MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jacquesm | 2025-12-14 05:22:11+00:00
You can tune that power down to what gives you the best tokencount per joule, which I think is a very important metric by which to optimize these systems and by which you can compare them as well.

I have a hard time understanding all of these companies that toss their NDA's and client confidentiality into the wind and feed newfangled AI companies their corporate secrets with abandon. You'd think there would be a more prudent approach to this.
by esperent | 2025-12-14 05:22:21+00:00
> If it is possible, maybe it is what some people supposedly feel as "auras"

I've always held two complementary beliefs regarding auras and similar senses:

1. It's plausible that some humans can sense subtle information about things like emotional states or reactions in other humans using non standard sensing mechanisms (so maybe electric fields rather than sight, for example).

2. I'm very certain that for overwhelmingly most humans who claim they can see auras, it's one of: bullshit, fakery, self delusion, wishful thinking, charlatanism, a scam.
by killingtime74 | 2025-12-14 05:24:13+00:00
Interesting they don't grant you enough credit as a Microsoft employee to dog food your own products. $300 a year seems a tiny amount.

I never worked at Amazon but understand they give you generally open ended access for learning/testing?

Surely there plenty of business value in getting someone like the author to ensure Rust applications run smoothly with all their products.
by calmbonsai | 2025-12-14 05:24:38+00:00
I wouldn't save the driver is "safety". It's happened that a few highly-specialized symbolic manipulation tasks now have enough market value such that they can demand highly specialized UX to optimize task performance.

One classic example is the "Bloomberg Box": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Terminal which has been around since the late '80s.

You can also see this from the reverse (analog -> digital) in the evolution of hospital patient life-sign monitors and the classic "6 pack" of gauges used in both aviation and automobiles.
by TZubiri | 2025-12-14 05:24:48+00:00
This is not the first time that an engineer working at a big company thinks they are using a monolith when in reality they are a small team in charge of a single microservice, which in turn is part of a company that definitely does not run a monolith.

Last time it was an aws engineer that worked on route 53, and they dismissed microservices in a startup claiming that in AWS they ran a monolith (as in the r53 dns).

Everything is a monolith if you zoom in enough and ignore everything else. Which I guess you can do when you work on a big company and are in charge of a very specific role.
by anyfactor | 2025-12-14 05:26:16+00:00
How does the govdirectory project work? Does it use web scrapers to collect the contact details? I checked the bot repository, and it was empty. https://github.com/govdirectory/bots I would like to know about their methodology and to be honest how it helps me.

There are only 46 countries listed there. I am not intending to be critical of the idea, but having contact information of government institutions is not an effective way to get things done, in my opinion. And most government websites and contact details are quite accessible because they are centrally built through national IT system and a unified software service (usually). In third and second world country the contact details is usually quite useless. You have to find the right person and sit in front of their office.

The issue with the government contact repository is that it does not connect 'I have this problem' and 'who do I reach out to'. From my experience, you have to invest time in doing research and finding out who to reach out to.
by jasonjayr | 2025-12-14 05:26:41+00:00
I'm using CNPG on my rinky-dinky 3-node k8s homelab, and it's been pretty good. I had a situation where my object storage ran out of space (again: homelab) which caused backpressure on db log backups; which stopped the pg databases. It correctly recovered automatically once I cleared up the root cause without much intervention on the CNPG side.
by tstrimple | 2025-12-14 05:26:57+00:00
Seems like a pathetic appeal to authority to me. Why should I care what weird idiosyncrasies billionaires have? I'm sure they have tons of things they don't want their children learning that a lot of people would consider to be trivial. In my mind this goes back to whether you model children as property that you own or individual humans you're hoping to introduce to the world in the best way you understand how. It sucks that other people's children are going to youtube to turn off their brains. But my kids are excelling because of it and similar services. My girls are constantly trying new things because of what they see on social media and youtube. My 12 year old daughter already plays flute, violin and cello but wants to pick up the saxophone because of content she has consumed. We get everything from weird science experiments to a desire to try sewing or knitting. When people talk about the "dangers" of the internet and social media I struggle to understand what they mean because it's always been an enabler to me to excel. Somewhere along the way so called "hackers" wanted to create safe spaces to completely isolate their children from any variables the world can throw at them and I just cannot understand the mentality.
by necovek | 2025-12-14 05:27:44+00:00
> I’m not begging the question. I’m simply stating what loose coupling looks like and the blog post is precisely the problem of tight coupling.

But it is not! They were updating dependencies and deploying services separately, and this led to every one of 140 services using a different version of "shared-foo". This made it cumbersome, confusing and expensive to keep going (you want a new feature from shared-foo, you have to take all the other features unless you fork and cherrypick on top, which makes it a not shared-foo anymore).

The point is that true microservice approach will always lead to exactly this situation: a) you either do not extract shared functions and live with duplicate implementations, b) you enforce keeping your shared dependencies always on very-close-to-latest (which you can do with different strategies; monorepo is one that enables but does not require it) or c) you end up with a mess of versions being used by each individual service.

The most common middle ground is to insist on backwards compatibility in a shared-lib, but carrying that over 5+ years is... expensive. You can mix it with an "enforce update" approach ("no version older than 2 years can be used"), but all the problems are pretty evident and expected with any approach.

I'd always err on the side of having a capability to upgrade at once if needed, while keeping the ability to keep a single service on a pinned version. This is usually not too hard with any approach, though monorepo makes the first one appear easier (you edit one file, or multiple dep files in a single repo): but unless you can guarantee all services get replaced in a deployment at exactly the same moment — which you rarely can — or can accept short lived inconsistencies, deployment requires all services to be backwards compatible until they are all updated with either approach).

I'd also say that this is still not a move to a monolith, but to a Service-Oriented-Architecture that is not microservices (as microservices are also SOA): as usual, the middle ground is the sweet spot.
by BoorishBears | 2025-12-14 05:29:23+00:00
Most people don't realize their applications are running like dogwater on Node because serverless is letting them smooth it over by paying 4x what they would be paying if they moved 10 or so lines of code and a few regexes to a web worker.

(and I say that as someone who caught themselves doing the same: severless is really good at hiding this.)
by defrost | 2025-12-14 05:30:15+00:00
Comments made by recent accounts appear with green names until a grace period passes.

HN prefers "legit accounts" (subjective) - good faith comments from real people, reasonable uses of alias and spun up fresh accounts for regulars to say things without being part of their main history, etc. New commenters welcome.

There are obvious and less obvious dark patterns of bad faith account creation.

The admins do a pretty decent job, sweeping cobwebs without hitting real genuine people is an artform ...

Returning to the main GP point - there's a lot of low key background churn activity that can result in "inexplicatable" votes, some from bots and some from the general case of "people are strange".
by CULPRITCHAOS | 2025-12-14 05:31:08+00:00
Hi HN — I built this and I’m explicitly asking skeptics to tear it apart.”

Interlock is a safety and certification layer for AI infrastructure, not an optimizer or a vector database.

The problem I am solving for is that AI systems (vector search, RAG pipelines, agent frameworks) don’t usually fail cleanly — they degrade silently, oscillate under load, or keep returning corrupted results until something crashes. Monitoring tells you after the fact; circuit breakers tend to be static and blind to context.

Interlock tries to address that by:

forecasting time-to-failure under stress

intervening before hard limits are reached

refusing to serve results when confidence collapses

producing cryptographically signed evidence of what happened (control vs protected runs)

It includes:

integrations with FAISS, Pinecone, Weaviate, Milvus, LangChain, LlamaIndex (Elasticsearch experimental)

TypeScript + Python support

automated stress tests (control vs protected)

long-run stability tests

certification classes (I–V) derived from actual configuration + behavior, not labels

Importantly: Interlock does not guarantee correctness or uptime. It certifies that a given configuration survived a defined stress test without crashing, oscillating, or serving degraded results — similar to a structural load rating rather than a promise.

The repo is fully open source, and all claims link to test artifacts and CI runs. I’m especially interested in feedback on:

failure modes this wouldn’t catch

where the certification model is too strict or too weak

whether this is actually useful in real production AI systems

Repo: https://github.com/CULPRITCHAOS/Interlock

Happy to answer questions or be told why this is a bad idea lol
by mapontosevenths | 2025-12-14 05:31:13+00:00
This reminds me of the study about dog poop being aligned to magnetic north/south.[0]

It seems a bit silly, but I suspect that more of our life may be effected by biomagnetism than we yet realize.

[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1742-9994-10-80
by calmbonsai | 2025-12-14 05:32:49+00:00
I use Emacs as my daily-driver so point well taken wrt incremental drill-down though I'd argue that's not just a "desktop thing". You see that in the Contacts manager of every smartphone.

I see "mouse gestures" as merely an incremental evolution for desktops.

Low latency capacitive touch-screens with gesture controls were, however, revolutionary for mobile devices and dashboards in vehicles.
by laz | 2025-12-14 05:33:03+00:00
Google, Apple, and Meta (maybe others?) have the data to build a complete GeoIP dataset. None of them will share because there are only downsides to doing so.

When FB was rolling out ipv6 in 2012, well meaning engineers proposed releasing a v6 only GeoIP db (at the time, the public dbs were shit). Not surprisingly, it was shot down.
by devilbunny | 2025-12-14 05:33:08+00:00
I don’t work in technology, so my knowledge base is almost certainly in the bottom 10% (or lower) of HN readers. I can install Linux, or a BSD, and following guides I can be reasonably certain that I am doing so safely, which puts me comfortably in the top 10% of all users out there.

It’s not what I’m comfortable setting up for myself that is the issue; I am willing to put up with oddities for something that is just for my convenience and amusement. The problem is what I am knowledgeable enough to fix from far away if and when it goes wrong, and how to explain to my very non-technical family how to access it.

I have a NAS, and I could roll my own with that (in fact it’s my exit node at home, because I’m fairly sure it has better encryption speed than the AppleTV), but when something I’m in charge of maintaining goes in someone else’s house, the last thing I want to spend my spare time doing is trying to diagnose and fix issues over the phone with people who don’t own a computer.

It’s not the perfect solution to every situation. It is reliant on Tailscale and Apple, and there are cheaper, more capable systems (like the RPi) out there if you have the knowledge and inclination to set them up. But it’s a very, very straightforward solution that is unobtrusive and easy to maintain and thus is extremely well-suited for my needs. I thought it might be for OP as well. Anyone who is willing to shell out €360 a year for a truly residential-IP VPN should at least be made aware that it’s an option.
by troupo | 2025-12-14 05:33:27+00:00
> LLMs have an impressive amount of ability to do knowledge-transfer between domains, it only makes sense that that would also apply to programming languages, since the basic underlying concepts (functions, data structures, etc.) exist nearly everywhere.

That would make sense if LLMs understood the domains and the concepts. They don't. They need a lot of training data to "map" the "knowledge transfer".

Personal anecdote: Claude stopped writing Java-like Elixir only some time around summer this year (Elixir is 13 years old), and is still incapable of writing "modern HEEX" which changed some of the templaring syntax in Phoenix almost two years ago.
by flexagoon | 2025-12-14 05:33:43+00:00
> Eg, DDG always fail the "watch (specific movie or tv show) online" search query test. Many other search engines like Bing and Google also fail.

DDG results are mostly Bing results, so if a page doesn't show up on Bing, it probably won't on DDG either. That doesn't mean DDG themselves censored the results.
by collingreen | 2025-12-14 05:34:18+00:00
I appreciate the honest capitalist-as-government take here because of how grisly a view it is in a pure form - essentially the claim is that government is neither for nor by the governed and it should only be used as a tool to further the interests dictated by the capital holders.

Personally I dont think this is anywhere near right or ideal - letting the movement of capital in free (as in speech not free as in beer) markets dictate what is produced by the economy at large has nothing to do with if a government should enact the will of its people or protect them. One is how and why governments exist (ie, democracy vs monarchy vs theocracy, etc) and one is how to plan an economy (capitalism vs various versions of a planned economy).

tl;dr - where government derives its power isn't the same as how an economy should decide what to make. Conflating the two is a way to hand-wave away a lot of harm done by unchecked greed.
by quotemstr | 2025-12-14 05:34:34+00:00
It's difficult for me to have a positive opinion of the author when he responds with dismissal and derision to concerns others have raised about Fil-C and memory safety under data races.

The fact is that Fil-C allows capability and pointer writes to tear. That is, when thread 1 writes pointer P2 to a memory location previously holding P1, thread 2 can observe, briefly, the pointer P2 combined with the capability for P1 (or vice versa, the capability for P2 coupled to the pointer bits for P1).

Because thread 2 can observe a mismatch between a pointer and its capability, an attacker controlled index into P2 from thread 2 can access memory of an object other than the one to which P2 points.

The mismatch of pointer and capability breaks memory safety: an attacker can break the abstraction of pointers-as-handles and do nefarious things with pointers viewed instead as locations in RAM.

On one hand, this break is minor and doesn't appear when memory access is correctly synchronized. Fil-C is plenty useful even if this corner case is unsafe.

On the other hand, the Fil-C as author's reaction to discourse about this corner case makes me hesitant to use his system at all. He claims Java has the same problem. It does not. He claims it's not a memory safety violation because thread 1 could previously have seen P1 and its capability and therefore accessed any memory P1's capability allowed. That's correct but irrelevant: thread 2 has P2 and it's paired with the wrong capability. Kaboom.

The guy is technically talented, but he presents himself as Prometheus bringing the fire of memory safety to C-kind. He doesn't acknowledge corner cases like the one I've described. Nor does he acknowledge practical realities like the inevitability of some kind of unsafe escape hatch (e.g. for writing a debugger). He says such things are unnecessary because he's wrapped every system call and added code to enforce his memory model's invariants around it. Okay, is it possible to do that in the context of process_vm_writev?

I hope, sincerely, the author is able to shift perspectives and acknowledge the limitations of his genuinely useful technology. The more he presents it as a panacea, the less I want to use it.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-12-14 05:34:49+00:00
"Recommendations" should be optional. I can recall early days of "recommendation engines". Never thought it would lead to this

The "algorithmic feeds" in Facebook, YouTube are greed-based

No user ever asked for them. They could be optional. But they are mandatory. A significant amount of user control is transferred to the company. ByteDance took this even further, arguably it has 100% control. Now Facebook and YouTube, and others, all have some form of this, rolls, shorts, whatever

What's interesting is the companies, no matter what the harm alleged to stem from the "algorithmic feeds", will not back down on "recommending" content. No compromise

I think that's telling. Perhaps traffic would plummet, stock price would tank

No one should be surprised by the legislation this had spurned
by killingtime74 | 2025-12-14 05:36:05+00:00
For me it was going back to university/community college and learning in a structured way. In Australia you can do a masters by coursework that covers broadly the same things as an undergrad degree in less time.

I was able to get a "real" software job on graduation.

I liked knowing I wasn't wasting my time learning random things when I had no idea what to learn
by nihiven | 2025-12-14 05:36:07+00:00
I have one of these. It's only 'ok'. There is significant ghosting and it's not very good when the scene is dark, but it's much better than my BOOX tablet. I just got it so I'm still experimenting with different uses.

Here's a clip of it playing video: https://youtu.be/povlk3hKTVA
by necovek | 2025-12-14 05:36:12+00:00
A few thoughts: this is not really a move to a monolith. Their system is still a SOA (service-oriented architecture), just like microservices (make services as small as they can be), but with larger scope.

Having 140 services managed by what sounds like one team reinforces another point that I believe should be well known by now: you use SOAs (incuding microservices) to scale teams, and not services.

Eg. if a single team builds a shared library for all the 140 microservices and needs to maintain them, it's going to become very expensive quickly: you'll be using v2.3.1 in one service and v1.0.8 in another, and you won't even know yourself what API is available. Operationally, yes, you'll have to watch over 140 individual "systems" too.

There are ways to mitigate this, but they have their own trade-offs (I've posted them in another comment).

As per Conway's law, software architecture always follows the organizational structure, and this seems to have happened here: a single team is moving away from unneeded complexity to more effectively manage their work and produce better outcomes for the business.

It is not a monolith, but properly-scoped service level (scoped to the team). This is, in my experience, the sweet spot. A single team can run and operate multiple independent services, but with growth in those services, they will look to unify, so you need to restructure the team if you don't want that to happen. This is why I don't accept "system architect" roles as those don't give you the tools to really drive the architecture how it can be driven, and I really got into "management" :)
by regus | 2025-12-14 05:36:46+00:00
I used to dislike AppleScript but now I enjoy using it. The turning point for me was when I finally bit the bullet and read a book on the subject.

AppleScript’s human readable language lulls you in this false sense of security that you can wing it and everything will just work out. This is simply not the case, it is a very quirky language and it helps to read a book to get the right mental model.

The second thing that helped was getting AppleScript debugger from Late Night Software. They recently decided to no longer develop it and release it for free on their site. It’s worth getting if you haven’t done so already.
by fifilura | 2025-12-14 05:38:49+00:00
2-3% of Ukraine's population are at the front lines. While the others are maintaining a reasonably functional society.

There are so many counter examples to your proposal so I think you are just guessing.

Where did the Civil War end up when Soviet invaded Hungary in 1956 or Prague 1967? Or Poland?

Should the Finns have invited the Soviets into their country in 1939 instead of defending it?

Would the British have been better of fighting Germany of the streets of London?

And what about the preventive force a regular army has? Would you want to be without that and simply leave the doors to your country unlocked?
by the_gastropod | 2025-12-14 05:39:35+00:00
You’re doing the thing. The Democrats are both: different in magnitude of corruption than Republicans, and absolutely imperfect and worthy of criticism.

For your example, 7 of the 10 congress members with the highest cap gains in 2024 (including the #1 spot) were Republicans. The previous democratic president and a significant number of Democratic members of congress support banning members of congress from trading stocks. The parties are not the same.
by ggm | 2025-12-14 05:39:40+00:00
This from the site:

/* Oh, you're looking at my CSS. Here be dragons. Let's bundle in a rant while you're here: I'd like to use variable width fonts instead of fixed size fonts. I enjoy 300 (i.e. light) and 600 (i.e. semibold) over regular and bold for Crimson Pro only. But Chrome doesn't like to show anything but 400 and 700 with variable width fonts, so I'll have to trick Chrome by declaring my 300 and 600 fonts as if they were 400 and 700 respectively. ... or well, I could use font-variation-settings, but that's a global override which means I have to specify it EVERYWHERE and that's just too much effort for poor me. */