Unlurker|Replay|About
You Can't Fool the Optimizer (xania.org)
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Better tell me how to make the compiler not fool me!
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Is this an argument for compiled code?
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It's not really an argument for anything, it's just showing off how cool compilers are!
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With this one I instead wondered: If there are 4 functions doing exactly the same thing, couldn't the compiler also only generate the code for one of them? E.g. if in `main` you called two different add functions, couldn't it optimize one of them away completely? It probably shouldn't do that if you create a dynamic library that needs a symbol table but for an ELF binary it could, no? Why doesn't it do that?
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> It probably shouldn't do that if you create a dynamic library that needs a symbol table but for an ELF binary it could, no? It can't do that because the program might load a dynamic library that depends on the function. That's one of the reasons why a very cheap optimization is to always use `static` for functions when you can. You're telling the compiler that the function doesn't need to be visible outside the current compilation unit, so the compiler is free to even inline it completely and never produce an actual callable function, if appropriate.
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It would but it's harder to trigger. Here, it's not safe because they're public functions and the standard would require `add_v1 != add_v2` (I think). If you declare them as static, it eliminates the functions and the calls completely: https://aoco.compiler-explorer.com/z/soPqe7eYx I'm sure it could also perform definition merging like you suggest but I can't think of a way of triggering it at the moment without also triggering their complete elision.
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One undesirable property of optimizers is that in theory one day they produce good code and the next day they don't.
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"The compiler" and "The optimizer" are doing a lot of the heavy lifting here in the argument. I definitely know compilers and optimizers which are not that great. Then again, they are not turning C++ code into ARM instructions. You absolutely can fool a lot of compilers out there! And I am not only looking at you, NVCC.
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But the point should be to follow the optimization cycle: develop, benchmark, evaluate, profile, analyze, optimize. Writing performant code is no joke and very often destroys readability and introduces subtle bugs, so before trying to oursmart the compiler, evaluate if what it produces is good enough already
I always code with the mindset “the compiler is smarter than me.” No need to twist my logic around attempting to squeeze performance out of the processor - write something understandable to humans, let the computer do what computers do.
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The fact that compilers are smart isn't an excuse to not think about performance at all. They can't change your program architecture, algorithms, memory access patterns, etc. You can mostly not think about super low level integer manipulation stuff though.
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You say that, but I was able to reduce the code size of some avr8 stuff I was working on by removing a whole bunch of instructions that zero out registers and then shift a value around. I don't it to literally shift the top byte 24 bits to the right and zero out the upper 24 bits, I just need it to pass the value in the top 8 bits direct to the next operation. I agree that most people are not writing hand-tuned avr8 assembly. Most people aren't attempting to do DSP on 8-bit AVRs either.
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also not all software need optimization to the bone pareto principle like always, dont need the best but good enough not every company is google level anyway
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This is decent advice in general, but it pays off to try and express your logic in a way that is machine friendly. That mostly means thinking carefully about how you organize the data you work with. Optimizers generally don't change data structures or memory layout but that can make orders of magnitude difference in the performance of your program. It is also often difficult to refactor later.
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> I always code with the mindset “the compiler is smarter than me.” Like with people in general, it depends on what compiler/interpreter we're talking about, I'll freely grant that clang is smarter than me, but CPython for sure isn't. :) More generally, canonicalization goes very far, but no farther than language semantics allows. Not even the notorious "sufficiently smart compiler" with infinite time can figure out what you don't tell it.
The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle (fxrant.blogspot.com)
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The did something similar to Buffy The Vampire Slayer when "upgrading" it to HD. It lost all/most of the color grading and was cropped to 16:9. Some night scenes now take place during daytime and you can see booms and camera operators in many shots. It never even got a blu ray release. The only way to watch it at home without egregious errors is still DVD as far as I know.
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Unrelated: does anyone else experience huge lag with HBO streaming app? It’s easily the slowest I regularly use on Samsung smart tv.
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On an Apple TV with first gen Homepods connected it is incredibly laggy. Specifically rewind and fast forward take sometimes up to 10 seconds to respond. And even then they never seem to get me to the correct location. It’s pretty maddening.
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A side story on the techniques for restoration: I'm guessing about 10-15 years ago I was watching a documentary on the re-release of Ken Burns Civil War. They were highlighting the digital tools they were using to restore and enhance the original film capture for new streaming services etc. They showed one of the restorers using a fascinating tool where one window was a video feed of the original film's "first pass" to digital. One of the landscape scenes had a small smudge in the upper right hand corner so the restorer pauses the feed, goes back frame by frame and then was able to drag and drop the frame into another window where he used Photoshop like tools to fix everything and then drag and drop it back into the "feed". Seemed VERY efficient and shows how good tools can really accelerate a workflow. I'm not sure if the above scene is in the below quick documentary but there are a lot of other cool "behind the scenes of restoration" moments: https://www.pbs.org/video/civil-war-restoring-civil-war/
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It's weird that they'd have the crew in the frame anyway. Was it really not possible to have them out of frame? I guess being able to "do it in post" makes people lazy?
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They were out of frame. Out of the 4:3 frame.
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I guess the crew has to stay pretty close to the end of the hose or it becomes hard to time the... flow... correctly. Likely, they still had to process the frames anyway to make the... flow... look like it comes out of Sterling's mouth, not from the side of his face, so it was basically no extra cost.
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If it can be fixed in post, what's the problem? The only flaw here is that they completely screwed up and forgot post for these scenes (in the remaster).
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Probably more a function of "shit happens" when doing something new (making and using a "vomit hose") in a big, multi-functional project (shooting a TV show).
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Possibly some issues with the hose length and the ability control the flow? Or perhaps it’s just an off the shelf up chuck chucker that doesn’t have a longer hose?
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Great article, I really thought it was a recropping like friends (and many others). So weird that they just forgot about CGI.
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It's even weirder when you consider how big of a deal this was for Star Trek only a few years ago (well maybe more than a few...). You would have thought people in the business would know about this.
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> You would have thought people in the business would know about this. People in the business world seems to only know business, and that's the limit of what they care about. Place these people into the arts, and you quickly see how important it is to have at least a single ounce of care when you work on projects where you want some level of quality. But I think HBO, Netflix and most TV/streaming services are run by business-people still, as they think it's a numbers game, not a arts game. Eventually someone will understand and take the world by storm, but seemingly not yet.
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Everyone is underpaid and overworked. All things considered the companies probably think it’s worth the trade off, they’ll just fix it and republish. Might even end up with more viewers in the end! How many people have learned that Mad Men is on HBO Max as a result of this? Execs have less and less shame as the years go on. Pride in artistic endeavour? That’s not going to make the shareholders happy.
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Great article. Can someone explain what was wrong with that _Friends_ screenshot? I can't tell.
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New York apartments rarely have holes in their walls opening to the hallway.
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I think it is the open hole in the wall next to the door -- which no real apartment would have. I think that part was meant be cropped in the final frame, maybe?
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haha. Take a look at the massive unfinished window into the hallway =).
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There's a cut out on the wall for cameras on a different angle.
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They never intended to show anything to the right of the doorframe on TV, so there's a random sign on the wall and a big hole in the wall (which makes sense if you are a camera crew wanting to film a sitcom in the apartment, that doesn't make so much sense in the fictional world that anyone would have a big rectangle cut out of the wall between their apartment and the hallway).
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There's a window-hole in what should be an exterior apartment wall facing a hallway. Right side of the screen.
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Damn, that's terrible. Reminds me of The Simpsons being cropped into 16:9 for Disney and obscuring the joke that all the Duff brews come from one pipe.
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I've had people make the Duff argument about real beers. Putting bad batches in a different can is a great way to do quality control on your main brand though.
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You can switch to the original 4:3 though Edit: and I'm getting flagged lol The Simpsons > Details > Remastered aspect ratio > Off https://i.imgur.com/pQohgQp.jpeg
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That option wasn't added until some time later.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Mathematics is hard for mathematicians to understand too (science.org)
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I think this would be extremely valuable: “We need to focus far more energy on understanding and explaining the basic mental infrastructure of mathematics—with consequently less energy on the most recent results.” I’ve long thought that more of us could devout time to serious maths problems if they were written in a language we all understood. A little off topic perhaps, but out of curiosity - how many of us here have an interest in recreational mathematics? [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recreational_mathematics ]
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> I’ve long thought that more of us could devout time to serious maths problems if they were written in a language we all understood. That assumes it’s the language that makes it hard to understand serious math problems. That’s partially true (and the reason why mathematicians keep inventing new language), but IMO the complexity of truly understanding large parts of mathematics is intrinsic, not dependent on terminology. Yes, you can say “A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors” in terms that more people know of, but it would take many pages, and that would make it hard to understand, too.
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Yeah, I don't want to be uncharitable, but I've noticed that a lot of stem fields make heavy use of esoteric language and syntax, and I suspect they do so as a means of gatekeeping. I understand that some degree of formalism is required to enable the sharing of knowledge amongst people across a variety of languages, but sometimes I'll read a white paper and think "wow, this could be written a LOT more simply". Statistics is a major culprit of this.
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Gatekeeping, or self-promotion? You don't get investors/patents/promotions/tenure by making your knowledge or results sound simple and understandable.
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Why not both? And that's a good point, there are a LOT of incentives to make things arbitrarily complex in a variety of fields.
Just the other day I was listening to EconTalk on this: https://www.econtalk.org/a-mind-blowing-way-of-looking-at-math-with-david-bessis/
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Thank you for posting! - I was not aware of this.
Mathematics is such an old field, older than anything except arguably philosophy, that it's too broad and deep for anyone to really understand everything. Even in graduate school I often took classes in things discovered by Gauss or Euler centuries before. A lot of the mathematical topics the HN crowd seems to like--things like the Collatz conjecture or Busy Beavers--are 60, 80 years old. So, you end up having to spend years specializing and then struggle to find other with the same background. All of which is compounded by the desire to provide minimal "proofs from the book" and leave out the intuitions behind them.
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I'll argue for astronomy being the oldest. Minimal knowledge would help pre-humans navigate and keep track of the seasons. Birds are known to navigate by the stars.
> I'm sure fields of literature or politics are older. As far as anybody can tell, mathematics is way older than literature. The oldest known proper accounting tokens are from 7000ish BCE, and show proper understanding of addition and multiplication. The people who made the Ishango bone 25k years ago were probably aware of at least rudimentary addition. The earliest writings are from the 3000s BCE, and are purely administrative. Literature, by definition, appeared later than writing.
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> As far as anybody can tell, mathematics is way older than literature. That depends what you mean by "literature". If you want it to be written down, then it's very recent because writing is very recent. But it would be normal to consider cultural products to be literature regardless of whether they're written down. Writing is a medium of transmission. You wouldn't study the epic of Gilgamesh because it's written down . You study it to see what the Sumerians thought about the topics it covers, or to see which god some iconography that you found represents, or... anything that it might plausibly tell you. But the fact that it was written down is only the reason you can study it, not the reason you want to.
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> That depends what you mean by "literature". If you want it to be written down That is what literature means: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/literature#Noun
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Well, then poetry is not literature.
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No, the argument is even dumber than that. The person who writes a poem hasn't created any literature. The person who hears that poem in circulation and records it in his notes has created literature; an anthology is literature but an original work isn't.
I was writing a small article about [Set, Set Builder Notation, and Set Comprehension]( https://adropincalm.com/blog/set-set-builder-natatio-set-comprehension-explained/ ) and while i was investigating it surprised me how many different ways are to describe the same thing. Eg: see all the notation of a Set or a Tuple. One last rant point is that you don't have "the manual" of math in the very same way you would go on your programming language man page and so there is no single source of truth. Everybody assumes...
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I wrote about overlapping intervals a while ago, and used what I thought was the standard math notation for closed and half-open intervals. From comments, I learned that half-open intervals are written differently in french mathematics: https://lobste.rs/s/cireck/how_check_for_overlapping_intervals#c_sy17qx
I find it strange to compare "math" with one programming language. Mathematics is a huge and diverse field, with many subcommunities and hence also differing notation. Your rant would be akin to this if the sides are reversed: "It's surprising how many different ways there are to describe the same thing. Eg: see all the notations for dictionaries (hash tables? associative arrays? maps?) or lists (vectors? arrays?). You don't have "the manual" of programming languages. "
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> You don't have "the manual" of programming languages. " Well, we kinda do when you can say "this python program" the problem with a lot of math is that you can't even tell which manual to look up.
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Not the original commenter, but I 100% agree that it's weird we have so many ways to describe dictionaries/hash tables/maps/etc. and lists.
I thought we were well past trying to understand mathematics. After all, John von Neumann long ago said "In mathematics we don't understand things. We just get used to them."
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It's probably a neurological artefact. When the brain just spent enough time looking at a pattern it can suddenly become obvious. You can go from blind to enlightened without the usual conscious logical effort. It's very odd.
I have tingling suspicion that you might have missed the joke. To date I have not met anyone who thought he summed the terms of the infinite series in geometric series term by term. That would take infinite time. Of course he used the expression for the sum of a geometric series. The joke is that he missed a clever solution that does not require setting up the series, recognising it's in geometric progression and then using the closed form. The clever solution just finds the time needed for the trains to collide, then multiply that with the birds speed. No series needed.
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Ah. I was going by memory, and I had those two as separate stories. I didn't remember that he said "I did the sum" on the trains problem.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
The Writing Is on the Wall for Handwriting Recognition (newsletter.dancohen.org)
Any self-hosted open source solution? I would like to digitize my paper notebooks but I do not want to use anything proprietary or that uses external services. What is the state of the art on the FOSS side? Ideally something that I can train with my own handwriting. I had a look at Tesseract, wondering if there’s anything better out there.
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Regular handwriting there are many. Historical handwriting, Gemini 3 is the only one which gave a decent result on a 19th century minutes from a town court in Northern Norway (Danish gothic handwriting with bleed through). I'm not 100% sure it's correct, but that's because it's so dang hard to read it to verify it. At least I see it gets many names, dates and locations right. I've been waiting a long time for this.
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> Regular handwriting there are many. Please share. I am out of the loop and my searches have not pointed me to the state of the art, which has seen major steps forward in the past 3 or 4 years but most of it seems to be closed or attached to larger AI products. Is it even still called OCR?
It feels unbelievable that in Europe literacy rate could be 10% of lower. Then I look at documents even as young as 150 years... fraktur, blackletter, elaborate handwritting. I guess I'm illiterate now. Hopefully next generations will feel the same about legal contracts, law in general, and Java code bases. They're incomprehensible not because of fonts but because of unfathomable complexity.
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You can learn fraktur or blackletter in a day and cyrillic in a few days, if you already know the latin alphabet.
Which Europe and which century do you live in where literacy rate is below 10%?
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Speaking about the past centuries.
The writing is on the wall for handwriting. Zoomers use speech recognition or touchscreen keyboards, millennials use keyboards. Boomers use pens
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I call out the Lindy effect. Handwriting survived printed characters, typewriters, and the last 50-70 years of computers and keyboards, it will survive this too.
Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service (theregister.com)
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Yep, all my new stuff is on Gitlab.
Is anything broken on the pure Git side of Github? From this, it's clear that actions and runners are becoming unusable. But are repositories still safe?
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The outages break `git push`. I'm not a fan of the AI adoption within the UI, and the side bars when browsing code usually get in the way. Using GitHub as a dumb git backend isn't a great option either, look at the Linux kernels PRs, it's almost all spam. Why on earth can't PRs be disabled? https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed
Am I in the minority when I actually like those AI features on GitHub? The ability to interrogate any open source codebase is __amazing__, this feature alone has saved me days of work/research. The AI code reviews are nothing to write home about, but occasionally catch stuff that I would've missed, a net benefit for me. I don't really get all the outrage... Sure, having an "Ask AI" Clippy-like thing in your face everywhere gets old quick, but at least on GitHub I find it non-obtrusive and often actually useful.
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...you can just clone the repository and do that interrogation locally with the AI tool of your choice. Every single application or webpage having its own AI integration is seriously one of the dumbest ideas in computing history (instead of separating applications and AI tools and let them work together via standardized interfaces).
The edit history of the announcement is quite a ride: > [2025-11-27T02:10:07Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining losers eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress [1] > [2025-11-27T14:04:47Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining rookies eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress [2] > [2025-11-28T09:21:12Z] it’s abundantly clear that the engineering excellence that created GitHub’s success is no longer driving it [3] --- 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20251127021007/https://ziglang.org/news/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg/ 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20251127140447/https://ziglang.org/news/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg/ 3: https://web.archive.org/web/20251128092112/https://ziglang.org/news/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg/
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to quote something I said a day ago about AI spotting in the posts of other people: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46114083 "I think that writing style is more LinkedIn than LLM, the style of people who might get slapped down if they wrote something individual. Much of the world has agreed to sound like machines."
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Also > More importantly, Actions is created by monkeys ... vs > Most importantly, Actions has inexcusable bugs ... I commend the author for correcting their mistakes. However, IMHO, an acknowledgement instead of just a silent edit would have been better. Anyway, each to their own, and I'm happy for the Zig community.
At least he edited it to something more palatable. I vastly prefer someone who can admit to making a mistake and amending what they said to someone who doubles down. The latter attitude has become far too normalised in the last few years.
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That's only here, he has been doubling down on Mastodon https://mastodon.social/@andrewrk
Is political correctness necessary to have a thriving community / open source project? Linux seems to be doing fine. I wouldn't personally care either way but it is non-obvious to me that the first version would actually hurt the community.
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How you treat others says everything about you and nothing about the other person. In this case, the unnecessary insults detract from the otherwise important message, and reflect poorly on Zig. They were right to edit it.
Linus famously was quite strict and cursed quite a bit when somebody pissed him off with stupidity.
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He's not exactly a role model when it comes to communication.
Additional note on Codeberg, which I think is great as a project, but I got curious on what infrastructure they are running on and how reliable this would be for larger corporate repos. Nov 22, 2025 https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-onwards-and-upwards.html Quotes from their website: Infrastructure status [...] We are running on 3 servers, one Gigabyte and 2 Dell servers (R730 and R740). Here's their current hardware: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg-Infrastructure/meta/src/branch/main/hardware [...] Although aged, the performance (and even energy efficiency) is often not much worse than with new hardware that we could afford. In the interest of saving embodied carbon emissions from hardware manufacturing, we believe that used hardware is the more sustainable path. [...] We are investigating how broken Apple laptops could be repurposed into CI runners. After all, automated CI usage doesn't depend on the same factors that human beings depend on when using a computer (functioning screen, speakers, keyboard, battery, etc.). If you own a broken M1/M2 device or know someone who does, and believe that it is not worth a conventional repair, we would be happy to receive your hardware donation and give it a try! [...] While it usually holds up nicely, we see sudden drop in performance every few days. It can usually be "fixed" with a simple restart of Forgejo to clear the backlog of queries. Gives both early-Google as well as hackerspace vibes, which can or can not be a good thing.
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To be fair, Codeberg isn’t for corporate repos, it’s for FLOSS projects. Take a look at their Terms of Use. They don’t aim to be a commercial provider, rather the opposite.
https://status.codeberg.eu/status/codeberg Their reliability is not great unfortunately. Currently their 24h uptime is 89% for the main site. They are partially degraded right now. The 14 day uptime is 98% but I think that’s actually because some of their auxiliary systems have great uptime, the main site is never that great it seems.
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This isn't a great time for them: https://social.anoxinon.de/@Codeberg/115652289949965925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46131693
IMHO, the main advantage of github is that it is an ecosystem. This is a well-thought-out Swiss knife: a pioneering (but no longer new) PR system, convenient issues, as well as a well-formed CI system with many developed actions and free runners. In addition, it is best to use code navigation simply in a web browser. You write code, and almost everything works effortlessly. Having a sponsorship system is also great, you don't have to search for external donation platforms and post weird links in your profile/repository. All in one, that's why developers like it so much. The obsession with AI makes me nervous, but the advantages still outweigh, as for me, the average developer. For now.
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>a well-formed CI system with many developed actions and free runners. It feels to me like people have become way too reliant on this (in particular, forcing things into CI that could easily be done locally) and too trusting of those runners (ISTR some reports of malware). >In addition, it is best to use code navigation simply in a web browser. I've always found their navigation quite clunky and glitchy.
I don't agree with this at all. I think the reason Github is so prominent is the social network aspects it has built around Git, which created strong network effects that most developers are unwilling to part with. Maintainers don't want to loose their stars and the users don't want to loose the collective "audit" by the github users. Things like number of stars on a repository, number of forks, number of issues answered, number of followers for an account. All these things are powerful indicators of quality, and like it or not are now part of modern software engineering. Developers are more likely to use a repo that has more stars than its alternatives. I know that the code should speak for itself and one should audit their dependencies and not depend on Github stars, but in practice this is not what happens, we rely on the community.
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Github became successful long before those 'social media features' were added, simply because it provided free hosting for open source projects (and free hosting services were still a rare thing back in the noughties). The previous popular free code hoster was Sourceforge, which eventually started its what's now called "enshittifcation phase". Github was simply in the right place at the right time to replace Sourceforge and the rest is history.
> Things like number of stars on a repository, number of forks, number of issues answered, number of followers for an account. All these things are powerful indicators of quality Hahahahahahahahahahahaha...
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For what its worth I think star based programming is far better than letting an AI generate your code. It is like community curation, in a way less centralized than an AI and more eyes to catch bugs and run in production.
> a well-formed CI system Man :| no. I genuinely understand the convenience of using Actions, but it's a horrible product.
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What do you consider a good product in this space?
My issue with Github CI is that it doesn't run your code in a container. You just have github-runner-1 user and you need to manually check out repository, do your build and clean up after you're done with it. Very dirty and unpredictable. That's for self-hosted runner.
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> My issue with Github CI is that it doesn't run your code in a container. Is this not what you want? https://docs.github.com/en/actions/how-tos/write-workflows/choose-where-workflows-run/run-jobs-in-a-container > You just have github-runner-1 user and you need to manually check out repository, do your build and clean up after you're done with it. Very dirty and unpredictable. That's for self-hosted runner. Yeah checking out everytime is a slight papercut I guess, but I guess it gives you control as sometimes you don't need to checkout anything or want a shallow/full clone. I guess if it checked out for you then their would be other papercuts. I use their runners so never need to do any cleanup and get a fresh slate everytime.
The main thing I like about Github's PRs is that it's a system I'm already familiar with and have a login/account for. It's tedious going to contribute to a project to find I have to sign up for and learn another system. I've used Gerrit years ago, so wasn't totally unfamiliar, but it was still awkward to use when Go were using it for PRs. Notably that project ended up giving up on it because of the friction for users - and they were probably one of the most likely cases to stick to their guns and use something unusual.
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> The main thing I like about Github's PRs is that it's a system I'm already familiar with and have a login/account for. It's tedious going to contribute to a project to find I have to sign up for and learn another system. codeberg supports logging in with GitHub accounts, and the PR interface is exactly the same you have nothing new to learn!
A competent developer should be aware of the tools of the trade. I'm not saying a competent developer should be proficient in using gerrit, but they should know that it isn't an obscure tool - it's a google-sponsored project handling millions of lines of code internally in google and externally. It's like calling golang an obscure language when all you ever did is java or typescript.
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It’s silly to assume that someone isn’t competent just because you know about a tool that they don’t know about. The inverse is almost certainly also true. Is there some kind of Google-centrism at work here? Most devs don’t work at Google or contribute to Google projects, so there is no reason for them to know anything about Gerrit.
One can always host Forgejo themselves if a service level has to be kept under control. With Github that’s not even an option. I would even consider that moving everything from one single point of failure to an other is not the brightest move.
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> With Github that’s not even an option. Github does offer a self hosted product: GitHub Enterprise Server
I said e.V., not EV. Codeberg is an e.V., i.e. a "registered association" in Germany. I am not actually sure if you could technically buy an e.V., but I am 100% certain that all of the Codeberg e.V. members would not take kindly to an attempt at a hostile takeover from Microsoft. So no, buying Codeberg is not easier than DDoSing them.
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they can't buy the orgs but they can buy the codeberg or its member which is basically the same thing
This is just FUD, there is nothing dangerous in having an SSH server open to the internet that only allows key authentication. Sure, scanners will keep pinging it, but nobody is ever going to burn an ssh 0day on your home server.
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> This is just FUD. No, it's just opsec. > Sure, scanners will keep pinging it, but nobody is ever going to burn an ssh 0day on your home server. I wouldn't be so sure about it, considering the things I have seen. I'd better be safe than sorry. You can expose your SSH if you prefer to do so. Just don't connect your server to my network.
Yeah no need for public ssh. Or if you do pick a random port and fail2ban or better just whitelist the one IP you are using for the duration of that session. To avoid needing SSH just send your logs and metrics out and do something to autodeploy securely then you rarely need to be in. Or use k8s :)
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Whitelisting single IP (preferably a static one) sounds plausible. Kubernetes for personal infrastructure is akin to getting an aircraft carrier for fishing trips. For simple systems snapshots and backups are good enough. If you're managing a thousand machine fleet, then things are of course different. I manage both so, I don't yearn to use big-stack-software on my small hosts. :D
Accepting US car standards would risk European lives (etsc.eu)
For the pollution side, just align with the Californa Auto standards which would be more in line with EU standards
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Do these laws do anything to limit the sales of these gas-guzzlers in California then?
> I can agree with the most of this, but the large families being pushed out of existence is plainly wrong. How much the school is costing you? Healthcare? How much do you save by being able to cycle with 4 kids to short distances, where most of your daily travel comprised of? Oh I love cycling. I know it's hard to find even remotely comparable cycling-friendly locations in the States, even if growing up (also in a large family) we were fortunate enough to live walking distance to schools in a suburban area. But for education and health, health care isn't "free" in the Netherlands. We pay hundreds per month for the whole family for health insurance on top of the high taxes that support the "system". Public education is also tax-supported in the USA for K-12, although indeed higher education is more expensive. I'm more referencing policy that is intentionally "squeezing" everything to make it all smaller and more frugal in a way that makes a <5 family size far more practical. It is not the same in the States.
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It’s certainly different in the US; 4 kids would likely unlock a large number of government assistance programs even if you’re relatively well compensated, and put you on state health insurance. Incidental costs go up but not terribly so. And vehicles get cheaper per person the more people you have unlike many transit packages.
Yeah, not a fan of cyclists. And it's kind of braindead to have my car break because if I hit a pedestrian somehow it is its job to absorb the impact. Maybe cyclists and pedestrians should be more mindful of their surroundings. The EU regulations have killed all the nice things about cars: straight lines, retractable headlights and so on.
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You know what else will be braindead in your nice world? The child who runs out in front of a car after a rigid tight-angled metal corner drives into their skull. These regulations aren't about blame or "drivers/pedestrians/cyclists should be more aware!", they're about reducing or avoiding as much harm as possible when things don't go to plan and an accident happens.
> Observe how quiet your conversation can be at 80mph. It might change your perspective a bit. Take a train some time. It might change yours.
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Trains do even better in pedestrian collisions. But pedestrians can be at fault there, they’re not allowed to be with cars.
The Dutch ones do the exact same..
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The government fixed it this year: https://www.belastingdienst.nl/wps/wcm/connect/nl/bpm/content/veranderingen-ondernemersregeling-bpm-bestelauto-2025
I once rented a small Kia (cheapest car I could get), drove from Houston to New Orleans and back. Apart from my eye balls popping at the sight of all the weapons on people and in shops, seeing some of the most obese people ever in my life (even in commercials it's ok to be obese), the 3x portions of all the food, and the variety of [drive-through-x for x in [ATM, pharmacy, funeral, etc]], I was in constant fear of someone not noticing my tiny Kia and driving over me. I was stopped by police while taking a walk and shouted at and treated like a criminal when walking in to a Wendy's drive through (even though only the drive through was open at that hour!) But, other than that, the people were incredibly kind! The culture shock though... It is very hard to imagine if you've never been there. I think as someone from western Europe I have more in common with people from Thailand. Cars are really a must-have in the US, biking is just a hobby. It's more the other way around here. Everybody is a "cyclist" (not even a word we use here) some of the time. It means "carists" have respect and understanding of how it is on a bike, and drive carefully around people on bikes (in general, there are always exceptions). Our infrastructure and law demands it (ie, a car-owner is always financially responsible in an accident with a pedestrian or person on a bike here, insurance for this is mandatory). Here people in massive US sized cars are really seen as anti-social, in general I'd say. Hope it stays that way. For now I think some of those cars can't even fit into city-center parking garages here (ie [0], btw if you look around there you see separated bike lanes, crossings where pedestrians always have priority (ignoring that is instant fine), very narrow lanes for cars. Go forward in time and you see they added "statues" that look like they are about to cross the street to make drivers aware of this.) [0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/tVaeHa4SNAz3iQ4x9
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> (even in commercials it's ok to be obese), To be fair, you can really lay that particular one at the feet of the demographics in this comment section far more justifiably than you can blame the obese people you saw in the deep south for it.
> I was stopped by police while taking a walk and shouted at and treated like a criminal when walking in to a Wendy's drive through I live in a very bike friendly country, so culturally closer to Europe in terms of transport, but if you walked into a drive through you may well be stopped by police. Drive throughs have long since stopped serving pedestrians. Generally anyone trying this is inebriated.
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>Drive throughs have long since stopped serving pedestrians. That's a social class and location based. The average overpaid techie on HN who lives in the kind of place where all the houses are a million bucks and everyone buys their trophy wife a 4Runner because that's what you need for one kid then yeah, the drive through won't serve you as a walk up. The Popeyes in Camden NJ don't care if you ride an elephant through the drive through.
Maybe the legislation allowing their import should take their special status in to account. I would suggest mandatory semi (or full) trailer truck drivers' license required for anyone who operates these. In addition, they should be indicated as a new category of "recreational trucks", with harsh penalties specific to them especially regarding road accidents. For example, if found guilty of reckless driving, or causing accidents, the vehicle would be permanently confiscated. (On top of personal fines, loss of license etc as already sentenced by law.) Perhaps the law enforcement could then be given access to such confiscated vehicles, creating also some incentive to enforce the law.
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> Perhaps the law enforcement could then be given access to such confiscated vehicles That is… not how we do things around here. It sounds like a baked-in conflict of interest and a wonderful way of making them chase the money instead of doing their policing job.
NotJustBikes just put out a video about this issue - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--832LV9a3I A couple years ago he also made a video about these trucks more broadly - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN7mSXMruEo What's truly maddening is how many of these vehicles which _do not_ meet European safety standards are _already_ in Europe. Walk around Hilversum in the Netherlands and you will see plenty of Dodge Rams (mostly 1500's, but there's even a 2500 Dually usually parked on the sidewalk ("pavement "for Brits) where my kids used to go to school). They're imported under "Individual Vehicle Approval" rules, exempting them from type safety requirements, and on top of that are almost always registered as "business vehicles" (you can tell from the V plate) which means they pay an absolute pittance in tax. I moved here to get away from American kindercrushers (among other reasons) and I am profoundly concerned that Europe is being invaded by these machines. (Edit) Worth noting is that a lot of Dutch street design is based on the idea that people _can_ share space with cars in dense, low speed environments, but that assumption flies out the window when the vehicles are so large you can't even see a kid walking or biking to school. Further edit - source - https://www.motorfinanceonline.com/news/dodge-ram-registrations-surge-in-europe-prompting-calls-for-regulatory-action/ 5,000 Dodge Rams imported in to Europe in 2023 alone.
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> I moved here to get away from American kindercrushers (among other reasons) and I am profoundly concerned that Europe is being invaded by these machines. I'm European and I'll go one step further: I'm profoundly concerned that the majority of people in Europe seem happy to imitate all the bad things that the US has, but fiercly reject all the good things that the US has.
Note that the term fatbike means a mountain bike in America but essentially a small electric motorcycle in the Netherlands, UK, etc
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Not the UK, here fatbikes are mountain bikes just with wider tyres. Something like a Trek Farely or Canyon Dude. They may also be assisted e-bike but not exclusively.
Yes- in the Netherlands the term 'fatbike' is pretty much synonymous with the battery powered bikes only (I presume elsewhere this may be different). They are mini motorcycles really- but exempt from all the rules and regulations that would apply to regular motorcycles.
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Elsewhere “fatbike” just refers to the tyre size. Pedal fatbikes for riding on snow and sand have existed for at least 20 years I’d say.
For the UK it is a problem that many of our roads were built for a horse and cart. People like the aesthetics of these narrow, hedge-lined roads, so they won't change. An F150 or Ram is a very large vehicle to be putting down these roads.
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Probably safer actually since you can’t go as fast and have to pay far more attention.
Implicitly you appear to be saying that we need to reach that point before action is taken?
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The question seems legit to me.. Otherwise worded it's essentially whether there's correlation between both. Without evidence it's more difficult to justify regulation. At the end of the day a pickup is adjacent to a midsize van. To me, both seem like you're essentially getting hit by a wall...
I'll always catch hate for saying this, but the quickest way to get people into small more efficient vehicles is to eliminate public roads and make the fuckers pay whatever the market rate is for their super-sized diesel coal rolling environmental destruction machine to be on a road. They'd quickly find out when they're not being subsidized by the general public and people actually have to pay their way to use their vehicles through tolls to people amortizing their road maintenance costs, that the smaller more pedestrian safe cars are the ones that make sense to operate.
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Where I presently live in the U.S., the fuel taxes and registration fees pay both for the roads and produce excess revenue used to pay for public transit. Larger vehicles use more fuel; they’re more often diesels which attract a higher tax; and they pay increased registration fees and tolls. Total tax on diesel fuel is about 71¢ a gallon (about .16€/L). When they fill up their F-350s, which get around 12mpg (20L/100km), they’re paying $21 in road tax, or about 6¢ per mile (.3€/km). In larger cities, there are often even more tolls/fees like in NYC which are raised whenever they need more money to pay for public transit.
You're getting downvoted because good enough quality roads are so cheap that market rate wouldn't really do anything. The government needs to be in the road business so it can stick its thumb on the scale.
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The roads where I live are paid for with a plate fee of $10 a year for cars and a higher one for trucks. The state also sends a certain amount of fuel taxes to local governments in accordance with how many miles are travelled in an area. New construction must privately pay to build the roads and then transfer ownership to the government. So the cost really is private. By far the most expensive part of maintaining roads is replacing bridges. Hence why so many bridges have rules about weight limits for trucks. I suppose if you really wanted a user fee on roads you could have a system of tolls on bridges, intersections and interchanges, but that would be really unpopular.
Then switch to subsidizing groceries instead of the the delivery method.
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Virtually everything is delivered by freight and freight is responsible for almost all road wear and tear. You would have to basically subsidise everything.
It would work beautifully for the last 10% of my journey. The only reason why there are no private roads for the las 10% is the county tax funds that road, and only a complete and utter moron would build a road when their "competitor" has a price of zero at the point of use. People commonly ask why the public road has a monopoly; it's not that they are a natural monopoly but rather that it's literally impossible to compete with someone with zero costs (tax costs already sunk) so places with public roads have ~no competition. The second that road gets defunded by the public coffers, guy with tractor would show back up.
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Private roads are actually pretty common, found in older suburban development and in rural areas. I live off of one that is about 300m long. They are unpopular since they effectively require a very small private association to maintain them. They really hurt property values (one reason I bought my place at a bargain price). Most jurisdictions try to prevent creating them because they lead to disputes between neighbours, or poorly maintained private roads become a problem when an emergency vehicle needs to get down one. The budget for local roads is also quite small, since they don’t carry much truck traffic. My township of 5,000 people or so has 3 part time guys who maintain the roads and a few pickup trucks and a dump truck for hauling the asphalt. That’s it. The most expensive part of road maintenance is replacing bridges.
There are many easier ways to effect this social change, if you’re willing to do basic legislation around the vehicle itself. The easiest way to decrease unnecessary oversized vehicles, frankly, is to require them be painted pink and flowery. Many men in America pick big vehicles as they're perceived as masculine, and a basic paint job to attack this psychological would probably work. Less jokingly, add mechanical speed limits to them. Big heavy vehicles are extremely dangerous, but that danger is closely related to speed. Other options include adding excessive cameras and radar equipment, so the front of the vehicle isn’t a blind spot. Cars have plenty of cameras and mirrors already, so it’s not novel to drivers. It’s a missed opportunity already since this could really be implemented by major manufacturers within a year.
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When I drive a pickup it’s typically for work purposes. I would not care one whit if it had pink flowers and neither would anyone else. If anything it would make it higher visibility. As far as a speed limit… what governed speed are you proposing? Being in a pickup pulling a trailer already makes you a cop magnet, and I never go even 1 MPH over the limit. It’s already expensive enough fuel economy wise and they aren’t exactly vehicles with fast acceleration. Incidentally of people I know who have died in vehicle accidents recently (last 5 years) all of them were because they got hit by a large commercial truck (typically 35 tonnes). One died when he crashed his motorcycle. That’s it.
I'm not sure the type of person who imports such a vehicle would have the appropriate amount of foresight to let such a law affect their behaviour.
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You'd be surprised to see people can't be classified meaningfully based on how much their car weighs.
Yeah there are always levels of risk we as a society have chosen to allow. My thinking was along the lines of how to self-regulate these imports of cars that do not follow the common safety standards our society has chosen if they are forced upon us by trade agreements or well-intentioned loopholes. ("murder" is a bit an extreme reaction but the more realistic idea may be to make harsher judgements the more pointlessly large and dangerous the vehicle is)
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You can get charged for murder in Germany when killing someone with a car.
A Mercedes Vito, despite being nearly 1m shorter and normal car width, has 4-5x the carry capacity and a 3x longer bed than the RAM. These cars are just for show, you can probably find a Kei truck with similar capacity.
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> These cars are just for show I love vans more than any vehicle, but they're garbage at offroad compared to trucks (even 4motion, etc can't compare). Most people don't use them for that, but in villa constructions sometimes you really want a pickup to get to the site. They're also better than vans in snow. Edge cases but they exist and they're not so obscure that I haven't experienced them.
Modern US trucks are an absolute atrocity. I am the demographic that thinks they look cool and might one day have bought one should I end up with more money than I knew what to do with if I hadn't learned that they're death traps. The tall grill means impact to pedestrians, bicyclists and motorcycles is basically instant death as their head - the only thing above the grill - gets whiplashed onto the rigid tip of the hood. On a normal vehicle you get your legs swiped and rotate your whole body onto an intentionally flexible area of the hood for a much gentler impact. The visibility from the driver seat is not only much worse than our actual semis, but also worse than actual tanks . You could have half a kindergarten and a small vehicle in front of your car without knowing. As for the tax, eh - tbf these vehicles are mostly used for business purposes by sole proprietors and the likes, and while they're stupid vehicles they do still do the job. A fully decked Iveco Daily or Mercedes Sprinter is also expensive with little registration tax. Registration tax is a weird (and arguably stupid) system, this isn't really an outlier in that regard. I roll my eyes more when I see a sports car attempted registered as a van.
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You have clearly never sat in the cab of a semi let alone a tank. The pass side blind spot is massive, even in a day cab with no trailer attached. You can hide an entire minivan in there. Even something like a modern F550 is worlds better. This isn't to say that modern pickups don't have huge blind spots, they very obviously do, only that your comparison is hyperbolic and unserious.
> Modern US trucks are an absolute atrocity This. I'm living in EU, thinking about getting some pickup. Just want to try this kind of vehicle (and I would love to transport my motorcycle, building materials etc). But I want something small - it looks like almost non-existent market here (there are cars like older f150, s10, etc - but very, very limited offers). Everyone gets the big modern trucks, that are unusable in our tight spaces.
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Loading a motorcycle in a pickup bed is always a delicate task unless you have dedicated equipment. Even when I had a pickup truck, I ended up getting a trailer for my motorcycle. In the end, I've got tired of having my luggage getting wet (no such thing as a fail proof bed cover) and replaced the truck with a more sensible minivan.
It’s possible. Visibility for pedestrians and bicyclists in these trucks is horrendous . It’s so ridiculously bad that even an M1 Abrams tank has less blind spots: https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/140dgn8/many_popular_trucks_have_a_bigger_dead_spot_in/
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It seems this could be largely mitigated with relatively simple lidar.
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> an M1 Abrams tank has less blind spots Absolutely not. You can't even turn around in the driver position of a tank.
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Tanks are famously dangerous to be anywhere other than directly in front of. The angular front blind spot isn't terrible, but from the front corners on back they're massive hazards to the point where infantry gets expressly told to give them a very wide berth. Also whoever made that illustration should be run over by a tank. Fix the size of the goddamn kid or fix the distance and change the size of the kid. Having both variables move serves to only add confusion and annoyance.
A lot could probably be done with a simple "a person 1.80m in length must be able to see a 50cm high object 1 metre in front of the car" or something like that. Just making up numbers here and don't know what would be reasonable, but it seems this doesn't need to be that hard? Weight also matters of course. Hopefully this relatively simple ruling will fix some of that too.
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>A lot could probably be done with a simple "a person 1.80m in length must be able to see a 50cm high object 1 metre in front of the car" or something like that. Just making up numbers here and don't know what would be reasonable, but it seems this doesn't need to be that hard? It's hard because the people pushing for new rules very transparently want rules far beyond what the public wants or considers sensible. If they were simply asking for that it'd probable be done already.
Absolutely true but beside the current point of whether they are more or less in the way when parked in residential areas than our normal commercial vehicles.
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"Let's drive around the hood to flex my Mercedes Sprinter", said noone ever. These are strictly professional cars. When they are not "in duty" they're probably parked at a garage. On the other hand, an American open truck driving/parked in a residential area is almost certainly some show-off.
You rarely see Sprinters parked in pedestrian areas though, they are commercial vehicles. Whereas these RAMs are often used as standard personal vehicles for grocery shopping.
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What are you talking about? Damn near every self employed tradesman parks his van where he lives.
I would guess it is a tariff thing rather than NATO. Is anyone in Europe really believing the USA still has our back?
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Curious to hear why you feel that way. Re Ukraine, the link below says US has given 114B euros of support, vs 63 from the EU. Is that not an indicator of support? I must say that Trump has a point that EU countries have not met their NATO spend obligations and this does give the sense of Europe taking advantage of US support. WDYT? https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/21/tracking-us-and-nato-support-for-ukraine-a-full-breakdown#:~:text=The%20EU%20(Commission%20and%20Council)%20is%20the,and%20Japan%20(13.57%20billion%20euros%20or%20$15bn).
Researchers Find Microbe Capable of Producing Oxygen from Martian Soil (scienceclock.com)
How is it "grossly incorrect"? Using both taxonomic and size classification, is it not accurate to refer to a blue-green alga as a "microbe" or "microorganism." [1] A microbe (or microorganism) is generally defined as an organism that is microscopic—too small to be seen clearly by the naked eye. Blue-green algae fit this definition as they are single-celled or form microscopic colonies. The scientific name for blue-green algae is cyanobacteria, which are technically a type of bacteria, universally classified as microbes. [2] They are prokaryotes (lacking a nucleus and other membrane-bound organelles), and the two prokaryotic domains of life (Bacteria and Archaea) are composed entirely of microbes. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9025173/ [2] https://doh.wa.gov/community-and-environment/contaminants/blue-green-algae/faqs
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It is grossly incorrect because it does not "produce oxygen from Martian soil". This is extremely misleading, because on Mars Martian soil is abundant, while water is very scarce, so the title makes the reader believe that this cyanobacterium solves easily the production of oxygen. It does not help at all for oxygen production. If you have water, then it is easy to produce hydrogen by electrolysis, using solar energy. Getting water on Mars is the hard problem. There are chances that such cyanobacteria will be used on Mars, but for producing protein and other useful organic substances, with oxygen only as a byproduct. However I believe that at least for the more distant future there is a better alternative to the use of cyanobacteria: the capture of solar energy by artificial means, coupled with the synthesis of some simple organic substance, e.g. glycerol or glycine, which can then be used to feed a culture of fungi located underground, which can then produce proteins and all the other complex substances needed for human food. There already are genetically modified fungi that can produce whey protein or chicken egg white protein suitable for human consumption. This variant is better because photovoltaic cells have better efficiency for capturing solar energy and without environmental constraints, while genetically modified fungi can produce proteins of better quality than cyanobacteria and also any other complex organic substances that will be needed.
HN title at the moment is: Researchers Find Microbe Capable of Producing Oxygen from Martian Soil Article title at the moment is: Microbe That Could Turn Martian Dust into Oxygen Neither of those are particularly misleading, but requires you to read it carefully I suppose, otherwise it can misleading I suppose. I guess "Martian Dust" is the most misleading part of the quote, as the soil isn't actually Martian of origin, but actually "materials that are similar to Martian soil".
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Both titles are very misleading, because neither "oxygen is produced from Martian soil" nor "Martian dust is turned into oxygen". As I have said, the oxygen comes only from water, which is missing on Mars, unlike the abundant Martian soil or Martian dust. So the "microbe" does not solve the problem of oxygen production, which is obtaining water. With water, making oxygen by electrolysis is trivial and a problem solved long ago. The cyanobacterium can make various useful organic substances, like proteins and vitamins. The fact that it also makes some oxygen is a minor additional advantage. Even if such cyanobacteria will be grown on Mars, most of the oxygen will be made by electrolysis anyway, because the efficiency from solar light to free oxygen is much better and the photovoltaic cells continue to function in a much wider range of temperatures.
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> As I have said, the oxygen comes only from water, which is missing on Mars The title nor the article itself doesn't claim otherwise, unless I'm missing something? It's also not claiming that the microbe somehow solve the problem of obtaining water, or anything else. The only thing they claim is that this specific microbe, under the right circumstances, can produce oxygen while it grows in Martian-like soil. That's what the article claims, and the titles.
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You have reproduced yourself the 2 titles, which contain: "Microbe Capable of Producing Oxygen from Martian Soil" "Microbe That Could Turn Martian Dust into Oxygen" The words "producing X from Y" and "turn Y into X" are extremely clear and they do not admit alternative interpretations. They both claim that X=oxygen comes from Y=soil|dust, contrary to what you say. I normally avoid to follow the fashion of accusing posters of being AI bots, but such a failure of comprehension could be explained only for an AI bot, or perhaps for someone who understands very little English, but the latter explanation does not match the correct English of the message. Perhaps you have used an English translation service that has confused you?
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"Producing Oxygen from Martian Soil" to me implies that martian soil is the thing being turned into oxygen.
I am quite ignorant on these specifics but wouldn't it be feasable to basically have them in a greenhouse environment, heated, in the North pole area, where I believe there was some form of IceWater found.. If possible to even melt some of that, and let that cascade the effect ? https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Mars_Express/Water_ice_in_crater_at_Martian_north_pole
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That would work only for a base located at the North pole. If you want to explore other regions, or to set there a base, for instance for extracting some useful minerals, all the water will have to be transported from the poles, unless some quantities of ice will be discovered underground elsewhere (or of hydrated rocks, which can produce water when heated enough). Unless enough ice or hydrated rocks are discovered underground elsewhere, the amount of ice from the poles will sustain only a small human population.
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