MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Openground, on-device RAG pipeline with hybrid search for coding agents
by poweroutlet2 | 2025-12-29 19:17:01+00:00
Hi HN!

tldr: openground lets you give controlled access to documentation to AI agents. Everything happens on-device.

I'm sharing my initial release of openground, an opensource and completely on-device RAG tool that let's you give controlled documentation access to your coding agents. Solutions like Context7 MCP provide a likely source of truth for docs, but their closed-source ingestion and querying pose security/privacy risks. openground aims to give users full control over what content is available to agents and how it is ingested. Find a documentation source (git repo or sitemap), add it to openground via the CLI, and openground will use a local embedding model and vector db (lancedb) to store your docs. You can then use the CLI to install the MCP server to your agent to allow the agent to query the docs via hybrid BM25 full-text and vector search.

Again, this is an initial release, so it is pretty barebones. Upcoming features I am working on:
- specific library version handling (it currently only supports latest versions)
- docs "registry" to allow pushing and pulling of documentation embeddings within organizations to S3
- lighter-weight package

Suggestions and PRs welcome! I'll also be around for discussion.
by narrator | 2025-12-29 19:17:08+00:00
The haters on here are ridiculous. If everyone who ever had a product that failed in the market was called a fraud on HN then probably almost everyone would be. SpaceX failed on their first three launches. All the haters here would have voted to shut it all down. Glad Elon's able to recover from business failures without going to the HN comments section to find out what he should do next.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-29 19:17:21+00:00
> "what's wrong with a usb-c to 3.5mm adapter"

Hidden inside of a USB-C to 3.5mm adapter is an entire DAC with a power amplifier for driving headphones. They're complex little things.

And like any other bit of active, plug-in electronics: They're not all the same.

Some of them are wonderful (Apple's adapter sounds great and don't cost much), but and some of them are terrible.

And there's compatibility issues. The combination of an Apple headphone adapter on an Android produces a volume control bug that prevents a person from turning it up even to normal line level output voltages that normal audio equipment expects.

And there's functional issues: Want to play some lossless audio in the car or low-latency audio on headphones, and charge your phone at the same time? Good luck with that! (Yeah, there's adapters that have USB C inputs for power, too. They're a mess. And I once popped one as soon as my phone negotiated a 12VDC USB PD mode instead of the 5VDC that the adapter must have been made for. (And no, wireless charging isn't a solution. It's a bandaid for the deliberately-inflicted footgun incident that brought us here to begin with.))

And it's complicated: For a "simple" audio output, we've got USB 2 with a signalling rate of 480Mbps and a power supply, when all we really want is 20Hz-20KHz analog audio with left, right, ground, and (optionally) microphone.

And then: It often doesn't work. When I plug the USB C headphone adapter I have into my car and go for a drive, it disconnects sometimes: I observe no physical change, but the device resets, the music stops, and the phone rudely presents a prompt asking me which voice assistant I'd like to use (the answer is, of course, "None" -- it's always "None", but it asks anyway). And then I get to figure out how to make it play music again, which presents either a safety issue or a time-suck issue while I stop somewhere to futz with it. (Oh, right. Did I mention that the electronics in these adapters also include support for control buttons? I guess I glossed over that.)

Forcing the use of USB C headphone adapters and their complexities represents a very Rube Goldberg-esque solution to the simple problem of audio interconnection that had already been completely solved for as long as any of us reading this here have been alive.

Except: While Rube Goldberg contraptions are usually at least entertaining, this is just inelegant and disdainful.
by yunnpp | 2025-12-29 19:17:27+00:00
The author never really defines "consistency" anyway. Consistency of what?

I've never seen consistency of libraries and even programming languages have a negative impact. Conversely, the situation you describe, or even going out of the way to use $next_lang entirely, is almost always a bad idea.

The consistency of where to place your braces is important within a given code base and teams working on it, but not that important across them, because each one is internally consistent. Conversely, two code bases and teams using two DBs that solve the same problem is likely not a good idea because now you have two types of DBs to maintain. Also, if one team solves a DB-specific problem, say, a performance issue, it might not be obvious how the other team might be able to pick up the results of that work and benefit from it.

So I don't know. I think the answer depends on how you define "consistency", which OP hasn't done very well.
by badsectoracula | 2025-12-29 19:17:44+00:00
> The real goat would be if GOG Galaxy were available for Linux and integrated with Lutris/Proton so that you didn't have to worry about setup.

Heroic Launcher can download the game files for you and any dependencies, including Wine/Proton/etc. You basically install the launcher (can be available from your distro's repository), use your GOG login in the app and it shows your library. Then click install and it'll download the files locally and after that you play the game. The experience is more or less the same like in Steam, at least as far as downloading and playing games is concerned.

I normally download the offline installers and use them with UMU Launcher (which is Proton without Steam, mainly meant to be used as a backend for projects like Lutris, Heroic, etc but you can use it directly from the command-line) but i just tried Heroic Launcher and all i had to do was run it, enter my GOG login and after it downloaded my library info, i was able to download and play a game the same way as in Steam.

I'm not sure what official GOG Galaxy for Linux would add here TBH.
by mindcandy | 2025-12-29 19:18:29+00:00
> especially if you are willing to wait for some days or weeks after launch (an important sales window for the publishers).

“Important” is an understatement. Even for long-term success stories, the first three or four months often accounts for half of a game’s revenue.

And, despite so many people theorizing that “pirates don’t have money and wouldn’t pay anyway”, in practice big publishers wait in dread of “Crack Day” because the moment the crackers release the DRMless version, the drop in sales is instant and dramatic.
by chowells | 2025-12-29 19:18:48+00:00
I mostly agree with your sentiment, but saying "math is not art" is the same as saying "writing is not art". Calculation isn't art. But math isn't calculation. Math is a social activity shared between humans. Like writing, much of it is purely utilitarian. But there's always an aesthetic component, and some works explore that without regard to utility. It's a funny kind of art, accessible to few and beautiful to even fewer. But there is an art there.
by NewsaHackO | 2025-12-29 19:18:51+00:00
I don't think you fully understood the purpose of the project. He wanted an end product (the bookshelf app) that he had been putting off due to the time commitment. He did not say he wanted to learn about how to program in general, nor did he even say he liked programming. People care about results and the end product. If you like to program as a hobby, LLMs in no way stop you from doing this. At the end of the day, people with your viewpoint fall short of convincing people against using AI because you are being extremely condescending to the desires of regular people. Also, it is quite ironic that you attempted to make a point about him not reading all 500 books on his bookshelf, yet you don't seem to have read (or understood) the opening section of the post.
by mbreese | 2025-12-29 19:18:52+00:00
I never worked for Google, but have seen some strange things like bit flips at more modest scales. From the parent description, it looks like defaulting to static binaries is helping to speed up troubleshooting to remove the “this should never happen, but statistically will happen every so often” class of bugs.

As I see it, the issue isn’t requiring static compiling to scale. It’s requiring it to make troubleshooting or measuring performance at scale easier. Not required, per se, but very helpful.
by epistasis | 2025-12-29 19:19:26+00:00
Well I think about them a lot, I hear about them a lot whenever SMRs come up, but they are not cheap. And they run on fuel that we typically don't want in civilian hands.

I still have a tab open for a comment reply that I never quite got to on the construction costs:

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...

Basically there's a very large dollar cost for nuclear power versus fossil fuel power for ships and submarines, but for military purposes that cost penalty is well worth it for the operational benefits. Shipping won't have those same operational benefits like keeping a submarine undersea for such extended times and without all the penalties of dealing with fossil fuel exhaust.

The article is pretty weak on arguing the economics of nuclear for shipping, for example here:

> Operating expenses would be much lower for nuclear-powered ships, because there would be no need for refueling for the lifetime of the vessel, which is around 25 years. Currently, fuel makes up nearly half of a ship’s operating expenses.

> ...

> The cost of a nuclear-powered ship could be an issue for many shipowners—it’s four times that of a conventional ship. That would be more than offset by the savings on fuel costs over the life of the ship, but it is a steep initial outlay.

I'm not sure why we should believe these numbers for unbuilt reactors. We have a real example of costs from the US Navy and they disagree with the numbers in the article. Further, the nuclear industry has a well-deserved reputation for low-balling costs before construction starts, and then delivering reactors at multiples of the initial estimates. We should expect the same to happen here unless there's strong evidence against it.
by FireBeyond | 2025-12-29 19:19:29+00:00
Or even vehicle autonomy.

His latest bullshit was about Tesla cameras and fog/rain/snow - on an investor call, no less - "Oh, we do photon counting directly from the sensor, so it's a non-issue".

No. 1, Tesla cameras are not capable of that - you need a special sensor, that's not useful for any real visual representation. And 2, even if you did, photon counting requires a closed "box" so to speak - you can't count photons in "open air".

And no-one calls it out.
by alphazard | 2025-12-29 19:19:43+00:00
> All societies are dysfunctional, great and small, because human beings are dysfunctional.

I don't agree with the 'because' part of this.
It misses my point about why organizations are dysfunctional.
Even if the organization was made up of perfectly rational, perfectly functional individuals, it would still be dysfunctional.
The people running large corporations, are individually, very rational, and very functional.
They are among the most capable humans at achieving their goals.
Any explanation of organizational dysfunction has to also explain that data.

The dysfunction (which means actions not aligned with the shareholders) comes from the fact that 1. preferences cannot always be aggregated coherently and 2. that the people operating the corporation do not necessarily have incentives aligned with the shareholders.
The first is a mathematical impossibility which cannot be fixed, and the second is a failure of mechanism design.
That's the "open problem" I mentioned.
by oakesm9 | 2025-12-29 19:19:55+00:00
Pretty much every electric car has charging stops built-in to the navigation. For some the quality of the data isn’t as high, but it will be there.

Many like Polestars and Renaults are built on Android Automotive (different from Android Auto) and the built-in navigation is full Google Maps with direct access to the cars battery state and control systems.

Works perfectly on my Renault Megane E-Tech.
by matklad | 2025-12-29 19:20:10+00:00
See https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/blob/main/docs/TI... for motivation.

- Operational predictability --- latencies stay put, the risk of threshing is reduced (_other_ applications on the box can still misbehave, but you are probably using a dedicated box for a key database)

- Forcing function to avoid use-after-free. Zig doesn't have a borrow checker, so you need something else in its place. Static allocation is a large part of TigerBeetle's something else.

- Forcing function to ensure existence of application-level limits. This is tricky to explain, but static allocation is a _consequence_ of everything else being limited. And having everything limited helps ensure smooth operations when the load approaches deployment limit.

- Code simplification. Surprisingly, static allocation is just easier than dynamic. It has the same "anti-soup-of-pointers" property as Rust's borrow checker.
by pokemyiout | 2025-12-29 19:20:16+00:00
I like the scroll animation!

I've actually been working on something similar since I also had this pain (plus I'm too cheap to buy all the books I'm reading)

To solve the issue related to having take the photos myself, I scrape from places like eBay to get the accurate spine images. Obviously this isn't 100% accurate, but like you I also decided 90% accuracy is good enough.

https://www.tinyshelf.me/maler/fav
by jfengel | 2025-12-29 19:20:19+00:00
Beyond a certain point it becomes self-reinforcing. You will distort everything else about your world view to support that lie. You will surround yourself with other people who believe it and live in a completely internally consistent reality, surrounded by a vast conspiracy trying to bring you down.

The really killer part is, I can't even be 100% certain that it's not me. I'm quite sure, and justify it solidly, but then, I would.
by tensor | 2025-12-29 19:20:37+00:00
The thing you made up sure seems odd yes! The facts are that it is not currently used in any other vehicle and we can assume by the fact that the contract was written down by 99% that there is no plan to do so in the near term, otherwise they'd actually, you know, need the batteries.

But don't let facts get in the way of some good bullshit!
by jwaldrip | 2025-12-29 19:20:50+00:00
Typing is not fun. It robs me of my craft of holding my pencil and feeling it press against the paper with my hand... LLMs are merely a tool to achieve a similar end result. The different aspects of software development are an art. But even with LLMS, I critique and care about the code just as much as if I were writing it line by line myself. I have had more FUN being able to get all of my ideas on paper with LLMs than I have had over years of banging my head against a keyboard going down the rabbit hole on production bugs.
by locallost | 2025-12-29 19:21:00+00:00
You do understand how a train works?

* It has tracks so it cannot go anywhere it wants to go

* It can only let passengers go at certain places, these are called stations

So no, I would not compare it to a random Uber driver that takes me somewhere random on a whim. I wouldn't call the police if an Uber took me on a different road if the original road was closed. Etc.

Please start making sense, thank you. I'm done.
by devilbunny | 2025-12-29 19:21:05+00:00
“I’m across an ocean from any of my network’s stores and need to activate a different phone on my regular network and number right now, on the side of the road, without WiFi or a computer or a different, working phone already on my account” is to me the most obvious case where eSIM is weak. And having been in that situation before eSIMs, it was really easy - remove SIM, put in backup phone, use. Not so much now.
by vee-kay | 2025-12-29 19:21:06+00:00
RAMageddon is here..
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/live/ram-price-crisis-updates

Summary:
* Massive spikes: Consumer RAM prices have skyrocketed due to a tight supply. Major PC companies have issued warnings of price hikes, with CyberPowerPC stating: "global memory (RAM) prices have surged by 500% and SSD prices have risen by 100%."

* All for AI: The push for increased cloud computing, as seen in the likes of ChatGPT and Gemini, means more data centers are needed, which in turn requires High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). Manufacturers like SK Hynix and Micron are now shifting priorities to make HBM instead of PC RAM.

* Limited supply: Companies are now buying up stock of all the remaining supply of standard DRAM chips, leaving crumbs for the consumer market and price hikes for the limited supply there is.

Good luck expecting "value for money" from this "efficient" market.
by asim | 2025-12-29 19:21:32+00:00
I wrote https://go-micro.dev - A go framework for microservices. I've written a few other things in my time (https://github.com/asim) and tried my hand at hosted paid APIs which was moderately successful but failed as a VC funded business. I think I've just existed so much in an era of free consumer services like Google and open source software that it's skewed my perspective a lot. Like why charge for this, it could be free..m
Ask HN: Cheaper conversational voice API (~10x cheaper than ElevenLabs)?
by willbdavenport | 2025-12-29 19:21:33+00:00
I was building a real-time AI voice chat app and couldn’t make ElevenLabs work economically, their per-minute prices are way too high.
I needed to find a solution that had:
* expressive, human-sounding voices
* low-latency
* low cost

I couldn’t find anything that combined these, so I reluctantly built and self-hosted a conversational voice pipeline (STT → LLM → TTS). It sounds close to ElevenLabs, but costs ~10× less per minute at scale. However, it’s difficult to maintain, and requires serious GPU capacity, so it feels like total overkill for just my app.

I’m considering exposing this as a turn-key conversational voice API or embeddable widget.

Is this something others would want to use?
by evilduck | 2025-12-29 19:21:39+00:00
Can't say I agree with the sentiment. Miryoku's layout looks pretty arbitrary, as is any other <60% setup. I daily drive a Planck (4 more total keys, but very similar levels of layout restrictions) and my layer designs are wildly different.

I would say just find or build a keyboard with support for Via or Vial so that you can change things on the fly when it feels wrong. If you're going down the small form factor keyboard path you're already committed to rewiring muscle memory, you might as well design your layout to meet your specific needs too. It's highly unlikely you will encounter someone else's Miryoku layout in the wild and need to type on it.
by Rochus | 2025-12-29 19:21:55+00:00
The Mono and .Net 4 times were too short; the true time is unknown. I only left the Mandelbrot result because I got a decently looking figure for CoreCLR, but the actual factor to Mono is unreliable. If the Mono result was 1, the factor would still be seven. I have no idea why it is that much faster.
by tezza | 2025-12-29 19:22:05+00:00
Had a nightmare getting a holiday only e-sim in Australia

Couldn’t set up easily because no wifi

then I just simply could not cancel the damn thing… It required being in Australia, and like the article needed a SMS code and the support was only contactable Australian working hours… who wanted the SMS code again.

So once back in Blighty there was no way… had to cancel the credit card to stop payments

So you are at the mercy of the competence of the provider
by bwb | 2025-12-29 19:22:09+00:00
We are working toward breaking even on costs while still adding new features. All the money we raise goes toward those costs, which are quite lean. I've worked on this project since Dec 2020 for free, plus put a LOT of my own savings into it :)

Hope that helps, and I am happy to answer questions, and more on our mission for readers and authors -> https://building.shepherd.com/

The ads on the books-like page are clearly marked, a different color, and they are partly how we fund being alive. If we had ~3,000 members, we could remove them. Currently, we have around 800.
by ValentineC | 2025-12-29 19:22:28+00:00
But it's not, because some carriers explicitly don't allow eSIM transfers, or reuse of the initial QR code, or even the forced generation of a new eSIM without either customer support manually revoking the previous one, or deleting it yourself from the old device.

I think the problem here is: there's no consistent regulation on how a replacement eSIM can be provisioned on a new device.
by torstenvl | 2025-12-29 19:22:32+00:00
Yeah... but I wouldn't characterize the bug itself (in its essential form) as UB.

Even if the implementation specified that the data would be indeterminate depending on what existed in that memory location previously, the bug would still exist.

Even if you hand-coded this in assembly, the bug would still exist.

The essence of the bug is uninitialized data being garbage. That's always gonna be a latent bug, regardless of whether the behavior is defined in an ISO standard.
by shmerl | 2025-12-29 19:22:52+00:00
I think the issue with requests to "release the client" isn't as simple as "you can use an open source alternative".

Their Galaxy backend only handles Windows and macOS builds of games. Linux builds aren't included now. There are hacks around it like using access to individual files over HTTP through zip format for Linux installers as pseudo Galaxy (lgogdownloader supports that) but it's still just a hack.

Another piece is multiplayer integration that games can ship. That depends on their support too (authentication, matching and etc).
by bwb | 2025-12-29 19:22:53+00:00
This feature doesn't require a login; you just put in the book/author you love, and it returns matches.

If you want to vote, you'll need to log in. We needed substantial protection around the votes, and this was the easiest way to do so.

Would you want a magic link that sends you a url to vote to your email or something like that?
by andsoitis | 2025-12-29 19:23:00+00:00
Interestingly, the US Govt. is also not "an individual human" and Softbank and Nvidia are both publicly traded companies.

> Otherwise these few companies are the largest holders of basically every security in existence.

Indeed. Due to inclusion of Intel in S&P500 index funds and ETFs.

Together, institutional investors own over 50% of Intel Corporation, giving them a significant collective influence on major board decisions. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/67-institutional-ownership-in...
by smoe | 2025-12-29 19:23:02+00:00
I'm not against AI art per se, but at least so far, most “AI artists” I see online seem to care very little about the artistry of what they’re doing, and much much more about selling their stuff.

Among the traditional artists I follow, maybe 1 out of 10 posts is directly about selling something. With AI artists, it’s more like 9 out of 10.

It might take a while for all the grifters to realize that making a living from creative work is very hard before more genuinely interesting AI art starts to surface eventually. I started following a few because I liked an image that showed up in my feed, but quickly unfollowed after being hit with a daily barrage of NFT promotions.