Maybe it’s a better link, but I can only read the content if I accept their sharing my data with 180 partners.
Which is the same as many if not most of the other sites we regularly link to on HN. You just aren't told about it.
Readit Newstharkun__ commented on A failure of security systems at PayPal is causing concern for German banks nordbayern.de/news-in-eng... · Posted by u/tietjens
tharkun__ commented on 450× Faster Joins with Index Condition Pushdown readyset.io/blog/optimizi... · Posted by u/marceloaltmann
Another example of row based dbs somehow being insanely slow compared to column based.
Just an endless sequence of misbehavior and we’re waving it off as rows work good for specific lookups but columns for aggregations, yet here it is all the other stuff that is unreasonably slow.
It's an example. But not of that.
It's an example of old things being new again maybe. Or reinventing the wheel because the wheel wasn't known to them.
Yes I know, nobody wants to pay that tax or make that guy richer, but databases like Oracle have had JPPD for a long time. It's just something the database does and the optimizer chooses whether to do it or not depending on whether it's the best thing to do or not.
tharkun__ commented on From $479 to $2,800 a month for ACA health insurance next year npr.org/sections/shots-he... · Posted by u/laurex
Does Germany represent the entirety of Europe? The UK, Italy, Denmark, Spain, plenty of others fund their healthcare through general taxes.. why are you focusing on one country?
And to not mis-represent Germany too badly - that 14.6% is split between the employer and employee
It was an example. You can make other examples.
Let's take France. Looks like it's 8% you pay:
You’ll pay 8% of your income (that the French government is allowed to tax, after an additional standard deduction of around $11,000 per person). As a ballpark figure, an individual who has income to declare to the French government of $30,000 will pay around $1,520 a year in healthcare.
In order to make up the remaining amount in excess of the 70% reimbursement (80% for hospital stays), many French residents opt for private, or “top-up,” insurance. Several options exist, and rates vary from $36 to $72, on average, per month
tharkun__ commented on From $479 to $2,800 a month for ACA health insurance next year npr.org/sections/shots-he... · Posted by u/laurex
Australia has a medicare levy of 2% taxable income - and last time I did the math I'd pay an equal amount in tax there as I do in the US
Seems ridiculous the US doesn't have it
Does it?
Let's look at another country that has "great universal health care". Let's look to Europe, that's always "up there", right?
For statutory or public health insurance, you pay for your insurance through social contributions, the rate of which is 14.6% of the income as determined by the Federal Ministry of Health for 2024.
Pretty sure that's up but let's assume 15% of income.
tharkun__ commented on A guide to Gen AI / LLM vibecoding for expert programmers stochasticlifestyle.com/a... · Posted by u/ChrisRackauckas
Yup. I think programmers are giving themselves too much credit here. I love programming, but let's not kid ourselves, at most organizations at least 75% of the code needed to make something a working product is BS. I'd rather prompt an LLM agent to take care of that while I review it so that I can spend my limited energy on the more interesting bits. I find the exercise of prompting an LLM to generate boring code to my exact specifications far more intellectually stimulating than doing any of that stuff by hand, and the time that I have invested in this area has paid dividends in making the code cleaner, more consistent, and more coherent.
Sounds like you really like code reviews. You must be a unicorn.
I find most programmers don't like code reviews. They do it because it's required by their job and most will just click the approve button. Or I guess in a more dysfunctional org, argue about formatting or something, which should just be done automatically so that nobody has to even think about it.
What they like doing is the coding and problem solving.
And now you want to make programming into code review?
How's that gonna go?
tharkun__ commented on Why LLMs can't really build software zed.dev/blog/why-llms-can... · Posted by u/srid
...then there are the other fun ones, like not wanting to tell people things exist that they don't have access to, like Github returning 404 errors for private repositories you know exist when you aren't logged into an account that has access to them.
That one at least makes sense if you ask me. It's not just Github doing it. On the web side of things you'd return the same "no such thing here" page whether you don't have access or it really doesn't exist as well. So leaking more info than the page you return to users in the browser would show via the status code would not be good.
I.e. that would be the appropriate thing to do if you're trying to prevent leakage of information i.e. enumeration of resources. But you should not return 401 for this still. A 404 is the appropriate response for pretending that "it's just not there" if you ask me. You can't return 404 when it's not there and a 403 when you have no access if enumeration is bad.
So for example, if you don't have access to say the settings of a repo you have access to, a 403 is OK. No use pretending with a 404, because we all know the settings are just a feature of Github.
However, pretending that a repo you don't have access to but exists isn't there with a 404 is appropriate because otherwise you could prove the existence of "superSecretRepo123" simply by guessing and getting a 403 instead of a 404.
tharkun__ commented on Why LLMs can't really build software zed.dev/blog/why-llms-can... · Posted by u/srid
At their peril, because any set of rules, no matter how seemingly simple, has edge cases that only become apparent once we take on the task of implementing them at the code level into a functioning app. And that's assuming specs have been written up by someone who has made every effort to consider every relevant condition, which is never the case.
And in the example of "why" this 401 is happening that's another one of those. The spec might have said to return a 401 for both not being authenticated and for not having enough privileges.
But that's just plain wrong and a proper developer would be allowed to change that. If you're not authenticating properly, you get a 401. That means you can't prove you're who you say you are.
If you are past that, i.e. we know that you are who you say you are, then the proper return code is 403 for saying "You are not allowed to access what you're trying to access, given who you are".
Which funnily enough seems to be a very elusive concept to many humans as well, never mind an LLM.
Agreed. We call those people assholes. We try our best to avoid hiring those people and we weed them out of our company as fast as possible if they're discovered. We also try to have as flat a structure as possible so nobody is taking credit for anyone else's work and ideally many of us are working together so we all share the glory or frustration when something goes well or not.
I do think the flat hierarchy thing is commendable for many reasons.
That said, don't think that just because you (try to) have few bosses that there isn't some form of hierarchy in which people don't take credit for other people's work.
Sure, maybe there's no boss by title that people suck up to and take credit for stuff to look good to them. But there very definitely will be the "alphas" in the group that everyone looks up to and wants to look good to and the taking credit for stuff will be done to impress those people.
So, if you weed out this kind of stuff successfully well enough, again, I commend you. But I doubt it's as complete as you may want to think. It's just a different looking game of favours and sucking up to with less easily visible (can't just look at title to figure out who to suck up to) lines.
For some people this will be positive as they're good at figuring out who to suck up to in that situation while others may need the title to figure that out. I bet many socially awkward / socially less aware people find it easier to navigate titles they can read in an org chart than sniffing these out of the "sociosphere".
There is almost always enough water to water your lawn but you would have to cut off industrial water waste/use and cities won’t do that. So you can’t water your lawn but Coca-Cola down the block wastes thousands of cubic feet a day without a care
There's no Coca-Cola down the block from here (nor a Nestle bottling plant ;)). Nor any high water usage industries (no real "industries" at all actually). We're one of a few towns in the area with municipal wells tapping an aquifer.
The next big city does not take water from an aquifer at all but from a river. One that's also currently lower on water than usual, which is not great because upstream cities put their sewage in there and that city does the same "downstream" (which will add to the problem cities even further downstream are going to have that also use the river water).
tharkun__ commented on The value of institutional memory timharford.com/2025/05/th... · Posted by u/leoc
> Cow-orker that didn't want to spend time writing boring documentation that might obsolete him
That seems like an upstream problem, if he was genuinely concerned about being "obsoleted" look upstream to why that might be the case, and fix it so people aren't looking over their shoulder worried they will get swapped out by the next cog.
Yes and no. In this particular case I'm not entirely sure what it was to be honest.
The guy was pretty good at "dodging" work he didn't like in general ;)
Overall the consulting company we were with was pretty good about keeping their clients/projects going and keeping our consultants in the same projects for a long time.