MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: LinkedQL – Live Queries over Postgres, MySQL, MariaDB
by phrasecode | 2025-12-08 14:23:36+00:00
LinkedQL is a new SQL client that supports live queries over any Postgres, MySQL, and MariaDB database. You get result sets that self-update differentially as rows change in your database – via inserts, updates, deletes. Works with no extra tooling/ORM layer or GraphQL servers. You opt into live mode simply with a flag: client.query('SELECT ...', { live: true }). More at: https://linked-ql.netlify.app/capabilities/live-queries

LinkedQL is written in JavaScript and runs in both client and server environments.

GitHub + docs: https://github.com/linked-db/linked-ql

Demo examples included.

I’d love feedback: • Anything confusing? • Anything seems useful or dangerous? • Anything else that'd make you consider LinkedQL for production?

Thanks for taking a look — happy to answer any questions.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-12-08 14:23:38+00:00
I outlined it over in another comment[1] so I'm not gonna copy it all over but the point isn't to eliminate all trust. The point of trustless architectures (of which blockchain and smart contracts are one) is that you are eliminating implicit trust.

You are taking all the implicit trust, lowering it into explicit trust assumptions, and formalising who is allowed to make what decisions when, what happens when they do, and how the other parties are permitted to respond.

You are moving all of those implicit assumptions about how a contract, interaction, or relationship work and formalising them into something explicit and upfront so that all participants can evaluate their risk tolerance and trust levels prior to agreeing to a given contract or interaction.

And of course you are also sprinkling in a heavy dose of automation to smooth out the complexities of these explicit, mechanised contracts such that the happy paths are buttery smooth and the unhappy paths are at the least bearable and correspond to the contract you signed on to at the beginning of your interaction.

TLDR: It's low trust automation + formalising implicit assumptions into explicit ones.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46181371#46192445
by ecshafer | 2025-12-08 14:24:13+00:00
An Engineering degree and a TS is basically a guaranteed job. They might not be the flashiest FAANG jobs, but it is job security. In this downturn where people talk about being unable to find jobs for years in big cities, I look around my local area and Lockheed, BAE, Booze Allen, etc they have openings.
by dexterous | 2025-12-08 14:24:23+00:00
I agree that the "there aren't enough programmers for language X" argument is generally flawed. Acceptable cases would be niches like maintenance of seriously legacy or dying platforms. COBOL anyone?

But, not because I think schools and colleges would jump at the opportunity and start training the next batch of students in said language just because some government department or a bunch of large corporations supported and/or mandated it. Mostly because that hasn't actually panned out in reality for as long as I can remember. Trust me, I _wish_ schools and colleges were that proactive or even in touch with with the industry needs, but... (shrug!)

Like I said, I still think the original argument is flawed, at least in the general case, because any good organization shouldn't be hiring "language X" programmers, they should be hiring good programmers who show the ability to transfer their problem solving skills across the panopticon of languages out there. Investing in getting a _good_ programmer upskilled on a new language is not as expensive as most organizations make it out to be.

Now, if you go and pick some _really obscure_ (read "screwed up") programming language, there's not much out there that can help you either way, so... (shrug!)
by bee_rider | 2025-12-08 14:24:24+00:00
The UI of the Internet (search) has recently gotten quite bad. In this light it is pretty obvious why Google is working heavily on these models.

I fully expect local modes to eat up most other LLM applications—there’s no reason for your chat buddy or timer setter to reach out to the internet, but LLMs are pretty good at vibes based search, and that will always require looking at a bunch of websites, so it should slot exactly into the gap left by search engines becoming unusable.
by liudasjank | 2025-12-08 14:24:24+00:00
Thanks for the thoughtful suggestions, those are spot on.

Rate-limit testing and proper 429/Retry-After handling are definitely on the roadmap. Idempotency checks for POST/PUT are a great call too, a lot of APIs behave unpredictably there, and it’s one of those areas people rarely test systematically. Unicode/emoji/RTL input fuzzing is a fun one, Rentgen already generates trimming/whitespace/negative cases, but expanding into more string-weirdness categories makes total sense.

If you end up trying it on any internal APIs this week, I’d genuinely love to hear what it catches. The tool often surprises me in places I didn’t expect.
by raincole | 2025-12-08 14:24:38+00:00
This very repo is just to "fix probability with more probability."

> The next time the agent runs, that rule is injected into its context. It essentially allows me to “Patch” the model’s behavior without rewriting my prompt templates or redeploying code.

What a brainrot idea... the whole post being written by LLM is the icing on the cake.
by woolion | 2025-12-08 14:25:07+00:00
"In theory it's a great idea, in practice not so much."

I feel that's the lesson anyone who toyed with libertarians ideals ultimately come to. It just takes a bit longer for some than others. It's also harder to realize if you're making mad bank on it, rather than be part of the idiots who blew their hard-earned money on some technical misunderstanding, scam, or retro-active regulation.
Show HN: WaldenWeek – Weekly challenges for simpler living
by calinf | 2025-12-08 14:25:09+00:00
Hey HN,

I built a static site, no login, no database, no apps, with weekly challenges designed to break dopamine loops, disrupt routines, and help you appreciate what you already have.

Every week, a new challenge drops: no moving frames, candlelight evenings, corded phones, sleeping on the floor, and more.

Here is the contract I generated for myself this week (Vol 50):

I am locking in for WaldenWeek Vol 50: Corded Phone. The Rule: Phone stays plugged in at home. 24/7. No exceptions. The Commitment: If I fail, I will Venmo $10 to the first friend who calls me out.

Who is brave enough to join me?

Rules and challenges are available at: https://waldenweek.com
by recroad | 2025-12-08 14:25:19+00:00
Yup, I have. And had to deal with converting "this awesome tool that does X, Y and Z" to an actual multi-user app because it was just so great. You end up discovering that there are tons of miscalculations in these formulas that only surface when you start writing tests for them, and that a lot of the business decisions based on these tools had flawed assumptions.

Having said that, I love that Excel has democratized app-building and made it easier for people to solve their own problems. In terms of alternatives, I think it's more about the UI and mental model that people have when using Excel, not necessarily the functionality. There may be 1-to-1 competitors in terms of functionality, but in terms of UX, Excel is sort of king.
Show HN: A Wordle helper I made after becoming a little obsessed with the game
by mr_windfrog | 2025-12-08 14:25:26+00:00
Hi everyone,

I really, really enjoy playing Wordle, but my limited vocabulary often leaves me stuck. So I ended up building a small helper to give myself a hand while playing.

It's not meant to "cheat" at Wordle — the idea is just to help you practice more often and get better at guessing words. I kept it lightweight and interactive so it still feels like you’re actually playing and learning as you go.

A few things I found interesting while building it:

1. The candidate list updates live as you type—no precomputed tables 2. The scoring model combines basic frequency weights and positional likelihood 3. Keeping the UI minimal made the tool feel more like a helper than a solver 4. I optimized filtering so it stays responsive even on low-end mobile devices 5. I added a dark theme mostly because I play late at night

Some technical notes for anyone curious:

1. All filtering and scoring happens client-side 2. The word list is cleaned up to avoid overly obscure entries, but I'm open to suggestions 3. I've been experimenting with different weighting strategies and would love feedback

If you like playing wordle games, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Feedback, ideas, or nitpicks are all welcome. Glad to answer any questions!
by StellarScience | 2025-12-08 14:25:44+00:00
The AI spreadsheet example in the linked article is interesting, but that occurs within a more specialized and constrained environment than general GUI design. I think of good UI design as involving a lot of human factors understanding combined with 2D spatial reasoning and layout, which I don't think AI is good at. (Today's article about Claude failing to reproduce an HTML layout to match a screen capture is one example of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46183294 )

But my pessimism may be unfounded or based on ignorance. At some point AI will probably get better at these things as well, either with better LLMs or by augmenting LLMs with outboard spatial reasoning modules that they can interact with.
by elicash | 2025-12-08 14:26:36+00:00
Quickly googled his website and found this from January 2021:

> [...] I’m reminded of all the UI and interaction designs and changes in iOS and MacOS that are just bad. There’s a real sense that Apple’s current HI team, under Alan Dye, is a “design is what it looks like” group, not a “design is how it works” group.

And this, from June of this year:

> Re-watching Jobs’s introduction of Aqua for the umpteenth time, I still find it enthralling. I found Alan Dye’s introduction of Liquid Glass to be soporific, if not downright horseshitty.

He has been even more critical on his podcast. This has been a repeated refrain and increasing over the years. My first reaction, when I read the news, was "Apple bloggers and podcasters will be THRILLED."
by npoc | 2025-12-08 14:26:59+00:00
It depends how you measure value. By stabilise I mean stops growing in value by 50%/yr with big short term swings of 80%.

As it matures and gets close to it's ultimate value, volatility will naturally reduce.

Once it is used as the unit of account, everything else will fluctuate in value relative to bitcoin, which has more stable fundamentals than anything else on earth (fixed/zero issuance, liquidity etc), but this will be decades in the future when it's dollar value will be 8 or 9 figures in today's money
by Aurornis | 2025-12-08 14:27:06+00:00
> Ironic that you posted this as a comment on HN.

It’s not ironic at all. Posting here was deliberate to highlight the bubble that happens here for consumer products. This comment section has a lot of people evaluating these price hikes as if they were targeted at HN individual users, not for a product targeted at a different audiences and corporate subscriptions.

Hacker News commenters are frequently unaware that their use cases and customer preferences do not reflect the average customer demand in the market.

Remember when Dropbox was launched and the top comment was doubting its utility because they could replicate it with rsync and other commands duct taped together? That level of disconnectedness with the market is common in every thread about consumer products.

As for AI demand: If you don’t think AI is in demand, you haven’t been looking at the explosive adoption of AI tools from ChatGPT to Sora (consistently high on app charts) by consumers. These products are in high demand, though you’d never know if it your only perspective was through upvoted HN stories and comments.
by xvilka | 2025-12-08 14:27:11+00:00
We use the tree-sitter[1] for parsing C declarations in Rizin[2] (see the "td" command, for example). See our custom grammar[3] (modified mainstream tree-sitter-c). The custom grammar was sadly necessary, due to the inability of Tree-Sitter to have the alternate roots[4].

P.S. Please add a license for your code.

[1] https://tree-sitter.github.io/

[2] https://github.com/rizinorg/rizin/tree/dev/librz/type/parser

[3] https://github.com/rizinorg/rizin-grammar-c/

[4] https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter/issues/711
by tatjam | 2025-12-08 14:27:15+00:00
As a quick example, compare doing embedded work with a C static uint8_t[MAX_BUFFER_SIZE] alongside a FreeRTOS semaphore and counter for the number of bytes written, vs using Rust's heapless::Vec<u8, MAX_BUFFER_SIZE>, behind a embassy Mutex.

The first will be a real pain, as you now have 3 global variables, and the second will look pretty much like multi-threaded Rust running on a normal OS, but with some extra logic to handle the buffer growing too big.

You can probably squeeze more performance out of the C code, specially if you know your system in-depth, but (from experience) it's very easy to lose track of the program's state and end up shooting your foot.
by phrasecode | 2025-12-08 14:27:33+00:00
Author here — a bit more detail on architecture and guarantees

Happy to dig into internals if anyone’s curious — how live updates propagate, how JOINs and complex queries resolve, consistency expectations, worst-case scaling, etc.

To keep the main post short, here are deep-dive links if you want to explore:

• Live update mechanics https://linked-ql.netlify.app/capabilities/live-queries

• Engineering paper (replication pipelines, differential projection, query inheritance) https://linked-ql.netlify.app/engineering/realtime-engine

Totally open to questions — I’m hanging around the thread to learn what concerns matter most.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-12-08 14:27:40+00:00
> The factual answer is traditionally the most plausible response to many questions

Except in cases where the training data is more wrong than correct (e.g. niche expertise where the vox pop is wrong).

However, an LLM no more deals in Q&A than in facts. It only typically replies to a question with an answer because that itself is statistically most likely, and the words of the answer are just selected one at a time in normal LLM fashion. It's not regurgitating an entire, hopefully correct, answer from someplace, so just because it was exposed to the "correct" answer in the training data, maybe multiple times, doesn't mean that's what it's going to generate.

In the case of hallucination, it's not a matter of being wrong, just the expected behavior of something built to follow patterns rather than deal in and recall facts.

For example, last night I was trying to find an old auction catalog from a particular company and year, so thought I'd try to see if Gemini 3 Pro "Thinking" maybe had the google-fu to find it available online. After the typical confident sounding "Analysing, Researching, Clarifying .." "thinking", it then confidently tells me it has found it, and to go to website X, section Y, and search for the company and year.

Not surprisingly it was not there, even though other catalogs were. It had evidently been trained on data including such requests, maybe did some RAG and got more similar results, then just output the common pattern it had found, and "lied" about having actually found it since that is what humans in the training/inference data said when they had been successful (searching for different catalogs).
by holocen | 2025-12-08 14:27:47+00:00
Started working on a training plan builder after getting frustrated with trying to use an existing service (trainingpeaks) and not finding the controls intuitive enough without being a coach in their system.

https://bloks.run/

I wanted something local and offline first + 10-20% better than excel, think I'm missing a few features other might find useful, but it works for my needs which has been great.
by hylaride | 2025-12-08 14:27:57+00:00
> Is there some code of conduct for public companies but not private ones?

It's more about Private Equity firms than private companies. The oversimplified TL;DR strategy for most PE firms is acquire, strip, pump, then dump (combined with all sorts of tax strategies). Most PE firms don't own the companies themselves, but act on behalf of investors and take a cut of the ultimate profits. So it's basically tons of short term thinking.
by sofixa | 2025-12-08 14:28:01+00:00
> I've not understood the propensity for using yaml for CI pipelines and workflows in general. A decent programming language would be a big improvement.

Because it's clear to write and read. You don't want your CI/CD logic to end up being spaghetti because a super ninja engineer decided they can do crazy stuff just because they can. Same reason why it's a bad idea to create your infrastructure directly in a programming language (unless creating infrastructure is a core part of your software).

> Why not just build the workflows themselves as docker images? I guess running other docker images in the workflow would then become a problem.

That's how Drone CI handled it. GitLab kind of does the same, where you always start as a docker image, and thus if you have a custom one with an entrypoint, it does whatever you need it to.
by onionisafruit | 2025-12-08 14:28:07+00:00
On the other hand, this issue has been known to GitHub since shortly after Actions’ release[0]. They added some cya verbiage to their docs, but they never followed up by making version pinning meaningful.

Sure you can implement it yourself for direct dependencies and decide to only use direct dependencies that also use commit sha pinning, but most users don’t even realize it’s a problem to begin with. The users who know often don’t bother to use shas anyway.

Or GitHub could spend a little engineer time on a feasible lock file solution.

I say this as somebody who actually likes GitHub Actions and maintains a couple of somewhat well-used actions in my free time. I use sha pinning in my composite actions and encourage users to do the same when using them, but when I look at public repos using my actions it’s probably 90% using @v1, 9% @v1.2 and 1% using commit shas.

[0] Actions was the first Microsoft-led project at GitHub — from before the acquisition was even announced. It was a sign of things to come that something as basic as this was either not understood or swept under the rug to hit a deadline.
by xnorswap | 2025-12-08 14:28:42+00:00
I've only been using it a couple of weeks, but in my opinion, Opus 4.5 is the biggest jump in tech we've seen since ChatGPT 3.5.

The difference between juggling Sonnet 4.5 / Haiku 4.5 and just using Opus 4.5 for everything is night & day.

Unlike Sonnet 4.5 which merely had promise at being able to go off and complete complex tasks, Opus 4.5 seems genuinely capable of doing so.

Sonnet needed hand-holding and correction at almost every step. Opus just needs correction and steering at an early stage, and sometimes will push back and correct my understanding of what's happening.

It's astonished me with it's capability to produce easy to read PDFs via Typst, and has produced large documents outlining how to approach very tricky tech migration tasks.

Sonnet would get there eventually, but not without a few rounds of dealing with compilation errors or hallucinated data. Opus seems to like to do "And let me just check my assumptions" searches which makes all the difference.
by jonhohle | 2025-12-08 14:28:42+00:00
Cocoa was so good. I even liked old-school Interface Builder’s IoC. Now there are controls where it’s obvious drag and/or drop should be supported but it isn’t or simple things like opening a custom SwiftUI (né Preferences) settings window from legacy AppKit code is unsupported.

Unfortunately, Objective-C added modern language features too late. IB never used the term IoC or anything else devs coming from other ecosystems would understand. A lot of great stuff that NeXT built 30 years ago is still great today, but never had the notoriety of lesser frameworks and languages.
by commandlinefan | 2025-12-08 14:29:12+00:00
I bought Microsoft Word, years ago, before it was "licensed". However, it auto-updated itself with my permission from time to time. A few weeks ago, I went to edit a document and was presented with a pop-up that said I needed to update my license fee in order to be allowed to make modifications to it.

This is doubly frustrating when Word is the standard for resumes.
by chasd00 | 2025-12-08 14:29:18+00:00
On my list for 2026 is a suite of tools for my coworkers who work in the same tech I do (we’re consultants). I get thrown a small bone from the silverbacks come bonus season for these kinds of thing.

Your project fits perfectly with what I need, I’ve built the functionality (using python even) now I need all the other stuff to get it up and running on the web. Thanks for doing this!
by rawbot | 2025-12-08 14:29:30+00:00
> Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics. I’ve even tried hard to use the open/Libre alternatives.

I agree 100% with this, since I've been trying the same. Although I do think some power-users take it way too far and should be using more robust data analysis tools (Python, DBs) instead of having these monstrous Excel spreadsheets with millions of rows and columns.
by ctippett | 2025-12-08 14:29:38+00:00
I couldn't tell you the exact details (I'm only passingly familiar with how it works myself), but you'd almost certainly want to start by looking into web assembly.

I found a-Shell's documentation[1] quite interesting, it describes their use of web assembly and offers some practical tips for compiling stuff so it can work in a sandboxed environment.

[1]: https://bianshen00009.gitbook.io/a-guide-to-a-shell/lets-do-...
by awkward | 2025-12-08 14:30:00+00:00
Having a relational database in a gui was great. The problem with access was that it tried to support network applications as a backend but supported a punishingly low number of connections. Having an application that crashed with 10-50 connections put it in an awkward space. Businesses without a strong technical team would build on it, release with N=1 load testing, and get surprised when it crashed out at scale. MS wasn't going to improve it, because they wanted more sophisticated customers to buy SQL server.
by galangalalgol | 2025-12-08 14:30:17+00:00
Not to mention embedded software is often half the pay of a startup and defense software often isn't work from home. Forget asking what languages they can hire for. They are relying on the work being interesting to compensate for dramatically less pay and substantially less pleasant working conditions. Factor in some portion of the workforce has ethical concerns working in the sector and you can see they will get three sorts of employees. Those who couldn't get a job elsewhere, those who want something cool on their resume, and those who love the domain. And they will lose the middle category right around the time they become productive members of the team because it was always just a stepping stone.