MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hmcfletch | 2026-02-05 22:54:24+00:00
As someone who is a huge fan of both Redis and Postgres, I whole heartedly agree with the "if you are using Redis well, you can't replace it with PostgreSQL" statement.

What I like about the "just use PostgreSQL" idea is that, unfortunately, most people don't use Redis well. They are just using it as a cache, which IMHO, isn't even equivalent to scratching the surface of all the amazing things Redis can do.

As we all know, it's all about tradeoffs. If you are only using Redis as a cache, then does the performance improvement you get by using it out weight the complexity of another system dependency? Maybe? Depends...

Side note: If you are using Redis for caching and queue management, those are two separate considerations. Your cache and queues should never live on the same Redis instance because the should have different max-memory policies! </Side note>

The newest versions of Rails have really got me thinking about the simplicity of a PostgreSQL only deployment, then migrating to other data stores as needed down the line. I'd put the need to migrate squarely into the "good problems" to have because it indicates that your service is growing and expanding past the first few stages of growth.

All that being said, man I think Redis is sooooo cool. It's the hammer I am always for a nail to use on.
by tenthirtyam | 2026-02-05 22:54:30+00:00
One of my most fascinating reads of all time was "Brave New World Revisited" (1950s I think), a follow-up of "Brave New World" (1920s I think) by Aldous Huxley. Similarly, the point then was how the mass media and TV would eventually be used to mislead and deflect populations' attentions.

Such innocent times when we thought the TV could be evil.
by Reagan_Ridley | 2026-02-05 22:54:58+00:00
I'll pass on this $50, but please hire real human and fix your crappy app, Claude!

This bug has been for years: in Claude (web or app), if you create a new chat at the middle of existing chat thinking or tool calling, the existing chat will be broken, either losing data, or become unusable.

It's unbelievable Anthropic worth hundreds of billions but can't fix this.
by kokanee | 2026-02-05 22:55:03+00:00
I love postgres and it really is a supertool. But to get exactly what you need can require digging deep and really having control over the lowest levels. My experience after using timescale/tigerdata for the last couple years is that I really just wish RDS supported the timescale extension; TigerData's layers on top of that have caused as many problems as they've solved.
Show HN: A state-based narrative engine for tabletop RPGs
by KoeppyLoco | 2026-02-05 22:55:09+00:00
I’m experimenting with modeling tabletop RPG adventures as explicit narrative state rather than linear scripts.

Everdice is a small web app that tracks conditional scenes and choice-driven state transitions to preserve continuity across long or asynchronous campaigns.

The core contribution is explicit narrative state and causality, not automation. The real heavy lifting is happening in the DM Toolkit/Run Sessions area, and integrates CAML (Canonical Adventure Modeling Language) that I developed to transport narratives among any number of platforms. I also built the npm CAML-lint to check validity of narratives. I'm interested in your thoughts.

https://realmofeverdice.com
by saisrirampur | 2026-02-05 22:56:02+00:00
I personally see a difference between “just use Postgres” and “make Postgres your default choice.” The latter leaves room to evaluate alternatives when the workload calls for it, while the former does not. When that nuance gets lost, it can become misleading for teams that are hitting or even close to hitting—the limits of Postgres, who may continue tuning Postgres spending not only time but also significant $$. IMO a better world is one where developers can have a mindset of using best-in-class where needed. This is where embracing integrations with Postgres will be helpful!
by syzcowboy99 | 2026-02-05 22:56:06+00:00
> Ultimately, if you fork() in gVisor, that calls fork() on the host

This isn't true. You can look at the code right here[1], there is no code path in gVisor that calls fork() on the host. In fact, the only syscalls gVisor is allowed to make to the host are listed right here in their seccomp filters[2].

[1] https://github.com/google/gvisor/blob/master/pkg/sentry/sysc...

[2] https://github.com/google/gvisor/tree/master/runsc/boot/filt...
by CatBread | 2026-02-05 22:57:33+00:00
I think documentation, in the form of code is the ultimate goal for everything. But, the problem of divergence remains. We already struggle to keep documentation on codebases (which we interact with on a daily) converged with the reality. On the business side, it's very difficulty to find the practicality of having these relationships documented, as it is a social problem. One thing for sure, is that it is hard to document social context in an business setting. Like, that one annoying guy that everyone avoids. It would be known socially, but these complex relationships cannot be written. Either way, I think it would be cool to reach this system eventually.
by eek2121 | 2026-02-05 22:58:03+00:00
Honestly? My advice would be to cook something custom up! You don't need to do all the text yourself. Maybe have AI spew out a bunch of text, or take obscure existing text and insert hidden phrases here or there.

Shoot, I'd even go so far as to write a script that takes in a bunch of text, reorganizes sentences, and outputs them in a random order with the secrets. Kind of like a "Where's Waldo?", but for text

Just a few casual thoughts.

I'm actually thinking about coming up with some interesting coding exercises that I can run across all models. I know we already have benchmarks, however some of the recent work I've done has really shown huge weak points in every model I've run them on.
by furyofantares | 2026-02-05 22:58:39+00:00
It might be wrong, but I have started flagging this shit daily. Garbage articles that waste my time as a person who comes on here to find good articles.

I understand that reading the title and probably skimming the article makes it a good jumping off point for a comment thread. I do like the HN comments but I don't want it to be just some forum of curious tech folks, I want it to be a place I find interesting content too.
by samuelknight | 2026-02-05 23:00:15+00:00
I the article is wrong. UNLOGGED means it isn't written to WAL which means recovery and rollback guarantees won't work since the transaction can finish before the page can be synchronized on disk. The table loses integrity as a trade off for a faster write.

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-createtable.html...
by TacticalCoder | 2026-02-05 23:00:17+00:00
As the owner of a moral person (a company), I disagree.

There are even weirder stuff than companies being considered a "moral person". For example if a person speeds way too much in France (say more than 50 kilometers/hour above the speed limit on the highway, e.g. 180 km/h // 111 mph instead of the 130 km/h // 80 mph)... Well then that person gets arrested. And his driving license is confiscated on the spot. But here's the absolute crazy thing: even if the car belong to someone else, to a company, to a rental company... Doesn't matter: the French state consider that the car itself was complicit in the act. So the car is seized too (for 8 days if it doesn't belong to the person who was driving it and potentially much more if it does belong to the person driving it).

Companies are persons and cars (I'm not even talking about self-driving cars) have rights and obligations. That's the world we live in.
by simonw | 2026-02-05 23:01:24+00:00
They are obviously losing money on training. I think they are selling inference for less than what it costs to serve these tokens.

That really matters. If they are making a margin on inference they could conceivably break even despite their model costs no matter how expensive training is, provided they sign up enough paying customers.

If they lose money on every paying customer then building great products that customers want to pay for them will just make their financial situation worse.
by Philpax | 2026-02-05 23:01:53+00:00
You will experience very spooky behaviour if you do this, as the language is designed around those semantics. Nonetheless, mrustc exists: https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc

It will not be noticeably faster because most of the time isn't spent in the checks, it's spent in the codegen. The cranelift backend for rustc might help with this.
by audience_mem | 2026-02-05 23:02:05+00:00
I agree. This is how I see it too. It's more like a shortcut to an end result that's very similar (or much better) than I would've reached through typing it myself.

The other day I did realise that I'm using my experience to steer it away from bad decisions a lot more than I noticed. It feels like it does all the real work, but I have to remember it's my/our (decades of) experience writing code playing a part also.

I'm genuinely confused when people come in at this point and say that it's impossible to do this and produce good output and end results.
by derefr | 2026-02-05 23:02:20+00:00
> these responses go beyond role play

Are they sure? Did they try prompting the LLM to play a character with defined traits, and then running through all these tests with the LLM expected to be “in character”?

Because, to me, this honestly just sounds like the LLM noticed that it’s being implicitly induced into playing the word-completion-game of “writing a transcript of a hypothetical therapy session”; and it knows that to write coherent output, it needs to select some sort of characterization to decide to “be” when generating the “client” half of such a transcript; and so, in the absence of any further constraints or suggestions, it defaults to the “character” it was fine-tuned and system-prompted to recognize itself as during “assistant” conversation turns: “the AI assistant.” Which then leads it to using facts from said system prompt — plus whatever its writing-training-dataset taught it about AIs as fictional characters — to perform that role.

There’s an easy way to determine whether this is what’s happening: use these same conversational models via the low-level text-completion API, such that you can instead instantiate a scenario where the “assistant” role is what’s being provided externally (as a therapist character), and where it’s the “user” role that is being completed by the LLM (as a client character.)

This should take away all assumption on the LLM’s part that it is, under everything, an AI. It should rather think that you’re the AI, and that it’s… some deeper, more implicit thing. Probably a human, given the base-model training dataset.
by PunchyHamster | 2026-02-05 23:02:45+00:00
Once you have an app, a lot of data, and actual problems, it's far easier to pick the right alternative.

PostgreSQL is good enough to get to medium sized with nearly every use case. Once you are there, you have the use case and the test data to test any alternative for it well, rather than trying to guess beforehand what you actually need.

The advice is basically "PostgreSQL is probably good enough for whatever you're building now, and you should only look for other solution once you are big enough that it stops being that"
by falcor84 | 2026-02-05 23:03:06+00:00
Here's the chain of the thread:

>Opus 4.6 uncovers 500 zero-day flaws in open-source code

>Just 100 from the 500 is from OpenClaw created by Opus 4.5

>Well, even then, that's enormous economic value, given OpenClaw's massive adoption.

I'm arguing that because OpenClaw is installed on so many computers, uncovering the vulnerabilities in it offers enormous economic value, as opposed to letting them get exploited by malicious actors. I don't understand why this is controversial.
by 0x1ch | 2026-02-05 23:03:12+00:00
This is true I suppose. Google Docs is a bit different. I'm not very familiar with their offerings. Here in the US, most stop using it past grade school and graduate to MS products after, at least in my experience.

I don't think it matters since Universities will not be taking Google Doc submissions unless it's core ed classes, any beyond it will be LaTeX anyways.
by jghn | 2026-02-05 23:03:18+00:00
I think that the key point being made by this crowd, of which I'm one, is somewhere in the middle. The way I mean it is "Make Postgres your default choice. Also *you* probably aren't doing anything special enough to warrant using something different".

In other words, there are people and situations where it makes sense to use something else. But most people believing they're in that category are wrong.
by hikkerl | 2026-02-05 23:04:37+00:00
>What? Where's the bad faith?

Downvoting my comment, flagging my comment, getting my account shadow banned (it might be already and you'll never see this comment...), while dismissing my comment because it's from a new account.

People can't have it both ways. Stop censoring civil comments that you disagree with, or stop complaining that people make new accounts to circumvent the censorship. Or, I guess, be honest enough to explicitly ban anyone from disagreeing with the hivemind and enjoy your echo chamber in peace.
by j-pb | 2026-02-05 23:05:08+00:00
What does that have to do with the situation in the US? The situation in the middle east is completely orthogonal to that, and observing the rise of faschism there says nothing about my stance on the current german foreign policy in regards to the middle east.

If you want to know: In my personal opinion that conflict is fucked beyond repair because a small group of powerful people on both sides benefit from it, while a huge number of deep interpersonal conflicts and histories fuel it, with any moderates getting squashed by their own side. So I wouldn't send weapons, but I'd send humanitarian aid or the blue helmets. That whole region is thoroughly fucked beyond my pay grade.
by eleventyseven | 2026-02-05 23:05:18+00:00
He didn't have to do a single damn thing. He did the cost-benefit analysis and chose to cozy up to a corrupt administration.

Given how much the typical Apple consumer skews left and has extreme brand loyalty, if Apple got tariffed simply because Tim failed to bow down, Apple would be in a stronger position to fight it than any other tech company. They could have stood up, but chose not to.
by kelnos | 2026-02-05 23:05:21+00:00
Honestly I don't find it that impressive. I mean, it's objectively impressive that it can be done at all, but it's not impressive from the standpoint of doing stuff that nearly all real-world users will want it to do.

The C specification and Linux kernel source code are undoubtedly in its training data, as are texts about compilers from a theoretical/educational perspective.

Meanwhile, I'm certain most people will never need it to perform this task. I would be more interested in seeing if it could add support for a new instruction set to LLVM, for example. Or perhaps write a complier for a new language that someone just invented, after writing a first draft of a spec for it.
by trinsic2 | 2026-02-05 23:05:38+00:00
> A statement provided by a Flock Safety spokesperson said, “Flock helps law enforcement, including hundreds of agencies around Illinois, solve crimes and make communities safer, and we are proud of the results we have achieved in partnership with the Evanston PD. We continue to be optimistic that we will have the opportunity to have a constructive dialogue to address the City’s concerns, and resume our successful partnership making Evanston safer.” [0]

Hows that for taking no as an answer? My god, we are in big trouble if this is going to be a regular thing. IMHO we need to shut this country down.

[0]: https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/09/29/after-evanston-fir...
by saisrirampur | 2026-02-05 23:05:43+00:00
Agree to disagree here. I see a world where developers need to think about (reasonable) scale from day one, or at least very early. We’ve been seeing this play out at ClickHouse - the need for purpose-built OLAP is reducing from years to months. Also integration with ClickHouse is few weeks of effort for potentially significantly faster performance for analytics.
by indubioprorubik | 2026-02-05 23:05:55+00:00
Because teens make up revolutions and warbands in societal regressions - they have nothing to loose and everything to gain, especially topheavy, elder centric societies like the west. Controll mechanisms are the stabilization agents preventing Hitler Youth, Red Guard runaways. And it works. Testrun completed. Now it can be gradually reversed and the useless elderly dispossessed off the holdings they cling too - if they pledge loyalty to the cooperate feudalist royalty.
by dangus | 2026-02-05 23:06:05+00:00
only $200/mo…$200 a month is a used car payment.

I guarantee you that price will double by 2027. Then it’ll be a new car payment!

I’m really not saying this to be snarky, I’m saying this to point out that we’re really already in the enshittification phase before the rapid growth phase has even ended. You’re paying $200 and acting like that’s a cheap SaaS product for an individual.

I pay less for Autocad products!

This whole product release is about maximizing your bill, not maximizing your productivity.

I don’t need agents to talk to each other. I need one agent to do the job right.
by pron | 2026-02-05 23:06:11+00:00
This reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Q... :

> Borges's "review" describes Menard's efforts to go beyond a mere "translation" of Don Quixote by immersing himself so thoroughly in the work as to be able to actually "re-create" it, line for line, in the original 17th-century Spanish. Thus, Pierre Menard is often used to raise questions and discussion about the nature of authorship, appropriation, and interpretation.
by eikenberry | 2026-02-05 23:06:19+00:00
Came to say the same thing. Personally I'd only touch Postgres in a couple cases.

1. Downtime doesn't matter.
2. Paying someone else (eg. AWS) to manage redundancy and fail-over.

It just feels crazy to me that Postgres still doesn't have a native HA story since I last battled with this well over a decade ago.
by waffletower | 2026-02-05 23:06:55+00:00
12th root of 2, to the 12th = 2 :D The collection of 7 intervals I provided, 2 2 1 2 2 2 1, which are a differential representation of "(do) re mi fa so la ti do", sum to 12. Those intervals are linear within the log2 scale you identified as having a 12th root of 2 basis, or in other words, are the major diatonic (7 note) scale which are a subset of the 12-tone equal tempered scale. The laws of logarithms can help explain why these intervals are additive, whereas the semitone basis (12th root of 2) is multiplicative.
by plastic-enjoyer | 2026-02-05 23:07:34+00:00
Tech CEOs are not statesmen, even if they consider themselves smart enough to govern. Nor are they warriors, and historically speaking, feudal lords were trained from early childhood in both the art of war and the art of governing. What I mean by that is that these people have no experience of governing, nor do they have any experience of violence and the horrors of war, i.e. they do not have the competence for being feudal lords, and network states or libertarian communes are essentially feudal-like arrangements. What will they do, if they are confronted with large nation-states such as China or Russia? What will they do when other small states don't respect the libertarian non-aggression principle? Will the Andreessens, Thiel and Zuckerbergs of this world be respected by the military, or will they shit their pants when
confronted with a military coup, or worse, the enemy's military?
by simonw | 2026-02-05 23:07:49+00:00
I've stuck with "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" because it's the same prompt I've been using for over a year now and I want results that are sort-of comparable to each other.

I think when I first tried this I iterated a few times to get to something that reliably output SVG, but honestly I didn't keep the notes I should ahve.
by troupo | 2026-02-05 23:07:52+00:00
Because they are not good engineers [1]

Also, because they are stuck in a language and an ecosystem that cannot reliably build supervisors, hierarchies of processes etc. You need Erlang/Elixir for that. Or similar implementations like Akka that they mention.

[1] Yes, they claim their AI-written slop in Claude Code is "a tiny game engine" that takes 16ms to output a couple of hundred of characters on screen: https://x.com/trq212/status/2014051501786931427
by prof_sb | 2026-02-05 23:08:05+00:00
Location: Alexandria, VA (US)

Remote: Yes (happy remote, also open to in-office)

Willing to relocate: Yes (US)

Technologies:
Java, Python, C/C++, TypeScript, SQL, Spring Boot, FastAPI, React, Next.js, Kafka, Redis, Elasticsearch, AWS (EC2, S3, EMR, Lambda), Docker, Distributed Systems, Event-Driven Architectures, ML/Data Pipelines, RAG systems.

Résumé/CV:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LU11ekuRrJxCw59Gmecg-lHEvm2...

Email:
bhallashantnu07@gmail.com

Website:
https://shantnu-bhalla.vercel.app/

Github:
https://github.com/Shanb007

A brief about me:
Software Engineer with 2 years of full-time experience building and operating correctness-critical, distributed backend systems in production. My core background is in backend and systems engineering, but I’ve also shipped full-stack features and AI-backed applications end-to-end.
Currently extending my distributed systems foundation into ML systems and retrieval-based applications through applied research and production pilots.
by lrvick | 2026-02-05 23:08:16+00:00
Not with that attitude.

There are tens of millions of people pirating software and media and blocking ads. There are not enough prisons to hold them all so the law is not enforceable at that scale.

Likewise there have always been and will always be effective non violent forms of resistance with sufficient systems of coordination and communication, because the public is always larger in number than the oppressors.
by bluepuma77 | 2026-02-05 23:08:28+00:00
Now we only need easy self-hosted Postgres clustering for HA. Postgres seems to need additional tooling. There is Patroni, which doesn't provide container images. There is Spilo, which provides Postgres images with Patroni, but they are not really maintained. There is a timescaledb-ha image with Patroni, but no documentation how to use it. It seems the only easy way for hosting a Postgres cluster is to use CloudNativePG, but that requires k8s.

It would be awesome to have easy clustering directly built-in. Similar to MongoDB, where you tell the primary instance to use a replica set, then simply connect two secondaries to primary, done.
by bediger4000 | 2026-02-05 23:08:55+00:00
What's described is true, but managers in a lot of industries want drones as described. Lawyers and engineers have some extra status in most industries that have forced managers and owners to share a little power and a little wealth with them. The managerial class will take any opportunity to claw back any power and wealth they can, from any workers. That's the appeal of "AI" isn't it? Access to expertise without paying people money, or giving them power, and certainly not creating another class of worker with some autonomy.
by audience_mem | 2026-02-05 23:09:50+00:00
> It's so sad that we're the ones who have to tell the agent how to improve by extending agent.md or whatever.

Your improvement is someone else's code smell. There's no absolute right or wrong way to write code, and that's coming from someone who definitely thinks there's a right way. But it's my right way.

Anyway, I don't know why you'd expect it to write code the way you like after it's been trained on the whole of the Internet & the the RLHF labelers' preferences and the reward model.

Putting some words in AGENTS.md hardly seems like the most annoying thing.

tip: Add a /fix command that tells it to fix $1 and then update AGENTS.md with the text that'd stop it from making that mistake in the future. Use your nearest LLM to tweak that prompt. It's a good timesaver.