MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ben_w | 2025-04-09 11:52:14+00:00
The length of winter nights in Europe vary from 14.3[0] hours to 52 days[1].

Transmission losses are subject to engineering, and can be as low as you're willing to spend money to get them — as in, if the world all suddenly (magically and unrealistically) decided to be friends, you could put a girdle around the world with only 1 Ω resistance using existing manufacturing capacity[2].

[0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Tarifa+Spain+sunrise+21...

[1] https://www.finavia.fi/en/newsroom/2023/what-polar-night-exp...

[2] ~ 12 months global aluminium production, but you could do it
by amelius | 2025-04-09 11:52:50+00:00
Thanks. Interestingly, strace speeds up the operation. What took 50s after a cache drop now becomes immediate with "strace -f ls -U".

Dropping the cache and doing "time ls -U" gives:

real 0m51,204s user 0m0,116s sys 0m0,718s

Update: never mind, it appears to be something in my shell. Switching to tcsh completely eradicated the problem.
by ElevenLathe | 2025-04-09 11:55:13+00:00
I happen to disagree with you here, but ironically therefore am suspicious of this "finding". It seems to both tell us that impartiality is contextual and relative, but also that it objectively exists and can be measured. The whole thing in incoherent.

I think the bigger problem with our information diet is that we're constantly exposed to grade school level analysis that any twentieth century newspaper editor would have laughed out of the newsroom, whether they worked for the Wall Street Journal or Pravda. I'm ok with far right and far left rags sharing newsstand space (metaphorically) with establishment mainstream papers, but in 2025 very little of what we read is fit to be in a proper newspaper, including most of the stuff that actually is. Instead we get sloppy analysis like this that polarizes without illuminating anything. Even a committed Nazi can read The Nation and actually learn something. The same is not true of a committed Marxist reading the average right wing Substack.
by DarkWiiPlayer | 2025-04-09 11:56:01+00:00
More and more I am coming to hate the term "tech elites"; it playes into the lie that these people have, themselves, any sort of "elite" status in the field, rather than the reality that they are just wealthy owners of big companies; some by luck, some by inheritance.

And people like Musk are increasingly making use of this misconception to justify their opinions with fake authority, as someone who understands tech rather than someone who owns companies that employs people who understand tech.

It's becoming more and more important to remind people that no, these people aren't in any way different from the rest of the wealthy owning class; they aren't smarter, they didn't pull themselves up by the bootstraps, they simply pay qualified people to make them money, and their only value to society is the capital they own.
by tim333 | 2025-04-09 11:56:26+00:00
I've been with them a while also and haven't noticed a huge change apart for switching the colour from blue to green?

Site from 4 years ago "The cheap, fast way to send money abroad" https://web.archive.org/web/20210305145221/https://wise.com/

vs now "Send money globally for less" wise.com
by cbarrick | 2025-04-09 11:56:57+00:00
> Your employer is bad and they should feel bad!

For the record, my employer is Google.

They call this process the Invention Assignment Review Committee or IARC.

From what I understand, the process is not actually enforceable anyway. Code I write related to my job is owned by them; other code I write is owned by me. I don't necessarily have to go through their process for this to be true. And their lawyers certainly know this.

I've done it once, and the process is lightweight. And I probably could ignore it in practice with no one actually caring. But the fact that the process even exists is enough of a blocker that I don't readily publish my hobby projects anymore, and that's kinda shitty.
by Shorel | 2025-04-09 11:57:04+00:00
I still use search engines, and not ChatGPT or any LLM as my primary behaviour.

Of course, I have used Phind and other LLMs, and the results sometimes are useful, but in general the information they give back feels like a summary written for the “Explain Like I'm Five” crowd, it just gives me more questions than answers, and frustrates me more than it helps me.

Where LLMs excel is when I don't know the exact search term to use for some particular concept. I ask the LLM about something, it answers with the right terms I can use in a search engine to find what I want, then I use these terms instead of my own words, and what I want is in the search results, in the first page.
by supermatt | 2025-04-09 11:57:20+00:00
Im pretty sure thats not correct, as you can authorise the nodes that get added, and it is only authorised nodes that can participate in the tailnet.

The problem IIRC is that it is the coordination server that decides what is authorised, so if Tailscale was hacked (or otherwise malicious), nodes could get added to your tailnet without explicit authorisation from the tailnet "owner", which is obviously not good. To prevent this, they introduced tailnet-lock, which requires other peers to participate in node authentication: https://tailscale.com/kb/1226/tailnet-lock#how-it-works
by lillecarl | 2025-04-09 11:57:59+00:00
There's a reason why our government doesn't do anything that you can squint into a monopoly, the EU comes after us with pitchforks when we implement government monopolies. So the alternative is regulating some standard that a private organization implements and hope regulations are sound enough to not be exploited, or pray self regulation works.

That's why our railways are falling apart and why we have 2500 pharmacies but people up north have to travel to the town 100k away to get meds.

I wish the government that we elect every 4 years with public voting and kindergarten bartering could take ownership of things that are essential to life in Sweden, but nop it's all privatized so the companies can optimize profits by removing utility (BankID seems to be an exception here where the incentives align between companies and citizens).
by haswell | 2025-04-09 11:59:15+00:00
While I know there have been plenty of scathing essays, backlash among various communities, etc. do you have some concrete examples of the clear lines being drawn and legislation that gives you this optimism?

Maybe the progress you’re describing has escaped me because of the sheer speed this is all unfolding, but it feels like all I’ve heard is lots of noise, while AI companies continue to hammer hosted resources across the Internet to build their next model, the US government continues to claim they’ll use AI to solve problems of waste and fraud, companies like Shopify claim they won’t hire anyone unless it can be proven that AI cannot do the job, and an increasing % of the content I encounter is AI slop.

Maybe this is all necessary for a proper backlash to form, and I definitely want to become more aware of the positives anywhere I can find them. I’m not an AI doomer, but haven’t yet found the optimism you describe.
by SomeUserName432 | 2025-04-09 11:59:24+00:00
The PIX QR codes are URLs without the preceding https://

Scanning a PIX QR code with your camera will just result in text, not a payable URL. You have to scan it in your online banking app for it to be processed as something.

Your banking app will load the details about the payment and you'll see the recipient details before performing the payment.

Even with regular barcode payments, these barcodes are registered with the bank before it's a valid barcode. A lookup is done, if it exists the recipient details are displayed, often the amount, and verifications that it has not expired. (Do not receive after date X)

Brazil has a pretty decent banking system, though the worst online-banking experience I've ever had. (Slowly improving)
by _diyar | 2025-04-09 12:01:03+00:00
It's fair to say that Boeing's status within their industries enabled them to slide down the slippery slope of quality and reliability. SpaceX does seem to become more dominant over time.

But to actually go down that path also requires a culture of management by non-engineers (MBAs have a bad rep for a reason). SpaceX, at least for now, has a strong engineering culture and does not seem at risk of becoming one.

In other words, status is necessary but not sufficient for enshittification.
by shafyy | 2025-04-09 12:02:23+00:00
We do know in general how LLMs work. Now, it's of course not always possible to say why a specific output is generated given an input, but we do know HOW it does it.

To translate it to your analogy with dogs: We do know how the anatomy of dogs work, but we do not know why they sometimes fetch the stick and sometimes not.
by foobar9898989 | 2025-04-09 12:02:23+00:00
Mozilla's finally realizing what my paranoid uncle has been shouting for years: "They're coming for your browser UI!"Jokes aside, it's pretty cool seeing them implement CSP in the front-end. Kind of like putting a security guard at the entrance of a bank that already has 50 guards inside. But hey, that 51st guard might be the one who catches the bad guy!The separation between privileged and unprivileged processes reminds me of my relationship with coffee - I know I shouldn't let it access my system too often, but somehow it always finds a way in.What's actually impressive is how Firefox keeps evolving despite being around forever (in internet years). Most of us would have given up and said "eh, good enough" years ago. Next thing you know they'll be securing the about:config page with a pop quiz on quantum physics.
by sgarland | 2025-04-09 12:02:27+00:00
I think they’re about the same in complexity, other than that Postgres offers more options. MySQL did have logical replication long before Postgres, so I’ll give it that.

Postgres has one option for replication that is a godsend, though: copy_data. This lets you stand up a new replica without having to first do a dump / restore (assuming your tables are small enough / your disk is large enough, since the primary will be holding WAL during the initial sync). Tbf, MySQL doesn’t need that as much, because it offers parallel dump and restore, even on a single table.
by ninkendo | 2025-04-09 12:04:01+00:00
FWIW I have no problems (and see no ads) on the site running a pihole dns-based blocker on my network.

In-browser blockers are interesting because they’re actually modifying the DOM, and any JavaScript which expects the DOM to have certain elements, and doesn’t handle them being missing, can cause these kinds of failures. Network-level blocking should at least cause the requests to the ad services to fail in the first place, which has a much higher likelihood of being a tested code path (ie. Not breaking the site just because a request failed.)

Basically I’m not surprised that in-browser, DOM-manipulating ad blockers cause failures in a lot of sites’ JavaScript, and I wouldn’t necessarily chalk it up to maliciousness on Slashdot’s part.
by DeathArrow | 2025-04-09 12:04:48+00:00
>I keep seeing people advocating that the idea that we should build everything, and every piece or everything

Here's another idea. A country should build whatever makes economic sense and it should be able to produce almost anything. It should not depend much on others for key technologies or industries.

The idea is not to isolate from others but extract the maximum economic benefits while surviving with if a war starts or alliances start shifting.
by agentultra | 2025-04-09 12:05:34+00:00
the importance of writing cannot be over-stated.

If you want to solve nasty, hard Heisen-bug problems you need to write. Ask questions, write down the answers. Follow the trail.

Some times you need to be more formal. Learning how to write maths is invaluable. Distributed systems, security, performance at scale… all benefit from a solid understanding of some pretty simple maths.

Writing is thinking! Challenge yourself, examine your thoughts, and learn to write well. It pays off in spades.
by noduerme | 2025-04-09 12:05:38+00:00
Any of them, but let's preempt the arguments.

Outright "communist" states like Cuba and Venezuela no longer have sponsors, and are sanctioned by the US, so they're exempt from having to prove that their economies could conceivably generate any innovation.

Right-wing "post-democratic" states like Russia and Hungary are, by some definition, capitalist, but you see no innovation there either. Presumably someone if not you could blame America for them being unable to innovate. One could equally say that their markets aren't free, because they're fully captured and manipulated by their respective mafia/oligarchies.

Ahem. Just like the so-called communist countries are.

Then of course there's China. Where capitalism is also a plaything of the governing power. Similarly, no major drug developments have come out of there. Although we did have a fantastic example recently of how not to manage a biolab doing gain of function research.

Pray tell, which countries without free markets do anything at all? I'm not holding my breath for North Korea to cure cancer, no matter how much of their GDP is spent trying to keep their Dear Leader alive.
by trealira | 2025-04-09 12:06:20+00:00
No, it doesn't, because in a switch with a loop, at the end of each case (after the break), the instructions have an unconditional jump to the top of the switch again, where it performs the indirect jump. With the code using computed goto, the indirect jump is at the end of every single case of the switch. You can see this in the assembly the author provides. I'm ignoring cases where there's fallthrough to another case of the switch, which is sometimes done in interpreters like these. And though I wasn't thinking of it, the lack of a bounds check also reduces the number of branches.

The reduced branching used to bring speed improvements due to better branch prediction, though they have shrunken and become smaller and smaller on newer CPUs as branch prediction has improved in general.

The fact that they had become increasingly miniscule was acknowledged even ten years ago:

Nehalem shows a few outstanding speedups (in the 30%–40% range), as well as Sandy Bridge to a lesser extent, but the average speedups (geomean of individual speedups) for Nehalem, Sandy Bridge, and Haswell are respectively 10.1%, 4.2%, and 2.8% with a few outstanding values for each microarchitecture. The benefits of threaded code decreases with each new generation of microarchitecture.

https://inria.hal.science/hal-01100647/document
by chrismorgan | 2025-04-09 12:07:41+00:00
> Doing any styling or scripting inline should be frowned upon as hard as table-based layouts.

I strongly disagree: inlining your entire CSS and JS is absurdly good for performance, up to a surprisingly large size. If you have less than 100KB of JS and CSS (which almost every content site should be able to, most trivially, and almost all should aim to), there’s simply no question about it, I would recommend deploying with only inline styles and scripts. The threshold where it becomes more subjective is, for most target audiences, possibly over half a megabyte by now.

Seriously, it’s ridiculous just how good inlining everything is for performance, whether for first or subsequent page load; especially when you have hundreds of milliseconds of latency to the server, but even when you’re nearby. Local caches can be bafflingly slow, and letting the browser just execute it all in one go without even needing to look for a file has huge benefits.

It’s also a lot more robust. Fetching external resources is much more fragile than people tend to imagine.
by jppope | 2025-04-09 12:09:16+00:00
I completely agree - though there are places where I trust an implementation of things like a well known algorithm.

However, to add onto this, I'm consistently shocked at how often it is much CHEAPER to "roll your own." We've done some reviews on systems after a few years and the number of bugs and security vulnerabilities we experience with code based around packages is much MUCH higher. Its hard to put a number to it because the time cost of fixing those issues is variable, but its substantial. Its also amazing to me that it can be cheaper to build your own vs using a 3rd party vendor for something that would appear to be highly specialized - of course opportunity cost is a real thing.
by nilkn | 2025-04-09 12:09:37+00:00
> It still remains an awesome tool, but a limited one.

And that's enough to drive significant industry-wide change. Just because it can't fully automate everything doesn't mean companies aren't going to expect (and, indeed, increasingly require) their employees to learn how to effectively utilize the technology. The CEO of Shopify recently made it clear that refusal to learn to use AI tools will factor directly into performance evaluations for all staff. This is just the beginning. It's best to be wise and go where the puck is headed.

The article gives several examples of where these tools are used to rapidly accelerate experimentation, pitches, etc. Supposedly this is a bad thing and should be avoided because it's not sufficiently artisan, but no defensible argument was presented as to why these use cases are illegitimate.

In terms of writing code, we're entering an era where developers who have invested in learning how to utilize this technology are simply better and more valuable to companies than developers who have not. Naysayers will find all sorts of false ways to nitpick that statement, yet it remains true. Effective usage means knowing when (and when not) to use these tools -- and to what degree. It also, for now at least, means remaining a human expert about the craft at hand.
by xenophonf | 2025-04-09 12:10:02+00:00
That's bad practice because it hides build steps from `docker inspect`. Per https://github.com/docker-library/official-images#clarity:

> Try to make the Dockerfile easy to understand/read. It may be tempting, for the sake of brevity, to put complicated initialization details into a standalone script and merely add a RUN command in the Dockerfile. However, this causes the resulting Dockerfile to be overly opaque, and such Dockerfiles are unlikely to pass review. Instead, it is recommended to put all the commands for initialization into the Dockerfile as appropriate RUN or ENV command combinations. To find good examples, look at the current official images.
by aktau | 2025-04-09 12:11:35+00:00
Does anyone know how this contrasts with `text-align: justify` (mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43258709#43260606)?

In Chrome (can't test Safari), `text-wrap: pretty` has a much milder effect.

Should one use both together in the main text of your average blog? I checked, they do appear to make individual changes.
by throwanem | 2025-04-09 12:13:11+00:00
NASA always does this in manned spaceflight: about once every two decades or one human generation, like clockwork since the 60s, they get "go fever" and people die in ways they promised the public people wouldn't.

The last one was in 2003, so I suppose those two astronauts in that Starliner must've had their guardian angels working triple shifts and overtime that day.
by ben_w | 2025-04-09 12:13:12+00:00
He does a lot of them, too.

I don't see any reason why he might not put 100% tax on any random business that doesn't do what he tells them to do, given what else he's demonstrated no concern about actually doing.

Unfortunately, given what he's also said of the trade deal that he himself signed, nobody can seriously do a deal with him ever even if it seems to be in their immediate interests: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-usmca-nafta-tariffs-can...
by Avshalom | 2025-04-09 12:14:33+00:00
It's hardly SWI's lib, clpFD is available almost identically in Sicstus, Ciao, GNU, B† and others. As to why? I dunno I guess for a lot of us constraint programming just comes to hand very naturally. It often feels more Prolog-y to us than non-constraint approaches.

†B-Prolog of course morphed into Picat which is also mentioned and Picat also leans heavy on clp so if the author is more familiar with Picat it would be even more natural to use clpFD.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-04-09 12:14:56+00:00
> Why would you expect US Fed data on US residents to have anything to do with Norway’s sovereign fund?

It is unclear if 93% of all stocks owned by Americans are owned by the richest 10% of Americans, or if 93% of all stocks traded in the US are owned by the richest 10% of Americans.

The defined benefit plan beneficial ownership is actually more so all taxpayers (since most are government employees), since they are on the hook for the benefits of the equity investments don’t live up to the expected returns. This would impact everyone via higher taxes, although exactly who and how much is up to politics.

I guess my point is the whole of society kind of has its eggs in the public equities basket.
by SixFeetUp | 2025-04-09 12:14:58+00:00
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by DeathArrow | 2025-04-09 12:16:25+00:00
>Regardless, countries that largely operate without protectionism or colonialism have become the wealthiest in the history of the world, without any real competition. There's not much argument remaining.

The wealthiest economies now are those of China and US. And both used colonialism and protectionism.

The further we look in history, the more we see most powerful economies practicing both colonialism and protectionism. From British Empire to Roman Empire.
by hugo_alves | 2025-04-09 12:17:24+00:00
[Bash Script] Interactive Menu to Automate Your Daily Commands! Tired of typing the same terminal commands over and over again? This lightweight Bash script is here to save you time!

Simple, fast, and fully customizable, it lets you build your own interactive menu for launching common actions like website updates, backups, or custom scripts. Clean color-coded UI, built-in safety check (blocks execution as www-data), supports aliases, and can auto-launch when opening a terminal.