MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gambiting | 2025-07-06 06:01:08+00:00
Cocaine, I could maybe see the argument. But the article also said there was another submarine seized with 4.5BN worth of meth aboard. And I really hope you aren't suggesting legalising meth. I could see the argument that if other amphetamines were legal no one would use meth, but.....I don't think that's necessarily true. All the illegal meth would have to do to keep existing is to be cheaper than legal speed.
by MrDrMcCoy | 2025-07-06 06:01:25+00:00
Long-term fixation, colloquially referred to as "obsession", is fairly common to various forms of neurodivergance, and neurodivergance is fairly common for engineering-adjacent folks. Since that forms a likely large cross section of the HN crowd, the suggested icebreaker is probably relevant to many of us, whether we are ourselves neurodivergant or otherwise frequently interact with those who are. I also dislike the "passion" question, but obsessions change frequently enough and are exciting to the person asked. It's just different enough to liven up the conversation if you're asking the right person.

> Where does the conversation go from there?

I dunno, maybe try asking a neurodivergant person sometime? I certainly would rather be asked about my obsessions than my passions, as my passions are all too often left to rot for one reason or another, which just makes me sad and want to leave.
by kmoser | 2025-07-06 06:01:59+00:00
> a massive team is following a rigid SDLC including code reviews for best practices

Regardless of how thoroughly a system is planned in advance, programmers are not automatons who mindlessly fill in the last few blanks. They must make choices about the code they write, and that is absolutely a part of the overall design. If that code fails a code review, well, then it gets rewritten, but that's ancillary to my point: programming is design (albeit at a lower level than the overall system design).
by jokoon | 2025-07-06 06:02:43+00:00
Hidden rules and randomness is intentional game design

It causes a feeling in uncertainty, which is closer to a gambling game.

Randomness prevents the player to form strategies that allows him to win must of the time.

Uncertainty is a bit similar. If the player could figure everything out, there would be less suspense.

The players are frustrated because they naively expect that they should always be able to determine things in advance so they can be experts at the game and know if they can win or not.

Sprinkling some randomness at such game is smart game design.
by weinzierl | 2025-07-06 06:04:50+00:00
Is your code really fast if you haven't measured it properly? I'd say measuring is hard but a prerequisite for writing fast code, so truly fast code is harder.

The number one mistake I see people make is measuring one time and taking the results at face value. If you do nothing else, measure three times and you will at least have a feeling for the variability of your data. If you want to compare two versions of your code with confidence there is usually no way around proper statistical analysis.

Which brings me to the second mistake. When measuring runtime, taking the mean is not a good idea. Runtime measurements usually skew heavily towards a theoretical minimum which is a hard lower bound. The distribution is heavily lopsided with a long tail. If your objective is to compare two versions of some code, the minimum is a much better measure than the mean.
by kragen | 2025-07-06 06:05:20+00:00
No, on all the servers I have any experience with, it can only execute executables the server administrator configures as CGI programs, not executables supplied by an attacker, and they never ran as root. Apache in particular is universally run as a non-root user, since the very first release, and its suEXEC mechanism (used for running CGI programs as their owners for shared web hosting services) refuses to run any CGI program as root. I've never seen a web server on a Unix system running as root: not CERN httpd, not NCSA httpd, not Apache, not nginx, not python -m http.server, not any of the various web servers I've written myself.

I hesitate to suggest that you might be misremembering things that happened 30 years ago, but possibly you were using a very nonstandard setup?
by sitharus | 2025-07-06 06:05:37+00:00
The main security issue I recall from CGI was caused by the web server having to execute the binary. This meant either executing as www-data, running the web server as root so it can call setuid, or using setuid binaries which have their own issues.

These were real issues on multi-user hosts, but as most of the time we don’t use shared hosting like that anymore it’s not an issue.

There were also some problems with libraries parsing the environment variables with the request data wrong, but that’s no different from a badly implemented http stack these days. I vaguely recall some issues with excessively log requests overflowing environment variables, but I can’t remember if that was a security problem or DoS.
by chii | 2025-07-06 06:06:09+00:00
> require more setup to secure

docker is not secure. It has no "real" security boundry, and any malicious actor could have you run a docker image that is just as malware as an executable. Like locks on doors, it just keeps out the honest people. So i say effort spent trying to secure it is wasted.

> backup

if you have data in the docker instance, you have to use volume mounts, and then backup that volume mount. I say it's easier to backup than an installed app, as you cannot be sure that it didnt write somewhere else their data!
by asciimov | 2025-07-06 06:06:14+00:00
I agree, if your linked pc wasn't from aliexpress it would be a compelling alternative. Not that these n100 mini-pcs are any better, but I can get one tomorrow off amazon for under $150.

I do think they bridge the server gap between using a rpi and a full server. Likely for the hobbyist that doesn't yet have the need (or space) for better hardware.
by LelouBil | 2025-07-06 06:06:30+00:00
Yeah, what I don't understand is that he seems to completely ignore the fact that a docker containers is still running linux, just isolated in a new filesystem (and more technologies I don't know a lot about like namespaces and stuff)

So the author thinks it's better for users to do (sometimes tedious) steps to get an application or a set of applications running, just for them to "know how to use linux", while ignoring the fact that Docker/containerization's primarily use case is for the developer side, and the developer needs to know linux to write a working Dockerfile.
by hmry | 2025-07-06 06:06:42+00:00
> Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable.

No? How would the "rights holders" be in any way liable for someone posting illegal content on a community-hosted server after a game has gone end-of-life?

Also, community servers not having to adhere to the publisher's standards of what community content is safe vs unsafe is clearly a positive in my humble opinion.
by sandworm101 | 2025-07-06 06:07:05+00:00
A good question is then whether a driver can recharge a truck during rest periods. Most jurisdictions dont allow refueling or maintenance during driver rest periods.

Trucks are not personal vehicles. They are run as part of a business. If an electric trucks can save money, every business will switch immediately. That isnt happening because the math/money doesnt, yet, make sense.
by bigmadshoe | 2025-07-06 06:07:26+00:00
The war on drugs has failed.

Everyone agrees that no-one should do meth. But the solutions presented so far by prohibition are not just conceptually flawed - they demonstrably don’t work. We literally have 50+ years of data that shows it.

We need to a) legalize drugs, b) provide proper treatment to addicts, and c) get unsafe drugs off the streets.

I’m speaking as someone who lost a close family member to an overdose. What we’re doing now is not working.
by anonzzzies | 2025-07-06 06:08:56+00:00
Was that the only reason? In our last testing (2021), on the same hardware and for our specific case (a billions of records database with many tables and specific workfloads), mysql consistently left postgres in the dust performance wise. Internal and external devs pointed out that probably postgres (or rather, our table structures & indexes) could be tweaked with quite a lot of work to be faster, but mysql performed well (for our purpose) even with some very naive options. I guess it depends on the case, but I cannot justify spending 1 cent (let alone far more as we have 100k+ tables) on something while something else is fast enough (by quite a margin) to begin with...
by ggm | 2025-07-06 06:09:06+00:00
For some people, paying the premium to jump the queue is the point. What they didn't forsee is what happens when everyone has wound up paying the premium, and the queue is now with you again. This is mostly Australian frequent flyers, when it was a high barrier to entry it conferred advantages and now Fly in Fly out work has commoditised club status, there is next to no boarding advantage, and no points flight availability.

So yes. Status seeking, and differential price seeking probably is a-social as a pattern when it's weaponised against the consumer.

That said, I hated Uber, they actually offered to underwrite people breaking the law to get foot in the door (how that didn't get them excluded as a corporate scofflaw is beyond me) and they continue to export all the profits offshore, but taxi services had become shit and now we have got used to Uber and I just don't worry about surge pricing. I got boiled slowly.

My fellow Australians all feel a bit shit about the introduction of tipping in paywave and food service. That's unaustralian. We have legally enforced minimum wages and penalty rates. Turn that feature off.

The European push to mandate included luggage in flight is seeing a fair bit of trolling. So there are still true believers who think needing clean underwear is weak.
by blackjack_ | 2025-07-06 06:09:51+00:00
Yes if they want to edit the running container config, that is exactly what to do. Also, if you are just running a mounted volume for the configs, you don't even have to go that far. You can just edit the mounted volume on the host machine and it will show up immediately in the container.

However, I would think you would want to edit the Dockerfile instead so that you fix it every time you restart the container.

But I think the whole point of this post is that the author has no idea how docker works and is mad about having to learn docker things, so nobody should use them. Never mind the entirety of cloud infrastructure running in containers and doing amazing things. Never mind being able to duplicate state across tons of different servers at the same time. It shows that the author isn't into making infrastructure at scale, and has no idea how incredible docker has been to software development, CI/CD pipelines, and deployment / release infrastructure as a whole.
by snaily | 2025-07-06 06:10:04+00:00
You're right about driver time being the key metric. mattlondon's reply[1] to the GP gives the extra context: the endurance is aligned pretty well with (EU) legally mandated breaks, allowing for mid-day charging.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44478186

Edit: I see you've replied there.
by qingcharles | 2025-07-06 06:11:16+00:00
That is a good explanation. I loved Hail Mary, but it's cheeseburger sci-fi. A lot of fun, an easy read, very enjoyable. It's not Michelin Star material, but even Gordon Ramsey eats at Burger King sometimes.

If you enjoyed The Martian (book or film), then this is just more of the same.
by svnt | 2025-07-06 06:11:19+00:00
I find these posts primarily interesting as a sort of demographic heatmap. Like now it has gotten to the point where instead of only chasing their interest of choice (geohot hacking, in this case), this person has become aware of the issue, and been sufficiently motivated to write a post about it.

geohot is pretty deep into the center of the map afaict.
by zerof1l | 2025-07-06 06:12:34+00:00
I get the impression that the person who wrote this article doesn't know much about docker. Running 2 apps and a certbot can be done without containers easily. Try running 20 apps, some of which depend on having the same dependency but on a different version.

Regarding security, it depends on how you set up your containers. If you just run them all with default settings - the root user; and give them all the permissions, then yeah, quite insecure. But if you spend an extra minute and create a new non-root user for each container and restrict the permissions then it's quite secure. There are plenty of docker hardening tutorials.

Regarding ease of setup, it took me a while to learn docker. Setting up first containers took very long time. But now, it's quick and easy. I have templates for the docker compose file and I know how to solve all the common issues.

Regarding ease of management, it's very easy. Most of my containers is setup once and forget. Upgrading an app just requires changing the version in the docker-compose file.
by gryn | 2025-07-06 06:13:13+00:00
> many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only

that's kinda the point, many users don't like having their single player game be online only because the devs thought it would give them more control.

seems like 'video games europe' is gearing up to lobby/influence the lawmakers to distort this initiative.

the bare minimum would be to ban these kind of things from describing themselves as products instead of a service in their marketing. no "Buy" or "Purchase", instead "Rent" or "Lease" possibly with a stated minimum guaranteed time online / expiration date.

EDIT: reminder, if you're from the EU and over the age of 18 it's still a good idea to sign the petition even though it passed the threshold since there could be invalid signatures (bots, underage people, etc ...) if the valid signatures are below the threshold after the verification is done this petition will get dropped.
by fcatalan | 2025-07-06 06:14:51+00:00
At that time I was developing with a friend what later was called a Learning Management System: It had content management, assignment uploads, event calendar, grade management, real time chat, forums... It was all plain C via CGI and it was hell to work with.

What almost brought us to tears the day we learned about PHP was how everything we had been painstakingly programming ourselves from scratch reading RFCs or reverse engineering HTTP was just a simple function call in PHP. No more debugging our scuffed urlencode implementation or losing a day to a stray carriage return in an HTTP header...
by honkycat | 2025-07-06 06:15:03+00:00
A bored teenager doesn't care.

There are people in the world who are profoundly nihilistic [0]. They will do mean shit for no reasons, and move on without caring.

This has always been true throughout human history.

"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do"

0: often without actually knowing what that word means
by crazylogger | 2025-07-06 06:16:42+00:00
I can see this makes sense for simple { user_query -> search -> llm_answer } usage, where tool use is only a means to retrieve background info.

For complex real-world agent flows though, tool use is often the only thing that the LLM is expected to do. Like in a coding agent:

```

User: Develop a program to ...

Agent: Bash("touch main.py") > 0, ""

Agent: Edit("main.py", initial_patch) > 0, ""

Agent: Bash("python main.py") > 1, "SyntaxError: ..."

Agent: Edit("main.py", fix_patch) > 0, ""

Agent: Bash("python main.py") > 0, "OK"

Agent: FINISH

```

Here, tool selection (+ writing the arguments) is actually the whole job. It's also easy to see that if you omit even one of the tool use records in the middle, the agent wouldn't work at all.
by PeterHolzwarth | 2025-07-06 06:16:56+00:00
I suppose I should add the URL: https://www.bluesnews.com/

I recall in the 90s when Blue (Stephen Heaslip) of BluesNews would host the early games-focused streaming show Quake Cast on Real Networks - at a time when audio and video streaming was a fraught endeavor.

It's difficult to describe today just how central Blues was in the early 90s internet community focused around first person shooters - and it's wonderful how focused he has continued to be on content-dense gaming news into the modern era.
by maxglute | 2025-07-06 06:18:00+00:00
>eating into domestic demand

Eating into domestic profit, if anything domestic demand would be up due to price wars, and we see in data domestic demand for price war sectors are crazy or higher than per capita consumption would demand, i.e. all the renewables. Auto domestic consumption is ~20 per 1000 people, about double Mexicos who according to GDP and other measures should consume comparable/more than PRC.

>how do you stamp out extreme competition

Look at much memed PRC bike sharing bubble which lasted ~5 years... graveyards of bikes from losers. IIRC ~8B spent, overcapacity -> consolidation cycle. Bubble burst mid 2010s. I think 1-1.5B / year industry, probably a few 100m profit / year for entire sector for 7B and growing rides per year. Lazy chatgpt numbers and PRC doing 5 rides per capita, western countries averaging 1. So it's... a very high utility sector... with marginal profits... i.e. affordable. which is what theoretically one wants, economic profits trend to zero over time under perfect competition.

Zero does not mean negative, and zero does not mean so little sector becomes globally uncompetitive. Ideally PRC industrial policy is to generate very competitive companies who are not wildly profitable after pouring resources into stuff like infra/r&d to keep competitive edge (i.e. fuck share buy backs). IMO why mantra/focus is "high-quality development" not "high-profit development". Low margins/profits is the goal of abundance, especially if big share of domestic market is 600m that's still low income, or the 50% of the world that is developing.

> just hoping for a correction to rebalance the economy

I think that's why QS is reporting. Bike sharing had market correction... because market correction typically inevitable. Cars on other hand is particularly strategic industry with very motivated backers, it's one of those market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent sectors because everyone (province/countries) wants auto industry. So this is one of those cases central gov will probably have to step in to correct, hence QS warning telling players central gov will do something if they don't.
by leptons | 2025-07-06 06:18:15+00:00
Okay, well your vague response suggests to me you aren't asking the LLM anything important at all, and most likely it's things that could have appeared in the first page of a google search. So, sure, 90% of the time it's going to give you the top Google result. The other 10% were probably best answered by the top Google result but the LLM chose to hallucinate instead. Is that really better?
by gambiting | 2025-07-06 06:18:26+00:00
There is a good YouTube channel of a truck driver in Germany who drives an electric truck and he's been praising it all over. The range is enough to go between pauses, and yes he can charge while resting.

https://youtu.be/I4b-cybcgkM?si=gGTBfgApQ_ssDANu

>>Most jurisdictions dont allow refueling or maintenance during driver rest periods.

Well good thing recharging is not the same as refueling. Fueling requires an operator to be present and watching the pump for safety reasons. Recharging doesn't have such limitation.
by jokoon | 2025-07-06 06:20:36+00:00
I don't think having less manufacturing is such a bad thing.

In a world of technology, what matters is designing and expertise, not making things.

China has a rampant cheating problem in its universities, and there is a lot of corruption. This discourages Chinese people to pursue innovation.

The communist party is a big obstacles to innovation.

China is dependent on stealing techs.

Not to mention Chinese talents would rather work in the US.

So it boils down to having the fairest political and regime system, which china is not, although it could be one day, but I don't think Chinese culture can absorb democracy very well.

I'm not worried.
by mock-possum | 2025-07-06 06:20:51+00:00
Seriously, I can’t remember the last time I was bored as an adult - the times I was bored as a kid, it was because adults were making be somewhere or do something that wasn’t engaging.

I literally have a computer at hand 24/7 now, I’m almost never bored. It’s kinda crazy to think about much of a change that is.
by emsign | 2025-07-06 06:20:53+00:00
I'm so sick of algorithms dictating choices for me. I just don't want to partake anymore. It's no fun anymore, my dopamine reservoirs get drained quicker now and I just want to drop out of this society that has been colonized by companies that hate us. The government hates us, the policies of the too rich are destructive and they hate us.
by dijit | 2025-07-06 06:21:00+00:00
It’s more complicated than that.

I work in games and in my last workplace I was CTO of a racing simulation; that means I was working with brands that were not only my own in a pretty big way.

The stipulations that were put on us was pretty strong. For example (and it’s not just these guys), Mercedes will not permit you to allow the logo to fall off; If you have a damage model in the game this is annoying. Some won’t allow the car to get dirty, or to deform in a realistic way because it harms a copyright (did you know that the front lights of cars are part of their brand and trademark in most cases).

I’m using a pretty obvious example, that by selling a product that contains these other brands, we are beholden to not represent them in a way they don’t like; it’s part of the transaction for having it.

I can already hear people thinking: but, most games don’t have any third party intellectual property. But that’s less true than you think, even fantasy games will inevitably wind up copying something from our world that is not completely generic. The most annoying ones are the little background things; Rockstar for example will almost assuredly have issues with using the shapes of famous buildings and licensing issues if they make their radio stations too easy to pirate.

It’s a quagmire. Honestly, I’m not even sure why we bother making anything, there seems to always be some random popping their head up seeking another slice.
by MrDrMcCoy | 2025-07-06 06:23:07+00:00
Tracking subscriptions isn't the problem. The problem is how much work it is to go and unsubscribe from many services. They all have a different process, that they don't make easy to find, and add as much friction as possible to discourage you. If you are trying to clean up your finances and unsubscribe from lots of things at once, it's exhausting. Having a single list of per-service cards that you can run down and click a button to pause or cancel is as much a convenience as it is a relief.

As a bonus, it's much easier to see where I've been spending so much money than running through my bank transactions and doing my own tally against their unhelpful categories and mismatched business names. And of course, the spending limits do as much to protect me from myself as it does surprise charges and price increases. It's been an invaluable tool for me, and I heartily recommend it.
by kragen | 2025-07-06 06:23:07+00:00
Golang seems pretty comfortable from the stuff I've done in it, but it's not as oriented toward prototyping. It's more oriented toward writing code that's long-term maintainable even if that makes it more verbose, which is bad for throwaway code. And it's not clear how you'd use Golang to do the kind of open-ended exploration you can do in a Jupyter notebook, for example. How would you load new code into a Golang program that's already running?

Admittedly Python is not great at this either (reload has interacted buggily with isinstance since the beginning), but it does attempt it.