skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's possible that this is generally true, but that's definitely not my perception. Growing up I remember hearing about stories like this [0] where people camped out in a church for over a decade to try to stop it from being closed. As someone who isn't religious, I still can't understand the level of attachment to the building itself, and it's hard to imagine that this would happen from people not ascribing some sort of religious significance to the building itself. That said, I know that there are some notable differences between Catholics and other Christians in terms of veneration, so maybe this perception is just due to my growing up in an area where other types of Christianity weren't as common, and elsewhere in the country where Catholics aren't as common, the generalization would hold more true.

[0]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/massachusetts-church-protest-11...
same for search engines
Very few software engineers are working in novel design spaces. Even 1:1000 is probably being generous. FWIW, this is true of conventional engineering too, but even more so.

A software engineer having no idea how to build something doesn’t make it novel, it just indicates inexperience or ignorance in all but a vanishingly small number of cases.

In practical systems, you won’t find much novelty outside the rare frontiers of performance optimization, systems software architecture, the occasional bit of weird silicon with unusual computational properties, and some narrow algorithm domains that have never been adequately developed e.g. compression and AI. Almost no software development can justify even thinking about these types of things and they virtually never do.

Conventional engineering is worse because the laws of physics constrain almost everything to boring well-explored solutions. In some cases, we’ve pretty much done exhaustive exploration of what is possible.
Yes.

https://gameofrent.com/content/is-land-a-big-deal#2-americas...
You felt the need to comment to tell people to be disinterested in compassion? Anyways, the ash spill is from well before Trump's ascendance.
And I hope, oh how I hope, that the positions eliminated in the US are administrative positions. That researchers, teaching assistants, lab technicians will keep their jobs.
This isn't quite correct (I'm the creator of Arroyo). We use DataFusion to implement parts of our SQL support (in particular the planner and the expression interpreter) but we have our own dataflow and operators. By contrast Synnada[0] is directly built on DF.

A contrast between Arroyo and systems like Benthos and from what I can tell ArkFlow, is that Arroyo is a "stateful" stream processing engine, which means that we can support things like windows, aggregates, and joins, with exactly-once semantics and fault tolerance, at the cost of significant additional complexity[1].

[0] https://www.synnada.ai/
[1] https://www.arroyo.dev/blog/stateful-stream-processing
You can absolutely do this with hypothesis stateful testing. https://hypothesis.readthedocs.io/en/latest/stateful.html
Really funny to see Sam whining about Elon "playing unfair" while attempting to do this with DeepSeek.
What worries me is the way big tech is forced to build some kind of law book (they call their TOS) some kind of detective apparatus, some kind of kangaroo court and a model for punishing the citizen (user) which is not something anyone should want them to do including them. It is like the old time court where every decision is made though the lens of profit. It gets even more dystopian in a closed ecosystem.
ꕷ𖣠𖢑𖤟 ꛃ𖣠𖦪𖤰 𖣠ꛘ ꛅꛘ.
You’re overindexing on Trump. The US being a police state with the highest incarceration rate in the world, police corruption, civil forfeiture, etc didn’t start with Trump.

Tell me one corporation that you can’t get away from? Now tell me how you avoid an over powerful government?

Why would you want to give a government with the history of the US more power?

Trump was elected fair and square. If you want to blame anyone - blame Americans. Despite the bullshit that the Democrats spout about “this isn’t who we are”. This is exactly who we are. Why would I want to give the government more control? Do you think the Democrats would be any more hands off when it comes to content?
I completely agree. Software engineering is just the most recent field I can think of(unless you consider data science a distinct enough portion of software to carve off as a separate field) that has had this pattern occur.

Well that and this is a forum for a lot of tech people which means a good number of software engineers here.
Given the growing focus on AIs as agents, I think it's going to be a real issue sooner rather than later.
As a Georgian-speaker, the ცΓმეპfυl style made me do a little sick.
I used systemd user timers, a shell script, and an HDHomerun to make a simple VCR.
Do you ________ take this immortal corporation ________ to be your lawful internet Gatekeeper?
To me, the four-color theorem is a very interesting proof of concept, perhaps the most interesting mathematical proof of the past 50 years. Perhaps the "pattern that can be used in future work" is the idea of having computers enumerate a large number of cases, which they then solve in individually straightforward ways.

But, I can understand if pure mathematicians don't feel this way. This might be only really an intriguing and beautiful concept to someone who is interested in scaling up algorithms and AI.
Unfortunately, this data is harder to find than it should be. For instance, just looking at Kioxia, which I've found to be very performant, their datasheets for the CD series drives don't mention write latency at all. Blocks and Files[1] mentions that they claim <255us average, so they must have published that somewhere. This is why we would extensively test multiple units ourselves, following proper preconditioning as defined by SNIA. Averaging 250us for direct writes is pretty good.

[1] https://blocksandfiles.com/2023/08/07/kioxias-rocketship-dat...
This is how I learned them in middle school — just common logs, as an aid to doing roots, powers and multiplications of big numbers.

We were told in an off-hand way that logs could be to any base, even ‘e’, but not to worry about that for a few years.
Show HN: PeriodicTable3D – Interactive 3D Exploration of the Elements
Learn and explore the periodic table in 3D. Read about the elements, who discovered them and when. Let me know if you'd like additional features added to this site!
and a buddy who can get drunk too.
I love this. Please never stop doing what you’re doing.

edit: Of course you’re the top contributor to IncludeOS. That was the first project I thought of while reading this blog post. I’ve been obsessed with the idea of Network Function Virtualization for a long time. It’s the most natural boundary for separating units of work in a distributed system and produces such clean abstractions and efficient scaling mechanisms.

(I’m also a very happy user of Varnish in production btw. It’s by far the most reliable part of the stack, even more than nginx. Usually I forget it’s even there. It’s never been the cause of a bug, once I got it configured properly.)
Perhaps the key insight is that there is no concise explanation that underlies this particular structure. Many mathematical statements are true for no concise reason. If you want to discover if these things are true or not, perhaps you need a computer-assisted search, and that's the intellectual lesson to be drawn here.
> I bet a lot of people 10-15 years older than you would say the same thing - except they'd say it about you and your generation.

And they’d probably be right!

I remember the grognards giving me shit about memory management and me giving it right back by explaining that what they considered a large chunk of memory would be worth pennys next year because of Moore’s law and I wasn’t going to waste time considering something that I literally couldn’t learn faster than it became obsolete knowledge.

Quantitative differences can create qualitative differences and I don’t think it’s surprising that we’re in a different age of software engineering than we were 10-15 years ago for any given X year
I think the hate on recursion is too strong. For one thing, some languages have tail call optimization, which can turn recursion into a loop without using up the stack. For another, recursion can be bounded, so that if a malicious document tries to use a lot of recursion, it just results in an error reporting the recursion was too deep.
First of all love it!

Second of all I hate you for giving me a new game to procrastinate with.

Thirdly, please make the lines more visible!
>As a leader and teacher with more grey hair every day, I feel this responsibility

You should probably do less of that since:

1). That's not what any of my posts said.

2). My degree says mathematical physics and not computer science or software engineering.

3). A field where you're tone policed by the tone deaf is the opposite of welcoming and inclusive.
I live in Detroit and don't understand why everyone wants to work remove AND live in the most expensive places in the world. To me working remote means I can live anywhere I want. Why not live where you get a lot more for your money?
I'm struggling to come up with a charitable, non-misanthropic, reading of that either/or.
Read http://mrob.com/pub/math/largenum.html . After that you'll probably look easier to those numbers.
There is something toxic about calling arbitrary things toxic.

>The effect of consistent, careful, workmanlike effort over time trumps any number of crunch weeks and burnout episodes, to an almost absurd degree.

If you have an actual life, you know, with unexpected stuff coming up from time to time, this is just not possible. Then the only way to get stuff done is go 10x during the time you have whenever you have it.
Nice use of of the MCP's 'prompt' feature.
At what point do you just fire your entire "Land on Moon" software team, and hire a couple young Neil Armstrong wanna-be's, who can hand-land your spacecraft remotely? (In spite of the moon-earth-moon signal lag.)
The inefficiencies come from infrastructure. Transferring electricity is so goddamn cheap, that city planners and developers hardly consider it a footnote. Water, sewage and drainage on the other hand are much, much more expensive. They require much more space, and oft times need to be pressurized. Imagine that with steam pipes where the steam on top of all that, needs to be heated too. Sure, hooking up to an existing steam main probably doesn't cost too much, but building new mains can't be worth it, even in the long run, as infrastructure constantly needs to be upgraded.
quick someone make rust bindings
It's very simple: they like the benefits of living in the expensive places, as distinct from closeness to work in particular.
I think support for per-user crontab's is implementation dependent. There are implementations (AFAIK) that do not support per-user crontabs.

Per Gentoo's wiki, both fcron and cronie have their own (different!) ways of whitelisting non-root users to run cronjobs.
In general, analysis becomes impossible when you have function pointers produced and used all over the place. But that doesn't have to be the case if the program is written deliberately to avoid the impossible cases. E.g., if you can separate the set of functions into "functions that (indirectly) are exported or have their address taken" and "functions that (indirectly) invoke a function pointer", then you know that there can't be any recursion through function pointers. Basically just a form of escape analysis.

And if you're writing your own language, you can just have explicit 'colored' functions (and corresponding pointers), and enforce that the call graph between different colors has no cycles, and no function invokes a pointer of its own color. Generics would get a bit messy, but it's still far from impossible.
I learned a lot about event-driven distributed systems by just building things with ZeroMQ. Even if you don't end up using it, learning its messaging patterns and the decisions behind them can give you a pretty solid mental framework.

The ZeroMQ guide really takes you through it in detail, for example check out Figure 19 here for a parallel job queue with cancellation: https://zguide.zeromq.org/docs/chapter2/#Handling-Errors-and...
Or 3) History has shown us repeatedly that people are easily manipulated by populist fascist dictators making lots of promises about making your country great again.
That depends on which cron you're using, not all of them support user crontabs (and the ones that do probably have subtle differences in behavior).
A 300 year old log table! What an opportunity to confirm Benford’s Law!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford's_law

“The discovery of Benford's law goes back to 1881, when the Canadian-American astronomer Simon Newcomb noticed that in logarithm tables the earlier pages (that started with 1) were much more worn than the other pages.”
>A truly great engineering organization is one where perfectly normal, workaday software engineers, with decent skills and an ordinary amount of expertise, can consistently move fast, ship code, respond to users, understand the systems they’ve built, and move the business forward a little bit more, day by day, week by week.

Agree completely, and 10X engineers build such organizations.
> Whereas religious people understand that the people are the church, the building is just a building.

Many (most?) religions invest enormous amounts in those buildings, some with staggering displays of wealth. Even in many/most towns, the religious institution is the nicest building around.
Wow. More bullshit from Altman.
He’s barely a TechBro propagandist than he is tech bro.

Getting his ass kicked and he tries to use state sponsored monopoly to save his ass.

Fucking pussy billionaires. They are all the most worthless garbage. A moral stain on our country.
Thank you for the list, seems interesting indeed.
I think in general it's a shrinking minority. I was outspokenly critical of systemd in the past, but much about it has improved, and I have to admit it has made my life significantly easier in many ways. I'm still not a big fan of some things being systemd projects that don't really need to be under the umbrella (why is resolved even a systemd project? Or systemd-timesyncd?) but service definition and management, transient services, sockets, timers, and many many more things are pretty great. At this point, I pretty much love it. Even things that initially annoyed me, like timers, I've grown to love, not least because my cronjob entries are manageable files that I can commit and backup, and I can individually enable and disable them without having to deal with stupid commenting and such.

Checking service status and managing services is also significantly better with systemd than any other init system I've used, and I've used a lot over 15 years of systems administration.

I still find journald a bit annoying, though, and I still am not completely sold on binary log files. I understand the benefits, but working with them is still much more opaque than text logs.
That's the hope, but that's never how things go. Of course researchers and research will be tremendously affected, and that's a shame.
For the same reason the prior administration would have employees with direct ties to Biden associates?

Because each administration hires their own people.
And never mind the TVA responsible for this is a government owned and operated organization with sovereign immunity.
Especially when you couple these actions with the literal pardons of those who broke into and encamped on the Capitol. You know, just interrupting the peaceful transfer of power. Yeah those people were “tourists” and “hostages”.

I’m embarrassed that I live in this country.
> Why not live where you get a lot more for your money?

People live in expensive places not because they are required to, but because they find these places appealing. There are much more arts, culture, food, smart people, better schools, etc. Look at the prices people are willing to pay to live in NYC, parts of the Bay Area, etc. That is supply and demand.

They are getting a lot more (of what they want) for their money. Others live in Aspen for the same reason - though they want different things. I hope you are fortunate enough to want things that aren't in quite so high demand.
There are a lot of administrative staff at research universities whose jobs support... research. Is there bloat and are there too many managers/VPs? Probably somewhat, but the more of the grant administration work that gets pushed back down to PIs and research groups, the less time they have for research. They will also make many mistakes in both grant applications and how they spend the money, because the regulations are byzantine. That will jeopardize future funding and possibly get them penalized.
It really does sound like LLM-generated text.
I wonder how many deaths the USAID cuts will cause in the next decade. Congrats again to everyone who voted for this.
Chris Lattner- Democratizing AI Compute: What about AI Compilers (TVM and XLA)?
Wonder if the rules will protect the information providers or the consumers.
you probably need robotic leg for walking. or better pony. but doing anything physically requires at least working torso.
As a remote tech worker who moved from the Bay to a (much) cheaper place - I agree that the expensive places are expensive for a reason - but if one can articulate what specifically they're looking for, it's almost always possible to find it in a significantly cheaper cost-of-living area.
Sure. I’m not saying they deserve no sympathy. Just that others probably deserve it first.
Ask HN: What's the move for static site hosting in 2025?
I'm talking the simplest possible minimal HTML site. Like I want to push a file called index.html and not think about it anymore -- ideally with the possibility to refine it further (add a framework or whatever)

Cloudflare Pages seems popular lately, but from a quick perusal it looks like there's an expectation you're using a framework?

Is pure hosting from S3 still a thing? I see that AWS tries to push you towards using Amplify when you setup an S3 site the old fashioned way -- does anyone actually use that? From a quick glance it seems Amplify is like a Cloudflare Pages competitor but more rough around the edges; also expects that you're using a framework

Do people still use Vercel? Are there other contenders? Is Heroku thoroughly enshittified now?

GH pages seems to no longer tolerate commercial projects[1], which is the intent here.

It feels surprisingly difficult to do this in the year of our lord 2025. I recall 7~ years ago there were lots of options for deploying with two CLI commands, but it seems like many of those are gone or overcomplicated today

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/pages/getting-started-with-github-pages/about-github-pages#prohibited-uses
Traditional advice is to keep tests independent of each other, that's why the setup part gets repeated instead of being inherited from the parent tests.
Independent tests can be run in parallel, dependent tests cannot be.

But I can see how this approach allows for parallelism as well, I especially like the fact that you only get one failure in case one of the steps fail
> the ash spill is from well before Trump's ascendance

The point is the survivors of this voted for Trump when he was talking, on the stump, about deregulating coal. One way or another, another coal-ash disaster didn’t strike them as a dealbreaker.
Ask HN: Next big thing in AI/ML?
Everyone's into building agents and RAGs these days, companies providing products/services around it.

If you were to start a startup now, what would it be around?
It's about as effective as the GDPR - which means very strong regulation and penalties on paper, but no actual enforcement of said penalties once you breach it - all bark and no bite.

(please, don't reply with that "enforcement tracker" link - a billion is nothing for Facebook and especially not when it's in exchange of 7 years of continuous and blatant breach of the regulation)
It seems like Trump is reforming everything that needs reforming, but he's doing it by going an equal amount of crazy in the opposite direction.

Universities are in dire need of reforms. Be it their costs, student encampments that disturb students of a certain religion, or university presidents who don't hold a stand on calling for the genocide for the entire Jewish people.

That gives Trump the legitimacy to intervene. But he's not restrained enough to do the minimum intervention needed. Rather, once he starts intervening, he doesn't want to stop until the institute looks like he created it.
I'm now the ATmosphere's biggest fan of Charlie the Owl. He's a weird one.
> Model cannot "learn" because it is not a human.

Sure, that’s why don’t like the analogy.

> What happens is a human obtains "a free copy" of a copyrighted work, processes it using a machine and sells the result.

Right, so for example it is pretty common to snip up small bits of songs and to use in other songs (sampling). Maybe that could be an example of somewhere to start? But, these ML models seem quite different, I guess because the “samples” are much smaller and usually not individually identifiable. And really the model encodes information about trends in the sources… I dunno. I still think we need a new law.
These folks track network censorship, you can contribute by running their stuff locally.

https://ooni.org/
- When XPipe will open a terminal connection and you have specified custom shell environments / init scripts for a certain system, it will first automatically create a temporary init script on the target system in the background, which will be run as the login script only for that terminal launch from XPipe. That way it's noninvasive and doesn't change any existing configuration on the system

- XPipe acts as an askpass program for SSH, meaning that it can listen to any password requests made from the ssh client, forward that your password manager, and reply with the password that the password manager returned. If you password manager supports the SSH-agent, XPipe can also use it to supply keys for ssh as well.
So they are missing a lot. And this is the core of the problem. Emotions are practical. They are a part of human experience. You cannot approach design process as a framework documentation or recipe. Moving with current trends of double diamonds or whatever tools are fashionable. You have to be a generalist first and tap not only to the tech stack or quantitive approach, but also into a psychology and culture.

>Emotions are inseparable from how we humans think, choose, and act. In Emotional Design, cognitive scientist Don Norman shows how the principles of human psychology apply to the invention and design of new technologies and products.

https://shorturl.at/EKhRu
> Trump was elected fair and square. If you want to blame anyone - blame Americans. Despite the bullshit that the Democrats spout about “this isn’t who we are”. This is exactly who we are.

I blame, primarily, the corporate takeover of government, punctuated by Citizen's United and everything that came after, and a couple of generations of a Republican party who have no goal other than setting out to prove that government is the enemy to take the heat off of their corporate masters.

> Tell me one corporation that you can’t get away from? Now tell me how you avoid an over powerful government?

I already did: avoid Tesla, show me how it's done. You can't, because the asshole in charge bought enough of the government to be in control. That's what happens when you have corporations with unchecked power, which is the inevitible conclusion of a powerless government.

You think you give the corporations all of the money and they're going to be bound by some tiny neutered government? No, they'll just buy it and then do what they want.
Area of a circle?
I'll give you a hint:

data.