MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hinkley | 2025-08-31 18:14:55+00:00
> It's the equivalent of adding more RAM to fix poor memory management

No it’s ten times worse than that. Adding RAM doesn’t make the task of fixing the memory management problems intrinsically harder. It just makes the problem bigger when you do fix it.

Adding caching to your app makes all of the tools used for detecting and categorizing performance issues much harder to use. We already have too many developers and “engineers” who balk at learning more than the basics of using these tools. Caching is like stirring up sediment in a submarine cave. Now only the most disciplined can still function and often just barely.

When you don’t have caches, data has to flow along the call tree. So if you need a user’s data in three places, that data either flows to those three or you have to look it up three times, which can introduce concurrency issues if the user metadata changes in the middle of a request. But because it’s inefficient there is clear incentive to fix the data propagation issues. Fixing those issues will make testing easier because now the data is passed in instead of having to mock the lookup code.

Then you introduce caching. Now the incentive is mostly gone, since you will only improve cold start performance. And now there is a perverse incentive to never propagate the data again. You start moving backward. Soon there are eight places in the code that use that data, because looking it up was “free” and they are all detached from each other. And now you can’t even turn off the cache, and cache traffic doesn’t tell you what your costs are.

And because the lookup is “free” the user lookup code disappears from your perf data and flame graphs. Only a madman like me will still tackle such a mess, and even I have difficulty finding the motivation.

For these reasons I say with great confidence and no small authority: adding caching to your app is the last major performance improvement most teams will ever see. So if you reach for it prematurely, you’re stuck with what you’ve got. Now a more astute competitor can deliver a faster, cheaper, or both product that eats your lunch and your team will swear there is nothing they can do about it because the app is already as fast as they can make it, and here are the statistics that “prove” it.

Friends don’t let friends put caches on immature apps.
by alwa | 2025-08-31 18:15:12+00:00
I’m unfamiliar, what’s the trouble in keeping them? I thought they’d long ago evicted the natives, and more or less handed the islands over to the Americans—does this move relieve them of either of those headaches?

Is the idea that Chagossian repatriation now becomes a Mauritian problem? Had the British been taking that problem particularly seriously?

Or more to do with the British not really wanting to be caught between the Americans and increasingly assertive regional powers who may be annoyed by the Americans’ stronghold there?
by a022311 | 2025-08-31 18:15:14+00:00
This feels like a troll, but I'll answer anyway.

The first command you mention is `jj bookmark move main --to @-`, which apart from the `@-` part, is easily read and does exactly what is written. It moves the main bookmark to the parent commit. The main difference to git here is that updating a branch is an explicit action. Jujutsu supports creating aliases and many users have a `jj tug` alias that moves the current closest branch to point to the parent commit. `git add .` just adds all changed files in the current directory to the current commit. That's an entirely different thing and Jujutsu takes care of doing that automatically.

The second command creates a git repository and while it is longer, I doubt the extra keystrokes will hurt you much. If it's too long, just alias it.

As for using `jj git`, since Jujutsu supports multiple backends, backend-specific commands require the `git` namespace. You generally only need it for cloning, pushing and fetching (with the option for aliases again). You'll rarely need to create a new repository or add a remote.
by Intralexical | 2025-08-31 18:15:21+00:00
> We know it’s possible for living things to be functionally near immortal.

Not in any sense that's applicable to humans.

The often-cited animal examples, like greenland sharks, tortoises, and lobsters, are slow-moving ectotherms with "cold" metabolisms. Adjusting for watts per unit mass of biochemistry, they might "live" less in all their centuries than you do in a single decade [0-3].

In that sense they're only "long-lived" in the same way a tree is long-lived. Yeah, it might not die. But it's also not doing much that produces wear and tear, misfolded proteins, scar tissue, plaque buildup, etc.

Microorganisms and cnidarians, which can be truly immortal, are even more divergent. For example a common form of "immortality" involves periodically regenerating body parts by reverting to stem cells. IIRC regeneration is ancestral to all animals, but mostly lost in mammals.

Humans can actually already regenerate to a limited extent [4]. But how are you going to regenerate an entire primate nervous system (which "immortal" animals don't have), without losing everything you are?

In fact, the use of regeneration to achieve "immortality", and even that only rarely and in very simple animals, suggests it may not be possible at all for living organisms to live indefinitely in the same body. Otherwise, why would evolution waste calories rebuilding a whole body?

I suspect some systems-theoretic effect like the Red Queen hypothesis [5], but on a micro scale. Change is the only constant, and immortality implies trying to stay the same when the only thermodynamically favorable options are to grow or decay.

0: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-76371-0 1: # Greenland shark metabolism over entire lifespan sh -c "units '((30mg/oxygen)*(mol/g))/hour/(1000/1000^0.84*kg) * (434kJ/mol) * 200year' MJ/kg" 2: # Greenland shark lifespan metabolism, alternate estimation sh -c "units '192kcal/day*200year/126kg' MJ/kg" 3: # Human metabolism over 1 decade sh -c "units '150W/100kg*10years' MJ/kg" 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneration_in_humans 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis
by decasia | 2025-08-31 18:15:22+00:00
To be clear - this isn't an endorsement on my part, just observations of why cloud-only deployment seems common. I guess we shouldn't neglect the pressure towards resume-oriented development either, as it undoubtedly plays a part in infra folks' careers. It probably makes you sound obsolete to be someone who works in a physical data center.

I for one really miss being able to go see the servers that my code runs on. I thought data centers were really interesting places. But I don't see a lot of effort to decide things based on pure dollar cost analysis at this point. There's a lot of other industry forces besides the microeconomics that predetermine people's hosting choices.
by ksec | 2025-08-31 18:15:56+00:00
>Hold China over a barrel by refusing to sell whatever it is we sell to China

China is currently the largest or 2nd largest buyer of UK Pork.

Although I won't be surprised in 2-3 years time China will use it as leverage. As they did with Denmark.

And it is not that China wants any of these either. UK is currently desperately trying to increase its export ( without success )
by bob1029 | 2025-08-31 18:16:20+00:00
This isn't even the end game for "one big server". AMD will give the most bang per rack, but there are other factors.

An IBM z17 is effectively one big server too, but provides levels of reliability that are simply not available in most IT environments. It won't outperform the AMD rack, but it will definitely keep up for most practical workloads.

If you sit down and really think honestly about the cost of engineering your systems to an equivalent level of reliability, you may find the cost of the IBM stack to be competitive in a surprising number of cases.
by sunscream89 | 2025-08-31 18:16:27+00:00
Couldn’t we just go back to the “Turing Test?”

I know, I know, early “AI” passed that, right! Ha!

Could you chat with an “AI” of any kind now and not distinguish from a human? Not in a staged environment, one where you hire a human to do a remote technical job?

Let AGI be one who passes a functional remote role as indistinguishable from a human (of any capacity, even one with English as a second language to make subtle idiosyncrasies irrelevant.
by bronlund | 2025-08-31 18:16:49+00:00
As I remember it; it was free for personal use, but if you were to use it commercially, you had to pay a license cost. There also was a server version which could set you back thousands of dollars. If you wanted to export the REBOL API which you could create using the REBOL SDK to users, you needed a separate distribution license. It was a mess. When REBOL finally went open source in 2012, it was too late, everyone had moved on.
by nobodyandproud | 2025-08-31 18:17:41+00:00
Why is it deeply ironic? Prasad is being called out for holding highly unscientific views that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

This similar to what Fauci and others were blamed for in early days of COVID: The confusing and dishonest message about masking.

Why should Prasad be held to a different standard?

At least with Fauci and his people, the intent was quite good.
by baq | 2025-08-31 18:18:22+00:00
The PRs are either small enough that it isn’t a problem or large enough that it isn’t a problem… the odd in-between PR experience sucks and it’s one of the cases when I sometimes add more commits instead of force pushing.

+1 to sibling gerrit recommendation; I used to use it a decade ago and it was better then than GitHub PRs today.
by lazide | 2025-08-31 18:19:29+00:00
And you think it would be ‘protecting’ the people of Hong Kong to argue with the CCP about it? Lulz

Or that it’s ever been about ‘protecting’ anyone when the British Crown fights anyone over territory? As compared to asserting ownership?

Not to mention the UK nearly lost it’s fight with Argentina - it wouldn’t even be pissing in the wind to go to war with China over Hong Kong.
by permo-w | 2025-08-31 18:19:42+00:00
you'd be naive to believe anyone saying anything like this. in fact if a speaker with vested interests feels the need to say something like this, then more than likely the reverse is true. the UK often tiptoes where it should stride, and it's in China's interest to keep it that way. it's obviously not a super power and hasn't been since WW2--or Suez depending on how you look at it--but it's still the world's sixth largest economy, has nukes, and has masses of soft and hard power that other powers would prefer that it doesn't make use of
by Puts | 2025-08-31 18:20:01+00:00
My experience after 20 years in the hosting industry is that customers in general have more downtime due to self-inflicted over-engineered replication, or split brain errors than actual hardware failures. One server is the simplest and most reliable setup, and if you have backup and automated provisioning you can just re-deploy your entire environment in less than the time it takes to debug a complex multi-server setup.

I'm not saying everybody should do this. There are of-course a lot of services that can't afford even a minute of downtime. But there is also a lot of companies that would benefit from a simpler setup.
by dmbche | 2025-08-31 18:20:02+00:00
You might want to just have a chat with your dr, as you'll likely try something like concerta if you are diagnosed - but you can skip the long process of diagnostic and just try the medication if you fill out a few questionnaires. At that point it's pretty self evident if the medication helps the issue or not and bam, you might have solved your problem without going through the hurdles.
by amunicio | 2025-08-31 18:20:32+00:00
Shahed where originally designed and manufactured by Iran. Russians initially bought and licensed them. And I assume are now improving upon the original design.

Russian is top down innovation with a thick layer of corruption. No matter how much you want to claim strategic depth, they are always several steps behind Ukrainians. No matter how many advantages due to size they have.

Sorry you picked the wrong team.
by icegreentea2 | 2025-08-31 18:20:51+00:00
I think it would be more correct to say that the concept of "the fall (or end) of the western roman empire" is insufficiently defined.

If one imagined an alternative US Civil War, where the war ended in stalemate, the Union and CSA coexisting for decades, before an miraculously resurgent Mexican Empire swept through and engulfed the territories of both, before allowing the original 13 states to continue to exist as a subservient, but nominally independent state that still had nominal local democratic republicanism, and the inhabitants on those states will called themselves "Americans".

When would you say "the United States of America fell" in that scenario?

Arguments about the "when did the Roman Empire fall in the west" are actually arguments about what are the most important aspects to Rome to us, here today in the modern world (particularly in the western world).
by furyofantares | 2025-08-31 18:20:55+00:00
> But who will hire them?

Anyone who wants a competitive advantage?

My claim is that the gap between junior and senior has temporarily widened, which is why someone who previously would want to hire juniors might not right now. But I expect it will narrow as a generation that learned on this stuff comes into the fold, probably to a smaller gap than existed pre-LLM.

I think it will also narrow if the tools continue to get better.
by theamk | 2025-08-31 18:21:11+00:00
How is this going to be enforced? Does that mean everyone has to fill timesheets all the time? I've worked in placed with timesheets and without them, and I liked latter ones much better.

Not to mention that even if timesheets were used, they provide no guarantees. We always had to get management permission to put overtime in, but no one really knew how much time we worked - especially with a possibility of remote work.

This can only be fixed by pervasive monitoring, and IMHO this leads to a very unpleasant workspace.
by awongh | 2025-08-31 18:21:25+00:00
> Also, the incentives of a cheaper than market rate flat, means that corruption and nepotism is rampant in those buildings.

Maybe there's some middle ground between socialized housing that incentivizes people to take advantage of overly cheap housing, and a 100% capitalist USA style housing market where lots of people are 1 missed paycheck away from being homeless.
by nerdsniper | 2025-08-31 18:21:29+00:00
They can for some people on some days or parts of days (my anxiety peaks when stimulants are wearing off). But like the other poster said, its more that they do nothing to solve it. I found a beta blocker in addition to stimulants was good at unlocking my productivity. YMMV.

Additionally, the boost in dopamines rewards anything you happen to be doing, so it can lock you into your avoidant behavior that day once you start doing it.
by bfouts | 2025-08-31 18:21:44+00:00
I take guanfacine. It’s an older blood pressure medication that happens to treat adhd. I also have high blood pressure so I get an added bonus. Stimulants are great for laser focus. Guanfacine helps with focus but its biggest help, for me, is executive function and curbs some of my emotional effects of adhd. I notice I’m not as sensitive to feedback or criticism.
by random9749832 | 2025-08-31 18:21:45+00:00
A country can have leverage that goes beyond how much potential it has to invade or destroy another nation.

> Last time I checked, most countries today, aside from Russia, aren't in the business of invading other countries and expanding territory

How about Israel that the UK is arming? Though in the case of the UK it is contracting.

> The UK will be just fine - it's doing as much as any other western country to keep it's relevance.

That's reassuring.
by pisanvs | 2025-08-31 18:22:11+00:00
I hope to not offend "purists" by saying this is or isn't art, but it definitely made me reflect on how some people's existence, especially in their later years is not so far from this same essence...

LLMs "know" how it feels, or rather, reads to die. It definitely makes me feel quite uneasy, especially with the recent news of a teen's suicide aided by an LLM.
by bee_rider | 2025-08-31 18:22:18+00:00
I keep it disabled by default (noscript) it is a tossup, lots of sites just load the essentials with JavaScript disabled and are, as a result, much better. Others break entirely. The ones that totally break tend to be the silly over-designed ones though. Most useful info is available in plain text (see the phenomenon of an old research professor’s home page).

How common? Dunno. People here talk about it whenever it comes up. As a website for chit-chatting about tech stuff we have an unusually large population that cares about this kind of stuff, though.
by alwa | 2025-08-31 18:22:26+00:00
> Meta said this allegation was “manufactured tension without basis in fact that’s clearly being pushed by dramatic, navel-gazing busybodies.”

Was this bombastic, “nyah-nyah,” “I know you are but what am I” style of public communication a thing before the current president hired spokespeople who behave this way?

If it’s at all indicative of how things work inside that company, I’d be out the door on the first day too, no matter how many absurd millions were supposedly on offer…
by YZF | 2025-08-31 18:22:33+00:00
But the change in hiring trends goes back to the beginning of the pandemic. This can't all be explained by tariffs. There is always uncertainty about the future but it seems there's been a shift in behavior across the board (CEOs copying each other is also a problem) that has been lasting many years. I guess you could blame it on Trump's first presidency if you really want to make this political.
by robertsinc | 2025-08-31 18:23:01+00:00
Made this in a couple hours

Sick of Elon's bullshit with Twitter

Very simple formula for posts displayed:

(Likes / Dislikes) / Time

If you think something is fire, you can set it alight

37 char limit

Custom profiles with AI-gen HTML

Numbers as usernames so no pre-conceived notions

Douse with water what's bad

Kinda self-explanatory
by const_cast | 2025-08-31 18:23:11+00:00
I "solved" this by using a black and white screen always and just checking social media on a web browser on my computer whenever I feel like it - usually once a month or so. Its great because I can turn off the black and white for pictures.

This isn't a real solution because you still have to take deliverate action and you're still just trusting your own behaviors. But, it's a great middle ground.

For social media - you don't actually need the apps. Like, at all. They work just fine in a browser and they can't send you notifications that way. So just delete them altogether.
by EliRivers | 2025-08-31 18:23:15+00:00
We don't have those integration tests. They happened by chance when customers did things. Do we really have tests if we cannot define those tests, if we cannot run those tests? If we make a significant change that could feasibly affect the outcome of those tests, and we are unable to run those tests, do we have those tests?

"How do you "design a good system" without testing it?"

We must be coming at this through such widly different contexts. To me, it is simply obvious and normal that it's possible to create a good design for something, and that good design can exist before any tests have ever been created or executed.

To me, that you asks that question suggests that we have such different contexts that we might as well be speaking different languages. I would be horrified that people would churn out a rubbish design and just let tests handle all the crap and force it into a good design; but I do gather that's normal procedure in some industries.
by ceejayoz | 2025-08-31 18:23:16+00:00
> To wit: he says that the mRNA cancer vaccines are a scientific dead end, that the existing mRNA vaccines' research can be funded by industry, there are good alternatives, and that the technology has been tainted in the public mind. Therefore he supports de-prioritizing the research.

> None of these arguments can be characterized as "wants to defund mRNA research".

If I said "paying our mortgage is a dead-end, someone else can fund it, there are good alternatives to paying it, and therefore I'm de-prioritizing paying it"…

Would "I'm defunding our mortgage" be a substantially accurate summary of my position? (Yes.)
by numpad0 | 2025-08-31 18:23:37+00:00
idk, my thinking is that sweatshop-slack-like inputs might correspond to more professional outcomes than exam-like questions as exams would be more likely to be solved by beginners. I also fear "Implement xxx" might be just too short, I feel they might like to have some bytes to map to outputs. Could very well be placebo as pointed out.
by jedimastert | 2025-08-31 18:24:04+00:00
Kinda? The biggest thing is that it's been done by so many other places already that it's sort of a waste of time to spend any time on it when there's already a number of other services. It doesn't really fit into the rest of the design and purpose of Bitwig, so it would really just be a gimmick, or at least seen as one by the core community.

Also, they're sort of an legal-ethics dilemma in that The only time you would really use stim separation is if you don't have the stems already, and therefore almost certainly don't have clearance and can't really use them for anything commercial. Probably not as big of a concern but definitely something to consider.

Really the big one is that a lot the creative online community and especially the kind of community around Bitwig has a pretty strong opinion against generative AI, which includes things like stem separation.
by tombert | 2025-08-31 18:24:31+00:00
I don't know if anything was found, but RFK Jr. has an absolute and clear conflict of interest with regards to vaccines [1], considering he gets paid money for every vaccine lawsuit. Now that he's in charge of the FDA and CDC, he can fairly easily fabricate "studies" that suggest vaccines are harmful and then he can make more money in lawsuits.

Is he doing this? I have no fucking clue, but it really doesn't matter. In cases like this, the appearance of impropriety isn't materially different than actual impropriety. Our institutions can only work if we can trust them, and we simply cannot trust anything from RFK Jr. with regards to health.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/01/22/nx...
by idoubtit | 2025-08-31 18:24:55+00:00
I've now seen a dozen of articles that explain that jj is wonderful and better than Git for everything. This tutorial is of the same kind. Now that I've read extensively about the good part, I'd be more interested by the bad and the ugly. Because my experience with jj was more balanced.

When I tried jj, I found a few pain points that made me return to Git. For instance, I was sharing a branch with a co-worker where we were just piling commits as soon as they were ready (after `pull --rebase` if necessary). Since jj doesn't have names branches, that workflow was easy with git and tedious with jj – even with the `tug` alias. The process in the "Tracking remote bookmarks" chapter of this tutorial still doesn't look nice to me.

Another pain point was that jj could not colocate with light clones, like `git clone --filter=blob:none`. Maybe that's fixed now.