MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mbo | 2026-02-10 02:14:09+00:00
This is an absolutely wonderful article. I helped build a system very similar to the one quoted below:

> A deploy pipeline that queries your orchestrator for running image tags, checks your migration history against the schema registry, diffs your GraphQL schema against collected client operations, and runs Buf’s compatibility checks: this is buildable today, with off-the-shelf parts.

that was largely successful at eliminating interservice compatibility errors, but it felt like we were scrambling around in a dark and dusty corner of software engineering that not many people really cared about. Good to see that there's a body of academic work that I was not entirely aware about that is looking into this.

The article successfully identifies that, yes, there are ways, with sufficient effort, to statically verify that a schema change is (mostly) safe or unsafe before deployment. But even with that determination, a lot of IDLs make it still very hard to evolve types! The compatibility checker will successfully identify that strengthening a type from `optional` to `required` isn't backwards compatible: _now what_. There isn't a safe pathway for schema evolution, and you need to reach for something like Cambria (https://www.inkandswitch.com/cambria/, cited in the article) to handle the evolution.

I've only seen one IDL try to do this properly by baking evolution semantics directly into its type model, typical (https://github.com/stepchowfun/typical) with it's `asymmetric` type label: it makes a field required in the constructor but not the deserialiser. I would like to see these "asymmetric" types find their ways into IDLs like Protocol Buffers such that their compatibility checkers, like Buf's `buf breaking` (https://buf.build/docs/reference/cli/buf/breaking/), can formally reason about them. I feel like there is a rich design space of asymmetric types that are poorly described (enum values that can only be compared against but never constructed, paired validations, fallback values sent over the wire, etc.)

Another one that I think makes a pretty good attempt is the config language CUE and its type system (https://cuelang.org/docs/concept/the-logic-of-cue/), which allows you to do first-class version compatibility modelling. But I have yet to investigate whether CUE is fit for purpose for modelling compatibility over the wire / between service deploys.
by jiggawatts | 2026-02-10 02:15:03+00:00
> this is just observation

Sure, but that's fundamental to observing the universe from the inside. We can't ever be sure of anything other than our observations because we can't step outside our universe to look at its source code.

> It doesn't explain why these rules must behave as they do.

Not yet! Once we have a a theory of everything (TOE), or just a better model of fundamental particles, we may have a satisfactory explanation.

For example, if the theory ends up being something vaguely like Wolfram's "Ruliad", then we may be able to point at some aspect of very trivial mathematical rules and say: that "the electron and proton charges pop out of that naturally, it's the only way it can be, nothing else makes sense".

We can of course never be totally certain, but that type of answer may be both good enough and the best we can do.
by AlotOfReading | 2026-02-10 02:15:23+00:00
Most colorblind people aren't dichromats, they're so-called anomalous trichromats. Basically, the genes coding opsins in your eyes have a number of functional sites that tune the spectral sensitivity. Those sites are tuned as far apart as they can be in color-normal humans. Anomalous trichromats usually have a genetic error that causes their opsins' sensitivity curves to overlap more, which manifests as reduced color sensitivity.
by LarsAlereon | 2026-02-10 02:15:47+00:00
I feel the same way, even though I have very different needs. I have an Asus ROG Phone 6 and was looking forward to upgrading to a ROG Phone 10 with a new SoC this year. Now Asus has completely discontinued smartphones and the only halfway decent option is the OnePlus 15. There are so many cool phones in China, but they'll never be released in versions that support US radio bands.
by ivewonyoung | 2026-02-10 02:16:08+00:00
> You seem knowledgeable. But I am just generally mildly frustrated by people online jumping to conclusions assuming malice or criminal intent, while knowing nothing about the US immigration process

The other side of the coin is that outlets like the Guardian have been intentionally omitting details and writing misleading headlines and stories in order to exaggerate things in a partisan manner. If the person's immigration status from 2010 to mid 2025 was legal, they would've posted that. They have been literally quoting his lawyer in the article. There's been several dozens of such intentionally misleading articles.
by tkel | 2026-02-10 02:16:19+00:00
Foreign policy of the US has always been about orchestrating coups to create passive client states for US capitalists more efficiently extract natural resources, going back to 1953 in Iran. Only difference with Trump is he has done away with pretenses. He says the quiet part out loud. He says things like "we want the minerals in Ukraine", and then negotiates a mineral deal. He talks about conquering Panama, Greenland, Canada. He is an unabashed imperialist. It's been at least 70 years of this happening, catch up already. And it goes back even further, to the US controlling the Philippines in 1898, and the Monroe Doctrine in 1823.
by mjrbrennan | 2026-02-10 02:16:36+00:00
I responded to the other comment, but I work at Discourse. As a site admin you can disable badges (which is our gamification system) entirely, or you can get rid of individual badges.

If you're interested in trying Discourse, our lowest hosting plan is $20/month, or if you want to self-host there have been a bunch of improvements in the setup process recently, see https://meta.discourse.org/t/self-hosting-discourse-just-got...
by EvansWilson | 2026-02-10 02:16:44+00:00
Michael Burry, the legendary "Big Short" investor, has just sent a massive shockwave through the markets. His latest filings show a complete exit from his previous bets on Chinese tech giants Alibaba and JD.com. In their place? A portfolio that looks less like an investment list and more like a bunker prepared for an AI market crash.

Decoding the Michael Burry Portfolio: Only 3 Physical Stocks Left

While Burry is famous for his complex maneuvers, he currently keeps a very short list of "real" businesses. In the current Michael Burry Portfolio, he has narrowed his physical equity holdings down to just three high-conviction names, moving away from broad diversification:

Molina Healthcare (MOH): A massive position signaling a bet on recession-resistant healthcare.

lululemon athletica (LULU): A contrarian play on premium consumer resilience despite a cooling economy.

SLM Corporation (SLM): Known as Sallie Mae, this suggests he sees specific value in the specialized credit and student loan sector.

The Real War: 5 High-Leverage Option Moves

The most aggressive part of the Michael Burry Portfolio isn't what he owns, but what he's betting against. Out of his 8 total disclosed holdings, 5 are derivatives designed for maximum impact.

Betting Against the AI Gods
Burry has placed a significant bet against the AI hype cycle. He has loaded up on Put Options against NVIDIA (NVDA) and Palantir (PLTR). This is a classic Burry move: identifying a sector where sentiment has completely outpaced reality and betting on a painful reversion to the mean.

Contrarian Calls in Pharma and Energy
On the flip side, he’s using Call Options on Pfizer (PFE) and Halliburton (HAL) to capture potential upside in beaten-down value sectors. It’s a barbell strategy: shorting the "expensive" AI and buying the "unloved" value.

The Bottom Line

Burry’s Q3 2025 moves are a loud warning. By dumping his previous Chinese "value" plays to fund massive shorts against AI leaders, he is telling us that the next big crash is likely brewing in the heart of the Silicon Valley bubble.

Are you still chasing the AI rally, or is it time to look for the exit sign like Burry?
by Paracompact | 2026-02-10 02:16:50+00:00
I'm not assuming they have to be small integers—I'm saying that if the universe is built on discrete rather than continuous foundations, then small integers and coincidences at the bottom-turtle theory-of-everything become much less surprising. You're treating the space of possible charge values as if it's the reals, or at least some enormous range, but I consider that unlikely.

Consider: in every known case where we have found a deeper layer of explanation for a "coincidence" in physics, the explanation involved some symmetry or conservation law that constrained the values to a small discrete set. The quark model took seemingly arbitrary coincidences and revealed them as consequences of a restrictive structure. auntienomen's point about anomaly cancellation is also exactly this kind of thing. The smallness of the set in question isn't forced, but it is plausible.

But I actually think we're agreeing more than you realize. You're saying "this can't be a coincidence, there must be a deeper reason." I'm saying the deeper reason might bottom out at "the consistent discrete structures are sparse and this is one of them," which is a real explanation, but it might not have the form of yet another dynamical layer underneath.
by komali2 | 2026-02-10 02:16:52+00:00
Do you mean PRC? The invasion of Tibet is canonically imperialism according to Party doctrine: they were "freeing the population" from the reactionary ruling class, which is maybe a great thing to do, but is by definition imperialism.

Making threats against sovereign Taiwan is imperialism, though of course a soft form for now. However it has engaged in imperialist economic pressure such as when it prevented vaccine deliveries to Taiwan during COVID-19, forcing the country to develop its own domestic vaccine.

The genocide and economic exploitation in Xinjiang is old school imperialism.

As for the soviets, if American operations in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam are imperialism, then so too were Soviet operations in Afghanistan.
by mschuster91 | 2026-02-10 02:17:48+00:00
> IMO, these industries need to be heavily taxed if not owned by the government.

... or for every building and infrastructure, a bond needs to be placed with the government to be a safeguard for its demolition cost, and for projects that risk environmental damage (mining, oil drills), proof of insurance needs to be provided before the construction begins, and should that insurance ever lapse, the entire property gets seized by the government.
by interroboink | 2026-02-10 02:17:51+00:00
I went down this rabbit hole a while back — there's a fascinating history of various scientists' investigations into the blue sky, across many decades, with some back-and-forth between Russia and Europe. Einstein eventually made a connection between it and the seemingly-unrelated issue of "critical opalescence," by showing that the fluctuations of densities is responsible for the scattering, not just a simple "individual molecules floating in space" analysis that Rayleigh originally performed. But funnily, for an ideal gas (such as our atmosphere), the formula works out to be the same.

So, "Rayleigh scattering" is the common term still used today, but there is a deeper reason for the formula being correct — it remains correct even when molecules are relatively close together, such as in the lower layers of our atmosphere.

I found this nice paper[1] giving an overview of the timeline, various discoveries, etc: http://users.df.uba.ar/bragas/Web%20roberto/Papers/sobelman%...
by wyclif | 2026-02-10 02:17:54+00:00
never done anything wrong to begin with

Except illegally migrate to the US without applying or engaging in human traffic and smuggling.

You may not like it, but the USA is still a nation of laws. It's also a modern nation. Third world shitholes have lots of problems caused by illegal immigration because they don't do enough to enforce the law and restore order for their citizens.

I'm rather glad that US culture hasn't yet turned into another Afghanistan or Pakistan.
by colechristensen | 2026-02-10 02:18:28+00:00
And perhaps with an economic collapse to rival the climate outcomes we're afraid of nevermind noncompliance by economies that couldn't begin to survive with such an expensive early switch followed by... what recourse? War?

Wouldn't everything be great if everyone did the super hard thing in the past so all of our problems would be solved and we'd live in peace and perfect harmony! /s
by tabbott | 2026-02-10 02:18:59+00:00
Check out https://zulip.com/for/communities/ and some of the linked case studies; they explain it better than I'll be able to in a quick comment.

But the main reason is that the topics-based organization and ability for moderators to move/split conversations means one can read and participate in a community much more fully given a fixed amount of time.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-02-10 02:19:30+00:00
It would be nice for neighborhood cameras to timely alert neighbors when a porch pirate was on the prowl in their neighborhood. I get the privacy implications, but after having a few packages stolen one might just not care anymore.

Since police absolutely have no care about porch pirates where i live, I rig my camera to turn up a siren for 10 seconds (using a homekit power plug) when it sees someone near my townhome after 11PM (this is enough to usually scare them off to easier pickings). It wouldn't be so bad if the kids bedroom wasn't on the first floor and we are on the third, but it is what it is. At least its only really bad in late spring and summer, the only time when Seattle's long rainy season comes in useful.

Its too bad that I can't bike in Seattle anymore, the theft situation just makes it too unbearable (and probably why you see fewer people biking these days even though they are dumping lots of money into biking infrastructure). Think what we could do with cameras like we've done with apple tags to ramp down bike theft (then again, police don't care, and people aren't ready to go vigilante here).
by thaumasiotes | 2026-02-10 02:20:08+00:00
The article has a section on "why are clouds white?", but it doesn't really address the reason I thought that question should be covered.

It just says that clouds act like a collection of randomly-oriented prisms, such that whenever light of any wavelength comes into the cloud, it is dispersed from the cloud evenly in all directions.

This would explain why a cloud was white if even white light was coming into the cloud. But the rest of the article establishes that the light coming into the cloud is predominantly blue and purple. Why isn't that also true of the light leaving the cloud?
by deaux | 2026-02-10 02:21:31+00:00
> That is because Facebook have already gone out of scale and no reasonable human can handle those appeals anymore.

You've been brainwashed. How can you seriously make this statement?

Meta has $200 _billion_ revenue.

Amazon employs _1.56 million_ people worldwide.

Meta could absolutely hire a million support workers and handle the appeals. They don't, but they could. Smaller social networks would be ideal, but not the only option. You can legislate a requirement of human support availability for gatekeeper platforms.
by zb3 | 2026-02-10 02:22:05+00:00
Yes, this shitty world where we can't control our devices we need to have (as they need to work against us) seems to be inevitable.

But I'm actually happy that these "protections" don't yet exist on desktop (albeit DRM already does).
If something really needs to work against my interest (for greater good), be it a smartcard, not my smartphone and definitely not my PC.
by jaggederest | 2026-02-10 02:22:27+00:00
We already have mutations, generally in women, for tetrachromaticism, who usually have male relatives with severe or moderate color blindness, in which the X chromosome encodes a different green cone. So they end up seeing red, strange-green, green, and blue, where strange-green is somewhere closer to red than green.

Only a few on record but they tend to have absolutely insane color matching and color perception. One of note worked in the fashion industry and could match fabrics perfectly even in varying lighting (e.g. working under fluorescent but able to match colors that would stay matched in halogen/stage lighting)
by mschuster91 | 2026-02-10 02:22:32+00:00
> The worst part is that most of number 3 is self imposed by the ridiculous amount of environmental review and litigation delays surrounding that process.

Because, surprise, we do not want more Superfund sites. Like, the Silicon Valley is the US' biggest cluster of Superfund sites by far.

At the same time, it is very convenient that there are lots of piss poor countries that have very difficult/dirty to mine resources... be it China, Congo or whatever. These countries didn't have the luxury to think decades into the future, and capitalism doesn't have built-in ethics, and this is how we ended up here.

The EU tried to introduce supply chain laws aiming at cutting back at this kind of exploitation, but the pressure from industry was immense.
by ggm | 2026-02-10 02:22:43+00:00
I had a conversation about this in HN some months back. It's a surprisingly modern experiment. It demanded an ability to reliably emit single photons. Young's theory may be 1800 but single photon emission is 1970-80.

(This is what I was told, exploring my belief it's always been fringes in streams of photons not emerging over repeated applications of single photons and I was wrong)
by kcplate | 2026-02-10 02:22:54+00:00
> So to arrest someone while they are following the steps they're supposed to be following

I think the issue complicating this man’s situation is that it appears when you dig into the details that for nearly 16 years he was skirting the system and only tried getting his legal situation resolved just a few months prior to his detainment. He is choosing to fight it which is resulting in the long detention.

Personally I believe we need some legal carve outs for this type of situation, but there is simply no doubt that this guy made a series of poor decisions prior to April of 2025 that has created the situation he is in.
by troad | 2026-02-10 02:24:06+00:00
Agreed, but the article begins with the previous quote, and is entitled "what functional programmers get wrong", so I feel like there's some preliminary assumptions being made about FP that warrant examining.

In practice, much of the article seems to be about the problems introduced by rigid typing. Your quote, for instance, is used in the context of reading old logs using a typed schema if that schema changes. But that's a non-issue in the FP languages mentioned above since they tend towards the use of unstructured data (maps, lists) and lambdas. Conversely, reading state from old, schema-incompatible logs might be an issue in something like Java or C++, which certainly are not FP languages as the term is usually understood.

So overall, not really an FP issue at all, and yet the article is called "what functional programmers get wrong". The author's points might be very valid for his version of FP, but his version of FP seems to be 'FP in the ML tradition, with types so rigid you might want to consult a doctor after four hours'.
by gruez | 2026-02-10 02:24:15+00:00
>Sounds like you either shouldn't use Debian or should find a repo with maintainers who align with your preferred style of package inclusion.

Are there actually viable alternatives to the default debian repo? At best there's repositories run by various projects, but that's basically the same as level of security as "run a random binary you downloaded off the internet". The only plausible way that package managers increase security is through curation. If you're just blindly adding whatever repo to get some software installed, you're back at square one.
by AdieuToLogic | 2026-02-10 02:24:49+00:00
> If the attacker already controls the download link and has a valid https certificate, can't they just modify the published hash as well?

This implies an attacker controlling the server having the certificate's private key or the certificate's private key otherwise being exfiltrated (likely in conjunction with a DNS poisoning attack). There is no way for a network client to defend against this type of TLS[0] compromise.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-02-10 02:24:52+00:00
Yes, and just like we will eventually be displaced (violently or not) by new arrivals as well, since "might makes right," correct?

It's just how it goes: white settlers kick brown (Indian descended with some European blood) Mexicans off their land, later brown Mexican descendants jump border into the USA to get that land back, white settler descendants kick them away again but demographics means those white settler descendants are going to get displaced one way or the other.

The math of growth curves doesn't lie. Trump is just a last racist hurrah for what was and what isn't meant to be anylonger.
by zorkian | 2026-02-10 02:25:29+00:00
(( This is a repost of what I shared on Reddit here https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/1r05vkj/comment... but I think the context will be helpful for this group, too. This article title is very misleading. ))

Tl;dr: The vast majority of adults will never have to interact with our age assurance systems and their experience won't change, because we know Discord and how people use it, so we're designing to respect privacy and deliver a safer experience while minimizing friction for adults.

Hey folks –

I’ve been on Discord since very early 2016 and actually joined the company in 2017. Safety is one of my areas, so today’s announcement on our blog is something I’ve been pretty involved with. I’ve always cared about Discord's approach to privacy (E2EE for A/V was another of my projects here), so I figured I’d add some more context to today's news.

I can say confidently that the vast majority of people will never see age verification. I say this because we launched age assurance in the UK and Australia in 2025, and we have some pretty good data on this now. The idea here is that we can pre-identify most adults based on what we already know (not including your messages!), and that looks to get us pretty far here. No face scans, no IDs, for the vast majority of adults.

And if you are one of the smaller subset of folks that we can't definitively pre-identify, then still, you only have to do it if you're accessing age-restricted servers or channels, or changing certain settings. That's really not most users. (Altho... might be more Redditors, tbh.)

Last, I know that there is concern about privacy and data leaks. That's a real concern. The selfie system is built purely client-side, it never leaves your device, and we did that intentionally. That'll work for a bunch of users who aren't pre-identified as adults. But if you do end up in the ID bucket, then yeah, you're right that has some risk. We're doing what we can to minimize this by working with our range of partners (who are different partners than the data leak you read about), and if it's any help, we learned a lot internally from the last issue. But I get if that doesn't necessarily inspire more confidence.

Anyway, we’ll be sharing more next month as we get closer to the global roll out about the system, including the technology behind it in March. I honestly wouldn't be happy if we didn't build something good and I am excited about what we’re launching, but please let us know what you think when we share more details.

And I really appreciate everybody's feedback here today. We’re definitely reading it!
by sparkie | 2026-02-10 02:26:13+00:00
`inline` is a hint, but he declares `static_inline` in the preprocessor to include `__attribute__((__always_inline__))`, which is more than just a hint. However, even `always_inline` may be troublesome over translation units, though we can still inline things in different translation units if using `-flto`, I believe there are occasional bugs. For libraries we'd also want to use `-ffat-lto-objects`.