MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mgerdts | 2025-12-20 16:19:26+00:00
Datacenter storage will generally not be using M.2 client drives. They employ optimizations that win many benchmarks but sacrifice on consistency multiple dimensions (power loss protection, write performance degrades as they fill, perhaps others).

With SSDs, the write pattern is very important to read performance.

Datacenter and enterprise class drives tend to have a maximum transfer size of 128k, which is seemingly the NAND block size. A block is the thing that needs to be erased before rewriting.

Most drives seem to have an indirection unit size of 4k. If a write is not a multiple of the IU size or not aligned, the drive will have to do a read-modify-write. It is the IU size that is most relevant to filesystem block size.

If a small write happens atop a block that was fully written with one write, a read of that LBA range will lead to at least two NAND reads until garbage collection fixes it.

If all writes are done such that they are 128k aligned, sequential reads will be optimal and with sufficient queue depth random 128k reads may match sequential read speed. Depending on the drive, sequential reads may retain an edge due to the drive’s read ahead. My own benchmarks of gen4 U.2 drives generally backs up these statements.

At these speeds, the OS or app performing buffered reads may lead to reduced speed because cache management becomes relatively expensive. Testing should be done with direct IO using libaio or similar.
by bgwalter | 2025-12-20 16:20:29+00:00
They are very advanced stochastic parrots that allow AI invested authors to suddenly write in perfect English.

If Antirez has never gotten an LLM to perform an absolutely embarrassing mistake, he must be very lucky or we should stop listening to him.

Programmers' resistance has not weakened. Since the ORCL drop of 40% anti-LLM opinions are censored and downvoted here. Many people have given up, and we always get articles from the same LLM influencers.
by ksec | 2025-12-20 16:20:43+00:00
It may be worth pointing out, current highest capacity EDSFF drive offers ~8PB in 1U. That is 320PB per rack, and current roadmaps in 10 years time up to 1000+ PB or 1EB per rack.

Design Database for SSD would still go a very very long way before what I think the author is suggesting which is designing for cloud or datacenter.
by pron | 2025-12-20 16:20:50+00:00
P.S. for the case of computing a mean, I would use Real rather than try to model floating point if the idiosyncracies of a particular FP implementation were important. That means you can't use TLC. In some situations it could suffice to represent the mean as any number (even an integer) that is ≥ min and ≤ max, but TLC isn't very effective even for algorithms involving non-tiny sets of integers when there's "interesting" arithmetic involved.

I don't know the state of contemporary model checkers that work with theories of reals and/or FP, and I'm sure you're much more familar with that than me, but I believe that when it comes to numeric computation, deductive proofs or "sampling tests" (such as property-based testing) are still more common than model-checking. It could be interesting to add a random sampling mode to TLC that could simulate many operations on reals using BigDecimal internally.
by zbentley | 2025-12-20 16:21:11+00:00
I wish I lived in a world where that worked. Instead, I live in a world where most downstream service issues (including database failures, network routing misconfigurations, giant cloud provider downtime, and more ordinary internal service downtime) are observed in the error logs of consuming services long before they’re detected by the owners of the downstream service … if they ever are.

My rough guess is that 75% of incidents on internal services were only reported by service consumers (humans posting in channels) across everywhere I’ve worked. Of the remaining 25% that were detected by monitoring, the vast majority were detected long after consumers started seeing errors.

All the RCAs and “add more monitoring” sprints in the world can’t add accountability equivalent to “customers start calling you/having tantrums on Twitter within 30sec of a GSO”, in other words.

The corollary is “internal databases/backend services can be more technically important to the proper functioning of your business, but frontends/edge APIs/consumers of those backend services are more observably important by other people. As a result, edge services’ users often provide more valuable telemetry than backend monitoring.”
by carlosjobim | 2025-12-20 16:21:18+00:00
I've never seen any pro-EU attitude in the European countries I've lived in. Except for among the political and media class. But those aren't representatives of the general population.

But I haven't lived in central Europe, like Germany, Belgium, etc. Where the attitudes seem to be quite pro-EU.

The original statement still stands. Europe is not the EU. The EU is not Europe.
by sreekanth850 | 2025-12-20 16:21:50+00:00
The deeper problem isnt global clocks or even strict consistency, it’s the assumption that synchronous coordination is the default mechanism for correctness.That’s the real Newtonian mindset, a belief that serialization must happen before progress is allowed. Synchronous coordination can enforce correctness, but it should not be the only mechanism to achieve it. Physics actually teaches the opposite assumption, time is relative and local, not globally ordered. Yet traditional databases were designed as if absolute time and global serialization were fundamental laws, rather than conveniences.We treat global coordination as inevitable when it’s really just a historical design choice, not a requirement for correctness.
by Rohansi | 2025-12-20 16:22:07+00:00
Games are there to be played. Not being able to build a business on top of a game does not make it irrelevant.

f you want to start a business making games then you really should consider using a game engine rather than something like Roblox because Roblox takes a massive cut (way more than 30%) when looking at what users pay vs. what you cash out. I don't
by serial_dev | 2025-12-20 16:22:14+00:00
Let’s say you need three transactions a week, that’s 150 a year. How do you get the right amount of funds into these wallets? How will you get your money out? How will they not be able to track you anyway? As far as I know, you just make the identifiable wallets one hop away.

Again, I’m assuming traditional “old school” non-privacy cryptocurrencies.
by mellosouls | 2025-12-20 16:22:36+00:00
How can skills be monetised by creators?

Obviously they are empowering Codex and Claude etc, and many will be open source or free.

But for those who have commercial resources or tools to add to the skills choice, is there documentation for doing that smoothly, or a pathway to it?

I can see at least a couple of ways it might be done - skills requiring API keys or or other authentication approaches, but this adds friction to an otherwise smooth skill integration process.

Having instead a transparent commission on usage sent to registered skill suppliers would be much cleaner but I'm not confident that would be offered fairly, and I've seen no guidance yet on plans in that regard.
by SigmundA | 2025-12-20 16:22:41+00:00
You must still commit the WAL to disk, this is why the WAL exists it writes ahead to the log on durable storage. Its doesn't have to commit the main storage to disk only the WAL which is better since its just an append to end rather than placing correctly in the table storage which is slower.

You must have a single flushed write to disk to be durable, but it doesn't need the second write.
by mfalcao | 2025-12-20 16:22:49+00:00
The most common way to achieve HÁ is using Patroni. The easiest way to set it up is using Autobase (https://autobase.tech).

CloudNativePG (https://cloudnative-pg.io) is a great option if you’re using Kubernetes.

There’s also pg_auto_failover which is a Postgres extension and a bit less complex than the alternatives, but it has its drawbacks.
by twoodfin | 2025-12-20 16:22:52+00:00
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.

The concern, I think, is that for many that “discard function” is not, “Is this information useful?”. Instead: “Does this information reinforce my existing world view?”

That feedback loop and where it leads is potentially catastrophic at societal scale.
by OptionOfT | 2025-12-20 16:22:57+00:00
What I really like about mitmproxy is that it runs on my server with a certificate I trusted on my phone.

I then flip on WireGuard on my phone, pointed to mitmproxy, and seamlessly all traffic from my phone is decrypted and viewable through the website on my computer.

Except of-course all the applications these days that do certificate pinning, which is annoying, but for that we have Frida.
by emp17344 | 2025-12-20 16:23:19+00:00
On the other hand, ever since LLMs came on the scene, there’s been a vocal group claiming that AI will become intelligent and rapidly bring about human extinction - think the r/singularity crowd. This seems just as untenable a position to hold at this point. It’s becoming clear that these things are simply tools. Useful in many cases, but that’s it.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-12-20 16:23:23+00:00
I don't know why people still get wrapped around the axle of "training data".

Basically every benchmark worth it's salt uses bespoke problems purposely tuned to force the models to reason and generalize. It's the whole point of ARC-AGI tests.

Unsurprisingly Gemini 3 pro performs way better on ARC-AGI than 2.5 pro, and unsurprisingly it did much better in pokemon.

The benchmarks, by design, indicate you can mix up the switch puzzle pattern and it will still solve it.
by adsharma | 2025-12-20 16:23:25+00:00
Re: keeping the relational model

This made sense for product catalogs, employee dept and e-commerce type of use cases.

But it's an extremely poor fit for storing a world model that LLMs are building in an opaque and probabilistic way.

Prediction: a new data model will take over in the next 5 years. It might use some principles from many decades of relational DBs, but will also be different in fundamental ways.
by lelanthran | 2025-12-20 16:23:30+00:00
This conclusion:

> If you cannot maintain the artefact you made yourself without AI, you did not make the artefact.

is mostly lost on those people boasting of 10x output.

The hope amongst the AI-coding proponents is that the SOTA will advance sufficiently rapidly that the loss due to attrition of knowledgeable people won't matter, because...

In this scenario the average software human coders will not be needed because you will simply ask the LLM to maintain, extend and enhance the software it already built.

Having seen the asympotic performance and convergence of performance in SOTA models, I don't believe that this will actually happen.
by acheron | 2025-12-20 16:23:47+00:00
I got an.. AMD (even today I still almost say “ATI” every time) RX6600 XT I think, a couple years ago? It’s been great. I switched over to Linux back in the spring and yes the compatibility has been fine and caused no issues. Still amazed I can run “AAA” games, published by Microsoft even, under Linux.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-12-20 16:24:34+00:00
What am I missing? As suspicious as benchmarks are, your link shows GPT 5.2 to be superior.

It is also out of date as it does not include 5.2 Codex.

Per my point about steerability compensated for by modalities and other harness features: Opus 4.5 scores 58% while GPT 5.2 scores 75% for the instruction following benchmark in your link! Thanks for the hard evidence - GPT 5.2 is 30% ahead of Opus 4.5 there. No wonder Claude Code needs those harness features for the user to manually reign in control over its instruction following capability.
by lisbbb | 2025-12-20 16:25:03+00:00
I worked at a major university that used ColdFusion. They had one guy furiously writing all these websites that were total one-offs. They didn't use source control. Every project was a copy of his original. If there was a bug, he had to update dozens of projects instead of maintaining common source across those dozens of sites. He was totally insane and making bank.
by samch | 2025-12-20 16:25:33+00:00
Can anybody speak to the current best practices around running underground power lines? I see these types of articles about above-ground distribution systems from time-to-time, particularly in California. I feel lucky that my area has underground power, but that was installed back in the 1980s. Would it be prohibitively expensive for Boulder’s utility provider to move to underground distribution? I can’t help but think it could be worth the cost to reduce wildfire risk and offer more reliable service.
by cheesecompiler | 2025-12-20 16:26:43+00:00
Excellent more grounded review. A few questions:

> LLMs are emerging as a new kind of intelligence, simultaneously a lot smarter than I expected and a lot dumber than I expected

Isn't this concerning? How can we know which one we get? In the realm of code it's easier to tell when mistakes are being made.

> regular people benefit a lot more from LLMs compared to professionals, corporations and governments

We thought this would happen with things like AppleScript, VB, visual programming. But instead, AI is currently used as a smarter search engine. The issue is that's also the area where it hallucinates the most. What do you think is the solution?
by erichocean | 2025-12-20 16:27:53+00:00
Some agentic systems do apply RAG to skills, there's nothing about skills that requires blind insertion into prompts.

This is really an agentic harness issue, not an LLM issue per se.

In 2026, I think we'll see agentic harnesses much more tightly integrated with their respective LLMs. You're already starting to see this, e.g. with Google's "Interactions" API and how different LLMs expect CoT to be maintained.

There's a lot of alpha in co-optimizing your agentic harness with how the LLM is RL-trained on tool use and reasoning traces.
by jshaqaw | 2025-12-20 16:29:05+00:00
Again, I'll accept your premise for the sake of debate (which I welcome, and sincerely thank you for doing so respectfully).

Let me try to rephrase where I am coming from. I'm going to accept there is a good argument that some science funding should be redirected towards theoretical physicists pursuing alternate approaches.

1. The focus towards this matter in online media circles is vastly disproportionate to the relative impact this has on anyone's life compared to the multitude of other intra-silo disputes across the federal budget. It's not irrelevant to the conversation or at least my subsection of the conversation. It is interesting to me what debates burst through the noise and get traction outside of their own little world. Maybe 1% of the people debating string theory online actually understand a micro-fraction of this stuff. To be clear, I don't claim to be in that 1%. I'm interested in how that happened and the cultural+platform reasons for it. I'm interested in why alongside those genuinely interested in alternative approaches to theoretical physics this topic attracts tons of people who just lump it in with their "they are all lying to you" worldview. Nothing this obscure, incomprehensible, and yes irrelevant to most peoples lives should have organically reached such breakout status. I can ask some of the 22 year old bros at my jiu jitsu gym what they think of string theory and they will tell me it's all part of the omni-conspiracy. It's literally the only science thing they know. It's not like they understand a word of the debate or know of/care about a single other intra-discipline debate about the allocation of resources. 2. No small part of this is the unfortunate emergence of the online narcissist huckster and nothing plays better in online circles than "they" don't want you to know the truth that "I" have the true answer but "Big X" won't admit it. This clown show distracts from the real merits of the relative positions. But it does get the charismatic narcissist a slot on general interest "they are all always lying to you" podcasts. 3. Obviously this doesn't apply to legit physicists and good faith normies who simply disagree with the existing dogma. That's not who I'm talking about. That said, theoretical physics is bargain basement cheap. I don't need to build a supercollider the size of Mars. I don't need to sequence a trillion genomes. I need a laptop, a whiteboard, some time to think, and a bit of ancillary budget. Surely there are enough allied tech/crypto heterodox rich dudes at this point to fund a Center for Heterodox ToEs and staff it with 50 bright people to prove they have something to add. I can't pretend to have the chops to analyze Eric Weinstein's Geometric Unity vs String Theory. I do know if I really thought I had the answer to the universe and his bankroll/connections I'd just fund a real research effort to prove it vs. doing the podcast circuit ad infinitum.
by twodave | 2025-12-20 16:29:08+00:00
Eh, don’t let other people define what is acceptable for production. Tests are nice but for most boilerplate type things nobody (and I mean NOBODY) writes unit or even integration tests. If you are deploying with the tolerance that you need this stuff to be automatically verified then you’re probably going to be running automated e2e UI tests anyway, and those will naturally uncover regressions and other issues with your auth backbone and other basics.

Source: self, from “shipping to production” for multiple decades
by jknoepfler | 2025-12-20 16:29:27+00:00
I use Patroni for that in a k8s environment (although it works anywhere). I get an off-the-shelf declarative deployment of an HA postgres cluster with automatic failover with a little boiler-plate YAML.

Patroni has been around for awhile. The database-as-a-service team where I work uses it under the hood. I used it to build database-as-a-service functionality on the infra platform team I was at prior to that.

It's basially push-button production PG.

There's at least one decent operator framework leveraging it, if that's your jam. I've been living and dying by self-hosting everything with k8s operators for about 6-7 years now.
by zahlman | 2025-12-20 16:29:38+00:00
It absolutely is culture war. I can easily imagine a less critical version of myself having ended up in that camp. It comes across to me that the perspective is informed by core values and principles surrounding what "intelligence" is.

I butted heads with many earlier on, and they did nothing to challenge that frame meaningfully. What did change is my perception of the set of tasks that don't require "intelligence". And the intuition pump for that is pretty easy to start — I didn't suppose that Deep Blue heralded a dawn of true "AI", either, but chess (and now Go) programs have only gotten even more embarrassingly stronger. Even if researchers and puzzle enthusiasts might still find positions that are easier for a human to grok than a computer.
by bediger4000 | 2025-12-20 16:30:00+00:00
There are so many things wrong with this.

First, are we no longer in favor of the market-based solutions that were demanded for roughly 40 years after 1980? Why did the demand for market-based solutions disappear? Why were the drugmakers able to suddenly lower their prices? We were told that high drug prices were necessary for various reasons.

Second, is this a personal, Trump deal, or some kind of legally-binding agreement? Will the prices stay lowered, or will they go back up? Will the NYT follow-up on whether or not the prices go down? How about follow-up on staying down?

Third, Trump hasn't been truthful or on top of things lately. His Dec 17th primetime address was rambling and repetitious. He's fallen asleep during cabinet meetings. Why should we believe this if the source is Trump? He clearly has a worse "age problem" than Biden did.

Fourth, there's the NYT itself. Sure, NYT has historically been called out for "liberal bias", but they were exceptionally hard on Hillary Clinton's email scandal, and have been exceptionally easy on Trump for the last 9 years. NYT no longer makes much, if any, money on news, its major income is from on-line games. Its reporting has gone downhill, much as other major media has in the age of US oligarchs. Why should we believe that NYT is doing anything other than a submarine PR hit on this?
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-12-20 16:30:15+00:00
My main terminal uses a PiHole with 120,000+ blacklist rules (not Cloudfare specifically — I allow most CDN's). This includes an entire blackout of Google/Facebook products, as well as most tracking/analytics services.

For example, I do not allow reCAPTCHA.

As a similar commentor noted, when just casually browsing I don't really have any desire to try hard to read random content. Should I absolutely need to access some information garden-walled behind Cloudfare: I have another computer that uses much less restrictive black-listing.
by dav43 | 2025-12-20 16:30:16+00:00
Anecdata- I did this as a 13 year old in the 90s. My old man came upon it after I was repeatedly ending up in hospital in Australia with asthma as a kid. I think there was a presentation in a local scout hall!

I didn’t understand the history at the time - but it stopped me going to hospital, I ended up being able to do a controlled hold (no discomfort) of around 1:30 min and a max hold of just shy of 5 mins.

So for me it had a big impact.

I stopped in my 20s and now I am no where near able to get those numbers.
by techblueberry | 2025-12-20 16:31:03+00:00
One that I think makes me feel fairly rationally concerned about AI in commercial/consumer application is like - I am 100% certain all AI tools like this will allow product placement in their solutions. I’m sure lots of designers may have deals with brand too, so maybe the extent to which this can be avoided is overstated, but I’m not sure how you trust AI for anything where you want a perspective that is unbiased, especially along financial lines.

So like, from a creativity perspective? Yeah, sure how many people can really afford a professional designer in the first place, I’m sure AI would do fine.
by macNchz | 2025-12-20 16:31:08+00:00
There’s nothing super special about it, it’s just handy if you have some instructions that you don’t need the AI to see all the time, but that you’d like it to have available for specific things.

Maybe you have a custom auth backend that needs an annoying local proxy setup before it can be tested—you don’t need all of those instructions in the primary agents.md bloating the context on every request, a skill would let you separate them so they’re only accessed when needed.

Or if you have a complex testing setup and a multi-step process for generating realistic fixtures and mocks: the AI maybe only needs some basic instructions on how to run the tests 90% of the time, but when it’s time to make significant changes it needs info about your whole workflow and philosophy.

I have a django project with some hardcoded constants that I source from various third party sites, which need to be updated periodically. Originally that meant sitting down and visiting a few websites and copy pasting identifiers from them. As AI got better web search I was able to put together a prompt that did pretty well at compiling them. With a skill I can have the AI find the updated info, update the code itself, and provide it some little test scripts to validate it did everything right.