MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jiggawatts | 2025-09-01 01:02:50+00:00
I'm in the process of breaking up a legacy deployment on "one big server" into something cloud native like Kubernetes.

The problem with one big server is that few customers have ONE (1) app that needs that much capacity. They have many small apps that add up to that much capacity, but that's a very different scenario with different problems and solutions.

For example, one of the big servers I'm in the process of teasing apart has about 100 distinct code bases deployed to it, written by dozens of developers over decades.

If any one of those apps gets hacked and this is escalated to a server takeover, the other 99 apps get hacked too. Some of those apps deal with PII or transfer money!

Because a single big server uses a single shared IP address for outbound comms[1] this means that the firewall rules for 100 apps end up looking like "ALLOW: ANY -> ANY" for two dozen protocols.

Because upgrading anything system-wide on the One Big Server is a massive Big Bang Change, nobody has had the bravery to put their hand up and volunteer for this task. Hence it has been kept alive running 13 year old platform components because 2 or 3 of the 100 apps might need some of those components... but nobody knows which two or three apps those are, because testing this is also big-bang and would need all 100 apps tested all at once.

It actually turned out that even Two Big (old) Servers in a HA pair aren't quite enough to run all of the apps so they're being migrated to newer and better Azure VMs.

During the interim migration phase instead of Two Big Server s there are Four Big Servers... in PRD. And then four more in TST, etc... Each time a SysOps person deploys a new server somewhere, they have to go tell each of the dozens of developers where they need to deploy their apps today.

Don't think DevOps automation will rescue you from this problem! For example in Azure DevOps those 100 apps have 100 projects. Each project has 3 environments (=300 total) and each of those would need a DevOps Agent VM link to the 2x VMs = 600 VM registrations to keep up to date. These also expire every 6 months!

Kubernetes, Azure App Service, AWS App Runner, and GCP App Engine serve a purpose: They solve these problems.

They provide developers with a single stable "place" to dump their code even if the underlying compute is scaled, rebuilt, or upgraded.

They isolate tiny little apps but also allow the compute to be shared for efficient hosting.

They provide per-app networking and firewall rules.

Etc...

[1] It's easy to bind distinct ingress IP addresses on even a single NIC (or multipe), but it's weirdly difficult to split the outbound path. Maybe this is easier on Linux, but on Windows and IIS it is essentially impossible.
by becausereligi | 2025-09-01 01:02:51+00:00
Alexander tied Bessus between two trees to dick him down -- Babylonian Chronicle One. But the Akkadian chronicles have the older stories.

While the Greek custom was to tie between trees ("Between Two Ferns"), the Romans and the East did crucifixion.

The Israelite Jews - who had invaded the pristine land of Canaan per the circum covenant of Abraham but really without the consent of the Canaanites - asked the Romans to handle Jesus Christ, a Jewish reformer who had trained to fish with John the Baptist. The Romans asked Herod to handle Christ. Herod was neither Jewish nor Roman (but Canaanite).

20 years later Paul - from a temple to Corinth, Greece - decided it was a love story; it's about love.
by mooiedingen | 2025-09-01 01:04:52+00:00
It is possible,... There is a GNU/Linux distro that has all the software needed. "DragonOS" For all you (Wireless) networking endeavors... But over here at The other side of the pond... "transmitting" radiowaves is "Regulated" with a "Permit"/ham-radio license... and the spectrum already is "Distributed" between operators.

however.. i am not saying one cannot have fun?! Spending an afternoon sticking together a broomstick and an usbstick trying to contact major tom because that is literally what you will be doing.

get a conductive piece of "material" Plug into usb and try to let it radiate electromagnetic waves...

have fun and stay safe <3
by isaacremuant | 2025-09-01 01:05:07+00:00
Authoritianism based on an emergenc that prevents civil rights such as freedom of assembly and movement. Censorship. Lockdown. Those set the tone. Media and corporations that need to censor what people say to combat disinformation.

Later we get the wet dream of surveillance with V passports. Social credit style. If you watched the ads companies were trying, you would've seen it. But of course you're going to call me a conspiracy theorists just like it happened back then.

Locking down your devices, putting age restrictions and therefore digital id and no privacy to access the internet, it's all pretty convenient.

But hey, Google is doing this all for your own good, or they aren't and the good EU will stop them because there's no way they'd like control.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-09-01 01:05:25+00:00
> Can you name an important software written in Tcl or Tk?

MacPorts[0] uses Tcl significantly.

EDIT:

The expect[1] command also uses Tcl and has a variant which uses Tk.

0 - https://github.com/macports/macports-ports

1 - https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=expect&apropos=0&s...
by Nursie | 2025-09-01 01:05:48+00:00
I want my less tech savvy family members to be able to buy locked-to-the-company-store hardware, that they can’t run other things on, as it protects them from one avenue of scams and hacks. This protection can and will be worked around if it can be easily disabled.

Fully open phone systems consistently fail to sell enough to make a difference, which is a bit of a shame, but honestly at this point the market has spoken.
by Terr_ | 2025-09-01 01:06:07+00:00
Code is an asset/liability the same way that unstable volatile chemicals are.

If you use them promptly, in the right way, you'll make money. If you let it sit and degrade, or spill it, then it's a liability.

While source code--unlike certain chemicals--doesn't spontaneously change on its own, its fitness-for-purpose does, as the organization constantly shifts goals and process.
by isaacremuant | 2025-09-01 01:06:45+00:00
Yes. They were. V passports. Censorship of so called disinformation.

I don't give a flying fuck if you dismiss me. You already did in 2020, 2021 and so on and I'm still here, didn't you?

Now I get to see you move uncomfortably while still ready to lick the next boot.

Enjoy it.
by throwup238 | 2025-09-01 01:06:58+00:00
Borders are not like coastlines because they’re abstract delineations, not physical things, even though they’re frequently defined using geographic features.

In this case, the length of the border is dominated by the length of the thalweg of the Oyapock river. Using thalwegs is SOP in international law when using rivers as the natural border and the choice of river is due to treaties that are hundreds of years old.
by api | 2025-09-01 01:07:24+00:00
A lot of this attitude comes from the bad old days of 90s and early 2000s spinning disk. Those things failed a lot. It made everyone think you are going to have constant outages if you don’t cluster everything.

Today’s systems don’t fail nearly as often if you use high quality stuff and don’t beat the absolute hell out of SSD. Another trick is to overprovision SSD to allow wear leveling to work better and reduce overall write load.

Do that and a typical box will run years and years with no issues.
by DvdGiessen | 2025-09-01 01:08:21+00:00
You might also be interested in the IRMA protocol and the app implementing it, Yivi. They support a similar scheme, but using some additional cryptographic systems that provide extra security properties such as unlinkability that are very useful for privacy.

https://docs.yivi.app/technical-overview/

Since I learned about it I've been hoping a system providing such unlinkability would be further developed and preferably adopted as the standard for online identity by for example the EU. Unfortunately I don't think the current proposals for the eIDAS include this (although it's been a while since I read up on this and I'd love to hear from someone more familiar if I'm wrong!)
by bsder | 2025-09-01 01:08:33+00:00
You don't need to allow completely unrestricted access to the network. However, there needs to be a process with a defined cost to certify your hardware. The cost can be expensive and time consuming but it needs to be known and published and the cellular companies need to be held to it.

The problem right now is that even if I had a couple of million dollars lying around, I STILL couldn't reliably get a piece of hardware certified for the cellular network. I would have to set up a company, spend untold amounts of money bribing^Wwooing cellular company executives for a couple years, and, maybe, just maybe, I could get my phone through the certification process.

The technical aspects of certification are the easy part.

The problem is that the cellular companies fully understand that when it happens their power goes to zero because they suddenly become a dumb pipe that everybody just wants to ignore.

That's why this will take legislation.
by noahjk | 2025-09-01 01:09:32+00:00
Agreed. I'm currently in a regressed state but a few times I've successfully done this and it changes life. Extremely locked down screen time rules are necessary - break the exciting loop of picking up your phone, eventually you'll re-associate the phone when each time you pick it up you're met with disappointment that nothing exciting is allowed.

Life just slows down in a way that allows you to appreciate little things, make better decisions and treat people with more empathy, read more, reflect on life, get better sleep. ADHD is easier to manage. Less decision fatigue and general mental fatigue (I personally feel that scrolling/youtube are not mentally refreshing and leave me just as if not more drained after).

The danger is in letting yourself slip. It's a very quick slope and brain chemicals are usually stronger than our willpower. Even knowing how much better life is during these periods, I'm still currently in a down cycle because I'm struggling to find the energy to make the right choices. Work can also be draining which takes away good choice energy later in the evening.
by hirvi74 | 2025-09-01 01:09:44+00:00
> A good IQ test would be a good way to help our most promising children get the largest head start.

If that were true, then why are they not administered to every child? IQ tests appear to only to the potentially disabled and potential precocious. If a child is already showing signs of precociousness, then what would an IQ test present that was not already observed?

> It could help point out adults in your own company that have some type of potential.

I highly doubt adults at a company have hidden potential that is unknown. Underused? Sure. It's not like the companies have some sort of hidden genius that no one knows about. If one were a genius, it would have likely been apparent far earlier in their life.

> It could be used for scholarship purposes.

Do you really believe we should be awarding scholarships for meritless human attributes? Why not offer scholarships to other human attributes like height, weight, and beauty while we are at it?

That's thing about IQ, according to the research, it's like eye color, skin color, etc.. There isn't a damn thing one can do to change it (positively). So, I am not certain I am comfortable offering scholarships on raw IQ alone. In fact, isn't the entire purpose behind grades, standardized testing, etc.?

(Yes, I am aware the early SAT was a psuedo-IQ test, but that ended in the 80s or 90s, I believe. ACT was never truly comparable to my understanding.)
by zikzak | 2025-09-01 01:10:38+00:00
I am tired of people mocking me for my interest in this topic so I won't bother to back this up too much, but this article doesn't really do what you say. It is itself disinfo designed to provide a simple, easily digested explanation for people that don't wish to think too deeply on this topic.

Anyone taking a cursory interest knows that the US government routinely sends out disinfo on the subject and uses it to cover up their own secret aerospace development. That was never contentious.

However, sightings and reports of strange phenomenon go back very far in recorded and oral history and they are not limited to the United States.

My personal feeling is people are terrible eye witnesses and historical sources are prone to be misinterpreted through a biased, modern lens. But I also know that if you read the Wikipedia article on von Neumann probes, it doesn't seem that far fetched to think one might have found its way here especially considering we are not that far away from being able to build them ourselves.
by Liftyee | 2025-09-01 01:10:58+00:00
As other comments have pointed out, this statement (one I 100% support, BTW) is a little naive. I can see how it might be unreasonable to expect companies to publish documentation, build infrastructure, etc. to support running your own code on the hardware you own (which 99% of people will never need to do).

However, I strongly believe that - should one choose to do so - you should not be stopped from jailbreaking, cracking, etc. manufacturer restrictions on the hardware you own. Companies aren't obligated to support me doing this - but why should legislation stop me if I want to try? (You can easily guess my thoughts on the DMCA.)
by crazygringo | 2025-09-01 01:12:11+00:00
It's an excellent question. The Wikipedia citations don't actually lead to much, and there's no indication they use the same methodology.

Best I can find is the CIA World Factbook [1] which lists France's border with Spain at 646 km (under "France" and "Spain", same value), and Brazil's border with French Guiana at 649 km (under "Brazil").

So, already a radical difference -- from a 45km difference to a 3km difference (just 0.5%). But there's more:

> When available, official lengths published by national statistical agencies are used. Because surveying methods may differ, country border lengths reported by contiguous countries may differ.

But there's no indication whether these particular measurements are made by the CIA using the same technique with maps of the same resolution... or, being so close to begin with, whether different resolutions would change the asnwer... or if these are official lengths derived using totally different and ultimately incomparable procedures.

So maybe it's not so cut-and-dried that France's longest border is with Brazil...?

[1] https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/about/archives/2022/f...
by tamimio | 2025-09-01 01:12:12+00:00
Not defending Apple, but when they restrict sideloading it's because they made both the software and the hardware. They didn't exploit thousands of open source developers who basically worked for free making Android what it is right now, only to be hijacked by Google. I used to use Android but I did notice a huge decline around 2015, which was around the time when the Android creator left Google.
by agentultra | 2025-09-01 01:13:41+00:00
100 percent agree.

I’ve given talks on how various jailbreak exploits work in order to teach people how to protect their own software but also with the suggestion that we should be able to do this.

It’s nuts that personal computers aren’t personal anymore. Devices you might not think of as PC’s… just are. They’re sold in slick hardware. And the software ecosystem tries to prevent tampering in the name of security… but it’s not security for the end user most of the time. It’s security for the investors to ensure you have to keep paying them.
by scosman | 2025-09-01 01:14:03+00:00
+1. Smartphones aren't a monopoly. GrapheneOS is a thing. More companies can build hardware for it if there's demand. Not every piece of hardware needs to be general purpose computer.

I've been delighted to get my parents on iPhone+iPad for simplicity (and they have too). It feels this crowd sometimes assumes every barrier put in place is anti-consumer, but it's not. Blocking access to sensors, limiting background runtime, blocking access to other app's data, limiting it to reviewed apps... are all great things for most people. Most people don't have the technical literacy to have "informed consent" prompts popping up every 5 minutes, and most of them know it too. Most folks don't mind trusting Apple to make the tougher technical calls for them, and actually appreciate it.

Make cool hacker centric hardware. Make cool easy to use, locked down, and foolproof hardware. Both can and should exist.
by mpyne | 2025-09-01 01:14:06+00:00
A specific presentation I'd point to is Khalil Estell's presentation on reducing exception code size on embedded platforms at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY2FlayomlE

But honestly you'd get vast majority of the benefit just by skimming through the slides at https://github.com/CppCon/CppCon2024/blob/main/Presentations...

With a couple of symbols you define yourself a lot of the associated g++ code size is sharply reduced while still allowing exceptions to work. (Slide 60 on)
by thejohnconway | 2025-09-01 01:14:08+00:00
People are responding to you saying that it doesn't retain the yin-yang shape, but I've been watching for a while on 64x speed, and the yin-yang shape is one it repeatedly returns to.

I'm not even a dimwitted individual with an advanced degree in hyperbolic topology, but I can see what's happening intuitively. When one of the balls makes an indent large enough, that indent focusses the bounce from the circular edge which reinforces the indent further. This leads to a semi-stable shape where one of the balls is bouncing around a horseshoe and the other in a tunnel. However, if one side of the horseshoe becomes pinched small enough that ball is less likely to enter, that side of get eliminated, and you have a yin-yang.

More simply, the round edge seems to encourage tunnelling, and any asymmetry in the tunnelling is yin-yang-ish.
by nikkwong | 2025-09-01 01:14:42+00:00
There is a lot of data that meditation is beneficial for people with ADHD and potentially even more so since they “need it more”. Yes it is extremely challenging which is why in my parent I stated that according to what I have read, it takes someone with ADHD potentially twice as long to see the benefits of practice in comparison to healthy controls. I have ADHD and have learned to meditate; my mind was out of control, and I feel as though I have control of it now, without stimulant medication. I encourage you to look into the data if this is something you find interesting.
by trod1234 | 2025-09-01 01:16:12+00:00
I disagree with this article on fairly foundational grounds.

This does nothing long-term for ADHD, and in fact creates a dependency on drugs which in many cases are not necessary because ADHD and other Spectrum Disorders fall into catchalls. It treats symptoms not the cause.

Sure you can manage so long as you get your SOMA, but the moment its gone you are back to square one, and the risk is not zero.

The best thing for managing this is meditation, and a disciplined lifestyle regiment.

Meditation being the intentional practice of stilling ones thoughts, which anyone can do with a little practice.

In my opinion, not a lot of people actually have ADD/ADHD, but the rhetoric gaslights towards this label because the diagnostic criteria are catchalls and ambiguous. Additionally, it has no cure, and treatments may have side-effects and other risk factors.

Fun fact, you can actually induce ADHD temporarily with a bit of hypnosis, its just a heightened state of awareness.

Most literature on ADHD, and other spectrum disorders doesn't pass muster, and they are just looking to sell you on an incurable ailment where you have to keep coming back for more.
by danpalmer | 2025-09-01 01:17:22+00:00
> Companies aren't obligated to support me doing this

Where does one draw the line on support? If I jailbreak an iPhone, should I still get Apple customer support for the apps on it, even though they may have been manipulated by some aspect of the jailbreak? (Very real problem, easy to cause crashes in other apps when you mess around with root access) Should I still get a battery replacement within warranty from Apple even though I've used software that runs the battery hotter and faster than it would on average on a non-jailbroken iPhone?

I feel like changing the software shouldn't void your warranty, but I can see arguments against that. I probably fall on the side of losing all software support if you make changes like this, but even then it's not clear cut.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-01 01:17:54+00:00
That works for smooth vector lines, like the border of Colorado, but not for rivers. The thalweg of a river is the same as a coastline -- it has the same fractal nature to it. The more you zoom in, the more it wiggles back and forth.

So yes, the length of the border is dominated by the length of the river, but that's just repeating the question, precisely because the thalweg is a physical thing, not a geometric delineation.
by throwaway13337 | 2025-09-01 01:18:23+00:00
Agreed. Monopoly is the killer of the market engine that powers the positive sum society we all benefit from.

Actually enforcing the anti-monopoly rules on the books would help, too.

And while we're making wishes, we could kill the VC-backed tech play by enforcing a digital version of anti-dumping laws.

With those rules in place, we'd see our market engine quite a bit more aligned with the social good.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
by interroboink | 2025-09-01 01:18:40+00:00
Jujutsu has many Mercurial-style features, one of them being revsets[1] - a set-notation-style DSL for selecting changesets (eg: which ones to log, etc). I have never found anything as powerful as revsets in Git.[2]

[1] https://jj-vcs.github.io/jj/latest/revsets/

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22520751/what-is-the-git...
by glitchc | 2025-09-01 01:19:15+00:00
First, we had bespoke computer systems where the hardware and software were tailored to solve specific problems. Then, as computers became commoditized, the hardware was more standardized and software interacted with it through an abstraction layer. Now, we're circling back to heterogeneous hardware where software and hardware are tightly coupled for the best performance and power efficiency. Of course there's always a trade-off. In this case, it's flexibility.

The smartphone does not consist of just one processor, it's a collection of dedicated processors, each running custom algorithms locally. Sure, there's software running in the application layer, but it's playing more of a coordination role than actually doing the work. Just think of sending a packet over the internet and how different it is between a smartphone and a computer, how much more complex a cellular modem is compared to a network card.

It's less about software now and more about hardware accelerated modules. Even CPUs run primarily on microcode which can be patched after the fact.

These patterns are cyclical. It will take a number of years before we return to standardized compute again, but return we will. Eventually.
by mannyv | 2025-09-01 01:19:31+00:00
If your database is slow because it's on spinning disks, then a cache will speed up access.

That's not a fundamental mistake, and there's very little you can do about that from an efficiency point of view.

It's easy to forget that there was a world without SSDs, high speed pipes, etc - but it actually did exist. And that wasn't so long ago either.

And of course sometimes putting data nearer to the user actually makes sense...like the Netflix movie boxes inside various POPs or CDNs. Bandwidth and latency are actual factors for many applications.

That said, most applications probably should investigate adding indexes to their databases (or noSQL databases) instead of adding a cache layer.