MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by maxenglander | 2025-09-22 18:50:20+00:00
Hi n_u, PlanetScale engineer here, I'm going to just address just the point about durability via replication. I can't speak to what you've seen with other distributed systems, but, at PlanetScale, we don't do replication instead of writing to disk, we do replication in addition to writing to disk. Best of both worlds.
by rcrowley | 2025-09-22 18:50:38+00:00
1. I don't know if there's a single name for this. I will point out that AWS EBS and Google Persistent Disk as industrial examples of distributed, replicated block devices are also providing durability via replication. They're just providing it at a lower level that ends up sacrificing performance. I'm struggling to come up with a citation but I think it's either Liskov or Lynch that offered a proof to the effect of achieving durability in a distributed system via replication.

2. The thinking laid out in the blog post you linked to is how we went about it. You can do the math with your own parameters by computing the probability of a second node failure within the time it takes to recover from a first node failure. These are independent failures, being on physically separate hardware in physically separate availability zones. It's only when they happen together that problems arise. The core is this: P(second node failure within MTTR for first node failure) = 1 - e^( -(MTTR node failure) / (MTBF for a node) )

3. This one's harder to test yourself. You can do all sorts of tests yourself (<https://rcrowley.org/2019/disasterpiece-theater.html>) and via AWS FIS but you kind of have to trust the cloud provider (or read their SOC 2 report) to learn how availability zones really work and really fail.
by Terr_ | 2025-09-22 18:50:53+00:00
I think in a sane world (heh) using "Steamboat Willie" should only be impaired by Disney trademark exactly as much (or as little) as people would be prevented from sharing pictures of the Statue of Liberty just because some tax-preparation company has a photo-realistic outline in their logo.

In both cases the company has zero rights to the underlying public thing, and the court just needs to ask: "Is someone trying to trick consumers into mis-identifying the company or product?"

P.S.: Even if the company transitioned into being a seller of commemorative Statue of Liberty figurines, their trademarked logo shouldn't give them the ability to monopolize the subject matter. In that other context it might even be revoked as too-generic and unenforceable.
by AppleBananaPie | 2025-09-22 18:50:53+00:00
Ahhh yup that was the obvious thing thanks.

I made the mistake of assuming it's not willpower or whatever you want to call it.

Basically I know there are lots of things I should be doing for my health but don't for whatever reason and this one is no different for some folks so it would be hypocritical not to recognize that.

Thanks!
by jrm4 | 2025-09-22 18:51:09+00:00
Whenever anyone says "Oh so I should hate company X" you know you're in for a bad, stilted argument that's going to defend some very narrowly defined thing.

Companies, by their nature, grow and take over things for the purposes of making money - tech companies moreso. We have seen companies overstep in the past.

Please don't stifle reasonable concerns with this sort of inflammatory rhetoric.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-09-22 18:51:18+00:00
And yet the Navajo Nation bordering both of them has fairly strict gun registries. Both of those are yet different than the situation in Alberta (more similar to TX), and YT more resembles Alaskan gun culture.

They're obviously not related by immigration group either. The Hopi descend from early first nations. The Navajo descend from the athabascan migrations. Yukon comes from Canadian and British gold rush populations. Alberta comes from various prairie settler efforts, including Ukrainian Canadians. The Mormons were their own settlement group in Mexico that went to war with many of the (now-) surrounding indigenous nations. Etc.

And this is just one "American nation". The same basic issue exists in all of them.
by clickety_clack | 2025-09-22 18:51:26+00:00
If you don't need the docs then you don't need them, but sometimes we all need a "hey bro, I know you're a little lost so I'm going to break down what's happening in plain English". At a certain point you just don't have the entire code base in your head all the time and you need a reminder on what exactly the Flargle team does to all the Nargs.
by snickerbockers | 2025-09-22 18:51:29+00:00
>Make no mistake, the Internet has never been free. There's always been a reward system that transferred value from consumers to creators and, in doing so, filled the Internet with content.

Jesus Christ I knew when I clicked on this link it was going to be corporate propaganda which pushes a specific narrative favorable to their business model, but this is just wrong.

It's one thing to say that online content has always relied on having somebody to foot the bill for infrastructure if the content can't offset that overhead itself but they're just lying as if none of those forums, IRC rooms and crazy geocities/angelfire webrings ever existed. As if there is nothing on the internet today which exists for its own sake rather than as the outcome of a creator's profit-motive.
by sbuttgereit | 2025-09-22 18:51:32+00:00
The store tends to always be there, there is often times need to have a lot of them, and they're available at well known (even published) times whereas the van isn't always at the same places at the same time and doesn't even carry predictable goods... just that you know there will be goods. Sure you can guess or make your luck by waiting for the van or search for it in good spots... but the cost is higher for the criminal to try and count on such a thing.

The truth is I expect stealing from a delivery van is ultimately simpler... or simply stealing the package off the porch easier still. The issue isn't the ease or difficulty.

Where I expect consumer delivery businesses to do better in the face of theft is on the cost of theft (assuming a certain scale in the delivery business). Given the economies of scale of a warehouse and the delivery model vs traditional retail locations, I bet means the loss for any item stolen from the van is less than that of the same item stolen from a traditional retail location.
by SilverElfin | 2025-09-22 18:51:46+00:00
I can’t understand why Amazon still comingles. It is so hard to trust what you buy. I only want items that either Amazon or the manufacturer purchased as the listed seller. Everything else I don’t trust. For this reason alone I recommend no one buy any personal care or food products from them. The risk isn’t worth it when you’re feeding your kid or whatever.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-09-22 18:52:15+00:00
How would you characterize the current abuse? I tentatively can agree there is some. My characterization would be that currently a lot of companies illegally under-pay labor they bring in to do jobs they probably could hire Americans for, which is means these positions aren't H-1B qualified.

But what is the impact? I do think it shorts American workers some, yes, absolutely. Companies are illegally using H-1Bs, and getting labor they have no right to.

Even though I feel directly harmed by this, I still think the upside is incredible. Amazing people from all over the world coming to work in America is amazing. This is such an enviable incredible position for America to be in. And yes the injury to our workers is real, but we are also enriched by having these others here, as coworkers.

I find it crass and dumb to whataboutism & nakedly scoff at Krugman like this, to discard the faults of The King Decides because the current system has some faults. Overall Iam far more afraid of this prospective politically rigged system & the necessary corporate obsequiousness to the president and party than I am of an H-1B system that lets a couple H-1B abusers hire too many they shouldn't be able to. And it seems like we have gotten markedly better with the H-1B system recently-ish, preventing many of the based forms of abuse by just flooding the lottery system.
by leoh | 2025-09-22 18:53:47+00:00
Frankly, several repos and tools from Google/DeepMind look a lot better.

https://github.com/google-deepmind/bbeh?tab=readme-ov-file

https://github.com/google/lmeval

I hesitate to say this lest folks adapt, but does anyone else immediately distrust a repo when it has a bunch of emojis in the README? It is often a giveaway that they were LLM-generated.
by pshirshov | 2025-09-22 18:53:54+00:00
Pure bullshit and incompetence.

> esoteric things like Bloom filters, so you can find them later in the unlikely case you need them.

They are not esoteric, they are trivial and extremely useful in many cases.

> Less DSA, more testing.

Testing can't cover all the cases by definition, why not property testing? Why not formal proofs?

Plus, in our days, it's easy to delegate testcase writing to LLMs, while they literally cannot invent new useful AnDS.
by capyba | 2025-09-22 18:54:21+00:00
I’m glad to hear someone say that. I’ve been wrestling for weeks with the idea of reinventing a particular wheel in my profession, for a personal coding project. The problem is that my implementation can’t ever be as complete or as useful as the existing solutions because it’s way too much for one person to accomplish in a reasonable amount of time.

But, I like it, I’ve reinvented many wheels in my work and it’s benefited me greatly. So I will reinvent this particular wheel as well…
Ask HN: Should I hurry while doing Take Home projects or submit a bit hazily
by rootsudo | 2025-09-22 18:55:22+00:00
One of the most interesting posts I've read on here was: when doing take home projects, don't neccessarily complete them too quickly since if you submit nearer the deadline/end of the recruiters hiring cycle you'll have a better chance of moving on.

But on the flipside, if you're serious about the role you'd complete it hastily.

I thought it was interesting since if given a specific deadline e.g. two weeks - I would imagine it'd show initiative if I submited it quickly, e.g. showing initative and all. But it does "sound" like a smart play to wait it out and submit later not at the deadline, but within the 50%-75% duration point.

You would think that bad work == rejection from the recruiter or that I'm weighing my work as less competitive but it does feel very meta for the process and a reflection of todays hiring schemes.
by xenelor | 2025-09-22 18:55:58+00:00
The hype around Omarchy is just insane..

It is not an installer script (anymore), so instead you have to download a 7GB ISO file (in the name of 'good UX') that ships with Zoom, Spotify, Hey, Basecamp, Steam, Minecraft (??), etc. but you still end up using the same package mirrors (arch's). If it was an install script, like LARBS or many others (before and after omarchy), I'd (almost) get it. If it was a derivative distro, like endeavour or manjaro, I'd (almost) get it. But this just makes no sense. I'm all for making Linux more accessible, but this ain't it, chief.
by crowcroft | 2025-09-22 18:56:17+00:00
It seems similar to how GE under Jack Welch would use their rock solid financials to take on low cost debt that they could lend out to suppliers who needed finance to purchase their products.

The biggest difference here though is that most of these moves seem to to involve direct investment and the movement of equity, not debt. I think this is an important distinction, because if things take a downturn debt is highly explosive (see GE during the GFC) whereas equity is not.

Not to say anyone wants to take a huge markdown on their equity, and there are real costs associated with designing, building, and powering GPUs which needs to be paid for, but Nvidia is also generating real revenue which likely covers that, I don't think they're funding much through debt? Tech tends to be very high margin so there's a lot of room to play if you're willing to just reduce your revenue (as opposed to taking on debt) in the short term.

Of course this means asset prices in the industry are going to get really tightly coupled, so if one starts to deflate it's likely that the market is going to wipe out a lot of value quickly and while there isn't an obvious debt bomb that will explode, I'm sure there's a landmine lying around somewhere...
by cogman10 | 2025-09-22 18:56:22+00:00
I agree.

The main benefit of being familiar with how data structures and algorithms work is that you become familiar with their runtime characteristics and thus can know when to reach for them in a real problem.

The author is correct here. You'll almost never need to implement a B-Tree. What's important is knowing that B-Trees have log n insertion times with good memory locality making them faster than simple binary trees. Knowing how the B-Tree works could help you in tuning it correctly, but otherwise just knowing the insertion/lookup efficiencies is enough.
by yieldcrv | 2025-09-22 18:56:32+00:00
AIPAC is the successor of an organization that the DOJ targeted for lack of FARA disclosure, its simply a reincorporation to slide by

But you’re right - putting the military on the OFAC list will be far more effective as it is practically putting economic sanctions on nearly every person in that country

It will likely impact pro-Israel non-profits as so many persons involved at all angles are also Israeli citizens, many holding US citizenship too, and it will be prohibited to move money to or from sanctioned people
by Supermancho | 2025-09-22 18:56:42+00:00
> And yet the Navajo Nation bordering both of them has fairly strict gun registries.

The fact there are political differences by region is not a defining factor, or the regions would look very different. The fact it is a cultural topic at all, looks to be one common factor. I feel like I'm talking in circles now.

Regardless, I really don't understand this sort of hair splitting. My imagination isn't that expansive, yet I can understand how these regions might have been determined in many cases. Asking the authors might get answers to these kinds of questions.
by jrflowers | 2025-09-22 18:57:00+00:00
Finding examples of people getting successfully sued for downloading or viewing movies without sharing them should be trivial, then.

Otherwise, less any examples of enforcement or successful legal action, downloading movies is illegal in the US in the same way that blasphemy is illegal in Michigan.

https://www.legislature.mi.gov/Laws/MCL?objectName=MCL-750-1...
by jtwaleson | 2025-09-22 18:57:20+00:00
Yes, the way I described it is actually a sensible approach to some problems.

"Almost-in-time compilation" is mostly an extremely funny name I came up with, and I've trying to figure out the funniest "explanation" for it for years. So far the "it prints a random answer" is the most catchy one, but I have the feeling there are better ones out there.
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-22 18:57:37+00:00
Those initial conditions are the design of your game?

That book strikes me as "Western" in the sense that a lot of anime criticism and other literature from Japan of that time, particularly

https://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Fighting-Girl-Saito-Tamaki/...

where you'll find an actual psychiatrist has heard of Lacan absorb heavily from French theory and do it in a way quite different than we have done it in America because the close tie between French and English causes serious problems of over and under-translation. [1] In Japan $20 dollar words are explained with $1 words and when it is translated to English it comes across as remarkably clear.

I'll grant that there is a certain naive reaction to French theory and thinking inspired by it that an analysis is so incisive that it would be the basis for an revolutionary intervention. I had that when I read Simulacra and it took me a while to realize that and Seduction are accelerationist.

I'd argue though that there is space for an intervention in terms of getting the old guard to at least understand that they don't understand memes, that some brainrot scrawled on bullet casings doesn't mean you're a radical TransFurry or right wing because you talk like a Redditor.

A catholic school student recently wrote a thesis on the application of Girardianism to pornography which is an excellent application but he had the same naive reaction that I had to Baudrillard once that you could understand a phenomenon you could make it go away.

Girard's idea of mimetic desire is interesting, particularly applied to pornography where various "attributes" have stuck like the nasty scowls that make western pornography dead to me yet somebody must think it is acceptable if not arousing because they've seen so much of it. Yet I think desire in the ordinary sense has nothing to do with memes -- you take a pleasure in spreading them that is intrinsic and instantaneous and self-reinforcing the same way a dog takes pleasure in barking. There is the thwarted desire that something might not spread or the boredom of waiting for something to arrive, but those are secondary. You can participate in the meme system without any desire to make something spread, in fact that desire to have some impact outside the meme system is... outside the meme system.

[1] French words are often "fancy" in English if you go to a gas station in Quebec there is an ad for an everyday breakfast sandwich, coffee and hashbrown combo advertised as "L'Ensemble Quotodienne" -- a rock band is "L'Ensemble" and a dive bar that it plays advertises the "SPECTACLE" that Guy Debord warned you about, Derrida got Différance under-translated but I'd argue that L'evenment should also be under-translated even though it is a technical term that Debord and Badiou use in entirely different ways.
by gpm | 2025-09-22 18:57:45+00:00
60% tariffs on solar components from China, an executive that is actively hostile to renewable energy, and you still are massively scaling it to some extent.

67% of new grid capacity in the US was solar in 2024 (a further 18% was batteries, 9% wind, and 6% for everything else). In the first half of 2025 that dropped to 56% solar, 26% batteries, 10% wind, and 8% everything else (gas). Source for numbers: https://seia.org/research-resources/solar-market-insight-rep...
by throwaway346434 | 2025-09-22 18:58:06+00:00
It's not just one person.

Between the initial removal of access, then giving it back after explaining it was a mistake; the people involved started a conversation about governance to clarify/fix things.

https://github.com/rubygems/rfcs/pull/61

The conversation terminated because the majority of those people then had their access revoked again.

When weighing the facts here; which group or claimant has the most evidence for their claims? The technical folks with lots of commits over many years, or the treasurer of an organisation who says the impetus for this was a "funding deadline" so all access had to be seized?
by rpdillon | 2025-09-22 18:58:09+00:00
I think this thread is an example of a fascinating class of miscommunication I've observed on HN, but I want to say it out loud to see if I'm understanding it.

Two people meet in an HN thread, and they both dislike the status quo in a particular way (e.g. that copyright is awful, DRMed games suck, whatever). They both want to fight back against the thing that they dislike, but they do it in different ways.

One person finds alternatives to the mainstream and then advertises them and tell people: Look, here's the other way you can do it so you can avoid this terrible mess! That messaging can sometimes come across as downplaying the severity of the problem.

The second person instead wants to raise awareness of how awful the mess is, and so has to emphasize that this is a real problem.

The end result is two people that I think agree, but who appear to disagree because one wants to emphasize the severity of the problem and the other wants to emphasize potential solutions that the individual can take to address it.

Concretely, I think that's what happened here. I think everybody in this thread is pissed that single-player games would have activation and online DRM. Some people like to get around that by buying on marketplaces like GOG or playing open source games, and others want to change the policy that makes this trend possible, which means insisting that it really is a problem.

Sorry for all the meta commentary. If I got it wrong, I'd be interested to understand better!
by hvb2 | 2025-09-22 18:58:12+00:00
This feels backwards. When you have a good understanding of data structures you have the luxury of testing.

If you focus on testing over data structures, you might end up testing something that you didn't need to test because you used the wrong data structures.

IMHO too often people dont consider big O because it works fine with their 10 row test case.... And then it grinds to a halt when given a real problem
by hermitcrab | 2025-09-22 18:58:38+00:00
'Millionaire flight' and 'trickle down economics' are both bullshit 'theories' invented by lackeys of the rich to explain which the rich shouldn't pay their fair of taxes.

However I am uncomfortable by the use of the term 'near 0%' twice in the article. What the hell does that mean? One of the footnotes says:

"The total number of millionaires reported on the Henley & Partners website to have migrated every year since 2013 to 2023 consistently represented around 0.2% of millionaires annually. "

So why not say 0.2% per year? 'near 0%' just seems slippery and dishonest.
by kragen | 2025-09-22 18:58:48+00:00
Forth was sort of designed by and for people who did want to solve these essential problems anew for each application. Chuck Moore claimed many times that a tailored ("ad hoc") solution that solves only the part of the problem you need to solve for a particular application would be 10× smaller and simpler than a generalized solution that has to balance the needs of all possible applications. He considered it preferable to not have a lot of library code in your application to solve problems you don't actually have. Maybe your ad-hoc solution is brittle, but it's brittle precisely in ways you know about, not in ways you don't.

But you don't have to use Forth that way just because Chuck did. You can totally use a generalized string library in Forth. I don't know which one to recommend, but http://turboforth.net/resources/string_library.html seems to be one possibility.

You can be sure that Python's file.readlines()† will have trouble if you try to read a line that is much longer than your RAM size.

You can get pretty far with just built-in standard functionality, though:

Gforth 0.7.3, Copyright (C) 1995-2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc. Gforth comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `license' Type `bye' to exit 128 constant len create buf len allot ok : greet ." Name? " buf len accept ." Hello, " buf swap type ." !" ; ok greet Name? Zelphir Hello, Zelphir! ok

And, as you said, GForth comes with a heap-allocated string library https://gforth.org/manual/String-words.html#String-words which you can use if you first say

include string.fs

______

† ever since Python 2.0, I'd recommend using list(file) instead of file.readlines(), or just iterate over the file directly, like [line.strip() for line in file if line.startswith('zel')]
by sgt101 | 2025-09-22 18:59:13+00:00
>That isn't the case. Aging has very little to do with our issues. The amount of revenue generated by people in their 30s is nowhere near enough to pay for the state as it is. The biggest marginal increase in sickness benefits has been people in 20/30s.

Apart from "That isn't the case" (great point there) I don't understand how any part of this paragraph refutes what I wrote.

But hey, belief beats stats every time I guess.