MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skrebbel | 2026-01-24 13:12:55+00:00
I haven't investigated this so I might be behind the times, but last I checked remotely managing an SQLite database, or having some sort of dashboarding tool run management reporting queries and the likes, or make a Retool app for it, was very messy. The benefit of not being networked becomes a downside.

Maybe this has been solved though? Anybody here running a serious backend-heavy app with SQLite in production and can share? How do you remotely edit data, do analytics queries etc on production data?
by password4321 | 2026-01-24 13:14:04+00:00
As another example, a SQL Server optimization per https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/statements/set-n...:

> For stored procedures that contain several statements that don't return much actual data, or for procedures that contain Transact-SQL loops, setting SET NOCOUNT to ON can provide a significant performance boost, because network traffic is greatly reduced.
by nchmy | 2026-01-24 13:14:05+00:00
The article doesnt make it at all clear what it is comparing to - mysql running remotely or on the same server? I'm sure sqlite still has less "latency" than mysql on localhost or unix socket, but surely not meaningfully so. So, is SQLite really just that much faster at any SELECT query, or are they just comparing apples and oranges?

Or am i mistaken in thinking that communicating to mysql on localhost is comparable latency to sqlite?
by KronisLV | 2026-01-24 13:14:36+00:00
For a company that (optionally) wants to self-host stuff, I'd say GitLab is pretty great - it's there for you, be it in the cloud or on-prem and mostly works, if you have enough resources to throw at the instance.

It's not as demanding as a some of the other software out there, like a self-hosted Sentry install, just look at all of the services: https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/master/docker-... in comparison to their self-contained single image install: https://docs.gitlab.com/install/docker/installation/#install...

At the same time it won't always have full on feature parity with some of the other options out there, or won't be as in depth as specialized software (e.g. Jira / Confluence) BUT everything being integrated can also be delightfully simple and usable.

I will say that I immensely enjoy working with GitLab CI at work (https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/), even the colleagues on projects using Jekins migrated over to it and seems like everyone prefers it as well, the last poll showing 0 teams wanting to use Jenkins over it (well I might later for personal stuff, but that's more tool-hopping, like I also browser and distro hop; to see how things have changed).

However, it was a bit annoying for me to keep up with the updates and the resource usage on a VPS so that's why my current setup is Gitea + Drone CI (might move over to Woodpecker CI) + Nexus instead of GitLab, and is way more lightweight and still has the features I need. Some people also might enjoy Forgejo or whatever, either way it's nice to have options!
by MiddleEndian | 2026-01-24 13:15:19+00:00
>However, if thousands of users report same domain or sender as spam, then the email service provider may take stern action, including blocking the sender email id or domain at the server level, so their messages will never reach your mailbox.

This is a good thing. If you spam thousands of users, you are a spammer, even if you also happen to send legitimate emails. If anything, it should be applied more broadly. When companies like Walmart or Paypal or LinkedIn or Comcast or whoever spam thousands or millions of people, if Gmail marked all their emails as spam until they stopped, that would be a major quality of life improvement for everyone.
by YetAnotherNick | 2026-01-24 13:15:26+00:00
With optimizations and new hardware, power is almost a negligible cost that $5/month would be sufficient for all users, contrary to people's belief. You can get 5.5M tokens/s/MW[1] for kimi k2(=20M/KWH=181M tokens/$) which is 400x cheaper than current pricing even if you exclude architecture/model improvements. The thing is currently Nvidia is swallowing up a massive revenue which China could possible solve by investing in R and D.

[1]: https://developer-blogs.nvidia.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/0...
by miki123211 | 2026-01-24 13:17:01+00:00
Wikipedia is also uniquely cacheable.

I suspect that 95+% of visits to Wikipedia don't actually require them to run any PHP code, but are instead just served from some cache, as each Wikipedia user viewing a given article (if they're not logged in) sees basically the same thing.

This is in contrast to E.G. a social network, which needs to calculate timelines per user. Even if there's no machine learning and your algorithm is "most recent posts first", there's still plenty of computation involved. Mastodon is a good example here.
by io_eric | 2026-01-24 13:17:12+00:00
I started with WebCC to get the best possible performance and small binaries, which works well for things like games. However, writing UI code that way is very tedious. I built Coi to make the development process more enjoyable (better DX) while keeping the efficiency. To me, the gain in performance and the cleaner syntax felt like a good reason to try a new language approach :)
by tialaramex | 2026-01-24 13:17:53+00:00
That's also a good point that the Network hardware does not care about cable categories.

If it plugs into your card the card goes "OK, lets see if 1000baseT fits on this?" the cables don't have a little chip or anything saying "I'm not suitable for high speed" the card will figure out whether this looks plausible and just do it.

At the turn of the century I was putting new Cisco gear into a building (which has since burned down, not related) that had been built a long time ago and so it didn't have Cat 5e cables. I was fitting switches which were state of the art at the time (IPv6 experiments), and they didn't have a 100Mbit option because that was legacy, so you'd plug this ancient looking 1980s cable designed for 10baseT into a switch, and in most cases once it's connected the switch and the network card at the far end both go "Aha link, can I do 1000baseT over this?" and conclude yeah, Gigabit just works. There is a setting to say "No, only do 10baseT" but why set it? Users don't want slow Internet.

Unless somebody went very cheap and strung literal bellwire (which was never rated for a telephone but would probably work) or your distances are very long, you will almost certainly get 100Mb and if there actually are four pairs you will most likely get Gigabit.
by tomashubelbauer | 2026-01-24 13:17:57+00:00
I do this sometimes - let Claude Code implement three or four features or fixes at the same time on the same repository directory, no worktrees. Each session knows which files it created, so when you ask CC to commit the changes it made in this session, it can differentiate them. Sometimes it will think the other changes are temporary artifacts or results of an experiment and try to clear them (especially when your CLAUDE.md contains an instruction to make it clean after itself), so you need to watch out for that. If multiple features touch the same file and different hunks belong to different commits, that's where I step in and manually coordinate.
by IshKebab | 2026-01-24 13:18:42+00:00
It's okay. But I would definitely pick Forgejo over it for self-hosting these days. It's written in Go which is a lot better. Much faster, easier to set up, you can actually follow the code (sometimes I've had to read Gitlab's code to understand features and nearly always failed). Also no features are paid. The ones that made us eventually pay for Gitlab were mandatory reviews and merge trains. Tbh I don't think Forgejo has either of those features yet but at least when they are available they'll be free!
by kaliades | 2026-01-24 13:19:13+00:00
Thanks! Those are exactly the right questions.

1. Cardinality: We don't do per-key metrics — that's a guaranteed way to blow up Prometheus. All pattern metrics are aggregated at the command pattern level (e.g., HGETALL user:* not HGETALL user:12345). The pattern extraction normalizes keys so you see the shape of your queries, not the individual keys.
For cluster slot metrics, we automatically cap at top 100 slots by key count — otherwise you'd get 16,384 slots × 4 metrics = 65k series just from slot stats.
The metrics that can grow are client connections by name/user, but those scale with unique client names, not keys. If it becomes an issue, standard Prometheus relabel_configs can aggregate or drop those labels.

2. Baseline window: We use a rolling circular buffer of 300 samples (5 minutes at 1-second polling). Minimum 30 samples to warm up before detection kicks in.
To reduce noise from bursty workloads, we require 3 consecutive samples above threshold before firing, plus a 60-second cooldown between alerts for the same metric. This helps with the "batch job at 2am" scenario — a single spike won't trigger, but sustained deviation will.
That said, you're right that periodic patterns (daily batch jobs, cache warming after deploy) aren't explicitly modeled yet. It's on the roadmap — likely as configurable "expected variance windows" or integration with deployment events. Would love to hear what approach would work best for your use case.

I think the licensing issues are long gone (it was all the way in 2024), so most people have moved on, but monitoring and observability are something that people have said are missing over and over.
by bArray | 2026-01-24 13:20:28+00:00
> I don’t personally do things that require dynamic memory management in C often, so I don’t have many practices for it. I know that wellons & co. Have been really liking the arena, and I’d probably like it too if I actually used the heap often. But I don’t, so I have nothing to say.

> If I find myself needing a bunch of dynamic memory allocations and lifetime management, I will simply start using another language–usually rust or C#.

I'm not sure what the modern standards are, but if you are writing in C, pre-allocate as much as possible. Any kind of garbage collection is just extra processing time and ideally you don't want to run out of memory during an allocation mid-execution.

People may frown at C, but nothing beats getting your inner loops into CPU cache. If you can avoid extra fetches into RAM, you can really crank some processing power. Example projects have included computer vision, servers a custom neural network - all of which had no business being so fast.
by mgerdts | 2026-01-24 13:21:00+00:00
Exactly. I question why the parent says you have to re-encrypt the drive.

Microsoft has the KEK or passphrase that can be used to derive the KEK. The KEK protects the DEK which is used to encrypt the data. Rotating the KEK (or KEKs if multiple slots are used) will overwrite the encrypted DEK, rendering the old KEK useless.

Or does BitLocker work differently than typical data at rest encryption?
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-01-24 13:21:05+00:00
Yes.

Channel Gen-Z's latent hipsterism (isolation from upper-middle-intellectuallism) into (gender neutral) "bernie-broism". If that makes sense

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Bro#:~:text=According%2...

(This assumes that those who run trade schools are able to peddle your Linebargerian goods without extra asinine* baggage)

*neuroses signified by The party mascot
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-24 13:21:10+00:00
Curious why this is here. It was my go to source for AQI data when I was living in Beijing, and I believe it is a Chinese site but the only evidence I have for that is that they have good Chinese data and the CN after AQI in their name. Beijing has cleaned up slot but I’m surprised to see bad air still in Hebei and Shandong.
by the_mitsuhiko | 2026-01-24 13:21:48+00:00
I think I told this story plenty of times now, but Wifi got so good, that even though we have network cables everywhere, basically nothing is hardwired in our household any more other than the TV and a few sonos speakers that were close enough to the outlets.

We have about ~100 devices connected to our home network according to my router and other than 6 devices, they are all on Wifi. I would never have expected that, but the reality is that it just got so much better over the years that I cannot be bothered with actually wiring things up any more.

That's in part because the outlets are not necessarily aligned well with the devices that would need to be connected, and then all kinds of other shit that is going on with home ethernet.

In 2020 I wrote about my USB-C adapter breaking ethernet [1]. It is still one of my most read blog posts and I get emails from it still, because apparently even in 2025 actually hooking up a USB-C ethernet adapter will cause quite a few switches to fail.

Long winded way of saying: our Ethernet does Gigabit because I never upgraded and has almost no devices left. Our Wifi does >4Gitabit because it was easy to swap and most devices are Wifi anyways.

[1]: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2020/7/6/usb-c-network-hubs/
by FarmerPotato | 2026-01-24 13:22:04+00:00
This reminds me of a problem from undergrad computer architecture: how can you validate the multiplier without checking all possible N squared inputs? (Which would take forever.)

I read later in a TI DRAM report about which bit pairs to exercise, based on proximity in silicon layout, to verify the part. I suppose something like that to stress-test the ALU.
by Neywiny | 2026-01-24 13:22:09+00:00
I think they're trying to not shame other services, but yes the comparison is vs networked whether that's local on loopback or not. For a small query, which is what they're talking about, it's not inconceivable that formatting into a network packet, passing through the userspace networking functions, into and through kernel, all back out the other side, then again for the response, is indeed meaningfully slower than a simple function call within the program.
Show HN: A free, no-login random decision toolkit (roulette, teams, order, dice)
by hejinhui | 2026-01-24 13:22:26+00:00
Hi HN — I built a small browser-only “random decision” toolkit for classrooms/events/office raffles.

Link: https://roulette-tool.online/

What it does: pick winners from a pasted list, spin a roulette, decide an order, split teams, roll dice, flip a coin.

Key details:

Uses the browser’s cryptographic RNG (Web Crypto) for fairness

No login / no email — data is processed locally on the device

Mobile-first UI, plus fullscreen mode for projector use

One-tap copy of results

I’d love feedback on: (1) usability on mobile, (2) any confusing wording, and (3) feature requests (e.g., weighting, history, shareable links).

Note: the UI is currently Japanese-first; if that’s a blocker, tell me and I’ll prioritize an English toggle.
by MITfather | 2026-01-24 13:22:26+00:00
1. You’re right that readers can’t independently verify this, and I don’t expect blind trust. I’m sharing what my friend and his family experienced as accurately as I can. They’re consulting attorneys, which limits what can be publicly documented right now. If people choose to discount the story on that basis, that’s understandable, I’m mainly hoping to hear from those who’ve dealt with similar situations or know what practical steps exist.

2. I’m not trying to generalize from a single incident or claim this is universal behavior. The point isn’t “this always happens,” but that it can happen, and when it does, the consequences for a family are severe. I’m asking how others would respond after a specific, extreme experience, not making a statistical argument.

3. I don’t see this as pushing a political agenda. This is about personal safety, legal recourse, and career decisions for a highly skilled person deciding whether to continue building a life in the US. Those are questions many people in tech—especially immigrants—face, regardless of political views.

I appreciate people engaging critically, and I’m genuinely looking for thoughtful, experience-based input rather than agreement.
by metalman | 2026-01-24 13:23:36+00:00
for much of the world, it is not a transition to Chinese tech, for them Chinese tech is the only tech they can afford, and withadvances in solar PV, and battery tech, having household power and automotive transportation is atainable now.
Europe has huge areas that are underserviced, and depopulated that ,once fuel/energy costs go away, are now again atractive for people to live in and work on.
Even the US, where say Denver has a 35%+ vacancy rate downtown will thrive with lower energy costs and more distributed self sufficient population.
And to be blunt, what fucking US tech is so extitentialy nessesary anyway? Bombers? the other weapon...Money?
by cyanmagenta | 2026-01-24 13:24:41+00:00
There is some risk that, if you design your website to use a local database (sqlite, or a traditional database over a unix socket on the same machine), then switching later to a networked database is harder. In other words, once you design a system to do 200 queries per page, you’d essentially have to redesign the whole thing to switch later.

It seems like it mostly comes down to how likely it is that the site will grow large enough to need a networked database. And people probably wildly overestimate this. HackerNews, for example, runs on a single computer.
by xecaz | 2026-01-24 13:25:43+00:00
1. If you watch the news, you would see this happening quite often in the US. From a European perspective we see this in the news. And the same pictures and clips are rolling on all channels. It's not a question if it's happening. What makes you question it?
2. If you read what he wrote he stated it was his friend, and what he is asking for is what kind of advise you can give someone in this situation.
3. US about to lose tech workers due to circumstances is not a political topic, but you are making it pretty clear where you stand.
by vansxxx | 2026-01-24 13:25:44+00:00
The Agent Permissions & Safety layer is the standout feature for me

I've been hesitant to let autonomous agents run wild in my local repo because of the risk of accidental rm -rf or messing up config files. Being able to set path-based rules (e.g., allow write to /tests but read-only for /src) and block specific bash commands makes this much more viable for production codebases than just a wrapper around an API.
by jrjeksjd8d | 2026-01-24 13:26:20+00:00
My CEO sent a company-wide email this week saying "AI use is mandatory for all developers". Until this kind of mandatory bullshit stops I'm happy to see other people fighting the good fight and publicly saying that they want to keep doing a job they actually enjoy.

Many of my coworkers have embraced AI coding and the quality of our product has suffered for it. They deliver bad, hard-to-support software that technically checks some boxes and then rush on to produce more slop. It feels like a regression to the days of measuring LOC as a proxy for productivity.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-01-24 13:26:54+00:00
Even if you're on the same local server, you're still going over a socket to a different service, whereas with sqlite you remain in the same application / address space / insert words I don't fully understand here. So while client/server SQL servers are faster locally than on a remote server, they can (theoretically) never be as fast as SQLite in the same process.

Of course, SQLite and client/server database servers have different use cases, so it is kind of an apples and oranges comparison.
by nemima | 2026-01-24 13:27:08+00:00
This is definitely the sort of use case we aim to support! I would need to check about Hindi specifically, but we have several bilingual models already with more to come:

https://docs.speechmatics.com/speech-to-text/languages#trans...

Drop me an email at mattn@speechmatics.com and we can chat about further details :)
by nerdsniper | 2026-01-24 13:27:31+00:00
> (doesn't mean you have capital)

Then you’re not going to be doing any significant lobbying so you’re not covered by GP’s comment, which was selecting for “people who have political capital”.

Yes, there are other forms of political capital besides money, but it’s still mostly just money, especially when you’re part of the tiny voter block of “people who make a lot of money and dont do much work and dont have wealth”.

Also I talked with the employees at my local McDonald’s last week. Not one of them had any idea who the owner was. I showed them a photo of the owner and they had never seem them. So apparently that could be an option for people who were overpaid and still want to pretend-work while making money.
by VorpalWay | 2026-01-24 13:27:57+00:00
Linux would support it for sure. It even still has support for several old NICs (it was only the other day I saw a news item about some old protocol from the early 90s finally being removed). But I can imagine no one wants to develop a new such driver.

And if you want to sell to consumers you need Windows and Mac support, and then it easier to just adapt to existing interfaces.
by epolanski | 2026-01-24 13:29:31+00:00
Sure if all you're doing is making it just vomit code then yes.

But there's way more LLMs can do, like assist you in connecting dots in complex codebases, find patterns to refactor given some rules, provide ideas, allow you to dig in dependencies to find apis that are undocumented or edge cases that are subtle to find, find information that you might've had to dig up by endless google queries and hard to find GitHub issues, provide support in technologies you have sometimes to use (sed, awk, regexes, Google sheets apis, etc) but you just don't care enough to learn because it happens to use them few times an year allowing you to focus on what matters, etc, etc.

I'm frankly tired of those pointless debates conflating LLMs in the context of code just for the same boring arguments of people hating on vibecoding or thinking every developer is delegating everything to AI and pushing slop. If that's your colleagues fire them. They are indeed useless and can be replaced by a prompt.

If one cannot see the infinite uses of LLMs even just for supporting, without ever authoring a single line of code or never ever touching a file, it's only been that person limiting it's own growth and productivity.

Seriously, this is beyond tiring.
by MaxGabriel | 2026-01-24 13:29:36+00:00
We have a similar check in our Haskell codebase, after running into two issues:

1. Nested database transactions could exhaust the transaction pool and deadlock
2. Same as you described with doing eg HTTP during transactions

We now have a compile time guarantee that no IO can be done outside of whitelisted things, like logging or getting the current time. It’s worked great! Definitely a good amount of work though.
by ontouchstart | 2026-01-24 13:30:20+00:00
That is a wonderful write up.

“This is a clear indication that while the AI can write the code, it cannot design software”

To clarify what I mean by a product. If we want to design a browser system (engine + chrome) from scratch to optimize the human computer symbiosis (Licklider), what would be the best approach? Who should take the roles of making design decisions, implementation decisions, engineering decisions and supervision?

We can imagine a whole system with human out of the loop, that would be a huge unit test and integration test with no real application.

Then human can study it and learn from it.

Or the other way around, we had already made a huge mess of engineering beasts and machine will learn to fix our mess or make it worse by order of magnitude.

I don’t have an answer.

I used to be a big fan of TDD and now I am not, the testing system is a big mess by itself.
by cyberrock | 2026-01-24 13:30:44+00:00
The article begins with video game consoles, but then doesn't address the fact that video games are the biggest counterexample against the thesis, because it's just collapsing into a PC (and Steam) monoculture. The fact that you're buying FPGAs and old cartridges doesn't mean anything when 2/3 console makers are just making PCs, and even mobile games need to be on Steam now.

I think this just reflects your changing tastes and perhaps increase in disposable income.