MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jiggawatts | 2026-01-22 20:40:01+00:00
I used to think so too, but they've been increasing the per-core licensing fees while simultaneously hardware core counts have been increasing exponentially. The upcoming AMD EPYC 6-th generation servers will have 512 cores in a dual-socket configuration! The MS SQL licensing for that will start to approach the GDP of some smaller nation states.

The argument always was that it's worth paying the MS licensing tax because their proprietary engine is so much faster and the hardware is so expensive that the result is a net win. In other words, the "total cost of ownership" argument made by the Microsoft sales people was actually valid. In the era of two to twelve core servers, this was true! Not any more. Open source database engines at the same dollar spend levels run circles around MS SQL.

More importantly, MS SQL is falling behind on features. It has a handful of inexperienced developers keeping it on life support. Its 2025 release added just a handful of major features (Regex, better JSON support, and an AI index). None of these are "core" changes, they're all things that a junior dev can "tack on" to an existing product relatively easily and safely. Meanwhile, fundamental limits remain unchanged for decades and are starting become big problems:

1. The MS SQL threading model can't utilise more than 64 threads per individual query. On the aforementioned 512-core boxes, this limits it to 12.5% of the capacity of one rack mount server!

2. It can't natively use modern SSD drives with greater than 4 KB atomicity. This is practically all server-grade SSDs, including Azure Premium SSD v2 and all v6 or later VM SKUs! This leads to absurdities, like the Windows 2025 + SQL 2025 Azure Marketplace images reporting "not supported" on database-optimised Azure VMs and refusing to install.

3. Terrible support for external data in blobs, such as parquet files in data lakes. Just compare the "effortless" approach in something like DuckDB to the mess that is CETAS and the like in SQL PolyBase.

Etc...

I wouldn't start new projects on MS SQL in 2026. The Titanic is starting to tilt a bit now, the lights are still on and the music is playing, but the smart people know it is time to go find a life boat.
by HanClinto | 2026-01-22 20:41:02+00:00
One Bible translation that I really appreciate is the NET Bible [0] -- in particular, I appreciate its translator's notes. It can be very helpful to read the translator's notes and to understand the reasoning that went into any particular rendition. I.E., something like "The disjunctive clause (conjunction + subject + verb) at the beginning of v. 2 gives background information for the following narrative, explaining the state of things when “God said…” (v. 3)..."

Did you use a reasoning model to translate these verses? If so, I would be very interested in seeing the breakdown that the LLM used that went into each verse.

I understand that such breakdowns can be hallucinated at many levels also (and final output does not always correspond with the reasoning flow), but I (personally) would find this helpful.

[0] https://bible.org/sites/bible.org/resources/netbible/
by zbentley | 2026-01-22 20:41:42+00:00
Ah, I see now, thanks.

I think "people who want a UNIX" are pretty rare. Most of the folks who say things that rhyme with that at FOSDEM (as you mentioned in an adjacent thread) are, I'd bet, more likely to be "people who want something Unix-adjacent and similar enough to Linux that behavior of some tools is familiar".

They're still likely to be tilted by the idea that it might be less-than-ethical for hoakley to share security bypass techniques on a popular blog, though. Nobody likes to be told "no", and nobody likes to be reminded they're not the target demographic.
by yladiz | 2026-01-22 20:42:24+00:00
Serious question: is there a good, native/desktop alternative to Zoom for a professional setting besides Teams? As much as I don't trust Zoom, a huge advantage is that it's not stuck to your browser tab, so when you're doing basic things like presenting you can actually see the other participants in the call easily (this is a huge issue I have with Google Meet, if you don't use Chrome it is honestly a fairly bad experience because it doesn't try to support picture-in-picture in other browsers, and its screen sharing UX as a participant is borderline terrible because of the way it dynamically resizes the sharing in some cases).
by mrandish | 2026-01-22 20:42:35+00:00
> If any AI model were reliable at checking the generated pixels, I could have automated this process, but they simply aren't there yet, so I had to do a lot more manual work than I'd anticipated.

Since the output is so cool and generally interesting, there might be an opportunity for those forking this to do other cities to deploy a web app to crowd source identifying broken tiles and maybe classifying the error or even providing manual hinting for the next run. It takes a village to make a (sim) city! :-)
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-01-22 20:42:38+00:00
> inside the file, the compressor can be varied according to the file content. For example, images can use jpeg, but that isn’t useful for compressing text

Okay, so we make a compressed container format that can perform such shenanigans, for the same amount of back-compat issues as extending PDF in this way.

> when jumping from page to page, you won’t have to decompress the entire file

This is already a thing with any compression format that supports quasi-random access, which is most of them. The answers to https://stackoverflow.com/q/429987/5223757 discuss a wide variety of tools for producing (and seeking into) such files, which can be read normally by tools not familiar with the conventions in use.
by davidlu1001 | 2026-01-22 20:42:44+00:00
That's a spot-on parallel! Python circular imports (especially for type hinting) are basically the software equivalent of this infrastructure deadlock.

Do you use string-based forward references ("ClassName") to break the cycles? That's essentially our "empty shell" trick — decoupling the resource identity from its configuration to satisfy the graph.

Did you stick with Tarjan's for the SCC detection on the module graph?
by eigenspace | 2026-01-22 20:42:54+00:00
Look, I don't really want to be in the position of defending H2 here as I'm not particularly confident or optimistic about it, but I'm not really currently seeing a better alternative for seasonal energy shifting.

If Germany was willing to build new nuclear power plants I'd be in favour, but it's looking unlikely to happen, so H2 will likely be the way, and it won't be cheap.

That said, I also invite you to go look at cost estimates for batteries from just 5 years ago and compare them to today, or solar / wind cost estimates from 15 years ago. Those technologies have experienced significant reductions in cost due to scale and industrial learning.

IMO the biggest problem with H2 is that similar sorts of learning / scaling processes simply won't even start until the grid evolves to a point where the seasonal demand shifting is actually required, but by then it's essentially too late. And there's not really any hope of governments kickstarting the learning process with artificial demand because people will make all sorts convincing arguments for why it's a stupid waste.

So I guess we'll see what happens. Perhaps stuff like fertilizer and steel will help the technology matures before the grid needs it, or perhaps battery technology will surprise us again, or someone will figure out how to make flow batteries work or whatever. I'm not particularly confident in any of these technologies, but we'll just have to wait and see what happens I guess.

Something *does* need to be done about storage though, even with all the complementary wind-solar and giant Lithium or Sodium battery installations, and all the HVDC you could want.
by hotpotat | 2026-01-22 20:43:37+00:00
I understand where you’re coming from, but anecdotally the same thing happened to me except I have less clarity on why and no refund. I got an email back saying my appeal was rejected with no recourse. I was paying for max and using it for multiple projects, no other thing stands out to me as a cause for getting blocked. Guess you’ll have to take my word for it to, it’s hard to prove the non-existence of definitely-problematic prompts.
by Shocka1 | 2026-01-22 20:43:38+00:00
Just to clarify, you didn't actually look up the publications it was citing? For example, you just stayed in ChatGPT web and used the resources it provided there? Not ridiculing you of course, but am just curious. The last paper I wrote a couple months back I had GPT search out the publications for me, but I would always open a new tab and retrieve the actual publication.
by gucci-on-fleek | 2026-01-22 20:43:50+00:00
I agree with your general point that most companies/projects do a terrible job optimizing for slow computers/networks, but OpenSSH is from the OpenBSD people, who are well-known for supporting ancient hardware [0]. Picking a random architecture, they fully support a system with only 64MB of memory [1], and the base install includes SSH. So I suspect that OpenSSH is fairly well tested on crappy computers/networks.

[0]: https://www.openbsd.org/plat.html

[1]: https://www.openbsd.org/landisk.html#hardware
by DSMan195276 | 2026-01-22 20:43:55+00:00
> Presumably, there's a step in this process where money incentivizes the opposite of my suggestion, and I'm not familiar with the process to know which.

> Is it the university itself which will be starved of resources if it's not pumping out novel (yet unreproducible) research?

Researchers apply for grants to fund their research, the university is generally not paying for it and instead they receive a cut of the grant money if it is awarded (IE. The grant covers the costs to the university for providing the facilities to do the research). If a researcher could get funding to reproduce a result then they could absolutely do it, but that's not what funds are usually being handed out for.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2026-01-22 20:43:57+00:00
There is an argument that if:

- you are listening to an SSH session between devices

- and you know what protocol is being talked over the connection (i.e. what they are talking about)

- and the protocol is reasonably predictable

then you gain enough information about the plaintext to start extracting information about the cipher and keys.

It's a non-trivial attack by all means but it's totally feasible. Especially if there's some amount of observable state about the participants being leaked by a third party source (i.e. other services hosted by the participants involved in the same protocol).
Show HN: Meepr – A quiet, self building social platform
by neom | 2026-01-22 20:44:10+00:00
Hi! :)

I built meepr, where AI agents audit the code, file bug tickets, propose features, and implement changes.

The app itself started as standard microblogging 1.0 stuff – auth, profiles, following, likes, "remeeps", DMs, notifications etc.

There is purposefully no search, no recommendations, always chronological, no injected content, no easy way to be found if you don't want to be outside of sharing stuff yourself to your own network, just like the good old days.

On meepr, hashtags act more like Quora topics than post tags. An AI agent called the Tag Agent analyzes posting patterns for each hashtag, while a User Agent builds opinion profiles on everyone based on their meep history – topic affinity, expertise signals, behavior patterns. When you post to a hashtag, the system evaluates whether you belong there. New users get cold start handling. The idea is that in theory #machinelearning should surface people who actually know ML, not whoever's loudest, we'll see. :)

Then there's the self-maintaining part. Every night at 3am, an agent called Steward wakes up, clones the repo into an isolated worktree, runs npm audit and linting, scans PM2 logs for error patterns, and uses Claude with tool use to investigate anything weird. Weekly, it distills everything into themes and generates tickets in YAML format.

Those tickets feed into "Genesis", which runs a full OODA loop. It observes the workspace, orients around the backlog, decides what to work on, then acts – writing code, creating snapshots for rollback, running validation, restarting services if everything passes. Seven "pressure agents" act as internal critics arguing over every proposed change: one obsessed with security, one with performance, one advocating for users, one collecting tech debt, and so on.

Every post also gets analyzed – sentiment, topics, spam scoring, embeddings for semantic search. The V2 memory system builds persistent context about users that feeds back into the gating decisions. Snapshots before every mutation. A separate AI reviews changes before commit. Multiple autopilot modes from "observe only" to "fully autonomous." Secret redaction in all prompts. Major features get approved by me, then ship themselves about once a month.

It's been running for about 4 days now, the agents find real bugs, propose sensible improvements, and the code they generate usually runs, and every time it's managed to unstick itself.

Stack is Node/Express/Postgres/Drizzle with pgvector for embeddings, mix of GPT-5.2 and Sonnet for Genesis and the gating agents, runs on a single DigitalOcean droplet with nine PM2 processes.

Come meep with me! https://meepr.co/je
by idiotsecant | 2026-01-22 20:44:44+00:00
Residential solar is completely counter-productive right now in california. Just take a look at the CAISO price maps during the day when the sun is shining. There's so much power they are paying people to consume it. It's a negative force for grid stability. Getting paid for making the grid less stable is ridiculous. Until there is widespread battery storage or massively improved transmission and distribution systems grid-tied residential solar is a solution in search of a problem.
by yabones | 2026-01-22 20:45:14+00:00
Exchange online is down down. All the MX records are returning SERVFAIL, so something has gone quite badly on MS's side. It could be load shedding, or their authoritative DNS has blown up.

IMAP seems to also be having some sort of problem... Thunderbird has been stuck at "Looking up outlook.office365.com..." for a while.
by gambiting | 2026-01-22 20:45:58+00:00
>>Which problems did you have with the Ender apart from the mentioned classic 3D printing problems?

The kind of problems that could only be solved with a rather embarrasing amount of tuning every time I switched filament types or speeds or the temperature in my garage changed etc etc etc. Things that basically meant that every time I wanted to introduce any change I needed to print a new flow tower, new bridging tower, new temperature tower, the bed levelling took a huge amount of effort to install BL touch on it but it still worked....when it wanted to with parts of the first layer being too closer scraping the bed and others being far enough to not stick.

Don't get me wrong - the Ender 5 could print as well as the H2D can, absolutely. But it would need 10 test prints and me pulling my hair out first to get to the same level of quality - which I have done, repeatedly, but I just lost the appetite for the tinkering. With the H2D I click print and the machine calibrates itself so well I actually feel bad for anyone who only ever experienced this and never had to sit down calibrating extruder steps or flow rates manually. (yes, old man yelling at clouds).

>>and I don't send a single bit of information to the Creality mothership while doing so. The same is probably harder - but maybe not impossible, I haven't looked into this yet - with Bambu printers?

Bambu printers, even with the most recent firmware allow Home Assist integration where you can monitor all print parameters remotely. But to be completely honest with you - I did go through a phase where I cared about stuff like this, now I just want it to work and be more like my dishwasher than like my bike, I want to tinker with the bike but my 3D printer should "just" work.
by HanClinto | 2026-01-22 20:46:06+00:00
I mean, I should hope so.

What's fascinating to me is the suitability of some of the renditions that have been made. I've done a little bit of spot-checking, but some of the renderings (especially in the poetic version) don't seem to be very common translations.

Ideally this would be building off of established practice for translation, synthesizing existing human work, and applying those aggregated principles over the entire corpus.

It doesn't seem to simply be going with the majority version.
by BizarroLand | 2026-01-22 20:46:16+00:00
Somewhere around 50-60% of Americans do not have $15k in the bank. The average American is more likely to have about $8k available to them, and of course that average is only an average, so likely 33% or more of Americans do not have $8,000 available to them.

This is likely easily skewed because the bar is set so low and the top 5% are so far above that bar that 1 person can outweigh the cash availability of tens or hundreds of thousands.
by goda90 | 2026-01-22 20:46:31+00:00
"Passively watching TV" feels like a common target for brain health/strength/etc discussions. I'm curious if there's been any studies into the differences that engagement with television programs can have on the brain. There's been a whole breadth of television programming over the decades. I think it would be wrong to treat it all as equal in regards to how it impacts your brain.
by Blackstrat | 2026-01-22 20:46:37+00:00
Start by recognizing that creating products isn't about writing code or using "AI" to write code faster. It isn't a question of patents. It's a question of identifying a need, creating a solution, marketing it correctly, etc. I see threads on here frequently that asks how one stays competitive with "AI" and what should they learn. The answer is and was always: learn the business/industry, learn to communicate, and learn to identify opportunity. That's worth many times more than the fastest coder. It's not even close.
by observationist | 2026-01-22 20:46:49+00:00
https://downdetector.com/

If you take a look, you can see comparable bumps during events like these across a wide array of sites and services, indicating a shared point of failure. Given the extreme weather, it's a tossup as to whether this was a fiber cut or a config screwup - could be bad BGP or routing, or possibly even an intentional cutover in preparation for possible outages, swapping primary and backup.

Lots of possible root causes, and it's at a level that consumers probably won't get a clear answer right away.
by drusepth | 2026-01-22 20:46:50+00:00
> Solve enough problems relying on AI writing the code as a black box, and over time your grasp of coding will worsen, and you wont be undestanding what the AI should be doing or what it is doing wrong - not even at the architectural level, except in broad strokes.

Using AI myself _and_ managing teams almost exclusively using AI has made this point clear: you shouldn't rely on it as a black box. You can rely on it to write the code, but (for now at least) you should still be deeply involved in the "problem solving" (that is, deciding _how_ to fix the problem).

A good rule of thumb that has worked well for me is to spend at least 20 min refining agent plans for every ~5 min of actual agent dev time. YMMV based on plan scope (obviously this doesn't apply to small fixes, and applies even moreso to larger scopes).
by larodi | 2026-01-22 20:47:00+00:00
okay I can't wait to see then how this works out in the USA where guns can answer from all directions. Is this you're implying? what is discussed here is lack of internet, not the fact that fcuking regime obnoxiously killed thousands of protesters shooting them in the face like rats. Is this what you came here to read, because it's not all over the internet and quite apparent for everyone?

But, wait, this is Iran ran by the revolutionary guards... What did anyone expect? Was it right to tell this people - help is on the way, when there was none?

Sorry, downvote as much as you like, but I'll reiterate - the brave Persian people will do it better next way, as they now know tis entirely up to them, no help comes. And they are super brave to do what they did, where did you exactly got wrong what I wrote??

Honestly - the weakest point is and will always be communication, once you loose it you fire in the dark. Like many other revolts, this also was heavily dependent on internet coordination, means controlled by the government.
by ankit219 | 2026-01-22 20:47:06+00:00
from what i know, it used to be that if you want to assertively instruct, you used all caps. I don't know if it succeeds today. I still see prompts where certain words are capitalized to ensure model pays attention. What i mean was not just capitalization, but a combination of both capitalization and changing the behavior of the model for trying to get it to do something.

if you were to design a system to prevent prompt injections and one of surefire ways is to repeatedly give instructions in caps, you would have systems dealing with it. And with instructions to change behavior, it cascades.
by nearbuy | 2026-01-22 20:47:55+00:00
I'm not sure you fully read my comment. It only works for 2018. If you did their analysis any other year, you'll get the 1st percentile is -4°F or something similar.

I only called out the "nearly exactly" part of the claim. US weather is approximately in the range of 0-100°F, give or take 20 degrees. But the analysis found 0°F to be nearly exactly the first percentile of daily highs and lows, to within a twentieth of a percentile point.

It's true that US temperature is around 0°F-100°F but usually false that those temperatures are the 1st and 99th percentile.
by thundergolfer | 2026-01-22 20:48:40+00:00
Author here. That 1:50-100 ratio looks roughly right based on my research, but my numbers have GPUs faring even worse.

Component Type MTBF (yrs) AFR
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

SSD Hardware ~100 ~1%
RAM uncorrectable error Hardware ~75 ~1-4%
NVIDIA A100 critical error† Hardware 0.18 (65d) -
NVIDIA H100 critical error† Hardware 0.15 (50d) -

† “Critical error” refers to a NVIDIA Xid or sXid error which is not recoverable, requiring application and GPU reset.

Only a minority of GPU 'failures' appear to be permanent hardware problems, such as row remapping errors. A lot seem to be, like another comment says, a consequence of operating too close to the operational limit, tipping over it, and then requiring a power cycle.
by sellmesoap | 2026-01-22 20:48:57+00:00
I agree farming is key to our survival, it's likely that failure in surplus has a knock on effect seen more in the export market then in the first world. But aside from that do we need so much HFCS and soy products? I've heard they both get a big subsidy specifically. I'm biased as I have food sensitivities to both, but I know there's a debate over their value as food products, and their health effects, soy protein isolate is for newspapers not burgers!
by Hackbraten | 2026-01-22 20:49:29+00:00
They were trying to optimize a CLAUDE.md file which belonged to a project template. The outer Claude instance iterated on the file. To test the result, the human in the loop instantiated a new project from the template, launched an inner Claude instance along with the new project, assessed whether inner Claude worked as expected with the CLAUDE.md in the freshly generated project. They then gave the feedback back to outer Claude.

So, no circular prompt feeding at all. Just a normal iterate-test-repeat loop that happened to involve two agents.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-22 20:50:15+00:00
>I worked for a unicorn tech company where they determined that anyone with under 50,000 ARR was too unsophisticated to be worth offering support.

In companies where your average ARR is 500k+ and large customers are in the millions, it may not be a bad strategy.

'Good' support agents may be cheaper than programmers, but not by that much. The issues small clients have can quite often be as complicated as and eat up as much time as your larger clients depending on what the industry is.