MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jihadjihad | 2026-01-25 13:59:32+00:00
The section on multi-column indexes mirrors how I was taught and how I’ve generally handled such indexes in the past. But is it still true for more recent PG versions? I had an index and query similar to the third example, and IIRC PG was able to use an index, though I believe it was a bitmap index scan.

I am also unsure of the specific perf tradeoffs between index scan types, but when I saw that happen in the EXPLAIN plan it was enough for me to call into question what had been hardcoded wisdom in my mind for quite some time.
by ryanjshaw | 2026-01-25 14:00:04+00:00
Aside from what you said, the paper actually contradicts their claim.

In the domain alignment section:

> The coefficient for “in-domain” is 0.004(p < 0.01), suggesting that in-domain roles generally lead to better performance than out-domain roles.

Although the effect size is small, why would you not take advantage of it.
by arter45 | 2026-01-25 14:00:39+00:00
If we're talking about big science&technology categories, I'd say:

Controlled fire (if you can consider it a "man-made creation") -> essential for food and a lot of manufacturing

Wheel -> essential for transportation, but also to make flour (millstones), and a lot of other stuff (e.g. turbines are, basically, specialized wheels)

Controlled electricity and electromagnetism -> artificial light, modern communications, not to mention medical advancements like X-rays

Insulin and pecillin -> millions of lives saved

the printing press -> knowledge becomes easier to spread

If we extend this to all kinds of human "inventions", including law, philosophy, religion, and so on, the list is even longer.
by Aman_Kalwar | 2026-01-25 14:01:42+00:00
I built a local-first AI full-stack code generator that creates complete web and mobile apps from prompts.
Most AI app builders run everything in the cloud, are expensive, and often hallucinate or generate messy code that’s hard to edit. I wanted something cheaper, private, and more predictable.
So this tool:
runs locally in VS Code
saves all files directly on your machine (no remote servers)
generates frontend + backend + database together
produces editable, production-style code (not locked templates)
costs ~free for now per project using small/efficient models
focuses on reducing hallucinations with constrained generation + file-aware context
You can scaffold things like:
CRUD dashboards
SaaS apps
landing pages
REST APIs
full-stack MVPs
The goal isn’t “magic one-click apps”, but practical, reliable code you can actually maintain.
Still early, but already using it to ship internal tools and small client projects.
Would love feedback from other devs — especially on reliability and workflows.
by jodrellblank | 2026-01-25 14:02:27+00:00
Do you also wish you could only get telephone calls from people using American made handsets, and that your email client asked you before receiving emails from other email clients, and that you couldn’t get SMS’s from other smartphone manufacturers without opting in one at a time?

Being able to reject spam , regions, specific people, specific topics, all makes sense. Wanting to approve/reject the program used to make the connection is a pretty useless way to segment communications - how will you determine “questionable” clients, and what when there’s a person you want to chat with and a person you don’t both using the same client?
by Aman_Kalwar | 2026-01-25 14:02:28+00:00
Hi HN — I built this because most AI app builders frustrated me.
They’re usually cloud-only, expensive, and generate code that looks good in demos but breaks or hallucinates when you try to extend it. I wanted something I could actually use for real projects.
So I built a local-first full-stack generator that runs inside VS Code and writes files directly to your machine.
It can scaffold:
frontend (React/Next/etc)
backend APIs
database models
basic auth/CRUD flows
The focus is reliability over “magic”. I try to keep generation constrained and file-aware to reduce hallucinations and produce clean, editable code.
Cost is ~$0.5–$1 per project using small models, so it’s cheap enough to use daily.
Still early, but I’m already using it to ship internal tools and small client apps.
Would genuinely love feedback from other devs — especially where it breaks or feels unreliable.
by clickety_clack | 2026-01-25 14:03:05+00:00
I switched from Android to iPhone last year, and this just isn’t true. There’s so many tiny issues with android apps that just don’t exist on iPhone, because the android apps have to work on all these different devices. You don’t even have to look for the kinds of apps you’re talking about because things like Safari and Apple Podcasts work really well. I know people have a lot of complaints, but things on the iPhone really do “just work”.
by egeozcan | 2026-01-25 14:04:43+00:00
IMHO, you should deal with actual events, when not ideas, instead of people. No two people share the exact same values.

For example, you assume that guy trying to cut the line is a horrible person and a megalomaniac because you've seen this like a thousand times. He really may be that, or maybe he's having an extraordinarily stressful day, or maybe he's just not integrated with the values of your society ("cutting the line is bad, no matter what") or anything else BUT none of all that really helps you think clearly. You just get angry and maybe raise your voice when you're warning him, because "you know" he won't understand otherwise. So you left your values now too because you are busy fighting a stereotype.

IMHO, correct course of action is assuming good faith even with bad actions, and even with persistent bad actions, and thinking about the productive things you can do to change the outcome, or decide that you cannot do anything.

You can perhaps warn the guy, and then if he ignores you, you can even go to security or pick another hill to die on.

I'm not saying that I can do this myself. I fail a lot, especially when driving. It doesn't mean I'm not working on it.
by techjamie | 2026-01-25 14:04:56+00:00
My girlfriend used to be hooked on TikTok for political stuff until I started pointing out how much of it is comprised of half-truths if not straight up lies.

For example, one day she came over and showed me a short where this lady was warning women the Rs were starting their discrimination campaigns up, because Kentucky was looking to pass an amendment making women get certified doctor letters on if/the status of their pregnancy.

I called out how ridiculous that was pretty quickly and she told me this is 100% real and the lady in the video wasn't lying. I looked it up, and it was a real proposal[1]... Made several years earlier by a Democrat as a satire bill that was never under true consideration.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/fact-check/kentucky-democrat...
by kxbnb | 2026-01-25 14:05:20+00:00
Your framing of the problem resonates - treating the LLM as untrusted is the right starting point. The CAR spec sounds similar to what we're building at keypost.ai.

On canonicalization: we found that intercepting at the tool/API boundary (rather than parsing free-form output) sidesteps most aliasing issues. The MCP protocol helps here - structured tool calls are easier to normalize than arbitrary text.

On stateful intent: this is harder. We're experimenting with session-scoped budgets (max N reads before requiring elevated approval) rather than trying to detect "bad sequences" semantically. Explicit resource limits beat heuristics.

On latency: sub-10ms is achievable for policy checks if you keep rules declarative and avoid LLM-in-the-loop validation. YAML policies with pattern matching scale well.

Curious about your CAR spec - are you treating it as a normalization layer before policy evaluation, or as the policy language itself?
by vladvasiliu | 2026-01-25 14:05:40+00:00
I've seen things about this, but I'm not convinced there's enough value in going to great lengths to replace that particular piece of equipment.

In the case where the terminating equipment is a small box that exposes ethernet, with no routing or otherwise interfering the function of my own router, I think it's good enough. An argument could be made for the all-in-one devices, like saving some power.

I get the geek factor, and it's one of the reasons why I run my own router, but for this specific bit, which needs to be fairly well integrated with the ISP's network, combined with their usual abysmal support, I think it's a better bet to just leave it alone.
by kxbnb | 2026-01-25 14:05:43+00:00
Nice execution on the replay testing with semantic diff - that's a pain point that's hard to solve with just metrics.

One thing I've noticed building toran.sh (HTTP-level observability for agents): there's a gap between "what the agent decided to do" (your trace level) and "what actually went over the wire" (raw requests/responses). Especially with retries, timeouts, and provider failovers - the trace might show success but the HTTP layer tells a different story.

Do you capture the underlying HTTP calls, or is it primarily at the SDK/trace level? Asking because debugging often ends up needing both views.
by myself248 | 2026-01-25 14:05:44+00:00
Define "residential connection".

There is no such thing. A connection to the internet should be equal to any other connection to the internet, modulo BGP peering. Noone has a right to dictate what services I run or don't run, what protocols I speak or don't speak, what traffic I accept or deny, but *me*. That's the whole point of being on the internet rather than Prodigy or Compuserve or something.

The physical location of that connection is irrelevant. Maybe I feel my servers are safer in a datacenter. Maybe I feel they're safer in my basement. In my case, it is very much the latter, and again, you don't get to make that call. I do.
by 0x000xca0xfe | 2026-01-25 14:06:01+00:00
> We do not work in "trust me bro" territory when it comes to signing software, anymore. I am sorry/not-sorry to say. It is very important to have a chain of trust that goes up somewhere above "goldenarm @ HN".

If you so deeply believe in giving up user freedom and delegating control to authority maybe you are at the wrong place here, check the title of this website: "Hacker News"....
by kxbnb | 2026-01-25 14:06:07+00:00
The "output validation not just input validation" point is underrated. Most guardrails focus on what goes into the model, but the real risk is what comes out and gets executed.

We're working on similar problems at keypost.ai - policy enforcement at the tool-calling boundary for MCP pipelines. Different angle (we're more focused on access control and rate limits than hallucination detection per se) but same philosophy of deterministic enforcement.

Question: how do you handle the tension between semantic enforcement and false positives? In our experience, too-strict semantic rules block legitimate use cases, but too-loose lets things through. Any patterns that worked for calibrating that?
by bartread | 2026-01-25 14:06:21+00:00
I love stuff like this.

Often films and TV shows have anachronisms in them (like the very first episode, IIRC, of Narcos with the clearly very modern touchscreen photocopier where the screen has been covered with a piece of paper, or the BMW that wasn't released until the mid/late 1990s), but every so often you'll see something that is instead a flash of the future.

Due to #reasons I watched the sentry gun scene in Aliens for the first time in decades the other day. This scene only appears in the director's cut of the film. Anyway, bearing in mind it was released in 1986, imagine my utter shock when Hicks busts out a couple of laptops to monitor and manage the guns. The machines in question are a pair of GRiD Compasses, originally released in, I think, 1984. Imagine that: a laptop computer from 1984. They're not even that big and cumbersome.

Of course, the specs are laughable by today's standards but actually pretty decent for the period, and especially for portables. In terms of memory and raw CPU power they'd certainly have wiped the floor with the average home computer of the day, although graphics capabilities might have been non-existent, and sound would have been PC speaker at best.

So, yeah, Nedry with a tablet? I can buy that. His whole den/lair is like a toy box of the coolest hardware and software from the early 1990s. But for all the times I've seen the film, I've never spotted this before.
by avcloudy | 2026-01-25 14:06:56+00:00
Safari just got uBlock back!

iOS isn't particularly open source friendly, but mostly people don't do it because of personal incentives, not because it can't be done.

It's subjective, and I get that, but what you miss is that features are subjective too. Missing parity apps are only relevant when you care about that feature; at no point in my life have I ever thought my life would be better or more convenient if I could only torrent on my phone.

But having an app that is responsive and works well has made my life better. Standing outside a bar in the rain trying to get a stupid Covid app to work, not work well, just work, on Android has made my life worse.

(Ironically, I've kind of noticed this is part of the Unix ethos writ small: do one thing and do it well. It's not exact, and iOS for sure has tons of crud everything apps. And they sure don't work together! I just think it's amusing.)
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-01-25 14:07:15+00:00
> Apple has had better mobile hardware for years.

No Aux port, no usb. Slow phone with slow animations. But maybe this is fixed, its been 10 years.

>Apple has higher consumer trust.

lmao, this is just a user error problem. None have trust. If they trust, yikes. Thats a negative that Apple can brainwash people.

>Apple has better app selection (for most people).

Solid no here. Being able to install stuff from fdroid is amazing.

>Apple has been increasingly implementing the core features that differentiate Android devices

As long as you are okay with waiting 4 years. Sure.

You forgot to mention how poor iPhone security is. People have died due to Apple's poor security.
by crims0n | 2026-01-25 14:08:38+00:00
When I was a kid I always wondered why Dr. Sattler had to manually prime/charge the breaker before enabling it. Apparently it is because that model (and others like it) use a spring to quickly close the circuit. When she is priming it puts tension into the spring, and when she presses the button it quickly releases and completes the circuit. This is done to prevent arc flashes due to the high voltage and amperage, since the coiled spring snapping into place can complete the circuit much faster than any human pulling a lever could.
by dangus | 2026-01-25 14:08:48+00:00
Factually inaccurate, the Wikipedia page for free solo climbing has an entire section on prominent free solo climber deaths.

In my view this guy is pretty irresponsible especially for promoting a “sport” that is unnecessarily dangerous in the most preventable way imaginable.

A bunch of kids and stupid adults watched that live stream and a non-zero amount of them now think they can try the same thing without anywhere near as much training and skill.
by Leherenn | 2026-01-25 14:09:01+00:00
How did you align with other teams?

I agree it's best if working in isolation, but if you need to synchronise then estimations make sense.

If you need 3 months to implement something, and another team 1 week, and both need to be ready at the same time; then if you actually know those estimations the second team can wait until then and do something immediately useful in between.
by spwa4 | 2026-01-25 14:09:30+00:00
Well you should keep in mind that my cat matches Tesla when it comes to self-driving taxis. My cat runs 0 self-driving taxis. Tesla runs 0 self-driving taxis.

The problem with Waymo is simple: at the price they're doing it, it isn't worth doing. Waymo only works with real drivers ready to take over at the first sign of trouble, so it's at best level 3 self driving, definitely not level 4. This may compare favorably with Tesla's taxis who failed level 3 self-driving and proved to be unsafe at level 2, which really is failing level 2 if we're honest.

I mean, Musk SCREAMs in the news they're improving, but let's not forget this is the same Musk that promised level 5 self-driving by 2016 (2014 if you count ...). And if you can tell: yes, I'm still pissed about believing him enough to pay for that.
by UncleMeat | 2026-01-25 14:09:47+00:00
I would like to believe this, but I think we need new leadership in dem leadership to make this happen.

Trump staged a coup to invalidate an election and install himself as president. Dem leadership thought that slow rolling his prosecution was the right idea. I believe that there is serious risk that the dems just say "well, let's try to put all that behind us" if they win in 2026 and 2028.
by brightbeige | 2026-01-25 14:10:17+00:00
> Ikejime … is a method of killing fish that maintains the quality of its meat.

> It involves the insertion of a spike quickly and directly into the hindbrain, usually located slightly behind and above the eye, thereby causing immediate brain death. After spiking the brain, a thin needle or piece of wire is inserted into the spinal column's neural canal to prevent any further muscle movement.

I read about it in a recent New Yorker short article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/01/26/how-to-kill-a-...
by tomhow | 2026-01-25 14:10:42+00:00
The story you're talking about was on the front page mostly between about 1pm and 3pm U.K. time, then hovered around the bottom of the front page and dropped off as most of the U.S. came online. And you're talking about one article but asserting a trend or pattern.

Here are recent stories about U.S. politics with inflammatory titles that spent multiple hours (over 22, in one case) on the front page.

The Palantir app helping ICE raids in Minneapolis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46633378 - Jan 2026 (858 comments - 2 hours)

Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355548 - Dec 2025 (471 comments - 22 hours)

A Developer Accidentally Found CSAM in AI Data. Google Banned Him for It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46233067 - Dec 2025 (93 comments - 2 hours)

You can't refuse to be scanned by ICE's facial recognition app, DHS document say - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45780228 - Nov 2025 (509 comments - 7 hours)

Police Said They Surveilled Woman Who Had an Abortion for Her 'Safety.' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45505103 - Oct 2025 (163 comments - 3 hours)

We could debate what counts as "recent" or "inflammatory," but I don't think that would be productive.
by shortishly | 2026-01-25 14:11:06+00:00
You could use the proxy to spread topics over a number of brokers. The broker and proxy share a number of services and layers, that could be used to route:

https://blog.tansu.io/articles/route-layer-service

My itch for SQLite was smaller scale (and reproducible) environments, e.g., development, test/integration (with a single file to reset the environment). PostgreSQL was intended for "larger scale", with (database level) partitioning of Kafka records on each topic/partition, and replication for leader/follower setups, which might work better for HA. S3 for environments where latency is less of any issue (though with the SlateDB/S3 engine that might change).

S3: Not yet. I've been working through tuning each engine, S3 is next on the list.
by MrJohz | 2026-01-25 14:11:14+00:00
An HTML file is a set of instructions to execute. They're very high-level, declarative instructions for describing a UI, similar to how SQL is high-level declarative instructions for describing a set of data to be loaded, or how Prolog is a high-level declarative set of instructions for describing a set of logical axioms, but they're still instructions. You pass them to an execution engine, and on the basis of the instructions you've written, the engine does something. (See e.g. the section on fourth generation PLs in the second link you gave.)

More broadly, I think this discussion is a stupid one. There is no formal, mathematically precise definition of a programming language. There are formal definitions of lots of PL-related things, and for what a language is in general (a combination of syntax and semantics), but there's no formal definition of the term "programming language" that's useful here.

So if we're not arguing about a formal definition, then we're arguing about essentially our favourite dictionaries, and how we personally interpret our favourite dictionaries. And that's just not a useful argument at all, it's not even how dictionaries are meant to work! And yet whenever someone dares to write "HTML programming language" or something similar, there is always a comment from someone demanding that the author use their personal dictionary, and correct their changes. And it is deeply grating, because whenever I see this happen:

* The original statement is never ambiguous. I have never seen a situation where referring to HTML as a programming language has ever caused some sort of confusion.

* The discussion about whether HTML is a programming language is almost always completely irrelevant to the topic at hand, and bringing it up adds no value to the discussion.

* The author's definition is usually inconsistent anyway. Which isn't a problem — I don't imagine my mental definition of a programming language is entirely consistent either — but it's dumb watching someone try and correct other people without understanding their own definition enough to be able to respond to clarifying questions.

In your original comment, you said "it's not really a debate", and that's completely correct. It's not a debate because there's no right answer. There's not even any value to a right answer. The matter is entirely a question of terminology. And if different choices of terminology make things unclear, then it might be worth clarifying that terminology, but here I don't think the author could have been any clearer at all about what they were trying to communicate.
by B1FIDO | 2026-01-25 14:11:14+00:00
A funny thing about the "stages of grief" is that they are a total myth and the originator of the hypothesis never intended them to be abused this way.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross did her research solely on people who were dying: people with terminal illnesses, and she studied how they coped with facing their own mortality. Not how other people did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_K%C3%BCbler-Ross

And of course, even for a dying person, this may be total bunk. It is not like some programmed flowchart that people go through five stages of emotional stuff. This is just, like, a framework for further therapy.

I'm actually studying this stuff right now. In the 1980s and 1990s, "The Five Stages of Grief" were basically a household phrase, and everybody talked about them like they were real and true and invariable. But everyone doing the talking had never actually studied the research or even knew who proposed it. They were just parroting headlines.
by lmeyerov | 2026-01-25 14:12:07+00:00
Fun!

I was curious given the cloud discussion - a quick search suggests default AWS SSD bandwidth is 250 MB/s, and you can pay more for 1 GB/s. Similar for s3, one http connection is < 100 MB/s, and you can pay for more parallel connections. So the hot binary quantized search index is doing a lot of work to minimize these both for the initial hot queries and pruning later fetches. Very cool!
by micw | 2026-01-25 14:12:17+00:00
Fun fact: Deutsche Telekom just started their ad campaign "being better in the best network" (https://www.telekom.com/de/medien/medieninformationen/detail...). While they have the worst network of all, especially when it comes to peering (30% of the internet is just slow over Telekom but fast over Telekom + any VPN).