MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ethin | 2026-01-14 14:52:12+00:00
I literally had to do this push > commit > test loop yesterday because apparently building universal Python wheels on MacOS is a pain in the ass. And I don't have a mac, so if I want to somewhat reliably reproduce how the runner might behave, I have to either test it on GH actions or rent one from something like Scaleway. Mainly because I don't currently knwo how else to do it. It's so, so frustrating and if anyone has ideas on making my life a bit better that would be nice lol.
by 9JollyOtter | 2026-01-14 14:52:13+00:00
> What’s the point in expressing opinions if you’re going to refuse to put any weight behind them whatsoever?

I did a long detailed response in this thread where I spent a lot of time detailing why I believed somebody's assessment of about about Dominic Cummings was incorrect (I actually listened to what he had to say). So I've already have put weight behind my opinions.

Your reply on this topic is essentially leading to a re-litigation of Brexit, which isn't anything to do with Dominic Cumming's observations on how Whitehall worked while he was present during COVID.

Brexit isn't something I wanted to get into, but both you and the other person I was replying to seemed to be focused on Brexit when it isn't the topic of discussion.

TBH. You can do a web search or ask an AI the various exit strategies that were present at the time. Many scenarios were proposed before and after the vote. This was discussed to death at the time. Loads has been written about it. Why do I have to summarise something that is easily found via a search engine for you?
by rerdavies | 2026-01-14 14:52:27+00:00
It seems more of a cultural issue that -- I'm pretty sure -- predates Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub. I assume crappy proprietary yaml can be blamed on use of Ruby. And there seems to be an odd and pervasive "80% is good enough" feel to pretty much everything in GitHub, which is definitely cultural, and I'm pretty sure, also predates Microsoft's acquisition.
by nemomarx | 2026-01-14 14:52:28+00:00
People will talk about it, but how much does it really matter? Many actors and other figures credibly accused of sex crimes or whatever just wait a few years and then start getting work again. Kevin Spacey seems to be going alright as an example.

The gap years certainly hurt, but at a sufficient level of money and power you're broadly fine I think. The real risk of cancelling is for people without money and status who could be shunned by family or friend groups mostly.
by alphazard | 2026-01-14 14:52:55+00:00
Firewalls are a fundamentally bad approach and are avoidable with good design.

Nothing should have access to the network by default.
You can either get that right by limiting resource access (which is the job of the operating system) or you can get it wrong and have to expose new APIs and hooks to invite an ecosystem of many, slightly different, complicated tools to configure network access.

To give access to the network, you spawn the process with a handle to the port it can listen on, or a handle to a dynamically allocated port that it can only dial out of.
This is no more complicated than configuration, and it doesn't have to be difficult for users.
It can bubble up to a GUI very similar to what the iPhone has for giving access to location, contacts list, etc.

The fact that most "security" people have a knee-jerk reaction to "firewall bad" is exactly the cultural problem that I'm talking about.
It's not a technical problem anymore, the solutions are known, but they aren't widely known, and they aren't known by decision makers.
We've become so used to the wrong way for so long that highly trained people reliably have bad taste.
by Storment33 | 2026-01-14 14:52:59+00:00
> Yeah, tends to happen a lot when you hold strong opinions with strong conviction :) Not that it's wrong or anything, but it's highly subjective in the end.

Strong opinions, loosely held :)

> Typically I see larger issues being created from "under-engineering" and just rushing with the first idea people can think of when they implement things, rather than "over-engineering"

Funnily enough running with the first idea I think is creating a lot of the "over-engineering" I am seeing. Not stopping to consider other simpler solutions or even if the problem needs/is worth solving in the first place.

> Yeah, tends to happen a lot when you hold strong opinions with strong conviction :) Not that it's wrong or anything, but it's highly subjective in the end.

I quickly asked Claude to convert one of my open source repos using Make/Nix/Shell -> Python/Nix to see how it would look. It is actually one of the better Python as a task runners I have seen.

* https://github.com/DeveloperC286/clean_git_history/pull/431

While the Python version is not as bad as I have seen previously, I am still struggling to see why you'd want it over Make/Shell.

It introduces more dependencies(Python which I solved via Nix) but others haven't solved this problem and the Python script has dependencies(such as Click for the CLI).

It is less maintainable as it is more code, roughly x3 the amount of the Makefile.

To me the Python code is more verbose and not as simple compared to the Makefile's target so it is less readable as well.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-14 14:54:06+00:00
A case can be made for Atlanta and Richardson/DFW because there is a fairly large preeexisting community already, but you can't deny that Vandy's yield protection is an issue.

Additionally, the CHE article is primarily talking about southern public flagships like UT, Georgia, etc which are targeting a different demographic compared to a Vandy - a university that continues to try and market itself as the "Harvard of the South" and tends to benchmark itself against Ivies, UChicago, and other T15 programs.

> The south is the most culturally Bangladeshi/Indian part of the U.S., for better and for worse

Yeah no. I'd say the Bay Area and NYC remains the primary hubs for the Desi community, and that's reflected in demographics as well.
by dijit | 2026-01-14 14:54:08+00:00
When growth stops, you focus on evaluation bias and institutional barriers. Blind resume screening, structured interviews with standardised criteria, expanding recruiting beyond homogeneous networks, addressing sponsorship patterns in promotions. None of these require growth.

None require discriminating against anyone.

But here's the thing: I'm not the one who needs to justify my position. You're asking me, someone who's been explicitly discriminated against multiple times, to solve systemic inequality for you, whilst simultaneously defending discrimination against individuals as acceptable policy.

I've spent two decades becoming exceptionally good at what I do. I ensure fairness in my own decisions. I can't fix capitalism or rewrite history, and it's absurd to demand I present a complete solution to systemic inequality before I'm allowed to object to being told I'm the wrong demographic for jobs I've earned.

Your position is that discrimination is fine as long as it's against the right people. Mine is that discrimination is wrong. One of us is being a hypocrite here, and it's not me.
by woodruffw | 2026-01-14 14:54:58+00:00
I think it's possible to both think GitHub Actions is an incredible piece of technology (and an incredible de facto public resource), while also thinking it has significant architectural and experiential flaws. The latter can be fixed; the former is difficult for competitors to replicate.

(In general, I think a lot of criticisms of GitHub Actions don't consider the fully loaded cost of an alternative -- there are lots of great alternative CI/CD services out there, but very few of them will give you the OS/architecture matrix and resource caps that GitHub Actions gives every single OSS project for free.)
by TuxSH | 2026-01-14 14:54:58+00:00
For good companies; there are _quite_ a few companies that underpay and not as many interesting job opportunities. Let's just say "at least 2x~2.5" and move on.

Also, even if you did not mention it, UK is a bit of a special case (English-speaking countries that has thus been attracting quite a lot of international talent (and companies) at least until recently), I wouldn't put it in the same bucket as EU countries.
by belorn | 2026-01-14 14:55:17+00:00
If we are looking for synonyms with related effects we should include banished, excommunicated, shunned and interdicted.

They have all slightly different meaning, used in slightly different contexts, with a slight different effect on the individual and community. They can't be used interchangeable without loosing that distinction and creating slight misunderstandings (as well as originating from different cultures and religions). We might say that someone should be banished from polite society, but we can't say they should be interdicted from polite society.
by dangus | 2026-01-14 14:55:33+00:00
Context is key.

“All lives matter” isn’t something that people said because they were championing equality and social justice.

No, it was a slogan in the context of a specific rebuttal to “black lives matter,” a slogan that put a spotlight on inequality in the criminal justice system and socioeconomic inequality in general (which factually exists if you look at data).

The entire reason people said “all lives matter” was because they didn’t like that people were saying “black lives matter.”

Some folks even specifically said “black lives don’t matter.”
by groundzeros2015 | 2026-01-14 14:55:50+00:00
Multithreading does not make code more efficient. It still takes the same amount of work and power (slightly more).

On a backend system where you already have multiple processes using various cores (databases, web servers, etc) it usually doesn’t make sense as a performance tool.

And on an embedded device you want to save power so it also rarely makes sense.
by alexellisuk | 2026-01-14 14:56:15+00:00
Disclaimer: author of the post here. Many people are considering Firecracker, and other sandboxing for AI agents, background tasks, and other processing. This post is a quick tour of what is possible - hopefully to get you thinking of what you could do with this kind of tech too. Of course, we're interested in users, please feel free to reach out on X to @alexellisuk or @slicervm
by Klonoar | 2026-01-14 14:56:50+00:00
> I am quite alienated by the hype and the completely exaggerated promises

And yet here you are writing a post that does that about a different technology. Not exactly the approach I’d expect from a senior engineer.

The individual you responded to did a great breakdown of the bias in your article. You should take it in to account rather than reject it, especially if you want to convince people.
by Bridged7756 | 2026-01-14 14:57:12+00:00
By order of importance

Meds - the baseline, the scaffolding.

Sleep - up there or higher than meds maybe. Seriously, if you want to throw money at something, do it here.

Meditation - it trains your focus, gotta be the "shamatha" kind, i.e focusing on a single point of your body, say the tip of your nose as you breathe, and upon losing focus and thinking of something else returning to that anchor point.

App blocker - really important. No distractions/limit short form content

Diet - also really important, low carbs, healthy diet. Lots of fiber. Minimize glucose spikes.

Sunlight

Exercise - aids sleep, boosts cognition

I believe these to be the main ones. The thing is that it all loops back to impulsivity (your brain constantly churning ideas and following them), which realistically, in my experience, is mostly affected by meds, sleep, exercise (as you do it), and maybe over the long run, via meditation. I do believe the first two are the basis to everything.
by adathrowaway | 2026-01-14 14:57:19+00:00
It's because PT has gotten more and more unhinged with his communications to people. nothing more, nothing less. He needs to step back from adafruit and go focus on the kid rather than go into his own postpartum descent to madness any further than he is.

It's not the first time he's flown off the deep end before, either.
by arghwhat | 2026-01-14 14:57:38+00:00
To be honest, I think a lot of the justification here is just a difference in standard library and ease of use.

I wouldn't consider there to be any notable effort in making thread build on target platforms in C relative to normal effort levels in C, but it's objectively more work than `std::thread::spawn(move || { ... });`.

Despite benefits, I don't actually think the memory safety really plays a role in the usage rate of parallelism. Case in point, Go has no implicit memory safety with both races and atomicity issues being easy to make, and yet relies much heavier on concurrency (with a parallelism degree managed by the runtime) with much less consideration than Rust. After all, `go f()` is even easier.

(As a personal anecdote, I've probably run into more concurrency-related heisenbugs in Go than I ever did in C, with C heisenbugs more commonly being memory mismanagement in single-threaded code with complex object lifetimes/ownership structures...)
by Xirdus | 2026-01-14 14:57:42+00:00
C++ isn't always "unsafe-but-high-perf". Move semantics are a good example. The spec goes to great lengths to ensure safety in a huge number of scenarios, at the cost of performance. Mostly shows up in two ways: one, unnecessary destructor calls on moved out objects, and two, allowing throwing exceptions in move constructors which prevents most optimizations that would be enabled by having move constructors in the first place (there was an article here recently on this topic).

Another one is std::shared_ptr. It always uses atomic operations for reference counting and there's no way to disable that behavior or any alternative to use when you don't need thread safety. On the other hand, Rust has both non-atomic Rc and atomic Arc.
by pc86 | 2026-01-14 14:57:52+00:00
It's important to note that the specific comments the NYT are referencing is when he was discussing a survey in which only 53% of black people surveyed agreed with the statement "It is okay to be white." He started discussing what happens to a society when nearly half of one race can't bring themselves to say it's okay to be a member of another race.

There are plenty of podcasts where plenty of people say truly racist things. Saying "47% of black people saying it's not okay to be white is a problem" is not one of them.
by simianwords | 2026-01-14 14:58:45+00:00
I agree with him by the way. But this kind of maximalist thought ending cliche is weird and anti intellectual.

One death of an amazon employee means we should change the whole system? A huge number of people are employed by them, enjoy their lives, became multi millionaires.

Why am I flagged for a fairly normal opinion? A few deaths are okay if the wast majority are satisfied?
by piva00 | 2026-01-14 14:59:15+00:00
Doesn't matter where they are produced, it matters where they are sold. They are sold in the EU, they need to follow the laws for the market where they are sold.

US companies want to sell to Europeans, they could choose to not do business here and wouldn't face any repercussions if breaking EU law. Since they do like the money from a very rich bloc of countries they do business in the EU.

It's very very simple, I don't know why you are trying to complicate a rule that exists anywhere in the world. If I want to sell something in the USA I need to follow USA's laws regarding that, if I don't then I can't do business there.
by ptorrone | 2026-01-14 14:59:46+00:00
hi, phil here — post on adafruit here:
https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teens...

i’ll stop back and answer anything (sparkfun will not?).

sparkfun is the exclusive maker and distributor of the closed-source teensy and informed us we will not be able to purchase the teensy. this happened after i sent an email reporting the founder, nate, for multiple harassing actions directed at limor, including behavior by him and a former employee.

instead of addressing that, they decided to kill the messenger, me, and also cut us off from teensy.

so! instead of posting weirdo "code of conduct" letters, we are doing an open-source alternative. so customers are not stranded, and this is not a supply chain emergency for us. looking forward to seeing which one delights customers more.

as much as nate wants to continue trying to damage limor’s business and adafruit by scraping our site, and now potentially not paying royalties owed after more than a decade of consistent payments, that’s nothing new. it’s a business strategy to cut others out, not a mystery or a “private drama.”

this is exactly why we do open source. when a closed product or exclusive channel is used as leverage, the correct response is to remove the leverage.

sparkfun chose to publish a vague public accusation. once you do that, speculation is inevitable.

ask away!
by toodlemcnoodle | 2026-01-14 14:59:49+00:00
Yes. But the speed is dependent on whether or not the compiler makes use of that information and the machine architecture the compiler is running it on.

Speed is a function of all three -- not just the language.

Optimizations for one architecture can lead to perverse behaviours on another (think cache misses and memory layout -- even PROGRAM layout can affect speed).

These things are out of scope of the language and as engineers I think we ought to aim to be a bit more precise. At a coarse level I can understand and even would agree with something like "Python is slower than C", but the same argument applies there as well.

But at some point objectivity ought to enter the playing field.
by marcianx | 2026-01-14 15:00:23+00:00
I was confused by this at first since `&T` clearly allows aliasing (which is what C's `restrict` is about). But I realize that Steve meant just the optimization opportunity: you can be guaranteed that (in the absence of UB), the data behind the `&T` can be known to not change in the absence of a contained `UnsafeCell<T>`, so you don't have to reload it after mutations through other pointers.
by woodruffw | 2026-01-14 15:00:32+00:00
I think this post accurately isolates the single main issue with GitHub Actions, i.e. the lack of a tight feedback loop. Pushing and waiting for completion on what's often a very simple failure mode is frustrating.

Others have pointed out that there are architectural steps you can take to minimize this pain, like keeping all CI operations isolated within scripts that can be run locally (and treating GitHub Actions features purely as progressive enhancements, e.g. only using `GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY` if actually present).

Another thing that works pretty well to address the feedback loop pain is `workflow_dispatch` + `gh workflow run`: you still need to go through a push cycle, but `gh workflow run` lets you stay in development flow until you actually need to go look at the logs.

(One frustrating limitation with that is that `gh workflow run` doesn't actually spit out the URL of the workflow run it triggers. GitHub claims this is because it's an async dispatch, but I don't see how there can possibly be no context for GitHub to provide here, given that they clearly obtain it later in the web UI.)
by torginus | 2026-01-14 15:00:34+00:00
A lot of C++ devs advocate for simple replacements for the STL that do not rely too much on zero-cost abstractions. That way you can have small binaries, fast compiles, and make a fast-debug kinda build where you only turn on a few optimizations.

That way you can get most of the speed of the Release version, with a fairly good chance of getting usable debug info.

A huge issue with C++ debug builds is the resulting executables are unusably slow, because the zero-cost abstractions are not zero cost in debug builds.
by Amezarak | 2026-01-14 15:00:44+00:00
There are many well-documented cases of this sort of thing happening in the 1980s and even earlier.

https://ia800108.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/24...

Note that here, Philip Morris explicitly said they used race-norming to hire minorities at the expense of people who performed better, but belong to the wrong race.

In some cases, it was court ordered:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-04-07-mn-22054-...

In this case, a test acknowledged as meritocratic caused too many minorities to be excluded, as nearly all the top performers were white. The fire department was sued, and ordered by a judge to hire at least 40% minorities -well above the applicant rate. They hired 55% minorities. Eventually SCOTUS ruled there was nothing wrong with the test - meaning for years, white applicants were discriminated against.
by Ygg2 | 2026-01-14 15:02:57+00:00
Sure, but all code is a potential future debt.

You wrote a music player that only allows one artist from list of all artists? Tech debt.

You wrote optimized assembly for x86_64? It's the year 2060, and we only support NGPU_ARM_N_LEG.

The moment your expectations change (which is all the time), your code needs to be changed, and effort isn't free.
by reactordev | 2026-01-14 15:02:58+00:00
One of four possible outcomes:

- This blows up in Sparkfun’s face and they lose sales for not having Adafruit so they invite them back. Or Adafruit apologies and comes back.

- Adafruit is forced to become their own distributor and be a Sparkfun.

- Adafruit finds another distributor willing to go to battle with Sparkfun.

- Adafruit is no longer available in Europe.
by codebyaditya | 2026-01-14 15:03:04+00:00
We analyzed the FY2024 H-1B LCA dataset to look for geographic inefficiencies.

Methodology: We joined DOL disclosure data with USDA Rural-Urban Continuum Codes (RUCC 2013) using a ZIP-to-County crosswalk.

The Signal: We found a clear inversion of the standard supply curve. Rural areas offered a 21.4% wage premium ($250k median vs $206k) yet achieved 10.2x lower placement volume.

Systemic Friction: The data suggests that for high-skill labor (physicians), geographic friction and regulatory overhead (including the new $100k fee) outweigh significant monetary incentives. The market is not clearing.
by JCattheATM | 2026-01-14 15:03:26+00:00
> Apart from the fact that this is extremely rare,

So are bubblewrap escapes, which is the sandbox flatpak uses.

> the first vulnerability is not a complete escape.

It could potentially lead to one, and being able to obtain information from other VMs defeats much of the point of isolation, and so defeats much of the point of why people use qubes.

> For example, any offline vault VM storing secrets stayed secure. This is just not happening with any other security approach.

That's not true. Strong MAC would suffice, no VT-d needed.

> Speculative sidechannel attacks have nothing to do with OS or compartmentalization technology

Of course they do, in fact they have more to do with it than solutions like flatpak, which is why Qubes releases security advisories and patches to address those vulnerabilities.
by bob1029 | 2026-01-14 15:03:31+00:00
For the last decade I've been doing my CI/CD as simple .NET console apps that run wherever. I don't see why we switch to these wildly different technologies when the tools we are already using can do the job.

Being able to run your entire "pipeline" locally with breakpoints is much more productive than whatever the hell goes on in GH Actions these days.