MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dspillett | 2026-02-05 10:58:35+00:00
> There’s a common rule of thumb that says you should have swap space equal to some multiple of your RAM.

That rule came about when RAM was measured in a couple of MB rather than GB, and hasn't made sense for a long time in most circumstances (if you are paging our a few GB of stuff on spinning drives your system is likely to be stalling so hard due to disk thrashing that you hit the power switch, and on SSDs you are not-so-slowly killing them due to the excess writing).

That doesn't mean it isn't still a good idea to have a little allocated just-in-case. And as RAM prices soar while IO throughput & latency are low, we may see larger Swap/RAM ratios being useful again as RAM sizes are constrained by working-sets aren't getting any smaller.

In a theoretical ideal computer, which the actual designs we have are leaky-abstraction laden implementations of, things are the other way around: all the online storage is your active memory and RAM is just the first level of cache. That ideal hasn't historically ended up being what we have because the disparities in speed & latency between other online storage and RAM have been so high (several orders of magnitude), fast RAM has been volatile, and hardware & software designs or not stable & correct enough such that regular complete state resets are necessary.

> Why? At that point, I already have the same total memory as those with 8 GB of RAM and 8 GB of swap combined.

Because your need for fast immediate storage has increased, so 8-quick-8-slow is no longer sufficient. You are right in that this doesn't mean you need 16-quick-16-slow is sensible, and 128-quick-128-slow would be ridiculous. But no swap at all doesn't make sense either: on your machine imbued with silly amounts of RAM are you really going to miss a few GB of space allocated just-in-case? When it could be the difference between slower operation for a short while and some thing(s) getting OOM-killed?
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-05 10:58:48+00:00
> In democracies money going to governments isn't sucked to some kind of vacuum. It's reinvested in infrastructure, social programs, investment programs, etc.

In practice it mostly goes to other rich people/corporations and affluent retirees.

Around half of federal revenues go to retirees (and disproportionately to the affluent ones), another trillion+ dollars goes to defense/VA contractors, another trillion dollars goes to interest (i.e. other rich people/corporations), and then all the rest of it combined is less than any one of those things individually.
by surgical_fire | 2026-02-05 10:58:52+00:00
I understand quite well. The banality of evil is a thing because most people have actual very little power to enact meaningful change. Risking yourself for the well being of complete strangers is commendable, but often has an obscene cost for the individual.

I reject that societal and systemic issues can be fixed by individual action, unless as an individual you are extremely powerful (and the ones that are typically are the ones causing the societal and systemic harm).

As an common man you can do small things. Do a lousy job when processing the paperwork of evil. Malicious cooperation to the powers that be. Small acts of charity. That sort of thing.

Systemic change can only be achieved through collective action. Easier said than done.

The world is cursed. Life is tough even at the best of times. The system as it is ensures compliance through coercion and threats.

I honestly believe we would agree more than disagree on the current state of things. I just reject the approach that individual action is a way out of this sort of mess.
by bandrami | 2026-02-05 10:59:03+00:00
Sorry, copy-paste error:

https://www.housingwire.com/articles/38536-failed-bank-ceo-g...

https://www.justice.gov/usao-md/pr/former-president-and-ceo-...

https://oig.federalreserve.gov/releases/news-bekkedam-senten...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2015/09/02/b...

Again, literally just the first half of the first page of Google results. People can do this on their own, too, if they want to learn more about it
by Balinares | 2026-02-05 10:59:20+00:00
Another factor other commenters haven't mentioned, although the article does bring it up: you may disable swap and you will still get paging behavior regardless, because in a pinch the kernel will reclaim pages that are mmapped to files. Most typically binaries and librairies. Which means the process in question will incur a map page read next time it schedules. But of course you're out of memory, so the kernel will need to page out another process's code page to make room, and when that process next schedules... Etc.

This has far worse degradation behavior than normal swapping of regular data pages. That at least gives you the breathing space to still schedule processes when under memory pressure, such as whichever OOM killer you favor.
by arvoantoni | 2026-02-05 10:59:35+00:00
OP here. I built this open-source dbt package to standardize B2B metrics (churn, activation, etc.) on top of Segment/Rudderstack schemas. It also uses persist_docs to push semantic definitions into the warehouse metadata so AI Agents/LLMs (via MCP) can read them to avoid hallucinations. You can install it in your dbt project or fork it.
by moring | 2026-02-05 10:59:50+00:00
I don't think graphics devs changing over would change much. They would probably not lament over 16ms, but they would quickly learn that performance does not matter much in application development, and start building their own abstraction layer cake.

It's not even that performance is unimportant in absolute terms, but rather that the general state of software is so abysmal that performance is the least of your problems as a user, so you're not going to get excited over it.
by IshKebab | 2026-02-05 11:00:09+00:00
Yeah because Linux's memory management is quite poor and running out of RAM without swap will often mean a hard reboot. Swap definitely helps a lot, even if it doesn't fully solve the problem.

To be honest I don't know why it's such an issue on Linux. Mac and Windows don't have this issue at all. Windows presumably because it doesn't over-commit memory. I'm not sure why Mac is so much better than Linux at memory management.

My eventual solution was to just buy a PC with a ton of RAM (128 GB). Haven't had any hard reboots due to OOM since then!
by Maro | 2026-02-05 11:00:29+00:00
Working at a non-tech regional bigco, where ofc cloud is the default, I see everyday how AWS costs get out of hand, it's a constant struggle just to keep costs flat. In our case, the reality is that NONE of our services require scalability, and the main upside of high uptime is nice primarily for my blood pressure.. we only really need uptime during business hours, nobody cares what happens at night when everybody is sleeping.

On the other hand, there's significant vendor lockin, complexity, etc. And I'm not really sure we actually end up with less people over time, headcount always expands over time, and there's always cool new projects like monitoring, observability, AI, etc.

My feeling is, if we rented 20-30 chunky machines and ran Linux on them, with k8s, we'd be 80% there. For specific things I'd still use AWS, like infinite S3 storage, or RDS instances for super-important data.

If I were to do a startup, I would almost certainly not base it off AWS (or other cloud), I'd do what I write above: run chunky servers on OVH (initially just 1-2), and use specific AWS services like S3 and RDS.

A bit unrelated to the above, but I'd also try to keep away from expensive SaaS like Jira, Slack, etc. I'd use the best self-hosted open source version, and be done with it.
Show HN: I built an AI UGC video generator for ads and creators
by wsmhj | 2026-02-05 11:01:57+00:00
Hi HN,

I built an AI tool that generates UGC-style videos from text or product links.

The idea came from:
- Hiring creators is slow and expensive
- Most AI video tools generate cinematic stuff, not real "UGC ads"

What it does:
- Input product / script
- Choose UGC style (TikTok, testimonial, unboxing)
- Generate short ad-style videos

Tech stack:
- Frontend: Next.js
- Backend: Python + queue
- Models: Sora / VEO / Wan (via API)

I'm looking for:
- Feedback from marketers
- Suggestions on what features are missing
by troupo | 2026-02-05 11:02:26+00:00
> The announcement surfaced new information for them, they probably reframed their own analytics and saw insights

That's such corporate-speak.

It means they don't know their customers at all and/or couldn't care less. They literally told major animation studios that the product is going to be dead in just a month.

And now they slightly backtracked the decision by promising vague support and bug fixes. Internally the product is already dead (otherwise there wouldn't be an announcement), teams disbanded and/or re-organized. They will fund a skeleton crew for "bug fixes", and the product will eventually be broken beyond repair in the same time frame as in the original deprecation notice.
by mangoman | 2026-02-05 11:02:27+00:00
I guess what’s wrong with it? Let’s say it has read only access, new messages and calendar invites need approval. I’m not sure I understand the harm? I suppose data exfiltration, but like you could start with an allowlist approach. So the first few uses and reads take a while with allowing the ai to read stuff , but it doesn’t seem that crazy given it’s what we basically do with ai coding tools?
by pjc50 | 2026-02-05 11:02:29+00:00
> the US predictably got even wealthier than it previously was

If you just look at the economic indicators, then it did. Certainly way better than the "no intervention" counterfactual would have gone. People do not like it when all the ATMs stop working.

There is a lot of discourse to be had as to why people aren't feeling that personally.

> killing people in Iraq because Muslims, amirite? All those bombs cost a bomb.

Sadly there is/was massive bipartisan support for this bullshit. Including from the public. I note from a chronology perspective that most of the money in Iraq was spent/lost/wasted before 2008.
by tsimionescu | 2026-02-05 11:02:33+00:00
I've personally seen WAY more abusive and hateful comments on Facebook, from real accounts of real people, with pictures and friends and everything, than I have ever seen on YouTube. This may be very locale dependent, but in my country (Romania, which has a pretty large proportion of people online from very socially conservative backgrounds) you can easily find extremely explicitly misoginistic, racist, homophobic, and just plain hateful comments coming from real FB and Instagram accounts, again, from people using their real names and faces and everything. I've seen far fewer similar comments on YouTube videos, even ones from the same country.
by throwaw12 | 2026-02-05 11:03:10+00:00
> Even if you have no moral problems at all with the China authoritarian

It's funny how you framed your sentence. Let's unpack it.

1. I didn't say Chinese companies are good, I said my hope is on open models and only Chinese labs are doing good in that front

2. Chinese company doesn't immediately mean its about regime. Maybe its true in the US with the current admin, see how Meta, Google, Microsoft got immediately aligned with current admin

3. Even when company is associated with Chinese regime, I don't remember Chinese authoritarian regime kidnapping the head of another state, invading bunch of countries in the Middle East and supporting states committing genocide and ethnic cleansing (Israel in Gaza, UAE in Sudan and many more small militant groups across Africa and ME), and authoritarian regimes like Saudi Arabia.

If you ask me to rate them by evil level, I would give the US 80/100, and China 25/100 - no invasions, no kidnapping of head of states, no obvious terror acts - but unfortunate situation with Uyghurs.
by Kim_Bruning | 2026-02-05 11:03:38+00:00
My father keeps asking me why I don't I ever apply to $BIGCO and earn more money. I certainly have the ability, he says.

But I ask him, "But would you work for Lex Luthor?"

He doesn't have a good comeback to that.

Anyway, I (mostly, hopefully) try to make my small corner of the world a happy place. And I hope everyone else does for theirs.
by ljm | 2026-02-05 11:03:58+00:00
Perhaps to show the level of privilege I enjoy as a software engineer with some level of seniority, I have had zero problem resigning from a position (more than once in fact) because I objected to something my employer was doing. It's been enough for me to filter potential opportunities exclusively to tech-for-good concerns.

Sure, I don't earn half a million a year total comp to kiss some billionaire's ass, but I still have a very comfortable lifestyle that is well above the median.
by HenriTEL | 2026-02-05 11:04:13+00:00
I had a similar experience where someone that had prior experience with django while we were using sqlalchemy started to design a django-like ORM on top of sqlalchemy.
Of course it took him some time to get working, was a hell to understand and extend and most importantly lacked support for basic features.

Fortunately it was limited to a small isolated service but I can imagine the damage on the long term if you continue that route on what becomes a huge monolith after a few years.
by CrzyLngPwd | 2026-02-05 11:04:25+00:00
#2.5ish

We rent hardware and also some VPS, as well as use AWS for cheap things such as S3 fronted with Cloudflare, and SES for priority emails.

We have other services we pay for, such as AI content detection, disposable email detection, a small postal email server, and more.

We're only a small business, so having predictable monthly costs is vital.

Our servers are far from maxed out, and we process ~4 million dynamic page and API requests per day.
by mhitza | 2026-02-05 11:04:28+00:00
I'm only interested in the steam controller, which is going to be delayed in bulk with the other hardware.

Can anyone help me understand the following.

> Can I play non steam games with the Steam Controller? The controller can work with any game compatible with the Steam Overlay.

So the controller will only work with games (including non steam) launched from the steam overlay?
by dspillett | 2026-02-05 11:05:31+00:00
> so that you can hibernate

The “paging space needs to be X*RAM” and “paging space needs to be RAM+Y” predate hibernate being a common thing (even a thing at all), with hibernate being an extra use for that paging space not the reason it is there in the first place. Some OSs have hibernate space allocated separately from paging/swap space.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-02-05 11:05:43+00:00
This. It's obviously an interior fastener. Maybe they'll have a cheaper one without the logo for the airbag module or whatever. OEMs have spent untold sums over the year hiding interior trim fasteners using all manner of push and snap fittings. A few low trim vehicles have bucked that trend recently, to much savings of labor and tool/die cost and no apparent ill effect in the mind of consumers. And now everybody is testing the waters.
by maldev | 2026-02-05 11:07:33+00:00
Are you implying that refugees are terrorists? Also, according to any refugee agreement, you go to the first country of safe harbor. Not across the world. Why can’t they go back now, make Iraq great?

Also, they arnt killing Americans anymore are they? We gave them everything we could. But the afghan army chose to just do drugs and do nothing and now their women can’t go to school and don’t have rights again.
by pm215 | 2026-02-05 11:07:47+00:00
Yeah, I think random-instruction-sequence testing is a pretty good approach to try to find the problems you didn't think of up front. I wrote a very simple tool for this years ago to help flush out bugs in QEMU: https://gitlab.com/pm215/risu

Though the bugs we were looking to catch there were definitely not the multiple-interacting-subsystems type, and more just the "corner cases in input data values in floating point instructions" variety.
Show HN: Remote AI coding without moving your code – CloudForge
by KenzoArai | 2026-02-05 11:08:00+00:00
I built CloudForge because I wanted to run Claude Code
while away from my desk, but didn't want my code on
someone else's server.

CloudForge is a web UI that connects to YOUR server via
a lightweight agent. Your code stays on your machine.

Features:

- Web terminal (xterm.js)
- Monaco editor
- Works with Claude Code, Codex CLI, Aider, Gemini CLI
- No SSH port forwarding needed
- Free tier: 1 BYOS server

The agent is open source (will be published soon).

https://cloud-forge.me

I'd love to hear your thoughts, especially from anyone
doing "vibe coding" with AI tools on the go.
by vga42 | 2026-02-05 11:08:50+00:00
I think you're absolutely on point and right that you shouldn't be listening to me, a potential internet nobody. There's no way you could tell me or anyone here apart from an AI at this point.

You should be listening to actual reporters, such as Jonathan Rauch from The Atlantic: https://archive.is/Maalh "Yes, it's Fascism"
Show HN: Track International Rugby with Live Rankings and Predictions
by lukejkwarren | 2026-02-05 11:08:54+00:00
I built a platform for following international rugby union. It covers fixtures, results, team stats, and news with deep features around World Rugby rankings, major tournaments, lineal titles etc.

What it does:
- Live men's and women's fixtures, results, and rankings synced from official sources
- Predict any match and see how it affects World Rugby rankings using the actual points formula
- Six Nations and Rugby World Cup predictors with shareable brackets
- Follow your teams, view head-to-head records, form streaks, and historical stats
- Match details with highlights, weather, and importance indicators
- News feed aggregating international rugby coverage

Stack: Next.js 15, MongoDB/Prisma, NextAuth v5, data from World Rugby PulseLive API

Would love feedback, especially from rugby fans. I made the rugby tool I wish I had but keen to add features based on feedback from other rugby lovers like me.
by torginus | 2026-02-05 11:09:16+00:00
I think the issue with this formulation is what drives the cost at cloud providers isn't necessarily that their hardware is too expensive (which it is), but that they push you towards overcomplicated and inefficient architectures that cost too much to run.

A core at this are all the 'managed' services - if you have a server box, its in your financial interest to squeeze as much per out of it as possible. If you're using something like ECS or serverless, AWS gains nothing by optimizing the servers to make your code run faster - their hard work results in less billed infrastructure hours.

This 'microservices' push usually means that instead of having an on-server session where you can serve stuff from a temporary cache, all the data that persists between requests needs to be stored in a db somewhere, all the auth logic needs to re-check your credentials, and something needs to direct the traffic and load balance these endpoint, and all this stuff costs money.

I think if you have 4 Java boxes as servers with a redundant DB with read replicas on EC2, your infra is so efficient and cheap that even paying 4x for it rather than going for colocation is well worth it because of the QoL and QoS.

These crazy AWS bills usually come from using every service under the sun.
by amluto | 2026-02-05 11:09:27+00:00
> Radiate the shit out of it by spraying it into the vacuum, dispersing into the finest mist with highest possible surface, funnel the frozen mist back in after some distance, by electrostatic and/or electromagnetic means. Repeat. Flow as you go.

Even if that worked, you don’t gain much. It’s not the local surface area that matters — it’s the global surface. A device confined within a 20m radius sphere can radiate no more heat than a plain black sphere of the same radius.

There are only two ways to cheat this. First, you can run hotter. But a heat pump needs power, and you need to get that power from somewhere, and you need to dissipate that power too. But you can at least run your chips as hot as they will tolerate. Second is things like lasers or radio transmitters, but those are producing non-thermal output, which is actually worse at cooling.

At the end of the day, you have only two variables to play with: the effective radiating surface temperature and the temperature of the blackbody radiation you emit.
by andix | 2026-02-05 11:09:31+00:00
The main issue why we don't see AI agents in products: PROMPT INJECTIONS

Even with the most advanced LLMs and even sandboxing there is always the risk of prompt injections and data extraction.

Even if the AI can't directly upload data to the internet, or delete local data, there are always some ways to leak data. For example by crafting an email with the relevant text in white or invisible somewhere. The user clicks "ok send" from what they see, but still some data is leaked.

Apple intelligence is based on a local model on the device, which is much more susceptible for prompt injections.
by bob1029 | 2026-02-05 11:09:54+00:00
The #1 reason I would advocate for using AWS today is the compliance package they bring to the party. No other cloud provider has anything remotely like Artifact. I can pull Amazon's PCI-DSS compliance documentation using an API call. If you have a heavily regulated business (or work with customers who do), AWS is hard to beat.

If you don't have any kind of serious compliance requirement, using Amazon is probably not ideal. I would say that Azure AD is ok too if you have to do Microsoft stuff, but I'd never host an actual VM on that cloud.

Compliance and "Microsoft stuff" covers a lot of real world businesses. Going on prem should only be done if it's actually going to make your life easier. If you have to replicate all of Azure AD or Route53, it might be better to just use the cloud offerings.
by chrisjj | 2026-02-05 11:11:23+00:00
> Don’t get me wrong: The prompts are well-crafted. But: They’re not magic. They’re structured instructions for tasks that legal professionals have been doing for decades.

If this is trying to say why these prompts aren't bad news for the profession, I think it just did the opposite.

They were taken as bad news because instructions to "AI" that genuinely execute tasks that legal professionals have been doing for decades IS magic. Obviously very bad magic for the future of the existing legal profession and the $billions invested in it.

Whether its genuine or not is of course a different matter. But hey, there's no telling investors who seriously believe stocastic parrottry is AI, especially when they've bet $billions on that self same delusion.
by jstanley | 2026-02-05 11:12:03+00:00
The post you replied to stated:

> Life long moderate cannabis use improves memory function. That's the main takeaway from the research.

Had you forgotten already? :)

(I don't actually know if it's true; I have no idea. I was just pointing out that if "lifelong" cannabis use improves memory function, and your observation is that your memory got worse after you quit cannabis... that is not a contradiction).