MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrkeen | 2026-01-31 16:40:25+00:00
I have no problem with ACID the concept. It's a great ideal to strive towards. I'm sure your favourite RDBMS does a fine job of it. If you send it a single SQL string, it will probably behave well no matter how many other callers are sending it SQL strings (as long as the statements are grouped appropriately with BEGIN/COMMIT).

I'm just pointing out two ways in which you can make your system non-ACID.

1) Leave it on the default isolation level (READ_COMMITTED):

You have ten accounts, which sum to $100. You know your code cannot create or destroy money, only move it around. If no other thread is currently moving money, you will always see it sum to $100. However, if another thread moves money (e.g. from account 9 to account 1) while your summation is in progress, you will undercount the money. Perfectly legal in READ_COMMITTED. You made a clean read of account 1, kept going, and by the time you reach account 9, you READ_ what the other thread _COMMITTED. Nothing dirty about it, you under-reported money for no other reason than your transactions being less-than-Isolated. You can then take that SUM and cleanly write it elsewhere. Not dirty, just wrong.

2) Use an ORM like LINQ. (Assume FULL ISOLATION - even though you probably don't have it)

If you were to withdraw money from the largest account, split it into two parts, and deposit it into two random accounts, you could do it ACID-compliantly with this SQL snippet:

SELECT @bigBalance = Max(Balance) FROM MyAccounts
SELECT @part1 = @bigBalance / 2;
SELECT @part2 = @bigBalance - @part1;
..
-- Only showing one of the deposits for brevity
UPDATE MyAccounts
SET Balance = Balance + @part1
WHERE Id IN (
SELECT TOP 1 Id
FROM MyAccounts
ORDER BY NewId()
);

Under a single thread it will preserve money. Under multiple threads it will preserve money (as long as BEGIN and COMMIT are included ofc.). Perfectly ACID. But who wants to write SQL? Here's a snippet from the equivalent C#/EF/LINQ program:

// Split the balance in two
var onePart = maxAccount.Balance / 2;
var otherPart = maxAccount.Balance - onePart;

// Move one half
maxAccount.Balance -= onePart;
recipient1.Balance += onePart;

// Move the other half
maxAccount.Balance -= otherPart;
recipient2.Balance += otherPart;

Now the RDBMS couldn't manage this transactionally even if it wanted to. By the final lines, 'otherPart' is no longer "half of the balance of the biggest account", it's a number like 1144 or 1845. The RDBMS thinks it's just writing a constant and can't connect it back to its READ site:

info: 1/31/2026 17:30:57.906 RelationalEventId.CommandExecuted[20101] (Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Database.Command)
Executed DbCommand (7ms) [Parameters=[@p1='a49f1b75-4510-4375-35f5-08de60e61cdd', @p0='1845'], CommandType='Text', CommandTimeout='30']
SET NOCOUNT ON;
UPDATE [MyAccounts] SET [Balance] = @p0
WHERE [Id] = @p1;
SELECT @@ROWCOUNT;
by ben_w | 2026-01-31 16:40:42+00:00
All of that is why I want Europe to take it seriously, even though I think they might be cooling off now that Trump has backed off.

We (both of my "we"s given I'm a British citizen but live in the EU) sent in tripwire forces to defend Greenland. Their purpose is that getting shot is a casus belli for us to go to war with the USA.

Also remember: NATO has two other nuclear powers besides the USA, and the biggest flaw with one of those nuclear arsenals is how when the UK test-fired the missiles it bought from the USA, they went the wrong way or didn't launch properly at all.

I don't know what the order of events would have been given how heavily tied together EU and US (and UK) economies are, but essentially the EU banning the purchase of new US treasuries by itself would cause something in the order of US inflation going to 10% for several years; this, plus any economic departure (I'm thinking emigration more than internment camps like Japanese-Americans in WW2, much worse if that) from all the European migrants on visas (and some or all of the naturalised ones, but that number will be less… unless Trump also strips that like he's been suggesting), the US could loose 2-5 million people's worth of useful economic labour from the workforce. (Even if they're put in work camps, they're not getting good work out of them).

In the other direction, if the US cuts off cloud computing today, the EU is almost immediately screwed. Hence article.

But if the EU's screwed, then we don't have the money to buy the US treasuries, so screwing us also screws the US. That 10% inflation I mentioned, that's just from not buying T-bills; screwing the EU like this would also mean no more trade with the EU, which basically doubles the US unemployment rate on top of that, budget deficit goes to $3T/year, and costs the US 5% GDP relative to the baseline (i.e. what it would have been without invading) forever. Without a shot fired. But France has enough nukes that even if the USA's anti-missile defences can stop 80% of them, it could by itself destroy every US state capital and still have several left over.

And if you're worried about Russia taking over Greenland, oh boy you should worry about what they do to a catastrophically weakened Europe that isn't just a hard-to-mine sheet of ice supporting a population that wouldn't even half-fill these seats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Narendra_Modi_Stadium_vie...
by tonfa | 2026-01-31 16:40:44+00:00
I don't even think it's about active vs. passive index funds.

Even if people were to do active bets on equity, what matters is the amount of money flowing in the asset class, so as long as there's an infinite stream of long investments into equity (due to 401k, etc.), the prices will rise.

You'd need people to actively balance their allocation between asset classes rather than stock X vs Y to counter those equity bubbles, but I don't think it's happening (and equity becomes too big to fail given the link with things like pension in the US).
by voakbasda | 2026-01-31 16:41:37+00:00
When I want to contribute to an open source project, I throw together some trivial but useful patches and see how the project responds.

Many projects behave this way, particularly those with corporate overlords. At best, it will take weeks to get a simple patch reviewed. By then, I have moved on, at least with my intention to send anything upstream. I commend the author for giving them a whole year, but I have found that is best a recipe for disappointment.

Maintainers: how you react to patches and PRs significantly influence whether or not you get skilled contributors. When I was maintaining such projects, I always tried to reply within 24 hours to new contributors.

It would be interesting to see how quickly the retention rate drops off as the time to review/accept patches goes up. I imagine it looks like an exponential drop off.
by twosdai | 2026-01-31 16:42:03+00:00
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by CuriouslyC | 2026-01-31 16:42:29+00:00
The routines Olympic champions follow are typically terrible for beginners. Michael Phelps's routine would destroy most swimmers, he has a ton of recovery assistance, he's got the bio mechanics 100% down so he doesn't accrue as much RSI, and he's just genetically gifted with a tolerance for a lot of exercise.

The same pattern holds at the elite levels of most things.
by ludoplan | 2026-01-31 16:42:34+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Ludoplan because I found most productivity apps lacked a real sense of progression. It’s a SaaS designed to gamify work goals without the clutter of traditional RPG habit trackers.

The Stack:

Next.js / Tailwind

Supabase (Auth & DB)

Cloudflare

Gemini API (for task breakdown logic)

I’m looking for feedback on the 'flow'—specifically if the gamification feels like a motivator or a distraction. I’ll be here to answer any technical questions about the implementation or the AI integration.

Thanks!
by tetha | 2026-01-31 16:42:57+00:00
When we designed the (by now largely self-hosted) stack for our production enviroment, we had that discussion. And honestly, on the persistence side, most people agreed that PostgreSQL, S3 and a file system for some special services is plenty. Maybe add some async queueing as well. Add some container scheduling, the usual TLS/Edge loadbalancing, some monitoring and you have a fairly narrow stack that can run a lot of applications with different purposes and customers..

We (10 people) run this + CI on just a VM + storage provider, mostly VSphere from our sister team of 6 (and yes it hurts, and we have no time to move it), Hetzner and some legacy things on AWS.

Though that's currently the problem -- there is a somewhat steep minimal invest of time into this. But that's good, because this means there could be value for European cloud providers to build up this narrow stack managed and get paid for it. We will see.
by bado | 2026-01-31 16:42:59+00:00
Yeah, when I created that repo, it was for me to store iterm themes that I found, and it took off and got ports to, well, pretty much every terminal . I didn't want to rename the repo since it's linked to in so many places. The main link people usually see is iterm2colorschemes.com but I do own terminalthemes.com and should probably just get around to pointing that one to the repo, too
by 0x_rs | 2026-01-31 16:42:59+00:00
It's a proprietary, closed-source application. It can do whatever it wants, and it doesn't even need to "backdoor" encryption when all it has to do is just forward everything matching some criteria to their servers (and by extension anyone they comply to). It's always one update away from dumping your entire chat history into a remote bucket, and it would still not be in contradiction with their promise of E2EE. Furthermore, it already has the functionality to send messages when reporting [0]. Facebook's Messenger also has worked that way for years. [1] There were also rumors the on-device scanning practice would be expanded to comply with surveillance proposals such as ChatControl a couple years ago. This doesn't mean it's spying on each and every message now, but it would have potential to do so and it would be feasible today more than ever before, hence the importance of software the average person can trust and isn't as easily subject to their government's tantrums about privacy.

0. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-facebook-undermines-p...

1. https://archive.is/fe6zY
by erickhill | 2026-01-31 16:43:15+00:00
When I was in the Air Force in the early 1990s, we still used KC-135 "flying gas stations" that had been built during the cold war in the 1950s. While expensive to maintain they were far less expensive to fix than buying new and starting from scratch. With regular full maintenance checks in the hangars (wash them, inspect them with dental picks and flashlights, replace broken parts, etc.) we kept those planes in service and mission ready for decades.

There was an entire supply chain of every single part ready to go, with technical manuals for every maintenance task you can imagine. If we couldn't fix something, it would go to the jet lab or machinists or whatever.

The system in place is mind bogglingly good.

/edited for a typo.
by gherkinnn | 2026-01-31 16:43:17+00:00
Allegations against a company who circumvented Android's security to track users?

I don't have any proof that Meta stores WhatsApp messages but I feel it in my bones that at the very least tried to do so. And if ever that comes to light, precisely nobody will be surprised.

https://cybersecuritynews.com/track-android-users-covertly/
by TheNewsIsHere | 2026-01-31 16:43:35+00:00
I’ve used iPhones exclusively as my daily driver phone for almost 20 years now.

It’s tempting to get a phone that GrapheneOS supports at my next refresh.

I generally like Apple’s technology. I like their high level stability - they don’t launch things as experiments in the same way other technology companies do. They seem to make a serious effort at only launching things they plan to keep around and refine. I think that’s the only user-friendly way to do it.

But I’m concerned about the post-Cook era particularly because in recent years the hardware has gotten better but the software has gotten worse. It is starting to feel like Apple is unable, unwilling, or incapable of focusing on two sides of the coin at once.

The software side is more data hungry than ever, no matter what they do with that data. They are seemingly desperate for services revenue on top of premium prices for devices. It was insane that any release, let alone how many releases, automatically enabled or re-enabled (after prior user disablement) Apple Intelligence. They finally stopped disrespecting asserted user choices but it took them awhile. That in particular really soured me. They had already learned that lesson (for some reason they had to learn that lesson period) with automatic OS update settings.

I’ve been working for a few years now on extricating myself from the connected services sides of both Microsoft and Apple so that it will be far easier to make the leap to GrapheneOS (or an analogue) when and if I decide to.
by austinthecoder | 2026-01-31 16:43:41+00:00
>> So every app broadcasts all its data to every other internal app?
>> Mandatory, irregardless of the data and the app?

Correct.

I added more context here for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46838143

Your thoughts align with mine very well. Thank you for that. I find it unreasonable to dismiss any technology outright. Requirements drive solutions, and if it's coincidence that we've landed on no APIs I could understand. But it' not a coincidence; it's a directed effort to disallow them.

Would love to hear your thoughts on my use case and proposal linked above.
by eudamoniac | 2026-01-31 16:43:46+00:00
Only 1.1% of workers earn the federal minimum wage. There are billboards in my state for grocery store stockers advertising $19/hour, and this is not a state with a higher minimum wage than federal. I think min wage concerns are generally wrong; the main problem is wage growth not tracking housing costs. Doubling or even tripling the minimum wage would overall do approximately nothing to the sentiment of economic despair.
by cosmicgadget | 2026-01-31 16:43:47+00:00
Well they wouldn't be breaking e2ee, they'd be breaking the implicit promise of e2ee. The chats are still inaccessible to intermediaries, they'd just be stored elsewhere. Like Apple and Microsoft do.

I am not familiar with the state of app RE. But between code obfuscators and the difficulty of distinguishing between 'normal' phone home data and user chats when doing static analysis... I'd say it's not out of the question.
by the_fall | 2026-01-31 16:43:57+00:00
Honestly, with all my love for the HN community, I think we have a couple of topics that just get upvoted without reading because they signal that you're in the ingroup. Few years back, another reliably upvoted thing was anything with "Bayesian" in the name. In the past couple of years, "busy beavers" would also get upvotes even though they have no practical use, their mathematical significance is dubious, and few people understand them in the first place.
by bayindirh | 2026-01-31 16:44:08+00:00
Well, they might work, but they are far from OK.

- An open source kernel module which talks with the card.
- A set of closed source GLX libraries for acceleration support.
- A signed and encrypted firmware which only works with this closed source driver package to enable the card.

Nouveau drivers are intentionally crippled with a special firmware which enables the card to show a desktop, with abysmal performance and feature set.

Nothing is OK about that.
by Closi | 2026-01-31 16:45:04+00:00
> Isn’t the more fundamental question why Europe has not been as successful as the US or China in building a native tech industry despite having a huge market? What are the barriers to creating startups and how can you lower them and preserve the enviable European social model? Solve that and you’ll solve the problem of a native cloud.

IMO here in the UK we are good at starting tech startups, we are just bad at not selling them to overseas investors early in their life, or having a tax framework that is advantageous to them growing in the UK.

In the UK see Google Deepmind, ARM, Deliveroo... Elevenlabs being incorporated in the USA, Dyson moving to singapore etc - Even outside of the tech space, Cadburys, Sainsbury's, Jaguar Land Rover... If the UK kept hold of everything that the UK created, we would be great!

Even our infrastructure we sell to the French, Chinese, Germans etc just for short-term gain, despite that we are cutting our nose off if we look forward 10 years.
by stego-tech | 2026-01-31 16:45:21+00:00
Finally, someone articulates the middle better than I have:

> Thus, the extreme proponents of manic “agentic” vibe coding,[19] and the outright denouncers of LLMs, are both missing the forest for the trees. That there is a pragmatic middle path, where people who have the experience, expertise, competence, and the ability to articulate can use these tools to get the outcomes they desire with the right sets of trade-offs.

LLMs are tools. They are not gods to replace man, nor are they exclusively means of harm. It is entirely possible to denounce the blatant attempt of rent extraction in the form of OpenAI, Google Gemini, Microsoft CoPilot, Anthropic, and others, while still running Qwen and Ministral and their like on local hardware. You can, in fact, have it “both ways”.

As fun as it is to poke at cloud services to see their new features and advancements, I (in IT terms) personally could never recommend them in any serious enterprise context for the very reason that they’re fundamentally insecure; you will never, ever have full E2EE with these services because it would nullify their ability to evolve, improve, monetize, and exploit.

That said? I can truly be a one dinosaur army in an enterprise now, as a generalist with a modest Mac Mini (or Studio) and a local LLM to fill in edge cases as needed. I can query these local tools for questions on database schemas or build a one-off API integration for me, so I can focus on the substance of work in safeguarding and accelerating the enterprise. I don’t need fleets of specialists unless I’m running a huge conglomerate or have specific needs - and even then, it’s going to be cheaper to retain one or two seniors to direct the larger army of generalists when needed. The landscape has changed, and it’s why I target leadership and management roles accordingly with my sales pitch (“One senior generalist can do the work of three mid-level specialists”).

Don’t get me wrong, I still have immense grievances regarding theft of work, reductions in force, rent extraction, and the seeming attempt at destroying local general compute, but local LLMs as a tool have been in my kit for years, and that’s not going away.
by bunderbunder | 2026-01-31 16:45:35+00:00
We know the answer to this because we’ve seen it. 20 years ago very very few podcasters were trying to monetize. The current ad infrastructure didn’t exist yet. Patreon didn’t exist yet. If people did anything they just had a PayPal donation link on the website.

It was smaller, but far from dead. More of a grassroots hobbyist phenomenon. Production quality was lower, but in some respects content quality was better because nerds nerding out without worrying about whether whatever they’re doing will attract enough listeners meant there was an incredible diversity of voices, perspectives and subject matter.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-01-31 16:46:16+00:00
This. We do't have bribery have made the bribery above the table to "legitimize" it and make the useful idiots and enablers simp for it. The "pure" act of lobbying is only the tip of the iceberg. There's all sorts of incestuous revolving door and distasteful but not illegal dealigns between government and the industries government favors.

If I had a nickle for every time I read a "if you don't like your tax dollars being spend on <obvious handout bullshit with negligible positive impact on anything> then you should go vote about it" or "if you do't like the govermet squashing <something> at the obvious behest of <entrenched interest> just vote harder" comment I'd be rich enough to buy an entire train worth of boxcars to put those comment's authors on.
by dudeinhawaii | 2026-01-31 16:47:21+00:00
I think you're underestimating the features used within Office. Offices isn't bloated because they wanted to add fluff. It's bloated because of the large number of customers that have differing but overlapping needs.

The Engineers: Word processor with basic features is fine

Management and Execs: Comments, Review, Multi-user editing, History, Tables, change tracking.

Marketing: Image placement and alignment, layers, embedding, templates, shapes

Research/Doc Writers: Table of contents, page numbering, cross-referencing, formula insertion, citations, figure tables, export to pdf

All customers (at some point): Layout, margins, padding, spellcheck

As engineers we tend to think "just deliver a simple word processor". For who?
by IAmGraydon | 2026-01-31 16:48:36+00:00
It's funny people still say this. The two are very much linked, as many millions of Americans have a large percentage of their net worth tied up in stocks via their 401Ks. Market tanks, net worth tanks, there's far less assets for people to borrow against, psychology changes, people stop spending, companies stop hiring, economy is now following the market.
by tzs | 2026-01-31 16:49:03+00:00
What about that counts as far left activism?

Nearly every Republican who was in Congress in 2014 would have described at least 3/4 of what Trump has done this term as illegal and totally unacceptable, and would have described at least half of the rest as incompetent.

Unless you can make a case that since 2014 the country has moved so far to the right that even 2014 Republicans are now "far left", about the only thing you can infer from someone bitching about Trump is that they are probably not far right. (Even that one is pretty iffy because he's pissed off a lot of the far right now too).
by paxys | 2026-01-31 16:49:24+00:00
The options for a company in their position are:

1. Sit out and buy the tech you need from competitors.

2. Spend to the tune of ~$100B+ in infra and talent, with no guarantee that the effort will be successful.

Meta picked option 2, but Apple has always had great success with 1 (search partnership with Google, hardware partnerships with Samsung etc.) so they are applying the same philosophy to AI as well. Their core competency is building consumer devices, and they are happy to outsource everything else.
by solenoid0937 | 2026-01-31 16:49:40+00:00
(1) made me chuckle. I've worked at nearly every FAANG including Meta. These companies aren't nearly as advanced or competent as you think.

I no longer work at Meta, but in my mind a more likely scenario than (1) is: a staff engineer proposes a 'Decryption at Scale' framework solely to secure their E7 promo, writes a 40-page Google Doc to farm 'direction' points for PSC. Ten PMs repost this on Workplace to celebrate the "alignment" so they can also include it in their PSCs.

The TL and PMs immediately abandon the project after ratings are locked because they already farmed the credit for it. The actual implementation gets assigned to an E4 bootcamp grad who is told by a non-technical EM to pivot 3 months in because it doesn't look like 'measurable impact' in a perf packet. The E4 gets fired to fill the layoff quota and everyone else sails off into the sunset.