MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by quotemstr | 2025-12-14 06:58:06+00:00
You may define "memory safety" as you like. I will define "trustworthy system" as one in which the author acknowledges and owns limitations instead of iteratively refining private definitions until the limitations disappear. You can define a mathematical notation in which 2+3=9, but I'm under no obligation to accept it, and I'll take the attempt into consideration when evaluating the credibility of proofs in this strange notation.

Nobody is trying to hide the existence of "eval" or "unsafe". You're making a categorical claim of safety that's true only under a tendentious reading of common English words. Users reading your claims will come away with a mistaken faith in your system's guarantees.

Let us each invest according to our definitions.
by grim_io | 2025-12-14 06:58:21+00:00
I tried jj a few times but it seems to be incompatible with my workflow.

I tend to have lots of uncommitted files and changes that i want to keep around in this state while I move around branches and while having multiple change lists (jetbrains implementation) that I will commit at some point in time.

This loose, flexible way of using git seems hard to do in jj.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-14 06:59:08+00:00
> If your software solves a tightly connected business problem, microservices probably aren't the right fit.

If your software solves a single business problem, it probably belongs in a single (still micro!) service under the theory underlying microservices, in which the "micro" is defined in business terms.

If you are building services at a lower level than that, they aren't microservices (they may be nanoservices.)
by breve | 2025-12-14 07:02:44+00:00
> What I wanted in MUDs was a simple editor to allow people with little technical skill a means to create a world—or extend an existing one.

Those are MOOs. They're fully programmable in MOO code. Here's the original MOO: https://lambda.moo.mud.org/

There's no point to a MOO other than to be itself, although LambdaMOO does have an RPG system in it you can play: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LambdaMOO

Server resources: https://www.wrog.net/moo/

Programmer's manual: https://www.wrog.net/moo/progman.html

yduJ's venerable duck tutorial: https://jkira.github.io/moo-cows/docs/tutorials/wind-up-duck...
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-12-14 07:02:58+00:00
I'd been concerned about that initially, but setting up some gitgnores made this a complete non problem for me. .scratch/ for a lot, *.scratch, and ig-*.

It's also so easy to go back to the change latter and remove the files (after they're already copied elsewhere, or just operations log to go get) that it's really not a problem to just let stuff get in your commits.

In git there's such a strong incentive to do things right, to make clean commits. Imo one of the huge strengths of JJ is abandoning the obsession, and having far far far better tools to clean up after.
by Arisaka1 | 2025-12-14 07:03:13+00:00
>2. Internalized speed: be a great individual contributor, build a deep, precise mental model, build correct guardrails and convention (because you understand the problem) and protect those boundaries ruthlessly, optimize for future change, move fast because there are fewer surprises

I think the issue here is, to become a great individual contributor one needs to spent time on the saddle, polishing their skills. And with mandatory AI delegation this polishing stage will take more time than ever before.
by opello | 2025-12-14 07:03:16+00:00
I was intrigued by the idea that it might be unreasonable for a book to include a glossary or dictionary to explain usages for made up or unfamiliar terms. I like that this list [1] exists because I was struggling to think of such a book. But then I thought about The Lord of the Rings, and it even includes an index of terms among its appendices, which is something I remember using to revisit parts of the story when I first read it. Another book with a glossary of terms is Dune, which I found fun and reasonable to avoid trying to explain hierarchy where doing so would break the narrative flow. But maybe that just means it's not as cleverly constructed or organized as it could have been--but the trade-off has to be how to engage a wide selection of readers...

Is the complaint about the dictionary at the end because it wasn't comprehensive? I'm unreasonably curious about the book and which phrases were included and which were not.

I think all written works occur in a context that should be taken into account when thinking critically about them. That context is temporal and linguistic and is more apparent when you consider something like Beowulf in Old English or The Canterbury Tales in Middle English. Understanding it requires either a modern reinterpretation or consideration given to the sociolinguistic context in which it was written.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/180823.Novels_with_Gloss...
by lukevp | 2025-12-14 07:07:12+00:00
Shared telemetry library, you realize that you are missing an important metric to operationalize your services. You now need to deploy all 140 to get the benefit.

Your runtime version is out of date / end of life. You now need to update and deploy all 140 (or at least all the ones that use the same tech stack).

No matter how you slice it, there are always dependencies across all services because there are standards in the environment in which they operate, and there are always going to be situations where you have to redeploy everything or large swaths of things.

Microservices aren’t a panacea. They just let you delay the inevitable but there is gonna be a point where you’re forced to comply with a standard somewhere that changes in a way that services must be updated. A lot of teams use shared libraries for this functionality.
by mlhpdx | 2025-12-14 07:10:04+00:00
Speed is the rationale. I have zero hesitation to deploy and am extremely well practiced at decomposing changes into a series of small safe changes at this point. So maybe it's a single spelling correction, or perhaps it's the backend for a new service integration -- it's all the same to me.

Churn is kind of a loaded word, I'd just call it change. Improvements, efficiencies, additions and yes, of course, fixes.

It may be a little unfair to compare monoliths with distributed services when it comes to deployments. I often deploy three services (sometimes more) to implement a new feature, and that wouldn't be the case with a monolith. So 100% there is a lower number of deploys needed in that world (I know, I've been there). Unfortunately, there is also a natural friction that prevents deploying things as they become available. Google called that latency out in DORA for a reason.
by reincoder | 2025-12-14 07:10:40+00:00
That was actually a great article. For us, that is like a crowdsourced bug hunting program. We actually got duped ourselves, and we appreciate the author.

We added additional features for location hint modeling and selection for IPv6 networks. There are a handful of open engineering tickets to understand more about the entire internet infrastructure of the country. Of course, hosting a probe server out there would be helpful.

https://ipinfo.io/countries/kp

We always appreciate feedback like that.
by mtriassi | 2025-12-14 07:12:31+00:00
There's an assured win combo in this game, at least against the Hard AI. The combo is as follows:

Take the top left corner. It takes the center. Take the bottom left corner. It flips it's center piece every time. Take either right corner. It takes the remaining corner. Take the center right. Flip one of your left corner pieces to form a diagonal ghost line

If the AI doesn't take the center and waste its flip, then it can definitely be countered.

As for feedback, I'd say i had a few moments where i was confused as to why a whole cluster of pieces flipped to ghosts. Honestly if that was described in a tutorial better it'd probably be a non-issue.
by rsingel | 2025-12-14 07:14:01+00:00
The video for that song uses excerpts from the movie version of Johnny Got His Gun. I don't know if the songwriting was inspired by it but the video certainly was. Because the video relied so much on the excerpts the band ended up buying the rights to the movie just to not pay royalties.

Hilariously, I won a writing prize about this connection as a teenager in 1989. Fun to see you had a similar experience
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-12-14 07:14:31+00:00
I'm pretty shocked we are still waiting for NVMe hard disk drives (classic spinning rust).

The overhead of SATA doesn't matter a ton, but doesn't seem excellent. It just feels like eventually it's going to be silly having SATA ports on systems at all, be such a very narrow use case, and that PCIe & NVMe really ought be an option. (More so if PCIe switches hadn't skyrocketed in price over the years, alas.)

There have been rumblings about NVMe HDD for years now but still no products. How that would help though, make the SATA ssd feel less necessary.
by tasuki | 2025-12-14 07:14:48+00:00
Heh, similar thoughts! The main difference that I only used Scheme for SICP, and I've used a bit of Haskell.

I like Haskell in theory, but: just to get a hello world takes a lot of CPU and disk space. The standard library is full of exceptions (you can use a different prelude, that opens a whole different can of worms). The ergonomics of converting between the thousand different string types are awful.

So, you being basically me, I have some recommendations:

Idris (2): good stdlib, has dependent types. A beautiful language. The compiler is self-hosted and bootstrapped by lisp - very elegant! The ecosystem is basically nonexistent though.

PureScript: also improves on Haskell in many ways. But, it's more of a frontend language, and though you can do backend, you're stuck with JavaScript runtime. Oh well.
by stevekemp | 2025-12-14 07:15:46+00:00
There's a good three-part writeup starting here, covering Douglas and the game:

https://www.filfre.net/2013/11/douglas-adams/

For my money the "best" adventure game was and is The Hobbit, but that may well be because it's the first one I was haunted by.

Similar two-part writeup starts here :

https://www.filfre.net/2012/11/the-hobbit/
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-14 07:16:21+00:00
It's always funny when I watch stuff about some foreigner visiting my home country and they either focus on something not all that important, or get something completely wrong.

The funniest part is trying to present some dish as "traditional" that everyone here eats, while it's some super niche thing only one region does, occasionally, if you have grandma that remembers how to make it
by fulafel | 2025-12-14 07:16:47+00:00
SSD (over nvme) and TCP (over 100gbe) both exhibit low tens of microseconds of latency as the low bound. This is ignoring redundancy for both of course, but the cost of that should also be similar between the two.

If the storage is farther away, then you'll go slower of course. But since the article is comparing to EFS and S3 Express, it's fitting to talk about a nearby scenarios I think. And the point of the article was that S3 Express was more problematic for cost than small-object performance reasons.
by reincoder | 2025-12-14 07:18:13+00:00
We (IPinfo) attended the IETF 3-day workshop on IP geolocation. Our presentation was about geofeed that can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/l8PR7VCmA3Q?si=dG-00UqljTopBquF&t=372.

It was a great session and we received a lot of questions. We attend different NOG conferences regularly. ISPs are incentivized to help us by providing good data. Although we are agnostic about adversarial geofeeds, ISPs themselves need to work with us to ensure good quality of service to their users.

We already do quite a lot of outreach, in fact, most network engineers in the ISP industry across the world are familiar with us. But if any ISP operator has any feedback for us, we are only an email (or even a social media comment) away.
by user_7832 | 2025-12-14 07:20:08+00:00
Unfortunately I’ve often seen such things in tech - the more “purist” or deep or nerdy something is, the worse he explanations, UX/UI, and explanations.

A GitHub readme for some software that sells a subscription (or is meant for “average” users) will have way more explanations and screenshots than something that’s more technical. HN has a “leaner” (worse for mobile) interface than old reddit, while both are way better than new reddit.

And god help you if you want to understand the chain of context on a Linux mailing list (email?) thread. “What, you’re not savvy enough to know the arcane and totally unintuitive stuff we use to format and can’t make sense of it? Too bad, sounds like user error.”

Yeah this turned into a rant, but seriously, little polish goes a long way in usability.
by Mawr | 2025-12-14 07:21:47+00:00
Safety is a continuum. It's a simple fact. Feel free to use a term other than memory safety to describe what you're talking about, but so long as you use safety, there's going to be a continuum.

Also, by your definition, e.g. Rust is not memory safe. And "It is true that Rust is only memory unsafe in a specific scenario, but [...]". I hope you agree.
by fulafel | 2025-12-14 07:23:13+00:00
Rooting gets you additional means to reverse engineer the proprietary software system but doesn't automagically lighten the box.

It's all relative of course, maybe you view anything you can Ghidra as not-black-box. (though this is kind of tangential to rooting - for a many/most devices you can get a hold of the blobs to reverse engineer without rooting anything)
by tripletao | 2025-12-14 07:23:21+00:00
That's true, but I believe the authors' complaint here is efficacy rather than safety. (I also think they're using terms of art from evidence-based medicine to make a statement the general public is likely to misinterpret, per my other comment here.)

Safety is barely discussed in this paper, probably because the available RCT evidence is favorable to cannabis. I'm not sure that means it's actually safe, since RCTs of tobacco cigarettes over the same study periods probably wouldn't show signal either. This again shows the downside of ignoring all scientific knowledge except RCT outcomes, just in the other direction.
by The_Fox | 2025-12-14 07:24:24+00:00
I was driving home with my family from a long trip having just bought a really cool camping trailer, a 1979 Airstream. Our vehicle died on the side of the road in a rural area. The owner of the property where we stopped was mowing his lawn and came over and asked if we needed help. When it became obvious our vehicle needed a tow, he used his own truck to bring the trailer onto his property. And he kept it there for a couple of weeks while the engine in our vehicle was replaced.

I'm really not sure what I would have done with the trailer if he hadn't offered to help. We were more than 600 km from home.
by reincoder | 2025-12-14 07:24:51+00:00
I work for IPinfo.

We also run traceroutes. Actually, we run a ton of active measurements from our ProbeNet. The amount of location data we process is staggering.

https://ipinfo.io/probenet

Latency is only one dimension of the data we process.

We are pinging IP addresses from 1,200+ servers from 530 cities, so if you add synthetic latency, chances are we can detect that. Then the latency-related location hints score will go down, and we will prioritize our dozens of other location hints we have.

But we do welcome to see if anyone can fool us in that way. We would love to investigate that!
by kgeist | 2025-12-14 07:29:12+00:00
We had a similar problem in our monolith. Team #1 works on a feature, their code breaks tests. Team #2 works on another feature, their code is OK, but they can't move forward because of the failing tests from team #1. Plus often it takes additional time to figure out if it the tests fail because of feature #1 or feature #2, and who must fix them.

We solved it by simply giving every team their own dev environment (before merging to main). So if tests break in feature #1, it doesn't break anything for feature #2 or team #2. It's all confined to their environment. It's just an additional VM + a config in CI/CD. The only downside of this is that if there are conflicts between features they won't be caught immediately (only after one of the teams finally merges to main). But in our case it wasn't a problem because different teams rarely worked on the same parts of the monorepo at the same time due to explicit code ownership.
by netsharc | 2025-12-14 07:29:26+00:00
God, so many edgy experts in here. Teaching kids that the "technology sucks" (i.e. what are its limitations, for one thing there's no "understanding", only a simulation of it) is also useful.

Yeah, yeah, for you who knows better than everything, you already know what they're going to teach from this press release, you already know it all, that's why you have no use for AI.

With little apology for breaking the HN civility rules. "They did it first."
by oofbey | 2025-12-14 07:29:59+00:00
Nit：The word “orthogonal” should not mean merely “different”. It should mean “completely unrelated” if we are drawing a proper analogy from linear algebra. Orthogonal vectors have a dot product of zero. No correlation whatsoever. As ML and linear algebra terms spread to more common language of course the terms will change their meaning. Just as “literally” now often means “figuratively” I’m not going to die on this hill. But I will try to resist degradation of terms that have specific technical meaning.

So I would very much disagree with the statement that memory safety and sandboxing are orthogonal. They are certainly different. Linearly independent even. But with a fair amount of overlap.
by pabs3 | 2025-12-14 07:31:27+00:00
Conservancy disagrees that GPLv2 doesn't require this.

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-t... https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...
by BatteryMountain | 2025-12-14 07:31:35+00:00
In C#'s dependency injector you basically have to choose from 3 lifetimes for a class/service: scoped, transient or singletons.

Scoped & transient lifetimes along with the new GC will make the runtime much leaner.

Some application are singleton heavy or misuse the MemoryCache (or wrap it as a singleton... facepalm) - these will still mess the GC situation up.

If you build web/api project it pays dividends to educate yourself on the 3 life times, how the GC works, how async/await/cancellation tokens/disposables work, how MemoryCache work (and when to go out-of-process / other machine aka Redis), how the built-in mechanisms in aspnet works to cache html outputs etc. A lot of developers just wing it and then wonder why they have memory issues.

And for for the dinosaurs: yes we can use the dependency injector in Windows Form, WPF, Console Apps and so on - those packages aren't limited to web projects alone.
by sails | 2025-12-14 07:31:40+00:00
These are great. Something you might find interesting is that you can expose a google sheet to have an interactive database. I have a map similar to yours, but with surf spots. Maybe defeats the point, but I find it handy

Edit: come to think of it, I should revisit it now that everyone can vibe code. The sheet was to allow people to add to it, now maybe easier for me to take a message and ask an agent to update the html directly
by hansmayer | 2025-12-14 07:34:11+00:00
No, please, stop misleading people Simon. People use tools to make things easier for them, not harder. And a tool which I cannot steer predictably is not a god damn tool at all! The sheer persistence the AI-promoters like you are willing to invest just to gaslight us all into thinking we were dumb and did not know how to use the shit-generators is really baffling. Understand that a lot of us are early adopters and we see this shit for what it is - the most serious mess up of the "Big Tech" since Zuckerberg burned 77B for his metaverse idiocy. By the way - animals are not tools. People do not use them - they engage with them as helpers, companions and for some people, even friends of sorts. Drop your LLM and try engaging with someone who has a hunting dog for example - they'd be quite surprised if you referred to their beloved retriever as a "tool". And you might learn something about a real intelligence.
by Ylpertnodi | 2025-12-14 07:35:04+00:00
> Every normal person has content in Google , iCloud , OneDrive , Dropbox and maybe more.

So, fallacy aside, the abnormals would be...

a) people that don't tech, and b) people that saw the writing on the wall years ago, and either didn't trust the system and didn'tget into it, or those that did for a while, and got tfo.

?
by inesranzo | 2025-12-14 07:35:18+00:00
Why do you need to use Git as a CMS?

That seems backwards and hellish when you want to grow your content and marketing team as they have no clue on how to use this arcane tool.

Now the engineers would need to be bothered by the marketing department time and time again to add blog posts, wasting engineering time.

This is the reason why CMS's like Sanity, Wordpress, Directus exist.

using Git as a CMS doesn't make sense at scale.
by reincoder | 2025-12-14 07:35:42+00:00
We (I work for IPinfo) talk about latency because it is a thread that you can start from when exploring our full depth of data.

We are the internet data company and our ProbeNet only represents a fraction of our investment. Through our ProbeNet, we run ping, traceoute, and other active measurements. Even with traceroute we understand global network topology. There are dozens and dozens of hints of data.

We are tapping into every aspect on the internet data possible. We are modeling every piece of data that is out there, and through research, we are coming up with new sources of data. IP geolocation is only product for us. Our business is mapping internet network topology.

We are hoping to work with national telecoms, ISPs, IXPs, and RIRs to partner with them, guiding and advising them about data-driven internet infrastructure mapping.
by anovikov | 2025-12-14 07:36:34+00:00
Thing is, young generation of Russians who never saw poverty - the country was doing just fine for the last 20 years at least - they are even more hard-right than the older gen.

People around 60 are perhaps the most reasonable - they remember enough of Communism to know it's shit, and they've been politically active when Russia had actual electoral politics during the Perestroika and the 1990s so they value freedoms they lost, and they had enough of experience with consuming competing manipulative narratives to understand how easy it is to bullshit people.
by mykowebhn | 2025-12-14 07:40:38+00:00
A few years before Covid, I was driving to work in San Francisco and I stopped at a Philz Coffee in Marin County, as I often did. It was a usual workday morning and everyone was looking down at their phones while waiting for their coffee. We were all preoccupied and eager to get to work.

All of a sudden, some guy who looked to be in his 20s comes in clearly not from the area. He was dressed like a backpacker and he seemed lost. He was studying the coffee menu and saying hi to those around him. His friendliness and being-in-the-moment-ness really touched me, helped to pull me out of myself. When I went to pay for my coffee, I told the cashier that I was going to pay for his coffee as well. While I was still waiting for my coffee, he went to pay and learned that I had already paid for his coffee. I was embarrassed, but I will never forget the look of appreciation on his face.
by thr0w4w4y1337 | 2025-12-14 07:40:49+00:00
awnumar/memguard[1] exists and does even more

1) allocations via memguard bypass gc entirely

2) they are encrypted at all times when not unsealed

3) pages are mprotected to prevent leakage via swap

4) and so on...

Not as ergonomic as OP's proposal, of course.

[1] https://github.com/awnumar/memguard