hyperpape

> PostgreSQL isn't "Generic SQL Database 47" it's the successor to Ingres (Post-Ingres-SQL).

Indeed. This helps me know that I'm using a database more modern than Ingres. I chose not to use Oracle or SQL Server because they might have predated Ingres.

Just one question: what's Ingres, and why do I care about it? Of course, I don't, which makes Postgres no more useful of a name than "fluffnutz" or "hooxup". That said, over time, I've come to like the name Postgres.

It's awful that there are these hallucinated citations, and the researchers who submitted them ought to be ashamed. I also put some of the blame on the boneheaded culture of academic citations.

"Compression has been widely used in columnar databases and has had an increasing importance over time.[1][2][3][4][5][6]"

Ok, literally everyone in the field already knows this. Are citations 1-6 useful? Well, hopefully one of them is an actually useful survey paper, but odds are that 4-5 of them are arbitrarily chosen papers by you or your friends. Good for a little bit of h-index bumping!

So many citations are not an integral part of the paper, but instead randomly sprinkled on to give an air of authority and completeness that isn't deserved.

I actually have a lot of respect for the academic world, probably more than most HN posters, but this particular practice has always struck me as silly. Outside of survey papers (which are extremely under-provided), most papers need many fewer citations than they have, for the specific claims where the paper is relying on prior work or showing an advance over it.

I think you're misreading that article.

> In an infrastructure organization, you need to impress your customers’ managers.

> I call this the Shadow Hierarchy. You don’t need your VP to understand the intricacies of your code. You need the Staff+ Engineers in other critical organizations to need your tools.

> When a Senior Staff Engineer in Pixel tells their VP, “We literally cannot debug the next Pixel phone without Perfetto”, that statement carries immense weight. It travels up their reporting chain, crosses over at the Director/VP level, and comes back down to your manager.

Visibility is important, it's just not the same kind of visibility.

> Capital is something you expend

Or hoard

I agree that there is no right to arbitrarily block traffic for prayer. But this does not require a ban on public prayer, it requires a law saying that one must allow traffic to flow (which I suspect already exists), and a clarification that prayer is not an exception. Prayer need not be specifically targeted more than board games, or bike protests, or just parking in the middle of the street.

The problem with citing cartels and greed is...when prices are low, is it because the industry is momentarily altruistic? Did the industry wake up in late 2025 and think "holy shit, I've been being nice, but it's time to turn over a new leaf and start gouging people?"

I mean, don't get me wrong, they are greedy. But that's been true for years. What's changed is the market.

For zero/one days, the trick is that you'd pair dependency cooldowns with automatic scanning for vulnerable dependencies.

And in the cases where you have vulnerable dependencies, you'd force update them before the cooldown period had expired, while leaving everything else you can in place.

I'm of two minds about this comment. A glance at the website suggests it has a lot of content and a full overhaul for 4.1m AUD (2.6m USD) might not be that that high of a price.

But the problem is with the assumption that the website needs a full overhaul. So often a full overhaul is where projects go to balloon in cost by 20x. An outside agency sells the leadership on a big picture full of fluff about "modernization" without any connection to real improvements.

A better approach would be to determine the most important weaknesses of the existing website, and incrementally improve them. But big organizations struggle with this. Government agencies are probably even worse than big corporations, but big corporations are terrible too.

Supply chain attacks are scary because you do everything "right", but the ecosystem still compromises you.

But realistically, I think the sum total of compromises via package managers attacks is much smaller than the sum total of compromises caused by people rolling their own libraries in C and C++.

It's hard to separate from C/C++'s lack of memory safety, which causes a lot of attacks, but the fact that code reuse is harder is a real source of vulnerabilities.

Maybe if you're Firefox/Chromium, and you have a huge team and invest massive efforts to be safe, you're better off with the low-dependency model. But for the median project? Rolling your own is much more dangerous than NPM/Cargo.

> Object-oriented (OO) patterns get a lot of flak in the Go community, and often for good reason.

This isn't really an OO pattern, as the rest of the post demonstrates. It's just a pattern that applies across most any language where you can make a distinction between an interface/typeclass or whatever, and a concrete type.

You could look at the graph and argue that eggs show official uninflation was underestimated from 2000 to 2025, but to be consistent, you'd then have to argue that it was overestated from 1985 to 2000.

I have two points, really: I appreciate the graph showing pretty good correlation between official CPI and the price of a very widely consumed

Secondarily, you can observe (not by thinking about eggs, b/c I don't remember what they cost in 2000, but just prices in general), that there hasn't been huge inflation since 2000 compared to the official numbers.

I appreciate this graph as a (very partial) rejoinder to the inflation truthers.

I could believe that there is some modest measurement error in how we calculate inflation, but, picking relatively arbitrary dates that I happen to remember, the idea that 2000-2025 inflation was double the reported numbers doesn't pass the sniff test.

My experience suffering with JIRA daily is that the AI is useless and fairly easy to ignore. If it were actually helpful, I could imagine using it more, and the costs would increase proportionately.

> shareholders will sue them for failing to maximize shareholder value

That's quite a bold claim. Do you have an example in which a company/CEO/board was sued specifically for not doing enough buybacks?

I'm not sure returning None is any safer than an Exception, because the caller still has to check.

> To put it in perhaps more concrete terms: playing a "tactic" position may net you +10 points across a sequence of 5 moves or so. (IE: One well placed tactical move, and ~4 followup moves may capture 5 enemy stones + 5 territory simultaneously from your opponent). However, every single early-game move is worth nearly +20 points of territory if played correctly. I'm serious.

I'm baffled by this comment. Both professional commentary and AI evaluation confirm that most joseki mistakes are very small, often on the order of 1-2 points, because the temperature is low. There are specific joseki that turn into fights (e.g. Taisha), and it is possible to lose 10-20 points in those, but first of all, it's typically possible to play conservatively and avoid those joseki, second, most errors in them are smaller, and third, mid-game fights end up being even bigger (an error in a capturing race can be an almost unlimited number of points, having 40 points at stake is common).

I'm curious what level you are? As a 4kyu (European), I can confidently say joseki is less important than reading up to my level. I believe stronger players say the same well into the amateur dan level.

The article was interesting, but this bit felt a bit like "and then a miracle occurred".

A lot of people are arguing about whether locking down access was justified to resolve the security issues. I guess it's debatable.

But I don't see any excuse for not putting out a statement when you do it. You have to know there will be a fight, and you will look like the bad guy. Perhaps I could see directly communicating to the maintainers that you expect that they'll be reinstated. But to say nothing? To let the post by duckinator float around for days without having a "we did this because of security concerns, we want to work together and find a resolution..." It's incomprehensible that they thought this would go well.

It only makes sense to talk about premature optimization in the context of building a production system (or a standard library).

This is research or experimentation, designed to improve our understanding of the behavior of algorithms. Calling it premature optimization makes no sense.

This assumes that the number of jobs in the US is magically fixed.

The thing is that all these mega-corporations have offices across the world, but currently want to hire in the US. You and I want our personal jobs to be expensive, but we don't want the prospect of hiring us where we live to be too expensive. And even aside from cost, you also don't want them to say "there's not enough employees there, it's not worth hiring."[0]

[0] I'm technically no longer living in the US, but I was until recently.

Nothing about this attack would be solved by namespacing, but it might have been solved by maven's use of GPG keys.

This post is right about some things, including the general solution to staglation, and wrong about others. Paul Volker was Fed Chair between 1979 and 1987, not 1973. The 1973 crash and recession were not caused by his actions, if you had to pick a single cause, I think Opec would be it.

The obvious followup question is how common it is for a company to bring in hundreds of workers to set up a factory.

I'm aware that there are people with specialized knowledge who travel internationally for that kind of work. What I'm unclear about is the scale.

Version control is almost 50 years old. It has very slowly won.

AI adoption is, for better or worse, voluntarily or not, very fast compared to other technologies.

From Dan Luu (https://danluu.com/wat/):

> When I joined this company, my team didn't use version control for months and it was a real fight to get everyone to use version control. Although I won that fight, I lost the fight to get people to run a build, let alone run tests, before checking in, so the build is broken multiple times per day. When I mentioned that I thought this was a problem for our productivity, I was told that it's fine because it affects everyone equally. Since the only thing that mattered was my stack ranked productivity, so I shouldn't care that it impacts the entire team, the fact that it's normal for everyone means that there's no cause for concern.

Do not underestimate the ability of developers to ignore good ideas. I am not going to argue that AI is as good as version control. Version control is a more important idea than AI. I sometimes want to argue it's the most important idea in software engineering.

All I'm saying is that you can't assume that good ideas will (quickly) win. Your argument that AI isn't valuable is invalid, whether or not your conclusion is true.

P.S. Dan Luu wrote that in 2015, and it may have been a company that he already left. Version control has mostly won. Still, post 2020, I talked to a friend, whose organization did use git, but their deployed software still didn't correspond to any version checked into git, because they were manually rebuilding components and copying them to production servers piecemeal.

I have a few links saved from my joyful experience using podman with Fedora (and therefore selinux). Iirc, I tried using podman because Fedora shipped cgroups v2, which didn't work with Docker (in my own ignorance, I would've thought coordinating with major dev tools would be important, but distros often have other ideas).

- https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/user-namespaces-selinux-rootl... - https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/sudo-rootless-podman

I'd summarize these posts as "very carefully explaining how to solve insane problems."

Mick Jagger had his most recent son at the age of 73. Today, that's an anomaly, but historically, older men fathering children was not at all uncommon (73 would probably be an outlier, but successful men were fathering children well past the age when women can no longer bear children). That would exert significant evolutionary pressure for men to have longer lifespans.

> You should do that too! Suppose you’ve got a Golang application that you want to add some kind of rate limiting to...Actually, are you sure your edge proxy doesn’t support rate limiting already? Could you just write a couple of lines in a config file instead of implementing the feature at all?

As I'm doing the simplest thing that could possibly work, I do not have an edge proxy.

Of course, the author doesn't mean _that_ kind of simplicity. There are always hidden assumptions about which pieces of complexity are assumed, and don't count against your complexity budget.

> The majority of the time, it is a company looking to sponsor an H1B for a role

You're right that I shouldn't have said 80%, but this still implies almost half of all job postings are ghost jobs from companies trying to hire H1-B visa workers.

It's still an insane claim.

In this case, the relevant comparison is 85,000 net new H1B visas to the total of job postings, since the parent post seemed to be saying 80% of job postings are ghost postings from companies seeking H1B visas.

Needless to say, that doesn't make any sense.