MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by growse | 2025-06-30 20:41:17+00:00
One of the biggest fallacies I see in this space is people looking at an observability standard like otel and thinking "I must enable all of that".

You really don't have to.

Throw away traces. Throw away logs. Sample those metrics. The standard gives you capabilities, it doesn't force you to use them. Tune based on your risk appetite, constraints, and needs.

My other favourite retort to "look how expensive the observability is" is "have you quantified how expensive not having it is". But I reserve that one for obtuse bean counters :)
by Marsymars | 2025-06-30 20:41:44+00:00
For many manual enthusiasts, a Mazda3 GX is effectively the “same car” as a Mazda3 Sport GT, with the significant difference being that the latter has manual transmission.

For me, most of the differences between a GX and a Sport GT, other than the transmission, are about as relevant as the paint colour, so telling me that they’re not comparable is like saying that I can’t compare two cars because the manual version is only available with an expensive quad-coat matte paint job. To me, that fancy paint job isn’t relevant - what’s relevant is that the manual transmission costs $10k more.
by _benton | 2025-06-30 20:41:48+00:00
This analogy makes no sense because you are not prevented in any way from purchasing the many other devices that provide almost identical functionality. It's like complaining that Walmart hiked their prices but ignoring the fact that the mom and pop stores still exist, at a higher number compared to walmarts, and are selling the same products for cheaper. You have incredible consumer choice for phones, you can't chose to purchase a luxury phone and then complain about it.
by baby_souffle | 2025-06-30 20:41:50+00:00
You absolutely have options at request time. Arguably, some of the things you can only do at request time are part of a full and complete mitigation strategy.

You can fingerprint the originating TCP stack with some degree of confidence. If the request looks like it came from a Linux server but the user agent says Windows, that's a signal.

Likewise, the IP address making the request has geographic information associated with it. If my IP address says I'm in Romania but my browser is asking for the English language version of the page... That's a signal.

Similar to basic IP/Geo, you can do DNS and STUN based profiling, too. This helps you catch people that are behind proxies or VPNs.

To blur the line, you can use JavaScript to measure request timing. Proxies that are going to tamper with the request to hide its origins or change its fingerprint will add a measurable latency.
by starkrights | 2025-06-30 20:41:58+00:00
Never seen WAI before, all I can come up with is Works As Intended or Web Accessibility Initiative?

Anyways- jail breaking requires being or remaining on certain iOS versions on certain specific hardware models. You can’t “just jailbreak” your apple device that you daily drive/use regularly. If you’re not on an old version on the right hardware already, you’re fucked. And waiting for a new jailbreak exploit is a (anecdotally, for me at least) nondeterministic amount of time on the order of O(years), with a significant probability that it will not be relevant for whatever device you’re waiting on.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-06-30 20:42:12+00:00
Veo3's world model is still pretty limited. That becomes obvious very fast once you prompt out of distribution video content (i.e. stuff that you are unlikely to find on youtube). It's extremely good at creating photorealistic surfaces and lighting. It even has some reasonably solid understanding of fluid dynamics for simulating water. But for complex human behaviour (in particular certain motions) it simply lacks the training data. Although that's not really a fault of the model and I'm pretty sure there will be a way to overcome this as well. Maybe some kind of physics based simulation as supplement training data.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-06-30 20:42:25+00:00
It’s also probably worth noting that most of the stock iOS apps are the most service-provider-agnostic in the industry. Mail and Notes work on bog standard IMAP, and Calendar and Contacts are built on CalDAV and CardDAV, respectively. Google services work fine in all of them (though could be better if it weren’t for Google’s crappy IMAP implementation). The only case where they don’t work is with non-standard providers like Proton.

Go try to sign into your open-standards-abiding calendar and notes accounts in the Calendar and Contacts bundled with nearly every Android phone on the planet and see how well that goes.
by jasperry | 2025-06-30 20:42:52+00:00
Sure, there are plenty of computations where you don't need much space no matter how many times you loop--like if you're just updating a single sum. But there are other problems where each time through the loop you might need to add an element to a big array or matrix, and then you go back and do more computation on the saved data elements to get the answer.

Before this result, there were believed to be at least some problems where you need (almost) as much space as time, but Williams shows that, theoretically at least, that's never necessarily the case.
by aruametello | 2025-06-30 20:42:59+00:00
> Or maybe just increments to absurd numbers or negative values. Or locks up when probed.

unironically that would mimick a bunch of existing hardware out there. I owned a PC motherboard that always reported a -65535c in a non existing sensor.

my guess is some sensor described but non existing, probably reporting an infinite value of resistance of some unused pin...
by bitpush | 2025-06-30 20:44:28+00:00
People love to parrot this, yet if you think for a second this isnt true at all in all the many ways.

1. Siri - not the first assistant, absolute garbage.

2. Apple Maps (original) - utter garbage at launch, slightly better today in US.

3. Vision Pro - Not the first VR headset. Massive failure.

If anything, Apple has been tremendously successful few times when they were not first (phones, tablets, silicon ..) but they have also been tremendously faltered when they were not first.
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-06-30 20:44:41+00:00
> If you sell me a computer and I don't have a shell on it that's false advertising at best

I believe that's why they're calling it "a phone", or "a tablet". The computer they actually sell has plenty of shells available, and lets you tinker with whatever you like.

A phone is not simply a computer, it's a regulated piece of hardware that must comply with local laws and regulations regarding radio transmissions and other stuff. You can't just peek and poke around anywhere you like in the system.

Besides that, it must be able to talk to carefully tuned 3G/4G/5G cell towers, which sounds easy in theory, but it's not. When I made mobile phones 20 years ago, we had people driving around all countries where we sold it, with a test setup where the phone connected to every cell tower it could "see", and recorded logs and GPS coordinates, and that work (and that of countless others) is partially what became the beginning of A-GPS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GNSS), which allows you to triangulate your phones location purely from the cell towers it can see.

Of course that's not how it works today, as most carriers these days register their cell towers in a central database with GPS coordinates, so A-GPS these days is simply a database dump (and a whole lot of math).

As a "fun" anecdote, when I wrote software for mobile phones, it was the only place I've ever worked that had a bug category for "potential harm to user". I'm certain companies working in Medicare and other critical industries also has that, but it was the first and only time I ever saw it.
by techpineapple | 2025-06-30 20:44:57+00:00
I’m not questioning Jonny Ive’s genius, but lots of geniuses need constraints to do their job well. Maybe this is all Sam Altman’s idea, but in struggling to see the killer AI device (that’s not a phone) and somehow doubt Jony Ive is the person to design it unless he’s in heavy conflict with someone else about it.
by jsight | 2025-06-30 20:45:24+00:00
>Observability is a lot like imaging or patching: a necessary process to be sure, but do you really need a Cadillac Escalade (New Relic/Datadog/etc) to go to the grocery store when a Honda Accord (self-hosted Grafana + OTel) will do the same job more efficiently for less money?

The way that I've seen it play out is something like this:

1. We should self host something like Grafana and otel. 2. Oh no, the teams don't want to host individual instances of that, we should centralize it! (2b - optional, but common, Random team gets saddled with this job) 3. Oh no, the centralized team is struggling with scaling issues and the service isn't very reliable. We should outsource it for 10x the cost!

This will happen even if they have a really nice set of deployment infrastructure and patterns that could have allowed them to host observability at the team level. It turns out, most teams really don't need the Escalade, they just need some basic graphs and alerts.

Self hosting needs to be more common within organizations.
by flysand7 | 2025-06-30 20:45:31+00:00
So I've got some things that seem a little bit weird to me:

1. Typing uppercase characters counts as a mistake

I'm not sure how that got to be the case, but somehow typing an uppercase letter instead of the lowercase is a mistake, despite the fact that sentences start with a lowercase letter. This conflicts with my muscle memory of starting sentences with a capital letter.

2. WPM is not a useful metric on its own

WPM can rise and fall depending on the length of the word. The bigger the word the less likely you are to type that word correctly from muscle memory, so the speed drops. The speed also drops due to the word being longer. I believe having both metrics would yield more useful data, such as when do you slow down etc.

Speaking of which, there are some more statistic things that could help, like measuring how fast you are at fixing the mistakes, or measuring three-letter combinations instead of two-letter combinations, because the context of the third letter might help, but you do need more data to gain a statistically significant result. Maybe trying to classify mistakes by the side of keyboard they happen on -- i.e. are they simple typos or a miscoordination of your hands.

---

Also, as pointed out by another commenter, hands also threw me off. I've been observing them and it's interesting that I don't use my little finger for the left row -- it's used in case I need to press shift.
by wahern | 2025-06-30 20:45:43+00:00
FWIW, as far back as 2015 my feature check library documents Visual Studio as supporting "__typeof".[1] Note the leading but not trailing underscores. Perhaps I was mistaken, but I usually tested that sort of thing. It's also possible __typeof had slightly different semantics.

[1] See https://github.com/wahern/autoguess/blob/b44556e4/config.h.g... (that's the 2015 revision, but HEAD has the same code).
by nikic | 2025-06-30 20:45:53+00:00
At least at a skim, what this specifies for exposure/synthesis for reads/writes of the object representation is concerning. One of the consequences is that dead integer loads cannot be eliminated, as they may have an exposure side effect. I guess C might be able to get away with it due to the interaction with strict aliasing rules. Still quite surprised that they are going against consensus here (and reduces the likelihood that these semantics will get adopted by implementers).
by tomrod | 2025-06-30 20:46:02+00:00
> It is very frustrating when people misstate other people's beliefs

I agree. It is also frustrating when people don't recognize or cry foul when their personal beliefs are restated within homotopy equivalence, perhaps (I speculate) because they think it weakens an already weak argument. Perhaps even moreso for those stating the equivalence because there is not argumentative advantage to be gained by expressing said frustration regarding said response.

Or at least it could be. I'm actually feeling indifferent on the topic.

> There are politicians and activists that have been pushing for lower car ownership and they do it openly.

Words are cheap, words and rallys and activist productions moreso, show the policy that impacts national and international production.
I got removed from GitHub for making open source stuff
by Hasturdev | 2025-06-30 20:46:16+00:00
Today I learned that if you attempt to make open source software then you better be prepared to lose accounts. Recently a friend asked me about a service named plex. I had looked at their front page and not really gone farther than that. I stopped the second someone informed me that I would have to pay money to use this service. To me that sounded silly. I could easily build an application like that for free for everyone. Use VLC media player and streaming output to another device is pretty easy to do once you do a little research. A few tweaks here, a few tweaks there, getting ai to write some html cus im bad at front ends and bam. There it was A simple service for turning any pc into a video streaming server for free. So of course wanting the world to gain the benefits of this work to never have to pay for silly things, I pushed it to github. In less than 12 hours my account was removed from public view and everything I did couldn't be touched by the outside world. My github was blocked from signing into the forums that I posted projects on, blocked from being linked to by anyone, and blocked from being seen at all by anyone, except me. Now I wait for the github team to decide my fate. Wondering why in the world is it OK for someone to immediately get an account removal for making something themselves. Is capitalism that incredibly fragile that a simple open source competitor puts everything at risk? Anyway All this stuff is dumb and hopefully it resolves quickly. Until then I might just push everything to a second account and keep my open source work on their so my personal projects aren't affected. So that employers don't wonder "do you have any work to show? Cus the link you sent is doing a 404" In case anyone is wondering, I believe the crux of the issue is the about line that I made for this project. "This is an simple server that I made to play videos instead of using something like plex. Because paying money for things isn't what I'm about"

Let me know what you think
by prymitive | 2025-06-30 20:46:17+00:00
> There seems to be a strong "instrument everything" culture

Metrics are the easiest way to simply expose your application internal state and then, as a maintainer of that service, you’re in nirvana. And even if you don’t go that far you’re likely to be an engineer writing code and when it comes time to add some metrics why wouldn’t you add more rather than less, and once you have all of them why not adding all possible labels? And in the meantime your Prometheus server is in a crash loop because it run if of RAM, but that’s not a problem visible to you. Unfortunately there’s a big gap in understanding between a code editor writing instrumentation code and the effect in resource usage on the other end of your observability pipeline.
by _benton | 2025-06-30 20:46:37+00:00
That's exactly backwards. I have no desire to limit the types of phones you can purchase, and you have an enormous amount of choices in phones outside Apple that provide essentially the same functionality, and can be as open as you wish. You wish to limit my ability to access a device that I want. I want a locked down phone, and third parties wish to intervene on a transaction between me and Apple so they can illegitimately get a piece of the pie.
by anthk | 2025-06-30 20:47:01+00:00
Even Inform6 with the English library running under a Pentium would run circles over llm's. They aren't even close. If7 will curb-stomp it.

NPC's running around were a thing even in the 80's, see The Hobbit. That on a ZX spectrum. 8 bit CPU, 48k of RAM. With if6 and Zmachine games for 16 bit and 32 bit computers in the 90's llm's can't even compete.

From Jigsaw, Anchorhead, Curses, Spider and Web to that anagram word puzzle game for Glulx (a 32 bit zmachine cousin), the array of amateur but professional looking games it's huge, really huge.
by o11c | 2025-06-30 20:47:11+00:00
The problem with `getlasterror` and `errno` is that they're global (thread-local, whatever).

But if you make them take a `context` object, there's no longer a problem.

One interesting observation - you can use them even for the initial "failed to allocate a context" by interpreting a NULL pointer as always containing an "out of memory" error.
by jerrysievert | 2025-06-30 20:47:19+00:00
I loved dat. I actually had that particular deck, but i had rack rails for it as well. sold it and replaced it with a Panasonic sv-3800, which I still have but it's seen better days and needs a cleaning/alignment badly.

amusingly, I won a contest for widmer brewing in the 90's when they were looking for interesting toasts to put as phrases under their bottle caps: "To Disc and DAT".

unfortunately, I have a bunch of masters and backups of a digital 4-track on dat, and am unable to access them due to the unhappy deck.
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-30 20:48:07+00:00
By and large you want to avoid async if you can help it. Sometimes you can’t. The struggles Rustifarians have had with it are a cautionary tale (the stack and borrow checking go together like peanut butter and jelly.). I used to have a lot of fun writing async Python, friends told me I was living dangerously, I finally rewrote my RSS reader/bookmark manager/personal web crawler/image sorter in sync style so some of it could run in Celery and that any blocking on the CPU on a 16 core machine is too much.

People used to worry about the 10k connection problem but machines are bigger now, few services are really that big, and fronting with nginx or something like that helps a lot. (That image sorter serves images with IIS)

JavaScript is async and you gotta live with it because of deployability. No fight with the App Store. No installshield engineer. No army of IT people to deploy updates. “Just works” on PC, Mac, Linux, tablet, game consoles, VR headsets, etc. Kinda sad people are making waitlist forms with frameworks that couldn’t handle the kind of knowledge graph editor and decision support applications I was writing in 2006 but that’s life.
by darknavi | 2025-06-30 20:48:23+00:00
Take a look at something like rclone and it immediately becomes clear that the photo app vendors you listed have no interest in allowing their users to easily access their data programmatically from their services in any meaningful way.

Example: https://rclone.org/googlephotos/#limitations

Glaring example:

> The current google API does not allow photos to be downloaded at original resolution. This is very important if you are, for example, relying on "Google Photos" as a backup of your photos. You will not be able to use rclone to redownload original images. You could use 'google takeout' to recover the original photos as a last resort
by msgodel | 2025-06-30 20:48:40+00:00
Lol. If phones were actually considered critical devices like this implies Android would have been nuked from orbit.

No. They're computers with a modem peripheral. This is like saying once you plugged your e machine into the phone line it could interfere with 911 calls so they need to be regulated by the FCC. We settled that one over 50 years ago.
by whstl | 2025-06-30 20:49:08+00:00
> You wish to limit my ability to access a device that I want. I want a locked down phone

As others have repeatedly said, you can still opt to not use any other kind of app from outside the AppStore.

But as I asked on another thread, as a thought experiment: What about we meet in the middle and governments force Apple to only "open" 50% of the phones, for the same price. Would that satisfy you?

> third parties wish to intervene on a transaction between me and Apple so they can illegitimately get a piece of the pie.

It's actually Apple that wants to intervene in transactions where I don't want them to be a part of. I don't want to pay 10 euros and give 3 to them.
by surgical_fire | 2025-06-30 20:49:32+00:00
> If a company invests billions in R&D to create hardware and its integrated software, shouldn’t it have the right to control who or what interacts with it?

Was that not the sort of rationale Microsoft used to defend its IE shenanigans back in the day?

It was considered to be a violation of antitrust laws then. I don't think Apple would be off the hook now. Especially considering how much more ubiquitous smartphones are in comparison to web browsers back then.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-06-30 20:49:42+00:00
The probes cost enough to exceed individual purchasing limits at hardware companies, which means you need to go through the requisition process. That takes long enough that you have to plan ahead and you don't order more as your needs increase. Then everyone's fighting for the limited probes right before a ship date and they get jealously guarded like priceless jewels.

JTAG also isn't usually exposed through enclosures, so using the probe on a field unit might require destructive entry depending on the application.
by ekunazanu | 2025-06-30 20:50:28+00:00
> When given a choice between grade-separated level bike lanes, and an equally good road network, people overwhelmingly prefer cars.

> Bikes are a freaking _miserable_ transportation mode. Try biking in subzero temps, or during rain/snow.

Your entire argument seems to revolve around car vs bikes. I am arguing for prioritizing human-centric infrastructure over car-centric infrastructure. This simply means not prioritizing cars above other modes of transit. For urban environments (high density areas) cars are sub-optimal at best and other alternatives like rail, buses, bikes, and trams are simply better. Granted, sometimes cars are appropriate, but I would not use those minority of cases as an argument to justify having a city designed around cars.

> Another example is China, it had bikes as the main transportation mode in many cities, but it abandoned them as soon as they could.

Because Chinese cities now have better public transit. Just look at the size and ridership of their suburban rail and metro networks.
by wavemode | 2025-06-30 20:51:04+00:00
I think it's specifically anticompetitive for Apple to force app developers to go through Apple Payments (with a 30% fee to Apple) for all purchases, otherwise their app is disallowed from being sold on the App store. There's no technological reason for app developers to be restricted from using other payment processors - it's purely a strategy for increased revenue for Apple.

In antitrust terms, it is a form of Vendor Lock-In[0], and could be seen as a form of Tying[1]:

> Tying is often used when the supplier makes one product that is critical to many customers. By threatening to withhold that key product unless others are also purchased, the supplier can increase sales of less necessary products.

As an example, Apple was sued successfully in the early 200s for selling music in a format that could only be played on iPods. iTunes is a platform Apple controls and invented, yet still it was deemed illegal for them to unfairly lock in customers and prevent them from using competing portable music players.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)