MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jandrewrogers | 2025-11-24 04:00:14+00:00
At scale, algorithms are commonly limited by memory bandwidth, not concurrency. Most code can be engineered with enough cheap concurrency to efficiently saturate memory bandwidth.

This explains why massively parallel HPC codes are mostly minimal mutable state designs despite seemingly poor theoretical properties for parallelism. Real world performance and scalability is dictated by minimization of memory copies and maximization of cache disjointness.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-11-24 04:00:50+00:00
> "...why the “official” one is still measured at all."

"The official measure provides a consistent historical view of poverty in the United States, but the SPM may be better suited to helping congressional policymakers and other experts understand how taxes and government programs affect the poor. Also, it may better illustrate how certain medical expenses and work-related expenses such as child care can affect a family's economic well-being."

"One of the most important differences between the two measures, however, is that the SPM is intended to be revised periodically, using improved data sources and measurement techniques as they become available, while the official poverty measure is intended to remain consistent over time."

Both quotes are from "The Supplemental Poverty Measure: Its Core Concepts, Development, and Use" at https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45031
by mrosett | 2025-11-24 04:01:40+00:00
I'm calling BS on this one.

The claimed increase in ridership is modest (18%) off a low baseline (0 service on weekends) and occurred over a long time period (pre-pandemic to today.) They also expanded service during that period, which probably fully explains the increase in ridership. Certainly the reduction in fare ($1-->0) is nice for some people, but it's hard to imagine that it is actually decisive for a large portion of trips.

The estimates of traffic reduction and CO2 reduction just quote the city's numbers without establishing that "traffic cleared, and so did the air."

Key paragraphs:

> In 2021, the city starting [sic] running more buses, streamlining routes and seriously considering waiving the $1 fares. In 2023, the City Council voted to pay for a two-year fare-free pilot with Covid-19 relief funds.

...

> Ridership eventually grew to 118 percent of prepandemic levels, compared to the average nationally transit ridership-recovery levels of 85 percent.
by yojo | 2025-11-24 04:02:37+00:00
I got my father-in-law to try AirPods Pro 2 last year. He’s needed hearing aids for about a decade, but wouldn’t get them, I think for vanity reasons. I’m at the in-laws for thanksgiving and he’s wearing the AirPods now.

From the other side, it’s night and day. We can have conversations. He can hear my kids. The TV volume is set to reasonable levels.

Sample size of one, but it’s been a tremendous improvement. A lot of places are closing out the second gens right now for $140. I’d give it a go. It’s a pretty low price of entry for something that could literally be life changing.
by what | 2025-11-24 04:02:47+00:00
It took me ages to find what you were referencing in [3], but it’s not inflation adjusted, so meaningless. I’ll assume the rest of your citations are equally meaningless.

Also home ownership rates, it’s by owner occupied dwellings, which would include owner occupied duplexes and triplexes. My building is technically owner occupied, he claims the in-law unit and receives mail there. But both flats are rented out.
by biophysboy | 2025-11-24 04:02:48+00:00
Any serious attempt at reducing the deficit would mean confronting one of the largest sectors of the American economy. All of the stuff you mentioned - pointless tests, upcoding fraud, etc - is part of that.

It is not irrational to cut millions in wasteful spending. It is irrational for a department of government efficiency to spend all of its energy cutting random million dollar contracts instead of figuring out how to plan the attack for the confrontation above.

DOGE did not fail because its a hard problem. They failed because they thought it was easy. Taking over a company with a thousand employees is categorically different than revamping the spending of the United States.
by hekkle | 2025-11-24 04:03:47+00:00
It's a storm in a teacup.

Effectively there was a proposed Swiss Law that would force Protonmail to cooperate in sharing customer data with authorities if requested.

The law hasn't passed, and it was even deemed illegal by the EU.

It did raise an interesting issue though, as Protomail was strictly in Switzerland, they realised that they were at the whim of their lawmakers (which was kinda the point in the first place as Switzerland has great privacy laws). However, if those laws did become adversarial, it would greatly affect Protonmail users. This is why they started diversifying some services outside of Switzerland, in case something like this ever did come to pass.
by the_af | 2025-11-24 04:04:34+00:00
Nobody argued pop & mom ("and larger") businesses don't strive to make money, the argument was that that's not their only goal.

We're arguing against your "at all costs" because you did imply it. Maximizing money earned at the cost of employees well being and happiness is ONE way of making money, but not the only way. You can earn money but not seek to maximize the money at the cost of burning out employees, for example.
by wredcoll | 2025-11-24 04:04:47+00:00
I mean, git lends itself to a lot of approaches, the ultimate goal is that the master repo's main branch has a readable and logical set of commit messages usefully describing every change.

Personally I try to avoid merge commits these days, although that's more of a habit than any reasoned position, as such I make frequent use of rebase/squash to edit previous commit messages. Is that worrying about clean commits?
by anon291 | 2025-11-24 04:05:21+00:00
I had put on the back burner some polyhedral compilation papers. I had read all the material, but some key questions still meant it was not possible for me to implement it. In particular, I was looking at barvinoks counting algorithm and did not understand why you needed to expand the polynomials in a pointed cone. However, chatgpt correctly led me through the reasoning. Could it have made a mistake? Of course. And it did. However, since my confusion meant that I was also wrong, bouncing the idea back and forth was really useful. Plus the ai bots are better at understanding your own particular points of confusion.
by protocolture | 2025-11-24 04:05:26+00:00
>The real benefits come from eliminating fares.

IIRC the 50 cent fares allow them to still charge ridiculous fines for fare evasion, keeping the Queensland Rail rentacops in business.

Most non metro stations only have tap on pillars and no fare gates anyway, and I think the inner city fare gates that still exist are on the list for removal.

The 50 cents also allowed them to track the changing usage profile and justify it by the explosion of use. Its basically self reporting that you used the system, and the origin and destination of your trip. Otherwise they would need to install foot traffic counters at train and bus stations and still end up with incomplete data.

It wasnt just super popular, it was that the data showed such a dramatic uptick in usage, which carried over to numbers of cars removed from the roads etc.

Probably took 5 minutes out of my normal commute, and that's in reduced vehicle traffic, I don't use the system at all except to take my kiddo to the museum on weekends. Benefits tracked to all punters results in an absolutely untouchable policy change.
by kelnos | 2025-11-24 04:06:40+00:00
It was interesting to read the author's timeline of ditching BigTechCo companies, like the switch to a Mac in 2013, away from Microsoft, and then ditching Apple entirely in 2022 & 2024. I've been a Linux desktop user since the late 90s/early 00s, but the lack of choice if you want/need a "mainstream" desktop and/or mobile OS is really disheartening. (I'd love to use GrapheneOS on my Pixel, but I've become reliant to a few things, like contactless payments, that won't work on Graphene.)

I'm also disillusioned with Amazon.com, but not sure about the alternatives. The author suggests eBay, but I'd worry about flaky sellers and counterfeit product just as much (if not more) than on Amazon. And switching to something like Walmart.com trades one force for bad for another. Even some of my old solid choices for certain things, like NewEgg for computer hardware, have devolved into a mess of unreliable third-party seller marketplaces. When making larger purchases, I'll gravitate toward manufacturer websites, but they often have worse pricing for the same product on Amazon, or with bizarrely long shipping timelines (like 3+ weeks).

I'm torn, because while I want an "everything store" like Amazon for convenience and predictable, consistent, fast shipping, I recognize that kind of store is really bad for competition, and for avoiding monopolists and big conglomerates.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-11-24 04:07:28+00:00
Wiles's initial presentation of the proof had a serious flaw that killed the whole thing until he found a workaround. I don't remember how long it took him to get out of the jam, but I'm sure he would have handed his credit card to the Devil himself if he thought it might help.

People who don't take advantage of the best available tools and techniques don't get to that level to begin with.
by dangus | 2025-11-24 04:08:02+00:00
Sounds like you don’t know what the word “permanent” means. If you can reboot and everything works again that doesn’t sound all that permanent.

I use all three major OSes regularly and none of them lock up in ways that require a reboot with any level of regularity, never mind entering a “permanently unusable state.”

In my experience I find that at present in 2025, rebooting Apple systems seems to fix occasional little wonky problems [1], my Linux laptop needs reboots or hard restarts for occasional sleep issues, and my Windows 11 desktop’s most frequent problem tends to be graphics driver crashes while playing games (and that’s partially my fault for choosing AMD instead of Nvidia). That is the kind of problem that used to cause full system lock-ups but Windows 11 actually manages that failure relatively gracefully.

But the point is that the only operating system I interact with that never has any issues on the OS level are my Linux servers, but that’s really an entirely different use case with much less complexity and risk than a desktop workstation. And even then it’s common practice to manage Linux servers as cattle rather than pets and just destroy/replace them when there’s an issue.

[1] Out of all the desktop operating systems, I think Apple has the highest quantity of hastily added features that ship with rarely-fixed minor bugs, while the Windows team doesn’t even attempt to add features at anything close to Apple’s pace. macOS has this struggle to keep feature parity with iOS and the iPhone which itself has a economic mandate to iterate quickly. For example, since iOS 26 I’ve been having random issues with Guided Access and the screenshot tool on iOS that only resolve when I restart the phone. I’ve also needed to cycle Bluetooth since iOS 26 on occasion to get my AirPods to connect successfully.
by metabolian | 2025-11-24 04:09:24+00:00
Agreed, he's confusing FTL travel, which has profound theoretical objections, with general interstellar space travel, which has no such issues, space rocks like Oumoumoua do it all the time. To a million-year-old, immortal alien ET, a journey of a hundred or a thousand years is trivial. An absolute paucity of imagination here.
by davydm | 2025-11-24 04:09:45+00:00
Also makes the output tedious to copy-paste, eg into an editor. Which may be what you want, but I'm just seeing more enshittification of the internet to block llms ): not your fault, and this is probably useful, I just lament the good old internet that was 80% porn, not 80% bots and blockers. Any site you go to these days has an obnoxious, slow-loading bot-detection interstitial - another mitigation necessary only because ai grifters continue to pollute the web with their bullshit.

Can this bubble please just pop already? I miss the internet.
by canyp | 2025-11-24 04:10:00+00:00
I always like me some memory allocator blog/code. Two links in the context of gamedev below, in case you or anyone else is interested.

https://screwjankgames.github.io/engine%20programming/2020/0...

https://www.bytesbeneath.com/p/the-arena-custom-memory-alloc...

I also don't know how much we want to butcher this blog post, but:

> RAM is fundamentally a giant array of bytes, where each byte has a unique address. However, CPUs don’t fetch data one byte at a time. They read and write memory in fixed-size chunks called words which are typically 4 bytes on 32-bit systems or 8 bytes on 64-bit systems.

CPUs these days fetch entire cache lines. Memory is also split into banks. There are many more details involved, and it is viewing memory as a giant array of bytes that is fundamentally broken. It's a useful abstraction up until some point, but it breaks apart once you analyze performance. This part of the blog didn't seem very accurate.
by protocolture | 2025-11-24 04:10:35+00:00
Bit of a bugbear of mine, but the cross river rail project is mostly a stopgap. Brisbane really needed standard gauge and double decker trains before it became so built up. We are already at trains per minute capacity for some of the inner city bridges, and duplication in the inner city is highly destructive. If we could increase the capacity of the vehicles themselves we would be way better off. But the cheap/compromise position is to just bypass the problem entirely.

Whats worse is that, theres a certain perspective, one of declining CBD use, where cross river rail makes a mountain of sense. But in that case we should be bypassing the CBD with a lot of room for expansion, ie, 8 lines worth of track. But this isnt being done either.

>When you have the electronic ticketing system already in place like Brisbane it makes sense to use it to monitor usage

This and being able to continue charging fines is why it was left in place 100%
by protocolture | 2025-11-24 04:10:39+00:00
The usual story is:

1. Add an IP that has been freed from another use to a CG-NAT Pool.

2. Get complaints from customers about being hard banned from things like Netflix, Sport Streaming and VPNs or other utilities.

3. Investigate, no IP reputation issues. Find some random GEO IP database that has a side business in selling lists of VPNS or other geo breakout tools. They have listed this IP for some random reason. Almost never nefarious.

4. Give it 3 weeks for the Geoip nard to update from the wrong classification (harmful) to some kind of also wrong but unharmful classification like "Datacentre"

5. Customers can stream The Witcher again. Yay.

Really while ipv6 should be a solution here, another very good solution would be the removal of such useless middlemen from the face of the earth.
by ben0x539 | 2025-11-24 04:10:56+00:00
In your experience, is there a lot of contention over whether a given issue counts as a bug fix or a feature/improvement? In the article, some of the examples were saving people a few clicks in a frequent process, or updating documentation. Naively, I expect that in an environment where bug fixes get infinite priority, those wouldn't count as bugs, so they would potentially stick around forever too.
by swaits | 2025-11-24 04:11:06+00:00
Go definitely popularized concurrency for the modern era, but coroutines themselves are ancient tech. Melvin Conway coined the term in 1963 and Simula had them by '67.

It’s also worth noting that the specific 'coroutine' model most languages are adding today (JS, Rust, Python) is based on C#'s async/await.

Go actually rejected that approach in favor of Green Threads (Goroutines, not coroutines), so technically it popularized the alternative to what everyone else is doing.
by wredcoll | 2025-11-24 04:11:22+00:00
From my pseudo-ivory tower viewpoint it seems like the concept of 3 strikes has some validity but with totally the wrong response.

If someone is convicted three times of stealing in a year, even if it's like 1$, clearly something is not working here between this person and the system. It's a pipe dream but it would be nice if we could have some kind of board you could refer cases like that to with the mission statement of "figure out exactlt what is going on here" with powers to take actions that involved things other than prisons.

Alas.
by jmye | 2025-11-24 04:11:30+00:00
Are you under the impression that CMS doesn’t address fraud and overpayments with extremely harsh penalties, every single time they’re found?

Do you think CMS just shrugs and oks every single test?

I don’t understand the basis for your complaints, here.

There are two big issues with CMS costs, and you’ve identified 10% of one of them.
by protocolture | 2025-11-24 04:13:14+00:00
>Every ISP that I have experienced, mobile and broadband, is using CGNAT. The easiest way I’ve seen this on broadband is https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/ showing several movie downloads per day.

From memory, APNIC was handing out a /22 to every new member, then a /23, then a /23 worth. Now it asks you to submit a plan on how you would allocate a /23 if you received those ips.
Show HN: WishDrop – AI-built gift coordination app (Claude Code, Nano Banana)
by vicdup | 2025-11-24 04:13:51+00:00
My family kept running into the same problem every year: How do you share a long list of gift ideas with multiple people — without ending up with duplicates?

This weekend I decided to fix it — and benchmark the new wave of AI coding assistants at the same time: Claude Code, Claude Code Web, Google Antigravity, and OpenAI Codex, with visuals from Google Nano Banana and ChatGPT.

Claude Code Web was by far the best autonomous agent — it planned, iterated, and wrote tests almost like a cofounder. I even ran five sessions in parallel from my phone until I hit the session cap.

The result: WishDrop.io A small app that helps families and friends coordinate gifts without duplicates. No login, instant sharing, real-time reservations. Even the name (and domain check!) came from AI.

Built with Next.js 16, Turso, Prisma, Resend, Tailwind 4, and deployed on Vercel — a reminder that modern stacks now feel lightyears ahead of Big Cloud setups.

Go test it wishdrop.io (And yes, you can probably break it if you try )
by Glyptodon | 2025-11-24 04:14:07+00:00
I think you're just picking at a detail that doesn't alter the picture much. I think we can all agree that having home Internet and a smart phone matter. Cheap phones cost a few hundred, cheap plans cost $40+/person if you use normal amounts of data, not < 5 gigs, home Internet costs $50+, and renting or buying modem type stuff. Amortizing all that might be under $200, but it's probably damn close (or at least circa $140) depending on a lot of details. Particularly if you crack a screen or something every few years.
by Nursie | 2025-11-24 04:15:27+00:00
> just search for countries by gdp/debt %. It's been just incresing for decades, that is not sustanaible

This is an idealogical argument more than a factual one. It certainly appears to be sustainable.

Step back from the gdp/debt ratio figures though. The argument is really only about whether a decreasing workforce can support an increasing population of retirees.

If government pays retirees then retirees get a direct payout, and use it to buy goods and services that younger people provide.

If (like in Australia) we make everyone invest through their life then each has a well-funded retirement account largely tied up in the stock-market. This represents part ownership of assets in the productive economy, which can be converted to funds that retired people will use ... to buy goods and services that younger people provide.

Where the money comes from seems less important to me than the fact if there is an ever increasing population of retirees, then one way or another they are supported by working people.

The mechanism is just an abstraction. The demographic problem is probably more real.
by sdenton4 | 2025-11-24 04:16:14+00:00
You can factor humans out with the same trick: All economic activity is driven by the needs of micro-organisms. We mainly observe these desires and economic transactions through their conglomeration into joint entities (ie, humans).

Corporate and state decision making is, I would argue, often completely distinct from the desires and needs of the individuals that make up the entity. As an example, no individual /needs/ a particular compliance check to pass, but the overall entity (corporation) does, and so allocates money and human effort to ensure the check passes. It's a need of the conglomerate entity, not the individuals within it.
by jmye | 2025-11-24 04:16:15+00:00
I directly responded to your whining about “action” - I’m sorry that you now want to have a different conversation because you realized how utterly incorrect you were, but I’m not interested in asinine purity bullshit from some “Enlightened Progressive” who doesn’t, faintly, understand European politics.

Healthcare, for instance, is not more expensive for the average low-income person because of the ACA. You’re utterly incorrect, completely misinformed, and repeating bullshit. “Progressives”. Lol.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-24 04:16:40+00:00
> Any serious attempt at reducing the deficit would mean confronting one of the largest sectors of the American economy. All of the stuff you mentioned - pointless tests, upcoding fraud, etc - is part of that.

Which is exactly what they should have been doing. It's blatantly obvious that they failed -- federal spending went up year over year.

But that means the problem remains and someone's going to have to take another go at it.
by ggm | 2025-11-24 04:16:44+00:00
The risk is being told no, and inviting dissent into the independence of ICANN. Not asking, means no risk of being told "no, you do as you're told" which would endanger the whole 3 legged stool. the GAC would immediately question the assumption the US government had that level of signoff, the money flows and lawyers would fire up, it would be come a shitstorm in a teacup.

The least likely outcome of asking the department of state if ICANN is "permitted" to add an HSM outside the USA, is a positive answer.

The most likely path to doing it, is not to assume you have to ask.
by AnonC | 2025-11-24 04:17:57+00:00
> Are you primary using electron-based apps, or true native macOS apps? Maybe I’m lucky but I run macOS daily without any problems.

There’s an in-between abomination — Catalyst based apps from/by Apple (quickly migrated from iOS to macOS). Reminders, Notes and others are downright unnavigable and unusable with a keyboard and are so, so terrible in their UX. It’s a shame that Apple hasn’t spent any effort in fixing those and making them true native macOS apps.

For the last several years, there has been nobody at Apple who has good taste and a deep and committed interest in UX.
by jaredklewis | 2025-11-24 04:18:03+00:00
Parking is "super short" because there is never enough supply of something that is free. When you make something free, you induce demand for it.

For almost everywhere in LA country (where I live), it is illegal to have a store, coffee shop, gym, restaurant, laundry mat or almost anything else without attached parking. There are pockets where they've allowed parking reform (like Old Pasadena) and beautiful, walkable neighborhoods spring up. But these are rare exceptions.

I just find it genuinely perplexing. A 1-hour commute in LA is absolutely unremarkable. That's 500 hours a year! We have horrible air pollution even though we're right by the ocean. The weather is perfect and yet people need to go drive someplace to be able to walk around in it. Like why do so many people out here think the status quo is so great?