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I'm genuinely surprised that there isn't column-level shared-dictionary string compression built into SQLite, MySQL/MariaDB or Postgres, like this post is describing.
SQLite has no compression support, MySQL/MariaDB have page-level compression which doesn't work great and I've never seen anyone enable in production, and Postgres has per-value compression which is good for extremely long strings, but useless for short ones.
There are just so many string columns where values and substrings get repeated so much, whether you're storing names, URL's, or just regular text. And I have databases I know would be reduced in size by at least half.
Is it just really really hard to maintain a shared dictionary when constantly adding and deleting values? Is there just no established reference algorithm for it?
It still seems like it would be worth it even if it were something you had to manually set. E.g. wait until your table has 100,000 values, build a dictionary from those, and the dictionary is set in stone and used for the next 10,000,000 rows too unless you rebuild it in the future (which would be an expensive operation).
"Early last year, the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel wrote an essay for the Financial Times arguing that Mr. Trump’s re-election meant that closely guarded government secrets — including about Mr. Epstein’s death — would finally come to light. In the months since, the scrutiny around Mr. Epstein instead revealed that an investment firm co-founded by Mr. Thiel accepted $40 million from Mr. Epstein and that Mr. Epstein and Mr. Thiel corresponded for at least five years before Mr. Epstein’s death.
'Visit me Caribbean,' Mr. Epstein urged the tech billionaire in 2018. Jeremiah Hall, a spokesman for Mr. Thiel, declined to comment on the relationship but said that Mr. Thiel 'never went to Epstein’s island.'"
Apple has always had problems with SMB since they switched from one of the open-source implementations to one it internally developed, many yaers ago.
Then again, SMB especially in its newer versions seems to be a protocol developed by MS with one of its goals being to make third-party implementations as difficult as possible.
What evidence is there that it's hurting their brand?
Outside of HN I see zero complaints. And the situation has been going on for a while. I might not like it, but it seems perfectly fine for their brand as far as I can tell.
Does anyone have a link to a good political model for Iran?
This looks maximally stupid given the American hardware in the region. But there may be internecine angles I’m missing. (Which factions benefit from American air strikes?)
If the building management is amenable to it, and somebody nearby has fiber near the building already, if you get enough residents to sign up for it, they will usually extend to the building and build out at no cost to the building (recouping the fixed costs as part of monthly service). If this is not an option, do you have clear line of site to a building that could service with fixed wireless?
If it’s any consolation, it appears a strike by the US is imminent based on hardware that has been repositioned, with the backing or approval of the Saudis.
It's been a while since I've looked at it, but I believe it says something along the lines of "Apple-branded systems". Putting an Apple logo sticker on a Hackintosh was a common thing to do for this reason.
This sounds close to Russell's "class of all classes" paradox. Is it?
103. Fun! Interesting it took werewolf but not jabberwocky.
To the contrary. Time Machine is for consumers. Most people use it either with an external hard drive (good for iMacs that stay in one place) or a NAS (good for MacBooks). Apple even sold the AirPort Time Capsule at one point. Since that was discontinued, Synology NAS is the main consumer-friendly alternative. It comes with dedicated Time Machine support. It's supposed to be easy setup and forget. That's the whole point of using Synology instead of alternatives that require more technical expertise, that aren't designed for Time Machine support straight out of the box.
Pay them more. There is no labor shortage, simply a shortage of workers unwilling to accept jobs at this compensation. The complaint put forth in the piece is "we cannot compress the wages of these folks because there is no labor surplus to leverage." This arrives eventually due to working age cohort demographic compression (citations below), we're still in early days though.
The US Is Flirting With Its First-Ever Population Decline - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-30/trump-imm... | https://archive.today/DranI - January 30th, 2026
Mapped: Every Country by Total Fertility Rate - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/mapped-countries-by-fert... - December 22nd, 2025
The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments)
HN Search: labor shortage - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
(~4M Boomers retire a year, ~11k/day, ~2M people 55+ die every year, about half of which are in the labor force; that means ~13k-14k workers leave the labor force every day in the US, ~400k/month)
Back issues of Game Developer used to have post-mortems of major projects, both successful and unsuccessful. Those were concrete. This is vague and abstract.
Flying magazine has been publishing "I learned about flying from that" since 1939, and those articles are still good.
The project seems orphaned. I never heard about it before. It's still referenced here as an option to run Genode OS: https://genode.org/about/index
He's the kind of person who's really privileged by Twitter. In an RSS world we probably never would've heard of vibe coding.
> They lose but ignore that they have lost
The way this comment ignores that the administration has not been held in contempt by the Supreme Court?
In the 70s I drove through Eureka, California, which had huge paper mills: I was astounded at how horrible it smelled. I wondered how anyone could live there.
https://humboldtwaterkeeper.org/programs/toxics-initiative/1...
> the 54% doesn't include the 21% does it? otherwise no-duh 20% are below 5th grade, 21% in fact
No, not in fact. Literacy is typically defined to an age level. A third grader could be literate while an adult reading at their level is not.
Doesn't matter. Generated comments are verboten here.
Somewhere in a dusty basement one of these is running a mission critical manufacturing system. It is the last of its kind and absolutely nobody knows that it is there.
Kidding aside, you could pick any issue from Byte of those years and you'd recognize maybe one or two protocols and a handful of brandnames. The rest has all disappeared.
The White House is definitely ready for another remodeling. Half of it is torn down.
Trump really should check out the text on the Quebec license plates.
What's even worse is those who can read at about 6th Grade Level - but are college graduates and media professionals
OpenLook was always prettier though, but Motif was more fashionable with all those 3d buttons.
> I hated the high-pressure midterms/finals of my undergrad
The pressure was what got me to do the necessary work. Auditing classes never worked for me.
> I do some spaced-repetition questions of important topics and give students a study sheet of what to know for the quiz.
Isn't that what the lectures and homework are for?
Sad. No remote airline pilot positions…
Maybe for cargo in a few years.
It‘s about getting a selfie with the blue PostgreSQL elephant wandering around campus. :-)
This is why I think things like devops benefit from the traditional computer science education. Once you see the pattern, whatever project you were assigned looks like something you've done before. And your users will appreciate the care and attention.
It uses it when you use the git backend, but not when you don’t.
Right now, the only other backend is at Google, so it’s not practical for most people. But it’s not an inherent part of jj, and that’s really important, actually.
Rust tags every &mut T and every &T with the equivalent of restrict except for when the T transitively contains an UnsafeCell<T>. Types like Arc<T> and Rc<T> are built on top of UnsafeCell<T>.
Don’t use shared ownership? You get the semantics you want. It’s the norm for the vast majority of things.
> TYCO Print is a printing service where professors can upload course files for TYCO to print out for students as they order. Shorter packets can cost around $20, while longer packets can cost upwards of $150 when ordered with the cheapest binding option.
This made sense a couple of decades ago. Today, it's just bizarre to be spending $150 on a phonebook-sized packet of reading materials. So much paper and toner.
This is what iPads and Kindles are for.
Hardly, even Turbo Pascal 7 for MS-DOS is more advanced than Go's type system.
This strikes me as a skunworks project to investigate a technology that could be used for autonomous vehicles someday, as well as score some points with Sundar and the Alphabet board who've decreed the company is all-in on Gemini.
Production Waymos use a mix of machine-learning and computer vision (particularly on the perception side) and conventional algorithmic planning. They're not E2E machine-learning at all, they use it as a tool when appropriate. I know because I have a number of friends that have gone to work for Waymo, and some that did compiler/build infrastructure for the cars, and I've browsed through their internal Alphabet job postings as well.
It is been years since from my last time, however already about 10 years ago, it used to be either stick to a room, or stay close to a door and leave 10 minutes earlier, to try to get a spot in another talk, equally staying close to the door.
Test and build are things that fall through the cracks and working on them can get outright hostility from management and other team members in some places, indifference in others.
At one place I worked nobody could give me a reliable build procedure, I settled in on one that was 40 min and worked reliably. I complained at every team meeting about the slow build and nobody cared. I put in a ticket for the slow build and was asked “how does this help the end user?” and my answer was “if my build was faster the end user would have had the product six months ago”
Where I am now I have a “maintenance droid” that automates a mildly polyglot build and when it runs into trouble it applies various levels of cleaning and every few months I run into some problem where it gets different results from my supervisor and/or the CI system and these days it always turns out to be right.
Social media has existed for centuries, in the old days it was village rumors.
> given up on the idea of saving their photos and videos over USB?
Until USB has monthly service business to compete with cloud storage revenue.
Wouldn’t this be useful for clustering Macs over TB5? Wasn’t the maximum bandwidth over USB-cables 5Gbps? With a switch, you could cluster more than just 4 Mac Studios and have a couple terabytes for very large models to work with.
Linkrot is a problem and edited articles are another. Because you can cite all you want, but if the underlying resource changes your foundation just melted away.
You just know how they found out about this...
> "I got the idea of using espresso as a staining agent from the circular dried stains in used coffee cups,"
Suuure...
Wifi is fast but the latency is terrible and the reliability is even worse. It can go up and down like a yo-yo. USB is far more predictable even if it is a bit slower.
Thunderbolt is basically external PCIe, so this is not so surprising. High speed NICs do consume a relatively large amount of power. I have a feeling I've seen that logo on the board before.
Armin Ronacher wrote a good piece about why he uses Pi here: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/31/pi/
I hadn't realized that Pi is the agent harness used by OpenClaw.
Facebook engineers (most notably Sam Gross) contributed a lot of the no-GIL work: https://lwn.net/Articles/939981/
Much of the initial work on the JIT came from Microsoft's Faster CPython team: https://lwn.net/Articles/1029307/
I worried about this a lot more at the tail end of 2003, when OpenAI's GPT-4 (since March) was still very clearly ahead of every other model. It briefly looked like control of the most useful model would stay with a single organization, giving them outsized influence in how LLMs shape human society.
I don't worry about that any more because there's so much competition: dozens of organizations now produce usable LLMs and the "best" is no longer static. We have frontier models from the USA, France (Mistral) and China now.
The risk of a model monopoly centralizing cultural power feels a lot lower now then it did a couple of years ago.
The author says it's too long. So let's tighten it up.
A criticism of the use of large language models (LLMs) is that it can deprive us of cognitive skills. Are some kinds of use are better than others? Andy Masley's blog says "thinking often leads to more things to think about", so we shouldn't worry about letting machines do the thinking for us — we will be able to think about other things.
My aim is not to refute all his arguments, but to highlight issues with "outsourcing thinking".
Masley writes that it's "bad to outsource your cognition when it:"
- Builds tacit knowledge you'll need in future.
- Is an expression of care for someone else.
- Is a valuable experience on its own.
- Is deceptive to fake.
- Is focused in a problem that is deathly important to get right, and where you don't totally trust who you're outsourcing it to.
How we choose to use chatbots is about how we want our lives and society to be.
That's what he has to say. Plus some examples, which help make the message concrete. It's a useful article if edited properly.
Here's the famous 2004 article on why tables are bad.[1] Cool people do everything with break and div. The CSS crowd then spent two decades re-inventing tables.
Yes, that is however a dialect, and one of the goals to Swift Embedded roadmap is to replace it.
It is called a legal binding contract, business use it all the time to enforce support.
Food produced by Fritz Haber's Haber-Bosch process (making fertilizer) supports about half of the world's population.
I briefly taught a beginner CS course over a decade ago, and at the time it was already surprising and disappointing how many of my students would reach for a calculator to do single-digit arithmetic; something that was a requirement to be committed to memory when I was still in school. Not surprisingly, teaching them binary and hex was extremely frustrating.
I tell people when I tip I "round off to the nearest dollar, move the decimal place (10%), and multiply by 2" (generating a tip that will be in the ballpark of 18%), and am always told "that's too complicated".
I would tell others to "shift right once, then divide by 2 and add" for 15%, and get the same response.
However, I'm not so sure what you mean by a problem with thinking that abstraction is bad. Yes, abstraction is bad --- because it is a way to hide and obscure the actual details, and one could argue that such dependence on opaque things, just like a calculator or AI, is the actual problem.
No LLMs is impressive. Also recognizes "drop bear". Well played.
> Do you think the current anti-ICE movement would have happened without social media?
Yes. There is a reason Minnesota is effectively resisting in a way Los Angeles failed to.
Once you have a movement, social media mobilizes. But if you’re building a movement, you need footwork and commitment. Not profiteers turning your cause into clicks.
> Or Jan 6th, or all the Palestine protests
Case in point. Support for each of their underlying causes dipped with notoriety around their online activity.
If you want to drain a movement of effective energy, distract it online from its streets.
Almost all of this report is about leaking system prompts.
The OpenClaw system prompt has no measures in it at all to prevent leaking, because trying to protect your system prompt is almost entirely a waste of time and actually makes your product less useful.
As a result, I do not think this is a credible report.
Here's the system prompt right now: https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/blob/b4e2e746b32f70f8fb...
Comparing these statistics across countries is not useful without demographic adjustment. For example, Hispanics in the U.S. have a higher life expectancy than white people in the UK: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/13te521/life_expect....
Systems used to be robust, now they’re fragile due to extreme outsourcing and specialization. I challenge the belief that we’re getting along fine. I argue systems are headed to failure, because of over optimization that prioritized output over resilience.
I've always found the numbers in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe... rather interesting, because of how different the cultures and living conditions are even among the top countries. Hong Kong and Japan are always around the top, but so are Switzerland and Australia.
This guru's comment probably started with "I'll bet" too.
Usually, breaking the plane apart means the people on board will also be much worse off.
We don’t have any similar program in the U.S. You seem to be talking about the fact that some states pay a larger share of the federal tax burden. That’s just a consequence of progressive taxation and those states having more rich people.
In terms of federal grants to states on a per-capita basis, Mississippi gets less than California, and a bit more than Massachusetts: https://ffis.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/SA24-02-1.pdf. Some of the states with very high grants relative to population are states that have a lot of natural resources and get federal lease payments and things like that.
Also, the gap between richer states and poorer states has closed dramatically. In 1950, the nominal per capita personal income in New York was 2.4 times higher than Mississippi. Today’s it’s about 60% higher. Adjusted for cost of living, incomes in New York today are only about 11% higher today: https://flowingdata.com/2021/03/25/income-in-each-state-adju...
GPS on my old Android takes a minute or two to get a fix every time I turn it on, and I very rarely have GPS on at the same time as the cell radio, so I doubt they're getting more than triangulation from me.
Wait wait, so if I know the "secret" SMS format I can text someone's phone and get their coordinates back?
Nobody has to have instructions on how to "hack" the Steam Deck because it's a computer and you just run whatever you want on it.
The instructions on how to crack open the immutable OS image are readily available from Valve but you probably won't need them since it's already got a lot of power even without that.
Term limits for elective office are fake, nonworking solution to problems caused by a broken electoral system; the solution is to fix the electoral system, not to impose term limits (which solve nothing.)
> That means the article contained a plausible-sounding sentence, cited to a real, relevant-sounding source. But when you read the source it’s cited to, the information on Wikipedia does not exist in that specific source. When a claim fails verification, it’s impossible to tell whether the information is true or not.
This has been a rampant problem on Wikipedia always. I can't seem to find any indicator that this has increased recently? Because they're only even investigating articles flagged as potentially AI. So what's the control baseline rate here?
Applying correct citations is actually really hard work, even when you know the material thoroughly. I just assume people write stuff they know from their field, then mostly look to add the minimum number of plausible citations after the fact, and then most people never check them, and everyone seems to just accept it's better than nothing. But I also suppose it depends on how niche the page is, and which field it's in.
It's not asinine. This suspension happened two years ago. I don't see any sudden panicking.
The distance between manager-speak and LLM-speak is very small. Who wrote that?
The ads/analytics providers very well might. They gather data and cross-reference from tons of different sources.
And I don't know about you, but I've put my phone number into a lot of apps and sites. Sometimes it's required, sometimes it's for 2FA, etc.
> Broadly speaking, if it's worth watching the end of a movie, it's probably worth watching the whole thing.
That's what I'm 100% disagreeing with. It might actually be worth fast-forwarding through some dark suspenseful parts with no dialog or meaningful action.
> "Suffering through boredom" was how you phrased it.
Right. It's boring. Boring isn't pain or discomfort. It's boredom, its own category. Why suffer that? Just speed it up and improve your experience.
There's no moral virtue in forcing yourself to watch every single shot at 1x speed, or deciding that if it isn't worth watching fully at 1x it isn't worth watching at all. That's unhelpful black-and-white thinking.
Related:
Havana syndrome: NSA officer’s case hints at microwave attacks since 90s - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27013602 - May 2021 (210 comments)
The title I've chosen here is carefully selected to highlight one of the main points. It comes (lightly edited for length) from this paragraph:
Far more insidious, however, was something else we discovered:
More than two-thirds of these articles failed verification.
That means the article contained a plausible-sounding sentence, cited to a real, relevant-sounding source. But when you read the source it’s cited to, the information on Wikipedia does not exist in that specific source. When a claim fails verification, it’s impossible to tell whether the information is true or not. For most of the articles Pangram flagged as written by GenAI, nearly every cited sentence in the article failed verification.
The issue is what the client app does with the information after it is decrypted. As Snowden remarked after he released his trove, encryption works, and it's not like the NSA or anyone else has some super secret decoder ring. The problem is endpoint security is borderline atrocious and an obvious achilles heel - the information has to be decoded in order to display it to the end user, so that's a much easier attack vector than trying to break the encryption itself.
So the point other commenters are making is that you can verify all you want that the encryption is robust and secure, but that doesn't mean the app can't just send a copy of the info to a server somewhere after it has been decoded.
L-theanine 100mg-400mg, test to optimize
Melatonin 1mg-3mg, test to optimize (less is usually more optimal, but everyone's biology is different)
Avoid alcohol whenever possible from a sleep perspective.
There's a whole section, early, in the analysis Albrecht posted that surfaces these concerns.
Implies, but doesn't prove.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/21/books/donald-trump-jr-tri...
The US has a soy glut and a corn glut, and Germany has a potato glut. What to do with all those carbs? Feed cattle?
The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. - Job 1:21
It's rare that I downvote something on HN, but this statement is so incredibly dangerous that I felt I had to. Doctors with a decade of education still make mistakes when prescribing drugs. What chance does the layperson have of getting it right?
Further aside, note that there are constructions designed specifically for that problem and its relatives:
Does this help? It‘s six years old though: https://youtu.be/4wKmpCrWSxI
Not really.
C took off because it was free, shipped alongside with an operating system that initially was available for a symbolic price, as AT&T was forbidden to take advantage of UNIX.
Had UNIX been a commercial operating system, with additional licenses for the C compiler, like every other operating systems outside Bell Labs, we would not be even talking about C in 2026.
Whether the price goes up or down from here, one notion has been sufficiently shattered over the last couple of years - that Bitcoin is a stable ~source~ store of value that acts has a hedge against inflation and currency control by governments. While assets like gold and silver have surged in the same time period due to political and economic uncertainty, as one may expect, Bitcoin has gone in the opposite direction and has been driven more by hype cycles and a small number of whales rather than any fundamentals.
Without bothering to look into old MS-DOS programming books, I remember the COM executable format, and the way some MS-DOS memory buffers related to file handles worked had a compatible layout to ease porting code from CP/M.
> If there was a legitimate drive to protect kids from the worst of the Internet, there'd have been more of a crackdown on porn, gore, etc long before social media became such a big problem. And smartphones would have never been allowed in schools.
Where are you from, because all of these things have/are being tried for a long time in the US (and, I'd note, received significant pushback from civil liberty advocates). Heck, TFA itself talks about how this social media ban is coming after a ban on phones in schools.
I don't recall that being any part of the rationale for the US war in Iraq (which, to be clear, will hopefully go down as the least just war the US ever instigated). "We'll be greeted as liberators" was trotted out as a mitigation for how bad occupations normally are, but we were going whether or not that was true. The Iraq war was not a war of liberation against an unjust government. It was a war of choice against a country that happened to have a horrendously unjust government.
The pretext for the Iraq war was that they were involved in 9/11 and possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Indeed and we are all still waiting for Xanadu.
You are also using proprietary, closed-source hardware and operating system underneath the app that can do whatever they want. This line of reasoning ultimately leads to - unless you craft every atom and every bit yourself your data isn't secure. Which may be true, but is a pointless discussion.
> I must say, this copy protection mechanism seems a bit… simplistic? A hardware dongle that just passes back a constant number? Defeatable with a four-byte patch?
Nowadays we don't bother with copyright protection other than a license key, because we know enterprises generally will pay their bills if you put up any indication at all that a bill is required to be paid.
This was basically the 80s version of that.