MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cogman10 | 2025-10-30 12:18:38+00:00
Kotlin on a modern JVM comes pretty close.

* Performance - the JVM is very competitive with C/C++ performance.

* Compile times - Not go fast, but not C/C++/Rust slow.

* Concurrency - Virtual threads (finalized in 21) bring in the concurrency capabilities of go to the JVM

* Type System Flexibility - Kotlin isn't quite as flexible as Typescript, but it's pretty close. It's more flexible than java but not as flexible as scala. I think it strikes a good middle ground.

* Native platform integration - This is probably the weakest part of the JVM but it's gotten a lot better with the work done on Project Panama (mostly delivered in 22). Jextract makes it a lot easier to make native integrations with Java. Definitely not as painful as the JNI days.

There's also kotlin native that you could play around with (I haven't).
by Citizen8396 | 2025-10-30 12:18:52+00:00
There are dubious results for "uBlock" as well on browser extension stores. If it's not breaking rules (copyright violation, malware) it's precarious for companies to take action. It's obvious to me that uBlock Origin is the "correct" result, but how would a company determine that at scale?

The app was removed a day after your article was posted. The app name, developer, icon, and images are all different. It's absolutely a problem, but it was addressed.

If Apple aggressively took action against this with a high error rate, the headlines would probably be about anti-competition, censorship, and upset developers.
by BirAdam | 2025-10-30 12:18:53+00:00
I absolutely loved OS/2. It was an absolutely phenomenal operating system. I really wish that IBM had put more effort behind it. Today, if MS and IBM could actually cooperate with one another, it'd be great to get it open sourced.

Sadly, by the time OS/2 was really competitive, MS had taken the market, and there was little reason for most users to go buy another operating system when Win3 or Win95 came on their machines, and NT was shipping on workstations.
by terminalshort | 2025-10-30 12:19:02+00:00
You Europeans are the ones who saw the Nazis and decided to take a page out of their playbook, not us. Saying you are censoring "to prevent Nazis" means nothing to me because I've seen the people you call "Nazis". You are just another person who pretends to favor democracy, but in reality only means if those damn voters vote for who you tell them to.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-10-30 12:19:03+00:00
If I lose power I can have a home generator running. These are incredibly common where I am due to hurricane outages - you’ll hear sometimes multiple on a single block powering whole homes.

S3 goes down, your entire data infrastructure (and systems attached to it) is out of reach. Local backups that can be deployed and run like S3 as if your services are still up, unless I’m mistaken, aren’t very common and would mean doing the thing you got S3 to handle in the first place. A generator is much easier to set up and use to solve the problem in a 1:1 way comparatively with zero dependence on local utilities and click on almost quite literally the second you lose power. Yeah they can’t run forever and aren’t the most cost efficient, but people use them weeks and have 100% function of all electronics in their home again.

I am not responsible for building and deploying these systems, I just depend on some of them at my job and interact with S3/media convert a ton. My understanding has always been that backups that can be restored very quickly are the aim, not trying to keep all the things attached to S3 running as if it’s still going. But if I am wrong please let me know and I would love to hear more from folks about this! I actually find this whole dance very interesting
by Aerolfos | 2025-10-30 12:19:06+00:00
Actually more common than you might think.

Bethesda games have the same ecosystem - they do provide an official plugin system, but since modders aren't content with the restrictions of that system, they reverse engineered the game(s, this has been going on since Oblivion) and made a script extender that hacks the game in-memory to inject scripts (hence the name).
by rramadass | 2025-10-30 12:19:47+00:00
Most folks don't understand what Physicists mean when they say "Reality doesn't exist at the Quantum level". Words like "Reality", "Illusion" etc. mean quite different things when applied at quantum level vs. classical-macro level.

The best book to get a grasp on the above is Werner Heisenberg's classic Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science. The introduction by Paul Davies itself is worth the price of the book since it highlights the main issues quite clearly.

At the fundamental level quantum systems have an inherent indeterminism (as a consequence of the famous uncertainty principle) which is what we find hard to grasp. It does not mean total anarchy but that you can only calculate relative probabilities of the alternatives in the answer set i.e. it is a statistical theory. Thus it can make definite predictions about sets of identical systems but generally cannot say anything definite about a specific individual system.

For example, an electron doesn't exist as a single thing occupying a specific trajectory around the nucleus. It only exists as a set of potentialities occupying an area of space viz. the so called electron shell. Only when a measurement is made does a electron-with-position or electron-with-momentum can be said to come into existence (since before the measurement there are only probabilities and you cannot measure both position and momentum sharply simultaneously). It is in this sense that the Reality of an electron is said to only exist in the Measurement/Observation and cannot be said to exist otherwise.

The other side of the coin is that, Modern Neuroscience tells us that the Brain itself is wired to Construct Reality from incomplete data and we seek/construct patterns where there are none. See for example Cordelia Fine's A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives and watch this Ted talk by Susana Martinez-Conde Reality is made of illusions—and we need them - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzDw07RqCSs
by Marshferm | 2025-10-30 12:20:22+00:00
Quoting Timos Moraitis a Neuromorphic PhD

"For reasons like this, "in-context learning" is not an accurate term for transformers. It's projection and storage, nothing is learnt.

This new paper has attracted a lot of interest, and it's nice that it proves things formally and empirically, but it looks like people are surprised by it, even though it was clear."

https://x.com/timos_m/status/1983625714202010111
by boxed | 2025-10-30 12:20:42+00:00
Hmm, I don't think that's correct. The single "Gone" has written "IOMMI" on it, but I think that's a design flourish mostly. There is an artist named "IOMMI" on Spotify though: https://open.spotify.com/artist/7H9kxQfhfZ0kJ7IOD3CTAP?si=l9...
by falcor84 | 2025-10-30 12:21:31+00:00
I was actually talking with some small children recently about the snow white story, and I found it amazing how for them there was nothing magical about the mirror on the wall - it's just a different form factor of a google home device.

Edit: on a separate note, this got me thinking - why does the story make it a mirror? I don't recall it ever being used for its reflective property. Is there supposed to be some deeper meaning to the mirror being a reflection of the queen? Because otherwise, it could have just been a magic talking picture.
by whstl | 2025-10-30 12:21:37+00:00
Same difference. Just because the huge amount of AWS work is distributed among other teams doesn't mean it's less work.

AWS in 2025 is way more work than Heroku/Fly/Vercel, but also more way work than renting bare metal from say Hetzner/OVH, and perhaps even more than renting colo.
by shubhamjain | 2025-10-30 12:22:00+00:00
This is one of the reasons I believe Google will ultimately win the AI race once the VC funding tap runs dry. For all its breakthroughs, OpenAI lacks any fiscal discipline. Sam Altman seems convinced that as long as they’re delivering value and have a clear mission, the money will somehow take care of itself. That’s fine for now, but the music will stop playing one day.

When it comes to software engineering at scale, nothing beats Google. They already operate the world’s largest and (profitable) information index, they design their own chips, and employ the best engineers who know how to deliver massive systems cost-effectively. They can sustain large investment far longer than any other company simply because of how profitable all their existing businesses are. I just wish they would get their act together when it comes to product management.
by throwaway-aws9 | 2025-10-30 12:22:05+00:00
I've seen how the cloud changed over 20 years from s3/ec2 in 2006 to what we have today. I've also seen how it's built at AWS. It's ironic they call it utility computing.

What I always feared as a user was that they'd invent a new billable metric, which happened a few times. Have you ever seen a utility add them at this pace? The length of your monthly usage report shows all those items at $0 that could eventually be charged. Let that sink in.

Another interesting element is that all higher level services are built on core services such as s3/ec2. So the vendor lock in comes from all propaganda that cloud advocates have conditioned young developers with.

Notice how core utilities in many countries are state monopolies. If you want it to be a true utility, perhaps that's the solution to get them started. The state doesn't need a huge profit, but it needs sovereignty and keep foreign agents out of its DCs. Is it inefficient? Of course. But if all you really need is s3/ec2 and some networking / queuing constructs, perhaps private companies can own higher tier / lock-in services while guaranteeing it runs on such a utility. This would provide their users reduced egress fees from a true utility which doesn't need (and is not allowed to have) a 50x profit on that line item.
by sgarland | 2025-10-30 12:22:25+00:00
> Generally it's best practice in this case to never delete messages from a SQL "queue", but toggle them in-place to consumed and periodically archive to a long-term storage table.

Ignoring the potential uses for this data, what you suggested has the exact same effect on Postgres at a tuple level. An UPDATE is essentially the same as a DELETE + INSERT, due to its MVCC implementation. The only way around this is with a HOT update, which requires (among other things) that no indexed columns were updated. Since presumably in this schema you’d have a column like is_complete or is_deleted, and a partial index on it, as soon as you toggle it, it can’t do a HOT update, so the concerns about vacuum still apply.
by Snafuh | 2025-10-30 12:22:35+00:00
It's already happening. Coal use in the US was up 15% in H1/25 compared to the previous year. Partially due to a shift from higher prices gas.

Coal retirement in the US is almost entirely driven by economics. If someone needs the power, coal plants will stay open and capacity factor go up.

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/elec_coal_renew.php
by UncleMeat | 2025-10-30 12:22:57+00:00
Google is definitely not doing nothing. A lot of smart people are there who work very hard.

But, as a Google employee for about a decade at this point, I really do think that the company is trash when it comes to planning and coordination and is getting worse at it over time. I think that there are a lot of things it never really needed to learn how to do because the ads money is just so outrageous.
by curt15 | 2025-10-30 12:23:45+00:00
The most pernicious effect of Big Cloud is the general erosion of infra know-how in the general public. People increasingly need to go out of their way to learn about computer hardware, networking, databases, disaster recovery, etc, when the default business decision is to outsource those tasks to a cloud service provider. For Cloud to become a commodity, computer professionals need to understand both infra and software.
by incomingpain | 2025-10-30 12:24:06+00:00
>Where are the peace movements? There has to be popular pressure to institute arms control, make peace and ultimately dismantle these nuclear weapons.

The current peace movement likes nuclear bombs. Which is odd, the old peace movement didnt, but it has been extremely effective difference.

But this distinction has essentially made nobody acknowledge them as a peace movement. Which is crazy, we finally have a peace movement that's successful and they dont get credit.
by vitus | 2025-10-30 12:24:15+00:00
I envy your intuition about high-dimensional spaces, as I have none (other than "here lies dragons"). (I think your intuition is broadly correct, seeing as billions of collision tests feels quite inadequate given the size of the space.)

> Just intuitively, in such a high dimensional space, two random vectors are basically orthogonal.

What's the intuition here? Law of large numbers?

And how is orthogonality related to distance? Expansion of |a-b|^2 = |a|^2 + |b|^2 - 2<a,b> = 2 - 2<a,b> which is roughly 2 if the unit vectors are basically orthogonal?

> Since the outputs are normalized, that corresponds to a ridiculously tiny patch on the surface of the unit sphere. Since the outputs are normalized, that corresponds to a ridiculously tiny patch on the surface of the unit sphere.

I also have no intuition regarding the surface of the unit sphere in high-dimensional vector spaces. I believe it vanishes. I suppose this patch also vanishes in terms of area. But what's the relative rate of those terms going to zero?
by Thorrez | 2025-10-30 12:26:50+00:00
I think Google has at least 1 datacenter that uses batteries instead of generators.

>In Belgium, we’ll soon install the first ever battery-based system for replacing generators at a hyperscale data center. In the event of a power disruption, the system will help keep our users’ searches, e-mails, and videos on the move—without the pollution associated with burning diesel.

https://blog.google/inside-google/infrastructure/cleaner-dat...

Disclosure: I work at Google, but no on anything related to this.
by a4isms | 2025-10-30 12:27:35+00:00
Old-timers who date back to when Joel Spolsky's early musings on the business of software development were fixtures on the HN front page will remember him using the phrase "fire and motion" for Microsoft's old strategy of constantly making changes so that everyone trying to keep up was—like the Red Queen—running as fast as they could but not getting anywhere.

> Watch out when your competition fires at you. Do they just want to force you to keep busy reacting to their volleys, so you can’t move forward?

> Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features. Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don’t have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP.

—Joel Spolsky, "Fire and Motion," 2002

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/
by cncjchsue7 | 2025-10-30 12:30:37+00:00
Opting not to over engineer the solution with abstractions nobody asked for until you came along is the definition of best practice. something not being designed for any and all use cases doesn't make something bad practice. Reading and writing from a filesystem you always expect to available is more than reasonable. Modular code for the sake of modularity is a recipe for fizz buzz enterprise edition.
by throw0101c | 2025-10-30 12:30:39+00:00
> “If you want to get rich, build roads first; have fewer children, plant more trees.”

Having fewer children followed "naturally" as child mortality dropped and women's education and workforce participation rose. You can quite clearly see China's birth rate dropping before the one-child policy was enacted:

* https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/11/20/will-the-...

* https://populationmatters.org/news/2021/06/chinas-changing-c...

Even India, which has also been growing in prosperity, has seen a declining fertility rate without a heavy handed government policy:

* https://archive.is/https://www.economist.com/china/2015/07/1...
by potato3732842 | 2025-10-30 12:30:44+00:00
> An obvious example was the decline of slavery ( a huge proportion of the population of the Roman Empire) but the descendants of slaves were not the only people who benefitted from the removal of imperial power, and heavy imperial taxes, etc.

Look at how a lot of those societies were structured. Were those people really doing "better" or are we just assuming that because of the biases our modern culture brings?

Being not a slave across the rome-middle ages boundary is like having a degree in liberal arts. It might've meant something at first but the back slide basically watered it down to nothing for a lot of people. That's why it went away. There was no point in maintaining it as an institution generally after Rome fell.

More broadly, there's a reason nobody really cared about slavery, rights, freedom, etc, etc, until the 1600s+ (i.e. the beginning of the off ramp toward industrialized societies). Prior to then so much of society was enslaved by the literal physics of the work that needed to be done to keep a roof over everyone's head and food in their stomachs that it didn't really matter. Almost nobody was in a place to exert more influence upon their life arc than the wind does upon the path of a stone thrown through the air (which is to say some but not much) so society didn't expend effort to hash out the details of something that wasn't relevant. Only once there were more surpluses the various shades of freedom become something that society could benefit from defining.
by latexr | 2025-10-30 12:30:52+00:00
This is frankly depressing.

> As my eldest son’s birthday was approaching, we suggested that instead of asking for physical gifts, he ask for their equivalent in money. That way, he gathered a decent amount of capital for his first investment adventure.

Yes, why would you want a toy or a book? Why waste time having fun or learning? You could instead watch a number go up slowly while you do nothing. Fun for the whole family, seconds at a time!

> Each day, as they watch their small fund grow, they grasp the magic of compound interest — and that, more than any gift, is a lesson I hope will stay with them for life.

This feels like raising finance dude bros and gambling addicts. There is no “magic” to compound interest, no one should have “watch money accumulate” as a life goal.
by falcor84 | 2025-10-30 12:31:20+00:00
Leaving aside the heart death of the universe, I can imagine a future that's a more utopian version of the Altered Carbon universe, where everyone who wants to have daily backups, which they could set to restore either in the cloud or in a biological/robotic body in the case of an unintended death.

I don't know if it's a laudable goal, but I think it'll eventually be possible.
by rzerowan | 2025-10-30 12:31:41+00:00
I believe this will only be possible once the provisioning in colo is as easy as or as fast as cloud provisioning.Think Hertzner but faster/more customizable , and for that the physical commodification would need to be more nimble/modular than it is now. Hyperscalars can drive down their costs by heavy customization of hardware/software while most colo and other builders are basically doing OEM machines or commercial rack units. The day one can be able to rent a space, spec out the machine, its network bandwith in lessthan a day and scale it in similar timeline - the power balance will shift a bit back from the hyperscalarers.
by _jsmh | 2025-10-30 12:32:02+00:00
I also wish it could build the app and let me use it, so I can see if it works, before it asks me to pay. Being asked to pay for something that I can't see if it works made me close my account and not want to use it again. Having to wait for 32 days for credits to reset is a non-starter.

In the end this app builder didn't give me what I want.

It also looks like it uses bolt.new instead of be something built by the OP.
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-30 12:32:13+00:00
What about downloading videos? I think it's the only thing holding me back from switching from the app, since I don't wanna share reddits posts, but the videos themselves.

Off-topic but damn how shitty of them to add their own watermark when you download an image from a post, and then they dare to say "Better to use the share button!" if you take a screenshot of it instead.
by whstl | 2025-10-30 12:32:55+00:00
The CTO was the one holding the bonus and promotions for tech, so he just shifted the blame down when it was "investigated".

On the other hand it's not hard to believe that the CEO and the board are as sleepy as the CTO here. And the whole management team.

The worst one was when a password for an integration with the judicial system expired. They asked the DevOps to open their email and there were daily alerts for six months. The only reason they found this happened was because a few low level operators made a big thing out of it.

I don't like talking about "regulatory capture" but this is the only reason this company still exists. Easy market when there's almost no competition.
by Brendinooo | 2025-10-30 12:34:07+00:00
Yeah, for sure! I mean, Narcissus is in the public consciousness there to back up your idea.

It's an interesting idea: that a piece of tech can represent one thing and have certain moral sensibilities that form around it, and then some innovation or something changes our relationship with it (in this case, puts it on a wall in every bathroom).

Maybe it changed us in ways we can't fully know! Maybe commoditizing the mirror largely robbed it of its power. Or maybe we're all a bunch of narcissists in ways we can't comprehend because we don't have the anti-mirror people out there scolding us.
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-30 12:35:05+00:00
Woah, that looks like an great effort! Never seen before, wonder why they're not making more noise about it and/or use it for more services, probably would have come across it while poking at various EU services DNS configs if so, but haven't so far.

Anyone happen to know exactly what the "Protective" option is for/does? I see there is one "Unfiltered", and lots of "Protective + Something" options, which is kind of clear what they do, but just "Protective", what does that mean in practice? Couldn't find any concrete information except "It protects you".
by general1465 | 2025-10-30 12:35:18+00:00
Again, Russia has much smaller economy than USA. What are you searching for is PPP And no amount of PPP will help you to have 5500 warheads on 8 Billion budget vs 200 warheads on 6 Billion budget.

With your logic Kongo should be able to afford 5500 nuclear warheads just by spending 0.4% pf GDP. That's not possible is it?
by gooodvibes | 2025-10-30 12:35:35+00:00
Not the person you asked but I have good data - I lost 32kg over 6 months on tirzepatide, 11kg of it was lean body mass, the rest was fat (based on DEXA scans).

In general, lean body mass loss is more of a result of rapid weight loss (I certainly consider mine very rapid), than result of the medication itself. If I was able to lose the same weight in the same period of time without the medication, and kept my protein and resistance training the same, I'd expect a similar ratio of muscle/fat loss.

Overall extremely happy with the outcome, very grateful that these drugs exist and that I was able to access them.