MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MuffinFlavored | 2025-12-26 23:12:18+00:00
> We discovered that on reconnect, Postgres would start reading the replication slot’s WAL from the restart_lsn—effectively the beginning—rather than from the last processed position. For workloads with long-running, large, or interleaved transactions, this meant unnecessarily re-reading large portions of WAL and drastically impacting replication lag.

I wonder if that's intended by Postgres? Doesn't seem logical at first glance.
by echelon | 2025-12-26 23:12:52+00:00
How is that any different than Hallmark? Humanity has outsourced this for a long time. Low-effort gifts, regifted gifts, bad white elephant gifts, etc. etc.

There's nothing stopping you from appreciating heartfelt effort. That is still possible today.

To be clear, I don't like automated low effort stuff like this. But I hate the internet's psychosis-like reaction to AI more.

It's become a vile performative meme to state how much you hate AI. The tone is always one of bravery and sacrifice mixed with disgust.

You know how you can tell someone hates AI? They'll tell you fifty times. It's becoming a personality type.
by exidy | 2025-12-26 23:14:09+00:00
It was very surprising to see zero mention of the Manila galleon[0] trade route in the linked article, even if technically the question was about gold rather than silver. The simple answer to the question of what happened to the money was that Spain spent it! The impacts on SE Asia were profound and are still being felt today.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila_galleon
by iinnPP | 2025-12-26 23:14:42+00:00
I recently had to deal with a ministry in Canada, where a worker who had been there since 20 years ago failed even a basic test of competence in reading comprehension. Then multiple issues with the OPC (Office of Privacy Commissioner) failing entirely on a basic issue.

Another example exists in Ontario's tenant laws constantly being criticized as enabling bad tenant behavior, but reading the statute full of many month delays for landlords and 2 day notices for tenants paints a more realistic picture.

In fact, one such landlord lied, admitted to lying, and then had their lie influence the decision in their favor, despite it being known to be false, by their own word. The appeal mentioned discretion of the adjudicator.

Not sure how long that can go on before a collapse, but I can't imagine it's very long.
by earnmyedge | 2025-12-26 23:14:58+00:00
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by l9o | 2025-12-26 23:15:12+00:00
Out of curiosity, what would be an ideal UX for you? I'm working on a Rust library for this exact problem (CLI and language bindings should be easy to add).

It uses KVM directly on Linux and Virtualization.framework on macOS, with a builder API for VM configuration. For AI sandboxing specifically, it has a higher-level "sandbox" mode with a guest agent for structured command execution and file I/O over vsock. You get proper exit codes and stdout/stderr without console scraping.

Also supports pre-warmed VM pools for fast startup and shared directories via virtio-fs.

I'm planning to support OCI images, but not sure if that's important to people. I typically just build my own root disks with Nix.
by fouc | 2025-12-26 23:15:53+00:00
A lot of the responses seem to be blaming the user/learner and requiring them to change their mindset/attitude, which is actually an insane take.

As you pointed out, SRS isn't the full solution.

BTW, I would say that language classes often try to maintain a constant level of difficulty, but there is usually some kind of coverage of the previous material too.
by ajb | 2025-12-26 23:17:25+00:00
It may be worth mentioning, for anyone who didn't know this already; that the fruiting body, which is what your normally see, isn't most of the mushroom. The rest of it is in the ground, or in something else like a dead log or live tree. So the organism can afford the fruiting body to be eaten, if it serves the purpose of spreading spores.
by Anon84 | 2025-12-26 23:17:53+00:00
I’ve been working towards my WSET diploma so not much non-wine related fun reading. That being said:

- Phylloxera: How Wine was Saved for the world by Christy Campbell is a surprisingly fun read on how the entire wine industry was almost destroyed in the late 19th century.
- Red/Green/Blue Mars by K. S. Robinson hard sci-fi about mars colonization and terraforming. First rereading in 20 years or so. Holds up extremely well.
- Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. A thought provoking take on how broad stroke human history developed since the Bronze Age.
by stigok | 2025-12-26 23:18:21+00:00
I think of this when I brush my teeth and realize I'm trying to be fast. I am tense and rapid, just rushing ahead to nowhere. I'm not really in a hurry.

It is also possible to walk at incredible low speeds. Some times, I try to force myself to walk as slowly as I dear. It is hard to walk slow in a city full of people. It feels silly. However, it feels great once you've actually slowed down.
by submeta | 2025-12-26 23:18:21+00:00
„Essentialism“ genuinely changed how I think about work and life. I used to operate under the assumption that every task deserves attention, often equal attention, which inevitably led to overload and constant context switching. Reading this helped me realize that the most successful people do the opposite: they focus relentlessly on a small number of truly important things and deliberately ignore the rest. That shift alone has been transformative for me.
by IgorPartola | 2025-12-26 23:18:26+00:00
Rust is also a systems language. I am still wrapping my mind around why it is so popular for so many end projects when its main use case and goals were basically writing a browser a maybe OS drivers.

But that’s precisely why it is good for developer tools. And it turns out people who write systems code are really damn good at writing tools code.

As someone who cut my teeth on C and low level systems stuff I really ought to learn Rust one of these days but Python is just so damn nice for high level stuff and all my embedded projects still seem to require C so here I am, rustless.
by casselc | 2025-12-26 23:18:26+00:00
If you look at a map of the fiber-optic network in the US, my parents spent most of the 90s surveying the portion along the Gulf coast from Texas to Florida and up the Atlantic coast to New England for Sprint, MCI, Level 3, and other companies that no longer exist and AutoLISP was used to generate most of their drawings.

From what I can remember, we made a spreadsheet template that captured the title block information and a list of bearings and distances with some optional columns for field notes, landmarks/monuments, elevations and other measurements, etc. and I wrote some AutoLISP code that would generate an overview drawing and a set of scale drawings for the route. It figured out the bounds for each segment based on the scale and drawing size and then drew the route like a turtle and added the various callouts and a consistent title block and legend. There was also some ability to draw details about the railroad/pipeline whose right of way was being used, but I don't remember exactly how it worked.

My mom (secretarially trained typist, self-taught Lotus/Excel wiz, former drafting assistant at an RBOC) would enter everything into the template and use it to generate basis drawings which they might then tweak and finalize by hand. It dramatically reduced the amount of time they spent creating drawings to the point they could usually finish the drawings for a week of surveying in a couple of hours. I like to think of it as my small contribution to the Internet.

I was in high school at the time and taught myself AutoLISP from some combination of in-app docs/help and mall bookstore fare. Now I desperately want to go dig through floppy disks at my parents' place to see if any remnants remain to look back at how younger me did everything. It was the first truly useful software that I ever wrote, and in hindsight, might've planted the brainworm that led me to Clojure decades later :)
by jcitsme | 2025-12-26 23:18:48+00:00
How can we really deal with increasing regulation? We're at a point of diminishing returns. Additional regulation doesn't add additional safety. Mostly it's just overhead at this point, but walking it back seems increasingly unlikely. If it continues, maybe we can automate our way out of it. Check out this blog post for more and a tool we created to help jump start the process.
by GMoromisato | 2025-12-26 23:19:24+00:00
I agree with the OP that "whoever owns the weights, owns the values". But by that criteria, Grok is an example to follow. Musk is very clear on his values, and we know what we're getting when we use Grok. Obviously, not everyone agrees with its values, but so what? We will never be able to create a useful AI that everyone agrees with.

In contrast, we don't know what values are programmed into ChatGPT, Claude, etc. What are they optimizing for? Alignment to some cabal of experts? Maximum usage? Minimum controversy? We don't entirely know.

Isn't it better to have multiple AIs with obvious values so that we can choose the most appropriate one?
by exasperaited | 2025-12-26 23:19:33+00:00
I believe I know an immune-compromised adult who was taking anti-parasitics for more than two years due to workplace (care context) reinfections. I say “believe” because these are two things people talk about in coded, careful ways. It might be a little more common than polite conversation ever really reveals.

For example if you know anyone who raised early concerns about antivaxxers causing short supply of ivermectin formulations for human use during the pandemic. More or less anyone who knew what ivermectin was at that point in time was either a farmer, a vetinarian, a doctor… or a patient with a condition.
by zzzeek | 2025-12-26 23:19:35+00:00
> pip could implement parallel downloads, global caching, and metadata-only resolution tomorrow. It doesn’t, largely because backwards compatibility with fifteen years of edge cases takes precedence. But it means pip will always be slower than a tool that starts fresh with modern assumptions.

what does backwards compatibility have to do with parallel downloads? or global caching? The metadata-only resolution is the only backwards compatible issue in there and pip can run without a setup.py file being present if pyproject.toml is there.

Short answer is most, or at least a whole lot, of the improvements in uv could be integrated into pip as well (especially parallelizing downloads). But they're not, because there is uv instead, which is also maintained by a for-profit startup. so pip is the loser
by mergesort | 2025-12-26 23:20:03+00:00
So I definitely understand where you're coming from, but let me provide a little bit of context.

The workshops are 3-4 hours and we do spend a lot of time discussing how things work in reality vs. how they work in the context of the workshop. It's worth noting that these workshops span the gamut of non-technical people in sales to seasoned developers, so a lot of people simply won't learn much (or have the excitement to learn on their own) if we spend the first 2-3 hours setting things up.

In my experience the heaviest lift for teaching practically any technical subject is getting someone interested by showing them how to accomplish something they care about, and then leaving them with lots of information and resources so they can continue experimenting and growing even once we're done. The way I do that is to make sure they leave the workshop having built their own idea — without taking shortcuts!

Being able to use Codex to accomplish something because you spent an hour crafting a good prompt isn't cheating, it's learning the skill of becoming a better technical communicator — in a short period of time — and taking advantage of the skill you've just learned. I don't consider that magic, it's actually the core tenant of building with AI, and is very much how I work with AI every day.

I'm late for dinner so I should probably stop here, so I'll leave just one final note. After every workshop I send each student a list of personalized resources that will help them continue on their journey by demystifying things that we may have glossed over or weren't clear in the workshop — so they should be armed with the tools to take their next steps away from any magical thinking.

It's a bit hard to boil down exactly what I do and how I try to design for best hands-on pedagogical practices in an HN post I'm writing on the go — but I am absolutely open to your thoughts! :)
by evil-olive | 2025-12-26 23:22:51+00:00
the all-important question - does "thinking of leaving" mean:

a) thinking of actually leaving the state, or

b) thinking of telling their team of accountants to claim on tax paperwork that their permanent residence is in another state

because things like this make me think it's the latter:

> In mid-December, three limited liability companies associated with Mr. Page filed documents to incorporate in Florida, according to state records.

at the amount of wealth we're talking about, it's trivial for a billionaire to buy an additional mansion in (Florida|Texas|Nevada|Wyoming|etc), and claim that as their "official" residence.

if they get billed with a wealth tax, their team of lawyers will claim that they live in that other state, and simply happen to spend a huge amount of their time on "business trips" to California.

so the success or failure of this will hinge on how thoroughly it's actually enforced. the "progressive" Governor Newsom is opposed to it:

> The measure faces opposition from Silicon Valley investors and others, including Gov. Gavin Newsom. At The New York Times DealBook conference this month, Mr. Newsom said a wealth tax was not pragmatic. The Democrat, who has been close with people like Mr. Page, is raising money for a committee to oppose the measure. The committee received a $100,000 donation from the venture capitalist Ron Conway in November, according to state campaign finance records.

which makes me think that even if it does pass, he won't make enforcement of it a priority (especially since he'll be busy running for President)
by karlgkk | 2025-12-26 23:23:03+00:00
i cant edit this but it's bugging me "does not rely on map level labeling for runtime" isn't quite true. they do use tagging in their centralized mapping that the waymo driver uses as one source of truth. but ultimately, the onboard sensors and the onboard classifier and pathing engine are used.

this allows them to tag things that their cars are not recognizing, but then are fed back into the training set and validated. it allows them to "live patch" troublesome sections of road but it's not intended for long term use.

they also use this to close sections of road, such as for car accidents, flooding, etc.
by momentmaker | 2025-12-26 23:23:04+00:00
The Burnout Society

Strangers in Paradise: How Families Adapt to Wealth Across Generations

Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI

The Year in Tech 2024

This Is Strategy

Optimal Illusions

Matrix Energetics

Models

The Value of Others

The Essence of Bhagavad Gita

From Barista to Billionaire

Go On Alone

78 Days Practical Transurfing

The New Game of Life and How to Play It

Getting Real

There Is No Such Thing as Business Ethics

How to Be Happy All The Time

Shape Up

Catching the Big Fish

Babaji The Lightning Standing Still

The Courage to be Happy

Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail

The Art of Spending Money

Laws of Life

The Oracle

Kriya Yoga: Spiritual Awakening for the New Age

Inner Excellence: Train Your Mind for Extraordinary Performance and the Best Possible Life
by perryprog | 2025-12-26 23:23:26+00:00
I think it's probably less frequent nowadays, but it very much does happen. This still-active lawsuit[0] was made in response to LLMs generating verbatim chunks of code that they were trained on.[1]

[0] https://githubcopilotlitigation.com
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/8/23446821/microsoft-openai...
by jacquesm | 2025-12-26 23:23:28+00:00
There are a lot of people hacking on insulin pumps and they are lightyears ahead of commerce. If you want a very interesting rabbit hole to dive into try 'artificial pancreas hacking' as google feed.

One interesting link:

https://www.drugtopics.com/view/hacking-diabetes-the-diy-bio...

I would trust the people that hack on these systems to be even more motivated than the manufacturers to make sure they don't fuck up, it's the equivalent of flying a plane you built yourself.
by liampulles | 2025-12-26 23:24:45+00:00
On the use of GitOps for k8s, I think it makes sense for application workloads, and less sense for raw infrastructure definitions (unless you are running at such a scale that your infrastructure is often scaled like an application).

For my infrastructure definition repo, I will apply it in my terminal with kubectl, watch, and then merge the PR/commit to master. I often need to do this progressively just to roll back if I see resource consumption or other issues, it would be quite dangerous to let the CI pipeline apply everything and then for me to try and change declarations whilst the control plane API is totally starved for resources.

Also (and maybe this is me not doing "proper devops", I don't care), I will often want to tinker a bit with the declaration, trying a bunch of little changes, and then commiting once all is satisfactory. That "dev loop" is less productive if I have to wait for a CI pipeline for every step.
by Applejinx | 2025-12-26 23:24:54+00:00
Yup. It's certainly an art project or something. It's like setting a bunch of Markov Chaneys loose on each other to see how insane they go.

…kind of IS setting a bunch of Markov Chaneys loose on each other, and that's pretty much it. We've just never had Chaneys this complicated before. People are watching the sparks, eating popcorn, rooting for MechaHitler.
by etempleton | 2025-12-26 23:25:05+00:00
It was staffed with walking examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect. People who knew very little about the departments or the work that they were cutting but enough to assume they knew more than people who had spent their life working there. That requires a special level of arrogance. They went in with the idea that all of these people at this organization are lazy and stupid and so everything they didn’t understand must be a result of one of those things or the other.
by farhaven | 2025-12-26 23:25:20+00:00
> Congress has become a radical leftist politics playground.

I don't know which past Chaos Communication Congresses you have attended, but it always was. If that's not for you, then that's too bad.

> The one thing you cannot ever do is go to CCC and express any idea that isn't very far left. That is a very certain way to get thrown out.

Opinions that people get thrown out for are not "I love my country" or "hey, maybe immigration should be handled differently". They're things like "Hitler was ok, actually". And IMO if a conference doesn't throw you out for _that_, it's not one worth attending.
by tialaramex | 2025-12-26 23:25:48+00:00
Right. It's extremely unlikely that "unable to synthesize Vitamin C" would ever have actively been selected for. But it was also unlikely to be strongly selected against in any version of humans or their near ancestors which have access to basically any common food.

So, randomly this pathway is deleted in our species, but there won't be a satisfying "just so" explanation, it's just blind luck. I happen to think we should fix it, most people either don't care or believe we shouldn't.
by jaimefjorge | 2025-12-26 23:26:34+00:00
All fiction.

- The Great Gatsby. Really enjoyed it and seemed fitting with the current times.

- Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann. Generational wealth come and gone. Good for putting things into perspective.

- Things Fall Apart, Achebe.

- The Pearl, John Steinbeck

- Hyperion (first book), Dan Simmons. Great sci-fi. Bought the second book and look forward to reading it.

- Stoner, John Williams. Incredibly well written book

- One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez. Still finishing but I hope to finish in time for next year
by xqcgrek2 | 2025-12-26 23:27:13+00:00
Most archival astro data have a lot of junk in them. Most of it is not worth the time of serious astronomers, because it's all rather inconsequential or incremental finding the Nth example of something rather than N=1. A good project for a high schooler as an exercise and signaling, but ultimately nothing will come from this work.
by woodruffw | 2025-12-26 23:27:25+00:00
> Yeah, so you'd have to pass around the `BytesIO` instead.

That wouldn’t be zero-copy either: BytesIO is an I/O abstraction over a buffer, so it intentionally masks the “lifetime” of the original buffer. In effect, reading from the BytesIO creates new copies of the underlying data by design, in new `bytes` objects.

(This is actually a great capsule example of why zero-copy design is difficult in Python: the Pythonic thing to do is to make lots of bytes/string/rich objects as you parse, each of which owns its data, which in turn means copies everywhere.)
by kassner | 2025-12-26 23:27:51+00:00
I think it depends. At least on $dayjob’s stack (webdev/Go) both are interchangeable and I’m fine using either. Ofc they aren’t the same thing, but depending on your task and constraints, both a MacBook or a Framework can attend your needs.

I can agree with you that they don’t have the same position, but users are going to see a Framework laptop on mainstream media and are going to compare options. A few might try out, and even though they’ll get frustrated, they might now understand the ideology around open hardware.
by liampulles | 2025-12-26 23:28:11+00:00
One of the issues is that the open source Helm charts (or whatever) for something like Grafana do not come out-of-the-box with good config. I spent a significant amount of time a little while ago reading blogs to get Grafana to use up to date indexing algorithms, and better settings, etc.

Considering these companies make money when you use their hosted solution, this is not surprising, and it just goes to show TANSTAFL.
by kevin_thibedeau | 2025-12-26 23:28:18+00:00
It doesn't matter what form it takes. Compiled binaries of GPL code are being distributed. The recipients of that binary are entitled to the source of the GPL portions in a usable form:

"The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable."

The GPL here doesn't extend beyond the kernel boundary. Userland is isolated unless they have GPL code linked in there as well. If they were careless about the linkage boundaries then that's on them.
by __jonas | 2025-12-26 23:28:54+00:00
Really strange project.

They have this blog post up detailing how the LLMs they let loose were spamming NGOs with emails: https://theaidigest.org/village/blog/what-do-we-tell-the-hum...

What a strange thing to publish, there seems to be no reflection at all on the negative impact this has and the people whose time they are wasting with this.