MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by remy_boutonnet | 2026-01-28 15:53:19+00:00
***Benchmark summary (TuringDB vs Neo4j)***

We benchmarked TuringDB against Neo4j using the Reactome biological knowledge graph, which is a real-world, highly connected dataset (millions of nodes/edges, deep traversal patterns).

- Both systems were run out of the box, cold start.

- No manual indexing, tuning, or query rewriting on either side.

- Same logical queries, same dataset.

- Benchmarks are reproducible via an open-source runner.

Multi-hop traversal from a small seed set (15 nodes):

- 1–4 hops: ~110×–130× faster

- 7 hops: ~300× faster

- 8 hops: ~200× faster

Example:

- Neo4j: ~98s for an 8-hop traversal

- TuringDB: ~0.48s for the same query

Label scans and label-constrained traversals:

- Simple label scan (`match (n:Drug)`): ~1200× faster

- Multi-label scan: up to ~4000× faster

More complex bidirectional traversals:

- Speedups range from ~6× to ~600× depending on query shape and result materialisation.

Why the difference exists:

The speedups are not from query tricks, but from architectural choices:

- *Column-oriented execution*: vectorized, SIMD-friendly scans instead of record-at-a-time execution.

- *Streaming traversal engine*: processes node/edge chunks in batches rather than pointer chasing one node at a time.

- *Immutable snapshots*: no read locks, no coordination overhead during deep analytical queries.

- *Graph-native storage*: traversal is the primary access path, not an emergent property of joins.

Neo4j’s record-oriented model performs reasonably for short traversals but degrades sharply on long paths and broad scans, especially on cold starts.

Scope and caveats:

- These benchmarks focus on *analytical read-heavy workloads*, not high-write OLTP scenarios.

- We’re not claiming universal superiority, different workloads want different systems.

- The full benchmark code and instructions are public and reproducible:

https://github.com/turing-db/turing-bench

This is not meant to replace transactional graph databases or general-purpose OLTP systems. It’s designed for large, read-heavy analytical graphs where latency, explainability, and control matter more than write throughput. The exact applications that blocked us when doing biomedical digital twins & large knowledge graphs.

Feedback always welcome.
by friendzis | 2026-01-28 15:53:21+00:00
> very stable due to rolling-release producing small changes

Can you elaborate on the chain of thought here? The small changes at high frequency means that something is nearly constantly in a <CHANGED> state, quite opposite from stable. Rolling release typically means that updates are not really snapshotted, therefore unless one does pull updates constantly they risk pulling a set of incompatible updates. Again, quite different from stable.
by order-matters | 2026-01-28 15:53:22+00:00
1 more perspective to add: while i did not know the NSA program was called prism, it did give me pause to find out in this thread. OpenAI surely knows what it was called, at least they should. So it begs the question of why.

If they claim in a private meeting with people at the NSA that they did it as a tribute to them and a bid for partnership, who would anyone here be to say they didnt? even if they didnt... which is only relevant because OpenAI processes an absolute shitton of data the NSA would be interested in
by colechristensen | 2026-01-28 15:53:30+00:00
Ok that's long, one top line thing people tend to miss in these flying explanations is that airfoil shape isn't about some special sauce generating lift. A flat plate generates any amount of lift you want just fine. Airfoil design is about the ratio of lift to drag most importantly and then several more complex effects but NOT just generating lift. (stall speed, performance near and above the speed of sound, laminar/turbulent flow in different situations, what you can fit inside the wing, etc)
by grayhatter | 2026-01-28 15:53:33+00:00
> Conspiracy? If that's a conspiracy then virtually any protest that involves any planning whatsoever could also be twisted into a conspiracy.

Yes, that's what a conspiracy is. In other news, the sky is blue.

Conspiracy, to conspire.

Conspire, to make plans, usually in secret.

The reason conspiracy is a more serious crime is because it's worse; it's one thing to go to a protest with a bunch of friends, and then decide in the heat of the moment, when everyone's emotions are raging, I don't wanna leave yet. It's completely different crime to decide before the protest starts, in a secret group with a bunch a friends. There's nothing they can do to make you leave. And when the cops show up, and when they say you have to leave you're gonna throw a frozen water bottle at them.

In this case, they planned to actively stop someone from receiving the medical care. Do you feel that's reasonable? Should I get to decide what medical care I think you should have? Only on days I'm free to go out and protest, obviously.

Somewhat related, after reading florkbork's post, I'm excited to hear your reply about if you think crushing someone's hand in the door counts as protesting?
by mc32 | 2026-01-28 15:53:40+00:00
What I'm talking about is orgs like the CDC, FCC, DMV, IRS, etc. They grow more than they re-org and cut the workforce, moreover, they seldom redefine positions to take on more responsibility at the staff level. Obviously they don't have the same outsourcing threat due to some limitations --which is good, but it's also true that public companies can outsource more readily. Goverment workers rarely get fired for under-performance outside of budget-induced cuts.
by talkingtab | 2026-01-28 15:53:53+00:00
AI is the poison pill for corporations. They cannot resist the idea that with no people to pay they will make even more profit. If you think about that, and understand that AI is about search, then you see that there will be enormous opportunity to build software that is built to help people not make profit.

Even if you don't really like programming, the takeover by Artificiality will mean that the value of Actuality will increase dramatically. So go for actual value in what you do.
by alexambarch | 2026-01-28 15:54:50+00:00
As an Ableton user myself, I’m pretty surprised that this musician could just… switch from Ableton to Bitwig. Goes to show how dire the situation was I guess.

I still have yet to hear any non-technical person I know encounter issues on Windows and seriously consider switching away. The learned helplessness instilled by Microsoft is very difficult to get people to shake off.
by publicdebates | 2026-01-28 15:54:51+00:00
How likely is a future where Microsoft

(a) gives us back 2000/XP/7/11 options for UI,

(b) gives us a desktop-first experience when we have keyboard/mouse plugged in,

(c) stops turning every OS feature into an ad, and makes it utilitarian again,

(d) and focuses 100% on making a stable OS and high quality dev/office apps?

It would be so nice if they just forked a commit from ~2005 and started from there.

(Maybe Copilot will mess up & erase commits so they have to? One can only dream.)
by Arnt | 2026-01-28 15:54:54+00:00
During WW1 the front moved rapidly from west of Ukraine's western end to east of its eastern. There's a fine map at the top of
https://www.britannica.com/event/Eastern-Front-World-War-I-h...

That trench warfare was a feature of one front of the war, a rather special case. It wasn't even unique to WW1.
by runarberg | 2026-01-28 15:55:12+00:00
When I first started using the internet, I was able to instant text message (IRC) random strangers, using a fake name, and lie about my age. My teacher had us send an email to our ex-classmate who had move to Australia, and she replied the next day, I was able to download the song I just heard on the radio and play it as many times as I wanted on my winamp.

These capabilities simply didn’t exist before the Internet. Apart for the email to Australia (which was possible with a fax machine; but much more expensive), LLMs don‘t give you any new capabilities. It just provides a way for you to do what you already can (and should) do with your brain, without using your brain. It is more like using replacing your social interaction with facebook, then it is to experience an instant message group chat for the first time.
by tgv | 2026-01-28 15:55:13+00:00
So it's too late, but if the trend continues, the US goverment may well ask Google, Meta, etc. for their data, and get a more detailed list of undesirables. From their data, you can infer ethnicity, age, country of origin, education, political affiliation, etc.

So, before it's too late, we, the people potentially enabling this data abuse, must think about consequences and morals.

Also: today they come for Latinos, tomorrow can be your turn.
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-01-28 15:55:54+00:00
But even tenacity is not enough. You also need an internal timer. "Wait a minute, this is taking too long, it shouldn't be this hard. Is my overall approach completely wrong?"

I'm not sure AIs have that. Humans do, or at least the good ones do. They don't quit on the problem, but they know when it's time to consider quitting on the approach.
by svara | 2026-01-28 15:56:05+00:00
Basically mirrors my experience.

Interestingly, when you point out this ...

> IDEs/agent swarms/fallability. Both the "no need for IDE anymore" hype and the "agent swarm" hype is imo too much for right now. The models definitely still make mistakes and if you have any code you actually care about I would watch them like a hawk, in a nice large IDE on the side.

... here on HN [0] you get a bunch of people telling you to get with the times, grandpa.

Really makes me wonder: Who are these people and why are they doing that?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46745039
by dmix | 2026-01-28 15:56:20+00:00
I've always said the root problem to most of America's problems has been in action by congress. Congress could have fixed the border long ago but they let each administration either ignore it, make it far worse by actually welcoming people to violate the law, or try to fix themselves without the proper tools.

There's also no doubt that "sanctuary cities" idea helped create this dangerous situation but I personally respect state/local rights and disagree with the Executive Branch simply forcing feds into their streets to subvert it. This 100% needs local/state police coordination. Immigration enforcement is far from an unpopular idea (it was in fact the most popular thing in the election), it just needs to be done right and across the board.
by orev | 2026-01-28 15:56:48+00:00
> my PC runs on Linux so I don't feel threatened.

Well, you should feel threatened. Where do you think the push towards TPM and secure boot is heading? Microsoft is insanely envious of how Apple and Google locked down their platforms and have total control over app stores, and that’s what Microsoft wants too. It’s a huge revenue stream they’re leaving on the table. Now that there’s precedent on mobile, they’ll have no problem pushing it through on desktop.

And once all the normies have moved to iPads, there won’t be a big enough market for anyone to manufacture PC hardware for hobbyists anymore.
by enum | 2026-01-28 15:56:51+00:00
This was vibe coded in a few hours with Codex 5.2 Medium. We now have examples of agent-written web browsers and Unix-y OSes (https://github.com/viralcode/vib-OS). I thought it would be interesting to try something a little more out of distribution. All done in a single Codex session -- transcript is part of the release.
by otherme123 | 2026-01-28 15:57:03+00:00
>Most people had never even heard of Linux.

My experience is that people fear linux, rather than not knowing. I am the lonely Linux user since c. 2005, and people see half my screen is always a console, the other half a browser. So they fear linux is for console wizards, not for regular users. Nothing will convince them otherwise, even when they are 100% of the time using online webapps. I have some coworkers using browser + VS code + WSL2 all the time, but they don't switch because they fear the console-to-config-everything instead of Control Panel.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-28 15:57:20+00:00
Not to downplay his efforts, but back in the 8 and 16 bit home computer days, kids were coding Z80, 6052, 8080, 68000 Assembly aged 10 - 12 years old onwards.

Having been one of those kids, I kind of expect a high schooler to be able to have such skills, when deeply interested into a specific subject.
by aix1 | 2026-01-28 15:57:24+00:00
I think we're talking past each other a little bit.

You're talking in the aggregate and making some good points.

I am talking about what concretely I am seeing on the ground. It's become a little too easy to churn out junk that looks plausible enough to pass the initial sniff test but that ultimately results in negative productivity. Someone has to go back and not only redo the initial work but also deal with all the knock-on effects. It's unclear to me that these effects are offset by productivity gains elsewhere. This can also results in highly problematic incentive structures: the initial launch ticks some box, whoever did it gets rewarded and then someone else is left to pick up the pieces. Higher overall cost to the orgnisation and worse experience for the customers than doing it well in the first place.

Not totally clear how to fix this other than by shifting towards longer-term incentive structures (which have their own drawbacks).

None of this is completely new, but has become 10X easier with the current generation of tooling.

This is in addition to my concern around what this is doing to our junior developers' skills.

Maybe the tooling will soon get good enough that nobody has to ever write any code except for enjoyment, but it's not clear to me that this is the current trajectory.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-28 15:57:43+00:00
> I know its a "meme" to talk about how great Arch is, but when you want the latest of something, Arch has it

I love my Arch installs to death, but I feel like I'm the oddball out about the mess that is AUR. The main repositories have a lot of things but I always end up getting pushed to AUR and then it just feels like I bolted on a hack rather than pacman/the arch base just supporting AUR more like a different package source normally.
by pipo234 | 2026-01-28 15:57:46+00:00
> However, if I were closer to the front end of my career, I'd certainly be looking to change, perhaps to technical writing.

It's tough for Juniors. I recommend specializing on one or two systems aspects, like performance, reliability, security. Understanding is design, how to measure the aspect, how to reason about it, knowing which levers to pull.
by techblueberry | 2026-01-28 15:58:04+00:00
I can’t find it now but there was a pretty good blog post on HN(it was marketing a product to solve this problem, but felt legit). That basically divided game development into four stages. Stage 1 is you can just one shot vibe code the boiler plate, stage 2 is you can like more specifically vibe code certain features, then I forget specifically, but like you have to have pretty deep subject matter expertise to handle the networking code.

(This was written by someone with game development experience I believe)
by nalekberov | 2026-01-28 15:58:24+00:00
Microsoft is its own worst enemy.

Microsoft had a chance make even better OS than XP and 7 and convince millions of users to use Windows.

Okay maybe with Office products the ocean was already red, but still, instead of disgusting its millions of users, they could make them happy.

I am not a firm believer that GNU/Linux distributions are a drop-in replacement for Windows. One can work around compatibility issues, but for non–tech-savvy people, it's just not feasible.

I switched to MacOS since the release of Windows 10 and never looked back, of course I did miss some apps, though using laggy windows was much more painful.
by butlike | 2026-01-28 15:58:30+00:00
We don't have the capacity to act "unanimal" at all. Deprive anyone of food or sincerely try and harm their children. You'll get the fall of Rome and French Revolution every time.

You eat, sleep, procreate, go to the grocery store (hunt). You honk at others they are preventing you from getting where you're going. You size up other males if you're male, females if you're female. Your favorite food is your favorite food and not mine because YOUR biology dictates that to you based on your experience. You consider ramifications as a self-preserving defense mechanism, not as some social cordiality.
by micimize | 2026-01-28 15:58:34+00:00
An obvious nice thing here compared to the cursor post is the human involvement gives some minimum threshold confidence that the writer of the post has actually verified the claims they've made :^) Illustrates how human comprehension is itself a valuable "artifact" we won't soon be able to write off.

My comment on the cursor post for context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46625491
by Hasz | 2026-01-28 15:58:35+00:00
Ever seen a default ubuntu splash screen/wallpaper on a train, coffee machine, airport terminal kiosk, bus, or other big piece of slow moving, appliance-y thing?

That is why Ubuntu Core (and similar) exist. More secure, better update strategy, lower net cost. I don't agree with the licensing or pricing model, but there are perfectly good technical reasons to use it.
by throw10920 | 2026-01-28 15:58:42+00:00
It takes about 30 seconds of thinking and/or searching the Internet to realize that people also predict doom when it actually happens - e.g. with people correctly predicting that TikTok will shorten people's attention spans.

It's then quite obvious that the fact that someone, somewhere, predicts a bad thing happening has ~zero bearing on whether it actually happens, and so the claim that "someone predicted doom in the past and it didn't happen then so someone predicting doom now is also wrong" is absurd. Calling that idea "intellectually lazy" is an insult to smart-but-lazy people. This is more like intellectually incapable.

The fact that people will unironically say such a thing in the face of not only widespread personal anecdotes from well-respected figures, but scientific evidence, is depressing. Maybe people who say these things are heavy LLM users?
by ryandrake | 2026-01-28 15:59:08+00:00
But relative wealth is all that matters, when it comes to lifestyle. If I have $100K net worth, and I'm living in a city where the first standard deviation net worth range is $80K to $120K, then I'm living a pretty average lifestyle, can afford my groceries and entertainment, and feel middle class.

If I have a $200K net worth, and I'm living in a city where the range is $1M to $500M, then I'm pretty much living in poverty, even though I have "more wealth" than in scenario 1.

This is also why, although my absolute wealth today is hundreds or thousands of times more than a king in the middle ages, I'm not actually living like a king today.

It's also how gentrification works. You're living somewhere and all of a sudden a bunch of very wealthy people move in, raising the prices of everything. You're no more or less wealthy than before, but everything has become slightly worse.
by chickensong | 2026-01-28 15:59:19+00:00
> AI keeps pushing it in a direction I didn't want

The AI definitely has preferences and attention issues, but there are ways to overcome them.

Defining code styles in a design doc, and setting up initial examples in key files goes a long way. Claude seems pretty happy to follow existing patterns under these conditions unless context is strained.

I have pretty good results using a structured workflow that runs a core loop of steps on each change, with a hook that injects instructions to keep attention focused.
by vladvasiliu | 2026-01-28 15:59:20+00:00
> People tend to generalize, but what they probably mean is "it's not reasonable for gaming for the games I play.

This. The corollary is also that people take the such quips way too literally.

I, personally, don't play that many games, and those that I do play tend to run faster on Linux (with an AMD GPU, which I bought specifically to avoid nvidia headaches).

But I still game on Windows. Why? Because I still have a Windows box, "because Linux is not reasonable for photo editing". I actually daily drive Linux, but I can't be assed to move from Lightroom and photoshop, so I still keep a windows pc under my desk. I just play games on it because it's much beefier than my 5 yo ryzen U laptop, and since I don't interact with that box all that much, I didn't feel like partitioning my smallish drive for no tangible benefit. My laptop is more than enough for all my other needs.
by quetzthecoatl | 2026-01-28 15:59:46+00:00
and it was an absolutely made up number. The real numbers would be so low it was insignificant. That number was only reported in global outlets, and that strike had zero practical impact in India. It was so uneventful, almost all of India except select pockets that has communist party influence didn't even know about the whole thing - let alone felt the impact of the strike.
by mitkebes | 2026-01-28 15:59:46+00:00
Basically all games work, except some multiplayer games with kernel anticheat. You can look up the status of games here:

https://www.protondb.com/

And specifically the state of multiplayer games with anticheat here (which is a much less favorable % of working games):

https://areweanticheatyet.com/

I personally wouldn't install any kernel anticheat on a computer that I intend to use for anything important, so I would personally refuse to install the incompatible games even if I was using windows.
by thinkingtoilet | 2026-01-28 15:59:49+00:00
95% on what? Income over a million dollars. Income over 10 million dollars? If you like living in a super liberal state and super liberal city like Boston, you're not going to move to Texas just because you're getting taxed higher. Rich people are still absurdly rich, I feel like that gets lost in these discussions. These taxes don't materially effect them in anyway but have massive benefits for society.
by NickC25 | 2026-01-28 15:59:53+00:00
You're not counting the money they paid to Adam Neumann to walk away, which was over a billion dollars as well.

Imagine doing what was effectively fraud, building a cult around you, everything going completely to the fan, and then the team you defrauded turns around and gives you a billion dollars.

And then, you get Marc Andreesen to write you a $350 million check not too long after.
by Levitating | 2026-01-28 15:59:53+00:00
> 1) very stable due to rolling-release producing small changes

Having very frequent updates to bleeding edge software versions, often requiring manual intervention is not "stable". An arch upgrade may, without warning, replace your config files and update software to versions incompatible with the previous.

That's fine if you're continuously maintaining the system, maybe even fun. But it's not stable. Other distributions are perfectly capable of updating themselves without ever requiring human intervention.

> 2) the skill barrier to getting a full system is “basic literacy, to read the wiki”

As well as requiring you to be comfortable with the the linux command line as well as have plenty of time. My mom has basic literacy, she can't install ArchLinux.

ArchLinux is great but it's not a beginner-friendly operating system in the same way that Fedora/LinuxMint/OpenSUSE/Pop!_OS/Ubuntu/ElementOS are.