MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by weiliddat | 2025-12-30 22:53:21+00:00
IME strato is OK for cheap VPSes as long as you don’t have high expectations.

5-6 years ago, I remember trying to scale up to the 16/32GB tier was miserable and oversubscribed; moving to Hetzner at the same price point brought a huge performance boost (mostly on CPU and disk access speed).
by forgotpwd16 | 2025-12-30 22:54:12+00:00
74910,74912c187768,187779
< [Example 1: If you want to use the code conversion facetcodecvt_utf8to output tocouta UTF-8 multibyte sequence
< corresponding to a wide string, but you don't want to alter the locale forcout, you can write something like:\237 D.27.21954
\251ISO/IECN4950wstring_convert<std::codecvt_utf8<wchar_t>> myconv;
< std::string mbstring = myconv.to_bytes\050L"Hello\134n"\051;
---
>
> [Example 1: If you want to use the code conversion facet codecvt_utf8 to output to cout a UTF-8 multibyte sequence
> corresponding to a wide string, but you don’t want to alter the locale for cout, you can write something like:
>
> § D.27.2
> 1954
>
> © ISO/IEC
> N4950
>
> wstring_convert<std::codecvt_utf8<wchar_t>> myconv;
> std::string mbstring = myconv.to_bytes(L"Hello\n");

Is indeed faster but output is messier. And doesn't handle Unicode in contrast to mutool that does. (Probably also explains the big speed boost.)
by IggleSniggle | 2025-12-30 22:54:22+00:00
In the broadest sense of the word, aliasing refers to a problem where an insufficient number of samples create a misrepresentation of an intended signal source. I was being a bit poetic, because in graphics programming, where the term "antialiasing" is most often encountered by lay audiences, antialiasing generally refers to X/Y sampling coordinate correction rather than representations across time. It's not usually considered a major issue in vision, because our brains naturally fill in the gaps pretty easily across time for motion (they already naturally do this for eg blinking, you don't see your eyelids when you blink). So usually antialiasing across time is only an issue in audio domains for the layperson, where a misrepresentation of a sample might be perceived as an entirely different pitch, since our ears need >40k samples per second (for accurate high pitches) vs the 24 samples per second that we are accustomed to getting in old fashioned film. When our eyes "miss" a frame or two, our brain is happy to fill in the gaps, ie "antialiasing."
by squigz | 2025-12-30 22:55:09+00:00
"When you give money to an eligible organization, we’ll match your donations one-for-one, so your $1 has the impact of $2. And if you choose to donate your time, we’ll contribute $25 for every hour you volunteer. Whether you donate time or money, Apple will match your contributions up to $10,000 a year."

https://www.apple.com/careers/us/life-at-apple/benefits.html
by nine_k | 2025-12-30 22:55:35+00:00
I see a number of assumptions in your post which I find not matching my view of the picture.

Containers arose as a way to solve the dependency problems created by traditional Unix. They grow from tools like chroot, BSD jails, and Solaris Zones. Containers allow to deploy dependencies that cannot be simultaneously installed on a traditional Unix host system. it's not a UNIX architecture limitation but rather a result of POSIX + tradition; e.g. Nix also solves this, but differently.

Containers (like chroot and jail before them) also help ensure that a running service does not depend on the parts of the filesystem it wasn't given access to. Additionally, containers can limit network access, and process tree access.

These limitations are not a proper security boundary, but definitely a dependency boundary, helping avoid spaghetti-style dependencies, and surprises like "we never realized that our ${X} depends on ${Y}".

Then, there's the Fundamental Theorem of Software Engineering [1], which states: "We can solve any problem by introducing an extra level of indirection." So yes, expect the number of levels of indirection to grow everywhere in the stack. A wise engineer can expect to merge or remove a some levels here and there, when the need for them is gone, but they would never expect that new levels of indirection should stop emerging.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_softwar...
by lexicality | 2025-12-30 22:55:44+00:00
I suspect most of it is going to utilities for power, water and racking.

That being said, if I was Sam Altman I'd also be stocking up on yachts, mansions and gold plated toilets while the books are still private. If there's $10bn a year in outgoings no one's going to notice a million here and there.
by andrepd | 2025-12-30 22:55:54+00:00
If the best case you can make for your position is a retracted statement from over two years ago, consider that perhaps your position is not as strong as you think.

Anyway

> On Friday 13 October, Israel ordered hospitals and the population of northern Gaza to evacuate to southern Gaza. Because of insufficient beds in the southern Gaza Strip and no means of transporting patients, such as newborns in incubators or patients on ventilators, the evacuation orders were widely regarded as impossible to comply with.

> The Anglican Diocese of Jerusalem stated the hospital had received at least three evacuation warnings from the Israeli military on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

After repeated warnings of imminent Israeli shelling, the immediate explanation for an explosion killing half a thousand people if obviously Israeli shelling. After a more thorough investigation, new facts come to light.

But regardless, all of this is moot! In what conceivable way are extra-judicial reprisals for opinions or public speeches an acceptable state of affairs in a democracy? This is what is being discussed, not the particulars of Albanese's reports.
by bawolff | 2025-12-30 22:55:54+00:00
The prosecution hasn't even started yet. The prosecution doesn't start until the alleged perpretators are either captured or turn themselves in (neither of which is likely to happen). Neither an investigation nor a warrant is the same thing as a trial. No evidence has been publicly presented yet, nobody has been found guilty.

Almost no other justice systems require notice that a mere investigation has been opened. So to answer your question, basically all of them.
by throw1235435 | 2025-12-30 22:56:16+00:00
Well globally it is a drop in the ocean compared to most tech jobs - I'm talking about what I perceive to be the median salary/conditions affected somewhat by my locality. Big tech does affect that but looking at salary sites doesn't swing the median that much. My point is more that I remember back in that period good salaries could be had outside big tech too even in the boring standard companies that you state. I remember banks, insurance, etc paying very well for example compared to today for an SWE/tech worker. For example I've seen contract rates for some of the people we hire haven't really changed for 10 years for developers. Now at best they are on par with other professional white collar workers; and the competition seems fiercer (e.g. 5 interviews for a similar salary).

Making software easier and more abstract has allowed less technical people into the profession, allowed easier outsourcing, meant more competition/interview prep to filter out people (even if the skills are not used in the job at all), more material for AI to train on, etc. To the parent comment's point I don't think it has boosted salaries and/or conditions on average.
by lapcat | 2025-12-30 22:56:18+00:00
Reelection campaigns are almost always a referendum on the incumbent, and the public was generally satisfied with the situation under Obama. That was a tough campaign for any opponent. Moreover, Romney was far from the ideal opponent, because he was a former hedge fund manager running after the Great Recession, and there were several instances where he shot himself in the foot by making remarks that made him look like an out of touch rich guy. Ridiculously, in the primaries Romney characterized himself as "severely conservative," which failed to convince actual conservatives and came back to haunt him in the general election, undermining any attempt to appear moderate.
by remich | 2025-12-30 22:56:37+00:00
Have you considered that it's a bit dismissive to assume that developers who find use out of AI tools necessarily approve of worse code than you do, or have lower standards?

It's fine to be a skeptic. Or to have tried out these tools and found that they do not work well for your particular use case at this moment in time. But you shouldn't assume that people who do get value out of them are not as good at the job as you are, or are dumber than you are, or slower than you are. That's just not a good practice and is also rude.
by alexfoo | 2025-12-30 22:57:04+00:00
> I learned C in about 1989/1990 and have used it a lot since then. I have worked on a fair amount of rotten commercial C code, sold at a high price, in which every millimeter of extra functionality was bought with sweat and blood. I once spent a month finding a memory corruption issue that happened every 2 weeks with a completely different stack trace which, in the end, required a 1-line fix.

That sums up one of my old roles where this kind of thing accounted for about 10% of my time over a 10 year period.

Heisenbug, mutating stack traces, weeks between occurrences, 1 line fix, do some other interesting work before the next weird thing comes along.

I think the longest running one I had (several years) was some weird interaction between pthread_cond_wait() and pthread_cond_broadcast(). Ugh.
by Avicebron | 2025-12-30 22:57:13+00:00
On the radio they mentioned that the total global chocolate market is ~100B, I googled it when I was home and it seems to be about ~135B. Apparently that is ... all chocolate, everywhere.. OpenAI's valuation is about 500B. Maybe going up to like 835B.

I'd love to see the rationale that OpenAI (not "AI" everywhere) is more valuable than chocolate globally.

... so crash early 2026?
by eichin | 2025-12-30 22:57:17+00:00
Nice afternoon of puzzling, thanks for sharing it. (The one feature I could have used was either dragging items around - maybe only already-grouped ones - or the ability to pop back to the one that got merged, since I'd noticed something in the neighbors but had to pick only one of them :-)

(minor spoiler) Fess up, how many of you tried to figure out if "Google Lips" was ever a thing? :-)
by ethbr1 | 2025-12-30 22:57:24+00:00
It's a complicated bit of American constitutional / federal law. Tl;dr...

The US military cannot be used to perform domestic policing functions (Posse Comitatus Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act ), except in times of insurrection or when state unable or unwilling to suppress violence that threatens citizens' constitutional rights (Enforcement Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enforcement_Acts ).

Hence Trump's continual (and false) claims that the cities he's targeting are lawless and dangerous places.

The above applies to federal US military forces. The laws specifically exclude the US Coast Guard. Non-military federal forces (FBI, ICE, etc) are also excluded.

It also, in the more complicated quirk, excludes state military forces (i.e. "National Guard" units). These forces can be activated under a variety of different legal frameworks (see https://www.nationalguard.mil/Portals/31/Resources/Fact%20Sh... ), some of which allow their use for domestic police functions (Title 32 and SAD), because they're still under the command of the state governor (who can use military forces to perform domestic policing functions inside their state or a neighboring state).

There's also a special exclusion for Washington, DC, as technically the president is sort of its governor for many purposes.

Given that background, what actually happened...

- Trump activated National Guard units under Title 10 (aka federal active duty service), because this doesn't require the consent of a state's governor

- Trump then deployed these units to several cities, some with the support of Republican governors and some without the support of Democratic governors

- The administration's legal team realized performing policing functions with the above forces was on extremely shaky ground

- Therefore, they mostly claimed (loudly) that they were deploying "the military", but in actuality used them for extremely limited, non-policing purposes (picking up trash, talking to tourists, guarding federal buildings, guarding other federal agents performing law enforcement functions)

- After state governments sued, the courts generally agreed the deployment was unlawful ( https://www.reuters.com/world/us-supreme-court-rejects-trump... )
by ahepp | 2025-12-30 22:57:27+00:00
> the “warmup” time for a unikernel is subsecond whereas the warmup time for, say, containers is… let’s just call it longer than the warmup time for the water i am heating to make some pourover coffee after i finish my silly post. to dismiss this as a profound advantage is to definitely sell the idea more than a little short.

I'm surprised to read that unikernels would start up much faster than containers. It seems like a unikernel needs to do more work (load kernel, and load app), in a more restricted way (hypervisor) than simply loading the app in a cgroup + namespace and letting it rip.

Are you sure this is an apples to apples comparison of similarly optimized images?
by zdragnar | 2025-12-30 22:57:39+00:00
There are arguments aplenty that schooling and a minimum amount of healthcare are public goods, as are roads built on public land (the government owns most roads after all).

What is the justification for considering data centers capable of running LLMs to be a public good?

There are many counter examples of things many people use but are still private. Clothing stores, restaurants and grocery stores, farms, home appliance factories, cell phone factories, laundromats and more.
by iamnothere | 2025-12-30 22:58:36+00:00
Taxing the rich is fine, likely even necessary, but it’s hardly sufficient. The major problem facing the West is that our economic policy is dictated by short term growth. This is because individual investments (retirement plans and pensions, the largest holders of equities) demand that growth. The amoral psychopaths who implement those demands in exchange for money are abundant and replaceable. They do skim an excessive amount off the top, but they aren’t the root of the problem.

The demand for growth at all costs is what led us to outsource our core industries, sell off the mines and factories, and financialize every aspect of the economy. Higher taxes would not have prevented this. Even if we confiscated all the wealth of the top 1%, it would not fund our obligations for long and it would not correct our trajectory.

The postwar US was very different. Cold War paranoia and military Keynesianism ensured that core industries were well funded and key infrastructure was built and maintained. Modern China uses a unique model where the central government sets a vision and provinces allocate state investments according to regional needs. Neither of these models is probably appropriate for the present day US, but there must be something out there besides neoliberalism and full privatization.
by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | 2025-12-30 22:58:46+00:00
https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/29/middleeast/iran-rebuilding-ba...

> European intelligence sources say several shipments of sodium perchlorate, the main precursor in the production of the solid propellant that powers Iran’s mid-range conventional missiles, have arrived from China to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas
by FloorEgg | 2025-12-30 22:59:03+00:00
Win-win, win-lose, lose-lose. It's game theory.

When locked into and committed cooperation (win-win) it's optimal to tell the truth. When locked into competition (win-lose) it's optimal to mix truth and lies.

American social media platforms consciously chose win-lose. They chose short term profits + deception over long term trust + cooperation with their users.

It didn't have to be this way, and it doesn't have to stay this way. Civilizations and those in power have biased to cooperation and win-win before and can do it again.

It may be naive to think that things will start trending to cooperation, win-win and truth telling now (seems to be trending the opposite), but a generation from now, maybe...

History if full of cycles.
by simonw | 2025-12-30 22:59:44+00:00
Coding agents and much better models. Claude Code or Codex CLI plus Claude Opus 4.5 or GPT 5.2 Codex.

The latest models and harnesses can crunch on difficult problems for hours at a time and get to working solutions. Nothing could do that back in ~March.

I shared some examples in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46436885
by Yoric | 2025-12-30 23:00:05+00:00
The answer to that would very much be: "it depends".

Yes, of course, network I/O > local I/O > most things you'll do on your CPU. But regardless, the answer is always to measure performance (through benchmarking or telemetry), find your bottlenecks, then act upon them.

I recall a case in Firefox in which we were bitten by a O(n^2) algorithm running at startup, where n was the number of tabs to restore, another in which several threads were fighting each other to load components of Firefox and ended up hammering the I/O subsystem, but also cases of executable too large, data not fitting in the CPU cache, Windows requiring a disk access to normalize paths, etc.
by andy99 | 2025-12-30 23:00:06+00:00
That could make sense in some steady state regime where there were stable requirements and mature tech (I wouldn’t vote for it but I can see an argument).

I see no argument why the government would jump into a hype cycle and start building infra that speculative startups are interested in. Why would they take on that risk compared to private investors, and how would they decide to back that over mammoth cloning infra or whatever other startups are doing?
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-30 23:00:19+00:00
I greatly enjoyed the first Iron Man movie which got me to look at the really affordable black and white editions of the Kirby/Ditko/Lee age. I watched a lot of them, bookended by Guardians of the Galaxy which I also greatly enjoyed. Somehow I fell out of the Marvel habit and didn't see any more after that though there wasn't any moment where I felt that I feel out of love.
by acomjean | 2025-12-30 23:01:10+00:00
To be fair, he really played down/ backpedaled and shifted right from a lot of positions he took as Massachusetts governor when running for federal office.

I thought he did decent job here in Massachusetts, but was really hard to see him run away from that experience in his presidential campaign.

Decent enough person/politician despite coming from management consulting. He didn’t loose his spine in Washington.
by awesome_dude | 2025-12-30 23:01:26+00:00
Squash loses the commit history - all you end up with is merge merge merge

It's harder to debug as well (this 3000line commit has a change causing the bug... best of luck finding it AND why it was changed that way in the first place.

I, myself, prefer that people tidy up their branches such that their commits are clear on intent, and then rebase into main, with a merge commit at the tip (meaning that you can see the commits AND where the PR began/ended.

git bisect is a tonne easier when you have that
by luckylion | 2025-12-30 23:02:08+00:00
Monopolizing the work doesn't work unless you have the power to suppress anyone else joining the competition, i.e. "certified developers only".

Otherwise people would have realized they can charge 3x as much by being 5x as productive with better tools while you're writing your code in notepad for maximum ROI, and you would have either adjusted or gone out of business.

Increased productivity isn't a choice, it's a result of competition. And that's a good thing overall, even if it sucks for some developers who now have to actually work for the first time in decades. But it's good for society at large, because more things can be done.
by anthk | 2025-12-30 23:02:08+00:00
Good. But I wish PostmarketOS supported more devices. On battery,
tons of kernel patches could be set per device plus a config package in order to achieve the best settings. On software and security...you will find more malware in Play Store than the repos from PmOS/Alpine.
I know it's not a 100% libre (FSF) system, but that's a much greater step towards freedom than Android, where you don't even own your device.
by Denvercoder9 | 2025-12-30 23:02:12+00:00
If my change is small enough that it can be treated as one logical unit, that will be reviewed, merged and (hopefully not) reverted as one unit, all these followup commits will be amends into the original commit. There's nothing wrong with small changes containing just one commit; even if the work wasn't written or committed at one time.

Where logical commits (also called atomic commits) really shine is when you're making multiple logically distinct changes that depend on each other. E.g. "convert subsystem A to use api Y instead of deprecated api X", "remove now-unused api X", "implement feature B in api Y", "expose feature B in subsystem A". Now they can be reviewed independently, and if feature B turns out to need more work, the first commits can be merged independently (or if that's discovered after it's already merged, the last commits can be reverted independently).

If after creating (or pushing) this sequence of commits, I need to fix linting/formatting/CI, I'll put the fixes in a fixup commit for the appropriate and meld them using a rebase. Takes about 30s to do manually, and can be automated using tools like git-absorb. However, in reality I don't need to do this often: the breakdown of bigger tasks into logical chunks is something I already do, as it helps me to stay focused, and I add tests and run linting/formatting/etc before I commit.

And yes, more or less the same result can be achieved by creating multiple MRs and using squashing; but usually that's a much worse experience.
by ipdashc | 2025-12-30 23:03:13+00:00
I'm too young to have used VB in the workforce, but I did use it in school, and honestly off that alone I'm inclined to agree.

I've seen VB namedropped frequently, but I feel like I've yet to see a proper discussion of why it seems like nothing can match its productivity and ease of use for simple desktop apps. Like, what even is the modern approach for a simple GUI program? Is Electron really the best we can do?

MS Access is another retro classic of sorts that, despite having a lot of flaws, it seems like nothing has risen to fill its niche other than SaaS webapps like airtable.
by commandersaki | 2025-12-30 23:03:26+00:00
Good thing you asked before I destroyed this ubuntu instance I was messing with:

root@t:~# cat $(which scapy)
++ which scapy
+ cat /usr/bin/scapy
#!/usr/bin/python3
# EASY-INSTALL-ENTRY-SCRIPT: 'scapy==2.5.0','console_scripts','scapy'
import re
import sys

# for compatibility with easy_install; see #2198
__requires__ = 'scapy==2.5.0'

try:
from importlib.metadata import distribution
except ImportError:
try:
from importlib_metadata import distribution
except ImportError:
from pkg_resources import load_entry_point

def importlib_load_entry_point(spec, group, name):
dist_name, _, _ = spec.partition('==')
matches = (
entry_point
for entry_point in distribution(dist_name).entry_points
if entry_point.group == group and entry_point.name == name
)
return next(matches).load()

globals().setdefault('load_entry_point', importlib_load_entry_point)

if __name__ == '__main__':
sys.argv[0] = re.sub(r'(-script\.pyw?|\.exe)?$', '', sys.argv[0])
sys.exit(load_entry_point('scapy==2.5.0', 'console_scripts', 'scapy')())
by bb88 | 2025-12-30 23:03:33+00:00
But isn't that a self-inflicted wound then? I mean is there some reason your devs decided not to fix the DB cluster? Or did management tell you "Eh, we have other things we want to prioritize this month/quarter/year?"

This seems like simply not following the rules with having a monorepo, because the DB Cluster is not running the version in the repo.