MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: VectorWave – Turn Python function execution into searchable vector data
by cozymori | 2025-12-27 08:10:36+00:00
Hello HN,

I built an open source Python framework called VectorWave. It connects your code execution flow directly to a Vector Database (Weaviate).

Instead of dumping inputs/outputs into unstructured text logs, VectorWave embeds them as vectors. This allows you to:
1. Search execution history semantically (e.g., find "bad input" errors without exact keyword matching).
2. Implement semantic caching (skip expensive calls if similar inputs were processed).
3. Enable "Self-Healing" by comparing error traces with past successful runs.

It is designed for AI engineers needing long-term memory for agents, or backend devs debugging complex workflows.

Repo: https://github.com/cozymori/vectorwave
Docs: https://cozymori.github.io/vectorwave-docs/

I'd love to hear your feedback on the concept of "Execution RAG".
by Dambalala | 2025-12-27 08:10:45+00:00
. Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch. Urban fantasy with a great audiobook narrator (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith). Harry Potter meets Sherlock Holmes. Loved the computer history and London Library parts in False Value.

. Chrestomanci series by Diana Wynne Jones. Found the first book in a local phonebox library. Especially liked the probability computer in Conrad’s Fate.

. Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer. Recommended by a barber after I mentioned the cartoon "Scavengers Reign". Annihilation is well worth reading.

. The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. Novel about memory, forgetting.

. Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman. Short novel imagining Einstein's dreams whilst he worked on his relativity theory.
by ggm | 2025-12-27 08:11:33+00:00
I consider the abstract a strawman. By far the largest number of robots deployed are non human 3 (or more) axis single arm, or the less complex but still unhuman interchangeable head multi axis NMC tools. The assumption of humanoid appears to me to be bogus from the get-go.

Humanoid robots are a self imposed goal, for many people it means substitution of a robot into human centric work.

Most of Amazon and other warehouse robots are grid traversal stackers. It's a shunting yard in 3 dimensions.
by WolfCop | 2025-12-27 08:12:01+00:00
Does anyone maintain a programmatically accessible list of holidays for their company? Similar to the HOLIDAYS.txt in the article, but it would allow for things like “don’t run this the day before or during a company holiday.”

I work at a company with different holidays in certain countries, which would complicate things, and require something more structured than a list of dates. But having that accessible could be useful.

Has anyone tackled that, or come across a solution?
by thaumasiotes | 2025-12-27 08:12:17+00:00
Noun sense 4.4 there comes from the medical use, which is a euphemistic reference to verb sense 1.1.

I don't know whether the noun retard developed within medicine from the medical use. But this much is clear:

1. The word retarded (not retard) was employed in an effort to be technical and sensitive in referring to people with mental deficiencies;

2. The same word, retarded, entered general use in reference to people with (more broadly-construed) mental deficiencies;

3. The noun retard derived straightforwardly from retarded, in the sense "person who is retarded". This might have happened before step 2 and then entered general use in parallel with retarded, or it might have happened after step 2. Doesn't really matter.
by tstrimple | 2025-12-27 08:12:55+00:00
You've got some great ones on here. I'm curious how you found some of them to be.

Jim Butcher "Brief Cases": I'm a huge fan of the Dresden series. I find it to be very enlightening as we watch an author grow with his primary character. The early books were particularly weak, but they grow and get better and better. However, I'm unfairly biased against short stories, so I avoid all the X.5 releases. Are these worth exploring as I'm waiting for the followup to Battleground?

Mother of Learning: I generally don't like litrpg or progression fantasy, but I'm a sucker for time loops. I enjoyed this series and craved more like it. Anything else you'd recommend in this genre?

I read the Fitz books... fuck... decades ago at this point. Is it worth revisiting in audiobook? I've been burned so many times by nostalgia that I'm reluctant to revisit old favorites.
Ask HN: How are you sandboxing coding agents?
by m-hodges | 2025-12-27 08:13:09+00:00
I've seen people rely on built-in sandboxes, use git worktrees (sometimes inside devcontainers), or run the whole agent inside a Linux VM with minimal host mounts. On Linux, I’ve also seen firejail/bubblewrap mentioned.

For folks actually using these tools day-to-day:

What’s your default setup?

Have you had any "learned the hard way" moments?

What tradeoff (safety vs convenience vs parallelism) has mattered most in practice?

I'm less interested in theoretical best practices than what's actually holding up under real use.
by mikhailfranco | 2025-12-27 08:13:32+00:00
China is the world's second largest producer of silver, after Mexico and ahead of Peru.

It is introducing licensing for export of silver starting on 1 January 2026.

There is speculation that the new regulations will favor a few large companies, slow the flow of exports, and provide a mechanism for the government to impose explicit 'critical mineral' export controls on silver in the future.
by Perseids | 2025-12-27 08:14:00+00:00
You misunderstand. The physicists are developing their own software to analyze their experimental data. They typically have little software development experience, but there is seldom someone more knowledgeable available to support them. Making matters worse, they often are not at all interested in software development and thus also don't invest the time to learn more than the absolute minimum necessary to solve their current problem, even if it could save them a lot of time in the long run. (Even though I find the situation frustration, I can't say I don't relate, given that I feel the same way about LaTeX.)
by ReflectedImage | 2025-12-27 08:14:38+00:00
Making the type annotations pass restricts you to writing more bloated and verbose programs in general.

Stating that A is an integer isn't much of a issue but once you get a reasonably complex program and A now has a compound type made of 5 parts, it really does slow you down and it really does make you write considerably worse programs for the sake of passing a type checker.

Any commercial code will need to be unit tested so there is no time saving from finding runtime errors earlier and an any good IDE will detect the same errors and provide you with the same auto complete automatically for free without any type annotations at all. These are problems which exist solely in your head.

1 developer vs a whole team of developers. I think you need to face the facts.

There are studies comparing old dynamically types languages against statically type languages. They always show approximately 1/3 of the lines of code being used with 3x faster development times in the dynamically types languages. This isn't some new discovery.

Well even Python is strongly typed but for the sake of this we are discussing type complexity.
by port11 | 2025-12-27 08:14:56+00:00
I'm not influential enough but I'll share the recommendations I think will help people like me: struggling parents.

This year I've reread The Discontented Little Baby Book. If you're getting/have a newborn, this is the book I'd read. It's humane. No sleep training, no nonsense about babies. We went full ‘possum’ with our baby and I like how happy he became.

I've also read Ten Things I Wish You Knew About Your Child's Mental Health. To me this could be an instant classic. No fluff, lots of advice for parents. Prima.

There's plenty of literature on parenting, but so much of it is poorly written or poorly researched. Be careful out there. (And don't read PLS, yikes.)

---

I finally discovered Andy Weir, the Thursday Next series, and The 13.5 Lives of Captain Bluebear. I'm amazed it took me so long to get there. All excellent.

For some reason I decided to read all 7 Harry Potters in French. If you're learning French, it's a great idea, the French gets progressively harder so you can keep up!

Bryson's At Home: A Short History of Private Life has been my companion for some weeks, but it's quite long.

I'm happy with all my reading this year, some 32 books, many in a foreign language. Given I've no time to read during the day, and can only get some pages in after the kid's in bed, it's not too shabby.

Oh, and we've read Stompysaurus, like, 90 times? Grawwwwr!

Happy reading!
by tourmalinetaco | 2025-12-27 08:15:13+00:00
They’re not. The MacBook Air can easily thermal throttle under any sustained load because they went with a fanless design. It may work for casual usage, but it also negates at least half of your claims.

Screen cracking was ~4 years ago for M1 laptops, which also included Apple making screen repairs far more difficult, exacerbating the problems they’re currently being sued over.

They did separate NAND from the rest of the board in recent models, but NAND on the board was only a problem because A) bad engineering & B) greed. Thay’s not even getting into MacOS overwriting to NAND and wearing it out.

“Engineering is hard” is not an excuse for a company that’s worth $4 trillion. With flexgate they cheaped out on shorter flex cables. Anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of flex cables knows that’s a recipe for disaster. And while Flexgate itself is an older case, it’s a clear example of their profits-at-all-costs approach.

For that ~$900 M1 Macbook Air, you’d get:

- an old laptop, nearing its end-of-life, with:

- a fragile, expensive-to-repair screen, plus:

- thermal throttling on any decent load

All for $1,000, which by the way is not “low-cost”. That same $1,000 can buy you far better machines. Genuinely, it doesn’t fit any realistic use case. Casual users? A Chromebook or cheaper Windows laptop suffices. Productivity? It can’t sustain loads, so heavy workloads are out of the picture (and can be handled more effectively by newer hardware). Its only clear benefit is the battery life, but that’s not enough to spend $900 on a 5yo laptop with known issues.
by runeks | 2025-12-27 08:15:59+00:00
> When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable.

I agree, but the only worth candidate I see is the medical industry.

And given that drug development is so expensive because of government-mandated trials, I think it makes sense for the government to also provide a helping hand here — to counterweight the (completely sensible) cost increase due to the drug trial system.
by tkzed49 | 2025-12-27 08:18:17+00:00
Thank you. I don't need to "fix" a commit before it ends up on a remote branch. Sometimes I expect a commit to pass checks and sometimes I don't. Frankly, don't even run pre-push hooks. Just run the checks in CI when I push. You'd better be doing that anyway before I'm allowed to push to a production branch, so stop breaking my git workflows and save me the time of running duplicate checks locally.

Also, if most developers are using one editor, configure that editor to run format and auto-fix lint errors. That probably cleans up the majority of unexpected CI failures.
by gf000 | 2025-12-27 08:18:26+00:00
> How do I use wlroots as a user

Why would you want to use it as a user? That makes zero sense.

> Is this why Xwayland exists, because it's so easy to do

I don't get your point. The reason it exists is backwards compatibility. There are binaries as well where changing a library is not so easy, and not every version change is equal within a toolkit.

But it's much different to go from X to Wayland then from Wayland to Wayland with one more protocol.
by vintermann | 2025-12-27 08:19:15+00:00
There are plenty of poisonous plants that large animals e.g. farm animals will happily eat and die. Yew, water hemlock etc. are notorious livestock killers.

According to a farmer friend of mine, sheep are also absolutely crazy about hedgehog mushrooms (hydnum repandum), which is not poisonous, but it suggests that they don't shun mushrooms.
by netcoyote | 2025-12-27 08:19:17+00:00
I use a Mac, and wanted to be able to run MacOS programs like Xcode and iOS simulator, so I wrote a couple of different sandbox projects:

- SandVault (https://github.com/webcoyote/sandvault) runs the AI agent in a low-privilege account

- ClodPod (https://github.com/webcoyote/clodpod) runs the AI agent inside a MacOS VM

In both cases I map my code directories using shares/mounts.

I find that I use the low-privilege account solution more because it's easier to setup and doesn't require the overhead of a full VM
by 578_Observer | 2025-12-27 08:19:25+00:00
That $56 vs current price gap is what we might call "Infinite Technical Debt."

Musk's genius wasn't just engineering cars; it was engineering the market's latency. He successfully pushed the "runtime error" (reality) further into the future, trading on pure speculation.

In the Shinise (1000-year company) philosophy, this gap between "Reputation" and "Reality" is considered the most dangerous vulnerability. They call it "Kyomei" (Empty Name).

If your reputation scales faster than your actual codebase, you aren't growing—you're just buffering a crash. The board knows the buffer is full.
by Joycewhi-16 | 2025-12-27 08:20:27+00:00
Stainless steel sinks are renowned for their durability and longevity, making them a popular choice in kitchens and bathrooms. With their resistance to corrosion, stains, and impacts, these sinks maintain their aesthetic appeal and functionality over time. This article explores the factors contributing to the durability of stainless steel sinks, their maintenance, and the advantages they offer compared to other materials.https://info.handmadesinkfactory.com/durability-and-longevit...
by f1shy | 2025-12-27 08:20:34+00:00
> because it's very likely there are no changes to the kernel

That is a gratuitous assumption. My experience is, as long as there is the smallest custom hardware, you will have to make some tweaks here and there.

> they're not asking for anything of value or using the GPL to advance software freedom by freeing up some valuable code, they're just wasting both theirs and others' time asking for something they can already download directly.

I'm sorry that the company which is making lots of money by using a copyrighted SW has to "waste" 200 dollars in some bureaucracy, printing and postage. But is the license of the SW they are using, and should abide by it.
by matroid | 2025-12-27 08:21:24+00:00
A while back, I implemented a paper that had showed up on HN for a course project (Dense, Interlocking-Free and Scalable Spectral Packing of Generic 3D Objects).

Over the holidays, I cleaned up the implementation (with the help of Claude Code, although this is not an advertisement for it) and released it on GitHub.

If anyone needs fast 3D packing in python, do give this a shot. Hopefully I have attributed all the code/ideas I have used from elsewhere properly (if not, please feel free to let me know).
by AndrewDavis | 2025-12-27 08:23:10+00:00
Great post. And if you want some control support for your cronjobs perl App::Cronjob[1] can provide features such has exclusive locking, so a job won't run if the previous run is still going, or provide a timeout, and some options for sending mail on success or failure

[1]https://metacpan.org/pod/App::Cronjob
https://metacpan.org/dist/App-Cronjob/view/bin/cronjob
by choilive | 2025-12-27 08:23:27+00:00
Yep, thats a good one. Caffeine is deadly to insects, but a mostly safe stimulant for us. Nicotine also comes to mind. Plants have developed tons of defense mechanisms that are deadly to one class of animals, but useful or only mildly deterrent to others. Avians are immune to capsaicin, but an irritant for mammals.. except for some hairless primates.
by 0x_rs | 2025-12-27 08:25:20+00:00
I recommend taking a look at this video to get an idea behind the through process (or lack thereof) law enforcement might display when provided with a number of "AI" tools, and even if this one example is closer to traditional face recognition than LLMs, the behavior seems the same. Spoiler: complete submission and deference, and in this specific case to a system that was not even their own.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9M4F_U1eEw
by jalapenos | 2025-12-27 08:25:34+00:00
Usually I go the "didn't deny it" route on responses like these, but it's Christmas.

Smearing the right is absolutely fine - the left have honed this in expertly, so I don't think anyone on the right should be upset by it, instead just they should recognize that their enemy is what they think they are, and that they should at least learn and use all their techniques (since otherwise they'll be at a severe disadvantage since the left are already maxed out in the opposite direction).

Hopefully the result from this is that the center of mentally normal and healthy people will end up empowered.
by devsda | 2025-12-27 08:25:41+00:00
> The government isn’t making any money here.

Hypothetically let's say govt is allowed to use unpaid labour outside menial tasks and the prison system is setup in a way to efficiently utilize the skills of their labour pool and is allowed to outsource their skills to private entities at attractive rate for covering prison costs (i.e. more money left for govt spending)

E.g. tradesmen employed on their related jobs. A programmer employed in software jobs or a technician "loaned" to a nearby lab etc.

Don't you think the local/state governments will then have incentive to fill their pool with "missing" talent according to the job requirements.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-12-27 08:26:43+00:00
> one could make the argument that staff notation is itself a form of text, albeit one with a different notation than a single stream of Unicode symbols

Mostly this is straightforwardly correct. Notes on a staff are a textual representation of music.

There are some features of musical notation that aren't usually part of linguistic writing:

- Musical notation is always done in tabular form - things that happen at the same time are vertically aligned. This is not unknown in writing, though it requires an unusual context.

- Relatedly, sometimes musical notation does the equivalent of modifying the value of a global variable - a new key signature or a dynamic notation ("pianissimo") takes effect everywhere and remains in effect until something else displaces it. In writing, I guess quotation marks have similar behavior.

- Musical notation sometimes relates two things that may be arbitrarily far apart from each other. (Consider a slur.) This is difficult to do in a 1-D stream of symbols.

> although, one can argue that musical notation is not able to adequately preserve some aspects of musical performance

Nothing new there; that's equally true of writing in relation to speech.
by Popeyes | 2025-12-27 08:27:04+00:00
We went to America to see some family and we were discussing books and we were shocked that they had never heard of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler who are an absolute staple of UK kids book culture (so much so that they adapt one of her books as animations for each Christmas). So if they aren't on your radar, then they come highly recommended.

https://axelscheffler.com/who-is-he
https://www.juliadonaldson.co.uk/books/
by lmm | 2025-12-27 08:27:19+00:00
Note that the advantages of Rust are not just execution speed: it's also a good language for expressing one's thoughts, and thus makes it easier to find and unlock the algorithmic speedups that really increase speed.

But yeah. Python packaging has been dumb for decades and successive Python package managers recapitulated the same idiocies over and over. Anyone who had used both Python and a serious programming language knew it, the problem was getting anyone to do anything about it. I can't help thinking that maybe the main reason using Rust worked is that it forced anyone who wanted to contribute to it to experience what using a language with a non-awful package manager is like.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-12-27 08:27:24+00:00
it does not use "some" resources

it uses a fuck ton of resources[0]

and instead of reducing energy production and emissions we will now be increasing them, which, given current climate prediction models, is in fact "killing the planet"

[0] https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-supply-for-...
by mr_toad | 2025-12-27 08:27:45+00:00
There’s a lot of research of people for whom punishment obviously didn’t act as a deterrent, and unsurprisingly this research concludes that the prospect of punishment doesn’t act as a deterrent.

There is no research I’m aware of on people for whom the prospect of punishment did act as a deterrent (i.e. people who decided not to commit the crime).

So I argue that there is a very big selection bias in literature surrounding the effectiveness of punishment as a deterrent .
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-12-27 08:27:56+00:00
The perps were patriots, resisting a murdering (among others, destroying USAID) sociopath committing mass treason against the government.

There were also like maybe a dozen actually destructive cases. No one got hurt. Total property damage was maybe a half million dollars? We're arguing over the dumbest pittances of nothing, even if we add an order of magnitude here. This is ridiculous.

Personally, your post seems to be strongly condemning, as if this was some absurd nightmare situation. I find it just ridiculous cowardice to pretend like this was an actual scary and bad problem. I'm not sure how many 9's of non violent peaceful protest it was, but it was a lot of 9's, and very little actual harm.

Yes, a brand had it's image destroyed. It did it itself. Telsa's leader set it's brand's name on fire. Molotov'ed itself into kingdom come. From which it seems impossible to recover. A brand that was early in on EV's. But it seems facetious and ridiculous blame this political suicide in public, with nazi salutes and chainsaws, on the left. Get real man; you have to be joking. The left didn't slow this down; what kind of a fool do you take us for?
by wojciii | 2025-12-27 08:28:50+00:00
I read a lot of sci-fi. Much of that is bad.

This is not the case.

Dennis Paul Himes: Raisinbread: The Story of Jennifer Choate and Her Role in the Crisis of 2262

After reading the above book (I didn't get much sleep) I e-mailed the author with the subject "Please take my money!" and asked him to write more books.
by dwattttt | 2025-12-27 08:29:16+00:00
> Still, at least it's an option to put base64 inline inside the JSON. With binary, this is not an option and must send it separately in all cases, even small binary...

There's nothing special about "text" or binary here. You can absolutely put binary inside other binary; you use a symbol that doesn't appear inside the binary, much like you do for text.

You use a divider, like " is for json, and a prearranged way to avoid that symbol from appearing inside the inner binary (the same approach that works for text works here).

What do you think a zip file is? They're not storing compressed binary data as text, I can tell you that.