News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

deathanatos

Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa on Monday November 02, 2026 @12:47PM (#50340625)
With the shift happening right after the 1976–1980 square, I'd assume people named their daughter after Stevie Nicks.
Re:Bidirectional Charging During Grid Outages on Sunday November 01, 2026 @11:05AM (#50326876)
> Wouldn't the charge / discharge cycles reduce the life of the car battery?

While I'd presume the answer here is "yes", I'd also presume we're talking like a fraction of the vehicle's lifetime charge cycles. Like, (generously/conservatively) 20 to 40 cycles total over the life of the vehicle, no? How often would you estimate your power going out?

Re:Much Ado About None: Sentinel Values in Python on Saturday October 31, 2026 @10:04PM (#50322110)
The adverse knee-jerk hate for exceptions far predates Google also saying they're bad, but certainly that didn't help.
Re:GitHub Incident with Actions, Pages, and Webhooks on Friday October 30, 2026 @02:55PM (#50308543)
If you hover over the green bar for today, the tooltip knows there's an incident.
Re:Google Search is now less than half of Alphabet’s revenue on Thursday October 29, 2026 @01:05PM (#50292378)
To be fair, the parent is excluding acquisitions:

> not including acquisitions

Of which only Chrome is in-house created. I wouldn't think Chrome brings in a lot of revenue, and these days I'd argue FF is a much better product.

Re:Git for US Legislation on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @12:02AM (#50269221)
> Unlike code, natural language laws have many exceptions and context dependencies,

In the interpretation of the law, yes, but that doesn't matter for version controlling the text of the law, and in that sense, you can absolutely manage the text pretty cleanly in git. Most laws are just text. Many bills are literal git-diffs, except in prose, which can make it hard to understand a bill.

> exception handling (hardcode-style responses)

This is basically non-sequitur (there no such thing as a "hardcode-style response" in git…), and again, I think you're misunderstanding the idea here.

Re:Git for US Legislation on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @11:57PM (#50269194)
Yes, it should absolutely change (both should be freely available), since ignorance of the law is not a defense, and case law is law (here, in the US, since we're a common law country). But the flip side of that is that the law has to be knowable, if ignorance is not a defense, or you're just going "lol too bad for you for not knowing the secret law".

Also, because how the judicial branch decides case law needs to be reviewable by the People, so that we can inform the various legislatures to adjust the law if the judicial system is not ruling to the will of the People.

Re:Type Server Protocol on Monday October 26, 2026 @04:20PM (#50250333)
> thus hardlinking a whole python installation in and making you "activate" it first

You don't have to activate a venv to use it; `$VENV_PATH/bin/python3` just works.

(It also softlinks/symlinks the binaries.)

Should you throw out your entire home every 1–2 years, just because a corporation would like you to?

It's not a phone, so we're not necessarily expecting the lack-of-longevity we'd expect of a phone. (Although even a lot of phones are basically corp "can-you-upgrade-every-2-yr-or-more".)

That's just the total number of times that package was downloaded, which is completely unrelated to how many servers it appears in? Same with `aiohttp`: aiohttp can be used as a client library.

Sure, people should check their dependency trees, and make informed decisions.

No, it's paywalled: there's 4 paragraphs, then it fades out to

> Sign up for free access to this post

> Free members get access to posts like this one along with an email round-up of our week's stories.

Sometimes these paywalls are variable, triggering sometimes and not others.

He's referred to himself as a "dictator". CPAC put out imagery likening him to Caesar. He's referred to himself as "King" and put out that ridiculous AI generated image of him as a king. He put out that ridiculous AI generated image of him as Jesus (and then later gaslit reporters about it). Him and his campaign have repeatedly stated ideations for an (unconstitutional) third term "and beyond".

> except they don't like the guy's policies and conduct.

That too, but his conduct rises above "policies I don't like"; he has shown direct contempt for the other branches of our government. For example, his administration has essentially dismantled or destroyed various functions in violation of the Constitution: take USAID as an example here: USAID is an agency created de jure by Congress, yet it has been de facto dissolved by the administration. We all learned, I think, in grade school, that the job of the executive is to implement the laws passed by Congress. From an article at the time about it:

> “The President does not have constitutional authority to ignore a statute that establishes a department or agency,” says Saikrishna Prakash, a law professor at the University of Virginia.

He holds the judicial branch in contempt too: quite literally any time any judge does anything he disagrees with, the judge is blasted as "left-wing radical", even and including cases where the judge was a GOP-appointee. Further examples include ignoring judicial orders and depriving people of access to the courts by physical force (see the many cases of the administration's removal of people from the country; to put it one way: "For depriving us, in many Cases, of the Benefits of Trial by Jury", or "The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U. S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene" — Justice Sotomayor, joined by Kagan & Jackson.)

Re:EMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @04:39PM (#50172357)
I guess the other question I have is just how many intermediates does this one CA have? They've had 8 compromised thus far; that's not the entire lot of them?

LE has two EC intermediates, by comparison.

Re:EMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @03:12PM (#50171231)
It's not within the realm of believability. The chance of "human screwed up" astronomically exceeds this being fairly randomly chosen, and the Firefox bug states, (I think this is supposition, not known fact, but IDK)

> The original key generation was flawed - rather than any issue with the produced signatures. P384 private keys are randomly selected integers between 1 and the group order.

That is within the realm of believability.

Re:EMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @02:58PM (#50171003)
Why are the intermediates, and not the root cert, being revoked?

The intermediates seem to be difficult in that the root stores don't seem to have a mechanism for it (… kinda seems like an oversight, at this 20:20 vision point?). If eight of the CA's intermediates are hosed … how many are still "good", and are they good good, or are we just fooling ourselves?

Re:Maybe There Was an Egg Cartel After All on Monday October 19, 2026 @03:34PM (#50156969)
> This briefly worked, then the market re-asserted itself and prices cratered. Now, after the fact, the justice department is investigating

No, the price drops at the exact moment the DoJ starts looking into it.

Well, had the officer not been lucky, he'd've opened the trunk and found nothing. The stop would presumably end there¹, and so too would any discussion of the legality of the stop unless the person whose rights had been violated had the time and resources to pursue the violation "on the principle of the matter"… not something I think most people are going to have the resources to do.

So I wonder if we could be seeing a bit of survivorship bias.

¹though with cops you never know

Re:16-bit fully functional DIY magnetic core memory on Sunday October 18, 2026 @10:24PM (#50147663)
> Neat! My Japanese is a bit rusty, how much memory is this?

The smaller one is 16 bit. The larger one is 128 bytes, or 1024 bit. The PCB is labelled in English. ;) (pause at 49s)

(There are also subtitles in English, though, yes, those could be inaccurate.)

> Wait, is each of the rings one bit?

Yes. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory>

Re:A skeptic's first contact with Kubernetes (2024) on Saturday October 17, 2026 @11:11PM (#50137576)
> Why does it not matter if the state is unstable? If I'm operating a cluster that can't settle, I'd like to know immediately!

Because it's probably an impossible to answer question hinging on each person's pet definition of "stable".

In one example of an unstable cluster, pods are "regularly" crashing — but at a really low frequency, like, each pod crashes onces every few days. They're OOM'ing — a bug in the workload, not really the cluster's fault — but the control loop pattern still ensures the failure is corrected in the sense that the pod will either be restarted or evicted and re-created.

(But yes, you absolutely want monitoring to pick up on that. In the specific example here, I'd say it's "just monitor pod failures", and then you get not only OOMs, but all the other ways a workload might crash too.)

I've actually had more problems when the control loops get stuck. (Which they can, almost always because you've asked for the impossible. But sometimes it is hard for the various pieces to say more than "no solution". Why no solution is usually a human-level deduction.)

Re:What changes when your search index lives on S3? on Saturday October 17, 2026 @02:22PM (#50133630)
> Latency is the whole point.

The article's title is literally:

> What changes when your search index lives on S3?

None of this changes because your search index lives on S3; there's no property of S3 that says "this is an inherently better format for S3 than it is for disk". The format improvements are independent of the latency difference.

Re:What changes when your search index lives on S3? on Saturday October 17, 2026 @01:21PM (#50133022)
> On a local SSD, a random read costs nothing if a page is cached, and costs under a millisecond in case of a page fault. […] The scarcest resource is not CPU, and not bytes, but the number of round trips you make to the object store, and most design decisions below follow from that

There's not really a difference here between S3 and your disk, aside from the literal amount of latency. Restructuring the format to require less reads to make S3 faster would proportionally benefit disk reads.

S3 is a lot easier manage, though. Storage is just then AWS's problem. (And what's a few ms of latency on the BE when pages take tens of seconds to load on the whole.)

Re:"In every study that considered the question" on Saturday October 17, 2026 @01:46AM (#50128311)
Confidently wrong? The labeling the author has chosen, with "park"/"drive", would lead someone to select headlights because they're in drive, even during the day. I have never seen the symbol they label "parking" described as such.

> “parking,” which activates only front lights, at half brightness, and (for some reason) leaves the tail lights off.

I've also just double checked the manual for my car to be sure I'm not talking out of my ass here: the symbol he calls "parking" activates the tail lights. From the manual:

> “[double headlights, one left one right symbol]” position:

> Instrument panel illumination, parking lights, front side marker lights, rear side marker lights, tail lights and license plate lights are on.

(My manual does not ascribe a name to it.)

Now, I suppose this could be an unexpected thing that differs between cars, but it also shouldn't really matter that much. The intro example is in the rain; you should be using the symbol he calls "park" in the rain, you should be using the "low beams" setting, and then your tail lights are definitely on. Or … just let "Auto" handle it?

(I've always called this symbol "daytime running lights". Wikipedia says that's a different symbol (a single headlight with stippled lines emitting from it), one I've definitely never seen before & isn't in TFA; Wikipedia claims it to be the ISO symbol, however, I've found the relevant ISO standard¹, but it seems to lack the symbol Wikipedia calls "daytime running lights". The symbol I call DRL is called "position" or "side" lights, and the term DRL is not used by ISO AFAICT, despite what Wikipedia claims. What a mess.)

(from TFA:)

> Many cars have an AUTO option now, but would you trust it to choose the right thing?

… yes? Absolutely yes. The car can just do the right thing for me, without me having to remember. Sensing ambient light is not complicated.

> pull on the stalk for high beams (another mode), or rotate the stalk left or right for turn signals.

There is absolutely no way whatever car this is a photograph of is rotating the stalk for turn signals. Turn signals are pull up or down, universally.

¹ISO-2575:2021, though technically a draft since ISO standards are not open. But this symbol has been around since forever, so unless it's changed recently…

Re:I Love Software Rendering on Friday October 16, 2026 @12:59PM (#50121031)
It's like 2.5D, maybe like 2.75D or so. Technically, every map in vanilla Doom is a 2D map, with various "sectors" in the map having height; they're rendered in a sort of pseudo 3D, but crucially the map will never have one floor about another¹. I don't think I'd argue the 2D maps technically make it "not 3D", though.

However, Doom also renders textures using an algorithm that sort of paints walls as like vertical lines of sorts. The exact algorithm it uses makes it hard to look up (to pitch), and I think impossible to roll the camera. See <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_engine#Rendering> — it has a good animated graphic of what happens if you do look up, and the differences between the output of Doom's software renderer's algorithm and something actually rendering 3D.

¹modern ports have ways to accomplish this, and even before there were direct ways of doing it, clever map layout and instantaneous teleporting can get pretty close.

Re:Maybe a better way to track the release history of a Git repo on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @01:55AM (#50082977)
I've never thought having the environment in the version tag (or whatever resembles that) was a good idea. It is a remarkably common thing, though.

But it means that, by definition, we are deploying a different tag to dev, staging, and prod. (Or whatever your pre-prod envs are called.) Hopefully, these all point at the same commit … hopefully¹. (Worse, some schemes out there — not the TFA's — force them to never specify the same commit(!) and we devolve to "let's pray those different commits specify the same tree.)

Just tag a version number. Use the date, if you can't think of a version number. Separately, you maintain some file containing what tag/revision you want on each of your dev/stage/prod/etc. environments. This is basically the same rough scheme as what TFA lays out … but not special. Just text files, in a repo², like everything else. You can do it in a separate repository (I'd recommend) or the same one (I wouldn't recommend, but it can work).

The exemplar question,

> When did we last deploy the www.our-app app to production?

Is just the `git log` of the file that contains the hash that that app should be deployed to.

The SRE in me notes, however, that gitops-based deployments (what all of these schemes are) represent the point in time that a deployment is requested — not when it actually rolls out. Deploys that fail or are blocked on some externality can converge much much later than the git commit instructing them to occur is minted. Also, the SRE in me wants to notes that deploys in any realistic scenario are not a point in time. (It starts when you start bringing up the first replica of your app, and it finishes when the last replica of the older deployment has spun down. Depending on how much bloat you have … it can be a good little span of time.)

(¹TFA's scheme seems to contain a textual reference to the tree sha, but is that checked?)

²If you have worked with Flux or ArgoCD, you're almost certainly doing exactly what I am describing, though those are not the only two such systems capable of it.

Re:Thinking will become a hobby on Monday October 12, 2026 @04:51PM (#50062911)
… are you trying to equate "going to Burning Man" as "having money", when they list working at Burning Man (and as a vendor, not even working for Burning Man), not going to it, on their resume?
Re:Decade-old RAM is making a comeback on Sunday October 11, 2026 @05:04PM (#50047800)
Really, I'm not sure how much simpler and clearer their comment could be:

The Persian empire did not exist until round about 550 BCE.

Thus, the upthread statement,

> the business plan people got convicted for trying in ancient Persia, 5000 years ago.

Is somewhat nonsensical: 5000 years ago, Persia did not exist. I suppose we could be talking about whatever existed in that locale of the world around 3000 BCE. But that's what they're saying: "what do you mean, 'in ancient Persia, 5000 years ago', Persia did not exist then".

You can restate all mentions of "value" in the parent post to "real value", and there entire point still holds: why should people expect the real value of a home to increase over time?
Re:Knuth Reward Check on Saturday October 10, 2026 @03:24PM (#50036252)
The HN URL is missing the trailing slash; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50036221
Re:Knuth Reward Check on Saturday October 10, 2026 @03:22PM (#50036221)
Can we adjust the URL to have a final trailing slash? The HN URL points to,

  https://www.thomas-huehn.com/knuth-reward-check
But this means the images, whose hrefs are like,

  src="./bug-report-knuth-2006.jpg"
Don't load; that relative-ref results in a URL of

  https://www.thomas-huehn.com/bug-report-knuth-2006.jpg
Which is a 404.

One can infer that the post's URI is like a "directory" of the subresources for the post, including those images; the URL of

  https://www.thomas-huehn.com/knuth-reward-check/
(n.b. the trailing slash) adjusts the resolution of the image's relative-ref now to:

  https://www.thomas-huehn.com/knuth-reward-check/bug-report-knuth-2006.jpg
And the images load. Yes, trailing slashes in URLs are significant in the case of resolving a relative ref like that.

If the author is here, you might consider redirecting the non-slash to the slash.

> But why will you find me there with the entry “0x$1.20”, i.e. decimal $2.88?

I know Knuth has his own notation here, (it is clearly noted at the bottom of the BOSS page) but 0x1.20 should really be decimal 1.125.

Re:A Terminal Protocol for Program Status (OSC 7501) on Thursday October 08, 2026 @06:31PM (#50013350)
Innovations like this make me sad that terminfo seems to have died and/or quagmired. It makes detection of these features unscalable and/or impossible, because most of the neoterms are just lying in $TERM, and any value that wouldn't be a lie is missing data in terminfo.

I've also never really fully understood why terminfo seems to be a singular package, and not something like man pages where, e.g., each terminal drops in their respectively entry.

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