MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sgarland | 2025-08-28 12:47:42+00:00
You say that, until you’re one of the unlucky people who discover that cloud DBs are just cloud VMs in disguise, and those cloud VMs have network throughput limits.

A fun part of a retro at my company last year was me explaining to a team, “had all of your pods’ requests succeeded, the DB would have been pushing out well over 200 Gbps, which is generally reserved for top-of-rack switches.” Of course, someone else then had to translate that into “4K Blu-Rays per second,” because web devs aren’t typically familiar with networking, racks, data centers…
by bob1029 | 2025-08-28 12:47:46+00:00
MSE remains my favorite distance measure by a long shot. Its quadratic nature still helps even in non-linear problem spaces where convexity is no longer guaranteed. When working with generic/raw binary data where hamming distance would be theoretically more ideal, I still prefer MSE over byte-level values because of this property.

Other fitness measures take much longer to converge or are very unreliable in the way in which they bootstrap. MSE can start from a dead cold nothing on threading the needle through 20 hidden layers and still give you a workable gradient in a short period of time.
by jkool702 | 2025-08-28 12:47:48+00:00
> Thanks. I suppose this will depend on each script, as there is another commenter here claiming that the overhead is much higher.

The better way to think about overhead with timep is "average overhead per command run" (or more specifically per debug trap fire). this value wont change all that much between profiling different bash scripts

The code that commenter was profiling was a rubix cube solver that was impressively well optimized: 100% builtins, no forking, all the expensive operations were pre-computed and saved in huge lookup tables (some of which had over 400,000 elements), vars passed by reference to avoid making copies, etc. The overhead from timep was about 230 microseconds per command, but that code was averaging a microsecond or two per command.

To put it in perspective, bash's overhead any time it calls an external binary is 1-2 ms. so in a script that did nothing but call `/bin/true` repeatedly timep's overhead would probably be a little under 20%.

> Re: the binary, that's fine. Your approach is surely easier to use than asking users to compile it themselves, but I would still prefer to have that option.

I mean technically you can, but i'll give you that its not really documented unless you read through all the comments in the code. A makefile is probably doable and would make the process more straightforward.

that said, its on my to do list to figure out how i can setup a github actions workflow to have github automatically build the .so files for all the different architectures whenever timep.c changes. Perhaps that would alleviate your concern.

> After all, how do I know that that binary came from that source code?

I mean, you can say that about virtually any compiled binary. sure , some of them (like from your distro's official repos) have been "signed off" on by someone you trust, but that is a leap of faith you have to make with anything you install from a 3rd party. And, in general, i feel like "compiling it yourself" doesnt really make it safer unless you personally (or someone you trust personally) look through the source to check that it doesnt do anything malicious.

> I wasn't even aware that Bash was so easily extensible.

bash supporting loadable builtins isnt a well known feature. Its really quite handy when you want to do something (e.g., access to a syscall) that bash doesnt support and you cant / dont want to used a external tool for it.

IMO, the biggest hurdle behind using them is that they make scripts much less portable - you either need to setup a distribution system for it (and require the target system has internet access, at least briefly) and/or require the target system has a full build environment and can compile it. which are both sorta crappy options.

unless, of course, you were to base64 encode the binary and directly include it inside of the script. ;)
by bell-cot | 2025-08-28 12:48:29+00:00
I didn't read much beyond the subtitle - "Why Bargaining With Authoritarians Fails"

Early 20th century history also has plenty of lessons about the economic and social circumstances under which authoritarians rise to power. Lessons pretty much forgotten in recent decades. Doubtless the rich & powerful have encouraged that - relative prosperity and security for the 99% is seldom in their short-term interests.

Sadly, I've yet to see any sign of today's (supposed) anti-authoritarians getting serious about reversing the trends which feed the growing authoritarianism.

And at some point, the authoritarians get powerful enough that they don't need to negotiate anymore. Or even pretend to negotiate. :(
by fleabitdev | 2025-08-28 12:49:10+00:00
try-finally is leaky in JavaScript, in any case. If your `try` block contains an `await` point, its finaliser may never run. The browser also has the right to stop running your tab’s process partway through a JavaScript callback without running any finalisers (for example, because the computer running the browser has been struck by lightning).

For this reason, try-finally is at best a tool for enforcing local invariants in your code. When a function like process.exit() completely retires the current JavaScript environment, there’s no harm in skipping `finally` blocks.
by dijit | 2025-08-28 12:49:31+00:00
Yeah, my mum could work with a chromebook- but why does that matter- what are we talking about, ease of use or power users?

Because if its power users; having command of the whole operating system is just objectively better. Nothing hidden or forbidden and no oddities and quirks that are non-detiministic, indeterministic and actively prohibit debugging.

If its ease of use: then the easiest laptop operating system to maintain is… Linux (in the form of a chromebook).

That said, I really haven’t helped my mum with her laptop- I actually thought she didn’t use it because she didn’t ask me any support questions but it turned out that it “just worked” and she clicked the update pop-up once in a while like I asked her to.

> Linux is harder than Windows. It can't be anything else, as it is not originally made for mainstream user

This sounds like cope. Accessibility can be better on Windows for this reason… people being paid to drudge through an accessibility checklist- but the reality is not this. CommodoreOS was also built for humans and its harder to use than OpenBSD (which makes no apologies to non-power users). Your entire thesis here is bunk- there’s just countless examples of people thinking they know best for users but actively harming them instead (by hiding information or misleading them intentionally).
by punnerud | 2025-08-28 12:49:54+00:00
Hi, the developer here. Its a very early version so there could be a lot of bugs, but I like to use it myself (already found several bugs and updated version soon on its way). Switching from Cursor to Claude Code this was the biggest loss. Have tried to improve on the Cursor functionality, with features I missed.

I would love any feedback on what you are missing etc
by moi2388 | 2025-08-28 12:49:57+00:00
I can’t reply to your other comment so I’ll do it here.

Article 8 can be revoked for public safety, prevention of disorder or crime, protection of the rights of other people, but also for the protection of health and morals.

Given the problems with attention spans in systems like TikTok and shorts, they definitely could ban it even given article 8.

Sorry to burst your bubble.
by yupyupyups | 2025-08-28 12:49:57+00:00
The US does espionage more overtly where they offer you some value before they take your data. That's the gambit being played to avoid diplomatic issues.

They also lobby politicians to betray their own nations in favour of US (corporate) interests.

Not to blame the victim here, but many times it's other countries fault for allowing themselves to be put in this predicament.

When it comes to China or Russia, those have already strained relationships with the US and the rest of the Western world and do not mind dirty tactics. There is nothing really holding them back from engaging in covert cyber warfare.

It's different types of threats that need to be dealt with differently.
by kube-system | 2025-08-28 12:50:09+00:00
Under a microscope, maybe.

But if you had a "perfect" piece of software that used Log4j in 2020, it wouldn't have been perfect for long.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of reasons that software needs maintenance, even if it was thought to be perfect when it was originally written.

Hardware changes. The software landscape changes. Dependencies are deprecated, or are found to have their own problems. Vulnerabilities are discovered. Vulnerabilities are found that aren't even the fault of your software, maybe they are a flaw in the hardware your software runs on, and the only way to fix it is via a software mitigation. These are all real things that happen to otherwise perfect software.
Show HN: AgentCheck – Local AI-powered code review agents for Claude Code
by vladsh | 2025-08-28 12:50:36+00:00
I just want code reviews to be useful. They should be about trade-offs, sharing knowledge, and holding each other accountable, not on policing style, naming quirks, or catching trivial regressions and security issues. Tools similar to Cursor Bugbot flood PRs with noise, run in a black box, and bill you per seat for the privilege... they try to solve problems too late, in the wrong place, and without your developer environment tools.

That turned into AgentCheck: an open-source subagent that runs locally with five focused reviewers - logic, security, style, guidelines, and product. It bakes in a lot of internal experience in building enterprise products, working in agentic-native SDLC, and solving Claude Code shenanigans. If you’re curious about the internals or have ideas for new reviewers, feel free to ask questions or contribute.
by uticus | 2025-08-28 12:50:47+00:00
> ...you would have to find a name for all the intermediate steps of an equation instead of simply doing...

Trying to understand this. Do you mean the operators in your example (-, +, *, /) would need to be named?

If so, I agree one-off terms wouldn't make it a great calculator substitute. In fact, you'd probably end up doing equations similar to the RPN on some HP calcs [0] to get the order of operations correct - minus the handy physical +, /, etc buttons. But for programming, wouldn't you either assign the parts or the whole of the term to a word?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Polish_notation
by 2paz7x | 2025-08-28 12:51:20+00:00
Obviously you're not a car guy if you earnestly believe classic cars should almost always be refitted with an electric engine rather than using a more environmentally friendly fuel replacement. We shouldn't just toss the old functional engine & ECU & other components into the landfill. You're seeing it from a tech perspective. No, Sam, the Porsche 964 is not comparable to the latest shiny MacBook where you can just throw it away after you've had your 2 years of fun and the non-replaceable battery looks like a pillow and Apple refuses to update your OS. My 10c is I'm all for the synthetic gasoline instead of completely gutting classics and just turning them into almost-sleeper "classic body & suspension with a Tesla motor thrown into it". That being said I don't mind the electric conversions but to imply they should be done rather than just switching fuels is silly at best. I see it in the same category of project as an engine swap, it's something that's done for fun or more power, not something that ought to happen to every classic.
by gruez | 2025-08-28 12:51:41+00:00
No, some SSDs use host memory buffer (HMB) to cache FTL tables. If the FTL cache gets corrupted, and that causes critical data to be overwritten, that could brick the SSD. For instance, if the FTL table was corrupted in such a way where a page for a random file is mapped to the page for the SSD's FTL (or other critical data), and the OS/user tries to write to that random file.
by cl3misch | 2025-08-28 12:52:24+00:00
I actually see this a lot: confusing backpropagation with gradient descent (or any optimizer). Backprop is just a way to compute the gradients of the weights with respect to the cost function, not an algorithm to minimize the cost function wrt. the weights.

I guess giving the (mathematically) simple principle of computing a gradient with the chain rule the fancy name "backpropagation" comes from the early days of AI where the computers were much less powerful and this seemed less obvious?
by guappa | 2025-08-28 12:52:25+00:00
> Is it your theory that working on large projects was better when you had communist masters?

It is. Unemployment was virtually non-existant in the ussr, and healthcare was not connected to employment status. So a worker there knew that saying no to their boss was not going to be a life-or-death decision. They might of course be less wealthy and so on but the worst case didn't look as bad.
by zokier | 2025-08-28 12:53:11+00:00
When I was back there in Seminary School

There was a person there

Who put forth the proposition

That you can petition the Lord with prayer

Petition the Lord with prayer

Petition the Lord with prayer

You cannot petition the Lord with prayer!

If you truly want to protect your rights then don't petition Google, but instead petition FTC and other antitrust agencies. Petitioning Google just establishes that they have a choice here.
by kleiba | 2025-08-28 12:53:35+00:00
Replace "paper" with anything else you consume in your everyday life. I know it's an unpopular opinion, but to me, if there's something offered to you for a certain price, and you're not ready to pay that price, the alternative should be to either get something comparable that's cheaper (hardly possible with scientific papers) or, unfortunately, abstain from getting that thing at all.

I don't see how "what they're charging is ridiculous, and the money isn't even going to the authors, so it's okay for me to get the papers through sci-hub" is morally justified.

Independent of the above: if it's for work, your employer should pay for the paper access (unless you're self-employed, of course).
by komali2 | 2025-08-28 12:55:09+00:00
> Man you guys are really bad at this.

Not really. You should have learned by now that jumping into a conversation on the internet with the wikipedia "list of logical fallacies" page open on the other half of the screen and then vaguely ascribing aspects of a comment to a cherry-picked list of fallacies basically only ever results in people making fun of you.

I don't even think that would fly on reddit. People have been making fun of that style of response since IRC. If anybody is bad at anything, it's you at understanding how to have a productive conversation on an internet forum.
by lmm | 2025-08-28 12:55:57+00:00
Yes, the secret of Rust is that it offers both a) some important but slightly subtle language features from the late '70s that were sadly not present in Algol '52 and are therefore missing from popular lineages b) a couple of party tricks, in particular the ability to outperform C on silly microbenchmarks; b) is what leads people to adopt it and a) is what makes it non-awful to program in. Yes it's a damning indictment of programming culture than people did not adopt pre-Rust ML-family languages, but it could be worse, they could be not adopting Rust either.
by ExoticPearTree | 2025-08-28 12:56:05+00:00
MS was slapped with lawsuits for anticompetitive practices. Now we have laws around that.

If you offer alternatives that are very close to drop-in replacements for what people want, then you can have a pig chunk of the cloud. At least in the PaaS/IaaS markets and some managed offerings that are popular such S3 like services, managed databases and a few others.

There is this oligopoly because Amazon/Microsoft/Google poured tens of billions into that.

Google is still in the 3rd place with a very low market margin and keeps investing in the cloud because I guess they see the future potential for doing this.

I don't see why an European company or a consortium can't make this happen since most of the technology used for cloud services is OSS and you just need some proprietary glue here and there to make everything work.
by morellonet | 2025-08-28 12:56:09+00:00
If you’re looking for an alternative here, we (the team that built Twistlock) launched Minimus a few months ago to provide near zero CVE images built continuously from source. We have long experience in this space (we even wrote NIST SP 800-190) and I’d love to talk if we could help anyone. We also have drop in replacement images and charts for Bitnami, as we describe here: https://www.minimus.io/post/the-bitnami-pricing-changes-what...

If anyone has tech questions about how it all works, tools we use, customer scenarios, etc I’d be happy to discuss.
by tim333 | 2025-08-28 12:56:43+00:00
I'm not a Trump fan but after about a dozen proclamations that Putin has to change his ways and has two weeks or else, I think this is the first time Trump has actually put meaningful sanctions against Russia?

Which is kind of progress. Changing borders through invasions is not good and hitting Russia's oil income is maybe the best way to try to make them rethink.
by Doxin | 2025-08-28 12:58:46+00:00
> I think reading philosophical arguments masquerading as novels, or any sort of fiction, is an intellectual trap in general. Anything can be made to work in a fictional work simply by saying that it works. It means nothing.

Only if you take the work as-given. Whenever I read a fiction book I take it as a starting point for thinking about things. The book provides a what-if. It's up to the reader to figure out if that what-if makes any sense, and if the conclusions in the book follow from that.
by egorfine | 2025-08-28 12:58:48+00:00
First, web environment integrity was about the web as a whole, not about something that is completely owned and under their control. Second, they will not stop trying. It was not their first approach and it won't be the last.

So, I believe that if they decided this is the path they want to take - they will find one way or another. It's not that resistance is futile (it's not!) but I believe that petitions are not a good tool for the case.
by lmm | 2025-08-28 12:59:04+00:00
In my experience a Rust codebase with no tests warrants more confidence than any practical level of testing seen in sloppy programming languages, at least until you get to SQLite-style "10x as much test code as main code" projects. A decent type system lets you reach a given level of confidence at much lower cost than doing the same thing with tests. A decent type system plus a handful of judiciously chosen tests lets you reach a higher level than you would ever achieve with tests alone.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-08-28 12:59:22+00:00
The real issue is that all systems have faults. Same with jury systems vs. trained judges.

The problem begins when law doesn't approximate justice anymore and currently it seems both separate from each other further and further. Without that law loses legitimacy. Some legal philosophy might see that differently, but it is the core of the issue.

But reforms are difficult because any lawyer will always be dependent on the status quo legal code. And not every reform would improve the situation.
by ollien | 2025-08-28 12:59:49+00:00
> The small coolers used by them are not recommended by Noctua for 9950X

Noctua's CPU compatibility page lists the NH-U9s as "medium turbo/overclocking headroom" for the 9950X [0]. I don't think it's fair to suggest their cooler choice is the problem here.

[0] https://ncc.noctua.at/cpus/model/AMD-Ryzen-9-9950X-1831
by ants_everywhere | 2025-08-28 12:59:50+00:00
This is false, striking was illegal in the USSR. If you refused to do work you were an enemy of the state.

If your town didn't meet the farming quota they would starve your entire town.

If you went on strike you would get murdered and sometimes your family would get murdered.

If you deserted from the army or retreated you would get shot by barrier troops.

If you were injured or sick you would be disposed of or hidden on an island.

If you were a female orphan under the age of 15 there was something like an 88% chance you'd be used as a prostitute.

The USSR was terrible for workers. Some of this was hidden by lying about statistics, same as it is today with authoritarian countries.
by sgarland | 2025-08-28 12:59:53+00:00
Not necessarily. Sharp tools are often sharp because someone needs it.

I’m not a frontend dev, and have next to zero experience with anything beyond jQuery, but an analogy is shell. Bash (and zsh, though I find some of its syntactic sugar nicer, albeit still inscrutable) will happily let you do extremely stupid things, but it also lets you do extremely complicated things in a very concise manner. That doesn’t mean it’s inherently bad, it means you need to know what the hell you’re doing, and use linters, write tests, etc.
by dwa3592 | 2025-08-28 12:59:56+00:00
I just thought it would be "better" if AI is served as WiFi? You go to someone's house and ask if they can share their 'AI password'? You put in the password and you have access to the models. You'd still have it on your phone just like your phone internet but probably a light weight local model?

These models can also be available to countless devices in the house or delivery vehicles of the future (drones asking to share an AI token so they can land properly??).

I was just thinking on the lines of what would the world look like when AI is in abundance, which there will be for sure, how would we use it etc.

I do find these kinds of exercises useful(_sometimes_) to imagine, what if we have a lot of something or we don't have it at all. I might be totally off here though.
by martypitt | 2025-08-28 13:00:12+00:00
My guess will be:

- Shorter support windows, with longer support available for purchase (VMWare actually introduced this, but Broadcom can weaponize it)

- Then Enterprise Spring, which has additional features

- Then some other license shenaningans.

Hazelcast recently made the move where CVE security updates are only released into the OSS ecosystem quarterly - whereas the enterprise model gets them as soon as they're ready. In OSS, you have to rebuild and patch yourself.

That's a special kind of evil, which has Broadcom DNA all over it.
by gooob | 2025-08-28 13:00:28+00:00
just making sure you understand the proposal correctly. you'd still be able to distribute the app through whatever means you want; the app just has to be signed with a key tied your identity that is verified by google, if trying to install on a "certified device" (which will be most devices).

i still disagree with the move. but it's not as bad as it could be. maybe there's a way to "unlock" a certified device (similar to unlocking the bootloader)?
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-08-28 13:00:29+00:00
> the problem is developers having fast modern machines.

> if they were forced to use slow machines, they would not be able to put out crap like that

Lots of developers are rather obsessed with writing good, performant code. The problem is rather that many project managers do not let them do these insane optimizations because they take time.

The only things that forcing developers to use slow machines will bring is developers quitting (and quite a lot of them would actually love to see the person responsible for this decision dead (I'm not joking) because he made the developers' job a hell on earth).

What you should rather do if you want performant software is to fire all the project managers who don't give the developers the necessary time (or don't encourage the developers) to write highly optimized code (i.e. those idiot project managers who argue with "pragmatism" concerning this point).