MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sunday_serif | 2026-03-08 04:44:43+00:00
I feel like the article “c is not a low level language” is worth linking here.

Once you start to dig into how computer hardware really works, you start to realize that nothing is really O(1).

If you’ve never looked into computer hardware, you’d believe that lots of the primitive machine operations like reading and writing a value are O(1). But on modern hardware, they can be far slower. And that’s before we even get into out of order instructions etc.

So by the authors definition, I guess assembly and machine code aren’t real systems languages ;)

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479
by jghn | 2026-03-08 04:45:34+00:00
Aha, yes! And it looks like meteor swarm was Kal Des Flam Ylem).

Its time to shine was short lived, I want to say it didn't even last the entirety of October '94. At the time it was out of reach of most toons anyways, but each individual meteor was close to instakill, plus it was AoE. The downside of course was it was AoE and friendly fire would make you red.

I remember one time in that time range getting called in because an argument was brewing between some guild mates and another guild in some dungeon. I arrived, decided to end the argument with a meteor swarm, promptly killed literally everyone from both guilds due to the AoE, and was a dread lord for a while. Needless to say, not how I drew it up on the board!
by dylan604 | 2026-03-08 04:46:16+00:00
> It's not a big threat to the US. The US is a net oil exporter,

The thing is that the US exported oil is sweet crude, and our own refineries are not made for that type of oil. So for the petroleum products used within the US need the heavy oil that is imported. So if the world goes tits up so that the US can only use the oil it produces, it would take time before the US could refine it.

>Trump could make up with Canada

I'm sorry, did this suddenly become a comedy?
by preserves | 2026-03-08 04:46:24+00:00
Disclosure: I work on VMs at Google Compute Engine :)

This was a really, really good write-up. I appreciated the breadth of VMs tested and the spread of benchmarks. A few random observations:

1. Turin is a beast.

2. The data on price-performance makes Hetzner look really fantastic, especially for small scale projects where region placement doesn’t matter much and big bursty scaling isn’t required.

3. I think the first ever cloud VM I ever provisioned was on DigitalOcean. I was surprised at how old their fleet was, but I guess they have some limited Emerald Rapids offerings now: https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/introducing-5th-gen-xeon-p...
by goku12 | 2026-03-08 04:46:34+00:00
This comment is probably going to be unpopular. But these questions need to be asked. Why did anybody think that Americans were NOT going to be targeted? While the regime claimed that they were going to round up and deport only 'the worst of the worst', they were also arresting illegal immigrants who had clean records otherwise, asylum seekers, legal immigrants and those who were made illegal by retroactive repeal of their residency permits, from the beginning itself. Why didn't enough people object at the time?

The opposition to ICE and CBP saw a massive upswing after the executions of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. I respect and grieve for them, because they were brave human beings who stood up and died for the less privileged people who were in danger. But they were hardly the first casualties of this regime. Nearly 40 had died by that time, in ICE's concentration camps (aka detention facilities), including at the El Salvadoran CECOT. And nearly a hundred men were blown up at sea, based on the unsubstantiated accusation of trafficking drugs. We will never know if they were actual drug traffickers, because they were never tried.

But the protests were relatively feeble until Good and Pretti were killed. There are two differences I see in them, from the other victims. They were white, and their death were caught on camera. (The assassination of the Venezuelan boaters were caught on camera, but it wasn't as clear.) If those prior extra-judicial executions generated as much outrage as the Good and Pretti murders, perhaps the latter two would still be alive.

Here is the problem with that line of thinking. Once a regime starts to violate constitutional and other laws, it's only a matter of time before they expand it to all demographics. Contrary to what they claim, they absolutely won't observe any boundaries. Why would they? They're the ones in power. This is the basis of the age old adage beginning "First they came for the Communists ...". It isn't a fancy poem. This is how autocrats behave. They're using your prejudices to silence you. It should have been taken for granted at that point that the American citizens were going to be in the cross hairs soon.

This is why such atrocities must never be downplayed or normalized. This is why prejudices must not be allowed to override justice. Where did all this go wrong? And why are you still making the distinction between Americans and non-Americans? Isn't it clear yet that everybody gets justice, or no one does?
by SigmundA | 2026-03-08 04:46:48+00:00
Interesting so you don't find it odd that an article about the storage engine of a SQL database system explains the solution to problem without once mentioning that it is the way most other sql database engines solve it? It is mentioned several times sql table are typically sparse, but not that this is how its typically solved, only this is how you solved it...

>The fix is simple: we stop storing Option<T> and instead we store a bitmap that records which fields are None.

Right here would have been the opportunity to let those not familiar with database internals know. Something like "This technique has been widely used in many RDBMS systems over the years, you can see the PG version of this in their documentation for page layout".

Instead you go into detail on what a null bitmap is and how to implement it, calling it a "trick". Which is strange if you think your target audience is assumed to already know this common technique.

I mean not one mention of the origin of the trick or even calling it a common solution to this problem...
by blehn | 2026-03-08 04:48:27+00:00
> It’s like learning how to drive. It’s a skill for sure but anyone can do it after practice.

The analogy only illustrates the parent's point. Most licensed drivers have been doing it for years and are still terrible drivers, because they never grasp the intricacies of driving — smoothly accelerating and decelerating, smoothing out corners, anticipating light changes, gauging merge distances and timings, using mirrors well, ensuring cars get by when making a left turn in an intersection, etc, etc
by anupamchugh | 2026-03-08 04:48:49+00:00
>The AI isn't doing novel reasoning here — it's fusing 179 intel sources and pattern-matching against known targeting frameworks at machine speed. What took analysts 12 hours now takes under a minute. The genuine concern isn't "AI picked the targets" (humans still approved), it's that we've collapsed the OODA loop so dramatically that the deliberation time — the part where someone asks "should we actually hit this?" — went from hours to seconds. The bottleneck on killing used to be human processing speed. That bottleneck was also, arguably, a feature
by matrixgard | 2026-03-08 04:49:02+00:00
The bottleneck isn't usually coding speed. Most of the AI-generated stuff that doesn't turn into useful software fails before the first line is written — nobody actually understood the problem they were solving.

The projects that do ship and matter tend to come from people who had a specific, painful problem and built exactly for that. The vaccine appointment site you mentioned is the perfect example — someone was solving their own family's real problem, not exploring what AI could generate.

What kind of software were you hoping to see more of? Curious if there's a specific gap you're noticing.
by bcrl | 2026-03-08 04:49:33+00:00
Software was already far down the bloat path by the time the Core 2 Duo came out, so the upgrade didn't make all that much of a difference in feel given how much latency was caused by software performing random reads off a disk. That's why SSDs made such a huge difference.

Back in the MS-DOS days, the amount of data needed to be read off a disk while the OS booted was negligible, so a second or two on a fast 486 felt amazing compared to the incredibly slow grind of watching code execute on an 8086 or slow 80286. Software was still in the space of having to run tolerably on an 8086, so the added resources of a newer faster machine actually did improve the feel of the system.
by comgen42 | 2026-03-08 04:50:18+00:00
Author here — I run a job board (grizzlypeaksoftware.com/jobs) specifically for burned-out software engineers looking for something different. Spotted this one today and thought the HN crowd might appreciate it.

Edurino GmbH is hiring a Senior Game Designer for their educational kids' platform — remote-first, backed by €17M Series B, 500k+ families. The role is genuinely cross-disciplinary: UX, systems design, A/B testing, cohort analysis, playtesting with real kids.

If you've got a strong analytical background and have ever wondered what it's like to apply those skills to something other than SaaS dashboards, this seems like a legit path.

Direct listing:
https://grizzlypeaksoftware.com/jobs/senior-game-designer-mf...
by chamomeal | 2026-03-08 04:52:58+00:00
I’m kinda getting off topic here but anecdotally: I’ve tried to get so many of my friends to learn programming. I love it, and I think a lot of em would love it too. But they hit a hard wall with the patience needed to self learn.

Like the moment something doesn’t happen like the tutorial said (error message saying “idk what python is, you mean python3?”), they just give up completely instead of googling it. I really feel like the venn diagram of “people who can code” and “people who can google errors they don’t understand for a couple hours” is nearly a perfect circle.

LLMs can smooth out those little tediums, so maybe more people really will be able to learn programming now. But then again if you don’t have the patience to trudge through the annoying parts, will you have the patience to be confused and struggle, instead of letting Claude do the hard stuff for you? I’ll be interested to see what future self-taught devs look like!
by RulerOf | 2026-03-08 04:52:59+00:00
I remember watching a video of a guy doing that to a display phone at an Apple Store.

While that action was definitely not a good idea, it did encapsulate just how polished that jailbreak[1] was. The UX was identical to an App Store install page of the day. You tapped the price "FREE" and then tapped "INSTALL" and the phone would appear to install Cydia as though you had just used the App Store to do it.

[1]: https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Saffron
by AtlasBarfed | 2026-03-08 04:53:59+00:00
Needs: network performance and costs, desperately.

I wouldn't mind SAN/non-local storage performance and costs too.

VM cost isn't where AWS gets you. It's ALLLLLLLL the other nickel and diming that they kill you on, especially since outbound data transfer costs a log of money to get off of the platform.
by beagle3 | 2026-03-08 04:54:18+00:00
I did write “embedded/hardware”. Yes, you need special drivers for your X-ray/drill/whatever so you earned an another decade of windows.

But in the places I frequent (backoffice, municipal, finance) it’s all gone web and rdp-through-web (which is web, in the sense that it doesn’t require windows on the client) with centralized administration with minimal (not quite self-serve but reasonably close) thin client users.
by jadenPete | 2026-03-08 04:54:44+00:00
I couldn’t disagree more. Most of my company’s backend code is written in Scala, and most of our engineers dislike it because the language is difficult to understand, has way too many features, and has many ways to solve the same problem. I don’t want Rust to continue down this path, and I already worry with some of the syntactic sugar and type system additions being discussed that it already has.

A language’s type system doesn’t need to model every possible type of guarantee. It just needs to provide a type safe way to do 95% of things and force its users to conform to use the constructs it provides. Otherwise it becomes a buggy hodge podge of features that interact in poor and unpredictable ways. This is already the case in Scala; we’ve discovered almost 20 bugs in the compiler in the past year.
by devsda | 2026-03-08 04:54:48+00:00
Instead of engineer vs PM/manager I separate those jobs based on these categories.

1. How long they can survive in the job while being mediocre or outright bad at their job.

2. Probability of failing upwards.

Engineering roles tend to filter out bad candidates more early, quickly and the probability of failing upwards is less when compared to PM and managerial roles.

Also, in my experience PM and managerial roles looks like skills based jobs but they tend to select individuals with specific personality types and they are more likely to excel.

Developer roles also select towards certain personality types but I think its more diverse than we care to admit.
by alex_dev42 | 2026-03-08 04:55:04+00:00
You make an excellent point about Dockerfile's flexibility being its enduring strength. In my experience, this flexibility is especially valuable in microservices environments where different services might need vastly different runtime environments - from Java Spring apps to Node.js services to Python data processing scripts.

The "copy files and run commands" approach you mention is indeed similar to traditional ops workflows, which I think is why it has such staying power. It's conceptually simple and maps well to how developers already think about building and deploying applications.
by zozbot234 | 2026-03-08 04:55:04+00:00
There's nothing "dogmatic" about containerization and providing services through userspace (IPC that's modeled as interaction with custom filesystem trees) rather than bespoke syscalls whenever feasible, which are basically the foundations of the plan9 approach. We do strive to do both in modern systems, but the approach to the problem space is clumsily bolted over the original system interfaces, and becomes overly complicated rather than elegant.
by kev009 | 2026-03-08 04:55:11+00:00
Conceivably, the 50 tankers per day could move in batches with the protection of a Destroyer. It's hard to imagine a credible surface or subsea threat with current fleet presence so it's basically a question of missile defense. Some constellation of vessels can indefinitely secure the zone if any powers that be with a suitable Navy desire it, and there are at least a few that have plausible capabilities.
by hollerith | 2026-03-08 04:57:57+00:00
>So for the petroleum products used within the US need the heavy oil that is imported.

Is that really true? I've heard experts say that sweet crude is easy to refine. I've always thought that the reason US refiners bother with sour crude is that they're better at refining it than non-US refiners are, so they make a little more money that way.
by BirAdam | 2026-03-08 04:58:40+00:00
Given that distributions are the distributors of packages and not the upstream developers, I think static linking is fine as is dep-shipping. The now dead Clear Linux was great at handling package distribution.

Personally, I think docker is dumb, so is AppImage, so is FlatPak, so are VMs… honestly, it’s all dumb. We all like these various things because they solve problems, but they don’t actually solve anything. They work around issues instead. We end up with abstractions and orchestrations of docker, handling docker containers running inside of VMs, on top of hardware we cannot know, see, control, or inspect. The containers are now just a way to offer shared hosting at a price premium with complex and expensive software deployment methods. We are charged extortionate prices at every step, and we accept it because it’s convenient, because these methods make certain problems go away, and because if we want money, investors expect to see “industry standards.”
by alex_dev42 | 2026-03-08 04:58:58+00:00
That FAQ is brilliant! There's something deeply satisfying about implementing modern computing concepts through ancient geometric constructions. The absurdity of a Game Boy ALU using compass and straightedge feels like the perfect intersection of mathematical elegance and programming whimsy.

The "I wanted to feel something" line really captures the essence of why we build these delightfully impractical things.
by Mawr | 2026-03-08 05:00:01+00:00
> And that is sad, as third party libraries should never perform better than standard library.

It's quite literally the opposite. The purpose of a stdlib is standardization, stability, and broad usefulness, not extreme performance. In fact, that can't be its purpose — you can only get max performance if you tune for your exact use case — but how could a stdlib that's by definition generic ever be able to do that?

> but then again there are faster libraries that can give you 3x performance(in case of numeric keys)

Yeah, exactly. If you can constrain your problem domain ("numeric keys only"), you can always squeeze out more performance than a generic algorithm can give you. Completely irrelevant as far as stdlib goes though.
by LAC-Tech | 2026-03-08 05:00:05+00:00
My predictions for the end of this war:

- The USA eventually declares some arbitrary "victory" condition.

- Iran will be left even poorer, and much less able to defend itself conventionally, but will remain under the same regime. Very likely they give up cooperating with atomic energy inspectors and do what North Korea did to a acquire weapons.

- Israel's ability to dictate US foreign and military policy will be degraded long term. What many commentators do not see is how anti-Israel younger consevatives trend in the US are now. It will be decades or
before a serious anti-Israel republican candidate will be fielded, but it is inevitable, and even your typical greatest-ally-wall-kissers will have to moderate themselves.

Will be very interesting to see what the mid terms bring. Some on the American right are already talking about voting democrat to protest - MAGA was specifically sold to them as an antidote to necon middle eatern entanglements.
by epistasis | 2026-03-08 05:01:57+00:00
I almost added "place the research into the context of other relevant research" as another way of saying "cite enough of the peer reviewer's papers" but fair enough.

I'm not sure if science has as much corruption as other fields, but it definitely has politics. PIs get to their position without the typical selection process for leadership that happens in most larger orgs, so there's more fragile and explosive personalities than I find in other management/leadership positions.
by dmonterocrespo | 2026-03-08 05:02:38+00:00
I built a small emulator project called Velxio.

A fully local, open-source Arduino emulator. Write Arduino code, compile it, and simulate it with real AVR8 CPU emulation and 48+ interactive electronic components,All running in your browser. GitHub: https://github.com/davidmonterocrespo24/velxio

The goal of this project was to learn more about how emulators work internally: CPU instructions, memory management, and low-level architecture.

It's still experimental, but it already runs basic instructions and I'm continuing to improve it.
by owlstuffing | 2026-03-08 05:03:03+00:00
What if these were real, type-safe expressions in Java:

2025 July 19 // → LocalDate
300M m/s // → Velocity
1 to 10 // → Range<Int>
Schedule Alice Tues 3pm // → CalendarEvent

That's the idea behind binding expressions — a compiler plugin I built to explore what it would mean if adjacency had operator semantics. It lets adjacent expressions bind based on their static types, forming new expressions through type-directed resolution.

Details here: https://github.com/manifold-systems/manifold/blob/master/doc...
by amluto | 2026-03-08 05:03:17+00:00
> You know very well what I meant by "compile to machine code".

I really don't. I think you mean that Rust compiles to machine code and neither loads executable code at runtime nor contains a JIT, so you can't possibly open a file and deserialize it and end up with code or particularly code-like things from that file being executed in your process.

My point is that there's an open-ended global registry of objects that implement a given trait, and it's possible (I think) to deserialize and get an unexpected type out, and calling its methods may run code that was not expected by whoever wrote the calling code. And the set of impls and thus the set of actual methods may expand by the mere fact of linking something else into the project.

This probably won't blow up quite as badly as NSCoding does in ObjC because Rust is (except when unsafe is used) memory-safe, so use-after-free just from deserializing is pretty unlikely. But I would still never use a mechanism like this if there was any chance of it consuming potentially malicious input.
by xiphias2 | 2026-03-08 05:04:31+00:00
The main problem I see is adding things slowly instead of automatic rewrites.

I remember adding lifetimes in some structs and then wanted to use generics and self pointing with lifetimes because that made sense, and then it didn't work because the composition of some features was not yet part of Rust.

Another thing: there are annotations for lifetimes in function signatures, but not inside the functions where there is a lot of magic happening that makes understanding them and working with them really hard: after finally the borrow checking gave me errors, that's when I just started to getting lots of lifetime errors, which were not shown before.

Rust should add these features but take out the old ones with guaranteed automatic update path.
by righthand | 2026-03-08 05:04:58+00:00
I have no idea I barely use it but has been around for ages, just figured it was a forgotten part of the net.

If you read my comments you will see I am skeptical towards AI and for the record I beleive that Gnod is algorithmic not necessarily the AI of “today”.

I wish gnod was a project I could pimp but the truth is that I got nothing. Go after the nerds who post their start up in comments. Me, I have never done so and I am too young to be the gnod creator.
by verdverm | 2026-03-08 05:05:33+00:00
The missiles destroyers have are not the kind you want to use to shoot down shaheds. The economics don't work out in the long run. Same for AIM-9s. There are some new guided pod rockets that likely break even, but they are new.

https://theaviationist.com/2026/03/06/typhoon-spotted-rocket...`
by rogual | 2026-03-08 05:07:15+00:00
Good article, and I feel your pain. Sometimes it feels like there's no point creating anything anymore, because shitty people will just steal it.

In case you're interested, though, I just wanted to point out that there are things you can do.

In my experience, Google does respond to requests to scrub infringing sites from their results if you submit their Copyright Claim form. They even give you a dashboard with the status of your claims. Probably worth trying your luck if you can be bothered.

Also, many of the theives have X and Bluesky accounts, and I don't believe either of these services let users censor replies to them.

There's also the payment platforms that are collecting money for your stolen work on behalf of these guys. They might be interested to hear about what's going on.

Then there's the hosting companies themselves, of course, hosting the infringing websites.

It's a pain, and it would be better if you could just create stuff and people weren't shitty, but we live in a fallen world and sometimes you gotta defend yourself. Up to you, of course, and I totally get it if you don't have the energy, but I've been through the same thing and you do have some power.