MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aggieNick02 | 2026-02-05 08:14:07+00:00
So many NVMe/SATA drives that are locked/frozen during boot, and it turns out this is because the drives are actually behaving incorrectly when "security operations" are blocked on the drive. When "security operations" are blocked, you should not be able to set a password on the drive, but should be able to format it. So that's bug 1.

Most modern motherboards, on boot, will block "security operations" on a drive where the security password is set to the default (because it hasn't been manually set by the end-user). They do this to prevent malware from being able to set a password on a drive that hasn't had its password set. (Malware could set the password and I believe configure the drive to effectively brick it.)

But many (probably most) motherboards fail to correctly block "security operations" on a suspend/resume. This is bug 2, and makes suspend/resume often an effective workaround for a drive with bug 1, as well as a theoretical opportunity for malware to easily inflict damage on all drives that support "security operations".

So one generally ends up stuck and unable to securely erase their drive when it has bug 1 and is installed on a motherboard without bug 2. In this case, you have to hope your motherboard has a feature in its BIOS to, on next boot, not block security operations. Otherwise you're stuck and need to find another motherboard if you want to sanitize your drive, or hope that a firmware update for your drive resolves bug 1.

The full details are in this comment on a Github issue from 2016: https://github.com/linux-nvme/nvme-cli/issues/84#issuecommen... . It was one of the most rewarding bugs I've had the fortune to get to the bottom of. We were extra motivated to fully understand it when we moved to a new SSD benchmarking test system that turned out to not have bug 2: https://pcpartpicker.com/forums/topic/460000-an-ssd-that-can...
by bonesss | 2026-02-05 08:14:37+00:00
Working faster, but at what?

LLM workflow:

Describing to Claude that I need an edit made in the second paragraph of the third section feels easy, comfortable, and straightforward. I’m using my speech centers, speech to text, and then I wait for a generation during which I hit my phone or Reddit. Poof, the text flies out like magic, taking 20+ seconds, then I re-re-re-read it to make sure the edit was good and nothing was lost in that edit. Oops, the edit inverted the logic of the paragraph, lemme repeat the above… and again… time flies! 2 hours gone in a flash.

Old and boring workflow:

I gruellingly move my mouse to open a file, then take a coffee break. I come back and left-click into the sentence that sucks. I hit Reddit to deal with the anxiety… I think, boo, and then type out the edit I needed. It’s bad, I fix. Coffee break. Squiggly red line from a misspelling? I fix. I google and find a better turn of phrase, copy and paste it in manually with a little edit. Ugh. This sucks. I suck, work sucks. Time sucks. 35 entire minutes of my life has been wasted… time to get another coffee and check Reddit.

———

Working with an LLM is kinda like working under stage hypnosis. The moment to moment feelings are deceptive and we humans are unreliable recorders of time-usage. Particularly when engaged in unwanted effort.

Google has had all this tech for a minute. Their restrained application and lack of 10x-vibe-chad talk make me think their output measurements are aligned with my measurements.

1 rabbit hole hallucination wrong-turn can eat up a lot, lot, lot of magic one-shotting.
by kingstnap | 2026-02-05 08:14:43+00:00
This is a good essay. I especially liked reading the linked articles.

This one in particular, where I really resonate with the whole thesis of we aren't spending money the same way anymore.

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2025/05/the-limits-of-con...

There is a lot to discuss there but I find this paragraph interesting.

> What we are seeing here is the replacement of normal human relationships with virtual monetized relationships.

> It could be argued that virtual prostitutes have seen an increase in their living standards, but in reality, they have likely just replaced being in a relationship in which a man pays for gifts, trips, and other things with virtual prostitution.

The classic incel meme involves a sort of diagram where there is small fraction of men getting the lions share of the sexual attention from women.

But there is this sort of dual one where an extremely small number of women on onlyfans, who themselves are a small fraction of all women in total, make up the majority of all income/attention.
by throwaway290 | 2026-02-05 08:15:17+00:00
To me it became clear when people here rejected any compromises on privacy and anonymous on device scanning of messages/data. Not because they rejected it but how they rejected it.

People here didn't say "yeah it's a real evil problem and e2e tech that we build makes it almost impossible to catch and helps it scale, so let's find the right tradeoff that minimizes privacy invasion". No. People here just mocked "think of the children" and said something along the lines of no amount of suffering can make any restriction to privacy be acceptable. The fact that 99% of our life is literally compromising our freedom for others they don't care.

To buellerbueller's killed comment, I totally feel it. it was a shocker when it turned out many of my fellow Russians got no problem with Putin's war and I bet that's what half of USA feels.
by rvz | 2026-02-05 08:15:40+00:00
Not long ago Railway moved from GCP to their own infrastructure since it was very expensive for them. [0] Some go for a Oxide rack [1] for a full stack solution (both hardware and software) for intense GPU workloads, instead of building it themselves.

It's very expensive and only makes sense if you really need infrastructure sovereignty. It makes more sense if you're profitable in the tens of millions after raising hundreds of millions.

It also makes sense for governments (including those in the EU) which should think about this and have the compute in house and disconnected from the internet if they are serious about infrastructure sovereignty, rather than depending on US-based providers such as AWS.

[0] https://blog.railway.com/p/data-center-build-part-one

[1] https://oxide.computer/
by surgical_fire | 2026-02-05 08:15:45+00:00
There's nothing extreme in what I said, it is actually how the world we live in works.

It's an extremely unfair system based on coercion - you are beaten down into submission by the implicit threat that without work you won't be able to make ends meet.

Maybe you have a family that can support you financially. Maybe you already own the place where you live and could save up money over an extended period that you can weather a storm. If you are in these situations, that's great, but it is also an extremely privileged position to be in.
by lelanthran | 2026-02-05 08:15:52+00:00
Your calculation assumes that an FTE is needed to maintain a few beefy servers.

Once they are up and running that employee is spending at most a few hours a month on them. Maybe even a few hours every six months.

OTOH you are specifically ignoring that you'll require mostly the same time from a cloud trained person if you're all-in on AWS.

I expect the marginal cost of one employee over the other is zero.
by LowLevelKernel | 2026-02-05 08:16:18+00:00
Curious, on the word usage.

In section 2, you wrote,

“Have you tried asking the <lecturer> if you can get <marked> just for your section? Or if that person can be removed from the group?”

In my mind, I swapped those 2 words- Lecturer and Marked with Professor and Graded
by int_19h | 2026-02-05 08:18:51+00:00
I don't think Elon is motivated purely by money. If he were, a lot of his actions don't make any sense, like tanking his own public image repeatedly by doing silly childish things.

It's more likely that he genuinely believes that he's building the future of human civilization, and he wants himself in charge of that so that he can shape it how he sees fit.

You're right that our socioeconomic system unfortunately doesn't have any guardrails for that kind of behavior. Arguably that's a bug (or yet another symptom of the architecture being fundamentally flawed).
by satvikpendem | 2026-02-05 08:19:53+00:00
While the author says that much of it can be attributed to the layers of software in between to make it more accessible to people, in my experience most cases are about people being lazy in their developing of applications.

For example, there was a case of how Claude Code uses React to figure out what to render in the terminal and that in itself causes latency and its devs lament how they have "only" 16.7 ms to achieve 60 FPS. On a terminal. That can do way more than that since its inception. Primeagen shows an example [0] of how even the most terminal change filled applications run much faster such that there is no need to diff anything, just display the new change!

[0] https://youtu.be/LvW1HTSLPEk
by alex43578 | 2026-02-05 08:20:30+00:00
Not only are they not equipped to provide for gifted students, they're scarcely equipped to educate basic students to the already-low bar of grade-level expectations.

Depending on the year and test, four in ten struggle with basic reading or basic math. That's not even the pressure of high expectations, but just the pathetic state of US culture around educational attainment, expected behaviors, etc.
by itay-maman | 2026-02-05 08:20:42+00:00
I really like this direction - I think it certainly clicks with your audience and solves a real problem.

One thing: my immediate gut reaction was "will they steal my idea?" On reflection, I think that's actually a super common concern among your target users. Early-stage founders are often paranoid about idea theft - even if it's usually irrational (execution >> ideas), the anxiety is real. This could be a conversion killer if not addressed.

Might be worth adding something visible about data privacy/handling right on the landing page.
by simianwords | 2026-02-05 08:20:46+00:00
Software companies have higher margins so these decisions are lower stakes. Unless on premises helps the bottom line of the main product that the company provides, these decisions don't really matter in my opinion.

Think of a ~5000 employee startup. Two scenarios:

1. if they win the market, they capture something like ~60% margin

2. if that doesn't happen, they just lose, VC fund runs out and then they leave

In this dynamic, costs associated with infrastructure don't change the bottomline of profitability. The risk involved with rolling out their on infrastructure can hurt their main product's existence itself.
by WalterBright | 2026-02-05 08:20:48+00:00
> Are you sure about that?

I remember it very well. I thought it was crazy they were still doing the times tables.

> this book at grade 7

I don't recall any of the grades going all the way through the book. My high school had an impressive course catalog. It looked pretty rigorous! But taking the classes, how sad they were. The textbook is not a reliable indicator of what was taught - it's more like wishful thinking.

I remember taking sophomore geometry. The teacher gave out a test at the beginning of the year, to measure where the kids were. Apparently I got it all right. The teacher asked me if I'd taken geometry before? I said no, the test was just obvious. It was really sad.

Now, before you think I am some kind of genius, nope. When I arrived at college it was a full on disaster for me. I had no idea how to study. I was way, way, way behind my peers. I needed a lot of help, bad. My roommate sighed at how ill-prepared I was, and coached me through a lot of classes, otherwise I would have been flunked out.

Have things gotten any better? I doubt it. Even Harvard was forced to add a bonehead math class to try to get their incoming freshmen up to speed.

Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed going to school. My friends were there, and we had a great time. Especially in high school, when we worked on each others' cars. I'm still a motorhead.
Is Sanae "Making Money"?
by jocelyner | 2026-02-05 08:21:04+00:00
From Fumio Kishida's "apology and resignation" to Sanae Takaichi's "silent response," the Liberal Democratic Party has demonstrated through its actions that they have no intention of solving the "black money" problem, because it is their "Achilles' heel" in maintaining power.
When a political party treats politics as a "business," donations as "capital," and the people as "tools," then the so-called "democracy" is nothing more than a facade.
Whether this lawsuit will be the final straw that breaks the Liberal Democratic Party's back remains to be seen. However, one thing is certain: when political corruption becomes the norm, and when the exchange of favors replaces the demands of the people, even a former "economic superpower" will eventually lose its way in self-destruction. After all, no amount of donations can buy public support, and no amount of clever excuses can cover up corruption.
What I Did to Earn a Chrome Web Store Featured Badge
by backrun | 2026-02-05 08:21:20+00:00
My extension recently got the Featured badge on the Chrome Web Store. (For context: it’s an exporter that turns ChatGPT conversations into clean docs like PDF / Word / Google Docs / Notion / Gmail, so you don’t have to copy-paste and break formatting.)
I’m not part of a big team and I didn’t do anything hacky — it was mostly about treating the extension like a product: clear value, tight UX, solid performance, and clean privacy posture.
Here’s what my process looked like, in a way you can replicate.
What I focused on
Start from the Badge criteria: User value, polished UX, fast + stable, clear privacy/minimal permissions.
Follow Best Practices: Trim confusing extras, cut permissions, simplify onboarding, optimize startup/memory, handle edge cases.
Treat the Store listing like a landing page: One clear sentence, screenshots that sell in 3 seconds, honest scope, no fluff.
Test like a reviewer: Different profiles/devices, slow/offline, errors/retries, extension conflicts, heavy pages.
Submit nominate with evidence: Problem → audience → how it meets criteria → what I improved. Then wait.
A checklist you can copy
If you want to aim for Featured, here’s a simple sequence:
Read the Featured-badge criteria and highlight what you can measure
Audit permissions and remove anything “just in case”
Make UX dead simple (especially first-run)
Optimize performance (startup, memory, background activity)
Document privacy clearly and honestly
Upgrade your listing: clear description + strong screenshots
Submit a nomination with a concise, criteria-mapped explanation
Keep shipping improvements while you wait
A few tips that helped
Bugs are a badge killer. Fix the boring stuff first.
Don’t chase the badge. Chase “this feels like a polished Chrome feature.”
Be transparent. If you collect nothing, say so clearly. If you do, explain why.
If you’ve been thinking about nominating your extension, go for it.
If you want, reply with what your extension does + your current permission list — I’m happy to suggest low-hanging improvements (UX/perf/privacy) that typically make the biggest difference.
by tombert | 2026-02-05 08:21:41+00:00
I took an IQ test about twelve years ago and I also got 160 on the Stanford–Binet [1], so if we are going to use that as the metric I was a “prodigy” as well (though no one ever called me that). I didn’t take calc when I was twelve though, that would have been cool. I had to wait until I was fifteen.

Anyway, if that’s the scale, it still can fit with the “doesn’t lead to exceptional outcomes”. I am a perfectly competent software person, and maybe I even understand some of the mathematics behind it better than the average programmer, but I am still basically just an “adequate” worker, and honestly I am afraid that I have more or less peaked career-wise. I am sure that some prodigies do great but the article seems to indicate that they’re rarely exceptional at adulthood.

[1] honestly I think that IQ is stupid and that it’s dumb to try and distill something as complicated and multi-faceted as intelligence to a single dimension or even a couple dimensions is pretty reductive.
by umanwizard | 2026-02-05 08:21:43+00:00
Okay, I'll accept your point for those software engineers that have a choice between working at an immoral company or "homelessness and starvation".

Thankfully, that isn't most of them. Despite the job market not being as good as it used to be, the vast majority of software engineers in the US could still find another job to pay the bills before becoming homeless and starving.
by djtango | 2026-02-05 08:21:49+00:00
There are 7 year olds[1] who can play better than I can despite 30+ years of playing piano, and even with fairly dedicated practise the progress is so much slower than someone with actual talent.

I had a friend who could play all the Chopin Etudes at age 9. Some of the best art simply requires a virtuoso to bring it to life.

[1] https://youtu.be/PX57r1l5W3U?si=wiix8NWw_9D4YCCb
by kaon_2 | 2026-02-05 08:22:01+00:00
Am I the only one that is simply scared of running your own cloud? What happens if your administrator credentials get leaked? At least with Azure I can phone microsoft and initiate a recovery. Because of backups and soft deletion policies quite a lot is possible. I guess you can build in these failsafe scenarios locally too? But what if a fire happens like in South Korea? Sure most companies run more immediate risks such as going bankrupt, but at least Cloud relieves me from the stuff of nightmares.

Except now I have nightmares that the USA will enforce the patriot act and force Microsoft to hand over all their data in European data centers and then we have to migrate everything to a local cloud provider. Argh...
by verdverm | 2026-02-05 08:22:06+00:00
This is a bad article. They start out with some finance / crypto nonsense and say they will give 5 reasons zero trust is needed... Then you get to the end and their 5 reasons are all things you can do today, without zero trust concepts from blockchainland, and are in fact all things we do today, some of which have nothing to do with secrets and are general guidelines for good security posturing
by imiric | 2026-02-05 08:22:13+00:00
Hhmm I think that's more difficult than using these tools for creating software. If generated software doesn't compile, or does the wrong thing, you know there's an issue. Whereas if the LLM gives you seemingly accurate information that is actually wrong, you have no way of verifying it, other than with a human domain expert. The tech is not reliable enough for either task yet, but software is easy to verify, whereas general information is not.
by yanhangyhy | 2026-02-05 08:22:23+00:00
It is really hard to understand that this is a country that our nation’s media and KOLs have vigorously whitewashed for decades. They say the United States protects private property, that America is free and democratic, and that everyone owns guns, so they can guarantee their own freedom.

All of our people should feel ashamed of this—being deceived by the media day after day for decades. Too stupid. Even today, there are still many people who firmly believe it.
by morshu9001 | 2026-02-05 08:22:30+00:00
Pleasantly surprised this post was about a neat little tool and not another migration manager. This always seemed like a weak spot in regular SQL. Wish it were declarative like Spanner DDL.

When using Postgres, I just try to keep my schema script idempotent and also work with any version of the DB. Like I start with a CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS, then if I add a new col, it goes into there and also a separate ALTER. But at some point it gets cluttered and I delete the ALTERs once things are stable. Maybe something could hit the fan, I have to restore an old backup from before the last purge, and this tool helps me make it compatible quickly.
by altacc | 2026-02-05 08:24:04+00:00
Almost every young developer joins the enterprise I work at and spends the first 6 months ranting about how bad everything is and how we could do things so much better with xyz or whatever. We wait, we educate, we leave them to come to the understanding that when you're in a business with billions in turnover, millions of customers, thousands of employees and hundreds of developers, what you learnt at university or building small side projects isn't enough to immediately judge and make changes. After about a year the good developers are proactively contributing good ideas that will actually work. It's not an environment that fits everyone, so we're fine when people decide to leave for somewhere smaller.
by littlecranky67 | 2026-02-05 08:24:07+00:00
> (1) can you point to some large important positive uses of Bitcoin at present

No, not at present - but there will be in the future. Bitcoin is faily new, hard to understand for laymen, and government regulation and the existing financial industry is actively fighting it (with some extend changing in the US right now). The properties bitcoin has allow for lots of benefits and use cases that are superior to our existing financial systems, but they depent on adoption. I am bullish on the bitcoin, the same way I was bullish on the internet in 1994. The internet is great, but not so great if only a couple of thousand people in the world use it. That is the same adoption problem, not an issue with the underlying technology.

> (2) are you saying all the bad things

All the bad things existed before bitcoin, and will exist for eternity. The internet in the early 90s and 00s was also a place full of scams, ponzi scheme emails, phishing, fraud etc. Most crime money today is fiat cash. Some people (especially in the EU) claim a total surveillance state and the removal of cash paired with total money control is needed for a safe and secure society. I am in team liberal democracy, where the freedom of cash and lack of government total control is a benefit to society, ensures perpetual democracy and freedom to the individual. The fact that bitcoin and crypto is used by criminals just as cash is, shouldn't be a reason to not have it. Just as removing cash to prevent illegal activity should not be goal in a free society.
by pu_pe | 2026-02-05 08:24:41+00:00
> Self-reliance is great, but there are other benefits to running your own compute. It inspires good engineering.

It's easy to inspire people when you have great engineers in the first place. That's a given at a place like comma.ai, but there are many companies out there where administering a datacenter is far beyond their core competencies.

I feel like skilled engineers have a hard time understanding the trade-offs from cloud companies. The same way that comma.ai employees likely don't have an in-house canteen, it can make sense to focus on what you are good at and outsource the rest.
by bluescrn | 2026-02-05 08:24:48+00:00
We can’t render modern games at decent frame rates at 4k without going down the path of faking it with AI upscaling and frame generation.

There was no hope of actual 8k gaming any time soon even before the AI bubble wrecked the PC hardware market.

Attempting to render 33 million pixels per frame seems like utter madness, when 1080p is a mere 2 million, and Doom/Quake were great with just 64000. Lets have more frames instead?

(Such a huge pixel count for movies while stuck at a ‘cinematic’ 24fps, an extremely low temporal resolution, is even sillier)
by 7777777phil | 2026-02-05 08:24:51+00:00
Thanks! Hardest part was redesigning the data model.. GoatCounter does complex aggregations at query time, but D1's 10ms CPU limit means you have to pre-aggregate everything (hourly rollups, per-dimension stats tables). Session dedup was tricky too since Workers are stateless so I ended up using KV with IP+UA hash and 8hr TTL. The other annoyance is Pages doesn't support cron, so daily cleanup needs a separate Worker. Still some way to go implementing Zero Trust auth etc..