MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jchw | 2025-07-09 17:31:37+00:00
OK good point. Let's see what Amazon describes the selling point of AWS Lambda is in the original press release from 2014; in fact, so early that it's actually not even the final draft[1]. Surely it will mention something about developers no longer having to write network server applications since (apparently) that is what the "server" in "serverless" is referring to (although this draft actually predates the term "serverless" entirely.)

> SEATTLE – (Nov XX, 2014) – Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced the introduction of AWS Lambda, the simplest way to run code in the cloud. Previously, running code in the cloud meant creating a cloud service to host the application logic, and then operating the service, requiring developers to be experts in everything from automating failover to security to service reliability. Lambda eliminates the operational costs and learning curve for developers by turning any code into a secure, reliable and highly available cloud service with a web accessible end point within seconds. Lambda uses trusted AWS infrastructure to automatically match resources to incoming requests, ensuring the resulting service can instantaneously scale with no change in performance or behavior. This frees developers to focus on their application logic – there is no capacity planning or up-front resource type selection required to handle additional traffic. There is no learning curve to get started with Lambda – it supports familiar platforms like Java, Node.js, Python and Ruby, with rich support for each language’s standard and third-party libraries. Lambda is priced at $XXX for each request handled by the developer’s service and $YYY for each 250ms of execution time, making it cost effective at any amount of usage. To get started, visit aws.amazon.com/lambda.

Let me emphasize some points here:

> Previously, running code in the cloud meant creating a cloud service to host the application logic...

> then operating the service, requiring developers to be experts in everything from automating failover to security to service reliability...

> Lambda eliminates the operational costs and learning curve for developers by turning any code into a secure, reliable and highly available cloud service with a web accessible end point within seconds.

> there is no capacity planning or up-front resource type selection required to handle additional traffic

It is genuinely impressive how devastatingly, horrifically incorrect the idea is that "serverless" ever had anything to do with whether your application binary has a network request server in it. It's just not a thing.

We can talk about the parallels between CGI servers and Lambda all day and all night, but I am not letting this non-sense go. Serverless is not a marketing term for CGI.

[1]: https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2024/11/aws-lambda-turn...
by recursivedoubts | 2025-07-09 17:31:42+00:00
The web, in traditional HTML-based responses, uses HATEOAS, almost by definition. JSON APIs rarely do, and when they do it's largely pointless.

https://htmx.org/essays/how-did-rest-come-to-mean-the-opposi...

https://intercoolerjs.org/2016/05/08/hatoeas-is-for-humans.h...
by mrweasel | 2025-07-09 17:31:44+00:00
Revenue is meaningless for a company that has never been close to covering the cost of building it.

Monthly active users, fair, but it also depends on the type of users that remain. My take still is that the users X cares about are politicians, journalists and the general elite. They are still on X. It doesn't matter that some random tech worker switched to Bluesky or Mastodon, those were never profitable anyway, complained a lot and used third party apps.
by ricksunny | 2025-07-09 17:31:46+00:00
In context of possible early Peruvian civilizations, definitely don't read the below; it's obviously an undersubstantiated pseudoscientific rabbit-hole not worth your curiosity and that your productive workday can not afford.

https://tridactyls.org/

(maintained by one Gonzalo Chavez https://x.com/gchavez101 )
by Night_Thastus | 2025-07-09 17:31:53+00:00
(b) isn't likely because CUDA. Nvidia spent a LOT of time developing CUDA into the de-facto standard for working with GPUs. No one has anything close to comparable. They poured a ton of time and effort into it and pushed it like crazy in the education space as well.

(a) can happen, but Nvidia has some buffer. All these companies promised their shareholders huge massive gains if only they embrace the AI revolution. They will be extremely resistant to admit they can't make any money out of it and will keep the charade going for as long as they can. It won't be like a cliff, so Nvidia has time to adjust and handle it.

The market cap is nonsense though, it's just hype. I never put any real weight on them.
by snapetom | 2025-07-09 17:32:21+00:00
I love Astro so much. After 20 years in data and backend, I got back into frontend for a big project. After banging my head with React, I took a leap of faith and choose Astro with Svelte. That includes an initial try with SvelteKit.

It's worked out so wonderfully. By being HTML/CSS centric, it forces a certain predictable organization with your front end code. I handed the frontend to another developer, with a React background, and because it's so consistently and plainly laid out, the transition happened almost overnight.
by marssaxman | 2025-07-09 17:32:43+00:00
Of course: this kind of thing has happened over and over.

Reality will settle in, the giddiness will fade, the market will overreact, fortunes will be lost, people will lose their jobs, and attention will move along to something else. At least a handful of solid new businesses will survive, though, and even thrive. Twenty years from now, whatever it is that the new technology is actually good for will seem obvious in retrospect, and the present breathless excitement will seem comical.
by oersted | 2025-07-09 17:32:55+00:00
I do broadly agree, but want to note that the ASML machines are not necessarily the bottleneck, or at least not the final bottleneck, and their valuation reflects that.

There’s a reason why only TSMC and to a lesser extent now Samsung and Intel are the only serious players in top-end semiconductors. You can’t just buy the machine and print chips, the amount of iterative tuning and know-how required to get good yields is immense. Weirdly, the actual bottleneck seems to be the availability of what can almost be described as “master craftsmanship”. But it’s not enough either to hire a couple of masters, it’s the collective institutional knowledge built up over >50 years.

And, of course, TSMC is not worth nearly as much as NVidia either even if they manufacture all their hardware.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-09 17:33:04+00:00
But this does nothing for the company to protect its IP from that employee quitting to immediately go to work for a competitor. By keeping them on the payroll but working on "Special Projects" that is no where close to IP, they become stale in current state of the art.

In the Silicon Valley show, this is why Big Head and the other folks "office" on the roof. They are segregated from the other employees while they continue to get paid.
by delfinom | 2025-07-09 17:33:27+00:00
>It is definitely part of TikTok's mission to sow dissent in free western countries.

How?

Because YouTube and other social media is the same as TikTok.

The feed algorithms have a inherent bias by the human audience. Outrage and clickbait draw human eyeballs more than plain content. Advertisers pay more for more eyeballs. The algorithms job is to maximize eyeballs to get more advertiser money.

If anything, Western (lack of education) and degenerating society is leading to more outrage and clickbait working.
by beders | 2025-07-09 17:33:28+00:00
I always urge software architects (are they still around?) and senior engineers in charge of APIs to think very carefully about the consumers of the API.

If the only consumer is your own UI, you should use a much more integrated RPC style that helps you be fast. Forget about OpenAPI etc: Use a tool or library that makes it dead simple to provide data the UI needs.

If you have a consumer outside your organization: a RESTish API it is.

If your consumer is supposed to be generic and can "discover" your API, RESTful is the way to go.

But no one writes generic ones anymore. We already have the ultimate one: the browser.
by lihanc111 | 2025-07-09 17:33:31+00:00
Hey HN Community!

A while back, we shared our open-source project LMCache here and were blown away by the incredible support and feedback. Today, our team is thrilled to share more about one of our core components: CacheBlend. Recognized with a Best Paper Award at ACM EuroSys 2025, this technique is a pain killer for efficient RAG applications The Problem: Your KV Cache is Wasting Potential In modern LLM applications like RAG and Agents, we constantly feed the model new context. For example, in RAG, we retrieve relevant documents and stuff them into the prompt.

The issue is that this dynamically retrieved context doesn't always appear at the beginning of the input sequence. Traditional KV caching only reuses a "common prefix," so if the new information isn't at the very start, the cache hit rate plummets, and your GPU ends up recomputing the same things over and over. The Solution: CacheBlend - 100% Hit Rate, No Compromises CacheBlend changes the game by allowing for the reuse of pre-computed KV caches regardless of their position in the input sequence.

This means we can finally achieve a 100% KV Cache hit rate in applications like RAG. The performance gains are significant:

Faster Time-To-First-Token (TTFT): Get your initial response much quicker.

More Throughput: Serve significantly more users with the same hardware.

Almost lossless Output Quality: All of this is achieved with little degradation in the model's generation quality.

How does it work? CacheBlend intelligently handles the two main challenges of reusing non-prefix caches: Positional Encoding Update: It efficiently updates positional encodings to ensure the model always knows the correct position of each token, even when we're stitching together cached and new data.

Selective Attention Recalculation: Instead of recomputing everything, it strategically recalculates only the minimal cross-attention needed between the new and cached chunks to maintain perfect generation quality.

For detailed analysis, please refer to the official paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689031.3696098

Where can I try it? Our official repo is at: https://github.com/LMCache/LMCache The newest interactive CacheBlend demo at: https://github.com/LMCache/LMCache-Examples/tree/main/demo-r...

Ask us anything!
by GolfPopper | 2025-07-09 17:33:48+00:00
A contract requires a 'meeting of the minds'. Artificially inflating the practicalities of canceling (exiting the contract in accordance with the contract) so as to extract more money from one party fails that test.

This isn't about cancellation fees, a fixed-term commitment, or anything of the sort. It's agreeing that "you can cancel by filling out the form" without mentioning that to get the form you need to climb down into an unlit basement, and find the form in a maze of unlabeled filing cabinets while evading the guard leopard.
by adrian_b | 2025-07-09 17:33:54+00:00
If life had appeared before the Earth-Theia collision, it could have been terminated by any of the earlier impacts.

The Earth-Theia collision has been only the last of a great number of collisions.

The original Earth had been much smaller and it had grown by colliding with many similar bodies.

The reason why the last collision is likely to have been also the greatest is that both Earth and Theia had grown previously through many collisions.

This has been similar to the "Highlander" movies, where each victorious immortal took the force of the decapitated one, until only 2 remained for the final confrontation, which were stronger than any of the previous immortals, because these 2 had gathered the forces of all the others.

In the same way the planets close to Earth have grown after each collision, at the expense of the smaller impactor, so the impacts have been between bigger and bigger planets, until the final collision between Earth and Theia, which both were bigger than the participants to earlier impacts from their history.

Before this final impact, the time intervals between 2 successive big impacts might have been too short for life to appear.
by glimshe | 2025-07-09 17:34:19+00:00
I'm frugal and I can't think of a time I bought clothes I didn't end up wearing them.

Back in the 80s when games were expensive, a backlog was unthinkable. Sure, I did but games I didn't play much because I didn't like them, but there was no such thing of an unopened, unplayed game for me
by feoren | 2025-07-09 17:35:04+00:00
Yes, corruption pays. Although if "doing remarkably well" means being addicted to ketamine, having many exes and children who refuse to speak with you, tanking multiple businesses to the point that your products get sabotaged just for being associated with you, getting booed off stages, licking the boots of fascists in the hope they'll let you call them "daddy", paying people to play online games for you to impress nerds (unsuccessfully, instead getting online-bullied for it), etc., etc., then I think I'd rather not "do remarkably well", thank you very much.

Elon does not seem like a happy man. Is money the only points humans score themselves by? It's like watching someone bragging about getting the highest ever score at a game that they hate.
by Glyptodon | 2025-07-09 17:35:13+00:00
$100 million or more rule seems silly when that's the cost of ~10 stoplights and there are like 33 million businesses in the US.

But it also seems ridiculous to skip since four people doing nothing but having a discussion about a new rule for 30 minutes across a good portion of those businesses is easily $100mil w/o them even having to lift a pinky besides.
by sokoloff | 2025-07-09 17:35:27+00:00
In the short run, markets are a voting machine; in the long run, they’re a weighing machine. — Ben Graham

If you own a slice of nVidia’s shares at a current P/E of 37, after a year, they’ve earned 2.7% of the value and you still have the same stake as you did before. That’s pricing in further growth and upside in earnings from here (otherwise, you could buy US treasuries at a better price), but doesn’t seem outrageous to me.

Disclaimer: I don’t directly own any $NVDA; I do own mutual funds that own some.
by TSiege | 2025-07-09 17:35:35+00:00
This site (~1475 BCE) is older than the Olmecs (1200-400BCE) and is associated with another city, Caral, which is even older than them (3000-1800BCE) and both are much farther south than Mexico is compared to the Bering Land Bridge.

Caral at 5000 years old is quite old! For additional context the Pyramids of Giza are ~4600 years old and Stonehenge is ~5100 years old. Given that it's in Peru this does not counter your narrative. But Archaeology is a Science and they cannot definitively say there is an older city without discovering it. It also might be unlikely to find what would be qualified as a "City" that is older. We've certainly found much older human settlements in the Americas, but megalithic building and cities is harder to say. Perhaps we'll find packed earth ones somewhere, but Peru really did have the jump on what would term "complex societies" in the Americas
by Night_Thastus | 2025-07-09 17:36:30+00:00
...no? Leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing is incredibly difficult. Keeping pace with it is nearly impossible. Many companies and entire countries have tried - and failed, over and over and over. You can't just throw billions of dollars at the problem and hope you solve it.

It is far, far smarter to design the chips and leave the manufacturing to others who will have the expertise and take on the risk.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-07-09 17:36:53+00:00
> But What If The Host Country [...] Legally Compels the App Store to Ship Malware?

> This is an endemic risk to smartphones, but binary transparency makes this detectable.

> That said, at minimum, the developer should control their own signing keys.

So, don’t ship on the Play Store unless you’re grandfathered?

> If the developers for an app do not live in a liberal democracy with a robust legal system, they probably cannot tell their government, “No,” if they’re instructed to backdoor the app and cut a release (stealth be damned).

Or when the laws of said democracy make it illegal for them to say “no” (see: Australia, possibly the US per Lavabit, realistically every country in Europe if the government is willing to claim a grave enough threat per the German hoster of Jabber.ru attempting a MITM against them).
by umvi | 2025-07-09 17:37:30+00:00
Also, in my limited experience the 30% also goes towards lots of other valuable features like access to the automatic marketing/recommendation engine. By launching your title on Steam, people will see your title in the "More like this" recommendation bars that appear at the bottom of each page. And if you like certain genres of games, Steam will just directly recommend you more titles of that genre on the home page.

I launched a steam demo of my programming game last month (you can find it in my HN profile if you are curious), and without having to do any marketing of my own built up about 1000 wishlists in a month just thanks to getting traffic from similar but more well known titles like Exapunks.
by cm2012 | 2025-07-09 17:37:36+00:00
Twitter valuation dropped for two primary reasons:

1) Most tech valuations dropped about 50%-80% in between Elon's offer and Reddit formally accepting it. This was the end of the 2021 tech boom.

2) Elon being a moron and turning off brand advertisers in any way he can when direct response ads don't really work on the platform.
by moffkalast | 2025-07-09 17:37:36+00:00
Yeah I kinda dislike that approach to MMO storylines, it's hard to suspend one's disbelief that you're "the chosen one" when there's a conga line of chosen ones behind you waiting for you to get on with it and start some story quest. Bonus points if they're all clipping through you lol.

There are some that take the MOBA type approach of just letting you go in a not-so persistent world with the story of the season going on that happens regardless if people participate in it or not, but if there are any quests they tend to be kinda generic and get old fast.

There are few that can manage a good middle ground, if any. I could never get into EVE Online but I respect their organic-ish approach to this, where the players make the story.
by nlawalker | 2025-07-09 17:38:13+00:00
> But still we pay people a lot to get that last 1%.

If people paid for docs as an independent product, or had the foresight to evaluate the quality of the docs before making a purchase and use it as part of their criteria (or are able to do that at all), I think attitudes around docs and "docs bots" and their correctness, utility etc. would be a lot different.
by fundad | 2025-07-09 17:38:13+00:00
Yes most of their revenue growth is expected to be as the everything app (or a video platform?).

Musk has said over and over he doesn't care about advertising revenue, he mangled a quote from the Princess Bride to say "I don't care" and then he said if advertisers try to blackmail him with money (even stranger phrasing) they could go f*ck themselves.

[https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-misquotes-princess...] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolis/2023/12/05/elon-musk...]

I think gaining the influence to fire regulators investigating his companies was what he wanted.

BTW he sold Twitter to another subsidiary of X Corp, I wonder if he paid back the debt from the LBO of Twitter.
by 9rx | 2025-07-09 17:38:13+00:00
> Software development is not just writing code.

But it remains that deployment is normally considered to be independent of development. If you put your binaries on a CD instead of sending it to AWS, the application will still be considered developed by most people. Deployment is a post-development activity.

> I guess the next argument is that Amazon is just diluting the term

Could be. Would it matter? The specific definition you offer didn't even emerge until ~2023, nearly a decade after Lamba was introduced, so clearly they're not hung up on some kind of definitional purity. Services like Cloud Run figured out that you could keep the server in the application, while still exhibiting the spirit of CGI, so it is not like it is hard technical requirement, but it is the technical solution that originally emerged and was named as such.

If what you are trying to say, and not conveying it well, is that it has become a marketing term for all kinds of different things, you're not wrong. Like I suggested in another comment, there is probably a "Serverless" toaster for sale out there somewhere these days.
by glenstein | 2025-07-09 17:38:28+00:00
I feel like I've been consistent throughout by evaluating costs as a percentage of revenue. That’s the actual denominator Mozilla uses when allocating its budget. There’s no switch or sleight of hand happening here. One percent of revenue is one percent of the available operating budget.

It seems like you've changed your framing entirely. Your original point was that CEO pay is significant because it's 20 percent of net earnings. That implied this metric better captured the weight of the cost. But now you’ve moved to a different argument, comparing the CEO’s compensation to individual developers and bringing in a shareholder-return perspective. These are entirely separate lines of reasoning and don’t follow from the point you started with.

Also, Mozilla doesn’t have shareholders? So the idea that the CEO should be compensated in a way that maximizes shareholder earnings doesn’t really apply. Mozilla’s spending decisions should be judged in terms of how well they serve its mission, not whether they increase a surplus that could be distributed to hypothetical owners.

I’m not even necessarily defending the CEO pay on its own. I just don't think you can make the case that it crippled their ability to work on needed features, and I think the logic you’re using has shifted in a way that doesn’t hold up when applied to Mozilla’s actual structure or purpose.
by SoftTalker | 2025-07-09 17:38:46+00:00
> 30 Tabs on Toothbrush because I haven't decided which one to buy.

I mean, really? A tootbrush is a $2 item. They are all basically the same, some bristles on a handle. Why would you spend the time reading or even opening 30 different pages about this?

Personally I just use the free one I get from the dentist with each cleaning/checkup.
by sfn42 | 2025-07-09 17:38:52+00:00
Sure, that's completely reasonable. But getting hung up on them for an hour is ridiculous.

I also think they're unnecessary in the first place. I wouldn't hold it against anyone in a scenario like you described but I also wouldn't expect it. Solving the task as it's posed is good enough.

I might just mention that my first instinct would be to fix the root of the problem instead of asking about it, I wouldn't expect the interviewer to have spent time world building for their made up task.
by tremon | 2025-07-09 17:39:09+00:00
I'm unsure what argument you are trying to make here? The page you linked makes no reference at all to nVidia. And directly below where it mentions Java (web servers are not mentioned at all, only web browsers), it also excludes:

* All 3rd party binaries such as fonts, sounds, artwork and branding

And further down, it also excludes:

* Packages without public available source * Packages with non-Open Source license

I'm not sure if SuSE considers nVidia drivers to be 3rd party or not, but they are definitely without public available source and without an Open Source license.