MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by somenameforme | 2025-12-02 06:58:43+00:00
I think this is impossible to answer for now. All you can do is look at known data and draw probable conclusions with an extremely high degree of uncertainty. So what do we know for certain about each side and the current state of the war?

Russia: Invaded with less than 200k soldiers. They later on mobilized approximately 300k soldiers. This mobilization was extremely unpopular and resulted in mass resistance within Russia, Russians emigrating and so on. Since then they swapped entirely to a 'voluntary' system of deployment, with some reported incidents of coercion. Benefits for soldiers are extremely high which is likely driving a significant rate of enlistment. Soldiers are demobilized after their contract ends, which is a very important issue for a war entering into its 4th year.

Ukraine: Had approximately 300k soldiers before the invasion. After the invasion they closed their borders, prevented men of 'fighting age' from leaving, and declared a general mobilization so that anybody between the ages of 27-60 could be forcibly conscripted and deployed to fight. They have carried out this mobilization very aggressively as well as constantly lowered the minimum age, and standard, of mobilization in a country that already had a severe demographic crisis before the war. Demobilization is somewhere between inconsistent and nonexistent.

Current: Both sides seem to agree that Russia has a significant manpower advantage with an army of approximately 700k soldiers remaining in Ukraine.

---

To even begin to create comparative casualty measures you need to create estimates for how many soldiers Russia was able to 'voluntarily' enlist and estimates for their contract length to account for demobilization. And then you need to contrast this against how many people Ukraine was able to conscript and mobilize. You can find numbers for these online, but nobody's even pretending to try to be remotely objective and there's highly organized propaganda abounds, so the numbers are completely meaningless.

And then on top of that you also need to somehow figure out how many are actual casualties and how many are desertions. For instance Ukraine has apparently filed more than 300,000 criminal cases over desertion. Of course they also have numerous major motivations to avoid KIA classifications. So basically yeah - you're not going to be able to realistically estimate casualties on either side, with anything even resembling a reasonable degree of confidence, until the war is over.
by caterama | 2025-12-02 06:59:05+00:00
My first hand experience with the deterioration of quality in MacOS: I bought a Mac Studio to run some traditional ML neural network type stuff with PyTorch. Unfortunately the GPU / MPS kept crashing (?!) and would require a full reboot of the computer to get working again. Without a reboot, PyTorch would not find a GPU / MPS device and random other apps would glitch. After finding nothing in logs and no information about how to debug anything related to MPS, I contacted Apple Support. Apple support was completely unhelpful and a very frustrating experience. It felt like they were laundering responsibility through the veneer of some engineer having glanced at whatever internal second hand report the support staff transcribed from me. The situation improved a bit after upgrading to Metal 4, but in the end I moved back to Tensorflow. It's very disappointing to spend $6k on a machine and the software doesn't work as expected.
by amrocha | 2025-12-02 06:59:29+00:00
imo that’s the worst of both worlds.

That’s what my company does, and none of the engineers ever come in. My manager comes in when he has meetings, and I’ll go in sometimes, but I’m usually alone. None of the benefits of collocation with all the of downsides of an office.

I find that office days work a lot better. Everyone comes in Tuesdays and Thursdays or something.
by brian-armstrong | 2025-12-02 06:59:48+00:00
Location: SF / Remote

Remote: Mostly (Open to 0 - 3 days/wk in office)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Rust, Elixir, Typescript, Python

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-armstrong-sf/

Email: brian.hn.hireme@gmail.com

Hello HN! I'm a Staff Software Engineer with a variety of backend experience. I helped Discord scale its WebRTC system and helped guide its media infra (blog post: https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-resizes-150-million-ima... ). Currently open to work where I can put my skills to use and help get your projects into production.

Some of my personal and working traits: I'm a big fan of data-driven decision making. I think the best time to think about "how are we going to deploy this" is before any code gets written. I think empathy is underrated and I prefer over-communication to under-.

Cheers!
by timc3 | 2025-12-02 06:59:51+00:00
I disagree with your take on that we should show all information to all users. It’s not always the case that they have someone on hand to help, and users do get anxiety when they do not understand or are presented with too many options. But what macOS should be giving is the full-fat answers and UI is asked for.

The rest of your comment I can’t argue against at all.
by charcircuit | 2025-12-02 07:00:53+00:00
They've been slowly moving the time lower and lower. It will go lower than 45 days in the future, but the reason why we don't go immediately to 1 hour is that it would be too much of a shock.

>So every small site that took the LE bait needs expensive help to stay online.

It's all automated. They don't need help to stay online.
by jimkleiber | 2025-12-02 07:03:37+00:00
I wonder if it's just creeping apathy, post-covid, current-AI boom. That we're just tired in life. There's a psych study, Dimensional Apathy Scale (DAS)[0] and one of the questions is basically "How much do I contact my friends?" I think it argues that the more apathy we feel, the less likely we are to reach out to others, and I imagine, the less likely we are to react or reply to comments (or even post).

I'm curious if the decline in reacting is matched by a decline in replying and posting in general.

Anyways, I worry that apathy is on the rise as we get overwhelmed with the rate of change and uncertainty in the 2020s and I'm working pretty hard to fight that apathy and bring more empathy, so if you're interested, please reach out to me the contact info in my bio.

[0]: https://das.psy.ed.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SelfDAS....
by modernerd | 2025-12-02 07:04:00+00:00
https://www.mathacademy.com/ is a great combination of structured learning across an incremental skill tree with practise problems to prove to yourself that you understand. It’s a big commitment but helped me go from “hasn’t done any math for a while and probably missed some basics” to much more comfortable. You can do the self-test to pick a starting level and work up from there.

As with many things you basically have to sit down and do the work, though, you’re not going to get better just by inhaling books and videos. MA isn’t a fun/gamified learning platform like Duolingo, the ‘fun’ comes from putting the work in and seeing yourself improve. For me it went from a grind initially to something I enjoyed doing.

https://www.geogebra.org/ is also worth exploring for its novel visual approach, but is much more rudimentary, less challenging, and less deep than MA.
by crote | 2025-12-02 07:04:06+00:00
It's not single-vendor. The ACME protocol is also supported by the likes of GlobalSign, Sectigo, and Digicert.

You've got to remember that the reduction to a 45-day duration is industry-wide - driven by the browsers. Any CA not offering automated renewal (which in practice means ACME) is going to lose a lot of customers over the next few years.
by dyauspitr | 2025-12-02 07:04:14+00:00
Strong disagree. I would say 90% of the text I “write” on my phone is speech to text. I wouldn’t use ChatGPT nearly as much if I had to type out paragraph prompts every single time.

Maybe it’s just my imagination, but it seems like text to speech in the ChatGPT prompt window uses the context around it in the paragraph to fix what I’m saying so it is inordinately accurate compared to the rest of the iOS system.
by eru | 2025-12-02 07:05:39+00:00
Well, _if_ they can get launch costs down to 100 dollar / kg or so, the economics might make sense.

Radiative cooling is really annoying, but it's also an engineering problem with a straightforward solution, if mass-in-orbit becomes cheap enough.

The main reason I see for having datacentres in orbit would be if power in orbit becomes a lot cheaper than power on earth. Cheap enough to make up for the more expensive cooling and cheap enough to make up for the launch costs.

Otherwise, manufacturing in orbit might make sense for certain products. I heard there's some optical fibres with superior properties that you can only make in near zero g.

I don't see a sane way to beam power from space to earth directly.
by woile | 2025-12-02 07:06:19+00:00
I did Beej's Guide to Network Programming and it was fantastic, I learnt a lot, and it was easy enough that I was able to do it in Rust. I'm sure this one is as good as all the others.

Point 7.5 of this guide reminds me of the Einstellung effect, I built my own "pomodoro" timer with notifications saying "go stretch" or "go drink water" (https://github.com/reciperium/temporis in case someone is interested)
by finaard | 2025-12-02 07:06:51+00:00
That'd mean we have a different compiler in CI than what the developers use on their workstations - which is not a good thing. And wouldn't be tolerated there anyway - people already had some doubts when we were wrapping IAR with wine and a bit of shell to look like a standard UNIX toolchain.

(Shout-out to IAR, though. I still think they're overpriced and you don't really need them - but if you're stuck with them their support is excellent. When an update broke license handling in our setup they didn't tell us to go away like any other vendor would've done for that kind of wildly unsupported use case, but actually made it work again in the next release. They also got us access to native Linux binaries way before they even were talking in public about working on that to play around with for our CI)
by chii | 2025-12-02 07:07:13+00:00
> these are bad-faith actors.

what i'm trying to imply is that every single actor, as an individual, are "bad-faith" actors. That's why it's only when collectively can each bad-faith actor be "defeated". But when society experience an extended period of peace and prosperity brought about by good collective action from prior generations, people stop thinking that such bad-faith actors exist, and assume all actors are good faith.

> I just do not want them in whatever society I have the capacity to be in

and you dont really have the choice - every society you could choose to be in, with the exception of yourself being a dictator, will have such people.
by themafia | 2025-12-02 07:07:38+00:00
> someone will throw TeletexString or BMPString

ASCII with escapes and UCS-2.

> horribly bloated and over-engineered.

It's no more or less complicated than XML, JSON or CSV. Which is why you can use ASN.1 to serialize to and from all these formats. ASN.1 provides you an additional level of schema above these. It simply allows you to describe your problem.

I find ASN.1 far more sane and useful than something like JSON Schema which is just as "bloated and over-engineered." It turns out describing data is not a simple problem.
by ridiculous_leke | 2025-12-02 07:08:24+00:00
Impartiality factors less when the entire Federal government apparatus is used to investigate some one for more than a decade. Also, by that reasoning should we start believing in the principle "guilty before proven otherwise"?

> It does help the discussion here, the comment correctly points out how this literal 1984-esque action plays into the current regime's totalitarian tendencies which go way before the 2002 pogrom and of course their parent org, RSS which is a whole other can of worms.

Who decided that those riots were a progrom? That term itself is misleading.

I am not fan of this step but the problems it's designed to tackle are huge in India and it's very much an option unless there are solid alternatives.
by motoxpro | 2025-12-02 07:09:03+00:00
That's only obvious in hindsight. Back in the day, people said how in the world am I going to use the same search box for buying a car (color, make, model, photos) as I do for finding the latest concerts in my area (map, seating charts, etc.)

And you're right vertical SaaS DID become a thing, and so will vertical AI, but the horizontal versions of both (search and SaaS) crush the vertical ones (Google for search Microsoft for SaaS), and I believe it will be the same. Theres a layer above what you are talking about (e.g. Teams as the product vs Slack as the company).

Horizontal has a higher TAM and Vertical is easier to execute.

But this is besides the point. My point was that productivity is a minority of the TAM.
by struc_so | 2025-12-02 07:10:34+00:00
It’s not just about code size or cycle count anymore; modern OoO (Out-of-Order) processors treat this idiomatically. The renamer recognizes xor reg, reg as a dependency-breaking zeroing idiom immediately, which frees up the physical register allocation faster than a mov. It's fascinating how hardware optimization has effectively leaked into the instruction set definition over time.
by philipallstar | 2025-12-02 07:11:19+00:00
It's possible the image could autodetect the OS (or even autodetect the presence of a package manager) and present a single option to download or launch the package manager into the right screen, which would then put Linux at parity with MacOS or Windows, but currently it can't.

It's definitely harder than those things, and lots of regular people struggle even with them.
by EagnaIonat | 2025-12-02 07:11:27+00:00
> If the iPhone hadn't dropped the headphone jack nobody would've bought Airpods, thus the jack was killed.

My understanding was Apple wanted to get rid of cables entirely if they could. It's one of the major pieces of waste and the reason EU forced USB-C on everyone.

Personally I find the airpods great. I use the noise cancellation to sleep.
by kyledrake | 2025-12-02 07:11:44+00:00
Without getting into specific stuff I've run into, automated stuff just, breaks.

This is a living organism with moving parts and a time limit - you update nginx with a change that breaks .well-known by accident, or upgrade to a new version of Ubuntu and suddenly some dependency isn't loading correctly, or that UUID generator you depended on to generate the name for the challenge doesn't get loaded, or certbot becomes obsolete because of some API change and you can't upgrade to the latest because the OS is older and you installed it from the package manager.

You eventually see it in your exception monitoring or when an ssl monitor detects the cert is about to expire. Then you have to drop that other urgent thing you needed to get done, come in and debug it, fix it, and re-issue all the certs at the rate limit allowed. That's assuming you have that monitoring - most sites probably don't.

If you detect that issue with 1/3 of the cert left, you will now have 15 days to figure that out instead of 30. If you can't finish it in time, or you don't learn about it in time, the site(s) hard fail on every web browser that visits and you've effectively got a full site outage until you repair it.

So you discover it's because of certbot not working with a new API change, and you can't upgrade with the package manager. Now you need to figure out how to compile it from source, but it doesn't like the python that is currently installed and now you need to install that from source, but that version of python breaks your python web app so you have to figure out how to migrate your app to that version of python before you can do that, and the programmer that can do that is on a week long whitewater rafting trip in Idaho.

Aside from all that, what happens if a hacker manages to wreck the let's encrypt infra so badly they need 2 weeks to get it back online? The internet archive was offline for weeks after a ddos attack. The cloudflare outage took one site of mine down for less than 10 minutes, it's not hard to imagine a much worse outage for the web here.
by paulddraper | 2025-12-02 07:11:51+00:00
The first time I saw the Pigeonhole Principle was in the following:

Problem: A plane has every point colored red, blue, or yellow. Prove that there exists a rectangle whose vertices are the same color.

Solution: Consider a grid of points, 4 rows by 82 columns. There are 3^4=81 possible color patterns of columns, so by the Pigeonhole Principle, at least two columns have the same color pattern. Also by the Pigeonhole Principle, each column of 4 points must have at least two points of the same color. The two repeated points in the two repeated columns form a rectangle of the same color. QED.

The Pigeonhole Principle is very neat. It would be hard not to use it for the proof.

Partly that article argues against proof by contradiction which does seem to be overused.
by raizer88 | 2025-12-02 07:12:06+00:00
Since we're on the topic of certificates, my app (1M+ logins per day) uses certificate pinning with a cert that lasts for one year, because otherwise it would be a nightmare to roll the cert multiple times in production. But what would be the "modern" way to do smart and automated certificate pinning, now that short-lived certs are becoming the trend?
by reeredfdfdf | 2025-12-02 07:12:10+00:00
I had a work-issued Dell Latitude for several years (2021 model, 11th gen Intel). Overall it was a mediocre machine, but battery life really sucked (like, max 2 hours of light browsing). Several years older Thinkpad T480s gave me way longer usage. Older Dell models had better general build quality IMO, but also problems with expanding batteries.

For personal stuff just dual boot my old Thinkpad, at work I use Macbook.
by qsort | 2025-12-02 07:13:11+00:00
I have a degree in CS and I got a lot from it, so I'm absolutely not going to bad mouth CS, but I have the feeling that it's possible to just get a piece of paper having learned little to nothing in a way that couldn't happen with Math or Physics.

Obviously lots of great people have CS backgrounds, but it also feels like "how did this idiot get a degree" happens far more frequently for CS than Math. It's not like everyone coming out of a Math degree is automatically a genius, but they set the bar higher and as a result math classes "feel" better.
by Someone | 2025-12-02 07:13:45+00:00
> You cannot even select your own notification sound for Messages on MacOS anymore

I don’t see a UI for it, but when I drop a sound in ~/Library/Sounds (tested with .aif an .m4r; .aiff likely will work, too, looking at ~/System/Library/Sounds) it shows up in the “Sound Effects/Alert sound” pop-up for me.
by skvark | 2025-12-02 07:13:47+00:00
The main reason is that most real blockers are tied to a specific language ecosystem. Even if the high-level ideas transfer across languages, the actual fix usually depends on the language’s APIs, tooling, and conventions. When someone is searching, they typically need something that fits the environment they are working in at the moment.

So the language choice in GitHits mainly steers the system toward code that is immediately usable.

Another part of the story is that finding patterns across languages is a much harder problem. It requires a level of semantic, cross-language search that does not really exist yet in a reliable way. I would love to reach that point, but today the best results come from staying within one ecosystem at a time.

Under the hood, there are several search modes, and not all of them are strictly language specific. The language selection guides the search, but it does not fully constrain it. And at some point, there might be a more generic search mode that is not tied to any single language at all, but that will take more research and iteration.
by petterroea | 2025-12-02 07:15:57+00:00
One of the tough pills I and probably many other developers have had to swallow when maturing is that "non-programming skills" from schools are useful and very valuable, actually. Writing is one of them. Everyone loves a programmer that can explain themselves. An opinion isn't worth having if you aren't able to defend it either. Maintaining a blog therefore seems like a great way of improving your writing skills while also testing your own opinions.

Writing down opinions on things have done wonders for my ability to reason about them, especially when the opinions are built on 10 years of "hunch" and no discussion.
by ZeroConcerns | 2025-12-02 07:17:34+00:00
> I would like to see the metrics

Well, I could regale you with my anecdotes on how all my 'grab a LetsEncrypt cert on Docker deploy and whenever remaining lifetime goes below 75%' services have not had a single TLS-related outage in at least a year, and how we just had a multi-day meltdown caused by a load-bearing cert that everyone forgot about expiring, but I doubt you'll be interested.

I'm not here to take away your right to set up a few more 5-year+ internal CAs (or, hey, how about an entire self-signed hierarchy? can't be that hard...), and neither is LetsEncrypt. But on the Big Bad Internet (where Google is the leading cause of More Security, and LetsEncrypt is merely the leading vendor catering to that), things have moved on slightly.
by pmontra | 2025-12-02 07:18:04+00:00
When I walk into those kind of shops I press a few keys of every laptop and check which keyboard flex. Usually the cheap laptops flex and the expensive ones don't. By cheap I mean 300 or 400 Euro and by expensive I mean 800 or 1000 Euro or more. Some laptops that flex are made of metal, some that do not flex are made of plastic. My HP ZBook 15 from 2014 is rock solid and does not flex even if it's mostly plastic. There is a catch: the keyboard is built with a sheet of metal on the bottom, so it's very rigid. The laptop itself has a frame of metal and a shell of plastic. It's definitely not light, one of those laptops in the 3 kg category (6 lbs?) and definitely not cheap. It's also built for total repairability: it opens with no screws and I can replace everything even the CPU and the GPU l. I replaced the HDD and the DVD with 2 SSDs, maxed out the RAM to 32 GB and replaced the keyboard many times, when keys eventually wear and start to fail. I'd buy it again, with modern components (NVME bus, DDR5 RAM) and without the number pad so I can center the space bar and the touchpad.
by flowerthoughts | 2025-12-02 07:18:20+00:00
This replaces an anonymous token with a LetsEncrypt account identifier in DNS. As long as accounts are not 1:1 to humans, that seems fine. But I hope they keep the other challenges.

I really would have felt better with a random token that was tied to the account, rather than the account number itself. The CA side can of course decide to implement it either way , but all examples are about the account ID.