MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TheBengaluruGuy | 2026-02-06 12:35:45+00:00
We built an AI agent for SRE/production operations (DrDroid) and found that standard RAG/embedding-based retrieval didn't work well for engineering contexts — keywords and jargons have no semantic meaning, and a single character difference (e.g. us-east-1 vs us-east-2) can mean completely unrelated things.

This writeup explains how we designed Dynamic Memory Retrieval (DMR) — a multi-layered agentic search system over 80+ integrations (Grafana, Datadog, K8s, AWS, etc.) that indexes 200+ record types and enables the agent to iteratively discover and extract relevant context during production investigations.

Key takeaways: why keyword search outperformed embeddings for our domain, how we structure short-term vs long-term memory, and what it takes to make an agent reliably navigate a company's entire production stack.
by modo_mario | 2026-02-06 12:35:52+00:00
>and a distraction from class consciousness

As a non american looking in I feel like that applies to the other side as well and is how you ended up here.

Having paid a bit of attention during the election seeing bernie and trump at least in terms of rethoric more in line with eachother on the same trade agreements, migration, etc whilst also both outperforming Hillary in the same swing states, etc is not some coincidence.

And given that you live in a 2 party state it's always going to swing at some point eventually. No matter how depraved someone like trump is.
If the next one is just as bad and they sit it out long enough they will get their turn.
by cornholio | 2026-02-06 12:36:00+00:00
The review seems completely consumed by professional bitterness to the point where Asimov sounds like an idiot. By the 1980s the methods of KGB, Stasi, Securitate etc. were well known in the west; how can he put this on paper and not realize he was being a complete fool:

> [the governmnet in 1984] has a system of volunteer spies in which children report on their parents, and neighbours on each other. This cannot possibly work well since eventually everyone reports everyone else and it all has to be
abandoned.

In fact, the human powered system of total state surveillance worked remarkably well, it was one of the few things that did work in most communist countries - because it was paramount for state security and enormous resources were dedicated to it.

In every factory team, every block of flats, every friend circle there was an informer who wrote down weekly reports about who is making political jokes, who is listening to Radio Free Europe, who is planning to flee abroad or has access to contraband meat and razor blades and so on. These informers were themselves controlled by blackmail and fear, were fanatical supporters or were simply doing the work in exchange for favors or goods. Any individual harboring intentions to overthrow the system was thus isolated, he knew that any such talk would quickly get him sidelined from his job, evicted from his flat, sometimes declared mentally unstable and committed, and finally, if nothing else worked, disappeared.

The entire review reads like a desperate attempt to soil Orwell's legacy, that was already, by that time, shaping to be far more significant than Asimov's own.
by lapcat | 2026-02-06 12:36:01+00:00
I wrote an erroneous comment in haste, which I regret. However, this kind of thing happens countless times every day on HN. It's not unusual. Except perhaps the regret part: unlike me, many of those other commenters admit no error and express no regret.

If you truly cared about HN etiquette as much as you claim, you wouldn't post haughty hyperbole such as "Consider this: just stop being reckless" and "The person you're responding to has a habit of posting implausible-but-plausibly-plausible nonsense," which go against the HN guidelines, as you may already know. Be honest: do you actually care about the thread? Why would you care, when you ridiculed my top-level comment? Who are you trying to save the thread for, posterity? Nobody cares. The thread had already been downvoted to the bottom of the submission, and the top-level comment was misinformation, so I removed it, because no more people needed to read the misinformation or respond to it. Nothing of value was lost, and I thought my action was prudent, but in any case, the term "reckless" makes a mountain out of a molehill.

My impression is that you made a bigger deal out of this than is warranted because you appear to have some kind of strange, unexplained, preexisting grudge against me and take any minor fault as an excuse to bash me personally. I have no objection to correcting a falsehood, but please keep your personal feelings to yourself and the personal attacks out of the comments.
by Qem | 2026-02-06 12:36:03+00:00
> it's widely understood, and scientifically backed up afaik, that strength training is healthy and good for longevity. Yet, if you look at people whose everyday jobs look a lot like functional strength training, eg construction workers, my general impression is that their bodies (age 50+) are in worse condition than the average population...

When it's a work, you're expected to show up and do it consistently every day. So you can't afford alternate days to get adequate rest and recovery time. Your body is gradually wasted away by the job. When it's more of a leisure activity, you can afford just not to do it and rest, when you don't feel well, so the combination of workouts and recovery time can be net-positive, health-wise.
by keepamovin | 2026-02-06 12:36:28+00:00
I'm familiar with immigration in a few countries - in my experience, whatever the background of the country (Western, Eastern, Middle Eastern...) it's all "torturous".

If I was an acolyte of Freud or Jung I would say that this dichotomy between "easygration" and "immigration" (im is for impossible, right?) is because easygration is the result of sex and being born in a country (yes yes pedants, that's changing now and not universal, but swallow your pedantry presently and persist with this a moment), and the "STATE" in its everquest to control all aspects of human existence, necessarily seeks to control and intermediate sex and all its analogs (as sex is the intimacy of individuals it seeks to control, it must get between there, too). So if sex-migration (by being born) is easy (as some concessions must be made), then the corresponding path must be a gauntlet gated by the difficulty proportional to how much the state wants to intermediate the individual's intimate affairs. The hard path of immigration, is then a mirror of the control the state ultimately seeks to exercise over every aspect of existence, but which for now, it is constrained by the modesty and norms of its people to resist.

TL;DR - immigration is hard because states can't control yet sex and intimacy as much as they want, so they control the next best thing, that thing which is accepted to arise from the result of sex and intimacy - citizenship or right of abode by birth.

Also one can make the obvious metaphors with borders, porosity, and penetration. One might be inclined to say: the state must currently tolerate the annoying promiscuity of its individuals, so it, in spite and compensation, becomes ultrachaste in turn, wrt its own intimate borders.

But I am not an acolyte of Freud or Jung. Tho sometimes I think as above.
by hirsin | 2026-02-06 12:36:39+00:00
The observation that the colors were meant to be absorbed over time rather than explicitly set out reminds me of the old NYC Metro mosaics. https://www.untappedcities.com/secret-meaning-behind-colors-...

While no one would ever navigate by learning what the mosaics mean, it's a fantastic setup for the expected audience of commuters. Give it a month and your brain would associate a given color with your stop coming up soon, and make navigation easier.
Show HN: Commentblocks – Website QA tool with no client signup needed
by julian97 | 2026-02-06 12:37:01+00:00
Hey HN,
I'm a freelance web developer and got tired of the endless email chains during website QA. Clients would send screenshots with red circles, or worse, Word docs with "the button on the page with the thing." I'd spend more time decoding feedback than actually fixing stuff.
So I built Commentblocks. You add a script to your staging site, send clients a link, and they click anywhere on the page to leave a comment. That's it. No signup for them, no explaining how to use it.
Each comment captures the exact element, viewport size, browser, and URL. Comments show up in a dashboard or can go straight to Slack/Notion.
Built with vanilla JS for the widget (13kb), keeps sites fast. The whole thing is designed to have zero learning curve for non-technical clients.
I'd love feedback on the landing page, pricing, or the tool itself. Happy to answer any questions.
by jycnaw | 2026-02-06 12:38:57+00:00
Movies that come to mind that involve genetic building at this level are Gremlins 2, The Clone Wars, and some in the Alien franchise.

Yes, someone has attempted in the last to breed or alter for specific traits, we’ve cloned many kinds of life, and if there was extraterrestrial life here, someone probably mixed it with humans and animals.

But the pace of this is not going to increase anytime soon, if history is a judge. CRISPR was scaring people years ago when publicized, but those worries were unfounded and so shall these be. Life is much harder than coding apps.
by thinker5555 | 2026-02-06 12:39:05+00:00
I gave it a try and ran into a situation where the 8 of hearts was the open card at the bottom of a column, and I had a 7 of spades sitting alone in another column, and when I tried to move the 7 to the 8, it refused to let me do it. It's been forever since I've played Klondike, and I've never looked up the official rules, so I'm not sure if there's a rule I'm unaware of or if it's a bug.

In the same game, I just ran into another one where I turned over the six of diamonds from the stock pile, and when I tried to move it onto the 7 of spades, it also refused that move.
by astura | 2026-02-06 12:39:14+00:00
I don't understand the premise of this. The author goes on and on about how "Americans have no idea how weird and tortuous their immigration system is" but doesn't really give any evidence. I wonder if they ever have spoken to an American? They must have some extremely out of touch social circles.

Here in the real world, every American I know knows that the only way for "normal" (non-rich, non-connected, non-extraordinary) person to legally immigrate is to marry an American citizen and have them sponsor you. Literally everyone knows the average "illegal immigrant" living in the US isn't eligible for citizenship and couldn't obtain citizenship legally. Exactly zero people think that any (let alone most) "illegal immigrants" could have just "followed the rules" and been able to live here legally. The reason they are "illegal immigrants" is because there's no legal way, other than marrying an American.

A lot of people would prefer if even family sponsorships didn't exist. Many people think of that as "gaming the system" because they allow "average" people to be immigrants. I assume Republicans want to get rid of this.
by t43562 | 2026-02-06 12:39:45+00:00
Big upfront designs are obviously based on big upfront knowledge which nobody has.

When they turn out to be based on false assumptions of simplicity the fallout is that the whole thing can't go forward because of one of the details.

Evolutionary systems at least always work to some degree even if you can look after the fact and decide that there's a lot of redundancy. Ideally you would then refactor the most troublesome pieces.
by Aerbil313 | 2026-02-06 12:40:01+00:00
How do you run a crime organization that big and that out in the open (communicating openly via email, which not even the biggest drug cartels dare to do) without getting taken down by the various intelligence agencies of the world, even avoiding the U.S. federal law enforcement for the longest time?

There is one answer: Epstein was protected by state forces, not that of U.S. but of its closest "ally" (more like master at this point).

Not that they need it that much today, anyway. AIPAC sponsors almost all of U.S. congress, check out how much your congressmen and women received from AIPAC here: https://www.trackaipac.com/congress
by globalnode | 2026-02-06 12:40:01+00:00
Borrowing from mechanical/electrical etc. Limit the number of things you can build with. An example in the comments here was a gear. You make a new gear based on examples of gears that work. So whats the software equivalent of a gear? an axle, a bearing, etc.. Using OO or some ABI, you specify an object is a gear and behaves like a gear and magically you know how it does or doesnt fit together with other objects. I know this idea has been used before but im wondering if theres a well known software framework or library. We have things like the stl in cpp or built in libraries in python but im thinking of a higher level abstraction.
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-02-06 12:40:17+00:00
Sure. If you’re racing your runway to go from 0 to 100 users you’d reach for a different set of tools than if you’re contributing to postgres.

In other words I agree completely with you but these new tools open up new possibilities. We have historically not had super-shovels so we’ve had to shovel all the things no matter how giant or important they are.
by hnsdev | 2026-02-06 12:40:26+00:00
The difficulties of the US immigration system is one of the reasons that made me give up of the US. I (unfortunately) moved to the US when I was younger on a tourist visa and had an overstay. After realizing I didn't have many options to become a legal resident, I gave up. Too hard to navigate it. Nowadays I live in the Netherlands, with my second citizenship (from another EU country). A lot easier. It feels quite contradictory that a country that has its history tied to immigration has a worst immigration system than countries that historically are not so tied to immigration.
by stevekemp | 2026-02-06 12:40:42+00:00
Only oddity was the reference to the "router cache". I agree if your browser tried to lookup example.com the local cache would be used, but then it would be the system's configured DNS server - and that would most likely be an ISP, rather than your local router.

(Assuming a typical home connection, your router is _probably_ not a DNS server with local cache, it probably is a DHCP server which will hand out the upstream/ISPs' nameservers.)
by Der_Einzige | 2026-02-06 12:40:55+00:00
In a world where the best ran country on earth is a "enlighten despotism" AKA Singapore, Nope.

They think we just need more LKYs, or really, AI systems controlling everything. A benevolent dictatorial AI running society is exactly what all the futurists think is coming. Go read Orions Arm.
by cs_throwaway | 2026-02-06 12:41:08+00:00
It is counter-intuitive that the more accomplished you are, the more evidence you need to provide. The part about the child not getting a naturalization certificate even though they are naturalized is very weird -- that should be fixed administratively.

Anyway, I don't think the O-1 / EB-1A is the easiest setting. An even easier setting is to become a tenure-track professor at a reasonable university in a technical field, e.g., computer science. That gives you an H1-B without any drama. An EB-1B green card requires a lot of evidence, but maybe a few pages less than an EB-1A green card.

Finally, getting citizenship is trivial. It's the green card that is hard to get.
by zingar | 2026-02-06 12:41:17+00:00
I disagree with most of this article, but this part stood out:

> the size of the iterations matters, a whole lot. If they are tiny, it is because you are blindly stumbling forward. If you are not blindly stumbling forward, they should be longer, as it is more effective.

You are not blindly stumbling forward, you're moving from (working software + tiny change) to (working software including change). And repeat. If there's a problem, you learn about it immediately. To me that's the opposite of moving blindly.

> you really should stop and take stock after each iteration.

Who is not taking stock after every iteration? This is one of the fundamental principles of agile/lean/devops/XP/scrum. This one sentence drastically lowers my impression of the author's ability to comment on the subject.

> The faster people code, the more cleanup that is required. The longer you avoid cleaning it up, the worse it gets, on basically an exponential scale.

Unsafe tempo is as likely to happen in big-spec design projects as in small iterations. In fact, working in careful small iterations helps us manage a realistic tempo because we know we can't move faster than we can get things into production and evaluate.

The terrible outcomes listed in the same paragraph are linked to unwise practice and have nothing to do with small iteration size.
by rayiner | 2026-02-06 12:42:45+00:00
You want the number to be small enough where the cultural and social impact of immigrants is controlled. We don't want America to become more like India or Bangladesh or places like that, so we need to keep immigration low enough where the native culture overwhelms that of the immigrants.

According to a 2021 Cato survey--which is a pro-immigration outfit--the median response to "how many immigrants should be allowed each year" was 500,000: https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/styles/aside_3x/pu.... If we enforced that number long term, we'd probably end up with a foreign-born population under 5%, as we had in 1970. That seems like an appropriate number to foster cultural homogeneity and a high level of social cohesion.
by nullbyte808 | 2026-02-06 12:45:07+00:00
The text details the methodology for "Sidewinder," a DNA assembly approach that utilizes oligo-derived heteroduplex fragments, barcode sequences, and toehold-mediated ligation. The process relies on computational design (NUPACK), specific thermal cycling protocols, and rigorous sequencing validation to assemble and screen complex DNA constructs.

Fragment and Barcode Design

Sidewinder fragments are composed of DNA oligos. The design process relies on calculating the length of a construct and a barcode to determine the maximum bases of coding information.

Toeholds: Standardized to 10 bases. Ligation is effective at ≥±6 bases from the Sidewinder helix; 10 bases allow sufficient distance for ligase docking.

Barcodes: Designed to be compatible with toeholds using a "guess-check" method or NUPACK Python scripts. Barcodes are screened for secondary structure and crosstalk at 50°C.

Ligase Selection: Taq ligase and HiFi Taq ligase were selected for their stability at high temperatures and efficiency at the 3-way junction (3WJ).

Oligo Preparation and Annealing

Sourcing: Oligos were synthesized by Millipore-Sigma. Standard desalt purification was generally sufficient, though PAGE purification was used for specific characterization steps.

Heteroduplex Formation: Coding oligos (phosphorylated via T4PNK) and barcode oligos are annealed in a PCR tube. The mixture is heated to 98°C and ramped down to 25°C to form stable heteroduplexes.

Purification: Annealed heteroduplexes are purified via PAGE gel extraction.

Assembly Protocols

The authors describe two primary assembly conditions using HiFi Taq ligase with fragments at equimolar concentrations (~1 nM):

Cycling Protocol: Cycles between 85°C (1 min) and 50°C (2 min) for 100 cycles, followed by a 1-hour hold at 50°C.

Ramp Protocol (e.g., h-fibroin): Heats to 85°C, slowly cools to 50°C, and incubates overnight at 50°C.

These methods were benchmarked against conventional 2-way junction (2WJ) and Gibson assembly methods.
by matsemann | 2026-02-06 12:45:14+00:00
While I understand the sentiment, most ads for a long time were fairly reputable? Like in the news papers, most ads were to make you aware of a brand (next car I buy I'll feel safe buying X because I've seen it in the papers), or to notify you about a local store having a sale etc. And disabling my ad blocker and going to a page I see ads for house listings nearby, offers to buy sports gear in a store in my city, and ads for a well known telecom company. All things I would trust.

What I don't understand is why high-value brands sell their screen estate to straight up scams or low quality ads.
by sillyfluke | 2026-02-06 12:45:39+00:00
>It must be said that immigration laws pretty much anywhere are rigid, and enforced equally seriously, so it's not just a US-exclusive thing

I'm puzzled how you came to this conclusion since its left completely unsubstantiated in your comment. It's not "enforced equally seriously" in the US itself let alone another country. European citizens for one had no fear of being sent to a detention camp or deported speedily prior to the latest Trump adminstration.
by seabass-salmon | 2026-02-06 12:45:45+00:00
Long-term Nexus custodian here. Last year's licence rugpull by Sonatype had be thinking the same. I particularly loathe their new front page "malware" warning saying you have to contact them to find out what it is. Sure.

I've read the main readme so excuse if comments are covered already but key features and/or opportunities:
- backend supporting Azure (Nexus has this under Pro though community does support S3 under community at least)
- clear navigable S3 structure that could be sorted by a human if needed, like the on-disk backend of Nexus 2 used to have, not like Nexus' current organisation/obfuscation (which would be understandable but for...)
- maintenance routines that actually work (Nexus' are a joke and very limited features for both cleanup and the task set leaving ever growing detritus).
- having an automatically take the latest from upstreams is a big problem in the npm world; it would be a perfect fit to introduce this kind of staging concepts and window on upstream (proxied) repos
- needs restful APIs and deep links to artifacts for ease of integration
- we end up proxying other sources of files in a web proxy since there's no easy "pass through" via Nexus where we don't want to copy the current files into our DB or S3 but just want to pass the latest to the consumer. a direct proxy feature with URL remapping would be cool

Things I'd have to play around to understand what it does currently:
- whether it has proper proxy and group support; composition is completely essential
- whether that caching is sensible there (Nexus does a poor job, though it's a hard problem, when bad states get cached)
- efficient (Maven) metadata generation (Nexus is abysmally slow)
- whether rbac is clear over the repo structures (Nexus does ok here except everything is repo level AND the initial setup is very painful).
- P2 consumption looks to be a supported format but P2 hosting I think was nerfed after Nexus v2.11 and some clients still use that
- rpms added ("yum" to Nexus) but as with repo hierarchies would need to be assured they can be nested and will correctly produced merged repomd.xml and the like so they function properly

other comments:
- having the security scanning in an open source tool would be amazing
- it would be very hard to get clients to trust this without either a community and review process or a company (that "can be sued") behind it. I know it's very early days but it's a bit chicken and egg as if I can't use this on clients I wouldn't use for anything. Not that I am a valuable customer by myself, but I influence clients decisions who then need that support
by Bender | 2026-02-06 12:45:47+00:00
A pseudointellectual.

Very much so.

I watched it the other day. It starts off somewhat interesting and covers some financial discussions that I think he understands quite well but towards the end it resembles something closer to an Eric Weinstein interview about math theories he created. Jeffrey would not dare say when he does not understand something and that was when the interview was cut short.

All of that said I think it is still worthwhile for people to watch, at least the first half of it.