MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jorangreef | 2025-04-10 19:11:43+00:00
To be clear, we have fun at TigerBeetle!

And to be fair, we did present the metrics (footprint etc.), and we did discuss alternatives to Docusaurus (e.g. Zine, which is pretty great!).

I think at the heart of your argument is this assumption that unquestionably taking on dependencies would achieve the same quality in less time, and that a methodology such as TigerStyle that challenges this assumption need necessarily take "infinite time". You almost force us to apologize that we don't share this view! :)

But again, this was the quickest, highest quality path (for us, at least!).

Have you read TigerStyle, our engineering methodology? And have you watched our talk? Perhaps that will help close the gap in understanding how we think about engineering at TigerBeetle: not as an expense to be minimized, to minimize only our own development time, but as an asset, to be invested in, since we build it once, but developers enjoy it many times over. However, as you watch TigerStyle, you'll see it's not only about quality, but also a way to get quality in less time (go slow to go fast).

In other words, I think we differ when it comes to Total Cost of Ownership. We're not trying to minimize only our own development time, but investing in it, to produce something quality for our community, and so minimize the Total Cost of Ownership across the relationship as a whole (ours + community) [1].

[1] Our talk on our business methodology, Biodigital Jazz! goes into this idea of TCO across the community: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C98cyJ-wJuY
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-10 19:11:44+00:00
If I have a bug that only triggers between 9 and 10 am EST on Mondays that is still a bug, no? Now extend that to "rand(1.0) < 0.01". Now extend that to a check using __TIME__ that goes off at compile time instead of runtime (some binaries are buggy, some aren't). Now extend that to UB.
by necovek | 2025-04-10 19:12:12+00:00
For any given ticket, unless you remove all creativity for an engineer, they will have to balance how deep and how wide they go, how much they refactor, and how much they skip, in order to be effective and not end up with a contraption that's extremely high risk to review and roll out to production: all of that is scoping.

If you are not doing that, you are being micromanaged and I feel for you in your engineering job.

And trust me, non-technical PMs are ill-equipped to figure out an incremental path to that North Star product or feature you want to ship — how you split branches and deliver value incrementally is something only a good engineer can do (well).

If you do not consider how an implementation will affect the user, you might just satisfy the requirement with an actually terrible experience (but the ticket never said it needs to load in under 30s and with no visible redraws and jumping elements): a good engineer will implicitly consider all of these, even if unspecified in a task (and many more, I only used an outrageous example to make a point).

Breaking down problems is certainly a life skill, but engineers are inherently good at it: it's the very definition of an engineer, and you can't be one without it. I have however seen PMs who mostly channel and aggregate customer experiences and stakeholder requests without an ability to consider (broken down, stepwise, incremental) paths to completion.

If you are good at all of these, you'd likely be a good engineer too: this does not mean that one can't be good at PM without being an engineer, just that a great engineer is very close to being a great PM too.

I am not against the division of labour and different motivations driving where each person invests their time, but if we are talking about a great either PM or engineer, they are pretty much of the same mindset with focus on different parts of the job that needs to be done — 90/10 split vs 10/90 split (and anything in between).

And finally, whether you are a great craftsman at engineering (or PMing), it is slightly different from a great engineer.
Ask HN: Why do some links start out [dead]?
by archagon | 2025-04-10 19:12:14+00:00
I posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43647126 and the link was [dead] on arrival. I am certain that nobody had time to flag it: the post was dead as soon as I hit Submit and the page refreshed. Why did this happen? Is this some sort of controversial topic detector or source filter?
by Suppafly | 2025-04-10 19:12:50+00:00
>I'd love to see quotes around "vehicle", or a different word.

I question why you, and so many others here, are so hung up the use of the word vehicle. Even if you weren't aware of the usage of drag type vehicles in the early Americas, you would at least envision something like a wagon, right? Or do you automatically assume vehicle is only self-propelled things like modern cars?
by erk__ | 2025-04-10 19:13:38+00:00
Its also pretty interesting given that the original title for the comic that would become Garfield was simply "Jon"

There was a small YouTube documentary about finding the old comics in libraries and scanning them in. I the description of the video there is links to scans of all the ones they were able to find: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxiwjaUSYJM
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-04-10 19:14:32+00:00
Read your article, it's really nice. I really feel much less demystified by this.

But can you / somebody please explain what this means

According to the official Kernel Admin Guide:

This Kernel feature allows you to invoke almost (for restrictions see below) every program by simply typing its name in the shell. This includes for example compiled Java(TM), Python or Emacs programs. To achieve this you must tell binfmt_misc which interpreter has to be invoked with which binary. Binfmt_misc recognises the binary-type by matching some bytes at the beginning of the file with a magic byte sequence (masking out specified bits) you have supplied. Binfmt_misc can also recognise a filename extension aka .com or .exe.

It’s another way to tell the Kernel what interpreter to run when invoking a program that’s not native (ELF). For scripts (text files) we mostly use a shebang, but for byte-coded binaries, such as Java’s JAR or Mono EXE files, it’s the way to go!

Like, can you give me an example by what you mean. What are its use cases, if any. I read it many times and always with some sort of enthusiasm because of this sentence ending in exclamation point making me feel like it's huge yet I just can't understand it's significance.

Does it mean we can have .jar files which can then run shebang like, so we don't need #! , can this also be used for main.go or every other language which has some issues with #! ,

I see there being some interpreter for golang, rust etc. which just compiles it but it was just too complex. I am just imagining something like a simple go file which is valid golang but can be run by linux simply by ./ And it autocompiles it...
by akshayshah | 2025-04-10 19:15:47+00:00
I claimed that Google is the only major cloud provider with all three of:

- single-zone object storage buckets

- regional object storage buckets

- transparently replicated, dual region object storage buckets

I agree that AWS has two of the three. AFAIK AWS does not have multi-region buckets - the closest they have is canned replication between single-region buckets.
by pseudalopex | 2025-04-10 19:16:37+00:00
> What constitutes "being asked many times". Is it a statistical significance in the general population? I don't know anyone who is even remotely thinking about or concerned about this.

The author does. Statistical significance has no definition in this context. You would ask the author what constitutes being asked many times if you wanted to know.

> If you read farther they say: "When I asked each of our guests whether Americans would still be welcome in their country, they all said the same thing: Yes, of course! Why on earth wouldn’t Americans be welcome here? Some of them seemed perplexed, even offended, by the premise of the question."

Do you believe this disproves any Americans spend time thinking about it?

Some Europeans I know would be offended by the question. I doubt any would be perplexed. And some feel less gracious than the American travel writer's colleagues.
by ytpete | 2025-04-10 19:16:38+00:00
The advance: scientists mapped all 523 million neural connections in one cubic millimeter of mouse brain tissue – covering a total of over 200,000 brain cells.

They did it by very thinly slicing the tissue and photographing each slice at a time (which I believe is a very longstanding technique), and then training an image recognition algorithm to detect neurons in each slice, stitch them together into 3D representations, and detect connections between them.

This "Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks" project (MICrONS) was led by researchers at Princeton, Baylor, and the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Sadly, the NIH program funding this research has been cut by 60% in the last two years.
by creer | 2025-04-10 19:16:51+00:00
Depends on the country. In many places, the law has gotten into this, and companies find it safer anyway to at least pay minimum wage. It won't be paid much.

On the contrary in the US, I often see young people take jobs which pay around minimum wage and will not count as industry experience in their field - when they have enough qualifications to execute usefully on much higher paying jobs (even if the employer would still be underpaying them compared to the usual hires). My business would have used them - but couldn't find them easily. The job market is a mess.
by ndiddy | 2025-04-10 19:17:24+00:00
Looks neat! SDL seems open to supporting legacy platforms, so hopefully it'll get mainlined at some point (at this point, may be more likely if they port SDL3 though, SDL2 is in maintenance mode). Does anyone know if it's possible to use a new compiler for this rather than CodeWarrior 7? It would make it easier to port stuff to Mac OS 9 if you don't also have to deal with the compiler only supporting old C/C++ standards.
by hodgesrm | 2025-04-10 19:18:39+00:00
Slightly off topic but if you are looking for a cabinet of curiosities for aircraft, visit the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos, California. It has a collection that includes some truly marvelous flying machines.

My favorite is a collapsible helicopter that folds up into a duffel bag for transport. [0] It was designed to be airdropped to pilots downed behind enemy lines. The pilot was meant to assemble it and fly back to safety. It could fly but not well enough to see actual service in combat.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiller_ROE_Rotorcycle
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-10 19:18:42+00:00
The search for water in outer space, and other life-sustaining elements, has ulterior motives.

I believe that the search for alien life is subordinate to the search for things that will sustain human life and/or industry, as we expand further outwards.

Most scientists and engineers don’t actually expect to encounter significant alien life in our solar system, and it’s merely a meme they use to tease middle-schoolers, Senators, CEOs, and naïve newspaper readers. Searching and discovering life forms would be really really fraught with terror and doom, if we indeed expected to find it when we looked.

Any natural resource that exists on a moon of Jupiter, or of Saturn or in the Asteroid Belt, and if we can exploit it and extract it and turn it into something useful, for example refueling, or life support, or repairing existing vehicles en route, or simply dragging raw materials back down the gravity well to Earth, then that is a natural resource we’ll want to investigate as we expand. Dyson spheres won’t be built in a day, but we’ll need a good start on the resource extractions real soon now.

This is the quiet part they won’t say out loud, because it’s much more exciting and non-threatening to say we’re looking for alien life forms rather than sustaining our own self-interest. But it’s all about self-interest when it comes to humans.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-04-10 19:19:23+00:00
I'm talking about salt water diesel engine regulations that had essentially no lead in.

The benefits may be clear, but that still side steps the question of to whom the cost and benefits accrue.

>Remember, your freedom ends where mine begins.

Yes, and this boundary is perpetually in dispute. The question is always who draws the line and how change is managed.
by susam | 2025-04-10 19:19:23+00:00
It's in UTC. The previous data from 2022 is available here: https://gist.github.com/susam/159c7d92659b3185eb0b0d683998a3...

In the current graphs, the x-axis represents the hour of the day in UTC. For example, the first graph shows 43 connections between 10:00 UTC and 11:00 UTC, 407 connections between 11:00 UTC and 12:00 UTC, and so on.

Previously, the first graph showed the number of hours elapsed since the experiment began (which started at 10:14 UTC). That's likely what you saw earlier today. After reading your question, I updated the graph to display the actual hour of the day (in UTC) instead of elapsed time, making the time of the day clearer. Thanks for the great question!
by gond | 2025-04-10 19:19:26+00:00
You approaching this the wrong way. What you are listing as disadvantages is, for the most part, the USP.

For example, if you are in the target group, you buy it exactly because it does not uses AR glasses; If you are proficient, you are sleepwalking the damage/distance/all other calculations within seconds in your head, you don’t even have to take a single look at any rule book. The biggest selling point, however is: there are others sitting in front of you, it can be very competitive, you can see the reaction, like in chess.
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-10 19:20:15+00:00
Usually because something looks spammy. The most common reason for this complaint is that somebody posts links to their personal blog and nothing but their personal blog.

I think 404media has a low level of regard on HN

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=404media.co

Not least because most of their content is behind a registerwall which is particularly ironic because 95% of what they write about is something privacy sensitive or about sex, I want to register to read that stuff about as much as I want to register for a porn site. If it is not that it is the kind of breathless political stuff that will wind up [dead] in a few minutes.

My biggest complaint about them is that they leaked a list of web sites being monitored by ICE to Google Docs so in the process of my viewing that list Google recorded that I read the document and now it appears in my feed when I use Google. Google is on that list so if I'm paranoid I have to assume ICE contractors know I read that list, great work 404 media!
by dodslaser | 2025-04-10 19:20:53+00:00
I'm like that too, but I don't think it transfers particularly well to LLMs. The problem is that you can just skip straight to the answer and ignore the explanation (if it even produces one).

It would be pretty neat if there was an LLM that guides you towards the right answer without giving it to you. Asking questions and possibly giving small hints along the way.
by anthk | 2025-04-10 19:21:26+00:00
Why half of Kubernetes and AWS look like technogies to support... themselves instead of shipping a new product such as LXC/LXD?

Most of the current technologies can be virtualized, and with LVM snapshots are a breeze, even extending media it's perfectly done. There's no need to use half-backed namespaces when kernel-level deduplition for memory pages exist when you run similar parallel VM's.

I find virtualisation far easier than containers. Not as fast to deploy, sure; but far more manageable for rollbacks.
by artimaeis | 2025-04-10 19:21:34+00:00
He cites his sources:

https://notjustbikes.com/references/firetrucks.txt

Re: the Baltimore FD

https://www.baltimoresun.com/2018/07/03/baltimore-city-counc...

And yes, the exception was granted just a few months later:

https://baltimorefishbowl.com/stories/city-council-passes-bi...

Even this article cites the fire department objections.

It's a shame that Not Just Bikes didn't seem to catch that the lane _did_ get built, but his point seemed to focus on FDs objecting to bike lanes, and I think that Baltimore story is a prime example of that.
by lrvick | 2025-04-10 19:22:23+00:00
Not everyone that programs is versed in decompiling, digital forensics, reverse engineering, etc.

Anyway, so your means of forming trust in a compiler faithfully compiling code, is to trust a decompiler to faithfully generate human readable source code followed by a lot of manual review labor repeated by every user that wishes to distrust the maintainers.

Okay, but a decompiler could be backdoored as easily as a compiler to hide malicious code vs inject it .

How do you get a decompiler you trust more than the compiler you are reviewing? Do you decompile the decompiler with itself? Back at the trusting trust problem.

Decompilers are way more complex than anything in the hex0->tinycc bootstrap path.
by susam | 2025-04-10 19:22:34+00:00
> But why 4 times?

When I originally shared this in 2022, it was just a comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30146019#30146451

I didn't expect it to get much attention, so I went with four beeps. I felt that a set of four beeps spread over three seconds would be long enough to grab my attention, even if I was busy with something else.

Also, as another commenter pointed out, a sequence of four beeps is distinctive enough that it doesn't get lost among the stray, ordinary beeps I might hear while working in a terminal or Emacs (like from hitting backspace or pressing ctrl+g, etc.).
by notlisted | 2025-04-10 19:22:41+00:00
Europe worries about Americans that don't leave the country.

Americans who travel to Europe (have a passport) are rarely the 'T%%' shirt or 'Maggi' Cap-wearing kind. If anything, traveling Americans have always been known for their ample smiles, friendly nature, unbridled enthusiasm, and positivity/sunny outlook.

[Recent actions by the current administration did help unify Europe, but they mostly feel sorry for us. Anyone part of the group stuck in the 'faux news' bubble may have a bad time, because nothing they've been told turns out to be true...]
by CalChris | 2025-04-10 19:22:51+00:00
Less fun fact: you can't substitute a <cr><nl> for <nl>.

I had a Perl script (way) back in the day that came from a Windows system and it wouldn't work on Linux. After I figured out <cr><nl> was causing the problem, I figured it out what bin_script (might have been in bin_misc) was doing wrong. bin_script sees "/bin/perl<cr>" and then fails to find that interpreter.

So I proposed a one line change which fixed the glitch and posted it to LKML … and promptly got yelled at by Allan Cox for breaking compatibility. I dunno if the null byte breaks the same compatibility. Chapter and verse weren't cited.
by wongarsu | 2025-04-10 19:23:06+00:00
On the other hand San Francisco has these giant articulated aerial ladder trucks. European trucks reach the same ladder heights on much smaller trucks by having more telescoping segments on the ladder.

I wouldn't be surprised if at least some of it is a feedback loop: wide streets mean fire trucks can be big, big fire trucks mean streets have to be big (even if only the streets the fire department cares about)
by philjohn | 2025-04-10 19:23:39+00:00
On [2] you conveniently left out the key quote: "minority groups and poorer students." why are you against helping out disadantaged people whatever their stripes?

On [3] it was found to be unlawful so your assertion that "It's legal to be racist against white people" careers headlong into reality that no, it's not.

As for the west yorkshire story, do you not want the police to be representative of the area they serve? There are far more white men than there are as a proportion of the local population.

It feels like you're grasping at straws here.
by fergal_reid | 2025-04-10 19:23:40+00:00
Strongly agree.

This seems to be very hard for people to accept, per the other comments here.

Until recently I was willing to accept an argument that perhaps LLMs had mostly learned the patterns; e.g. to maybe believe 'well there aren't that many really different leetcode questions'.

But with recent models (eg sonnet-3.7-thinking) they are operating well on such large and novel chunks of code that the idea they've seen everything in the training set, or even, like, a close structural match, is becoming ridiculous.
by wubrr | 2025-04-10 19:23:54+00:00
Almost everything we learn in schools, universities, most jobs, history, news, hackernews, etc is literally human-generated text. Our brains have an efficient structure to learn language, which has evolved over time, but the processes of actually learning languages happens after you are born, based on human-generated text/voice. Things like balance/walking, motion control, speaking (physical voice control), other physical things are trained on sensory data, but there's no reason LLMs/AIs can't be trained on similar data (and in many cases they already are).
by thequux | 2025-04-10 19:24:02+00:00
Calendar apps expose all of the weird edge cases in dates and times. For a specific instance of a specific event that never needs to move, TAI will work. However, suppose that you schedule a meeting for 28 March at 13:00. You then move that meeting forward a week, crossing a DST switch. If you simply add 604800 seconds to the TAI, that meeting will be at 14:00, which is surprising. OK, easy enough to solve; convert the TAI back to the local timezone, add 7 to the day field (carrying into month and year, as needed), and you're good to go. Now suppose that the meeting was set up in the US, and you realized that you needed to reschedule the meeting while you were travelling in Germany. You get back to the US, and suddenly the meeting is an hour early, because DST rules aren't universal.

Worse, imagine a recurring meeting, every week at noon. You've got the TAI for the original instance, but as you cross a DST boundary, some places will shift according to DST and others won't, and thus you have half the attendees showing up at the wrong time.

Finally, TAI introduces the leap second bug for calendars. When you schedule a meeting for noon next year, you want that to happen at noon, not now plus however many seconds. If a leap second is introduced, you don't want that meeting to happen at one second before or after noon.

TBH, if you find yourself in a situation where you need to deal with calendar events, I recommend updating your CV.
by szszrk | 2025-04-10 19:24:42+00:00
If it's sanctioned, it's sanctioned. It's a simple math. It's seldom caused by mistake.

I'm in EU, on top of mandatory regulations of not dealing with sanctioned nations, strictly regulated finance (including insurance), constant mandatory trainings for employees, obligatory sanction list checks for individuals, we entered a phase that any company could be forced to let whole business in another country go.

Sold for cheap, not to mention IP and know-how left there. You gotta do what you gotta do.
by satiated_grue | 2025-04-10 19:24:51+00:00
The 6502's lack of registers is one point of view.

Another point of view is that the zero page provides 256 registers:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/q-a-with-co-creator-of-the-6502-pr...

"[Bill Mensch]:Rod Orgill and I had completed the designs of a few microprocessors before the 6501/6502. In other words, Rod and I already knew what was successful in an instruction set. And lower cost was key. So we looked at what instructions we really needed. And we figured out how to have addressable registers by using zero page [the first 256 bytes in RAM]. So you can have one byte for the op code and one byte for the address, and [the code is compact and fast]. There are limitations, but compared to other processors, zero page was a big deal."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38627821

http://forum.6502.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=7304