MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thomashabets2 | 2025-11-17 16:46:08+00:00
> isn't that a more general problem with pledge?

No, for two reasons: 1) pledge() lets you give high level "I just want to do I/O on what I already have", and it doesn't matter if new syscalls "openat2" (should be blocked) or "getrandom" (should be allowed) are created. (see the `newfstatat` example on printf). And 2) OpenBSD limits syscalls to be done from libc, and libc & kernel are released together. Other libs need to go through libc.

Yes, if libfoo starts doing actual behavioral changes like suddenly opening files, then that's inherently indistinguishable from a compromised process. But I don't think that we need to throw out the baby with that bathwater.

And it's not just about libfoo doing raw syscalls. `unveil()` allows blocking off the filesystem. And it'll apply to open, creat, openat, openat2, unlink, io_uring versions of the relevant calls (if OpenBSD had it), etc…

But yes, if libc could ship its best-effort pledge()/unveil(), that also blocks any further syscalls (in case the kernel is newer), that'd be great. But this needs to be part of (g)libc.

Though another problem is that it doesn't help child processes with a statically compiled newer libc, that quite reasonably wants to use the newer syscalls that the kernel has. OpenBSD decided to simply not support statically linked libc, but musl (and Cosmopolitan libc?) have that as an explicit goal.

So yeah, because they mandate syscalls from libc, ironically OpenBSD should have been able to make pledge/unveil a libc feature using a seccomp-like API, or hell, implemented entirely in user space. But Linux, which has that API, kinda can't.

(ok, so I don't know how strictly OpenBSD mandates the exact system libc, so maybe what I just said would open a vulnerability)
by alextofan | 2025-11-17 16:46:44+00:00
Really appreciate how this isn't just another "cloud vs bare metal" holy war.The "own the core, rent the periphery" approach is exactly the kind of nuanced thinking we need more of in these discussions. That said,important caveat for anyone reading this: Veridion is processing petabytes of data with predictable workloads. If you're still figuring out product-market fit or your usage patterns are all over the place, premature infrastructure optimization will absolutely kill you.The cloud's "boring reliability" has real value when you need to focus on building the actual product. The 30x multiplier is real, but it only kicks in at serious scale with stable, known workloads. Most startups aren't there yet, and that's fine.
by nograpes | 2025-11-17 16:46:45+00:00
I appreciate that others may not have got much out of this, but let me say that as someone who knows about statistical modeling, but has no physics training, this made Fourier transforms very clear.

There was another comment that referred to why we use this orthonormal basis versus another, and I think to appreciate the full reason of why this was done in the first place is important. But this presentation is a very good introduction for someone with my particular training.
by 1718627440 | 2025-11-17 16:46:53+00:00
From https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/x86-Options.html

> -mabi=name Generate code for the specified calling convention. [...] The default is to use the Microsoft ABI when targeting Microsoft Windows and the SysV ABI on all other systems.

> -mms-bitfields Enable/disable bit-field layout compatible with the native Microsoft Windows compiler. [...] This option is enabled by default for Microsoft Windows targets.

Doesn't this work in practice, due to bugs?
by WesolyKubeczek | 2025-11-17 16:46:55+00:00
Ah, Miele.

When after some time the water pump on my 2014 Miele dishwasher gave up the ghost, I had a look at their parts catalogue. I had mixed feelings.

On one hand, they still produce parts for things they sold in 2008, maybe even earlier, I was looking for a pump. Very repair-friendly, very anti-ewaste. Kudos.

On the other hand, for the price they have of that pump and labor, I could buy a perfectly serviceable new midrange Bosch thing. Which I, after a short inner struggle, did. After all, the pump may have been the tip of an iceberg of more costly repairs. It's a real Apple or Porsche of home appliances — it costs a lot when you buy it, and then it keeps costing you later.

But maybe this knowledge is going to be handy with the Miele fridge I still have...
by jerf | 2025-11-17 16:47:47+00:00
Whether or not GC is a negligible portion of your runtime is a characteristic of your program, not your implementation language. For 99% of programs, probably more, yes.

I have been working in GC languages for the last 25 years. The GC has been a performance problem for me... once. The modal experience for developers is probably zero. Once or twice is not that uncommon. But you shouldn't bend your entire implementation stack choice over "once or twice a career" outcomes.

This is not the only experience for developers, and there are those whose careers are concentrated in the places where it matters... databases, 100%-utilization network code, hardware drivers. But for 99% of the programs out there, whatever language they are implemented in, GC is not an important performance consideration. For the vast bulk of those programs, there is a much larger performance consideration in it that could be turned up in 5 minutes with a profiler and nobody has even bothered to do that and squeeze out the accidentally quadratic code because even that doesn't matter to them, let alone GC delays.

This is the "system programmer's" equivalent of the web dev's "I need a web framework that can push 2,000,000 requests per second" and then choosing the framework that can push 2,001,000 rps over the one that can push 2,000,000 because fast... when the code they are actually writing for the work they are actually doing can barely push 100 rps. Even game engines nowadays have rather quite a lot of GC in them. Even in a system programming language, and even in a program that is going to experience a great deal of load, you are going to have to budget some non-trivial optimization time to your own code before GC is your biggest problem, because the odds that you wrote something slower than the GC without realizing it is pretty high.
by zekica | 2025-11-17 16:48:05+00:00
I used it. It's an (ugly) functional programming language that can transform one XML into another - think of it as Lisp for XML processing but even less readable.

It can work great when you have XML you want to present nicely in a browser by transforming it into XHTML while still serving the browser the original XML. One use I had was to show the contents of RSS/Atom feeds as a nice page in a browser.
by stefan420 | 2025-11-17 16:48:25+00:00
i would argue 90% of startups think they are going to need autoscaling, invest in that, and then never reach the scale up point, while having spent the investment money already.

besides the point of the article, tho. even if at the end of the day the numbers don't perfectly add up, i don't believe they are WAY OFF. we are paying for cables and HDDs man. "ancient" tech.
by bccdee | 2025-11-17 16:48:45+00:00
If the author of the article had done a bit of searching, they might know that Canadians (the primary predictable American ficasco spectators) phased out pennies years ago. We also "had no plan" for the remaining pennies, and we didn't really need one. They get deposited, lost, and thrown away over time—that's why the mint had to keep printing them. Now they've gone the way of the 50-cent piece. It's not a big deal. Frankly I'm surprised the US didn't do it sooner.
by chaosprint | 2025-11-17 16:49:03+00:00
Great finish. I was busy designing and soldering the prototype synthesizer during the summer, but I had to put it on hold because my baby was born in September.

I had the same problem back then: injection molding is quite expensive to start. But you could consider a more creative approach: using a PCB directly as the panel, such as a TE's Pocket Operator. Korg also has this solution for some educational products. Alternatively, you could use 3D printing; there are many inexpensive services in China. CNC doesn't have the mold-making issue, but it's more expensive and doesn't seem suitable for children.

Another interesting point: after my child was born, I didn't have much time for my sound work. But recently, I was surprised to find that I spend most of my time playing white noise on Glicol (http://glicol.org/) and it works great for my kid.

``` o: noise 42 >> lpf ~mod 1 >> mul ~mod3

~mod: sin ~mod2 >> mul 200 >> add 1000

~mod2: sin 0.1 >> mul 0.04 >> add 0.1

~mod3: sin 0.04 >> mul 0.3 >> add 0.8 ```

Good luck with kickstarter!
by sowbug | 2025-11-17 16:49:25+00:00
Same here in the US.

Back in the day, I'd sift through my jar of change and keep the quarters, which were good for parking meters and laundry. The rest went into the Coinstar machine. The fee for counting dimes, nickles, and pennies seemed OK.

The machine always had some weird foreign coins or subway tokens left over by the previous customer in the reject bin, which was potentially interesting.
by accelbred | 2025-11-17 16:49:29+00:00
Unfortunately, for C++, thats not true. At least with glibc and libstdc++, if you do not link with pthreads, then shared pointers are not thread-safe. At runtime it will do a symbol lookup for a pthreads symbol, and based off the result, the shared pointer code will either take the atomic or non-atomic path.

I'd much rather it didnt try to be zero-cost and it always used atomics...
by gbacon | 2025-11-17 16:50:20+00:00
We care about Z3 because it is a Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solver.

Satisfiability: In 1971, Stephen A. Cook established that Boolean satisfiability, given an arbitrary Boolean formula whether an assignment to its variables exists that evaluates true, is NP-complete.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800157.805047

Translating between NP-complete problems is at most a polynomial (“fast”) amount of work, so every improvement gained on satisfiability (whose worst case is exponential rather than polynomial time complexity) benefits all other NP-complete problems, and thus the rest of NP.

Modulo Theories: We can think of SMT as a high-level language that automates encoding of other problems into raw Boolean formulas. Applications built on Z3 outsource search by encoding problems via one or more theories and then decoding results back to the problem domain at hand.

The benefits of doing this are (1) using an existing robust, well-tested suite of algorithms where (2) lots of research effort is concentrated and (3) improvements to Z3 improve your problem’s results more-or-less for free. According to Microsoft, “Z3 is used in a wide range of software engineering applications, ranging from program verification, compiler validation, testing, fuzzing using dynamic symbolic execution, model-based software development, network verification, and optimization.”

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/z3-3/

See also:

https://github.com/Z3Prover/z3
Ask HN: Did iOS and iPadOS 26 slow down your devices as it did mine?
by robinhood | 2025-11-17 16:50:54+00:00
I have an iPhone 16 Pro, and an M1 iPad. Both have become much slower since the 26 release. Both are up to date in terms of software. The M1 iPad, in particular, has taken a severe performance hit. I understand that software must move forward, but I regret the degredation of performance.
by cflewis | 2025-11-17 16:51:03+00:00
I honestly have no idea; I left academia 12 years ago now. I do know that game research continued (e.g. the conference I published that paper in continues: http://fdg2025.org/ and the workshop I started at ICSE continues on as well: https://sites.google.com/view/icsegasworkshop2025/home), but I'm not aware of anyone working in the patterns work right now.

My read from the paper was that Deturding was getting at in his rebuttal was my paper that was getting really popular for citing (now over 500) when really it was some Stuff Made Up By Some Guys. And it was! We all had backgrounds in pattern research, but even things like the Gang of Four are just Stuff Made Up By Some Guys. He reviewed my book that I span off from my thesis which contained the patterns so he was intimately aware of it all. We were friendly, if not capital-F friends, and I was interested in what he wrote for my academic career. He's a smart guy.

My co-authors and I never intended for the paper to be a be-all-and-end-all at 2013. Much of the non-AI research work in games at that time was "well, what if we poked at this avenue of research? what if we poked at that avenue?" And we did that by coming up with papers that were supposed to trigger conversation. It was not a good idea to go down a research avenue for 5 years only to find out no-one cared or someone had an idea that would have changed the direction dramatically had you just gotten something out there in year 1. So we thought hard about what we wrote, but we didn't do legwork tying it back to behavioral economics or something like that (my thesis attempted that to varying degrees of success).

I gave up some time ago trying to track where all the citations were coming from, but it did seem it was being cited because other people cited it. It wasn't really related to many of the papers, and certainly I didn't see anything directly building from it. And that's really what the rebuttal was saying: stop citing this paper unless you're building from it and making it more rigid in its foundations. It's not got the strong analytic/empirical basis that science is about. Which is 100% true, but was 100% known and somewhat by design.
by lunar_mycroft | 2025-11-17 16:51:10+00:00
The fact that people didn't realize that a site used XSLT before the recent drama is meaningless. Even as a developer, I don't know how most of the sites I visit work under the hood. Unless I have a reason to go poking around, I would probably never know whether a site used react, solid, svelte, or jquery.

But it ultimately doesn't matter either way. A major selling point/part of the "contract" the web platform has with web developers is backwards compatibility. If you make a web site which only relies on web standards (i.e. not vendor specific features or 3rd party plugins), you can/could expect it to keep working forever. Browser makers choosing to break that "contract" is bad for the internet regardless of how popular XSLT is.

Oh, and as the linked article points out, the attack surface concerns are obviously bad faith. The polyfil means browser makers could choose to sandbox it in a way that would be no less robust than their existing JS runtime.
by troupo | 2025-11-17 16:51:36+00:00
> If there isn't enough usage of a feature to justify prioritizing engineering hours to it instead of other features, so it's removed, that's just a regular business-as-usual decision. Nothing "political" about it. It's straightforward cost-benefit.

Then why is Google actively shoving multiple hardware APIs into the browser (against the objection of other vendors) if their usage is 10x less than that of XSLT?

They have no trouble finding the resource to develop and maintain those
Show HN: Pi9eon – Send Real Postcards from iMessage
by mtolbert | 2025-11-17 16:52:03+00:00
Hi HN,

My co-founder Sandy and I built Pi9eon, an iMessage app that lets you send real physical postcards from any photo on your phone — with no account, no signup, and no need to know the recipient’s address.

Why: We were penpals before we were co-founders. We loved sending each other postcards while traveling, but they often got lost or delayed. We wanted a way to keep the tangible, meaningful part of postcards without the friction of stamps, postboxes, or international mail.

How it works:

Pick a photo in iMessage

Write your message

Send

Recipient gets a link to privately enter their address (“claim their Pi9eon”)

We use a vendor to print + ship via USPS (delivery in 7–10 days within the U.S., even from abroad)

Tech: Native iMessage extension. Addresses handled via a tokenized claim link. Minimal data stored; no accounts or social graph.

We’d love feedback from this community — on UX, privacy, or edge cases we should account for.

App link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pi9eon/id6753701299

Thanks, Maddie & Sandy
by kachapopopow | 2025-11-17 16:52:31+00:00
not sure about all chinese models, but deepseek has absolutely no problem and qwen just avoids anything controvertial including completely unrelated subjects to china such as the lgbtq movement. also any kind of safeguards like those are easily bypassed since there isn't that much effort that was put in to prevent models talking about these subjects which to be sounds like dataset tainting rather than intentional bias.
by array_key_first | 2025-11-17 16:52:54+00:00
1. Don't do the 'huh?' thing. It's not cute, it's just annoying.

2. I am referring to the snapdragon x elite and associated devices, which were and are a failure.

3. You don't need ARM to create an SOC. Even Intel makes a more power efficient x86 SOC than the x elite.

4. Games and work are, like, HUGE use cases. If you can't use the ARM laptops for your job or your not-at-job, then what the fuck can you use it for?
by mihaivinaga | 2025-11-17 16:53:21+00:00
That's a fair point, the scale discounts certainly matter. That said: We did in fact run our prototype on AWS, and early on they flagged our account because our VMs were under heavy CPU load (we were told we'd need to cut below ~50 % or risk suspension). When you switch to dedicated hardware, you're no longer paying for "noisy neighbours" or hypervisor over-provisioning, so the effective per-unit cost often cleaner fully justifies the shift.
by cschep | 2025-11-17 16:53:41+00:00
oh my god. I am a fucking idiot.

I thought we were talking about BUYING THE SECRETARY A GIFT. E.g. breaking his commitment to his wife through some implied/emotional cheating?

Having the secretary buy the gift? My god who cares. I have no argument against that at all.

Sorry I feel like I should delete all my comments but.. such is the internet.
by ChipopLeMoral | 2025-11-17 16:54:15+00:00
Back when I was a Googler, I used to play a little game where I would think of a random word and then check if there was a Google internal project code named for it. It was a bit hard finding stuff that wasn't some system or project, and often there would be multiple ones. I actually found one that I thought would be a nice name and reserved the go link for it, but naming anything after it never panned out, when I finally got to design a system from scratch my manager wanted a boring descriptive name like "consolidated data system" (it was a bit more specific but that was the vibe).

Side note: I noticed that more "boring" and less sexy projects had cooler names a lot of the time, and my theory was that people were compensating for doing unsexy work.
by throw0101c | 2025-11-17 16:54:24+00:00
Whenever discussions of IPv6 come up on HN, there are some folks who ask "What problem(s) does it solve?" and such. Well, one answer to that is it solves not having to deal with the tomfoolery / rigmarole of this.

Certainly hole punching [1] (via PCP, UPnP IGD) is still needed for P2P clients like home video games and consoles, but most home/CPE routers support that, and there's not much more infrastructure needed.

P.S. / N.B.: And just because you have a globally routable address on your home computer does not mean that the address is globally reachable: stateful firewalls (on D-Link, Asus, Linksys, Netgear, etc) are a thing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hole_punching_(networking)
by taurath | 2025-11-17 16:54:52+00:00
If we stopped the relentless pressure on working people in dramatically increased living costs and stagnant wages it would probably help people be far less rushed and be able to take time in their day. In my observation, everyone who uses TikTok the most has the most stress in their life, and the advantage of the platform is it can get you a little dopamine hit in those moments in between the stress.

We could also fund education, pay teachers more, and make the pathways into a good life not require every ounce of mental energy.
by svieira | 2025-11-17 16:54:54+00:00
> Removing XSLT from browsers was long overdue

> Google is willing to remove standards-compliant XML support as well.

> They're the same picture.

To spell it out, "if it's inconvenient, it goes", is something that the _owner_ does. The culture of the web was "the owners are those who run the web sites, the servants are the software that provides an entry point to the web (read or publish or both)". This kind of "well, it's dashed inconvenient to maintain a WASM layer for a dependency that is not safe to vendor any more as a C dependency" is not the kind of servant-oriented mentality that made the web great, not just as a platform to build on, but as a platform to emulate.
by spankalee | 2025-11-17 16:55:07+00:00
This page makes some wild claims, like Google wants to deprecate MathML, even though it basically just landed. Yeah, the Chrome team wasn't prioritizing the work and it came through Igalia, but the best time for Chrome to kill MathML would have been before it was actually usable on the web.

The post also fails to mention that all browsers want to remove XSLT. The topic was brought up in several meetings by Firefox reps. It's not a Google conspiracy.

I also see that the site is written in XHTML and think the author must just really love XML, and doesn't realize that most browser maintainers think that XHTML is a mistake and failure. Being strict on input in failing to render anything on an error is antithetical to the "user agent" philosophy that says the browser should try to render something useful to the user anyway. Forgiving HTML is just better suited for the messy web. I bet this fuels some of their anger here.
by kstrauser | 2025-11-17 16:55:24+00:00
Furthermore, you can’t polyfill USB support. It’s something that the browser itself must support if it’s going to be used at all, as by definition it can’t run entirely inside the browser.

That’s not true for XSLT, except in the super-niche case of formatting RSS prettily via linking to XSLT like a stylesheet, and the intersection of “people who consume RSS” and “people who regularly consume it directly through the browser” has to be vanishingly small.
by ajross | 2025-11-17 16:55:38+00:00
> Homes got more expensive, income did not increase as fast.

That's true, but not nearly so much so as people tend to believe. Median home price expressed as a fraction of household income is up about 38% since 1985: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1NXLF

That's significant, and worth talking about. But it's not justification for the ridiculous hyperbole people like to throw around on this. Note that median real income (where "real" means "inflation adjusted") is up by almost the same fraction over the same time period: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N Which is to say, impact on disposable income from housing costs is negligible, especially since so much other stuff is cheaper now.

So basically no: "I still blame housing the most here" is just wrong per the numbers.
by redwood | 2025-11-17 16:55:54+00:00
Well I'd assume the acquisition is with equity and that much of their employee compensation comes from equity, neither of which show up in a free cash flow view. Still you do make a good point. I'd have expected bigger capital costs that even if amortized would show up on cash flow some of the time.. but they appear to run a very tight capex ship. So more security SaaS than cloud provider IMO