MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thaumasiotes | 2025-08-31 04:34:57+00:00
Can you point to something with the text of the tablet? I was curious, but all I could find were references to an 1863 attempt at reconstructing it by Theodor Mommsen.

I'm not sure why "language skills" are necessary for this piece - these questions are fundamentally about what the words inscribed on a document are, not what those words mean. It could easily be true that Latin scrolls started labeling something "capitulum" while Greek scrolls called the same thing "kephalaia".
by tombert | 2025-08-31 04:36:04+00:00
Weren't the charges against Eric Adams dismissed with prejudice? [1] They shouldn't have been dismissed at all, but the judge didn't want the president to be able to directly control the major of NYC.

I personally think he should at least be impeached because I have the woke liberal opinion that people in power taking bribes is bad.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/mayor-eric-adams-case-dismis...
by andrewflnr | 2025-08-31 04:36:51+00:00
Nah, as a writer who talks to other writers with wildly different processes, I don't think that's how it works for anyone. Time spent writing is almost unrelated to visible time markers in the text. It's not a big deal to stop writing in the middle of a scene or stop one and start another in the same session (assuming we're writing linearly at all). Scene and chapter boundaries are something we specifically think about in their own right to optimize the reading experience.
by baazaa | 2025-08-31 04:37:30+00:00
I would just add the IsAllowed etc. as a comment next to the relevant line. Often the explanation is bigger than what you'd want in a variable name, I find it less overhead than making more variables, and it makes better use of screen-space.

I'd only lean towards intermediate variables if a) there's lots of smaller conditionals being aggregated up into bigger conditionals which makes line-by-line comments insufficient or b) I'm reusing the same conditional a lot (this is mostly to draw the reader's attention to the fact that the condition is being re-used).
by neehao | 2025-08-31 04:38:23+00:00
This article covers a lot of the points: https://www.gojiberries.io/building-together-separately-chal...

"A single page on Doordash can make upward of 1000 gRPC calls (see the interview). For many engineers, upward of a thousand network calls nicely illustrate the chaos and inefficiency unleashed by microservices. Engineers implicitly diff 1000+ gRPC calls with the orders of magnitude fewer calls made by a system designed by an architect looking at the problem afresh today. A 1000+ gRPC calls also seem like a perfect recipe for blowing up latency. There are more items in the debit column. Microservices can also increase the costs of monitoring, debugging, and deployment (and hence cause greater downtime and worse performance)."
by thaumasiotes | 2025-08-31 04:39:45+00:00
I like your comment, but I'm not sure about this part:

> Is a brainworm that controls the host (e.g. to get some subsidies) the fittest? Based on your example, you think it's not. So how do you define fitness?

The parent comment says (with my emphasis):

>> a Tesla taking in $38B of government subsidy or a google/apple getting special lenient legal treatment is not laissez-faire.

As you note, there is something of an assumption here that the claim being responded to is that all incumbent-friendly policies are laissez-faire.

But there does not appear to be a claim that successfully seeking large subsidies isn't a type of corporate fitness.
by echelon | 2025-08-31 04:41:36+00:00
I was curious what y'all were on about until I read the headline.

> The studio is brilliant at selling small, provocative films. Now it wants to sell blockbusters, too.

God damnit. The best modern film studio in the world about to become a slop house.

The world is missing low budget and mid-market. There's so much appetite for it. We don't need more blockbusters. The world needs the product A24 is delivering now.
by akomtu | 2025-08-31 04:41:45+00:00
It's amusing to see such grandiose predictions about the fate of the entire cosmos when our science doesn't hold water even at the galactic scale, I mean its dark matter band aid. If the accuracy is only 10% at the galactic scale, it must be less than 1% at the scale of galaxy clusters, and beyond that it's no better than tea leaves reading.
by simonh | 2025-08-31 04:42:24+00:00
The fundamental question is who gets to start, control, own and grow businesses. Who makes those decisions? If it’s not private citizens, it is government functionaries. The latter has been tried many times. It can just about work, but only barely, and it has all the same problems of patronage, cronyism, monopolisation and labour abuse as capitalism but x10.
by com2kid | 2025-08-31 04:43:09+00:00
Counterpoint -

Nearly every startup I've talked to recently (last year or so) has been cash flow positive after just series A (or sometimes after just a seed round!)

Companies are pursuing smart business strategies and prioritizing healthy rates of growth over "hire everyone we can and figure out how to make a profit later". I'm seeing a lot of very focused businesses that are meeting customers demand right away and solving real problems. They aren't billion dollar problems, but they are profitable problems to solve. I wonder how the startup ecosystem will change if VCs start seeing 60% of companies making a healthy profit after a couple years, vs the historical trend of waiting a decade and hoping 1 company strikes it big. 60% of companies growing 10-20x ROI seems ... Not bad?

One problem of large mega corps is they don't even bother to go after new ideas that aren't multi-billion dollars markets. It used to be Microsoft would make a bunch of senior engineers filthy rich, they'd go boot strap a new company, and if the idea took off, Microsoft would aquire them again. Some people in the 90s/early 2000s pulled that off multiple times!
by on_the_train | 2025-08-31 04:43:33+00:00
The topic is a bit tiring at least. You can't provide something for free and then complain. And let's not assume the world is incapable of writing an alternative. Open source authors deserve praise for their work and skill. But they also get quite a bit of recognition for it. It's not like they're enslaved. It's still a pretty good deal, and my own side projects landed me every good job I ever had.
by goneri | 2025-08-31 04:44:37+00:00
Btrfs is NOT constantly eating people data. You have nothing to back this statement.

It's widely used and the default filesystem of several distributions. Most of the problems are like for the other filesystem: caused by the hardware.

I've been using it for more than 10 years without any problem and enjoy the experience. And like for any filesystem, I backup my data frequently (with btrbk, thanks for asking).
by imcritic | 2025-08-31 04:44:52+00:00
FrankenPHP sounds promising, but in reality it is a weirdo: no one uses PHP without modules. Where is the list of PHP modules supported by FrankenPHP? Is it possible to compile it with some extra PHP modules? How? I see it is tightly bound to Caddy. I am not much familiar with that webserver, I would prefer nginx, but there's not a single guide mentioning if that's possible to use nginx with FrankenPHP (as a php-fpm replacement). Also, either Caddy itself, or FrankenPHP's docker image is quite opinionated in regards to using let's encrypt certificates and it is not trivial at all how to make it work via HTTP (if something external would provide SSL) or using own certificate.
by ada1981 | 2025-08-31 04:44:53+00:00
If you are 6 foot tall and a building has 5 foot ceilings and you keep hitting you head and some doctor says you have a height disorder and prescribes a foam helmet and pain killers, this is what it's like to be ADHD.

You are being diagnosed as not fitting into a malformed environment, that's all it is. Oh, you aren't super into being stuffed into a deck for 8 hours a day for 12 years? Here are some amphetamines, this will help you conform to your role as an input in an industrial process.

Get into nature, run wild, follow your bliss!
by elliotto | 2025-08-31 04:46:07+00:00
The optimal strategy in a resource acquisition game with no rules is usually just to kill all the other players. This results in really bad nash equilibria where everyone is dead.

I think about this as entropic decay - the lowest energy state of a social system (Hobbes' state of nature).

Lucky it is possible to create social and economic systems that use cooperation to produce better individual and group utility (dissipative structures). But there is a particular arm of politics that is currently dismantling these to feast on their cores.
by magicalhippo | 2025-08-31 04:46:43+00:00
Given the bug fixes and changes, the experimental flag seems quite appropriate to me. That's not a bad thing.

However, it was put in the kernel as experimental. That carries with it implications.

As such, while it's very commendable that you wish to support the experimental bcachefs as-if it was production ready, you cannot reasonably impose that wish upon the rest of the kernel.

That said I think you and your small team is doing a commendable job, and I strongly wish you succeed in making bcachefs feature complete and production ready. And I say that as someone who really, really likes ZFS and run it on my Linux boxes.
by eth0up | 2025-08-31 04:46:57+00:00
I re-read this thread thinking I may have been unnecessarily harsh. No.

I am apparently supposed to forget my experience of being in the eye of Irma for over an hour, and presumably the hurricane altogether and all memories of my time within it and efforts to mitigate its aftermath - all because wunderboy pasted an AI summary of Irma's path in attempt to further belittle my little post, based on the profound impetus of imperfect punctuation.

If HN can't call out this kind of desperate opportunism, lurking in strange places waiting to trounce on any opening to expose oneself as an erudite hero wielding an elaborate encyclopedic remedy to a misplaced comma, then your future here may involve many bots.

And really, that should be the job of a bot - dealing with other bots or trivial wankers who stand tall and proud upon the bodies they've sucker punched. If so, a bot is welcome to take my place too.
by Insanity | 2025-08-31 04:47:45+00:00
This is an incredibly naive take in trying to postulate the US as a better place to live, and genuinely makes me curious how much you’ve actually seen of EU.

Quality of life, by a number of metrics like HDI, is higher in (Western) European countries compared to the US. And even while total salaries might be lower, healthcare infrastructure, life expectancy, food quality etc are better.

Pure take-home money doesn’t tell you the entire picture.

And for pure anecdata, I have friends who migrated to the States and then moved back to EU when they had kids because EU seemed like the safer and better place to raise them.

You can find anecdata to tell pretty much any story you want to tell though.
by com2kid | 2025-08-31 04:48:05+00:00
You are giving examples of markets where goods and services are commodified.

Cellular technology between providers is basically identical now. The nightmare that all cellular providers dreaded, becoming a dumb data pipeline, has happened. Value add services are dead across the board.

Telus has a profit margin of around 4%, what sort of innovation are you expecting with those financials?
by queenkjuul | 2025-08-31 04:48:57+00:00
I do agree, but for this to work everyone has to be on the same page about what is a "unit"

I think most people are largely on the same page, but idk. Anyway what i mean is that as long as your unit tests are very narrowly scoped and testing specific chunks of logic, they really shouldn't break very often. I feel like my current project has done a decent job of this. Our unit tests rarely break, but to be fair, our integration tests fail too often.

I'm a UI developer, I've seen a lot of "unit" tests in PRs that go too far beyond testing specific logic and end up being brittle and not very useful.
by cookiengineer | 2025-08-31 04:49:24+00:00
This is kind of a stupid ChatGPT article.

No, this will not effectively help to reduce the fingerprint of your Browser.

A LOT more tracking services are integrated into the Firefox browser in various places (like New Tab page, Sync, Pocket, Shavar, Google Safebrowsing, OSCP, etc pp).

I wrote a more detailed article about this, and got an "as good as possible" as a result.

But yeah, please please start to use a Host Firewall where you can block on a per-domain and per-port and per-process basis (like LittleSnitch, OpenSnitch etc) to validate your assumptions. UIs will always lie to you, including the one from Firefox.

[1] https://cookie.engineer/weblog/articles/firefox-privacy-guid...
by supriyo-biswas | 2025-08-31 04:49:45+00:00
> FrankenPHP sounds promising, but in reality it is a weirdo: no one uses PHP without modules.

You usually build the modules yourself in the Dockerfile, for example for the "pgsql" module:

RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y libpq-dev && docker-php-ext-install pdo_pgsql && apt-get remove -y libpq-dev && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

And for http, you just put the following in the Caddyfile:

http://:80 { # rest of the Caddyfile directives }
by positron26 | 2025-08-31 04:51:44+00:00
My entire feeling about privacy is that, while surveillance economy tends to amplify the worst parts, ultimately, Richard Thieme's presentation is right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atDgnkvzD8I

Thought experiment: in 100 years or even ten, can you imagine that there will not be tiny little camera robots that can get into the home of every person alive? Wouldn't every single living person be prone to having nude and unflattering, private moments leaked all over the internet?

Socially, if privacy is a construct, then so is the fallout we expect others and ourselves to feel when privacy is violated. To some extent, not all, this is self-inflicted Victorian thinking. To the extent that it's true, part of the answer is, in the words of the brave (lol) Michael Cohen, "So what?" Really, so what? I hope we can get to that kind of reaction to adults having their privacy upended because it just takes so much of the bite out of the problem, the shame that relatively innocent people would experience for something completely out of their control.

As far as the getting it back under control thing, we may also be coming to a point that more technologies are so dangerous or impactful that there becomes a need for more strict control so that powerful tech like miniaturization produces paper trails and the use of such technology comes with an implicit requirement for openness. I don't really care that people can use miniaturization, but I care if they can anonymize it to the extent that we create a lawless society with no remaining means of accountability.

What *will* Russia and North Korea do when it becomes plausible to unleash little robot assassins either in small numbers to target individuals or mass numbers to carry out what is essentially nuclear scale death without nuclear scale fallout and destruction? It is plausible that this is a new facet of WMDs and MAD-based deterrence.

Privacy, robots, and the inevitable slide into world war 3.
by kragen | 2025-08-31 04:53:13+00:00
DRY isn't an optimization of any kind, so it can't be a premature optimization. "Premature optimization" is a specific failure mode of programmers, not just a meaningless term you can use to attack anything you don't like. "Optimization" is refactoring to reduce the use of resources (which are specifically cycles and bytes) and it's "premature" when you don't yet know that you're doing it where it matters.

Otherwise I mostly agree.
by wtallis | 2025-08-31 04:56:43+00:00
> but it's silly to act like it's a paragon of stability in the kernel.

And it's dishonest to act like bugs from 15 years ago justify present-tense claims that it is constantly eating people's data and is a bad joke. Nobody's arguing that btrfs doesn't have a past history of data loss, more than a decade ago; that's not what's being questioned here.
by rendaw | 2025-08-31 04:58:21+00:00
There is an alternative: take the parts that _aren't_ in if statements (the actual common code) and make them into shared functions. Then split up the rest into multiple functions that call the shared functions, one for each independent condition, so that they don't have if statements.

These individual functions are easier to reason about since they have specific use cases, you don't have to remember which combinations of conditions happen together while reading the code, they simplify control flow (i.e. you don't have to hack around carrying data from one if block to the next), and it uses no "abstraction" (interfaces) just simple functions.

It's obviously a balance, you'll still have some if statements, but getting rid of mutually exclusive conditions is basically a guaranteed improvement.
by qalmakka | 2025-08-31 04:58:29+00:00
> Btrfs is NOT constantly eating people data

Tell it to my data then. I was 100% invested in Btrfs before 2017, the year where I lost a whole filesystem due to some random metadata corruption. I then started to move all of my storage to ZFS, which has never ever lost me a single byte of data yet despite the fact it's out of tree and stuff. My last Btrfs filesystem died randomly a few days ago (it was a disk in cold storage, once again random metadata corruption, disk is 100% healthy). I do not trust Btrfs in any shape and form nowadays. I also vastly prefer ZFS tooling but that's irrelevant to the argument here. The point is that I've never had nothing but pain from btrfs in more than a decade
by adzm | 2025-08-31 05:03:48+00:00
> we also improved performance because ZFS could decompress reads faster than the disk could read

This is my favorite side effect of compression in the right scenarios. I remember getting a huge speed up in a proprietary in-memory data structure by using LZO (or one of those fast algorithms) which outperformed memcpy, and this was already in memory so no disk io involved! And used less than a third of the memory.
by ArtTimeInvestor | 2025-08-31 05:04:30+00:00
Not sure if that is due to ETFs.

US companies have great reporting. Every quarter you get a nice report with GAAP numbers. In Europe, for example, reporting is less frequent and murkier. Reports often don't even include standardized net earnings.

Top US companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, Meta, all have intelligent, driven, forward looking CEOs. Most other companies have CEOs asleep at the wheel. Can anyone name a smaller public company or a public company outside the US with a highly driven, forward looking CEO?
by necovek | 2025-08-31 05:04:32+00:00
> OTOH I am very impressed with how Volodymir Zelenski turned out. Who would have thought?

He played his cards so well that Ukraine now has 100k dead people, another 300k injured, so much destroyed infrastructure and so many cities turned into battlegrounds. Yes, "impressive".

I am not saying he's to "blame" for this, but being "very impressed" is weird to me as well — whether it was possible to play the fine line between sovereignty and compromise I don't know, but I can certainly see less costly middle ground.

What would have impressed me was to have gotten Ukraine into EU, yet committed not to join the NATO and figured out a "neutral combat zone" for Eastern Ukraine — keep both Ukraine people and Russia happy, for instance.
by daxfohl | 2025-08-31 05:06:50+00:00
Or maybe when you buy a phone you can pay $5 extra to get the OS build that allows sideloading, or make it cost $5 and require you to hand-sign a bunch of forms to upgrade an existing phone to a sideloading-capable version. A little extra friction at phone purchase time (rather than app download time) would likely steer most people, especially non-techies, toward the safer option. Sure, maybe it doesn't stop the problem completely; someone completely bought in to some scam may go through the effort anyway. But if someone is that gullible, they're pretty destined to be scammed out of their money no matter what the protection.
by strogonoff | 2025-08-31 05:07:12+00:00
That sounds suspiciously like “don’t need to test if I use static typing and monitoring”.

> Ideally any changes are manually tested before releasing, and a bug in one part of the app that's being worked on is not likely to affect a different section, e.g. not necessary to retest the password reset flow if you're working on the home dashboard

That is one can of worms. First, during normal development work it is very common to modify some part that affects multiple parts of the app. In fact, it is inhuman to know exactly what it affects in a big app (ergo, testing). Second, while manual testing is a kind of e2e testing, it is not feasible in a bigger application.

> usually flaky end-to-end tests

Then make them not flaky. It’s amazing what can happen if something stops being treated as an afterthought!
by seadan83 | 2025-08-31 05:07:47+00:00
Tariffs are protectionist, does not boost competitiveness. Tends to be the wrong tool, there are better.

Tax breaks, grants, physical infrastructure, creation of entire markets - those are better tools.

The issue with tariffs is non-competetive companies aren't required to become more competitive.

I mean consider it, a tariff is a tax on those buying a specific competitors goods. Even if tariffs were done surgically, still it seams like a tax benefit is a better tool
by alnewkirkcom | 2025-08-31 05:08:18+00:00
I understand the sentiment. That's the current status quo: keep things verbal, keep them fuzzy, keep an escape hatch handy (i.e., plausible deniability). The whole point of bi-directional accountability (via CBC) is to shut those doors up front. Once you (two or more parties, e.g., leader/report) agree to "do" CBC, you're immediately bound by the methodology, which essentially means a work contract you negotiate and sign off on. Escape hatch removed. The system makes deviations visible, costly, and merit-eroding.
by quag | 2025-08-31 05:09:13+00:00
Thank you for the description of CBC.

I'm curious about it and your thinking on how to track things over time and see what has surprised us since we got started. It is useful to note down every time you (or your team) sets an expectation with someone (or another team) and then make sure you don't forget about that. It's also useful to be deliberate when setting expectations.

Having a public journal could well work for noting down when expectations are set and whenever there is a meeting of minds. I've found when tracking things like this that the amount of data can quickly grow to the point where you can no longer quickly and easily reason about it. The success seems to live and die on the data visualization or UI/UX.
by danielmarkbruce | 2025-08-31 05:09:47+00:00
They also said there isn't a physical reason, that is often meant to mean "it isn't a law of physics".

The fact that something happens doesn't mean it's a law of anything. Cars didn't exist before we built them - no law of "no cars". People died of TB before we had a cure - no law of "TB". Same for various types of cancer.

In practice when someone says "live forever", they don't mean to imply they'll live the 10^100 (or whatever the guestimates are) years to the end of the universe. They mean they'll stop aging in the sense that we do now. Maybe we could live to 10,000 or 50,000 or whatever. You can always get hit by a bus, or get some strange disease from a bat, or whatever.