MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by raducu | 2025-11-28 07:09:39+00:00
> expedited the fall of Soviet Union by forcing them into expensive competition?

Nobody forced the Soviet Union into anything. I think the soviet leaders knew that the system in the West AT THAT TIME was simply better in all ways imaginable and the comunism utterly failed at its mission -- the workers in the West were enjoying a much much better life that those in communism, and having lost that ideological space, they thought they could override common sense on the battle field -- surely, if you win the space race, more olympic gold medals or on the battlefield, then communism actually won?
by xxs | 2025-11-28 07:10:31+00:00
Aside already mentioned comparison to unordered_map, there appears to have a bug, on line 61: "p = (p + 1) & LenV". It should be mod (%) like the rest of the code.

Morealso mod is slow in general and it should be replaced by bitwise and (&) and power of 2 sized map, then using LenV-1.
by cess11 | 2025-11-28 07:11:11+00:00
It's common to distinguish between hard real-time and soft real-time (and sometimes firm real-time).

This software is supposedly soft real-time, similar to what you'd expect from e.g. an Erlang system. Delayed tasks aren't considered fatal failures but overall you get a user experience close to what hard real-time systems are supposed to deliver.
by bee_rider | 2025-11-28 07:12:13+00:00
It is, as others have pointed out.

Although, we’re very unusual humans in the grand scheme of things. So using medication might be reasonable. The brain might start taking damage around 104F. That was probably a good tradeoff for a peasant farmer (our ancestors, on average). Most of us nowadays just think for a living, not such a good tradeoff for us. Take the fever suppressant, what’s the worst that’ll happen if you miss an extra day of work?
by rhubarbtree | 2025-11-28 07:12:35+00:00
Just chiming in here to say, absolutely you should keep functions small and doing one thing. Any junior reading this should go and read the pragmatic programmer.

Of course a function can be refactored in a wrongheaded way as you’ve suggested, but that’s true of any coding - there is taste.

The ideal of refactoring such a function you describe would be to make it more readable, not less. The whole point of modules is so you don’t have to hold in your head the detail they contain.

Long functions are in general a very bad idea. They don’t fit on a single screen, so to understand them you end up scrolling up and down. It’s hard to follow the state, because more things happen and there is more state as the function needs more parameters and intermediate variables. They’re far more likely to lead to complecting (see Rich Hickey) and intertwining different processes. Most importantly, for an inexperienced dev it increases the chance of a big ball of mud, eg a huge switch statement with inline code rather than a series of higher level abstractions that can be considered in isolation.

I don’t think years worked is an indicator of anything, but I’ve been coding for nearly 40 years FWIW.
by fooker | 2025-11-28 07:13:14+00:00
Neutrons were first definitively observed in 1932.

First nuclear reactor was 1942, and bomb was 1945.

Once the science is established, we have smart engineers to make a short work out of it.

Fusion energy is really the only counterexample in history, which makes me think we are still missing some crucial physics about how it works, for example in stars. Specifically the particle physics view of how it's reliably triggered with minimal energy.
by alister | 2025-11-28 07:14:03+00:00
Remember blogs on the old web when the author would plaster his name in a huge font on every page along with his photo, and have an extensive bio about himself and perhaps even his resume?

Well this author has gone to the opposite extreme: There isn't one shred of info that I can find about him. I liked his writings and was curious who he was in real life, but there's nothing. Stands on its own merits like Death Note, Bitcoin, or Truecrypt.
by benrutter | 2025-11-28 07:14:50+00:00
I would argue that these:

- 'commitment to zero technical debt'

- 'design for performance early'

Will save you time and cost in designing, even in the relatively near term of a few months when you have to add new features etc.

There's obviously extremes of "get something out the door fast and broken then maybe neaten it up later" vs "refactor the entire codebase any time you think soemthing could be better", but I've seen more projects hit a wall due to leaning to far to the first than the second.

Either way, I definitely wouldn't call it "privileged" as if it isn't a practical engineering choice. That seems to judt frame things in a way where you're already assuming early design and commitment to refactoring is a bad idea.
by northerndev | 2025-11-28 07:15:36+00:00
I've been building local agents and found debugging the RAG retrieval step frustrating. I often couldn't tell why the LLM was pulling specific context chunks, and console logging vector arrays didn't help.

I built this tool to act as a standalone 'memory server' sitting on top of PostgreSQL with the pgvector extension. I wanted to avoid managing separate specialized vector DBs for smaller projects.

The main feature is the visualizer dashboard. It shows the retrieval process in real-time, displaying raw chunks, similarity scores, and how 'recency decay' influences the final ranking.

The backend is Node.js/TypeScript using Prisma. It runs via Docker Compose.

Current limitation: The default config relies on OpenAI for embedding generation. I am working on adding local support via Ollama bindings as the next priority so the entire stack can run offline.

The code is MIT licensed.
by thisisit | 2025-11-28 07:16:21+00:00
Without knowing what is “good decision” how do you even evaluate neck to neck?

At this point "Humans are also imperfect" is becoming a lazy defense. It is equivalent to crypto bros saying "humans are corrupt. Blockchain FTW!". Remind me where we are with that?

Replace your imperfect analyst with a equally imperfect, if not worse, and maybe black box system is not the winning sales message you seem to think it is.
by flyinglizard | 2025-11-28 07:16:47+00:00
I also suspect Google is launching models it can’t really sustain in volume or that are operating at a loss. Nothing preventing them from like doubling model size compared to the rest or allocating an insane amount of compute just to make the headlines on model performance (clearly it’s good for the stock). These things are opaque anyway, buried deep into the P&L.
by distances | 2025-11-28 07:16:56+00:00
> Yeah I know drilling through ~8-10 kilometers of rock is kinda hard… they know, they tried, maybe it now is a good political climate to try again?

The Finnish 7 kilometer geothermal drilling failed commercially, I guess that's what you're referring to. Is there any reason to assume drilling deeper would work?

Ref. https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otaniemen_syv%C3%A4rei%C3%A4t
by pjmlp | 2025-11-28 07:17:14+00:00
I don't get the point.

First of all, multiple vendors has always been a thing in Java since the early 2000's.

Second, configuring a couple of environment variables isn't that much of a challenge.

Third, all IDEs have an option to use a bundled JVM, and allow for JVM selection per project.

Finally, for applications the modern way is to build the runtime alongside the application, or AOT compilation.
by valleyer | 2025-11-28 07:18:25+00:00
Fair. The greater point was that you're not just "helping the business" by maintaining a clean environment (whether the "dirt" be carts or excrement). You're also helping your fellow humans.

And, in fact, you almost certainly are helping employees. Sure, there could be fewer of them, but they'd be doing less menial work. And the ones who got laid off due to your contentiousness would find less menial work elsewhere. Society as a whole would benefit.

You probably already know this, but the idea that we should make the world worse to preserve people's jobs is called the broken-windows fallacy.

I probably should have just responded with that originally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
by input_sh | 2025-11-28 07:18:38+00:00
Been using it for about a year now, but not in a way it's "intended to be". I wrote some scripts that add data to it and then I have a (static) website that pulls data from it and builds pages. So, for me it's more of a REST API and a web interface in front of sqlite than a proper auth provider (at least for now).

My biggest gripe with it by far is that the web interface is not phone-optimised at all, which prevents me from quickly correcting a field or two when I'm not behind a computer. For my use case, that happens at least once a week. Another gripe I have is that the search bar in the admin interface could be far more powerful than it currently is. Anything more complex than searching my records by exactly one field and I'm better off writing one-off scripts to do so than by using the web interface.

Good things: the control it gives me over which fields get exposed publicly, ability to resize images (instead of slowing down my build by doing so from the frontend), overall stability (never had it go down unexpectedly), S3-compatible storage, automated backups.

To give some sense of scale, ~10k records scattered across 30 or so tables (or collections as they call it), most with some attachments, and plenty of one-to-one and one-to-many relations between the tables. The database itself is only a couple of megabytes in size, but the whole backup (attachments included) is nearing 3 gigabytes now.

While updates happen pretty frequently, they don't change the parts I actually use, so I can't say I ever struggled with keeping up to date.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-11-28 07:19:25+00:00
I do really enjoy the domain ownership method on bluesky, quick and easy, sorted. But due to the mostly centralized nature there still is a need to rush in there and get your handle on their domain username.bsky.social because still the majority of users believe/recognize the bsky.social handles as 'official'. The nice touch is once you have yours and then switch to your domain Bluesky keeps your previous bsky.social username reserved so you don't have to worry about it.

Another thing with the adoption is we still see tons of major corporate/media/notable entities on there not moving their account to their domain despite having one and it giving them the more obvious "verified" impression. I dunno what's going on in some of those marketing / digital dept's that they aren't jumping to verify on the domains.
by ano-ther | 2025-11-28 07:20:19+00:00
I don’t get the negativity.

The specs look impressive. It is always good to have competition.

They announced tapeout in October with planned dev boards next year. Vaporware is when things don’t appear, not when they are on their way (it takes some time for hardware).

It’s also strategically important for Europe to have its own supply. The current and last US administration have both threatened to limit supply of AI chips to European countries, and China would do the same (as they have shown with Nexperia).

And of course you need the software stack with it. They will have thought of that.

https://vsora.com/vsora-announces-tape-out-of-game-changing-...
by jillesvangurp | 2025-11-28 07:20:31+00:00
A couple of points in the article that are interesting:

- EV trucks in China have less safety/comfort features and are therefore cheaper. The same would presumably true for diesel trucks. And that "extra" cost for that stuff would be the same elsewhere. It's not a reason EV trucks would be more expensive specifically anywhere.

- China is starting to export these things around the world. I think this is very disruptive because it means the EU/US are increasingly isolated with higher cost of transport locally.

- The ASP of EV trucks is dropping below those of diesel trucks. This is being driven by battery cost, which in China is of course closely following production cost of those and in any EV truck is (or was) the biggest cost component. Going from 150$/kwh to 50$ or lower is a big deal. Prices could be trending towards 10$/kwh mid term for some chemistries. At 150$ it's 90K, at 50$, 600kwh is 30K. at 10$ it's 6000$. It stops being the largest cost factor on the truck somewhere along that curve. That's going to happen everywhere. It's just economics and physics. There's no logical reason for an EV truck to be more expensive than a diesel truck long term.

- Diesel usage is in decline in China. That's a real world effect that's hard to ignore. In China that means less imports are needed. It's a big economic shift in their favor to be needing less diesel/oil. Road miles tend to be dominated by newer vehicles: this effect might be faster than market shares suggest.

The EU has very expensive diesel. Those effects would be exaggerated here. It also has very strictly enforced rest breaks every 4.5 hours. Ideally spaced to allow for a 45 minute charging break. 600kwh is all you need for long distance trucking in the EU.

IMHO, the EU will catch up much quicker than the US: it has a bigger economical incentive. The US is producing its own fuel. China and the EU are not. Unless they switch to electric.
by zem | 2025-11-28 07:20:45+00:00
> Say, you have a process that is single threaded and does a lot of stuff that has to happen step by step. > New dev comes in; and starts splitting everything it does in 12 functions, because, _a function, should do one thing

I would almost certainly split it up, not because "a function should only do one thing" but because invariably you get a run of several steps that can be chunked into one logical operation, and replacing those steps with the descriptive name reduces the cognitive load of reading and maintaining the original function.
by cachius | 2025-11-28 07:21:27+00:00
To electrify long distance trucks Bosch developed a fuel-cell power module (FCPM) it is already using for internal logistics. For long disctances f-cell and hydrogen tank are lighter than batteries would be. It supposedly can do 1000km without stops. https://www.bosch-mobility.com/en/mobility-topics/fuel-cell-...

See also my other comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46075305#46076161
by jharohit | 2025-11-28 07:21:53+00:00
love it. been using for personal projects.

some things that still need to be done before v1 launch:

- easy data migration in and out (right now is a pain if its large volume of data from other DB eg firebase or sqlite!)

- API/programmatic setup of tables (right now its only via UI making it hard to setup large complex tables with variable permissions)

- Multi-instance: easiest is to have another pocketbase in "mirror" mode that it updates once a day or whatever with primary (primary > secondary method like in mongo is a great mechanism, with some kind of voting for primary)
by igor47 | 2025-11-28 07:23:08+00:00
Though you will no doubt assume you're getting downvoted because you're speaking truth to sociopaths, I just wanted to say I'm downvoting you because your comment violates multiple HN guidelines. Reminder, those are here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's disappointing to see such a long-term community member engage so thoughtlessly. I know the guidelines also say I should just flag and move on, but this will only reenforce your narrative, and I am hoping to break the cycle.
Show HN: SiteIQ – LLM and Web security testing tool (built by a high schooler)
by sastrophy | 2025-11-28 07:24:58+00:00
Hi HN! I'm an 11th grade student learning cybersecurity and web development. I built SiteIQ as a hands-on way to understand security vulnerabilities, SEO, and how to test them.

I used AI as my coding partner throughout this project – it helped me understand concepts, debug issues, and write code. Building with AI felt like having a patient tutor available 24/7. I learned way more than I would have just following tutorials.

What it does: - Security Testing: OWASP Top 10 (SQL injection, XSS, CSRF, etc.) - SEO Analysis: Meta tags, schema markup, Core Web Vitals - GEO Testing: Multi-region accessibility and latency - LLM Security: Prompt injection, jailbreaking, system prompt leakage, and "Denial of Wallet" attacks

The LLM security part was the most interesting to build. With everyone adding AI to their apps, I wanted to understand how prompt injection actually works and how to test for it.

Features: - Web UI with real-time console output - CLI for automation - Self-hosted (no data leaves your machine)

Tech: Python, Flask, pytest

GitHub: https://github.com/sastrophy/siteiq

I'd love feedback – are there vulnerabilities I'm missing? Any suggestions for the LLM attack payloads?

This is my first open source project, so any advice is welcome!
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-11-28 07:25:23+00:00
We might just replace aeroplanes altogether with ultra-high-speed maglev.

Although the cost calculation for this would be totally different—hundreds of billions up-front for world-crossing tunnels and infrastructure and rolling stock, but then nearly no running cost.

The Chuō Shinkansen will be an interesting small-scale experiment in proper high-speed maglev in regular, long-distance passenger service.
by Jarred | 2025-11-28 07:26:39+00:00
> undermine your confidence in Zig

Nah

I do think the combo of not using Twitter, not using Discord, and not using GitHub does make it a bit more challenging for Zig to become a mainstream programming language. Twitter being the least important amongst those. Hard to say how much it matters in practice, as things tend to win on their strengths and not on lack of weakness
by jolux | 2025-11-28 07:27:19+00:00
Ah, it was written in Groovy last time I looked at it I believe. In any case here’s how to install a default java:

`mise ls-remote java` to show all vendors and versions, or just `mise latest java@temurin` (or any other vendor) to get the latest version string

`mise use -g java@<version>` to install it and set it as a default
by baq | 2025-11-28 07:29:52+00:00
Yeah, that’s the one. Economics of this are hard - but money is numbers in computers, it’s just a question of how serious the government is with getting it done - physics-wise it gets like 10-15C warmer with every km, which is important for the delta T obviously. I know nothing about drilling the extra couple km, though, only assuming it can be done with enough engineering.
by dust42 | 2025-11-28 07:30:16+00:00
Thus in China a 600KWh truck is 85.000€ while in Germany an eActros with 600KWh is 290.000€ (w/o VAT) [1]. Consumption is 100-120KW/h per 100km. The range is then up to 500km / 310 miles.

Electricity price for industry is 0.112 USD in China, 0.455 USD in the UK, 0.29 USD in Germany, 0.149 USD in the US. [2]

This definitely looks like starting to be competitive for various use cases and regions. Obviously it needs a charging infrastructure that can keep up with it.

Charging speed is currently 350KW, 1MW chargers are in development.

[1] https://www.auto-anders.de/eactros-600 [2] https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/map/electricity_industria...
by mathewcohle | 2025-11-28 07:30:59+00:00
Here’s the plan: build a simplified framework of software engineering and then throw agentic coding into the picture. Once that’s done, the fun part - poking holes in our own model to see what falls out.

Two claims I want to justify: the bottleneck is still you, and agentic coding multiplies your output - it doesn’t add to it. Zero times anything is still zero.
by rubenbe | 2025-11-28 07:31:23+00:00
I've built OpenSOHO using this, and it has been an amazing timesaver! Even though I modified it a bit to reuse the backend. It's clearly not what it's made for, but it wasn't too hard either. If you have a look at the screenshot, you'll recognize the Pocketbase pedigree immediately.

https://github.com/rubenbe/opensoho/
by noodletheworld | 2025-11-28 07:31:29+00:00
Hmmm… firebase clones are many and varied.

Whats special about this one?

Being a single file binary doesnt impress me; thats true of many projects in many langauges.

It seems nice you can use it as a go framework if you happen to use go, but Im not really compelled by the “it doesn't scale at all” aspects of it.

Someone whos used some other similar stuff comment on why this over any of the others, eg. self hosted superbase?
by dotancohen | 2025-11-28 07:32:16+00:00
Interesting idea. It seems to me that most things which would need to be protected from hidden cameras would be stationary and not require the operator to mount the detectors on his body, but starting with mobile constraints is often helpful.

I would like to draw attention to this gem of wit, easily the best I've seen in a long time:

> I think the idea behind this approach is sound (actually it's light)
by lmm | 2025-11-28 07:32:44+00:00
OK but again what's the use case for that? Can you not just use a new version of Java for all your projects, at most setting -source/-target in your project configuration? Certainly in the old days it was always backwards compatible, at least enough that you could develop under a current version and maybe just have a CI job to check that your code still worked on old versions.
by jabl | 2025-11-28 07:33:49+00:00
There's pipework for circulating air inside it when they want to charge/discharge it, but yes, essentially it's mostly tons of sand.

They have resistors for charging it with electricity (resistors heat the air, air is circulated in the pipes which heats the sand) when the electricity price is cheap, and then for discharging they have a air-water heat exchanger so they can pump the heat energy into the district heating network.
by pdevr | 2025-11-28 07:34:53+00:00
I use version managers for Python, Node, Ruby, and others. But for Java, none. I have all the recent versions of Java on my Linux and Windows devices. I download the zip and extract it to a common directory "Java". Setting the path within IDEs is easy, and is mostly unavoidable (regardless of a version manager). Running standalone programs is not that complicated too.
by MissTake | 2025-11-28 07:35:24+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

>We try not to delete entire account histories because that would gut the threads the account had participated in. However, we care about protecting individual users and take care of privacy requests every day, so if we can help, please email hn@ycombinator.com. We don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN.
by baalimago | 2025-11-28 07:36:13+00:00
Then I'm curious about what their principles on deadlines. I don't see how it aligns with their coding styleguide. Taking the TigerStyle at face value does not encourage deliverance. They're practically saying "take the time you need to polish your thing to perfection, 0 technical debt".

But ofc, I understand styleguides are... well.. guides. Not law.
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-11-28 07:36:54+00:00
This project is so well thought out, you couldn't vibe code it in a week or a month. Genuinely, it's quite a wonderfully designed piece of software. It seems simple at a glance, but what makes it so good is almost intangible; it's a joy to use not only because of what it is, but what it isn't as well. And I really believe that's not something you can achieve with vibes in such short order.

Kind of like people said they could write airbnb or dropbox's software in a weekend. Sure, you can approximate it, but there's a bit of soul and momentum and history there that makes it more than a repository of code and gives it a unique capacity and potential all its own.
by SackSolStr | 2025-11-28 07:37:15+00:00
yes 7% ROI if no depreciation, but neither panels nor inverter are expected to last much beyond ten years. I was actually chatting with him just now since I got into this discussion, and he said he also needs a maintenance/emergency callout and cleaning contract, thats about €250 a year. In spite of this, he was still happy with doing this, good for the planet, even if not for this wallet. He also put up a large screen with the relevant numbers to train others in the house to use appliances at optimal times.