MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rsyring | 2025-10-13 18:06:11+00:00
Please note that in my OP, I never mentioned containers.

Let's say, as a developer, I need to do some API interactions with GitHub. So, in a terminal, using 1Password's cli tool `op`, I load my GH API token and pass it to my Python script that is doing the API calls.

Presumably, the reason I use that process is because I want to keep that token's exposure isolated to that script and I don't want the token exposed on the filesystem in plaintext. There is no reason for every process running as my user on my laptop to have access to that token.

But, that's not how things work. The Claude agent running in a different CLI session (as an example) also now has access to my GitHub token. Or, any extension I've ever loaded in VS Code also has access. Etc.

It's better than having it in plain text on the file system but not by much.

Additionally, unless I've misunderstood the systemd docs, if you are passing secrets through environment variables using unit's `Environment` config, ANY USER on a server can read those values. So now, we don't even have user isolation in effect.

My reasoning is pretty plain. It could be wrong, but it's hardly specious.
by atoav | 2025-10-13 18:06:37+00:00
Arguments only matter if we assume totally rational actors. There is ample evidence that this could potentially be a faulty assumption.

A questiom: What do you think, do people first have an emotion and then try to rationalize it? Or do they first have a the rational judgment and only after that start to become emotional?

If you watch right wing media it is pretty clear that emotions play a huge role for them. And because nobody particularly likes having emotions they can't explain, the rationalizations come after: "Windmills are destroy the landscape" (unlike let's say an oilfield which is somehow totally fine), things about the infrasound (which if a concern you can get rid off by the same way it is done with nuclear waste in the US, just use that massive land mass to your advantage).

If we had rational, emotionally distanced actors they would change their mind once all doubts are addressed and the facts are on the table. But that is not the case here in my own experience. Once the last rationalization breaks they go back to the feeling of: "I just don't like it".

That means the much more fruitful question to investigate is that particular dislike and where it might come from, emotionally.

Surely this isn't just one root. For some it may be the "safe" opinion of their herd/tribe. Others say it, their entertainment (that under traditional media law wouldn't deserve the title "News") says it and so on.

For yet others this may be a question of their insecure masculinity. They feel insecure, but men have to be strong! So they try their best to appear strong, by buying manly products, driving manly trucks and spouting manly opinions. You know what isn't manly in their mind? Being sensible. Sensible with other people, the environment, wensible with thought. And then a sensible energy option come around. Guess what, that feels like an attack to them. Suddenly society wants to erect huge pillars thst remind them that being sensible is now required. That really touches their core fear of not being manly enough. Being sensible could be misread as being gay after all.

There are probably more reasons.

P.S.: I am not saying there are no rational critics of wind energy. Whwt I am saying is the bulk of categorical dislike comes from an entirely uninformed, purely emotional direction
by ryanrasti | 2025-10-13 18:07:04+00:00
Author here. Thanks to `kqr` for sharing this!

I wrote this post to distill the tough lessons from using Nix in production for three years with a small team building a full-stack Elixir/React app. My core take is that Nix has already solved the impossible (reproducibility); what remains is solving the approachable (adoption).

Happy to answer any questions about our production experience or the proposals in the article.
by lesuorac | 2025-10-13 18:07:09+00:00
College sports should expand into having an Alumni league. Like the WNBA and other W-sports have a suspicious system where the leagues expenses grow very much in line with revenue while player salaries don't.

Colleges already have the facilities to host games so it seems like an easy steal as there's actually a lot of money in (certain) woman's sports (i.e. USMNT and USWNT in soccer have similar revenue but different salaries) but the salaries are low so its an easier target then say the NFL.
by carterschonwald | 2025-10-13 18:07:33+00:00
Oh fun, I wrote a similar library in 2015 for Haskell. There is an annoying gotcha to deal with: there are sequences of valid characters that can be parsed incorrectly if you’re doing incremental chunks, namely if “0.0” is split across two input chunks you can get a token stream with two valid float literals rather than 1! Namely “0” and “.0”, which is just a really annoying wart of json float syntax.
by latchup | 2025-10-13 18:07:39+00:00
Are you sure? Based on what? All I see is people desperately throwing money they don't have at AI like a gambling addict who just converted their child's college fund into chips.

Call me a buzzkill here, but my bet is you aren't gonna hit it big. While you can win at the casino, that requires a careful plan with contingency solutions, which AI simply does not have. Realistically speaking, it is indeed best to just not play this game; you are just digging a deeper hole.
by surajrmal | 2025-10-13 18:08:00+00:00
Google is not aggressively attempting to kill Android as a FOSS platform. It has always been 99% developed by Google and a handful of close partners like Samsung. It is simply aligning workflows to make this arrangement less costly to maintain. The fact that Graphene is hurt by the change was simply not part of the consideration. I'm sure they can alter their arrangement to get similar access to other partners and continue on as before.
by bluGill | 2025-10-13 18:08:15+00:00
It was generally understood by 1970 that the US didn't hold enough gold to fulfill the promise. You as a normal person couldn't go to any bank and get 1oz of gold though, only other countries could do that and they didn't in large amounts and so it worked out despite there not being enough gold in the US.

In the 1800s 1oz of gold was tradable for $20. The $35 figure was already accounting for some inflation despite the backing (I don't recall the year it changed, but sometime in the 1930s seems reasonable)

$1 used to be tradable for 1oz of silver. since silver and gold have different supplies though sometimes you could (in the 1800s) make a lot of money from this.
by Barrin92 | 2025-10-13 18:08:15+00:00
>Manufacturing is an inferior way to make money

sure in the sense in which operating an airline or high speed rail network makes you less money than running an ad or porn website but the world doesn't run on money, it runs on infrastructure. I believe we have a term for civilizations that value money over power, we call them decadent.

If you're content living in Mark Zuckerberg's slop metaverse that's a possible route to go down but it's important to understand that the world will belong to countries that focus on what powers that entertainment dystopia, and the US has some competitors who have the good sense to understand that the material world matters.
by anosidium | 2025-10-13 18:08:18+00:00
I’m still developing Oliphaunt, a native macOS client for Mastodon, designed to offer a fully native desktop experience that feels at home on the platform. You can find more details, including screenshots and a project overview, here: https://github.com/anosidium/Oliphaunt-Feedback-And-Support. You can try the TestFlight build here: https://testflight.apple.com/join/Epq1P3Cw

I’m also working on the next version of HacKit, a macOS Hacker News reader focused on simplicity, performance and adherence to macOS design language. It’s already available on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1549557075 and further information can be found here: https://github.com/anosidium/HacKit-Feedback-And-Support.

I’d be delighted to hear any feedback, suggestions, or ideas — or simply to connect with others working on Apple platform development.
by lithocarpus | 2025-10-13 18:08:34+00:00
Regarding the reduction in mm Hg due to sodium - my argument is that the kind of impact on blood pressure can be qualitatively different.

In the same way that increased salt intake causes increased water retention, and thus increased weight, but this increased level of water weight goes away after a few days if you start consuming less salt, and there's no evidence of this causing long term harm.

I could see where if one already had severe CVD, maybe eating more salt could be the straw that breaks the camel's back, and thus until they heal the CVD it could be wise to limit salt. But this would be no indication that the salt is the cause of the CVD or causes any long term chronic problem. And it is the long term chronic CVD that is by far the most important to address IMHO. If salt is not causing that, this whole discussion is largely misdirected energy.

---

> IMO Replacing butter with refined oils and whole grain flours/carbs - sure, solid move.

We disagree here but that's a separate issue from salt so I'll leave it. :)

> I’m very wary of trying to find “the culprit” for public health problems [etc]

I agree entirely with this. It's very complex, many factors, no single culprit or silver bullet, and that this is extremely important. It's all the things. So it's important to try to tease out which things are having which kind and degree of effect. And this is where I think salt has been scapegoated in a way that probably just distracts from the root problem as I describe above.
by actinium226 | 2025-10-13 18:08:37+00:00
I only skimmed through the website, but it looks like it only does dotfiles. So I'd need to maintain a separate script to keep my packages in sync. And a script with install commands wouldn't be enough - maybe I decided to stop using abcxyz, I'd like for the script to remove it. Versioning between the package and the dotfile can also sometimes be an issue.
by carlosjobim | 2025-10-13 18:08:37+00:00
> To achieve growth while also reducing energy use, efficiency must be increased proportionately through technology.

And that's something which happens thousands of times per day all over the world in different businesses and in almost all human endeavour. We're constantly getting more and more utility out of the material and energy we use. So growth is both using more resources, as well as using them in better ways.
by Havoc | 2025-10-13 18:09:19+00:00
>If your GPU(s) have less than 80GB, you'll have to tune some of the hyperparameters or you will OOM / run out of VRAM. Look for --device_batch_size in the scripts and reduce it until things fit. E.g. from 32 (default) to 16, 8, 4, 2, or even 1.

That sounds like it could run on a 24gb GPU. Batch size of 8 would imply 20gb mem, no?

...presumably just takes forever
by bell-cot | 2025-10-13 18:09:52+00:00
> On 16 December 2013, the residents [...] heard on the news that their tap water had been switched over to a different source. The water supply, which had won awards for being one of the cleanest in Sweden, had been found to contain high levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or Pfas.

> News reports said the chemicals had seeped into the municipal water system from the firefighting foam used at the airbase. It had been going on for years, even decades, but no one had previously thought to check the water for Pfas...

If a small nation somehow acquired a competent government - how much would it actually cost to run a national testing laboratory for municipal water supplies? One that didn't just test for some "usual top 12" contaminants, but ran the water samples through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_chromatography and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_spectroscopy and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_fluorescence - or whatever modern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_chemistry methods were the most suitable to know what's actually in the water?
by nonethewiser | 2025-10-13 18:10:08+00:00
You are exactly right. The only way to deal with the sheer volume of information generated by LLMs is to use LLMs to paraphrase.

Recently at work a team produced some document that they asked for review on. They mentioned that they experimented with LLMs to write it (didnt specify to what extent). Then they suggested you could feed into an LLM to paraphrase to help review.

So yeah. This is just the world we live in.

rough details -> LLM -> product -> summarize with LLM -> feedback -> revisions -> finished product

Where no single person or group knows what the finished writing product even is.
by alphazard | 2025-10-13 18:11:33+00:00
I'm talking specifically about US companies, which make up the lion's share of popular websites. They are served from the US as a primary location, and the company is incorporated there as well. Modulo CDN hosted assets, there is no presence in the UK.

If the company is in the UK, then yes, they are obviously screwed. The damage to the UK's web presence has already been done. I don't expect anyone would want to incorporate an internet dependent company there.
by NekkoDroid | 2025-10-13 18:12:01+00:00
On systemd systems you can just either set KEY=VALUE pairs in `/etc/environment` or any file in `/etc/environment.d/` (and technically a few other places [0]). In theory it should be relatively easy to write a GUI for it by manually parsing the files.

The application restarting part can't really be fixed, since environment variables aren't ever injected to a running process and can only be changed by the process itself (terms and conditions may apply) and even changes during runtime could be ignored since the program itself may have cached some already computed value based on the variable.

[0]: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/envi...
by zz3 | 2025-10-13 18:12:31+00:00
This is not in line with current scientific beliefs at all, and most biologists will confirm that with you. Just like most things in biology and life in general, sex exists on a spectrum. We also distinguish between sex and gender. On the biological front alone, one person's sexual phenotype (what they appear to be) is determined by several factors, including but not limited to: how many chromosomes, how many are X or Y for humans (XXY vs XYY), the SRY gene (basically even if you're XY, if you don't have a functional SRY gene on your Y chromosome, you will develop as if you were XX), hormones such as testosterone and estrogen, and hormone receptors. We're not actually clear on what percentage of the population is noticeably intersex, but it's estimated to be on the same order of magnitude as red hair. This is not including trans at all, this is just human biological sex. Social roles are a whole separate, but very important ballgame. It doesn't seem like you're very familiar with current scientific thought on this topic, but if you're ever curious it's really interesting and I hope you investigate more! Fun fact! The Y chromosome is actually disappearing and we're not quite sure what's going to happen when it disappears. Not that it would happen for a very long time, but there's plenty more we don't know.
by GuB-42 | 2025-10-13 18:12:31+00:00
QUIC is actually a level 4 protocol, on the same level as UDP and TCP, it could work on IP directly, making it QUIC/IP.

They chose to keep the UDP layer because of its minimal overhead over raw IP and for better adoption and anti-ossification reasons, but conceptually, forget about UDP, QUIC is a TCP replacement that happens to be built on top of UDP.

Now for the answers:

- Why not HTTP over UDP? UDP is an unreliable protocol unsuitable for HTTP. HTTP by itself cannot deal with packet loss, among other things.

- Why not keep HTTP/2? HTTP/2 is designed to work with TCP and work around some of its limitations, it could probably work over QUIC too, but you would lose most of the advantages of QUIC

- Why not got back to HTTP/1? I could turn out to be a better choice than HTTP/2, but it is not a drop-in replacement either, and you would lose all the intersting features introduced since HTTP/2
by rustyminnow | 2025-10-13 18:13:19+00:00
I think in the context of containers you're right, there's a level of isolation and secrets are probably fine. But I think under other contexts that lack that isolation (e.g. bare-metal processes, local dev tooling) there are extra concerns.

(inb4: container env-vars are isolated from other containers, not from processes on the host system)
by seanw444 | 2025-10-13 18:13:29+00:00
Oh for the love of God. Lawmakers that don't understand the things they're making laws about, using tools that have not-insignificant error rates, and whose mistakes will not all be reviewed by a human before being passed as law because there already isn't enough bandwidth without them?

This country is doomed to collapse. This is about the time when Rome decided it was too much overhead to manage the whole empire, so they split into two empires. We're on such a mountain of cards that we're considering running our representative government with AI.

Your optimism just reinforced my blackpill...
by peter_d_sherman | 2025-10-13 18:13:54+00:00
>"Wow, I really enjoyed writing this… …and I hope it wasn’t a boring read."

No, it was very interesting actually!

An excellent deep-dive into the murky area of Unix/Linux environment variables, how they are set, how they are passed, what's really going on behind the scenes.

Basically a must-read for any present or future OS designer...

Observation (if I might!) -- environment variables are to programs (especially chains of programs, parent processes, sub processes and sub-sub processes, etc.) what parameters are to functions -- and/or what command-line parameters are... they're sort of like global variables that get passed around a lot...

They also can influence program behavior -- and thus the determinism of a program -- and thus the determinism of a chain of programs...

Phrased another way -- software that works on one developer's machine might not work on another developer's machine and/or in a production environment because one crucial environment variable was either set or not set, or set to the wrong value...

(NixOS seems to understand this pretty well... that "hermetically sealing" or closing or "performing a closure around" (that's probably slightly the wrong language/terminology in "Nix-speak" but bear with me!) a software environment, including the environment variables is the way to create deterministic software builds that run on any machine... but here I'm digressing...)

But my main point: I complete agree with the article's author -- environment variables are a legacy mess!

Although, if we think about it, environment variables (if we broaden the definition) are a sub-pattern of anything that affects the state of an individual machine or runtime environment -- in other words, things such as the Windows Registry, at least the global aspects of it -- are also in the same category.

Future OS's, when they offer environments for programs or chains of programs to run -- should be completely containerized -- that is, the view of the system -- what data/settings/environment variables/registry variables/files/syscalls/global variables it has access to -- should be completely determinable by the user, completely logabble, completely transparent, and completely able to be compared, one environment to another.

In this way, software that either a) fails to work at all b) works in a non-deterministic way -- can be more easily debugged/diagnosed/fixed (I'm looking at you, future AI's that will assist humans in doing this!) -- then if all of that information is in various different places, broken, and/or opaque...

To reiterate:

>"Wow, I really enjoyed writing this… …and I hope it wasn’t a boring read."

No, I really enjoyed reading it(!), it's a brilliant article, and thank you for writing it! :-)

Upvoted and favorited!
by mannyv | 2025-10-13 18:14:22+00:00
"Adobe couldn't decide if PDF was for print control or documents"

Apparently people don't understand the history of PDF. PDF was originally a way to encapsulate PostScript so you could display it on a screen. Unlike PCL, Postscript (and PDF) were device-independent, with a WYSIWYG guarantee. Postscript and PDF are literally the history of WYSIWYG on personal computers and computer-based printing/typesetting.

PDF is not "print control" in the sense of a job control language. PDF has always been about documents, and the features of PDF files can be seen as an attempt by Adobe to both drive and follow the market's evolution of document handling.

PDF is complicated because it's used widely for lots of different things, including printing. And if you've never worked in the printing industry you have no idea how much of a PITA it is.

PDF succeeded for a lot of reasons, but probably the easiest explanation is that they were easier to create - you just printed it and the PDF printer driver spat out a PDF file that you could share everywhere.
by crote | 2025-10-13 18:14:36+00:00
> Nukes make conventional war for survival irrelevant.

So how come Russia hasn't annexed Ukraine yet? And why spend literally hundreds of billions of dollars a year maintaining a conventional military when you already have nukes?

And when are you going to press that button? Do you nuke Eurasia the second they cease diplomatic communications? When a cargo ship heading to LA founders for mysterious reasons? When a small detachment plants a flag on Little Diomede Island? When they capture Attu Island? When they land troops on Hawaii? When they declare war? When they are walking in San Francisco? When they capture Salt Lake City? When they are 15 minutes away from the missile fields? When DC falls?

What do you imagine the world is going to look like afterwards? If you fired too soon, how are you going to stop the revolution breaking out after you've killed hundreds of millions of innocent people? If you fired too late, why bother? The country is lost already, surely you're not going to nuke yourself?

Besides, that's assuming the existential war happens in the US itself. The US isn't self-reliant, and it will never be. Are you going to nuke any country refusing to sell critical materials to the US? Sure, the US has started wars in the Middle-East for oil before, but nukes?
Turkish "ı" and "ş" bug creates design problem across many fonts?
by Printerisreal | 2025-10-13 18:14:41+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45559767

Inspired by post above, there is another problem with Turkish letters. For more than a decade I have seen font problems just because of these letter. It exist across different systems, online and in public writing and many fonts. Below ss is from Amazon customer service and even they can't escape it. "ı" and "ş" are written in different font so it looks different and not bold.

https://imgur.com/a/qpAP2dc

Even Amazon fonts are not immune to it.
by ahartmetz | 2025-10-13 18:15:27+00:00
The Winsock version doesn't have this limitation. It's a very weak select() because it only works on network sockets, but it doesn't care about numeric values of file descriptors. As on POSIX, file descriptors are added and removed to the select set using macros, and these work on a vector or linked list (I forgot) instead of a bitset.
by deadfece | 2025-10-13 18:15:28+00:00
If you’re just checking alignment or fit on FDM printing, sometimes I just print those specific layers 1mm high and see if I got it right. I also cut away the parts of the model I’m not trying to fix.

Just anything I can do to subdivide the problem space and iterate more quickly.

Since there’s some spool up time on printing (heating up and leveling) sometimes I also bracket parameters 5% on either side of my value and print 3 tests to see if those fit better or worse