I’ve also worked on systems with lots of small processes, and the operational issues that creates dwarfs GC problems: It takes one middle tier machine, and adds 64-128 network boundaries, and also creates an extremely difficult static memory allocation problem.

I know people do it anyway, but it’s rare that they can articulate a decent technical reason for it, and it wastes something like 90% of the hardware (even in carefully optimized code bases / deployments).

Anyway, I’m not the target market for such stuff.

The remaining allocator performance problems are mostly due to it zeroing allocated memory unless I use unsafe. Is java able to stackify most new Object calls and elide default initialization of object members these days?

I’m surprised to hear there is no demand for compiler enforced/facilitated thread safety in Java. That was a major pain point in all the Java code bases I’ve worked with in the past, and is a headline safety feature for rust (which goes even further and enforces aliasing rules) and JS. Could you be seeing selection bias in your user base?

Ten years ago, “rewrite in C++” was definitely easier than getting the Java GC to stay up under server load.

Most servers I work with run on big machines and are the only process, so figure a 100-250GB heap that lives for months, all async, small requests, so insane amounts of Future and String allocation spam.

Optimizing that stuff away in Java is harder than writing Rust, so assume idiomatic Java.

Also, is there any work on statically enforcing data race freedom in Java? That’s a bigger rust selling point than memory safety for me. I think swift has done some interesting work in that space. It would be nice to get those sorts of safety properties without manually writing borrow checker annotations.

I moved to c++/rust years ago because those languages do, and tens of milliseconds matter for network services. At the time Java could pause for 10’s of seconds, which was 1000x worse than waiting for a spinning disk to seek.

These days, disks are 100s micros to single digit millis, so I guess if Java GC is finally working 30 years after they “fixed” its performance problems, then I’d want to be able to tune ZGC to not pause the app for more than ~ 500us, max.

This article is from last year, but suggests they’re still off by an order of magnitude:

https://www.morling.dev/blog/lower-java-tail-latencies-with-...

Also, that’s measuring a 30 second window.

If you hammer a 100GB-1TB heap in steady state with small allocations for, say, a month at 100% CPU, does it eventually do the typical Java thing, where a major compaction takes the process down for seconds or even minutes, or does it just slow down application requests so it can keep up with load?

Those people change their minds the first time a machine has intermittent network issues, and the logs needed to debug it are lost (or worse, the log buffer fills, then stdout fills, which backpressures the application, creating an outage while simultaneously eating the logs).

Yes, that means the FS will sometimes punch nulls towards the tail of the log. However, it is the lowest latency / write amplification way to get stuff on disk (other than a blocked compression format, which would be a small change to syslog), so if the text file gets holes punched in it, the journalctl file would be truncated before the hole anyway in practice.

If you really care about nulls in logs for ideological reasons, you could write a few lines of code that finds the first stream of nulls in the text file, then truncates there.

In practice, no one wants that. It is strictly worse than returning partial entries after the hole, and by the time you are hitting this corner case, you are debugging a kernel crash.

FreeBSD isn’t too shabby these days either.

It could have some simple tools that let you generate reports, display them on screen, and compose tools for that sort of thing in a natural way.

We could call it UNIX.

Instead, they currently own the entire Pareto frontier — they have the lowest cost model (in terms of inference and training) at every commercially-available level of output quality.

We saw the same attitude from Silicon Graphics, Sun, etc vs Linux and Windows during the 1990s. It led to those companies’ ruin.

Concretely, I remember lots of arguments that the Linux kernel team would stall out once they implemented posix, since that was the end of the “copy for the sake of compatibility” runway.

While making such claims, none of the Unix vendors produced anything vaguely price-competitive with whitebox PCs (they were slightly better for niche workloads at 10x the cost, with crippling guardrails, er, license gated features).

Those vendors even tried getting the US government to intervene with procurement regulations, etc.

Anyone that was paying attention during the dotcom era should know how the current bubble ends.

I stopped paying attention the third time they redefined matrix arithmetic semantics. That happened to be around the 100th time I was sent a script and it only ran on the author’s machine. Maybe they will fix it some day. When they do, I will not believe it.

In contrast, TS has a much nicer type system and better async support. It runs well on web, mobile, desktop and server. Yes, sometimes you have to ship node.js or a whole web browser, but the tooling for that is slightly less insane than the analogous tooling for python.

Its language interoperability story is slightly nicer too (invoke native code, or use wasm). It’s UI story is much, much better since it reuses all the web stuff.

Pip practically invented the supply chain attack; npm perfected it. That’s probably a draw.

Of course, if you care about performance, then other choices make more sense. If you’re training a model then python probably still wins, but very few customers have a $1M+ machine.

I guarantee such a list will contain surveillance watering holes like google, and pedo havens like roblox. 99% of the stuff my kids see that I wish they wouldn’t involves misogynistic/racist/incel jokes buried 20+ minutes into YouTube minecraft videos.

Child mode should just require a second device (or a pin) to install apps, and include a adblock-list style whitelist (one regexp per line) for parents to select from for the web browser.

Alcatel used to make landfill-grade android tablets with the first feature, no account required.

That reminds me: Child mode should not require a third party account with a commercial surveillance firm, like it does on Android!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49259105

Points: 3

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49258970

Points: 124

# Comments: 206

The companies pushing age verification make their money monetizing access to children. They are exactly the sorts of groups I’d like to keep my kids away from. Forcing the kids to label themselves as minors just makes them more vulnerable to online exploitation.

Some members of the Trump administration / military say a specific goal is to bring about Armageddon, and have not been fired for it:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/03/us-israel-iran...

Other religious fanatics outside the gov’t take a more circumspect public stand on this particular holy war, but aim to use the Supreme Court to convert the US into a religious dictatorship.

Here’s a primary source; an interview with the defense secretary’s pastor:

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/06/nx-s1-5822558/pastor-doug-wil...

Also, who gets the $200/day? If I issue a drop request, wait 145 days, then buy my data from brokers, do they have to pay me $20,000 per record they return?

Back then, you were still using Google's backup thing, and it was the year when they intentionally broke it to encourage people to move to unencrypted cloud services for important data.

(I heard Europe and China passed the same laws. The EU has intelligence sharing agreements with the US, so I guess American authorities can just have the EU pull the data for US citizens in the US and forward it back home. I'm not a lawyer. It'd be nice if I'm wrong.)