MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LeanOnSheena | 2026-01-07 03:48:37+00:00
I am a CPA by training originally, but have spent most of my time in operational finance roles for PE-backed technology companies. While my work is all finance and accounting related, I mostly work with SQL and Python day to day creating internal applications for things like ARR etc.

I agree completely on your "thorough grounding" comment. I spend a lot of time explaining to finance people how tools like python, SQL, AWS stuff can be leveraged in simple ways for analytical purposes, and I spend a lot of time explaining to technology people what all the finance and accounting stuff is really about. In both cases my experience is it always comes back to explaining fundamental ideas or concepts over and over, but applying them to different situations and contexts (I do so much more confidently when explaining accounting and finance stuff since I have deeper education & experience there).

A lot of times these fundamental ideas and concepts can be explained very simply and intuitively using toy examples. the problem is it can take years and years to build up enough experience to really separate the signal from the noise and see clearly what is truly fundamental (yes that's where formal education is helpful but it can be hard to really grok absent experience imo... In the same way learning a programming language can be easier if you just try to build something).

A deep understanding of fundamental concepts is what allows you to pick apart very complex and novel problems into it's component parts. A deep understanding of fundamental concepts is one of the things that separates professionals from non-professionals in my opinion.
by LAC-Tech | 2026-01-07 03:48:57+00:00
Why are flags part of unicode? I thought the point of unicode was to add something for every glyph ever written in every text so they can be stored digitally as plain text. Flags are... not text. And who decides what sorts of flags and valid which aren't? I mean... we know who.. .but humour me.

(didn't read the article because the website is deliberately unreadable. zero guilt)
by justsomehnguy | 2026-01-07 03:49:04+00:00
> of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces

Good, you made a first step, now do the other two.

> but should have been otherwise compensated for that loss

It's quite amusing what you are clearly imply what some state shouldn't be compensated at all.

> Are you incapable of telling what was meant by context, or where you just looking for a reason not to address the point made?

Yes, I'm incapable of telling why you threw something completely unrelated to the question. I'm not LLM.

> Ukraine literally designed and built large portions of these systems as was capable of keeping them.

Ah, yes, the mighty Ukraine who solely done that, right? Every other nation, state and people in the USSR didn't do shit to that. I have a feeling you are thinking about that issue as some sort of video game: just a couple of factories and a bunch of special units. But the things are not like that in RL.
by simplicio | 2026-01-07 03:49:36+00:00
"They don't. Follow the money: why do ads power free services? The advertiser needs to expect to make more money in the scenario where they run the ad as compared to where they don't. The viewer must be spending more money in response to having seen it"

The first part is true, the second part pretty obviously isn't. Advertizers expect to net $ from ad buys, but most advertising isn't trying to increase a consumers total spending, its trying to drive that spending towards the companies products.

To give the most obvious example, the largest category of advertising is for food and beverage products. But no one thinks that if those ads all suddenly disappeared, people would stop buying food.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-07 03:50:13+00:00
> I'm available to discuss this further, if that would be helpful.

That would not be helpful, because the whole business of "consent management" is to provide plausible deniability and the illusion of compliance to businesses without actually making them comply (since complying with the GDPR would incur significant cost and obsolete most of the marketing/analytics team's jobs).

I'm very sure they perfectly know what they're doing and have the budget for the best legal advice money can buy, it's just that their business is all about selling the illusion of compliance instead of actual compliance.

> in their actual products

The products are configurable by the customer. Now you could indeed argue that the product should not offer an option to configure it in a way that would be in breach of the regulation it's supposed to help you comply with... but again see above.
by mickdeek86 | 2026-01-07 03:50:45+00:00
He may have been pulling your leg. We bottle feed the calves formula, because to allow the calves to drink the milk would defeat the purpose of raising dairy cows. Also teat cleanliness and health is huge; suckling causes problems.
Incidentally, wild cows actually are a thing in a bunch of far-flung places. I saw them in the Aleutian islands (some genius brought them up there thinking he could get a beef business going and just left them when it of course failed) and they're mean as hell. There's a bunch of feral cattle on the Big Island of Hawaii as well, and TIL there are ~5 million stray cows in India where it illegal to kill them for religious reasons, which creates a massive problem for transport infrastructure, and gave rise to possibly my all-time favorite wikipedia article title:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_vigilante_violence_in_Indi...
by dandano | 2026-01-07 03:50:45+00:00
I'm almost like you, I just download what I want to watch. But instead of going through network files - I have Plex Media Server on my M1 Macbook Air. Plex looks at the downloads folder, indexes it into a nice viewing experience that I use Plex app on the TV to connect to my local Plex server. It's a very seamless experience.
by doodlesdev | 2026-01-07 03:51:09+00:00
A poll done by GNOME devs will largely be answered by people who are power users. Knowing your target audience is harder than just polling your users or taking telemetry (in this case, because telemetry normally excludes power users, since they will disable it).

I think it's just clear that the proposal of the GNOME desktop is to be pretty democratic, both in types of devices it can run on and the variety of users. The project gets a lot of shit for many decisions it takes (some of which I also disagree with), but I think changing this default is absolutely justified.
by philipwhiuk | 2026-01-07 03:52:08+00:00
> I think paxos and xaut have audits etc. from what I know/ I have heard.

Ah, yes, the almighty auditors.

Auditing proves you passed the audit. Nothing more, nothing less. The audit can be at any level that suits the person paying for the audit. In this case it's the company who has the vested interest in passing the audit.
What problems do you have at your job / startup / side project?
by DinakarS | 2026-01-07 03:53:00+00:00
It is Tuesday and I am looking for real problems to solve.

I am looking for general insights like:
- task planning - focus management - email workflows — customer relationships management — streamlining the processes to get paid / reduce friction etc

Feel free to share specific details that come to mind. Thanks in advance.
by bee_rider | 2026-01-07 03:53:19+00:00
I guess based on all the phrases like “used to” and “seen as,” you’d agree that these perceptions were never really all that realistic, right? He had better PR in the past for sure, but it was always just a PR thing. That makes his behavior a bad example of something engineers do.

We’ve got plenty of smug actual engineers, we don’t need to take blame for some cosplayer’s bad behavior.
by Ericson2314 | 2026-01-07 03:53:33+00:00
I know what you are talking about, but there is more to life than just product-market fit.

Hardly any of us are working on Postgres, Photoshop, blender, etc. but it's not just cope to wish we were.

It's good to think about the needs to business and the needs of society separately. Yes, the thing needs users, or no one is benefiting. But it also needs to do good for those users, and ultimately, at the highest caliber, craftsmanship starts to matter again.

There are legitimate reasons for the startup ecosystem to focus firstly and primarily on getting the users/customers. I'm not arguing against that. What I am arguing is why does the industry need to be dominated by startups in terms of the bulk of the products (not bulk of the users). It begs the question of how much societally-meaningful programming waiting to be done.

I'm hoping for a world where more end users code (vibe or otherwise) and the solve their own problems with their own software. I think that will make more a smaller, more elite software industry that is more focused on infrastructure than last-mile value capture. The question is how to fund the infrastructure. I don't know except for the most elite projects, which is not good enough for the industry (even this hypothetical smaller one) on the whole.
by eru | 2026-01-07 03:53:44+00:00
That's in the US. Canada for example never had any legal reserve requirements.

However legal limits aren't the only ones that apply. Canadian banks still keep more than zero reserves around.

The more useful limitation in economic terms and in legal terms is on the amount of capital banks need to hold. A capital cushion is what makes your deposits stable, not reserves.

If you have a big enough capital cushion, you can always go and liquidate some assets to get the reserves needed to satisfy withdrawal requests. Having some reserves on hand is just very convenient, so the customer doesn't have to wait.
by nine_k | 2026-01-07 03:54:05+00:00
This sounds like magical thinking.

For one, there are objectively detrimental ways to organize code: tight coupling, lots of mutable shared state, etc. No matter who or what reads or writes the code, such code is more error-prone, and more brittle to handle.

Then, abstractions are tools to lower the cognitive load. Good abstractions reduce the total amount of code written, allow to reason about the code in terms of these abstractions, and do not leak in the area of their applicability. Say Sequence, or Future, or, well, function are examples of good abstractions. No matter what kind of cognitive process handles the code, it benefits from having to keep a smaller amount of context per task.

"Code structure does not matter, LLMs will handle it" sounds a bit like "Computer architectures don't matter, the Turing Machine is proved to be able to handle anything computable at all". No, these things matter if you care about resource consumption (aka cost) at the very least.
by geerlingguy | 2026-01-07 03:54:06+00:00
Decided to run an actual llama-bench run and let it go for the hour or two it needs. I'm posting my full results here (https://github.com/geerlingguy/ai-benchmarks/issues/47), but 8-10 t/s pp, and 7.99 t/s tg128, this is on a Pi 5 with no overclocking. Could probably increase the numbers slightly with an overclock.

You need to have a fan/heatsink to get that speed of course, it's maxing out the CPU for the entire time.
by Analemma_ | 2026-01-07 03:55:08+00:00
The point of Unicode is to try and be the One True Encoding and remove the need for all other language encoding standards, so there's never any more "mojibake" or cross-border compatibility issues. In order to do this, every feature that has existed in other encoding standards has to be supported in Unicode, or else people will stick to that other encoding in some circumstances.

With emoji specifically, they were popular in Japan dating all the way back to the 90s, via carrier-specific encoding standards. The lack of emoji support in messaging was a reason that the iPhone and Android were slower than expected to take off in Japan, and so Apple and Google asked the Unicode Consortium to add emoji support, so they could have this feature on their phones while sticking to a universal encoding standard. IIRC, the Unicode Consortium was actually hesitant to do this and didn't want to be involved with standardizing pictograms into Unicode, but eventually relented.
by qsera | 2026-01-07 03:55:15+00:00
>They don't create wealth out of nothing.

They may don't create wealth. But they promise its creation to the society. The value of the money that they lend out comes from that promise.

And the people who borrowed from the bank create wealth. The responsibility of the bank is to track it and ensure that it is created.

If the banks does not do it, then all the people who worked for the money loaned by the bank, got their work stolen.

In other words, when you take a loan from a bank, you are actually borrowing from the society.
by diamond559 | 2026-01-07 03:55:37+00:00
Why does Hyundai need "general purpose" bots, do they want to create a robot civilization? They don't need a robot to "do everything", they need robots to efficiently make cars. What do you even mean "do everything? Does it need to take the bus home and make love to its robot wife, walk its robot dog around the block? It doesn't need legs, you have drunk the koolaid, snap out of it. AGI isn't around the corner and your fantasy robot world isn't real.
by xp84 | 2026-01-07 03:55:50+00:00
> “ I function best when I have a snack every two hours or so. At the office, I was too self-conscious to eat, so I spent hours trying to distract myself from my hunger”

Did anyone else throw an exception here? Why would someone be too self-conscious to eat? Is she afraid men are judging her for eating food? Other women? Zero times in my career have I paid attention to what any colleague was eating unless it was to ask them where they got something that looked especially tasty. Zero times have other men, or women, said to me “Check it out — Kathy’s eating another Clif bar.” Nobody cares if you’re snacking, just like nobody’s counting your bathroom trips. We’re all humans. We all do those things.

Maybe this is just what generalized anxiety disorder looks like and she (deep down) knows nobody else actually cares about these things, but I wish people wouldn’t torture themselves like this.
by LAC-Tech | 2026-01-07 03:57:21+00:00
NVMe passthrough skips abstractions. To access NVMe de-
vices directly, io_uring provides the OP_URING_CMD opcode, which
issues native NVMe commands via the kernel to device queues. By
bypassing the generic storage stack, passthrough reduces software-
layer overhead and per-I/O CPU cost. This yields an additional 20%
gain, increasing throughput to 300 k tx/s (Figure 5, +Passthru).

Which userspace libraries support this?. Liburing does, but Zig's Standard Library (relevant because a tigerbeetler wrote the article) does not, just silently gives out corrupt values from the completion queue.

On the rust side, rustix_uring does not support this, but widely doesn't let you set kernel flags for something it doesn't support. tokio-rs/io-uring looks like it might from the docs, but I can't figure out how (if anyone uses it there, let me know).
by big_youth | 2026-01-07 03:57:49+00:00
That markets been slaughtered for a while. Pretty much every big tech company has built up strong internal security teams and automated as much as possible. Look up what happened to NCC Group post Matasano acquisitions, I joined within a year of the isec/matasano/intrepedus acquisitions and saw a slow ride down. After 5 years the rate was still $2500 a day and everyone with real talent left to internal teams for much much higher pay. NCC Group is now a scan shop operating out of the phillipines, I still have one friend that works there from the isec days! The exception being some leet places like Trail-Of-Bits.
by credit_guy | 2026-01-07 03:58:40+00:00
You are right. I checked the source, it is the graph on slide 14 of the Lazard presentation [1]. The graph is the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) in dollars per MWh.

[1] https://www.lazard.com/media/5tlbhyla/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
by mnau | 2026-01-07 03:59:00+00:00
> Saying this as a German, where the economy is the worst it’s been in decades and our federal government acts incapable at changing this so far.

That's not true. Germany has a 200-points plan on reducing the bureaucracy. At first it sounds like a joke, but actual points would be transformative if all points were done... I don't see it happening.

As an example, automatic approvals if a response is done within a deadline would be huge. I don't see that happening.

Or possibly happening, then there will be a scandal, and it will be rolled back.

Another funny trick is a "We are looking at it" response, or "The EIA doesn't use standardized language in ground water section, rework it" (EIA was made by company that specializes in that).
by eru | 2026-01-07 03:59:00+00:00
Not at all. Goldman Sachs had and has plenty of regular folks as counterparties for their credit cards (branded as Apple Cards, I think). These regular folks don't get bailed out.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archegos_Capital_Management which had Goldman Sachs as a counterparty and was not bailed out.
by tgtweak | 2026-01-07 03:59:16+00:00
change the ssd and retry - those windows updates do a lot of disk writes and a small miss there can screw up an entire install since it shuffles things around in preboot environment (moving them on disk) and that can corrupt things and prevent a new install in the same way.

You can also try to live boot into Ubuntu 25.04 arm64 since that iso has experimental snapdragon elite support and has some built-in drivers for storage and network - you can extract firmware from the windows drivers with qcom-firmware-extract - they recommend doing this from a windows partition which you should have (albeit possibly corrupted).

If that still fails - you have a ram issue as others have pointed out. I've had the exact same symptoms (hardware instability after windows update) and it was nvme ssd (an early samsung one) and ram, in both instances.

Not saying the windows update didn't also come with some junk firmware that got loaded into some of your devices, but that would be a distant diagnosis from ssd/ram (and many others would have seen the exact same thing during their update if it was that).
Show HN: Proof that any fixed-axis type system fails for some domain (Lean4)
by trissim | 2026-01-07 03:59:48+00:00
I formalized a proof that the structural vs. nominal typing debate can't be won: any fixed-axis type system necessarily fails for some domain.
The core result: for a type system with fixed axes (like structure, inheritance, hierarchy), there exists a domain whose requirements cannot be fully captured. This isn't a limitation of specific languages, it's a mathematical impossibility result.

What's in the zip

Full Lean 4 formalization (compiles with lake build) Instantiations for Python, TypeScript, Java, and Rust The axioms for type system structure are extracted from actual language specifications, not invented

Main theorem: For any fixed-axis type framework, there exists a domain D such that no complete typing is achievable.

Let me know there are any holes or if this ends the structural vs nominal typing debate.
by tptacek | 2026-01-07 04:00:42+00:00
Late-period NCC doesn't look great. But I've been a buyer of these services for the past 5 years (a seller, of course, for the 15 years leading up to that) and rates have not gone down; I was shocked at how much we ended up spending compared to what we would have billed out on comparable projects at Matasano.
by OptionOfT | 2026-01-07 04:01:09+00:00
Minor correction:

Object value = null
try {
value = a.b.c.d
} catch(NullPointerException x) {}

and

const value = a?.b?.c?.d;

are not the same. The ?. operator returns `undefined`, even if the operand is `null`.

Also, Optional<T> in Java is kinda weird. It's a mechanism to enforce null checks.

I much prefer pattern matching like in F# and Rust, where you get an Option<T>:

https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/the-option-type/

The ergonomics of matching and only having the variable when it's actually Some(_) makes it very natural, so much so that switching languages feels painful, as I'm constantly doubting myself. I don't need to read documentation about whether the output CAN be null/None. If it can be, it is encoded in the type system.

This is unlike Java. Many types can still just return null.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-07 04:02:01+00:00
> the subscription becomes completely unmaintainable outside of the Apple ecosystem.

Are they complaining about Apple Pay or in-app purchases?

Apple Pay works like a normal card payment and any good payment processor should offer easy-to-use scripts to support this. It works on the web (on Apple devices) and will work seamlessly in a web view. There is no extra fee and you still retain full control of the customer relationship.

In-app-purchases is the one where the payment goes through Apple. It seems like they're not asking for that currently for your browser extension, but keep in mind they will likely do insist on it for the actual iOS app, so plan ahead.
by bflesch | 2026-01-07 04:02:45+00:00
Viel besser! I'm happy to hear you have recovered, thanks for sharing. You're correct, the mycotoxin contamination of food products is such an important but overlooked fact. Once your body starts reacting to them your life is turned upside down.

The kicker for me was IKEA furniture. I was literally allergic to IKEA furniture, and only against specific parts of that IKEA furniture. It was only happening with the newer models of IKEA furniture bought in the past ~5 years. I had to throw away so much IKEA furniture.

In their recent sustainability reports IKEA has proudly mentioned how they are saving both costs and the planet by increasingly using recycled materials. They are quite light on the details but you can put together the stories across several of their publications and promotional videos.

Basically IKEA uses fungal waste products from industrial processes such as aspergillus from citric acid production. These fungal waste products are used as packaging material but also as a novel fungal adhesive for their "recycled wood" materials. This novel IKEA material sigificantly reduces plastic use and is cheaper - the holy cow of sustainability. It is basically old wooden furniture shredded into wood chips and then the wood chips are throw onto a big pile where they outside in the rain (even in the official IKEA video). Then they glue the wood chips back together with the novel fungal-based adhesive. Then they put a big layer of plastic around it and use it in parts of their furniture which are a bit more hidden, like the side panels of the pull-out drawers. One can recognize it by the rugged surface.

So these things are basically mold time bombs. It is wet wood chips, wrapped in plastic, and laced with fungal adhesive. The problem was so bad for IKEA that they changed the color of all components made from this from WHITE to GREY because people kept posting pictures of the slight grey mold on top of the white paint to social media.

If you go on the IKEA website and look at furniture, they list the exact material name for every single part of the furniture - except for the recycled wood parts.

I am 99% convinced that a big part of what is reported as "long covid" is actually IKEA's mold-laced recycled wood time bombs shipped to people's apartments. If your immune system is wrecked by covid infection and lockdown-triggered vitamin D deficiency the mold really hits hard. I do not believe that IKEA sufficiently removed residual humidity from all shipments of this material, there are too many pictures on social media that show it.

The timing really coincides with IKEA's introduction of their sustainable wood material. Too many people reported the "gray dust" that was appearing on these white pieces so IKEA simply painted them gray.

If you are located in the US and have access to a lawyer and a microbiology lab, buy some IKEA drawers and do some experiments with the material of the pull-out drawers (left and right side panels). If you can document it for a court case, it might be a big class action lawsuit.