MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Iceberg-JS, a TypeScript Client for the Apache Iceberg REST Catalog
by kiwicopple | 2025-12-09 11:46:10+00:00
This is a small, framework-agnostic JavaScript/TypeScript client for the Apache Iceberg REST Catalog. It is good for managing the catalog (eg: managing tables), and it's MIT licensed.

The goals:

- Generic: Works with any Iceberg REST Catalog implementation, not tied to any specific vendor

- Minimal: Thin HTTP wrapper over the official REST API, no engine-specific logic

- Type-safe: First-class TypeScript support with strongly-typed request/response models

- Fetch-based: Uses native fetch API with support for custom implementations

- Universal: Targets Node 20+ and modern browsers (ES2020)

- Catalog-only: Focused on catalog operations at this stage

Although Iceberg is becoming very popular, we were surprised that the developer tooling is so nascent. This library is our contribution back to the ecosystem. The goal is to keep it minimal and well-maintained, so that developers can manage their warehouse from any JS server.

We are using it with AWS's new "S3 Tables". If it doesn't support other REST catalogs we'd welcome contributions
by Havoc | 2025-12-09 11:46:54+00:00
> When you’re looking at a pre-training dataset in the frontier lab and you look at a random internet document, it’s total garbage. I don't even know how this works at all. It’s [stuff] like stock tickers, symbols, it's a huge amount of slop and garbage from like all the corners of the internet

Seems like there would be low hanging fruit in heavier pre processing then? Something deterministic like a reading level score. Or even a tiny model trained for the task to pick out good data?
by 72deluxe | 2025-12-09 11:47:08+00:00
It's sad that the "gold rush" on social media just means "using the Internet" is a depressing experience of being tracked incessantly and sold to, constantly. A lot of the content isn't to educate or delight, but to build a following exclusively so that you can sell to said following.

It's more like the "poo rush", where you are the one getting pooped on.
by thw_9a83c | 2025-12-09 11:47:43+00:00
I think we can call LLMs artificial intelligence. They don't represent real intelligence. LLMs lack real-life experience, and so they cannot verify any information or claim by experiencing it with their own senses. However, "artificial intelligence" is a good name. Just as artificial grass is not real grass, it still makes sense to include "grass" in its name.
by Anthony-G | 2025-12-09 11:48:11+00:00
A friend’s daughter (young adult) told me about five years ago that cassette tapes are “cool” again. I was surprised because I always considered them to be the worst physical medium for music. I still have the cassette deck that I bought in the 90s for my hi-fi separate system but I haven’t listened to it in years. In the mid-2000s, I gave away most of my cassettes to a friend who had bought an old car that only had a tape deck. I only held on to recordings that were only released on cassette: demo tapes, bootlegs of live concerts that I had attended and some DIY releases from 90s’ punk bands that didn’t have (nor want) a record label.
by saberience | 2025-12-09 11:48:30+00:00
What planet are you on? What relevance does this have at all? Computers don't need to go and fly somewhere, they can just be accessed over a network. Also, the location and traveling is irrelevant to the main point, that is, that computers far exceeded our capacity in Chess and Go many years ago and are now so much better we cannot even really understand their moves or why they do them and have no hope to ever compete.

The same will be true of every other intellectual discipline with time. It's already happening with maths and science and coding.
by ninkendo | 2025-12-09 11:48:40+00:00
I honestly couldn’t care less how things (don’t) work in Russia. It’s a complete non-sequitur. Sucks that your country sucks. Maybe work on fixing your country. Sorry you’re too caught up invading your neighbors to fix basic things like your financial system.

Your fallacy is in saying “government isn’t perfect therefore crypto is better”. This makes no sense. Crypto dials down the protections to zero. It’s worse than any possible government can be, even in principal. Sorry your government is so bad that crypto’s flaws seem minor.
by luqtas | 2025-12-09 11:49:15+00:00
do you mean something like running a full blown and expensive GPU or relying to have your prompts parsed into a server that often times is draining the water, as well causing power shortages of nearby places (sometimes residential areas) trained on copyright violated data to do something like: "hey chat cd my Downloads folder" instead of "cd Downloads"? or any alias for $often used $stuff?
by sokoloff | 2025-12-09 11:49:19+00:00
Similar shopping story at our house, but I will observe that Home Depot has made amazing strides into competing with Amazon for delivery of items.

They’ll ship me a $10 <thing my project needs> almost always for free and often next day, sometimes same day. And their prices are competitive in general with Amazon and supplyhouse.com.

I don’t know that it’s a great (or even sustainable) offering from their business angle, but I love it as a consumer and DIYer!
by rvnx | 2025-12-09 11:49:27+00:00
I think I should have replied as a totally separate comment. This is my mistake.

It is nice that the author shared the results of his exercise / experiment. Just got sad as I was reminded (when the 100 USD were mentioned) that all this game is 90%+ about money and hardware rather than skills.

That being said I really like the initiative of the author.
by fooker | 2025-12-09 11:49:31+00:00
Sure, but how do I know you in particular are intelligent?

Any test you can device for this, ChatGPT would reliably pass if the medium was text, while a good fraction of humans might actually fail. It does a pretty good job if the medium was audio.

Video, and in person remains slightly out of reach for now. But I doubt we are not going to get there eventually.
by amluto | 2025-12-09 11:49:45+00:00
I don’t know much about the kind of giant motor that would be used in a ship, but as a general principle: the load that a motor presents to the drive electronics does not resemble your house in the slightest.

To power your house (or, more generally, supply vaguely sine-wave like output at a constant voltage), you need a converter that will convert DC at the battery voltage to AC at the desired voltage. If a buck converter is used, for example, the AC voltage can only ever be lower than the battery voltage. If you use a cheap square wave inverter, it’s possible that the output and input voltages must actually be equal.

A motor, though, is a highly inductive load, and large motors will and do operate from truly gnarly supply waveforms as long as the current waveform is approximately correct. Industrial VFDs (variable frequency drives) do unspeakable things involving switching a DC bus voltage across the motor via H bridges at tens of MHz, which is a horrible thing to do the the wiring between the drive and the motor if it’s not extremely short. (There are, recently, some guidelines that specific types of wire with twisted conductors, better than average insulation, and high quality shields should be used to improve tolerance of the fact that rather impressive standing waves can appear in the wiring if the wiring is a quarter wavelength or longer.). I can easily imagine designing a VFD that works just fine over a respectable range of DC input voltages by adjusting its duty cycle accordingly.

One way to think of this is that a VFD looks kind of like a buck converter where the inductor is free in the sense that it’s already right there in the motor. If it’s designed right, it will handle the battery’s full voltage range, and the inductor will still be free :)
by 72deluxe | 2025-12-09 11:49:56+00:00
This is true. Just look at what selling of products with "memory" means - "the tablet has 256GB memory"; no it doesn't. It has 8GB RAM and 256GB non-volatile storage.

I suppose "AI" is easier to say than "word-guessing non-deterministic instruction transformer", but it does carry "intelligence" into the hearer, when the truth is that "AI" is not intelligent - it is a great mimicker of everything it has read.
by omnimus | 2025-12-09 11:49:59+00:00
Thank you for asking! I thought I was just making funny comment on political situation. After quick search it turns out its not funny… just predictible.

“Larry Ellison donates $16.6 million, says, ‘Since Israel’s founding, we have called on the brave men and women of the IDF to defend our home’”

Oh and i know FIDF - Friends of the IDF (nonprofit through which these donations are going) are just that. Just friends.
by rvz | 2025-12-09 11:50:10+00:00
Before someone replies and does a fallacious comparison along the lines like: "But humans also do 'bullshitting' as well, humans also 'hallucinate' just like LLMs do".

Except that LLMs have no mechanism for transparent reasoning and also have no idea about what they don't know and will go to great lengths to generate fake citations to convince you that it is correct.
by numitus | 2025-12-09 11:50:12+00:00
I watched a video on the Vertasium channel, and I got the impression that this story is completely different from the story of PFAS. The actual links to diseases are very weak; it wasn't even labeled as carcinogenic, but rather listed as possibly carcinogenic. I have a theory that this scandal was caused by the company itself because its patent was expiring, and if not for the scandal, competitors would have been able to use this extremely effective herbicide.
by spondyl | 2025-12-09 11:50:39+00:00
I was just about to go to bed and what a surprise seeing Grandia trending #1 on Hacker News of all places.

For myself, Grandia is one of those games that was part of my childhood so despite having flaws, it transcends ratings in a sense.

It was the first game I ever got on the first home console I ever had, the PlayStation 1. I would only have been about 9 or 10(?) (31 now) and the intro to the game is burned into my mind because I never had a memory card for quite some time so I'd replay the opening hour or two over and over until it was time for dinner or bed.

Eventually I got a memory card and my next entry was Digimon World 2003 and I wonder to what extent that lead to me being interested in computers generally and ultimately becoming a developer as a day job.

To this day, I've still yet to finish Grandia. I picked up the HD Collection on Switch and I'm about halfway. Every time I go on vacation (or particularly during the Christmas holidays), I'll progress a bit. There's no real rush though in that once it's over, it's over. I don't really tend to replay titles, particularly long RPGs.

It's also kind of weird actually seeing the rest of the game too. For the longest time, I had no idea where the story was going. I've still mostly managed to avoid spoilers as well so I conceptually don't know where the story ends up which is nice, given years of reading Wikipedia synopsis only to regret it later.

> A total joy… but one that demands an intense time commitment. A player Justin’s age surely has the time

I found this part funny because I was Justin's age when I first played Grandia and never found the time then let alone now
by belter | 2025-12-09 11:51:50+00:00
The only post in this thread that actually summarized the core findings of the study, namely:

- ACKed messages can be silently lost due to minority-node corruption.

- A single-bit corruption can cause some replicas to lose up to 78% of stored messages

- Snapshot corruption can propagate and lead to entire stream deletion across the cluster.

- The default lazy-fsync mode can drop minutes of acknowledged writes on a crash.

- A crash combined with network delay can cause persistent split-brain and divergent logs.

- Data loss even with “sync_interval = always” in presence of membership changes or partitions.

- Self-healing and replica convergence did not always work reliably after corruption.

…was not downvoted, but flagged... That is telling. Documented failure modes are apparently controversial. Also raises the question: What level of technical due diligence was performed by organizations like Mastercard, Volvo, PayPal, Baidu, Alibaba, or AT&T before adopting this system?

So what is next? Nominate NATS for the Silent Failure Peace Prize?
by 72deluxe | 2025-12-09 11:52:26+00:00
I think the initial idea of being the fast to hit all platforms was the idea, but this has meant a lack of skill in developers who don't know about each platform, so you end up with a mess of apps that attempt to (badly) replicate native elements like menus.

You are right about async/await. I am old! (But I still find the development of software in a large JS system unmanageable versus old C++ development approaches).
by javipas | 2025-12-09 11:52:38+00:00
Back in January 2025, I shared a massive post about how I set up my own Google Photos alternative using this exceptional Open Source project called Immich.

I’m still enjoying its virtues, but for the longest time, I suffered from its one major flaw: the lack of a (good) native TV client. Immich looks phenomenal on a computer or smartphone, but if you want to view family photos on the big screen, you hit a wall. My workaround involved a long HDMI cable or casting a Chrome tab from my MacBook Air — functional, but far from ideal.

The Problem. I wanted a native Android TV/Google TV experience to navigate my library seamlessly. There was a glimmer of hope in the form of the Immich Android TV project. The developer, giejay, is quite active, but the app lacked two features essential for my sanity: a Timeline and Favorites management.

Without a timeline, finding a photo from 2015 meant scrolling linearly through 140,000 images (that’s the size of my photo library) starting from today. That’s not browsing; that’s an endurance sport.

So what I did is a fork of the official Immich Android TV project and, with AI as a coding assistant, I added a few features that I wanted to add to that project. It would have been impossible for me otherwise, but AI allows (almost) anyone to transform his ideas for an app into a reality. And if there’s an Open Source project already created, like in this case, that concept is even more powerful.

In case you're interested, here's the rest of the story with lots of images and links to the GitHub Repository and the APK.

Please let me know what you think!
by mrweasel | 2025-12-09 11:53:21+00:00
That probably depends on the country and what you mean by small. Smaller shops/supermarkets in Denmark tend to be cheaper, because they are run mostly as discount brands, while the larger stores a premium brands and have the more expensive options.

However, Danish supermarkets are generally kept small by regulation, meaning that there are very few supermarket that could be considered big by international standards.
by ninkendo | 2025-12-09 11:53:34+00:00
> What about cases of private abuse?

What about it?

Your entire point boils down to “fiat has flaws therefore crypto is better”, while completely ignoring that crypto is worse at the very things fiat is flawed at. Fiat sometimes doesn’t protect you, but crypto NEVER does, and CAN’T, even in principle.

None of your CONSTANT whataboutism across this entire thread is going to change this, so please, just stop posting.
by shevy-java | 2025-12-09 11:53:44+00:00
This kind of seems to be a combined strategy. I mean this is not old; many of us may still remember Abu Ghraib and so forth. We now have a somewhat comparable situation: build up of enemies. See ICE raids and videos manhunting people. There always are people susceptible to do so (e. g. inflict pain onto others). The strange thing is how some "democracies" do that. Where is the net difference to a dictatorship? This is also blurred. You have a similar problem in Israel - again, tons of examples that can be given, but it seems as if this is a combined strategy originating from the top (of command chains).

The article claims that the torture box ("confinement box") is the worst torture, but some 20 years ago we had the same with waterboarding. I see a repeat of older patterns here. I wonder what those who torture other people think.
by strken | 2025-12-09 11:53:47+00:00
One of the interesting things about the internet is that almost anyone who runs a web browser on their phone is using a processor designed by Sophie Wilson, a trans woman, to run a language designed by Brendan Eich, a guy who donated money to oppose gay marriage and then lost the spot as head honcho of Mozilla because of it. I often think about this and wonder if the two of them ever met, or what would have happened if they did.

The internet doesn't run on "tolerance"; it runs on actual, real neutrality, which enforces tolerance by making anything else impossible. You cannot possibly stop gay people accessing your website any more than you can prevent homophobes or drug dealers or AI startups or North Koreans or fascists. You can ban behaviour but it's impossible to ban classes of people without real-life action.
by yread | 2025-12-09 11:53:47+00:00
LLM is a model. So, it fits under "all models are wrong, some are useful". Of course, it can produce wrong results. But it can also help with mechanistic tasks.

And you can run some models locally. What does he think of open-weight models - there is no source code to be published. Closest thing - the training data - needs so many resources to turn into weights that it's next to useless.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-09 11:53:49+00:00
> It is unfortunate that cassettes are the lowest fidelity consumer medium

So what? The quality of music and enjoyment of it isn't depending on fidelity. I have Adam A7X monitors I mostly use day-to-day, but when I listen to lo-fi, I change the output to the output of my monitor which are absolutely horrible, but fits the mood better.
by gwd | 2025-12-09 11:54:42+00:00
> Are you saying that LLMs _do_ have a model of the human mind in their weights?

On topics with "complicated disagreements", an important way of moving forward is to find small things where we can move forward.

There are a large number of otherwise intelligent people who think that "LLMs work by predicting the next word; therefore LLMs cannot think" is a valid proposition; and since the antecedent is undoubtedly true, they think the consequent is undoubtedly true, and therefore they do not need to consider any more arguments or evidence.

If I can do one thing, it would be to show people that this proposition is not true: a system which did think would do better at the "predict the next word" task than a system which did not think.

You have to come up with some other way to determine if a system is thinking or not.
by pickpuck | 2025-12-09 11:54:44+00:00
This adage has been "the first rule of ARIA" since the beginning.

There are a few ARIA "widgets" that have no HTML equivalent, such as Tabs or a spreadsheet-like Grid. Those are heavily documented so you can basically copy and paste whenever you need them.

Avoiding sprinkling ARIA on already-semantic HTML, because this can lead to confusing or inconsistent behaviors for the end user.
Show HN: I made a tool to fix chaotic handovers and slow onboarding
by kevinbaur | 2025-12-09 11:55:05+00:00
Hey HN.

I realized how much time and context teams lose when someone leaves a role. I joined a job once with basically zero onboarding because the person before me was already gone, and it took months to figure everything out.

So I built SkillPass, a tool that interviews people before they leave and turns their answers into a structured onboarding handbook for the next person. No templates, no writing, no chaos.

Kevin
by ben_w | 2025-12-09 11:55:13+00:00
> If we say that seconds "pass", at what rate do they pass?

One second per second for yourself, but other observers generally disagree.

Or one could use it as an inverse of the things measured against time, so meters/second of speed can be turned into seconds flowing at a rate of length.

Does "miles per gallon" lead to similar questions about gallons passing?

> Could they pass at some rate other than one second per second?

Only, and always, from the point of view of people in different frames of reference.
by mrob | 2025-12-09 11:55:32+00:00
I have CDs from the 80s that still play perfectly. The only CDs I've had fail were a multi-disc set that were packaged with foam padding in the case, touching the label side of the disc. The plasticizer leached out and diffused into the protective lacquer, which softened and stuck to the foam, and tore away when I took them out, pulling chunks of the metal layer with it.

They weren't anything rare so I wasn't too bothered, but it later occurred to me that they technically could have been saved. The data is pressed into the polycarbonate, so if I'd very carefully peeled off all the metal, ideally in a laminar flow cabinet to avoid any dust, and then had them re-coated in aluminum with vacuum deposition, they would probably have still played. I think this is true for CDs lost to "disc rot" too.

I don't have any nostalgia for tapes. I used them as a child, but I never liked them. The first music I bought was on CD. I still buy a lot of used CDs on Ebay. Lots of great bargains are available and they sound identical to brand new CDs. It's worth finding sellers who'll combine postage and buying in bulk or you'll end up paying more for postage than the discs themselves.
by acituan | 2025-12-09 11:55:39+00:00
Unfortunate that he starts with the thinking argument because it will be nitpicked to death, while bullshit and computing freedom arguments are much stronger and to me personally irrefutably true.

For those who will take “bullshit” as an argument of taste I strongly suggest taking a look at the referenced work and ultimately Frankfurt’s, to see that this is actually a pretty technical one. It is not merely the systems’ own disregard to truth but also its making the user care about the truthiness less, in the name of rhetoric and information ergonomics. It is akin to the sophists, except in this case chatbots couldn’t be non-sophists even they “wanted” to because they can only mimic relevance, and the political goal they seem to “care” about is merely making other use them more - for the time being.

Computing freedom argument likewise feels deceptively about taste but I believe harsh material consequences are yet to be experienced widely. For example I was experiencing a regression I can swear to be deliberate on gemini-3 coding capabilities after an initial launch boost, but I realized if someone went “citation needed” there is absolutely no way for me to prove this. It is not even a matter of having versioning information or output non-determinism, it could even degrade its own performance deterministically based on input - benchmark tests vs a tech reporter’s account vs its own slop from a week past from a nobody-like-me’s account - there is absolutely no way for me to know it nor make it known. It is a right I waived away the moment I clicked “AI can be wrong” TOS. Regardless of how much money I invest I can’t even buy a guarantee on the degree of average aggregate wrongness it will keep performing at, or even knowledge thereof, while being fully accountable for the consequences. Regression to depending on closed-everything mainframes is not a computing model I want to be in yet cannot seem to escape due to competitive or organizational pressures.