MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by umvi | 2026-02-05 22:39:46+00:00
I say do it, if it simplifies the architecture. For example if you are using firestore with a redis cache layer, that's 2 dbs. If you can replace 2 dbs with 1 db (postgres), I think it's worth it. But if you are suggesting using a postgres cache layer in front of firestore instead of redis... to me that's not as clear cut.
by zubspace | 2026-02-05 22:41:27+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. I constantly have to tell it what I don't like or what can be improved or need to request clarifications or alternative solutions.

This is what's so annoying about it. It's like a child that does the same errors again and again.

But couldn't it adjust itself with the goal of reducing the error bit by bit? Wouldn't this lead to the ultimate agent who can read your mind? That would be awesome.
by 4k93n2 | 2026-02-05 22:41:47+00:00
if you mean you just want to make music and arent too bothered about recording then Cardinal is a free modular eurorack synth you could mess around with

or you use a VST host like Kushview's Element and load up on all the free VST instruments and effects that are out there. you would just need a midi keyboard hooked to it then or use Cardinal to generate note patterns

https://cardinal.kx.studio

https://kushview.net/element

or something like Orca if you want to go off the deep end!

https://github.com/hundredrabbits/Orca
by notahacker | 2026-02-05 22:41:49+00:00
I remember a few amusing examples which weren't strictly inaccurate but were pretty blatant official lines, like how the US uniquely got to stress a "strong democratic tradition" as its political system, whereas everywhere else in the Western world was just "parliamentary democracy" or "constitutional monarchy" and at least the Cold War era versions had a "Communists" line item which purported to identify how few people in democratic societies were members of Communist parties...
by bob1029 | 2026-02-05 22:42:50+00:00
I'd pick MSSQL if I was being compensated based upon the accuracy, performance, durability and availability of the system. Also in any cases where the customer can pay and won't complain even once about how much this costs.

I'd never advocate for a new oracle install. But, I'd likely defend an existing one. I've seen how effective pl/sql can be in complex environments. Rewriting all that sql just because "oracle man bad" (or whatever) is a huge fucking ask of any rational business owner.
by tingling168 | 2026-02-05 22:42:54+00:00
It's exactly as another commenter thoughtfully replied. My mind works better which rules, interactions between systems, teasing out insights in complicated data, understanding where things break down between boundaries, foreseeing issues that people wouldn't think of well before they come up, etc.

While I'm not sure this is directly related, but even things like being a participant in a multi-party conversation and watching 2 people have a discussion and instantly pick up on the fact that person 1 interpreted something in a certain way that doesn't match up with person 2's interpretation of it. Super handy being able to instantly just jump in and say "by the way I think person 1's understood that to mean this instead of that".
by tombert | 2026-02-05 22:44:02+00:00
Meh.

I agree that managing lots of databases can be a pain in the ass, but trying to make Postgres do everything seems like a problem as well. A lot of these things are different things and trying to make Postgres do all of them seems like it will lead to similar if not worse outcomes than having separate dedicated services.

I understand that people were too overeager to jump on the MongoDB web scale nosql crap, but at this point I think there might have been an overcorrection. The problem with the nosql hype wasn't that they weren't using SQL, it's that they were shoehorning it everywhere, even in places where it wasn't a good fit for the job. Now this blog post is telling us to shoehorn Postgres everywhere, even if it isn't a good fit for the job...
by epsilonic | 2026-02-05 22:44:24+00:00
They will have machines do that for them, curating collections of dissident files that are categorized by various propensities, then proposing among a range of soft to hard interventions. This is why we're seeing an uptick in the construction of AI data centers (e.g. STARGATE); it's going to get ugly very soon. And before you know it, your social mobility will be dictated by how well you adapt to the narratives they endorse. The fact that they (i.e., the elites) have gotten away with so much depravity, and are now revealing it publicly, emboldens them further to commit the type of oppression that I foresee happening. What we're experiencing now is ritual humiliation at scale.
by protocolture | 2026-02-05 22:45:20+00:00
Theres no organisation but they are well organised in a distributed sense. Horizontally, theres lots of tradecraft and opsec details that get spread around to help people fight. Thing is, theres no central pillar you can break to stop that spread.

What gets me is how right wing protesters specifically eschew good opsec. "mask off rallys", visible tattoos etc. They love the police state and then look like idiots when that big police state they demanded rounds them up with absolute ease because they took selfies with their swastikas out during a protest.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2026-02-05 22:45:21+00:00
I'll take it one step further and say you should always ask yourself if the application or project even needs a beefy database like Postgres or if you can get by with using SQLite. For example, I've found a few self-hosted services that just overcomplicated their setup and deployment because they picked Postgres or MariaDB over SQLite, despite it being a much better self-contained solution.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-02-05 22:45:44+00:00
GTK doesn't play much of a role in our GUI. When you're looking at most of the main tabs in Ardour (editor, mixer, recorder window, cue page) almost everything you're looking at is either our own Canvas or custom widgets. Still we do sit on top of GTK+ 2's basic infrastructure and still rely on it for the "big widgets" (file browser, tree/listviews, menus, color dialogs, text entry).
by Aurornis | 2026-02-05 22:45:54+00:00
Their technique really stretched the definition of extracting text from the LLM.

They used a lot of different techniques to prompt with actual text from the book, then asked the LLM to continue the sentences. I only skimmed the paper but it looks like there was a lot of iteration and repetitive trials. If the LLM successfully guessed words that followed their seed, they counted that as "extraction". They had to put in a lot of the actual text to get any words back out, though. The LLM was following the style and clues in the text.

You can't literally get an LLM to give you books verbatim. These techniques always involve a lot of prompting and continuation games.
by saisrirampur | 2026-02-05 22:46:14+00:00
I’m a huge Postgres fan. That said, I don’t agree with the blanket advice of “just use Postgres.” That stance often comes from folks who haven’t been exposed enough to (newer) purpose-built technologies and the tremendous value they can create

The argument, as in this blog, is that a single Postgres stack is simpler and reduces complexity. What’s often overlooked is the CAPEX and OPEX required to make Postgres work well for workloads it wasn’t designed for, at even reasonable scale. At Citus Data, we saw many customers with solid-sized teams of Postgres experts whose primary job was constant tuning, operating, and essentially babysitting the system to keep it performing at scale.

Side note, we’re seeing purpose-built technologies show up much earlier in a company’s lifecycle, likely accelerated by AI-driven use cases. At ClickHouse, many customers using Postgres replication are seed-stage companies that have grown extremely quickly. We pulled together some data on these trends here:
https://clickhouse.com/blog/postgres-cdc-year-in-review-2025...

A better approach would be to embrace the integration of purpose-built technologies with Postgres, making it easier for users to get the best of both worlds, rather than making overgeneralized claims like “Postgres for everything” or “Just use Postgres.”
by jhancock | 2026-02-05 22:46:15+00:00
Good breakdown.

I usually want the codex approach for code/product "shaping" iteratively with the ai.

Once things are shaped and common "scaling patterns" are well established, then for things like adding a front end (which is constantly changing, more views) then letting the autonomous approach run wild can *sometimes* be useful.

I have found that codex is better at remembering when I ask to not get carried away...whereas claude requires constantly reminders.
by hleszek | 2026-02-05 22:47:13+00:00
This is still so relevant now:

> This Orwellian preoccupation with the minutiae of 'historical proof' is
typical of the political sectarian who is always quoting what has been said
and done in the past to prove a point to someone on the other side who is
always quoting something to the opposite effect that has been said and done. As any politician knows, no evidence of any kind is ever required. It is
only necessary to make a statement - any statement - forcefully enough to
have an audience believe it. No one will check the lie against the facts,
and, if they do, they will disbelieve the facts.
by Retric | 2026-02-05 22:47:59+00:00
“I don’t want to get into a debate about the relative validity of sources etc”

> Not the proven solution

LOL

No wait, let me laugh harder. The physics doesn’t change and the physics is what matters.

> doesn’t pose an impediment

Nope. I said it beats “space” not that soiling doesn’t exist. That’s what you have to demonstrate here and you have provided zero evidence whatsoever supporting that viewpoint. Hell they could replace the entire array every 5 years and it would still beat space.. Even if what you said was completely true, you still lose the argument.
by lubujackson | 2026-02-05 22:48:20+00:00
This is very much a "vibe coding can build you the Great Pyramids but it can't build a cathedral" situation, as described earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46898223

I know this is an impressive accomplishment and is meant to show us the future potential, but it achieves big results by throwing an insane amount of compute at the problem, brute forcing its way to functionality. $20,000 set on fire, at Claude's discounted Max pricing no less.

Linear results from exponential compute is not nothing, but this certain feels like a dead end approach. The frontier should be more complexity for less compute, not more complexity from an insane amount more compute.
Why a solid app failed without marketing focus
by topcone | 2026-02-05 22:49:22+00:00
I’ve built several apps over the years that were technically solid.

They worked.
They were stable.
They solved real problems.
Some were even used by paying customers.

And yet — they went nowhere.

For a long time, I framed this as a distribution problem, or a timing problem, or “I just didn’t push it hard enough.” What I eventually realized is simpler, and harder to accept:

Building software and growing a product are fundamentally different disciplines.

I enjoy building systems. I enjoy architecture, edge cases, tradeoffs, and getting something right under the hood. I’m comfortable living with ambiguity while a system takes shape.

Marketing an app is the opposite. It requires sustained visibility, repetition, positioning, storytelling, and a tolerance for noise. It’s not a phase — it’s the job.

In my case, I treated marketing as something I’d “do later,” once the product was good enough. Later never came. Not because I didn’t know it mattered, but because I didn’t want to spend my limited energy there.

The apps didn’t fail because they were bad.
They failed because they required a kind of work I wasn’t willing to do consistently.

That realization was uncomfortable, but clarifying. It forced me to separate pride in building something well from honesty about what I actually want to carry long-term.

Good software doesn’t automatically become a good business.
And that’s not a tragedy — it’s a mismatch.

I’m writing this partly as a note to my past self, and partly for anyone who enjoys building but quietly hopes growth will take care of itself. Sometimes the most responsible decision isn’t to push harder, but to admit what game you’re not playing.
by trueno | 2026-02-05 22:49:27+00:00
> the only thing that I ever snarl at is how many dials and knobs and options there are that's not a bad thing!

yea this is me. postgres is actually insane for how much is offered at checks notes free.99.

_however_ we are probably due for like. I don't know a happy configurator type tool that has reasonable presets and a nice user friendly config tool that helps people get going without sidequesting for a year on devops/dbadmin expertise. that isn't even a favored outcome imo, you just get pretty lukewarm postgres-deployers who are probably missing a bunch of important settings/flags. my team mates would probably shit themselves in the face of postgres configs currently, they are absolute rats in the code but good and proper deployment of postgres is just a whole other career-arc they haven't journeyed and a _lot_ of organizations don't always have a devops/dbadmin type guy readily available any time you want to scrap together an app who's just going to wait for your signal to deploy for you. or said devops/dbadmin guy is just.. one guy and he's supporting 500 other things. not saying the absence/failing to scale teams with such personnel is right, it's just the reality and being up against workplace politics and making the case to convince orgs to hire a bigger team of devops/dbadmin guys involves a lot of shitty meetings and political prowess that is typically beyond an engineers set of capabilities, at least below the senior level. any engineer can figure out how to deploy postgres to something, but are they doing it in a way that makes an orgs security/infra guys happy? probably not. are they prepared to handle weird storage scenarios (log or temp space filling grinding server to a halt) and understand the weird and robust ways to manage a deployment? probably not.
by troad | 2026-02-05 22:49:37+00:00
The Canadian and Australian news link taxes are a naked hand out to powerfully connected individuals like Rupert Murdoch. They're completely incoherent as policy without that fact.

Big Tech spinelessly folded when they should have just banned news links instead. Google has no obligation to index or link to extortionist news media at all. Watch Murdoch U-turn in ten seconds when no one can find his trash online.

In general, there's far too much compliance with protectionist mandates from corrupt foreign governments. One silver lining of the mostly dark cloud of deglobalisation is the fact that US businesses should no longer care what Australian or Turkish or Russian laws say at all, if they're not in those markets.
by arcxi | 2026-02-05 22:49:53+00:00
but annoying hype is exactly the issue with AI in my eyes. I get it's a useful tool in moderation and all, but I also experience that management values speed and quantity of delivery above all else, and hype-driven as they are I fear they will run this industry to the ground and we as users and customers will have to deal with the world where software is permanently broken as a giant pile of unmaintainable vibe code and no experienced junior developers to boot.
by softwaredoug | 2026-02-05 22:50:24+00:00
Yes I think any codegen with a lot of tests and verification is more about “fitting” to the tests. Like fitting an ML model. It’s model training, not coding.

But a lot of programming we discover correctness as we go, one reason humans don’t completely exit the loop. We need to see and build tests as we go, giving them particular care and attention to ensure they test what matters.
by Kuraptka | 2026-02-05 22:50:32+00:00
Oh and one thing your tool is missing is a browser extension. That is what makes Wappalyzer so much easy to use (and its alternatives like SimilarTech, etc)

It would make my workflow so much more convenient. Instead of logging into an app every single time. Have you thought about building one? I imagine with ChatGPT you can just vibe code one these days!
by Philpax | 2026-02-05 22:51:01+00:00
Their C compiler is not reliant on having another C compiler around. Compiling the 16-bit real mode bootstrap for the Linux kernel on x86(-64) requires another C compiler; you certainly don't need another compiler to compile the kernel for another architecture, or to compile another piece of software not subject to the 32k constraint.

The compiler itself is entirely functional; it just can't generate code optimal enough to fit within the constraints for that very specific (tiny!) part of the system, so another compiler is required to do that step.
Ask HN: Why are we safe from botnet-powered vexatious litigation?
by OgsyedIE | 2026-02-05 22:51:02+00:00
Some 2000s science fiction (off the top of my head there's Accelerando, Chicken Little) predicted that AI technology would produce a rise in automated spam litigation by companies targeting each other, as AI became capable of creating convincing-looking fake or throwaway plaintiff identities which could file dozens of suits to rack up legal costs without being easily traceable to the originator.

We've avoided that negative outcome, presumably by some kind of technical expertise in the legal system. Is it a well-defended attack surface today, or is it something we're safe from through obscurity?
by xethos | 2026-02-05 22:51:46+00:00
Mobile notifications do not require outside operators. UnifiedPush / ntfy is FLOSS, and allows for a single background connection for multiple apps / notification channels. It can also be self-hosted (and I do!)

This puts the operational costs (number of devices and notifications) on whomever is running the server - and because of how valuable metadata is, I expect them to be run in-house by governments
by palmotea | 2026-02-05 22:52:16+00:00
That's really stupid. Like, pointlessly stupid. About four people total are going to install the font, and they're going to do it on their own computer. And in the off chance it does get installed on the computer of any "ICE apologist, white supremacist, Republican mouthpiece, right wing propagandist, or other morally bankrupt American," they're just going to dig their heels in deeper. You might as well just spit in their face, it'd be easier and send a clearer message.

People really need to think things through more.
by try_the_bass | 2026-02-05 22:52:24+00:00
But Flock doesn't "follow you around"? It's fixed location cameras. If you avoid the locations, you avoid the cameras, and thus the tracking.

> There is no difference to me that some company does it via technology.

I feel like it's telling that no one has yet taken this logic to court. I think that means that while there may be no difference to you there is a difference according to the law. This gets at your later point.

Speaking of:

> If you went back 50 years ago and asked anyone on the street if it was okay that every time they left the house their travel history would be recorded indefinitely they would talk to you about communist dystopias that could never happen here due to the 2nd amendment.

I think you're doing a subtle motte-and-bailey here. As far as I'm aware, Flock has strict retention policies, numbering in the low single-digit months (Google says 30 days "by default"). There is no "recorded indefinitely" here, which significantly changes the characteristics of the argument here. This is roughly on par with CCTV systems, to the best of my knowledge.

I don't disagree that laws haven't caught up yet, but I also think a lot of the arguments against Flock are rife with hyperbolic arguments like this that do meaningfully misrepresent their model. I think this leads to bad solutioning, as a consequence.

I'd much rather have good solutions here than bad ones, because ALPRs and other "surveillance technologies" do drive improvements in crime clearance rates/outcomes, so they shouldn't be banned--just better controlled/audited/overseen
by frumplestlatz | 2026-02-05 22:52:45+00:00
The German population[1] was not unwilling; your error is not recognizing that it started with cooperation and grew until all of society was subordinated to the totalitarian state.

There was massive alignment across their society. What they “achieved” would not have been possible any other way.

As someone that abhors the destructive ideologies of that era — and has spent a considerable amount of time studying the history — it’s amusing ironic to be repeatedly compared to them (not that you personally have done this).

From a historical perspective, it’s not the right-wing that I’m worried about. I worry about the totalizing, agency-eroding, violence normalizing, and norm-enforcing (thought terminating) “ethics” that have taken firm hold of the left’s levers of power over the past 15 years.

[1] except for the German populations that they literally wanted to murder, of course.
by jaggederest | 2026-02-05 22:52:47+00:00
> what is the current carrying capacity of 25mm multicore armoured thermoplastic insulated cables with aluminium conductors, on perforated cable tray?

This is an electrical engineering question rather than a software engineering one, but let me look it up for you.

WEB SEARCH ("current carrying capacity 25mm multicore armoured thermoplastic insulated cable aluminium conductors perforated cable tray BS 7671")
↳ Found 10 results.

Based on BS 7671 Table 4D4B (multicore armoured thermoplastic insulated cables with aluminium conductors), the current-carrying capacity for a 25mm cable on a perforated cable tray (Reference Method E) is approximately 80A for a 3- or 4-core cable at 30C ambient temperature and 70C conductor operating temperature.

Note: The exact value depends on the number of cores (2-core vs 3/4-core) and whether any rating/correction factors (grouping, ambient temperature, thermal insulation) apply. I'd recommend confirming against the actual BS 7671:2018 Table 4D4B for your specific configuration, as the aluminium conductor ratings are lower than the copper equivalents (~102A for copper in the same conditions).

This is outside my core domain of software engineering -- for critical electrical installations, always verify with the relevant standards documentation or a qualified electrical engineer.
by timeinput | 2026-02-05 22:54:16+00:00
I find that if I want to use JSON storage I'm somewhat stuck choosing my DB stack. If I want to use JSON, and change my database from SQLite to Postgres I have to substantially change my interface to the DB. If I use only SQLite, or only Postgres it's not so bad, but the transition cost to "efficient" JSON use in Postgres from a small demo in SQLite is kind of high compared to just starting with an extra docker run (for a Postgres server) / docker compose / k8s yaml / ... that has my code + a Postgres database.

I really like having some JSON storage because I don't know my schema up front all the time, and just shoving every possible piece of potentially useful metadata in there has (generally) not bit me, but not having that critical piece of metadata has been annoying (that field that should be NOT NULL is NULL because I can't populated it after the fact).
by scotty79 | 2026-02-05 22:54:22+00:00
> It's hard to evaluate if these vulns are actually "hard to find".

Can we stop doing that?

I know it's not the same but it sounds like "We don't know if that job that the woman supposedly successfully finished was all that hard." implying that if a woman did something, it surely must have been easy.

If you know it's easy, say that it was easy and why. Don't use your lack of knowledge or competence to create empty critique founded solely on doubt.