MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fxtentacle | 2025-04-21 09:55:52+00:00
I don't quite get the mean and accusatory tone of this article.

It's obvious to everyone that stuff went seriously wrong and that they lost a lot of money when their hardware caught fire. And OVH was way more transparent about what happened and why than what you usually hear from Amazon/Google/Microsoft about their outages. They quickly provided internal documents, video footage, and their own theory as to why a power supply caught fire. (And their info matched up with later-released firefighter heat camera footage.) Most likely, their own legal battle with their supplier of the USP that first received maintenance and then a day later caused the fire is still ongoing, so they probably aren't allowed to say much anymore, or else it would be considered interference with their own lawsuit.

They refunded customers for the downtime and, additionally, also granted extra refunds to customers who did not have proper backups. That's more generous than my experience with AWS & GCloud, who just categorically refused any data-loss-related refunds even though we followed their best practices with a multi-AZ RDS deployment and automated snapshots to S3. When I saw data loss with a cloud storage provider that claimed to be more durable than an atomic bunker, they just shrugged it off and since it wasn't viable to sue them for it, they just got away with not paying. OVH tried the same with a customer where automated backups turned out badly, and then lost in court and were ordered to pay up. In my experience, OVH is behaving like everyone else, they don't stand out as especially bad here.

The article then gets accusatory with "Neither OVHcloud nor Klaba will talk about the SBG2 fire now, but they are both using the experience in surprising ways, having seen that national champions get special treatment." and "being a European tech champion makes you fireproof." but I just don't see that. They paid for the damages caused, changed their datacenter design to prevent these issues in the future, and then rebuilt the whole thing on their own costs. How is that "special treatment"? What could they have done better?

And then the article complains about datacenter operators not sharing enough details publicly. But if this is the treatment you get for being even mildly transparent, I can totally understand why everyone now keeps their lips sealed.
by perlgeek | 2025-04-21 09:56:42+00:00
If it's not a language feature, there's always a risk of fragmentation. Some people won't use it because it adds another dependency, that means fewer programmers will be familiar with it. Others will come up with their own, slightly incompatible implementation. See for example Perl and its various Object Orientation frameworks (Moose, Mouse, Moo, Mo, M, Mojolicious comes with its own...)

Other languages have a policy of prototyping such things out of core, and only adding it to the core language if it gains traction. Of course that works better if the language has a mechanism for extending the syntax out of core.
by vidarh | 2025-04-21 09:56:49+00:00
The Jesuits do indeed have a long tradition of research on the basis of a belief that understanding how the universe works gives a greater understanding of God's creation.

As such, they've traditionally been more open, and a disproportionately high proportion of Jesuits have been scientists. At one point about 1/3 of all members of the Jesuit order were scientists.

"The pope's astronomer"[1] is a jesuit, and the Jesuits have a long tradition in astronomy, with the result of numerous lunar craters (e.g. McNally) and several asteroids named after Jesuits. More than once, Jesuits have also tangled with the question of extraterrestial life, e.g.[2a] - a question fraught by the question it would raise about what it would mean for belief [2b].

Wikipedia also has a long list of Catholic clergy scientists[3]. When reading it, it's worth considering that if anything they had more influence as teachers (e.g. Descartes, Mersenne were both educated at Jesuit colleges), and that the order ranged from low thousands to a few tens of thousands during the centuries the list covers.

With respect to the last few popes, the most notable recent intervention is Pope Francis making clear that he saw the theories of evolution and the Big Bang as real[4]. But already in 1950, even the deeply conservative Pope Pius XII, while expressing hope that evolution would prove to be a passing fad, made clear that catholic doctrine officially did not conflict with evolution. John Paul II formally acquitted Galileo, and stated that "truth cannot contradict truth", when talking about evolution vs. catholic doctrine. [5]

[1] https://www.deseret.com/faith/2024/07/27/vatican-observatory...

[2a] https://aleteia.org/2020/08/28/jesuit-astronomer-calls-extra...

[2b] https://www.ncronline.org/vatican/men-black-belief-aliens-no...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Catholic_clergy_scient...

[4] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/pope-francis...

[5] http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/vatican...
by timlatim | 2025-04-21 09:57:48+00:00
Not the poster you've asked, but I think you might be interested in Mark Fisher's "What is Hauntology?" (10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.16). It argues the contemporary culture is incapable of coming up with genuinely new ideas because postmodernism and late capitalism constraint our imagination to the point where we can no longer imagine a wholly different system of politics and values. We're left with the upkeep of an already established system, and this is reflected in how the present crop of films and music mostly sample and rehash what's been done in the past century.

As a personal addendum, I feel this can be (partly) attributed to the loss of the Cold War's ideological struggle that drove the West to innovate, not just in technology but in societal structures and freedoms as well. This is why it can feel as if we've arrived at "the end of history", the current system has won, so what is left to seek or prove?
by havkom | 2025-04-21 09:57:48+00:00
try catch - where you catch the right types of errors at the right level is hard to beat.

However, many make the mistake to handle any errors at the wrong level. This leads to really buggy and hard to reason about code and in some cases really bad data inconsistency issues.

A rule of thumb is to never catch a specific error which you are not in a good position to handle correctly at that precise level of code. Just let them pass through.
A Fan Website for the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remake
by hiked | 2025-04-21 09:57:53+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a website to showcase and follow the progress of the Oblivion Remake – a fan-led project reimagining The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in a modern game engine.

https://oblivionremake.net/

The site brings together available info, media, lore, and community updates about the remake. It’s designed to be a central hub for fans who want to keep up without digging through forums, videos, or scattered social media posts.

I’m not part of the development team – just a fan who loves the Elder Scrolls series and wanted to build something useful and clean for others. Would love your feedback on design, usability, or other ideas I could add!
by tomhow | 2025-04-21 09:58:47+00:00
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by cladopa | 2025-04-21 09:59:29+00:00
The concept of Liberal in the US is different from liberal in Europe. In Europe "liberal" means supporter of low taxes, small govertment. The concept in the US has to do with sexual liberation and sexual freedom more than economic marxism.

Francis was not sexually liberal. He was marxist. He believed in liberation theology.

As someone who knew personally the man from a spiritual exercises' house in Spain(obviously when he was not yet Pope), I never liked the guy.

He was the friend of dictators. Loved so much Raul Castro, and Maduro, never criticised them, but criticised the affluence of western democracies. His business was the poor and he loved poor makers.

His support for Putin and not denouncing the takeover of absolute power was jarring for someone in his position.

You can be a leftist religious leader, but you have to report abuses when you see them, specially if the abuses are made by your friends. Of course you will lose them if you do.

Francis was too weak in character to oppose them. But as a Pope, that is your job.
by Scaevolus | 2025-04-21 10:00:11+00:00
Obfuscation is one part of defense in depth. Tiktok also has a variety of captchas to block scrapers, independent of this.

None of it's perfect, and they can be worked around, but by providing a barrier you've restricted some of the bad actors (spambots, scrapers) from acting at all.

It's easier to deal with 100 spambots than 1000!
by phtrivier | 2025-04-21 10:00:14+00:00
Condoléances.

I wonder if a Pope's funeral can serve as an occasion for backdoor diplomacy - the world needs a lot of that.

If the next Pope is young and energetic, he may want to use his first few days making a mark in history by putting people from different side of different conflicts.

Paraxodically, he may have more chance putting the Israelis and Palestinian around a table (or at least provide the optics for a deal that would be discussed in the usual boring transactional way.)

On the other hand, one has to wonder what a populist pope would do (interfere in elections ? Make a u turn on climate, migrants, etc... ? Go back to hardcore conservatism ? Or fall into irrelevance ?)
by bilekas | 2025-04-21 10:00:46+00:00
Regulations would absolutely be nice to have, I do like how the EU does actually try to get some good regulations down, my biggest problem with them is though that they don't have any teeth. A lot of the time the cost of the relatively small fines are baked into the cost of doing business if they get caught in breach. It's infuriating. Maybe a fixed percentage of revenue from the services or product that infringes would be more appropriate.
by supriyo-biswas | 2025-04-21 10:00:48+00:00
> Packers and obfuscators are not a "VM". It may look like a VM and act like a VM, in that it has opcodes that you can write to in another higher-level "language", but that is not a VM. It's in the same sandbox as the thing you're trying to obfuscate.

Indignant, caustic comments that simply discard all presented evidence such as this is the primary reason why people with the relevant experience have reduced their contributions on HN. I suspect I'll join their ranks too.
by yoavm | 2025-04-21 10:01:04+00:00
In my early 20s I was part of secular and socialist Jewish research centre. Franciskus was just voted as the new pope, and my first assignment was to write an opinion paper about him, and forecast his future actions. I don't think anyone, including myself, expected that I'll end up with a positive report — religion was almost always a negative thing, and Catholic Christianity even more so. However, I concluded that his action seem to show that he cares more for people rather than for specific rules or biblical quotes. That he is flexible and open to changing things. In retrospect, I think the whole world benefited from his openness. I wish we could say that about other influential religious leaders.
by tomhow | 2025-04-21 10:01:53+00:00
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43749471 and marked it offtopic. Please adhere to the guidelines, particularly these ones:

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by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-21 10:02:21+00:00
It always seems weird and ignorant for people to be labeling Catholic bishops as “left-wing” or “right-wing” or “liberal/progressive” or “conservative”.

Those are all political terms for politicians and their platforms or parties. They do not translate to Catholic doctrines or teachings. Y’all are simply parroting what the lamestream media wants to impose, a political veneer on non-politicians who are shepherds, pastors, teachers.
by fforflo | 2025-04-21 10:02:41+00:00
In 2021, during a visit to the Greek island of Mytilene, Pope Francis delivered one of the finest speeches I've ever read:

> This great basin of water, the cradle of so many civilizations, now looks like a mirror of death. Let us not let our sea (mare nostrum) be transformed into a desolate sea of death (mare mortuum). Let us not allow this place of encounter to become a theatre of conflict. Let us not permit this “sea of memories” to be transformed into a “sea of forgetfulness”. Please brothers and sisters, let us stop this shipwreck of civilization!

> We are in the age of walls and barbed wire. To be sure, we can appreciate people’s fears and insecurities, the difficulties and dangers involved, and the general sense of fatigue and frustration, exacerbated by the economic and pandemic crises. Yet problems are not resolved and coexistence improved by building walls higher, but by joining forces to care for others according to the concrete possibilities of each and in respect for the law, always giving primacy to the inalienable value of the life of every human being

Worth reading in full https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2021/de...
by von_lohengramm | 2025-04-21 10:03:05+00:00
It sounds like the sort of compile-time code that you're talking about is closer to "buildtime" code in Zig, that is Zig code compiled for the host platform and executed by the build system to generate code (or data) to be used when compiling for the target system. As it stands now, there's absolutely nothing special about buildtime code in Zig other than Zig's build system providing good integration.

On the other hand, "comptime" is actually executed within the compiler similar to C++'s `consteval`. There's no actual "emulation" going on. The "emulation" is just ensuring that any observable characteristic of the platform matches the target, but it's all smoke and mirrors. You can create pointers to memory locations, but these memory locations and pointers are not real. They're all implemented using the same internal mechanisms that power the rest of the compilation process. The compiler's logic to calculate the value of a global constant (`const a: i32 = 1 + 2;`) is the "comptime" that allows generic functions, ORMs, and all these other neat use cases.
by StefanBatory | 2025-04-21 10:03:11+00:00
I had been talking with my conservative colleagues - they were deeply unhappy with him on stance of migration, LGBT issues, or even very recent - his talk with Vance, whom they support (American politics are just so big that it has effect on us even across the ocean).

Then, from religious point of view - they didn't really like his ecumenism approach, to them it was borderline of heresy.
by justlikereddit | 2025-04-21 10:03:25+00:00
I guess you're not a scientist by your own admission because your entire post is just a big

"Ackshually, we know dark matter is real because computer models"

Though to be honest that's unfair to computer models as dark matter cannot be consistently modeled in a way that lines up with the observable universe.

So your philosophy is more accurately described as

"ackshually we know dark matter is real because it's a fundamental pillar of the scientism dogma, have faith in the cold dark matter that we will never be able to detect"

If we replace "dark matter" with "the will of god" as a mysterious force with arbitrary value and direction, we end up with the very same theory with only a changed name.

That anyone takes it seriously at all does as much good for cosmology as a field as Trump does good for politics.
by tomhow | 2025-04-21 10:03:46+00:00
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43749471 and marked it offtopic. Please adhere to the guidelines, particularly these ones:

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

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by noduerme | 2025-04-21 10:04:16+00:00
But that's basically an emulator of a VM, isn't it? It's like rewriting the Flash AVM2 into JS... it's still running in JS whereas the original VM was C++. It could JIT compile stuff but only because it literally was reserving memory that could overflow, and (semi-technical take here) from that advantage, of being closer to the metal, flowed all of the flaws in AVM2 that precipitated most of Adobe's woes with Flash. A VM implant in a web page that uses a plugin like Java or Flash, to get around running browser-sandboxed code, which can take over physical memory, is far different from just emulating a VM in Javascript. I wouldn't call writing a ton of opcodes in JS, which resolved to JS functions, a "virtual machine", because it isn't reserving anything or doing anything that Javascript can't do. Someone correct me here if I'm wrong... this is just heavy-duty obfuscation.

Also, one major purpose of a VM is to improve performance over what's available in the browser. If you use that as a measurement, this clearly doesn't fit that goal.
by potato3732842 | 2025-04-21 10:06:00+00:00
The fact that your knee jerk response was to put words in his mouth, specifically the ones you chose, and then claim you stand for liberty really casts a lot of doubt on that second part.

Nowhere did he say corporations would be doing everything. There were a whole plethora of organizations and institutions (social clubs, religious adjacent institutions, etc) that used do do a lot of the public good type stuff and have fallen by the wayside or become indistinguishable from government contractors over the past 100yr as high touch western governments have usurped and stuck their noses in their functions.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-04-21 10:06:52+00:00
Anyone that has maintained a shipping product, can relate to this.

Often, there is disagreement over the definition of “bug.”

There’s the old joke, “That’s not a bug, it’s a feature!”, but I have frequently gotten “bug reports,” stating that the fact that my app doesn’t do something that the user wants, is a “bug.”

They are sometimes correct. The original requirements were bad. Even though the app does exactly what it says on the tin, it is unsuitable for its intended demographic.

I call that a “bug.”
by MrDresden | 2025-04-21 10:07:29+00:00
Realise that most people have these experiences at some point in their career. You don't need to explain the frustrations you had to your future employer or coworkers.

Focus on the accomplishments, how you navigated tough situations, how you helped make things better.

Cut all the 'extreme' truth about the reality of the situation out. There is no benefit in over sharing how you felt about this, that or the other thing while working there.
by basisword | 2025-04-21 10:08:04+00:00
I interpret it very differently from you. Modern warfare is directing drones at 'targets' based on 'intelligence' with little regard for the collateral damage. We see it daily in the news in various conflicts: children killed in strikes with the excuse being that bad guys were also in the vicinity - zero regard for the innocents. It' a reminder that just because you don't have to see the destruction you cause (thanks to modern technology) innocents are still being killed by your actions and you shouldn't forget that (and maybe should reconsider your actions).
by fxtentacle | 2025-04-21 10:08:46+00:00
I'd say you would hope to receive that, but in reality you don't. For Google Cloud and AWS, even a "multi-AZ" deployment might mean that it's just 2 servers in the same building, i.e. exactly what OVH is accused of here. For example, see this discussion about Google's Paris disaster:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35711349

and especially: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35713001

And here for AWS multi-AZ losing data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4115937

I fully agree with you that OVH did a bad job. But so do all the other cloud providers. Cloud just means "someone else's computer" and you still need a watertight contract and the legal ability to sue them to make sure they uphold their end of the contract.
by taurath | 2025-04-21 10:08:50+00:00
It’s funny, because I took the suggestion and went thru the substack sign up process (which wanted email, phone number, contacts, and interests.. not exactly lightweight).

The first thing they show you is a feed, a never ending scroller.

I don’t get an intro to any channel - it seems like Twitter for writers. Half the stuff I subscribed to (you can’t peek in the onboarding) was absolutely written by ChatGPT, emoji headers and all.

I’m sure there’s interesting stuff happening on there, but it’s a scroller just like Reddit, and it’s pretty disappointing how much apps like these don’t respect a single user need - only the needs of the platform to engage engage engage.

Also holy shit, there’s no option to not send emails - only “prefer push”. You can’t turn it off. There’s zero respect for users, their inboxes, or their attention here whatsoever.
by jhbadger | 2025-04-21 10:09:44+00:00
Not the poster you asked either, but another big reason why the 1980s seems more like today than the 1940s did the 1980s was that the 1960s happened in between the 1940s and 1980s. Our modern world view is greatly shaped by the struggles for racial and gender equality that occurred in the 1960s.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-04-21 10:09:55+00:00
Pretty sure this line: https://meowbark.dev/Better-error-handling#:~:text=return%20...

will immediately throw if b == 0, because

a / b

is evaluated immediately, so execution never makes it into fromThrowable(). Does it need to be

() => a / b

instead?

Similarly, withRetry()'s argument needs to have type "() => ResultAsync<T, ApiError>" -- at present, it is passed a result, and if that result is a RateLimit error, it will just return the same error again 1s later.
by 986aignan | 2025-04-21 10:10:12+00:00
Couldn't you replace the CCD with an adapter, connect the adapter to the video out of a computer, and then use the camera to "take a picture" of your already edited picture?

It seems to me that any "paper trail" scheme of the sort you describe would have to solve the problems of DRM to work: making the elements that report on the real world (in this case, the CCD) tamper-proof, making the encryption key impossible to extract, designing robust watermarks to avoid analog holes, etc.
by TriangleEdge | 2025-04-21 10:10:14+00:00
I remember having a conversation with my friend some 15 years ago when FB only allow .edu accounts. I argued that the incentives for the company cannot be to connect people because that in itself isn't profitable. I signed up maybe 10 years ago for 6 months or so and never tried again. I think this has isolated me in some ways, but I'm quite comfortable with the friends I currently have.

Hypothesis: people who regularly use social media score higher then the average population in narcissic personality trait.
by raphman | 2025-04-21 10:10:34+00:00
Two thoughts:

- The pope was not only a very important religious and political leader but also wrote and spoke about the relationship between humans and technology [1, 2]

- I joined Hacker News due to its links but stayed for the community of smart and thoughtful people (and the great moderation). Oftentimes, a HN submission acts as a seed crystal for "off-topic" discussions that people want to talk about. As the people that make up this community get older, and as the times change, the topics we discuss change, too. At some level, technology always has political, moral, ideological implications. For me, HN is one of the best places to discuss these.

[1] https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/it/bollettino/pu...

[2] Tim Cook on how Pope Francis influenced his thinking: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1541230109287507