MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cyberpunk | 2025-12-30 08:21:15+00:00
To be honest, I don't think it was a stand-out 'it's better for X than Y because of Z' kind of choice for us. We are a bank, and so database options are quite limited (it's Oracle or Mongo, essentially for certain applications).

I have one application at the moment which needs to handle about 175k writes/second across AZ's. We are not sharding at the moment, but probably will once scale requires (we are getting close) -- so just one big replica-set and it's behaving .. really nicely. I tried to emulate this workload on Postgres (which is my favourite database over my entire career so far (many scars)) and we couldn't get it to where mongo was for this workload, multi-az is painful, automatic failover is still an unanswered question really, I've tried all the 'right around the corner' multi-master Postgres options and none of them did anything other than make us sad.

From the developer standpoint, it's very nice to use, I just throw documents at it and it saves them. If I want an extra field, I just add it. If I want an index on something, also just add it. No big complicated schema migrations.

Especially what helps is we have absolutely incredibly great support from MongoDB. We have a _weekly_ call with them with a bunch of their senior engineers who answer all our stupid questions and proactively look for things to improve.

Ops story is also good, we aren't using Atlas, but the on-prem kube setup while a bit clunky has enough CRDs and whatever to keep devops happy for weeks at a time.

tl;dr -- it's boring and predictable, and I rarely have to think about it which is all I ever want from a database. I'm sure we could achieve the same results with other database technologies, but the ROI on even investigating them would not be worth it, as at best I think we would end up at the same place we are at now. People seem to have deeply religious feelings on databases, but I've never really been one of them.

I would not hesitate to use it on a new project.
by EbNar | 2025-12-30 08:22:37+00:00
Incidentally,that's the reason why I love photography in Nolan's movies: he seems to love scenes with bright light in which you can actually see what's going on.

Most other movies/series instead are so dark that make my mid-range TV look like crap. And no, it's not an HW fault, as 500 nits should be enough to watch a movie.
by XorNot | 2025-12-30 08:22:47+00:00
Honestly what I don't get is how this even happened though: it's been I think 10 years with no progress on getting the volume of things to equal out, even with all the fancy software we have. Like I would've thought that 5.1 should be relatively easy to normalize, since the center speech channel is a big obvious "the audience _really_ needs to hear this" channel that should be easy to amplify up in any downmix....instead watching anything is still just riding the damn volume button.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-12-30 08:23:01+00:00
> Coding AIs design software better than me, review code better than me, find hard-to-find bugs better than me, plan long-running projects better than me, make decisions based on research, literature, and also the state of our projects better than me.

That is just not true, assuming you have a modicum of competence (which I assume you do). AIs suck at all these tasks; they are not even as good as an inexperienced human.
by matthewmacleod | 2025-12-30 08:26:40+00:00
I expect it’s your “I’m an expert and everyone else is merely an idiot child” attitude that’s probably making it hard to take you seriously.

And don’t get me wrong - I totally understand this personality. There are a similar few I’ve worked with recently who are broadly quite skeptical of what seems to be an obvious fact to me - their roles will need to change and their skillsets will have to develop to take advantage of this new technology.
by splittydev | 2025-12-30 08:28:41+00:00
Yeah, this is the great irony of it all. Germany really wants to discourage taking a car for "environmental reasons" and so on and does everything to encourage public transport.

But one thing is clear: I won't be bothered, robbed or even stabbed in my own car, and I also won't arrive in a different village lest I drive there myself. I won't arrive three hours late either, or have to stay overnight in some shitty Hotel because they couldn't find a replacement train.

The German public transport, like many other things in Germany, is an absolute fever dream for a "developed country".
by godelski | 2025-12-30 08:28:45+00:00
I think an important thing to add is that users don't always know how to properly complain. So a difficulty is figuring out what they actually want. They're on the outside looking in, so don't know all the details but they can express that they have a problem. It can often be hard, and frustrating, to figure out what that problem actually is but if they're communicating then it is usually not too difficult to diffuse the situation. As long as they feel you are trying to understand.

Another part is that we're breeding a society of Karens. "The squeaky wheel gets the grease". The wheels not squeaking aren't getting regular maintenance or care. No one is incentivized to ask nicely but people are strongly being incentivized to scream. To generalize outside software: a loyal customer gets standard service but Karen gets a discount or something free just to make her go away. It's natural that we do that but it's the wrong reward system. When you reward a dog when they stop barking they only learn to bark.
by lapcat | 2025-12-30 08:29:37+00:00
> The key here is ownership of things that facilitate the production of goods and services.

I think this is so vague as to be useless. Does ownership of cash not facilitate the production of goods and services? The cash certainly gets spent on goods and services. Does home ownership not facilitate the production of goods and services, namely, homes, as well as the goods and services that maintain homes?

Your distinction between productive and non-productive seems like BS to me and just a way of making rich people appear superior.

My point was that when you spell out exactly what "facilitate" means, sitting on a bunch of stock waiting for it to appreciate in value isn't particularly "productive". Bill Gates is richer now after he stopped working than when he was CEO of Microsoft, despite the fact that he claims to want to give away most of his money. It seems that he can't give it away faster than he passively makes more.

> Having most wealth "on paper" is very much a situation of note from the viewpoint of the common person, and your position puts you closer to the billionaires in this regard.

Well, I rent rather than own my home, so I have no real estate assets. Does that fact alone make me more "productive"?

> Wealth tax on stock is a punishment

No. Fines are a punishment. Prison is a punishment. Probation is a punishment. Tax is not a punishment. Taxes are how the government funds public services, and everyone pays taxes in one way or another. The point here is to tax based on ability to pay, and billionaires have more ability to pay than anyone else.

As everyone admits, billionaires are free to leave and avoid paying the tax. This is not true for fines, prison, and other punishments. If Peter Thiel leaves, no arrest warrant will be issued.

> This is a fully informed acknowledgement you simply don't seem to care if the investments leave the community.

According to the submitted article, Khanna himself said much the same about the prospect of Larry Page and Peter Thiel leaving.
by XorNot | 2025-12-30 08:32:00+00:00
This is exactly it: they're making a perfectly rational decision keeping Musk on the way he is, because the alternative once he's out is the stock crashes due to the uncertainty and the fanboys bailing.

Why have less money when you actually don't care what happens if you have more money? So long as the stock retains its value, you can do things like borrow against your holdings, leverage that into other investments etc.
by tgv | 2025-12-30 08:33:05+00:00
My application's primary task is to move JSON objects between storage and front-end. It does a lot more, but that's it's primary task. So document storage is a logical choice. There are no real reasons to join records, although it sometimes is more efficient to do so. MongoDB's join operation has one advantage (for 1:N relations): it groups the joined records as an array in the document, instead of multiplying the answers, so whatever function operates on the original data, also works on the joined data. The data itself is hierarchical in nature, so back-end operations also preferably work on structured data instead of rows.

You can argue that you can imitate that in Postgres or even SQLite by storing in JSON fields, but there are things they can't do quite as efficiently (e.g. indexing array contents); storage itself isn't very efficient either. But ignoring that, there's no functional difference: it's document in, document out. So then the choice boils down to speed, memory usage, etc. One day I'm going to check if Postgresql offers a real performance advantage, but given the backlog, that may take a while. Until then, MongoDB just works.
by VBprogrammer | 2025-12-30 08:35:18+00:00
You know when something doesn't annoy you until someone points it out?

It's so obvious in hindsight. Shows like the Big Bang theory, House and Scrubs I very rarely caught two episodes consecutively (and when I did they were on some release schedule so you'd forgotten half of the plot by next week). But they are all practically self contained with only the thread of a longer term narrative being woven between them.

It's doubtful that any of these netflix series you could catch one random episode and feel comfortable that you understand what's going on. Perhaps worse is the recent trend for mini-series which are almost exactly how you describe - just a film without half of it being left on the cutting room floor.
Tell HN: Wrapping up the year and resetting my goals
by rankiwiki | 2025-12-30 08:36:01+00:00
As the year wraps up, I’m doing a quiet reset.

This year reminded me how fragile “reliable” channels can be, and how easy it is to overestimate things that worked well in the past.

Going into the new year, my goal is simple:
build smaller, listen more, and focus on tools that help people think or decide together, not just consume content.

Wishing everyone here a calm end to the year.
Thanks for all the thoughtful discussions; I’ve learned a lot just by reading.
by jason_oster | 2025-12-30 08:36:14+00:00
You might want to setup WireGuard on your Pihole device [1], so that you can VPN to it for DNS resolution remotely. It's crazy good. (And it can also be used as a full VPN, if you want to access anything remotely.)

[1] https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/vpn/wireguard/
by laszlojamf | 2025-12-30 08:36:43+00:00
The way I see it, the problem with LLMs is the same as with self-driving cars: trust.
You can ask an LLM to implement a feature, but unless you're pretty technical yourself, how will you know that it actually did what you wanted? How will you know that it didn't catastrophically misunderstand what you wanted, making something that works for your manual test cases, but then doesn't generalize to what you _actually_ want to do?
People have been saying we'll have self-driving cars in five years for fifteen years now. And even if it looks like it might be finally happening now, it's going glacially slow, and it's one run-over baby away from being pushed back another ten years.
by bloppe | 2025-12-30 08:36:51+00:00
It's not 20 and it's not 2. It's not a person. It's a tool. It can make a person 100x more effective at certain specific things. It can make them 50% less effective at other things. I think, for most people and most things, it might be like a 25% performance boost, amortized over all (impactful) projects and time, but nobody can hope to quantify that with any degree of credibility yet.
by huali | 2025-12-30 08:36:54+00:00
I've built a lightweight Memory MCP service to efficiently store conversation memories. It only implements essential *CRUD* (Create, Read, Update, Delete) methods, minimizing token usage.

Deploy the service on your cloud server or your local computer, then add the streamable MCP and skill to Claude Code.

To activate in a new conversation, simply reference the skill first: `@~/.claude/skills/mem/SKILL.md`.

If you like this project, please give it a star on GitHub!
by unemp | 2025-12-30 08:37:31+00:00
To elaborate: the CEO was really into AI and asked the whole team to use it on daily basis. Not only developers, but marketing, support, designers. Explore possibilities, where we can speed up our processes etc.

I was always being prized for being frontman of the change. I quickly learned how to avoid having AI-mess produced and I was delivering quite good code, often being accepted on the first code review (human + automatic AI code review tools).

But I felt it is a matter of time of being fired, even though CEO was saying he will not be doing this. It is to deliver more with the same workforce, he was soothing everyone.

Still, it was obvious things are changing. Developers were looking for tasks because there was so much idle time. The issues, used to take weeks started to be done in one week at most and quickly Trello board's backlog shrink with no valuable tickets to take.

I was not the first who has been fired because of being idle. Of course I was not told it is "because of AI", no one was, but everyone knew. The firing pace was crazy in the days I left the company, 2-3 ppl / month for a 10 following months when in years before it was 2-3/year. Not only developers, support of course has been hit the hardest
by smj-edison | 2025-12-30 08:38:02+00:00
What, that's super cool! I've also been working on a from scratch implementation of TCL for firstclass multithreading, and it's been really fun learning all the edgecases that show up. I've gotten a lot of the core components working, but man is reference counting a pain in the neck or what. Are you doing a mostly one-to-one port, or something more novel? I've been working on my design to dramatically lower double indirections for lists. It's a little sad that a list contains a list of pointers pointing to another list. So much indirection! So I'm trying an experiment where all non-list/non-dict objects are contained directly after the head dict object in memory. It took a crash course in buddy allocators to finally figure out how to store objects, but it's really cool how I can allocate 8 contigious objects, set the first to the dict metadata, and all other items are the dict's objects. One cooler thing is if one of the dict's items is still borrowed somehere (ref_count > 1), the dictionary will dissolve into individual allocations, and all non-shared items are freed. Then, the new dict will reference them, as they're now normal objects.
by roenxi | 2025-12-30 08:38:12+00:00
The US federal deficit is, order of magnitude, $1.5 trillion dollars annually. A billionaire has assets, order of magnitude, of a few billion. Even if they just confiscate their entire wealth of all the billionaires then it will do approximately nothing compared to the vast bulk of the US government. I think people underestimate how large and centralised the US State has become since WWII.

If this is being pitched as strictly a class warfare measure then sure. It sounds like a bad idea but hey, politics away. However if the idea is to actually tackle any of the problems that the US is facing then this scheme seems pointless on the face of it.
by pentaphobe | 2025-12-30 08:39:02+00:00
There's been a lot of speculation/rationalisation around this already, but one I've not seen mentioned is the possibility of it being at least a little down to a kind of "don't look back" collective arrogance (in addition to real technical challenges)

(This may also apply to the "everything's too dark" issue which gets attributed to HDR vs. SDR)

Up until fairly recently both of these professions were pretty small, tight-knit, and learnt (at least partially) from previous generations in a kind of apprentice capacity

Now we have vocational schools - which likely do a great job surfacing a bunch of stuff which was obscure, but miss some of the historical learning and "tricks of the trade"

You come out with a bunch of skills but less experience, and then are thrust into the machine and have to churn out work (often with no senior mentorship)

So you get the meme version of the craft: hone the skills of maximising loudness, impact, ear candy.. flashy stuff without substance

...and a massive overuse of the Wilhelm Scream :) [^1]

[^1]: once an in joke for sound people, and kind of a game to obscure its presence. Now it's common knowledge and used everywhere, a wink to the audience rather than a secret wink to other engineers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_scream

EDIT: egads, typing on a phone makes it far too easy to accidentally write a wall of text - sorry!
by jillesvangurp | 2025-12-30 08:39:30+00:00
With many traditional auto makers you at this point have to wonder if they are still going to be around in ten years. Companies like Ford, Toyota, BMW, etc. are not looking so great. They each have the dilemma of a market that's shrinking by double digit percentages year on year (ICE cars) while another market is growing by the same percentage (EVs).

The way Toyota and Ford deal with this is reducing investments in EVs while at the same time meeting increased EV demand by heavily leaning on other companies to make them some EVs. Ford is working with VW and Renault in Europe. Toyota is working with big Chinese manufacturers in China. So is Ford. BMW has some success with their recent EV models but it is taking big hits with demand for their overall products in markets like the US and China.

The US is clearly lagging the EU and China when it comes to electrification. It's not at all clear that Tesla is doing much better. Their market share has tanked in markets where EVs do well (China, EU). However, it does have its own tech and still plenty of money. Where other manufacturers are leaning on outside suppliers, Tesla is pushing their own technology hard for just about everything. Including self driving cars and batteries. It's a different strategy at least and one that isn't dependent on the ICE market doing well or Chinese manufacturers doing all the technical heavy lifting.

Tesla's stock price is based on investor expectations on some of those bets working out eventually. Even if a lot of that stuff seems like it is struggling right now, it's too early to write all of it off as failed. The 4680 is still expected to be a big part of the semi's Tesla is expected to finally start mass producing in 2026. Self driving tests are still continuing and might eventually add up to something that works well enough. And it's also a relavant format for LFP based chemistries.

The problem for all of them have right now (especially Tesla) is that the Chinese are moving full steam ahead and are doing really well on technology and growth currently. Including things like self driving and of course batteries. The 4680 seems like it is old news when solid state is happening and new chemistries other than NMC are starting to dominate. And FSD while impressive has plenty of competition from other vendors at this point. Rivian has its own version. So do several Chinese vendors. And of course Waymo is actually moving lots of passengers autonomously at this point.
by corv | 2025-12-30 08:39:38+00:00
I’ve been working on a different approach to this problem: syscall-level interception via PyPy sandbox rather than command filtering. This captures all operations at the OS level, so tmp.sh scripts and Makefile edits get queued for human review before executing.

It’s still WIP but the core sandbox works. Feedback greatly appreciated: https://github.com/corv89/shannot
by zen4ttitude | 2025-12-30 08:40:06+00:00
Most people now conduct searches through AI chat. We never trusted Google with our search terms, IP address linked to WiFi and cell towers surveys with Google trucks for cross referencing on Google map, browser fingerprinting, time of day pattern detection, mouse reaction time measurement for age estimation, cross referencing with economic profiling of neighbourhoods, income bracket estimation algorithms, interest profiling based on search terms, browsing breadcrumbs, social network tracking, etc. Now imagine the new powers of AI chat adding reasoning patterns, deep thinking and complete trust to the equation. Let us organise a disconnect day where you turn off your phone and Internet router and ISP box just to confuse the algorithms! Where do we go from here? We stay home and invite disconnected friends for a rare moment of statistically insignificant privacy.
by stefanlindbohm | 2025-12-30 08:40:19+00:00
Competition on the railways is mandated through EU law.

Most regional services are tendered to the (in theory) best operator. The details on how, both which governing body organises the tender and whether the trains are branded by the region or the operator, varies across Europe. In Germany, these contracts are operated by a mix of DB, foreign state-owned operators and private operators. DB sells tickets for all region-organised trains regardless of who is the current operator.

Most countries have decided to have no or limited tenders on long-distance trains. In Germany, government support is prohibited for long-distance.
Has Anyone Deployed AI in a Small Business and Seen Real Value?
by wolfgangB33r | 2025-12-30 08:41:18+00:00
Over the last year we all followed the wave of AI news.
I was wondering what use-cases really landed in production so far?
Do you know real-world examples of deployed generative and agentic AI that provides value especially for small business owners (if possible provide a reference)?
Please mind that I am not so much interested in software or developer related startups, as there are millions of those around.
I am specifically searching AI use-cases for businesses operating in:
- small retailers
- hospitality
- restaurants and food-trucks
- travel
- entertainment
- beauty
- fitness
- accounting and bookkeeping
- manufacturing
- industrial & machinery
- logistics
- agricultural
- education
by hexbin010 | 2025-12-30 08:42:22+00:00
> The leaves are actually a big deal because...

Because of the substandard, cost-cutting line-side vegetation mismanagement coupled with the NIMBYs and save-the-planet warriors getting up-in-arms. Plus high wages making proactive vegetation management not cost-effective due to the extent. Network Rail is well aware of the issue but due to budget cuts, can't do much.

Behind every excuse on the railway, if you peel back just a tiny bit of the layer, you'll see the real reasons. In the UK it's usually "we need to spend that money on the NHS and welfare" and "ROSCO profits are not put back into the railway"
by kashyapc | 2025-12-30 08:43:34+00:00
The person you're quoting has a point. Everyone is losing their minds about this. Not everyone needs to be on top of AI developmemts all the time. I don't mean you ignore LLMs, just don't chase every fad.

The classic line (which I've quoted it a few times here) by Charles Mackay from 1841 comes to mind:

"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

"[...] In reading The History of Nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities, their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first."

— Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds