MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dancrystalbeach | 2025-12-28 21:57:52+00:00
I give the people what they want; I’m a slave to clicks and the buzz of internet anger and mayhem. Not so long ago, I tried, with limited success, to convince a legion of engineers who were raised on the Snowflake and Databricks teat, that salvation lay right at their feet; all they must do is lean down and put their hand to the plow.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-12-28 21:58:12+00:00
What we didn't know back in the 1990s was how little this sort of presentation (that you describe) was engaging. Everyone could sort of tell, which is why producers shied away from it, but with the rise of algorithms and internet slop it can be measured very precisely. And the measurements show that it's damn near close to zero, on whatever scale it is that they use.

Intelligent people are boring. They're worried about problem-solving. Problems like on the tests back in school that used to make my head hurt, problems I'd get the red X on and have to repeat 3rd grade over because of. Unintelligent people are exciting. They're in conflict. They're fighting, or going to find a fight somewhere, and if you watch long enough they might even get into that fight right then and there (Bill O'Reilly used to do that on air, after all).
by jesse__ | 2025-12-28 21:58:16+00:00
There's a bit to unpack here.

There are two things one might care about when computing an SDF .. the isosurface, or the SDF itself.

If you only care about the isosurface (ie. where the function is 0), you can do any ridiculous operations you can think of, and it'll work just fine. Add, sub, multiply, exp .. whatever you want. Voxel engines do this trick a lot. Then it becomes more of a density field, as apposed to a distance field.

If you care about having a correct SDF, for something like raymarching, then you have to be somewhat more careful. Adding two SDFs does not result in a valid SDF, but taking the min or max of two SDFs does. Additionally, computing an analytical derivative of an SDF breaks if you add them, but you can use the analytical derivative if you take a min or max. Same applies for smooth min/max.
by joshuamorton | 2025-12-28 21:58:28+00:00
Very few organizations need security from state level or similar threats and the infrastructure provider. Most organizations that want secure email don't use any kind of e2ee at all, they just trust Google or Microsoft or whomever.

The few jobs that actually care about this stuff, like journalists, do use signal.

Openwall doesn't get security via pgp, it gets a spam filter.
by hagbard_c | 2025-12-28 21:58:43+00:00
A new ${computer_brand} with Linux doesn't show you any ads, doesn't add more bloat than you let it, doesn't insist on you creating any iCloudy or Microsofty accounts, doesn't try to police what software you run on the thing, doesn't try to upsell you to some ${precious_metal} plan, doesn't insist your 5 year new computer is obsolete, doesn't spy on you, etcetera.

What are you waiting for?
by hyperman1 | 2025-12-28 21:59:15+00:00
You scare me. After life dishing out one of its lessens, I decided to get some fundamentals in order, and for me that includes 3 meals a day, with the family. Things have to get really disastrous to not get breakfast, and I don't think my kid skipped breakfast ever. Each his own, of course, but I wonder what happens in your life that this is semi normal?
by theologic | 2025-12-28 22:00:22+00:00
I arrived at IBM just a little before Gerstner got there. He was an absolutely amazing individual in terms of how he spoke incredibly bluntly to everyone. At IBM, it was all about legacy internal political structures, where you would have enormous presentations held by various executives trying to explain why their business was going to be best and why you needed to invest in it. The ritual of presenting at IBM’s headquarters in Armonk was a symbol of the culture.

While I don't remember every single speech word for word, I remember one of his earliest all-hands meetings. He said, "If I have one more exec come to me with a bunch of slides that can't simply describe what's happening in their business with the key strategic attributes, I'm going to start firing people." He continued, "If you're running a massive section of the business, I should be able to come to you and we should just be able to have a good, solid conversation about the levers. You need to demonstrate to me that you know exactly what's going on, and you can't have your staffer answer my questions."

He also stated that he was completely appalled because, at every other company he had been at, they woke up every day paranoid about the competition. He told everyone we had completely lost our way. if you weren't waking up every single day thinking about the scorecard, you probably weren't right for the new environment.

If you were internal and under any scrutiny at all during these years, you would understand that Lou, without Jerry York, was only half of the story. Jerry was an amazing financial mind who could sniff through spreadsheets and smell bullshit. People would come out of executive reviews hanging on for dear life. Some of these executives, after they had been exposed to York and actually performed well, would leave IBM and succeed elsewhere. However, to be clear, he was an A-hole.

They achieved an enormous amount of cultural change, which was excellent. The problem was that while they had a great cultural leader and a great financial leader, IBM which was built to the brim with some of the most incredibly technical people you had ever seen, was completely lacking a clear technical lead. Inasmuch as these two guys created an amazing turnaround story, they never stopped for a moment to ask how to find the technical leadership to truly transform the place. While they did a great job, you cannot support a stool with only two legs. If IBM had found that third leg, we would still be counting it among the Mag 8 of today.
by ludicity | 2025-12-28 22:00:38+00:00
Oh, I glossed over that in my response. I've had people at the C-level admit that they don't care about ethics to me, and I especially see startup CEOs lie a lot, or otherwise be so self-deluded to make sales easier that it's hard to tell if they know they're lying.

I think Sean is right that, in the abstract, they prefer good software to bad software, but they won't make any sacrifices if those sacrifices require losing money or status. It's the same "do your what your manager wants" playbook, but run up to board level.
by j45 | 2025-12-28 22:00:52+00:00
There is one pretty epic stackoverflow post that AI probably won't find.

It turned out a lot of the thermal throttling (kernel_task usage) on the i9 macbook pros went away if you plugged in the power on the right side, instead of the left.

Why turned out to be a chip that didn't have enough cooling.

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/363337/how-to-find...

One could also put fans under the i9 to make it draw air away and run markedly faster.

That, combined with the keyboard failures, meant I could put a wireless keyboard on top of the laptop keyboard and use it.

This is how I took it to the Apple store for warranty repair. I asked them this is a feature of all macbooks when you buy the fastest ones to have to cool it the right way and not use the keyboard in case there might be dust in the air.
by nateb2022 | 2025-12-28 22:01:25+00:00
> I own the code that I bring into my repo, I belive the standard library is sufficent for my needs without having to pull in more crates.

Unless you're working on something with extremely limited scope, dependencies will become unavoidable; without resorting to reinventing many wheels.

> This is not THE idiomatic way to write rust but rather the way that I write errors.
> impl From<std::num::ParseIntError> for DemoError {
> fn from(error: std::num::ParseIntError) -> Self {
> DemoError::ParseErr(error)
> }
> }

This introduces a lot of observability risk.

You've essentially built a context eraser. By using a generic From impl with the ? operator, you’re prioritizing brevity during the "happy path" write, but you're losing the "Why" of the error. If my_function has five different string-to-int conversions, your logs will just tell you "Invalid Digit." Good luck grep-ing that in a 100k LOC codebase.

map_err can help fix this, but look at what that does to your logic:

let my_number: i32 = first_input
.parse()
.map_err(|_|
DemoError::new(DemoErrorKind::FirstNumberErr(
first_input.into()
))
)?;

In a real-world refactor, someone is going to change first_input to validated_input and forget to update the variable inside that closure. Now your error message will report the wrong data. It sends the SRE team down a rabbit hole investigating the wrong input while the real bug sits elsewhere.

And by calling error.to_string() in your Display impl:

DemoErrorKind::ParseErr(error) => write!(
f,
"error parsing with {}", error.to_string()
),

...you are manually "flattening" the error. You’ve just nuked the original error's type identity. If a caller up the stack wanted to programmatically handle a specific ParseIntError variant, they can't. You've turned a structured error into a "stringly-typed" nightmare.

Realistically your risk of mismanaging your boilerplate is significantly higher than a supply chain attack on a crate maintained by the core library team.
by IshKebab | 2025-12-28 22:01:33+00:00
I agree. Is he really trying to say that e.g. errors for `std::fs::read()` should not distinguish between "file not found" and "permission denied"? It's quite common to want to react to those programmatically.

IMO Rust should provide something like thiserror for libraries, and also something like anyhow for applications. Maybe we can't design a perfect error library yet, but we can do waaay better than nothing. Something that covers 99% of uses would still be very useful, and there's plenty of precedent for that in the standard library.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-12-28 22:02:16+00:00
Yet, anonymous compute providers exist. Either way, if all you want is to identify who your users are, that's fine. Email hardly helps. It's not hard to setup a temporary mailbox. Anyone can sign up to protonmail without identifying themselves too much. All you're doing is making it inconvenient for the opportunistic an lazy potential criminals (and legit users alike). Simply not accepting crypto payment goes a long way. Furthermore, even if your users are 100% innocent & legitimate, they could and do get compromised (happens a LOT).

I think it's just something people do because "everyone else" is doing it. Lots of familiarity around email. "it's just not done" as they say.
by FireBeyond | 2025-12-28 22:02:28+00:00
Interesting, likewise, the Camera app. And other camera apps, I use Halide too.

And Photos. Will it sync? Yes. When? Who the fuck knows? Doesn't matter whether you're on Ethernet or Wifi, gigabit internet. You can quit Photos on both devices, you can then keep Photos open foreground... so what? Photos will sync when it wants to, not what when you want it to.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-12-28 22:02:32+00:00
>Somebody getting news from TikTok will probably be better informed than somebody relying only on print or TV.

Imagine talking about how the "internet has unlimited stories" and then following up with "people who use TikTok are better informed".

If you're getting the information by listening to one of those jackasses in their sing-song presenter voices... you're not getting information at all. You're functionally illiterate and hyponotized by someone who learned to exploit Youtube-style algorithms.
by cj | 2025-12-28 22:02:37+00:00
You’re welcome to flag my comment if you don’t like it was appropriate.

I oversee a team of 10 sales and marketing people who do outbound sales for our company. I’m accountable for their results, and set the direction and strategy. I’m speaking from first hand experience.

I’m not going to link to random blog posts or courses, which seems to be what you’re expecting. Sorry!
by Grosvenor | 2025-12-28 22:02:47+00:00
Linux had been doing SMP for about 5 years by that point.

But you're right OS resource limitations (file handles, PIDs, etc) would be the real pain for you. One problem after another.

Now, the real question is do you want to spend your engineering time on that? A small cluster running erlang is probably better than a tiny number of finely tuned race-car boxen.
by auscompgeek | 2025-12-28 22:03:01+00:00
It was definitely a relatively well known problem with the 2019 MBP on the internet at some point. I found a Reddit thread linking to a news article about this. https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/vi3grj/you_should_char...

It was so much of a problem that at work we added a check that you were charging from the right ports to our internal doctor script (think like `brew doctor`).
by deossaboss | 2025-12-28 22:03:28+00:00
This case is known as the Northern Bank robbery in Belfast.
What makes it unusual is that no technical breach was involved.

The attackers used a method called “tiger kidnapping” — taking employees’ families hostage and forcing compliance during normal work hours.

Over £26 million was removed from the vault across two trips.
No one was ever convicted, and most of the money was never recovered.

The video breaks down the sequence step by step for anyone interested in how non-technical attacks can bypass complex systems.
by LoganDark | 2025-12-28 22:03:34+00:00
A JVM agent is able to instrument and modify running JVM applications. Stuff like debugging, hot patching, etc rely on this. You used to be able to tell the JVM to listen on a port where you could connect debuggers (agents) dynamically at runtime, but that was deemed a security issue so now you can only declare specific agents at launch time through command-line flags.
by tombert | 2025-12-28 22:04:14+00:00
FWIW, I replaced that MacBook with a Thinkpad (AMD Edition) about a year, and i have been extremely with it. Not only was it one of the easiest Linux installs I have ever had, but the hardware feels solid, the keyboard (while not one of the legendary classic Thinkpad keyboards) is nice to type on, the 4K screen looks nice, and everything just feels well built and snappy.

Outside of the terrible speakers, it is a nearly perfect computer. I don’t really mind a crappy speaker on a laptop since it usually lives on mute and when I need decent-enough quality audio I will plug in headphones or Bluetooth to a speaker, but YMMV.

Still, if this computer ever breaks then I will likely buy another thinkpad.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-28 22:04:41+00:00
> unfortunately only Apple is able to build something that works in all areas that matter: sleeps when lid closed, wakes when lid opens, touchpad and display don’t suck

In my case I'd add:

- Chassis that doesn't flex like crazy

- Battery life good enough that I typically don't need to think about AC outlet accessibility

- Can sit in standby for upwards of a week without battery drain forcing it to shut down

- Is inaudible except when maxing out CPU or GPU for several minutes

- Has a screen panel with a resolution that's either 1x or 2x UI scaling native

The number of laptops in the market that check these boxes is disappointingly tiny.
by ebbi | 2025-12-28 22:05:27+00:00
The sad thing is, this kind of stuff was encouraged in the previous company that I worked for when I got promoted to a certain level. 'Be a thought leader', 'represent the company and influence the industry' was the standard directives the leadership team were given.

On one hand, it's funny to see the ones that made the company their whole identity, only to then leave for a competitor and make the new place their identity.

On the other hand , it's sad that a lot of people that are hiring (in my line of work at least), are impressed by these crappy posts and the people posting it tend to get more exposure and get hired quicker.
by ThatPlayer | 2025-12-28 22:06:15+00:00
This ignores that community servers basically invented client anticheats. Almost all the current 3rd party anticheats started for community servers. Even Quake 3 Arena was updated with Punkbuster at some point.

You still see this with modern day servers. Modded GTA V, FiveM, had additional anticheat even before the unmodded game added anticheat. Part of the appeal of CS2 servers, Face-IT and ESEA, is the additional anticheats.
by marcosdumay | 2025-12-28 22:06:21+00:00
> You can buy a 1000MHz machine with 2 gigabytes of RAM and an 1000Mbit/sec Ethernet card for $1200 or so. Let's see - at 20000 clients, that's 50KHz, 100Kbytes, and 50Kbits/sec per client. It shouldn't take any more horsepower than that to take four kilobytes from the disk and send them to the network once a second for each of twenty thousand clients.

It was about physical servers.
by divbzero | 2025-12-28 22:06:45+00:00
> It is just a plain fact that software engineers are not the movers and shakers in large tech organizations. They do not set the direction of the company. To the extent that they have political influence, it’s in how they translate the direction of the company into specific technical changes. But that is actually quite a lot of influence!

I don’t know if you’d label this view “cynical” or “idealist” but it feels balanced and I think there is a lot of truth in it. As a software engineer, you’re not a mindless automaton “just doing your job”. Your judgment about the proper way to do things—or whether a thing should be done like that at all—makes a difference in how useful and beneficial a product is for end users and for our society more broadly.
by eevmanu | 2025-12-28 22:06:54+00:00
cr=country<two letter>

I have a "kind" of similar need and use *cr* query param based on *ISO 3166-1 alpha-2* [1] to force official language when i want to narrow the search on a specific country (as example when I want to search for english, I use *cr=countryUS*)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2

p.s.: YMMV, sometimes works, sometimes it doesn't, most of the time works but there is no determinism
by brabel | 2025-12-28 22:07:11+00:00
A similar problem happened with logging in Java. For many years, there were several competing libraries for logging. Eventually, the community converged on basically none of them, and it became a convention that libraries should use an implementation-agnostic logging API (slf4j), allowing applications to use their preferred implementation (which has a "bridge" to slf4j, e.g. log4j, logback etc.).

Eventually, the JDK did add a logging facility [1]... but too little, too late: nobody uses that and any library that uses logging will probably forever use slf4j.

[1] https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/11/core/java-logging-...
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-28 22:08:08+00:00
> think they pretty clearly meant 'practical best' rather than 'theoretical best’

I guess I question this, too. This “battleship” a cartoon drawn for the President. It might damage our fighting ability if built. But it’s not reflective of our practical best.

There is a broader, genuine criticism of American warship building. But this battleship has as much to do with that as do rubber ducks.
by duxup | 2025-12-28 22:08:34+00:00
>On the whole, it’s pretty clearly a grab-bag of stuff that sounded cool, thrown together without any real attempt to explain how is this better spending an equivalent amount of money on Burkes or on the DDG(X) program, which was going to come in around 15,000 tons, and which this is allegedly supposed to replace.

Yeah it's an ego project for someone with a fragile ego.
by hollow-moe | 2025-12-28 22:08:59+00:00
Indeed and we don't want to restrict the license. But one good thing about closed gardens is the ability for screening to enter and throw "bad actors" out. Don't ask me the details about "yes but one bad actor and the code is out" or "but how would you check for id at signup", at least the forges aren't DDoS'd, "vibecoders" can be put to the door, it's harder for AI companies to steal stuff around the code in the forge or code updates, hell even put docs behind the wall I wouldn't even care, as we say here "Aux grands maux, les grands remèdes".
by hagbard_c | 2025-12-28 22:10:14+00:00
My biggest beef with client-side decorations is that they're not optional. For those of us using tiling window managers those decorations are totally superfluous and only take up space, especially since the Gnome folks seem to have decided that every UI element needs to have lebensraum by adding huge areas of white space around them. I want my windows densely populated and I want lots of them on my screen because I'm using a COMPUTER - not a PHONE - with a LARGE SCREEN and a pointing device. I do not need to be able to fat-finger those buttons, I have an accurate pointing device with which I control a pointy cursor with which I can accurately hit single pixels if needed. Now I need to LD_PRELOAD some library to get rid of those stupid unneeded decorations, I need to find the current iteration of the compact Adwaita theme (for as long as that is still possible...) and I otherwise need to FIGHT the software as if I were running some proprietary blob of malware from the Fruit Factory or from Redmond. Blegh, so much wasted time and effort.
by kayo_20211030 | 2025-12-28 22:10:28+00:00
I agree in general, but something one ought never to do is to foreclose a future. Constitutions (AI or otherwise), without some responsive mechanism for adjustment and moderation, would only set today's principles for an eternal, unchanging future. That's not right! Let the future adjust its own course as it sees fit. Set out your stall by all means, but accept some mechanism for course corrections by committing to an adjudicated law process that would serve those necessary adjustments - adjudicated by persons who are democratically "adjacent" at least. Nothing's ever perfect, but I have a quixotic belief in the political process to get the laws right eventually. It's always a political process - puts and takes, but more importantly, it needs to be deliberate, and slow-ish.
by BiteCode_dev | 2025-12-28 22:11:48+00:00
At least one worker for each virtual cpu core you get for CPU. I got 16 on my laptop. My servers have much more.

If I have 64 cores, and 20 dependencies, I do want the 20 of them to be uncompressed in parallel. That's faster and if I'm installing something, I wanna prioritize that workload.

But it doesn't have to be 20. Even say 5 with queues, that's 100ms. It adds up.
by AphantaZach | 2025-12-28 22:11:57+00:00
Totally fair question. "Higher performance" is definitely a subjective claim, so I should clarify the mechanism I'm relying on.

The core concept is Photic Driving (the "Frequency Following Response"). There is decent literature (e.g., Herrmann, 2001) showing that the visual cortex effectively synchronizes its firing rate to match high-amplitude external flickers (like a 14Hz strobe).

My goal with this tool is to induce Transient Hypofrontality (down-regulation of the prefrontal cortex), which is often associated with "Flow States" (Dietrich, 2003).

To be clear: I haven't run a clinical trial. I built it to replicate the "Ganzflicker" effects (Reeder, 2021) in a browser environment to help with my own Aphantasia. Subjectively, it helps me clear cognitive noise faster than silence, but I'm releasing it for free to see if that holds true for others or if it's just placebo.
by brabel | 2025-12-28 22:12:20+00:00
Great question! But no, they are not the same, despite some similarities.

In Unison, effects are called abilities, and they wrote a very good post explaining the differences!

https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/fundamentals/abilities/for-...

In summary: both have advantages and disadvantages. Which one is "better" depends on which factors you value more.