MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zbentley | 2025-07-25 00:12:56+00:00
You're mostly right; computers are fast at core/thread parallelism now and leaving capacity on the table is bad.

But there are a lot of common problems where the overhead of threads shows up a lot earlier in the scaling process than you'd think. Probing sets of ~100 URLs to see which are live? Even in a fast, well-threaded language, the overhead of creating/probing/shutting down all those threads adds up to noticeable latency very quickly. Creating lingering threadpools requires pre-planning available thread-parallelism and scheduling (say) concurrent web requests' workloads onto those shared pools with care. Compared to saying "I know these concurrent computations are 99.9% slow IO-wait-bound while probing URLs, let the event loop's epoll take care of it", that's a hassle--and just as hard to get right as manually messing about with select/poll/epoll multiplexers.

You're right that there are a lot of buggy IO multiplexer implementations out there; that kind of stuff is best farmed out to a battle-hardened event loop, ideally one that's distributed with your language runtime. But such systems aren't "google scale only", they're needful in a lot of places for ordinary programs' work--whether or not they're ever coded manually or interacted with directly in those programs.

If you don't often see problems like the hypothetical URL liveness checker, consider the main socket read/write components of a webserver harness: do you really want to spin up a thread as soon as bytes arrive on a socket to be read/written? Or would you rather allocate a precious request-handler thread (or process, or whatever) only after an efficient IO-multiplexed event loop has parsed enough of a request off of the socket to begin handling it? Plenty of popular webservers take both approaches. The ones that prefer evented I/O for their core request flow are less vulnerable to SlowLoris.

There are more benefits to async/await concurrency (and costs, too), including cancellation/timeout semantics, prioritization, and more, but even without getting into those, near-automatic IO multiplexing is pretty huge.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-07-25 00:13:16+00:00
Statically link a binary with musl, and it'll work on the vast majority of systems.

> they're not worrying about what audio subsystem you installed

Some software solves this by autodetecting an appropriate backend, but also, if you use alsa, modern audio systems will intercept that automatically.

> what side of the systemd turf war your distro landed on

Most software shouldn't need to care, but to the extent it does, these days there's systemd and there's "too idiosyncratic to support and unlikely to be a customer". Every major distro picked the former.

> or which of three (four? five?) popular desktop environments you installed

Again, most software shouldn't care. And `curl|bash` doesn't make this any easier.

> or whether your `/dev` directory is fully-populated

You can generally assume the devices you need exist, unless you're loading custom modules, in which case it's the job of your modules to provide the requisite metadata so that this works automatically.
by Barrin92 | 2025-07-25 00:13:23+00:00
it wouldn't, if the implication of you wondering is supposed to be if someone will find and treat a "gay gene". Homosexuality is (like almost all complex traits[1]) influenced by thousands of genes in addition to environmental, social, cultural factors etc.

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/omnigenic-model-suggests-that...
by mandevil | 2025-07-25 00:13:29+00:00
If data was reliable, instant, and comprehensive, this might work. Of course, under those circumstances socialism or communism would probably work out even better.

It is precisely because data comes out murkily, with a lag - and the effects of changes have a lag as well- that managing the Federal Reserve can't by reduced to a simple process. It is an art done by humans- one where 'general trust in the institution' is the single most important variable of the last 40 years.
by mingus88 | 2025-07-25 00:13:40+00:00
I think it’s absolutely fair to judge a person as a whole. It’s part of who they were.

I heard Keanu Reeves anonymously donated millions to cancer charities. It’s private. Should we not include this in our assessment of his character?

Or are we just excusing disgusting racism/sexism because Hogan did it with an inside voice?
by lurking_swe | 2025-07-25 00:14:06+00:00
genetics doesn’t care about your feelings. If a human has the genetic issue (issue with cell division on a specific chromosome…i forget which one), they’ll typically have severe developmental challenges in childhood. And if unlucky, end up nonverbal.

I’m pretty sure most scientists would consider being able to communicate effectively with your own species, “normal”. Regardless of what animal you are. Just like it’s normal to have 5 fingers as a human. But some humans have more or less. That’s just…life.

No need to be unnecessarily sensationalist. I do agree that using the term “normal” should give someone pause. But warning bells? Depends on context…like everything in life. :)
by dilap | 2025-07-25 00:14:28+00:00
It's a lot more disruptive, and psychologically much more annoying, to lose something, than to never have it at all.

I do think it's a shame that Apple controls the App Store so tightly -- it's not just NSFW stuff that's banned, it's all kinds of stuff for all sorts of reasons, e.g.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/aug/30/apple-blo...

If the web were invented today, it'd be strangled in the crib, since Apple would never approve the browser app.
by ameliaquining | 2025-07-25 00:14:31+00:00
This is also approximately true of Idris. The thing that really helps Wuffs is that it's a pretty simple language without a lot of language features (e.g., no memory allocation and only very limited pointers) that complicate proofs. Also, nobody is particularly tempted to use it and then finds it unexpectedly forbidding, because most programmers don't ever have to write high-performance codecs; Wuffs's audience is people who are already experts.
by hopelite | 2025-07-25 00:14:35+00:00
I’ve always wondered how that is even really possible, especially today … ignoring the likely bribery, aka lobbying. For example, in Germany there is something called an EC patent network (there are others in different European countries), they process what are effectively debit card payments like would be done on the visa network. I do not see a reason other than corruption and maybe lack of an initiative, for all of Europe to e.g., put all of Visa, MC, Amex, etc out of business by having a universally payment processing network standard for all payment types. It is effectively nothing different than the BPE and Mint making currency, why could the government not have a universal payment processing system for all transactions in America?
by spl757 | 2025-07-25 00:16:37+00:00
There are really two separate claims being made about the P320 and unintentional discharges.

One claim is that the gun can fire when dropped at a certain angle from a certain height. The voluntary "recall" lets you send it back to Sig and they replace some parts. I think the cause was because the trigger itself was bulky enough for a drop to give it enough inertia to fire, but I'm not 100% sure on that.

The other claim is that the P320 can fire without being dropped, and while holstered, seemingly on it's own. That's all I really know about it.

I own a P320, and I consider it an unsafe weapon at this point. I have not had the self-recall fix done and I'll never chamber a round in it again, so I guess it's a paperweight now.
by 93po | 2025-07-25 00:17:07+00:00
I think hating small talk and avoiding it is a perfectly fine selection filter. If someone takes a long time to warm up and talk about deeper stuff, that's totally valid, but it's probably a sign of there being a mismatch in either vulnerability, actual available depth of conversation, or general conversation patterns. This mismatch means that yes, I could put in a lot of effort to get this person comfortable, but then you're accommodating someone else's priorities over your own, and I don't really want to do that with strangers. I'll go make friends with someone that is going to better match me.
by andsoitis | 2025-07-25 00:17:33+00:00
Om is a novel, maximally-simple concatenative language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33382397 - Oct 2022 (49 comments)

Stem, an interpreted concatenative programing language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39151094 - Jan 2024 (74 comments)

A Simply Arrived Concatenative Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15576215 - Oct 2017 (21 comments)

Factor: A Practical Stack Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32215048 - Jul 2022 (45 comments)

Xs: a concatenative array language inspired by kdb+ and FORTH - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23437003 - Jun 2020 (27 comments)

Cat: a statically typed concatenative language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24534755 - Sep 2020 (13 comments)

8th: a secure, cross-platform, concatenative programming language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15672361 - Nov 2017 (59 comments)

Programming in the Point-Free Style - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14077863 - Apr 2017 (101 comments)
by corysama | 2025-07-25 00:18:29+00:00
Reminds me of https://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/old-age-and-treachery....

Data condition can definitely affect runtime performance. All the way down to the micro architecture level. Random, sorted, reverse-sorted, uniform data sets often lead to dramatic differences in perf. Then you get into “Ooops, my dataset had a surprisingly large number of NaNs or denormalized floats!”
by hopelite | 2025-07-25 00:18:49+00:00
It is total corruption through Visa/MC of our political system in a way that people really do not understand. That is who and what would be affected. You can’t even get anyone to propose a bill to create a digital payment processing capacity just like how the government issues currency. It has been the hijacking and takeover of the most fundamental task of the government, issuing currency.
by spartanatreyu | 2025-07-25 00:19:13+00:00
Typescript's template literal types are awesome when creating values that have to match a specific format.

But depending on the format it can sometimes be tricky to narrow a string back down to that format.

We have type guards to do that narrowing. (see: https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/2/narrowing.htm..., but their older example is a little easier to read: https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/advanced-types....)

If writing the check is too tricky, sometimes it can just be easier to track the type of a value with the value (if you can be told the type externally) with tagged unions (AKA: Discriminated unions). See: https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/typescript-in-5...

And if the formats themselves are generated at runtime and you can use the "unique" keyword to make sure different kinds of data are treated as separate (see: https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/symbols.html#un...).

You can combine `unique symbol` with tagged unions and type predicates to make it easier to tell them apart.
by jrockway | 2025-07-25 00:19:45+00:00
I'm aware that nothing should automatically attempt this recovery, but asking the database to throw an error when it happens does not seem crazy to me. I mean, I get why it doesn't. I have worked on systems with "mount /dev/sda1 || mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1" because there isn't a UI to recover the filesystem, so nothing is lost by erasing it. But I don't think it makes you bad at databases to want this condition to be optionally fatal. (I can also see why "welp it's corrupted <unlink>" is also annoying. If I'm the author of this software, I would be interested in checking out the corrupted file before deleting it. I can live with the slight hit to my free disk space if it means I can fix a bug!)
by bnop | 2025-07-25 00:19:54+00:00
When will people wake up and see that venture capital is driving execs to show growth, overhire, then RIFF to consolidate wealth and drive profit metrics?

When will people see that technology and AI is not the solution to save the world, but one that is actively killing it? One that is actively driving us apart and radicalizing us?

As a kid, I grew up loving sci fi, games, and tech. It is a shame these same dreams drive so us to destroy our planet and civilization. Our curiosity is going to be our end

As the zen parable says, the man is flying by on a horse and is asked “where are you going?”, to which he replies, “i dont know, ask the horse!”

I hope people can self reflect and challenge themselves on if what they believe is really right. The only way is for us to open our views
by robmensching | 2025-07-25 00:19:55+00:00
The window was definitely smaller than I would consider ideal. But the OSMF only applied to WiX v6 (released in April) and later. So, all the older versions would not be impacted.

Also, the timing was never raised as an issue by anyone in the community. If there had been significant pushback, I would have definitely re-evaluated the timing.

The launch went really well though.
by j_timberlake | 2025-07-25 00:19:58+00:00
"My theory is that LLMs will get commoditized within the next year."

Incredibly bad theory, it's like you're saying every LLM is the same because they can all talk, even though the newer ones continue to smash through benchmarks the older ones couldn't. And now it happens quarterly instead of yearly, so you can't even say it's slowing down.
by robmensching | 2025-07-25 00:20:06+00:00
Yes! There are many Open Source projects my company depends on (like Astro, Vue, and Vite for our web sites) that I would love to pay a Maintenance Fee to encourage the maintainers to keep on keeping on. For all Open Source projects that we depend on and accept sponsors, we do pay the $10 "fee" even if they don't require it.
by everfrustrated | 2025-07-25 00:20:25+00:00
I've been trying to understand myself about why there are no European cloud providers.

Recently I've starting thinking that the cloud business required a particularly unusual set of circumstances that was mostly true of only the US.

1. Developers in a position to chose infra vendor 2. Young companies encouraged by external investors to optimize for growth over conserving cash.

None of that happens in Europe.

If you're growing quickly, being in the cloud is a genuine advantage. But if you have static growth it just looks expensive.

It was only relatively recently that the big American cloud companies started to seriously get into the enterprise space. Which is not to say that they were excluding them but that wasn't who they were designing and building for. For example, if your customers are only enterprise you would build a UI and not worry about an API. Eg VMware. Whereas AWS clearly builds the API first and the UI second and cloudformation forth.

Having relatively few well funded startups meant there were no customers to support a native European cloud ecosystem.

Otherwise I find it very hard to explain why none of the European hosting providers even 15 years on have made any meaningful progress in becoming cloud companies. Their existing enterprise customers weren't looking for cloud. Their cheap VPS customers certainly weren't either.
by jpgvm | 2025-07-25 00:20:28+00:00
It's really not just ecological concerns and tbh the mining really isn't that big of a deal. It's entirely the processing that is the problem, ecologically sure but mostly technically. Without the Chinese machines that do the processing because yes, you guessed it they are the only country in the world that makes most of them, you end up more than 20-30% less efficient. At that point on the world market you just aren't competitive at all.

This is all assuming you can get past the NIMBYs to build the plants in the first place.
by robmensching | 2025-07-25 00:20:39+00:00
Honestly, thus far it's been a relative breeze. I expected the need to work out "bugs" as the idea is new. My hope is that after we address the bulk of the issues that actual consumers have raised about the OSMF, it'll be relatively trivial for other projects to pick up in the future.

Note: A few Open Source projects have already added the OSMF. I've not yet followed up to see how it is going for them.
by oskarkk | 2025-07-25 00:20:48+00:00
I wondered how much energy could pass through some area 1000 miles away from the explosion, so I made some rough calculations.

Assumption: all energy of the nuclear explosion is radiation uniform in every direction.

The energy E would be spreading in a sphere with area 4*pi*R^2. Area A being a part of that sphere would capture E*A/(4*pi*R^2) of energy. So with:

energy E = 209 PJ (Tsar bomba for an extreme example) area A = 1 m^2 radius of the sphere R = 1000 miles (1609 km)

That would give:

2.09 * 10^17 J * 1 m^2 / (4 * pi * (1.609 * 10^6 m) ^ 2) = 6.4 kJ

So at the distance of 1000 miles an 1 m^2 object would be exposed to 6.4 kJ of radiation. I don't know how destructive would that be. That energy would be equivalent to 6 seconds of sun irradiating a 1 m^2 area above the Earth's atmosphere, but of course sun's radiation is less dangerous (very little gamma/x-ray), and all of that radiation would be almost instant.

From what I'm reading about high-altitude nuclear testing, it can cause artificial radiation belts around the Earth (composed of high-energy electrons). I think that may be more dangerous to satellites at distances like 1000 miles (or at any distance) than the immediate gamma/x-ray radiation.
by robmensching | 2025-07-25 00:20:48+00:00
Yeah, the build system integration was always one of the core benefits provided by the WiX Toolset. I know you're not working with MSI any longer, but in recent versions of WiX Toolset we _finally_ nailed down how to include files in the .wxs file using the new `Files` element in a way that wouldn't break other MSI features (like patching).
by streblo | 2025-07-25 00:22:02+00:00
Intel missed GPUs, missed ARM, missed ASICs, missed everything right under their nose for the last 15 years. This from Andy Grove's "Only the Paranoid Survive" company, a company that in it's own past pivoted from commoditized RAM production to become the one that won the CPU race, a company perfectly positioned to win the next big cycle as the dominant leader in the industry.

This is what happens when the MBAs and the bean counters take over. They cut the fat, then they slice right through the muscle and bone.
by zbentley | 2025-07-25 00:23:52+00:00
Well, there aren't reasons why Python couldn't have that, but there certainly are good reasons why the Python maintainers decided that type of runtime was not appropriate for that specific language--not least among them that maintaining a scheduling/pre-empting runtime (which is the only approach I'm aware of that works here without basically making Python into an entirely unrelated language) is very labor intensive! There's a reason there aren't usable alternative implementations of ERTS/BEAM, and a reason why gccgo is maintained in fits and starts, and why the Python GIL has been around for so long. Getting that type of system right is very, very hard.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-25 00:24:13+00:00
> Homosexuality is (like almost all complex traits[1]) influenced by thousands of genes in addition to environmental, social, cultural factors etc.

Homosexuality is also preserved across practically all social animals [1], and–I believe–absolutely all that form monogamous pairs. That isn't true for Down syndrome [2], which manifests much more like a disease.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals

[2] https://allthatsinteresting.com/animals-with-down-syndrome
by johanyc | 2025-07-25 00:24:20+00:00
They would. The main reason has always been the location. It’s right at the doorstep of China. It’s the same reason when Russia tried to install missile in Cuba, Americans dont like that. Cuba “crisis” is actually a US centric term. Also on east coast of Taiwan, theres a deep waters, submarines can enter pacific ocean much more stealthily.

Everything else is just bonus to them. Semiconductors, supporting nationalism, you name it.
by clipsy | 2025-07-25 00:25:37+00:00
Perhaps you didn't read the comment you were responding to[0]:

> I'm sure the workers would be happy to take substantial raises in the form of equity.

Let me explain it to you as clearly as possible. You claimed that reducing CEO compensation would not result in more money for workers because the majority of CEO compensation is in equity[1]:

> To put it plainly - not paying the CEO wouldn't free up any meaningful amount of more money to pay the workers.

I then attempted to point out that if the company were to redistribute some or all of that equity to workers, they certainly would not turn it down.

Here is a simple example with nice, round numbers: Imagine a company in which the CEO's compensation package is $1m/yr cash and $10m/yr equity at current valuation, and there are 100 workers with a compensation package of $100k/yr cash and $0/yr equity. If you take $5m/yr in equity from the CEO's compensation and distribute it equally among the workers, you now have a company in which the CEO makes $1m/yr cash plus $5m/yr equity, and the workers make $100k/yr cash and $50k/yr equity. See? You can, in fact, reduce CEO pay to increase worker pay! Of course, we both know that money and equity are not interchangeable, which is why I justified my comment by pointing out that the workers would -- presumably -- not reject a compensation increase in the form of equity.

Clear?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44663106

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44663077
by heavyset_go | 2025-07-25 00:27:18+00:00
When you're selling customers a big ticket item like that with one side of your mouth, and are failing to mention it to prospective hires, you have to go out of your way to dance around it.

They emphasized certain genetic selections that sound good, but failed to mention that the leadership, investors, marketing and customers are actually really concerned with this one specific trait that sounds bad, that's selective omission.
by mzitelli | 2025-07-25 00:27:42+00:00
> Right now, the only thing that makes credit cards a better proposition is being able to pay without having enough money in the bank

It will not take long. Banks are already offering products with credit on top of the Pix. Furthermore, contactless Pix is now available in Android phones. If we look from the financial and usability aspects, Pix will continue eating the credit card market share.

I didn't know Thailand and Malaysia had similar systems, though. I hope the example spreads! Creating a competitive infrastructure and product is an interesting way to deal with monopolies.
by nevermindthegap | 2025-07-25 00:27:42+00:00
I can’t imagine anyone colluding with LBT, unless they told him it was collusion to fool him, and he fell for it.

Doing more with less is warning sign like “curve ahead”.

And the agentic focus is not forward-thinking.

Our present is to a small degree agentic, and that will increase, but that won’t sustain because (1) latency and (2) technological evolution.

It’s more likely that everyone will have their own AI on-board which will have all of the data it needs in local storage that gets regular updates. Evolving to current agentic flows won’t help with that type of processing.
by Analemma_ | 2025-07-25 00:28:10+00:00
It’s arguably even worse than that: their entire PR strategy around this issue has been not just denial but “accuse everyone who says the gun has a problem of being Woke Communist Gay Liberals out to destroy America”. If you’re not up to speed with the P320’s issues, it might sound like I’m exaggerating: I promise I’m not, you can go look up their press statements.

I’d call it shameful behavior, but it’s increasingly SOP from a class of people who have deliberately exorcised their ability to feel any shame.