MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Rivestack – Managed PostgreSQL with pgvector, $29/mo
by stranger90 | 2026-02-16 11:04:47+00:00
Hey HN,

I built Rivestack because managed PostgreSQL with pgvector is either expensive (AWS, GCP) or shared resources (Neon, Supabase free tiers).

What it does:
- Dedicated PostgreSQL with pgvector pre-installed
- Automated backups, monitoring, HA
- EU and US-East regions
- Free tier for testing

Benchmarks on the $29 tier:
- 10k vectors: 2,000 QPS, <4ms latency
- 1M vectors: 252 QPS, 32ms latency, 98% recall

Stack: Hetzner infrastructure, Patroni for HA, pgBackRest for backups.

Would love feedback from anyone building RAG or semantic search. Happy to answer questions!
by happymellon | 2026-02-16 11:04:56+00:00
This is untrue.

In the UK everyone turning 65 is offered the vaccine on the NHS.

The problem is that long term effectiveness generally drops in vaccine. Although we haven't had Shingrix long enough to give great estimates long term evidence of this we have this:

https://www.ncoa.org/article/how-long-does-the-shingles-vacc...

> No Shingrix vaccine booster is currently available.

So if you get it whem you are 50, it will be less effective when you are 80 and more vulnerable to shingles. It has nothing to do with "being state funded" and everything to do with giving it to people when they need it rather than wasting it on people who don't, who then can't have it when they actually do need it.
by 0x3f | 2026-02-16 11:06:17+00:00
I don't want to dox myself by getting too specific, but yes it's essentially a frontend framework for backend engineers in a niche lang (at least, niche for frontend). So they'd just hire more backend engineers in their language of choice.

I think this might actually be fine for internal tooling, but this is a customer-facing web app. It's now incredibly clunky and every feature takes an age to get out. Full page reloads for everything, etc.
by tempo_throwo | 2026-02-16 11:06:22+00:00
I feel like a lot of people miss out what this hire and his decision to join are really about. I (think) I can relate, because I once had a viral hit (with interviews, press, etc) that made me "silicon valley famous" for a while, and ended up with me joining a mega-company, despite lots of speculation I'd build it into a startup.

The two sides:

* From his POV: He said he's not interested in doing "another company" after spending 13 years trying to build a startup. I imagine there's another aspect too, which is that OpenClaw is not in itself an inherently revenue-generating product, nor is it IP-defensible. This was my situation. My viral hit could (and soon was) replicated by many others. I had the advantage of being "the guy who invented that cool thing", but otherwise I would be starting from scratch.

* Then from the company's POV: despite hiring thousands and thousands of employees, only a tiny handful of them ever capture any "magic." You've got an army of product managers who have never actually built or conceived of a product people love, and engineers who usually propose ideas that are ok but not usually true gold. So now here we have a guy who did actually conjure up something magical that really resonated with people. Can he do it again? Unknown, but he's already proved himself in the ideas space more than most people, so it's worth a short for the company.
by aurareturn | 2026-02-16 11:06:39+00:00
I disagree. I used to spend most of my time writing code, fixing syntax, thinking through how to structure the code, looking up documentation on how to use a library.

Now I first discuss with an AI Agent or ChatGPT to write a thorough spec before handing it off to an agent to code it. I don’t read every line. Instead, I thoroughly test the outcome.

Bugs that the AI agent would write, I would have also wrote. Example is unexpected data that doesn’t match expectations. Can’t fault the AI for those bugs.

I also find that the AI writes more bug free code than I did. It handles cases that I wouldn’t have thought of. It used best practices more often than I did.

Maybe I was a bad dev before LLMs but I find myself producing better quality applications much quicker.
by account42 | 2026-02-16 11:06:56+00:00
> Continuity between episodes is normal now. Everyone is used to shows that play out as one long narrative instead of hitting the reset button every week.

It actually feels more like most shows make things up along the way for each episode or at least each season, always trying to one up previous universe-shattering changes in order to give the audience their dopamine hit. While the continuity was well done in B5 it's been mostly a disaster for the industry afterwards.
by tkejser | 2026-02-16 11:07:03+00:00
Hi All

Original author here (no, I am not an LLM).

First, a clarifying point on INFORMATION_SCHEMA. In the post I make it clear that this interface is supported by pretty much every database since the 1980s. Most tools would not exist without them. When you write an article like this - you are trying to hit a broad audience and not everyone knows that there are standards for this.

But, our design goes further and treats all metadata as data. It's joinable, persisted and acts, in every way, like all other data. Of course, some data we cannot allow you to delete - such as that in `sys.session_log` - because it is also an audit trail.

Consider, by contrast, PostgreSQL's `pg_stat_statements`. This is an aggregated, in memory, summary of recent statements. You can get a the high level view, but you cannot get every statement run and how that particular statement deviated from statements like it. You also cannot get the query plan for a statement that ran last week.

To address the obvious question: "Isn't that very expensive to store?"

Not really. Consider a pretty aggressive analytical system (not OLTP) - you get perhaps 1000 queries/sec. The query text is normalised and so is the plan - so the actual query data (runtimes, usernames, skewness, stats about various operators) is in the order of few hundred bytes. Even on a heavily used system, we are talking some double digit GB every day for a very busy system - on cheap Object Storage. Your company web servers store orders of magnitude more data than that in their logs.

With a bit of data rotation - you can keep the aggregates sizes over time manageable.

What stats do we store about queries?

- Rows in each node (count, not the actual row data as that would be a PII problem)
- Various runtimes
- Metadata about who, when and where (ex: cluster location)

Again, these are tiny amounts of data in the grand schema of things. But somehow our industry accepts that our web servers store all that - but our open source databases don't (this level of detail is not controversial in the old school databases by the way).

Of course, we can go further than just measuring the query plan.

Performance Profiling of workers is a a concept you can talk about - so it is also metadata. Let us say you want to really understand what is going on inside a node in a cluster.

You can do this:

```sql
SELECT stack_frame, samples
FROM sys.node_trace
WHERE node_id = 42
```

Which returns a 10 second sample (via `perf`) of the process running on one of the cluster node.

(Obviously, that data is emphemeral - we are good at making things fast but we can't make tracing completely free)

Happy to answer all questions
by Jacques2Marais | 2026-02-16 11:07:38+00:00
An LLM's take on this thread (GPT 5.1):

"""
- Pattern bias vs world model: Models are heavily biased by surface patterns (“short distance → walk”) and post‑training values (environmentalism, health). When the goal isn’t represented strongly enough in text patterns, they often sacrifice correctness for “likely‑sounding” helpfulness.

- Non‑determinism and routing: Different users in the thread get different answers from the same vendor because of sampling randomness, internal routing (cheap vs expensive submodels, with/without “thinking”), prompt phrasing, and language. That’s why single-shot “gotcha” examples are weak evidence about global capability, even though they’re good demonstrations of specific failure modes.

- Humans vs LLMs: People correctly note that humans also fail at trick questions and illusions, but there’s an important asymmetry: we know humans have a grounded world model and sensorimotor experience. With LLMs, we only have behavior. Consistent failures on very simple constraints (like needing the car at the car wash) are a real warning sign if you’re imagining them as autonomous agents.

- Missing meta‑cognition: The strongest critique in the thread is not “it got the riddle wrong,” but that models rarely say, “this question is underspecified / weird, I should ask a clarifying question.” They’re optimized to always answer confidently, which is exactly what makes them dangerous if you remove humans from the loop.

- Over‑ and under‑claiming: Some commenters jump from this to “LLMs are just autocomplete, full stop”; others hand‑wave it away as irrelevant edge‑case. Both are overstated. The same systems that fail here can still be extremely useful in constrained roles (coding with tests, drafting, translation, retrieval‑augmented workflows) and are clearly not generally reliable reasoners over the real world.

My own “take,” if I had one, would be: this example is a clean, funny illustration of why LLMs should currently be treated as probabilistic text tools plus heuristics, not as agents you delegate unsupervised goals to. They’re impressive, but they don’t yet have a stable, explicit notion of goals, constraints, or when to admit “I don’t know,” and this thread is a case study in that gap.
"""
by hobofan | 2026-02-16 11:07:49+00:00
Care to explain why you think it's infeasible? Then one could provide targeted counter-optimism ;)

I don't see what's infeasible about it. It doesn't seem to different from .po files (gettext catalogs) meshed with hooks for post-processing as would see in e.g. a handlebars, both of which have individually found great adoption.
by chainbuilder | 2026-02-16 11:08:36+00:00
I built a free blockchain intelligence tool at kettaro.com and just shipped Bitcoin whale tracking.
It scans recent blocks via the Mempool.space API, pulls transactions above a configurable BTC threshold (1–500+ BTC), and displays them in real-time with auto-refresh. You get sender/receiver addresses, BTC amounts, USD values, and block confirmations — no account required.
The BTC tracker sits alongside Kettaro's existing EVM tools: wallet profiling across 10 chains (Ethereum, Base, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Avalanche, etc.), transaction tracing with visual graphs, NFT provenance verification, and a smart money tracker that monitors 50+ known whale wallets.
Stack: Python/Flask backend on Render, React frontend, PostgreSQL, Mempool.space API for Bitcoin, Etherscan API v2 for EVM chains.
Try it: kettaro.com/btc/whale-activity
Would love feedback — especially on what other Bitcoin analytics would be useful.
by ithkuil | 2026-02-16 11:09:46+00:00
> The fact that millions of people are now using them, with varying degrees of success for various reasons, is a testament of this.

I do agree with you that by design this new tool lowers the bar to entry etc.

But I just want to state the obvious: billions of kids are playing with a ball; it's not that hard. Yet far less people are good soccer players.

> The goal is to replace all cognitive work. Just because this is not entirely possible today, doesn't mean that it won't be tomorrow.
> [..]
> I'm of the opinion that this goal is unachievable with the current tech generatiom
> [..]
> In the meantime, your own skills will continue to atrophy the more you rely on this tech [..]

Here I don't quite follow.

I agree that if this tech is ready to completely replace you, you won't need to use your brain.
But provided it is not there yet (like, at all), your intellect is needed quite a lot to get out of it anything more than toys.

The question is: do you benefit from using it or not? can you build faster or better by applying these tools in the appropriate way or should you just ignore it and keep doing things the way things used to be done up until a few months ago?

This is a legit question.

My point is: in order to anwswer this question I cannot base my intuition only on some vague first principles on what this tech stack ought to be able to do, or what other people say it's able to do, or what I suspect it will never be able to do: I need to touch it, to learn how to use it, just like every other tool. That's the only way I can truly get a sensible answer. And like any other skill, I'm fully aware that I can't devote just a few minutes trying it out and then reaching any conclusion.

EDIT: I do share a general concern about how new generations are going to achieve the full-picture understanding if they get exposed to these tools as the main approach towards software production. I come to this after a long career in system programming, so I don't personally see this as a threat to atrophy my own skills; but I do share a quite undefined sense of concern about where this is going
by DonHopkins | 2026-02-16 11:09:48+00:00
He could say he injected disinfectant and shoved an ultraviolet flashlight up his ass and ate horse dewormer pills, then snorted cocaine off a toilet seat because he's not afraid of germs, but that didn't cure his COVID, to blame it all on Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Then the could mention the Dow is over 50,000 right now, S&P at almost 7,000, and the NASDAQ smashing records, to justify what he did.

https://wttrends.com/dow-is-over-50000-meme-meaning-explaine...
by punnerud | 2026-02-16 11:09:59+00:00
ChatGPt 5.2:
“ Drive — because it’s your car that needs to get to the car wash.

50 meters is comically short, but walking there without the car doesn’t solve the “wash the car” part. If you’re worried about it feeling silly, you can also just roll/push it that distance if it’s safe and legal where you are, but the practical answer is: drive it over.”

Grok:
“To wash your car at a car wash 50 meters away, you’ll need to drive it there—walking would leave the car behind, and I’m assuming you don’t have a really long hose or a team of helpers to carry it. That said, if you’re feeling extra eco-friendly (or just want the exercise), you could theoretically push it, but that’s probably more hassle than it’s worth for such a short distance. Drive safe!”

Claude Opus 4.6:
“Drive. You need the car at the car wash. ”
by mk89 | 2026-02-16 11:10:28+00:00
The way I see it is that long game is to have agents in your life that memorize and understand your routine, facts, more and more. Imagine having an agent that knows about cars, and more specifically your car, when the checkups are due, when you washed it last time, etc., another one that knows more about your hobbies, another that knows more about your XYZ etc.

The more specific they are, the more accurate they typically are.
by sedan_baklazhan | 2026-02-16 11:11:22+00:00
Let me remind you of three things:
1) This weaker neighbor is aided and funded by a block of countries with a total population of 1b, 6 times that of Russia.
2) The same block is doing all it can to crash the Russian economy.
3) Nevertheless, this union of a weak neighbor + 1b block is steadily loosing land.
by lovlar | 2026-02-16 11:11:28+00:00
thank you for the feedback, it totally makes sense to want those fetures. and yes, I've also seen that there are a lot of sites like that.

its tempting to implement but also comes with more complexities, which Im at this stage not that exited to hop on. I'm thinking of:

- need for a backend with login/authentication -> kills the endless scalability aspect of only having a frontend.

- there are soo many competing tools already existing. Im not sure what my moat would be.

- For me, as a freelancer with max 1 assigments per month so far, a standalone pdf-maker like this one is preferred over being locked in to a Saas product.

- in that case I would want support for e-invoices which seems a bit bureaucratic to get in place
by ranbo | 2026-02-16 11:11:38+00:00
I kept following the same 30-step hardening checklist every time I spun up a new VPS. Disable root login, set up UFW, configure fail2ban, enable SYN cookies, install auditd... Each time I'd miss something or forget a step. So I turned the checklist into a script.

What it does: 14 modules covering SSH hardening (key-only auth, AllowUsers, MaxAuthTries), firewall (UFW default-deny), fail2ban, kernel sysctl hardening, Netbird mesh VPN, SOPS+age secrets management, auditd monitoring, unattended upgrades, and more.

What makes it different from the usual hardening scripts:

Idempotent — checks current state before every action. Re-run it weekly to catch drift. It won't duplicate rules or break existing config.
Dry-run mode — preview every change before applying. Nothing is touched until you're ready.
Lockout protection — validates sshd config syntax, verifies your SSH keys exist, checks AllowUsers includes you, confirms UFW has an SSH rule — all before restarting sshd. Auto-rolls back if anything fails.
Interactive wizard — run sudo vps-harden with no args on a fresh server. It auto-detects your SSH key, IP, and timezone, offers a dry run first, and prints the equivalent CLI command for future runs.
Grouped scorecard — the verify module prints a security scorecard with section headers explaining what each group does ("Kernel Hardening — Prevents network-level attacks"). After a real run, it shows next steps: an SSH test command, a ready-to-paste ~/.ssh/config block, and conditional guidance for anything still WARN/FAIL.
Zero dependencies — single Bash file, no Python, no Ansible, no agents. curl | bash to install, sudo vps-harden to run.

The lockout protection was the hardest part to get right. The script disables password auth and restricts SSH to a single user, so if the key deployment or AllowUsers config is wrong, you're locked out.

It validates everything before reloading sshd, and if validation fails, it removes the config and rolls back.

Your existing session stays alive throughout.

Install: curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ranjith-src/vps-harden/mai... | bash

Repo: https://github.com/ranjith-src/vps-harden

Happy to answer questions about the design decisions or trade-offs.
by summerdown2 | 2026-02-16 11:12:03+00:00
> My first instinct was, I had underspecified the location of the car. The model seems to assume the car is already at the car wash from the wording.

Doesn't offering two options to the LLM, "walk," or "drive," imply that either can be chosen?

So, surely the implication of the question is that the car is where you are?
by adrianN | 2026-02-16 11:13:14+00:00
You have way more trust in test suites than I do. How complex is the code you’re working with? In my line of work most serious bugs surface in complex interactions between different subsystems that are really hard to catch in a test suite. Additionally in my experience the bugs AI produces are completely alien. You can have perfect code for large functions and then somewhere in the middle absolutely nonsensical mistakes. Reviewing AI code is really hard because you can’t use your normal intuitions and really have to check everything meticulously.
by layer8 | 2026-02-16 11:13:54+00:00
> They still answer earnestly.

Gemini at least is putting some snark into its response:

“Unless you've mastered the art of carrying a 4,000-pound vehicle over your shoulder, you should definitely drive. While 150 feet is a very short walk, it's a bit difficult to wash a car that isn't actually at the car wash!”
by netdevphoenix | 2026-02-16 11:14:52+00:00
> AI generates code fast but then you're stuck reading every line because it might've missed some edge case or broken something three layers deep

I will imagine that in the future this will be tackled with a heavy driven approach and tight regulation of what the agent can and cannot touch. So frequent small PRs over big ones. Limit folder access to only those that need changing. Let it build the project. If it doesn't build, no PR submissions allowed. If a single test fails, no PR submissions allowed. And the tests will likely be the first if not the main focus in LLM PRs.

I use the term "LLM" and not "AI" because I notice that people have started attributing LLM related issues (like ripping off copyrighted material, excessive usage of natural resources, etc) to AI in general which is damaging for the future of AI.
by dpatterbee | 2026-02-16 11:14:57+00:00
Are you sure? Just because you feel that way doesn't mean you can just make up a statistic that supports your viewpoint.

In my experience, ergonomics in Zig means something other than ergonomics in many other languages. In plenty of languages, ergonomic code is basically just writing as few characters as possible and being able to achieve complex logic with little boilerplate. In Zig, it feels good to be able to compose the conceptually simple language features into an optimal solution to your problem, even if it results in code that is maybe not aesthetically pleasing on first glance.

I'm not going to declare that this solution is ergonomic or not, you can't always tell just by looking at Zig code whether using it is ergonomic, but by that same logic we shouldn't dismiss it off hand.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-16 11:15:08+00:00
This looks quite meaningful.

There's a small aside in one of the ongoing sagas with a casual but sophisticated recognition in passing, about the ultimate effect of mass propaganda:

>because of the false cause of the Bentites and the Persians, the peoples of the cities turned against one another, and with swords sharper than those of their enemies, they perished.

>Ponus the tyrant, the enemy of righteousness, with his arrogance that exceeded all bounds, destroyed and annihilated many every day.

In the same breath, associated it with deep character defects to the extreme, such as lack of empathy that is off the charts.

This is nothing new, lots of people have been instantly recognizing this stuff no differently for millennia.

The ongoing problem is, lots of other people fall for certain propaganda at certain times, hook, line, and sinker.

And when it's coming from a character having extreme lack of empathy or even downright hate, the people who are drawn to congregating around that lightning-rod are the more hateful, as well as more easily manipulated, or they wouldn't be there.

It's got to be the worst when it's somebody well-known enough to write about historically, and all future generations are supposed to learn from.

Edit; Found the alternate translation to the above passage:

>Because of the absurd reasons of the Veneti and the Prasini, the peoples of the towns fought each other and were destroying themselves with swords sharper than the swords of the enemies.

>Bonosus, the tyrant and the enemy of good, with a haughtiness exceeding all, was killing and destroying many every day.
by deanc | 2026-02-16 11:15:10+00:00
What vision? Everyone and their mother has been trying to build useful AI assistants and personal CRMs since computers were invented - way before LLMs. He glued it together, and he succeeded because he executed before anyone else.

I applaud what he's done, and wish him luck trying to get this working safely at scale, but the idea that he's some visionary that has seen something the rest of the world hasn't is ludicrous.
by stack_framer | 2026-02-16 11:15:32+00:00
I'm seeing a 404 page. I assume this is unintentional, but it's making a funny point: How could AGI possibly be imminent and we still have 404 pages?

Regardless, I agree with this article whose body eludes me: AGI is not imminent, it's hype in the extreme. It's the next fusion. It's perpetually on the horizon (pun intended), and we've wasted trillions on machines that will never reach it.