MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ookblah | 2025-09-13 04:02:20+00:00
matt relies on the passage of time and the fact that nobody really cares too much about wordpress drama. it's best that people do not forget what type of person he actually is behind the public facade when he inevitably pulls this kind of shit again later.

from literally back in 2011 when someone predicted exactly what would happen and got crucified for it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110117190122/http://wpblogger....

https://web.archive.org/web/20110117192124/http://wpblogger....

one of his responses to DHH when the WPE thing went down:

https://archive.md/UZZit
by lalaland1125 | 2025-09-13 04:03:01+00:00
What middle class SFHs? There are no middle class SFH neighborhoods remaining in Los Angeles or the Bay Area. Take a look at Zillow. Your average young person isn't buying anything anyways.

Your information is at least two decades, maybe three, out of date.

But this bill will help lower rents, which is a very worthy goal in and of itself.
by roncesvalles | 2025-09-13 04:03:06+00:00
I think you have a misunderstanding. Most companies that do LC-style interviews usually show unknown problems.

Memorizing the Top 100 list from Leetcode only works for a few companies (notably and perplexingly, Meta) but doesn't for the vast majority.

Also, just solving the problem isn't enough to perform well on the interview. Getting the optimal solution is just the table stakes. There's communication, tradeoffs between alternative solutions, coding style, follow-up questions, opportunities to show off language trivia etc.

Memorizing problems is wholly not the point of Leetcode grinding at all.

In terms of memorizing "patterns", in mathematics and computer science all new discovery is just a recombination of what was already known. There's virtually no information coming from outside the system like in, say, biology or physics. The whole field is just memorized patterns being recombined in different ways to solve different problems.
by epistasis | 2025-09-13 04:03:41+00:00
Those SFH are already rentals, from small landlords that bought a second, then a third, then a fourth home.

The ship has already sailed on the redistribution, because 1) California created an artificial housing shortage from regulatory capture by home owners, and 2) condo defect law differs so much from SFH defect law that it's almost always insane to sell condos instead of renting apartments.

This is not the doing of SB 79, this was Boomers deciding to milk future generations and prevent them from having the same easy opportunity that they enjoyed.
by orbital-decay | 2025-09-13 04:03:48+00:00
Yeah. If you try hard enough, you can slightly break the correction and directly notice the curvature of the straight lines, especially long ones moving towards you, on the border of your visual field. The eye physically produces a heavily distorted picture, but it's at least partially rectified and the brain does a sort of continuous neural SLAM, what you perceive is the result of it.
by theendisney | 2025-09-13 04:04:31+00:00
coins = [100,50,25,10,5,1] change = 1234; result = [0,0,0,0,0,0]; for(i=0:i<coins.length;i++){ while(change>coins[i]){ result[i]++; change-=coins[i]; } } //[12,0,1,1,4]

Coudnt help myself sorry
by strcat | 2025-09-13 04:04:49+00:00
Pixels are the most secure Android devices and the only ones meeting the hardware security requirements for GrapheneOS at this time. GrapheneOS is working with a major Android OEM towards their future devices meeting these requirements.

Neither /e/ or CalyxOS is a hardened OS. They provide much weaker protection against these attacks than the stock Pixel OS or especially an iPhone. They're weakening privacy and security substantially including lagging many months and even years behind on standard security patches. CalyxOS has not shipped the June 2025-06-05 patch level or later. /e/ is regularly many months behind on OS and browser security patches along with very often being a year or more behind on kernel updates and firmware/driver updates.

See https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24134-devices-lacking-stand... with in-depth information about /e/ on Fairphone devices with links to multiple articles from third party security researchers covering it and other information.

Those non--Pixel devices do not provide a secure base either.
by twotwotwo | 2025-09-13 04:04:51+00:00
Discord: https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-supercharges-network-di...

(Somehow the name "SuperDisks" was burned into my brain for this. Although Discord's post does use 'Super-Disks' in a section header, if you search the Internet for SuperDisks you'll everything's about the LS-120 floppies that went by that name.)
by echelon | 2025-09-13 04:06:34+00:00
I really don't get the engineers on HN sometimes.

I get that Matt based WordPress on open source software initially, but 99% of the work that became what WordPress (and by extension, WP Engine) is today was done by him and his company.

WP Engine contributes nothing back. They're just leaches on an open source license.

They're doing what AWS and the other hyperscalers have done. Making bank on other people's hard work because "pure" open source allows for third party commercialization without compensation. (Or even giving back, as is with WP Engine's case. IIRC, they're not a top contributor to the open source code.)

Shouldn't we be angry at the appropriators that take everything and give nothing back?

AWS is 99.999% closed source. They're taxing the industry and contributing to increased centralization. Much of what made the early web so exciting has been hoovered up by these open source thieves.

Google for taking WebKit, snatching the web, and then removing Manifest v2 amongst other crimes.

Again - I think the community is attacking the wrong person here. Matt acted immaturely, but he's the one that put in the work. Not WP Engine.
by bertil | 2025-09-13 04:07:26+00:00
It’s kind of hilarious how he called Orwell to deny something as blatant as Trump’s racism and immediately copied some absurd talking points from the darkest echo chambers of the internet. Denying that Trump is fascist because The United States, dealing with a Civil War, used wreaths as a symbol of unity is a particularly sophomoric attempt at turning bad puns into arguments. You have to live in particularly deep dungeons to think that’s not laughable.
by userbinator | 2025-09-13 04:08:39+00:00
At this point, it starts WIN86.COM (loaded by WIN386.EXE) to start a real-mode copy of Windows in the first VM, otherwise known as the “System VM”.

The DOS-based Windows lineage is definitely very interesting to study and a large contrast to more "normal" operating systems like Linux or NT, because they're actually hypervisors running a VM; and their whole userspace is essentially based around an extended DOS (protected mode) application.

From there, it checks if the resident protected-mode software is a memory manager that it recognizes

What's noteworthy is that EMM386 is also a hypervisor, albeit a very thin one. One could imagine an alternate reality in which x86 gained full virtualisation extensions earlier, causing the hypervisor model to be taken even further and creating a bigger architecture gap between Windows and other OSes.
by pandaman | 2025-09-13 04:08:43+00:00
>No explicitly not that. I want whoever sponsors and h1b or the equivalent in my fantasy world here to pay for the cost to society up front and then for that h1b person to have the same freedom as a citizen.

That would be too much - an alien having all the privileges of a citizen but no obligations is above a mere citizen. If you want to become a citizen there is an employment-based immigration, if you don't - you are going to be restricted in any developed country because normal countries do not put foreigners above citizens.

>My thinking behind that is that if a company is saying we can not find a single citizen who can fill this role so we need to import one, then this makes it real.

Nothing like this happens with temporary visa workers. All that company claims in such a case is that they want to hire a foreigner and are going to pay no less than the minimum wage determined for the position. This system is based entirely on the temporary nature of the employment so there is not much scrutiny as the legal fiction here says that the foreigner is going to leave in 6 years tops.
by dmz73 | 2025-09-13 04:08:54+00:00
UTF8 is a horrible design. The only reason it was widely adopted was backwards compatibility with ASCII. There are large number of invalid byte combinations that have to be discarded. Parsing forward is complex even before taking invalid byte combinations in account and parsing backwards is even worse. Compare that to UTF16 where parsing forward and backwards are simpler than UTF8 and if there is invalid surrogate combination, one can assume it is valid UCS2 char.
by cwstarblazer | 2025-09-13 04:09:27+00:00
What sort of conclusions do you want more explanation for? If you're curious about, for example, how I determined that the Windows/386 executable format was in the Xenix x.out format, I didn't. Geoff Chappell examined/disassembled the WIN386.EXE loader to see how its loader code lined up with the contents of the WIN386.386 file, and Michal Necasek of the OS/2 Museum immediately noticed obvious similarities between the format described by Chappell and the Xenix x.out format. After examining the WIN386.386 file, he found that it did indeed line up with the x.out format. It is worth noting that this specific finding was a late edition to the article; I send a draft version of parts of it to Necasek who informed me of this fact, so I rushed an edited version to Neozeed hours before he posted the article on his Patreon (which occurred a few days before the posting to the blog). As it happens, Necasek had noted that Windows/386 used the x.out format in a comment about a year ago on one of his old articles about Windows/386, though I hadn't seen it.

If you're curious about anything else, I'm happy to elaborate.
by strcat | 2025-09-13 04:09:44+00:00
CalyxOS was not a hardened OS and is a much different space from GrapheneOS. It hasn't provided the 2025-06-05 or later Android security patches and updates for it have been discontinued. It's strange to recommend people use an insecure and non-private OS without updates.

https://calyxos.org/news/2025/08/01/a-letter-to-our-communit...

https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm has a high quality comparison of the privacy and security between different alternate AOSP-based operating systems.
by bigiain | 2025-09-13 04:12:01+00:00
Most providers will hand you a new IP if you suspend then restart your instance. That at least spreads you pool of IPs across their AS (or some subset of it). For the price of a "reputable" VPN service, you could run 2 or 3 low end VPSes from different providers. A bit of Ansible, Python (or language of your choice), and perhaps some browser automation if the cheap VPN provider doesn't have a usable API - should allow you to automate provisioning VPN endpoints and rotating IP addresses.

That would at least move your needle around a lot, even if it isn't bringing along the haystack of all the other VPN customers sharing their endpoint IP addresses. You couldn't consider this sufficient protection against TLAs or Mossad. Or disgruntled Magic The Gathering players burnt by MtGox...
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-09-13 04:12:45+00:00
Here is what an UTF-8 decoder needs to handle:

1. Invalid bytes. Some bytes cannot appear in an UTF-8 string at all. There are two ranges of these.

2. Conditionally invalid continuation bytes. In some states you read a continuation byte and extract the data, but in some other cases the valid range of the first continuation byte is further restricted.

3. Surrogates. They cannot appear in a valid UTF-8 string, so if they do, this is an error and you need to mark it so. Or maybe process them as in CESU but this means to make sure they a correctly paired. Or maybe process them as in WTF-8, read and let go.

4. Form issues: an incomplete sequence or a continuation byte without a starting byte.

It is much more complicated than UTF-16. UTF-16 only has surrogates that are pretty straightforward.
by strcat | 2025-09-13 04:13:58+00:00
> It forces you to give your money to Google and rely on Google hardware

These are the only reasonably secure mobile devices with proper alternate OS support. It's not GrapheneOS forcing people to use these devices if they want a device to run it but rather other OEMs not providing what is required. The hardware requirements are listed at https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices. GrapheneOS has been working with a major Android OEM since June 2025 towards their future devices meeting these requirements and providing official GrapheneOS support.

> Their developers are constantly attacking GNU/Linux phones, which are the actual long-term solution for both freedom and security.

These devices provide objectively far less privacy and security at a hardware, firmware and software level. Linux itself is not a long term approach to privacy and security due to being a massive monolithic kernel written in C with very poor security. A long term approach will involve moving over current software onto a reasonably secure base. Moving to a dramatically less private and secure desktop operating system stack would be a huge regression in both the short and long term. It's not advancing as quickly in those areas, would not the usability/functionality people expect and is definitely not the future of secure devices. Android's current incarnation based around the Linux kernel is not the future of secure devices either, but it's far more private and secure today with a clearer path to moving forward.
by cwstarblazer | 2025-09-13 04:14:16+00:00
What's noteworthy is that EMM386 is also a hypervisor, albeit a very thin one. It is absolutely noteworthy, and something I touch on in my article; Windows/386 was heavily based on EMM386's code, both for the EMS emulation as well as for the V86 monitor itself. EMM386 was the starting point for Windows/386, and CEMM/EMM386 are special because they know how to transfer their state into Windows/386 via GEMMIS aka the Windows/386 Paging Import Specification.

After a conversation with Ralph Lipe, designer of Windows/386, he revealed to me that Windows/386 was so thin of a layer over EMM386 (being a slightly more heavy hypervisor but not by much) that it had no scheduler for 32-bit code; there was one thread of execution in the VDMM that IRET'd into VMs, but each VM did not also have an independent Ring 0 protected-mode context like in Windows version 3.0.

One could imagine an alternate reality in which x86 gained full virtualisation extensions earlier, causing the hypervisor model to be taken even further and creating a bigger architecture gap between Windows and other OSes. Worthy reading would be: https://www.os2museum.com/wp/an-old-idea-x86-hardware-virtua...
by grugagag | 2025-09-13 04:14:47+00:00
It’s not about memorizing individual problems per se, but rather recognizing overall patterns and turning the process into a gameable endeavor. This can give candidates an edge, but it doesn’t necessarily demonstrate higher-level ability beyond surface familiarity with common patterns and the expectations around them. I’d understand the value if the job actually involved work similar to what's reflected in leetCode style problems, but in most cases, that couldn’t be further from reality. leetCode serves little purpose beyond measuring a candidate’s willingness to invest time and effort. That’s the only real virtue it rewards. But ultimately, I believe leetCode style interviews are measuring the wrong metric.
by strcat | 2025-09-13 04:15:46+00:00
CalyxOS was not a hardened OS and is a much different space from GrapheneOS. https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm provides a high quality comparison of the privacy and security between different alternate AOSP-based operating systems.

CalyxOS has essentially been discontinued, see https://calyxos.org/news/2025/08/01/a-letter-to-our-communit.... It hasn't received the 2025-06-05 or later patch level.
by epistasis | 2025-09-13 04:15:51+00:00
It would actually cost a lot less to use renewables and storage than a bunch of nuclear.

For a completely decarbinized grid, there are two paths: 1) 100% renewables plus storage, or 2) ~90% renewable plus storage, and 10% nuclear/advanced geothermal.

There's lots of debate about which one would be cheapest. But the true answer depends on how the cost curve of technologies develops over the coming 20 years. (Personally, I think 100% renewables will win because projections of all experts severely overestimate storage and renewables costs, while simultaneously severely underestimating the costs of nuclear. Renewables and storage are always over delivering, while nuclear always under delivers. So I think that trend will continue...)

You won't hear much about this in the popular media though, because they are too afraid of offending conservatives with politically incorrect facts. Sites like Ars Technica cover it though:

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22092022/inside-clean-ene...
by gpm | 2025-09-13 04:16:17+00:00
No amount of altruism or engineering work entitles you to lie/cheat/extort/defame/...

When you publish something under an open source license, you entitle the rest of the world to use it to get rich. That's what the license says on the tin, what the licenses have always been advertised, etc. I have absolutely no problem with AWS or WPEngine using that entitlement, nor do I have any problem with any software engineer (or software engineering organization like AWS) choosing not to publish source code they didn't promise to. Even if I wasn't of this opinion though - I don't see how someone violating this supposed prohibition could possibly entitle Matt to lie/cheat/extort/defame/...

Edit: I know it's off topic to talk about flagging, but can we consider not flagging the comment this is in reply to? I think it's generated valuable discussion for people learning about this case... even though I strongly disagree with the author.
by fakedang | 2025-09-13 04:16:43+00:00
Ukraine is different because Ukraine is fighting under one identity, that of their legitimate elected government. Afghanistan's Communist government was deposed by the warlords, who then began carving fiefdoms for themselves, which eventually gave rise to corruption, then the counter-corrupt-govt movement (the Taliban), and eventually a safe haven for Al Qaeda. That was also the reason for the US nation-building efforts in Afghanistan to fail miserably.
by gorgoiler | 2025-09-13 04:17:12+00:00
The Roche phenomenon in the article is always an interesting one, for me. I know this will sound silly to most people here but my experience with the Bernoulli “explanation” for lift in aerofoils makes me feel a little uneasy about tidal forces in general.

I don’t mean that I find the Bernoulli explanation non-sensical — that’s a very common thing these days — more that the experience of listening to the falsehood presented as truth by so many people now means I am suspicious of other non-intuitive explanations.

In this specific case, I can’t get a good intuition about how tidal forces explain (1) Earth’s moon causing ocean bulges on both sides of Earth; and (2) tidal friction making Earth’s moon stop spinning and move further away. I feel like it’s one of those phenomena, like aerofoil lift, whose explanation is glossed over far too quickly given how odd the explanation is.
by whateveracct | 2025-09-13 04:17:29+00:00
You're being too first principles here, for one. These giant operations have coarse rules because they are giant. Coming up with a single counterexample is not compelling. Coarse rules are inherently going to have false positives. That's a feature not a bug - regulated entities can't risk racking up offenses due to their automations or policies being too lax. Sooo..you did not "gotchya" anything with your comment.

Secondly, I was talking about categorically changing how we treat MC/Visa. If you are going to change their class of operation, something has to give. And it gets complicated.
by roncesvalles | 2025-09-13 04:17:32+00:00
I never made any claims about optimality. It works (for whatever reason) hence companies continue to use it

If it didn't work, these companies wouldn't be able to function at all.

It must be the case that it works better than running a RNG on everyone who applied.

Does it mean some genius software engineer who wrote a fundamental part of the Linux kernel but never learned about Minimum Spanning Trees got filtered out? Probably. But it's okay. That guy would've been a pain in the ass anyway.
by cyberax | 2025-09-13 04:20:15+00:00
> It is not. We’re discussing what coal is being replaced with for electricity generation. But let’s talk about it.

Let's. DW has a nice overview article: https://www.dw.com/en/how-germany-seeks-to-cut-electricity-c...

A third of the total cost is grid charges, and another third is taxes. Both go towards subsidizing the renewables.

BTW, the US average for all consumers is 14 cents: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

> So building out more gas plants won’t eliviate prices when the gas is responsible for them in the first place.

So Germany is _deepening_ its dependency on natural gas prices by building more plants because it's... more volatile?

Just imagine if there was some other reliable form of energy that doesn't require fossil fuels.

> None of that has to do with electricity.

It has everything to do with electricity. The government understands that the grid can't handle additional load from heating, so the subsidies are not pursued vigorously.

Again, let me repeat, actions speak louder than words. Like this one: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/german-coalition-agrees... Or just from today: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/cop/eu-countries-dela...
by nchmy | 2025-09-13 04:21:28+00:00
you didnt even link to the right version of the DHH post! The original had this gem of a paragraph:

> David, perhaps it would be good to explore with a therapist or coach why you keep having these great ideas but cannot scale them beyond a handful of niche customers. I will give full credit and respect. 37signals inspired tons of what Automattic does! We’re now half a billion in revenue. Why are you still so small?

https://archive.md/4yLNR
by twotwotwo | 2025-09-13 04:22:08+00:00
They mention it as a block device, and the diagram makes it look like there's one reader. If so, this seems like it has the same function as the page cache in RAM, just saving reads, and looks a lot like https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-supercharges-network-di... (which mentions dm-cache too).

If so, safe enough, though if they're going to do that, why stop at 512MB? The big win of Flash would be that you could go much bigger.
by SilverElfin | 2025-09-13 04:22:32+00:00
> The people who want small, mid-sized towns are free to live literally anywhere they want outside major metro areas.

This is what I was referring to, in terms of HN’s attitudes on this topic. Why should a “major metro area” change to accommodate newcomers? It should just stay serving its current residents, who may want it to stay the size it is. The ones desiring to live there at a price they can afford are the entitled ones. They could be the ones to choose to live “anywhere they want outside major metro areas”. Major metro areas also don’t just come in one size. There are larger cities and smaller ones, denser ones and less dense ones. And it is perfectly valid to want a smaller one.
by lovemenot | 2025-09-13 04:22:41+00:00
I don't know what to say. I have tried to point it out more than once. I agree with EU's approach to earbud access, but am also sympathetic to Apple wrt to ROI on its LLM.

Perhaps the issue you seem to be having is that there's nuance in a position which tries to see an issue from both sides. Whatever is the problem with your comprehension, I advise you to reflect on the fact that others in this thread seem to get it and some have raised valid counterpoints or added relevant information.