MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ryao | 2025-08-27 17:40:00+00:00
You are wrong about those invocations being invalid. Such patterns happen in filesystem code fairly often. The best example off the top of my head is:

error = old_dir->i_op->rename(rd->new_mnt_idmap, old_dir, old_dentry, new_dir, new_dentry, flags);

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/fs/namei.c#L51...

That is a close match for the first example, with additional arguments.

It is helpful to remember that this is not object oriented programming and not try to shoehorn this into the paradigm of object oriented programming. This is data abstraction, which has similarities (and inspired OOP), but is subtly different. Data abstraction does not automatically imply any sort of inheritance. Thus you cannot treat things as necessarily having a subclass and superclass. If you must think of it in OOP terms, imagine that your superclass is an abstract class, with no implemented members, except you can instantiate a child class that is also abstract, and you will never do any inheritance on the so called child class.

Now, it is possible to implement things in such a way where they actually do have something that resembles a subclass and a superclass. This is often done in filesystem inode structures. The filesystem will have its own specialized inode structure where the generic VFS inode structure is the first member and thus you can cast safely from the generic inode structure to the specialized one. There is no need to cast in the other direction since you can access all of the generic inode structure’s members. This trick is useful when the VFS calls us via inode operations. We know that the inode pointer is really a pointer to our specialized inode structure, so we can safely cast to it to access the specialized fields. This is essentially `superclass->op->start(object)`, which was the second example.

Data abstraction is a really powerful technique and honestly, object oriented programming rarely does anything that makes me want it over data abstraction. The only thing that I have seen object oriented programming do better in practice than data abstraction is marketing. The second example is similar to C++’s curiously recurring template pattern, which adds boilerplate and fighting with the compiler with absurdly long error messages due to absurdly verbose types to achieve a result that often at best is the same thing. On top of those headaches, all of the language complexity makes the compile times slow. Only marketing could convince someone that the C++ OOP way is better.
by CharlesW | 2025-08-27 17:40:08+00:00
> I'm not on a clean install either, and I have changed the save location from iCloud to a local folder a zillion times.

That's unfortunate, I can only confirm that it doesn't happen to me on current/next versions of macOS.

If that happened to me, I guess I'd just turn it off. https://imgur.com/a/Cl0xyJi
by jasonlotito | 2025-08-27 17:40:25+00:00
From the Report:

> The MP initiated a conference call with Lockheed Martin engineers through the on-duty supervisor of flying (SOF). The MA held for approximately 50 minutes while the team developed a plan of action.

Seems accurate to what CNN was reporting. It's simplified a bit, but it's not misleading to me.

I mean, I guess if you want to nit pick and suggest "No the pilot wasn't literally on a phone and there was an intermediary in between" or some such, but the report makes it seem like CNN is accurate.

https://www.pacaf.af.mil/Portals/6/documents/3_AIB%20Report....
by ryanryke | 2025-08-27 17:40:31+00:00
Thanks for the feedback. My plan is to spend a little more time to dive into the details on a follow up post.

I'll try to explain our experience here in a little better detail though.

In a traditional IAC tool (tf for example). The flow would go something like this (YMMV)

Update TF -> Plan -> PR -> Review (auto or peer) -> Merge -> TF Reviews State File -> TF Makes changes -> Updates State.

Some issues we could run into: - We support multiple customers each with their own teams that may or may not have updated infra so drift is always present.

- We support customers over time so modules and versions age, and we aren't always given the time to go make sure that past tf is updated. So version pins need to be updated among other dependencies.

Each of those could take a bit of time to resolve so that the tf plans clean and our updates are applied. Of course there are tools such as HCP Cloud, Spacelift, Terrateam etc. But, in my experience it shifts a lot of the same problems to different parts of the workflow.

The work flow with SI is closer to the following: Ask AI for a change -> AI builds a changeset (PR) -> Review -> Apply

The secret sauce is SI's "digital twin". We aren't just using AI to update code, we're actually using it to initiate changes to AWS via SI. While I would never want to have a team make changes directly to AWS without a peer review or something similar, it is sitting closer to what the actual infrastructure is. Even with changes that are happening to the infrastructure naturally.

This has allowed us to move quite a bit faster in updating and maintaining our customers infrastructure. While still sticking as close as possible to best practices.
by zachwills | 2025-08-27 17:40:34+00:00
Great points -- thanks for contributing to the discussion. It's an internal app with auth, ties to LLMs for analysis, ties to 3rd party data sources for aggregation of data, etc. It's not a Slackbot! It's actually something that we can use instead of paying ~$30k/yr (what we were quoted for similar products by vendors). I'd consider it an alpha release in it's current form.
by cbm-vic-20 | 2025-08-27 17:40:35+00:00
In my last job, I was on the team that handled the Windows NT bulid on DEC Alpha. Native Alpha apps were much faster than the equivalent Intel NT machines. Apropos to this topic, DEC had a sybsystem called FX!32 that was sort of like what Rosetta does for Apple Silicon, allowing Intel apps to be run at useable speeds on Alpha.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32
by tietjens | 2025-08-27 17:40:37+00:00
I have been on a small journey to try to understand what SI is. I’ve read your blog posts, listened to the Changelog show with the CEO, watched some demos and joined the Discord. But I still don’t understand what a 1:1 digital twin means. You are mirroring AWS’s api? Can you help me grok what 1:1 means concretely?
by stackskipton | 2025-08-27 17:40:37+00:00
Ops type (DevOps/SRE/Sysadmin/whatever you want to call me) here, so I was really interested and this blog left me with more questions than answers?

What is SI? Homegrown GUI Terraform? That part is not clear in article. It looks like homegrown GUI Terraform with module so that's what I'm going with. Cool, glad you got that working, sounds like a big project and you were able to pull it off.

However, this part confused me, "Our engineers were investing a lot of time in what felt like “IaC limbo,” making a change in a Terraform file, waiting for review, waiting for CI/CD to run, and only then finding out if it worked. A simple tweak to a networking rule could take hours to validate."

What in tarnation are you doing? Do you have massive terraform file repo so apply takes forever since the plan is running forever? Talk to me Goose, what is going on that Terraform changes take hours to run? Our worst folder takes about 10 minutes to plan because it's massive "everything for this specific project". We also let people run tofu plan/apply from their laptops in Dev so feedback is instant.

We do have folders that have dependency on others folder, for example, we can't setup Azure Kubernetes without network being in place but we just left dependson yaml that our CI/CD pipelines work off when doing full rollout which is not their normal mode of operation (it's for DR only). We also assume that people have not been ClickOps either or if they have, they take responsibility for letting IaC resolve it.

Writing your own API calls to Cloud Provider is not something I would wish upon anyone. I did it for Prometheus HTTP Service Discovery system and just getting data was difficult, I can't imagine Create/Update/Delete.
by f1shy | 2025-08-27 17:40:51+00:00
It is a culture. No doubt. And certainly not only processes. I work in a company where there are literally processes for everything. For every engineer doing actual work (requirement engineering, architecture, coding, testing) there are at least 3!doing processes. The SW we make is the ultimative piece of shit, late, expensive, and to the brim full of bugs. So process is importannt, but good engineering, and culture also.
by duxup | 2025-08-27 17:41:14+00:00
He has outright said that he went home and Melania told him something so he decided to do a thing.

I suspect the same goes for whatever he runs across on Twitter. Some of his firings have been strangely specific and it seems like it's just whatever meme like thing that got traction with the right twitter troll at the right time ...

Heck his own comments in this story:

>I hear so many stories about ‘We’re not going to allow their students’” to come in

No apparent awareness that he is the source of the stories :P
by ZenoArrow | 2025-08-27 17:41:46+00:00
This article is full of nonsense. The Linux desktop push isn't failing because it has experiences and apps that are similar to Windows and macOS. Being able to run Windows apps on Linux is a benefit, not a failure. As for religious wars over init systems, desktop environments and package managers, competition is making the options stronger, not weaker. Competition is a reason why package management on Linux is far better than equivalents on Windows and macOS.

The main reason for Linux not taking off on the desktop is because most users don't care about what OS they run, they just want a computer that works. If the PC they buy comes with Windows out of the box, they're going to stick with that. Until you get manufacturers shipping PCs with Linux as the default OS, you're mainly going to see desktop Linux as an enthusiast-only option. It's no accident that one of the devices helping to spread Linux (the Steam Deck) comes with Linux as the default option.
by throw0101a | 2025-08-27 17:42:33+00:00
Reminder of the structure:

* seven Board members (including Chair and Vice-Chair)

* twelve regional banks

* the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), made of:

* * seven Board members

* * president of New York bank

* * 4 of 11 of the rest of regional banks on a rotating basis

Source:

* https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/fed-structure

* also: https://www.clevelandfed.org/about-us/understanding-the-fede...
by jasonlotito | 2025-08-27 17:42:37+00:00
From the Report:

> The MP initiated a conference call with Lockheed Martin engineers through the on-duty supervisor of flying (SOF). The MA held for approximately 50 minutes while the team developed a plan of action.

"though the SOF" implies a middle-man, but I imagine that's because you don't want literally hook up a conference call directly to the cockpit. That being said, seems like the pilot was effectively on the conference call.

Unless you want to suggest I don't trust the report?

https://www.pacaf.af.mil/Portals/6/documents/3_AIB%20Report....
by Syzygies | 2025-08-27 17:42:59+00:00
The Kodak Research Labs (like Bell Labs) let their researchers play. In the 1960's my father (who later devised the Bayer filter for digital cameras) coded this algorithm for "Jotto" the 5 letter word version of Mastermind.

Computers were so slow that one couldn't consider every word in the dictionary as a potential guess. He decided empirically on a sample size that played well enough.

I became a mathematician. From this childhood exposure, entropy was the first mathematical "concept" beyond arithmetic that I understood.
by graemep | 2025-08-27 17:43:07+00:00
> They don't care about Snap or Flatpack

They usually do not need to know - they just see a software centre which is app store like.

> they care that their favorite apps will work

That depends on app developers.

> that updates won't break anything (which Windows does all the time)

Already done

> and that they don't have to learn a list of text commands to make basic changes to their computers.

Already done.
by dijit | 2025-08-27 17:43:10+00:00
the irony here of course is that Kubernetes is sort of designed to be run on bare-metal.

As a life-long ops person, a lot of the capabilities of kubernetes were things we used to bolt-on. (Like logging a boot ID so that we could track looks easier, service managing, having as little local state as possible so that the workloads are somewhat immutable and nodes can be cycled out, draining machines due to hardware failure (or cordoning them at least) etc;etc;etc)

Cloud came in and made some of those things a little easier I guess, but the value of kubernetes for most people is that they don't have to care about it because the providers give you a one size fits all solution: just don't peek under the hood.

Even the best implementation of Kubernetes (GKE) has a huge amount of waste due to software that has been added to every node and configured wrong.
by dang | 2025-08-27 17:43:18+00:00
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45038993.)

I found the first submission on the story (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45034496), which used a github url, and merged the thread into it - more explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45042727.
by dylan604 | 2025-08-27 17:43:25+00:00
Will modern versions of those other browsers still work on an 8 year old OS, or has it been updated where it is no longer compatible? So much effort has been put into hardware rendering, and the mechanisms for the browser to interact with that hardware has changed within those OS versions. Forcing the user to download an older compatible version of the browser to work with the older OS is also tossing away potential security fixes.
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-27 17:43:35+00:00
In most languages, this is not possible, because they abstract over the implementation of classes. In C it is so you can be more creative. You can for example use it instead of a flag for behaviour. Why branch on a variable and then call separate methods, when you can simply assign the wanted implementation directly. If you want to know, which implementation/mode is used, comparing function pointers and scalar variables amounts to the same. It is also an easy way to get a unique number. When all implementations of that can operate on the same type, they are interchangeable.

In C you can also change the "class" of an instance as needed, without special syntax. Maybe you need to already call a method of the new/old class, before/after actually changing the class type.

> is that the subclass method implementation is used

The entire point of invoking the superclass method is, because the subclass has a different implementation and you want to use the superclass implementation.
by jasonlotito | 2025-08-27 17:43:43+00:00
> If you want to harp on CNN for accuracy, I'm sure there are plenty of opportunities but this feels pedantic. It is like saying 'the astronauts weren't talking to mission control, they were talking to the capcom. Only the capcom talked to mission control'.

Um, actually, they were talking to a mic. And the mic converted the noise... /s

But yeah, excellent comment here.
by benoau | 2025-08-27 17:43:46+00:00
Patreon weren't violating their rules, Patreon weren't doing anything wrong, and Patreon aren't getting anything out of this modified deal other than "their business not getting burned down if they comply" with a new condition that compelled a 30% fee. For which customers had to pay an extra $4.50/month in fees per creator they support.
by skydhash | 2025-08-27 17:44:30+00:00
> distro package managers carrying libraries for all programming languages is an insane practice that is impossible to scale and maintain.

That's not the idea. If a software is packaged for a distro, then the distro will have the libraries needed for that software.

If you're developing a new software and wants some new library not yet packaged, I believe you can figure how to get them on your system. The thread is about the user's system, not yours. When I want to run your code, you don't have to say:

Use flatpak; Use docker; Use 24.1.1 instead of 24.1.0; Use $THING
by donmcronald | 2025-08-27 17:44:41+00:00
One of my complaints with Gnome is that I can’t hand it to a normal person and let them use it because it’s not obvious how to use it. The entry point to everything looks like a horizontal scroll bar in the top left corner and basic actions take more clicks than Windows.

The biggest battle desktop Linux is losing is the one where a minority of devs are dictating their preferred compute paradigm to a majority of users that don’t agree it’s a good solution.

I can “fix” Gnome in about 2m with extensions, but that doesn’t help when a new user loads it up for the first time and is hit with the unintuitive ideology of some nerds.
by zachwills | 2025-08-27 17:45:21+00:00
Copy/pasting from another comment:

> My process is to dictate and word vomit all of my thoughts to AI (in this case Gemini 2.5 Pro) and then refine from there. I know there's some amount of "smells like AI" in the writing, but at this point I don't think it takes away from the lessons shared. That said, maybe it's worth it to modify things so there is less "AI sounding" verbiage. Don't want folks to write it off as "AI Slop" because of certain phrases. TBD!
by eyberg | 2025-08-27 17:45:27+00:00
I would kinda disagree with this. The whole 'better than nothing' is what gave a huge chunk of people a false sense of security wrt containers to begin with. The reality is that there is no singular create_container(2). Much of the 'security' is left up to the runtime of choice and the various flags they choose or don't choose to enable. Others in this thread have already mentioned both bubblewrap and podman. The fact that the underlying functionality is exposed very differently through different 'runtimes' with numerous optional flags and such is what leads to all sorts of issues because there simply was no thought to designing these things with security in mind. (We just saw CVE-2025-9074 last week). This is very different than something like the v8 sandbox or gvisor which was designed with certain properties.
by ghaff | 2025-08-27 17:45:52+00:00
I've never been much for word games but have been a Wordle regular. But a friend of mine made the very astute observation that Wordle is more like Mastermind (which I played and even wrote a Windows version of as an exercise once upon a time) than any traditional word game. OK. You need a solid English 5 letter vocabulary. But it's really pretty different from crosswords and a lot of other word games including those on the NYT site.
by _fat_santa | 2025-08-27 17:45:57+00:00
> Yeah the real problem is that the only thing that’s well tested is what devs use

I see this issue as well. A CLI setup with Emacs/VIM doing C/C++ development is very stable, because that's how the majority of linux devs interact with Linux.

What puts a bad taste in my mouth is when you mention issues outside of that setup, the usual response isn't "oh this is an issue we need to fix", it's "well your setup sucks, stop using VSCode/Gnome/Chrome/etc"
by WalterBright | 2025-08-27 17:46:04+00:00
> I still think Shuttle could have worked, if it had been cheaper to evolve it.

I doubt it. It's a gigantic kludge that isn't fixable.

For example, the requirement that it land like an airplane meant it needed wings, landing gear, and a full set of flight control surfaces. None of that is useful apart from the landing, and yet it is necessary to push it all into space and re-enter it.

I once emailed Homer Hickam about it, and he was kind enough to reply and said he'd argued the same thing.
by ActorNightly | 2025-08-27 17:46:04+00:00
> Is that it?

I was thinkin more along the lines of unconstitutionally cutting things like USAID thats going to actively result in more unnecessary deaths, personal vendetta against LBGT organizations in cutting those budgets, cutting IRS funding which is going to end up costing more ironically as there isn't enough staffing to pursue all the people using tax avoidance

Not to mention in general supporting someone and donating campaign funds who literally tried to coup the government, contributing to him being elected, and thus being responsible for everything that Trump is doing, from fucking up the economy further to playing wanna be dictator with ICE, all of which have long term repercussions.

In comparison to GWB, Trump is going much worse (especially if you want to compare deficit spending), and Musk has a direct hand in that.

>Well, the most cost effective rocket ever built uses this, but please do elaborate.

Cost effectiveness has nothing to do with engineering. For example, I can start a car company, fund it with my other business venture, and then sell cars for $50 and it would be the most cost effective car.
by m4rtink | 2025-08-27 17:46:14+00:00
Actually existing Starlink satellites regularly bu p into each other when lobbed in benches by the Falcon 9.

They are built to tolerate that, resulting in much better launch volume and weight utilization (sats are stacked on top of each other & held in place by rods that are then released).

The Starship Starlink release demo was quite tame in comparison to that. ;-)
by UtopiaPunk | 2025-08-27 17:46:23+00:00
Probably a good move on Microsoft's part, tbh. Not great for society, but good for Microsoft.

I find it annoying because I often just want a document to live on a local device, and I'll decide when I want to upload it to a cloud service. But a lot of normal, non-tech people don't have any concept of how data is stored on their devices. I can't tell you how many times I've encountered a situation that roughly goes,

"Did you download the file?" "I guess so." "Okay. Now go the file and open it." "Where is it?" "I don't know. Where did you download it? "I don't know!"

For a lot of normies, just saving the document in the cloud is going to be easier. The ironic thing is that now I'm the one who is annoyed because I have no idea where my document is saved.
by zachwills | 2025-08-27 17:46:29+00:00
Copy/paste from another comment: "My process is to dictate and word vomit all of my thoughts to AI (in this case Gemini 2.5 Pro) and then refine from there. I know there's some amount of "smells like AI" in the writing, but at this point I don't think it takes away from the lessons shared. That said, maybe it's worth it to modify things so there is less "AI sounding" verbiage. Don't want folks to write it off as "AI Slop" because of certain phrases. TBD!"

Mind sharing which points were pretty rough? I don't want the message to get lost in the "oof this is AI slop" mess, so always interested in what might be hitting folks the wrong way so I can adapt.
by zachwills | 2025-08-27 17:46:47+00:00
From another comment: "It's an internal app with auth, ties to LLMs for analysis, ties to 3rd party data sources for aggregation of data, etc. It's not a Slackbot! It's actually something that we can use instead of paying ~$30k/yr (what we were quoted for similar products by vendors). I'd consider it an alpha release in it's current form."
by quest88 | 2025-08-27 17:47:21+00:00
I'm a 98% VFR pilot. I've not once said "That's not in the manual!". Is it ridiculous to think that Phil cannot see a small arm hundreds of feet in the air, at night, in an environment so dark a pilot needs the strip lit up? What type of wave does the pilot need to do to indicate "Can I land?" versus "Hi Phil"? Can Phil distinguish the two at night? At day? At night, a pilot that doesn't know Phil's land won't be flying low enough to see an arm due to hidden obstacles (wires, towers, etc).

Your points are all over the place here, and I have to conclude you don't have any experience in this topic, and you've invented some contrived example that won't happen in practice.