MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by imiric | 2025-11-25 13:01:43+00:00
> The Unix philosophy is not an end goal neither. It's not even something well defined.

You're right. But what I take issue with is that systemd authors deliberately decide to go against it. We know because there are other init systems that do follow these design principles much more closely.

Of course, an init system is not trivial, and is a special program that must be given additional permissions over most user space programs. But the problem with systemd is that it's not just an init system. It is a collection of tools that also manages logging, networking, DNS resolution, containers, and a bunch of other system tasks, which, in my opinion, it has no business managing. When you add to this the fact that these programs are all interdependent in some way, and that I can't use e.g. `journald` without systemd itself, it really drives the point that this is an attempt to establish a cohesive and centralized system, rather than rely on a collection of independent but composable tools, most of which already exist. So I get the appeal why some people would prefer this, particularly if they're not already experienced with existing tools, but it's also not a surprise why experienced Linux geeks would scoff at this.

In my experience, systemd doesn't give me anything that I can't do well with other tools. And instead of having the choice to use a tool of my preference for each individual task, I'm forced to use a gargantuan system designed by a single group of people. Whether or not this ultimately makes my life easier, it goes against the primary reason why I choose to use Linux in the first place. If I wanted someone else to make decisions about how I use my computer, I have Windows and macOS for that.

Tangentially, this is also why I have a love-hate relationship with NixOS. As much as I appreciate reproducibility, atomic upgrades and rollbacks, and having a fully declarative system, its authors insist on managing every part of my system with Nix, which is completely insane to me. So, for example, it tries to replace every single package manager in existence, whereas I much prefer using something like `mise` to manage my development environments. Technically, I still can and do that, but it's certainly not the "Nix way".

Interoperability and composability are the core tenets of the Unix philosophy IMO. It's this that allows me to use programs written decades ago together with programs written today, without either tool being aware of each other. In contrast, tools that try to take over my machine forcing their own UIs on me—no matter how supposedly superior they might be—are hostile to my overall computing experience.
by aa-jv | 2025-11-25 13:01:51+00:00
Once, back in the woolly days of the Internet and before crypto became a household name, Wired magazine published an article about Phil Zimmermans' work .. and included his phone number at the end of the article, for some strange reason.

I was immediately star-struck, and without even thinking about it, called him up - not really expecting an answer.

He answered, and I was suddenly lost for words. What the heck was I calling him for? I told him, sorry, I just wanted to see if that phone number was real, and whether or not he was really so accessible to the general public to discuss crypto things.

He was very cordial, said yes indeed he enjoyed hearing from people who had constructive ideas about his work, and what was I really interested in. I glibly told him, I was just really testing the phone number - how did he feel about being so contactable - and he replied he had no problem with it whatsoever, and thanks for my call. I stupidly tried to explain to him how important it all was, and bumbled my way out of the call .. and I still, decades later, distinctly remember his chuckle as he put the receiver down on the other end ..
Show HN: BTreePlus – A cache-optimized B+Tree engine for .NET faster than SQLite
by staloriana | 2025-11-25 13:02:02+00:00
I built a small, cache-optimized B+Tree storage engine for .NET called BTreePlus.

The goal wasn’t to build a general database but to explore how far a minimal, modern B+Tree design can go when tuned for CPU-cache behavior, small fixed-size pages, and predictable read/write paths.

In my benchmarks (linked in the repo), BTreePlus shows better throughput than SQLite and Postgres for specific key-value style workloads—mainly:

- single-key point lookups

- sequential inserts with small pages

- read-heavy scenarios without complex SQL layers

I’d love feedback from database and systems engineers on:

- the page layout / split-merge logic

- the latching model

- whether the design avoids classic B-Tree pitfalls

- benchmarking methodology (happy to adjust or rerun)

NuGet: https://www.nuget.org/packages/BTreePlus
by monooso | 2025-11-25 13:02:17+00:00
I don't disagree with your general argument, but I do have a small nitpick with this:

> If nobody can hold you accountable and punish you for it, then it's legal.

Just because someone isn't punished for an act doesn't make the act legal. I think a more accurate description of the behaviour of certain countries is "if you can get away with it, who cares if it's legal."
by carlosjobim | 2025-11-25 13:02:38+00:00
I don't see much value in complaining about something before trying it, before the project has started, when it's just a rumor. Is that an honorable or fulfilling way to spend the limited time we have on earth? Complaining about some product which you will never have any interest of buying, which hasn't even been decided yet?

When will hackers wake up? You are wasting your time being angry at completely meaningless things in this world and complaining about things which don't affect you in the slightest. The clock is ticking, we are all approaching our graves further each day. TICK! TOCK!
by djvdq | 2025-11-25 13:02:46+00:00
I wanted to build a gaming PC around summer, to be able play with my son, but I postponed it for no real reason. I built this PC a 2 weeks ago, so instead of paying 250 pln (~$70 usd) for 32 GB RAM, I paid 899 pln (~$250). Now, exactly the same RAM costs 1099 pln (~$300).
by throwaway2037 | 2025-11-25 13:02:54+00:00
This theory sounds nice, but do you have any sources to share? For example, I assume a fab runs for about 20-30 years. The labor inputs must be very high over this period. Basically, there are no poorly paid people inside a fab. And wouldn't "wildly variable borrowing costs" also affect oil and gas who need to finance the research phase and construction of the plant?
by bradgessler | 2025-11-25 13:03:24+00:00
A big problem with CLI tooling is it starts off seeming like it’s an easy problem to solve from a devs perspective. “I’ll just write a quick Go or Node app that consumes my web app’s API”

Fast forward 12-18 months, after several new features ship and several breaking API changes are made and teams that ship CLIs start to realize it’s actually a big undertaking to keep installed CLI software up-to-date with the API. It turns out there’s a lot of auto-updating infrastructure that has to be managed and even if the team gets that right, it can still be tricky managing which versions get deprecated vs not.

I built Terminalwire (https://terminalwire.com) to solve this problem. It replaces JSON APIs with a smaller API that streams stdio (kind of like ssh), and other commands that control browsers, security, and file access to the client.

It’s so weird to me how each company wants to ship their own CLI and auto-update infrastructure around it. It’s analogous to companies wanting to ship their own browser to consume their own website and deal with all the auto update infrastructure around that. It’s madness.
Show HN: ChimeraDB – Vector search, graph queries and SQL
by machinewriter | 2025-11-25 13:03:33+00:00
I built ChimeraDB to stop juggling three separate databases when building LLM apps. It combines vector embeddings, property graphs, and SQL analytics in a single DuckDB file.

from chimeradb import KnowledgeGraph kg = KnowledgeGraph("my.db") # Semantic search - find by meaning results = kg.search("who works on language models?") # Graph traversal - follow relationships employees = kg.traverse("acme", direction="incoming") # SQL analytics - aggregate data stats = kg.query("SELECT company, COUNT(*) FROM nodes...")

Why it's useful:

- RAG needs semantic search + relationship context

- AI agents need graph traversal + analytical queries

- Combine all three in a single SQL query

Zero infrastructure: One file, runs anywhere, 10-100x faster than SQLite for analytics.

Built on DuckDB + duckpgq + vss extensions. MIT licensed.

pip install chimeradb

GitHub: https://github.com/codimusmaximus/chimeradb
by leo_e | 2025-11-25 13:04:35+00:00
Hard agree. The hidden cost of 'cheap' models is the complexity of the retry logic you have to write around them.

If a cheaper model hallucinates halfway through a multi-step agent workflow, I burn more tokens on verification and error correction loops than if I just used the smart model upfront. 'Cost per successful task' is the only metric that matters in production.
by Ukv | 2025-11-25 13:05:02+00:00
The paper's reasoning appears to be:

1. Creativity = Effectiveness × Novelty, all ranging from 0 to 1

2. In LLM outputs, effectiveness/novelty are negatively correlated (higher-scored continuations have higher effectiveness but lower novelty, and vice versa)

3. "the negative correlation of E[ffectiveness] and N[ovelty] means that Novelty [...] can be expressed as one minus the Effectiveness"

4. So the creatvitiy equation becomes Creativity = Effectiveness × (1 - Effectiveness), which maxes out at 0.25 creativity

5. 0.25 creativity corresponds to the boundary between amateur and professional creativity ("the 4Cs representation of creativity")

But just because there's a negative correlation between E and N does not mean that N = 1 - E. The exact correlation wouldn't matter if these were just arbitrary units with no defined scale or zero-point, but the conclusion rests on referencing "0.25 creativity" against an existing scale to determine its meaning. That there's a negative correlation/trade-off between the two (straying from well-established solutions increases risk of failure) doesn't seem unique to LLMs.
by HeinzStuckeIt | 2025-11-25 13:05:09+00:00
I think the claim that modernity is different is easily defendable. No society during the rest of history had such effective birth control, nor welfare states that removed pressure to produce offspring or even interact so much with family or other members of society. Again, as a man I feel like I am able to live a life very different than I would have been pressured into before, and this surely has ramifications for modern dating and relationships.
by 1dom | 2025-11-25 13:05:44+00:00
I think this is specifically the consequence of smart people working in a bubble: there's no clearly defined problem being solved, and there's no common solution everyone's aiming for, there's just a general feeling of a direction ("AI") along with a pressure to get there before anyone else.

It leads to the false feeling of progress, because everyone thinks they're busy working at the forefront, when in reality, only a tiny handful of people are are actually innovating.

Everyone else (including me and the person you responded to) is just wasting time relearning new solutions every week to "the problem with current AI" .

It's tiring reading daily/weekly "Advanced new solution to that problem we said was the advanced new solution last month", especially when that solution is almost always a synonym of "prompt engineering", "software engineering" or "prompt engineering with software engineering".
by troupo | 2025-11-25 13:05:53+00:00
> There are hundreds minor viral news about a lot of stuff daily. I am not even trying to keep up with it all.

Yup. The gist of my text was that it was viral news, and not Disney owning exclusive copyright on a chunk of human culture for 70 years.

> the ones you keep mentioning are not the stuff I would read or my kids would read.

Yes, because all examples should be 100% directly applicable to you, and you alone, and if a few examples don't, then nothing matters.

> My kids do watch some superheroes, I dont

"It's something my kids would never read but look this is exactly what my kids are interested in but it's completely irrelevant because I, me, I, mine".

And yes Disney is not just superheroes. And for better or worse superheroes are a huge part of the American culture, and Disney owns a huge chunk of it (either through direct ownership of Marvel, or through licenses and deals it got when acquiring US TV and film producers).

> But, Disney is really not necessary and ignoring it is perfectly workable strategy.

Yup. "I never" somehow turned into "my kids watch superheroes" but you didn't even catch on to that.

BTW, if you have favorite movies, a lot of them are owned by Disney. If not by Disney, but then by some other huge conglomerate. The books you read are owned by a few huge publishing houses. Most music you listen to is owned by at most 4 companies etc.

Disney is just a very convenient example.
by anuramat | 2025-11-25 13:07:03+00:00
I believe ADHD might be neutral/beneficial in some environments, and I also am not a big fan of labels; if it has a non-negative impact on your life -- sure, you don't need the meds

but

Until I started doing stims, I was regularly forgetting about food/water until I could barely move, and at one occasion I procrastinated from replying to an email with the offer of my life until the deadline was over. There's a lot that you can explain with "not motivated enough", but these just don't make any sense, right?

You do need some sort of a label to prescribe controlled substances. Even if you forget about the meds, just knowing that it's a pretty common thing and you're not alone is pretty helpful.
by swapnilt | 2025-11-25 13:08:01+00:00
The 'tool use' framing is interesting but feels like a rebranding of what's essentially sophisticated prompt engineering with structured outputs. The real limitation isn't whether Claude can 'use' tools—it's the latency and token overhead. Has anyone benchmarked whether these tool calls are actually faster/cheaper than fine-tuning smaller models with deterministic output schemas? Curious if the 'advanced' framing here is product differentiation or genuine architectural improvement.
by raducu | 2025-11-25 13:08:11+00:00
> in a pre-civilization pre-agrarian world, but ADHD would make pretty much no difference.

I have ADHD and I also have hyperfocus, I think hyperfocus is an advantage in a pre-industrialized world.

As a child I was fascinated with blowguns. After a summer of shooting unripe grapes out of plastic pipe, I could shoot anybody in the forehead from 20 meters away, easily. I shot the blowgun thousands of times a day, it was relentless.

The same when I went fishing, a whole day could vanish and it would feel like a blink of an eye.

I taught myself how to ride a bike and I woke up that night to ride the bike, even though it had a flat tire.

I like to go mushroom hunting, but when I do, I usually like to go alone, I walk for extraordinary distances, rough terrain, I don't get bored, I can literally keep at it for the whole day that people think I'm crazy.

It's a bit like a stimulant induced obsession, but my inner voice recedes far back in my skull, it's an incredible flow state-like feeling.

I'm sure this kind of obsession builds skills and it has to have some benefits in pre-industrial societies.
Show HN: Deft-Intruder – Real-time malware detection daemon for Linux
by 539hex | 2025-11-25 13:08:23+00:00
I built an open-source malware detection daemon that monitors all running processes in real-time using ML + heuristics. No kernel modules or eBPF required.

Key points:

- Polls /proc for new processes (works on any Linux kernel 2.6+)

- Random Forest model trained on EMBER 2018 dataset (2.3M samples)

- Heuristic rules for crypto miners, ransomware, rootkits

- ~20MB RAM, <1% CPU, sub-millisecond scan latency

- Pure C, zero runtime dependencies

- Model embedded directly in binary (50KB)

Why I built this: Existing solutions either require modern kernels (eBPF) or are heavy/proprietary. I wanted something lightweight that works everywhere - servers, containers, old distros.

Detection approach: Extract features from executables (entropy, imports, sections), run ML prediction, apply heuristic rules, combine scores. If above threshold, kill the process.

Happy to discuss implementation details or Linux security in general.
by gyulai | 2025-11-25 13:08:30+00:00
I was very much the kind of student who didn't perform well under exam-taking pressure. For marked work that I did outside of school, it was straight-As for me. For written exams performed under time pressure and oral examinations (administered without advance notice), it was very much hit-and-miss.

If my son should grow up to run into the same kinds of cognitive limitations, I really don't know what I will tell him and do about it. I just wish there was a university in a Faraday cage somewhere where I could send him, so that he can have the same opportunities I had.

Fun fact on the side: Cambridge (UK) getting a railway station was a hugely controversial event at the time. The corrupting influence of London being only a short journey away was a major put-off.
by ben_w | 2025-11-25 13:09:10+00:00
> and they still can't refrain from feeding me false info

If that's your metric, and even then only if you've got a boolean yes/no measurement, then I agree.

If you measure "false info" as a percent, they're better. If you measure scores on IQ tests, on general knowledge, on exams, on the size of a code problem they can write before they have a 20% chance of failure, on the quality of translations they make, on the new modalities like being able to both consume and respond with images, on mathematical olympiad questions, then they're significantly better.

Unfortunately, we can tell by the general public reaction (not just you) that even all those things combined still don't fully capture what normal people mean by "intelligence".

> They are useless to me because I will take more time checking their output than I will just doing the task myself.

What size problem do you give them? I use them in software, and try to keep each single task I give them to ones which would take a human 90 minutes. I can check the quality of an attempt at a human-would-take-90-minutes-to-do task in about 5 minutes.

When I've accidentally let an LLM do bigger tasks than that, then the difficulty of checking goes way up and the quality of the output goes way down.

Conveniently, one of the tasks that generally takes a human less than 90 minutes is breaking down a bigger task in to sub-tasks that themselves take less than 90 minutes. Fail do do this and I get exactly what you experience.
by seidleroni | 2025-11-25 13:09:26+00:00
The author actually discusses the results of the paper. He's not some rando but a Wharton Professor and when he is comparing the results to a grad student, it is with some authority.

"So is this a PhD-level intelligence? In some ways, yes, if you define a PhD level intelligence as doing the work of a competent grad student at a research university. But it also had some of the weaknesses of a grad student. The idea was good, as were many elements of the execution, but there were also problems..."
by ArcHound | 2025-11-25 13:10:11+00:00
I am thinking about the last entry. I'll be addressing them in this response.

If you're searching for emotional safety, you probably have some unmet needs.

Fortunately, there's one place where no one else has access - it's within you, within your thoughts. But you need to accept yourself first. Relying on a third party (even AI) will always have you unfulfilled.

Practically, this means journalling. I think it's better than AI, because it's 100% your thought rather than an echo of all society.
by swapnilt | 2025-11-25 13:10:15+00:00
The framing here is typically optimistic. Three years in, we're seeing AI primarily used for homework completion (defeating the stated purpose of learning) and administrative busywork. The real implication isn't 'personalized learning'—it's credential devaluation. If every student can produce 'their own' essays with AI assistance, how do we distinguish actual capability? The schools adopting AI fastest are ironically the ones least equipped to enforce academic integrity. The policy question isn't 'how do we use AI in schools?' but 'what's education for if not to demonstrate work capability?'
by armchairhacker | 2025-11-25 13:10:51+00:00
The point is that one-off LLM-generated projects don’t get support. If a vibe-coder needs to solve a problem and their LLM can’t, they can hire a real developer. If a vibe-coded project gets popular and starts breaking, the people who decided to rely on it can pool a fund and hire real developers to fix it, probably by rewriting the entire thing from scratch. If a vibe-coded project becomes so popular that people start being pressured or indirectly forced to rely on it, then there’s an issue; but I’m saying that important shared codebases shouldn’t have unreviewed LLM-generated code, it’s OK for unimportant code like one-off features.

And people still shouldn’t be using LLM-generated projects when security or reliability is required. For mundane tasks, I can’t imagine worse security or reliability consequences from those projects, than existing projects that use small untrusted dependencies.
by leo_e | 2025-11-25 13:10:58+00:00
Hardware is faster, but the "abstraction tax" is higher than ever.

As someone currently fighting to shave megabytes off a C++ engine, it hurts my soul to see a simple chat app (Electron) consume 800MB just to idle. We spent the last decade using Moore's Law to subsidize lazy garbage collection, five layers of virtualization, and shipping entire web browsers as application runtimes. The computer is fast, but the software is drowning it.
by creaktive | 2025-11-25 13:11:38+00:00
Can’t we use LLMs as models to study delusional patterns? Like, try things that are morally questionable to try on a delusional patient. For instance, LLM could come up with a personalized argument that would convince someone to take their antipsychotics, that’s what I’m talking about. Human caretakers get frustrated and burned out too quickly to succeed
by ghosty141 | 2025-11-25 13:12:19+00:00
> C++ is valuable, because the existing tooling enables you to optimize the runtime peformance of a program

This is true for MANY other languages too, I don't see how this makes c++ different. With gdb its quite the opposite, handlig c++ types with gdb can be a nightmare and you either develop your own gdb glue code or write c-like c++.

> C++ is valuable becaus it's industry support guarantees code bases live for decades _without the need to modify them_ to latest standards.

In times of constant security updates (see the EU's CRA or equivalent standards in the US) you always gotta update your environment which often also means updating tooling etc. if you don't wanna start maintaining a super custom ecosystem.

I don't see this as a positive in general, there is bit rot and a software that is stuck in the past is generally not a good sign imo.

> C++ is valuable because the industry tooling allows you to verify large areas of the program behaviour at runtime (ASAN etc).

Sanitizers are not C++ exclusive too and with rust or C# you almost never need them for example. Yes C++ has extensive debugging tools but a big part of that is because the language has very few safeguards which naturally leads to a lot of crashes etc..

I think the idea of using only a small subset of C++ is interesting but it ignores the problem that many people have, you don't have the time to implement your own STL so you just use the STL. Ofc it gives me more control etc. but I'd argue most of the time writing orthodox c++ won't save time even in the long run, it will save you headaches and cursing about c++ being super complicated but in the end in modern environments you will just reinvent the wheel a lot and run into problems already solved by the STL.