MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by blaze33 | 2025-12-20 13:17:23+00:00
Ok so this "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" argument is so recurrent I once went looking where it came from.

The oldest account I found is in a religious book from 1832 [1]: "We must have nothing to hide, nothing to fear", but, and this is the important bit, this is in the context of your relationship with Christ.

Later accounts are mostly from judicial documents like "well tell us what happened, if you have nothing to hide, you'll have nothing to fear".

And later on we start to see the current form of the argument related to privacy, except now this argument is never directly used to erode it. It will always be in some form of "ok now we have to do this collective thing because of criminals, because of terrorism, because of protect the children, etc.". If you search "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" 100% of the results are about how it is a logical fallacy, nobody at all seems to defend the argument and yet, here we are!

Food for thought:

- this argument may well be stuck in the collective unconscious of lots of people (albeit in the religious context)

- many governments, organizations and in any case the people in position of power and authority can develop a god complex (power corrupts etc.)

So unless I end up dealing with an all-loving and all-forgiving entity I could fully trust, I'd like to keep my right to privacy, thank you very much!

[1] https://www.google.fr/books/edition/Sermons_on_the_Spiritual...
by ExoticPearTree | 2025-12-20 13:20:10+00:00
> thing. Long term stable large contracts are great simulation for a market.

They are not. It can hurt Airbus very much if a provider says they can provide a certain level of hardware/software for 10 years and in three years the RAM or storage goes through the roof and the provider is not big enough to absorb all the losses.

People don’t choose the hyperscalers because they are based in the US, they choose them because they are too big to fail and have pretty much unlimited resources and have multiplr streams of revenue.
by creatonez | 2025-12-20 13:21:45+00:00
My understanding is that people who connect specifically to the NIST ensemble in Boulder (often via a direct fiber hookup rather than using the internet) are doing so because they are running a scientific experiment that relies on that specific clock. When your use case is sensitive enough, it's not directly interchangable with other clocks.

Everyone else is already connecting to load balanced services that rotate through many servers, or have set up their own load balancing / fallbacks. The mistakenly hardcoded configurations should probably be shaken loose anyways.
by Youden | 2025-12-20 13:21:46+00:00
There's a lot of focus in this thread on the atomic clocks but in most datacenters, they're not actually that important and I'm dubious that the hyperscalers actually maintain a "fleet" of them, in the sense that there are hundreds or thousands of these clocks in their datacenters.

The ultimate goal is usually to have a bunch of computers all around the world run synchronised to one clock, within some very small error bound. This enables fancy things like [0].

Usually, this is achieved by having some master clock(s) for each datacenter, which distribute time to other servers using something like NTP or PTP. These clocks, like any other clock, need two things to be useful: an oscillator, to provide ticks, and something by which to set the clock.

In standard off-the-shelf hardware, like the Intel E810 network card, you'll have an OXCO, like [1], with a GPS module. The OXCO provides the ticks, the GPS module provides a timestamp to set the clock with and a pulse for when to set it.

As long as you have GPS reception, even this hardware is extremely accurate. The GPS module provides a new timestamp, potentially accurate to within single-digit nanoseconds ([2] datasheet), every second. These timestamps can be used to adjust the oscillator and/or how its ticks are interpreted, such that you maintain accuracy between the timestamps from GPS.

The problem comes when you lose GPS. Once this happens, you become dependent on the accuracy of the oscillator. An OXCO like [1] can hold to within 1µs accuracy over 4 hours without any corrections but if you need better than that (either more time below 1µs, or more accurate than 1µs over the same time), you need a better oscillator.

The best oscillators are atomic oscillators. [2] for example can maintain better than 200ns accuracy over 24h.

So for a datacenter application, I think the main reason for an atomic clock is simply for retaining extreme accuracy in the event of an outage. For quite reasonable accuracy, a more affordable OXCO works perfectly well.

[0]: https://docs.cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/true-time-externa...

[1]: https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/OX-221

[2]: https://www.u-blox.com/en/product/zed-f9t-module

[3]: https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/clock-and-timing/co...
by andsoitis | 2025-12-20 13:22:32+00:00
> almost all wars are fueled by nationalism

Many wars, especially modern ones, are fueled in part by nationalism, but almost none are caused by nationalism alone or mostly caused by nationalism alone.

Instead, they're driven primarily by other factos: power & security, economic interests, religion or ideology, contorl and authority. Nationalism is often a tool rather than the root cause.
by lazide | 2025-12-20 13:22:45+00:00
It depends on the side of read - most SSD’s have internal block sizes much larger than a typical (actual) random read, so they internally have to do a lot more work for a given byte of output in a random read situation than they would in a sequential one.

Most filesystems read in 4K chunks (or sometimes even worse, 512 byes), and internally the actual block is often multiple MB in size, so this internal read multiplication is a big factor in performance in those cases.

Note the only real difference between a random read and a sequential one is the size of the read in one sequence before it switches location - is it 4K? 16mb? 2G?
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-20 13:24:42+00:00
The Kotlin functions are actually quite easy to write, they're all written in standard Kotlin.

also: https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/blob/2.3.0/libraries/std...

apply: https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/blob/2.3.0/libraries/std...

let: https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/blob/2.3.0/libraries/std...

with: https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/blob/2.3.0/libraries/std...

run (two overloads): https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/blob/2.3.0/libraries/std... and https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/blob/2.3.0/libraries/std...

These all heavily rely on Kotlin's ability to write an extension function for any class. When you write `with(x) { something() }` you're extending the type of `x` (be that int, List<String>, or SomeObject) with an anonymous method, and passing that as a second parameter.

Consider the signature here:

public inline fun <T, R> with(receiver: T, block: T.() -> R): R

The first object is a generic object T, which can be anything. The second is a member function of T that returns R, which again can be just about anything, as long as it operates on T and returns R.

Let does it kind of diferently:

public inline fun <T, R> T.let(block: (T) -> R): R

This is an extension method that applies to every single class as T isn't restricted, so as long as this function is in scope (it's in the standard library so it will be), every single object will have a let() method. The only parameter, block, is a lambda that takes T and returns R.

So for instance:

val x = makeFoo() with (x) { bar = 4 }

is syntactic sugar for something like:

fun Foo.anonymous() { this.bar = 4 } val x = makeFoo() with(x, Foo::anonymous)

You could absolutely write any of these yourself. For instance, consider this quick example I threw together: https://pl.kotl.in/S-pHgvxlX

The type inference is doing a lot of heavy lifting, i.e. taking a lambda and automatically turning it into an anonymous extension function, but it's nothing that you cannot do yourself. In fact, a wide range of libraries write what might look like macros in Kotlin by leveraging this and the fact you can define your own inline operators (i.e. https://pl.kotl.in/TZB0zA1Jr).

This isn't possible in many other languages because taking a generic type definition and letting it possibly apply to every single existing type is not exactly popular. Combined with Kotlin's ability to extend nullable types (i.e. this = null) as well makes for a language system that wouldn't work in many other flexible languages.
by pbowyer | 2025-12-20 13:24:44+00:00
I'm pleased they rename it because grid-lanes opens up more than masonry layouts.

I've been waiting to be able to have a fully responsive layout (where interleave sidebar content in with the page content on small screens, but have it in a sidebar on larger screens) without using any JavaScript, and this finally makes it possible.

Demo: https://codepen.io/pbowyer/pen/raLBVaV

Previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46228993
by NathanielK | 2025-12-20 13:24:47+00:00
This blog post is pretty readable, but it's still obviously written with the help of an LLM. A common trend is that LLMs lack the nuance and write everything with the same enthusiasm. So in a blogpost it'll infer things are novel or good/bad that are actually neutral.

Not a bad blogpost because of this, but you need to be careful reading. I've noticed most of the article on the HN front page are written with AI assistance.
by neomantra | 2025-12-20 13:25:41+00:00
Great list! Just double-checked the CAT timekeeping requirements [1] and the requirement is NIST sync. So a subset of all UTC.

You don’t need to actually sync to NIST. I think most people PTP/PPS to a GPS-connected Grandmaster with high quality crystals.

But one must report deviations from NIST time, so CAT Reporters must track it.

I think you are right — if there is no NIST time signal then there is no properly auditable trading and thus no trading. MFID has similar stuff but I am unfamiliar.

One of my favorite nerd possessions is my hand-signed letter from Judah Levine with my NIST Authenticated NTP key.

[1] https://www.finra.org/rules-guidance/rulebooks/finra-rules/6...
by deaux | 2025-12-20 13:26:24+00:00
> Or to put it in other way - food itself is often superb, as long as its more traditional one and not some copy of foreign one (ie dont try south/east asian stuff its rather disappointing).

Hah, I was thinking this as well while reading the parent - maybe this explains why non-European food tends to be especially bad in France. Even compared to places like the UK or the Netherlands which aren't exactly known for their food and where too most non-European food isn't great.
Show HN: OpenSpecBuddy – Native macOS App for Viewing OpenSpec Data
by pj4533 | 2025-12-20 13:28:01+00:00
We are considering using OpenSpec to help organize agentic development. I wanted to understand the workflow better, so I am using OpenSpec to build this app that helps…use OpenSpec.

Feels like I missed an opportunity and should rename it YoDawg.
by nickthegreek | 2025-12-20 13:28:12+00:00
No it’s not, and you know it. If a child wants dino stickers for something they are doing, I see no difference of them obtaining those stickers from Walmart or from a printer in their house. In both scenarios, the dinosaurs were not designed by the child. at least in the AI example they can customize to their wants. You don’t seem willing to thoughtfully engage in conversation. Why even post here in first place?
by jmyeet | 2025-12-20 13:28:54+00:00
This administration has done more to undermine US power than probably any in history. This isn't a new statement either (eg [1]). Personally, I think that's not such a bad thing because we are the bad guys. I know people get all in their feelings when you say stuff like that but the number of democratically elected governments we've overthrown, just to get their resources, is indefensible.

This week it broke that China is pretty far along in duplicating EUV litthography. The US restricts ASML, a Dutch company, from exporting their best machines to China and Korean, Japanese and Taiwanese companies from exporting their chips to China. The second one was a massive mistake. Why? Because it created a marekt for China to produce chips because they had no other choice.

Geopolitically I think this is very similar to the USSR copying the atomic bomb in just 4 years after WW2 where US leaders either thought it was impossible or would take 20+ years.

The US has become unpredictable and unreliable. Ukraine is a big part of this because Europe is waking up to them having to be responsible for their own defense and that ultimately will undermine US power projection through NATO.

Since very early in this administration, probably back when the tariff nonsense began, I believed that Europe would be forced to distance themselves from US tech giants and at some point the EU would require cloud storage to be within EU borders and eventually require European companies to own and run that cloud rather than US companies.

China has their own version of virtually every tech company. I can see the EU moving in this direction for key functions and cloud is likely the first of those.

What's really precarious is the entire US economy is now essentially a bet on US companies owning a global AI future and I honestly don't think it's going to happen, mainly because China won't let it happen. DeepSeek was a shot across the bow for this and only the beginning.

What you really need to remember about the current administration is we're not even 1 year into a 4 year term with everything that's happened and the entire foreign policy is kleptocratic not strategic in nature.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45775985
by estearum | 2025-12-20 13:29:07+00:00
Just because you don't see it written verbatim "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" doesn't mean it's not the argument being made.

Right now you have half the country downright giddy about federal agents terrorizing broad swaths of Americans, driving recklessly down their freeways, waving guns around their neighborhoods, bodyslamming random passersby, all fundamentally because half the country believes the only reason someone could not be giddy about this is because they "have something to hide."
by simondotau | 2025-12-20 13:31:13+00:00
I agree that numerous companies inspire occasional weird reflexive defences from their most enthusiastic supporters. Thankfully, bad arguments have no transitive value.

Implying otherwise is itself a bad argument.

It is true that Safari sometimes lagged in ways that are legitimately open to criticism. There are instances where Safari had incomplete or broken feature implementations. But many claims of “broken sites” are really just evidence of lazy developers failing to test beyond Chrome or to implement graceful fallback. Relying on bleeding-edge Chromium features before they've been broadly adopted by browsers is, IMHO, a infatuation with novelty over durability. It's also, IMHO, a callous disregard for the open web platform in favour of The Chrome Platform. Web developers are free to do whatever they like, but it's misleading to blame browsers for the bad choices and/or laziness of some web developers.
by threethirtytwo | 2025-12-20 13:31:20+00:00
Are you going to address a single point I or others have made? Or you gonna dodge everything with some dismissive remark? I think it’s clear you’re wrong.

You know one thing an LLM does better than me and many other people? It admits it’s wrong after it’s been proven wrong. Humans, including me have a hard time doing that but I’m not the one that’s wrong here. You are wrong, and that’s ok. Don’t know why people need to go radio silent or say stupid shit just to dodge the irrefutable reality of being completely and utterly wrong.
by andsoitis | 2025-12-20 13:31:59+00:00
> Huawei became very competitive to Apple. Huawei got banned.

How would you explain Samsung, LG, Sony, etc.?

> DJI got banned.

Untrue.

Supply is constrained and future of new product availability is uncertain because of FY2025 National Defesnse Authorization ACt, which requires a security audit by late Dec 2025. If that doesn't happen, DJI could automatically be added to the FCC's restricted list, which could block new products from being certified and sold in the US.

In the meantime, for sale at Best Buy, Adorama, B&H, Walmart, etc. e.g. https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1737927-REG/dji_cp_ma...

> Sale of AI and Chips to China got banned.

Your argument is that US tech companies do not have the ability to compete, but this example doesn't support your claim; in fact it does the opposite.

But even so, your information is out of date. Nvidia is now allowed to sell its advanced H200 AI chips to China. The whiplash is dumb, but the move is aimed at maintaining US AI leadership, support American jobs, while addressing concerns about China's military AI development.
by nly | 2025-12-20 13:33:25+00:00
Optimising hardware to run existing software is how you sell your hardware.

The amount of performance you can extract from a modern CPU if you really start optimising cache access patterns is astounding

High performance networking is another area like this. High performance NICs still go to great lengths to provide a BSD socket experience to devs. You can still get 80-90% of the performance advantages of kernel bypass without abandoning that model.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-12-20 13:33:42+00:00
Not wishing to join the bully's side, but I think making something private to prevent discussion/criticism has a bad smell about it. It's possible (to someone who knows neither you nor the bully) that the bully had some valid suggestions and that you became over defensive in allowing that to become a distraction rather than saying something like "okay, but can you make these suggestions after the meeting and we can work through them later".

Personally, I don't like the idea of someone hiding data and methodology just because of not wanting feedback.
by spuz | 2025-12-20 13:34:23+00:00
It does not state that half of aircraft pollution is from contrails. It says half of the climate impact of aviation is from contrails. Soot can have other effects and cause pollution in other ways such as reducing air quality but I suspect that is very minimal compared to other industries.

The guide presented by the map gives a very good explanation on how contrail formation can be mitigating by altering the course of flights to reduce the formation in areas where it will have the most impact. This is based on a recent study that showed contrail avoidance could be one of the most cost-effective methods of reducing warming that we know of.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2634-4505/ad310c

Simon Clark did a good video on this recently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoOVqQ5sa08
by kibwen | 2025-12-20 13:35:11+00:00
Those languages aren't expression-oriented, so you would need to assign the result to a previously-initialized variable in a higher scope. But that just makes this pattern clunkier in those languages. This subthread is about jumping to labels, which is a relatively obscure yet widespread feature supported by many languages (though C and Go allow forward jumps, and the rest only allow backward jumps, since the latter ensures that control flow does not become irreducible).
by adamcharnock | 2025-12-20 13:35:20+00:00
In case any SME-sized companies here are wanting to do something similar but are looking askance at the risk/investment/hiring required, then we'd [0] love to talk to you.

We specialise in doing this but on a smaller scale. Eg. 10-100 person companies that have 0-to-a-few DevOps engineers. Included is DevOps time each month to use as you wish, we're on call for SLAs, around 50% reduced cost vs AWS/Google/Azure, etc.

Somewhat differently to most, we deploy onto bare metal. In addition to dropping costs we typically see at least a 2x speed-up overall. Once client just reported a 80% reduction in processing time.

CTOs like us because we're always on-hand via Slack (plus we're the ones getting woken up in the night), and CFOs like us because billing becomes consistent.

Anyway, blatant pitch complete.

[0]: https://lithus.eu/

adam@ above domain
by tgv | 2025-12-20 13:35:33+00:00
From the FAQ

* Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

* Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

* Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

* Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

* Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

* Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
by NicolaiS | 2025-12-20 13:35:42+00:00
> Have mitmproxy gotten any better in usability over the years?

The new-ish "Local Capture" and "WireGuard"-mode are quite nice.

And running e.g. `mitmproxy --ignore-hosts '.*' --show-ignored-hosts` [1] for monitoring apps with certificate pinning also a new feature

[1] cmd will turn mitmproxy into a "non-MITM proxy" but do show domains (SNI) the app is connecting to.
by d-lisp | 2025-12-20 13:36:03+00:00
Indeed, I was probably grumpy at the time I wrote the comment. I do find some truth in it still.

You're right ! The strawman theory is based.

But I think there's more to it, I find dislikable the structure of these sentences (which I find a bit sensationnalist for nothing, I don't know, maybe I am still grumpy).
by mexicocitinluez | 2025-12-20 13:36:38+00:00
> this site is amazing!

NO. IT. ISN'T.

lol. Anytime React is mentioned people like you rush in to tell others just how great stuff like...checks notes...a message board is. As if it in any, way, shape or form adds to the conversation.

You just couldn['t help yourself from rushing in to defend the simplest site on the planet (lol written in LISP) as if it demonstrates anything other than some rando building a w3 schools site in a language no one uses anymore.
by pmontra | 2025-12-20 13:37:15+00:00
A tangent:

> Companies are global, businesses are 24/7

Only a few companies are global, so only a few of them should optimize for those kind of workload. However maybe every startup in SV must aim to becoming global, so probably that's what most of them must optimize for, even the ones that eventually fail to get traction.

24/7 is different because even the customers of local companies, even B2B ones, mighty feel like doing some work at midnight once in a while. They'll be disappointed to find the server down.
by blibble | 2025-12-20 13:37:54+00:00
> There are two striking aspects of this rejection of EU bureaucracy. First, in comparison with other, comparable entities, such as the US federal bureaucracy, the EU’s administrative apparatus has a marginal size. Specifically, the EU, which is responsible for more than 440 million citizens, employs only around 60,000 people, while the US federal bureaucracy has more than two million employees that govern a territory with about 330 million inhabitants.

that's because the EU co-opted existing member state agencies instead of creating its own

e.g. the german federal department of agriculture effectively is controlled by the EU (almost all of its duties are an EU competence), but 100% of its costs are attributed to germany

this makes the EU look much more efficient than it is
by microtonal | 2025-12-20 13:38:46+00:00
The EU has a services deficit compared to the US, the US has a goods deficit compared to Europe. Together, they are almost in balance, the difference is just 3% of total trade [1]. Put differently, the US and the EU need each other. This is why Trump is using footguns.

[1] https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/eu-trade-relationships-cou...