MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: qqqa – A fast, stateless LLM-powered assistant for your shell
by iagooar | 2025-11-06 10:59:42+00:00
I built qqqa as an open-source project, because I was tired of bouncing between shell, ChatGPT / the browser for rather simple commands. It comes with two binaries: qq and qa.

qq means "quick question" - it is read-only, perfect for the commands I always forget.

qa means "quick agent" - it is qq's sibling that can run things, but only after showing its plan and getting an approval by the user.

It is built entirely around the Unix philosophy of focused tools, stateless by default - pretty much the opposite of what most coding agent are focusing on.

Personally I've had the best experience using Groq + gpt-oss-20b, as it feels almost instant (up to 1k tokens/s according to Groq) - but any OpenAI-compatible API will do.

Curious if the HN crowd finds it useful - and of course, AMA.
Show HN: Minimal Portfolio Tracker for Stocks, Crypto, Gold and Funds
by ahmtyldz | 2025-11-06 11:00:27+00:00
I built a simple portfolio tracking app to view daily and total profit/loss clearly.

I invest across Turkish stocks, US stocks, crypto, gold and mutual funds. Most existing apps felt either too complicated or didn't show daily performance in a clean way. So I created my own.

Key features: - Track stocks, crypto, commodities, FX, and funds in one place - Daily and total P/L, with quick category-level summaries - Clean UI focused on “check your positions in 5 seconds” - Optional account sync (Firebase) or full offline use - Data caching to reduce API calls

Tech stack: - Flutter (mobile) - Node.js + Express backend - Firebase Authentication + Firestore (optional sync) - Local caching layer for API efficiency

Screenshots: (link) App Store / Play Store: (link) GitHub (optional): (link)

I’d really appreciate feedback on: - UI clarity and layout - Which metrics matter most in daily use - Whether a “premium” tier for advanced analytics makes sense

Thanks for taking a look!
by ehnto | 2025-11-06 11:00:39+00:00
Oh I wasn't really referring to tone or language like that, I also don't particularly like it and prefer concise clear language. While LLMs can totally achieve that, I want to know a human decided to do it that way. At some point this mindset is going to look very silly, and perhaps even more so for software. But ultimately it's a human feeling to want that and humans are also not deterministic or logical.
by Treegarden | 2025-11-06 11:00:53+00:00
I dont disagree, but you can horizontally scale a monolith too, no? So scaling vert vs horiz is independent of microservices, its just that separating services allows you to be precise with your scaling. Ie you can scale up a compute heavy micorservice by 100x, the upload service by 10x but keep the user service at low scale. I agree that one can vert scale, why not. And I also agree that there are probably big microservices. At my last workplace, we also had people very bullish on microservices but for bad reasons and it didn't make sense, ie ideology.
by scioto | 2025-11-06 11:00:54+00:00
One of the biggest reasons I left a company was because the CTO and his toady, both coming from company X, made a unilateral decision to switch to X's proprietary and expensive framework above senior developers' objections because, in his words, if people leave the company, we can always go back to company X to support the application written in X's proprietary framework. Um, yup. Never mind that framework was totally inappropriate for the application, or that the UI looked like a refugee from 2000. Oh, and never mind that the biggest customer had nothing but trouble in another application written in said expensive proprietary framework.

That mindset plus a dash of RTO equaled me out the door.

Edit: spelling
by wojciech12 | 2025-11-06 11:01:07+00:00
Kubermatic| Full-time | Product Eng & Open Source Dev | Remote Europe

I am looking for Product Engineers and Open Source Developers to join the KDP and kcp teams at Kubermatic.

- Open Source Software Engineer (https://kubermatic.bamboohr.com/careers/24): Work directly on the upstream kcp project. Your contributions will have a direct impact on the open-source community and will help build a framework for managing multi-tenant services at scale. Kubermatic is the project’s maintainer.

- Product Software Engineer (https://kubermatic.bamboohr.com/careers/25): Build a platform that makes other engineers more productive. Drive features from discovery to delivery and shape architectural and product decisions. KDP is currently available as a standalone, on-premises solution. As we prepare to launch a new SaaS offering, you’ll help evolve our tech stack to meet these emerging requirements.I will post the links to both roles in the comments.

Both projects tackle the same problem: managing complexity across heterogeneous IT landscapes at scale. kcp is the open source foundation—a control plane technology that works with any tech stack. We maintain it upstream and contribute to the community. KDP builds on that foundation, delivering a pragmatic platform for enterprise.

Feel free to PM (wojciech.barczynski@kubermatic.com or LinkedIn) me if you would like to learn more.
by scosman | 2025-11-06 11:01:26+00:00
Not so much features as design.

Svelte files look like HTML+TS files. You aren’t learning some abstraction to HTML, you are just using HTML. But it adds the modern bits you need: reactivity, loops, components, routing, etc. Nothing react doesn’t have, but the devex is great.

Other benefits:

- your app is compiled. You don’t ship the framework to clients, they just get a minimal compiled app.

- The rendering modes are pretty great. Any page can be server side rendered, or client side, with per page flags. You also can easily setup SSR for the first page, and CSR for later pages - both the fastest option. It will even pre-fetch the next page when you hover a link, making most nav instant.
by glimshe | 2025-11-06 11:01:58+00:00
You're touching the heart of the question, but not in the way you think. Any arbitrary statement could be construed as offensive by SOME culture out there. But people prefer to immediately assume the worst and be offended instead of giving others the benefit of the doubt.

For instance, if I followed the principles of indignation culture, I could be offended by your "I can assure you about that :)" statement. I could say "Are you making fun of me?!?!"

To be clear, your statement is perfectly fine. I understand what you're saying, despite disagreeing.

Also, this happened in an English language forum. It's reasonable to expect that foreign speakers would be somewhat versed in the conventions of the English language and see that the comment was not offensive at all.
by HeavyStorm | 2025-11-06 11:02:32+00:00
How do you went from what I said to "fanatical"...?

I don't have the slightest idea who "Simon" is and I'm taking the post at face value: it contradicts itself, and that's a bad argument.

Just think about it... In this scenario, management screws up a formula through AI... Which, at least st this point, will surface at some point - not all of us are math ignorant - so what happens is Brenda gets her position back and upper management loses trust in AI. That's the likely outcome; the Brenda's of the world will suffer until upper management realizes their mistake, but end of the day, they have _not_ lost their value, given the post says that AI screws up.

But this is clearly not the conclusion the author ("Simon") intends - they believe AI will erode Brenda value.

That's what I'm saying - AI can't be both incapable and a job menace. For it to threaten jobs like Brenda's, it need to be very capable.

And sorry but "heart transplant" by a transformer model is laughable. Writing formulas, on the other hand, isn't.
by pjc50 | 2025-11-06 11:02:37+00:00
How does this interact with the EU "eCall" mandate? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECall

(one of those things I've seen very little discussion of, the WP page correctly points out that this mandates a mobile-station in every car; although it does not precisely mandate that it be always-on, in practice it will be in order to manage messaging promptly)
by Levitz | 2025-11-06 11:02:46+00:00
The only context I can think of in which it wouldn't be true is if someone learned the language through full immersion with no text involved, it's a bizarre situation.

There's also no reason as to assume that a volunteer translator is good at speaking, especially in regards to English, which pronunciation is not explicitly stated in its writing (like, say, Spanish).

You can't really ascertain how good I am at speaking, for an obvious example.
by Freak_NL | 2025-11-06 11:03:09+00:00
> You want a CI pipeline, so the junior developer can't just break prod because they forgot to run the tests before pushing.

Make them part of your build first. Tagging a release? Have a documented process (checklist) that says 'run this, do that'. Like how in a Java Maven build you would execute `mvn release:prepare` and `mvn release:perform`, which will execute all tests as well as do the git tagging and anything else that needs doing.

Scale up to a CI pipeline once that works. It is step one for doing that anyway.
by tsimionescu | 2025-11-06 11:03:44+00:00
Hop on a call is very informal language, and suggests that this is just a small problem we can quickly workaround. The issue isn't so much the idea of getting in a direct call (though there are problems with that as well, especially the tendency to remove this from the record). It's the wording that suggests this is a tiny issue that we can just "hop" on a call to address.
by kouteiheika | 2025-11-06 11:03:49+00:00
Unfortunately SIMD in Rust tends to be pretty painful if you want to gracefully do runtime autodetection of a given SIMD extension (instead of it being a hard requirement for your program to even run).

The major problem is that Rust essentially requires you to annotate every (!) function in your whole call stack with e.g. `#[target_feature(enable = "avx2")]` to make sure that the SIMD intrinsics will actually get inlined (if they're not inlined then the performance is horrible, which makes using SIMD completely pointless). This makes it very hard to build any reasonable abstractions because you need to hardcode this all over your code. You can't have e.g. a `DataStructure<S>` where S is the SIMD ISA, so that you could do `DataStructure<AVX2>` or `DataStructure<SSE>` to get a nicely specialized version of it for a given instruction set. You need to copy-paste the whole thing with changed `target_feature` attributes (or use a procedural macro which does the copy-pasting) and have two entirely separate `DataStructureAVX2` and `DataStructureSSE` types.
by sjamaan | 2025-11-06 11:04:01+00:00
This is also how you can identify decent places to work at: look for job postings that emphasize you aren't expected to already know the language.

For example, in the recent "who's hiring" thread, I saw at least two places where they did that: Duckduckgo (they mention only algorithms and data structures and say "in case you're curious, we use Perl") and Stream (they offer a 10-week intro course to Go if you're not already familiar with it). If I remember correctly, Jane Street also doesn't require prior OCaml experience.

The place where I work (bevuta IT GmbH) also allowed me to learn Clojure on the job (but it certainly helped that I was already an expert in another Lisp dialect).

These hiring practices are a far cry from those old style job postings like "must have 10+ years of experience with Ruby on Rails" when the framework was only 5 years old.
by GuB-42 | 2025-11-06 11:04:31+00:00
Often, measures of happiness really means content. It doesn't mean a lack of suffering, but how well you accept it.

Nordic countries for instance are often ranked as the "happiest" even though their winters are terrible, no one is smiling in the streets and they have severe issues with alcoholism resulting in some of the strictest regulations regarding alcohol sales. But because they are accepting of their situation and support each other, they are considered happy.
by znpy | 2025-11-06 11:05:01+00:00
Lisps have a similar concept: save-lisp-and-die: https://screwlisp.small-web.org/fundamental/sbcl-slime-eval-...

In the world of containers, I wonder if one could use this feature to interrupt the execution of some computation, save the state somewhere (disk or object storage) and once the workload has been rescheduled on some other node, basically you boot up from your image file, re-establish network connections (if necessary) and just resume computation as if nothing happened.
Show HN: WebPizza – AI/RAG pipeline running in the browser with WebGPU
by stramanu | 2025-11-06 11:05:24+00:00
I built a proof-of-concept for running RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) entirely in the browser using WebGPU.

You can chat with PDF documents using models like Phi-3, Llama 3, or Mistral 7B - all running locally with zero backend. Documents never leave your device.

Tech stack: - WebLLM + WeInfer (optimized fork with ~3.76x speedup) - Transformers.js for embeddings (all-MiniLM-L6-v2) - IndexedDB as vector store - PDF.js for parsing

The main challenges were: 1. Getting esbuild to bundle without choking on onnxruntime-node 2. Managing COOP/COEP headers for SharedArrayBuffer 3. Keeping the bundle reasonable (Angular + models = ~11MB base)

Performance is surprisingly decent on modern hardware: - Phi-3 Mini: 3-6 tokens/sec (WebLLM) → 12-20 tokens/sec (WeInfer) - Llama 3.2 1B: 8-12 tokens/sec

Demo: https://webpizza-ai-poc.vercel.app/ Code: https://github.com/stramanu/webpizza-ai-poc

This is experimental - I'm sure there are better ways to do this. Would appreciate feedback, especially on: - Bundle optimization strategies - Better vector search algorithms for IndexedDB - Memory management for large documents

Happy to answer questions!
by contrarian1234 | 2025-11-06 11:05:30+00:00
I don't really get this line of argument

Or at least it's not engaging with the obvious counterargument at all - that: "You may not need the scale now, but you may need it later". For a startup being a unicorn with a bajillion users is the only outcome that actually counts as success. It's the outcome they sell to their investors.

So sure, you can make a unscalable solution that works for the current moment. Most likely you wont need more. But that's only true b/c most startups don't end up unicorns. Most likely is you burn through their VC funding and fold

Okay stack overflow allegedly runs on a toaster, but most products don't fit that mold - and now that they're tied to their toaster it probably severely constrains what SO can do it terms of evolving their service
by jwr | 2025-11-06 11:05:32+00:00
While I agree with most of this rant, I have a problem with the common "just use postgres" trope, often repeated here.

I recently had to work with SQL again after many years, and was appalled at the incidental complexity and ridiculous limitations. Who in this century would still voluntarily do in-band database commands mixed with user-supplied data? Also, the restrictions on column naming mean that you pretty much have to use some kind of ORM mapping, you can't just store your data. That means an entire layer of code that your application doesn't really need, just to adapt to a non-standard from the 70s.

"just use postgres" is not good advice.
by floppyd | 2025-11-06 11:06:03+00:00
I did something similar a while back, but I treat it as "text thumbnails" and kind of replace YT frontpage with this. I don't use it all the time, but sometimes the clickbait is too much.

Also I should add Gemini (the app) is able to access YT transcripts most of the time, so sometimes I'd just paste the link and ask for a tldr. One of the few reasons to go for Gemini app, not google ai studio.

That said, Technology Connections is worth watching just because videos are very pleasant, it's probably my favorite YT subscription right now.
by StarGrit | 2025-11-06 11:06:08+00:00
You always get a comment like this. I don't particularly agree. There are pros and cons to either approach

The tooling in a lot of languages and frameworks expects you to use an ORM, so a lot of the time you will have to put up a fair bit of upfront effort to just use Raw SQL (especially in .NET land).

On top of that ORM makes a lot of things that are super tedious like mapping to models extremely easy. The performance gains of writing SQL is very minor if the ORM is good.
by forgetfulness | 2025-11-06 11:06:09+00:00
Any minute you spend in a job interview defending your application server + Postgres solution, is a minute that you will lack to talk of follow up questions about the distributed system that interviewer was expecting.

Yes, it’s nonsense, stirring up a turbulent slurry of eventually consistent components for the sake of supporting hundreds of users per second, it’s also the nonsense that you’re expected to say, just do it.
by louthy | 2025-11-06 11:07:03+00:00
That’s how my Miele washing machine works and I love it.

You put two large detergent containers in (one for whites and one for colours) and then forget about them. The machine reminds you when you’re running low and allows you to reorder more thru the app.

I have no idea if it’s cheaper or not, but anecdotally they feel like they last a long time. Ultimately, I don’t care, because of the convenience and the fact I know the machine is working out the correct dose per wash (the machine has a touchscreen interface that allows you to state what’s in the wash: T-shirts, denim, towels, etc. the level of soiling, etc. Then it works out the temperature, duration, drying time, and correct detergent type and dosage)
by preommr | 2025-11-06 11:07:13+00:00
No no, don't give me this.

I was there before 10 years ago. I remember the pain in the ass that was hosting your own web server and own hardware, dealing with networking issues with cisco switches and thinking about getting a ccna. I remember the days of trying to figure out php and ranodm ass modules or how python and wsgi fit together on a slow ass windows machine instead of just spinning up an app and doing network calls using a spa.

Have you guys just forgotten all the enterprise crap that existed? Have you guys forgotten before that how things like compilers (ones you had to pay exorbintant amounts of money for) and different architectures were the headaches?

It's been two steps forward, one steps back, but we're still way better off.

Yes, people bring in k8s because they want to resume build and it goes poorly, but I've also used k8s in my personal setup that was much easier than the poor man's version I had of it.

All of this is just rose-tinted glasses, and people throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Just because some people have bad experiences with microservices because people don't often do them right, people just write them off completely.
by goku12 | 2025-11-06 11:07:32+00:00
> I wish I had the abilities of the engineer, plus the time he could devote to the problem.

Ability is a matter of patience and persistence. And both are the results of motivation. Anyone can learn anything as long as they really want it. (barring disabilities like depression that destroy motivation. But some people use even that as an opportunity to learn new skills that in turn help them recover.) But Time is an entirely different matter. You can find time if you really want to, but life has other priorities too - including time doing nothing (rest). Finding the extra time in between all that will depend on your craftiness. That's the true skill here.
by dpkirchner | 2025-11-06 11:08:15+00:00
I have the same problem, and yeah, that's the site. Tapping the button to increase the font size just zooms the page in so now I have to scroll horizontally to read the content. Something on the page is preventing natural reflowing, I could probably figure out what if I was on my desktop. My hunch is it's the row of images.
by darkwater | 2025-11-06 11:09:30+00:00
To do that you need a mixture of elements: work in a somehow "exotic" language [1] and the company can afford to pay top-talent salary [2]

[1] all those examples check that box, but please let's not start a language war over this statement.

[2] for Jane Street I hear they do, DDG pays pretty well especially because it pay the same rate regardless where you are in the world, so it's a top-talent salary for many places outside SV.
by macspoofing | 2025-11-06 11:09:50+00:00
>So sure, you can make a unscalable solution that works for the current moment.

You're making two assumptions - both wrong:

1) That this is an unscalable solution - A monolith app server backed by Postgres can take you very very far. You can vertically scale by throwing more hardware at it, and you can horizontally scale, by just duplicating your monolith server behind a load-balancer.

2) That you actually know where your bottlenecks will be when you actually hit your target scale. When (if) you go from 1000 users to 10,000,000 users, you WILL be re-designing and re-architecting your solution regardless what you started with because at that point, you're going to have a different team, different use-cases, and therefore a different business.
by qsort | 2025-11-06 11:09:55+00:00
I'm not claiming to be an expert, but more or less what the article says is this:

- Context: Terence Tao is one of the best mathematician alive.

- Context: AlphaEvolve is an optimization tool from Google. It differs from traditional tools because the search is guided by an LLM, whose job is to mutate a program written in a normal programming language (they used Python). Hallucinations are not a problem because the LLM is only a part of the optimization loop. If the LLM fucks up, that branch is cut.

- They tested this over a set of 67 problems, including both solved and unsolved ones.

- They find that in many cases AlphaEvolve achieves similar results to what an expert human could do with a traditional optimization software package.

- The main advantages they find are: ability to work at scale, "robustness", i.e. no need to tune the algorithm to work on different problems, better interpretability of results.

- Unsurprisingly, well-known problems likely to be in the training set quickly converged to the best known solution.

- Similarly unsurprisingly, the system was good at "exploiting bugs" in the problem specification. Imagine an underspecified unit test that the system would maliciously comply to. They note that it takes significant human effort to construct an objective function that can't be exploited in this way.

- They find the system doesn't perform as well on some areas of mathematics like analytic number theory. They conjecture that this is because those problems are less amenable to an evolutionary approach.

- In one case they could use the tool to very slightly beat an existing bound.

- In another case they took inspiration from an inferior solution produced by the tool to construct a better (entirely human-generated) one.

It's not doing the job of a mathematician by any stretch of the imagination, but to my (amateur) eye it's very impressive. Google is cooking.
by dvt | 2025-11-06 11:10:06+00:00
The fact that we have lambdas/serverless functions and people are still over-engineering k8s clusters for their "startup project" is genuinely hilarious. You can literally validate your idea with some janky Python code and like 20 bucks a month.

The problem is that people don't like hearing their ideas suck. I do this too, to be fair. So, yes, we spend endless hours architecting what we'd desperately hope will be the next Facebook because hearing "you are definitely not the next Facebook" sucks. But alas, that's what doing startups is: mostly building 1000 not-Facebooks.

The lesson here is that the faster you fail, the faster you can succeed.