MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wewewedxfgdf | 2025-11-06 10:25:00+00:00
Ha ha nice one - when your startup is Facebook you'll need that, not for your 12 users.

The reason startups get to their super kubernetes 6 layers mega AWS powered ultra cached hyper pipelined ultra optimised web queued applicatyion with no users is because "but technology X has support for an eventually consistent in-memory caching layer!!"

What about when we launch and hit the front page of HN how will the site stay up without "an eventually consistent in-memory caching layer"?
by auxiliarymoose | 2025-11-06 10:25:39+00:00
I think remote climate controls in a car are an ideal use-case for a simpler architecture.

Consider WhatsApp could do 2M TCP connections on a single server 13 years ago, and Ford sells about 2M cars per year. Basic controls like changing the climate can definitely fit in one TCP packet, and aren't sent frequently, so with some hand-waving, it would be reasonable to expect a single server to handle all remote controls for a manufacturer for all cars from some year model.

Or maybe you could use wifi-direct and bypass the need for a server.

Or a button on the key fob. Perhaps the app can talk to the key fob over NFC or Bluetooth? Local/non-internet controls will probably be more reliable off-grid... can't have a server outage if there are no servers.

I guess my point is if you take a step back, there are often simple, good solutions possible.
by jjav | 2025-11-06 10:27:08+00:00
> And shutdown for a month should trigger elections.

I'd be more strict and say shutdown on day 1 trigger reelection for all senate and congress seats and the president & VP. Get everyone out.

It's not like they don't know this is coming months in advance, so there is no excuse at all to fail at their job which is negotiating a compromise.
by cryptonym | 2025-11-06 10:27:14+00:00
> I'm sorry you feel like this

Nope. Start by apologizing for the impact of what YOU did. Contributor of 20y just quit and provide a clear list of what is wrong. "your feelings" and "your struggles" is not respectful.

You should be sorry that YOU pushed changes on them in a way that impacted badly their work and made them quit. Thank them for the feedback and try to open a discussion on finding a positive outcome.
by mschuster91 | 2025-11-06 10:27:37+00:00
> What makes a browser so much more inefficient vs. other UI frameworks?

The fact that each app carries their own copy of the browser engine.

Teams, Chrome, Steam - that's at least three Chromium engine embeds that all take up hundreds of megabytes each. Not to mention Steam is in the background and has no windows visible, and yet it has the Chromium helper processes gobbling up RAM. WTF is this shit.

Life used to be easier in the Windows 98 days with OCX, you just dragged a webview in the VB6 application designer and that was it, and IIRC it was even possible to embed Firefox in the same way for a while...
by Copenjin | 2025-11-06 10:27:39+00:00
Thinking is scary. No one (among non-thinking colleagues) is going to criticize you for using de-facto standard services like kafka, mongo, redis, ecc... regardless of the nonsensical architecture you come up with.

Yes, I also put Redis in that list. You can cache and serve data structure in many other ways, for example replicate the individual features you need in you application instead of going the lazy route and another service to the mix. And don't get me started on Kafka... money thrown in the drain when a stupid grpc/whatever service would do.

Part of being an engineer is also selecting the minimum amount of components for your architecture and not being afraid of implementing something on your own if you only need 1 of 100s features that an existing product require.
by fabian2k | 2025-11-06 10:27:48+00:00
I personally wouldn't like to put caching in Postgres, even though it would work at lower scales. But at that scale I don't really need caching anyway. Having the ephemeral data in a different system is more appealing to me as well.

The caching abstractions your frameworks have are also likely designed with something like Redis in mind and work with it out of the box. And often you can just start with an in-memory cache and add Redis later, if you need it.
by perlgeek | 2025-11-06 10:27:59+00:00
"We are sorry for overwriting the manual translations of all our volunteers. We have disabled the workflow and are working on restoring the old, manual translations.

We had planned to use the translation bot to help you guys, but based on your response, we have understood that we have overshot our target, and actually made it harmful.

Would you be interested in a call where we can apologize in person, and interview you about how the workflow integration could be designed so it actually helps you and other translators?"
by iolloyd | 2025-11-06 10:28:06+00:00
As the author, it's less about marketing and more about scratching my itch as a shy writer to explain some of the things I've experienced and seen. Having spent 12 years as a Royal Marine, and seen behaviours that map into the startup and corporate world, I'm using the time that I now have to write more and share opinions. Your comment about my timelines is partially valid. There are situations where the timelines are indeed reversed.
by hellojohnbuck | 2025-11-06 10:29:05+00:00
hi kilibe,

thanks for your interest.

i have concentrated on apple in the era when jobs isn't there to cancel or squash ideas and invention. many folks, not unlike stephen, come out of the woodwork. and i have slowly connected with them.

last week i documented (through interviews) tom gilley's work on apple's first hand-held pen-driven tablet called scribe. this included innovation and invention of suppressing electro mmagnetic interference, removng contemporary tech's weight, stretching battery output and so forth - as well as writing a slimmed down version of the mac/os and handwriting recognition rather than writing one completely from scratch (which was what newton/dylan) were doing.

so there's a lot of conversations to document.
by bigmealbigmeal | 2025-11-06 10:29:40+00:00
> Chatbots [are] going to remain niche for quite some time.

> iPhone immediately caught on like wild fire.

> I'm not saying there won't be users, but it's a much smaller population.

The facts say you're wrong about this.

The adoption rate for the iPhone was slow. There were only 1.4 million iPhones sold in its first year,[1] whereas there were 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users in its first year.[2]

ChatGPT is not niche, and is not a 'much smaller population'. Right now it has 800 million weekly active users. That's how many iPhones were active in 2017. Are we to say that iPhones were a niche in 2017? It's how many smartphones in general were active at the start of 2012. Are we to say that smartphones were a niche in 2012?

[1] https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/technology--media-a...

[2] https://www.demandsage.com/chatgpt-statistics/

[3] We can go deeper on this data, but these are generally accepted figures, and I have seen no figures that agree with your statements
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-11-06 10:29:43+00:00
That seems more optimistic (or solar punk) than your summary e.g.:

> In terms of waste management, 85.3% of distributors reported that they had a waste management strategy. Mostly, this tended to involve collecting broken products, harvesting them for spare parts and then storing the remainder in a central warehouse before sending them to a (usually certified) local e-waste recycling facility. How effective these recycling facilities are, however, was beyond the scope of this report.

They seem to suggest that lithium batteries are the hardest to repair and recycle, but people want to do so. It feels like a problem that will get easier at scale.
by redhale | 2025-11-06 10:30:07+00:00
I agree that this is annoying, but you answered your own question about why this is the way it is.

> You *Google* “how to fix a Git conflict”, and every result ... is ... *"SEO-stuffed* filler drowning ... the answer.

Mate, you've searched something using Google, and the results you're looking at have been optimized to appear at the top of Google search results. So why are you surprised by this?

Your quibble, if it's with anyone, is with Google and why they value this kind of content (why filling the page with valueless drivel makes it more likely to appear in search results).
by kragen | 2025-11-06 10:30:57+00:00
I just compiled some C++ code using G++ under ulimit -v 108032, but it didn't use much of the STL. For a simple example program using iostream, vector, unique_ptr, and std::string, I needed more, but had success with ulimit -v 262144: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/docentes.cc.

The last "real" C++ code I wrote was probably the modular softsynth in http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/sweetdreams-c++.cc (see http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/sweetdreams.html for an explanation) which also compiles successfully in under 256MiB of virtual memory (¼GiB). But that's still under 500 lines of code.

I'm not sure how much RAM you need to compile G++ itself. More, I imagine. I was definitely compiling versions of GCC long before I ever saw a machine with so much RAM as 1GB, but I am guessing you probably need at least 1GiB for recent versions, maybe 4GiB.

LLVM, which is required for both clang and Rust, is much heavier. You definitely can't compile current versions of LLVM on i386, m68k, or any 32-bit platform anymore. You can get it to cross-compile to them as targets. In theory there are PPC64 machines that have enough address space to build it, but I'm not sure anyone ever made a PPC64 machine with enough physical RAM to build it in a practical span of time.
by zimpenfish | 2025-11-06 10:31:38+00:00
Back in the olden times (2009) I was working for a company trying to sell advertising devices (screens on buses) with a fancy* HTML interface for setting up/controlling/reporting etc. to Titan. Except all the Titan operators hated it because their old system - an old TUI - was about a million times faster for them to use (not just because they were used to it but it didn't require a mouse, etc.) than the fancy* HTML (which was, to be fair, bloody awful but not my fault.)
by jeroenhd | 2025-11-06 10:31:43+00:00
Redis is the filler you shove in there when Postgres itself starts slowing down. Writing database queries that work and writing database queries that work efficiently are very different things.

It'll give you time to redesign and rebuild so Postgres is fast enough again. Then you can take Redis out, but once you've set it up you may as well keep it running just in case.
by koyote | 2025-11-06 10:32:48+00:00
> Buy a normal vacuum cleaner for half the price, spend 10 minutes a week vacuuming your apartment

You obviously don't have a pet or a baby.

Make that 15 minutes of vacuuming AND mopping 3 times a day for a baby. Suddenly it seems very attractive to have a clean house while not having to find the time during the baby's sleep and nap time to do it manually.

You could argue the same for a dishwasher: I used to only use a single fork, glass and pot (eat out of the pot). A dishwasher seemed like the most idiotic device anyone could own if that's all you need to rinse every day. Until of course you add more people to that equation...(and maybe cook more than just pasta)
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-11-06 10:33:43+00:00
> but it does look inevitable if the trends at play keep their trajectories.

I think this too is utter nonsense. Too much of the twitter brainrot.

But it does highlight the dangers that this poses, that people can easily fall into it as you have done. So, Mr Musk's incitement is a danger to you and others. Even if the "civil war" remains someone's fantasy.
by NoboruWataya | 2025-11-06 10:33:51+00:00
As a native English speaker, I don't see it as condescending either. Yes it's a bit "corporate" in tone, but that is not uncommon at all in large human organisations (not just for-profit corporations but also government, NGOs, political orgs, etc). Also the reality is that "hopping on a call" can often help to resolve problems that would otherwise devolve into months of bikeshedding on mailing lists. Which is often entertaining but rarely very useful.

But it's Mozilla. There is a segment of the community that will be pissed off by everything they do. Check the username of the person you're replying to.
by cryptonym | 2025-11-06 10:35:50+00:00
> Anything else you read into this is going to be fraught with your own coloring based on a hundred words written in text

> That's what communication is about.

Yup, communication is about making sure your message will be well received and it's difficult. Looks like they failed at communication when they pushed LLM, and once again, when they got negative feedback on it.
by Spare_account | 2025-11-06 10:35:55+00:00
Does the Samsung use the same drying method as the LG did?

Older dryers (that needed a vent) were inefficient, but faster at drying. They constantly pumped damp, heated air out of the vent.

Modern condensing dryers keep the heat in the system for a more energy efficient drying cycle but the condensing process is slower.
by HeavyStorm | 2025-11-06 10:37:17+00:00
I think what the grand parent meant is that the staff doesn't acknowledge issues - instead, clearly says that this is how _they_ feel, points out that changes were "only recently introduced", and says that is interested in learning what they are struggling with, again, not acknowledging issues with the process or bot, instead wording as if this is marsf issue.

Personally, I don't think this is that bad. This is a public thread and he's Mozilla staff - the wording has to be clinical. The worse part is the _recently introduced_ bit, but I would look over it.
by adastra22 | 2025-11-06 10:38:07+00:00
They use Rust, but they basically reinvented the wheel for everything they did, because the existing GUI stuff in the rust ecosystem sucked so badly it wasn't worth fixing.

Which is great, Zed's stack is pretty damn good. But like anything not yet widely used outside of its original use case, it can be rough around the edges, and just plain doesn't support anything that is not needed by Zed.
by watwut | 2025-11-06 10:38:19+00:00
> If you have a better solution to correct an error or solve a problem than having a call/meeting and openly discuss situation and possible resolutions - I would love to know about that.

I do, actually. You first read what the other person wrote. Then your response will take whatever they wrote into account. If they did not expressed themselves clearly, you explain what it is that you do not understand. The "We want to make sure we truly understand what you're struggling with." is wholly inappropriate if the only reason you do not understand is that you did not read what they wrote.

Second, you dont suggest the other person is struggling with something, unless they are actually struggling with something. The original post does not show someone struggling at all.

Tl;dr if you want to "openly discuss situation and possible resolutions" you dont start by ignoring what the other person wrote. This response makes it very clear that manager does not intend to openly discuss the situation or possible resolutions, the manager is not taking the complaint seriously at all.
by kragen | 2025-11-06 10:39:48+00:00
A mechanical power switch can certainly be digital; the Harvard Mark I digital computer was made entirely out of mechanical power switches, actuated by solenoids (so-called "relays"). It depends on how you use it—as you say, by combining multiple different bits, either simultaneously or serially.

I agree that a PWM signal is not really a digital signal, but it's kind of on the edge—for example, https://tinyurl.com/25y54mph is a simulation I designed of a completely analog PWM generator (a simulated LM324 op-amp, five transistors, 13 resistors, and a couple of caps), and several vendors offer better-designed versions of the same thing on an IC, but you can also get a perfectly adequate PWM signal out of a digital GPIO pin, and the PWM peripherals commonly included in microcontrollers are entirely digital.
by jbstack | 2025-11-06 10:39:59+00:00
They have their place. I started out with Doom and it definitely helped to streamline the beginner phase where vanilla would have felt overwhelming. But, as with you, I soon became frustrated when I wanted to move beyond its default configuration.

I've since switched to Vanilla and I've been using ChatGPT to gradually explain and help me integrate the Doom features that I like, so that I end up with a similar base that I actually understand and which I can deviate from where I want to.
Show HN: KnexBridge – Generate TypeScript and Zod Types from Knex DB
by knexbridge | 2025-11-06 10:40:08+00:00
I built KnexBridge to fix a long-standing pain in Knex projects — keeping TypeScript types and runtime validation in sync with your database schema.

KnexBridge introspects your DB and auto-generates:

- bridge.schema.ts → strongly-typed table definitions - bridge.validation.ts → matching Zod schemas

SQLite is supported now; PostgreSQL and MySQL are next.

Usage: npx knexbridge generate

Example output: export const users = z.object({ id: z.number(), email: z.string(), created_at: z.date(), }); export type User = z.infer<typeof users>;

Repo: https://github.com/Neon-Nomad/KnexBridge npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/knexbridge Core: https://www.npmjs.com/package/knexbridge-core

Roadmap: • PostgreSQL + MySQL • Watch mode • OpenAPI + JSON Schema output • Plugin system

Would love feedback from anyone using Knex with TypeScript or Zod. Always open to PRs or ideas.
by pjc50 | 2025-11-06 10:40:54+00:00
In practice, it seems not to be a tradeoff but an ideology. Largely because you can't measure the counter-factual of building the app the other way.

It's been a long time since I've done "normal" web development, but I've done a number of high-performance or high-reliability non-web applications, and I think people really underestimate vertical scaling. Even back in the early 2000s when it was slightly hard to get a machine with 128GB of RAM to run some chip design software, doing so was much easier than trying to design a distributed system to handle the problem.

(we had a distributed system of ccache/distcc to handle building the thing instead)

Do people have a good example of microservices they can point us to the source of? By definition it's not one of those things that makes much sense with toy-sized examples. Things like Amazon and Twitter have "micro" services that are very much not micro.
by fragmede | 2025-11-06 10:41:09+00:00
I'm flattered that you think that the intelligence agencies of the four other "eyes", Australia, Canada, New Zealand; would tell me their moves, or that I'd hear about it, but honestly, I'm not that important.

Seriously though, what are you expecting to hear? For the CSIS to post to Twitter what they're hiding from the CIA, as if the CIA hasn't heard of Twitter or something? Or for the GCSB to broadcast which billionaires are making bunkers in Hammer Springs to /r/secretbillionairebunkers like someone is wrong on WarThunder?

What I'm saying is the spooks of their respective countries are just gonna keep a bit more to themselves and not tell the US because the think someone in the current US administration is going to leak it, putting their assets at risk. The respective secret agencies haven't put out coordinated press releases saying they're doing this or gone on the talk show tour to talk about it, so I have no proof, but it seems quite possible to me that they are.
by pjmlp | 2025-11-06 10:41:35+00:00
An improved CV, lets be honest most stuff is boring projects that could even be built with 1990's technology, distributed systems is not something that was invented yesterday.

However having in the CV any of those items from left side in the deployment strategy is way cooler than mentioning n-tier architecture, RPC (regardless how they are in the wire), any 1990's programming language, and so forth.

A side effect from how hiring works so badly in our industry, it isn't enough to know how master a knife to be a chef, it must be a specific brand of knife, otherwise the chef is not good enough for the kitchen.
by fhd2 | 2025-11-06 10:43:00+00:00
> Regardless, the keyboard vs mouse thing always struck me as one of the many dumb flamewars that tech people engage in.

Certainly. I wouldn't argue that text editing speed is a relevant bottleneck in software development, actually. To me it's enjoyable and that's a big factor in my productivity, but that's just me.

My point was mainly that the keyboard (efficient use is difficult to learn) vs mouse (arguably easier to learn) is just one example of why the current desktop metaphor won over something I'd say is designed for heavy keyboard use (even if usable without it). The "code the entire environment" thing you mention is another example. Not sure I expressed that point all that well, rereading my comment it almost looks as if I'm trying to start a flame war :D
by defrost | 2025-11-06 10:43:56+00:00
Err, no, it's an actual system we built here to service an actual town to soak excess energy from midday solar and buffer an actual real town from blackouts.

The battery banks in Adelaide an elsewhere are real - you can kick them.

You can price these against gas peaker turbine plants, and then compare the robustness of mini distributed storage nodes against larger single point of failure fossil fuel gas plants.

I understand the Western Power link provided looks like media hype, it was put together years back at the start of the project with minal updates in the interim.

It's well out of date now that the Walpole project has been completed and is up and running for a few months now.
by the_gipsy | 2025-11-06 10:44:26+00:00
Shameless plug:

https://github.com/benjajaja/mdfried/

Markdown is really cool in the sense that you can still look at the raw text and read it easily. But one thing that always made me load up .md files in the browser was that it's just much easier to read when the headers are bigger.

So I wrote a markdown viewer that renders the headers as images. You need to configure your font once for it to work, can't really detect the terminal font. It obviously also renders inline images, which was another reason to use the browser.

And then, Kitty developed the novelty https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/text-sizing-protocol (I think it's now also implemented in Ghostty), which means we can skip the text-to-image processing and directly leverage that protocol.
by jbstack | 2025-11-06 10:45:01+00:00
I think some of these are unfair criticisms, because they are things that can be trivially changed. E.g. disabling evil mode or changing the theme are one-line modifications in the Doom config. After all, any opinionated Emacs distro has to make some choices otherwise there would be little point in anyone using one.

For me the issues with Doom are (a) the complexity as a whole that it introduces, and (b) so many things are already installed/configured that you end up using them without any real "under the hood" understanding which is so essential for customisation.
by buzzardbait | 2025-11-06 10:45:02+00:00
Does it read like a canned response? Yes.

But it is not "forceful and rude" by any means and your interpretation is way over the top for what looks like two people from different cultures trying to communicate in a mutually non-native language using words on a screen.

Written messages can feel cold even when it's two native English speakers communicating over email or text and it's best to assume good faith until you see clear evidence to the contrary.
by Asraelite | 2025-11-06 10:45:16+00:00
No it doesn't. The fact that the article had to say "Maybe Redis for caching" because Postgres can't handle caching at scale shows that Postgres is not a perfect solution. Choosing an alternative database that can do everything you need means simplifying your architecture in the spirit of the article (not to say that MariaDB specifically is the right choice here, I'm not familiar enough with it to comment on that).