MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by palmotea | 2025-04-09 15:12:33+00:00
>> Like "I don't know anything, so I'm just going to try "stuff" I find online without really understanding.

> A reasonable place to start. But fair that you can't stop there if it isn't working.

It's not a reasonable place to start. You're basically talking about copy-paste coding. Google search, stack overflow, paste in the first answer. Afterwards, ask the dev if they know what they did and why it works, and they won't be able to answer because they don't know.

> Next step, in my opinion, is to look at the interface more closely to see if it provides any hints. It will most of the time if it is well designed.

The people I'm taking about can't and won't do that.

> Sure. That's what the test suite is for, though: To document for users full intent and usage. You're still not going to go to a reference for that. As an added bonus, it is self-validating, so none of the "is it me or is the reference incorrect?" rigamarole.

I'm getting an "I don't need comments because code is self-documenting" vibe here. I disagree with that. Prose is a better way to express many, many things related to code than the code itself or even its test.

Sure, the code is the most authoritative place to find what was implemented, but it's not the best way to find the why or the concepts and thought behind it.
by paulddraper | 2025-04-09 15:13:04+00:00
Apples and oranges.

Among many other things, Docker (and Podman etc) has

1. Images and OverlayFS

2. Networking

3. User namespace mappings

4. Resource management

---

If all you want is file system isolation, then docker (and postman, etc) is massive overkill chroot is correct.
by matthewfcarlson | 2025-04-09 15:13:19+00:00
Not a developer affiliated with the project. But here's my take:

The problem is that the proof is in the pudding. Some of their claims feel outlandish. Imagine writing your game with SQL queries. Rather than crafting update packets that only contain relevant game info you just do `select * from players where abs(player.x - current_player.x) + abs(player.y - current_player.y) + abs(player.z - current_player.z) < 100^2` and it just updates automagically 60 times a second.

Running physics sim in SQL stored functions sounds insane but that's exactly what they're advertising. They say it's due to in-mem DB optimization but I'm not sure how they horizontally scale that (they allow you to run standalone but any scaling requires their cloud product)
by _huayra_ | 2025-04-09 15:13:22+00:00
Mothy Roscoe, the Barrelfish PI, gave a really great talk at ATC 2021 [0]. A lot of OS research is basically "here's a clever way we bypassed Linux to touch hardware directly", but his argument is that the "VAX model" of hardware that Linux still uses has ossified, and CPU manufacturers have to build complexity to support that.

Concretely, there are a lot of things that are getting more "NOC-y" (network-on-chip). I'm not an OS expert, but deal with a lot of forthcoming features from hardware vendors at my current role. Most are abstracted as some sorta PCI device that does a little "mailbox protocol" to get some values (perhaps directly, perhaps read out of memory upon success). Examples are HSMP from AMD and OOBMSM from Intel. In both, the OS doesn't directly configure a setting, but asks some other chunk of code (provided by the CPU vendor) to configure the setting. Mothy's argument is that that is an architectural failure, and we should create OSes that can deal with this NOC-y heterogeneous architecture.

Even if one disagrees with Mothy's premise, this is a banger of a talk, well worth watching and easy to understand.

[0] https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc21/presentation/fri-key...
by toast0 | 2025-04-09 15:13:28+00:00
If you look at the retailer margin on an individual product, it looks pretty big. But if you look at their overall financial report, their overall margins aren't anywhere close to that.

There's a lot of cost to running a retailer. If it was so easy to avoid the costs and the margins, you'd see more brands going direct to consumer exclusively, but most brands do a little direct to consumer and most of their sales through retailers.

Movie theater economics basically suck and have gotten worse over time. The projectors are very expensive, the pricing to show a film is bad, so ticket and consession prices go up and people stop showing up. Big chains have more negotiating power for film terms and equipment, which can help them survive. Sometimes the independents band together for group purchases, but I think that doesn't always happen.
by spmurrayzzz | 2025-04-09 15:13:40+00:00
Assuming you're referring to the backend side of things for online/multiplayer games, working through the Hathora tutorials in the docs can be a good first introduction to general idioms related to backend systems architecture: https://docs.hathora.dev/#/builder/

From my past consulting experience though, the distributed systems side of games is all over the place. Designs tend to need to be customized for each games needs, which usually directly influences which technologies are chosen.
by andrewflnr | 2025-04-09 15:13:58+00:00
> but dentists can fix this

I find this a laughably bad excuse. Dentist visits are expensive. A society-wide increase in dentist visits is expensive to society. The post in OP mentioned that dentist visits went up in Israel by 2x. This is not an adequate alternative option to fluoride.

Edit: also, dentistry does not fully restore teeth to their pre-cavity condition anyway. It doesn't prevent all the pain. There's lots of non-monetary damage even before the dentist visits increase.
by darknavi | 2025-04-09 15:14:10+00:00
The specific (fictitious) example they gave was $100 -> $150 due to a ~$23 tariff.

> But if we bump the cost of freight, insurance, and customs from $5 to, say, $28, then they wholesale the shoes to Footlocker for about $75. And if Footlocker purchases Nike shoes for $75, then they retail them for $150. Everyone needs to fixed percentages to avoid losses.

The point being that many parts of the supply chain don't operate on fixed costs and instead percentages.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-09 15:14:33+00:00
In the early 90s, my parents undertook and completed an ambitious project to expand our home, after owning it for about 20 years. Without adding a third story or encroaching too much on our open yard space, we managed to double the kitchen and expand/renovate several other rooms and the results were really wonderful.

However, the process was painful for me as a young adult. I recall first a controversy over whether a professional, licensed architect should be retained, or if the contractor himself should draw up the plans. We were told that architects often had ivory-tower type plans that were impractical, expensive, or needed modifications by the contractor anyway. I can't actually remember which side we came down on.

Mom and Dad also permitted me to specify a bunch of elements in my own room, and being a rebellious goth in the throes of PTSD I made some really bad decisions, before permanently moving out two years later. My dad has the room now: it's got pitch-black carpeting with an incense burn in it, the miniblinds are also charcoal black with dark-grey accents in weird middle stripes, and two windows may be cranked open for fresh air, but one is ridiculously narrow, and I suspect that the design intent was "prevent AStonesThrow from jumping out of this one". (Well I did climb out of windows, but more for exploration's sake than self-harm.)

The demolition was also mindblowing as I got a taste of just how sturdy our original construction was. It was a tough "chicken-wire" lath embedded in plaster/stucco, and it was a Faraday cage fortress that took weeks to tear down. They replaced it with ordinary gypsum drywall, and I was incredulous about the sheer quality difference, but it was clear that matching the original style would need to be superficial unless we were spending millions of bucks at that point.

It really turned out well despite all my efforts at sabotage. I'm not sure about my parents' motivations; I believe it was mostly Mom who received a really awesome modern kitchen, and a modicum of "keeping up with the Joneses" because that decade saw so many of our neighbors adding stories and Granny Flats and renovations, commensurate with rising property values. Yay!
by ryandrake | 2025-04-09 15:14:42+00:00
This thread is kind of wild and something I've never heard anywhere in tech. Every place I've worked would consider a developer at least 5X more valuable if they actually had business or product sense, and could operate without the need for constant symbiosis with a "product guy". At one BigTech company we've all heard of, our division didn't even have product people. The engineering lead was expected to handle all of the product duties, and they wouldn't hire you if they didn't think you could at least grow into that role.

It's one of the reasons I went back for a business degree and then re-entered tech. No, of course nobody in Silicon Valley cares about the "MBA" title (HN sees it as a negative), but everywhere I've interviewed/worked they've appreciated that we could talk about the economic and business impact of the software, and not just the algorithms and data structures.
by vessenes | 2025-04-09 15:14:48+00:00
7.2 Terabit/s HBM Bandwidth raised my eyebrows. But then I googled, and it looks like GB200 is 16Tb/s. In plebe land, 2Tb is pretty awesome.

These continue to be mostly for bragging rights and strategic safety I think. I bet they are not on premium processor nodes; If I worked at GOOG I’d probably think about these as competitive insurance vis-a-vis NVIDIA — total costs of chip team, software, tape outs, and increased data center energy use probably wipe out any savings from not buying NV, but you are 100% not beholden to Jensen.
by foxyv | 2025-04-09 15:15:14+00:00
Markdown, Markdown Extended, GLFM, Mediawiki Markup, Asciidoc, reStructuredText (RST), Pandoc, Mundimark, Djot, Creole, Textile, BBCode, Dendron, Pendown.

I bet at this point if you came up with a new completely independent standard it would probably match one of the ones already created. We mostly just have to pick one.
by ericmay | 2025-04-09 15:15:17+00:00
> Full sale was never likely. Some sort of 51%+ US JV (which afaik US investors already owns majority) maybe. But tarrifs obviously blew everything up. So now it's wierd scenario where Trump seems loath to ban, as in very much want US to own so nationalization of US operations doesn't seem unfathomable.

Trump was very popular on TikTok which is why he's in favor of keeping it or making it a US company so he can sell it to one of his sycophants. But it will be fully sold to a US company or banned. I don't think a JV is on the table.

> In response to shenanigans like TikTok US branch being nationalized, or CFIUS mass reversing PRC MNC portfolios, i.e. shares/purchases of US assets. They can be functionally "nationalized" in retaliation as in just have whatever is in country siezed, as in their presence in PRC. It means WFOE like Tesla losing their factory, whose workers will make domestic cars. Apple losing some R&D centres, all the capex infra build for foxconn can be messed with. Continue hampering capex/engineer export to India or whereever Apple wants to setup their none PRC operation to make process as painful as possible... or simply just kill Apple hardware 90% dead like US tried with Huawei/ZTE.

Right but those activities harm China too. If China isn't building iPhones in China because China nationalized those specific assets then Chinese workers sort of lose too. Similarly with the Tesla factory - if they keep it running they have to spend money to retool it to make BYD cars, then they have to sell those cars to someone - perhaps domestic consumers, but there's a lot of analysis that would be needed to be done to understand the exact effects.

I mostly took issue with your statement that Apple and Tesla would be nationalized, but I think you just meant to say their assets would be nationalized in China which is certainly an option that China has on the table.

But like all things there are actions the US can take that China would be very unhappy about, like, perhaps the US decides to build a military base in Taiwan. Now what? I'm not suggesting that's a good idea or on the table, but just saying both countries can get creative.

> Because it's been ~30 years, foreign MNCs who wanted to be in PRC are in PRC. In the short term domestic companies better positioned to soak up domestic demand, which has been independant trend in past few years.

Sure but now with US ventures like KFC probably being forced to shut down there should be room for European companies or companies from other countries to move in to China, which China will be just fine with right? I'm imagining since tariffs will be higher for Mercedes in the US they'll have to ship those cars to other countries and who better than China?
by parpfish | 2025-04-09 15:15:29+00:00
> "we're not against change, we're not against business, if you want to open a nice little coffee shop and bookstore, but Dollar General just isn't quite a good fit."

this line stood out to me because it mirrored a lot of debate in my small rural community when a dollar general proposed moving in (spoiler alert: DG won).

the debates around DG had a way of exposing some previously-unseen class and economic divisions in the the community. it wasn't a NIMBY vs YIMBY thing -- both wanted development -- but they just had very different needs and expectations.

you have one group that wants the cute little bookstores/coffeeshops to preserve "local character". they may not be rich, but they aren't struggling day to day so they say "I don't mind paying a little extra to support local business".

then there's the other group which says "i don't have any extra money to support local business". they'd love to be in a position to worry about local character, but today they just need to be able to afford another single roll of TP and have some snacks for their kid after school.

in my community, these two groups existed in their own little bubbles never really interacted until the DG debate came up, so in a way it was good for dissolving some of those boundaries.
by krapp | 2025-04-09 15:16:03+00:00
>The world's democratic governments generally oppose the overthrow of democratic governments by dictators who want to grab some place by killing the locals.

Not only do Western governments not actually oppose this, they have orchestrated the overthrow of democratic governments and installed dictatorships numerous times when it suited their interests.

The actual Western perspective is not to give a damn who runs Taiwan or how many locals they kill as long as we can do favorable business with them. Although the Red Menace rhetoric does play well at home.
by olokobayusuf | 2025-04-09 15:16:55+00:00
Spot on! We're starting from specific functions for now, and will expand the scope if/when feasible. The challenges exist across two axes: language coverage and library coverage.

For language coverage, Function currently doesn't support classes (on the roadmap) or lambda expressions (much harder). But these are the main limitations.

For library coverage, this is where things get incredibly hairy. If a library isn't pure Python (i.e. most of the important libs), we can't compile them. We instead have to reimplement the library's functionality. For now, we plan on using LLMs to automate this as much as possible.
by blululu | 2025-04-09 15:16:58+00:00
Fair enough. During the pandemic there was an acute shortage of medical supplies and there were really not enough to go around for everyone. It would be a tough sell to convince the person who is actually making these supplies to put the needs to an arbitrary person above the needs of their immediate community. I didn't really enjoy having to be the one to go without on that round, but I would have been pretty angry in a hypothetical situation where my neighbor has needed medical supplies and refuses to provide them to the local fire department because he is trying to sell them to a foreign country for the greatest possible profit. In any case I don't really hold much personal animosity to the people and organizations who made these decisions during the pandemic. I do however want to make sure that we can avoid repeating that the next time around.
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-09 15:17:06+00:00
I think you're conflating a few pieces of the ecosystem.

Linux (and GNU/Linux, and POSIX, and the tools that run on and through them) have the same great strength and great weakness: they aren't owned by anyone. To a first approximation, the only thing that gives them consistency is some loci of discourse and consensus built up around some charismatic leaders (Torvalds, Stallman). But the end result is that nobody's actually in charge of making all this stuff work together "all of the time or we don't ship," which means... It all kind of works, most of the time, with some weird corner cases that make a person dig deep into some historical interactions to fix it (TIL that manpages aren't even all in the same language, or that `man` does more that pop a file open and dump it raw to the terminal).

... but on the flip side, there's no artificial barrier to entry. If you want to get started, you can download a distro onto a machine willing to accept some media that will overwrite its boot rules and get started. And that's extremely powerful.

The Linux ecosystem is awful and weird and gross and arbitrary and broken... And beautiful. And it's not going away anytime soon because it's free (beer and usually speech). The alternatives can't replace it because they generally lack the incentives to be as open and fast as the incumbent ecosystem; they either aren't free (beer or speech), so already constrain their domain to people willing to pay... Or they are too different (even if different in a better way), and therefore don't interoperate with the software that's already there and have a labor shortage (having an ecosystem that mostly works most of the time creates a positive feedback loop on improving it that is missing in the attempts to burn it down and replace it).

(Side-note on git: while I concur that git out of the box doesn't make it obvious the right way to use it... In fact, there is no one right way, that's the thing about git... I've used four version control systems in my day, and git's the only one I've ever used where there was a way to do what I wanted, every time. The flexibility of its abstraction makes it tricky to delve into but powerful).
by jonnat | 2025-04-09 15:17:11+00:00
Worse than projecting one's values onto a rationalization of the new tariffs is to simply take the administration's rhetoric at face value. That other countries are "taking advantage of us" is just a talking point. We have to look at how the tariffs fit historical conservative programs. Republicans have long wished to replace our progressive income taxation with a flat tax system, but that's simply not achievable, even for Trump. Further decreasing tax rates from high earners and replacing revenue with tariffs to avoid the ballooning of the government debt, for which Trump was heavily criticized during the first term, may be the closest he can get to approximating flat taxation.
by ericmay | 2025-04-09 15:17:27+00:00
In my mind there are two scenarios:

1. He's literally just a moron and is fixated on tariffs. Many think that's most likely but something tells me it's not the whole story.

2. They see a war with China coming in the next few years and they need to decouple as quickly as possible and make sure the US is not reliant on China or Chinese manufactured products, while also potentially harming Chinese trade. Something to ask here is, if we thought we were going to war with China over Taiwan in the next few years what actions would we take now to better positions ourselves for that coming war? Making our allies angry doesn't seem to be helping, but were EU members really going to send troops to the Pacific to defend Taiwan anyway? Certainly not when they have Russia at their doorstep.
by rickydroll | 2025-04-09 15:17:40+00:00
I have mixed feelings about local small businesses. Like you, if I have the time, I go to a small hardware store about 40 minutes away instead of the Home Depot, which is within 10 minutes. I usually use Amazon as a catalog and then try to find a different on line outlet that sells that item. Usually, shopping at local stores involves an afternoon of driving around from store to store looking for what I want. Then I discover nobody sells what I want or they sell the same Chinese crap you would find on Amazon at twice the price.
by lapcat | 2025-04-09 15:17:57+00:00
There is literally a "Submit to HN" button at the bottom of the blog post.

Moreover, the author appears to be a lot more serious than just a free time blogger:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250405193600/https://endler.de...

> My interests are scalability, performance, and distributed systems

> Here is a list of my public speaking engagements.

> Some links on this blog are affiliate links and I earn a small comission if you end up buying something on the partner site

> Maintaining this blog and my projects is a lot of work and I'd love to spend a bigger part of my life writing and maintaining open source projects. If you like to support me in this goal, the best way would be to become a sponsor
by Vvector | 2025-04-09 15:18:24+00:00
Whats your definition of "properly compensate" when dealing with hundreds of millions of artists/authors and billions/trillions of individual training items?

Just a quick example, what's my proper compensation for this specific post? Can I set a FIVE CENTS price for every AI that learned from my post? How can I OPT-IN today?

I'm coming from the position that current law doesn't require compensation, nor opt-in. I'm not happy with it, but I dont see any easy alternative
by theamk | 2025-04-09 15:18:26+00:00
Recent enough Androids have this "Work Profile" feature. You get two app stores, and work apps get little "work" overlay. There are separate lock settings and sound/notification settings for work profiles too - I think this means you can have simple pincode for personal stuff and more complex for work one. And you can turn off all work apps at once with a single button press. And if your admin gives "remote wipe" command, only work apps are wiped.

Sadly this is automatic, which means regular people can't use it. You workspace admin got to enable MDM, and then phone will prompt you if you want a work profile when you try to install it.
by jackb4040 | 2025-04-09 15:18:43+00:00
It's a cool technology, but the hard thing about building an MMO is architecture, not just making the server faster / wider. If you want a good overview of the types of problems to be solved in scaling an MMO, check out https://youtu.be/-c4t3Y5l5jY.

There is a pretty big underlap between these problems, and the ones solved by SpacetimeDB. So much so that if you built a system using both SpacetimeDB and another, high-level tool to manage chunking, transitioning, server provisioning etc. it would obviously be the latter system that was more indispensable to scaling your MMO.
by rep_lodsb | 2025-04-09 15:18:50+00:00
Rather than some conspiracy, my suspicion is that AI companies accidentally succeded in building a machine capable of hacking (some) people's brains. Not because it's superhumanly intelligent, or even has any agenda at all, but simply because LLMs are specifically tuned to generate the kind of language that is convincing to the "average person".

Managers and politicians might be especially susceptible to this, but there's also enough in the tech crowd who seem to have been hypnotized into becoming mindless enthusiasts for AI.