hackernews

1. Build Your Own Database Total comment counts : 14 Summary An instructional guide to building a key-value database from scratch. It starts with a naive file-based store (db.txt) where updates/deletes rewrite the file, which is inefficient. To fix this, it proposes immutable, append-only logs: add new records, keep the last key occurrence, and use tombstones to mark deletes. To prevent unbounded growth, it introduces periodic compaction, splitting into segments, and merging....

1. Claude Code on the Web Total comment counts : 28 Summary Claude Code on the web lets you delegate coding tasks from your browser in a beta research preview. You can connect GitHub repos, describe tasks, and Claude executes them in isolated cloud sandboxes, enabling parallel sessions, real-time progress tracking, and steering as it runs. It supports automatic PR creation and change summaries, and a single interface can manage tasks across multiple repos....

1. Doing well in your courses: Andrej’s advice for success (2013) Total comment counts : 28 Summary Andrej Karpathy’s study advice: skip all-nighters; sleep ~7.5 hours (min ~4). Start studying days ahead; brains consolidate at night. Attend tutorials to stimulate thinking; if boring, switch sessions. Make a study plan, list all topics, estimate time, review past tests to learn professor’s style. Focus on being able to write/derive key concepts, not just read....

1. Root System Drawings Total comment counts : 15 Summary error Overall Comments Summary Main point: The discussion centers on a collection of plant root diagrams, their production and interpretation, and the idea of roots as a metaphor for hidden knowledge behind visible systems. Concern: The main worry is that the diagrams and their metaphors may be misinterpreted or overly generalized beyond what the images actually depict. Perspectives: Views range from awe and fascination with the visuals and their creation, to scientific and artistic interpretation, to caution about context and potential misinterpretation....

1. Exploring PostgreSQL 18’s new UUIDv7 support Total comment counts : 4 Summary UUIDv7, introduced in Postgres 18, improves on UUIDv4 by placing a 48-bit timestamp as the most significant portion, enabling natural sortability and efficient sequential inserts. This reduces index fragmentation, improves cache locality, and simplifies time-based queries, with broad language support (e.g., Python 3.14). UUIDs are consistent across platforms via uuid_extract_version. Caution: the embedded timestamp leaks creation time, so use UUIDv7 for internal keys only and keep an external random UUIDv4 as public identifiers....

1. Claude Skills Total comment counts : 65 Summary Claude Skills are modular folders with instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude loads only when relevant, boosting performance on tasks like Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and PDFs. They work across Claude apps, Claude Code, and the API, loading minimal data to stay fast. Available to Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise users, skills can be created with a “skill-creator” tool. Admins can enable org-wide for teams....

1. Apple M5 chip Total comment counts : 88 Summary Apple unveils M5, the AI-focused 3nm Apple silicon with a 10-core GPU, each core housing a Neural Accelerator, delivering over 4x peak GPU compute vs M4 and up to 6x AI vs M1. It features a faster 16-core Neural Engine, a new 10-core CPU (up to six efficiency and four performance cores), and 153 GB/s unified memory bandwidth (nearly 30% higher)....

1. Why your boss isn’t worried about AI – “can’t you just turn it off?” Total comment counts : 15 Summary Public misreads AI bugs as typical software bugs that experts can fix with debugging. In modern AI, most issues come from training data, not code, and datasets are enormous (e.g., FineWeb ~11.25 trillion words) so no one reads all training material. When AIs err, tracing the exact data cause is usually impossible; fixes involve retraining or data curation....

1. NanoChat – The best ChatGPT that $100 can buy Total comment counts : 28 Summary NanoChat is a full-stack, minimal LLM project designed to resemble ChatGPT in a single, hackable codebase. It runs on one 8XH100 GPU and uses speedrun.sh to complete the full pipeline—from tokenization and pretraining to finetuning, evaluation, inference, and a web UI. A typical run takes about 4 hours; after that you can chat with the LLM via a ChatGPT-like UI....

1. Wireguard FPGA Total comment counts : 12 Summary An open-source project to implement WireGuard VPN in hardware on an affordable Artix-7 FPGA using open tools. It emphasizes transparency and backdoor scrutiny of RTL, embedded, build, and delivery. Phase 1 is a proof-of-concept to establish HW/SW partitioning, a basic WireGuard datapath for a few channels, and groundwork for Phase 2 to scale channels, add GUI, and improve usability. Realistic limits include Artix-7 I/O up to ~600MHz and core ~100MHz; the project is WIP with no deployment guarantees....