MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alephnerd | 2025-11-01 16:05:05+00:00
Doesn't pass the smell test as someone who has been on boards that made these decisions.

This would be like saying cloud spend was circular because F1000 tech companies represent the majority of cloud spend from a revenue perspective, but tend to sell or partner with those same organizations. For example, AWS and Zscaler, or GCP and Broadcom.

Reality is, a lot of product lines were formed or overhired with little-to-no business justification during the late 2010s and early 2020s. Most of us are now cleaning shop and axing those product lines and features that cannot be attached to tangible revenue generation. Inevitably this leads to ICs getting axed.

If you want to blame someone, blame EMs, PMs, Principal SWEs, and VPs who decided to launch product lines and features for their resume instead of for business justification. (Edit: that said, BeFlatXIII is right that we probably won't have hired most people if this didn't happen at all)

Additionally, comp expectations just got too high - most new grads are not worth $150k-200k TC (some absolutely are though)
by dmoy | 2025-11-01 16:05:56+00:00
It is a non trivial problem to do just that.

It's related to the same problems you have with e.g. Sybil attacks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack

I'm not saying it wouldn't be worthwhile to try, just that I expect there to be a lot of very difficult problems to solve there.
by tacostakohashi | 2025-11-01 16:05:56+00:00
There's actually a simple, low-tech, decentralized solution to this problem, for those of us who like such things. It's compatible with all providers, and even works across countries.

Step 1: Ask for, and obtain your medical records from your providers.

Step 2: Once you have your medical records in your possession, keep them organized, and share them with whoever you want, whenever you want.

I just keep them like one directory per doctor/provider, and dated filenames like dr-foo/2023-02-24-chest-xray.pdf or whatever.

Patients have an absolute right to their medical records, test results, with very few exceptions. It is _not_ hard to get access, just ask, and if you have any trouble, talk to whoever hands out and takes away the medical licenses in that jurisdiction.

If you have all your records, its easy to switch providers whenever you want, get second opinions, and do your own research. It can be pretty interesting seeing the raw notes from doctors, getting the DICOM files for x-rays/ct/mri imaging too.

Just keep, and take responsibility for your own data, it is not realistic to expect providers, the government, or any business to do this for you.
by yinznaughty | 2025-11-01 16:06:02+00:00
>Let's be realistic if some 3 letters agency really want some data about me, there's not much I can do to counter that unless I'm ready to go to extreme lengths.

I once thought like you. You do not need to go to extreme lengths to make things difficult and that is what is important. The fact is that the 3 letter agencies are increasingly fucking with normal people in a race to the bottom. Do not be defeatist - that only hurts everyone. The more people protecting themselves the safer everyone is from these people. If people just give up on privacy it puts a spotlight on normal people protecting themselves. The current state of which is so bad I have trouble putting it into words.
by UncleEntity | 2025-11-01 16:06:37+00:00
The thing I think most people forget is why society made the decision that the government requires a neutral third-party to be consulted to determine if there is probable cause to conduct a search of "persons, houses, papers, and effects".

Otherwise, you have a 'king' issuing general warrants which allow federal agents to search and seize anyone they want in the course of their investigations based on 'feels'. What makes it even worse is some court said racial profiling is sufficient reason to conduct a Terry stop to determine if the person is engaged in (civil) criminal activity and lets law enforcement demand they show their papers or be scanned by some dodgy app.
by kstrauser | 2025-11-01 16:07:32+00:00
I find Rust much easier to write than C. Its types let me be reasonably sure I’ve written appropriate code before I even get to the point of running tests, and I don’t have to memorize the flow of the whole program to have that assurance.

For instance,

struct Feet(i32); struct Meters(i32); fn hover(altitude: Meters) { println!("At {} meters", altitude.0); } fn main() { let altitude1 = Meters(16); hover(altitude1); let altitude2 = Feet(16); hover(altitude2); }

This fails at build time with:

12 | hover(altitude2); | ----- ^^^^^^^^^ expected `Meters`, found `Feet` | | | arguments to this function are incorrect

Guaranteeing that I’ve never mixed units means I don’t have to worry about parking my spacecraft at 1/3 the expected altitude. Now I can concentrate on the rest of the logic. The language has my back on the types so I never have to waste brain cycles on the bookkeeping parts.

That’s one example. It’s not unique to Rust by a long shot. But it’s still a vast improvement over C, where that same signed 32 bit data type is the number of eggs in a basket, the offset of bytes into a struct, the index of an array, a UTF-8 code point, or whatever else.

This really shows up at refactoring time. Move some Rust code around and it’ll loudly let you know exactly what you need to fix before it’s ready. C? Not so much.
by Calavar | 2025-11-01 16:08:39+00:00
Const is the reverse.

Constness is infectious down the stack (the callee of a const function must be const) while asyncness is infectious up the stack (the caller of an async function must be async). So you can gradually add constness to subsections of a codebase while refactoring, only touching those local parts of the codebase. As opposed to async, where adding a single call to an async function requires you to touch all functions back up to main
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-11-01 16:08:47+00:00
It's interesting how so many online discussions of internet privacy devolve into nationalist chest-beating. I'm beginning to suspect that people don't inherently value privacy all that much -- they just want to brag about how their country is the most private.

Recall that the premise of this thread is that the EU should sponsor an alternative to Android. The EU vs US question isn't really topical, since no one suggested that the US government should sponsor an alternative to Android instead.
by iroddis | 2025-11-01 16:08:59+00:00
Except function colouring is a symptom of two languages masquerading as one. You have to choose async or sync. Mixing them is dangerous. It’s not possible to call an async function from sync. Calling sync functions from async code runs the risk of holding the run lock for extended periods of time and losing the benefit of async in the first place.

I don’t have anything against async, I see the value of event-oriented “concurrency”, but the complaint that async is a poison pill is valid, because the use of async fundamentally changes the execution model to co-operative multitasking, with possible runtime issues.

If a language chooses async, I wish they’d just bite the bullet and make it obvious that it’s a different language / execution model than the sync version.
by QuiEgo | 2025-11-01 16:09:09+00:00
Agree completely with this.

When I use a desktop display, my pattern is: load page, read content for 10-30 seconds, scroll, repeat.

When I use a phone, the read-time-before-scroll is more like 1-5 seconds due to the much smaller display.

I notice the scrolling blur in both places on 60 Hz displays, but it bothers me way more on a phone because I'm scrolling so much more.
by zackmorris | 2025-11-01 16:10:05+00:00
Before being considered for submission to arXiv’s CS category, review articles and position papers must now be accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review.

Huh, I guess it's only a subset of papers, not all of them. My brain doesn't work that way, because I don't like assigning custom rules for special cases (edit: because I usually view that as a form of discrimination). So sometimes I have a blind spot around the realities of a problem that someone is facing, that don't have much to do with its idealization.

What I mean is, I don't know that it's up to arXiv to determine what a "review article and position paper" is. Because of that, they must let all papers through, or have all papers face the same review standards.

When I see someone getting their fingers into something, like muddying/dithering concepts, shifting focus to something other than the crux of an argument (or using bad faith arguments, etc), I view it as corruption. It's a means for minority forces to insert their will over the majority. In this case, by potentially blocking meaningful work from reaching the public eye on a technicality.

So I admit that I was wrong to jump to conclusions. But I don't know that I was wrong in principle or spirit.
by rnrn | 2025-11-01 16:10:34+00:00
> even on x86 on recent server CPUs, cache-coherency protocols may be operating at a different granularity than the cache line size. A typical case with new Intel server CPUs is operating at the granularity of 2 consecutive cache lines

I don’t think it is accurate that Intel CPUs use 2 cache lines / 128 bytes as the coherency protocol granule.

Yes, there can be additional destructive interference effects at that granularity, but that’s due to prefetching (of two cachelines with coherency managed independently) rather than having coherency operating on one 128 byte granule

AFAIK 64 bytes is still the correct granule for avoiding false sharing, with two cores modifying two consecutive cachelines having way less destructive interference than two cores modifying one cacheline.
by api | 2025-11-01 16:11:05+00:00
I think it’s a terrible complexity multiplying workaround for the fact that we can’t fix our ancient 1970s OS APIs. Threads should be incredibly cheap. I should be able to launch them by the tens of millions, kill them at will, and this should be no more costly than goroutines.

(All modern OSes in common use are 1970s vintage under the hood. All Unix is Bell Labs Unix with some modernization and veneer, and NT is VMS with POSIX bolted on later.)

Go does this by shipping a mini VM in every binary that implements M:N thread pooling fibers in user space. The fact that Go has to do this is also a workaround for OS APIs that date back to before disco was king, but at least the programmer doesn’t have to constantly wrestle with it.

Our whole field suffers greatly from the fact that we cannot alter the foundation.

BTW I use Rust async right now pretty heavily. It strikes me as about as good as you can do to realize this nightmare in a systems language that does not ship a fat runtime like Go, but having to actually see the word “async” still makes me sad.
by kstrauser | 2025-11-01 16:11:07+00:00
That was exactly what I was thinking of when I wrote that.

But also think of how many libc functions take multiple ints or multiple chars in various orders. You can get carried away with typing, i.e. by having a separate type for everything*. Still, imagine you’re writing, say, a hypothetical IDE device driver and had separate types for BlockNumber and ByteInBlock so that it’s impossible to transpose read(byte_offset,block) instead of read(block,byte_offset), even if those are really the same kind of numbers.

That kind of thing makes a gazillion bugs just vanish into the ether.
by jcalvinowens | 2025-11-01 16:11:16+00:00
> tasks must poll them for them to keep running.

So async Rust introduces an entire novel class of subtle concurrent programming errors? Ugh, that's awful.

> The analogous thing with threads would seem to be something like if the kernel forgot to enqueue some runnable thread on a run queue.

Yes. But I've never written code in a preemptible protected mode environment like Linux userspace where it is possible to make that mistake. That's nuts to me.

From my POV this seems like a fundamental design flaw in async rust. Like, on a bare metal thing I expect to deal with stuff like this... but code running on a real OS shouldn't have to.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-11-01 16:11:18+00:00
> The alternative is lightweight/green threads and actors.

How lightweight should threads be to support high scale multitasking?

Writing my own language, capturing stack frames in continuations resulted in figures like 200-500 bytes. Grows with deeply nested code, of course, but surely this could be optimized...

https://www.erlang.org/docs/21/efficiency_guide/processes.ht...

This document says Erlang processes use 309 words which is in the same ballpark.
by lxgr | 2025-11-01 16:11:25+00:00
One big problem I see with that is that, while almost all passports and EU ID cards now support ICAO cryptographic document validation standards, there's usually no publicly accessible revocation list for these.

Combine that with the absence of any built-in user verification (some national schemes have a PIN code, but the track record of that isn't great), and it becomes clear why these documents don't fully solve the problem of strong identity verification.
by simonw | 2025-11-01 16:12:14+00:00
I found John Gruber's roundup of tech company profits (not revenue) interesting: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/10/30/apple-q4-result...

- Google (a.k.a. Alphabet): $35B

- Microsoft: $27.7B

- Apple: $27.5B

- Nvidia: $26.4B

- Amazon: $21.5B
by zozbot234 | 2025-11-01 16:12:30+00:00
The safety guarantees of Rust the language around unsafe are just as good as C or Zig if you use the appropriate facilities (raw pointers, MaybeUninit, UnsafeCell/Cell, Option for nullability, Pin<> etc). Sometimes this is made unnecessarily difficult by standard library code that expects all the guarantees of ordinary Safe Rust instead of accepting more lenient input (e.g. freely aliasable &Cell<T>'s), but such cases can be addressed as they're found.
by wkat4242 | 2025-11-01 16:12:52+00:00
The same with copilot for office. It was much better before but it seems like they're really turning the screws on the compute. Especially the research agent is pretty useless now and it was really powerful.

I guess these companies are running into issues not being able to expand capacity fast enough. Even a hyperscaler like Microsoft can't power a whole hype cycle. Or they're just squeezing to get more bottom line.
by mikelevins | 2025-11-01 16:13:45+00:00
Besides programming, my hobbies are writing stories, writing and recording songs, drawing, and painting. None of them needs to cost anywhere near $3000. Any of them can cost as much as you want.

Take the music hobby as an example. I have several expensive guitars now, but in the first 20 years of that hobby I probably spent under $1000 on guitars and related gear the entire time.
by sethev | 2025-11-01 16:14:06+00:00
This is just FUD. The reason SQLite does locking to begin with is to avoid data corruption. Almost every statement this blog post makes about concurrency in SQLite is wrong, so it's little surprise that their application doesn't do what they expect.

>Who knows when those writes you scheduled really get written

When a commit completes for a transaction, that transaction has been durably written. No mystery. That's true whether you decide to restrict writes to a single thread in your application or not.
by pona-a | 2025-11-01 16:15:52+00:00
For me, eSIM was the only solution to a very real problem: being able to use virtual carriers without mailing a physical SIM. I can pay anonymously for a regional SIM from my MVNO at an affordable price, without giving a local carrier a copy of my passport to retain indefinitely. Unfortunately, they still only resell incumbent bandwidth--but that's the reality of spectrum licensing.
by tempest_ | 2025-11-01 16:16:12+00:00
From the outside looking in most of the push back against rust seems to be of the "I am too old, never make mistakes, and don't want to learn a new thing late in my career" variety.

I have rarely seen an argument that pushes back against Rust with actual alternative solutions to the problems the rust proponents are trying to solve. It is mostly a bunch of old people letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
by ajross | 2025-11-01 16:16:39+00:00
.NET wasn't the first either. Lisps were doing continuations in the 70's.

But "invented" and "revealed" are different verbs for a reason. The release of node.js and it's pervasively async architecture changed the way a lot of people thought about how to write code. For the better in a few ways. But the resulting attempt to shoe-horn the paradigm into legacy and emerging environments that demanded it live in a shared ecosystem with traditional "blocking" primitives and imperative paradigms has been a mess.
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-01 16:17:26+00:00
Construction isn't a good bell-weather because it's so micromanaged by regulation. If they're doing tip up around you it's because the rules disadvantage steel buildings.

Building anything these days is like responding to a government contract RFP, it's an exercise in cost cutting to get around whatever industries, companies, etc. got the crap that makes them money written into the rules.

Don't look into it. You'll want to armor a bulldozer. Igornance is bliss
by wkat4242 | 2025-11-01 16:17:29+00:00
Obscure musicians never made a lot of money. That's not Spotify's fault. It's just a. Industry where the majority doesn't make it. Gigs are still the main way to earn money for them.

And for video it wouldn't have to be $15. People easily pay $50-80 for cable channel packages. A comprehensive streaming service could cost similar. The willingness to pay is there. I'm just really sick of this shit paying for tons of different services.

When Netflix was the only game in town I subscribed to it. And prime later. But now I've dropped all my subs and gone back to the jolly roger. As have many people I know.

We have a saying in Holland: he who looks too deep in the can gets the lid on his nose. It's a bit akin to the American saying of having your cake and eat it. But the thing is there's lucky so many profits you can extract especially if you're competing with free but more hassle.
by Froedlich | 2025-11-01 16:17:50+00:00
Sounds like Jeff Duntmann's "jiminy", which he wrote about in PC Techniques magazine back in 1992. A matchbox-sized general purpose computer and life log, infrared connections to peripherals as needed, with a mesh network to other jiminies and the internet-at-large. Jeff didn't use the term "AI", but that would describe how it worked.

http://www.duntemann.com/End14.htm

Elon Musk's portable-Grok-thing is a long step toward the jiminy idea.
by dboreham | 2025-11-01 16:17:55+00:00
Neither Physics nor Computability are my field, but this seems like a circular argument or perhaps just fallacious: If they aren't proposing some experiment the result of which should prove or disprove simulation, aren't they just drawing conclusions from a potentially invalid set of mathematical assertions? iow is it possible to deduce something about the physical world simply by rearranging mathematics? And they seem to be saying that nobody has provided a mechanistic relationship between various realms of physics, therefore there isn't one, therefore it can't be simulated.

If someone asked me to figure out a way to prove that a program I'm running is inside a VM or not inside a VM, I don't think I'd begin with reading the programming language manual...I'd be looking for observable differences a program can detect to tell if it's virtualized.
by firefoxd | 2025-11-01 16:18:21+00:00
Most companies using AI are just paying for a subscription. They aren't actually building LLMs or other machine learning applications that take over a known task. You could easily replace the term AI with just subscription.

When they say they are laying off workers, they are saying "we signed up for Cursor, and enabled some AI features on Jira and Salesforce"

The layoff is just an excuse until they realize that just because Jira can write a summary of the ticket, doesn't mean the ticket gets done any faster.
by lycopodiopsida | 2025-11-01 16:18:33+00:00
A bunch of tools - Carbon Copy Cloner for backup, Cryptomator for syncing my docs to iOS, Samurai Search for searching through docs on iOS, Find Any File for search on Mac, and refiling... whatever, I've used a loosely hierarchical structure before, so I refiled with Alfred for some time, then I wrote a small script for dired in emacs.

Way happier now - DT did what I expected, but it was ugly, slow and cumbersome. Now I have a loose collection of tools and if I do not like Find Any Files, I can switch to ripgrep or whatever. Don't like CarbonCopyCloner? Take any other backup/sync solution, no problems.
by jayd16 | 2025-11-01 16:19:01+00:00
I think this analogy is too extreme. That said, modern languages should probably consider the main function/threading context default to async.

Calling sync code from async is fine in and of itself, but once you're in a problem space where you care about async, you probably also care about task starvation. So naively, you might try to throw yeilds around the code base.

And your conclusion is you want the language to be explicit when you're async....so function coloring, then?
by CharlieDigital | 2025-11-01 16:19:25+00:00
I rarely post comments on LinkedIn, but I saw some of the dumbest content today and felt compelled to leave a response:

> Just met a founder who fired his entire team because he was able to individually beat their entire productivity with Claude Code

My only thought when I read this is that this absolutely embarrassing...for founder who wasted dozens of hours recruiting, qualifiying, interviewing, onboarding, and training these resources. Then paying their salaries for who knows how long!

It just came across as some of the most small-brain thinking that anyone would then "Like" this content and not see it for what it is: idiotic management and leadership and just complete lack of basic foresight.

Why are you hiring absolutely replaceable people in the first place?
by jMyles | 2025-11-01 16:19:34+00:00
> If I was in the country legally I would want the best technology to confirm i am the person I say I am.

I'm in the country legally, and I don't care at all how often that is confirmed or by whom.

> What's the alternative? Human beings eyeballing a license a few seconds?

The alternative is dispensing with the notion that some people are illegal and must be purged, or even that this a legitimate function of government.

As long as the state can feign incompetence (let alone launder it with a facial recognition app), this power can easily grow to arbitrary executive authority.

I have no problem with faces being recognized; that's a normal part of living in society. Computers doing it is just a bit more efficient, as you point out. The trouble comes when the state uses it as a liability limiter for their crimes.