MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vacuity | 2025-11-24 04:39:56+00:00
I am not too familiar with D, but it seems that D's borrowing system is somewhat different than Rust's, given that it is not the focus of how D is implemented and used. This means different design tradeoffs.

There are appropriate ways to contrast D with Rust and illustrate where D is stronger, but it is inaccurate to say "Rust has borrowing; D has borrowing" and conclude that they are comparable in this sense.
by chrismorgan | 2025-11-24 04:40:02+00:00
> You can determine user's language from IP address location.

I live in Hyderabad, Telangana, India. I do not yet speak enough Telugu or Hindi or Urdu to be useful, and cannot read Hindi or Urdu at all; but I’m a foreigner who grew up on English only, rather rare around here, so let’s consider native Indians instead. Many can speak these languages but not read them in their native scripts, only romanised (in which case they can probably speak English tolerably). And many (many) come from other parts of India (or even Nepal) and can’t speak Telugu. Or are Muslim and at least prefer to deal in Hindi, often not having very good Telugu. And so on. It’s messy.

Some IP geolocation doesn’t even get the city right—I’ve seen Noida suggested, which is up north in Hindi territory.
by mustntmumble | 2025-11-24 04:40:11+00:00
I'll tell you what is NOT hot!

I have Phonak Audeos paired over bluetooth with my iPhone. A few years prior, I used to have Oticon, also paired with my iPhone.

With the Oticon, if I made a cellphone call, the iPhone would use the default iPhone microphone while the audio would stream to my hearing aids. It was good that way because in a noisy environment I could hold the iphone right up to my mouth and the other party would be able to hear what I was saying.

With the newer Phonaks, I was very disappointed to find that the new hearing aids would only use the microphone input that is built into the hearing aids themselves, and not the iPhone mic input. I discovered this when I realised that talking directly into iPhone mic did not make it any easier for the other party to hear me.

I complained to my Audiologist who explained that yes, the new hearing aids were copying the behaviour of Apple AirPods, which also have the mic input on the earpod itself, and that there was no way at all to configure the Phonaks to use the iPhone mic input instead.

Why is this a problem you might ask? Because my hearing aids are Behind The Ear (BTE) and thus the mic input on the hearing aid is a good 4 inches away from my face and thus my voice cannot possibly sound as clear as when I could speak directly into an iPhone mic.

When I next replace my hearing aids, I shall look for aids that do not mimic this crappy AirPods behaviour...
by tbrownaw | 2025-11-24 04:41:36+00:00
> If you keep Orshansky’s logic—if you maintain her principle that poverty could be defined by the inverse of food’s budget share

This is not accurate. There was no such principle. There was an extrapolation technique to use well-measured numbers to calculate a desired but not measured number.

This is not a principle about how things should be calculated, it is a tool for dealing with missing features in a dataset.
by shostack | 2025-11-24 04:42:13+00:00
Love his channel in general. I actually tried something similar and attended team meetings while sitting in a private jet in VR in Microsoft Flight Simulator. It was such a cool experience and totally immersive. Especially pulling up pinned windows for the work like a laptop on a plane.

There is something to be said for a change in scenery to somewhere stunning. Staring off somewhere beautiful while listening to what people are saying actually helped me stay focused on the content of the meeting.
by defrost | 2025-11-24 04:42:25+00:00
Diving in, that research is less against public transport in general, more about how the US is just not very good at it:

Our measure of environmental performance is a transit agency's average carbon dioxide emissions per passenger-mile or vehicle-mile. During the period of analysis, the sector's carbon dioxide emissions declined by 12.8%, while vehicle-miles travelled increased by 7.1% and passenger-miles increased by 10.5%. Thus, the emissions intensity of public transit has shrunk since 2002 using both measures. Yet, compared with public transit emissions in the United Kingdom and Germany, we document that the U.S. bus fleets had the highest carbon emissions per mile and the smallest efficiency progress.

ie. US public transport was inefficient and polluting to begin with, and while it improved somewhat when a prior administration finally applied some funding to the task, US public transport stills woefully lags in comparison about the glone.
by krick | 2025-11-24 04:43:22+00:00
It would be a good thing, if it would cause anything to change. It obviously won't. As if a single person reading this post wasn't aware that the Internet is centralized, and couldn't name specifically a few sources of centralization (Cloudflare, AWS, Gmail, Github). As if it's the first time this happens. As if after the last time AWS failed (or the one before that, or one before…) anybody stopped using AWS. As if anybody could viably stop using them.
by cebert | 2025-11-24 04:43:27+00:00
Honestly, it took me a Sunday afternoon with Claude Code to build this on Cloudflare worker while watching football. I spent time crafting a solid design spec and rules. Then, I mostly let Claude do the heavy lifting. The site serves a purpose for me, but it might not be everyone’s cup of tea. What makes these agentic tools so incredible is that they empower us to create custom software tailored to our specific needs (especially us more technical folks).

I’m open to feedback and suggestions for this site if anyone has them. One of my goals is to keep costs down because I am not independently wealthy.

This was my first time building anything on Cloudflare, but I was quite impressed with the experience.
by vacuity | 2025-11-24 04:43:32+00:00
"Generics" is not why Rust compiles slowly. Rust had certain design decisions and implementation details that impact compile times significantly. Do not misrepresent them and pretend that the Rust developers are incompetent or malicious. By doing so, you invite discourse as ideological and uncritical as that of Rust fanatics, however many or few there are.
by Broken_Hippo | 2025-11-24 04:44:08+00:00
we don't let our neighbors and kids become fent zombies on the main drag

Nope, you'll take homeless folks right to jail, promptly, where they can be zombies out of sight. It isn't like folks in small towns are gonna help the person with treatment. As long as they stay out of view most times, they'll just be gossip. If they are lucky, someone will invite them to church. Small towns will absolutely let folks suffer if they just stay somewhere out of sight.
by jjav | 2025-11-24 04:44:24+00:00
> but even a year away from hands on technical work is going to leave you likely stranded and unable to execute on the technical aspects

This is an interesting myth, but certainly a myth. I guess if we consider technical skill to be intimate knowledge of the latest fad framework, that might be one source of the myth. But that's not technical skills, just trivia about an implementation detail.

The fundamentals like networking, process and memory management, databases and SQL, all change slowly and are very long-lived career-spanning knowledge.
by chrismorgan | 2025-11-24 04:44:28+00:00
I meant, in the context: blocked by Cloudflare with hCAPTCHA recourse. But as I consider it more carefully, I don’t think they don’t use hCAPTCHA in their challenges any more. They used reCAPTCHA at first, moved to hCAPTCHA around 2020, then they made their own thing Turnstile in ~2022 and migrated challenges to that at probably? the same time.
by remarkEon | 2025-11-24 04:46:13+00:00
Others have commented on why Howard should be well known if you live here.

The whole point of the United States government existing is, supposedly, for the betterment of its citizens. From time to time, its worth debating from first principles whether or not existing immigration policy - or any policy, really - actually does this. Given the unemployment rate for recent STEM grads in the US, I think it's perfectly reasonable to ask some hard questions about whether or not some of these visa schemes are actually doing good in the general sense, and not just in the specific sense of "this AI start up that's really just a ChatGPT wrapper has access to more bodies, so their runway is longer".
by atonse | 2025-11-24 04:47:05+00:00
Geez lord I can’t believe this ever made it out of testing.

Even all the text selection stuff stinks.

Honestly I’m about to disable Apple Intelligence. I don’t know what’s going on there.

What is everyone working on over at apple?

Anyone checked if this still happens (it typed that as “halles” which isn’t even a word!) even after disabling Apple Intelligence?
by anonym29 | 2025-11-24 04:47:25+00:00
The stated research goals are not necessarily the same as the strategic funding motivations. The DoD clearly recognized packet-switching's survivability and dynamic routing potential when the US Air Force funded the invention of networked packet switching by Paul Baran six years earlier, in 1960, for which the explicit purpose was "nuclear-survivable military communications".

There is zero reason to believe ARPA would've funded the work were it not for internal military recognition of the utility of the underlying technology.

To assume that the project lead was told EVERY motivation of the top secret military intelligence committee that was responsible for 100% of the funding of the project takes either a special kind of naïveté or complete ignorance of compartmentalization practices within military R&D and procurement practices.

ARPANET would never have been were it not for ARPA funding, and ARPA never would've funded it were it not for the existence of packet-switched networking, which itself was invented and funded, again, six years before Bob Taylor even entered the picture, for the SOLE purpose of "nuclear-survivable military communications".

Consider the following sequence of events:

1. US Air Force desires nuclear-survivable military communications, funds Paul Baran's research at RAND

2. Baran proves packet-switching is conceptually viable for nuclear-survivable communications

3. His specific implementation doesn't meet rigorous Air Force deployment standards (their implementation partner, AT&T, refuses - which is entirely expectable for what was then a complex new technology that not a single AT&T engineer understood or had ever interacted with during the course of their education), but the concept is now proven and documented

4. ARPA sees the strategic potential of packet-switched networks for the explicit and sole purpose of nuclear-survivable communications, and decides to fund a more robust development effort

5. They use academic resource-sharing as the development/testing environment (lower stakes, work out the kinks, get future engineers conceptually familiar with the underlying technology paradigms)

6. Researchers, including Bob Taylor, genuinely focus on resource sharing because that's what they're told their actual job is, even though that's not actually the true purpose of their work

7. Once mature, the technology gets deployed for it's originally-intended strategic purposes (MILNET split-off in 1983)

Under this timeline, the sole true reason for ARPA's funding of ARPANET is nuclear-survivable military communication, Bob Taylor, being the military's R&D pawn, is never told that (standard compartmentalization practice). Bob Taylor can credibly and honestly state that he was tasked with implementing resource sharing across academic networks, which is true, but was never the actual underlying motivation to fund his research.

...and the myth of "ARPANET wasn't created for nuclear survivability" is born.
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-24 04:47:43+00:00
> I'm not sure how accurate the methodology is to come up with the specific budget that produces the number "sixteen" here, but broadly speaking, it seems extremely likely that the number is no longer "three"

If we assume that general inflation captures the right basket of goods, and that (3 × minimum food) was correct in 1963, then what is actually done (adjusting the result in 1963 by inflation) is correct as well.

That is not what you would get if you computed the minimum food budget now and multiplied by 3; the shifting of the food share of the budget is captured in the CPI.
by siliconc0w | 2025-11-24 04:49:40+00:00
I'm a bit torn on Fix-it weeks. They are nice but many bugs simply aren't worth fixing. Generally, if they were worth fixing - they would have been fixed.

I do appreciate though that certain people, often very good detail oriented engineers, find large backlogs incredibly frustrating so I support fix-it weeks even if there isn't clear business ROI.
by bccdee | 2025-11-24 04:49:48+00:00
This crash gets caught and handled too: the process exits, the kubernetes pod fails, and the deployment recreates it from scratch. Panicking like this is a request for the infrastructure to turn the whole service off and on again, which is sometimes the correct way to deal with transient failures. The problem here is that the infrastructure was restarting the service with the same bad config every time, causing a crashloop. It's a system design bug.
by altmanaltman | 2025-11-24 04:49:50+00:00
I get the argument you're making but that's a bit like saying cavemen used to do calculus as they hunt, which is a valid way of looking at this maybe but they didn't really "use calculus" just intuition. Simillarly, when learning calculus, most people do not do so at a driving course, they do it in the classroom.

If you're willing to stretch the definition of what "using" maths is then it can apply to everything and that devalues the concept as a whole. I'm not on the toilet, I'm doing calculus!
by spankibalt | 2025-11-24 04:50:21+00:00
Ach, fuck it, one more, for it got personal. A tad bit out of order:

> "Is this seriously a point of confusion for you?"

Another strawman; it's about art as opposed to programming which I objected to, not about some confabulation of art as "drawing and painting".

> "Up until this sentence I assumed I was talking to another person who does both art and programming. [...] Which means you're just running your mouth about something you have no experience with."

I am interested in and develop my skills in both disciplines; I don't claim to be even close to a master in both. So keep such speculations about my life to yourself.

> "Ten years of full time study to learn, according to a master who has been teaching for over 35 years. Are you going to lie and tell me it takes that long to get a job as a programmer?"

You started out with the imprecise statement "reasonably good". That already begged the question what you fucking mean by that. Only now, after much back-and-forth, you roll-in with James Watts who talks in his vidya, after being prompted to describe what he considers the fucking teaching elite of his field and what it took to get there, with some extrapolations based on experience. Not exactly an optimum comparison to some "reasonably good" Coder Johnny in whatever particular (set of) coding language(s) you were sadly only dreaming about in these moments, but they are all the same anyway, amirite? ;)

And the essence worth taking home from Watts? He doesn't, and I paraphrase, "try to put his students in a box" when gouging the way ahead of 'em. In other words: "It depends". Yeah, it fucking does, lol. Any educator worth their salt knows that.

> "I can name more programmers than I can count on my fingers that got a job straight out of a four-year or two-year program. I've never met or heard of an artist that got a full time professional job with less than ten years of study."

Good for you. I on the other hand met many artists that got pro jobs after a four program at a university. Of course, like the programmers, almost each and everyone of them [1] already honed their skills (depending on talent and life circumstances even long) before they enrolled for art (or compsci) courses. That obviously still leaves one to define if these people are just "reasonably good" or are peers to "the (teaching) elite" at that point, let alone taking in account outliers such as (child) prodigies or late bloomers.

> "Oh, I realize now you're just new to internet forums, [...]"

No. I only realized too late that you clearly never made it beyond reiterating tedious logical fallacies in this discussion. You can do better.

1. Only one notable outlier: I know two cutters/editors (one now a successful TV film director) that got jobs straight out of a two- or three-year film school who never did anything even remotely close to their chosen field before.
by timenotwasted | 2025-11-24 04:50:36+00:00
"Embrace outages, and build redundancy." — It feels like back in the day this was championed pretty hard especially by places like Netflix (Chaos Monkey) but as downtime has become more expected it seems we are sliding backwards. I have a tendency to rely too much on feelings so I'm sure someone could point me to some data that proves otherwise but for now that's my read on things. Personally, I've been going a lot more in on self-hosting lots of things I used to just mindlessly leave on the cloud.
by noduerme | 2025-11-24 04:50:39+00:00
Having taken some flak here for my reaction to that line, I'd clarify that I don't blame the writer for feeling that way. That's perfectly natural. My critique is that the injection of a summary opinion cheapened the writing and flattened the complexity. In a literary sense, the author was doing a great job of showing, rather telling the reader what to think, up to that point. The reader may very well have drawn the conclusion that the father was a coward. In a legal sense, the flash of bitterness actually harms their case. It draws into question their reliability as a witness. Calling it a "slip" was insightful, as it implies both.
by brookst | 2025-11-24 04:51:23+00:00
> Ironically many of the people in favor of banning VPNs are themselves using a VPN.

It’s ironic but also completely typical.

Same way so many people publicly freaking out about homosexuality turn out to be gay. There’s something in human nature that makes people shout about the dangers of the things they themselves do, some kind of camouflage instinct I guess.
by echelon | 2025-11-24 04:51:53+00:00
This is a great resource!

Some TILs:

Hashing

> The default hashing algorithm is not specified, but at the time of writing the default is an algorithm called SipHash 1-3. This algorithm is high quality—it provides high protection against collisions—but is relatively slow, particularly for short keys such as integers.

> An attempt to switch from fxhash back to the default hasher resulted in slowdowns ranging from 4-84%!

I/O

> Rust’s print! and println! macros lock stdout on every call. If you have repeated calls to these macros it may be better to lock stdout manually.

Build times

> If you use dev builds but don’t often use a debugger, consider disabling debuginfo. This can improve dev build times significantly, by as much as 20-40%.

Interesting std library alternatives

> If you have many short vectors, you can use the SmallVec type from the smallvec crate. SmallVec<[T; N]> is a drop-in replacement for Vec that can store N elements within the SmallVec itself, and then switches to a heap allocation if the number of elements exceeds that.

> If you have many short vectors and you precisely know their maximum length, ArrayVec from the arrayvec crate is a better choice than SmallVec. It does not require the fallback to heap allocation, which makes it a little faster.

> The SmallString type from the smallstr crate is similar to the SmallVec type.

I doubt I'll change my use of the standard types often, but this is good information to know for cases where this might be applicable.

Advice on enums

> If an enum has an outsized variant, consider boxing one or more fields.

I'm surprised I didn't see any advice about skipping proc macros or Serde for faster compile times.
by nielsbot | 2025-11-24 04:52:03+00:00
Their function is to maximize profit. I doubt they think about their company's position in society often if at all.

But there are many factors. Allowing stock buybacks is definitely one of those.

If I'm reading this chart right they're spending about $500M/quarter on buybacks? https://www.financecharts.com/stocks/MCD/cash-flow/repurchas...
by captainkrtek | 2025-11-24 04:53:18+00:00
> It would be a good thing, if it would cause anything to change. It obviously won't.

I agree wholeheartedly. The only change is internal to these organizations (eg: CloudFlare, AWS) Improvements will be made to the relevant systems, and some teams internally will also audit for similar behavior, add tests, and fix some bugs.

However, nothing external will change. The cycle of pretending like you are going to implement multi-region fades after a week. And each company goes on continuing to leverage all these services to the Nth degree, waiting for the next outage.

Not advocating that organizations should/could do much, it's all pros/cons. But the collective blast radius is still impressive.
by vacuity | 2025-11-24 04:53:30+00:00
Mutable shared state is literally the nature of contention. It's true that locking is the mediocre default, but "avoid locks" is not a silver bullet. Alternatives have their own tradeoffs. If you "carefully design" a solution, it's probably because you're not just using an alternative but actually taking care to optimize, and because you have a specific use case (which you described).
by SilentM68 | 2025-11-24 04:53:36+00:00
Without minimizing the quality or your book, I actually like subject matter books that encompass prerequisite knowledge into the text without forcing the reader to read another book in parallel (e.g. Calculus for Machine Learning by Jason Brownlee or No Bullshit Guide to Math & Physics by Ivan Savov). Though not saying that these books are better, they appeal to my learning style a bit more. Learning institutions tend to force students to take too many courses in parallel when they should find a way to join the subjects, whenever possible, without having to break the instruction into multiple semesters, just to sell more books.
by bccdee | 2025-11-24 04:54:24+00:00
What UB? This has nothing to do with UB; it'd be well-defined in any language. It's equivalent to this python snippet:

config = load_config() if !config.valid(): sys.exit(1) # config is corrupt. restart pod

Did Python do something wrong by letting users call `sys.exit`? No. This is a deliberate crash. Under other circumstances, crashing might have been a valid strategy, but here it turned out to be a bad choice, since Cloudflare's infrastructure was restarting the service with the same bad config every time.