MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JimBlackwood | 2025-12-21 00:57:17+00:00
I don’t fully understand the problem this is trying to solve. Or at least, if this solves your problem then it feels like you have bigger problems?

If you have staging/production deployments in CI/CD and have your Kubernetes clusters managed in code, then adding feature deployments is not any different from what you have done already. Paying for a third party app seems (to me) both a waste of money and a problem waiting to happen.

How we do it: For a given helm chart, we have three sets of value files; prod, staging and preview. An Argo application exists for each prod, staging and preview instance.

When a new branch is created, a pipeline runs that renders a new preview chart (with some variables based on branch/tag name), creates a new argo application and commits this to the kubernetes repo. Argo picks it up, deploys it to the appropriate cluster and that’s it. Ingress hostnames get picked up and DNS records get created.

When the branch gets deleted, a job runs to remove the argo application and done.

It’s the same for staging and production, I really wouldn’t want a different deployment pipeline for preview environments - that just increases complexity and the chances of things going wrong.
by strken | 2025-12-21 00:57:40+00:00
I can't talk about staff costs, but as someone who's self-hosted Postgres before, using RDS or Supabase saves weeks of time on upgrades, replicas, tuning, and backups (yeah, you still need independent backups, but PITRs make life easier). Databases and file storage are probably the most useful cloud functionality for small teams.

If you have the luxury of spending half a million per year on infrastructure engineers then you can of course do better, but this is by no means universal or cost-effective.
by flaminHotSpeedo | 2025-12-21 00:57:50+00:00
> Researchers analyzed coroner records from Montgomery County in Ohio from January 2019 to September 2024, focusing on 246 deceased drivers who were tested for THC following a fatal crash.

This paper would need to go into way more detail to be at all useful.

40% is a staggering number, which makes me suspect that all it measures is Montgomery County police's pretty good track record for deciding when to test someone for THC during an autopsy
by _wire_ | 2025-12-21 00:59:09+00:00
Cyber-attack / Malware?

Causing a large commercial airliner to crash by remotely cutting off fuel to engines would be quite a feat. Would exploit be most manageable at departure? Location is almost fixed. Plane control is most vulnerable immediately at take-off. What, if any, vital control domains are transitioned outboard vs onboard at takeoff? Etc...

--

This article is at least nuanced, but reads more like muck-raking and rehabilitation than systemic analysis.

Regarding the article's language: the focus on "single point of failure" reads like weasel words regarding the "core network": A "point" of failure is extremely context sensitive. To the occupants of the vehicle, the plane itself is a single point of failure.
by adrian_b | 2025-12-21 01:00:34+00:00
A full-size desktop computer will always be much faster for any workload that fully utilizes the CPU.

However, a full-size desktop computer seldom makes sense as a personal computer, i.e. as the computer that interfaces to a human via display, keyboard and graphic pointer.

For most of the activities done directly by a human, i.e. reading & editing documents, browsing Internet, watching movies and so on, a mini-PC is powerful enough. The only exception is playing games designed for big GPUs, but there are many computer users who are not gamers.

In most cases the optimal setup is to use a mini-PC as your personal computer and a full-size desktop as a server on which you can launch any time-consuming tasks, e.g. compilation of big software projects, EDA/CAD simulations, testing suites etc.

The desktop used as server can use Wake-on-LAN to stay powered off when not needed and wake up whenever it must run some task remotely.
by matt-p | 2025-12-21 01:00:42+00:00
Vast majority of the civil service is outside of London these days, I suspect disproportionally so.

BBC similarly, spends the vast majority of it's money outside London. If you were from anywhere near Manchester, Glasgow or Liverpool you'd know that perfectly well.

I'm afraid governments have actually done genuine work to try and reduce dependence on London to not very much avail. Network effects rule again, why is twitter (X) bigger and more popular than blusky or whatever?
by mazone | 2025-12-21 01:00:50+00:00
You are correct. Would need something like distributed ledger to fully prove things.

It might not be possible to verify 100% but the more transparency the better i guess. Seeing the 3 way handshake and connection information, the timings, location of the server. Would need to be quite elaborate to fake. Just thought was a fun idea. Have the customer allowed in to production. A lot more difficult then publish privacy page, source code, fake audit reports.
by tsimionescu | 2025-12-21 01:00:54+00:00
Does that mean the log level is a compilation parameter? Ideally, log levels shouldn't even be startup parameters, they should be changeable on the fly, at least for any server side code. Having to restart if bad enough, having to recompile to get debug logs would be an extraordinary nightmare (not only do you need to get your customers to reproduce the issue with debug logs, you actually have to ship them new binaries, which likely implies export controls and security validations etc).
by _aavaa_ | 2025-12-21 01:01:30+00:00
> The only way not to do that is to stop breathing and breeding. Or go back to the trees but that the same thing.

Not a productive comment for this website.

> And for what purpose?

So that local companies that have to pay for their pollution are not at a structural disadvantage against companies in other parts of the world where they can pollute for free.

> tariffs aren't a tool for preventing pollution and haphazardly using them

Why are they not a tool for preventing pollution? And what is haphazard about this application?
by gnfargbl | 2025-12-21 01:02:45+00:00
Huge is a subjective term, but go and count the number of participants at Strings 2025 [1]. Then realise that is just one of many conferences [2]. It's still a very big field.

[1] https://nyuad.shorthandstories.com/strings-conference-abu-dh...

[2] https://www.stringwiki.org/wiki/Conferences
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-12-21 01:03:54+00:00
This is true when you look at raw numbers but you'll still get some pushback on this fact since the pace of USA's drop in median wealth has been so sudden. As in my home country of Australia now has ~2.5x the median wealth per capita compared to the USA. This never used to be the case at all. Australia still has a lower average wealth but this is just telling of the extreme inequality. The median and averages aren't meant to be this far apart.

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

Sort by median and compare to average wealth to see the issue the USA has right now. The USA's median wealth in 2007 was $173,151 in inflation adjusted teams for some reference, it dropped in 2008 and never really recovered. It's now well below many other Western nations.
by marcosdumay | 2025-12-21 01:05:23+00:00
The problem is that once, a long time ago, String Theory was something that made concrete predictions that people just couldn't calculate.

Then people managed to calculate those predictions, and they were wrong. So the people working that theory up relaxed some constraints and tried again, and again, and again. So today it's that framework that you can use to write any theory you want.

That original theory was a good theory. Very compelling and just a small adjustment away from mainstream physics. The current framework is just not a good framework, it's incredibly hard to write any theory in it, understand what somebody else created, and calculate the predictions of the theories you create.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-12-21 01:06:30+00:00
Do we know what the THC levels are in (1) drivers who didn't die, and (2) the population in general?

It could just be that 40% of the population is over the limit on THC all the time. Unless we can compare this against something else, and we can somehow normalize the comparison for other factors like age, I don't know how we can use the data.
by zanderz | 2025-12-21 01:07:54+00:00
The person who wrote this Spotify p2p software also wrote uTorrent, which was bought by the company bittorrent after they struggled to make a C++ client on their own. The original bittorrent implimentation was in python, but they re-skinned uTorrent as bittorrent and shipped both for a few years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludvig_Strigeus
Ask HN: Why Do People Prefer YouTube Videos over Big-Budget Movies and TV Shows?
by Gtex555 | 2025-12-21 01:09:26+00:00
I understand the basic arguments—YouTube’s rise in short-form content, faster dopamine hits, and lower expectations placed on creators. But even if we set short-form content aside, the contradiction still stands. You’ll find people calling the new Avatar movie boring, even if they pirated it and watched it for free, while those same people will happily spend hours watching livestreams where someone reacts to content or talks about nothing in particular, day after day, for an entire year. How can Avatar be dismissed as boring, yet that kind of content is considered engaging? I would understand if it was a Wikipedia like scenario were all those hours of User generated content just lead to better quality content being produced by process of selection but that isn't really the case with youtube.
by fasbiner | 2025-12-21 01:10:09+00:00
Using -ist instead of engaging in discussion or presenting any evidence or explanation whatsoever for extradorinaiy claims is in fact a thought-terminating cliche.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...

If I were to stoop to your level of reasoning and inquiry, I could simply say that you are are a racist and a sexist for disagreeing with me with just as much basis.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-21 01:10:42+00:00
Your link doesn’t work. But I assume you are talking about this label? I looked at the first artist and I found the artist’s music on iTunes. Everything that Apple sells on the iTunes Music Store has been DRM free AAC or ALAC (Apple lossless) since 2009.

https://mountainfever.com/colin-kathleen-ray/

While ALAC is an Apple proprietary format, it is DRM free and can be converted to FLAC using ffmeg. AAC is not an Apple format
by n2d4 | 2025-12-21 01:10:42+00:00
It's a different kind of complexity. Essentially, your app layer needs shift from:

- transaction serializability - atomicity - deadlocks (generally locks) - occ (unless you do VERY long tx, like a user checkout flow) - retries - scale, infrastructure, parameter tuning

towards thinking about

- separating data into shards - sharding keys - cross-shard transactions

which can be sometimes easier, sometimes harder. I think there are a surprising amount of problems where it's much easier to think about sharding than about race conditions!

> But with B2B, we have accounts ranging from 100 users per organization to 200k users per organization.

You'd be surprised at how much traffic a single core (or machine) can handle — 200k users is absolutely within reach. At some point you'll need even more granular sharding (eg. per user within organization), but at that point, you would need sharding anyways (no matter your DB).
by Rendello | 2025-12-21 01:10:47+00:00
Gordon Ramsey (in one of his failing restaurant tear-down shows) said that pictures on menus meant the food was shit, and to axe them. He's coming from fine dining, of course, but I couldn't disagree more. Sometimes a lot of the menu is illustrated, but the thing I want to try isn't, so I have to Google it and take a chance.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-12-21 01:11:22+00:00
> It's the same process as music and film. If you keep on producing mass slop, don't surprised when people can't tell the difference between it and AI.

That's not a surprise, given that AI is trained on mass slop. In other words, garbage in - garbage out.

Enshitification has been with us for a lot longer than AI and despite the promises to the contrary, AI ain't fixing it without people changing it first.
by jordwest | 2025-12-21 01:13:31+00:00
> - this argument may well be stuck in the collective unconscious of lots of people (albeit in the religious context)

Another example of such a belief is that "humans are inherently evil" which seems to have been planted in Western society by the concept of original sin. Interestingly the idea that sin was about our inherent badness didn't really arise until the struggle against Gnosticism [1] hundreds of years after Jesus died.

Now the belief is pervasive in secular society thanks to stories like "Lord of the Flies".

It's fascinating how even though we can call ourselves non religious we can still carry these beliefs around.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin
by al_borland | 2025-12-21 01:15:56+00:00
There were a few things that would have been projects that I was able to knock out quickly with AI. However, it didn’t feel like I made it, so it wasn’t as fulfilling as seeing the results of something I made myself.

I need to ask myself what the goal of these projects are. Am I just looking for the end result so I can use the thing that I need, but doesn’t yet exist? Or am I trying to occupy my time with something I enjoy, learn some things along the way, and have something I feel good about using at the end because I made it?

There is a lot of talk of the digital garden. A project you can work on and cultivate over time and putter around with. A hand built project feels like a garden, while AI feels more like factory farming.
by Retric | 2025-12-21 01:16:18+00:00
A mutation in our ancestors 10 million years ago likely spread due ground fruit fermenting, becoming toxic to other creatures thus creating an ecological niche. So, even if they were not human it’s reasonable to say the love affair is that old and shared with other species.

“Ten million years ago a common ancestor of humans, chimpanzees and gorillas acquired a mutation that let them remove ethanol from the body more efficiently. This adaptation coincided with a change of habitat. Tropical forests were collapsing, notes Robin Dunbar of Oxford University. Some 90% of apes went extinct. One lineage survived by leaving the trees and foraging on the ground.

Whereas apes in trees gobbled fresh fruit, those on the ground found fallen fruit, which ferments. Thus, our ancestors may have acquired a taste for alcohol–which allowed them to use these scarce calories. This “drunken monkey” hypothesis suggests that a love of the smell and taste of alcohol, the sign of an energy-rich fruit, gave our ancestors an edge. Their chosen poison would have been fairly weak. A study of overripe wild Panamanian palm fruits found none stronger than 5% alcohol—about the same as a Heineken.“
by stevenwoo | 2025-12-21 01:16:22+00:00
Nomadland the book documents this for a lot of Americans surviving in the brink in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, turning to living in vans and RVs, a less glamorous version of van life, barely scraping by and eventually bad luck or circumstance of some kind of another just crushes individuals. Even in Silicon Valley just a few streets from Google HQ in Mountain View on Longhorn and other streets there are several blocks filled with RVs of folks I assume like the ones in Nomadland. https://maps.app.goo.gl/KQY2AWL2sNfGem44A
by taylorsatula | 2025-12-21 01:16:48+00:00
I use a two-step generation process which both avoids memory explosion in the window and the one turn behind problem.

When a user sends a message I: generate a vector of the user message -> pull in semantically similar memories -> filter and rank them -> then send an API call with the memories from the last turn that were 'pinned' plus the top 10 memories just surfaced. the first API call's job is to intelligently pick the actual worthwhile memories and 'pin' them till the next turn -> do the main LLM call with an up-to-date and thinned list of memories.

Reading the prompt itself that the analysis model carries is probably easier than listening to my abstract description: https://github.com/taylorsatula/mira-OSS/blob/main/config/pr...

I can't say with confidence that this is ~why~ I don't run into the model getting super flustered and crashing out though I'm familiar with what you're talking about.
by calvinmorrison | 2025-12-21 01:17:52+00:00
same reasons northern europeans had to invent all sorts of fancy food preservation and complex power struggle societies revolving around crop limitations and war.

Meanwhile closer to the equator, much less progress was needed to live and let live.

In short, Americans are native tribes. we have plentiful IPV4 and couldnt care less about SLAAC or whatever other complex moon sun and seasonal tide gods, salted codfish and salt mining operations. we just dont need to care about long addresses, they're plentiful here.
by wildzzz | 2025-12-21 01:18:21+00:00
In high school, I participated in a STEM-based competition. There were a ton of categories like CO2 dragsters (my favorite), architecture, 2D and 3D CAD, GIS, and numerous others I can't remember. Some categories had more of a business focus but most were science/engineering related. The 3D CAD one was pretty fun. I recall two parts. In the first half, you got a hand-drawn sketch of a bushing and had to recreate it in Autodesk Inventor as fast as possible and then generate a 2D drawing properly dimensioned (like what you'd hand to a machinist). The second half involved creating all of the parts for a basic ceiling fan and then making an animated exploded view that also spun the fan. I was really good at that stuff back then but I definitely wasn't the quickest. I'm sure it's a lot different now, so much of CAD now involved CNC and 3D printing that's there's probably aspects that include messing with gcode now.

My GIS competition was fun too. They gave me a bunch of map data and I had to produce a report on Washington DC storm surge flood zones and potential rescue helicopter locations all within a couple hours.

I recall there being a video production category too. I didn't compete in it but you'd be given props and dialogue to turn into a video over the course of a day or two. Very few of the categories were contemporaneous competitions, most were long term project presentations.
by edent | 2025-12-21 01:19:05+00:00
You are welcome to fork our code for OpenBenches

https://github.com/openbenches/openbenches.org/

It is fairly standard PHP + MySQL.

We use Auth0 for authentication - people editing have to use a social network to log in. That significantly reduces (but doesn't eliminate) the need for moderation.

As for maintenance - once in a while dependabot will say a PHP library is out of date and I'll run the update.

Please do launch your project; it sounds like fun
by taylorsatula | 2025-12-21 01:20:45+00:00
(As I said above I changed to an AGPL earlier today but I'll speak to my BSL logic)

I liked BSL because the code ~was~ proprietary for a time so someone couldn't duplicate my software I've worked so hard on, paywall it, and put me out of business. I'm a one-man development operation and a strong gust of wind could blow me over. I liked BSL because it naturally decayed into a permissive open source license automatically after a timeout. I'd get a head start but users could still use it and modify it from day one as long as they didn't charge money for it.
by shark_laser | 2025-12-21 01:20:54+00:00
Yep. And you still de-anonymise yourself with Mastodon when you buy hosting and a domain. If you use an existing provider, then you're back at square one and living in hope that the provider doesn't keep logs etc, or just decide they don't like you.

Nostr fixes both of these. So whilst you're at the mercy of relays storing your data, you can at least be anonymous.
by n2d4 | 2025-12-21 01:21:13+00:00
I talk about these problems in the "How hard can sharding be?" section of the article — long story short, not all business requirements can be dealt with easily, but surprisingly many can if you choose a smart sharding key.

You can also still do optimistic concurrency across shards! That covers most of the remaining ones. Anything that requires anything more complex — sagas, 2PC, etc. — is relatively rare, and at scale, a traditional SQL OLTP will also struggle with those.
by oraphalous | 2025-12-21 01:23:06+00:00
That's interesting - but I guess we need to understand better what innovation counts as a good example of Chinese incipient superiority.

If China is leap frogging the west technologically, then it can still only be a very recent fact. It stands to reason that their current innovations will be developed on top of much of what they learnt from the west.

That doesn't mean that a particular innovation does not deserve to be counted as an example of their progress, just because that innovation was on the shoulders of western tech. Most progress is done on the shoulders of others anyway. So I don't feel examples like this should be discounted.

But also - there are a lot of dimensions to think about here. For example, one dimension is the raw development of a technology. Maybe China has not developed so much newer tech (although I'm reading much to the contrary in this respect also). But another dimension is the economics involved in implementation. With scale comes so many advantages. Business models that just aren't economical in Western countries can thrive in China.

There was one example that really struck me. I was at a mall with my partner and her friends (who live in Guangzhou). Those friends wanted to order something to drink. One of them got out their phone, ordered those drinks and had them delivered outside the mall. This was less effort and cost in their minds than actually wandering around the mall trying to find the drinks they wanted. Heaps of people just get their morning coffee delivered.

You might not think this example is a good demonstration of technological superiority. Every country has the phone and internet tech for goods delivery. But that they can leverage the technology to this degree is only be possible where the cost of delivery is so low - as it is in China.

So yeah - raw innovation is one dimension, but opportunity for implementation is another very important one as well.
by robbiewxyz | 2025-12-21 01:23:27+00:00
AI is being pushed forcefully on K-12 teachers and the effect education quality is horrible. Some teachers, including my cousin, refuse to use the AI tools but most don't. The result is that my 6th & 8th grade siblings mostly bring home assignments that are nonsensical, obviously AI-generated bullshit.

I'm infuriated to see these capable kids wasting their time working on slop a human never bothered to review before assigning and will probably never bother to grade.
by silcoon | 2025-12-21 01:26:19+00:00
> The Anna’s archive group is ideologically motivated.

Anna’s archive business is stealing copyrighted content and selling access to it. It's not ideologically motivated.

What ideology is about pirating books and music where most of the people producing this stuff cannot afford to do it full-time? It's not like pirating movies, software and large videogame studios, which is still piracy, but they also make big money and they don't act all the time in the interests of the users.

Writers and musicians are mostly broken. If we sum the rising cost of living, AI generated content and piracy, there's almost no reward left for their work. Anna’s archive is contributing to the art and culture decadence. They sell you premium bandwidth for downloading and training your AIs on copyrighted content, so soon we can all generate more and more slop.