MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Flere-Imsaho | 2025-08-30 22:16:01+00:00
> I’m now 43 and other day I was looking up test papers for the 11+ (school entrance exams for 11 year olds) and thinking - damn this is HARD!

Are you me? I've been helping my daughter study for the 11+, and some of the questions I really struggle with (I'm 44). However if you look up the answers and see how the answer is calculated/resolved, it does seem like it's a case of just learning the method.

This does make me think that to pass the 11+ you basically need to pay for private tuition. We'll see how well my daughter does in a few weeks time (when the 11+ test is conducted).

Likewise with a lot of these cognitive IQ tests, if you know the method or tricks you can basically pass no problem... but I'm not 100% sure it means you're "smarter" than everyone else.
by osigurdson | 2025-08-30 22:16:05+00:00
Sometimes I think we should go back to basics: pixels, data, latency / bandwidth. The web is an optimization problem in the sense that we want to render correct pixels at perceptual speed given latency and bandwidth constraints.

It should be more like: what pixels is the user about to see? What data is need to set the the pixels? What data is likely needed next and optimistically pre-fetch - something like that.
by thisislife2 | 2025-08-30 22:16:09+00:00
Not sure that Americans (or even Europeans) don't (or wouldn't) care about it.

What I have personally observed is that there is really a strong moral dichotomy between western politicians and their citizens to such things. Most western politicians don't seem to really care about the brutality of warfare, and accept it as given and necessary for their (superpower-) politics. The people however do not hold to this. Considering them as two distinct entities does offer a better political perspective about a western country.

You can see this in the ongoing genocide in Gaza - there have been multiple, large protests in both US and Europe in the last 2+ years, and most western States have often tended to clamp down hard on the protests and the media to suppress it. Abuse of State power, by using antisemitism laws and even terrorism (see Why opposing Israel's genocide got me arrested for terrorism - https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/why-opposing-israels-g... ), against the protestors has also been a feature. Note that the politicians aren't ignorant, and recognize that there is genuine anger, if not discomfort, in the population to what is happening in Gaza. But most believe that suppressing these protests, along with some public platitudes ("yes, what is happening is horrible", "ceasefire is necessary", "aid should be allowed" etc. etc) but not doing anything really substantial or meaningful (i.e. taking actual action towards this) is enough to "pacify" the population. In some ways, it has been - despite public anger in the west to the Gaza genocide, most western superpowers have gotten away with doing nothing. But there have been political miscalculations too - sparks of these anger did give a burn to Biden / Harris in the US as some American democrats saw through their hollow platitudes and lack of honesty, and did not vote for them, contributing to Trump's victory ( see https://politics.stackexchange.com/q/89703 ).

This is why, in my opinion, we now see some European States rushing to recognize the State of Palestine, another public gesture that has high PR value but is meaningless in political substance (it is mostly meaningless as more than 80% or so of the world already recognize it as a State; but despite this, Palestine is still not allowed to even be a UN member - the US used its veto against the General Assembly to deny it membership). So I wouldn't say that western people don't care ... the politicians don't, and some of them do pay the (democratic) price of it.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-08-30 22:16:16+00:00
> Compression seems silly in the modern world. Virtually everything is already compressed.

IIRC my laptop's zpool has a 1.2x compression ratio; it's worth doing. At a previous job, we had over a petabyte of postgres on ZFS and saved real money with compression. Hilariously, on some servers we also improved performance because ZFS could decompress reads faster than the disk could read.
by jonplackett | 2025-08-30 22:17:03+00:00
It now seems to be a choice of ‘let it autocomplete everything’ which because it’s shit so often is just draining and distracting. Or no autocomplete at all.

I just want it to fill in the names of function and variables and enums etc. just stuff that is sometimes hard to keep in your head but such a small suggestion it doesn’t mess up your line of thinking.
by delichon | 2025-08-30 22:17:33+00:00
He wasn't quiet about it in the campaign. Presumably it was part of the package a plurality voted for.

https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47/president-donald-j-tru...

* Deploy all necessary military assets, including the U.S. Navy, to impose a full naval embargo on the cartels, to ensure they cannot use our region’s waters to traffic illicit drugs to the U.S.

From that it seems that embargos of Venezuela, El Salvador and Mexico are on the table.
by monooso | 2025-08-30 22:17:55+00:00
> "Lots of people use it" doesn't make it good.

I didn't say it was good (or bad), I said it's a perfectly viable approach.

> Lots of people in the past have written "successful" web applications as loose PHP files with little structure, no classes, using associative arrays everywhere (including me when I was starting out), but today it's generally agreed upon that this is not a good idea.

You're right, which is why, in 2025, no experienced developer builds web applications in this way.

Plenty of experienced developers build web applications using the active record pattern.

>Are there any hidden advantages I'm not aware of?

You mean aside from others having a different opinion about the relative pros and cons of active record, or personal preference?
by underlipton | 2025-08-30 22:18:54+00:00
I kind of welcome this. Corporations panicking and being afraid to raise prices too much, and perhaps having to take a loss because they're essentially giving away product, is the LEAST that could happen to them after their naked and abusive COVID-era gouging.

EDIT: You had years of corporate stimulus and ZIRP expanding M2, but the inflation floodgates only opened after a paltry return of a small fraction of the real wage losses the middle class and lower sustained over that period? Live by the macro grift, die by the macro grift. And I wrote-in Bernie both times.
by sigotirandolas | 2025-08-30 22:18:58+00:00
> Measuring and feeling are not mutually exclusive.

They are not mutually exclusive, but they compete to a degree. If someone's time is mostly spent on what can be measured, they can't spend time on "common sense" or investigative work that is less easily tracked. At the end of they day, trying to measure everything makes as much sense as trying to document every line of code. (Most of this, naturally, also applies the other way around).

> This is just the frame that the author is trying to prop up in order to sell us their shallow, meaningless piece.

> I see this pattern a lot in “influencer” content that people sometimes share with me

I think a lot of the shallowness is from blogs or HN being a public, persistent, broadcast written media. In a face to face conversation, you can generally follow up and share more specifics and nuance without fear of getting a bad reputation.

If anything I think the bias is the other way around, on the Internet whatever you write can get cherry-picked and framed to make you appear terrible, in person it's much easier to get a fair sample.
by benjiro | 2025-08-30 22:19:26+00:00
A ton of stuff in PHP is mostly templating + DB calls for a lot of websites.

If you combine Go + Templ for instance, your "if err" are mostly on the DB calls. What you needed to check in PHP anyway.

Yes, the if err != nil is extreme frustration when your doing for instance, type conversion. But if your already doing this with reflection in your DB calls (by casting to the correct types in your struct), that saves a ton.

Same with getting external data, casting it directly to structs and if something is wrong, its a single "if err".

And if your just doing PHP style programming in Go, well, _, ignoring errors like PHP does and you can panic/recover to make Go act as badly as PHP, to save on the "if err". ;-)
by robotnikman | 2025-08-30 22:19:43+00:00
>The NSA used to play defence and offence, and has gone full-offence for a generation.

And IIRC most of those people who used to work for the NSA now work at private firms like the NSO group, which is pretty scary when you think about it. It's hard to blame them though, if I was being offered the amount of money they were given, I would probably take it as well.

I recommend the book 'This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends' by Nicole Perlroth, it gives some good insights into what is going on behind the scenes (though with some of the major events which have happened since it was published some things may be outdated. Either way it's a good read.)
by ryeats | 2025-08-30 22:19:44+00:00
This is a trap junior devs fall into DRY isn't free it can be premature optimization since in order to avoid copying code you often add both an abstraction AND couple components together that are logically separate. The issues are at some point they may have slightly different requirements and if done repeatedly you can get to a point that you have all these small layers of abstraction that are cross cutting concerns and making changes have a bigger blast radius than you can intuit easily.
by randycupertino | 2025-08-30 22:21:37+00:00
It's down for me in Bay Area with the SOS message and unable to send or receive text messages. Verizon's website didn't say anything but there is a lot of chatter about the outage in the /r/verizon subreddit.

Frustratingly I wasn't able to log into their online support because I couldn't two factor authenticate mysef because I couldn't receive text messages!

I called customer support and they were like, "our system is down and unable to take calls" and it hung up on me.
by mjx0 | 2025-08-30 22:21:58+00:00
> If it is then I have a 5th amendment right not to.

No, you don't. You have a 5th amendment right not to incriminate yourself. That means:

1. You must have committed a crime, which is not a given in a traffic accident.

2. You may not be coerced by the government into incriminating yourself. You are not protected from your property incriminating you. Imagine how absurd a world that would be: the government couldn't use a bloody knife as evidence of a knife attack because the knife was owned by the attacker.

Importantly, you'll also note that if you try not to provide evidence against yourself in civil discovery, you'll end up in a world of shit involving contempt of court.
by 1a527dd5 | 2025-08-30 22:22:49+00:00
Joined {{company}} when everything was using 5.4, there was a big distaste of PHP back then.

But as PHP have released newer versions I'm convinced our migration away from PHP (which is just finishing) is probably a step backwards _now_ that PHP is awesome.

Everyone still thinks it is like 5.x days, it really isn't.
by afro88 | 2025-08-30 22:23:13+00:00
> Another Director at Splunk told me his process: he wrote down everything good that his teams did in a doc, and then every Friday sent that out on Slack celebrating their achievements. Implied in the whole exercise was "and I am leading this group of people", but he never said that because he didn't need to. This person got promoted to Sr. Director. He had a process that he regularly followed to a T that was borne out of a deep understanding of the culture around him.

Without knowing this Sr Director, I have to wonder if this is actually the take away they were trying to offer. If a senior engineering manager isn't regularly celebrating their team's wins, being proud if their achievements and recognising the smart and hard work, providing exposure to the rest of the company, then there's something amiss.

If the take away really was "do this and you will make yourself look good for a promotion" then, yuuuuuck.
by commandersaki | 2025-08-30 22:23:34+00:00
I did for my laptop and Raspberry Pi which I didn't care much about. It was great being able to interact with Kent over IRC to sort out problems and when he is actually available he's really helpeful, but it made me realise that bcachefs has a long ways to go, and I have come to the realisation bus factor 1 is not something I'd want long term.
by kbaker | 2025-08-30 22:23:48+00:00
Yeah, I see the comments down below in pager.c which explain it a bit better. I guess I thought its behavior was more like PERSIST by default.

** journalMode==DELETE ** The journal file is closed and deleted using sqlite3OsDelete(). ** ** If the pager is running in exclusive mode, this method of finalizing ** the journal file is never used. Instead, if the journalMode is ** DELETE and the pager is in exclusive mode, the method described under ** journalMode==PERSIST is used instead.

So I guess this is one of the tradeoffs SQLite makes between extreme durability with (PERSIST, TRUNCATE, or using EXTRA) vs speed.

I know we have used SQLite quite a bit without getting into this exact scenario - or at least the transaction that would have been rolled back wasn't important enough in our case, I guess when the device powers down milliseconds later to trigger this case we never noticed (or needed this transaction), only that the DB remained consistent.

And it seems like if DELETE is the default and doesn't get noticed enough in practice that it needs to be changed to a different safer default (like to PERSIST or something,) I guess it is better to have the speed gains from reducing that extra write + fsync.

But, now I guess you know enough to submit better documentation upstream for a sliding scale of durability, I definitely agree that the docs could be better about how to get ultimate durability, and how to tune the knobs for `journal_mode` and `synchronous`.
by kaiwenwang | 2025-08-30 22:23:49+00:00
Pretty sure cognition is biological. I am of the opinion though various programs and college admissions accelerate a large portion of capable and able people to the top, they are not likely the best out of the entire population. I have frequently met (mostly young males) working in restaurants or supermarkets who would do exceedingly well if they had the right circumstances. Though personality (in terms of choosing to fight for an education) is important too: of those I offered to sit down and chat with (because their media landscape is mostly bad social media/conspiracies), none have taken me up on the offer. Whether due to their personality or my approach I do not know.

https://raypeat.com/articles/articles/intelligence.shtml

https://kaiwenwang.com/writing/hypothetical-foldy-ears-as-an...
by ajross | 2025-08-30 22:24:25+00:00
On urging from tptacek I'll take that seriously and not as flame:

1. This is misunderstanding how device corruption works. It's not and can't ever be limited to "files". (Among other things: you can lose whole trees if a directory gets clobbered, you'd never even be able to enumerate the "corrupted files" at all!). All you know (all you can know) is that you got a success and that means the relevant data and metadata matched the checksums computed at write time. And that property is no different with dm. But if you want to know a subset of the damage just read the stderr from tar, or your kernel logs, etc...

2. Metadata robustness in the face of inconsistent updates (e.g. power loss!) is a feature provided by all modern filesystems, and ZFS is no more or less robust than ext4 et. al. But all such filesystems (ZFS included) will "lose data" that hadn't been fully flushed. Applications that are sensitive to that sort of thing must (!) handle this by having some level of "transaction" checkpointing (i.e. a fsync call). ZFS does absolutely nothing to fix this for you. What is true is that an unsynchronized snapshot looks like "power loss" at the dm level where it doesn't in ZFS. But... that's not useful for anyone that actually cares about data integrity, because you still have to solve the power loss problem. And solving the power loss problem obviates the need for ZFS.
by th0ma5 | 2025-08-30 22:28:25+00:00
So, I've done this, I've pasted in the headers and pleaded with it to not imagine ABIs that don't exist, and multiple models just want to make it work however they can. People shouldn't be so quick to reply like this, many people have tried all this advice... It also doesn't help that there is no independent test that can describe these issues, so all there is anecdote to use a different vendor or that the person must be doing something wrong? How can we talk about these things with these rhetorical reflexes?
by broker354690 | 2025-08-30 22:28:31+00:00
A certain kind of arrogant man who hails from the land of theory tends to believe that everything can be perfectly optimized, that even real-world systems can be designed with mathematical guarantees as to some constraint or another. In their world every thing and every one is an abstract variable to be managed and modified, a goat to be herded. User input is modeled as untrustworthy, hostile input and treated accordingly. The unwashed masses have never toiled in their sterile computer science cathedrals, never been anointed with the sacred waters of ROOT, and thus could never possibly deserve to wield the powers of computation without the infallible guidance of Saint Jobs (peace be upon him) and his holy host.

To compute on one's own is to open one's electronic soul to the Sins of Free Software. Such devilish arts must be shunted to the margins of society, till they may be purged on That Day when all shall bask in Google's light forevermore.
by BoredPositron | 2025-08-30 22:28:39+00:00
Grounded? Not offensive?

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wiLE9BkSiq8F-mFW5NOtPzYrt...

https://lore.kernel.org/all/citv2v6f33hoidq75xd2spaqxf7nl5wb...
by criemen | 2025-08-30 22:29:17+00:00
I'm not so sure: If you think about hiring talent, there's a perception in the wider industry about PHP (rightly or wrongly, let's not debate that here) that'll prevent access to a lot of great developers. So even if not warranted anymore on technical merits anymore, in terms of employer branding, I'd say migrating away from PHP is helping.
by dancrystalbeach | 2025-08-30 22:29:43+00:00
I was recently working on a PySpark pipeline in which I was using the JDBC option to write about 22 million records from a Spark DataFrame into a Postgres RDS database. Hey, why not use the built in method provided by Spark, how bad could it be? I mean it’s not like the creators and maintainers of Spark aren’t probably our version of rocket engineers.
by adolph | 2025-08-30 22:29:57+00:00
Another example of a new OS developed by a vendor is DryOS by Canon [0] as a replacement for WindRiver VxWorks[1]. It has been extensively explore by the chdk community of custom software extensions for Canon cameras. It appears to have some compatibility with Linux in some form.

In my non-expert mind, an OS for "foveated rendering" would be similar to what many cameras prioritize and more likely be similar to an "realtime OS" of some sort. OTOH, Apple's goggles use the XNU kernel, so maybe a microkernel would be sufficiently realtime, similar to QNX often used for automotive applications [4].

0. https://web.archive.org/web/20190214134247/http://www.canon....

1. https://www.windriver.com/

2. https://chdk.fandom.com/wiki/For_Developers

3. https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX
by tick_tock_tick | 2025-08-30 22:30:27+00:00
Gaza is the exception rather then the norm. I don't want to say propaganda because that implies some moral value on the campaign to make it relevant but lets be clear there is a campaign it's not organic in any way. Without said efforts Gaza would have been treated just like Libya or Syria. Probably worse because of Oct 7th.

> In some ways, it has been - despite public anger in the west to the Gaza genocide, most western superpowers have gotten away with doing nothing.

What do you mean gotten away with? In the USA right by are large fine with the events happening and the only people on the left who are anger barely both to vote on a good day. I absolutely think if Harris had come out firmly condemning Israel her lose would have been even more dramatic.

There are no other "western superpowers" Europe is completely ineffective and has to rely upon the USA even for things literally on their doorstep. Which is why they do meaning less PR moves like recognizing them for statehood.
by nh2 | 2025-08-30 22:31:53+00:00
> Not true. In its default configuration, SQLite is durable.

Could you explain why this is?

I have quoted above the documentation that suggests it's not durable (summarising: DEELTE is the default, and DELETE appears only durable in EXTRA mode which is not a default).

This is also supported by the comment in the SQLite forum: https://sqlite.org/forum/forumpost/8d7e2aae21a261f2

Thanks!
by lazarus01 | 2025-08-30 22:32:14+00:00
In NYC, for the first 6 months of 2025, 994 new private sector jobs were created [1]. During the same period last year, there were 66,000 new jobs created.

Higher cost of doing business from tariffs has frozen hiring. With a frozen job market, there’s less revenue coming in.

NYC is a leading indicator for the rest of the country.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/nyregion/nyc-jobs.html