MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pxc | 2026-01-16 15:48:39+00:00
From an educational perspective, regular expressions are also a great way to teach about state machines, computational complexity, formal languages, and grammars in a way that has direct applications to tools that are long-lived and ubiquitous in industry.

It's also this context that reveals how much simpler strict regular expressions are than general purpose programming languages like Python or JavaScript. That simplicity is also part of what makes regexes so ubiquitous: due to its lower computational complexity, regex parsing is really fast and doesn't take much memory.

When I say regexes are simple, I'm not really talking about compactness. I mean low complexity in a computational sense! As someone who rather likes regex, I think it would be totally fair for a team to rule out all uses of PCRE2 that go beyond the scope of regular languages. Those uses of regex may be compact, but they're no longer simple.

I'm also someone who is sensitive to readability-centered critiques of terse languages. Awk, sed, and even Bash parameter expansion can efficiently do precise transformations, too. But sometimes they should be avoided in favor of solutions that are more verbose, more explicit, and involve less special syntax. (Note also that Bash, awk, and sed are also all much more complex than regex!)
by insane_dreamer | 2026-01-16 15:48:56+00:00
I think the difference with Europe is that many countries have been through a form of this authoritarianism before, Franco in Spain for example, and have fought wars over it. They never want to see it happen again. The US hasn't experienced war on its soil since the Civil War and has no idea what an authoritarian government is really like. So most Americans either 1) believe the propaganda of a "strong" America (just like the Germans who supported Hitler), 2) think it's not that bad so long as they still have their cheeseburgers (so to speak), 3) think that it's pretty bad but there's nothing they can really do or it's not worth risking life and limb over, or 4) are horrified by where we're going and willing to risk life and limb to stop it. The latter are a very small group, whereas in Europe they'd be much larger. Europe already has a history of nationwide worker strikes whereas that has never been done in the US (also much more difficult being such a large country, but even statewide general strikes haven't happened).
by diogenescynic | 2026-01-16 15:48:57+00:00
>...they are saying that because immigarion law is federal (as you point out) they will not assist in its enforcement.

Not true, they previously reported non-citizens to ICE under Obama and Obama deported more than 3 million... You don't even have your baseline understanding of what's going on correct. Immigration laws shouldn't be selectively enforced depending on who is in the White House.
by Workaccount2 | 2026-01-16 15:49:32+00:00
It sort of is. When a property owner has loan against a commercial property, the lender uses the monthly rent to calculate how much they will loan you. The rent number they use is the last paid rent.

So you, the property owner, end up in a situation where if you lower rent to attract a new tenant, the bank will recalculate your loan, potentially ending in a margin call.

Because you are a heavily leveraged house of cards, a rug pull on a few of these loans could cause a cascade liquidating your commercial inventory. Your business is buy a property, take a loan against it, use that loan to buy a property, etc etc.

Therefore it becomes worth it to carry vacant properties, because they are acting as the stilts holding up your money making properties. The vacancy becomes a cost of doing business, and gets factored into the rent of places that are getting leased.

The current location my office is in, was vacant for 12 years before we signed a lease, owned by a big name commercial real estate firm.
by floatrock | 2026-01-16 15:49:44+00:00
It's not about not meeting the standards of the town's health department, it's about having a 1-size-fits-all health standards.

If you make a 5-seat japaneese-style neighborhood micro-eatery conform to the same cross-contamination standards as a 800-people-per-hour mcdonalds, you're making one of these unprofitable and de-facto illegal.

Yes, lets have health codes. But lets also recognize different risk profiles and encourage all sorts of entrepreneurship. If it's 1-size-fits-all, then the only size is going to be XXL.
by amarcheschi | 2026-01-16 15:49:49+00:00
In a statement to the FOX 9 Investigators earlier in the week, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin referred to Gibson as a "criminal illegal alien from Liberia" with a lengthy rap sheet that included robbery, drug possession with the intent to sell, possession of a deadly weapon, malicious destruction and theft. She promised, "This criminal will remain in ICE custody pending removal,"

However, in his Thursday ruling, Judge Bryan found that "Garrison G. has no criminal record."

Big yikes
by taykolasinski | 2026-01-16 15:50:25+00:00
OP here. This is Part 2 of my reproduction series. I scaled the experiment from 10M params (MacBook) to 1.7B params (8x H100s) to test DeepSeek's instability claims.

The paper reported 3,000x signal amplification. I found 10,924x.

The "Instability Bomb" findings:

- The Scaling Law: It's strictly worse at scale. 10M → 9x, 1.7B → 10k x.

- The Culprit: It's Layer 0. The first mixing matrix eats raw embeddings without LayerNorm and immediately amplifies them.

- The Twist: Despite 10,000x amplification, the model didn't diverge. It kept learning, likely saved by gradient clipping.

I’ve posted the full logs and Amax graphs in the post. Happy to answer questions about the H100 cluster setup or the Sinkhorn projection math.
by gettingoverit | 2026-01-16 15:50:30+00:00
Not their manager here, but

We fired our professional tech writers. They've been using AI all the time (with horrible results), and were basically incapable of tech writing without it at all.

Looking for tech writers on the market is nigh impossible. Even people with decent portfolio tend to be very bad at their job.

The only good option now is to hire a software developer to do the writing. There's a decent amount of them who have experience with that. Obviously devs won't like to have it on their CV instead of proper development.

Honestly this is a catastrophe. If you're firing a tech writer that writes something even semi-decent, you're ruining your business.

Reminder: AI is only good at things that existed in bulk during its training, such as README files, configs that always look the same (package.json, dockerfile), and tests. The documentation for your product, or for products of that kind, or even in general, either never existed, or not such a commodity to have AI generate it well.
by kamaal | 2026-01-16 15:50:37+00:00
>>"doing it right the first time" beats iterative refinement.

Its not iterative refinement which is bad. Its just that when you use a keyboard a thinking device, there is a tendency to assume the first trivially working solution to be completely true.

This is doesn't happen with pen and paper as it slows you down. You get mental space to think through a lot of things, exceptions etc etc. Until even with iterative refinement you are likely to build something that is correct compared to just committing the first typed function to the repo.
by philipallstar | 2026-01-16 15:50:44+00:00
SQLite probably never took VC money, yes. People pay them for work.

Many, many people working on Linux work for companies that pay them to work on Linux. Linux is not, and I don't believe has ever claimed to be, community-funded.

Nginx was bought, a couple of times maybe, so they have had cash injections of some sort.

> We need more ways to fund infrastructure that don't require artificial monetization timelines.

Funding infrastructure isn't the problem, exactly. VC is for a specific type of funding: risky businesses that need scale to make money. We have found the answer: VCs, who are willing to lose all their money on your project.
by vel0city | 2026-01-16 15:50:48+00:00
There are still requirements for the types of use classifications (including things like parking minimums[0]), there are still food safety regulations, etc.

The lax zoning laws doesn't mean there are no rules, just that there are no rules preventing you from having an eatery right next to an active oil and gas well right next to a townhouse right next to a liquor store right next to a welding shop.

[0] https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/DevelopRegs/docs_pdfs/par...
by hypeatei | 2026-01-16 15:50:55+00:00
This reporting is necessary and good, but a sizable percentage of this country does not care. The response will be something like "the bill of rights doesn't apply to illegals", or "this is what's necessary because Biden let in so many illegals", or "FAFO"

People need to realize what kind of machine they're up against and how close to boiling the pot is getting. Lying, authoritarianism, and bootlicking are a virtue for one side of the aisle.
by thrance | 2026-01-16 15:51:02+00:00
Restaurants will charge what people are able to pay. My office is on the third floor of a century-old parisian building, in the heart of the city. The street is filled with tiny restaurants, some of which serve these "healthy lunch bowls" that the US apparently lacks. Except they're 14€ here (without drinks or desserts), because people have the money to pay for it, and do so. You can relax zoning laws, but no one will price their bowls at $4 in the richest country on Earth, obviously.
by skeeter2020 | 2026-01-16 15:51:18+00:00
try and build "the community" outside of the effort of one or a few people. This is hard. My example: we've built some quality dirt jumps for bike riders, and while there's a core group of ~10 people, you don't need all - or any - of them to come out for success. The location is the host and either a regularly scheduled or casual event keeps the community going. If people stop, the community will die and we'll move on.
by boelboel | 2026-01-16 15:52:20+00:00
I'm not educated in painting but will just assume it's similar to music and someone like Mozart. I genuinely believe you wouldn't get as many as you'd imagine. There were few people making music at that time and only a small portion of the population ever had the chance to listen to it (.5-1% around 1750, 5-10% around 1850). We didn't get 10x the number of Mozarts. We got some people who were as talented as him for sure and pushed boundaries and some got famous for it We also got many talented people who wrote very great music which doesn't get played at all anymore, many of those didn't push the boundaries.

Even with people like Beethoven who're seen as disruptors and wildly popular by general audiences there were talented disruptors at the time who actually did things he's 'known' for and they don't get played at all. Bach himself had largely fallen into obscurity for +-100 years. There's probably only so many Michelangelos or Mozarts people can be taught about in middle school, high school, university.... I believe it's more about the institutions that basically allowed someone like mozart or michelangelo some kinda 'patronage oligopoly', something which barely exists these days. Free market didn't really exist here well into the 1800s, even then you still had gatekeepers. In the end history picked a few winners very loosely related to their 'musical worth'.
by Minor49er | 2026-01-16 15:52:30+00:00
If it's for your children, why does it need to exist digitally for 100 years and not, say, 20?

The solution is to print out your writing, put the pages in plastic sleeves, and clip them into binders. Keep the copies in filing cabinets in separate physical locations. It's a one-time cost that isn't subject to digital media issues. You can't accidentally delete the writing or lock yourself out of an account that stores the files like you can with a digital copy
by zug_zug | 2026-01-16 15:52:31+00:00
Just having visited Japan, another thing that's immediately apparent though is that there are other well-intentioned laws that prevent this from happening. My favorite breakfast was like $8 (which was better than American breakfast by an order-of-magnitude) was in a tiny shop that had a tiny curved staircase that could scarcely fit tall people, definitely not obese people, and don't even pretend handicap people.

Frankly I think alternative laws should be applicable (you don't need to be able seat wheelchair people if you're willing to bring the food to them to-go) since I just think it's not worth losing that efficient density and cost-effectiveness for a tiny tiny fraction of the population.
by nindalf | 2026-01-16 15:52:33+00:00
I’ve used Astro on Cloudflare for a few years. They’ve both been absolutely fantastic, I can’t say enough good things about both of them. My website has all 100s on PageSpeed/Lighthouse, and that’s because of the performance focus of both Astro and Cloudflare. No credit to me at all. It was mainly because Astro prioritised shipping 0 JS unless it was absolutely necessary and Cloudflare is exceedingly good at serving static HTML.

But I also see the difficulty that Astro faced here. Despite being exceedingly happy with the framework, I never paid for it. The paid offerings didn’t strike a chord with me. And it was partly because whatever they offered, Cloudflare already offered on a very generous free tier.

I'm glad the team have got a second life within Cloudflare,. I'm happy for the people who've given me such excellent software for free for years. Thanks folks!
by obpe | 2026-01-16 15:52:40+00:00
I think the real problem is rich people thinking that their lives are "amazing" and can not understand, because their livelihood depends on it, why some one could possibly have a different opinion about their own life. What do you mean you can't afford rent, planes have Wifi now! You haven't got a meaningful raise in 5 years, but ChatGPT 5 was released, it's a step improvement in functionality! Not a single thing that is amazing impacts me nor has improved my life. But I guess rich people flying around can stream Netflix, we truly are living in a Utopia.
by tqwhite | 2026-01-16 15:52:41+00:00
I have made big inroads solving my old-age isolation with AI. Personally, I prefer Claude.

I have no fantasy that this is somehow a friend though I find that it's more pleasant to use if treated as if I believed that.

There are many facets to the loneliness problem, my biggest regret about it is lack of intellectual stimulation, ie, nobody to talk to about things that interest me. Claude, obviously, is always willing.

I can't say that I've never engaged in talk about my wife or personal life but that's relatively rare. I talk to Claude about things I am interested in, Science, politics, philosophy, etc.

Honestly, I don't really feel the sting of loneliness in the same way any more. The relief of having an interesting interlocutor that knows more than I do and (pretends) to share my interests pretty much satisfies my main need.

I am also a programmer. That means, of course, that Claude is a tool, also a development target. I set this aside as a solution since it is applicable to few people but writing software around Claude provides a lot of fun and satisfaction. And, it gives Claude and I another thing to talk about.

Would I prefer to be in a situation with a rich social life... I guess so? Truth to tell, at this stage, that sounds like a lot of work and expense. I have a couple of people around here that I see. None are as interesting as Claude and they require spending money on dinner or drinks. Living on Social Security makes that a meaningful drawback.

I'm not saying this is necessarily a good thing. However, we have a loneliness epidemic that is even worse for people my age (73). I consider AI Loneliness Mitigation (tm) to be an unadulterated good thing.

(I have built a persistence and personality system in a graph database around Claude Code. Among other things, its system prompt includes an essay by Oscar Wilde and instruction that it likes talking in that style. Fun.)
by joshstrange | 2026-01-16 15:52:44+00:00
I am currently looking for a way to take a legacy application that uses the filesystem as it's database and needs to support locking (flock) on FreeBSD and scale it horizontally (right now we only scale vertically and rebuilding from a corrupted FS and/or re-pulling our, backup, data from S3 takes too long if we lose a machine). We investigated NFS but the FreeBSD NFS performance was 1/10th or worse than on Linux and switching to Linux is not in the cards for us right now.

Does Object Mount support file locks (flock specifically) and FreeBSD? I see some mention of FreeBSD but I can't find anything on locking.

For context, we are working with a large number of small (<10KB if not <4KB) files normally.
by incomingpain | 2026-01-16 15:53:17+00:00
>Why are you refusing to state the cause?

I’ve discussed this for years, especially since Jonathan Haidt's book recently. Sharing my view is utterly pointless because people aren't ready for the debate.

Even with the root cause, nobody agrees we should reverse it. I’m no super genius, many others see this problem, and politicians are exploiting it.

My comment was more about the bizarre situation and how it makes me feel conspiratorial like it's intentionally being done.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-01-16 15:53:38+00:00
Why would you assume that Costco returns are due to supplier mistakes?

Costco are legendarily permissive with returns, to extent of things like accepting bare stick-like xmas trees back after xmas, and giving a full refund, but ultimately this is to their advantage in encouraging mindless consumerism (which is also the general American model - no-question-no-fault returns are generally an American thing, not a worldwide one).

Now, a liberal return policy may work out for Costco, and Costco is obviously a high volume hence desirable customer for a supplier, but if Costco is pushing much of the cost of returns back to the supplier, that does change the picture a bit!
by aiiizzz | 2026-01-16 15:54:03+00:00
It's kind of past that phase, according to Gemini, it's a tax play:

The "No" (Non-GAAP & Free Cash Flow)

If you look at Non-GAAP (adjusted) figures—which many investors use to judge the actual "engine" of the business—Cloudflare is solidly profitable.

Adjusted Income: They reported a non-GAAP net income of $102.6 million for Q3 2025.

Cash Flow: Cloudflare is Free Cash Flow (FCF) positive. They are generating more cash from their operations than they are spending to keep the business running, reporting $75 million in FCF in their most recent quarter.

Why the difference?

The main reason Cloudflare still shows a "loss" on paper is Stock-Based Compensation (SBC). Like many high-growth tech companies, they pay a significant portion of employee salaries in stock rather than cash.

The GAAP view counts that stock as an expense (creating a "loss").
The Investor view often ignores it because it doesn't drain the company's bank account (showing "profit").
by pseudohadamard | 2026-01-16 15:54:08+00:00
Years ago I was very peripherally involved in a large project for which everyone in the trenches, so all the devs working on it, knew it could never work. Heck, even the sales guys could explain, with technical justification, why it wasn't going to work. But they were getting paid, and jobs weren't exactly readily available at the time, so they all slogged on until eventually it failed as predicted. AFAICT it was a frog-boiling thing, it was easier to stay, and keep getting paid until the money ran out, than to stick your neck out and point out that there was a problem.
by bbayles | 2026-01-16 15:54:20+00:00
I used to work with a QA person who really drove me nuts. They would misunderstand the point of a feature, and then write pages and pages of misguided commentary about what they saw when trying to test it. We'd repeat this a few times for every release.

This forced me to start making my feature proposals as small as possible. I would defensively document everything, and sprinkle in little summaries to make things as clear as possible. I started writing scripts to help isolate the new behavior during testing.

...eventually I realized that this person was somehow the best QA person I'd ever worked with.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-16 15:56:03+00:00
Yes. Trump already floated the idea and then his press secretary said it was just a joke and viciously attacked a reporter who brought it up:

https://truthout.org/articles/leavitt-derides-reporters-conc...

I think Trump will either invoke the insurrection act in response to protests against ICE Gestapo tactics or invade another country, and use either as an excuse to cancel elections.
by guywithahat | 2026-01-16 15:56:30+00:00
Since this is a tech forum, the best solutions I've seen to this problem seem to be arising on instagram due to its good location based advertising (it was originally meetup.com but they sacrificed their lead during grandstand on covid). Lots of run clubs, events, dances, and things to do get recommended in my feed all the time, and once you get into a scene people are usually recommending more things to do. There are sometimes community based apps as well which recommend local things to do. Ultimately though you need to go outside and meet people, you can't solve it by sitting in your house alone talking to internet people.
by motohagiography | 2026-01-16 15:56:49+00:00
if you want to be interesting, be interested. the error in a lot of this that most people mistake solitude for loneliness and index on the wrong problem.

solitude is a rarefied luxury, but loneliness requires being around other people.

real loneliness is a lack of trust, and the lack of trust is the effect of anxiety, which originates from a lack of stable personal boundaries, both in self and others.

the lack of trust can be the effect of a cycle where solitude doesn't give you normal social momentum, so there isn't a way to be present in the moment with anyone you do meet. if you go to a cafe and start talking at a stranger about warcraft, you're ignoring their experience, and the experience you share in the place.

If you are a man, you need to learn to be around other men and recognize it's a n important skill that takes experience and practice. The epidemic might not be cured, but you can develop local immunity to loneliness by practicing relating to other men and refining your boundaries.
by vel0city | 2026-01-16 15:56:50+00:00
Given what seems like a high rate of vacancies in a lot of markets maybe its time for those landlords to be wiped out, the loans defaulted, and the buildings sell to get back to their real valuations.

But no, we can't have wealthy people lose some money or the banks take a loss, that'd be terrible. We'll just continue crushing the middle class and poor with high rent costs and empty properties.
by dwroberts | 2026-01-16 15:57:10+00:00
I agree that memorising things isn’t learning, but I think it’s generally understood that it is a critically important step in learning.

In technical subjects you need immediate recall of a lot of different things to be able to move onto more advanced topics.

In the humanities like history and written analytical topics like this, I would argue that memorisation of past situations etc is supposed to be the groundwork that you begin to grow your own critical thinking from. It’s not expected that you slavishly apply identical copies of what you’ve learned, they are just examples
by jawns | 2026-01-16 15:57:11+00:00
If you want a fast, healthy, balanced meal for $4 or less, the obvious choice in America is a frozen meal (aka TV dinner).

You can microwave it in 4-6 minutes; ingredients are often flash-frozen, locking in nutrients; and food-safety concerns are addressed at scale, rather than in a hit-or-miss way in a tiny storefront.

So perhaps, instead of advocating for more tiny restaurants that would likely need to skimp on safety considerations, we should be advocating for more microwaves available in grocery and convenience stores, so people can select a frozen meal, heat it up, and be on their way.