MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by floundy | 2025-06-06 18:38:23+00:00
Incorrect, the DJIA lost around 90% of its index value in the Great Depression, so the theoretical portfolio in this exercise would have declined to around 10 cents, but holding an asset at a negative return does not result in a margin call if one is not trading with leverage.

In practice, it would have been a toss-up between individuals' outcomes because index funds as we are familiar with them today did not exist at the time. The DJIA was a price index but there was no way to invest in the DJIA basket as there is today, so brokers picked stocks on behalf of investors. So it's certain that some investors' portfolios did decline to zero during this time due to bankruptcies of all the companies they happened to be holding.
by jchw | 2025-06-06 18:38:36+00:00
I'm not even 100% certain there's really much of a specific reason why there has to be a low hard limit on file descriptors. I would guess that Windows NT handles take up more system resources since NT handles have a lot of things that file descriptors do not (e.g. ACLs).

Still, on the other hand, opening a lot of file descriptors will necessarily incur a lot of resource usage, so really if there's a more efficient way to do it, we should find it. That's definitely the case with the old way of doing inotify for recursive file watching; I believe most or all uses of inotify that work this way can now use fanotify instead much more efficiently (and kqueue exists on other UNIX-likes.)

In general having the limit be low is probably useful for sussing out issues like this though it definitely can result in a worse experience for users for a while...

> Feels a bit like Windows programming back when GDI handles were a limited resource.

IIRC it was also amusing because the limit was global (right?) and so you could have a handle leak cause the entire UI to go haywire. This definitely lead to some very interesting bugs for me over the years.
by meindnoch | 2025-06-06 18:40:35+00:00
Ok, but there are clear morphological, genetical, etc. differences between e.g. a Han Chinese person and a Yoruba person. So putting aside politics, sociology and whatnot, purely on a scientific basis, what term do you use for these differences? When you say that "these people belong to different $INSERT_TERM_HERE", what's the correct term to substitute?
by mrguyorama | 2025-06-06 18:41:17+00:00
I'm betting HN is vastly more normal people and manager types than people want to admit.

None of us had to pass a security test to post here. There's no filter. That makes it pretty likely that HN's community is exactly as shitty as the rest of the internet's.

People need to stop treating this community like some club of enlightened elites. It's hilariously sad and self-congratulatory.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-06-06 18:41:34+00:00
Modern CPUs don't actually execute the legacy instructions, they execute core-native instructions and have a piece of silicon dedicated to translating the legacy instructions into them. That piece of silicon isn't that big. Modern CPUs use more transistors because transistors are a lot cheaper now, e.g. the i486 had 8KiB of cache, the Ryzen 9700X has >40MiB. The extra transistors don't make it linearly faster but they make it faster enough to be worth it when transistors are cheap.

Modern CPUs also have a lot of things integrated into the "CPU" that used to be separate chips. The i486 didn't have on-die memory or PCI controllers etc., and those things were themselves less complicated then (e.g. a single memory channel and a shared peripheral bus for all devices). The i486SX didn't even have a floating point unit. The Ryzen 9000 series die contains an entire GPU.
by trod1234 | 2025-06-06 18:41:38+00:00
The vast majority of your argument's volume was promoting an incorrect way of thinking comparing two unrelated things, for a question not asked or really that useful.

You can't determine logical truth in a stochastic environment except after the fact when there is objective measure; and importantly there is no personal harm in doing this either, which is a direct contradiction to what you said.

You then went way out into the weeds when you started talking about pedophiles, and truth.

Any reasonable reader would throw away the vast majority of what you had to say as useless, or worse unstable.

The underlying concepts you mention indirectly, while correct in a narrow context in psychology, bad choice of example aside, also don't have anything to do with what's being said here in this topic.
by sethhochberg | 2025-06-06 18:41:38+00:00
FWIW: this might be a suggestion of the specific audit team you’re working with or a requirement of one of the “follow our playbook and you’ll pass” vendors if you’re using one of those, but the SOC 2 on its own doesn’t really impose specific technical feature/control requirements like this.

I don’t have the exact exam language in front of me right now but the requirement would be something like “you have some process for learning about, assessing, and mitigating vulnerabilities in software dependencies that you use”.

Enabling an automated scan and version bump tool like dependabot is a common and easy way to prove your organization has those capabilities. But you could implement whatever process you want here and prove that you do it on the schedule you say you do in order to satisfy the audit requirement.
by database64128 | 2025-06-06 18:42:18+00:00
> In fact it’s quite common to “commit” on close, at least from what I’ve seen.

close(2) does not "commit". You have to call v.Sync() (i.e. fsync(2)) for that.

From man 2 close:

A successful close does not guarantee that the data has been successfully saved to disk, as the kernel uses the buffer cache to defer writes. Typi‐ cally, filesystems do not flush buffers when a file is closed. If you need to be sure that the data is physically stored on the underlying disk, use fsync(2). (It will depend on the disk hardware at this point.)
by krapp | 2025-06-06 18:42:46+00:00
>What makes you think that all the people who didn't vote not support him for President?

If you're talking about the popular vote, only the people who vote matter. I'm sure there are people who didn't vote for Trump but who support him. Certainly a lot of leftists and erstwhile Democrats stayed home or voted third party because they were disillusioned with Kamala Harris, which implicitly supports whatever the status quo winds up being.

You can find polling that supports just about any narrative you like, but I don't think you can find much objective evidence that a significant majority of the American population supports Trump but most just didn't care enough to show up to the polls. Votes are the only objective data showing intent that we have, and they don't seem to indicate a sweeping mandate on Trump's behalf.
by quotemstr | 2025-06-06 18:42:54+00:00
There's a certain kind of person who just likes limits and will never pass up an opportunity to defend and employ them.

For example, imagine a world in which Linux had a RLIMIT_CUMULATIVE_IO:

"How else am I supposed to prevent programs wearing out my flash? Of course we should have this limit"

"Of course a program should get SIGIO after doing too much IO. It'll encourage use of compression"

"This is a security feature, dumbass. Crypto-encrypters need to write encrypted files, right? If you limit a program to writing 100MB, it can't do that much damage"

Yet we don't have a cumulative write(2) limit and the world keeps spinning. It's the same way with the limits we do have --- file number limits, vm.max_map_count, VSIZE, and so on. They're relicts of a different time, yet the I Like Limits people will retroactively justify their existence and resist attempts to make them more suitable for the modern world.
by Beijinger | 2025-06-06 18:43:00+00:00
People here are very fond of Mullhad VPN. I have mixed experiences with NordVPN, especially under Linux.

If you look for something cheap, AirVPN hast a sale going on: https://airvpn.org/ It works okay for me or my current needs.

https://expatcircle.com/cms/privacy/vpn-services/
by techpineapple | 2025-06-06 18:44:07+00:00
I imagine it was always a weird conflict of intentions.

On the one hand if you're really trying to disrupt an industry, you want to hire at least a good percentage of people who don't understand the industry, so they're not biased by the set of circumstances you may be trying to disrupt - and Thiel and Yarvin and maybe Vance and Elon certainly wanted to disrupt the government. Like Thiel and Yarvin probably don't want people who understand how to renegotiate government contracts, they just want people who know how to burn them to the ground.

But I imagine there were very few people in government, including some of the people "over" them like the senate and house wanted real disruption, and certainly most of the population didn't want real disruption, and Trump and his administration probably didn't want real disruption that would impact their popularity.

So it was probably doomed from the start.
by duped | 2025-06-06 18:44:40+00:00
No it's way simpler than that. The file descriptors are indices into an array containing the state of the file for the process. Limiting the max size of the array makes everything easier to implement correctly.

For example consider if you're opening/closing file descriptors concurrently. If the array never resizes the searches for free fds and close operations can happen without synchronization.
by treetalker | 2025-06-06 18:45:14+00:00
Some of my favorite heuristics / decision algorithms:

- I see flowers at the store. Should I buy some for my $specialPerson ? Yes.

- What will happen if I make this same choice 1,000 days (or more) in a row?

- What I do now is what I always do. (This has two senses. First, it reminds me that I'm primed to act in a certain way now because I have been consistent in doing the same thing in the past — so it helps me remember that I'm a creature of habit, but I can also choose something else, which will take more effort because it's not a habit yet. And second, it reminds me of the foregoing in that making a certain choice now will make it easier to make the same choice later, and will build a habit too. In other words, every choice is part of the habit-building process, and I should strive to live consistently.)
by dragonwriter | 2025-06-06 18:45:29+00:00
> Do you consider Westbank and/or Gaza a full state independent from Israel?

Whether or not a legally independent state exists with some or all of that territory within its borders, that area is effectively controlled by, and in large part (including all of the West Bank, though the exact administrative details differ in different locations in the WB) under military occupation by, Israel.
by halawaykeller | 2025-06-06 18:46:22+00:00
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Every 3 seconds, someone downloads Co–Star. We’ve reached 30% of 18–25 year olds in the US without spending a dime on marketing.

We use astrology to get at something deeper: how people reflect/connect in a chaotic, atomized world. The horoscopes are generated by a custom stack that mixes functional programming and AI with real human poets and astrologers.

You’d be writing Haskell, building ML infra, and scaling data pipelines.

We’re a small team that cares about systems design, poetry, psychoanalysis, and doing things in a principled way. We also care about profitability and efficiency, because they keep us alive.

If you’re into weird problems at the intersection of tech and culture, come help us build some cool shit.

Questions: hal@costarastrology.com - I'm Hal, I manage the backend.

Apply here: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/costar/jobs/5421308004
by _Microft | 2025-06-06 18:46:48+00:00
> This may be more of a proof for the method, of encapsulating a fragile mRNA in a protective lipid layer, but one which will be incorporated into cells. I'd expect it to be used outside attempts to cure HIV (having consumed some HIV funding).

What does that mean? (mRNA encapsulated in a lipid nanoparticle entering cells is exactly how the COVID vaccines of BioNTech and Moderna work)
by bombcar | 2025-06-06 18:46:55+00:00
> I'm not even 100% certain there's really much of a specific reason why there has to be a low hard limit on file descriptors.

There was. Even if a file handle is 128 bytes or so, on a system with only 10s or 100s of KB you wouldn't want it to get out of control. On multi-user especially, you don't want one process going nuts to open so many files that it eats all available kernel RAM.

Today, not so much though an out-of-control program is still out of control.
by dingnuts | 2025-06-06 18:47:03+00:00
Attacking individual privacy and security is still authoritarianism when done by a democratically elected government. That's why it's important to be a Republic founded on a rule of law that limits what the majority may do; eg in the US a majority cannot take away rights of expression from individuals.

The EU is authoritarian in many ways. How the laws get made is secondary to whether or not they are authoritarian.
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-06-06 18:47:23+00:00
I'd say the exception is when `n` is under about 10, and is counting some sort of hardware constrained thing (e.g. some operation over all CAN interfaces pesent on an OBDII connector can be O(n^(2)) since n will always be between 1 and 4). If you wouldn't have to physically replace hardware for `n` to increase, you really need to avoid n^2 operations. And even then consider them carefully, perhaps explicitly failing if `n` gets too big to allow for noticing rework is needed before new hardware hits the field.
by greatgib | 2025-06-06 18:47:28+00:00
Quoting wikipedia: The regulation does not purport to apply to the processing of personal data for national security activities or law enforcement of the EU; however, industry groups concerned about facing a potential conflict of laws have questioned whether Article 48 could be invoked to seek to prevent a data controller subject to a third country's laws from complying with a legal order from that country's law enforcement, judicial, or national security authorities to disclose to such authorities the personal data of an EU person, regardless of whether the data resides in or out of the EU. Article 48 states that any judgement of a court or tribunal and any decision of an administrative authority of a third country requiring a controller or processor to transfer or disclose personal data may not be recognised or enforceable in any manner unless based on an international agreement, like a mutual legal assistance treaty in force between the requesting third (non-EU) country and the EU or a member state. The data protection reform package also includes a separate Data Protection Directive for the police and criminal justice sector that provides rules on personal data exchanges at State level, Union level, and international levels.[8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...
by pama | 2025-06-06 18:47:54+00:00
Maybe I'm a hoarder. My timestamped histories from four machines in four different locations added up to 898028 lines --- I kept most of my shell commands, including errors and iterative attempts to get a good command, since early 2009 in the servers that matter the most to me. I use named shells with different histories each (roughly one to four shells per project), so the largest single shell history in these logs is only 43424 lines (21712 commands). The average across all shells is a bit over 75 logged commands per day, which doesn't sound as bad as the total line count in these histories. Despite the advent of LLMs I still need a lot of internal esoteric hacks that are relatively easy to find in these histories. Perhaps I should switch to using a centralized db that keeps the outputs as well and use them to finetune LLMs, but the ease of simple unix/Emacs tools operating with standard/simple history files always felt attractive.
by not_your_vase | 2025-06-06 18:49:45+00:00
So it's tiring to use and to set up and you can't actually touch virtual things.

I would also add the price. Of course Vision Pro is an extreme example, but every time I look at Oculus glasses, they seem pretty pricey if I also consider their actual usefulness (which I can only assume from the reviews and reading others' experiences) - they still look like an interesting toy which would be fun for a week, but after that it sounds like a chore. Maybe that is not true, of course, I'm only assuming. But then the companies will have to show the opposite...
by constantcrying | 2025-06-06 18:49:59+00:00
>Hoping for an open system (which I think RISC-V is) and nothing even close to Intel ME or AMT.

The architecture is independent of additional silicon with separate functions. The "only" thing which makes RISC-V open are that the specifications are freely available and freely usable.

Intel ME is, by design, separate from the actual CPU. Whether the CPU uses x86 or RISC-V is essentially irrelevant.
by kstrauser | 2025-06-06 18:50:06+00:00
I honestly don’t know. Maybe there’s a great reason for it that would be obvious if I knew more about the low-level kernel details, but at the moment it eludes me.

Like, there’s not a limit on how many times you can call malloc() AFAIK, and the logic for limiting the number of those calls seems to be the same as for open files. “If you call malloc too many times, your program is buggy and you should fix it!” isn’t a thing, but yet allocating an open file is locked down hard.
by dmoy | 2025-06-06 18:50:07+00:00
If you want breathing exercises that go way into the specialized deep end, you can always pick up the sport of 3p rifle. You'll get incidentally very good at calming via breath, because of the tight feedback loop of holes-must-go-closer-to-the-center

See e.g. Reinkenmeier describing breath work in

standing: https://youtu.be/dHsG3GU9_PY?si=qlaLrSfKLCeiCgl4

prone: https://youtu.be/5odRbYSbDIk?si=joBeFyyUrwBvQ7bk

Just general: https://youtu.be/JJ3zXuFsrfk?si=xdQ5NY0cHfK89CCg

The general points (deep from diaphragm, lean back, relax shoulders, etc) also carry over to other discipline like music (wind instruments at least).
by toast0 | 2025-06-06 18:50:12+00:00
How else am I supposed to service a million clients, other than having a million sockets?

This isn't a real issue though. Usually, you can just set the soft limit to the often much higher hard limit; at worst, you just have to reboot with a big number for max fds; too many open files is a clear indicator of a missing config, and off we go. The defaults limits are small and that usually works because most of the time a program opening 1M fds is broken.

Kind of annoying when Google decides their container optimized OS should go from soft and hard limits of 1M to soft limit 1024, hard limit 512k though.
by pistoriusp | 2025-06-06 18:50:34+00:00
Curious about this. The usual argument is that hosting on Cloudflare is vendor lock-in, I am stating that picking _any_ SaaS induces vendor lock-in.

> No matter what choice you make, it's always going to be vendor-locked in. Switching out something, even if it's open source and self-hosted, means that you're rewriting a lot of code.

The argument is that you might as well not "spend" those 5 taxes, just use the platform, and write the software.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-06-06 18:51:51+00:00
The original intent for this architecture was for modelling large spiking neural networks in real-time, although the hardware is really not that specialized - basically a bunch of ARM chips with high speed interconnect for message passing.

It's interesting that the article doesn't say that's what it's actually going to be used for - just event driven (message passing) simulations, with application to defense.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-06-06 18:52:01+00:00
iPhones have always been able to access web pages. Web pages run on general purpose computers, and basically have to, because they're made of site-specific content and site-specific code. To get rid of "piracy" you would not only need to prevent users from having access to their own phones, you would need to make it impossible for anybody to have their own web page.

That level of dystopia is the sort of thing that could never last very long because enough people would rather burn it to the ground while still inside of it than allow it to continue to exist.
by d_burfoot | 2025-06-06 18:52:28+00:00
Note that the government has huge incentives to downplay the inflation rate. Over the time period of the graph, the price of gold went up by about 100x; I would consider that a more accurate estimate of inflation than the 18x number implied by the chart. Due to the way exponentials work, you can hide a lot of inflation over 100 years by claiming the annual rate is just half a percent lower than it really is.
by trhway | 2025-06-06 18:52:56+00:00
>Thus Ukraine proved, that civilian equipment can destroy nuclear deterrence.

yes, that is the point i've been making for a while - those cheap automated systems, the drones being the first examples of it, is the new MAD/equalizer weapons now available to all countries, not only to the large nuclear ones (and that becomes very important for avoiding future wars giving for example growing doubt that NATO, and USA in particular, would come to the defense of Baltic countries, whereis several millions of drones (including larger long range ones) which Baltic countries can get relatively easy for several billions of dollars may pose an unacceptable high cost to Russia of any potential aggression against those countries).

In this particular case a much smaller Ukraine can use that MAD/equalizer potential to win the war, or at least to get a great negotiating position by systematically severely degrading Russia's strategic capabilities toward making Russia potentially defenseless against US or China, or even say Turkey.

That is how i think they can degrade strategic air/missile defense systems https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42529638

And imagine if similarly to the plane attack Ukraine would attack Russian nuclear submarines parked openly at the bases (say using ships for drone launching instead of trucks) - there is no risk of destruction of those submarines, yet 10-50kg drone can damage the skin and outer hull forcing the submarine out of service for prolonged time.
by fazlerocks | 2025-06-06 18:53:04+00:00
We're building tools that could genuinely make people's lives better, but instead most companies are laser-focused on "how many jobs can we eliminate?" The whole conversation around AI safety isn't even about keeping people employed… it's about making sure the AI doesn't turn on us.

Investors want to hear about efficiency gains and cost savings (aka layoffs). Customers want solutions that work. Trying to balance building something useful while not contributing to the dystopia is genuinely difficult.

What keeps me going is focusing on problems that actually matter and being selective about who I work with. Not everyone can do this, but if you have some leverage, use it to push back on the worst impulses.
by rblion | 2025-06-06 18:54:45+00:00
This is the most important chapter in the book according to Ray himself. Titled 'The Overall Big Cycle' and it covers the 5 major factors to keep an eye on as we all navigate our future.

I hope this is helpful and sparks some quality discussion of micro and macro trends unfolding in our line of work. It's fascinating and frightening at the same time. I'm along for the ride though, don't know what else I'd do with my life.
by swed420 | 2025-06-06 18:55:48+00:00
> It's not even comparable, not by a long shot. There is an immense amount of the highest quality video content you can find on YouTube, and the trend has only accelerated in the past few years.

Both of you need to define what you mean by quality or you're going to keep talking past each other.

I agree with the person you responded to though: blind profit motive on platforms like youtube destroys quality and fills the firehose with brain melting content, even if it has professional lighting and is in 1080p.