skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I tried btrfs for the first time a few weeks ago. I had been looking for mature r/w filesystems that support realtime compression, and btrfs seemed like a good choice.

My use case is this: I normally make full disk images of my systems and store them on a (100TB) NAS. As the number of systems grows, the space available for multiple backup generations shrinks. So compression of disk images is good, until you want to recover something from a compressed disk image without doing a full restore. If I put an uncompressed disk image in a compressed (zstd) btrfs filesystem, I can mount volumes and access specific files without waiting days to uncompress.

So I gave it a try and did a backup of an 8TB SSD image to a btrfs filesystem, and it consumed less than 4TB, which was great. I was able to mount partitions and access individual files within the compressed image.

The next thing I tried, was refreshing the backup of a specific partition within the disk image. That did not go well.

Here's what I did to make the initial backup:

(This was done on an up-to-date Ubuntu 24.04 desktop.)

cd /btrfs.backups

truncate -s 7696581394432 8TB-Thinkpad.btrfs

mkfs.btrfs -L btrfs.backup 8TB-Thinkpad.btrfs

mount -o compress=zstd 8TB-Thinkpad.btrfs /mnt/1

pv < /dev/nvme0n1 > /mnt/1/8TB-Thinkpad.nvme0n1

All good so far. The backup took about three hours, but would probably go twice as fast if I had used my TB4 dock instead of a regular USB-C port for the backup media.

Things went bad when I tried to update one of the backed up partitions:

kpartx -a /mnt/1/8TB-Thinkpad.nvme0n1

pv < /dev/nvme0n1p5 > /dev/mapper/loop20p5

This sort of thing works just fine on a normal, uncompressed ext4 filesystem.
I did not really expect this to work here, and my expectations were met.

The result was a bunch of kernel errors, the backup device being remounted r/o, and a corrupt btrfs filesystem with a corrupt backup file.

So for this use case, btrfs is a big improvement for reading compressed disk images on the fly, but it is not suitable for re-writing sections of disk images.
For example, zero is the only real infinitesimal value.
I think a dense philosophical text on ethics at the edge of sentience is a useful thing for a society to have.

Even if it's hard to turn that into a widespread shift of consciousness, it's a great first step and a solid foundation to build on. Assuming it is solid philosophically, that is - no way to tell that from just an article.
I think this is the key to them actually being useful - generate a sane project in some widely used language under the hood, and let people give up on the low code solution when they outgrow the guardrails. Otherwise you're just dooming yourself to an eventual rewrite as soon as you need some feature that's not supported.
That's nonsense. a/b is float in Python 3, and even in other languages a/b gets closer to it's actual value as a and b get bigger (the "limit", which is the basis of Algebra). So four operations in programming generally do agree with foundations of Algebra. But a/0=0 is %100 against Algebra. And it's very unintuitive. It's basically saying zero is the same as infinity, and therefore all numbers are the same, so why bother having any numbers at all?
I've generally chosen a new (to me) or spartan lang to challenge myself, but this year I'm going easy mode with python and just focusing on meeting the requirement.
> I think that trying to read political messages in Borges is wrong and disrespectful

You can say wrong. But for the record, you lost the credibility to use the word "disrespectful" when you termed all philosophers as "wordcels." :)
Fidelity marks up its X stake by 32 percent
doesn't the existence of the public leaderboard beg to differ? :)
Totally, these companies are pushing towards showcasing their AI models as self thinking and reasoning AI while they are just trained of a lot of amount of data in dataset format which they extrapolate to find the right answer.

They still can't think outsider their box of datasets
And all real-world computers are also just finite state machines. But we obviously model computers as turing machines for a reason.
Roman numerals were designed for a world where calculations were done on an abacus, and numerical systems merely recorded inputs and outputs.

In that world they are better than Arabic numerals, for the simple reason that your brain doesn't have to translate so hard between what you see, and what you record.
> I would have loved that big corps would have taken this approach, as it opens the doors to others to add features for different use cases

EDB and Cybertech definitely made a great start with Zheap[0] although the initiative stalled for whatever reason

Hopefully the community can support this effort to improve the Table AM API - it would be beneficial even beyond oriole. As you point out, a Pluggable Storage system in Postgres would open up a few new use cases

[0] https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Zheap
It is kinda interesting. I talked with a less technical member of my extended family over the holidays. Fairly successful guy in his chosen profession ( accounting ). To say he was skeptical is an understatement and he is typically the most pro-corporate shill you can find for a company to save a few bucks. I assumed he would be attempting to extol its virtues with the assumption that lower level work has errors anyway. I was wrong. Sadly, we didn't get to continue down that line since my kid started crying at that moment.
Hmm, does Asahi Linux translate between x86 / x64 and ARM layers (e.g., similar to Rosetta on MacOS)? If not, I can’t imagine it’s all that many.

(If Valve can somehow find a way to nail that, I imagine that’ll be a huge boon for portable PC gaming.)
Do I understand correctly that this will also change the price while I am using it? So if I get a server now at $1/h and run it overnight can the price jump so that the price will actually be $2/h?

Or is the price at purchase locked in?
Hopefully without the latency, it's slow to respond on a 2022 M2 Macbook Air (tried Firefox and Safari)
Interesting, a Japanese view of old America. I think I can see a bit of Japanese influence in the paintings. I think the paintings are quite good and end up being nostalgic.
Most everything else I've read has just been vibes. If this book can deliver on being more than vibes, I'm all for it.
This is right. Staff is also another title where EMs abscond from any engineering duty. They offload all engineering to staff engineer while themselves playing empire-building and performance review games.

As a result, the management ladder in tech companies become completely detached from what the company is producing and how to bring benefit to customers.
Show HN: Glyph3D – A 3D text visualizer for macOS and iOS / iPadOS
Hello internet folks!

I'm happy to share the first TestFlight release of Glyph3D, a 3D text visualizer for macOS and iOS. It's free, supports pretty much any utf8 data, and is a pretty interesting way to navigate your repositories or data directories without the limitations of standard text windows!

Download and bookmark for macOS and iOS:
https://github.com/tikimcfee/LookAtThat/

- You should be able to download public repos from GitHub and render them.

- Play with opening and closing windows. I've disabled many of the in-flight features to keep user confusion down, and will be creating additional documentation about those features as they are implemented.

- Editing works but there's nowhere to put the data for now ;) The user can pull from the app's caches if they want for now, but there's no actual repo support - by design. Bringing in the git SDK, or accessing the CLI, is a bit more work and danger than I want to include in the app right now.

Any feedback is welcome, and if you'd like to support me or the project in any way, please reach out to me, and I'll be looking forward to that conversation.
Here's to another year of being sleep deprived for the entire month of December.
I know that now, even though some of the details remain fuzzy (Get_Line reads 100 characters?), but it's just that the documentation is a big pile of facts with very little to guide you towards the right function/type. And then to get it to use in the rest of the code. And of course, many 'modern' helpers are simply not available, so that too takes a bit of time to find out. But that's learning.
In SQL, if you divide by zero, you get a NULL. If you divide by NULL, you get NULL (any operation involving a NULL yields NULL, even GROUP BY). I call it "a black hole zero", if it touches anything, that thing becomes a black hole zero.

Some languages will wrap division by zero in a special type, a NaN (not a number). You can then reason on top if that NaN if you want to.

So, in a sense, there are some people already doing practical stuff with substituting /0 for a new symbol.
clabretro did an interesting video on the hardware of a 1997 PowerPC RS/6000 machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8IFtnD5oOM
It’s on here
If you were to define a/0 the most logical choice would be a new special value "Infinity". The second best choice would be the maximum supported value of the type of a (int, int64 etc). Anything else would be stupid.
iOS 18 is the worst software Apple has ever released
I was in the same spot for the first few years of my career and I regret staying there as long as I did. It really is easier to learn if you have senior engineers to give you feedback. My recommendation is to find a new job.

Failing that, I’m not sure what your relationship with your manager is like, but in most tech companies, part of your manager’s job is to help you grow. Maybe they could help you reach out to the few other tech people at the company to organize some kind of collaboration to help you all grow and improve.
Why do you care about the time so much then? Just ignore it :D
Google Cloud TPU v6e Trillium Shown at SC24
Well, it's not great, but it's still a step up from an opaque firmware blob and (maybe?) still allowed under FCC rules.
In the computational domain we hold entropy in high esteem. Arbitrarily assigning a value of 0 does not preserve entropy. We could return a promise that eventually we will not overflow if we get to be very very clever (arbitrary time) so that we can maintain purity.
For a more current example of a mathematical technique that preceded formalization by a considerable amount, consider renormalization. Particularly renormalization over a calculation that takes place over Feynman diagrams.

For decades physicists were happily using this to predict experiment, while mathematicians were tearing their hair out trying to make some formal sense of this, even if only in a limited context. I'd have to do some poking around to find out whether mathematicians are happy about it yet, even though the idea is older than I am.
If my bank uses "GlobalSign" and my browser says "Brazilian CA", I know something is wrong. Granted, such a discrepancy would have been more noticeable back then since the lock icon had the issuer displayed next to it. Now I have to click the lock, then select a menu item to get that information. And, if I'm feeling particularly paranoid, it takes 5 clicks to review the certificate. (At least in Firefox.)

If the bank is unable to tell me which CA they use through a trusted channel, the only way I could tell if there is a problem is if the CA changes.
But if you write a + b and the result is wrapped around or saturated, it's not integer addition. It's something else and should be written in another way in code and have a different name. I am aware of modular arithmetic.

If you have a type named "int" with an operation called "addition", and that operation is not actually integer addition... it's wrong.
I have enough fun side project ideas that I want to do. Ones which will also be helpful for me once I’m done with them.
"Zero" is just a specific element of the field which satisfies being the additive identity as well as the rest of the properties of a field where 0 is mentioned. When the rest of the axioms refer to "zero" they refer to the exact same element of the set that is also the additive identity.

It's not the "number zero" because a field does not care about numbers, it's just elements of a set (which might be numbers like in R's case).

1 is not "multiplicative zero", it's the "multiplicative identity".

0 and 1 are just the shorthand we give for those elements. because those are the symbols we use in R which is the most common field we deal with in everyday life.

Or am I misunderstanding your question?
I’ve personally found every standard I’ve been presented with to be disingenuous in some way.

Take Group A, sometime in their life their prefrontal cortex got advanced enough to notice non-human species experience pain and other similar responses to stimuli, after a lifetime of being apathetic or completely dismissive to the idea. Group A is way slower in this realization than everyone else but they don’t know it. Now Group A wants everyone to change their behavior for the specific reason that non-human species experience pain and have responses to stimuli, and that if everyone else knew that they would change their behavior on their own.

Except everyone else already knew that, and developed their existing behavior already understanding that and coming to terms with that.

Group A needed an octopus documentary and a psychedelic journey to point this out to them. Everyone else could already tell.

Makes it hard to have a conversation with Group A about anything because Group A is slow.
One way archive, no automated deleting. I treat it as a WORM drive (write once, read many). Family Apple iCloud shares 2TB storage for $10/month. If we get close to the 2TB limit, I’ll refactor the pipeline.
> even in other languages a/b gets closer to it's actual value as a and b get bigger (the "limit", which is the basis of Algebra)

This is not generally true. 5/2 = 2, 50/20 = 2, 500/200 = 2, and so on no matter how big the numbers get.
I would presume:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement
That's just how it works — Gigabit Ethernet doesn't mean gigabit data transfer rates. This is why all fiber providers I'm aware of provide ONTs with 2.5 GbE for their gigabit internet service.

If you're paying for gigabit internet and getting 925 Mb/sec through a gigabit Ethernet router, you're doing great. But you need to use a 2.5 GbE-capable router/switch to get advertised speeds.
I thought at first it was a way to share the symbol tables between multiple instances (though you could use memory mapping), but then I read this in the README.md:

> Server is written in C, with no special headers or SDK used.

So maybe it helps them keep the parser simpler? Decouples that part from the GUI in a way they prefer?
Are you a developer working on multithreaded applications? Debugging deadlocks, segfaults, and assertion failures can be tough, but McMini is here to help!

What is McMini?

McMini is an advanced dynamic partial-order reduction (DPOR)-based model checker that scans your multithreaded binaries for concurrency issues like deadlocks and segmentation faults. It runs directly on Linux binaries—no modifications or wrappers needed.

How does it work?

Just run your executable with:

```
mcmini ./your_program.out
```

McMini will explore possible thread schedules and detect issues that regular execution may miss.

Once McMini has found a deadlock or race condition, you can use the `mcmini-gdb` command to step forward and backward in the execution trace, observing all thread operations that lead to the bug.

Key Features:

- Direct analysis of Linux binaries

- Deadlock, segfault, and assertion failure detection

- Step through execution traces with `mcmini-gdb` to pinpoint issues

- Quick setup: install with Git and go

- Advanced tracing options for in-depth analysis

- Ideal for debugging multithreaded code across all experience levels

Whether you’re a computer science student, a software engineer, or just learning about concurrency and multithreading, McMini can help you analyze, test, and optimize your code.

---

Try McMini Today!

[GitHub Repo](https://github.com/mcminickpt/mcmini.git)

[Manual](https://mcmini-doc.readthedocs.io/)

Get a flavor of McMini's advanced usage by reading our tutorials:

- [Running McMini](https://mcmini-doc.readthedocs.io/usage/tutorial-basic.html)

- [Analyzing a Subtle Bug](https://mcmini-doc.readthedocs.io/usage/tutorial-subtle.html)
So.. I think it already has been happening ( people attempting to poison some sources for a variety of reasons ). I was doing a mini fun project on HN aliases ( attempting to derive/guess their user's age based on nothing but that alias ) and I came across some number of profiles that have bios clearly intended to mess with bots one way or another. Some have fun instructions. Some have contradictory information. Some are the length of a small night story. I am not judging. I just find it interesting. Has vibes of a certain book about a rainbow.
I very much agree with the perspective that LLMs are not suited for “reasoning” in the sense of creative problem solving or application of logic. I think that the real potential in this domain is having them act as a sort of “compiler” layer that bridges the gap between natural language - which is imprecise - and formal languages (sql, prolog, python, lean, etc) that are more suited for solving these types of problems. And then maybe synthesizing the results / outputs of the formal language layer. Basically “agents”.

That being said, I do think that LLMs are capable of “verbal reasoning” operations. I don’t have a good sense of the boundaries that distinguish the logics - verbal, qualitative, quantitative reasoning. What comes to my mind is the verbal sections of standardized tests.
Review of "Every Valley: The Story of Handel's Messiah" by Charles King
Ok so in a nutshell they took a turtlebot and stuck a 3d printer on top of it. Crazy what qualifies as an IEEE article these days.

Wasn't there a working implementation of cooperative holonomic robots a few years back that each had a print head and they could print arbitrarily large parts by driving around instead of using a gantry for the xy axis? I'm trying to find the article but Google just swarms me with a quadrillion results of how to 3D print a mecanum robot so there's that.
It’s things like this that constantly remind me that biology is far more complex in practice, and even while having a deeper understanding than most, I’m relying on some very grossly oversimplified abstractions.
Both low code and Rails have become a lot less relevant since LLM assisted coding became the norm.

Low code became less relevant because 1. LLMs solved many of the problems low code solves with better control over the output, and 2. you can’t use many low code platforms as an output from LLMs or other types of models (yet).

Rails became less relevant because Ruby is dynamically typed, and this poses a challenge for LLMs due to hallucinations. You don’t want to find out at runtime what things were complete bs from the model. Static typing isn’t a panacea to hallucinations but it’s a significant enough advantage, especially against such a dynamic language as Ruby. Even mere mortals struggle to understand the magic in meta programming DRY golf that many in the Ruby world have chosen to embrace.

EDIT: Any down voters care to explain why you disagree?
That's 50% better than losing all your data!
Crucially, this is what MacIntyre's narrativity thesis is talking about:

If a university professor is giving a lecture on decentralized finance and forks into a recipe for chocolate chip cookies: crack two eggs, add a cup of flour, and fold in brown sugar prior to baking, it would break linearity.

A generalizable strategy for synthesizing LLMs differentiated by their training parameters is a tokenization is isolating data sets and then establishing a lattice in uniformity within the field of technics.
This is something people on message boards believe that practitioners roll their eyes about.
Retro game coders achieve some pretty astounding results sometimes. One of my favorite examples is one who optimized super Mario 64 to such a degree that it runs with much better framerate on the original hardware. Also, multiplayer was added: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_rzYnXEQlE
> in an effort— well intentioned—to control the coronavirus, we may inflict great damage on ourselves.

And you believe he was wrong and you believe Covid was a "Holocaust-scale outcome" ? He said the rates would be exaggerated and now with the benefit of hindsight, although some would claim common sense after seeing the sensationalism of the media, we can see he was correct. Or do you believe that's not true ?
Scalable and Performant Data Loading
because I believe there is a realistic prospect of materializing and it would increase accountability for many actions where its currently impossible even with the burgeoning ubiquity of video
BTRFS Raid10 can seemlessly cpmbole multiple raw disks without trying to match capacity.

Next time I just replace my 4T disk in my 5 disk Raid10 with 20T. Currently I have 4+8+8+16+20 disks.

MD raid does not do checksumming. Although I believe XFS is about to add support for it in the future.

I have had my BTRFS raid filesystem survive a lot during the past 14 years:
- burned power: no loss of data

- failed ram that started corrupting memory: after a little hack 1) BTRFS scrub saved most of data even though the situation got so bad kernel would crash in 10 minutes

- buggy pcie SATA extension card: I tried to add 6th disk, but noticed after fee million write errors to one disk that it just randomly stopped passing data through: no data corruption, although btrfs write error counters are in 10s of millions now

- 4 disk failures: I have only one original disk still running and it is showing a lot of bad sectors

1) one of the corrupted sectors was in the btrfs tree that contains the checksums for rest of the filesystem and both copies were broken. It prevented access to some 200 files. I patched the kernel to log the exact sector in addition to the expected and actual value. Turns our it was just a single bit flip. So I used hex editor to flip it back to correct value and got the files back
Can limit behavior be defined as Cauchy sequences?
Here’s a challenge: Get that thing to record license plates at night.

All the closed source ones I’ve seen set the aperture/exposure based on the average exposure of the frame, so the plate comes out as a pure white rectangle.

Have it sweep through bright and dark when recording at night.
It's advent calendar-style, so <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_in_public_domain> might be more informative.
Oh this is a really good book. I've had it in my want-to-read pile for years. I will read the review now.
Nope that's the answer. Additive zero is the only zero.
Solved the whole thing. It's a business problem. Just replace the Chief Historian.
Just in case anyone else is out of the loop like me. This can be used as a plugin in obsidian! https://obsidian.md/plugins?search=markw
AoC is fun for learning a new language but I feel like all of us have that one "project" that we rewrite every few years in this language or that to learn it.
So I'm confused.

In my college classes, sometimes we'd get problems involving "construct a markov chain to model this process". Doing the naive, obvious solution wouldn't make the probabilities work because we'd "forget" crucial information, so we'd just add on extra bits to the state (e.g. "flag1 flag2 flag3 ...") that would make the number of nodes exponentially larger.

But the infinite information part of markov chains is really helpful sometimes too, e.g. the position of your random walk wouldn't be encoded in your "state" (which could be infinite), it'd just be returned as a value (if you were trying to compute the distance from the origin or something).

Are you guys just arguing over "at what point does this shoving a billion bits into my state make it not really a 'markov' chain like you'd traditionally think about it"? Basically the formal definition vs what we intuitively think about as the 'point' of markov processes and why the markov observation is important?