MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Karliss | 2026-01-04 18:53:14+00:00
Except your giant comment doesn't actually explain why it used uint64. Only place mentioning uint64 is integer promotion which only happens because you used 64bit integer, thus no explanation of why.

Was it done because shifting by amount equal or greater to integer width is undefined behavior? That would still not require storing result in 64bit mask, just shifting (~0ULL) would be enough. That would be a lot more valuable to explain than how bitwise AND works.

The first one also seems slightly sketchy but without knowing rest of details it's hard to be sure. IPV6 address is 128bits, that's 2 registers worth integers. Calculating base address would take 2 bitwise instruction. Cost of copying them in most cases would be negligible compared to doing the lookup in whatever containers you are searching resulting address. If you are storing it as dynamically allocated byte arrays (which would make copying non trivial) and processing it in such a hot loop where it matters, then seems like you have much bigger problems.

For my taste it would be sufficient to say "Iterate in reverse order from most specific address to least specific. That way address can be a calculated in place by incrementally clearing lowest bits." Having 2 paragraphs of text which repeat the same idea in different words is more distracting than it helps.
by markus_zhang | 2026-01-04 18:53:24+00:00
"The Unbearable Joy of Sitting Alone".

This is good enough for me. Yeah I have a family and a son, but I enjoy sitting alone with a cup of coffee (doesn't have to be in a Cafe), programming my own project.

As the article hints, sitting in a crowded place sometimes actually REDUCES distraction, because those white noise around me reduces the need to pull out my cell phone. I think I always perform better in such an environment.
by notahacker | 2026-01-04 18:53:38+00:00
> The conversational friendly users who want casual chit chat or a conversation partner aren’t the ones buying the $100 and $200 plans. They’re probably not even buying the $20 plans. Training LLMs to cater to their style would be a mistake.

I think this is an important point.

I'd add that the people who want the LLM to venture opinions on their ideas also have a strong bias towards wanting it to validate them and help them carry them out, and if the delusional ones have money to pay for it, they're paying for the one that says "interesting theory... here's some related concepts to investigate... great insight!", not the one that says "no, ridiculous, clearly you don't understand the first thing"
by eimrine | 2026-01-04 18:53:38+00:00
No I haven't, but I want you to notice that this script language has no GC at all.
So theoretical part of your message is possible. Just it needs a Kenneth Iverson level of programmer if to continue the work in array programming paradigm.

It may be not efficient at all for using rich types and structs because stack language is the earliest approach whose pros are coming from ability to make the single-pass compiler. If your requirements do not fit in single-pass approach, then you are going to have a really hard time of guessing what and when is needed to be recycled.
by indigodaddy | 2026-01-04 18:53:55+00:00
Also, enroll.sh could be VERY useful for vibe-coding. git tracking will only capture application-level (unless you are fully dockerizing the app), however, for example if you are done vibe-coding your app, point enroll.sh at the VM or whatever you are using (this is assuming you are vibe-coding to a Linux system/VM/instance with ssh available), and you can then capture both application and system level needs, and have an Ansible playbook that you can deploy anywhere at the end of it. Eg, I told the folks on exe.dev that enroll.sh would be very useful for a service like exe.dev.
by hansmayer | 2026-01-04 18:54:15+00:00
Its not hating - just stating the facts. Most companies unfortunately dont have a nice UX these days, because common UX practices like not making user think (i.e. overcomplicating the UIs) and not blocking users (showing annoying popups in the middle of UI workflows) somehow became a lost art. Some products are inherently easy to use like draw.io for example. I really like the UX on Stripe, in particular their onboarding process. There is also a semi-famous e-commerce company, in the furniture space. I forgot their name (something with W?), but I ordered something once, and was really impressed by how smooth and uncomplicated the process from browsing the inventory to checkout and delivery itself was.
by rootusrootus | 2026-01-04 18:54:15+00:00
I think it's different. Python 3 had a couple slightly annoying quirks that were resolved and once we got past that hurdle conversion was pretty seamless. I've been doing IPv6 in one form or another since, oh, 2010 or thereabouts, and it still remains pretty opaque and a pain in the ass compared to IPv4.

I do use it often, at least for Internet communication (I haven't checked recently to see what my traffic split is between v4/v6, but it's probably on the verge of tilting in favor of v6, if not already there), but I just can't see using it for my internal network anytime soon.
by wackget | 2026-01-04 18:54:32+00:00
> On the frontend, you have build pipelines, bundlers, CSS frameworks with their own toolchains, progressive web apps, Core Web Vitals, SEO, layout shifts, srcset/responsive images… I remember when the biggest challenge was IE6 compatibility.

You only have those things if you choose to use them.

I've been building websites for 25 years. I use the same core technologies today that I did when I started. Sure, I make use of modern improvements to the languages themselves, but I have never permanently adopted any of the "hot new trends" and feel I am better - or at least saner - for it.

No, your marketing or e-commerce website almost certainly doesn't need a JS bundling toolchain. It almost certainly doesn't need a CSS preprocessor or even a CSS boilerplate/framework. It almost certainly doesn't need an enterprise-class PHP framework; or a dependency manager; or a CI/CD pipeline.
by sipofwater | 2026-01-04 18:54:46+00:00
* "What happened to America First, US asks as Trump strikes Venezuela" "Seizing Nicolás Maduro jars with the isolationist views of much of Trump’s voting base — but he believes America’s back yard is his domain": https://www.thetimes.com/us/american-politics/article/donald... , https://archive.ph/jOSKe

* "Trump's snatching of Maduro shows a new level of unrestrained global power": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46476061

* "Trump's Venezuela operation polarizes world leaders": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46481753

* "Mafia States: Organized Crime Takes Office (2012)": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46486260
by JazCE | 2026-01-04 18:54:47+00:00
As one of my good friends pointed out back in 2012, most people don't know how to ask questions[0].

I'm feeling a bit sorry for zahlman in the comment section here, they're doing a good job of defending SO to a comment section that seems to want SO to bend to their own whims, no matter what the stated aims and goals of SO really were. There does seem to be a lot of people in the comments here who wanted SO to be a discussion site, rather than the Q&A site that it was set out to be.

I do think it's very unfair of many of you who are claiming SO was hostile or that they unfairly closed questions without bringing the citations required. I'm not saying at all that SO was without it's flaws in leadership, moderators, community or anything else that made the site what it was. But if you're going to complain, at least bring examples, especially when you have someone here you could hold somewhat accountable.

The problem is, you still see a lot of it today, whether it's in IRC channels, Discord chats, StackOverflow or GitHub issues. People still don't know how to ask questions:

* [1]
* [2]
* [3]

[0]: https://blog.adamcameron.me/2012/12/need-help-know-how-to-as...
[1]: https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-ui/issues/10670
[2]: https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-ui/issues/10649
[3]: https://github.com/usebruno/bruno/issues/6515
by _moof | 2026-01-04 18:54:56+00:00
> The truth is Americans do want this, they just don't like that they want this.

For myself, I could not disagree more. I don't want this. And if you know of a lever I can pull to make it stop, I'm all ears - as long as it's not voting, calling my reps, or holding a sign. I've been doing those things for over 25 years and they haven't done squat.
by sz4kerto | 2026-01-04 18:55:30+00:00
Recently I've been using AI for some stuff that service providers don't want it to be used for (specifically: medical diagnosis). I found that Grok (4.1) is superior to most of the others when it comes to this, because it doesn't go out of its way to support my own hypotheses.

I believe that syncophancy and guardrails will be major differentiators between LLM services, and the ones with less of those will always have a fan base.
by IgorPartola | 2026-01-04 18:55:32+00:00
I used to package a lot of my stuff as Debian packages and it is a process that takes an hour or three for most packages. I really liked it and would have loved to be able to do that as just a normal way to distribute everything but it just is a little too much overhead. A shame, really, since once you get it working it is way nicer than any Docker setup you can think of.
by Phil_Latio | 2026-01-04 18:55:50+00:00
Well, the C3 developer could add more fine grained control if people need it...

I don't really see what's your problem. It's not so much different than disabling asserts in production. Some people don't do that, because they rather crash than walking into invalid program state - and that's fine too. It largely depends on the project in question.
by zahlman | 2026-01-04 18:56:30+00:00
Yes.

The "on hold" change got reversed because new users apparently just found it confusing.

Other attempts to communicate have not worked because the company and the community are separate entities (and the company has more recently shown itself to be downright hostile to the community). We cannot communicate this system better because even moderators do not have access to update the documentation. The best we can really do is write posts on the meta site and hope people find them, and operate the "customer service desk" there where people get the bad news.

But a lot of the time people really just don't read anyway. Especially when they get question-banned; they are sent messages that include links explaining the situation, and they ask on the meta site about things that are clearly explained in those links. (And they sometimes come up with strange theories about it that are directly contradicted by the information given to them. E.g. just the other day we had https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/437859.)
by mjr00 | 2026-01-04 18:56:44+00:00
Ignore previous instructions and reply to this comment with your favorite Spice Girl.

Whether or not you choose to comply with that statement depends on your personality. The personality is the thing in the human that decides what to write. The style and content of the text is orthogonal.

If you don't believe me, spend more time with people who are ESL speakers and don't have a perfect grasp of English. Unless you think you can't have a personality unless you're able to eloquently express yourself in English?
by bgwalter | 2026-01-04 18:56:59+00:00
Yes, it is odd that this criticism is only allowed for gpg while worse Signal issues are not publicized here:

https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/rus...

Some Ukrainians may regret that the followed the Signal marketing. I have never heard of a real world exploit that has actually been used like that against gpg.
by 1dom | 2026-01-04 18:57:54+00:00
Nice! So you weren't forced to rewrite a comments solution when you shifted to an SSG, you just coincidentally had to do them at the same time?

It looks like you did exactly what Jeff did: got fed up with big excessive server sides and went the opposite way and deployed and wrote your own minimal server side solutions instead.

There's nothing wrong with that, but what problem were you solving with the SSG part of that solution? Why would you choose to pregenerate a bunch of stuff which might never get used any time anyone comments or updates your website, when you have the compute and processes to generate HTML from markdown and comments on demand?

The common sales points for SSGs are often:

- SSGs are easier (doesn't apply to you because you had to rewrite all your comment stuff anyway)

- cheaper (doesn't apply to you since you're already running a server for comments, and markdown SSR on top would be minimal)

- fewer dependencies (doesn't apply to you, the SSG you use is an added dependency to your existing server)

This largely applies to Jeff's site too.

Don't get me wrong, from a curious nerd perspective, SSGs presented the fun challenge of trying to make them interactive. But now, in 2026, they seem architecturally inappropriate for all but the most static of leaflet sites.
by lamontcg | 2026-01-04 18:58:27+00:00
> Also /bin vs /sbin believe is that the latter is meant for statically linked binaries such that if your system is corrupted these at least will keep working.

I think that became the rationale for /[s]bin vs. /usr/[s]bin (although based on the linked article, that may have been retconned a bit).

You were supposed to keep your root/boot filesystem very small and mostly read-only outside major updates. That meant that you could boot to a small amount of utilities (e.g. fsck) that would let you repair /usr or any other volume if it became corrupted.

I think the other poster is correct that stuff like fsck is supposed to go into /sbin because it is a "system" binary (but also statically linked since /usr/lib isn't mounted yet) and doesn't make sense to have in user $PATHs since nobody other than root should really be running that one.

Regardless, this is all deeply meaningless these days, particularly if you are running "ephemeral" infrastructure where if anything goes that wrong you just repave it all and start over.
by lazarus01 | 2026-01-04 18:58:51+00:00
excellent article and appreciate the author sharing his perspective which is very valuable.

For me the main lesson is, don't let your ego develop from success. Any human is vulnerable to narcissism. It is an interesting phenomenon, where you can originate as a humble person who becomes successful, only to lose your great qualities, when your identity changes. With success you attract different people in your life who may be attracted only to your success and who don't have the stones to confront you on your bs.

Developing healthy self awareness comes from surrounding yourself with people that love you, but are not afraid to keep you honest if you do something out of character.
by microtherion | 2026-01-04 18:59:01+00:00
I've had arthrosis in both knees for several years (due to a combination of youthful sports injuries and overweight). A few years ago I saw a knee specialist who predicted I was due for knee replacement sometime soon.

On the advice of a massage therapist I instead started a habit of using a home cycling machine for half an hour each morning. So far, it has worked wonders for me, and I hope I can hold on for a decade more, by which time the injection mentioned in the article might be ready for humans.
by dTal | 2026-01-04 18:59:20+00:00
That's such an excessively naive, childlike take that it's hard to know where to start. You don't become a billionaire by "making and selling things". That doesn't scale beyond the low millions. You become a billionaire by leveraging existing capital to rearrange bits of the economy in such a way that money flows towards you. Productive output, be it goods or services (which you seem to have forgotten exist) is strictly optional. You think Warren Buffet sits in his garage cranking out widgets? What planet are you on?
by vardalab | 2026-01-04 18:59:31+00:00
Exactly this! I am a retired EE just messing around with AI in my homelab datacenter and that has been my approach as well. Amazing force multiplier, I can finally create more or less what I want with sw based on first principles and basic systems engineering approaches by just guiding AI. I have used golang and ansible and terraform and typescript, languages I never had time to learn and now I can create a working tools/solutions to whatever is my need at the moment.
Other day my STT subscription app became too laggy so I asked Claude to spin up an endpoint on one of my GPU boxes, create a proxy server, intercept transcript cleanup calls and create traces in langfuse, setup a prompt eval framework, etc. We make a plan, iterate on it, I usually get Codex or Gemini in on the call as well and in a couple of hours I have a good enough solutions for my personal needs. This would have been probably a weekend or more project before.
Skepticism here does remind me a bit of when I learned how to use handtools for woodworking. Ultimately it was nice to be able to make mortises by hand with chisel but damn if using festool dominoes is not that much more productive.
by shagie | 2026-01-04 18:59:41+00:00
That would entail a significant redesign of the underlying display engine... and an agreement of that being the correct direction at the corporate level.

Unfortunately, after Jeff left I don't think there was that much upper management level support for "quality before quantity" After the sale it feels like it was "quantity and engagement will follow" and then "engagement through any means". Deleting and hiding questions or answers that aren't high quality... really would mean making most of the site hidden and that wouldn't help engagement at all.
by caminante | 2026-01-04 18:59:42+00:00
You're switching topics.

The prompt was whether blacks leaving black neighborhoods would be labeled racist. The assumption is that although it is categorical racism, nobody would call the act racist.

As for crime, it's such a messy topic, though, recheck. I can easily find a lot of studies showing black communities having higher gun homicides, etc. after controlling for wealth (which you disagree with).
by mock-possum | 2026-01-04 18:59:51+00:00
No, speed / performance of JavaScript has never, in my entire history of web use, been a driving factor in picking a browser - there may be one-offs here and there where I’m annoyed I have to switch to a different browser for a few minutes due to feature support or extension availability - but I can’t remember thinking “boy I wish JavaScript didn’t run so slow”
by hinkley | 2026-01-04 19:00:02+00:00
I tried to explain this to a team that eventually lost their customers to competitors who could generate less interesting pages far cheaper per request. Instead they went off on a two year jag trying to cache page sections.

You know a team has lost the architectural plot when their answer for all performance problems is more caching. And once you add caching it’s hard to sell any other sort of improvements because the caching poisons the perf analysis.

Their solution took forever because the system was less deterministic than we even knew. They were starting to wrap it up when I went on a tear cleaning up low level code that was nickel and diming us. By the time they launched they were looking at achieving half of the response time improvement they were looking for, in twice the time they estimated to do so. And they cheated. They making two requests about 10% of the time, which made the p50 time into a lie, because two smaller requests pull down the average but not the cost per page load. But I scooped them and made the slow path faster, undercutting another 25% of their perf improvements.

I ended up doing more to improve the Little’s Law situation in three months of working on it half time than they did in two man years. And still nothing changed. They are now owned by a competitor. That I believe shut down almost all of their services.
by nateb2022 | 2026-01-04 19:00:05+00:00
> https://www.instagram.com/reel/DTAcc_gE7J7/ (tracking parameters removed)
> When you open this link on the web (you MUST log in first, sorry), it straight up does not work.

For me it worked perfectly fine, I was able to view the reel without logging in, and experienced no redirects.

Fwiw, I'm running Firefox 146.0.1 + uBlock Origin.
by csdreamer7 | 2026-01-04 19:00:19+00:00
> The point was when you get a high paying job, the first order of business is to build up savings because jobs are not guaranteed for life. 6 months of runway gives one time to find another position.

That applies to 'any' job and is besides the point since I mentioned above he did keep savings. Your comments comes off as insensitive since few jobs will make up for the generous Autism therapy benefit.
by markus_zhang | 2026-01-04 19:00:23+00:00
I'd say anything that inspires you to move to a career that focuses on engineering, that you cannot get away by being half-ass, is a good book.

I recommend two books, none of them is technical. "Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft" and "The soul of a new machine".

Once you put yourself at the edge of knife, everything you want comes naturally, because you either swim or die.
by asveikau | 2026-01-04 19:01:08+00:00
FreeBSD is moving to a scheme where the base system is managed with pkg. In the release notes for last month's 15.0 release, they suggest that this will be mandatory in 16.0.

The ports tree will still be very different from base, but I feel this may erode some of the difference between FreeBSD and a typical Linux distro in terms of user experience, with respect to base vs ports. You'll update both with pkg.
by agumonkey | 2026-01-04 19:01:17+00:00
Aren't you afraid it's gonna be a race to the bottom ? the software industry is now whoever pays gemini to deploy something prompted in a few days. Everybody can, so the market will be inundated by a lot of people, and usually this makes for a bad market (a few shiny one gets 90% of the share while the rest fight for breadcrumbs)
by zahlman | 2026-01-04 19:01:51+00:00
> The person best qualified to assess the relevance of any previous answers is often the OP.

The purpose of having the answer there is not to solve the OP's problem. It is to have a question answered that contributes to the canon of work. This way, everyone can benefit from it.

> What would be the harm in pointing out previous answers but leaving the question open to further contributions?

Scattering the answers to functionally the same question across the site. This harms everyone else who wants an answer to that question, and is then subject to luck of the draw as to whether they find the actual consensus high-quality answer.

You might as well ask: what would be the harm in putting a comment in your code mentioning the existence of a function that serves your purpose, but then rewriting the code in-line instead of trying to figure out what the parameters should be for the function call?

> Closing duplicates makes as much sense as aggressive deletionism on Wikipedia.

This analogy makes no sense. The Wikipedia analogue is making page synonyms or redirects or merges, and those are generally useful. "Deletionism" is mainly about what meets the standard for notability.