MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LexiMax | 2025-12-11 06:41:45+00:00
I think this is too simplistic of an outlook. The post-Napoleonic balance of powers was not uni-polar, it was a carefully constructed and negotiated settlement by diplomats and politicians who knew the cost of war, and it lasted a remarkable 99 years. There were skirmishes in the interim, but the balance of power ensured that the bloodletting never escalated to the point of continent-spanning "world" war...until it did.

Pax Americana, by contrast, was essentially a standoff between ideological opposites that were equipped with enough nuclear weapons to assure mutual destruction. The choices were clear - coexist or die, and there were many opportunities where we narrowly escaped the second option.

You could point to many possible causes of WW1, but I think that a lot of the causes can be traced back to a hot-headed emperor who desired a larger and more prestigious empire but lacked the statecraft to do so without pissing off nearly all of his neighbors. Looking around at our world today at the number of unserious leaders who govern like a bull in a china shop, I would be lying if I didn't see any similar causes for concern.
by menaerus | 2025-12-11 06:41:45+00:00
No, this is just an example of confirmation bias. You're given a totally unrealistic figure of 1 vuln per 200K/5M LoC and now you're hypothesizing why that could be so. Google, for anyone unbiased, lost the credibility when they put this figure into the report. I wonder what was their incentive for doing so.

> But unsafe block are, by definition, limited in scope and assuming you design your codebase properly, they shouldn't interact with other unsafe blocks in a different module. So the complexity related to one unsafe block is in fact contained to his own module, and doesn't spread outside. And that makes everything much more tractable since you never have to reason about the whole codebase, but only about a limited scope everytime.

For anyone who has written low-level code with substantial complexity knows that this is just a wishful thinking. In such code, abstractions fall-apart and "So the complexity related to one unsafe block is in fact contained to his own module, and doesn't spread outside" is just wrong as I explained in my other comment here - UB taking place in unsafe section will transcend into the rest of the "safe" code - UB is not "caught" or put into the quarantine with some imaginative safety net at the boundary between the safe and unsafe sections.
by rozap | 2025-12-11 06:42:49+00:00
I wasted several hours this week going around in the exact same circles. We have a billing account, but kept hitting a gemini quota. Fine. But then on the quota page, every quota said 0% usage. And our bill was like $5. Some docs said check AI studio, but then the "import project from google cloud to AI studio" button kept silently failing. This was a requests per minute quota, which was set at 15 (not a whole lot...) but wouldn't reset for 24 hours. So then I kept making new projects so I could keep testing this thing I'm building, until eventually I ran out.

The only way we could get it resolved was to (somehow) get a real human at google on the phone because we're in some startup program or something and have some connection there. Then he put in a manual request to bump our quota up.

Google cloud is the most kafkaesque insane system I've ever had the misfortune of dealing with. Every time I use it I can tell the org chart is leaking.
by sebmellen | 2025-12-11 06:43:08+00:00
It's the exact same for me. The spiders are by far the most visceral fear response, especially if a gruesomely detailed photo pops up on my phone.

Smaller spiders scared me when I was younger, but I have overcome that phobia significantly. Large, hairy, distinctly arthropodic spiders, though...? Yuck.
by Manuel_D | 2025-12-11 06:43:33+00:00
To be clear, that claim of 4,000 comes from a member of Hezbollah:

> According to the Lebanese government, the attack killed 42 people,[11] including 12 civilians,[12] and injured 4,000 civilians (according to Mustafa Bairam, Minister of Labour and a member of Hezbollah).

The wikipedia page's other reference claiming that the majority of those injured were civilians is also vague. For instance, it writes, "On 26 September, Abdallah Bou Habib, Lebanon's Foreign Minister, confirmed that most of those carrying pagers were not fighters, but civilians like administrators"

The reference for that sentence is this, which reads: https://carnegieendowment.org/emissary/2024/09/israel-hezbol...

> It was an attack mostly on Hezbollah, but a lot of civilians got hurt in the process, because not everybody is sitting there fighting on the front. These are people who have pagers or have telephones. They are regular people. Some of them are also fighters, but not most of them. A lot of them are administrators working here and there. . . .

This is a very different claim that what the article reads. "Administrators" and "not fighters" is a very different thing than "civilian". A woman working in my building also works in the Army's HR department during the day. She's literally a member of the military, but it's also not wrong to say she is "not a fighter" and an "administrator".

In short, the idea that we have credible evidence that the 4,000 people who were injured (and more, importantly, those that were actually maimed rather than receiving light injuries) were mostly civilians doesn't seem to pan out.
by palmotea | 2025-12-11 06:43:35+00:00
> FWIW, our CEO has declared us to be AI-first, so we are to leverage AI in everything we do which I think is misguided. But you can bet they will be reviewing AI usage metrics and lower wont be better at $WORK.

I've taken some pleasure in having GitHub copilot review whitespace normalization PRs. It says it can't do it, but I hope I get my points anyway.
by ankurdhama | 2025-12-11 06:43:49+00:00
> The TaskBar at the bottom was a great innovation that persists to this day

The taskbar was supposed to be at the top of screen but some apps would put window at 0,0 and will be below taskbar, to fix they moved the taskbar to bottom (which I think is bad from ergonomic point of view)[1]

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030912-00/?p=42...
by eru | 2025-12-11 06:45:10+00:00
> It's a 64 bit CPU, [...]

Only really in the marketing material. It's a bit like calling a 386 with an arithmetic co-processor an 80 bit machine, when it was still clearly a 32 bit machine by all metrics that matter.

However, I agree in general that the N64 CPU sits idle a lot of the time. It's overspecced compared to the rest of the system.
by Telaneo | 2025-12-11 06:48:03+00:00
I mostly agree. I like the idea of using domains as a universal user handle, and that's part of why I have my own (going to myfancywebsite.com is still a very low bar even for the most casual of internet users), but the recurring costs (unless you could get them for like a dollar a year or something similarly cheap) and the fact that they expire and can then be squatted or exploited by other people makes them unsuitable for most casuals.

Even the casuals know about the general problems of user handles being squatted and such, and thus have little problem finding alternatives (put in an extra letter or number or two) and leaving the verification of account ownership to the platforms themselves, so the problem domains could be used to fix here just isn't that big after all.
by rand17 | 2025-12-11 06:49:07+00:00
I do not think that all LLMs are evil; they are valid tools, but it's not a hammer with meta glasses attached to render everything into a nail. I also find it very useful in certain situations - but not in all situations.

Two more things. Bad code (in work, in reality, not in a hobby project) is rarely converted into good code. And the last one: in my twenty plus years of being a dev, this is the first year job offers simply just dried up. With bad code being good enough (hey, it compiles! it mostly works!), hopefully you and I will be the lucky few to still be in the business five years later.
by redox99 | 2025-12-11 06:52:20+00:00
I think the main reason is that when they architected it, RDRAM seemed like the better choice based on price and bandwidth at that time, and they underestimated the performance issues it would cause (RDRAM has amazing bandwidth but atrocious latency).

By the time the N64 launched, SDRAM was better and cheaper, and they considered it was too late to make the switch. Allegedly SGI wanted to make changes but Nintendo refused.

Basically they made the wrong bet and didn't want to change it closer to release.
by tombert | 2025-12-11 06:52:31+00:00
I love blog posts like this. You're not wrong in saying that the kernel is sort of this magical block box to most engineers (including me). I know how to use systemd and I know how to use bash and I know a few other things, but the kernel has always been "the kernel", and it's something I've never really tried to mess with. But you're right: ulimately the kernel is just a program. Yes, it's a big and important program that works at a lower level than I typically work at, but it's probably not something that is impossible for me to learn some basic stuff around.

I have had a bit of a dream of building a full desktop operating system around seL4 [1], with all drivers in user space and the guts fully verified in Isabelle, but learning about this level of code kind of feels like drinking from a firehose. I would like to port over something like xserver and XFCE and go from there, but I've never made a proper attempt because of how overwhelming it feels.

[1] I know about sculpt and Genode, and while those are interesting, not quite what I want.
by DocTomoe | 2025-12-11 06:54:20+00:00
There is a qualitative distinction between 'I filter for myself what I don't want to see' and 'The State decides what everyone is allowed to see.'

Not too sure about those zit-popping videos. But in my time, we had rotten.com - so I might be immunized to that kind of stuff. Personally, I find a honest zit-popping video no worse than yet another AI voice going on and on about some non-topic, clearly written by AI as well. I don't seek out either, but the zit-popping at least is over after 10 seconds.

But that's Google curating content. State censorship is something else entirely. Once justified "for the children" or "for security", it never stops at the first target. It grows, layer by layer. We’ve watched that pattern repeat for centuries across every medium humans have ever invented.

Facebook, the genocide facilitator? If we are honest, so has the printing press. Let's ban letters, they have facilitated genocide.

The printing press spread enlightenment, propaganda, revolutions, and atrocities. The State tried to control that too. It failed every time. It will fail with the net, for young people and for old ones.

Repression never works long-term, it always creates pressure that eventually breaks the system that produced it. Historically, societies tend to get worse before they correct themselves, because authoritarian overreach generates exactly the instability it claims to prevent.

Jefferson’s warning about the recurring need to renew freedom wasn’t a call for violence - it was an observation about the cyclical nature of power, repression, and reform. Every attempt to restrict communication has eventually collapsed under its own contradictions, and the internet will be no exception.
by DeathArrow | 2025-12-11 06:54:29+00:00
Not sure if it's a London thing. In my city neither I, nor the people I know rely on Google maps reviews for picking restaurants. We either know the place, follow a recommendation or try the place based on menu, price, looks, vibe, position etc.

A week ago I went to Venice and I only looked on Google maps to see what the menus and prices are, but I wasn't interested in the reviews themselves or the grade, bacause IMO, people have biases. One evening we went to one of the restaurants I spotted on Google maps but the rest of the evenings we wandered the streets, and picked what was close, if we liked the menus, the prices and the atmosphere.

One of the restaurants had only 3.4 grade on Google maps, few reviews and mostly locals ate there. The food was very good and the service was great.

I do not generally make my mind based on reviews from Google Maps, Booking, Amazon. Of course, if the overall grade is very low, I will give it some thoughts and maybe read some reviews. But generally I don't make a decision based on reviews.
by colechristensen | 2025-12-11 06:54:50+00:00
As opposed to the 15 levels of priority available in Chef.

5 different types (default, force_default, normal, override, force_override)

which can be in 4 different places (attribute, node, environment, role) but not all of the types can be in all of the places

PLUS the "automatic" type, which is from somewhere else entirely

Oh and there's inheritance and merging which does not behave intuitively at all because it's not exactly inheritance.

In other words I have early career trauma from someone's extremely unwise priority implementation and am deeply suspicious of ANY priority override system which isn't just code I've written in a normal programming language.
by bobjordan | 2025-12-11 06:56:01+00:00
I went through similar song and dance using a paid Gemini code assist “standard” level subscription. I finally got Gemini 3 working in my terminal in my repository. I assigned it a task that Claude code Opus 4.5 would quickly knock out, and Gemini 3 did a reasonably similar job. I had opus 4.5 evaluate the work and it was complimentary of Gemini 3S work. Then I check the usage and I’d used 10% of the daily token usage limit, about 1.5M tokens on that one task. So I can only get about 10 tasks before I’m rate limited. Meanwhile with Claude code $200 max plan, I can run 10 of those same caliber of tasks in parallel, even with opus 4.5 model, and barely register the usage meter. The only thing the Gemini code assist “standard” plan will be good for with these limits are just double checking the plans that opus 4.5 makes. Until the usage limits are increased, it’s pretty useless compared to Claude code max plan. But there doesn’t seem to be any similar plan offering from Google.
by bulbar | 2025-12-11 06:56:03+00:00
At least in Germany they are legal in general, only highly regulated.

Most guns are owned by relatively few people. Nobody from the common crowd here thinks about owning fire arms, virtually nobody does. Maybe that's a cultural gap hard to imagine from an US perspective.

The question remains, against what and who are you even defending? Maybe it's different in Europe because it's densely populated, but people generally don't consider fire arms being a net plus to the security of themselves and that of their family.

It also just doesn't seem useful to move to a state with loose fire arms laws - it's much better to move to a state/city/neighborhood with low crime rate instead.
by kace91 | 2025-12-11 06:56:30+00:00
>I never knew there was an entire subclass of people in my field who don't want to write code.

Regardless of AI this has been years in the making. “Learn to code” has been the standard grinder cryptobro advice for “follow the money” for a while, there’s a whole generation of people getting into the industry for financial reasons (which is not wrong, just a big cultural shift).
by KingMob | 2025-12-11 06:57:38+00:00
> No, I am not a lawyer. Does that preclude my having an opinion on the [...] legality of a military strike?

Hacker News arrogance in a nutshell, ladies and gentlemen.

Feel free to also weigh in on Napoleonic currency reform, the proportion of Siberian anime fans, DNA methylation rates of Tyrannosaurs, and anything else you know nothing about.

Or maybe I just skipped CS456: "How To Know Everything About Non-Tech Topics" in college.
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-11 06:57:54+00:00
I wonder if the next generation will be facing this same sentiment.

For instance TV was basically a drug for the last generation, there was people watching near 8 to 10h of TV a day. It might have been replaced by something else, but I don't think our current generation has this specific issue.

From that POV, currently people in their 30~60s are the more stuck to social networks and raging against fake news all day, while younger generations tend to be on different services with potentially a lot more reduced circle of users.

Do we really know how the generation that is 5~6yo right now will react to our social media landscape ? (put another way, are we fighting the last war ?)
by timr | 2025-12-11 06:58:07+00:00
> A lot of software gets a foothold in an org by starting with the ICs, and individuals, not groups, are often the ones that request or approve software.

Not really. Even if we keep the conversation in the realm of startups (which are not representative of anything other than chaos), ICs have essentially no ability to take unilateral financial risk. The Github “direct to developer” sales model worked for Github at that place and time, but even they make most of their money on custom contracts now.

You’re basically picking the (very) few services that are most likely to be acquired directly by end users. Slack is like an org-wide bike-shedding exercise, and Github is a developer tool. But once the org gets big enough, the contracts are all mediated by sales.

Outside of these few examples, SaaS software is almost universally sold to non-technical business leaders. Engineers have this weird, massive blind spot for the importance of sales, even if their own paycheck depends on it.
by webstrand | 2025-12-11 06:59:10+00:00
I like how z-index works, currently. And though I agree with the article, it should apply to all elements by default, I'm not sure how you'd do stacking differently in a way that'd work any better than the current situation?

You can't do away with stacking contexts, you need those to isolate content you don't control to prevent it from breaking the stacking order of content you do control.

I completely agree with you about h* tags, though. I wish html5 sectioning hadn't been killed by the browser vendors. As is there's no safe way to put headings inside custom elements. We almost had it, it was specified and everything.
by akst | 2025-12-11 06:59:15+00:00
A singleton for me is just making sure you define a single instance of something at the entry point of your app and passing it down via constructor arguments, which is normally what I do.

I understand you can override modules in tests, and if you have a version of your app that runs in a different environment where you might replace a HTTP service with a different variant (like if an RPC service that normally performs HTTP requests, but in one case maybe you want to talk to specific process, worker or window using message passing).

I really really feel using constructor args is just a lot simpler in most cases. But I think there's a reason why people don't always do this:

1. Sometimes someone is using a framework that imposes a high level of inversion of control where you don't get to control how your dependencies are initialised.

2. (this was me when I was much younger) Someone dogmatically avoided using classes and thought they could get away with just data and functions, and then they realise there is some value in some shared instance of something and then they just undermine any functional purity. Don't get me wrong, functional purity is great, but there are parts of your apps that just aren't going to be functionally pure. And you don't need to go full OOP when you use classes.

----------------------------------------

Here are some examples of what I mean.

Here's one example, where I have an app defined in web components and I define the components for each part of the app before passing them into the skeleton. It's a more simple app and I avoid some shared state by different landmark components communicating by events.

https://github.com/AKST/analysis-notebook/blob/b3f082fc63c9b...

----------------------------------------

Here's another example, this app is built of multiple command line instructions that sometimes have their own version of services (singletons) with specific configuration, sometimes they are initialised in child processes.

https://github.com/AKST/Aus-Land-Data-ETL/blob/672280a8ded69...

Because this app is doing a lot of scrapeing and I wanted to also child worker processes to do their own HTTP I was going to make a variant of my HTTP service which talked to a daemon process that tracked state for open connections to specific domains to avoid opening too many simultaneously and getting blocked by that host.

Updating the code that uses HTTP will be effortless, because it will continue to conform to the same API. I know this because I've already done this multiple times with HTTP scrapping in the app.

https://github.com/AKST/Aus-Land-Data-ETL/blob/672280a8ded69...
by falcor84 | 2025-12-11 06:59:40+00:00
You are probably right that Japan were close to surrendering and had begun some signaling around it, particularly via the soviets, but my understanding is that they hadn't actually done that, and according to the sources I read, they absolutely weren't willing to unconditionally surrender and demilitarize before the bomb.

But I don't understand why you put the ground invasion plans in quotes - are you claiming that all the effort spent on Operation Downfall[0] was just a misdirection intended to fool everyone, including the high-ranking officers involved in the planning?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall
by kalleboo | 2025-12-11 06:59:44+00:00
> The people developing standards are in the business of developing standards

Are they? Usually these standards consortiums are composed of the companies that develop products based on the standards, where their products gain value from having a standard (a Blu-ray player and a TV with no way to connect them together is worth less). Even if they couldn't gatekeep the standards they would still have developed them out of necessity.
by rdm_blackhole | 2025-12-11 07:00:15+00:00
> Do it right, like the EU is doing

Doing it right like the EU? You mean like the EU, scan everything that is sent through anybody's phone in the name of protecting the children?

> the site you prove age to gets no information other than that you are old enough, and your government gets no information about what sites

That is the case for now. What happens when the lobbies get in there and decide that this info is actually very valuable and that they should have the right to know who is visiting their client's websites and apps, will the anonymity remain? I think not.

And what about the defense industry who in the name of fighting terrorism will demand that users that identify themselves on "suspicious" sites now need to have their data recorded?

The issue is that once everyone is using this system, then it's very easy for any government to come and start expanding the scope of the data recorded and as always under the cover of good intentions.

This is how it goes: - In 2025, they record nothing - In 2026, they start logging IP addresses and passing along suspicious log ins to the cops - In 2030 they start recording more and more data until all anonymity is gone

I wouldn't touch the EU's identity wallet with a 10 foot pole and I certainly wouldn't use anything that the EU is doing now as a benchmark considering what happened with the Chat control law recently.