MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bell-cot | 2025-12-08 14:53:21+00:00
> Without AMD, ...

Perhaps? I don't know enough to judge whether one of the other companies working on IA-32 compatible processors could plausibly have stepped in -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_IA-32_compatibl...

It's true that most of those would have lacked the resources to replicate AMD's feat with AMD64. OTOH, AMD itself had to buy out NexGen to produce their K6. Without AMD and/or AMD64, there'd be plenty of larger players who might decide to fill the void.
by quietbritishjim | 2025-12-08 14:53:44+00:00
I used Publisher (2.0! and then 95) quite a bit in the mid to late 1990s. I haven't used it since then because Word now has all the features that were previously exclusive to Publisher, so its purpose has evaporated. It's certainly true that Word has bugs and frustrations but I'd be surprised if Publisher didn't too.

It's very odd that they propose PowerPoint as the Publisher replacement. How do you create a fold out leaflet in PowerPoint!? Maybe most of the people left using Publisher actually only need PowerPoint's features, rather than the full power of Word?
by SirMaster | 2025-12-08 14:53:51+00:00
So it was dumb of me to buy my bitcoins back when they were less than $100 a coin just in the slim chance that it completely blew up? I don't see what was dumb about a decision to put less than $1000 into 10 coins just in case. Worked out really well for me in the end and a less than $1000 gamble doesn't seem like that crazy of a gamble, at least to me.
by zoeysmithe | 2025-12-08 14:55:12+00:00
I mean why is that a problem? Win95 engineering reflects the hardware of the time, the same way today's software engineering reflects the hardware of our time. There's no ideal here, there's no "this is correct," etc its all constantly changing.

This is like car guys today bemoaning the simpler carburetor age or the car guys before them bemoaning the model T age of simplicity. Its silly.

There will never be a scenario where you need all this lightweight stuff outside of extreme edge cases, and there's SO MUCH lightweight stuff its not even a worry.

Also its funny you should mention win95 because I suspect that reflects your age, but a lot of people here are from the dos/first mac/win 2.0 age, and for that crowd win95 was the horrible resource pig and complexity nightmare. Tech press and nerd culture back then was incredibly anti-95 for 'dumbing it all down' and 'being slow' but now its seen as the gold standard of 'proper computing.' So its all relative.

The way I see hardware and tech is that we are forced to ride a train. It makes stops but it cannot stop. It will always go to the next stop. Wanting to stay at a certain stop doesn't make sense and as in fact counter-productive. I wont go into this, but linux on the desktop could have been a bigger contender if the linux crowd and companies were willing to break a lot of things and 'start over' to be more competitive with mac or windows, which at he time did break a lot of things and did 'start over' to a certain degree.

The various implementations of linux desktop always came off clunky and tied to unix-culture conventions which dont really fit the desktop model, which wasn't really appealing for a lot of people, and a lot of that was based on nostalgia and this sort of idealizing old interfaces and concepts. I love kde but its definitely not remotely as appealing as win11 or macos gui and ease of use.

In other words, when nostalgia isn't pushed back upon, we get worse products. I see so much unquestionable nostalgia in tech spaces, I think its something that hurts open source projects and even many commercial ones.
by paxys | 2025-12-08 14:55:21+00:00
IBM paid a ~30% premium on the current stock price, so all shareholders (I imagine employees own a bunch of shares) will get a decent chunk of cash.

Some redundant departments (HR, finance, accounting and the like) will be downsized after the acquisition.

Engineering and product will be unaffected in the short term, but in a year or two the IBM culture will start to seep in, and that would be a good time for tenured employees to start planning their exits. That's also when lock-up agreements will expire and the existing leadership of Confluent will depart and be replaced by IBM execs.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-08 14:55:51+00:00
> Clojure is built on dynamic typing. This is pain. I wrote enough Python (pre-mypy), Javascript, and elisp to say this.

Probably not an absolute truth, but definitely a personal truth for you. For me, it's pretty much the opposite, static/fixed types is such a pain when you just wanna solve a problem and you know how to achieve it, all the invariants/constraints but the language tells you "No, you know what, this other person said you cannot use X for Y, so I'm gonna say no" instead of just letting me do that thing.

With that said, I still reach for Rust for about ~30% of new projects, despite the types, because some languages fit other problems better, simple as that. And still a lot more contracting gigs available for various Rust codebases who've fallen into disrepair, so one does what one can.

I feel like big codebases regardless of their size are hard to wrangle not because of the languages used, but because of the programmers having to rush through building proper abstractions, or even considering not adding so much abstractions. I've seen awful heavily typed codebases as much as I've seen awful dynamically types codebases or awful codebases not using explicit types anywhere, to me there seems to be no correlation between "awful" and "number of explicit types used".

Personally, I prefer a big codebase with lots of (good) unit tests in a dynamic program, than a that same big codebase with no unit tests and explicit static typing everywhere, especially when refactoring and needing to ensure everything (from a business logic perspective) works correctly. But again, this is my personal truth, and I'm not trying to claim it's universal.
by dpedu | 2025-12-08 14:56:19+00:00
My company (Matterport, YC Winter '12) uses it to store metadata about 3d models. I really don't have that much to say about it because it's not my primary area of focus, and besides that, has been extremely reliable and hands-off, administration-wise. I particularly love that you can change redundancy modes on the fly, for example those listed here[1], and FDB will automatically re-arrange data to your liking, all without downtime. It handles offline/missing or replacing nodes quite well, and I credit my coworker's great efforts to make it work on top of Kubernetes for making our lives so much easier.

1: https://apple.github.io/foundationdb/configuration.html#choo...
by _jzlw | 2025-12-08 14:56:48+00:00
Well, that's kind of what I mean. For scripts in a python project, you can freely use whatever packages you need. But for one-off scripts, if you need bs4 or something, you're screwed. Either your script now has external dependencies or it requires special tooling.

It just feels strange that C# of all languages is now a better scripting tool than Python, at least out of the box. I did notice uv has exactly the feature I'm looking for, though it's obviously third-party:

https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/scripts/#declaring-script-d...

Is everyone just using uv now instead of pip, perhaps? Or is just another alongside pipenv, conda, poetry, etc.? (Python's not my main these days, so I'm out of the loop.)
by dardeaup | 2025-12-08 14:57:12+00:00
I've been holding off on Zig because it hasn't reached 1.0 milestone, but I'm starting to think that it might be time to start digging in. Is Ziglings kept up with language changes being made in Zig? It would be very frustrating to find that Ziglings is out of sync with the newer version of Zig that you might be using at the time.
by IAmBroom | 2025-12-08 14:57:39+00:00
I got minorly pressured to go into the office for my current job when hired, which was silly - in over three years I've never professionally interfaced with anyone outside of my one teammate. I agreed to go in 2 days/week, and I'm glad I did; it gives me some healthy facetime with other Homo sapiens. In winter, with Amazon Prime and Doordash, I can basically exist without seeing people at all. Not good for me!
by fusslo | 2025-12-08 14:58:01+00:00
I don't understand the workflow that makes JJ more useful than git. I dont think I've even had the idea of having multiple worktrees going at once. What is the use case? The author mentions being blocked by CI flow. Don't you have CI running on gitlab or github? just commit and push the branch and run CI. The author mentions stashing the changes, but like.. if you're running against CI, isn't it in a state that is commitworthy? I don't see how creating a worktree in a new folder and opening a new editor is more convenient than creating a branch at a certain commit.

I can understand if you need to run a CI or unit tests locally. Is that it?

I am not attacking JJ, I genuinely can't understand its value in my current workflow.
Show HN: CocoIndex – Open-Source Data Engine for Dynamic Context Engineering
by georgehe9 | 2025-12-08 14:58:44+00:00
Hi guys, I'm back with a new version of CocoIndex (v0.3.1), with significant updates since last one. CocoIndex is ultra performant data transformation for AI & Dynamic Context Engineering - Simple to connect to source, and keep the target always fresh for all the heavy AI transformations (and any transformations).

Adaptive Batching Supports automatic, knob-free batching across all functions. In our benchmarks with MiniLM, batching delivered ~5× higher throughput and ~80% lower runtime by amortizing GPU overhead with no manual tuning. It you use remote embedding models, this will really help your workloads.

Custom Sources/Target With custom source/target connector, you can now use it to any external system — APIs, DBs, cloud storage, file systems, and more. CocoIndex handles incremental ingestion, change tracking, and schema alignment.

Runtime & Reliability Safer async execution and correct cancellation, Centralized HTTP utility with retries + clear errors, and many others.

Btw, we are also on Github trending in Rust today :) it has Python SDK.

We have been growing so much with feedbacks from this community, thank you so much!

We have lots of releases since last time i shared the project, a few recent ones (each contains 20+ releases) : - https://cocoindex.io/blogs/changelog-0310 - https://cocoindex.io/blogs/cocoindex-changelog-2025-10-19 - https://cocoindex.io/blogs/cocoindex-changelog-2025-08-18
by jacquesm | 2025-12-08 14:59:42+00:00
It would be a really nice exercise - for which I unfortunately do not have the time - to have a non-trivial conversation with the best models of the day and then to rigorously fact-check every bit of output to determine the output quality. Judging from my own (probably not a representative sample) experience it would be a very meager showing.

I use AI as a means of last resort only now and then mostly as a source of inspiration rather than a direct tool aiming to solve an issue. And like that it has been useful on occasion, but it has at least as often been a tremendous waste of time.
by wsxiaoys | 2025-12-08 14:59:57+00:00
OP here - this is Part 2 of a series documenting how we built NES (Next Edit Suggestions), our real-time edit model inside the Pochi editor extension.

The real challenge (and what ultimately determines whether NES feels “intent-aware”) was how we manage context in real time while the developer is editing live. For anyone building real-time AI inside editors, IDEs, or interactive tools.

I hope you find this interesting. Happy to answer any questions!
by superxpro12 | 2025-12-08 15:00:18+00:00
The toyota code was a case of truly abysmal software development methodology. The resultant code they released was so bad that neither NASA, nor Barr, nor Koopman could successfully decipher. (Although Barr posited that the issue was VERY LIKELY in one of a few places with complex multithreaded interactions).

Which therein lies the clue. They wrote software that was simply unmaintainable. Autogenerated code isnt any better.
by 9rx | 2025-12-08 15:00:45+00:00
> most humans are ill suited for that line of work.

Based on what? Certainly there are humans with crippling disabilities that remove them from pretty much any kind of work, but of the "normally functioning" population?

Most lack the necessary attention directed towards R&D as they're too busy living out other lives in other jobs. If that's what you mean, that is a fair point. But if those jobs went away as suggested earlier, they'd have nothing else to do but turn their attention towards R&D. That current world model wouldn't apply anymore.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-08 15:01:01+00:00
Very interesting, thank you for your response Katie. I might do the support-form request but since you are here, I think I am comfortable enough asking it in the public too and I don't mind it as this might be the best way

But imagine if a PAAS (platform as a service, well technically its still just an idea which can take a long time to work but just a theory but yes), wants to build on top of hetzner, I am extremely worried that since hetzner has a very strict abuse policy, they might not understand PAAS use case which can include some abuse from downstream lets say and might block my account impacting all the other PAAS solutions.

I wish if there was a way that some time could be given lets say 24-48 hours for the product lets say to work with abuse as I am just a single guy but I haven't coded the implementation mostly, quite frankly wanting to building upon hetzner but worried that It can fail due to any misunderstanding etc.

What are hetzner's opinion on platform as a service basically, I see some people using hetzner as providers but can hetzner understand the thing which I am saying basically and can it still be the right tool for the job essentially?
by notepad0x90 | 2025-12-08 15:01:06+00:00
This is so fascinating to me. I mean how IBM keeps taking over other companies, but they consistently deliver low quality/bottom-tier services and products. Why do they keep doing the same thing again and again? How are they generating actual revenue this way?

Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt before chatgpt. they built it in house. Why didn't they compete with OpenAI like Google and Anthropic are doing, with in-house tools? They have a mature PowerPC (Power9+? now?)setup, lots of talent to make ML/LLMs work and lots of existing investment in datacenters and getting GPU-intense workloads going.

I don't disagree that this acquisition is good strategy, I'm just fascinated (Schadenfreude?) to witness the demise of confluent now. I think economists should study this, it might help avert larger problems.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-08 15:01:30+00:00
> Well, Typed Clojure is a thing!

I think we (the Clojure community) quickly figured out we don't really want static typing, which is a bit evident by the low uptake of Typed Clojure.

Personally I found it to A) make it a hassle for downstream consumers since your design is suddenly impacting others, because you can "lock things down" and B) have that very same effect on your own codebase, where it becomes a lot less flexible where it needs to be flexible.

Nowadays, I just use another language if I want static types, which happens sometimes but not nearly as often to say that dynamically typed languages are "dead" or whatever.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-12-08 15:01:47+00:00
The only reason people still need office -- other than a niche of advanced Excel users -- is because no one, despite the last several decades, has managed to make a 100% compatible DOCX editor (not LibreOffice, not Apple Pages, not Google Docs). I'm guessing it's because there are aspects of it that MSFT keeps secret?

The only reason I still use Word is because I don't want to have to deal with random layout incompatibility issues when sharing docs with colleagues.

In general, I find Apple Pages much more pleasant to work with and by far my favorite word processor (and I have used them all extensively on Win/Mac/nix).
by traceroute66 | 2025-12-08 15:02:18+00:00
> This feels like a dangerous game they're playing. Yes, there is some lock in, but competitors exist and are better than ever.

Except there are not really any competitors if you look at the whole package.

A Microsoft 365 Business Standard subscription, for example, gets you bundled Teams and Exchange.

The fact you get the big-four (Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint) thrown in is really just icing on the cake.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-08 15:02:30+00:00
This same argument has now been made a couple of times in this thread (in different guises) and does absolutely nothing to move the conversation forward.

Words and letters are not copyrightable patterns in and of themselves. It is the composition of words and letters that we consider to be original creations and 'the bard' put them in a meaningful and original order not seen before, which established his reputation as a playwright.
by JSR_FDED | 2025-12-08 15:03:05+00:00
IBM have an absolutely stellar record of blowing acquisitions. The highly motivated newly acquired team will be in honeymoon phase for 3 months, and then it slowly dawns on them that they’ve joined an unbelievably rigid organization where things like customer satisfaction and great products don’t matter at all. Then they’ll be in shock and disbelief at the mind boggling Byzantine rules and internal systems they have to use, whose sole purpose is to make sure nobody does anything. Finally, the core IBM sales force will start to make demands on them and will short to ground any vestiges of energy, time, opportunity and motivation they might have left. The good team members will leave and join a former business partner, or decide to spend more time with the family. They’ll meet often at the beginning to relive the glory days of pre-acquisition and recount times where they went went above and beyond for that important early customer. But then these meetings will become fewer and fewer. Finally they’ll find a way of massaging their resumes to cast the last years as being “at the heart of AI infrastructure”.
by mrweasel | 2025-12-08 15:03:20+00:00
> The secret is held by the metadata server that the CI instance has access to

But how does the metadata server know that the CI instance is allowed to access the secret? Especially when the CI/CD system is hosted at a 3rd. party. It needs to present some form of credentials. The CI system may also need permission or credentials for a private repository of packages or artifacts needed in the build process.

For me, a CI/CD system needs two things: Secret management and the ability to run Bash.
by goku12 | 2025-12-08 15:03:53+00:00
> Note: Indian Government recently adopted Zoho office suite to insulate themselves from Microsoft.

India's central government didn't adopt Zoho just to insulate against Microsoft. It was done when Trump imposed a 50% tariff on imports from India. It was targeted against US IT companies in general, though the most mentioned one was Google. Zoho is an Indian company.

I had switched to Zoho about 6 months before them and it has provided a rather decent experience so far. The biggest attractions for me though, are that it's very economical and it has transactions in local currency using local payment systems. They also have a good selection of apps.

Honestly, this was a wasted opportunity for GoI. Indian domestic IT market is an untapped gold mine that they didn't promote much until recently. But better late than never, I guess.

Another relevant point here is that India is one of the countries that voted against Microsoft OOXML document format in favor of ODF at ISO. There are several central and state level government agencies that adopted ODF officially.
by rmccue | 2025-12-08 15:03:58+00:00
We moved off HashiCorp's Terraform Cloud when they tried to hike the price 100x on us, although that was technically pre-acquisition I think (it was their move to resource-based pricing). In talking with our account manager, they basically said they only really cared about enterprise accounts, and that migrating away would probably make sense for us.

HashiCorp also changed their licenses to non-open-source licenses, but again I think this was technically pre-acquisition (I think as they were gearing up to be a more attractive target for an exit).
by jraph | 2025-12-08 15:04:34+00:00
Yeah, sure, why not repeat the multi-decade old mistakes and decide to go from being dependent and locked in on one piece of proprietary software to being dependent and locked in on another piece of proprietary software.

2026 is definitely a great time for still not considering free software since lessons have not been learned yet.

You are trashing a competitor despite having the exact same fundamental flaws.

Please be actually better, please don't lock your users in. It's still time to make the right decision.
by stevenjgarner | 2025-12-08 15:04:48+00:00
This is great! I would love to see this method extended to the full Pasterski–Strominger–Zhiboedov (PSZ) triangle, where Fourier transforms are the binding relationships tying together soft theorems and memory effects. Such an extended guide would be a powerful interaction encompassing also vacuum transitions and Ward's identities. A "smoothie" combining the theory of relativity, quantum field theory and quantum gravity might make those subjects more accessible.
by shagie | 2025-12-08 15:04:53+00:00
> Like it can't think or reason about something without writing it out first.

Setting aside the philosophical questions around "think" and "reason"... it can't.

In my mind, as I write this, I think through various possibilities and ideas that never reach the keyboard, but yet stay within my awareness.

For an LLM, that awareness and thinking through can only be done via its context window. It has to produce text that maintains what it thought about in order for that past to be something that it has moving forward.

There are aspects to a prompt that can (in some interfaces) hide this internal thought process. For example, the ChatGPT has the "internal thinking" which can be shown - https://chatgpt.com/share/69278cef-8fc0-8011-8498-18ec077ede... - if you expand the first "thought for 32 seconds" bit it starts out with:

I'm thinking the physics of gravity assists should be stable enough for me to skip browsing since it's not time-sensitive. However, the instructions say I must browse when in doubt. I’m not sure if I’m in doubt here, but since I can still provide an answer without needing updates, I’ll skip it.

(aside: that still makes me chuckle - in a question about gravity assists around Jupiter, it notes that its not time-sensitive... and the passage "I’m not sure if I’m in doubt here" is amusing)

However, this is in the ChatGPT interface. If I'm using an interface that doesn't allow internal self-prompts / thoughts to be collapsed then such an interface would often be displaying code as part of its working through the problem.

You'll also note a bit of the system prompt leaking in there - "the instructions say I must browse when in doubt". For an interface where code is the expected product, then there could be system prompts that also get in there that try to always produce code.
by Wololooo | 2025-12-08 15:05:01+00:00
Which funnily is the dumbest thing ever. Because in order to use the currency you need to exchange it which means that you need input and outputs, you slightly obfuscate that but in the crypto chain everything is saved, so everything is traceable forever. Slip up once when extracting or get your wallet involved in unsavoury interactions and you're done. It's not a matter of if but a matter of when...
by IAmBroom | 2025-12-08 15:05:10+00:00
The Efficient Market Hypothesis is an approximation at best, and fails hard at labor issues.

Employee salaries don't fluctuate continuously. In most cases, labor loading - the number of warm bodies paid to be there 9-5 - can't fluctuate much, quickly (with the exception of catastrophic business failure). Salaries and wages almost never go downwards for employees already hired. Etc.