MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-20 02:51:14+00:00
It's not harmful. It's necessary for modern systems that are not "an ECU in a car"

> Memory overcommit means that once you run out of physical memory, the OOM killer will forcefully terminate your processes with no way to handle the error. This is fundamentally incompatible with the goal of writing robust and stable software which should handle out-of-memory situations gracefully.

The big software is not written that way. In fact, writing software that way means you will have to sacrifice performance, memory usage, or both because you either * need to allocate exactly what you always need and free it when it gets smaller (if you want to keep memory footprint similar)m and that will add latency * over-allocate, and waste RAM

And you'd end up with MORE memory related issues, not less. Writing app where every allocation can fail is just nightmarish waste of time for 99% of the apps that are not "onboard computer of a space ship/plane"
by canucker2016 | 2025-12-20 02:51:59+00:00
Couldn't you use your smartphone and Google Lens (on Android, Google app on iOS includes Google Lens functionality) to translate the Spanish to English?

FYI - Lens on Android does in-place language translation including attempting to use the same/similar font that the original language is written/printed.

Unfortunately, I don't think Lens can be used in an automated batch translation mode to convert an entire book/multiple pages
by counters | 2025-12-20 02:52:39+00:00
Machine learning _has_ been widely used in weather forecasting, but in a different way than these models. Going back to the 1970's, you never just take the output of a numerical weather model and call it a forecast. We know that limitations in the models' resolution and representation of physical processes lead to huge biases and missed details that cause the forecast to disagree with real world observations. So a standard technique has been to post-process model outputs, calibrating them for station observations where available. You don't need super complex ML to really dramatically improve the quality or skill of the forecast in this manner; typically multiple linear regressions with some degree of feature selection and other criteria will capture most of the variance, especially when you pool observation stations together.
by Lucasoato | 2025-12-20 02:54:37+00:00
If you’re looking for a cheap but reliable alternative, Hetzner offers i7 64GB Ram servers for as low as 37.45€/month.

Of course you’re not in AWS, forget about all the managed services, but we’re talking about 95%~98% cheaper egress costs, with 20TB included in most machines.
by sublinear | 2025-12-20 02:55:45+00:00
> those aged 55 and above are proportionately more positive than younger people about the internet's impact on civilization

The same is probably true across other technology topics as well. I don't think anyone should be surprised. People that age neither give a rat's ass about the future nor do they deeply understand these technologies or use them as extensively.

The mid-to-late 20th century also conditioned them to believe absurdly optimistic fantasies that never really came true. They were assuaged with trite statements like "well not in your lifetime, but someday soon". There are huge differences between witnessing invention and mass adoption vs refinement. This century so far has largely been modest refinement and even bigger lies.
by tsol | 2025-12-20 02:55:56+00:00
I haven't heard any clear motives yet. Some people are saying it's simply a case of someone who was a genius that ended up in a mediocre place in life, leading to to killing. Still that story is so common in America I don't see how it leads to killing innocent children at your alma mater? It makes no sense to me.

But as with many of these situations the truth might not make sense-- sometimes it's simply irrational thinking by someone mentally unwell. It reminds me a bit of the Reiner killings as well, considering there too there's no clear motive except maybe a hypothetical mental break. Truthfully, we might just never have a satisfying answer as to why this tragedy happened.
by constantinum | 2025-12-20 02:55:56+00:00
At instances where data accuracy is of paramount importance, i think a hybrid route of non-llm ocr for data parsing and LLMs for structured data extraction is the safe passage to tread on. Seen better results for LLMWhisperer(OCR)[1] and Latest Gemini.

[1] - https://pg.llmwhisperer.unstract.com/
by bloppe | 2025-12-20 02:56:10+00:00
I think beginner programmers like the fact that they can just open one app and the AI chat box is right next to their editor window. Other than that, I agree that it's pretty silly to maintain a whole IDE just to attach an AI chat box to it.

Now that there's MCP, the community will out-innovate anything a single company can do in terms of bolting on features. It's easy enough to get all the LSP integration and stuff into Claude code.

So it all comes down to model differentiation. Can cursor compete as a foundation model creator? Maybe, but even so, that's going to be a very tough market. Margins will be razor thin at best. It's a commodity.

Anyway, the last thing I would want if I were them is to keep worrying about maintaining this IDE themselves.
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-20 02:56:37+00:00
> It's not really wrong. For something like redis, you could potentially fork and the child gets stuck for a long time and in the meantime the whole cache in the parent is rewritten.

It's wrong 99.99999% of the time. Because alternative is either "make it take double and waste half the RAM" or "write in memory data in a way that allows for snapshotting, throwing a bunch of performance into the trash"
by queenkjuul | 2025-12-20 02:56:47+00:00
> thousands of developers are using the tools productively,

There's at least one study that suggests that they actually are not in fact working more productively, they just feel that way.

Unfortunately for me personally, Claude Code on the latest models does not generally make me more productive, but it has absolutely led to several of my coworkers submitting absolutely trash-tier untested LLM code for review.

So until i personally see it give me output that meets my standards, or i see my coworkers do so, I'm not going to be convinced. Legions of anonymous HN commenters insisting they're 50 year veterans that have talked Claude into spitting out perfect code will never convince me.

(I spent over an hour working with Claude Code to write unit tests. I did eventually get code that met my standards, after dozens of rounds of feedback and many manual edits, and cleaning up quite a lot of hallucinatory code. Like most times I decide to "put in the effort" to get worthwhile results from Claude, I'm entirely certain I could have done it faster myself. I just didn't really feel like it at 4 on a Friday)
by inkyoto | 2025-12-20 02:57:56+00:00
Without going into a discussion about whether this is right or wrong, how is fork(2) wasteful?

fork(2) has been copy-on-write for decades and does not copy the entire process address space. Thread stacks are a non-sequitur either as stack uses the data pages, the thread stacks are rather small in size in most scanarios, hence the thread stacks are also subject to copy-on-write.

The only overhead that the use of fork(2) incurs is an extra copy of process' memory descriptior pages, which is a drop in the ocean for modern systems for large amounts of RAM.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-20 02:58:19+00:00
You don’t get to be a senior engineer just because of tenure. It’s not gaming the system to expect a level to be based on the amount of responsibility and not just from getting 1 year of experience 10x.

You want a promotion because you want more money. Even though I have found the difference to not be that great on the enterprise dev side. But in BigTech and adjacent, we are talking about multiple six figures differences as you move up.

I work in consulting and our bill rate is based on our title/level of responsibility. It kills me that some non customer facing consultants want to have a “career track” that doesn’t involve leading projects and strategy and want to stay completely “hands on”.

We can hire people cheaply from outside the country that can do that. There is an IC career track that is equal to a director (manager of managers). But you won’t get there hands on keyboard.
by leetrout | 2025-12-20 02:58:51+00:00
I looked around for reasonable datacenter colo in the triad and triangle and didn't get anything promising. Where are you physically hosting your infra?

Curious if you are having to buy bandwidth as well. Some of the Midwest data centers include over 30TB of bandwidth in the rack rentals.

And if you are willing to go into the details curious how you are handling bare metal provisioning. MaaS or home grown tooling? Or are you just installing proxmox by hand?
by ggrantrowberry | 2025-12-20 02:59:07+00:00
Nah. It is the same but at a different scale.

You give a calculator a problem and it gives an easy answer thus involving no further work from the human brain which causes it to atrophy just like any other underused muscle.

Just like a calculator can easily solve some problems so can AI. Sure the set of problems it can solve is bigger than a calculator. AI just enables you to work on bigger problems because you’re not spending so much time “calculating by hand”.

If you delegate all your thinking to AI or you use AI when the point of the activity is to do the activity (ie homework at school) then I think you’ll see problems. Just like using a calculator when you’re supposed to be learning how to add will stunt your growth.
by reactordev | 2025-12-20 02:59:28+00:00
>Darwin is based on proven technology from many sources. A large portion of this technology is derived from FreeBSD, a version of 4.4BSD that offers advanced networking, performance, security, and compatibility features. Other parts of the system software, such as Mach, are based on technology previously used in Apple’s MkLinux project, in OS X Server, and in technology acquired from NeXT.

Exactly.
by user3939382 | 2025-12-20 03:00:38+00:00
> Money supply management is important for price stability

That’s an academic answer but it’s wrong. Price stability is derived from economic equilibrium, which means energy however you want to label it in and out must be stable. It’s not a philosophical debate nash models most of it. Our landfill pipeline is the source of our debt.

The classical hypothesis is that a swamp of credit is always going to buy some magic wand where the ends justify the means and there are infinite ways for society to store debt. What you get is fraud after a phase transition which is the society we live in now. Basically all I’m pointing out is no free lunch. There’s nothing to debate. I’m mapping no free lunch to the various materializations of energy in the economy. Food fuel labor oil power whatever you want to label it you have to pay for that oil. It’s potential energy whose current payment date is hundreds of years in the future. The whole global supply chain theology is laid bare a bunch of horrible trade offs which falsely claim credit for largely unrelated gains in raw human output and hidden costs.
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-20 03:01:50+00:00
> Even if you disable overcommit, I don't think you will get pages assigned when you allocate. If your allocations don't trigger an allocation failure, you should get the same behavior with respect to disk cache using otherwise unused pages.

Doesn't really change the point. The RAM might not be completely wasted, but given that near every app will over-allocate and just use the pooled memory, you will waste memory that could otherwise be used to run more stuff.

And it can be quite significant, like it's pretty common for server apps to start a big process and then have COWed thread per connection in a pool, so your apache2 eating maybe 60MB per thread in pool is now in gigabytes range at very small pool sizes.

Blog is essentially call to "let's make apps like we did in the DOS era" which is ridiculus
by ipaddr | 2025-12-20 03:03:01+00:00
Have you tried going back 80% ap articles, some opinion columns, classifieds and sports with a lifestyle section.

We are living in an era of more news, different formats more in depth. I think our expectations are misaligned we expect everything to be one click away and social media to present it to us in a doom scroll. The articles shared just here on hn you would never find in a newspaper. If you are lucky you discover a zine like phrack or 2600 and wait months for the next issue.
by N_Lens | 2025-12-20 03:04:37+00:00
I've read that book and also Patrick McKeown's 'Oxygen Advantage', which also talks about CO2 tolerance and the benefits of Buteyko.

https://www.amazon.com/Oxygen-Advantage-Scientifically-Breat...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-m8jIhQyiDY

Good stuff honestly, helped me a lot
by barchar | 2025-12-20 03:04:43+00:00
Fwiw you can use pressure stall information to load shed. This is superior to disabling overcommit and then praying the first allocation to fail is in the process you want to actually respond to the resource starvation.

Fact is that by the time small allocations are failing you are almost no better off handling the null than you would be handling segfaults and the sigterms from the killer.

Often for servers performance will fall off a cliff long before the oom killer is needed, too.
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-20 03:06:27+00:00
overcommit 0

- Apache2 runs. - Apache2 takes 50MB. - Apache2 spawns 32 threads. - Apache2 takes 50MB + (per-thread vars * 32)

overcommit 2

- Apache2 runs. - Apache2 takes 50MB. - Apache2 spawns 32 threads. - Apache2 takes 50MB + (5032) + (per-thread vars 32)

Boom, Now your simple apache server serving some static files can't fit on 512MB VM and needs in excess of 1.7GB of memory just to allocate
by kittikitti | 2025-12-20 03:07:40+00:00
Because they serve their own independent search index. Others, under the hood, just use Bing or Google API for searches. This could mean that searching on other engines queries the sites that enable abuse described in the original article. Other sites that operate their own index include Yandex but because it's headquartered in Moscow, Russia, I have doubts about their privacy. This is what leads me to conclude that Brave Search has the best general privacy. I'm not entirely convinced by DuckDuckGo because it could just be a honeypot since it's approved by Big Tech gatekeepers.
by culi | 2025-12-20 03:08:29+00:00
interop is a subset of tests chosen beforehand (nowadays, mostly by devs voting in the github issues). This says Safari has reached 100% on the subset of tests agreed upon for interop-25. Those specific tests can be expanded by clicking it in the menu. It'll take you here:

https://wpt.fyi/results/wasm/jsapi?label=experimental&label=...

The full test-suite of wasm tests are here:

https://wpt.fyi/results/wasm
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-20 03:09:00+00:00
The waste comes with asterisk

That "waste" (that overcommit turns into "not a waste") means you can do far less allocations, with overcommit you can just allocate a bunch of memory and use it gradually, instead of having to do malloc() every time you need a bit of memory and free() every time you get rid of it.

You'd also increase memory fragmentation that way possibly hitting performance.

It's also pretty much required for GCed languages to work sensibly
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-20 03:10:46+00:00
That's the answer I'd give to someone asking me to just run linux when I'm ranting about some commercial OS.

But I think the point of FreeBSD is more to provide something that you wouldn't get otherwise, and justifies going above and beyond to get it properly working.

My own anecdote is running the 4x and then 5x versions on my cobbled parts crappy desktop as a student and getting excelent perfs for how cheap it was, while still having linux level CJK and multi-input support and stellar stability.

I wouldn't do that anymore, but hope it stays an option for those with other specific needs that a BSD OS would help.
by aw1621107 | 2025-12-20 03:12:04+00:00
> Upon appeal from the Court of Chancery. AFFIRMED IN PART, REVERSED IN PART.

> For the reasons explained below, we reverse the remedy chosen by the Court of Chancery – rescission of the 2018 compensation plan. We reinstate the 2018 plan and award the Plaintiff nominal damages. We also award the Plaintiff’s counsel fees based on quantum meruit and expenses.
by agumonkey | 2025-12-20 03:14:12+00:00
I got mentally hit hard by the 2nd push of vibe coding (gemini-cli and similar) for reasons you mention. I'd add a that:

- inverse career growth structure and black hole effect

usually, an industry has a number of skills to hone, you start with simple ones, and as you go you may learn more to do harder, and earn more. the more you love, the more you learn, the better for you. this is evaporating.. and worse, the people who don't love it, get to run you over. you're now competing in the 'llm orchestration game' where the most mentally intense task is to chat with the cli and check its output.

llms may also be all encompassing, even if I adapt and accept that well software engineering is done for, i don't even foresee what i should learn now.. my brain thinking power is not that great, and the places where llms can't beat human are probably post-graduate intelligence and i can't compete much here either.

how i see it it's a middle layer collapse
by barchar | 2025-12-20 03:15:02+00:00
Unless you reserve on fork you're still over committing because after the fork writes to basically any page in either process will trigger memory commitment.

Thread stacks come up because reserving them completely ahead of time would incur large amounts of memory usage. Typically they start small and grow when you touch the guards. This is a form of overcommit. Even windows dynamically grows stacks like this
by dionian | 2025-12-20 03:15:40+00:00
I think it depends on the project and the context, but I developed my own task management system particularly because of this challenge. I'm starting to extend this with verification gates as well.

If I worked on different types of systems with different types of tasks I might feel the same way as you, i think AI works well in specific targeted use cases, where some amount of hallucination can be tolerated and addressed.

What models are you using, I use opus 4.5, which can one shot a surprising ratio of tasks.
by yupyupyups | 2025-12-20 03:16:33+00:00
Depending on the underlying storage being reliable is far from unique to garage. This is what most other services do too, unless we're talking about something like Ceph which manages the physical storage itself.

Standard filesystems such as ext4 and xfs don't have data checksumming, so you'll have to rely on another layer to provide integrity. Regardless, that's not garage's job imo. It's good that they're keeping their design simple and focus their resources on implementing the S3 spec.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-12-20 03:18:03+00:00
> It is stress in the consumer economy

The consumer economy is the reason for existence of everything else related to economics. Corps stressing the consumer economy is like the tail wagging and starving the dog. Amirite?

> everything is flocking and concentrating around AI related hardware due to better ROI

The "better ROI" is the results of crooked financial schemes that steal from the consumer economy and redistribute to corporate fancies.

The circular debt schemes being employed here are going to be bailed out by the consumers by inflation and starvation, outright bailouts of the CDS market are quite likely as well.
by dionian | 2025-12-20 03:18:13+00:00
This is why claude code/codex cli is the way to go for me because often they can recompute the state from the minimal description automatically. If i relaly do needto stop the session and come back in i can point it at the task file. it also has docs and scaladocs/javadocs in key places. good naming and project structure helps it very easily find the data it needs without me needing to feed it specific files. I did the 'feed it files and copy paste the code snippet' thing in chatgpt for months. wish i went to claude code sooner.
by noodletheworld | 2025-12-20 03:18:18+00:00
Strawman.

Imaginary situation: People are using claude instead of cursor, and you can run claude in a terminal, so this is going back to the days of not using an IDE for the people that do it.

Straw man shake down: Terminal based development like vim and emacs are old and shit, and we moved away from that for a reason, and so (although totally unrelated) this means 'using claude' means going back to using a terminal for everything, which is similarly old and shit.

...but, obviously wrong.

- There's a claude desktop app that isn't done via the terminal.

- Agents use the terminal/powershell to do lots of things, even in cursor because that's the only way to automate some things, eg. running tests.

- Terminal environments like vim and emacs are ides. :face-palm:

- It literally makes no difference what interface you copy and paste your text prompt into and then walk off to get a coffee in agent mode.

Anyone who's seriously arguing that IDE integrated LLM chat windows somehow beat command line LLM chat windows is either a) religiously opposed to the terminal window, or b) hasn't actually tried using the tools.

...because, you'll find it makes no difference at all.

Why is cursor getting involved with graphite? ...because the one place where is makes a difference is reviewing code, where most CLI based tools (eg. `git diff`) are just generally inferior to visual integrated code review tools.

You know what that is?

An acknowledgement that cursor, in terms of code generation has nothing that qualifies as the 'special sauce' to use it over any other tool. CLI or not.

So they're investing in another company that actually has a good, meaningful product.
by vrc | 2025-12-20 03:21:30+00:00
I did the opposite. Tesseract to get bboxes, words, and chars and then mistral on the clips with some reasonable reflow to preserve geometry. Paddle wasn’t working on my local machine (until I found RapidOCR). Surya was also very good but because you can’t really tweak any knobs, when it failed it just kinda failed. But Surya > Rapid w/ Paddle > DocTr > Tesseract while the latter gave me the most granularity when I needed it.

Edit: Gemini 2.0 was good enough for VLM cleanup, and now 2.5 or above with structured output make reconstruction even easier.
by JSR_FDED | 2025-12-20 03:23:31+00:00
No no I agree: “No negotiations. No equity. No retention packages.”

I don’t know if HN has made me hyper-sensitized to AI writing, but this is becoming unbearable.

When I find myself thinking “I wonder what the prompt was they used?” while reading the content, I can’t help but become skeptical about the quality of the thinking behind the content.

Maybe that’s not fair, but it’s the truth. Or put differently “Fair? No. Truthful? Yes.”. Ugh.
by inkyoto | 2025-12-20 03:24:44+00:00
The described scenario (and, consequently, a concern) is mostly a philosophical question or a real concern for a very specific workload.

Memory allocation is a highly non-deterministic process which highly depends on the code path, and it is generally impossible to predict how the child will handle its own memory space – it can be little or it can be more (relatively to the parent), and it is usually somewhere in the middle. Most daemons, for example, consuming next to zero extra memory after forking.

The Ruby garbage collector «mark-and-sweep» (old versions of Ruby – 1.8 and 1.9) and Python reference counting (the Instagram case) bugs are prime examples of pathological cases when a child would walk over its data pages, making each dirty and causing a system collapse, but the bugs have been fixed or workarounds have been applied. Honourable mention goes to Redis in a situation when THP (transparent huge pages) are enabled.

No heuristics exist out there that would turn memory allocation into a deterministic process.