Several US States Bet That AI Can Solve Their Prison Recidivism Crisis
America’s state prison systems need ways “to keep people from returning to prison,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “when an estimated 40% end up back behind bars within three years.”

Part of the problem comes in the form of filing cabinets, manila folders and legacy digital databases. In other words, records for a single prisoner m … ⌘ Read more

Validation, Docs, tests, and database schemas from one source of truth
Article URL: https://github.com/justhamade/triadjs

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48486577

Points: 3

# Comments: 1 ⌘ Read more

PgDog is funded and coming to a database near you
Article URL: https://pgdog.dev/blog/our-funding-announcement

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48476466

Points: 4

# Comments: 0 ⌘ Read more

Spanish traders set the standard forGnuCash database design
Article URL: https://handson.money/blog/2026-06-06-horse-arse-and-design/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48444784

Points: 5

# Comments: 0 ⌘ Read more

pg_durable: Microsoft open sources in-database durable execution
Article URL: https://github.com/microsoft/pg_durable

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414367

Points: 9

# Comments: 0 ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Thanks. I noticed the <updated> of the feed, too. But for some reason, some articles were suddenly marked as new.

On some YouTube feed <entry>s, I noticed updated <updated> fields showing today’s timestamps. But unless there is no <published>, the <updated> is not even considered. I verified that in the source code. Yet, all the affected articles in Newsboat show today’s timestamp, not the years old publication timestamp. I generate the YouTube feeds from the original feeds myself once a day, so I doubt that this is cause by some YouTube shenanigans.

Very weird, it doesn’t make any sense at all. What is going on here? O_o It doesn’t appear that I have duplicates in the database either.

I just missed the 20 year anniversary of my blog. 😬 What a stupid long time to do this.

This started out as a PHP page with user comments, MySQL as a database, a PHP webadmin … can you believe that? Totally unnecessary. But everything was “LAMP” back then, so that’s what I was using as well. I kicked out MySQL in 2011 (it just stored files since then) and eventually switched to static HTML pages in 2015.

RSS feeds have only been there since 2009, because I was late to the party. For a long time, I didn’t understand what they were good for. 🤦

Models.dev: open-source database of AI model specs, pricing, and capabilities
Article URL: https://github.com/anomalyco/models.dev

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48241172

Points: 3

# Comments: 0 ⌘ Read more

Valkey 9.1 Delivers More Performance & Enhanced Security
Valkey 9.1 released on Tuesday as the latest version of this popular fork of the Redis in-memory, key-value database… ⌘ Read more

FBI Wants to Buy Nationwide Access to License Plate Readers
The FBI is seeking up to $36 million for nationwide access to automated license plate reader (ALPRs) data, which could let it query vehicle movements across the U.S. and its territories through a commercial database. 404 Media reports: “The FBI has a crucial need for accessible LPRs to provide a diverse and reliable range of collections across the United S … ⌘ Read more

I’m a Normie. Can Normies Really Vibe Code?
Apparently anyone can vibe code anything these days. So Claude and I tried to make a database for tracking the petty grievances of the masses. ⌘ Read more

[$] Buffered atomic writes, writethrough, and more
In back-to-back sessions at the start of the 2026 Linux Storage,\
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (which spilled over into
a third slot), the atomic-buffered-writes\
feature was discussed. In the first session, Pankaj Raghav and Andres
Freund set the stage with an introduction to the problem, along with a use
case for its solution: the PostgreSQL database system. In the second, Ojaswin … ⌘ Read more

AI Agent Designed To Speed Up Company’s Coding Wipes Entire Database In 9 Seconds
joshuark shares a report from Live Science: An AI coding agent designed to help a small software company streamline its tasks instead blew a hole through its business in just nine seconds. PocketOS founder Jer Crane, said that the AI coding agent Cursor –powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 model – delet … ⌘ Read more

[$] Version-controlled databases using Prolly trees
Modern database and filesystems make pervasive use of
B-trees, which are tree
structures optimized for storing sorted lists of keys and values on block
devices.
Dolt is an Apache 2.0-licensed project that makes clever use of a
variant of a B-tree to support efficient version control for an entire database.
The data structure it uses could well be of interest to other projects. ⌘ Read more

The auDA, and some 3rd-party identify service and my Registrar are a joke!

WOW! I just had to share this little story I ran into today.

I tried to register a .AU Domain the other day, only for it to instantly fail.

I emailed support, which took several days to respond, only for them to respond by saying (paraphased):

We’re sorry, but the identify checks failed. The 3rd-aprty service doesn’t tell us why, But, please make sure that the ID you used matches the Full Name, including any Middle name(s).

I used my Passport number. Which of course has my First, Middle and Last Name.

I can only assume at this point that the checks failed on the missing “Middle name”. Why? Because the Registrar I use has a database and user interface for “contacts” that only have support for First name and Last name. NO Middle Name.

🤦‍♂️ This is basically stupid at this point. Systems cannot be trusted at the most fundamental level, no matter how good they are.

Until we figure out how to build a system that allows an individual to prove to another entity that they are who they say they are without a shred of doubt (i.e: cryptographically), we’re stuffed.

There is literally nothing I can do in this case. The auDA are at fault. The 3rd-party identify service (unknown) are at fault. The registrar are at fault. Hell, even the Passport office are at fault for even bothering to or requiring a Middle name.

How has “identity” come to this?

Popular Rust-Based Database Turns To AI For Up To 1.5x Speedup, Other Improvements
Redb is one of the open-source, embed-friendly key-value databases written in the Rust programming language. Redb is ACID-compliant while known for being high performance and with its new Redb 4.1 release is even faster thanks to some improvements authored by Claude (AI)… ⌘ Read more

20-Year-Old Enters Prison for Historic Breach, Ransoming of Massive Student Database
20-year-old Matthew Lane sent a text message to ABC News as his parents drove him to federal prison in Connecticut. “I’m just scared,” he said, calling the whole situation “extremely sad.”

Barely a year earlier, while still a teenager, he helped launch what’s been described as the biggest cyberattack in U.S. … ⌘ Read more

NIST Limits CVE Enrichment After 263% Surge In Vulnerability Submissions
NIST is narrowing how it handles CVEs in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), saying it will only automatically enrich higher-priority vulnerabilities. “CVEs that do not meet those criteria will still be listed in the NVD but will not automatically be enriched by NIST,” it said. “This change is driven by a surge in CVE submissi … ⌘ Read more

‘TotalRecall Reloaded’ Tool Finds a Side Entrance To Windows 11 Recall Database
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Two years ago, Microsoft launched its first wave of “Copilot+” Windows PCs with a handful of exclusive features that could take advantage of the neural processing unit (NPU) hardware being built into newer laptop processors. These NPUs could enable AI and machine le … ⌘ Read more

FBI Extracts Suspect’s Deleted Signal Messages Saved In iPhone Notification Data
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: The FBI was able to forensically extract copies of incoming Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone, even after the app was deleted, because copies of the content were saved in the device’s push notification database, multiple people present for FBI testimony i … ⌘ Read more

AWS Engineer Reports PostgreSQL Performance Halved By Linux 7.0, But A Fix May Not Be Easy
An Amazon/AWS engineer raised the alarms on Friday over the current Linux 7.0 development kernel leading to the throughput for the PostgreSQL database server being around half that of prior kernel versions. The culprit halving the PostgreSQL performance is known but a revert looks like it may not happen and currently suggesting that PostgreSQL may need to be adapted… ⌘ Read more

AWS Engineer Reports PostgreSQL Performance Halved By Linux 7.0, But A Fix May Not Be Easy
An Amazon/AWS engineer raised the alarms on Friday over the current Linux 7.0 development kernel leading to the throughput for the PostgreSQL database server being around half that of prior kernel versions. The culprit halving the PostgreSQL performance is known but a revert looks like it may not happen and currently suggesting that PostgreSQL may need to be adapted… ⌘ Read more

European Commission Investigating Breach After Amazon Cloud Account Hack
The European Commission is investigating a breach after a threat actor allegedly accessed at least one of its AWS cloud accounts and claimed to have stolen more than 350 GB of data, including databases and employee-related information. AWS says its own services were not breached. BleepingComputer reports: Sources familiar with the i … ⌘ Read more

I’m supporting incremental SQLite schema changes to just upgrade from an older database version to whatever the current software version supports. In the past, I already noticed that this is quite expensive in unit tests when each test case runs through the entire schema patches and applies them one by one.

To speed up test execution I now decided that I finally go through the troubles of maintaining both a set of incremental patches and a full schema setup in one go. A unit test verifies that both ways end up with the same structure. This gives me a set of SQLs to check the structures:

SELECT type, name, tbl_name, sql
FROM sqlite_schema
ORDER BY type, name, tbl_name

Unfortunately, the resulting CREATE TABLE SQL queries are formatted differently, depending on whether the full schema was set up in one big step or the structure had been modified with ALTER TABLE. Mainly, added columns are not on their own lines but appended in one physical line. That’s why I wanted an SQL formatting tool. Since I didn’t find one that works decently, I’m now doing some simple string manipulation. Joining consecutive whitespace into a single space character, removing spaces before commas and closing parentheses and spaces after opening parentheses. This works surpringly good enough. Of course, if it fails, the “diff” is absolutely horrendous.

Now for the cool part, my test execution dropped from around 5:05 minutes to just 1:32 minutes! I call that a win.

I just stumbled across PRAGMA table_info('tablename') https://sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_table_info, PRAGMA foreign_key_list('tablename') and friends. I guess, I have to play with that, now. It’s probably much better to use than the SQL text approach.

Linux 7.0 Shows Off Nice Performance Gains For Databases In Small AMD EPYC Servers
Last week with my ongoing testing of the in-development Linux 7.0 kernel I found nice performance improvements for PostgreSQL and other workloads when testing on a 128-core AMD EPYC 9755 “Turin” server. Curious if those wins were due to optimizations focused on better scalability with today’s “big” servers, I also ran some comparison Linux 7.0 benchmarks on the smaller AMD EPYC 4005 class servers too. Some nice wins carried over.. … ⌘ Read more

UK Orders Deletion of Country’s Largest Court Reporting Archive
The UK’s Ministry of Justice has ordered the deletion of the country’s largest court reporting archive [non-paywalled source], a database built by data analysis company Courtsdesk that more than 1,500 journalists across 39 media organizations have used since the lord chancellor approved the project in 2021.

Courtsdesk’s research found that journa … ⌘ Read more

Google Axion CPU Performance With The New Google Cloud N4A Instances
Back in 2024 Google rolled out their Axion in-house ARM processors with the Google Cloud C4A instance type. Today they are expanding their Axion offerings in Google Cloud with the N4A instances now out of preview. The Google Cloud N4A instances are designed for scale-out web servers and microservices, containerized applications, back-end application services, databases, data analytics, and cost-effective development/staging/testing environments. ⌘ Read more

To Pressure Security Professionals, Mandiant Releases Database That Cracks Weak NTLM Passwords in 12 Hours
Ars Technica reports:

Security firm Mandiant [part of Google Cloud] has released a database that allows any administrative password protected by Microsoft’s NTLM.v1 hash algorithm to be hacked in an attempt to nudge users who continue using the deprecated function … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org … I sure hope that they generate these files from the general terminfo database instead of maintaining their own DB. 😳

Rust-Based Fjall 3.0 Released For Key-Value Storage Engine Akin To RocksDB
In addition to the release of Stoolap 0.2 as a modern embedded SQL database written in Rust, Fjall 3.0 is available as another Rust-written database solution. Fjall is a log-structured, embedable key-value storage engine akin to RocksDB but with the benefit of being written in Rust. With Fjall 3.0 its performance is now very competitive… ⌘ Read more

Stoolap 0.2 Released For Modern Embedded SQL Database In Rust
Stooplap v0.2 released today as this SQLite alternative for providing embedded SQL database needs while written in the Rust programming language. Stoolap supports both in-memory and persistent storage models… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I noticed that your feed’s last modification timestamp was missing in my database. I cannot tell for certain, but I think it did work before. Turns out, your httpd now sends the Last-Modified with UTC instead of GMT. Current example:

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 06:50:20 UTC

I’m not a fan of this timestamp format at all, but according to the HTTP specification, HTTP-date must always use GMT for a timezone, nothing else: https://httpwg.org/specs/rfc9110.html#http.date

At around 19 seconds in the video, you can see some minor graphical glitches.

Text mode applications in Unix terminals are such a mess. It’s a miracle that this works at all.

In the old DOS days, you could get text (and colors) on the screen just by writing to memory, because the VGA memory was mapped to a fixed address. We don’t have that model anymore. To write a character to a certain position, you have to send an escape sequence to move the cursor to that position, then more escape sequences to set the color/attributes, then more escape sequences to get the cursor to where you actually want it. And then of course UTF-8 on top, i.e. you have no idea what the terminal will actually do when you send it a “🙂”.

Mouse events work by the terminal sending escape sequences to you (https://www.xfree86.org/current/ctlseqs.html#Mouse%20Tracking).

ncurses does an amazing job here. It’s fast (by having off-screen buffers and tracking changes, so it rarely has to actually send full screen updates to the terminal) and reliable and works across terminals. Without the terminfo database that keeps track of which terminal supports/requires which escape sequences, we’d be lost.

But gosh, what a mess this is under the hood … Makes you really miss memory mapped VGA and mouse drivers.

@prologic@twtxt.net In my opinion, the integrity isn’t lost. The same input data always result in the same output hash, no matter when you calculate the hashes. It’s true that a corrupt database contents yields to corrupt hashes, but then you have a whole bigger problem than just receiving different hashes. :-D

@zvava@twtxt.net By hashing definition, if you edit your message, it simply becomes a new message. It’s just not the same message anymore. At least from a technical point of view. As a human, personally I disagree, but that’s what I’m stuck with. There’s no reliable way to detect and “correct” for that.

Storing the hash in your database doesn’t prevent you from switching to another hashing implementation later on. As of now, message creation timestamps earlier than some magical point in time use twt hash v1, messages on or after that magical timestamp use twt hash v2. So, a message either has a v1 or a v2 hash, but not both. At least one of them is never meaningful.

Once you “upgrade” your database schema, you can check for stored messages from the future which should have been hashed using v2, but were actually v1-hashed and simply fix them.

If there will ever be another addressing scheme, you could reuse the existing hash column if it supersedes the v1/v2 hashes. Otherwise, a new column might be useful, or perhaps no column at all (looking at location-based addressing or how it was called). The old v1/v2 hashes are still needed for all past conversation trees.

In my opinion, always recalculating the hashes is a big waste of time and energy. But if it serves you well, then go for it.

@zvava@twtxt.net The problem you now then is you lose integrity of the message content if you compute the hashes at runtime rather than on the way in. So if your message content or database becomes corrupt in any way, so do your hashes.

@zvava@twtxt.net I might misunderstand what you wrote, but only hashing the message once and storing the hash together with the message in the database seems a way better approch to me. It’s fixed and doesn’t change, so there’s no need to recompute it during runtime over and over and over again. You just have it. And can easily look up other messages by hash.

How We Ingest Plastic Chemicals While Consuming Food
A comprehensive database built by scientists in Switzerland and Norway has catalogued 16,000 chemicals linked to plastic materials, and the findings paint a troubling picture of what Americans are actually eating when they prepare food in their kitchens. Of those 16,000 chemicals, more than 5,400 are considered hazardous to human health by government and industry sta … ⌘ Read more

SoundCloud Confirms Breach After Member Data Stolen, VPN Access Disrupted
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Audio streaming platform SoundCloud has confirmed that outages and VPN connection issues over the past few days were caused by a security breach in which threat actors stole a database containing user information. The disclosure follows widespread reports over the past four … ⌘ Read more

Over 10,000 Docker Hub Images Found Leaking Credentials, Auth Keys
joshuark shares a report from BleepingComputer: More than 10,000 Docker Hub container images expose data that should be protected, including live credentials to production systems, CI/CD databases, or LLM model keys. After scanning container images uploaded to Docker Hub in November, security researchers at threat intelligence company Flare foun … ⌘ Read more

Using AI To Modernize The Ubuntu Error Tracker Produced Some Code That Was “Plain Wrong”
A week ago I wrote about AI being used to help modernize Ubuntu’s Error Tracker. Microsoft GitHub Copilot was tasked to help adapt its Cassandra database usage to modern standards. It’s worked in some areas but even for a rather straight forward task, some of the generated functions ended up being “plain wrong” according to the developer involved… ⌘ Read more

Contractors With Hacking Records Accused of Wiping 96 Government Databases
Two Virginia brothers Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, previously convicted of hacking the U.S. State Department, were rehired as federal contractors and are now charged with conspiring to steal sensitive data and destroy government databases after being fired. “Following the termination of their employment, the brothers allegedly sou … ⌘ Read more

‘We Built a Database of 290,000 English Medieval Soldiers’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Conversation, written by authors Adrian R. Bell, Anne Curry, and Jason Sadler: When you picture medieval warfare, you might think of epic battles and famous monarchs. But what about the everyday soldiers who actually filled the ranks? Until recently, their stories were scattered across handwritten manuscripts i … ⌘ Read more

Morgan Stanley Warns Oracle Credit Protection Nearing Record High
A gauge of risk on Oracle debt “reached a three-year high in November,” reports Bloomberg.

“And things are only going to get worse in 2026 unless the database giant is able to assuage investor anxiety about a massive artificial intelligence spending spree, according to Morgan Stanley.”

A funding gap, swelling balance sheet and obsolesce … ⌘ Read more

Violent Conflict Over Water Hit a Record Last Year
Researchers at the Pacific Institute documented 420 water-related conflicts globally in 2024, a record that far surpasses the 355 incidents logged in 2023 and continues a trend that has seen such violence more than quadruple over the past five years. The Oakland-based water think tank’s database tracks disputes where water triggered violence, where water systems were target … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Slated To Land “mm/cid” Rewrite That Has Very Positive Performance Potential
A set of Linux kernel patches posted back in October for rewriting the kernel’s memory-mapped concurrency ID code for some nice performance wins looks like it will land for Linux 6.19. This is the code that prominent Intel engineer Thomas Gleixner found to yield up to an 18% improvement for the PostgreSQL database. My testing of this “mm/cid” code has also shown some nice performance wins too… ⌘ Read more

Cloudflare Explains Its Worst Outage Since 2019
Cloudflare suffered its worst network outage in six years on Tuesday, beginning at 11:20 UTC. The disruption prevented the content delivery network from routing traffic for roughly three hours. The failure, writes Cloudflare in a blog post, originated from a database permissions change deployed at 11:05 UTC. The modification altered how a database query returned information about … ⌘ Read more

When I have to explain to the client that we can’t use their Excel 2010 file as a database ⌘ Read more

ACLU and EFF Sue a City Blanketed With Flock Surveillance Cameras
An anonymous reader shares a report: Lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued the city of San Jose, California over its deployment of Flock’s license plate-reading surveillance cameras, claiming that the city’s nearly 500 cameras create a pervasive database of residents movements in a s … ⌘ Read more

IRS Accessed Massive Database of Americans Flights Without a Warrant
An anonymous reader shares a report: The IRS accessed a database of hundreds of millions of travel records, which show when and where a specific person flew and the credit card they used, without obtaining a warrant, according to a letter signed by a bipartisan group of lawmakers and shared with 404 Media. The country’s major airlines, inc … ⌘ Read more