MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chrismorgan | 2025-11-06 11:56:45+00:00
> I analyzed the feeds of some of the top contributors on HN, and almost all had something wrong with them.

I’m sceptical about your analysis, because your tool makes spurious complaints about my feed <https://chrismorgan.info/feed.xml> which show that it’s not parsing XML correctly. For stupid reasons¹ that I decided not to fix or work around, many of the slashes are encoded as &#x2F;, which is perfectly valid, but your tool fails to decode the character references inside attribute values. I don’t know what dodgy parser you’re using, it’s possible this is the only thing it gets wrong about parsing XML², but it doesn’t instil confidence. I would expect a strict XML parser to be more reliable. I’ve literally only once encountered a feed that was invalid XML³. Liberal parsing is not a virtue, it’s fragile in a different way. Postel was wrong.

—⁂—

¹ I wish OWASP’s XSS protection cheat sheet had never been written. I will say no more.

² Honestly, parsing XML isn’t very hard; once you’re past the prologue, there are literally only about seven simple concepts to deal with (element, attribute, text, processing instructions, comments, cdata, character/entity references), with straightforward interactions. Not decoding references in attribute values is a mind-boggling oversight to me.

³ WordPress thinks it’s okay to encode U+0003 as &#x03; in an XML 1.0 document.
by StarGrit | 2025-11-06 11:57:30+00:00
> how did I misstate your position?

Straw-man and now gas-lighting. Obviously I wouldn't have the same opinion about a classic novel (however flowery prose is a problem in a many novels) as I do about throwaway news "stories" written by a copy writer that wants to make use of their English degree. Pretending someone would (without any evidence to the contrary) is a disingenuous tactic to make people shut-up. I've had this done to me in person.

> there was tons of news rehashing facts of what happened (phones banned yadda yadda), why not just read that instead if you want it

If they hadn't have used the story like prose I may have read the rest of it! That is my and the OP's entire complaint.

I think we will leave it there.
by exDM69 | 2025-11-06 11:59:06+00:00
In my experience, compiling C with -ffast-math will tremendously improve floating point autovectorization and optimizations to SIMD (C vector extensions, which are similar to Rust std::simd) code in general.

This obviously has a lot of caveats, and should only be enabled on a per function or per file basis.

Unfortunately Rust does not currently have options for adjusting per-function compiler optimization parameters. This is possible in some C compilers using function attributes.
by dcminter | 2025-11-06 12:00:06+00:00
"I'm sorry you feel that way" is shaped like an apology, but is essentially blaming the other party's feelings as being the problem.

"I'm sorry I did that" is an actual apology.

To be clear, I'm agreeing with you. I think that the former version emerged as it's litigation proof. Corporate PR can say that without it being an admission of anything if whatever they fucked up results in a lawsuit.

It has spread to personal communications from corporate ones and it's now so prevalent that it is possible someone might use it and actually mean a real apology. But it's ... tainted.
Show HN: Dimension-UI, a desktop alternative to Grafana for time-series analysis
by akardapolov | 2025-11-06 12:00:25+00:00
I've built Dimension-UI, a desktop application for interactive analysis of time-series data, written in Java 25+ with a Swing UI.

While Grafana is fantastic for high-level dashboards, I always found it cumbersome for deep, iterative analysis. The main pain point is its "stateless" drill-down: you select a time range, and you jump to a new, filtered view, losing the original context. To compare different views, you end up juggling multiple browser tabs.

Dimension-UI's core concept is "stateful drill-down." When you select a time range on a chart, a detailed breakdown (like a Gantt chart, pivot table, or raw data) appears directly below it. The main context is never lost, which dramatically reduces cognitive load when hunting for the root cause of an issue.

Key differentiators from a standard Grafana/Prometheus stack:

- High Interactivity: Being a desktop app allows for a much more responsive, stateful interface that's hard to achieve on the web. In my tests, Dimension-UI uses significantly less RAM (~400MB for 300+ charts) compared to a browser tab with a complex Grafana dashboard (~900MB).

- Simplified Stack: It can connect directly to databases (PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc.) via JDBC or to Prometheus via HTTP. For many use cases, this eliminates the need for separate exporters.

- Built-in Advanced Analysis: It includes out-of-the-box anomaly/motif detection using Matrix Profile and forecasting with ARIMA, accessible directly from the UI.

- "No-code" DB Explorer: An Ad-hoc mode lets you point the tool at a database table, select the timestamp and metric columns, and start visualizing and analyzing data without writing SQL.

I wrote a detailed comparison with Grafana, focusing on the task of analyzing Active Session History (ASH) in a PostgreSQL database. It clearly demonstrates the difference in workflow and how much faster you can pinpoint performance issues.

This project was also the first real-world application for Dimension-DI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45821919

Migrating from Dagger 2 to my own DI solution made the codebase much more modular and testable.

The project is open source, and I'd love to get your feedback.

Sample profiles and GIF screencasts are in the repo.

Links:

Dimension-UI (GitHub): https://github.com/akardapolov/dimension-ui

Article: Grafana vs. Dimension-UI for ASH Monitoring: https://habr.com/ru/articles/865622/ (The article is in Russian, but browsers can translate it, and the screencasts are self-explanatory)

Dimension-DI (the DI container it uses): https://github.com/akardapolov/dimension-di
by pantulis | 2025-11-06 12:00:56+00:00
> I use profiles for when I need different user contexts (different bookmarks and frequently used sites for different clients or projects).

This is the part where the new Firefox profiles fall short. I just checked and cannot create two separate profiles with the same email address. So it's not possible tohave different profiles for different _projects_ at work, for example.

Containers are the way to go with this, but then they are not exactly intuitive. Arc got this right and Zen is showing a lot of promise.
by CGamesPlay | 2025-11-06 12:00:59+00:00
Given that it doesn't support multiple tool calls, one thing I noticed that is not ideal is that it seems to buffer stdout and stderr. This means that I don't see any output if the command takes 10 minutes, and I also can't see stdout mixed with stderr. It would be ideal to actually "exec" the target process instead, honestly. https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/os/unix/process/trait.CommandE...
by snickmy | 2025-11-06 12:01:06+00:00
I'm with you, and actually bullish on this to be a viable way forward.

48V DC has been eyed already for a potential standard to emerge. Doesn't need massive cables to deliver decent power (4A ~200W). There is enough hardware around coming from use cases like EV and Boats that could make it work. Many battery solutions already 'talk' 48v without lossy stepdown of voltage, etc.

Big plus is that the regulation is A LOT less strict for <48v DC compared to AC 110/220/240.
by japhyr | 2025-11-06 12:01:15+00:00
I started teaching in the 90s, and left classroom teaching in 2019. This is how I saw it play out in every school I was aware of.

People think "just ban phones". But there are so many factors at play, it has to be a coordinated effort across an entire school. And everyone has to play along. Any policy is only as good as its enforcement, and enforcement is hard.
by wouldbecouldbe | 2025-11-06 12:02:04+00:00
Yeah theoretically that sounds good. But I had more downtime through cloud outages, Kubernetes updates then I ever had using simple linux server with nginx on hardware; most outages I had on linux was with my VPS was due to Digital Ocean issue with their own hardware failures. AWS was down not so long ago.

And if certain servers do get very important you just run a backup server with VPS and switch over DNS (even if you keep a high ttl, most servers update within minutes nowadays) or if you want to be fancy throw a load balancer in front of it.

If you solve issues in a few minutes people are always thankful, and most dont notice. With complicated setups it tends to take much longer before figuring out what the issue is in the first place.
by gwd | 2025-11-06 12:02:20+00:00
Yeah, I occasionally tell my Chinese friends that the grammar of English and Chinese is actually pretty similar. If they respond with surprise, I'd say, "Have you ever tried to learn Turkish?" Chinese doesn't have conjugation; but the basic sentence structure (subject-verb-object, preposition, etc) are similar. There are of course loads of differences; but nothing nearly so deeply structural as Turkish, where you indicate relationships between things by adding suffixes; or Japanese, which just has a completely different way of bringing up topics.
by crote | 2025-11-06 12:02:24+00:00
Some people just want to contribute to a common cause. Some people just want to spend five minutes of their time to fix that one annoying papercut which been bothering them for ages, others just enjoy working together with friendly people to achieve something tangible they can be proud of.

In my opinion one of the biggest benefits of Github to the open-source community is that contributing now has extremely low barriers. It is absolutely trivial to put an "edit this page" link in your documentation which lets a complete stranger fix a typo and open a pull request within seconds - and seeing your fix go live within a few hours is absolutely magical. That kind of trivial contribution is a gateway drug to becoming a valued community member, and it is absolutely essential to maintaining a healthy ecosystem around open-source projects.
by nl | 2025-11-06 12:03:20+00:00
Hopefully this will finally stop the continuing claims[1] that LLMs can only solve problems they have seen before!

If you listen carefully to the people who build LLMs it is clear that post-training RL forces them to develop a world-model that goes well beyond a "fancy Markov chain" that some seem to believe. Next step is building similar capabilities on top of models like Genie 3[2]

[1] eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45769971#45771146

[2] https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/genie-3-a-new-frontier...
by braiamp | 2025-11-06 12:04:03+00:00
Dude, if someone is saying "hey we will pack up, we have nothing to do here" out of the blue, I would like a more nuanced conversation that written text could not hope to convey. We are humans and while reading is perfectly capable of relying information, it's unable to rely intention accurately. There's ton of information that is conveyed by the inflection of voice, demeanor, body language, etc.
by pshirshov | 2025-11-06 12:04:15+00:00
A bit surprised (and delighted) to see this on the front page.

Essentially, this is a greatly simplified port of distage (my library implementing phased DI for Scala).

Most of the job was done by Claude, the primary point was to showcase phased DI for Typescript, which has many annoyances and limitations, especially when it comes to reflection.

My contributions here were

(a) the approach itself: first we turn functions and constructors into runtime-inspectable entities called Functoids, then we trace binding dependencies from requested roots, do conflict resolution and build a DAG of operations, then we produce instances by traversing the graph in topological order.

(b) a bit unconventional approach to Typescript reflection, which is manual but comes with compile-time validation.

There are many benefits of phased approach to DI, one of the most important benefits is that you can have "configurable apps" (think use-flags for your applications) which are sound, free of logical conflicts and validated early (in case of Scala we even do it at compile time).

Also this approach is extremely easy to comprehend and reproduce (even Claude can do it with some guidance and interventions; I've done ports to several other languages, some with LLM assistance, some manually). While most DIs (especially single-phased ones) are hard to comprehend, maintain and port to other languages/runtimes, for this approach you need to have just one concept implemented - Functoid. The DAG-forming logic fits in 200-300 lines of code and would look the same in any language.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-11-06 12:04:36+00:00
> There is not, and will not be a civil war, its just poor reporting shit.

Agreed, but that doesn't make Mr Musk's ravings harmless. He is a powerful man, promoting deranged violent fantasies. It could cause harm. Arguably already has, see the last event where he addressed the crowds over video.
by MrsPeaches | 2025-11-06 12:06:06+00:00
For sure recycling is improving. That’s different from repair though.

The current cycle is 1. sell product 2. wait three years for it to break 3. Go back to 1.

The impact of the recycling can lessen the impact of that but it definitely doesn’t eliminate it. That’s just on environmental scale, think about the financial impact of carrying this debt for years on people earning $2 a day.

Also important to note that a lot of this is contingent of legislation that implements things like Extended Producer Responsibly (EPR) where you essentially have an additional tax on producers that gets used to fund collection. Kenya implemented this for the first time 12 months ago [1], so we will see the impact over the next couple years.

Re solar punk, my personal vision is that you basically teach people how to build and maintain these systems themselves by running solar tech bootcamp and giving them off-grid tools.

They then have tools and skills to fix anything without the need for the grid. Train 100k people and have them maintain these systems using a decentralised approach.

In fact, as part of our training we now have e-cooking stove suppliers who deliver training on their stoves to our students.

The economic impact of this cannot be over stated.

1. You are giving people the ability to 4x their income as repairers

2. You are saving the people who are getting new systems, instead of repairing them, multiples of their yearly income.

[1] https://cleanupkenya.org/30-things-to-know-about-kenyas-epr-...
by Havoc | 2025-11-06 12:06:35+00:00
> Add complexity only when you have proof you need it.

This does assume that said complexity can be added ad hoc later. Often earlier architecture choices make additions complex too or even prevent it entirely without a complete rewrite

So while the overall message is true there is some liberal use of simplification at play here too

In some cases a compromise can make sense. Eg use k8s but keep it simple within that - as vanilla as you can make it
by davydm | 2025-11-06 12:06:38+00:00
Whilst DHH is a lot of things (many unpleasant), I find it difficult to get behind someone's argument when they provide links to blog posts, but retitle them to suit their own agenda - it's disingenuous, bordering on deceit. Such subtle lies detract from the actual facts in that article and make me view the author with an air of skepticism.

Pity, because DHH is a weapons-grade plum, to borrow words from Sue Perkins, though she never used them against DHH - it's just an apt title.
by rjmunro | 2025-11-06 12:06:43+00:00
I think Microsoft Office 2007 moving to a "ribbon" rather than normal menus and an optional toolbar for certain things was the major break in usability. Mac OS has kept the menus, and added a really useful menu search thing in "help", and this is huge.

I think sublime text was one of the first to bring the TUI style super-powers into the modern desktop UK, where you press some random keyboard shortcut (e.g. cmd-p in sublime) and you can instantly start typing a command.

Another thought I have had for a long time is that when GUIs like Mac and Windows were taking off, they were often described as more "user friendly" than TUIs. I always thought this depended on the kind of user. A lot of effort went into prioritising making it possible for an untrained user to use a system, but making it fast for someone with experience was no longer important.
by bodge5000 | 2025-11-06 12:06:54+00:00
Other than the usual scepticism around AI, it seems like it goes in the complete opposite direction of what they're trying to do. It sounds like they want to rethink how computers should work right from the beginning, eg they dont ship with a web browser, presumably so developers can rethink what a web browser actually is/should be, which is all really cool.

But then to throw in "you know that thing thats built upon decades of pre-existing infrastructure and assumptions on how computing should work? Yeh thats there too" doesn't seem compatible with the above.
by benterix | 2025-11-06 12:07:40+00:00
With time, I discovered something interesting: for us, techies, using container orchestration is about reliability, zero-downtime deployments, limiting blast radius etc.

But for management, it's completely different. It's all about managing complexity on an organizational level. It's so much easier to think in terms "Team 1 is in charge of microservice A". And I know from experience that it works decently enough, at least in some orgs with competent management.
Show HN: CountdownShare – simple embeddable countdown timer, free and no signup
by jatinlalit | 2025-11-06 12:07:48+00:00
Hi HN — I built CountdownShare, a tiny web tool at https://countdownshare.com/ that lets you create a shareable, embeddable countdown in under 10 seconds.

What it does - Create a countdown by target date/time or duration, then get a short public URL + embed code. - Share instantly on socials or embed into any site — no signup required. - Lightweight tool, real-time sync across viewers, mobile-friendly and focused on zero friction.

Why I built it I wanted a fast way to make promotional timers, social share timers, event timers — without logins, bloated JS, or heavy setup. So I built a tool that’s focused, free forever, and easy to embed.

Tech & constraints - Built with Next.js + Firebase Realtime Database (for sync) + simple embed iframe/JS widget. - No user accounts: generate timer → share it → optional deletion. - Embed code is small, responsive, and works across devices.

What I want from HN - Honest feedback on the UX, embed approach, and privacy/usage model. - Thoughts on growth: where would you list a tool like this or how would you promote it? - Bugs or features missing you’d expect (e.g., private timers, analytics, custom domains).

Thanks — I’ll be around to answer questions and fix anything broken.
by verzali | 2025-11-06 12:08:33+00:00
Mercury really is the closest planet to us right now - it is 129 millon km away. Venus is 245 million and Mars is 361 million. From December the Sun will be closer than Mercury (147 million) but it won't be until August next year that Venus will be closer than both. After that Venus is the closest until the start of 2027, when it is the turn of Mars.
by exDM69 | 2025-11-06 12:10:11+00:00
Despite all of these issues you mention, std::simd is perfectly usable in the state it is in today in nightly Rust.

I've written thousands and thousands of lines of Rust SIMD code over the last ~4 years and it's, in my opinion, a pretty nice way of doing SIMD code that is portable.

I don't know about the specific issues in stabilization, but the API has been relatively stable, although there were some breaking changes a few years ago.

Maybe you can't extract 100% of your CPUs capabilities using it, but I don't find that a problem because there's a zero-cost fallback to CPU-specific intrinsics when necessary.

I recently wrote some computer graphics code and I could get really nice performance (~20x my scalar code, 5x from just a naive translation). And the same codebase can be compiled to AVX2, SSE2 and ARM NEON. It uses f32x8's (256b vector width), which are not available on SSE or NEON, but the compiler can split those vectors. The f32x8 version was faster than f32x4 even on 128b hardware. I would've needed to painstakingly port this codebase to each CPU, so it was at least a 3x reduction in lines of code (and more in programmer time).
by tclancy | 2025-11-06 12:11:17+00:00
Because they’re meeting the patients at their own level. Plus while using PG for everything is a currently popular meme on HN (and I am all for it), it’s not something you see all that often. An app server, a database and a cache is a pretty sensible and simple starting point.

Until you get to 100 test users. Then you need Kafka and k8.
by jl6 | 2025-11-06 12:11:29+00:00
My takeaway from observing “tech in developing world” projects is that the key gap is usually maintenance. That is, continuous small investment to prevent things from breaking in the first place. To be fair, that’s not exactly a solved problem in developed countries either!

Sometimes development projects just throw solutions at rural communities then move onto their next project, leaving no legacy of training or continued supply of parts/tools/funding.

Sometimes solutions get treated as resources instead of infrastructure, like a water treatment plant that got strip-mined for metal (that example was from South America).

Tech is a whole ecosystem, mindset and lifestyle, not just magic hardware to parachute into situations that aren’t set up to manage it on a long term basis.
by mrighele | 2025-11-06 12:11:31+00:00
Not 100% related, but there are a few of business around that still use home computers from the 80's.

some examples:

A bakery in Indiana is still using the 40-year-old Commodore 64 as a cash register | A 1 MHz CPU and 64KB of RAM are enough [1]

A an Atari 1040ST still in use for the a campsite's operations [2]

Commodore 64 Still Powering Auto Repair Shop in Poland [3]

A Japanese kimono factory that still use a Sharp MZ-80K [4]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/gadgets/comments/1hhqa0h/a_bakery_i...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LxPEz9x2fs

[3] https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a23139/c...

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWJZFQHklBg

(Note: some of the above links are a few years old, it may be that it is no longer the case)
by sfn42 | 2025-11-06 12:12:06+00:00
I don't see how you solve this with microservices. You'll have to take down your services in these situations too, a monolith vs microservices soup has the exact same problem.

Also in 5 years of working on both microservicy systems and monoliths, not once has these things you describe been a problem for me. Everything I've hosted in Azure has been perfectly available pretty much all the time unless a developer messed up or Azure itself has downtime that would have taken down either kind of app anyway.

But sure let's make our app 100 times more complicated because maybe some time in the next 10 years the complexity might save us an hour of downtime. I'd say it's more likely the added complexity will cause more downtime than it saves.