MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by franckpachot | 2025-12-20 16:55:50+00:00
It's largely cultural. In the SQL world, people are used to accepting the absence of real HA (resilience to failure, where transactions continue without interruption) and instead rely on fast DR (stop the service, recover, check for data loss, start the service). In practice, this means that all connections are rolled back, clients must reconnect to a replica known to be in synchronous commit, and everything restarts with a cold cache.

Yet they still call it HA because there's nothing else. Even a planned shutdown of the primary to patch the OS results in downtime, as all connections are terminated. The situation is even worse for major database upgrades: stop the application, upgrade the database, deploy a new release of the app because some features are not compatible between versions, test, re-analyze the tables, reopen the database, and only then can users resume work.

Everything in SQL/RDBMS was thought for a single-node instance, not including replicas. It's not HA because there can be only one read-write instance at a time. They even claim to be more ACID than MongoDB, but the ACID properties are guaranteed only on a single node.

One exception is Oracle RAC, but PostgreSQL has nothing like that. Some forks, like YugabyteDB, provide real HA with most PostgreSQL features.

About the hype: many applications that run on PostgreSQL accept hours of downtime, planned or unplanned. Those who run larger, more critical applications on PostgreSQL are big companies with many expert DBAs who can handle the complexity of database automation. And use logical replication for upgrades. But no solution offers both low operational complexity and high availability that can be comparable to MongoDB
by bxparks | 2025-12-20 16:55:53+00:00
I agree that the article is a bit unfocused about the supporting material. But the primary topic is clear: it's about the memory consumption of the Go map implementation.

This is an article written by a real human person, who's going to meander a bit. I prefer that over an LLM article which is 100% focused, 100% confident, and 100% wrong. Let's give the human person a little bit of slack.
by LarsKrimi | 2025-12-20 16:56:08+00:00
As someone else said in the previous thread when it was announced: it's about the software first. Qualcomm likely doesn't get this and likely never will

Writing traditional MCU software without an RTOS always sucked for a multitude of reasons. Vendor lockin, expensive specialty compilers, and so on

Arduino showed that it could be done differently with some not too expensive abstractions. Sure it is looked down on by traditional embedded engineers but the productivity gains and accessibility was hard to argue against

ESP didn't (only) grow huge because the hardware was cheap and available. The integration in the Arduino ecosystem was done brilliantly. It truly felt like a natural citizen in between usual Arduino code
by cardanome | 2025-12-20 16:56:22+00:00
You are missing that most services don't have high availability needs and don't need to scale.

Most projects I have worked on in my career have never seen more than a hundred concurrent users. If something goes down on Saturday, I am going to fix it on Monday.

I have worked on internal tools were I just added a postgres DB to the docker setup and that was it. 5 Minute of work and no issues at all. Sure if you have something customer facing, you need to do a bit more and setup a good backup strategy but that really isn't magic.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-12-20 16:56:29+00:00
I agree with the sentiment, although not sure if "error" is the right category/verbiage for actionable logs.

In an ideal world things like logs and alarms (alerting product support staff) should certainly cleanly separate things that are just informative, useful for the developer, and things that require some human intervention.

If you don't do this then it's like "the boy that cried wolf", and people will learn to ignore errors and alarms since you've trained them to understand that usually no action is needed. It's also useful to be able to grep though log files and distinguish failures of different categories, not just grep for specific failures.
by andsoitis | 2025-12-20 16:57:10+00:00
>> So the number of anti-vaxxers is going to plummet drastically in the following decade, I guess.

> Depends if they use lobotomized bots like Grok...

What are you on about?

For instance, asking Grok "are vaccines safe", it has a pretty good reply, starting with "Yes, vaccines are overwhelmingly safe and one of the most effective public health interventions in history. Extensive scientific evidence from decades of research, including rigorous clinical trials, post-licensure monitoring, and systematic reviews by organizations like the WHO, CDC, NIH, and independent bodies, shows that the benefits of vaccination far outweigh the risks for individuals and populations." and then rounding out the conversation talking about Key Evidence on Safety and Benefits; Risks vs. Benefits; Addressing Concerns.

https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtNA_69e20553-2558-46be-9f21-6a...

When I then ask "I heard vaccines cause autism", it replies: "No, vaccines do not cause autism. This is a thoroughly debunked myth that originated from a fraudulent 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield linking the MMR vaccine to autism. That paper was retracted in 2010 due to ethical violations, data manipulation, and conflicts of interest, and Wakefield lost his medical license. Since then, dozens of large-scale, high-quality epidemiological studies involving millions of children across multiple countries have consistently found no causal link between any vaccines (including MMR, those containing thimerosal, or aluminum adjuvants) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD)."

Seems pretty good to me.
by spwa4 | 2025-12-20 16:57:19+00:00
For small companies things like vercel, supabase, firebase, ... wipe the floor with Amazon RDS.

For medium sized companies you need "devops engineers". And in all honesty, more than you'd need sysadmins for the same deployment.

For large companies, they split up AWS responsibilities into entire departments of teams (for example, all clouds have math auth so damn difficult most large companies have -not 1- but multiple departments just dealing with authorization, before you so much as start your first app)
by locknitpicker | 2025-12-20 16:57:22+00:00
> Maybe listing shouldn't be enabled even if all the files are public.

I don't see why. Support for firmware upgrades literally involve querying available packages and downloading the latest ones (i.e., apply upgrades). Either you use something like the S3 interface, or you waste your time implementing a clone of what S3 already supports.

Sometimes simple is good, specially when critics can't even provide any concrete criticism.
by hammock | 2025-12-20 16:57:37+00:00
> even a tiny bit better weather forecast is highly economically valuable (and saves a lot of wasted energy) if it means that 1 city doesn't have to evacuate because of an erroneous hurricane forecast

Here is the NOAA on the improvements:

> 8% better predictions for track, and 10% better predictions for intensity, especially at longer forecast lead times — with overall improvements of four to five days.(1)

I’d love someone to explain what these measurements mean though. Does better track mean 8% narrower angle? Something else? Compared to what baseline?

And am I reading this right that that improvement is measured at the point 4-5 days out from landfall? What’s the typical lead time for calling an evacuation, more or less than four days?

(1)https://www.noaa.gov/news/new-noaa-system-ushers-in-next-gen...
by inciampati | 2025-12-20 16:58:25+00:00
To have a competitive code writer with ngrams you need more than to "scale up the ngrams" you need to have a corpus that includes all possible codes that someone would want to write. And at that point you'd be better off with a lossless full text index like an r-index. But, the lack of any generalizability in this approach, coupled with its markovian features, will make this kind of model extremely brittle. Although, it would be efficient. You just need to somehow compute all possible language before hand. tldr; language models really are reasoning and generalizing over the domain they're trained on.
by etra0 | 2025-12-20 16:58:41+00:00
> I find it hard to trust anyone with any kind of profit motive.

As much as this is true, and i.e. doctors for sure can profit (here in my country they don't get any type of sponsor money AFAIK, other than having very high rates), there is still accountability.

We have built a society based on rules and laws, if someone does something that can harm you, you can follow the path to at least hold someone accountable (or, try).

The same cannot be said about LLMs.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-20 16:58:53+00:00
That's the crux of the matter, I suppose. How do you paywall a local model that generates art and fiction on par with the commercial mass market?

You can RTFA by hitting F9 in Firefox to bring up Reader mode. I think that's worthwhile, as it's not a bad article. But it's one we've seen before and will see again: "My previous judgement that AI was incapable of X, Y, and Z was based on last year's model, and now I can no longer back up that opinion. This is <great | terrible>."
by locknitpicker | 2025-12-20 16:59:10+00:00
> Here we go again. Statements with the single source in the head of the speaker. And it’s also not true.

You're making the same sort of baseless claim you are criticising the blogger for making. Spewing baseless claims hardly moves any discussion forward.

> The llms still produce bad/irrelevant code at such rate that you can spend more time promoting than doing things yourself.

If that is your personal experience then I regret to tell you that it is only the reflection of your own inability to work with LLMs and coding agents. Meanwhile, I personally manage to effectively use LLMs anywhere between small refactoring needs and large software architecture designs, including generating fully working MVPs in one-shot agent prompts. From this alone it's rather obvious who is making baseless statements that are more aligned with reality.
by petterroea | 2025-12-20 16:59:45+00:00
I have ran (read: helped with infrastructure) a small production service using PSQL for 6 years, with up to hundreds of users per day. PSQL has been the problem exactly once, and it was because we ran out of disk space. Proper monitoring (duh) and a little VACUUM would have solved it.

Later I ran a v2 of that service on k8s. The architecture also changed a lot, hosting many smaller servers sharing the same psql server(Not really microservice-related, think more "collective of smaller services ran by different people"). I have hit some issues relating to maxing out the max connections, but that's about it.

This is something I do on my free time so SLA isn't an issue, meaning I've had the ability to learn the ropes of running PSQL without many bad consequences. I'm really happy I have had this opportunity.

My conclusion is that running PSQL is totally fine if you just set up proper monitoring. If you are an engineer that works with infrastructure, even just because nobody else can/wants to, hosting PSQL is probably fine for you. Just RTFM.
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-20 17:00:02+00:00
> The number of staff needed to manage a cloud infrastructure is definitely lower than that required to manage the equivalent self-hosted infrastructure.

There's probably a sweet spot where that is true, but because cloud providers offer more complexity (self-inflicted problems) and use PR to encourage you to use them ("best practices" and so on) in all the cloud-hosted shops I've been in a decade of experience I've always seen multiple full-time infra people being busy with... something?

There was always something to do, whether to keep up with cloud provider changes/deprecations, implementing the latest "best practice", debugging distributed systems failures or self-inflicted problems and so on. I'm sure career/resume polishing incentives are at play here too - the employee wants the system to require their input otherwise their job is no longer needed.

Maybe in a perfect world you can indeed use cloud-hosted services to reduce/eliminate dedicated staff, but in practice I've never seen anything but solo founders actually achieve that.
by metadope | 2025-12-20 17:00:49+00:00
Here in the USA, exculpatory evidence can be ignored or suppressed, and innocent but snarky comments can put you in jail. Be careful what you publish. Be careful what FOSS you create. Don't be fooled by the now-defunct Bill of Rights; there's an entire apparatus devoted to using your casual and innocent behavior against you.

Here's a software engineer who was incarcerated into the worst jail in the country, yesterday: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keonne_Rodriguez

He Built a Privacy Tool. Now He’s Going to Prison. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fshsk8MCAf4
by jimnotgym | 2025-12-20 17:01:26+00:00
You would think so, wouldn't you? Then why is the FX department at my bank based in London? As a mid market client they occasionally used to send one of them out to see me. They told me all about their office and team in London...sat in front of screens. Their system aggregated the banks position onto the screen of the master trader for each currency, sat at a screen in the next office. What utter waste
by techblueberry | 2025-12-20 17:01:32+00:00
Is it really about colonialism? I’d say it seems more about the dangers of ambition, really exemplifies the sort of “those who seek power are least qualified to hold it.”

I also think it’s actually remarkably morally nuanced. Sure there’s good and evil, but ironically, it seems like everyone in the Thielverse naming their companies after LOTR concepts would be the targets of criticism. Again this idea that one aspires towards honor and duty, and ultimately a peaceful life, but certainly not power.
by xethos | 2025-12-20 17:01:33+00:00
Based on my read of "Amusing Ourselves to Death", length and complexity of political speeches by presidents over time, and the current administration: What makes you think American voters want to put adults back in the room?

I mean I'm sympathetic; I fully support having adults back in the White House, even from above the 49th parallel. It does not, however, seem realistic.
by greatgib | 2025-12-20 17:02:19+00:00
"Along similar lines, Seminole County Public Schools (SCPS) communications officer, Katherine Crnkovich, emphasized in an email to Ars to “please make sure it is noted that this student wasn’t simply carrying a clarinet. This individual was holding it as if it were a weapon.”

I don't know if this communication officer realize the ridicule of her statement.
by AYBABTME | 2025-12-20 17:02:22+00:00
In this year of 2025, in December, I find it untenable for anyone to hold this position unless they have not yet given LLMs a good enough try. They're undeniably useful in software development, particularly on tasks that are amenable to structured software development methodologies. I've fixed countless bugs in a tiny fraction of the time, entirely accelerated by the use of LLM agents. I get the most reliable results simply making LLMs follow the "red test, green test" approach, where the LLM first creates a reproducer from a natural language explanation of the problem, and then cooks up a fix. This works extremely well and reliably in producing high quality results.
by DaSHacka | 2025-12-20 17:02:34+00:00
Literally this.

"The US is gonna have their FO moment aaaany day now, they're gonna regret messing with us Europeans!"

"Bro you haven't even kept your end of the deal on your NATO military spending."

Turns out despite all the hubub, the 'superpower' fading the fastest was Europe after all.
by zbentley | 2025-12-20 17:03:05+00:00
…in which case, you should probably use a hosted offering that takes care of those things for you. RDS Aurora (Serverless or not), Neon, and many other services offer those properties without any additional setup. They charge a premium for them, however.

It’s not like Mongo gives you those properties for free either. Replication/clustering related data loss is still incredibly common precisely because mongo makes it seem like all that stuff is handled automatically at setup when in reality it requires plenty of manual tuning or extra software in order to provide the guarantees everyone thinks it does.
Ask HN: Looking for contributors and maintainers for a open source launcher
by yongdohyun | 2025-12-20 17:03:16+00:00
Hi HN,

I maintain ProjT Launcher, an open source, cross platform Minecraft launcher that intentionally diverged from its upstream to focus on long term maintainability, clean architecture, and reproducible packaging.

The project is already shipped and used: - Windows: available via winget (merged in microsoft/winget-pkgs) - Linux: Flatpak / Flathub in progress - Cross-platform: Linux, Windows, macOS (Qt 6)

I’m looking for contributors and potential long term maintainers who are interested in owning parts of the project.

Areas where help is especially welcome: - Packaging & distribution (Flatpak, Flathub, Nix/Nixpkgs) - Core development (C++20, Qt6, QML) - Architecture and refactoring - Documentation and contributor guidelines

The goal is a boring, predictable, maintainable launcher with clean internals and long-term sustainability.

Repository: https://github.com/Project-Tick/ProjT-Launcher

Happy to answer questions here. Thanks.
by Adrig | 2025-12-20 17:03:30+00:00
I don't follow closely all these benchmarks but I would love to have some idea of the status of models for these specific use cases. Average intelligence is close for each mainstream models, but on writing, design, coding, search, there is still some gaps.

Even if it's not benchmark, a vibe test from a trusted professionnal with a close use case to mine would suffice.

Your point about ecosystem is true, I just switched main main provider from OpenAI to Anthropic because they continue to prove they have a good concrete vision about AI
by zsoltkacsandi | 2025-12-20 17:03:30+00:00
I've operated both self-hosted and managed database clusters with complex topologies and mission-critical data at well-known tech companies.

Managed database services mostly automate a subset of routine operational work, things like backups, some configuration management, and software upgrades. But they don't remove the need for real database operations. You still have to validate restores, build and rehearse a disaster recovery plan, design and review schemas, review and optimize queries, tune indexes, and fine-tune configuration, among other essentials.

In one incident, AWS support couldn't determine what was wrong with an RDS cluster and advised us to "try restarting it".

Bottom line: even with managed databases, you still need people on the team who are strong in DBOps. You need standard operating procedures and automation, built by your team. Without that expertise, you're taking on serious risk, including potentially catastrophic failure modes.
by SoftTalker | 2025-12-20 17:03:32+00:00
There are still a lot of jobs that (for maybe debatable reasons) require a college degree. Major is far less important. So if you have that degree, you at least have a larger job pool to work in. Of course, having a degree can overqualify you for some jobs, so it's not a purely better situation in all cases.

And (so I'm told) at least half the value of an Ivy degree is the people you meet while you are there. I guess that assumes you do some network-building, which maybe not everyone does.
by johng | 2025-12-20 17:04:36+00:00
The community, or rather, future customers should show this company that intimidation and behavior like this will only hurt. Stop paying a monthly fee if they are, stop buying new copies, let the IP go worthless.

Show the company not to bite the hand that feeds them -- the customers, which the modders are part of and attract more of.

That's the only way to shut this type of stuff down for good.
by runako | 2025-12-20 17:04:41+00:00
> What am I missing?

IME the need for 24x7 for B2B apps is largely driven by global customer scope. If you have customers in North American and Asia, now you need 24x7 (and x365 because of little holiday overlap).

That being said, there are a number of B2B apps/industries where global scope is not a thing. For example, many providers who operate in the $4.9 trillion US healthcare market do not have any international users. Similarly the $1.5 trillion (revenue) US real estate market. There are states where one could operate where healthcare spending is over $100B annually. Banks. Securities markets. Lots of things do not have 24x7 business requirements.
Built a content system that 6x'd traffic. Turning it into product. Want to test?
by zchmael | 2025-12-20 17:04:43+00:00
Hey YC

Jumping in here because we've been building something we think is pretty cool and are looking for some founders to test it out and give us some honest feedback.

We're technical founders. We hated content marketing. But we needed organic growth, so we built a cohesive system to handle it for us.

Researched trending keywords & competitors. Proactively queued topics. Drafted SEO & LLM optimized content. Published directly to CMS. Tracked what ranked. Doubled down on what worked.

It's led to 6,000% traffic growth in 6 months for us.

Now we're packaging that entire workflow into Averi — a content engine for founders who'd rather be focused on shipping product than writing blogs.

What it does: → Researches and queues topics for you → Drafts content optimized for Google + LLM citations → Publishes to your CMS → Tracks rankings and performance → Recommends what to create next

You approve (and edit collaboratively with your team if you'd like). It runs. Visibility compounds.

We're looking for ~50 founders to test this before we launch publicly. Full access, completely free, and we'll hop on a call to walk you through it if you want.

All we ask: tell us what works, what's broken, and what's missing.

Interested? Comment below or shoot me a DM. Would love to get your thoughts!

Link to learn more: https://www.averi.ai/workflows/your-ai-content-engine
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-20 17:04:43+00:00
> Do you account for frequency and variety of wakeups here?

Yes. In my career I've dealt with way more failures due to unnecessary distributed systems (that could have been one big bare-metal box) rather than hardware failures.

You can never eliminate wake-ups, but I find bare-metal systems to have much less moving parts means you eliminate a whole bunch of failure scenarios so you're only left with actual hardware failure (and HW is pretty reliable nowadays).