MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vlovich123 | 2025-08-24 23:30:40+00:00
> ref counting still has worse throughout than a tracing GC, even if it is single-threaded, and doesn't have to use atomic instructions. This may or may not matter, I'm not claiming it's worse, especially when used very rarely as is the case with typical c++/rust programs.

That’s a bold claim to make that doesn’t seem to actually be true from my experience. Your 5ghz CPU can probably do ~20 billion non atomic reference adjustments whereas your GC system has to have atomics all over the place or it won’t work and atomics have parasitic performance on unrelated code due to bus locks and whatnot.

> Java can also do on-stack replacement.. sometimes

That’s not what this is. It’s called hybrid RC and it applies always provided you follow the rules.

> The point is not that manual memory can't be faster/more efficient. It's that it is not free, and comes at a non-trivial extra effort on developers side, which is not even a one-time thing, but applies for the lifetime of the program.

The argument here is not about developer productivity - the specific claim is that the Java GC lets you write higher throughput code than you would get with Rust or C++. That just isn’t true so you end up sacrificing throughput AND latency AND peak memory usage. You may not care and are fine with that tradeoff, but claiming you’re not making that tradeoff is not based on the facts.
by noosphr | 2025-08-24 23:30:41+00:00
>Jack Good, a veteran of Colossus practice at Bletchley Park, later claimed that, if appropriately configured, Colossus could almost have carried out a multiplication but that this would not have been possible in practice because of constraints on what could be accomplished in a processing cycle. We have no reason to doubt this, though it would presumably have required special settings of the code wheels and message tape and been, even if possible, a rather inefficient alternative to a desktop calculator. This fact has been offered as proof of the flexibility of Colossus, which in a sense it does attest to: a device designed without any attention to numerical computations could almost have multiplied thanks to the flexibility with which logical conditions could be combined. Yet it also proves the very real differences between Colossus and devices designed for scientific computation. Multiplications were vital to computations, and a device that could not multiply would not, by the standard of the 1940s, be termed a “computer “or “calculator.”

https://www.sigcis.org/files/Haigh%20-%20Colossus%20and%20th...

The limitation seems to have been physical rather than logical.
by nikolay | 2025-08-24 23:31:07+00:00
They are lazy if they don’t educate themselves about what they are doing and what they are giving their children. Don’t get offended. I’ve never done anything health-related to my kids without doing thorough research. I’ve witnessed four major medical mistakes made right in front of me in Orange County, California, in some of the best medical facilities and by the best pediatricians in the area! That’s why I don’t blindly trust anyone, whether it’s a doctor or not. I use critical thinking and always look for alternative advice. Doctors often find me a nuisance, but that’s okay with me. Just try asking a doctor when they prescribe Tylenol for a fever: “Why should I try lowering their fever?” or “Why should I give them Tylenol exactly?” The hepatotoxicity of acetaminophen occurs when the production of the toxic metabolite NAPQI exceeds the liver’s glutathione detoxification capacity, which can happen quite frequently during infections! So, then ask your doctor: “Doesn’t it make sense to give them NAC with Tylenol as well, just in case?” They won’t know what to say, trust me!
by johnecheck | 2025-08-24 23:32:10+00:00
I frequently say the same thing about the word Capitalism. (Communism too). They're second only to 'god' in terms of historical baggage.

If you say 'I like Capitalism', a significant minority will hear 'I love US imperialism and hate nature', despite that almost certainly not being what you meant. Similarly, if you say 'I like Communism', many hear 'I love dictators, gulags, 5 year plans and famine'.

A word of advice: if you actually want to have valuable political conversations with people, don't start by identifying yourself with ideology that's arguably responsible for various atrocities and millions of deaths.
by sebastiennight | 2025-08-24 23:32:55+00:00
I'm not even sure you're being serious here, but I'll assume good faith.

What Google tracking is there in, for instance, vanilla MacOS?

I have my traffic logs, so please let me know and I'll check it for myself.

Edit: and please don't say "Safari has Google as the default engine", since we've covered that above. What else is there?
by prasadjoglekar | 2025-08-24 23:33:28+00:00
It was reusable, but way over promised.

Don't take my word for it. Richard Feynman served on the Challenger commission and very nicely summarizes the difference between Apollo and Space Shuttle.

https://youtu.be/4kpDg7MjHps

SpaceX is doing stuff that's just beyond the scope of what's deemed conventionally realistic. That's achievable and pushes us forward.
by aspenmayer | 2025-08-24 23:34:00+00:00
> To put it another way: you have shows that have strong enough writers where they don’t need gimmicks to keep your attention. And you have shows that are intentionally about the gimmicks. Then you have shows that aren’t about the gimmicks but the writers don’t have enough confidence in their work to avoid putting them in anyway.

Can you elaborate a bit about the gimmick(s) in Halt and Catch Fire? I think it's a drama, so there are human concerns and interactions, but that's like, what tv shows are? I don't know what you mean specifically.

> Shows like The West Wing, House of Cards etc aren’t about gimmicks and don’t need them.

The West Wing is statist propaganda for liberals. House of Cards is statist propaganda for neocons.

> Shows like Mr Robot are about the gimmicks. And that’s ok too because you know it’s meant to be silly drama.

I actually really appreciate that every hack shown on Mr. Robot had a real world POC and used actually existing tools and techniques. The storyline is hokum and gives hackers a bad name, but black hats are kinda supposed to have a bad name. Elliot is kinda gray hat, but he definitely violated CFAA multiple times and would probably be dead or in jail irl.
by atombender | 2025-08-24 23:35:45+00:00
For a long time I've wondered if we could just invent an extension for Postgres that allow physically ordered, append-only tables.

The main two things that makes Postgres less suitable for Kafka-type logs is that tables aren't very efficient for sequentially ordered data, and that deletion incurs bloat until vacuumed. You could solve both by providing a new table engine (table access method), although I'm not sure you can control heap storage placement to the degree desired for a physically ordered table. But you could also do a lot of tricks to make it delete faster (append only means no updates; just prune from the head without MVCC when provably safe against concurrent reads?) and make filtering faster.

Kafka is of course more than that, but I bet you can get quite far with this.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-08-24 23:36:56+00:00
Yeah. Most simulations are highly simplified toy models, and most of them need to be calibrated to real-life experimental results. The more complex the system, and the fewer experimental results you've got, the less reliable any simulation is going to be.

WRT Starship, I'm sure that certain aspects (like heat shield performance) can be simulated to acceptably high fidelity, but the entire system is beyond simulation. An accurate simulation would have to simulate the materials and mechanical behavior of every component, in an interconnected way, under a wide variety of stress states -- which is basically impossible with modern technology. Maybe in a few decades...
by downrightmike | 2025-08-24 23:36:58+00:00
My intel powered workstations from 2008 have chips that are more than decent enough for modern computing.

But in reality, they gave up on R&D, Missed Apple mobile chips and then put a lot of MBAs in top leadership positions to make their financial schemes work. Those schemes did not work and they were left without technical leadership. When they got the tech leadership, the board just gave up and fired him and brought in a chop shop CEO to part intel out.

For some reason, the US admin thinks this is a good buy. You probably would too, if you bankrupted multiple casinos.

Intel is going the way of SunBeam, Sears and Toys r Us. The board failed to stop that. And failure attracts more failure.
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-08-24 23:37:33+00:00
Even if the kernel doesn't break userspace, GNU libc does, all the time, so the net effect is that Linux userspace is broken regardless of the kernel maintainers' efforts. Put simply, programs and libraries compiled on/for newer libc are ABI-incompatible or straight-up do not run on older libc, so everything needs to be upgraded in lockstep.

It is a bit ironic and a little funny that Windows solved this problem a couple decades ago with redistributables.
by vlovich123 | 2025-08-24 23:37:36+00:00
No, that’s an overly strong statement - concurrency doesn’t necessarily require locks even though they can be convenient to express it. You could have channels and queues to transfer data and ownership between threads. Not a lock in sight as queues and channels can be done lock free. The presence of locks in the Rust standard library says nothing other than it’s a very common concurrency tool, not that it’s absolutely required.

> and to implement a ConcurrentHashMap in Rust you would still need to lock

There’s many ways to implement concurrency safe hashmaps (if you explicitly needs such a data structure as the synchronization mechanism) without locks. Notably RCU is such a mechanism (really neat mechanism developed for the kernel although not super user friendly yet or common in userspace) and there are also generational garbage techniques available (kind of similar to tracing GC conceptually but implemented just for a single data structure). A common and popular crate in Rust for this is DashMap which doesn’t use locks and is a concurrency safe hashmap.
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-08-24 23:38:05+00:00
Trade one devil for another?

I’ve never looked to see the compatibility of Office to Gsuite.

So unless it is 110% perfect it is a non-starter. The second we have a supplier send an excel with some goofball formula in it and we don’t see some data or can’t open it - it’s over.

This isn’t even getting to the next devil… Adobe.
by nikolay | 2025-08-24 23:38:08+00:00
The issue with these studies, according to what I've heard, is that they use the wrong type of aspirin - they use enteric-coated aspirin, which doesn't work the same way. Instead, if you take pure aspirin (you can only find it for veterinarian use) together with vitamin C and/or DGL (Deglycyrrhizinated Licorice), then you protect your stomach from aspirin, and it acts as it's supposed to act. Georgi Dinkov of Ray Peat's fame told me once that another trick is to take aspirin with gelatin, which also coats and protects your stomach lining. I discussed different novel aspirin formulation such as the disappeared now Vazalore. I still think the easiest way is to take Aspirin C by Bayer in Europe and breat it into 4 pieces, because the asprin dose is pretty high otherwise, which is good if you have an acute problem, but it's a bit too much for a daily use.
by treetalker | 2025-08-24 23:38:13+00:00
I always felt that Cornell Notes never worked for my in-class note-taking — primarily because, when dealing with any subject of at least moderate complexity, the space for actual notes was only enough for 1–3 actual points (and sometimes less than one).

I find the technique much more useful for rewriting those notes (often more than once) after class and periodically thereafter. It's a useful way to boil things down, Feynman-Method style. And then the space for keywords/questions serves as an ersatz spaced-repetition / active-recall system (simply fold the page over to hide the answer, and possibly partially cut the page horizontally so you can reveal one answer at a time and avoid peeking/cheating during your review).

If I recall correctly, the person or people who invented the method had several other versions and methods too; perhaps someone else can find and share a good resource explaining them all.
by Dave3of5 | 2025-08-24 23:38:29+00:00
Actually nowadays it's less that it's a problem to pop the pills out the booster pack and more that you are limited to the number you can buy.

So if you're going to off yourself you'd have to stock pile or roam around shops picking up.

There is a not insignificant number of suicides where people just say fck it I'll just kill myself but they don't want to go out to any real bother to do it i.e. they don't pre-plan it it's just spur of the moment. A bottle of kill yo self pills is pretty easy. Cupboard, swallow, drink down some water, die. But having to go out and buy a bunch over a few days or like drive around in your car just buying as many as you can. Like you'd have to look it up to check you're going to buy enough.

Back when that law came in when they didn't reduce the total amount you could buy at one time so if you went in and bought like 10 packs at the supermarket then the person at the till would be like ok this person's going to kill themselves so again that would require a bit of balls from the would be kill yo selfer.

I think you can buy a bottle of like 100 x 500mg for like $20 in the USA. That's like over 2 weeks swigging at the max amount. Like you don't need that many, 3-4 days is enough shouldn't be taking that much of the stuff.
by deadbabe | 2025-08-24 23:38:41+00:00
I think if you transported the average Roman to modern times, after the initial future shock wears off, they would likely just become accustomed to technology much like any other person today who has no clue how most things work. They could learn to drive cars, use smartphones, catch flights, take medicine, etc.

They would probably even spend a lot of time talking about how things were better back in their days, and how pathetic society is now.
by SpecialistK | 2025-08-24 23:39:28+00:00
That's a big (and almost offensive) assumption. Who is to say that the worker does not have their own alternative sources of capital, such as a farm, inheritance, creative outputs, own company, etc?

It's also an assumption that the worst case for an owner is to declare bankruptcy. Depending on the jurisdiction, they may be financially responsible for losses and debts; face civil or criminal charges for their role in the downfall; and reputational damage which prevents them from meaningful employment that someone else would get.

It's far from ideal, sure. But it also isn't as black-and-white as you assert.
by slipperydippery | 2025-08-24 23:39:52+00:00
> We are destined for the stars.

The stars suck, though. Even Mars is entirely awful.

Like, that's not very different from "we're destined for Hell". Not an inspiring sentiment, right? It's really bad.

How awful it is aside, it's also roughly as realistic as "we're destined for Tolkien's Middle Earth". Only marginally less fantastical.
by adinhitlore | 2025-08-24 23:40:18+00:00
my current belief as of today is that "big balls" or whoever weird teenager Musk hires is behind things like that. I'd say Musk is too old to believe in the 'AGI' but folks 18-25 must be crazy about it + he is prolly too busy to follow anon users on x.com. In any case this speaks volumes for his horrible hr "skills".
by gpm | 2025-08-24 23:40:31+00:00
1. I think starlink alone means there is demand for that. Starlink is an appreciable fraction of satellites in orbit... Apart from starlink, satellites spend a lot of money on being as light as possible, at the very least there's a tradeoff here where you get to make the same satellite cheaper by being less mass efficient.

2. I wouldn't dismiss the cost savings from a reusable second stage.

3. They already have experience with legs from Falcon 9, and they're already landing this rocket very precisely with their tower. I would expect the development timeline for legs to be short. Much shorter than the development timeline for human rating the rest of this, for instance...

3.5. Winches and ropes are light and cheap, lowering things to and raising things from the surface doesn't strike me as a particularly difficult problem... apart from maybe the human-rating aspects of the system.

I think Starship has a good theoretical basis for being an economic success. On the other hand I don't have much faith they will successfully execute at this point.

They're massively behind schedule and presumably above anticipated cost. They aren't showing signs of having successfully designed a safe, reliable, and cheaply built vehicle. They've been making what externally seem like stupid mistakes like having their rocket fail in basically the same way twice in a row. They are making political enemies left right and center whether it's by having a fascist CEO committing election related crimes, or littering the same down-range islands with rocket parts from failed launches. They are almost certainly driving away talent by virtue of the same CEOs political roles and crimes, and by virtue of doing things like taking SpaceX engineers and having them work on twitter.
Show HN: Sping – An HTTP/TCP latency tool that's easy on the eye
by zorlack | 2025-08-24 23:42:01+00:00
I've frequently found myself using [nvitop](https://github.com/XuehaiPan/nvitop) to diagnose GPU/CPU contention issues.

The two best things about it are:

- It's easy to install if I can access pip in the container

- It makes a compelling screenshot (which helps me communicate with coworkers.)

With those two lessons in mind: Here is Sping!

Purpose: Help observe and diagnose latency issues at layer 4+ (TCP/HTTP/HTTPS)

Two good things about it:

- It's easy to install if you have pip. (Available at [service-ping-sping](https://pypi.org/project/service-ping-sping/) on PyPi)

- It makes a compelling screenshot.

Not sure if this is the kind of thing that anyone else would be interested in. But I've enjoyed making it and intend to keep using it.
by tptacek | 2025-08-24 23:42:03+00:00
In practice, DNSSEC won't do anything for ordinary Internet users, because it runs between recursive resolvers and authority servers, and ordinary users run neither: they use stub resolvers (essentially, "gethostbyname") --- which is why you DHCP-configure a DNS server when you connect to a network. If you were running a recursive resolver, your DNS server would just be "127.0.0.1".

The parent comment is also correct that the best DNSSEC can do for you, in the case where you're not relying on an upstream DNS server for resolution (in which case your ISP can invisibly defeat DNSSEC) is to tell you that a name has been censored.

And, of course, only a tiny fraction of zones on the Internet are signed, and most of them are irrelevant; the signature rate in the Tranco Top 1000 (which includes most popular names in European areas where DNSSEC is enabled by default and security-theatrically keyed by registrars) is below 10%.

DNS-over-HTTPS, on the other hand, does decisively solve this problem --- it allows you to delegate requests to an off-network resolver your ISP doesn't control, and, unlike with DNSSEC, the channel between you and that resolver is end-to-end secure. It also doesn't require anybody to sign their zone, and has never blown up and taken a huge popular site off the Internet for hours at a time, like DNSSEC has.

Whatever else DNSSEC is, it isn't really a solution for the censorship problem.
by dismalaf | 2025-08-24 23:42:23+00:00
Maybe their shares get bought, in this case it looks like Intel might have simply issued the shares. In this case, shareholders have equity in a company that just had $10 billion added to the balance sheet and which the government signalled can't fail. INTC was up over 5% on Friday, obviously shareholders think the government investment is good for them.

Versus in most nationalisation events their shares simply get taken away or diluted to pennies.
by colinsane | 2025-08-24 23:42:28+00:00
> [RSS] is a standard that websites and podcasts can use to offer a feed of content to their users, one easily understood by lots of different computer programs. Today, though RSS continues to power many applications on the web, it has become, for most people, an obscure technology.

arguing that RSS is dead because the average person doesn't understand it is like saying HTTP's dead for the same reason. neither are dead: we've just abstracted them to the point that they're no longer the front-facing part of any interaction.
by x0x0 | 2025-08-24 23:43:14+00:00
From my pov, it looks more like intel shit the bed repeatedly.

Missed on: mobile, custom chips in the data center, graphics cards, ai, and building out fab services they can sell.

Meanwhile, they took at least 5 years off of making their chips faster, and we're treated to the absurdity that the m-series chips are as performant in single core as anything Intel can build on a power budget 1/10th of Intel's.

I'm not sure what that has to do with outsourcing? It looks more like a comprehensive lack of execution.
by brendoelfrendo | 2025-08-24 23:44:23+00:00
I think that would require some testing and evaluation according to personal preference. My opinion is that Qwen 3 and Deepseek Chat v3.1 become much more concise when summarizing searches, but much less detailed. When used without the web search tool, they become more verbose (and express more "personality"), which may be less desirable in some contexts, but they also gave more informative answers. With Kimi K2 I seem to find the opposite; it really does well when analyzing search results (and really likes inserting tables to give break down its findings), and its "offline" version was much less detailed.

Oh, and an interesting finding: Kagi's selector indicates that they're offering Deepseek Chat v3.1's non-reasoning version, but when I ran it without web search it appears to have messed up and output some of its chain of thought, so it clearly is thinking.
by gridspy | 2025-08-24 23:45:07+00:00
1. You raise some valid points, but it's pretty common that when you lower the price for something ($ per KG to LEO) you raise the demand. The planned price drop is so severe that it becomes practical to send full weight objects into space without spending money and time on reducing weight.

2. Still a huge reduction in price. A full StarShip launch is expected to be much cheaper than a full Falcon 9 launch (per launch) because the cost is just fuel (about $300k) and some maintenance.

3. Putting legs back on for the Mars landing vehicle (a small fraction of the # starships launched btw) is totally practical.

Testing-

Yes, there is a lot more testing to go. I personally prefer testing and data-driven approvals than the traditional Paperwork based approval methods.