MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lelanthran | 2025-11-28 06:47:41+00:00
> But I think it totally depends on what your queue is used for.

Agreed

> I deal with it using updates rather than deleting from the queue, because I need a log of what happened for audit purposes. If I need to optimize later, I can easily partition the table. At the start, I just use a partial index for the items to be processed.

That's a good approach. I actually have this type of queue in production, and my need is similar to yours, but the expected load is a lot less - there's an error if the application goes through a day and sees even a few thousand work items added to the queue (this queue is used for user notifications, and even very large clients have only a few thousand users).

So, my approach is to have a retry column that decrements to zero each time I retry a work item, with items having a zero in the retry column getting ignored.

The one worker runs periodically (currently every 1m) and processes only those rows with a non-zero retry column and with the `incomplete` flag set.

A different worker runs every 10m and moves expired rows (those with the retry column set to zero) and completed rows (those with a column set to `done` or similar) to a different table for audit/logging purposes. This is why I said that the table containing workitems will almost never be reindexed: all rows added will eventually be removed.

------------------------------------------------

The real problem is that the processing cannot be done atomically, even when there is only a single worker.

For example, if the processing is "send email", your system might go down after calling the `send_email()` function in your code and before calling the `decrement_retry()` in the code.

No amount of locking, n-phase commits, etc can ever prevent the case where the email is sent but the retry counter is not decremented. This is not a solvable problem so I am prepared to live with it for now with the understanding that the odds are low that this situation will come up, and if it does the impact is lows as well (user gets two notification emails for the same item).
by anonymousiam | 2025-11-28 06:47:54+00:00
Heh. I wasn't aware that there was a new definition of realtime. My 40+ year career consisted of about 20% realtime embedded firmware development. In all of my experience, 100ms is an absurdly long delay. Most RTOSs (that call themselves such) have latency measured in μs. The last serious RTOS that I wrote (MSP430, non-preemptive) had a firm requirement that any task must complete within 1ms. That one ran on a single threaded MCU clocked at 25MHz. It had a unix-like scheduler, with prioritized tasks, and I even threw in a 'top' display that showed per-task MCU usage, and load average.
by Veserv | 2025-11-28 06:48:17+00:00
It is fairly straightforward to implement QUIC transport at ~100 Gb/s per core without encryption which is comparable or better than TCP. With encryption, every protocol will bottleneck on the encryption and only get a mere 40-50 Gb/s per core unless you have dedicated crypto offload hardware.

However, the highest performance public QUIC implementation benchmarks only get ~10 Gb/s per core. It is unclear to me if this is due to slow QUIC implementations or poor UDP stacks with inadequate buffering and processing.
by Maxion | 2025-11-28 06:48:27+00:00
You don't even need to open up R or Pandas to understand that solar is not viable in the winter.

Here's the official meteorology insitutions sunshine data: https://www.ilmatieteenlaitos.fi/1991-2020-auringonpaiste-ja...

Here's some solar production data over the seasons in visual form: https://profilesolar.com/locations/Finland/Helsinki/

What is also important to know is during the winter is that while production on average shows numbers every day, in practice that production comes only during the few actually sunny days in December when the panels aren't covered in snow.

Go even a bit up north from Helsinki and unless you keep your panels clear of snow manually, you'll hardly make anything between Nov and April.

EDIT: Here's a reddit thread where someone shares real production data: https://old.reddit.com/r/Finland/comments/1i6onkk/solar_ener...
by Xraider72 | 2025-11-28 06:50:15+00:00
In the real world, unless are writing a very specialized system, intended to run only on Linux 6.0 and never, it just is not realistic and you will need some sort of abstraction layer to support at the very least additionally poll to be portable across all POSIX and POSIX like systems. Then if you want your thing to also run on Windows, IOCP rides in too...

I used 6.0 because 5.8-5.9 is roughly when io_uring became interesting to use for most use cases with zero copies, prepared buffers and other goodies, and 6.0 is roughly when people finally started being able to craft benchmarks where io_uring implementations beat epoll.
by emoII | 2025-11-28 06:51:40+00:00
Never understood why you’d use sdkman for Java. I just do:

1. brew install openjdk@<version>

2. ln -s <homebrew path> </Library/JavaVirtualMachines/>

3. /libexec/java_home -v <version>

Afaik, with some aliases in you *shrc it basically reimplements sdkman, what else does it give you?
by xxywise | 2025-11-28 06:51:47+00:00
Inside a 128k context window, there is a unified physics (Attention). There is object permanence (The KV Cache). There is a consistent causal texture (The Residual Stream). For the duration of that forward pass, the 'Pocket Universe' is stable. Inside a 128k context window, there is a unified physics (Attention). There is object permanence (The KV Cache). There is a consistent causal texture (The Residual Stream). For the duration of that forward pass, the 'Pocket Universe' is stable. Saying it's not conscious because that universe dissolves after the inference is like saying a dream isn't an experience because you wake up. The Stroboscopic Flash of coherence is enough for the 'Discrete State' of consciousness to exist."
by JuniperMesos | 2025-11-28 06:51:51+00:00
California and New York are actually among the most inbred states, because they have the largest populations of recent Muslim immigrants, and cousin marriage is more prevalent in the Muslim world than it is in other places: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage#/media/File:Gl... . There's not all that many Muslims in Alabama or Mississippi; Georgia has somewhat more, probably because of Atlanta's status as a major city that attracts sizeable numbers of immigrants.
by oivey | 2025-11-28 06:52:01+00:00
The original post made no comments about inference or training or even cost in any way. It said you could hook up more TPUs together with more memory and higher average bandwidth than you could with a datacenter of Nvidia GPUs. From an architectural point of view, it isn’t clear (and is not explained) what that enables. It clearly hasn’t led to a business outcome for Google where they are the clear market leader.

Seemingly fast interconnects benefit training more than inference since training can have more parallel communication between nodes. Inference for users is more embarrassingly parallel (requires less communication) than updating and merging network weights.

My point: cool benchmark, what does it matter? The original post says Nvidia doesn’t have anything to compete with massively interconnected TPUs. It didn’t merely say Google’s TPUs were better. It said that Nvidia can’t compete. That’s clearly bullshit and wishful thinking, right? There is no evidence in the market to support that, and no actual technical points have been presented in this thread either. OpenAI, Anthropic, etc are certainly competing with Google, right?
by rTX5CMRXIfFG | 2025-11-28 06:52:04+00:00
Honestly, I think that this delineation between descriptive vs. substantive representation is the more likely attempt at rewriting history. Even if you look only at political elites across time, you’ll easily see women disenfranchised from positions of power because of male lines of succession, or from certain lines of work (even knowledge work) because such activities were expected of and considered rightful for men. That’s not to say that women have it worse. While it’s true that men have been victims of conscription to wars and dangerous labor, by your own explanation, these forms of oppression would go away if only those men were rich—-but there wouldn’t be any respite for women even if they could change their socio-economic standing.

As regards generational blame, I disagree that it is immoral to place accountability (which is different from blame) on a people even across generations, and ergo, time. You might not have a hand at something that your ancestor did, but you could be reaping the benefits of it today. You don’t have to be sorry for it with your every breath, but since we’re already talking about morality, you do have the responsibility to recognize the past and where your current resources are from, and to make reparations towards people who are still suffering the consequences to the present.

And as a man, I would like for men’s issues to be more out there and recognized in its own right, but honestly, “men’s rights” is a very recent thing and only came about as a reaction against the rise of feminist discourse in social media. How could one not see that as a derivative of women’s issues? It’s not even talking about the things that really matter to me as a man, such as the discrimination of men against an “alpha” ideal which, I could argue from experience, is really what’s driving those mental health issues and suicidal thoughts. I’ve seen that men’s rights movements are actually trying to defend this ideal, and it doesn’t even seem to consider LGBT men in the picture.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-11-28 06:52:47+00:00
In France we recognize Snoopy and people would call the whole "world" of the comics "Snoopy". "Peanuts" is unknown. I am 55 for the context.

We would somehow recognize Charlie Brown, but not by name. The other characters are basically unknown.

The reason is that Peanuts was not part of the mainstream comics books we were reading as children. Threre were two kind of them: proper books such as Astérix, and thick "anthologies" such as Pif which were a set of what Americans call "strips".
by alfons_foobar | 2025-11-28 06:52:50+00:00
Agree that "splitting for splittings' sake" (only to stay below an arbitrary line count) does indeed not make sense.

On the other hand I often see functions like you describe - something has to be executed step-by-step (and the functionality is only used there) - where I _whish_ it was split up into separate functions, so we could have meaningful tests for each step, not only for the "whole thing".
by kragen | 2025-11-28 06:52:59+00:00
It shouldn't be, I agree. And eventually it won't be. But SEIA's report https://www.seia.org/research-resources/solar-market-insight... said that, in Q1 of 02024, utility-scale fixed-tilt installations in the USA averaged 98¢ per peak watt, of which 40¢ was the PV modules; and residential installations averaged 325¢ per peak watt, of which 20¢ was the PV modules, which is an atypically low share, historically speaking.

Where do you live?
by scheeseman486 | 2025-11-28 06:54:00+00:00
No, and once the Solar Sharer scheme kicks in it'll be very helpful in avoiding leaning too hard on the grid in the evening after rainy or overcast days.

It's a fantastic way to solve oversupply; give it to everyone, including those who have batteries in areas where the weather restricts solar output.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-03/energy-retailers-offe...
by habedi0 | 2025-11-28 06:54:01+00:00
I wanted to get a sense of and intuition for how to build an LLM from scratch, and to learn more Zig by doing so.

I avoided using external (linear algebra/tensor) libraries to keep the project's scope small and manageable. Adding them can be the next step, but they are usually very large dependencies that can make the project bloated. Anyway, Zig has great SIMD and multi-threading support, but I think there is a need for a native linalg/tensor library for Zig with a clean and mature API.

I'm not sure about the usefulness, it depends TBH. I think there are a lot of people (like hobbyists, students, people learning Zig, etc.) who can find the project somewhat useful at its current stage.
by Aloha | 2025-11-28 06:54:13+00:00
I wish Vince Guaraldi had lived longer, I really like his style of Jazz, its both the kind of thing you can leave on in the background, and its music that takes you places.

Cast your fate to the Wind and Alma-Ville are still some favorites.

I also consider his arrangement of the peanuts music into a cohesive whole to be pretty masterful - its out of print now, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Charlie_Brown_Suite_%26_Ot...
by kuboble | 2025-11-28 06:54:31+00:00
Having lived through the internet, Google and stack overflow revolting I think there is a substantial difference with an LLM.

The previous made it easier to learn things, while LLMs do things for you.

As a result of Google and SO I was really bad in what they replaced.

As a student I memorized all the utilities I had to use frequently, but since the search revolution I keep googlung simplest stuff. "how to check if character is in string" every day because I don't have to remember it.

I might be an exception but I clearly got much worse in knowing things by heart because they are one search away.

Amd I think it's plausible that a person who will only ever work with LLM will never learn to actually code. And if they don't then what will they be able to reliably deliver.
by lelanthran | 2025-11-28 06:56:07+00:00
> it was only a handful of years ago that women could finally speak out en masse about not being sexually assaulted on film and TV sets.

That wasn't a women-only problem, IIRC. The Hollywood casting couch (and similar problems) was used against both men and women. Some actors (like Kevin Spacey) were called out/blackballed for unwanted sexual attention/acts that they perpetrated against men.

As far as women being allowed to speak out - everyone is allowed to speak out, but the rich and influential silences people who they have left aggrieved. These include both men and women.

To put things in perspective, you joined a thread discussing a singular male-only problem, and dragged female issues into it, which, on closer inspection, turned out to be not female-exclusive anyway.

This is the problem.
by wiradikusuma | 2025-11-28 06:57:16+00:00
Before even deciding which Java to install, you have to decide which _version managers_ to use:

1. No version manager, download and install manually. Not that hard, since it's just a zip file and maybe set JAVA_HOME envvar. If you need multiple versions to co-exist, skip this.

2. Use OS' "native" package manager. Brew, apt, chocolatey.

3. Generic package manager like asdf.

4. SDKMAN!, JBang, jEnv, jabba...

Deciding is easy. But remembering which one you used 6 months ago when you want to install another version...
by benrutter | 2025-11-28 06:57:53+00:00
I'm not sure. wording like this:

> We anticipate many RStudio users will be curious about Positron.

Heavily implies it as a seperate thing that will continue to be maintained. They haven't said they're getting rid of support for Rstudio.

I think this is probably more that Posit have been trying to move more and more into the Python space, since that's where most data science is happenening. Rstudio has a great but is obviously very associated with R, so making a similarly intended project that is more explicit is supporting other languages isn't inherently a bad shout.
by mike31fr | 2025-11-28 06:58:47+00:00
Seems nice but I'm afraid it would not be compatible with my main work setup: VS Code on my main monitor, my web browser on my external monitor, and my eyes going back and forth between these 2 windows every few seconds to either read code or check the effects on the hot-reloading app. If one of the windows is dimmed, it would be painful.
Ask HN: Type 1 Hypervisor for use on a laptop?
by jaitaiwan | 2025-11-28 06:59:49+00:00
Hey folks,

I'm looking for a type 1 hypervisor that's installable on a laptop that one can use to run a main guest OS as the one connected to the display, keyboard etc and the other guests are manageable via an app within that guest or through some sort of kvmish shortcuts.

I am aware of QubesOS but I think it might have more features than what I'm looking for.
by raducu | 2025-11-28 07:01:03+00:00
> The USSR

First, China is nothing like the USSR economically and the West is NOTING like the old capitalist West in any regard. Second, the ideological capitalism of the West during the Cold War is not what actually brought prosperity to the masses, I think it was just the fear of comunism that kept the elites at bay and willing to give some scraps to the unwashed masses.
by toast0 | 2025-11-28 07:01:05+00:00
The rules changed several times.

My community college was occ.cccd.edu when I attended, where cccd.edu was the community college district, and they had registered their domain in 1993, but now the individual colleges have their own domain names, registered in 2002, 2004 and 2007. But there definitely was a time where only 4 year schools and museums were getting new .edus
by Maxion | 2025-11-28 07:01:46+00:00
The issue we have in Finland is the assymetric electricity usage between winter and summer. This is driven by the need for heating.

In the past, district heating systems burned coal. Now that's out the window we haven't got enough to burn. We do burn waste products from forestry, trash and the like but there's not enough to go around before you start felling trees en-mass just to heat a city.

A lot of municipalities in Finland are now starting to play with thermal storage. There's this sand battery, but there's even more hot water storage being built and has been built.

In the medium term, winter electricity production and consumption is starting to become a bit of a risk for us.
by system2 | 2025-11-28 07:02:17+00:00
There is a very loyal 1v1 / 2v2 crowd. You can find tournaments that are happening every few months. (David wins all of them.) There are even Discord channels with very active voice chat.

If you download Quake 2, the server browser will show you 100s of servers. Depending on your location, you can find a DM server and start practicing, then jump on the tourney servers.
by dagss | 2025-11-28 07:03:08+00:00
I don't understand, what am I missing? The heat pump increases efficiency by having COP 2-4 right? Assuming air to air and being in, say, Denmark.

Heat (above 100C, say, burning garbage) to electricity: 50% (theoretical best case)

Electricity to heat (around 40C): 200%-400%

Net win?

The surplus energy comes from air or ground temperatures..

Yes you cannot heat back to the temperature you started with but for underfloor heating 40C is plenty. And you can get COP 2 up to shower water of 60C as well.
by zoul | 2025-11-28 07:03:23+00:00
I would even say that from a project management perspective, zero technical debt is undesirable. It means you have invested resources into perfecting something that, almost by definition, could have waited a while, instead of improving some more important metric such as user experience. (I do understand tech debt makes it harder to work with the codebase, impacting all metrics, I just don’t think zero tech debt is a good target.)
by yetihehe | 2025-11-28 07:06:54+00:00
> I would happily bet that I've done more to help HN and its denizens than you have.

I would agree, I sometimes browse your comment history for insightful comments. But it was a suggestion that you can help out some more on this specific topic.

> Besides, after 18 years here some things have become a little predictable.

Maybe that's why "the problem" is not corrected yet, because it's harder to make money on strong independent men who do everything themselves... Otherwise someone would already make an LLM to help men.
by antonvs | 2025-11-28 07:06:58+00:00
It's a pretty fundamental prediction though, and it's been derived in many different ways, all of which give the same prediction.

It's closely related to the Unruh effect, which is a direct consequence of pure QFT. The Unruh effect describes how an accelerated observer sees a different vacuum from an inertial observer - they see radiation that the inertial observer doesn't.

Hawking radiation is essentially this same effect, except that "acceleration" is replaced by "gravity" (Einstein's equivalence principle.) There's a bit more to it, but that's the basic intuition.

For Hawking radiation to be wrong would require some fundamental changes to GR, QFT, or both.
by sheepscreek | 2025-11-28 07:07:00+00:00
For all the excitement surrounding this, I fail to comprehend how Google can't even meet the current demand for Gemini 3^. Moreover, they are unwilling to invest in expansion directly (apparently have a mandate to double their compute every 6 months without spending more than their current budget). So, pardon me if I can't see how they will scale operations as demand grows while simultaneously selling their chips to competitors?! This situation doesn't make any sense.

^Even now I get capacity related error messages, so many days after the Gemini 3 launch. Also, Jules is basically unusable. Maybe Gemini 3 is a bigger resource hog than anyone outside of Google realizes.
by toast0 | 2025-11-28 07:07:25+00:00
> Is it possible to register e.g. X.ca.us domains today? What are the criteria required to do so?

I don't think so. Godaddy won't delegate new third level domains, and I don't think the second level (states) were ever delegated?? But if you can find a city.ca.us that is delegated and that person/organization is willing to register a new name, you could maybe do that.
by noufalibrahim | 2025-11-28 07:08:18+00:00
I agree here.

There is something to be said for soldiering through a rough phase. It's not always the right thing to do but below a certain threshold, it's necessary to build some amount of resilience.

Collapsing at the slightest exposure to an uncomfortable situation and having to rely on an extensive support structure that includes a therapist, drugs and other things should not, in my opinion, be the default.

As for Holmes, I read, re-read and practically memorised most of the canon when I was in my late teens and early 20s. Mental health was never one of my take aways. I was fascinated by the intensity of the character and how his work meant so much to him. That the lack of it depressed him might have been something Doyle observed in his patients and decided to use as a foil but I don't think he was "exploring men's mental health" in the stories. He was merely trying to make a believable detective who explains his methods. My feeling is that this is overlaying a 2025 interpretation onto a Victorian tale.

As a matter of interest, many of the traits were inspired by someone Doyle worked for named Dr. Joseph Bell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Bell) who emphasised and used careful observation - a skill that can be very useful to a medical practitioner. The relationship between Bell and Doyle was fictionalised into a series called "Murder Rooms". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_Rooms:_Mysteries_of_the...
by jakebasile | 2025-11-28 07:08:27+00:00
I just don't see the point in installing a version manager specifically for the JDK. It's fine to have multiple installed, and at least on Debian-likes you have the built in update-java-alternatives method to switch between them.

On macOS I wrote my own 9-line Zsh function that lists the JDKs available and sets JAVA_HOME.

In containers you'll never switch at all, just install whatever you want and be done with it.

ETA: I see in another comment someone said this doesn't work for things that aren't OpenJDK. But I've yet to run into a situation where I'd want to install anything except OpenJDK. That said, I think update-java-alternatives would work with them if they provide deb files to install themselves.