MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by swinglock | 2025-08-29 21:12:40+00:00
If a torrent is already well seeded then downloading in random order isn't really a problem because there are already multiple complete copies out there. If it isn't, then the streaming client will likely receive less data from non-streaming peers due to the data it can offer being less rare and desirable, given several peers in the swarm downloads in sequence. That makes them all even less likely to be able to stream without pausing for buffering when there's not already a lot of capacity. So it probably works itself out alright.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-29 21:12:47+00:00
> Just because an antivirus isn't perfect that doesn't mean it's useless.

If the security of your system depends on the attacker not doing something the attacker can easily do, it's useless.

> A bank may not want to put in the extra effort of supporting 3 platforms of secure phones, insecure phones, and insecure web and would prefer to support less and potentially dropping features from the web platform.

So now we've gone from some kind of hypothetical security benefit to "banks don't support that because they're lazy". Except that adding support for attestation is work they do for no reason, because the people using locked phones are still using locked phones and preventing people with unlocked phones from using them instead of the web page is paying to do work only in order to cause customers trouble.
by _mlbt | 2025-08-29 21:13:03+00:00
It carried out just enough of an aid mission to run cover for CIA activities. As an example it nominally supported farmers in Afghanistan, except the "farmers" were opium producers.

USAID was shut down on July 1st. Somehow people have survived without it for nearly 2 months. It just goes to show you how critical the "aid" it provided was.
by malux85 | 2025-08-29 21:13:56+00:00
I was one of the original engineers of DFP at Google and we built the systems that send billions of ads to billions of users a day.

The complexity comes from the fact that at scale, the state space of any problem domain is thoroughly (maybe totally) explored very rapidly.

That’s a way bigger problem than system complexity and pretty much any system complexity is usually the result of edge cases that need to be solved, rather than bad architecture, infrastructure or organisational issues - these problems are only significant at smaller, inexperienced companies, by the time you are at post scale (if the company survives that long) then state space exploration in implementation (features, security, non-stop operations) is where the complexity is.
by Moldoteck | 2025-08-29 21:14:33+00:00
Sweden did spent similar amounts for ren subsidies over years, that's why I'm not sure it's the biggest. If the goal is 1.5gw nuclear, that would be about 20bn for bwrx if fully funded by govt, looking at Canada. 20bn is a lot, but on the other hand Sweden for sure did spent similar amounts for ren over years.

renewables cover different aspect of demand. What you do if you don't have enough firming power? Hope neighbors will have spare power? That's why you start planning nuclear now, or you'll start planning gas later, just like Germany
by globular-toast | 2025-08-29 21:14:33+00:00
I don't write much boilerplate anyway. I long ago figured out ways to not do that (I use a computer to do repetitive tasks for me). So when people talk about boilerplate I feel like they're only just catching up to me, not surpassing me.

As for catching bugs, maybe, but I feel like it's pot luck. Sometimes it can find something, sometimes it's just complete rubbish. Sometimes worth giving it a spin but still not convinced it's saving that much. Then again I don't spend much time hunting down bugs in unfamiliar code bases.
by prerok | 2025-08-29 21:14:47+00:00
You are not wrong, but the source of the problem may not be the domain but poor software design.

If the software base is full of gotchas and unintended side-effects then the source of the problem is in unclean separation of concerns and tight coupling. Of course, at some point refactoring just becomes an almost insurmountable task, and if the culture of the company does not change more crap will be added before even one of your refactorings land.

Believe me, it's possible to solve complex problems by clean separation of concerns and composability of simple components. It's very hard to do well, though, so lots of programmers don't even try. That's where you need strict ownership of seniors (who must also subscribe to this point of view).
by raincole | 2025-08-29 21:14:52+00:00
> Want to make a TV show that is "the simplest thing that could possibly work"? Get an iPhone and record 3 people in an empty room saying lines. Publish a new episode every week.

You just described Podcast. It did work for many (obviously it failed for many as well). That's an excellent example of why one should start with the simplest thing that could possibly work. Probably better than the OP's examples.
by jajko | 2025-08-29 21:14:57+00:00
I am deep in one such corporate complexity, yet I constantly see an ocean of items that could have been in much simpler and more robust way.

Simple stuff had tons of long term advantages and benefits - its easy to ramp up new folks on it compared to some over-abstracted hypercomplex system because some lead dev wanted to try new shiny stuff for their cvs or out of boredom. Its easy to debug, migrate, evolve and just generally maintain, something pure devs often don't care much for unless they become more senior.

Complex optimizations are for sure required for extreme performance or massive public web but that's not the bulk of global IT work done out there.
by spectraldrift | 2025-08-29 21:14:58+00:00
I agree with the spirit of the article, but I think the definition of "simple" has been inverted by modern cloud infrastructure. The examples create a false choice between a "simple but unscalable" system and a "complex but scalable" one. That is rarely the trade-off today.

The in-memory rate-limiting example is a perfect case study. An in-memory solution is only simple for a single server. The moment you scale to two, the logic breaks and your effective rate limit becomes N × limit. You've accidentally created a distributed state problem, which is a much harder issue to solve. That isn't simple.

Compare that to using a managed service like DynamoDB or ElastiCache. It provides a single source of truth that works correctly for one node or a thousand. By the author's own definition that "simple systems are stable" and require less ongoing work, the managed service is the fundamentally simpler choice. It eliminates problems like data loss on restart and the need to reason about distributed state.

Perhaps the definition of "the simplest thing" has just evolved. In 2025, it's often not about avoiding external dependencies. You will often save time by leveraging battle-tested managed services that handle complexity and scale on your behalf.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-29 21:15:13+00:00
One of the worst periods of my career was at a company that had a team who liked to build prototypes. They would write a hasty proof-of-concept and then their boss would parade it in front of the executives. It would be deployed somewhere and connected to a little database so it technically "worked" when they tried it.

Then the executives would be stunned that it was done so quickly. The prototype team would pass it off to another team and then move on to the next prototype.

The team that took over would open the project and discover that it was really a proof of concept, not a working site. They wouldn't include basic things like security, validation, error messages, or any of the hundred things that a real working product requires before you can put it online.

So the team that now owned it would often have to restart entirely, building it within the structures used by the rest of our products. The executives would be angry because they saw it "work" with their own eyes and thought the deployment team was just complicating things.
by declan_roberts | 2025-08-29 21:15:20+00:00
Elon needs to do the right thing and play by the rules of other data centers: green wash their energy with a fake green energy company /s

The only player doing the right thing here is probably Microsoft which is retrofitting an entire nuclear energy plant.

Everybody else is faking it to make you feel better. Elon just is skipping the faking it part.
by guptadeepak | 2025-08-29 21:15:50+00:00
This article highlights a critical, often-overlooked security gap in how organizations manage AI agents: applying human identity frameworks to digital workers that operate continuously and at a high volume.

The author stresses the need for purpose-built AI agent identity systems featuring automated credential rotation, real-time policy evaluation, and behavioral analytics.

For those working on AI workforce security, what techniques have you found effective for dynamic authorization and auditability?
by CamperBob2 | 2025-08-29 21:16:27+00:00
But I have wondered why one of these companies with billions of dollars to burn hasn't tried to create something new as a strategic initiative.

They have; Taligent comes to mind. You may not have heard of that -- or more likely, you have but just forgot about it -- but it's a good object lesson (no pun intended) in why a successful new OS is hard to just conjure into existence. There has to be a crying, desperate need for it, not just a vague sense that This Time We'll Get It Right.

You could probably cite OS/2 Warp as a less-obscure example of the same phenomenon.
by ineedasername | 2025-08-29 21:16:35+00:00
It doesn't look like it's just root nodes from the structure, it appears to be the entire structure including a summary and excluding the text content itself:

{json.dumps(tree_without_text, indent=2)}

The end result is that a pre-summarized digest is input in each prompt, the LLM selects whatever it decides on.

The pageIndex value add here is ostensibly the creation of that summary structure, but this too is done with LLM assistance. I've been through the code now, and what I see is essentially JSON creation and parsing during the index process that has LLM prompts as the creation engine for all of that as well.

Yes, it is technically vectorless-RAG, but it gets there completely and totally with iterative and recursive calls to an LLM on all sides.

Looking through the rest of their code & API, the API exists to do these things:

1: Create your ToC using unsupervised[1] LLM calls. 2: Serve your ToC to an LLM when searching or querying your doc base 3: Be your document store to return hits from #2

[1] Unsupervised in the ML sense, not as a value/quality judgement.
by Gud | 2025-08-29 21:16:56+00:00
Not everybody wants to manage some commercial grade packet filter that can handle some DDoSing script kiddie, it’s a strong argument.

But another argument against using the easiest choice, the near monopoly, is that we need a diverse, thriving ecosystem.

We don’t want to end up in a situation where suddenly Cloudflare gets to dictate what is allowed on the web.

We have already lost email to the tech giants, try running your own mail sometime. The technical aspect is easy, the problem is you will end up in so many spam folders it’s disgusting.

What we need are better decentralized protocols.
by rpcope1 | 2025-08-29 21:17:03+00:00
Now if only Intel would start packing their iGPUs (maybe more than one, or many for a high core count CPU like this) on their Xeon CPUs, you could basically build insane video streaming infra with little hardware (given how good the iGPUs are at things like transcoding on a watt for watt basis). This seems like a huge slam dunk slapping at least one iGPU on their Xeon CPUs like you used to be able to get...I have no idea why they stopped.
by GMoromisato | 2025-08-29 21:17:05+00:00
Agreed! The author is clearly an experienced and talented software engineer.

But the irony, in my opinion, is that experienced engineers don't need this advice (they are already "doing engineering"), but junior engineers can't use this advice because they don't have the experience to know what the "simplest thing" is.

Still, the advice is useful as a mantra: to remind us of things we already know but, in the heat of the moment, sometimes forget.
by like_any_other | 2025-08-29 21:17:26+00:00
> The back-and-forth has escalated to the point where the state has now deployed as many as six police squad cars to guard asphalt

Isn't that de-escalation from the prior state of outright arresting people that damaged pride crosswalks? E.g.

https://www.krem.com/article/news/local/arrests-wednesday-at...

https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/4-charged-hate-crim...
by krapp | 2025-08-29 21:17:38+00:00
90% of normal people have never heard of a whitelist either, but any English speaker could intuit what "allowlist" means more easily that "whitelist" without context. And both are technical terms of art in the context of this conversation, so what 90% of normal people would or wouldn't understand isn't even relevant.

And "enshittification" is even newer than "allowlist" and it's practically mainstream.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-29 21:17:47+00:00
Yes, that's ollama's fault. They renamed the fine-tuned qwen model to deepseek, and a lot of people got confused. But behind the naming blunder, the model you got was qwen2.5-finetuned-r1, which was identical in architecture with qwen2.5 (so it should have ran at the exact same speed)
by int_19h | 2025-08-29 21:18:36+00:00
> anyone who says you shouldn't have a round in chamber is living in a fantasy world.

That was historically a very common military rule, and AFAIK it's still common worldwide, just not in US.

IDF is particularly famous for having empty chamber as the standard protocol, which is why this is often colloquially known as "Israeli carry". And you can say a lot of things about IDF, but one thing for sure: they have operational experience.
by marcelr | 2025-08-29 21:18:42+00:00
i think css is one of the most brilliant languages

but you have to separate the specific properties (float) and the semantics of the language

the selector system is incredible, in a way i can’t quite describe why but it feels similar to programming in prolog

inheritance is kind of stupid for most things yes, but `all: initial` is a easy fix / debug

to me the part i love is the debugger (dev tools) and the ability to plop down code where ever and it just works, code organization is just writing good selectors

unfortunately i don’t get to do this professionally so the largest css files i work with are 1000 lines, and usually no shared libs, but i find it extremely fun to work with
by craftkiller | 2025-08-29 21:19:25+00:00
> I don't want to touch the same screen that 1000 other people have touched since it was last cleaned

How do you handle doors in public spaces? People have been touching door handles to enter fast food restaurants for decades and we've been fine.

> you'll quickly realize how slow people are

This, I think, is the real reason we won't see screens at drive-throughs. Screens can work in-store because you can have many screens to compensate for slow people. To apply the same for cars you'd either need the screen move with the car as it moves through the line, which would likely mean placing the order on your phone, or you'd need significant infra to create many stalls where cars can place orders. For the latter, Sonic is well positioned for this with their drive-in stalls but most other fast food restaurants don't have the physical space for that.
by dondraper36 | 2025-08-29 21:19:27+00:00
Not directly related to the article we're discussing here, but, based on your experience, you might be the ideal kind of person to answer this.

At the scale you are mentioning, even "simple" solutions must be very sophisticated and nuanced. How does this transformation happen naturally from an engineer at a startup where any mainstream language + Postgres covers all your needs, to someone who can build something at Google scale?

Let's disregard the grokking of system design interview books and assume that system design interviews do look at real skills instead of learning common buzzwords.
by mechanicalpulse | 2025-08-29 21:19:45+00:00
Others have already mentioned that this is possible with iOS. iOS 14 introduced a bunch of privacy improvements including the PHPickerViewController, but some apps may not yet be using it. [0]

I will say that in the event that an app is not using PHPickerViewController, sometimes it's still possible to emulate it by exiting the app, going into the photos app, selecting the photo, selecting the little "send" arrow in the bottom left, and then picking the app to send it to. I do this all the time with the Slack app. Copy-and-paste may be another route. Sure, it's a silly workaround for a feature that should have been there from day one, but c'est la vie.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/photokit/deliverin...
by mikepurvis | 2025-08-29 21:21:18+00:00
I think the proper comparison point here is probably what game consoles have done since the Xbox 360, which is basically run a hypervisor on the metal with the app/game and management planes in separate VMs. That gives the game a bare metal-ish experience and doesn't throw away resources on true multitasking where it isn't really needed. At the same time it still lets the console run a dashboard plus background tasks like downloading and so on.
by gmueckl | 2025-08-29 21:21:21+00:00
It matters who you communicate concerns to. Something as fundamental as "I think that your team shouldn't even exist" should go to the team leads and their managers exclusively at first. Writing that to the entire affected team is counterproductive in any organization because it unnecessarily raises anxiety and reduces team productivity and focus. Comments like this from influential people can have big mental and physical health impacts on people.
by agwa | 2025-08-29 21:21:59+00:00
OK, I just tested it:

In terminal 1, I created a database and added a table to it:

$ sqlite3 testdb sqlite> create table test (col int);

In terminal 2, I attached gdb to sqlite3 and set a breakpoint on unlink:

$ gdb sqlite3 `pidof sqlite3` (gdb) b unlink (gdb) c

Back in terminal 1, I inserted data into the table:

sqlite> insert into test values(123);

In terminal 3, I saved a copy of testdb-journal:

$ cp testdb-journal testdb-journal.save

Then in terminal 2, I resumed executing sqlite3:

(gdb) c

In terminal 1, the INSERT completed without error.

Back in terminal 3, I sent SIGKILL to sqlite3, simulating a power failure:

$ killall -9 sqlite3

I then restored testdb-journal, simulating what could happen after a power failure when the parent directory is not fsynced:

$ mv testdb-journal.save testdb-journal

I then opened testdb again and ran `SELECT * FROM test` and it returned zero rows.

This proves int_19h and I are right - if the journal file comes back, SQLite will apply it and roll back a committed transaction.

I then confirmed with strace that, as the documentation says, the directory is only fsynced after unlink when synchronous=EXTRA. It doesn't happen with synchronous=FULL. So you need synchronous=EXTRA to get durability in DELETE mode.
by craneca0 | 2025-08-29 21:22:26+00:00
agreed on the presence and stickiness of no-code tooling. but in a future where we want to enable LLMs and agents to do as much of that work as possible, a code-first approach seems far more likely to make that effective. not just because agents are better are writing code than clicking through interfaces (maybe that will change as agents evolve?), but because the SDLC is valuable for agents for the same reasons it's valuable for human developers - collaboration, testing, auditing, versioning, etc.
by runjake | 2025-08-29 21:22:55+00:00
USAF SF is probably different (if SOP hasn't changed) because USAF SF gets so little time in training. USAF SF also ironically seem to have the largest numbers of disciplinary issues. Your average Marine, even a non-rifleman, has far better firearms training than a USAF SF airman.

Disclaimer: I was not SF. I was merely surrounded by them in a very high security environment. :-)
by immibis | 2025-08-29 21:23:09+00:00
But you don't get billions of requests per minute. You get maybe five requests per second (300 per minute) on a bad day. The sites that seem to be getting badly attacked, they get 200 per second, which is still within reach of a self hosted firewall. Think about how many CPU cycles per packet that allows for. Hardly a real DDoS.

The only reason you even want to firewall 200 requests per second is that the code downstream of the firewall takes more than 5ms to service a request, so you could also consider improving that. And if you're only getting <5 and your server isn't overloaded then why block anything at all?
by crote | 2025-08-29 21:23:16+00:00
The difference is that organisations like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC were primarily tech-first: innovations were the result of very clever and creative people doing blue skies research. The most groundbreaking stuff shocked the world while it was still a hacked-together demo, and similarly the cost of failure was quite low.

On the other hand, Meta's experiment is primarily CEO-driven. The outcome is predetermined, changing direction is not possible. Sure, clever engineers get to draw the rest of the owl, but that's not very useful when it turns out that everyone needs a horse instead.

They are spending a fortune, but rather than getting 900 crappy ideas to throw away and 100 great ones to pick from for continued development, they are developing 1 technological marvel nobody is interested in.
by badsectoracula | 2025-08-29 21:23:30+00:00
Well, i can't think of a better analogy to say that you can't offset doing bad things by doing good things. The karma system some games use (e.g. Fallout 3 where you can nuke an entire city that puts your karma in negatives and then give fresh water to beggars to reset your karma) was what i was reminded of.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-08-29 21:23:43+00:00
Well...To be completely accurate it's better to say that it actually IS aligned, it's just aligned to be neutral and steerable.

It IS based on synthetic training data using Atropos, and I imagine some of the source model leaks in as well. Although, when using it you don't seem to see as much of that as you did in Hermes 3.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-29 21:23:50+00:00
> They also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad

I've only seen John Carmack's public interactions, but they've all been professional and kind.

It's depressing to imagine HR getting involved because someone's feelings had been hurt by an objective discussion from a person like John Carmack.

I'm having flashbacks to the times in my career when coworkers tried to weaponize HR to push their agenda. Every effort was eventually dismissed by HR, but there is a chilling effect on everyone when you realize that someone at the company is trying to put your job at stake because they didn't like something you said. The next time around, the people targeted are much more hesitant to speak up.
by gbhdrew | 2025-08-29 21:23:59+00:00
What serious person is pitching LA -> DC as a city pair for HSR?

The best routes are the ones that replace short-haul flights that are currently really inconvenient in terms of driving and rail service. A route like New York to Toronto would make plenty of sense, where you have two major population centers that are very close together, but a huge headache to travel between by rail today (at 12+ hours total on Amtrak and Via Rail).