errors. And the most common error was erase error which just means to no longer use that back.

But then as the years progressed, the transistors were made smaller and MLC and TLC were introduced all to increase capacity but it made the NAND worse in every other way like endurance, retention, write/erase performance, read disturb. It also makes the algorithms and error recovery process more complicated.

Another difficult thing is recovering the FTL mapping tables from a sudden power loss. Having those power loss protection capacitors makes it so much more robust in every way. I wish more consumer drives included them. It probably just adds $2-3 to the product cost.
by dpark | 2025-11-26 19:40:46+00:00
If the smartest engineers cannot do it, it doesn’t work.

This isn’t even getting to the practical question of whether it’s worth doing, given the significant additional cost. If the smartest folks you can find are not smart enough to use the framework then it’s useless.

Maybe this means the tooling is insufficient. Maybe it means the field isn’t mature enough. Whatever, if you need an IQ two standard deviations above normal and 10x as long it’s not real world useable today.
by jacquesm | 2025-11-26 19:40:48+00:00
> I don’t understand why anyone should want this.

That's ok, but then you should bow out of the conversation, which is between people that do understand why anyone should want this.

To have predictable behavior is a must have in some industries, less in others. At the level of infrastructure that is deemed critical by some - and I'm curious what JGC's position on this is - the ability to avoid this kind of outage carries a lot of value. The fact that you do not see that CF has achieved life-critical reach is one that tells me that most of this effort is probably going to waste, but I trust that John does see it my way and realizes that if there are ways to avoid these kind of issues they should be researched. Because service uptime is something very important to companies like Cloudflare.

Boeing managed to kill a bunch of people with shitty business practices, not with shitty software, the software did what it was built to do. It is the whole process around that software as well as the type certification process and regulatory oversight that failed dramatically.
by rf15 | 2025-11-26 19:42:00+00:00
I've used AI assitance in coding for a year before I quit. The hardest part was a day when the services where unexpectedly down, and working felt like I was amputated in some way. Nothing works, my usual movement does not produce code. That day I realised these AI integrations take away my knowledge and skill of the matter and is just maximising the easiest and fastest part of software development: writing code.
Show HN: Database-replicator – Replicate any DB to PostgreSQL
by taariqserendb | 2025-11-26 19:42:15+00:00
Repo: https://github.com/serenorg/database-replicator

Open-source CLI (Rust, Apache 2.0) that replicates SQLite, MySQL, MongoDB, or PostgreSQL to any PostgreSQL target. Selective table filtering, continuous sync for PG→PG, checkpointing for interrupted transfers.

cargo install database-replicator database-replicator init \ --source "mysql://readonly@prod:3306/db" \ --target "postgresql://admin@replica:5432/db" \ --include-tables "orders,products"

Backstory: We're building SerenDB, a Neon-PostgreSQL fork with native micropayments for AI agent data access. Our early users kept saying, "We're not migrating our production database for LLMs." Fair point. So we built this replicator instead—keep your existing infra, create a filtered replica for AI queries, drop it when you're done.

- We have an opinion about the future that we are sharing with everyone

1. The future web is agentic as publishers get fed up with training LLMs and not receiving compensation

2. The agentic web will be agents directly querying databases instead of websites.

3. Your data in your database/datalake shouldn't migrate, but replicate, where agents will pay the most for it. "If you want my data, make me an offer I can't refuse!"

Works with any PostgreSQL target, not just ours. PRs welcome, especially for commercial database connectors (Oracle, SQL Server, etc.).
by alephnerd | 2025-11-26 19:42:17+00:00
> Why is demand extremely high...

Data Center projects that were announced a couple months ago are now beginning to be built out.

Additionally, there have been some supply chain issues the past few years due to trade wars between the US, SK, and China [0], along with the earthquake that hit Taiwan last year [1].

Generally, you feel the pain of supply chain issues within 6-18 months of the initial incident, which is where we are now at because stockpiles have been reduced significantly.

[0] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20230310PD204/chip-war-memor...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/technology/micron-flags-hit-its-dram...
by layer8 | 2025-11-26 19:42:38+00:00
Maybe not in a few thousand years, but given the deceleration of the Earth’s rotation around its axis, mostly due to tidal friction with the moon, in a couple hundred thousand years our leap-day count will stop making sense. In roughly a million years, day length will have increased such that the year length will be close to 365.0 days.

I therefore agree that a trillion years of accuracy for broken-down date calculation has little practical relevance. The question is if the calculation could be made even more efficient by reducing to 32 bits, or maybe even just 16 bits.
by itrash | 2025-11-26 19:42:42+00:00
We were a little team, doing the API dev, the infra, the hardware and countless things. The product is improving and it was impossible to even imagine remoing the case as we spent so many time wiring everything, going to DC and setting up everything. Yes the team is actually doing all of this, even going to DC installing the macs in the racks.

But I agree that for a big scale, this is a good solution. (cf: github)
by theturtlemoves | 2025-11-26 19:42:44+00:00
I didn't say it felt natural haha. It was so incredibly difficult. But I was, what, ten, twelve? I fell into those holes so often but I kept going at it until I could run those levels. Difficult, yes, unnatural, yes, but also very satisfying to master (in the context of being that young, I never managed to get a full score or get all the gems and whatnot, so it wasn't exactly mastery, but I could eventually get through the level. Good times)
by renewiltord | 2025-11-26 19:42:53+00:00
It's just that when something is widespread enough you can actually study other effects it has. Sort of like how psilocybin and weed had all these other effects but we couldn't study them till they got a little less criminalized. All sorts of shit does stuff, but we grandfathered in substances and froze everything for a while. Then COVID came along and a bunch of people started doing telemedicine and before you know it compounding pharmacies were handing out GLP-1RAs as a substitute for the phentermine they were passing out. Not scheduled, absolutely effective, great stuff.

Then with all that use in the wild you could rock and roll. Only problem is that off-label use like me with my retatrutide makes some population studies less effective than before.
by jiggawatts | 2025-11-26 19:42:56+00:00
To be fair, that’s a rare exception. Most government tenders are quite narrow in scope.

What I have found is that they’re written by people with zero knowledge of either the solution requirements or the technology! Combine that with zero profit motive and zero personal consequences, and you can end up with total nonsense even on projects with billion dollar budgets.

A state school department here put out a tender for wiring over two thousand schools with fibre, but the way the contract was stipulated only a single applicant could win the contract and most handle every single location across a thousand miles of territory. Hence, only the largest incumbent telco could possibly win… which they did… at 15x the cost of a bunch of local contractors doing the work. This cost something like a billion dollars to taxpayers.

The excuse of the guy writing the tender was “it’s easier for me to get one contract signed than fifty.”

He’s a public servant getting paid $50K. He’s got nothing else on, no other pressing needs or distractions, but he’s too busy, you see? So much easier to waste a billion dollars to save himself a few months of effort.
by zX41ZdbW | 2025-11-26 19:42:57+00:00
Interesting how it compares with the ClickHouse implementation, which uses a lookup table: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/blob/master/src/Com...

So that a day number can be directly mapped to year, month, and day, and the calendar date can be mapped back with a year-month LUT.