MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ZeroConcerns | 2025-12-20 16:04:00+00:00
So, yeah, I guess there's much confusion about what a 'managed database' actually is? Because for me, the table stakes are:

-Backups: the provider will push a full generic disaster-recovery backup of my database to an off-provider location at least daily, without the need for a maintenance window

-Optimization: index maintenance and storage optimization are performed automatically and transparently

-Multi-datacenter failover: my database will remain available even if part(s) of my provider are down, with a minimal data loss window (like, 30 seconds, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, depending on SLA and thus plan expenditure)

-Point-in-time backups are performed at an SLA-defined granularity and with a similar retention window, allowing me to access snapshots via a custom DSN, not affecting production access or performance in any way

-Slow-query analysis: notifying me of relevant performance bottlenecks before they bring down production

-Storage analysis: my plan allows for #GB of fast storage, #TB of slow storage: let me know when I'm forecast to run out of either in the next 3 billing cycles or so

Because, well, if anyone provides all of that for a monthly fee, the whole "self-hosting" argument goes out of the window quickly, right? And I say that as someone who absolutely adores self-hosting...
by j1elo | 2025-12-20 16:05:10+00:00
Interesting how the Go team is the utmost example of thinking through and bikeshedding ad infinitum even the tiniest angles of each proposal (something that I like a lot by the way), which is part of the reason that popular feature requests take years to come, and others such as the `Set` type are binned because of not providing enough added value.

But an implementation change that will for sure baloon the memory usage of everybody's code making heavy use of Hashmap-as-set (a popular idiom)? Yeah no problem, change shipped.
by mjr00 | 2025-12-20 16:07:13+00:00
> No, that doesn’t make you a skeptic in this context.

That's good to hear, but I have been called an AI skeptic a lot on hn, so not everyone agrees with you!

I agree though, there's a certain class of "AI denialism" which pretends that LLMs don't do anything useful, which in almost-2026 is pretty hard to argue.
by jdiff | 2025-12-20 16:07:34+00:00
Of course it is. It's not capable of actually forgetting or suppressing its training data. It's just double checking rather than assuming because of the prompt. Roleplaying is exactly what it's doing. At any point, it may stop doing that and spit out an answer solely based on training data.

It's a big part of why search overview summaries are so awful. Many times the answers are not grounded in the material.
by exasperaited | 2025-12-20 16:07:47+00:00
The Pico series is, IMO, the truest implementation of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s broader goal to make physical computing accessible to education. I am so glad that this is now such a major focus for both the foundation and the trading company (a pivot that was accelerated by the pandemic chip shortage)

The RP2350 is an awesome device but hypothetically it feels like the next one is where things will really kick off, because there likely won’t be a 90s computer it can’t emulate, and it feels clear from what Eben Upton says that retrocomputing, historical device education and simple 90s-style computing environments are part of the picture, and that absolutely dirt-cheap simplified modern “home computer” environments on these devices could have value to them.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-20 16:07:57+00:00
Very interesting.

The Timo Tijhof data is based on Wikipedia visits, and shouldn't be affected by adblockers.

Meanwhile, StatCounter is based on sites that use its analytics, and on users not using adblockers that might block it. The CanIUse table makes clear there's a long tail of outdated Chrome versions that each individually have tiny usage, but they seem to add up.

It's fascinating they're so wildly different. I'm inclined to think Wikipedia, being the #9 site on the web [1], is going to produce a more accurate distribution of users overall. I can't help but wonder if StatCounter is used by a ton of relatively low-traffic sites, and the long tail of outdated Chrome is actually headless Chrome crawlers, and so they make up a large proportion relative to actual user traffic? Since they're not pushed to update, the way consumers are. And especially with ad-blocking real users excluded too?

Anecdotally, in web development I just haven't seen users complain about sites not working in Chrome, where it turns out the culprit is outdated Chrome. In contrast to complaints about e.g. not working in Firefox, which happen all the time. Or where it breaks in Chrome but it turns out it's an extension interfering.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-20 16:08:15+00:00
mitmproxy/mitmweb offer a WireGuard server implementation to do pretty much this. You can grab any existing WireGuard VPN, scan a QR code to import the VPN config, and start monitoring (after installing the MITM certificate, of course).

The packet tunnel story is crazy. I'm glad Android allows you to just use network APIs without question as a developer.
by evanelias | 2025-12-20 16:08:39+00:00
Postgres's strategy has traditionally been to focus on pluggable indexing methods which can be provided by extensions, rather than completely replacing the core heap storage engine design for tables.

That said, there are a few alternative storage engines for Postgres, such as OrioleDB. However due to limitations in Postgres's storage engine API, you need to patch Postgres to be able to use OrioleDB.

MySQL instead focused on pluggable storage engines from the get-go. That has had major pros and cons over the years. On the one hand, MyISAM is awful, so pluggable engines (specifically InnoDB) are the only thing that "saved" MySQL as the web ecosystem matured. It also nicely forced logical replication to be an early design requirement, since with a multi-engine design you need a logical abstraction instead of a physical one.

But on the other hand, pluggable storage introduces a lot of extra internal complexity, which has arguably been quite detrimental to the software's evolution. For example: which layer implements transactions, foreign keys, partitioning, internal state (data dictionary, users/grants, replication state tracking, etc). Often the answer is that both the server layer and the storage engine layer would ideally need to care about these concerns, meaning a fully separated abstraction between layers isn't possible. Or think of things like transactional DDL, which is prohibitively complex in MySQL's design so it probably won't ever happen.
by DalekBaldwin | 2025-12-20 16:08:46+00:00
Right, I don't think I've ever actually seen anybody make the "nothing to hide" argument. Maybe it was used more commonly in the past, but I only ever see people pre-emptively attack it without prompting. It seems to be a special case of a straw-man argument: a no-man argument. It's not the only such example, but it seems to appear without fail in the top comments in any discussion of privacy issues.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-20 16:08:51+00:00
> That's good to hear, but I have been called an AI skeptic a lot on hn, so not everyone agrees with you!

The context was the article quoted, not HN comments.

I’ve been called all sorts of things on HN and been accused of everything from being a bot to a corporate shill here. You can find people applying labels and throwing around accusations in every thread here. It doesn’t mean much after a while.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-12-20 16:09:03+00:00
"Look Ma, no hands!" vibe coding, as described by Karpathy, where you never look at the code being generated, was never a good idea, and still isn't. Some people are now misusing "vibe coding" to describe any use of LLMs for coding, but there is a world of difference between using LLMs in an intelligent considered way as part of the software development process, and taking a hit on the bong and "vibe coding" another "how many calories in this plate of food" app.
by zbentley | 2025-12-20 16:09:32+00:00
Really? That might be an anecdote sampled from unusually small businesses, then. Between myself and most peers I’ve ever talked to about availability, I heard an overwhelming majority of folks describe systems that really did need to be up 24/7 with high availability, and thus needed fast 24/7 incident response.

That includes big and small businesses, SaaS and non-SaaS, high scale (5M+rps) to tiny scale (100s-10krps), and all sorts of different markets and user bases. Even at the companies that were not staffed or providing a user service over night, overnight outages were immediately noticed because on average, more than one external integration/backfill/migration job was running at any time. Sure, “overnight on call” at small places like that was more “reports are hardcoded to email Bob if they hit an exception, and integration customers either know Bob’s phone number or how to ask their operations contact to call Bob”, but those are still environments where off-hours uptime and fast resolution of incidents was expected.

Between me, my colleagues, and friends/peers whose stories I know, that’s an N of high dozens to low hundreds.

What am I missing?
by thedougd | 2025-12-20 16:10:42+00:00
It's even worse when you start finding you're staffing specialized skills. You have the Postgres person, and they're not quite busy enough, but nobody else wants to do what they do. But then you have an issue while they're on vacation, and that's a problem. Now I have a critical service but with a bus factor problem. So now I staff two people who are now not very busy at all. One is a bit ambitious and is tired of being bored. So he's decided we need to implement something new in our Postgres to solve a problem we don't really have. Uh oh, it doesn't work so well, the two spend the next six months trying to work out the kinks with mixed success.
by everforward | 2025-12-20 16:10:46+00:00
The threat profile feels scarily different too. SteamOS doesn’t feel like something I’d install a banking app on.

I don’t think they want to wander further into malware arms races. They don’t seem to really want to maintain their anti-cheat currently, it’s notoriously poor. I love Valve but I’m not sure I’d trust them with a platform I log into my bank with.
by Fnoord | 2025-12-20 16:11:19+00:00
mitmproxy isn't the gold standard; it is Burp Suite, sadly.

Burp Suite uses a subscription model. Charles a model like Sublime Text: you buy it and get to keep the version forever, major upgrades available for a discount.

I had to chuckle at this one:

> If you purchased a Charles license prior to 1 May 2008 your existing license key is still valid for Charles 5.

So I guess in past they used a model where you'd have lifetime upgrades.

Which also made me think: I recognize this name! This has to be an older piece of software. Was it published on Freshmeat in the start of this century?

There's also some TUI for Wireshark, such as frontends for tshark. I think [1] looks interesting, since it can be used with a local LLM (via Ollama).

[1] https://github.com/kspviswa/pktai
by lisper | 2025-12-20 16:11:21+00:00
These claims are bullshit. You can get technical details about the clock first-hand at this link:

https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-re...

and you can see a photo of the actual installation here:

https://www.denver7.com/news/front-range/boulder/new-atomic-...

As you can see, the room is clearly not filled with asbestos. Furthermore, the claim is absurd on its face. Asbestos was banned in the U.S. in March 2024 [1] and the clock was commissioned in May 2025.

The rest of the claims are equally questionable. For example:

> The actual port for the actual clock ... isn't actually hooked up to anything ... they use the other ports on the card for actual data transfer

It's hard to make heads or tails of this, but if you read the technical description of the clock you will see that by the time you get to anything in the system that could reasonably be described as a "card" with "ports" you are so far from the business end of the clock that nothing you do could plausibly have an impact on its operation.

> You can't put anything in the room or take anything out. That's how sensitive the clock is.

This claim is also easily debunked using the formula for gravitational time dilation [2]. The accuracy of the clock is ~10^-16. Calculating the mass of an object 1m away from the clock that would produce this effect is left as an exercise, but it's a lot more than the mass of a human. To get a rough idea, the relativistic time dilation on the surface of the earth is <100 μs/day [3]. That is huge by atomic clock standards, but that is the result of 10^24kg of mass. A human is 20 orders of magnitude lighter.

---

[1] https://www.mesotheliomahope.com/legal/legislation/asbestos-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_time_dilation

[3] https://tf.nist.gov/general/pdf/3278.pdf
Show HN: Fixing Chase Travel's UI in Two Weeks with LLM Assistance
by ktut | 2025-12-20 16:12:07+00:00
As a software engineer recently RIF'd by JPMorgan Chase, I was never given the opportunity to work on one of our apps that was the most in need of a major overhaul — Chase Travel. Therefore, I decided to try it on my own as a side project.

The goal of this project was to build a better webapp based on the conclusions of my case study: https://rkdvis.com/chase-travel

Per JPMC confidentiality policies, no internal information was used in any way on this project— everything was based solely on observations of the existing public-facing product.
by pineaux | 2025-12-20 16:12:12+00:00
the name fits the post. I have a different take on "nothing to hide" I think it's a shame that you have nothing to hide. Interesting minds have things to hide. It can be new ideas that are revolutionary and need hidden work to develop into a strong idea. It can be things that challenge the status quo in a dangerous way (for the status quo). It might be gaining freedom from stifling sexual norms. It could be information about your status (rich or poor). If you have nothing to hide, please walk around naked. Never close your curtains. Carry a screen with all your assets and bank accounts. Please carry all your passwords in plain text in your pocket or tattooed on your arm. Keep your address visible on a post-it note on your forehead.

Its just absurd to think you have nothing to hide. If it's not from the state, then it is from other people that mean you harm. That will take advantage of the information you are broadcasting.
by azangru | 2025-12-20 16:12:19+00:00
> rushing in to defend the simplest site on the planet

This 'simplest site on the planet' does the job that it is tasked to do. Brilliantly. I am baffled by why you would scorn at simplicity.

> as if it demonstrates anything

It demonstrates that a great product (a product that many people use and love) can be built with simple tools. At least on the frontend.
Show HN: Automatic Riff Track Creator
by jareklupinski | 2025-12-20 16:12:49+00:00
I'm a big fan of listening to humorous commentary tracks along with my favorite movies. Currently the only way to do this is to start one program with the commentary audio file, and another program with the video file, and use audio cues from both tracks to line them up using the seek bars of each interface while you're watching. It's... an experience. Especially frustrating if you need to pause for a second...

This tool allows you to create a new audio track in the video file containing the commentary track merged with an existing audio track from the video. It also allows you to adjust the offset of the commentary track, so you can line it up with the audio in the movie at arbitrary points in case they are not already in sync. The script tries to do this automatically using subtitles and audio analysis, followed by an optional 'fine-tuning' step if you really want it dialed in to the millisecond.

I hope this is useful to anyone else who wants to enjoy these "riff tracks" more easily :)
by antirez | 2025-12-20 16:13:58+00:00
What happened recently is that all the serious AI researches that were in the stochastic parrot side changed point of view but, incredibly, people without a deep understanding on such matters, previously exposed to such arguments, are lagging behind and still repeat arguments that the people who popularized them would not repeat again.

Today there is no top AI scientist that will tell you LLMs are just stochastic parrots.
by dahart | 2025-12-20 16:14:28+00:00
I saw this the other day. I’m not sure exactly what the concerns are, nor why Qualcomm deserves any shade. I don’t know much about Qualcomm, but at least on the face of it, they’re keeping Arduino alive and infusing a lot of cash and expanding the platform, and they’re also keeping the board designs fully open source. It seems reasonable (and probably necessary in today’s world) to have terms on the cloud services. Arduino’s website itself was never open source, the chips they’ve always used aren’t open source. And it was Arduino’s decision to sell to Qualcomm, right? Why should the cloud services be open source?
by elephanlemon | 2025-12-20 16:14:30+00:00
“Gemini 3 Pro was often overloaded, which produced long spans of downtime that 2.5 Pro experienced much less often”

I was unclear if this meant that the API was overloaded or if he was on a subscription plan and had hit his limit for the moment. Although I think that the Gemini plans just use weekly limits, so I guess it must be API.
by gus_massa | 2025-12-20 16:14:41+00:00
> Q24: Why are balconies often made with aluminum alloy?

> Because it's corrosion- and weather-resistant, perfect for outdoor use.

For HN, you probably would have better results with more technical questions. I guess only 3 or 4, but very technical, but not ultra mega technical.

Is the alloy used in bicycles different from the alloy used in balcony? How is the composition different? How are the mechanical properties different? How are those related?

I remember an old post about a creating an alloy of steel for knives, and one of secret parts was to add a small amount of vanadium to keep it sharp for a long time. These kind of details may create a nice post.
by snakepit | 2025-12-20 16:15:28+00:00
In many ways, we're past the point of no return. So-called ubiquitous technical surveillance is largely the norm, often encroaching by design beyond the boundaries of expected decency.

Informational terrorism, a dysphemism that describes the manner by which certain data is abused to "re-rank content" for a "personalized experience," is encoded into the DNA of certain large tech companies.
by mfuzzey | 2025-12-20 16:15:48+00:00
I think it's difficult to say without knowing how the system is deployed and administered. "If a SMTP mailer trying to send email to somewhere logs 'cannot contact port 25 on <remote host>', that is not an error in the local system"

Maybe or maybe not. If the connection problem is really due to the remote host then that's not the problem of the sender. But maybe the local network interface is down, maybe there's a local firewall rule blocking it,...

If you know the deployment scenario then you can make reasonable decisions on logging levels but quite often code is generic and can be deployed in multiple configurations so that's hard to do
by santadays | 2025-12-20 16:16:30+00:00
I get this take, but given the state of the world (the US anyways), I find it hard to trust anyone with any kind of profit motive. I feel like any information can’t be taken as fact, it can just be rolled into your world view and discarded if useful or not. If you need to make a decision that can’t be backed out of that has real world consequences I think/hope most people are learning to do as much due diligence as reasonable. Llms seem at this moment to be trying to give reliable information. When they’ve been fine tuned to avoid certain topics it’s obvious. This could change but I suspect it will be hard to find tune them too far in a direction without losing capability.

That said, it definitely feels as though keeping a coherent picture of what is actually happening is getting harder, which is scary.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-12-20 16:17:52+00:00
Quite - I fully admit that I know nothing about that particular situation.

However, I have personally seen people get overly defensive when someone has pointed out a major error in their methodology and they have then gone on to hide their working rather than trying to fix the issue. Often it's because they are not particularly expert in that field and don't really understand the issue that needs to be fixed.

I've also seen plenty of bullies in the workplace too.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-12-20 16:18:10+00:00
There's plenty of innovation in DB storage tech, but the hardware interface itself is still page-based.

It turns out that btrees are still efficient for this work. At least until the hardware vendors deign to give us an interface to SSD that looks more like RAM.

Reading over https://www.cs.cit.tum.de/dis/research/leanstore/ and associated papers and follow up work is recommended.

In the meantime with RAM prices sky rocketing, work and research in buffer & page management for greater-than-main-memory-sized DBs is set to be Hot Stuff again.

I like working in this area.
by esafak | 2025-12-20 16:18:15+00:00
It was authorized by the CEO, Thomas J. Watson Sr., who apparently had a "soft spot" for the Nazis. Hitler decorated him: https://www.nytimes.com/1937/07/02/archives/thomas-j-watson-... and it took the occupation of France and the Low Countries three years later for Watson to decide to return the medal.
by hilbert42 | 2025-12-20 16:18:41+00:00
"The biggest thing we need is a better way to pay someone over the internet without them knowing who you are."

I've been saying that for years. Buy a prepaid card for cash at say the supermarket with xyz value on it and a unique email address included (an anonymous debit card with email). That is every new card you buy would have a different disposable email address that would expire when the card is empty.

Such a scheme could also be used to donate micro payments to opensource projects, ad-free Youtubers, etc. and do so anonymously. Moreover, it would make payments easier thus overcome the "requires effort to do" resistance when it comes to donating. Making donating super easy would I reckon greatly increase the income for all those on the receiving end.

However I can't see it happening, governments would outlaw it claiming it'd be used to transfer money for nefarious purposes, money laundering etc.

The major reason I don't donate to good/charitable causes is that I cannot do so anonymously.

Shame really.