1. Google is dead. Where do we go now?
Total comment counts : 40
Summary
An entertainment business owner reports a 50% revenue drop over three months. Despite years of Google Ads expertise, inflated budgets and weekly experimentation yielded zero returns, even after a Google holiday bonus. With funds depleted, they explore TikTok/Instagram ads, rely on a 50% returning-customer base, and started an email newsletter. Plans include physical marketing (free shows at a market, handing out cards) and new Magic Poi projects with ordered supplies. Now broke, they offer website or IoT work and tout AI-assisted speed as a selling point, seeking a way forward.
Overall Comments Summary
- Main point: The thread discusses whether Google Ads and traditional search are dying and how advertisers should adapt to AI-driven search and new discovery platforms.
- Concern: There is worry that reliance on Google Ads may yield diminishing returns as attention shifts to alternative channels and technologies.
- Perspectives: Opinions vary from declaring Google Ads dead and pushing to platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, and AI-assisted search, to defending Google Ads as still valuable and urging adaptation with new formats and diversification.
- Overall sentiment: Mixed
2. All Delisted Steam Games
Total comment counts : 20
Summary
Delisted Games provides direct access to a catalog of 1,038 delisted Steam titles on the site. Each entry shows the related company, with an asterisk marking placeholder pages that contain basic details. Examples include ChronoForge (Dec 30, 2025), NBA 2K24 (online services) (Dec 31, 2025), Chiyo, Ming Imperial Guards, Gravity Oddity, Guilt Battle Arena (Dec 31, 2025), Apex Point (placeholder) (Dec 31, 2025), Pandum Online shutdown (Dec 31, 2025), and Byte Cats (Dec 31, 2025).
Overall Comments Summary
- Main point: The discussion centers on video games being delisted due to licensing and business changes, making some classics illegal to buy or difficult to play today.
- Concern: Licensing expirations and corporate moves permanently remove access, harming consumers and complicating preservation.
- Perspectives: Viewpoints range from lamenting delistings and pushing for better preservation/visibility, to accepting licensing as a business reality, with occasional suggestions like community catalogs or review portals as fixes.
- Overall sentiment: Mixed
3. Static Allocation with Zig
Total comment counts : 13
Summary
kv is a small Redis-compatible KV store in Zig, built with static memory allocation at startup (TigerStyle). All memory is allocated at init and not freed, aiming for performance, predictability, and maintainability by avoiding dynamic allocation and use-after-free. The design budgets memory by system needs (max connections, per-connection buffers, data throughput). They use io_uring for async I/O and three pools: Connection structs, receive buffers, and send buffers. Connections and buffers are reused from pools; if no Connection is available, requests are rejected. Each connection enforces limits. It’s a learning exercise with trade-offs.
Overall Comments Summary
- Main point: The discussion analyzes the trade-offs of static, startup-time memory allocation in databases (as exemplified by TigerBeetle) versus dynamic memory approaches.
- Concern: The core worry is that fixed allocation can reduce flexibility and cause runtime issues such as fragmentation, overcommit risks, or use-after-free bugs, depending on workload.
- Perspectives: Viewpoints range from strong praise for predictability, simplicity, and performance benefits of static allocation to skepticism about practicality, fragmentation, memory waste, and maintenance complexity.
- Overall sentiment: Mixed
4. Flame Graphs vs. Tree Maps vs. Sunburst (2017)
Total comment counts : 8
Summary
Brendan compares several file-system visualization methods using Linux 4.9-rc5 data: Flame Graphs (SVG) quickly show big-picture structure (e.g., drivers ~50%, drivers/net ~15%) with zooming; GrandPerspective and Baobab (tree maps) reveal structure and large areas but vary in detail access and labeling; Sunbursts present hierarchy by angle, which can mislead when judging sizes; ASCII bar charts show line-length comparisons; Polar-coordinate flame graphs are pretty but can distort interpretation. He suggests offering multiple visualization modes (flame graphs as default) and validating with more data, linking to ACMQ resources.
Overall Comments Summary
- Main point: The thread weighs different visualization options for hierarchical data (icicle charts, nested bar graphs, flame graphs, treemaps) and debates which approach is most effective.
- Concern: There is worry that many common choices are confusing, misleading, or suboptimal for conveying structure and size, prompting calls for clearer alternatives.
- Perspectives: Views range from criticizing icicle and polar charts and preferring nested bar graphs, to praising flame graphs for interpretability and proposing dual treemap/tree representations plus practical disk-usage tools.
- Overall sentiment: Mixed
5. List of domains censored by German ISPs
Total comment counts : 17
Summary
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Overall Comments Summary
- Main point: A discussion about Germany’s DNS-based blocking of copyright-infringing sites and the practical and political implications of these blocks.
- Concern: The blocks raise worries about censorship, legality, and whether they prevent wrongdoing or simply disrupt legitimate access while inviting circumvention.
- Perspectives: Some view the blocks as a practical copyright enforcement measure and a useful update, while others condemn them as overreach that chill access and enable circumvention, with notes on ISP compliance and the broader legal context.
- Overall sentiment: Mixed
6. The production bug that made me care about undefined behavior
Total comment counts : 9
Summary
An anecdote from maintaining a large C++ payments API about a bug when a Response struct could end up with error and succeeded set. In C, reading an uninitialized struct is UB; in C++, default initialization can generate a default constructor for non-POD types (due to a std::string member) that leaves primitive fields uninitialized. So error and succeeded could remain uninitialized or become true, causing the contradiction. The fix is to provide a proper default constructor or in-class initializers, or initialize the object at the call site (Response response{};), ensuring all fields are initialized. Noted: C/C++ differences.
Overall Comments Summary
- Main point: Uninitialized data in C/C++ can be treated by the compiler as having any value, enabling aggressive optimizations that cause undefined behavior and subtle, hard-to-track bugs, especially when structs or initialization rules change.
- Concern: This leads to brittle code and hidden errors that may surface only under optimization or after seemingly innocuous changes, such as adding a field or altering struct semantics.
- Perspectives: Some advocate explicit initialization and safer designs (e.g., clear state flags or zeroing memory) to prevent UB, while others acknowledge compiler optimizations, suggesting mitigations like sanitizers or historic patterns, and noting the language’s complex initialization rules.
- Overall sentiment: Mixed
7. Which Humans?
Total comment counts : 4
Summary
error
Overall Comments Summary
- Main point: Cross-cultural bias in LLMs is a central issue, as models tend to reflect WEIRD human performance and diverge from diverse populations, raising ethical concerns.
- Concern: Ignoring cross-cultural diversity in evaluation and deployment risks reinforcing biases and creating unequal outcomes for non-WEIRD populations.
- Perspectives: Multiple viewpoints are reflected: concern about the WEIRD bias and a call for mitigation, curiosity about how newer models will affect bias, and anecdotal cross-cultural adoption (e.g., Mongolian teens learning English to use ChatGPT).
- Overall sentiment: Cautiously optimistic
8. Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth
Total comment counts : 3
Summary
The Left Behind series, a best-seller rooted in evangelical Christianity, reframed the biblical Rapture as a near-future, secular disaster requiring tech-savvy survival. Its cultural impact helped normalize apocalyptic thinking in 21st-century America and spurred a culture of preparedness—bunkers, stockpiles, advanced gear, and elaborate shelters—mirroring mid-20th-century nuclear anxieties. Across books, games, and films, believers are portrayed as modern, well-equipped survivors within a global eschatology, linked to broader social and environmental fears driving end-times prepping.
Overall Comments Summary
- Main point: The discussion uses a hypothetical Rapture to critique American exceptionalism, global inequality, and how wealth, nationalism, and militarism shape human suffering.
- Concern: The main worry is that the US would be wiped out or crippled by the Rapture, leading to global instability and exposing the flaws of wealth-driven, nationalist systems.
- Perspectives: They range from viewing the scenario as a critique of American exceptionalism and global inequality to humorous notes about survival logistics, and to calls for reducing divisiveness and militarism in favor of shared welfare.
- Overall sentiment: Mixed
9. The Future of Software Development Is Software Developers
Total comment counts : 4
Summary
After 43 years, the author notes repeated predictions that tech would end programmers—4GLs, No-Code, AI—yet history shows more software and more programmers, a Jevons paradox. Today LLMs may slow teams and hurt reliability, unlike past tools. The real challenge remains translating messy human thought into precise computational instructions; the difficulty doesn’t vanish with AI. Dijkstra warned we won’t program in natural language. Even with some gains, AI isn’t replacing developers; hiring trends and costs rather than AI drive headcount, and AGI remains distant.
Overall Comments Summary
- Main point: The debate centers on whether LLMs and coding AIs will transform software development—potentially reducing the need for human programmers—and how to use them as safety-conscious, efficiency-boosting layers in the workflow.
- Concern: The main worry is that reliance on AI for coding could lead to widespread job displacement and a stagnation of innovation if training data quality declines and users over-rely on sloppy code.
- Perspectives: Perspectives range from enthusiastic belief that AI can design, review, and manage software tasks better than humans and act as an organization-wide multiplier, to cautious skepticism about limits to AI progress, the importance of precise prompts, data-quality issues, and the risk of eroding creative problem-solving.
- Overall sentiment: Mixed
10. Show HN: Aroma: Every TCP Proxy Is Detectable with RTT Fingerprinting
Total comment counts : 10
Summary
Aroma uses RTT fingerprinting to detect proxies by comparing minimum TCP RTT (tcpi_min_rtt) with smoothed RTT (tcpi_rtt). In a demo, Cloudflare WARP is detected as a TCP proxy; if not detected, it’s likely Layer 3 proxying. The score (1.0 to <0.1) is derived from tcpi_min_rtt/tcpi_rtt using Fastly data; values around 0.7–1.0 are normal, lower values suggest proxies or unstable connections. The project is not production-ready; setup instructions exist for Fastly Custom VCL or other hosts. RTT has multiple layers (L3, L4, L7, TLS). Proxying can inflate higher-layer RTTs.
Overall Comments Summary
- Main point: The discussion centers on latency/RTT fingerprinting to detect TCP proxies and other proxies, evaluating its usefulness and its limitations.
- Concern: The method may be unreliable in complex networks (e.g., Tor, corporate proxies) and could be distorted by buffering or path variability, leading to false positives/negatives or misuse.
- Perspectives: Opinions range from praising the approach as clever and potentially valuable for non-CDN setups to questioning its readme accuracy, robustness, and real-world reliability.
- Overall sentiment: Mixed