MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ahachete | 2026-01-23 23:58:56+00:00
Postgres can really scale well vertically (and horizontally for read-only workloads) as the post shows.

However, I'm still surprised about the reasons for not sharding. They have been mentioned before, but I haven't seen a substantial rationale.

Sharding is almost only analyzed from the perspective of write scaling. But sharding may not only be about write scaling, but a path to reducing blast radius. And this is something that triggers much earlier than write scaling needs (especially given how well Postgres scales vertically and reads).

When you shard your database, you end up having N clusters (for HA purposes, each "shard" must be a primary-replica(s) cluster itself), each holding 1/Nth of the data.

There are certain scenarios which, while unlikely, may hit you: data corruption in the WAL replication stream, a problem during a major upgrade, a situation that requires a whole cluster restore from a backup, you name it. For those cases, the whole cluster may experience notable downtime.

If you have a single cluster, 100% of your users experience downtime. If you sharded into N clusters, only 1/Nth of your users experience downtime. For a company servicing 800M users the difference from both scenarios is dramatically different. Even for much much smaller companies.

I'm puzzled why this is not perceived as a risk, and if it is not, how it is mitigated.

While I wouldn't advocate to shard "too early", given that it comes with notable caveats, I believe more and more in sharding your workloads when possible more earlier than later. Way before truly needing it from a write scaling perspective. Because apart from reducing the blast radius, it applies implicitly the principle of "divide-and-conquer", and your problems become much more manageable (your number of connections per cluster decreases at will, backup restore times can be a fraction of the time, logical replication can be considered as a true option for replication/upgrades/etc if you keep shards relatively small and many other operational procedures are greatly simplified if now you have much smaller databases, even if you have many more of them).
by jumploops | 2026-01-24 00:00:01+00:00
Maybe it's changed, but this is certainly how it was back in November.

I would see my context window jump in size, after each user turn (i.e. from 70 to 85% remaining).

Built a tool to analyze the requests, and sure enough the reasoning tokens were removed from past responses (but only between user turns). Here are the two relevant PRs [0][1].

When trying to get to the bottom of it, someone from OAI reached out and said this was expected and a limitation of the Responses API (interesting sidenote: Codex uses the Responses API, but passes the full context with every request).

This is the relevant part of the docs[2]:

> In turn 2, any reasoning items from turn 1 are ignored and removed, since the model does not reuse reasoning items from previous turns.

[0]https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/5857

[1]https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/5986

[2]https://cookbook.openai.com/examples/responses_api/reasoning...
by scoofy | 2026-01-24 00:00:10+00:00
I mean, machine politics means that Congressmen who want to stay Congressmen fall in line.

The problem was never the system, the problem is always that the electorate actually wants this. The system is there to prevent a king from emerging if the people do not overwhelmingly want a king. Right now, we have a president and congress and judicial system in place that actually want this stuff.

Obviously this is all terrible, but the American left have spent nearly three generations putting all their faith in the judicial branch to just "take care of it" because passing legislation became "too hard" because they didn't want to get rid of the filibuster. Now those chickens are coming home to roost. We have a judiciary that is saying "we need legislation more than the assumption of rights" and the American left just isn't willing to actually force through legislation when they have power.
by spacechild1 | 2026-01-24 00:00:11+00:00
> They're good for exceptional situations where foundamental, core assumptions are broken for some reason.

No, that's what assertions or contracts are for.

Most exceptions are supposed to be handled. The alternative to exceptions in C++ are error codes and `std::expected::. They are used for errors that are expected to happen (even if they may be exceptional). You just shouldn't use exceptions for control flow. (I'm looking at you, Python :)
by darkteflon | 2026-01-24 00:00:14+00:00
Thanks for this suggestion! Good enough for Mitchell is good enough for me. I tried this yesterday and it’s working great - GPU acceleration enabled out of the box. I’ve got some reservations about NixOS from previous attempts to use it on bare metal - and from reading others’ experiences with the project and concerns about its governance on hn - but I can definitely see that running it in a VM is a much lower-stakes undertaking. Already started customising my configuration.nix and it’s going great. Top contender at this time. Thanks!
Show HN: Floating-point drift between Apple M1 and H100 is real
by luxiedge | 2026-01-24 00:02:33+00:00
I’m tired of people saying floating point drift is "unavoidable."

I run safety-critical math. "Close enough" doesn't cut it.

I ran the exact same workload on my local M1 and my H100. The numbers didn't match. Standard libraries (NumPy, PyTorch) drift because standard GPU schedulers fuse and reorder ops differently than CPUs.

I built my own engine (LuxiEdge) to fix it. Now I get bit-exact matches across both architectures. 0.00% drift.

Here is the repo and the reference hash. If you think your standard tools can do this, go ahead and try to match it. You can't.

https://github.com/RegularJoe-CEO/Art-of-Fugue
by kergonath | 2026-01-24 00:03:18+00:00
> Besides the point.

No, it is not. The previous post’s words were that "the English displayed massive control over their own fate". They did not. Their arses were saved by French battalions who resisted well beyond what was expected from them. I am happy for them. I am an Anglophile and they were, and still are, friends and allies. Allies lives are also worth the sacrifice. But then I think you at least owe the truth to your friends that gave their lives to save you. All the other efforts would have been utterly futile otherwise.

> Human agency shaped the fate of the nation.

But now you’re saying something completely different. Yes, human agency was at play, but not theirs. They were saved by actions outside their control. Not completely, because the boat evacuation in itself was an achievement, but still. They could do it in 10 days; they could not have done it in 2.

> The relevant point though is that the example doesn't make much sense in context of the belief that men are powerless to shape their fate.

Dunkirk is a terrible example for what you were trying to prove. So yes, the example does not make sense.
by slg | 2026-01-24 00:03:49+00:00
Remember when part of the argument to force a TikTok sale was protecting American's private data? Honestly, if I had to hand my personal data over to someone, I much rather give it to the nebulous "China" that people always fearmonger about than an American billionaire aligned with the current administration because the latter is much more likely to have avenues to use that data against me.
by Bender | 2026-01-24 00:03:57+00:00
Percona [1] mentioned in the article have commercially supported their fork of MySQL for quite some time. It's free to use but they offer support if required. It is used by many large companies and I know the DBA's have had great experience with it at two large companies I worked at. Percona have some really sharp people.

[1] - https://www.percona.com/mysql
by beAbU | 2026-01-24 00:05:25+00:00
Although I fully agree that the papercuts are sill numerous, allow me a counterpoint:

Recently I bought a cheap epson inktank printer/scanner, with built in wifi. Getting it working on my work Windows PC was a huge faff, struggling to find the right drivers and all that. The main installer for some asinine reason needed location permissions, which was disabled by MDM, so the default route did not work. Let's not even begin talking about getting scanning working...

On my Linux Mint personal laptop, the printer just appeared after I connected it to my network, and it worked perfectly. The built-in scanning app detected the scanner and allowed me to scan without any configs.

This is the first time for me where linux "just work"ed, and I was truly delighted.
by trhway | 2026-01-24 00:05:27+00:00
He3? The trips will be cheap. Moon will be extended weekend trips. $10/kg to LEO. I.e. $1M for 100ton ship - compact nuclear reactor, small living quarters, 70 tons ejection mass for ionic drive - that is possible today - gets you to Mars in a few months.

And in modern attention economy there is another extremely valuable resource to mine - attention of millions. At least initially the trips by IG/TikTok influencers (would be like Jack London posting TikToks as he goes instead of writing books later) will generate tremendous revenue paving the interplanetary ways for us, mere mortals.

>Gold is way too cheap (and much easier to get on earth, even if the current mines are exhausted)

With that logic Manilla Galeons wouldn't have happened :)

Edit: just looked up prices of iridium, rhodium - $6K-$10K/ounce. So just 10kg - $2M+ . Thus it looks like there is a lot of economic sense for asteroid mining once we get to cheaply launch into LEO 100+ ton items like nuclear powered ships.
by vict7 | 2026-01-24 00:06:46+00:00
There are 3 classes of e-bikes in the US, with class 3 topping out at 28mph—anything above that is illegal or in some weird legal grey area. You are thinking of e-motos which are an entirely different beast.

e-motos are a real problem; please don’t lump legitimate e-bikes in with those. It’s simply incorrect.
by darkteflon | 2026-01-24 00:07:42+00:00
I can definitely see this working for some people and have tried it in the past. Orbstack - which I’m running for Docker anyway - makes it trivial. However, without wanting to get off-topic, I’ve carefully considered my needs and I know what they are, and I think there are quite a lot of people in my situation. Enough to warrant asking for peoples’ thoughts.
by shykes | 2026-01-24 00:08:43+00:00
The trademark policy does.

In any case I meant it in an informal software engineering sense: it's bad form for a packager to distribute upstream software under its original name, with substantial modifications beyond what users would expect distro packagers to make - backporting, build rules, etc.

For such a downstream change to introduce security vulnerabilities is a major fuckup. To actively blame upstream for said vulnerability, while competing with them in the market, is unethical.
by keen919 | 2026-01-24 00:09:37+00:00
https://github.com/keenp919/rir-toolkit/releases/download/v2...

RIR isn’t a flag system ..it records the resolved outcomes (mode/runtime/entitlements), including source + reason, then promotes that to a contract that CI can enforce. The attestation proves the shipped artifact corresponds to that contract. It was born from a real drift bug: dev had ?builder=true, native didn’t .. same code, different behavior. RIR makes those differences explicit and enforceable.
by cptskippy | 2026-01-24 00:10:21+00:00
The over arching theme of your article is "tech is fun again because we're escaping the monoculture" but there's a strong unspoken signaling of "look at how cool I am". You're saying "my tech choices signal discernment." You've got this curated counterculture vibe of being off mainstream by being on different mainstream platforms.

The shifts taking place are all reminiscent of the shift from Windows to Apple that started in the late 90s. Back in the early 2000s we had Jony Ive channeling Deiter Rams and telling us how cool Helvetica was. And the "I'm a Mac" commercials beating us over the head with metaphor.

You talk about tech consolidation as something that emerged in the 2000s that killed the fun but consolidation has always been there. Technology is about making your life easier and consolidation is a part of that. When a product can reasonably be consolidated into another product, it often is. Look no further than Swiss Army Knives, the Leatherman, Telephone answering machines, boom boxes, or countless other technology chimera. Even your Meta Ray-Bans are a combination of the Humane AI Pin and sunglasses.

You wax poetically about the need for devices to feel personal, that's always been there. It still is but refinement often is about distilling something down to it's simplest possible form and that's where we're at with Smartphones. So the degree of customization is limited to cases and colors in much the same way as a Swiss Army Knife.

We haven't escaped the monoculture. Bambu Labs is the new 3d printer monoculture. Meta is the AR monoculture. Options like Linux have always been there, they just weren't cool. Gog for example is nearly as old as Steam.

What's changed is that we've slowly moved from running code on our devices to running in the cloud, which has made the choice of device or ecosystem less relevant. Linux is emerging as an option because Apple has grown to be more like Microsoft with age and they're both stuffing tracking and ads into every corner of their platform. They're no longer cool.

To me this article reads as soft elitism with a side of mid-life crisis.
by imiric | 2026-01-24 00:11:33+00:00
I would like to live in a world where open source (not just open weights) models dominate the landscape, but I don't see that happening.

The moat is not the quality of the models, but the compute. Any open model that consumers can run will pale in performance compared to SOTA commercially hosted models. There's just no comparison. The really big open models (e.g. DeepSeek, Kimi K2) are much closer, but they're not accessible to most consumers, who still have to rely on companies to provide them.

Maybe this will change one day, but considering how this industry is artificially inflating the cost of hardware, I wouldn't bet on that happening anytime soon. In the meantime, mega-corporations are building out increasingly larger datacenters to meet the demand, and the moat grows.
by ninninninnin | 2026-01-24 00:12:30+00:00
I think you are thinking this is all there is. There is more. Yes current tasks are automatable. But what about future tasks? When we don't need to write code what can we do with our brains instead?? What can we learn about biology/chemistry/physics/engineering that we don't know now.

The same thing happened in the industrial revolution... This might be different than that but freeing up resources from menial tasks means we can work at a higher level.

AI might be able to do that too, and there will be a period of adjustment, but we as a whole need to change a and move forward together. Not just tech bros. Government and industry will also need to change to help society... Else we will have collapse.
by Krssst | 2026-01-24 00:13:16+00:00
Considering Windows's history with user consent I would be worried about the keys eventually being uploaded without asking the user and without linking online accounts.

Probably not now but not something unimaginable in some future.

However, since Windows can still run on user-controlled hardware (non-secure boot or VMs), I guess this kind of behavior could be checked for by intercepting communications before TLS encryption.
Show HN: Booklife-MCP – MCP server unifying Libby, Hardcover, and your TBR
by andybrummer | 2026-01-24 00:13:24+00:00
I built an MCP server in Go that connects Libby (library ebooks/audiobooks), Hardcover (reading tracker), and Open Library (metadata) into one
conversational interface through Claude.

The problem: I use three separate platforms to manage my reading life. Libby for borrowing, Hardcover for tracking, and I had no single view
of what I want to read next. Switching between apps to check availability, update status, or decide what to read was friction I wanted to
eliminate.

booklife-mcp exposes 27 tools over MCP stdio that let you:

- Search your library catalog and place holds from a conversation
- Sync returned Libby loans as "read" in Hardcover automatically
- Maintain a unified TBR list across Hardcover want-to-read, Libby holds, Libby tags, and physical books
- Get content-based recommendations using enriched theme/mood metadata
- Check "what's the best way to read this?" (library availability vs. buy)

Technical notes:
- Go, single binary, SQLite for local cache
- Hardcover via GraphQL, Libby via reverse-engineered OverDrive API, Open Library REST
- Progressive disclosure pattern — tools return summaries first, drill down on request
- Also ships as a Claude Code plugin with skills/slash commands

GitHub: https://github.com/andylbrummer/booklife-mcp
Docs: https://andylbrummer.github.io/booklife-mcp/
by devnullbrain | 2026-01-24 00:13:45+00:00
I have the desktop app open right now. In the top-right corner is a nag saying 'Share your plan'. It's an ad for Proton Duo.

I just clicked 'Don't show again'. I get a toast saying you won't show me that offer again and it's immediately replaced with a nag saying 'Refer friends'. It has its own 'Don't show again'.

In August 2024 I sent Proton support an email with this text:

>I pay 95.88 € a year for Proton and every time I open the webapp or the desktop program, I see this:

>https://imgur.com/a/3kE6zJI

>Is there a tier of Proton that doesn't have ads?

The support reply told me I can remove the button by clicking on it, then "Don't show again". If I was frustrated enough to email you about it, I'm guessing I clicked it.

I have expressly opted out of ads for Proton Duo. You're interpreting this as me opting out of a single ad for Proton Duo. Changing the copy doesn't mean I have opted into comms about it. So I disagree you take this seriously.
Show HN: I built a dumb website using AI – Bets by Mitch
by mitch292 | 2026-01-24 00:14:57+00:00
I wanted to try out some products and tools like Lovable, Cursor, MCPs. So I built a dumb website to show how bad I am at sports gambling. Some thoughts in the linked blog. Site is here https://bets.bymitch.com/
Show HN: Dwm.tmux – a dwm-inspired window manager for tmux
by saysjonathan | 2026-01-24 00:15:20+00:00
Hey, HN! With all recent agentic workflows being primarily terminal- and tmux-based, I wanted to share a little project I created about decade ago.

I've continued to use this as my primary terminal "window manager" and wanted to share in case others might find it useful.

I would love to hear about other's terminal-based workflows and any other tools you may use with similar functionality.
by culi | 2026-01-24 00:15:55+00:00
In this thread I've seen

- https://altstack.jp for Japan

- https://worktree.ca/taffer/canadian-alternatives for Canada

- and ofc https://european-alternatives.eu/ for the EU

But I just wanted to point out that https://alternativeto.net/ recently (well, over a year ago) added a flag next to each suggestion so you can easily tell where its from. It's all crowd-sourced and I've both contributed to and greatly benefited from the project myself (especially for finding FLOSS alternatives to popular software). Here's an example

https://alternativeto.net/software/github/

I think the fact that it's crowd-sourced gives it a lot more staying power than a lot of these one-off projects that are presumably maintained by a single person or team.
by at1as | 2026-01-24 00:17:39+00:00
> first-world tech consumerism is out of control ... this is living in a silicon bubble. 90% of the planet just doesn't care, is not even aware of these "toys"

The US is not really among the countries that likes tech "toys". The number of things you can buy in BestBuy, for instance, doesn't compare to a trip to Shenzen, Tokyo, HK, etc. Those items are far more likely to be throwaway than the things listed in my article (most of which are high quality and I expect can last a decade).

> I think it's part of why the tech bros consistently over-estimate the relvance, pace and world-changing potential of technology like LLMs

I think the opposite is happening. A year ago it was sacrilege to state that an LLM would not lead to AGI. Today that's pretty uncontroversial to say that and most discussions center around 2nd order impacts of current capabilities on employment, education, etc.

> Technology does change the world eventually, but the latest pair of smart goggles or a slightly better camera on your personal surveillance device does not.

You can judge the product uncharitably, but I prefer to judge the outcome. Shared with my family many travel videos from my Rayban Metas. Provides a much more intimate perspective, like you're actually at the Swiss Alps, which just isn't a perspective you get from a smart phone. And this was not an upgrade, per se, it was me entering a new category that simply didn't exist before. My other cameras are not recent (Canon 6D - 12 years old, iPhone 12 - 5 years old).
by variaga | 2026-01-24 00:17:50+00:00
Big-endian matches the way we commonly write numbers, but if you have to deal with multiple word widths or greater than word-width math I find little-endian much more straightforward because LE has the invariant that bit value = 2^bit_index and byte value = 2^(8byte_index).

E.g. a 1 in bit 7 on a LE system always represnts 2^7 for 8/16/32/64/ whatever bit word widths.

This is emphatically not true in BE systems and as evidence I offer that IBM (natively BE), MIPS natively BE) and ARM (natively LE but with a BE mode) all have different mappings of bit and byte indices/lanes in larger word widths* while all LE systems assign the bit/byte lanes the same way.

Using the bit 7 example

- IBM 8-bit: bit 7 is in byte 0 and equal to 2^0

- IBM 16-bit: bit 7 is in byte o and equal to 2^8

- IBM 32-bit: bit 7 is in byte 0 and equal to 2^25

‐ MIPS 16-bit: bit 7 is in byte 1 and equal to 2^7

- MIPS 32-bit: bit 7 is in byte 3 and is equal to 2^7

- ARM 32-bit BE: bit 7 is in byte 0 and is equal to 2^31

Vs. every single LE system, regardless of word width

- bit N is in byte (N//8) and is equal to 2^N

(And of course none of these match how ethernet orders bits/bytes, but that's a different topic)
by ThinkBeat | 2026-01-24 00:18:15+00:00
I fully agree that this is disconcerting form a privacy standpoint,
and the danger it poses when Microsoft gets hacked.

As for it being user hostile.
I am pretty certain that thousands of users a year are delighted when something has gone wrong and they can recover their keys and data from the MS Cloud.

There should perhaps be a screen in a wizard,
Do you want your data encrypted?
y,n

If (yes)
Do you want to be able to recover your data if something bad happens?
(else it will be gone for ever, you can never ever access it again)
y/n
by jcalvinowens | 2026-01-24 00:18:15+00:00
You're conflating two orthogonal threat models here.

Threat model A: I want to be secure against a government agency in my country using the ordinary judicial process to order engineers employed in my country to make technical modifications to products I use in order to spy on me specifically. Predicated on the (untrue in my personal case) idea that my life will be endangered if the government obtains my data.

Threat model B: I want to be secure against all nation state actors in the world who might ever try to surreptitiously backdoor any open source project that has ever existed.

I'm talking about threat model A. You're describing threat model B, and I don't disagree with you that fighting that is more or less futile.

Many open source projects are controlled by people who do not live in the US and are not US citizens. Someone in the US is completely immune to threat model A when they use those open source projects and build them directly from the source.