MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ggreer | 2025-10-21 21:35:42+00:00
Bridges are not public goods. Public goods are non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Bridges are both excludable (people can be prevented from crossing unless they pay a toll) and rivalrous (only so many people can use a bridge at once). This makes them a private good. Yes bridges are funded by governments with revenues collected from taxes, but that doesn't change their economic classification.

And the main cost of bridges is not materials, it's design, permitting, and construction. For example: Adjusted for inflation, the new San Francisco Bay Bridge span cost $8.6 billion. Its 450,000 cubic yards of concrete weigh around 1.3 million tons, for a cost of around $6,000 per ton. Concrete is $50-75 per ton, so that's 1% of the cost.
by vlovich123 | 2025-10-21 21:36:24+00:00
Swap to disk involves a relatively small pipe (usually 10x smaller than RAM). So instead of paying the cost to page out to disk immediately, you create compressed pages and store that in a dedicated RAM region for compressed swap.

This has a number of benefits: in practice more “active” space is freed up as unused pages are compressed and often compressible. Often times that can be freed application memory that is reserved within application space but in the free space of the allocator, especially if that allocator zeroes it those pages in the background, but even active application memory (eg if you have a browser a lot of the memory is probably duplicated many times across processes). So for a usually invisible cost you free up more system RAM. Additionally, the overhead of the swap is typically not much more than a memcpy even compressed which means that you get dedup and if you compressed erroneously (data still needed) paging it back in is relatively cheap.

It also plays really well with disk swap since the least frequently used pages of that compressed swap can be flushed to disk leaving more space in the compressed RAM region for additional pages. And since you’re flushing retrieving compressed pages from disk you’re reducing writes on an SSD (longevity) and reducing read/write volume (less overhead than naiive direct swap to disk).

Basically if you think of it as tiered memory, you’ve got registers, l1 cache, l2 cache, l3 cache, normal RAM, compressed swap RAM, disk swap - it’s an extra interim tier that makes the system more efficient.
by dpifke | 2025-10-21 21:36:46+00:00
With Windows 11, WSL has X and Wayland support, so you can run graphical applications as if they're native (e.g. share the same cut-and-paste buffer, switch between windows using alt+tab, and so on). It's also much easier to attach USB devices like Yubikeys to an already-running container than the last time I tried to do the same with Parallels. (That was quite a few years ago, so maybe it's gotten better.) You can also launch Windows applications from Linux, which is makes it trivial to control my (Windows-native) browser from within WSL.

I strongly disagree about Mac hardware vs. Thinkpads or Framework, but to each their own.
by waynesonfire | 2025-10-21 21:37:10+00:00
> zram, formerly called compcache, is a Linux kernel module for creating a compressed block device in RAM, i.e. a RAM disk with on-the-fly disk compression. The block device created with zram can then be used for swap or as a general-purpose RAM disk

To clarify OP's represention of the tool, it compresses swap space not resident ram. Outside of niche use-cases, compressing swap has overall little utility.
by gregsadetsky | 2025-10-21 21:37:18+00:00
From having talked to many folks, migrations are psychologically very, very, very very hard.

At least, the "fear" factor (will the new system work? what bugs will it introduce? how much time will I spend, etc.) pushes a lot of folks to accept a very big price differential aka known knowns versus unknowns...

It's understandable really. It's just that once you've migrated, you almost definitely never want to go back :-)
by TomasNieteriter | 2025-10-21 21:38:04+00:00
In Ernst Mach's Opera Omnia, his Principia had a `gedenken experiment' visiting a related question about angular inertia, as an affection of all the matter in the universe and its simultaneity with local causation. He inferred by simile of unwinding the trajectory of a toy spinning top on the possibility of reversing the arrow of time.
by tony-vlcek | 2025-10-21 21:38:49+00:00
Also 2, as part of migrations:

There 3 types of migration files/scripts: structure, basic-data, dummy-data.

structure - new table, add column goes here basic-data - e.g. default config values go here dummy-data - gets used on local and stating

Run migrations with a flag to include the dummy-data migrations.
by b33j0r | 2025-10-21 21:38:55+00:00
I talked like that before this happened, and now I just feel like my diction has been maligned :p

I think it’s because I was a pretty sheltered kid who got A’s in AP english. The style we’re calling “obviously AI” is most like William Faulkner and other turn-of-the-20th-century writing, that bloggers and texters stopped using.
by hinkley | 2025-10-21 21:39:09+00:00
I have a keyboard dance that feels like choreography or maybe, at this point, ritual prayer.

There are definitely shortcuts I could take in some scenarios but walking the safe path even though it's a little longer is the sane response especially when you can type as fast as most of us and you've been using a bourne shell as long as I have.

Or if I'm being more charitable, it's about staying outside the yellow tape lines on the factory floor. No exceptions.
by bdangubic | 2025-10-21 21:39:19+00:00
> Code needs to be simple and maintainable and do what it needs to do.

And yet after 3 decades in the industry I can tell you this fantasy exists only on snarky HN comments.

> Hand-coding is no longer "the future"?

hand-coding is 100% not the future, there are teams already that absolutely do not hand-code anything anymore (I help with one of them that used to have 19 "hand-coders" :) ). The typing for sure will get phased out. it is quite insane that it took "AI" to make people realize how silly and wasteful is to type characters into IDEs/editors. the sooner you see this clearly the better it will be for your career

> How much you rely on an LLM won't necessarily change the quality or speed of what you produce.

if it doesn't you need to spend more time and learn and learn and learn more. 4/6/8 terminals at a time doing all various things for you etc etc :)
by nitwit005 | 2025-10-21 21:39:32+00:00
It's truly, very difficult, to believe the man cares more about the mission of his companies than extracting wealth from them: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...

Most CEOs presumably do want their companies to succeed and do good things in the abstract, but a lot of them would happily have them fail if it made them a huge pile of cash.
by testing22321 | 2025-10-21 21:39:48+00:00
SpaceX and to a much lesser extent Tesla are good examples. Excluding those for a minute, what else does the US have world-leading manufacturing of?

Semiconductors? Nope.

High speed rail? Nope.

Auto industry? Nope.

Major infrastructure projects like bridges, tunnels, airports, etc? Nope.

Electronics (phones/laptops/etc)? Nope.

?????

The US is not exactly a manufacturing powerhouse.
by dls2016 | 2025-10-21 21:40:15+00:00
I got a job at AWS/EFS from a post here on hacker news. Stayed there almost 2 years until RTO took its toll (left early 2024). If not for that, I'd still be there... and I went in with full knowledge of all the horror stories. Perhaps the EFS org was just a diamond in the rough, but it was honestly one of the best jobs I've had. Even the on call wasn't so bad, with management taking an extremely hands-on and proactive approach to reducing operational burden. Extremely high technical bar which taught me a ton about building and operating large distributed systems. I do wonder if EFS is still run so well.

I've since been at Oracle/OCI (absolute dog shit with the worst on call I've ever seen, and I've been in the military lol), and now at Microsoft/Azure, which so far seems like a decent workplace.
by hirvi74 | 2025-10-21 21:40:42+00:00
I've got another one for macOS. It's not as significant as what you listed, but it was extremely annoying for me.

When using homebrew, the default package for emacs is version 30. However, that version on macOS was compiled with an outdated tree-sitter version (v14). If one tries to install a tree-sitter parser for a particular language it will not work with emacs 29 or 30 on macOS (or at least not that I could figure out). I tried the D12Frosted version and some of the alternatives for macOS (I forget the names).

The current tree-sitter project is on v15+, so in order for it to work, one has to go through the commit histories for each language and find when the tree sitter's parser version was last compatible with v14. To my knowledge, this was not clearly listed in all the git commits in a nice clean manner.

One alleged workaround was to install everything via RedHat OS and move the installed parsers over to macOS since their version of emacs and the tree-sitter parsers are still compatible. However, I was not interested in doing this.

Interestingly enough, Neovim does not have this issue on macOS to my knowledge, but I could be wrong.

Now, this is not entirely an emacs issue, but it does introduce an interesting issue. If emacs has to be compiled with a particular tree-sitter version, then it makes things quite difficult to maintain. The maintainers apparently are discussing various options on how to handle this going forward, but there isn't a clear way to work around this.

Now, I do believe if one builds emacs from source, he or she can work around this issue to some degree, but I was also not interesting in doing this because one loses out on some of the nice features that the macOS focused emacs versions come with. I also did not want to install all the dependencies required to build from source since those dependencies are not something I have any other use for other than building emacs.

So, I just gave up on the tree-sitter. Though, I think emacs 31 has this fixed until it happens again, but I also encountered a lot of other bugs when trying other use it since it's a prerelease version anyway.

This was all months ago, so maybe things have changed. I haven't kept up. I can live without tree-sitter for the time being.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-10-21 21:40:53+00:00
Their point (I believe) is “why do we want to go there over the moon?” What is there that makes the effort worth it at all now or later (until we can truly move a large population there permanently/for very long stretches)?

If the point is a colony, then we should just do it on the moon. If the point is for the advances in technology it will bring, we don’t have to go to Mars to explore those things. We could just keep practicing on the moon.

Obviously it’s not exactly the same but idk, most of why I’d be interested in our going to mars can be answered with “it’s easier, more feasible, and generally just as useful to do it on the moon instead.” It’s still low gravity, no oxygen/breathable atmosphere, a hostile desert essentially, etc. but far closer. We can respond to emergencies more easily. We know for a fact we are currently capable of getting there and back safely.

TL;DR: we will likely get a lot more out of dumping our resources into trips to and from the moon and building something there than trying to go to mars for a very long time.
by dahviostudios | 2025-10-21 21:40:57+00:00
On October 14, Consumer Reports published testing showing some popular protein powders contain lead levels 15x over California's safe limits. Naked Nutrition (7.7 µg), Huel (6.3 µg), and several others got "AVOID" ratings.

I was using one of the contaminated brands daily. Spent the weekend analyzing the data and built this tool to help people:

- Check if their current brand is safe - Find verified-clean alternatives based on their needs - Understand the Consumer Reports rankings

Tech stack: Vanilla JS, no framework (wanted it fast and simple). Quiz uses client-side logic, no backend needed. Storage via localStorage for quiz state.

Also wrote detailed articles breaking down why plant proteins tested worse (soil absorption), which certifications actually matter (NSF Certified for Sport, Clean Label Project), and symptoms of lead poisoning from chronic exposure.

The hardest part was distilling 23 products + complex heavy metal data into a simple 60-second quiz without oversimplifying the safety concerns.

Happy to answer questions about the data, methodology, or implementation. Feedback welcome!
by alganet | 2025-10-21 21:41:06+00:00
It depends on where the rest of the team is.

Have they gone through the experience of having a persistent staging environment that slowly drifts from production (1)? If they haven't, they can't possibly understand why that is a bad idea. I'll just go with the flow until they realize. Maybe I'll hint at the possible issues sometimes.

Have they figured out that copying prod is a bad idea (3)? If they haven't, same thing. They can't understand why that sucks and why that's not true reproducibility.

Finally, (2). Fixtures! It's also a journey. There are so many things that can go wrong. Knowing those things depends on having gone through those journeys with a persistent staging and production copies.

There is no relief from the pain. No magic bullet. No product or solution that will ever solve this. You have to go through those stages. If you're lucky, someone will guide you through them (in practice). The journey can be sped up, but I haven't seen a shortcut that works (like forcing the team to adopt a practice without them internalizing it).
by Waterluvian | 2025-10-21 21:41:08+00:00
Re: 1. I think the America of Theseus mindset is a bit troubling. A lot of people like to identify with achievements that they played no role in. Based on zero expertise whatsoever, I have a sense that this is a bit self defeating. To be born a winner, to be taught you’re a winner… how can that be healthy?

Today’s America scores zero points for its accomplishments of the past. But I think one way it can be a good thing is the, “we’ve done it before, we can do it again” attitude. Which is somewhat opposite to “we already won!”
by roadside_picnic | 2025-10-21 21:42:13+00:00
I've been in the "doomer" camp for over a decade and been surprised how many things I thought were far off in the future have come to fruition earlier.

But, the one thing I always find interesting, philosophically, about believing the world-as-we-know-it is coming to an end is that all of the things people are concerned about will happen no matter what.

Being afraid of the end of the world is ultimately being afraid that we will lose the things we have, that our work will be lost to time and history, that ultimately we will return to a void and all of "this" will have been for nothing.

However, all of that is true either way. You will lose everything you've ever loved over time in life, all the work you've done will be lost to time, in the end all of your efforts will be for nothing and even that won't matter.

The "end of the world" scares people because it forces them to discard the normal tools they use combat these many existential anxieties, but the world continuing to go on doesn't actually resolve any of those anxieties.
by jumploops | 2025-10-21 21:42:41+00:00
“LSM trees are the underlying data structure used for [..] DynamoDB, and they have proven to perform really well at scale [..] 80 million requests per second!”

This is a tad bit misleading, as the LSM is used for the node-level storage engine, but doesn’t explain how the overall distributed system scales to 80 million rps.

iirc the original Dynamo paper used BerkeleyDB (b-tree or LSM), but the 2012 paper shifted to a fully LSM-based engine.
by tomku | 2025-10-21 21:42:58+00:00
Believe Andrew Ng's new course is all Python now, yeah. Amusingly enough another class that I took (Linear Algebra: Foundations to Frontiers) kinda did the opposite move - when I took it, it was all Python, but shortly after they transitioned to full-powered MATLAB with limited student licenses. Guess it makes sense given that LAFF was primarily about the math.
by teekert | 2025-10-21 21:43:27+00:00
I use NixOS and a lot of it is in a single file. I just saw some ansible coming by here, and although I have no experience with it, it looked a lot simpler than Nix (for someone from the old Linux world, like me… eventhough Nix is, looking through your eyelashes, just a pile of key/value pairs).
by Dagger2 | 2025-10-21 21:43:29+00:00
So... why? The article only mentions "the Medicube installer, based on OpenStack’s Ironic, “created completely wrong configurations for IPv6.”" and "Certain Dell BIOS implementations lacked complete IPv6 boot support, and when present, were buggy". The former sounds more like it's a failure of the Medicube installer rather than of IPv6, and the latter sounds more like a failure of certain Dell BIOS implementations.

It says the BIOS problem is fixed and they're using a custom deployment tool now, with no mention of them needing to move off of IPv6. They're running "a record-breaking Kubernetes cluster" on it, so it sounds more like it succeeded rather than failed?
by gregsadetsky | 2025-10-21 21:43:40+00:00
Correct, GitHub is necessary at this point to deploy code.

However, yes, you can ask Disco to fetch an existing Docker image (we use that to self-host RabbitMQ). An example of deploying Meilisearch's image is here [0] with the tutorial here [1].

Do you typically build your Docker images and push them to a registry? Curious to learn more about your deployment process.

[0] https://github.com/letsdiscodev/sample-meilisearch/blob/main...

[1] https://disco.cloud/docs/deployment-guides/meilisearch
by bahmboo | 2025-10-21 21:44:01+00:00
I agree people should at least learn the happy path. It really is not hard at all and it solidifies the underlying concepts.

However I find there is a huge difference between me working solo on a repo or with one or two other people versus managing a complex project with 10+ developers and multiple SKUs in the same codebase (as an example).

That's when the "neurosurgery" aspects come in. Problems were frequently caused by junior devs making mistakes in their repo management that could be a headache to untangle (again, as an example).
by jdprgm | 2025-10-21 21:44:32+00:00
Just saw Nate Berkopec who does a lot of rails performance stuff posting about the same idea yesterday saying Heroku is 25-50x price for performance which is so insane. They clearly have zero interest in competing on price.

It's a shame they don't just license all their software stack at a reasonable price with a similar model like Sidekiq and let you sort out actually decent hardware. It's insane to consider Heroku if anything has gotten more expensive and worse compared to a decade ago yet in comparison similar priced server hardware has gotten WAY better of a decade. $50 for a dyno with 1 GB of ram in 2025 is robbery. It's even worse considering running a standard rails app hasn't changed dramatically from a resources perspective and if anything has become more efficient. It's comical to consider how many developers are shipping apps on Heroku for hundreds of dollars a month on machines with worse performance/resources than the macbook they are developing it on.

It's the standard playback that damn near everything in society is going for though just jacking prices and targeting the wealthiest least price sensitive percentiles instead of making good products at fair prices for the masses.
by damnesian | 2025-10-21 21:44:39+00:00
This is really the perfect point in the timeline- "in these uncertain times-" to posit themselves as a working repository of credible information.

Also I firmly believe the Wikipedia app is key to their sustained relevance. Users get forwarded to the app from web browsers with wiki links, this gets people in the dedicated interface.

from a design standpoint there need to be more avenues on each page inviting people to browse and explore, spend more time there.
by spelk | 2025-10-21 21:44:44+00:00
Enlist and get your top secret clearance managing LANs and teaching officers how to add images into PowerPoints, they said. You’ll never be unemployed. Then you realize the “job” mostly involves being a disposable cog in some ex-colonel’s endless PowerPoint war. Every meeting feels like a high-stakes reenactment of “Yes, sir,” where accountability is optional and speaking up is career suicide. Billion-dollar mistakes are brushed off as “lessons learned,” while you get a lecture about integrity. It’s the world’s most expensive game of “the emperor has no clothes,” except everyone’s wearing lanyards and classified guilt.
by dotnet00 | 2025-10-21 21:45:42+00:00
I don't think Shuttle's issue was that the material science wasn't there. The issue was the way the design was constrained, and the general aerospace culture at the time (that only began to change with "New Space").

Shuttle's heatshield would've been much less dangerous if it wasn't facing a giant ice and insulation covered external tank (like, if it was mounted on top of a booster), but the Air Force's demand for crossrange forced giant wings, which forced the lower mounting position.

They could've iterated on heat shield designs, particularly with attachment mechanisms, but every mission had to carry people, so you couldn't risk it, and anyway, the industry culture was already set in the "even the simplest things must cost large amounts of money and time" stage.

One of the key points that I feel a lot of people miss is that Starship is pretty much the first program actually doing the flight testing needed to understand the engineering requirements for an efficient fully reusable heatshield. They don't have much prior art to look at for tile spacing, mounting mechanisms, metal tiles or transpiration cooling. The fundamental materials haven't changed a lot, but we can see over test flights that SpaceX are figuring things out.

In the early days they used to lose tiles all the time, even after just pressure testing IIRC. Nowadays they may barely lose any tiles on static fire tests. Similarly, tile loss on reentry has decreased greatly, and we've gone from seeing plasma leaving the fins barely attached, to the latest test, where the fins were pretty much fully intact.
by cookiengineer | 2025-10-21 21:46:14+00:00
You have two options: Burn out because you need to correct every stupid line of code, or... Start to not give a damn about quality of code and live a happy life while getting paid.

The sane option is to join the cult. Just accept every pull request. Git blame won't show your name anyways. If CEOs want you to use AI, then tell AIs to do your review, even better.