Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | throw0101b's commentslogin

> Defense is starting to get a blank check with fairly bipartisan support for the first time in at least 30-40 years and it's centered on semiconductor supply chains.

Really? Because:

> During Donald Trump's 2025 speech to a joint session of Congress, the president asked House Speaker Mike Johnson to “get rid” of the subject act.[190]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act#Subseque...


> ZFS isn’t viable for SQLite unless you turn off fsync’s in ZFS

Which you can do on a per dataset ('directory') basis very easily:

    zfs set sync=disabled mydata/mydb001
* https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/man/master/7/zfsprops...

Meanwhile all the rest of your pools / datasets can keep the default POSIX behaviour.


You know what's even easier than doing that? Neglecting to do it or meaning to do it then getting pulled in to some meeting (or other important distraction) and then imagining you did it.


> Neglecting to do it or meaning to do it then getting pulled in to some meeting (or other important distraction) and then imagining you did it.

If your job is to make sure your file system and your database—SQLite, Pg, My/MariDB, etc—are tuned together, and you don't tune it, then you should be called into a meeting. Or at least the no-fault RCA should bring up remediation methods to make sure it's part of the SOP so that it won't happen again.

The alternative the GP suggests is using Btrfs, which I find even more irresponsible than your non-tuning situation. (Heck, if someone on my sysadmin team suggested we start using Btrfs for anything I would think they were going senile.)


In any interesting tech position, "your job" is a myriad of things. And if everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. They ask us to automate our work so that "someone else on the team could do it during an outage at 3 am" for a reason. So my point is that moving away from the exotic and towards the commodity is an IT imperative.


Facebook is apparently using it at scale, which surprised me. Though that’s not necessarily an endorsement, and who knows what their kernel patcheset looks like.


Disabling sync corrupts SQLite databases on powerloss, I've personally experienced this following disabling sync because it causes SQLite to hang.

You cannot have SQLite keep your data and run well on ZFS unless you make a zvol and format it as btrfs or ext4 so they solve the problem for you.


Doesn't turning off sync mean you can lose confirmed writes in a power failure?


> SQLite on ZFS needs the Fsync behaviour to be off […]

    zfs set sync=disabled mydata/mydb001
* https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/man/master/7/zfsprops...


As noted in a sibling comment, this causes corruption on power failure.


This is a bug in zfs or in sqlite, sync=disabled should never cause actual corruption (it should at worst make existing corruption bugs in sqlite more likely & cause loss of committed sqlite transactions)


I highly doubt it's an SQLite bug, considering how thoroughly they test their code to behave correctly as long as their assumptions are filled. And those assumptions are clearly violated when SQLite runs on ZFS with sync=disabled (since writes may not be written to disk despite fsync).


(see https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSTXGsAndZ... for an explanation of sync=disabled)


> Not sure why you'd need more than 10/8

Large organizations have moved to IPv6 because they, and everyone else, are using 10/8, and so when mergers and acquisitions happen trying to connect the networks together becomes a nightmare.

See this talk from Wells Fargo as an example:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzTWjNUb4H4


The pain of merging acquired company networks cannot be overstated!

IPv6 can help, but in my experience there's just soo much old IPv4 tech that no one is prepared to migrate to IPv6.


Yeah:

> "The Pentagon ... announced that we are eliminating woke climate change programs and initiatives inconsistent with our core warfighting mission," [Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell] said.

* https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/41...

See also "Pentagon Starts Purging Climate Change Measures":

* https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-pentagon-pu...

But from 2021 (during Biden), "Climate change is a risk to national security, the Pentagon says"

* https://www.npr.org/2021/10/26/1049222045/the-pentagon-says-...



Also talked about in Michael Lewis’s book Fifth Risk.


> Also talked about in Michael Lewis’s book Fifth Risk.

Highly recommend that book. Haven't gotten to his most recent Who Is Government?:

* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/788713/who-is-govern...

But from the interviews it sounds interesting as well. Colbert interview from April 2025:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T30BF32qPgg


Thanks for the heads up, added to the list


> What red tape? Anyone can buy/rent a GPU(s) and train stuff.

Well previously the Chinese were not able to, but that was changed recently:

* https://www.wsj.com/tech/nvidia-wins-ok-to-resume-sales-of-a...

* https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/07/22/nvidia-chip-deal-us-chi...


I am sure someone is winning from this. But it aint the American public.


NVIDIA shareholders


"A policeman's job is only easy in a police state."

* Touch of Evil, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052311/quotes/?item=qt0321627

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch_of_Evil


A lot of motion blur: have they tried adjusting the shutter speed…


If I know what you're referring to, the motion blur is the stars, not the comet. That's because Hubble is tracking (pointing at) the comet, not the stars. The comet is therefore not blurred in its direction of travel, while the stars appear to be moving in the direction opposite of the comet's travel. To the extent that the comet appears blurred, that's presumably its coma.


At ~100s, it's already at about the minimum for Hubble; often it's 1-2 orders of magnitude longer.


> There are true facts, but a human observer can never be sure of them

See:

> Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that examines the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge. Also called "the theory of knowledge", it explores different types of knowledge, such as propositional knowledge about facts, practical knowledge in the form of skills, and knowledge by acquaintance as a familiarity through experience. Epistemologists study the concepts of belief, truth, and justification to understand the nature of knowledge. To discover how knowledge arises, they investigate sources of justification, such as perception, introspection, memory, reason, and testimony.

> The school of skepticism questions the human ability to attain knowledge, while fallibilism says that knowledge is never certain. Empiricists hold that all knowledge comes from sense experience, whereas rationalists believe that some knowledge does not depend on it. Coherentists argue that a belief is justified if it coheres with other beliefs. Foundationalists, by contrast, maintain that the justification of basic beliefs does not depend on other beliefs. Internalism and externalism debate whether justification is determined solely by mental states or also by external circumstances.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology

A philosophy joke:

> When I talk to Philosophers on zoom my screen background is an exact replica of my actual background just so I can trick them into having a justified true belief that is not actually knowledge.

* Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed, https://old.reddit.com/r/PhilosophyMemes/comments/gggqkv/get...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: