MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by imtringued | 2025-11-17 09:52:55+00:00
The context is literally this:

>Less incentive to write small libraries. Less incentive to write small tutorials on your own website.

What weitendorf posted is definitively not a library, nor is there a small tutorial for the code.

>Unless you are a hacker or a spammer where your incentives have probably increased. We are entering the era of cheap spam of everything with little incentive for quality.

Considering the low effort to post and high effort to understand what weitendorf wrote, he might be considered a spammer given the context. The code quality is also low since his application can easily be replicated by a bunch of echo calls in a bash script, making me lean towards thinking he is a low quality spammer, given the context.

>All this for the best case outcome of most people being made unemployed and rolling the dice on society reorganising to that reality.

I'm not sure you can argue that weitendorf sufficiently addressed this. He put too much emphasis on an obvious strawman (real programmer) which is completely out of context. Nobody is questioning here whether someone is a programmer or not. There is no gatekeeping whatsoever. You're free to use LLMs.

I'll also complain about your use of "salient" here, which generally has two meanings. The first is that something is "eye catching" (making me think more of spam), the second meaning is "relevancy/importance" to a specific thing and that's where weitendorf falls completely flat.

Now you might counter and argue that he packaged all of his salient points inside the statement "want to lay off bread-and-butter red-blooded american programmers", then your position is incredibly weak, because you're deflecting from one strawman to another strawman or alternatively, your counterargument will rely heavily on reinterpretation, which again just means the point wasn't salient.
by hagen1778 | 2025-11-17 09:52:57+00:00
Using "period" triggers me :)

If Mimir is the only one, why Roblox, GrafanaLabs's customer, isn't using Mimir for monitoring? They're using VictoriaMetrics on approx scale of 5 Billion active time series. See https://docs.victoriametrics.com/victoriametrics/casestudies....

None solution is perfect. Each one has its own trade-offs. That is why it triggers me when I see statements like this one.
by jimnotgym | 2025-11-17 09:52:59+00:00
Where I grew up, Rural UK, there was a kid my age who lived a mile away. There was noone else for 5 miles. We used to cycle to see each other all of the time, go on adventures. But were always outsiders at school to the kids from areas with more kids, especially those where there was a girl! Another boy moved in once we were older and it transformed our group.

Every other house had older adults in it.

In 1940 you could imagine there would have been many more kids in the local village.
by JuniperMesos | 2025-11-17 09:53:07+00:00
> It's not memory safe like Rust is, but it comes with constructs that make it simple to build largely memory safe programs.

Right, this is the specific important thing that Rust does that Zig doesn't (with the caveat that Rust includes the `unsafe` mechanism - as a marked, non-default option - specifically to allow for necessary low-level memory manipulation that can't be checked for correctness by the compiler). Being able to guarantee that something can't happen is more valuable than making it simple to do something correctly most of the time.
by paxiongmap | 2025-11-17 09:54:04+00:00
I highly recommend Peter Gray's writing: https://petergray.substack.com/

Relevant to the discussion about online spaces and autonomy in childhood, I'd jump into this discussion about teen suicide rates: https://petergray.substack.com/p/d3-why-did-teen-suicides-es...

We have robbed our children of autonomy and freedom and then wonder why anxiety and depression are rampant.
by ethin | 2025-11-17 09:54:55+00:00
> ... granted, the majority did, but you can find distributions that did not surrender user's rights here...

I really don't like the phrasing of this. Nobody's rights are being "infringed" by distros going with systemd. Especially because, as other comments have noted, systemd is (not) just an init system, and more often than not I have found that people who hate on it or try to compare it to any pure init system are usually both arguing in bad faith and fundamentally misunderstanding what systemd actually is.
by lproven | 2025-11-17 09:55:33+00:00
> Concurrent DOS

This is the real deal here.

CDOS was a multitasking, eventually x86-32 native, OS that could multitask DOS apps even on a 286.

Back in the 20th century the limitations on a multitasking DOS were largely around hardware compatibility: could it talk to your network card, sound card, CD drive, and let multiple DOS apps access them?

But now, DOS networking is largely irrelevant: it didn't natively talk TCP/IP and nobody cares about IPX/SPX or NetBEUI. Few have a CD-ROM any more. You probably need a driver shim to emulate a Soundblaster anyway.

However all those 10s of thousands of DOS apps are still there and still work.

For DOS there's FreeDOS, SvarDOS, PDOS, and others, including this project.

A modern FOSS CDOS clone would be great fun.
by usrusr | 2025-11-17 09:55:44+00:00
So you buy a battery for your tiny grid island and pay a little more so that you can also use for a drive? Or perhaps not even more, because the standalone battery is less mass market item.

Truly an interesting change, considering how much of the ICE market used to be hand-me-downs from more industrialized countries. I guess proximity to those is now a hindrance to the renewable revolution, because places with less access to hand-me-downs have a market (and mindset!) for low-priced new cars that never existed in places flooded with second hand cars? Will the upmarket-first kind of BEV ever work in that way?
by rahen | 2025-11-17 09:55:50+00:00
The best challenger to systemd in terms of feature parity is probably dinit: https://davmac.org/projects/dinit/

Have a look at Chimera Linux if you want to give it a try: https://chimera-linux.org/

runit, s6, and OpenRC don't have the downsides of systemd, but they also only cover a subset of its features
by edistra | 2025-11-17 09:55:56+00:00
Thanks for the deep dive on Postgres WAL.

I recently had the opportunity to play with PostgreSQL WAL in the scope of implementing opensearch cdc pipeline, and it was really exciting to see what is possible to achieve with it.

Be cautious with idle replica slots though, I got bitten by inactive slots filling up the production database storage.

PostgreSQL 18 introduces idle_replication_slot_timeout to mitigate this.
by frisia | 2025-11-17 09:56:49+00:00
I'd be careful with what you mean by "realistic" here. Is this realistic as in would any normal person ever say this? The answer to that is a hard no, because people don't talk like this. But it is a moot point, because there shouldn't be any reason in the first place for you to care about the opinion of Chat-GPT, sycophancy or not.

I'm gonna assume that you are a pretty young developer. I think you have built something that you have put a lot of thought and engineering effort into, and that you should be proud of that. But asking very open-ended leading questions ike this to an LLM is not the way to go. Truthfully, it is not even the way to go when talking to another human either but humans are more understanding. We've all been young and insecure once, and one with any ounce of empathy will gently steer you towards a more healthy path without overt flattery.

I urge you, for your own emotional well being, seek more human connections. Chat-GPT can be great for very targeted questions if you have a specific problem or a very specific area you want feedback on and prompt it to give feedback to that. And this may sound very harsh, but I think you need to hear it: The kind of validation-seeking you are engaging with in this chat is not at all that different from the ones seeking emotional support from an "AI-girlfriend" or similiar. Please be careful, and find your own community with real humans that you can relate and look up to.
by sgt | 2025-11-17 09:58:05+00:00
Sure but there's this belief in the Rust community that it's not responsible anymore to write software that isn't memory safe on the same level as Rust.

So Zig would fail that, but then you could also consider C++ unsuitable for production software - and we know it clearly is still suitable.

I predict Zig will just become more and more popular (and with better, although not as complete- memory safety), and be applied to mission critical infra.
by teamonkey | 2025-11-17 09:59:09+00:00
Computers didn’t introduce the notion of solo play and there are examples of games throughout history that are not about competition.

Archery, for example, has its roots in improving your skills for the battlefield. But archery as an hobby, which goes back as long as the bow was invented, is simply for the enjoyment of doing it.

Kids playing together with toys is not a competition. Lego/Meccano/building blocks. The list goes on.
by rckt | 2025-11-17 10:00:41+00:00
There's nothing to elaborate actually. The state of the AI currently does not allow to use seriously. If we mean "then spend N amount of time reviewing and trying to make a better output", then yes, I can agree that AI is usable. But the time wasted on the reviews can be simply put into doing the task yourself. And it will be faster and less frustrating.
by bayindirh | 2025-11-17 10:00:45+00:00
> actually do change the way you think about software. It's a pretty momentous paradigm shift.

That's true for people who doesn't read and think about the code they write. For people who think from the perspective of a computer, Rust is "same checks, but forced by the compiler".

Make no mistake, to err is human, but Rust doesn't excite me that much.
by pkolaczk | 2025-11-17 10:01:03+00:00
Technically it's not a pause as the pauses introduced by a typical STW tracing GC. It does not stop the other threads. The app can still continue to work during that cleanup.

And it pops up in the profiler immediately with a nice stack trace showing where it rooted from. Then you fix it by e.g. moving cleanup to background to unlock this thread, not cleaning it at all (e.g. if the process dies anyway soon), or just remodel the data structure to not have so many tiny objects, etc.

Essentially this is exactly "way more deterministic and easier to understand and model". No-one said it is free from performance traps.

> And free itself can be expensive.

The total amortized cost of malloc/free is usually much lower than the total cost of tracing; unless you give tracing GC a horrendous amount of additional memory (> 10x of resident live set).

malloc/free are especially efficient when they are used for managing bigger objects. But even with tiny allocations like 8 bytes size (which are rarely kept on heap) I found modern allocators like mimalloc or jemalloc easily outperformed modern GCs of Java (in terms of CPU cycles spent, not wall clock).
by yeoyeo42 | 2025-11-17 10:01:23+00:00
5 microseconds is a whole lot of time for just a branch misprediction, which is on the order of a few nanoseconds. probably a lot more important stuff going on and focusing on the wrong thing.

for example, predicting a different branch can lead to different memory access patterns. maybe you can get rid of most of the real world cost of the misprediction by just forcefully prefetching the memory the send() path is going to use.
by andy12_ | 2025-11-17 10:02:36+00:00
For my part, I don't know why, but Zig's syntax feels wrong to me. I don't even know why. I really want to like its syntax, as Zig seems really promising to me, but I just don't, which makes it not very enjoyable for me to write.

I don't know if it's my lack of practice, but I never felt the same about, say, Rust's syntax, or the syntax of any other language for that matter.
by ashdnazg | 2025-11-17 10:03:45+00:00
The bare basics are working with a hex editor and understanding data types - ints, floats, null-terminated strings, length-prefixed strings etc.

I'd recommend taking a well documented binary file format (Doom WAD file?), go over the documentation, and see that you manage to see the individual values in the hex editor.

Now, after you have a feel for how things might look in hex, look at your own file. Start by saving an empty project from your program and identifying the header, maybe it's compressed?

If it's not, change a tiny thing in the program and save again, compare the files to see what changed. Or alternatively change the file a tiny bit and load it.

Write a parser and add things as you learn more. If the file isn't intentionally obfuscated, it should probably be just a matter of persevering until you can parse the entire file.
by bayindirh | 2025-11-17 10:04:07+00:00
> To call Rust syntax beautiful is a stretch.

I'm no Rust fan, but beauty of a syntax is always in the eye of the beholder.

I personally find Go, C++ and Python's syntax beautiful. All can be written in very explicit or expressive forms. On the other hand, you can hide complexity to a point.

If you are going to do complex things in a compact space, you'll asymptotically approach Perl or PCRE. It's maths.

All code is maths, BTW.
by czl | 2025-11-17 10:04:32+00:00
One of the big advantages humans have is that we are really good at working around constraints rather than just fighting over them. Health care, education, and even things like prenatal screening to reduce serious genetic disease all expand people’s potential and quality of life. Over time, that means more people who are emotionally stable, educated, and healthy, which is exactly what makes “higher quality” partners possible in the first place.

When we treat everything as a zero sum status game, especially when it comes to other human beings, we tend to slide into ugly, destructive dynamics (up to and including wars) where everyone burns resources just to keep their relative place. Cooperation and innovation, on the other hand, are how we turn a fixed pie into a growing one.

So yes, relative position matters in some contexts, but the whole reason our species has gotten this far is that we are not limited to fighting over scraps. We can change the size and shape of the pie together.
by josephg | 2025-11-17 10:08:12+00:00
> why is 70kb of source code a problem?

Because javascript isn't compiled. Its distributed as source. And that means the browser needs to actually parse all that code before it can be executed. Parsing javascript is surprisingly slow.

70kb isn't much on its own these days, but it adds up fast. Add react (200kb), a couple copies of momentjs (with bundled timezone databases, of course) (250kb or something each) and some actual application code and its easy to end up with ~1mb of minified javascript. Load that into a creaky old android phone and your website will chug.

For curiosity's sake, I just took a look at reddit in dev tools. Reddit loads 9.4mb of javascript (compressed to 3mb). Fully 25% of the CPU cycles loading reddit (in firefox on my mac) were spent in EvaluateModule.

This is one of the reasons wasm is great. Wasm modules are often bigger than JS modules, but wasm is packed in an efficient binary format. Browsers parse wasm many times faster than they parse javascript.
by ssl-3 | 2025-11-17 10:08:51+00:00
If dealing with the absence of the penny were straight-forward, then there would be no real discussion about it today. We'd already be moving along [mostly!] according to the new, published normal and things would be a snoozefest.

But there is no guidance provided. Accordingly, we get discussions.

I would like to present this indeterminable discussion (from several days ago) as evidence of the kinds of differing opinions that a lack of planning and guidance brings forth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45901904

This is the kind of discussion that the dust should have settled on years ago.
by homebrewer | 2025-11-17 10:12:15+00:00
Does the heater handle real winters, like they have in Alaska, Mongolia, and parts of Russia north of it? Or just European and American "winters" where -20°C is considered hardcore? Gasoline powered engines handle this well, and you can warm them up with a gasoline torch if they stay outside for too long and refuse to start. The cold does not destroy them.
by 1718627440 | 2025-11-17 10:12:48+00:00
> This blog post talks as if mocking the `open` function is a good thing that people should be told how to do. If you are mocking anything in the standard library your code is probably structured poorly.

Valgrind is a mock of standard library/OS functions and I think its existence is a good thing. Simulating OOM is also only possible by mocking stuff like open.
by liampulles | 2025-11-17 10:12:54+00:00
If one is shooting film, then they have to make visual choices during the shoot. Shooting with high range digital cameras and grading it later allows for delaying the decision.

The problem (IMO) is that more stakeholders then get involved in deciding what the look of the film should be. Good looking films make bold visual choices, and bold decisions rarely come from a committee.
by wongarsu | 2025-11-17 10:16:39+00:00
Smaller cities with about 40k-200k inhabitants can also be a nice sweet spot: big enough to have a decent number of events and hobby opportunities, small enough that you have low-traffic sidestreets within walking distance of the city center, and nature is still very much in reach

Assuming a European city layout where a city center exists and the 200k inhabitants aren't all spread out into suburban sprawl. Suburbia quickly kills the idea of walking and biking distances
by topspin | 2025-11-17 10:16:48+00:00
I downplayed there, because occasionally I try to moderate my extreme cynicism.

It would be miraculous, in the biblical sense of the word. Not only because it would be a technical and regulatory triumph for RR and the UK, but because it would mean this is something other than what it appears to be to me.

None of this will get built. It's all fake, and after the benefits are taken, and the subsidy budgets are drained, and the various political and academic and regulatory folks have populated the requisite non-profit no-show jobs, and the professional opposition leaders have collected all the anti-nook bucks, and RR et al. have wiggled out of whatever obligations they're pretending to pursue via the holes they've already carefully arranged for themselves, these papers and headlines will be forgotten.
by ralferoo | 2025-11-17 10:17:23+00:00
IIRC the average seek time across optical media is around 120ms, so ideally you want all reads to be linear.

I remember one game I worked on, I spent months optimising loading, especially boot flow, to ensure that every file the game was going to load was the very next file on the disk, or else the next file was an optionally loaded file that could be skipped (as reading and ignoring was quicker than seeking). For the few non-deterministic cases where order couldn't be predicted (e.g. music loaded from a different thread), I preloaded a bunch of assets up front so that the rest of the assets were deterministic.

One fun thing we often did around this era is eschew filenames and instead hash the name. If we were loading a file directly from C code, we'd use the preprocessor the hash the code via some complicated macros, so the final call would be compiled like LoadAsset(0x184e49da) but still retain a run-time hasher for cases where the filename was generated dynamically. This seems like a weird optimisation, but actually avoiding the directory scan and filename comparisons can save a lot of unnecessary seeking / CPU operations, especially for multi-level directories. The "file table" then just became a list of disk offset and lengths, with a few gaps because the hash table size was a little bigger than the number of files to avoid hash conflicts. Ironically, on one title I worked on we had the same modulo for about 2 years in development, and just before launch we needed to change it twice in a week due to conflicts!
by self_awareness | 2025-11-17 10:18:24+00:00
I've installed emacs now on ArchLinux Wayland system and its window refuses to resize (on purely default settings), and freezes the contents until I move it. Very refreshing indeed.

I bet this is some kind of a known issue, but that just reinforces my original point above.

edit: yeah, here it is: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509871

I mean, how it's not an Emacs issue if it only happens with emacs?
by 1718627440 | 2025-11-17 10:18:32+00:00
> - can't pause or save: except when you maybe play against a computer which is not the point of the game

Famous games span multiple years or decades and are also done across continents over a phone line. Chess is very pausable.

> - grinding: you need to play the same openings many many times to encounter all the responses that will let you know if your "build" is worthy

You can start from a given state to try things out. You can even start from non-reachable states if you want to.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-17 10:19:52+00:00
> there's no upside to publishing open source work because it might be utilized by more people, is that correct?

I believe the perspective here is "I make code for fellow hackers to look into, critique, be educated on, or simply play with". If you see the hacker scene as a social one, LLM's are an awful black hole that sucks up everything around it and ruins this collaboration.

Not to mention that the hacker scene was traditionally thought to be a rejection of what we now call "Big Tech". Corporate was free to grab the code, but it didn't matter much as long as the scene was kept. Now even that invisible social contract is broken.

But I suppose if you're of a diehard FOSS mentality, "Free" means "Free". Free to be used to build, or destroy society at its whim. a hivemind to meld into and progress the overall understanding of science, for science's sake.

I'll admit the last few years have had me questioning what I truly want to do within the on these two mentalities.
by cachius | 2025-11-17 10:19:57+00:00
The founders of the Miniaturwunderland Hamburg were in the media describing how they push back against smartphones and media in their family life: https://www.ardmediathek.de/video/ndr-talk-show/miniatur-wun...

Strange coincidence: shortly after they were hacked https://www.borncity.com/blog/2025/11/12/miniatur-wunderland...
by dust42 | 2025-11-17 10:20:14+00:00
> Old wind turbines might be perfectly fine but they are also no longer competitive with modern replacements. Usually it does make sense to replace them with more modern alternatives.

I would just for once love to see a calculation for this. There have been no advancements in generator technology nor in blade technology. Generators in power stations have a life time of many decades. A third of the 31000 German wind turbines will be put down because of the end of subsidies.

Also subsidising solar power in the north of Germany makes no sense - for months there is no solar in winter but in summer solar adds to the already massive surplus of energy from offshore wind. It is a waste of money. If you believe that global warming is a problem (which I agree with) then the money should be put to efficient use.