skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Relational databases are not the preferred storage mechanism at Amazon. If a team wants to use an OLTP relational database it’s possible that it will be a decision they will need to defend at any kind of design review.

Of course there are relational databases running OLTP workloads, but it’s far away from the norm. There was a program a while ago to shift many RDBMS systems onto something else.
Oh, it's certainly more standard than it used to be, and maybe it's on the way to being fully standard. But it definitely hasn't arrived in the spot that npm, cargo, hex, bundler, and similar have in their respective ecosystems.

Npm is a pretty good example of what pip should be. Npm has had to compete with other package managers for a long time but has remained the standard simply because it actually has all the basic features that people expect out of a package manager. So other package managers can spin up using the npm registry providing slightly better experiences in certain ways, but npm covers the basics.

Pip really does not even cover the basics, hence the perpetual search for a better default.
For anyone that used rye, it's worth noting that the creator of rye recommends using uv. Also, rye is going to be continually updated to just interface with uv until rye can be entirely replaced by uv.
I want some friction too so it’s good there’s option for everybody
> This feels like an urban legend made up after the fact.

Raymond Chen of Microsoft has this to say about that:

"... [the person adding 30 megs of random crap] could have just called the CryptGenRandom function to generate 30 megabytes of cryptographically random bytes, but where's the fun in that? Instead, he dug through the archives and found a copy of Microsoft Bob. He took all the floppy disk images and combined them into one big file. The contents of the Microsoft Bob floppy disk images are not particularly random, so he decided to scramble up the data by encrypting it. When it came time to enter the encryption key, he just smashed his hand haphazardly across the keyboard and out came an encrypted copy of Microsoft Bob. That's what went into the unused space as ballast data on the Windows XP CD..."[0]

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/technet-...
If that mass doesn't accumulate fast enough he is right and people want him to run things the way he does. It might look weird to me or others, they might even say the opposite but only ones actions count.
Thank you for putting it in words. I felt the same way, both about this and the writeup for their previous .mobi thing. Well explained with plenty of context, no buzzwords, light hearted and cool (while not trying too hard to make themselves sound cool), and plenty of substance with no fluff. A lot of blog posts or security write-ups violate some of these; this is a breath of fresh air.
Some of us grew up with childhood friends who cleaned the meat plants at night. A practice that continues to this day. You can always tell - they stink of bleach in the morning.
That's supposed to be WebMention, right? It is standard (W3C), but not widely deployed.

https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/
Where did you settle on for your image hosting? I like GH Pages and Hugo, but it feels dirty to put images in a git repository. At the same time, GitHub does allow 5GB per repo, so I'm torn.
Why can’t python just adopt something like yarn/pnpm + and effing stop patch-copying its binaries into a specific path? And pick up site_packages from where it left it last time? Wtf. How hard it is to just pick python-modules directory and python-project.json and sync it into correctness by symlink/mklink-inf missing folders from a package cache in there in a few seconds?

Every time when I have to reorganize or upgrade my AI repos, it’s yet another 50GB writes to my poor ssd. Half of it is torch, another half auto-downloaded models that I cannot stop because they become “downloaded” and you never know how to resume it back or even find where they are cause python logging culture is just barbaric.
Does sleep and wake work for you with a standard Linux distro? If so a newer kernel might help,like the kernel-latest-qubes-vm package, might help:

https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/managing-vm-kernels/#installing...
Not just Microsoft: look at Google's policy for app developers to target newer and newer devices, keep updating apps with no material changes besides this obsolescence, just to be allowed to stay in the Play Store
The main possibility, I'd say, is that organizationally there's a push and pull of wanting to have the fear of secret weapons programs existing (for funding) and not wanting to seem incompetent. For example, if the CIA doesn't come out and deny these weapons, your geriatric boss calls up and says where are our secret sound guns? Why don't we have countermeasures?

In general, I think intelligence agencies are not monolithic and probably have many different factions etc. vying for funding, power, and control. It seems reasonable that many in the CIA would benefit from denying this, and many would benefit from exaggerating it.
I have a non-phd friend who did this. About a year ago he was caught up in the layoff wave and decided teaching would be a good way to earn money, stay productive, and pad his resume while interviewing. A great idea in theory, but his experience was less than ideal. Here were the highlights from his short tenure:

- The university sets a schedule and you are assigned to classes that are otherwise short staffed - there's little consideration for your interests. Basically you get bottom of the barrel courses and inconvenient hours.

- The students can barely program and do not care. I know it's a cliche, but it can't be understated. These "masters" students could not handle the equivalent of leetcode easy problems. Get ready for a lot of late submissions, half-assed homework, and begging for extra credit. Oh, and the final is open-book and you're not allowed to fail anyone.

- The student body is largely H1B visa holders. Anyone that's been paying attention to the H1B story knows that part of the visa scheme is funneling students into masters programs to improve their chances in the lottery. Nothing against visa holders, but this is obviously a cash cow for universities.

- Academic personalities and elitism. You are an outsider and will be looked down on. In my friends case, the Dean started getting very bossy and started dumping responsibilities on him that he really had no business being apart of. Ex. Being a judge for someone's thesis defense. My friend got a lot of satisfaction out of submitting his resignation after just 2 semesters.

I personally have a fondness towards teaching as well and tend to romanticize it, but my friends story really turned me off to any interest in that line of work. Of course this is just my friends anecdata, YMMV.
It is fully within their right to demonstrate their beliefs via book burning or other legal means. What they did not do is achieve a book ban. And the "recently banned books" they are referring to were removed from schools, not 'banned' in the general sense.

It's not about "what I think is fine." It's about equal rights to speech.
Anyone remember the "yellow rain of poison" in the Haig years which turned out to be insect shit on leaves?

If you weren't there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_rain

These kinds of things are why people are skeptical when "official sources" tell us things from intelligence sources they can't discuss in public.
> It would be way easier to just generate random bytes, and nobody could ever tell the difference.

Programmers love easter eggs.

Edit: sillywalk's comment proves my point.
var that = this;

p.s. you can edit the title and add it back if you catch it in time.
This is generally not how scientists, if they are being careful, use the word "theory".

What you describe, the idea that two things are connected, is not a theory. That's a hypothesis. A hypothesis is a claim about the world, and it might not (yet) be equipped with an acceptable explanation for why it should be believed.

A theory would be a formula or equation or perhaps a process which is consistent with a set of information and allows scientists or mathematicians to calculate more information. It's a system whose consequences you can work out on paper, or in a computer, or in your head. But notably, a theory need not have any bearing on reality. You can develop a robust theory in all its mathematical glory and never find or expect to find anything like it out in the universe. It is a theory nonetheless, because you can work with it and explore it for it's sake.

Now, certainly, we have developed some theories of dark matter over the years and hypothesized that they are candidates for explaining the real world. There are many such theories. And, for each one, some scientists hypothesize that that one might be an accurate description of the world.

But, no, the idea of dark matter is not a theory.
I remember this! It was Nixon!
Lisp is of the old gods, only the most brave of Nix brethren dare tread upon their parenthesised ways.
The same people who will write a history phd dissertation about the obscure, problematic origins of some innocuous phrase will also tell you that you can't say "balls to the wall" because it's "sexually suggestive" and then stare blankly when you explain the phrase has nothing to do with genitalia.
J8 has unsigned integer arithmetic at least.
Has someone asked you to provide this "service" or have you just decided to point out irrelevant things on your own?
Our remote isle celebrates New Year on 13 January
It depends a lot on how idiomaic you wan to the "python" code to look.

I guess you wish that a person can see it and think it's python with a few surprising &mut here and there. It will be a hard decition to select what to add to "python" to be able to write (almost) any program in rust.

Another hard decition is what python synax to remove. Do you want to support list comprehension?

A few years ago, Racket was rewriten to use Chez Scheme as a "backend". It took 4 years (or more), and Matthew is extremly good programing. It was harder becuse the objective was to get a new version that is bug compatible and as fast as the old one. It was easier because a lot of the hard decitions were avoided becuse the programs in new version should be identical to the programs in the old one.

So my guess is that you need like a year.

(Are you planing to port the standard library? I don't know enough about python and rust to show an example, but sometimes in one language the name of the functions or the order of the parameters is different.)
20 years ago?

Nah, the golden era of online community was 40-50 years ago, on the PLATO system.
How did they make cars fall apart in old movies (2017)
> That's about the time people started saying things like "drink the Koolaid" in a positive sense

wait, when was this? is there a linkable example? (i don't doubt you, but that's pretty bad)
Perhaps you want people to notice for overt action, but deniability is useful for covert action. I don’t see why it wouldn’t be considered a hostile act, and if it results in what would otherwise appear to be a psychosomatic illness that causes distress in order to muddy the waters to conceal the affiliation of the actors involved, I think it’s fair to call it a terror attack.
Let me also add the brilliant https://justine.lol
Look up “Targeted Individuals” - the human mind is an amazing thing
Thanks! Does anyone know how accessing the internet works on something so old? I mean, I used computers far older than this back in my youth, but the web browsers weren't ancient back then. I guess I'm trying to say that a 25 year old browser might not work with most modern web pages. Is that right?
Most of them are also being rebuilt with the same inherent problems. If they were rebuilding after a fire or tornado with concrete or ICF homes, with metal roofs with ember screens and tornado straps that would be okay.
I absolutely loved it. Keep up the good work! Well researched, thoughtful and balanced. What more to ask for ?
https://archive.ph/77WAh
Very nice way of saying that you can't wait for all those pesky indigenous people to die.
I stole the footnotes from my very talented friend Jake (https://jakelazaroff.com/), whose work you might have seen on here in the past. Note that they’re sidenotes on large screens but on small ones they swap to inline footnotes that expand when you click on them.

Anyway steal away!!
It's because the people who say things like the above have no real alternative solution in place and simply say things that sound good in theory (or are even wholly unrelated, as you explained) but fundamentally don't change anything about the world.
This x1000. It's not about the org, really. It's about what's being changed.

Yes, a lot of large codebases have things that look wrong. They're not always wrong. Trying to clean up what look like cobwebs at the core of a large codebases often means removing things that are there for a reason. The reason is usually counterintuitive and could be documented better. But often only a few people can really evaluate the change.

A small PR is likely to be accepted quickly, and a large PR is likely to take awhile. No one gets upset by that, though.

The flip side is that a small PR to a critical part of the codebase is also likely to take awhile and be treated as "default to no". It's often hard to see that from the "outside", though.

With that said, trying to go the extra mile and make things clear, concise, and better documented than before goes a long way in getting an MR reviewed quickly.
Thanks, just did that.
You’re talking about swap? You can allocate a swap partition and register it in the fstab and the kernel as well and happily swap out to it. Unlike windows and mac, you can set the swappiness too to go from conservative to aggressive.
I think this is the point-when one wanted “easy” parsing and readability for humans, they abandoned binary protocols for JSON; now, people who are finding some performance issue they don’t like are trying to start over and re-learn all the past lessons of why and how binary protocols were used in the first place.

The cost will be high, just like the cost for having to relearn CS basics for non-trivial JS use was/is.
> limited JS runtime of the PDF engine

humanity has gone too far
I have had a theory this is a "blowback" effect of counter-intel functions inside US diplomatic and related facilities. The amount of RF, sound and other burdens inside the suspended secure communications facility, and the ubiquity of these facilities inside US state functions operated in potentially adverse economies.

Like EMP, you protect to the level you can afford, and demonstrate inside your own testing it's operationally feasible to prevent, not the actual scale an attacker can elect to deploy. It's a variant of the 'look for your lost keys under the lamppost because you can see' problem: to protect secure communications you need to do work, in the radio and sound spectrum, at least as energetic as the attacks you have hypothesised, and you probably wind up injecting TWICE the effective energy overall, if an attack happens: their energy, and your mitigation.

If these defences are purely passive, I'd be deeply wrong. I doubt if anyone who knows what active defences are deployed would be able to say so.

edit: if this is potentially caused by US counter-intel efforts, they'd probably seek to deny it, but that heads to a conspiracy theory place. A lot of Iraq veterans can testify to how much the forces seek to minimise the damages of service, I would be totally unsurprised if state department and foreign affairs doesn't want a multi-million dollar health claim on their books. No matter what, they have one, but for now it's without associated damages. If they admit to it being their own fault the class action lawyers will have a field day.
recently divorced I'm finding dating is so much harder these days...

I needed to grow up a lot, learn about situationships, attachment styles, co-regulation better emotional IQ, etc... things maybe I should've already known but not something taught....

I think schools should teach psychology classes that prepare people for being successful in relationships romantic, business, or platonic...
There are people already imagining this - look up “targeted individuals”
> pretended we resolved them

Who did? Dark matter and energy are famously-unsolved problems in physics.
Could this Butler be the inspiration for Dune’s Butlerian Jihad?

I guess this is just coincidence

Update: From the comments::

“The story mentions Asimov and The Matrix, but overlooks the Dune saga, where the Butlerian Jihad - the revolt against thinking machines that shaped society as we know it from Frank Herbert's novels - likely took its name from the very Samuel Butler and his letter.”
The feedback is useful to me about 50% of the time. It is rare though.
I think the design of the Whonix website is not clear enough. After browsing the page for more than ten seconds, I still don't know what it actually is. I even thought it was some kind of new network tunneling protocol.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, it is objectively true that people in the past were less productive than today, not necessarily because they were lazier, but because technology has gotten better. It has been the case since civilization started, as we were 99% farmers until we became productive enough to stratify our division of labor, something that every world history student learns.
IE 6 was already more than half past the “early” web, IMO.
New NASA Study Tallies Carbon Emissions from Canadian Fires
Original source: https://diogenesii.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/...
> Walmart was amazing for low income families in small cities and rural areas.

stop drinking the corporate Kool-Aid, my friend

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/12/walmart-pr...

> In the 10 years after a Walmart Supercenter opened in a given community, the average household in that community experienced a 6 percent decline in yearly income—equivalent to about $5,000 a year in 2024 dollars—compared with households that didn’t have a Walmart open near them. Low-income, young, and less-educated workers suffered the largest losses.

> They calculate that poverty increases by about 8 percent in places where a Walmart opens relative to places without one even when factoring in the most optimistic cost-savings scenarios.
It's the distinction between the terror of the victim, and the terror of the witnesses.
> a hidden mind ray targeting random 10 people a day in a big city and you’ll get a lot of panic,

You'll get just as much panic by having friendly press start pretending that this is happening.

A significant portion of the population does not have a working bullshit filter, and will believe all sorts of stupid garbage.

You don't actually need to build a child trafficking ring in the basement of a pizza shop, you just need to tell people that one exists and tens of millions of people will believe you.

And in this case, your side business of selling ubermensch supplements and tinfoil helmets will be cracking.
What does that have to do with eating more sugar which seems to have a direct causal effect on becoming fatter and getting diabetes? Lots of countries over millennia have worked hard and have been stressed, often much more than us today, yet they were by and large not obese (no pun intended), the only thing that changed in the last century was the rise of processed foods with high amounts of sugar.
I’m a big fan of the Sharpie S Gel in 0.7mm
Cars are traceable. Poison would be the alternative for those that dont want to be apprehended.

I think many people misunderstand the degree to which society is contingent on the good faith participation of most people.

It is like a prisoners dilemma where we have managed to convince 99.9% of people to cooperate and the whole thing can easily fall apart if they dont.
What makes you think it's ever stopped? Did I miss the proletarian revolution comrade?
California wildfires are relevant for HN. Information/disinformation about said fires are relevant for HN. Political responses on said information/disinformation are one step beyond relevance for HN mission IMHO. Looks like the start of political rant festivals that HN avoids for good reason.
My daily driver is also a (16GB) 2015 MBP and the only reason I’m starting to consider an upgrade is because of the scary “unsupported OS” warnings that brew is starting to show. I don’t really look forward to the day when that warning changes from “things could break at any time” to “your system is now broken”.
"So, I quit. Twitter, TikTok, Facebook — all gone"

I'm always curious here what counts as Social Media, and what's just a useful site?

Github? HackerNews? Reddit? Facebook, but only for FB Marketplace which is now a better local sales site than Craigslist?

What makes it social? Originally with FB and before it with MySpace it was the ability to put up a page about yourself, and then chat with others. HN has a profile and communication, so do the others listed.
Exactly right. People who have “leadership” skills are the ones that pay attention to their own leadership and are manage up more than anything else.

They usually repackage people’s work around them into their own, take ownership and defend loudly their territory (project ownership) and methodically build relationships with leadership. Having “leadership skills” and being good a team work are often orthogonal to each other.
> except ... it doesn't.

Until some political weirdo recently went and defaced the wikipedia article on cargo cults, you could just google "cargo cult" and understand the analogy within 5 seconds.
Windows support is definitely a second class feature in Qubes, across the board. I don't think many of the core developers actually use or particularly care about Windows.

It should run a standalone Windows VM just fine, though I've not played with that. I've not had any real need for Windows in years - and if you think you need it for games, go try a recent Ubuntu/Steam/Proton configuration and see how it works out.
You're being too reductive. There is no simple one sentence answer and the path to modern western liberal values spans 400-ish years.

It wasn't really that long ago that all/most societies believed that slavery was normal.

Just the IDEA that "all men are created equal" is intensely liberal. And that it was put into a document without qualifiers is miraculous. We can't judge the past only from a modern lens. YOU didn't do anything to help the world move towards liberal values. YOU are just the benefactor of thousands of years of conflict/learning/etc.
Not a lot of Twue Celtic Britons left these days, waves of Anglo-Saxon settlement, along with Danes and Gaelic-speaking tribes to the north pushed the RealBritons™ back to the tin mines and sea tunnels of Wales and Cornwall.
And Jesus wept!

https://youtu.be/z4FGzE4endQ
It always shocked me that isn’t the way for all. When I was on FB, I only friended people that I “knew” in real-life. I guess that’s why I only had a handful of friends :)
if it wasn’t for the russians you’d be writing this comment in german
It was great when Google Talk would federate with any compatible chat service over XMPP. Nowadays, Google's different services don't even have compatible chat systems within themselves.
That is absolutely not what the author is saying here, just that users should have the ability to install their own software on their own hardware, and that locked bootloaders and the like should not be allowed.
Saying that you can’t measure productivity is a pseudo-truism and a cop out of doing your job.

How do you measure productivity = how do you decide whom to promote; how do you decide whom to fire; how do you decide how to distribute bonuses; etc.

If you can’t measure productivity, you can’t do your job as an engineering manager. It’s not a question that should have been asked 3 months into a job. It’s a question that should have been asked during the hiring interview.
Querying public PyPI downloads to fact-check AI hype
St Brendan's Isle