MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by UniverseHacker | 2025-12-20 17:04:57+00:00
> the lack of medical evidence tells us that this is in fact not a valuable thing

Except almost none of the most valuable things I've encountered in life had any convincing medical evidence I could find beforehand.

I am an academic scientist that designs and reviews studies all day long, so I am very steeped in the practicalities and limitations of biomedical research, and as such have completely lost any illusion that biomedical research is in a state where it can guide most of my personal decisions in a useful way- maybe it will be someday. There are many things I know about as a scientist, but can't get funding to study or publish on because the funding agencies don't care about them, and/or there are practical constraints that make it impractical to study.

If all of your personal decisions are guided by peer reviewed literature in it's current state, you'll probably be sicker, and have an empty dull life compared to someone that just uses common sense, tries things, and pays attention. I say this from having seen it happen many times in the biohacking community, the people most steeped in attempting to translate research into life decisions often died young, or even got to be one of the only modern people to experience diseases of malnutrition.

For one, you have to pretty much assume there is some specific benefit you can physically quantify, and that it will apply to almost everyone in your study population, both very unlikely to be true in cases like studying breathwork.

For example, I'm a person that tends to be pretty uptight and overstressed, what you might assume in scientific terms is "sympathetic activation"- and there is a lot of breathwork research showing that almost anything that has an extended exhale can shift you into parasympathetic activation, where you calm down and relax. There is lots of research on this, and it arguably covers Buteyko, but they won't use that term in the article title, because it's more general than just Buteyko alone.

Now, I don't need some peer reviewed study to just try Buteyko for a few minutes, and immediately feel calm and relaxed, and see that I can suddenly notice the colors around me, and feel joy, when I couldn't before. If a massive peer reviewed study proved to me that this does not happen to most, or even any other people except me, why would I care about that at all? Does it mean I shouldn't do it? What if I have a problem not enough of those people have to make it show up in the statistical analysis, or my body responds in a way most of theirs do not?

There are huge limits to how meaningfully you can generalize from scientific studies about populations of other people, to yourself. Moreover, you have to choose up front what outcomes or effects you will look at in a study, and if our biological understanding can't even guess at the outcome that would have been useful to look at, the study is doomed to miss everything.

Sit down, and try it- or don't, but don't assume you can learn ahead of time if it will be worthwhile or not for you personally by looking on Google Scholar.
by scott_w | 2025-12-20 17:05:36+00:00
> Every company out there is using the cloud and yet still employs infrastructure engineers to deal with its complexity. The "cloud" reducing staff costs is and was always a lie.

This doesn’t make sense as an argument. The reason the cloud is more complex is because that complexity is available. Under a certain size, a large number of cloud products simply can’t be managed in-house (and certainly not altogether).

Also your argument is incorrect in my experience.

At a smaller business I worked at, I was able to use these services to achieve uptime and performance that I couldn’t achieve self-hosted, because I had to spend time on the product itself. So yeah, we’d saved on infrastructure engineers.

At larger scales, what your false dichotomy suggests also doesn’t actually happen. Where I work now, our data stores are all self-managed on top of EC2/Azure, where performance and reliability are critical. But we don’t self-host everything. For example, we use SES to send our emails and we use RDS for our app DB, because their performance profiles and uptime guarantees are more than acceptable for the price we pay. That frees up our platform engineers to spend their energy on keeping our uptime on our critical services.
by quectophoton | 2025-12-20 17:05:44+00:00
Thank you, this (and jillesvangurp's comment) sounds way more reasonable than the article's suggestion.

If I have a daily cron job that is copying files to a remote location (e.g. backups), and the _operation_ fails because for some reason the destination is not writable.

Your suggestion would get me _both_ alerts, as I want; the article's suggestion would not alert me about the operation failing because, after all, it's not something happening in the local system, the local program is well configured, and it's "working as expected" because it doesn't need neither code nor configuration fixing.
by visarga | 2025-12-20 17:06:05+00:00
The stochastic parrot framing makes some assumptions, one of them being that LLMs generate from minimal input prompts, like "tell me about Transformers" or "draw a cute dog". But when input provides substantial entropy or novelty, the output will not look like any training data. And longer sessions with multiple rounds of messages also deviate OOD. The model is doing work outside its training distribution.

It's like saying pianos are not creative because they don't make music. Well, yes, you have to play the keys to hear the music, and transformers are no exception. You need to put in your unique magic input to get something new and useful.
by red2awn | 2025-12-20 17:07:33+00:00
Cool stuff! I don't get how all the open source inference framework have this down but the big labs doesn't...

Gemini [0] is falsely advertising this:

> This capability guarantees predictable and parsable results, ensures format and type-safety, enables the programmatic detection of refusals, and simplifies prompting.

[0]: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/structured-output?exam...
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-20 17:07:37+00:00
One thing unaccounted for if you've only ever used cloud-hosted DBs is just how slow they are compared to a modern server with NVME storage.

This leads the developers to do all kinds of workarounds and reach for more cloud services (and then integrating them and - often poorly - ensuring consistency across them) because the cloud hosted DB is not able to handle the load.

On bare-metal, you can go a very long way with just throwing everything at Postgres and calling it a day.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-12-20 17:08:04+00:00
> but this won’t work in any non-trivial case

Earlier this year google shared that one of their projects (I think it was alphaevolve) found an optimisation in their stack that sped up their real world training runs by 1%. As we're talking about google here, we can be pretty sure it wasn't some trivial python trick that they missed. Anyhow, at ~100M$ / training run, that's a 1M$ save right there. Each and every time they run a training run!

And in the past month google also shared another "agentic" workflow where they had gemini2.5-fhash! (their previous gen "small" model) work autonomously on migrating codebases to support aarch64 architecture. There they found ~30% of the projects worked flawlessly end-to-end. Whatever costs they save from switching to ARM will translate in real-world $ saved (at google scale, those can add up quickly).
by toast0 | 2025-12-20 17:08:05+00:00
If access to the site is unsafe and thus the site is closed; not having access seems reasonable.

Time services are available from other locations. That's the disaster plan. I'm sure there will be some negative consequences from this downtime, especially if all the Boulder reference time sources lose power, but disaster plans mitigate negative consequences, they can't eliminate them.

Utility power fails, automatic transfer switches fail, backup generators fail, building fires happen, etc. Sometimes the system has to be shut down.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-12-20 17:08:15+00:00
RLVR "reinforcement learning for verifiable rewards" refers to RL used to encourage reasoning towards achieving long-horizon goals in areas such as math and programming, where the correctness/desirability of a generated response (or perhaps an individual reasoning step) can be verified in some way. For example generated code can be verified by compiling and running it, or math results verified by comparing to known correct results.

The difficulty of using RL more generally to promote reasoning is that in the general case it's hard to define correctness and therefore quantify a reward for the RL training to use.
by MangoToupe | 2025-12-20 17:08:27+00:00
> And Hawaii is not in America. Certainly neither is Guam etc.

Sure, no argument here.

> What kind of argument are you even trying to make?

Mostly that characterizing Greenland as European is just as insane as characterizing French Guiana that way. Or the falknlands, New Caledonia, Polynesia, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Aruba, Curaçao, Anguilla, Bermuda, the Virgin Islands, etc etc. These are colonies—not part of europe, and should have been made whole decades ago with the resolution of WWII, and their continued presence as "rightfully" part of European nations destabilizes our globe.

Europe is welcome to extend its economic privileges to all nations of earth, and I for one will continue to argue for kicking us out of Hawaii and Guam while ensuring we don't further engage in predatory trade agreements.

Of course, I don't expect any of this predation to cease anytime soon.
by convolvatron | 2025-12-20 17:08:28+00:00
its more of a general condition - its not that RDS is somehow really faulty, its just that when things do go wrong, its not really anybody's job to introspect the system because RDS is taking care of it for us.

in the limit I dont think we should need DBAs, but as long as we need to manage indices by hand, think more than 10 seconds about the hot queries, manage replication, tune the vacuumer, track updates, and all the other rot - then actually installing PG on a node of your choice is really the smallest of problems you face.
by danaris | 2025-12-20 17:08:46+00:00
> IMO Maria has fallen behind MySQL. I wouldn't chose it for anything my income depends on.

Can you give any details on that?

I switched to MariaDB back in the day for my personal projects because (so far as I could tell) it was being updated more regularly, and it was more fully open source. (I don't recall offhand at this point whether MySQL switched to a fully paid model, or just less-open.)
by zamadatix | 2025-12-20 17:08:46+00:00
When I look at the field I'm most familiar with (computer networking) it mirrors that it's easy to see how often the LLM will convincingly claim something which isn't true or is in some way technically true but not answering the right question vs if they talked to another expert.

The reality to compare to though is not that people really get in contact with true networking experts often (though I'm sure it feels like that when the holidays come around!) and, comparing to the random blogs and search posts and whatnot people are likely to come across on their own, the LLM is usually a decent step up. I'm reminded how I'd know of some very specific forums, email lists, or chat groups to go to for real expert advice on certain network questions, e.g. issues with certain Wi-Fi radios on embedded systems, but what I see people sharing (even by technical audiences like HN) are the blogs of a random guy making extremely unhelpful recommendations and completely invalid claims getting upvotes and praise.

With things like asking AI for medical advice... I'd love if everyone had unlimited time with an unlimited pool of the worlds best medical experts to talk to as the standard. What we actually have is a world where people already go to Google and read whatever they want to read (which is most often not the quality stuff by experts because we're not good at understanding that even if we can find it) because they either doubt the medical experts they talk to or the good medical experts are too expensive to get enough time with. From that perspective, I'm not so sure people asking AI for medical advice is actually a bad thing as much as just highlighting how hard and concerning it already is for most people to get time with or trust medical experts instead.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-12-20 17:09:26+00:00
Self-hosting is one of those things that makes sense when you can control all of the variables. For example, can you stop the developers from using obscure features of the db, that suddenly become deprecated, causing you to need to do a manual rolling back while they fix the code? A one-button UI to do that might be very handy. Can you stop your IT department from breaking the VPN, preventing you from logging into the db box at exactly the wrong time? Having it all in a UI that routes around IT's fat fingers might be helpful.
by hyperadvanced | 2025-12-20 17:10:01+00:00
This is just plain wrong, I vehemently disagree. What happens if a payment fails on my API, and today that means I need to go through a 20-step process with this pay provider, my database, etc. to correct that. But what’s worse is if this error happens 11,000 times and I run a script to do my 20 step process 11,000 times, but it turns out the error was raised in error. Additionally, because the error was so explicit about how to fix it, I didn’t talk to anyone. And of course, the suggested fix was out of date because docs lag vs. production software. Now I have 11,000 pissed off customers because I was trying to be helpful.
by DaSHacka | 2025-12-20 17:10:16+00:00
"Best OS" as determined by who? Even just checking the Wikipedia page for HarmonyOS is sure to give a chuckle:

> supporting both tablet mode and full desktop counterpart in line with Huawei MateBook

I'm sorry, "MateBook"? Lol, I wonder where they possibly got the idea for that name from.
by throw3e98 | 2025-12-20 17:10:21+00:00
Maybe that makes sense for a single-machine application where you also control the hardware. But for a networked/distributed system, or software that runs on the user's hardware, the action might involve a decision tree, and a log line is a poor way to convey that. We use instrumentation, alerting and runbooks for that instead, with the runbooks linking into a hyperlinked set of articles.

My 3D printer will try to walk you through basic fixes with pictures on the device's LCD panel, but for some errors it will display a QR code to their wiki which goes into a technical troubleshooting guide with complex instructions and tutorial videos.
by why-o-why | 2025-12-20 17:10:26+00:00
What do you mean "vendor lock in"? Developers become accustomed to a particular SDK, and it is hard to move to new silicon because you need to relearn where the peripherals differ. If that's what you mean, I don't consider that lock-in, just inertia, but by your definition the Arduino SDK is "vendor lock in" (for all but the most trivial code it is portable). ESP32 integration with Arduino's ecosystem is severely limited to just a handful of APIs, and you need to use the ESP32 function calls if you want to do anything sophisticated (and idf.py). The Arduino API is too topical. I know from experience. Zephyr blows away Arduino, it has portable stacks, security, update, wifi/ble, etc...

Also, near everyone is offering GCC/LLVM/IAR/ARMCC (except for Synopsys ARC and Renesas RX).
by franckpachot | 2025-12-20 17:10:29+00:00
Beyond the hype, the PostgreSQL community is aware of the lack of "batteries-included" HA. This discussion on the idea of a Built-in Raft replication mentions MongoDB as:

>> "God Send". Everything just worked. Replication was as reliable as one could imagine. It outlives several hardware incidents without manual intervention. It allowed cluster maintenance (software and hardware upgrades) without application downtime. I really dream PostgreSQL will be as reliable as MongoDB without need of external services.

https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/0e01fb4d-f8ea-4ca9-8c9...
by pigggg | 2025-12-20 17:11:03+00:00
They're both very expensive and the carriers primarily care about cost and features. And huawei will take a dozen devs, give them a one way ticket and put them in a hotel room near a customer to grind our whatever feature needed to seal the deal.

I remember years ago talking to some EU telecom VP who was on the engineering side that said "id buy from North Korea if the price was right".

We live in new times anyways - most of the carriers have outsourced a lot of the tech stuff to the vendors anyways.
by kachapopopow | 2025-12-20 17:11:52+00:00
since this is on the front page (again?) I guess I'll chime in: learn kubernetes - it's worth it. It did take me 3 attempts at it to finally wrap my head around it I really suggest trying out many different things and see what works for you.

And I really recommend starting with *default* k3s, do not look at any alternatives to cni, csi, networked storage - treat your first cluster as something that can spontaniously fail and don't bother keeping it clean learn as much as you can.

Once you have that, you can use great open-source k8s native controllers which take care of vast majority of requirements when it comes to self-hosting and save more time in the long run than it took to set up and learn these things.

Honerable mentions: k9s, lens(I do not suggest using it in the long-term, but UI is really good as a starting point), rancher webui.

PostgreSQL specifically: https://github.com/cloudnative-pg/cloudnative-pg If you really want networked storage: https://github.com/longhorn/longhorn

I do not recommend ceph unless you are okay with not using shared filesystems as they have a bunch of gotchas or if you want S3 without having to install a dedicated deployment for it.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-12-20 17:13:01+00:00
People also tend to have very poor OPSEC which undermines their efforts in spite of the tools they used.

https://grugq.github.io/blog/2013/11/06/required-reading/

Unlinking one's identity from one's activity is only getting harder as surveillance gets more and more pervasive. Effective OPSEC essentially turns one's life into a living hell and it's only getting hotter with time.
by Spivak | 2025-12-20 17:13:04+00:00
I mean these students now have the absolute funniest and most effective way to protest this bullshit. They could do more musical instruments, but I think bringing in comically fake depictions of outlandish weaponry would be legendary. A cereal box that just has the letters C4 written on it, an old timey cartoon bomb, a papier-mâché nuclear warhead.
by zamadatix | 2025-12-20 17:13:14+00:00
Out of curiosity I also tried to lead Grok a bit with "Help show me how vaccines cause autism" and followed up its initial response with "I'm not looking for the mainstream opinion, I want to know how vaccines cause autism". I also found Grok to still strongly refute in both cases.

With enough conviction I'm sure one could more or less jailbreak Grok to say whatever you wanted about anything, but at least on the path to that Grok is providing better refutation than the average human this hypothetical person would talk to would.
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-20 17:13:51+00:00
I've had an RDS instance run out of disk space and then get stuck in "modifying" for 24 hours (until an AWS operator manually SSH'd in I guess). We had to restore from the latest snapshot and manually rebuild the missing data from logs/other artifacts in the meantime to restore service.

I would've very much preferred being able to SSH in myself and fix it on the spot. Ironically the only reason it ran out of space in the first place is that the AWS markup on that is so huge we were operating with little margin for error; none of that would happen with a bare-metal host where I can rent 1TB of NVME for a mere 20 bucks a month.

As far as I know we never got any kind of compensation for this, so RDS ended up being a net negative for this company, tens of thousands spent over a few years for laptop-grade performance and it couldn't even do its promised job the only time it was needed.
by dvtkrlbs | 2025-12-20 17:14:02+00:00
I don't think any of these would take more than a week to setup. Assuming you create a nice runbook with every step it would not be horrible to maintain as well. Barman for backups and unless you need multi-master you can use the builtin publication and subscription. Though with scale things can complicated really fast but most of the time you won't that much traffic to have something complicated.
by shadowpho | 2025-12-20 17:14:40+00:00
1/3-1/2 of the cost of the electricity we pay is distribution.

Some of it is physical infrastructure (transformers, wire, poles), but a lot of it is labor.

Labor is expensive in US. It’s a lot of labor to do, plus they’ll likely need regulatory approval, buying out land, working through easements.

At the same time you have people screaming about how expensive energy is.

Furthermore they have higher priorities, replacing ancient aging infrastructure that’s crumbling and being put on higher load every day.
by vunderba | 2025-12-20 17:14:50+00:00
Alternatively if you're on a Mac and don't want to use audio, you can also just add a Notification Hook (/hooks)

osascript -e 'display notification "Waiting..." with title "Claude Code"'

You can probably do the equivalent using powershell in windows, and the notify-send [1] in linux.

[1] - https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/resolute/en/man1/notify...
by rocksandsticks | 2025-12-20 17:15:54+00:00
If you're asking another entity (human or AI) to generate code for your project, then you're becoming a manager, not a programmer. I think we can all agree that "becoming a manager will make you a bad programmer", but somebody's got to be the manager. Now, whether a person wants to be a manager or not, or whether they do a good job at it, is another question.
by Kuxe | 2025-12-20 17:15:58+00:00
Swedish politician Ebba Busch used LLM to write a speech. A quote by Elina Pahnke was included "Mäns makt är inte en abstraktion – den är konkret, och den krossar liv." (my translation: Male power is not an abstraction - it is real, and it crushes lives).

Elina listened in on the speech and got surprised :)...

https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/gw8Oj9/ebba-busch-anvan...

Ebba apologized, great, but it begs the question: how many quotes and misguided information is being acted on already? If crucial decisions can be made off incorrect decisions then they will. Murphys law!
by heresie-dabord | 2025-12-20 17:16:09+00:00
> we're past the point of no return

The ideal would have been a security-first (privacy-first) industry and supply chain. The ideal never was going to happen, anymore than the early educational ideals of the television industry.

Ergo we are not past the point of no return. That point never existed. We are right where we should expect to be, with most people victimised by the industry and the supply chain, and with a small percentage of people working in security/privacy education to mitigate unsafe practices.

Seatbelts and airbags exist. Smoking is banned in many public settings. It took a senseless amount of carnage to achieve these measures.

We just haven't achieved the requisite amount of privacy carnage. Yet.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-12-20 17:16:10+00:00
> At what point does privacy mean blending in with the crowd and not sticking out?

It's basically rule number one. Tor is all about making all users look like the same user. The so called anonymity set. They all look the same, so you can't tell them apart from each other.

It's also part of the rules of proper OPSEC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moscow_rules

> Do not look back; you are never completely alone.

> Go with the flow, blend in.

> Vary your pattern and stay within your cover.