MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-11-02 13:11:44+00:00
Ideally, you have a separate docker container for each process (i.e. a separate container for the ssh service, one for cron etc). The text editor can be installed if it's needed - that's not an issue apart from slightly increasing the container size. Most of the time, the monitoring agent would be running on the host machine and setup to monitor aspects of the container - containers should be thought of as running a single process and not as running a VM along with all its services.
by bytefish | 2025-11-02 13:12:11+00:00
It’s great to see Apache Baremaps being mentioned. It’s a great project and I saw its first iterations. Really amazing they have built a community around it.

Although my library in Apache Baremaps probably plays a minor role only (PgBulkInsert for Postgres COPY protocol), it’s great to see it chugging on all this data day by day.
Ask HN: What would your top local-first apps be?
by mactavish88 | 2025-11-02 13:12:22+00:00
Local-first tech has been around since before the internet, and scalable local-first tech has become increasingly accessible due to the hard work of many, many incredibly talented engineers over the years (e.g. via the R&D from Martin Kleppmann and the team at Ink and Switch).

What are your top 3 apps that're currently primarily cloud-based that you'd much rather see become local-first? (i.e. cloud-optional)
by graemep | 2025-11-02 13:12:24+00:00
I would love to see that happen, but its not going to.

It is the people with basic needs who need to stick to the mainstream stuff because they can get support and it does what they expect. People need bank and other complex websites to work. They want to watch online video. Kids will need educational apps.

Also do not make assumptions about elderly people. Not long ago I met a woman (guess in her 70s?) who used to write embedded software for nuclear reactors. I have known many people or similar or greater age who need quite complex stuff.

Its the geeks who can manage with the non-mainstream stuff.
by latexr | 2025-11-02 13:12:50+00:00
> Because nobody actually wants a "web app". People want food, love, sex or: solutions.

Talk about a nonsensical non-sequitur, but I’ll bite. People want those to be deterministic too, to a large extent.

When people cook a meal with the same ingredients and the same times and processes (like parameters to a function), they expect it to taste about the same, they never expect to cook a pizza and take a salad out of the oven.

When they have sex, people expect to ejaculate and feel good, not have their intercourse morph into a drag race with a clown half-way though.

And when they want a “solution”, they want it to be reliable and trustworthy, not have it shit the bed unpredictably.
by frm88 | 2025-11-02 13:12:58+00:00
Wow! This has aged really, really badly. 50 years and many billions of dollars later and we're neither on the Moon or Mars or have significantly enhanced the distribution of food to those in need, let alone international cooperation.

Higher food production through survey and assessment from orbit, and better food distribution through improved international relations, are only two examples of how profoundly the space program will impact life on Earth.

As good counters go, this underperforms.
by hollerith | 2025-11-02 13:13:32+00:00
Yes, the US was involved in the coup in Iran, but again not as part of some plan to enrich the US. (They didn't want the Communists in control in Tehran and they didn't want Soviet warships and Soviet shipping in general to be able to operate from Iranian ports.)

Since the world is complicated and people are creative and opportunistic about how they try to make money, certain American individuals and certain small conspiracies of Americans probably tried to make money off of the US's interventions in other countries, but the US government as a whole basically never has -- at least not in the last 100 years.

While the US economy was dependent on oil from the Persian Gulf (approximately from 1957 to 2020) it used military force and pressure on governments to ensure American companies could buy Persian Gulf oil, but those American companies always paid the going price for the oil: Washington never tried to arrange so that any American interest got oil from overseas for free or for less than the fair price for the oil.

So I still haven't seen any example in this thread of Washington's extracting any wealth from the rest of the world other than through free trade, i.e., trade in which the non-American half of the trade entered into the trade voluntarily. (And again the US economy doesn't even need to engage in any free trade with the rest of the world for the US to be the richest country.)
by ethmarks | 2025-11-02 13:14:37+00:00
That's a great point, and I think I was being vague before.

To clarify, I was making a broad statement about automation in general. Running an automated loom is more efficient in every way that getting humans to weave cloth by hand. For most tasks, automation is more efficient.

However, there are tasks that humans can still do more efficiently than our current engines of automation. Go is a good example because humans are really good at it and it AlphaGo can only sometimes beat the top players despite massive training and inference costs.

On the other hand, I would dispute that LLMs fall into this category, at least for most tasks, because we have to factor in marginal setup costs too. I think that raising from infancy all of the humans needed to match the output speed of an LLM has a greater cost than training the LLM. Even if you include the cost of mining the metal and powering the factories necessary to build the machines that the LLMs run on. I'm not 100% confident in this statement, but I do think that it's much closer than you seem to think. Supporting the systems that support the systems that support humans takes a lot of resources.

To use your blueberries example, while the cost of keeping the blueberries cold isn't much, growing a single serving of blueberries requires around 95 liters of water[1]. In a similar vein, the efficiency of the human brain is almost irrelevant because the 20 watts of energy consumed by the brain is akin from a resource consumption perspective to the electricity consumed by the monitor to read out the LLM's output: it's the last step in the process, but without the resource-guzzling system behind it, it doesn't work. Just as the monitor doesn't work without the data center which doesn't work without electricity, your brain doesn't work without your body which doesn't work without food which doesn't get produced without water.

As sramam mentioned, these kinds of utilitarian calculations tend to seem pretty inhuman. However, most of the time, the calculations turn out in favor of automation. If they didn't, companies wouldn't be paying for automated systems (this logic doesn't apply to hype-based markets like AI. I'm talking more about markets that are stably automated like textile manufacturing). If you want an anti-automation argument, you'll have a better time arguing based on ethics instead of efficiency.

Again, thanks for the Go example. I genuinely didn't consider the tasks where humans are more efficient than automation.

[1]: https://watercalculator.org/water-footprint-of-food-guide/
by mrbombastic | 2025-11-02 13:14:38+00:00
https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/2025-Intern...

The state dept report from 2025 found that fentanyl basically only comes to the US through Mexico and Venezuela is not a major player.

I find your point 5 to be particularly anti-democratic to be honest, we don’t know because Trump doesn’t think us nor Congress need to know beyond some tweets on Truth Social.

I am sorry for your loss, I have some friends who passed the same way, and it is horrible.
by oceanplexian | 2025-11-02 13:15:06+00:00
If your company built a super intelligent LLM, say that could find Alpha in the financial markets, would you make it public to anyone with a ChatGPT subscription?

Of course not! They would use it to trade and would keep it concealed while throwing the public a bone with a less advanced version. Same thing applies as AGI or even as code gen gets better.
by chiph | 2025-11-02 13:15:18+00:00
3M was indeed a big player in those markets. I purchased both 5.25" and 3.5" 3M floppies and they were good quality and reliable.

I expect they left the market because of declining use and the entrance of much cheaper foreign manufacturers. I expect they didn't enter the flash memory market as they had no existing manufacturing base for them to build on. They would have had to rebrand another firm's chips and circuit boards.
by card_zero | 2025-11-02 13:15:37+00:00
> Mr. SIMMONDS asked the Minister of Transport whether he is aware that the erection of signs bearing the letter C is inadequate to differentiate between controlled and uncontrolled pedestrian crossings; and whether in the interests of public safety, he will have these two types of crossings painted upon the roadway in an unquestionably distinctive manner?

> The MINISTER of TRANSPORT (Mr.Hore-Belisha) The present arrangements are experimental, and I am watching them closely with a view to making such alterations as experience may show to be desirable in the interests of public safety.

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard//commons/1934/jul...

I think "controlled" means drivers are legally obliged to stop to let pedestrians cross.
by Mountain_Skies | 2025-11-02 13:15:37+00:00
Developers give away their time and brain power for free. Apparently technical writers are less inclined to do so. It's not like developers are unique. Lawyers do probono work, doctors and dentists volunteer at community clinics, accountants offer free tax prep to people in disadvantaged communities, etc. Maybe there are people who would be willing to take developer documentation of FOSS products and turn them into user friendly documents. Pretty sure that already exists for some projects, though some of that might be paid work (which sometimes is true for development work too).
by simonask | 2025-11-02 13:16:02+00:00
If that's all you need, the state of the art is very available already through the JVM and the .NET CLR, as well as a handful others depending on your use case. Most of those also come with decent languages, and great facilities to leverage the GC to its maximum.

But GCs aren't magic and you will never get rid of all the overhead. Even if the CPU time is not noticeable in your use case, the memory usage fundamentally needs to be at least 2-4x the actual working set of your program for GCs to be efficient. That's fine for a lot of use cases, especially when RAM isn't scarce.

Most people who use C or C++ or Rust have already made this calculation and deemed the cost to be something they don't want to take on.

That's not to say Fil-C isn't impressive, but it fills a very particular niche. In short, if you're bothering with a GC anyway, why wouldn't you also choose a better language than C or C++?
by numpad0 | 2025-11-02 13:16:26+00:00
There were no activation for GSM phones. You insert a whitelisted SIM and the phone would just register(login) to the network. The network doesn't care. Phone might care, but it's processed instantly on the modem. It was Apple that added online "activation" gimmick to it.

"CDMA" networks built on proprietary Qualcomm cdma2000 standards used its equivalent of eSIM, and that was why it required special trusted phones for OTA programming. It was also used by Verizon which IIUC had better coverage than others so lots of people would have had memories of having to go through something akin to Apple activation.
by johnisgood | 2025-11-02 13:16:41+00:00
https://wiki.minix3.org/doku.php?id=www:documentation:featur... seems pretty appealing to me.

Read more about it here: https://wiki.minix3.org/doku.php?id=releases:3.2.0:developer...

> In Minix as a microkernel, device drivers are separate programs which send and receive message to communicate with the other operating system components. Device drivers, like any other program, may contain bugs and could crash at any point in time. The Reincarnation server will attempt to restart device drivers when it notices they are abruptly killed by the kernel due to a crash, or in our case when they exit(2) unexpectedly. You can see the Reincarnation Server in the process list as rs, if you use the ps(1) command. The Reincarnation Server sends keep-a-live messages to each running device driver on the system periodically, to ensure they are still responsible and not i.e. stuck in an infinite loop.

The point is that when failures do occur, they can be isolated and recovered from without compromising system stability. In a monolithic kernel, a faulty driver can crash the entire system; in a microkernel design, it can be restarted independently, preserving uptime and isolating the fault domain.

Hardware glitches, transient race conditions, and unforeseen edge cases are unavoidable at scale. A microkernel architecture treats these as recoverable events rather than fatal ones.

This is conceptually similar to how the BEAM VM handles supervision in Erlang and Elixir; processes are cheap and disposable, and supervisors ensure that the system as a whole remains consistent even when individual components fail. The same reasoning applies in OS design: minimizing the blast radius of a failure is often more valuable than trying to prevent every possible fault.

In practice, the "driver resurrection" model makes sense in environments where high availability and fault isolation are critical, such as embedded systems, aerospace, and critical infrastructure. It's the same philosophy that systems like seL4 and QNX goes by.

Do you understand now?
by exasperaited | 2025-11-02 13:17:20+00:00
> I feel or have the fear that the world will tumble and crack under the sheer amount of code we produce and can’t be maintained because at one point no one human can understand all the stuff that was written.

IMO the best advice in life is try not to be fearful of things that happen to everyone and you can't change.

Good news! What you are afraid of will happen, but it'll happen to everyone all at once, and nothing you can do can change it.

So you no longer need to feel fear. You can skip right on over to resignation. (We have cookies, for we are cooked)
Show HN: I built a free tool to find the best way to stretch your PTO
by waqar199 | 2025-11-02 13:18:46+00:00
I built this because I got tired of manually checking calendars to figure out how to make my PTO line up with weekends and public holidays.

Holiday Optimizer helps you find the best way to stretch your time off — turning a handful of vacation days into proper breaks.

The first version got more traction than I expected, so I rebuilt it. Not a patch — just a cleaner, faster version with a few ideas people asked for.

What’s new:

• Flexible timeframes — plan for 2025, 2026, or any custom 12-month window (useful if your company runs on a fiscal year)

• Personal options — add booked vacations and customize your weekends (Fri–Sat, Sun–Mon, etc.)

• Cleaner flow — faster, tidier, and mobile-friendly

Still does the basics:

• Add company days off (summer Fridays, winter shutdowns)

• Combine public holidays + PTO for longer runs

• Automatically skips past dates so every suggestion is actually bookable

In my own setup (15 PTO days + 12 public holidays + 7 company days), the tool found a way to reach 56 total days off in 2026. That’s just one example — your number will depend on your country’s holidays and any company-specific days off. Some will get more, others less, but it’s interesting to see what’s possible when you map it out.

It’s free and runs in the browser: https://holiday-optimizer.com

Would love feedback on edge cases, performance, or any odd calendar setups it doesn’t handle well.
by maddmann | 2025-11-02 13:19:14+00:00
I really enjoyed reading this. One thought I had on the issue of paths in Claude.md

My concern with hardcoding paths inside a doc, it will likely become outdated as the codebase evolves.

One solution would be to script it and have it run pre commit to regenerate the Claude.md with the new paths.

There probably is potential for even more dev tooling that 1. Ensure reference paths are always correct, 2. Enforces standard for how references are documented in Claude.md (and lints things like length)

Perhaps using some kind of inline documentation standard like jsdoc if it’s a ts file or a naming convention if it’s an Md file

Example:

// @claude.md // For complex … usage or if you encounter a FooBarError, see ${path} for advanced troubleshooting steps
by mbrock | 2025-11-02 13:19:41+00:00
I don't understand the need to hammer in the point that Fil-C is only valuable for this tiny, teeny, irrelevant microscopic niche, while not even talking about what the niche is? To be clear, the niche is rebuilding your entire GNU/Linux userland with full memory safety and completely acceptable performance, tomorrow, without rewriting anything, right? Is this such a silly little idiosyncratic hobby?
by mauvehaus | 2025-11-02 13:19:57+00:00
On the other hand, I'm impressed that a company is owning up to the problem. Is it a dumb problem to have? Definitely. Are they the only ones to have it? Almost certainly not.

People are going to use the tools at their disposal, and they aren't all going to learn their tools at a high level. Think of every insane misuse of Excel you've ever heard of, for instance.

IT has the choice in this case to mitigate, or limit the access to the tools. Choosing mitigation prevents the growth of shadow IT and helps ensure that IT remains a trusted partner and not an obstacle to be worked around. This reflects well on the company, especially if they then go and provide better training to their users as well.
by gausswho | 2025-11-02 13:19:59+00:00
I am sorry to hear you lost someone to Fentanyl. It really is wreaking havoc upon American society.

In the majority of cases (not to assume the one you experienced) this is but a new variant of 'slow suicide', alongside excessive drinking, gambling, various forms of risk seeking.

It's not enough for me to agree that making a new Vietnan is 'something we've got to do'. The scars of America's war adventures are widely visible and part of the reason we uniquely suffer from these slow suicides.

Blowing up other citizens is easy (at first). Not unlike the addicts this purports to protect, this administration thinks this one quick fix they don't want you to know about will cure our ails. Unfortunately the something we can do (must do) is hard. It means addressing why American society is increasingly disenfranchised, lonely, and unhappy.
by tim333 | 2025-11-02 13:19:59+00:00
That kind of fits with Altman saying they put them in because users liked them (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/curtwoodward_chatgpt-em-dash-...)

I guess in the past if you'd shown me a passage with em dashes I'd say it looks good because I associate it with the New Yorker and Economist, both of which I read. Now I'd be a bit more meh due to LLMs.
by neilv | 2025-11-02 13:20:02+00:00
> > people who are genuinely enthusiastic

> This seems absurdly difficult to measure well and gameable in its own way.

True, and it is gamed currently (some prep books tell you to feign enthusiasm).

But let's whimsically say that the hypothetical of software development no longer being the go-to easy lots-of-money career meant that the gaming people would go to some other field instead, leaving you with only the people who really want to do this job.
by timenotwasted | 2025-11-02 13:21:29+00:00
I had an opportunity to work with OSM data (nowhere close to something like FlightAware would need) at the beginning of the year and this comment put into words something I felt deeply at that time — "OSM is amazing, but as a global project with thousands of contributors, its data can be... quirky.". I have tons respect for this kind of stuff after working on that project and seeing the massive amount of time that gets invested to make things look correct for the use. It's the quintessential if nobody notices then you've done your job extremely well.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-11-02 13:21:40+00:00
What's up with the images that are supposed to appear in the article? They appear to be coded to load from "./images/containerd-high-disk-io-iotop.png", but https://sealos.io/blog/images/containerd-high-disk-io-iotop.... and https://sealos.io/images/containerd-high-disk-io-iotop.png both fail.

(And indeed, the images are broken in Firefox and Edge. Is there another browser where they're not broken?)
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-11-02 13:21:44+00:00
> I think you're forgetting to control for the fact that the former would be severely punished for doing so, and the latter would be severely punished for not doing so? > What if you paid them equally to do the same things?

I think the larger point is that rewarding bombing, or paying bank officers to evict people from their homes is how the superorganism functions. Your counter examples are like saying 'what if fire was cold instead of hot', well then it wouldn't be fire anymore.
by DonHopkins | 2025-11-02 13:21:57+00:00
Well if you write paragraphs of redundant repetitive parenthetical text yourself (like I tend to do), that meanders around and repeats the point again and again (oh there I go again), like both you and I obviously do (and I'm doing now), then LLMs can be useful for condensing and sharpening it.

For example, your post could have been just one paragraph and said the same thing. Do you purposefully write so verbosely as a virtue signal of authenticity?

And no, readers can't just ask the LLM to reproduce the same slop, because they don't have the verbose, redundant (there I go again) original source text that it's condensing. And even if they did, they would not bother reading it, because it's tl;dr and full of typos.

Nobody wants to read pages of repetitive human generated slop, either.

PS:

>I thought my english was fine but then somebody pointed it out and I try to fix my grammar and now its second nature to me writing.

Since you asked for somebody to point it out:

Use it's when it's a contraction for "it is" or "it has," and use its when it's a possessive pronoun showing ownership. A helpful trick is to try replacing the word with "it is" or "it has" in the sentence; if it still makes sense, use "it's".

Full disclosure, in case you can't tell: the paragraph above was LLM generated. Did you find it helpful, was it tl;dr, or did you dislike "its" style?
by Vasbarlog | 2025-11-02 13:22:12+00:00
You realise that killing people without even identifying them first, and even going as far as invading a foreign country is not a solution in any shape or form. It’s not a ”something”.

If the market for fentanyl is there, the drug will come. And one of the reasons the market became so big because of all the legal opioid drugs being so broadly prescribed.
by dwood_dev | 2025-11-02 13:22:17+00:00
Let me preface this one with the statement that I am completely against regime change wars.

This is one scenario where it might actually have a positive outcome. Maduro looks to have barely won his reelection in 2018. The 2024 election he lost, badly. All the individual precinct results had him at 30-40%. Conveniently, the central election database was "hacked" and they lost all the final numbers. But not to worry, Maduro definitely won!

Was the CIA/USAID involved? Almost certainly, and in 2018 it was barely hidden. The U.S. has been meddling in Venezuela long before Chavez came to power, and has not helped the situation in any way.

Even given all that, the Venezuelan people want Maduro gone. The help of the U.S. to remove the regime might actually have a positive end. This isn't like other countries where the U.S. foisted democracy upon a population that had never experienced it. Venezuela has been imploding, for years. Nearly 8 million people have left in the last decade. The diaspora represents nearly 1/4 of all Venezuelans.