skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You'll never see true support for horizontal scalability in Postgres because doing so would require a fundamental shift in what Postgres is and the guarantees is provides. Postgres is available and consistent. It cannot truly be partitionable without impacting availability or consistency.

When an application grows to such a scale that you need a partitionable datastore it's not something you can just turn on. If you've been expecting consistency and availability, there will be parts of your application that will break when those guarantees are changed.

When you hit the point that you need horizontally scalable databases you must update the application. This is one of the reasons that NewSQL databases like CockroachDB and Vitess are so popular. They expose themselves as a SQL database but make you deal with the availability/consistency problems on day 1, so as your application scales you dont need to change anything.

Context:
I've built applications and managed databases on 10's of thousands of machines for a public saas company.
Oh, agreed then.
Language is funny. Some of the best engineers I know have terrible spelling.
Magnonic Combinatorial Memory
"The number of possible magnet arrangements scales factorially with the size of the magnetic part. The number of possible paths per one configuration scales factorial as well. It makes it possible to drastically increase the data storage density compared to conventional memory devices. Magnonic combinatorial memory with an array of 100 × 100 magnets can store all information generated by humankind."
They do have insane pattern recognition skills when it comes to models. Good mathematicians also have this.

But the good ones are very hard working too, in order to build a big enough library of building blocks.
Tech media has a lot to improve on, but Kara is one of the good ones. She has openly said her goal is to let people know what kind of people run these companies. That includes subtlety and accepting that people are complex.
I would presume it's a state actor. Generally in the blackhat world, attackers have very precise targets. They want to attack this company or this group of individuals. But someone who backdoors such a core piece of open source infrastructure wants to cast a wide net to attack as many as possible. So that fits the profile of a government intelligence agency who is interested in surveilling, well, everything.

Or it could in theory be malware authors (ransomware, etc). However these guys tend to aim at the low hanging fruits. They want to make a buck quickly. I don't think they have the patience and persistence to infiltrate an open source project for 2 long years to finally gain enough trust and access to backdoor it. On the other hand, a state actor is in for the long term, so they would spend that much time (and more) to accomplish that.

So that's my guess: Jia Tan is an employee of some intelligence agency. He chose to present an asian persona, but that's not necessarily who he truly represents. Could be anyone, really: Russia, China, Israel, or even the US, etc.

Edit: given that Lasse Collin was the only maintainer of xz utils in 2022 before Jia Tan, I wouldn't be surprised if the state actor interfered with Lasse somehow. They could have done anything to distract him from the project: introduce a mistress in his life, give him a high-paying job, make his spouse sick so he has to care for her, etc. With Lasse not having as many hours to spend on the project, he would have been more likely to give access to a developer who shows up around the same time and who is highly motivated to contribute code. I would be interested to talk to Lasse to understand his circumstances around 2022.
Some companies pay fine. I’m not going to find 250k for how easy my work is jumping ship.
See comments about "Hans Janson" upthread, he appeared to collaborate on the exploit in other ways as well.
Yeah, Gruber is one of the most enthusiastic cheerleaders for Apple outside of Cupertino itself. It comes from a place of deep and abiding love, but he seems to see Apple kind of the way its internal culture also does — as a plucky upstart who has to fight for its very survival against all the big bad industry leaders (IBM and MS, originally). That viewpoint has become more and more absurd the larger and more dominant that Apple has got, leading us to this point where they want to argue that they should be able to simultaneously be an iron-fisted gatekeeper, and a purveyor of apps that “compete” with less-privileged apps on that same platform.
You can be certain it has happened, many times. Now think of all the software we mindlessly consume via docker, language package managers, and the like.

Remember, there is no such thing as computer security. Make your decisions accordingly :)
When I was in college I went on a family vacation where we crossed the CBBT. I remember I had an early Android phone acting as a hotspot and I was trying to play multiplayer Minecraft on my laptop. It worked well up until the first tunnel portion, at which point signal dropped out, and I decided to actually pay attention to my surroundings. (To be clear, I was not the one driving)
I think the confusion might be because the Carpathian zone includes Romania, Slovakia, and Ukraine, and the site I linked to is using that number solely for Romania.

In any case, it's not my website and the general point remains that the specific region has a big percentage of European bears.
We're just speed-running the NN pendulum, at this point.
Or we could slightly rethink our economic system and buy ourselves some time to deal with all the problems we caused previously due at least partially to unsustainable population growth.

https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2015/01/25/tomtoro03_wide-6...
After a certain point, a lot of reddit is just bots having discussion with bots.

If you don't believe me, start paying attention to usernames of this format: Word-word-XXXX, where XXXX are some 4 random digits. These usernames almost always post some kind of ragebait or low-effort comment designed to promote engagement.

Yes, regular people do it too, but usually in a more subtle/unique way and typically have a wider variety of usernames.

The leadership just had to keep this bot scam going on long enough to go public and dump the majority of their shares. Once the public realizes this, it'll be a very quick spiral down.
You know you've read too much SF when...your first reaction to the title is "A time machine could revolutionize physics, if it can be built".
> It's insane to me that the now-adult students still oppose the journalist. They were victims of this law. Whatever they are saving on their taxes now, they lose in a lifetime of benefits - money and otherwise - from a better personal education and a better educated community.

You are significantly mischaracterizing the criticisms by the students:

> Trigueros said he was not among the most distressed of Jones’ classmates and listened to both sides of the debate. He understood the Chronicle’s attempt to reveal the challenges facing teachers and students, but said a major line was crossed when Jones stepped into the Peer Resource Center, where the school’s most vulnerable students gravitated and opened up.
Nov. 3, 1992: Jonny Dror hangs out at the Peer Resource Center, a gathering space where students could speak their minds at George Washington High School in San Francisco.

> “She saw kids were processing divorces and death and homelessness and coming out. She saw all of that,” he said. “We wanted to consider (Shann the reporter) an ally and advocate for us, (but there was) this deep betrayal, and we didn’t consent to all of that.”
That's fair, I guess if you're already around retirement age, being unable to find a job might be an impetus to quit looking.
What about sponsors? Actually, now I have the idea of a platform similar to Kickstarter but for software development, and with just sponsors. It wouldn't work, sure... Except in some cases. Like when things like this happen...
upon further reflection all 3 of your points are cogent and fair and valid. my original point was a knee-jerk reaction to this. :/
I'm reading into the story alright.

> Jones’ classmates also came off as complicated figures, brilliant and with seemingly endless potential, but so used to diminishing resources that many didn’t see themselves as victims. It’s the resigned lack of ambition... [Jones] found soft drinks and apathy...

> ...many of the students involved grew more resentful and felt unheard.

> I’m not going to calm [the students] down. … I’m not going to try to silence them. If they’re angry and they want to march [to voice their anger at the news article], then I’m going to help them figure out how to do that.

> Tigueros [the student] added: “I’ve got kids now, and imagining that somebody would reveal the secrets that my daughter gave to somebody she trusted? It sounds horrific.”

> Jones didn’t write about the deepest personal secrets discussed in the center...

Tigueros, a now-adult student who was friends with Jones: verbatim only thinking about himself and his family in that quote. And the thing he says verbatim he worries about the most didn't even happen. It doesn't even make sense. It isn't horrific.

I know they were defenseless kids then. But there were also ambitious students at that school. Kids who would benefit from the funding that evaporated. What of them?
1. Everything must be visible. A diff between the release tarball and tag should be unacceptable. It was hidden from the eyes to begin with.

2. Build systems should be simple and obvious. Potentially not even code. The inclusion was well hidden.

3. This was caught through runtime inspection. It should be possible to halt any Linux system at runtime, load debug symbols and map _everything_ back to the source code. If something can't map back then regard it as a potentially malicious blackbox.

There has been a strong focus and joint effort to make distributions reproducible. What we haven't managed though is prove that the project compromises only of freshly compiled content. Sorta like a build time / runtime "libre" proof.

This should exist for good debugging anyway.

It wouldn't hinder source code based backdoors or malicious vulnerable code. But it would detect a backdoor like this one.

Just an initial thought though, and probably hard to do, but not impossibly hard, especially for a default server environment.
Very sad to hear this. I remember emailing him about a newbie question I had about a topic in his Security Engineering book, and he responded very kindly with a detailed explanation that corrected my misunderstanding. Which was really lovely of him. A genius and a gentleman. Rest in peace, my condolences to all who knew and loved him.
It does not require either of those.
Why would you not use it just because Google coopted it?

Google will rename or cancel it soon anyways.
Well yeah. Linux is basically funded and contributed to “by a bunch of big tech corporate interest”. Even Microsoft contributes to it.
- "Decaying muons also radiate energetic neutrinos, creating a novel radiation safety challenge. Shooting horizontally from the collider ring, these elusive particles would zip through the earth and emerge dozens of kilometers away."

I understand you have neutrinos leaking from the entire collider ring, along all the tangent rays? That fills out an entire geometric plane!
Never hear of meebok in comment above yours. Even a name like that has a .org and .com [1] neither of which, as far as I can tell, have anything to do with the e-reader.

[1] Danish, I think, and kept timing out.
Chelsea hasn't run for president yet.
I see, we have a volunteer for the sacrifice ..
Why would Google use "Gemini" now that the astrology community has co-opted it?
> where do we arbitrarily draw the line?

clearly, a line is if both species are alive at the same time and competing for resources. we don't have do be moronic/sophomoric about the discourse.
Technically editorialized title (since the original article just uses the emoji verbatim), but I think this is a net improvement.
I can only chuckle when I read things like this. There was another post on the homepage today talking about how podcasts in general are still growing in popularity. But Google fumbled the bag yet again!
00011900: 0000 4883 f804 7416 b85f 5f5f 5f33 010f ..H...t..____3.. │
00011910: b651 0483 f25a 09c2 0f84 5903 0000 488d .Q...Z....Y...H. │
00011920: 7c24 40e8 5875 0000 488b 4c24 4848 3b4c |$@.Xu..H.L$HH;L │
00011930: 2440 7516 4885 c074 114d 85ff 0f84 3202 $@u.H..t.M....2. │
00011940: 0000 498b 0ee9 2c02 0000 b9fe ffff ff45 ..I...,........E │
00011950: 31f6 4885 db74 0289 0b48 8bbc 2470 1300 1.H..t...H..$p.. │
00011960: 0048 85ff 0f85 c200 0000 0f57 c00f 2945 .H.........W..)E │
00011970: 0048 89ac 2470 1300 0048 8bbc 2410 0300 .H..$p...H..$... │
00011980: 0048 8d84 2428 0300 0048 39c7 7405 e8ad .H..$(...H9.t... │
00011990: e6ff ff48 8bbc 24d8 0200 0048 8d84 24f0 ...H..$....H..$. │
000119a0: 0200 0048 39c7 7405 e893 e6ff ff48 8bbc ...H9.t......H.. │
000119b0: 2480 0200 0048 8d84 2498 0200 0048 39c7 $....H..$....H9. │
000119c0: 7405 e879 e6ff ff48 8bbc 2468 0100 004c t..y...H..$h...L │
Please tell me what this code does, Sheldon
I agree, probably a coincidence. Just wanted to point out we can, actually, find the username online.
How to use stacked PRs to unblock your entire team
Unfortunately eval in a shell script has an effect on the semantics but is not necessary to do some kind of parsing of the contents of a variable, unlike Python or Perl or JavaScript. A

$goo

line (without quotes) will already do word splitting, though it won't do another layer of variable expansion and unquoting, for which you'll need

eval "$goo"

(This time with quotes).
This is very likely the case. Arch maintainers do get early information on CVEs just like any other major distro.

But with pacman/makepkg 6.1 (which recently released) git sources can also now be check summed IIRC which is a funny coincidence.
> c)

Is there a field of math that's something like "local actors put in what appear to be rational choices, yet to external observers it often appears 'broken' or 'bad'"? Seems like a field of game theory or something. Many times, those internal view the situation as acceptable.

Politics in America seems like it is almost always this type of result. All local actors, all take rational choices, and all America says politics is a ______ (choice of 50 negative words) https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/09/19/americans-fe...
Sorry for the derail, but I really hate that published papers with audio/video clips often don't work at all on iPadOS or iOS. I do most of my leisure reading on my iPad Pro, purposefully separating that leisure time from when I'm on my MacBook, which I try to use exclusively for working.
Pure speculation but my guess is a specific state actor ahem is looking for developers innocently working with open source to then strongarm them into doing stuff like this.
It's definitely not optimal, but I love doing this stuff with TLA+. You define rules for state transitions, and constraints that cannot happen, and then you run a model check.

There's probably better ways of doing it, but I already know TLA+ and TLC does a breadth-first search so it'll find the shortest path.
To put a positive spin on it, within a certain age and savings range, someone might choose not to be underemployed or just say screw it if they weren't finding anything they were looking for. Admittedly that's basically a fairly high earner story so a fairly small part of the mix. But I can absolutely see someone checking out a few years before they might have chosen to if they're not finding what they're looking for and don't want or need to be a Starbucks barista.
I'll try without it.
I always imagined it as everything always moved at the speed of light in spacetime, like 4d motion vectors that were always the same length. Acceleration is changing the angle of the vector to move through more space and less time. Space curvature causes motion on stationary objects (gravity) because of some of the time motion becomes space motion.

I kind of assume this is incorrect because it seems like a simple explanation and explanations of this stuff tend to not be simple
Well... It could.
> The issue you see about pricing is that they only offer that cheap price in some data centers. Atlanta has it, but the current default selection of Miami does not. They could definitely do better to make this obvious since they are advertising that minimum, but this is not at all surprising to me who has used tons of cloud provisioning UIs. I don't think it's reasonable to expect the same pricing in all regions, no one actually does that.

They have a one year free-tier you can sign-up for during your trial. I am on that plan now. Still I always forget to search different regions when attempting to launch a free VM, so there is some delay until I remember to choose Atlanta.
Any good use cases for Fuchsia over Linux?
The same authors have also contributed to Zstd
Seems like a contradiction...

Timekeepers may subtract a second in 2029 as planet spins slightly faster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39841984
With higher pay plus less experience comes entitlement. It’s the attitude of I shouldn’t have to do x, y, or z. Usually it’s because they can’t do those things and in full fear mode vomit some bullshit excuses.

That, more than anything else, is why I’m in another line of work full of former programmers who are eager to do something else.
Was it the result of them getting lucky with timing the RSU grant or was it just their original offer?
This has similar ideas to this review that was posted here a few weeks ago:

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/marshall-sahlins-n...
I am not mischaracterizing the criticisms. They should have the maturity by now to see that she was indeed trustworthy, to admit that their gut reactions were wrong, and it is especially bad of them to invoke the modern, pervasive and mischaracterized "consent" framework, today, in defense of their feeling pissed off 30 years ago.

It doesn't change the fact that they are in favor of Prop 13. The average person in California is in favor of Prop 13, and that's exactly the problem! In that sense, it doesn't really matter what happened. They missed the point.
How many people read build.rs files of all the transitive dependencies of a moderately large Rust project?

Autoconf is bad in this respect but it's not like the alternatives are better (maybe Bazel).
NAT traversal is the first point on the feature list of the linked repo. So in context, it's important to point out.

While in theory it doesn't it reduces the possible connections quite a bit.
Though STUN servers are plenty on the internet and free to use.
There's even a service providing TURN (US geo though), but I have no idea who runs it and what their business model is, so I wouldn't rely on it.
Funny how Lasse Collin started to ccing himself and Jia Tan from 2024-03-20 (that was a day of tons of xz kernel patches), he never did that before. :)

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240320183846.19475-2-lasse.co...
I've been over and under this a few times in my life, and it truly is a modern marvel.

https://www.cbbt.com/
I'm not sure what this guy's obsession with violent crime is. What SBF did was incredibly violent. He destroyed the fortunes of thousands of people in a way that caused visceral material harm. I'd rather get punched in the face than lose years of savings.
Western populations are shrinking already, so it would have to specifically target peoples in Africa and the Middle East. Turns out degrowth advocates and Neonazis have shared goals.
A lot of the work with Podcasting 2.0 is moving things into apps like Fountain or Castamatic. By all accounts, people are way way more likely to engage if they don't have to leave their app.

There's crypto-less features that Podcasting 2.0 adds like livestream notifications and transcriptions. Apple actually just added transcriptions to their app officially!
> You can't just shut it off suddenly

Everyone who says this is pushing a false dichotomy. The two solutions are not "create a landed gentry who pass preferential tax rates to their genetic offspring" and "kick grandma to the curb and throw sand in her face while twirling your mustache".

Many other states have allowances/exemptions for a single owner-occupied "homestead" to prevent older people from losing their homes. Just copy their homework. Under those schemes you don't stop owing property taxes, but (with some variations) you can defer them until you sell the property or pass away. And it is beyond sick (and anti-American and probably unconstitutional) that the Prop 13 tax preference can be inherited by children and grandchildren.

The only "problem" with those schemes (from the perspective of Prop 13 proponents) is that they do not allow the creation of a class of "petite nobility".
Not to mention the Gemini Protocol, which had the name long before Google: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
That's better than being forced to do interviews at other FANGs, getting offers and only then getting raises matching those offers. I heard Netflix suggested this as well, for determining the current "market rate". Offloading the market research to engineers basically.
[Deleted per below]
Seems like a contradiction...

Polar ice melt caused by climate change is slowing the Earth's rotation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39858909
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39852953
Math is extremely good for precision and conciseness.

It's a terrible language for communicating novel ideas to another human being. The amount of context one needs to grasp what is being said is enormous.

That's not to say it doesn't have its place. It's more to say that it's almost always the case that if you aren't communicating with someone in a parallel research space on a mathematical topic, you should supplement that communication with some context and de-generalization to get the message across.

I think it's about pattern. If your audience is already familiar with a pattern and its common properties (matrix mathematics, imaginary number mathematics, infinite series, for example), you can communicate an idea concisely by providing them an instance that fits a pattern and making a small change. But there are way too many patterns to just assume the audience knows what context we're in.

To that end, I generally highly recommend the "3Blue1Brown" channel on YouTube as a great dive into multiple math topics, because the author does a great job of straddling the notational representations and the underlying concepts they describe.
A long read about NBA shot data
> enough neutrinos to be dangerous

That would have to be a huge amount of these little things.
> Maybe there is a demon in my head giving me the illusion of reality

Me too! And yeah and if it weren't for that guy I could be a perfectly adequate automaton instead of dealing with this 'consciousness' nonsense. :P
Not convinced. The second reference has a slight Indian accent that isn’t carried over into the generated samples.

Training data bias?
Isn't the Bitter Lesson more like, "Whatever random thing you try will probably outperform every logical approach, if you just do it enough?"

More concisely, I suppose it could be expressed as, "Nothing really matters except choosing a good fitness function."
I haven’t been keeping up, is Fuchsia in use much? From their site I see mention of Google nest hub as using it, but that is it.
Even in binary you can see patterns. Not saying it's perfect to show binary diffs (but it is better than showing nothing) but I know even my slow mammalian brain can spot obvious human readable characters in various binary encoding formats. If I see a few in a row which doesn't make sense, why wouldn't I poke it?