MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by waynesonfire | 2026-02-05 16:21:56+00:00
What makes you think they can't "keep it going"? They're ceasing the publication, aka, the act of releasing it.

From the CIA Factbook History page it writes,

> It was first made available to the public in 1975 and in 1981 was renamed The World Factbook

Is it just being classified again? Who knows! That could be classified.
by sgarland | 2026-02-05 16:21:57+00:00
Note that they're running R630/R730s for storage. Those are 12-year old servers, and yet they say each one can do 20 Gbps (2.5 GBps) of random reads. In comparison, the same generation of hardware at AWS ({c,m,r}4) instance maxes out at 50% of that for EBS throughput on m4, and 70% on r4 - and that assumes carefully tuned block sizes.

Old hardware is _plenty_ powerful for a lot of tasks today.
Show HN: Hister – fast, content-based search for visited websites
by asciimoo | 2026-02-05 16:22:10+00:00
I'm working on a self-hosted search service called Hister with the goal to reduce my dependence on online search engines.

Hister is basically a full text indexer for websites which saves all the visited pages rendered by your browser. It provides a flexible web (and terminal) search interface & query language to explore previously visited content with ease or quickly fall back to traditional search engines.

I've been using it for more than a month now and as my local index is growing I can avoid opening google/duckduckgo more and more frequently.

The project is still heavily under development with constant fine-tuning, but the current version is in a fairly usable state in my opinion, so I wanted to share it here - perhaps some of you find it useful as well. (Or at least have some constructive criticism =])

The code is AGPLv3 licensed, available at https://github.com/asciimoo/hister
The beginning of a new era in Rust
by comstrx | 2026-02-05 16:23:14+00:00
To the Rust community, system architects, and everyone tired of boilerplate and fake complexity:

Listen closely. I have spent years in the shadows—building, testing, and tearing down—searching for "The Core." Today, the silence ends.

I am Core Master. And I am coming to shatter the status quo of the Rust world.

The Arsenal: One Unified Workspace, 30 Golden Crates
I’m not just bringing you libraries. I am releasing the world’s most powerful 30 crates. These aren’t just tools; they are a Full Life Cycle solution for any system you dream of building:

Web: Unmatched velocity.

CLI: Tools that think faster than you type.

Infra: Infrastructure as solid as steel.

Embedded: Efficiency down to the kernel.

My goal is singular: Absolute Power + Effortless Simplicity. I will make writing complex Rust code feel like a walk in the park, without sacrificing a single nanosecond of performance.

The Secret Weapon: Rust Gun
Crates alone are not enough. So, I built "Rust Gun." This is not just a project manager; this is the Orchestrator. A tool that puts the entire infrastructure logic in your hands with a single trigger.

The Technical Miracle: The Generative Engine
And here is the game-changer. Alongside Gun, I have developed a historic, one-of-a-kind engine.

Input: A simple, structured YAML prompt.

Output: World-Class, Production-Ready Code.

Clean & Idiomatic.

Examples Included.

Benchmarks Ready.

Fully Tested.

This isn't magic; this is the result of fusing Moltbot and Opencode with the most advanced AI models (Gemini Pro & ChatGPT-5). This code has been "forged," tested hundreds of times, and benchmarked against competitors until it surpassed them all.

Final Warning: The era of wasting time on setup and fighting configurations is over. The era of Core Master has begun.

Prepare your repos. I am coming.

#RustLang #SystemArchitecture #CoreMaster
by actondev | 2026-02-05 16:23:30+00:00
it's trivial to implement a REPL yourself, you "just" need to poll for stdin in your main loop and pass this to S7 for evaluation. I made a demo once upon a time live coding with DearImGui: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgHsl0u26MY

For the emacs side I used cmuscheme which is basically comint. Of course you don't get the same experience as in common lisp, but I found S7 to be pleasant to work with also in regards to reporting errors etc
Show HN: Open-source ClickHouse skills – SQL craft course for your agent
by alvarogar | 2026-02-05 16:23:48+00:00
Hey HN, I am Álvaro and I am working on ObsessionDB, a managed ClickHouse infra as a service. We run CH at about 100B rows scale and we spent the last few years learning what works and what doesn't at that scale.

These are open-source skills that teach Claude Code, Cursor, or any agent the ClickHouse patterns that matter.

The problem is that AI agents write syntactically correct ClickHouse SQL, but they don't know your query patterns. They'll suggest `ORDER BY (timestamp, user_id)` because that's what most examples online show. Any ClickHouse dev knows to put your filter column first, but the agent doesn't. Every conversation starts fresh.

I got tired of reviewing the same issues. The agent isn't stupid, it's just uninformed. So I wrote down what I'd tell a new engineer: ORDER BY column selection, why PREWHERE matters, when to use LowCardinality, partition strategies, materialized view gotchas.

Three skills so far:
- Schema Design - ORDER BY selection, partitioning, engine choice
- Query Optimization - PREWHERE, column selection, join strategies
- Materialized Views - Aggregation patterns, refresh timing

Each pattern has a priority (CRITICAL/HIGH/MEDIUM) so the agent knows what to check first.

npx skills add obsessiondb/clickhouse-skills

Curious what patterns I'm missing or what other devs have experienced. What ClickHouse lessons should your agent know?
by seg_lol | 2026-02-05 16:24:36+00:00
Your numbers don't line up, if you are spending 5k in cloud costs, and on prem is 1/3 of cloud. At 48 month replacement cycle, 1/3 of 5k * 48 months is 80k. So it is 80k vs 5k a month for 48 months.

I think the primary reason that people over fixate on the cloud is that they can't do math. So renting is a hedge.
by JoseOSAF | 2026-02-05 16:24:39+00:00
Fair point — and you're partially right.

The "44 days" outlier (Grov) appeared in our snapshots on 12 unique dates spread across 47 calendar days, not continuously. Our methodology measured time between first and last appearance in the top 50, which collapses resubmissions into one window. That's a real limitation we should have flagged.

The raw data: Grov first appeared Dec 8, then clusters on Dec 17-22, Dec 29, and Jan 16-24. Big gaps in between. It wasn't sitting on the front page for 44 days straight — it kept reappearing.

We're updating the study to add a "continuous visibility" metric alongside the existing one. The core finding still holds (99% of Show HNs are gone within days, and the median post gets a single 30-min window), but the outlier framing was misleading.

Appreciate the pushback.
by tracker1 | 2026-02-05 16:24:59+00:00
Yeah, I'd say that's the gist of it altogether... I get they want to monetize hosting/support etc.. but they should really try not to gatekeep what should be basic/public information.

I'd still probably put Collabra above Google Docs, but definitely a step below even MS Office Online, err 365, err CoPilot App or whatever the hell they're calling it now... (naming issues not withstanding). Though MS has been enshitifying the offline versions of office a lot, not to mention Outlook in particular.

Aside: Why MS hasn't done a version of "Microsoft Access Online" with a WASM port of VBA in order to lift/shift Access apps into a hosted environment that's backed by Azure SQL under the covers is kind of beyond me. I mean, it shouldn't take too much effort at this point with the level of tooling MS has been capable of.

Access was the distilled VB + Database apps kind of thing that a lot of SOHO really thrived on, and they could totally (re)capture that market with a bit of legacy uplift/support along with a newer model/design. Displacing the winforms models with webforms and a dedicated server/service system. 3 versions to start, a legacy/support, a bridge and a new model where it's TS/JS and monaco for editing instead of VBA/wasm/webforms in a browser/canvas. People are running older versions of Windows in wasm/x86 emulation... making that pretty and wrapping hosted access runtimes should be somewhat reasonable. Shouldn't it?
by rustyhancock | 2026-02-05 16:25:09+00:00
I think it's because LLMs are very good at tuning into the what the user wants the text to look like.

But if you're outside that and looking in the text usually screams AI. I see this all the time with job applications even those that think they "rewrote it all".

You are tempted to think the LLMs suggestion is acceptable far more than you would have produced it yourself.

It reminds me of the Red Dwarf episode Camille. It can't be all things to all people at the same time.
by scalemaxx | 2026-02-05 16:25:10+00:00
Everything comes circle. Back in my day, we just called it a "data center". Or on-premise. You know, before the cloud even existed. A 1990s VP of IT would look at this post and say, what's new? Better computing for sure. Better virtualization and administration software, definitely. Cooling and power and racks? More of the same.

The argument made 2 decades ago was that you shouldn't own the infrastructure (capital expense) and instead just account for the cost as operational expense (opex). The rationale was you exchange ownership for rent. Make your headache someone else's headache.

The ping pong between centralized vs decentralized, owned vs rented, will just keep going. It's never an either or, but when companies make it all-or-nothing then you have to really examine the specifics.
by ecshafer | 2026-02-05 16:25:34+00:00
This article has very little context. Here is the kind of comment he was receiving: https://www.threads.com/@thehawthornelibrary/post/DUE7PWnjIm...

So the "backlash" is people on threads complaining that he isn't morally pure enough because he invested in SpaceX. This is to be expected from the "everything is political" types of people that are prevalent on Threads (and BlueSky). Tom should just ignore them.
by amadeuspagel | 2026-02-05 16:26:13+00:00
Thanks. So this has modern "s" characters, rather then characters that look like an "f" with the horizontal bar missing, which is an improvement. Still, when an "s" or "c" is followed by a "t", there's this ligature connecting it. This kind of makes sense - the sounds are different after all - but it took me a while to figure out.
by superfluous_g | 2026-02-05 16:26:38+00:00
Hi - I'm a former strat comms guy turned AI strategist. I've spent the past two years laser focused on adoption at a FTSE 250. Despite getting some strong results, we had the CFO blow up everyone's budget in Dec, and consequently left as the best I could do for people going forward was Copilot.

I'm typically not on social media, so come back after a long time away to see an absolute tonne of inane drivel on LinkedIn and Twitter. One thing that's really stunned me is the complete lack of awareness when it comes to risk. As such, one of the things I'm trying is to highlight risk we're seeing at the cusp of this and explain it in ways that hopefully connect with the average interested person.

Picked on Musk making Grok into Skynet in this first piece. If you enjoy it, would greatly appreciate a like or a share. If you didn't, would appreciate your feedback so I can improve for the next one. I am aware it's longer than most of the crap I'm seeing online atm, but not a fan of this whole 'give it to me bitesized' culture that's emerged in recent years.

Thanks!
by nekocode | 2026-02-05 16:27:06+00:00
I built a CLI tool to manage git worktrees for AI coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor, and Aider.

The killer feature is "snap mode":
wt new -s claude

This creates a worktree, launches the agent inside it, and when done, prompts you to merge and cleanup. One command, full workflow.

Works with any agent that runs in a terminal. Written in Rust.

GitHub: https://github.com/nekocode/agent-worktree
by cfmcdonald | 2026-02-05 16:27:26+00:00
This video [0] shows someone using Gopher (and other common pre-web Internet tools) in the early 90s.

I used Gopher when I did a high school summer science camp at Indiana University in 1994. It was a really interesting time of transition when the graphical Web was just coming on-line with Mosaic, but most tools were still textual/command line (FTP, pine/elm email/Usenet clients, MUDs, etc.)

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDV4zrex18o
by utopiah | 2026-02-05 16:27:44+00:00
It's been about 6 years so I doubt it.

If they do though then I won't update and won't buy the next model. I can imagine them doing it for a new model for already sold one that'd be a first.

FWIW if you really want ownership and don't care much for weight the PineNote is probably the best our there, able to run Android (with root) but also Linux proper.
by rsynnott | 2026-02-05 16:28:14+00:00
6 years may be a _bit_ long, but I think it has probably been kept going longer than it otherwise would by the current AI bubble, after the EV bubble fizzled (while EVs are a real industry they no longer drive super-high valuations). The likes of AOL maintained very high PE ratios for some years during the dot-com bubble, as did Enron, say.

The big question is can Tesla find yet _another_ bubble to jump to after the AI one pops. Watch out for Musk starting to say the word 'quantum' a lot.
by szszrk | 2026-02-05 16:28:21+00:00
> I feel like skilled engineers have a hard time understanding the trade-offs from cloud companies.

They spend too much time on yet another cloud native support group call, learning for ThatOneCloudProvider certificates, figuring out that single implementation caveats, standardizing security procedures between cloud teams, and so on.

Yet people in the article just throw a 1000 lines of code KV store mkv [0] on a huge raw storage server and call it a day. And it's a legit choice, they did actual study beforehand and concluded: we don't need redundancy in most cases. At all. I respect that.

[0] https://github.com/geohot/minikeyvalue
by graphitout | 2026-02-05 16:28:34+00:00
The RAG was setup on a bunch of documents, most of them were manuals containing steps about measurements, troubleshooting, and replacing components of industrial machines.

The issue was that most of these steps were long (above 512 tokens). So the typical chunk window wouldn't capture the full steps. We added a tool calling capability by which LLM can request nearby chunks of a given chunk. This worked well in practice, but burned more $$.
by sho_hn | 2026-02-05 16:28:38+00:00
Thanks for teaching me about Bulverism, I hadn't heard of that fallacy before. I can see how my comment displays those characteristics and will probably try to avoid that pattern more in the future.

Honestly, I still think there's truth to what I wrote, and I don't think your counter-examples prove it wrong per-se. The prompt I responded to ("why are people taking this seriously") also led fairly naturally down the road of examining the reasons. That was of course my choice to do, but it's also just what interested me in the moment.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-05 16:29:31+00:00
> Makes me wonder whether we’re already setting up the next cycle 10 years from now, when everyone rediscovers why cloud was attractive in the first place and starts saying “on-prem is a bad idea” again.

My entire career I’ve encountered people passionately pushing for on-prem and railing against anything cloud. I can’t remember a time when Hacker News comments leaned pro-cloud because it’s always been about self-hosting.

The few times the on-prem people won out in my career never went exactly as they imagined. Buying a couple servers and setting them up at the colo is easy enough, but the slow and steady drag of maintaining your own infrastructure starts to work its way into every development cycle after that. In my experience, every team has significantly underestimated how all the little things add up to a drag on available time for other work.

The best case for on-prem that I saw was when a company was basically in maintenance mode. Engineers had a lot of extra time to optimize, update. maintain, and cost reduce without subtracting from feature development or bug fixes.

The worst cases for on-prem I’ve seen have been funded startups. In this situation it’s imperative that everyone focus on feature development and rapid iteration. Letting some of the engineers get sidetracked with setting up and maintaining their own hosting to save a dollar amount that barely hires 1-2 more engineers but sets the schedule back by many months was a huge mistake.

In my experience, most engineers become less enchanted with rolling their own on premises hosting as they get older. Their work becomes more about getting the job done quickly and to budget, not hyper-optimizing the hosting situation at the expense of inviting more complexity and miscellaneous tasks into their workload.
by robhawkes | 2026-02-05 16:30:39+00:00
The squiggly ones across the country? Those are the National Energy System Operator (NESO) transmission boundaries for Great Britain. They represent areas of the country that are tracked for the purposes of managing constraints, which is when the transmission network over the boundary can't handle the amount of power flowing over it. When they are overloaded (or rather, before that happens) NESO will step in and "balance" the various zones by turning up or down generators.
We moved all of our collaboration to mailing lists
by mixcocam | 2026-02-05 16:31:02+00:00
6 months ago we moved to using mailing lists full time for internal collaboration.

=== Mailing list setup ===

We have only 2 lists. We figured creating complex rules to filter through mail at an individual level was better than creating a large variety of lists. We are currently using groups.google.com to manage the list, it's good enough although things like the MailArchive[0] of IETF would be amazing, we just don't want to run and maintain ourselves.

=== Advantages we have found ===

0. EXCELLENT search. This is the biggest advantage of using email for everything.

1. Any tools we work with integrate into email, being 100% email native is great to keep things in one place.

2. Each individual can use the tools they prefer: thunderbird, mutt, mail.app, outlook etc.

3. Email is boring. Things like Slack are super addictive to use. Our business is not communication or collaboration. Email allows communication to take a back seat and let people work.

4. 100% asynchronous, we are all around the world. If we are excellent at writing email, makes us excellent at collaborating across the dozens of time-zones that we work in.

5. Offline first. For some, it's a great feature to be able to turn off their internet and still have access to all previous communications to conduct deep work. This system accommodates this.

=== Lost features of email ===

Things like sub-threads and bottom-posting[1] are becoming a lost art.
It is precisely these power user features of email which make it irreplaceable.
Try to find another tool which allows you to build a conversation tree that looks like this and has different parties involved at each level:

```
MainThread
├── Response1
│ ├── sub-thread1
│ └── sub-thread2
│ ├── Response1
│ ├── Response2
│ └── Response3
└── Response2
└── sub-thread1
```

=== We still have chat ===

We have real-time chat in the company for absolute emergencies or tiny questions.
We have found that people tend to be so used to the quick dopamine hits of chat that they tend to abuse of the availability of chat. Policing is often required to move conversations back to email when things get complex/lengthy.

[0]: https://github.com/ietf-tools/mailarchive.

[1]: https://subspace.kernel.org/etiquette.html#do-not-top-post-when-replying
by noncentral | 2026-02-05 16:31:24+00:00
I’ve been working on something I call Recursive Collapse Constraints, or RCC.
It’s a boundary theory for any inference system that operates inside a larger manifold, including modern LLMs.

RCC is not an architecture and not a training trick.
It’s a set of structural axioms that describe why hallucination, inference drift, and loss of long-horizon consistency appear even as models get larger.

Axiom 1: Partial Observability
An embedded system never has access to the full internal state of the manifold it operates in.

Axiom 2: Non-central Observer
The system cannot determine whether its viewpoint is central or peripheral.

Axiom 3: No Stable Global Reference Frame
Internal representations drift over time because there is no fixed frame that keeps them aligned.

Axiom 4: Irreversible Collapse
Each inference step collapses information in a way that cannot be fully reversed, pushing the system toward local rather than global consistency.

Several predictions follow from these axioms:
• Hallucination is structurally unavoidable, not just a training deficit.
• Planning failures after about 8 to 12 steps come directly from the collapse mechanism.
• RAG, tools, and schemas act as temporary external reference frames, but they do not eliminate the underlying boundary.
• Scaling helps, but only up to an asymptotic limit defined by RCC.

I’m curious how people here interpret these constraints.
Do they match what you see in real LLM systems?
And do you think limits like this are fundamental, or just a temporary artifact of current model design?

Full text here: https://www.effacermonexistence.com/axioms
by tracker1 | 2026-02-05 16:31:41+00:00
A lot of open-source doesn't have a process to integrate and follow a design strategy from a designer. A business can mandate that work be done to adapt/follow a given design strategy... for open-source it's often harder to do so... and even then you face the same or more resistance to change.

It took basically a corporate control for Audacity to make its' difficult transition to a better design from its' mediocre one. That said, I'd love to see something modern transformed from The Gimp's core in a similar way. That doesn't even begin to cover what you might want in terms of inter-app collaboration...

KdenLive, Blender, Gimp, Krita, InkScape, Audacity and other tooling, as an example, all use different UI/UX base libraries, and no clean way to cross-integrate features between them if someone wanted to assemble an open-source Adobe alternative. There's no baseline equivalent to even MS/Office's use of COM/DCOM for interoperability.
by gpm | 2026-02-05 16:31:43+00:00
I've always thought of the NDP as being pretty firmly to the left of the liberals - with labour movements, democratic socialism, welfare, etc being pretty much the defining features of what I consider to be the left and core tenets of the NDP.

The liberals are obviously left of the conservatives, and a (mildly) left wing party, but not as far left as the NDP.

I wonder if you're working from a different definition of left than I am?
by simonw | 2026-02-05 16:31:48+00:00
Yeah, vector embeddings based RAG has fallen out of fashion somewhat.

It was great when LLMs had 4,000 or 8,000 token context windows and the biggest challenge was efficiently figuring out the most likely chunks of text to feed into that window to answer a question.

These days LLMS all have 100,000+ context windows, which means you don't have to be nearly as selective. They're also exceptionally good at running search tools - give them grep or rg or even `select * from t where body like ...` and they'll almost certainly be able to find the information they need after a few loops.

Vector embeddings give you fuzzy search, so "dog" also matches "puppy" - but a good LLM with a search tool will search for "dog" and then try a second search for "puppy" if the first one doesn't return the results it needs.