MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tnjm | 2025-08-21 19:04:32+00:00
While I wouldn't dream of standing up k8s on a bare metal cluster without a devops team, I set up managed k8s using EKS several years ago for a client and... it just chugs along, self-healing, with essentially zero maintenance.

For my own projects I use a managed Northflank cluster on my own AWS account and likewise... just a fantastic experience. Everything that Heroku could and should have been. Yes the cluster is a bit pricey to stand up both in terms of EC2 compute and management layer costs, but once it's there, it's there. And the costs scale much more nicely than shoving side projects onto Heroku.

At this stage I consider managed k8s my default go-to unless it's something so lightweight I just want to push it to Vercel and forget about it.
by jbg100 | 2025-08-21 19:04:53+00:00
Great questions, ty!

1. The UI (for now at least) is definitely inspired by olds. Some have called it MySpace x StumbleUpon. 2. Agree going retro future has its pros and cons tho and the point about chat UI path dependency. We were in fact leaning more AIM/MSN Messenger w that, and are hoping it clicks more when we roll out Graph chat soon. 3. Glad the onboarding 0 - 100 clicked. Hope that saves time for folks. Fun fact is I wanted to build something like this years ago, but didn't see ppl having the time to hand type dozens, much less, 100 key interests or media likes. 4. For sure would love to make this a native mobile app. It's a hack but I've gotten far in using the iOS shortcut UX to make a shortcut app of it on my phone. Maybe this can be a holdover for some before we get opt-in email digests live.

Thanks for the great questions and checking it out!
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-21 19:05:27+00:00
Man firstly I wanted to say that I loved your comment to which I responded to and then this comment too. I feel actually happy reading it and maybe its hard explaing it but maybe its because I learned something new.

So firstly, I thought that you meant that they had to listen to every call so uh yeah a misunderstanding since I admittedly don't know much about it, but still its great to hear from an expert.

I also don't know about the GP's context but I truly felt like this because of how I said in some other comments too on how people are just slapping AI stickers and markets rewarding it even though they are mostly being reckless in how they are using AI (which the post basically says) and I thought of them as the same, though I still doubt them though. Only more context from their side can tell.

Secondly, I really appreciate the paragraph that you wrote about testing different strategies and almost how indepth you went into man. Really feel like one of those comments that I feel like will be useful for me one day or the other Seriously thanks!
by herval | 2025-08-21 19:05:39+00:00
I tried that in the past and found it extremely unreliable as a production environment. Documentation was also non-existent and I'd have to manually handle clusters, setup my own observability and log stack, etc. Any cloud provider these days gives you all that out of the box for K8s, so I'm, not sure the time one would invest on Swarm really makes sense?
by signal11 | 2025-08-21 19:06:01+00:00
k8s isn’t worth the time and money for many small teams, until they cross a complexity bar.

Even in some very non-startup enterprises, Cloud Foundry and Open Shift get adopted for a reason: some teams don’t need the overhead.

For startups there’s fly.io, render.com, and of course Heroku, but really — you can get from MVP to pretty decent scale on AWS or GCP with some scripts or Ansible.

Use k8s if you need it. It’s pretty well-proven. But it’s not something you need to have FOMO about.
by beckthompson | 2025-08-21 19:06:20+00:00
I think its simple, just don't hide it. I've had mutliple contributors try to hide the fact that they used AI (E.g removing claude as a code author - they didn't know how to do it and close the PR when it first happened.). I don't really care if someone uses AI, but most of the people who do also do not test their changes which just gives me more work. If someone:

1.) Didn't try to hide the fact that they used AI

2.) Tested their changes

I would not care at all. The main issue is this is usually not the case, most people submitting PRs that are 90% AI do not bother testing (Usually they don't even bother running the automated tests)
by tracker1 | 2025-08-21 19:06:25+00:00
Anyone else get completely side tracked as soon as you saw the shebang (self-executing rust scripts)? MY mind kind of exploded in a similar fashion to when I discovered Go could do the same. It's definitely a nifty feature and can see it getting a lot of basic usage. I've seen a couple projects that do similar with rust to control build and testing pipelines, this could be a good alternative in those cases.

That said, I mostly just use Deno + TS for my shell script needs beyond simple bash. Mostly in that JS is hands down the language I know the best (28 years), close would be C# (24 years) for me. I was also an early adopter of Node. I also think that dealing with shared/centralized packages is an easier option for Deno than Node, Python or other languages/environments. The cargo front-matter here seems to work similarly.
by brookst | 2025-08-21 19:06:43+00:00
Does that mean the boot-weirder is also a violent person in need of a boot to the mouth?

Or is it not “real” violence if it’s justified? In which case, pretty much all violent people will tell you they are justified.

Which means it reduces to “it’s ok for me to be violent because I’m righteous, unlike those thugs”
by marcianx | 2025-08-21 19:06:54+00:00
There are further bugs:

`for path in paths`

should be

`for (const path of paths)`

JS will immediately error on the lack of parens, but the `in` vs `of` iterates over indexes, not values, and those indexes are unfortunately converted to strings (since `for-in` is object field-name iteration). So even TypeScript would not have caught it when the (stringified) index is used as the first argument of `fs.watch()`.
by closewith | 2025-08-21 19:06:54+00:00
> That sort of culture takes time to build.

It does. Generations. We should get started.

Just to be clear, I don't think policing is futile or unethical or anything. But it is symptom control and cannot improve your society. Leaning into policing as a panacea inevitably results in worse outcomes for everybody, police included.
by glenstein | 2025-08-21 19:06:56+00:00
Wholehearedly agree, I found her intellectually very interesting for a time before thinking that some controversies were kind of manufactured out of uncharitable interpretations to find a contrarian angle, but I can't make a specific case to that end, it's more a general gloss.

I'd be interested if you can say any more about comments she made that are closer to your wheelhouse.
by vslira | 2025-08-21 19:06:59+00:00
I use Anki to study all kinds of subjects, and more than half of the value is processing what I learned (usually with pencil and paper) into good anki cards ("atomic", as per Michael Nielsen's definition), including the insights that I had when studying the subject (like "what's the comparison with X that I used to understand Y?")

I'm not sure if it is efficient, mind you, but I suppose it's effective because I can recall information later when relevant, and I believe that like exercising just being able to stick to a study routine ends up being more important than picking the best routine
by Spivak | 2025-08-21 19:07:04+00:00
I mean both languages (and programs) have modules, string interpolation, lambda syntax, and a compiler/interpreter. The only thing they really left out is Promises. And you're iterating over an array so there's no understanding of iterators needed. You can write Python for a long time without ever learning about __iter__. In the example Rust program the iterator is exposed. I think if the Rust version only used the for syntax you could say you don't need to know about iterators.
by closewith | 2025-08-21 19:07:12+00:00
> A society where trust is regularly abused isn’t—or will not long remain—a “high-trust” society.

Yes, well, I think you'll find this is how every high-trust society to date has ended up. Trust is abused, usually by the in-group rather than strangers. Abuse of power by politicians, the clergy, authorities like police, etc has largely lead to the collapse of trust across the West.

It's part of the inevitable cyclical nature of social change.

> Also, it’s not clear me if you really meant that enforcing property laws inevitably worsens outcomes for those who would otherwise have been victims, or if you mean that the now-much-smaller pool of victims have a worse time with effective enforcement.

Yes, increasing enforcement without structurally addressing the underlying issues - starting with poverty and wealth inequality - only ever leads to a criminal underclass, more poverty, more crime, and a worse society for everybody, criminals and victims alike.

It doesn't create fewer victims, it creates more (and I'm not being mealy-mouthed and counting the criminals as victims).

There is no way to police yourself into a better society.
by mattnewton | 2025-08-21 19:07:17+00:00
Exactly, If it’s dumb and it works it isn’t dumb. (Just have to measure that it does work).

I think this is one of those cases where doing the simplest possible thing is suprisingly good and getting better as LLMs get better. I thought it would be a placeholder with all kinds of problems I would have to hurry to replace but it was surprisingly hard to beat on our most important metric of accuracy. And accuracy got better for “free” when the underlying model got better.
by yallpendantools | 2025-08-21 19:07:53+00:00
Preach. Shout out to the be/st bank in Germany, Commerzbank. They advertise being reachable 24h a day[1] but all day you gotta go through a chatbot first and beyond core hours there isn't a human at the end of the line. Worse, they don't tell you what their actual core hours are so if you are calling at, say, 9:00, you could be suckered into waiting on the line for the next hour for an actual human agent. You could call 16:01 on a Friday not realizing that the next opportunity to talk to a human agent is at 10:00 the next Monday.

Okay, the last one is a stretch but people worried about their money are desperate. Not to go all radical all of a sudden here but fact of the matter is banks hold a lot of power over your average guy. The least that they could do is show some respect for your time.

[1] See: https://web.archive.org/web/20250617083138/https://www.comme... and even the actual page as of this writing.
by cultofmetatron | 2025-08-21 19:08:45+00:00
the catch is that the langauge is so maleable that no two lisp codebases look the same. Makes it very difficult to establish broader idioms. But in terms of what it cando, its got ridiculously good runtime speed for how dymanic it is and the debugger is one of the best around. you can literally pause on an exception, rewind, fix your code and continue from where you left off.
by bluGill | 2025-08-21 19:09:12+00:00
This is why some companies have a separate org for eu data where no us citizen has access. the data is in the eu and when the company is told to provide it the eu employees whe are the only ones with the passwords to get it are legally required to refuse. The company may be required to fire those employees - but that is all they can do, and eu employee protection laws will jump in the middle. the next step is an international diplomatic issuse that I refuse to speculate on.
by areyousure | 2025-08-21 19:09:28+00:00
> Ask four mathematicians whether something is a Commutative Ring or not and they'll all agree.

Amusingly, there are at least 3 different definitions of commutative ring.

The principal issue is whether it must have a 1 (unity, ie a multiplicative inverse). Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commutative_ring as well as most modern sources insist on this.

Britannica https://www.britannica.com/science/ring-mathematics#ref89421... as well as many older sources (such as Noether's original definition and van der Waerden) do not insist that the ring have a 1. Even first-edition Bourbaki didn't have 1!

Finally, if you do have a 1, then sometimes people include the condition that 0 != 1, ie the trivial/zero ring is deemed not a [commutative] ring. This is somewhat hard to find, but is relatively common among people who specifically define the concept of "ring with identity" (eg Zariski+Samuel). I have also found it unqualified (ie, just in the definition of "commutative ring") in the wild, eg in "Handbook of Mathematical Logic" by Barwise or "The Math You Need" by Mack.

(I agree with people like Conrad and Poonen that rings should have a 1. And I guess that the zero ring is in fact a [commutative] ring.)
by hombre_fatal | 2025-08-21 19:09:35+00:00
My ideal flash card for vocabulary (foreign language) focuses on one word per card but always uses that word in a sentence since words never have one single meaning. Like a single sentence or two with the word in bold that you must define.

I think it'd be cool to then use that "{word} {part of speech} {example sentence}" info to generate more example sentences with an LLM.

That way you can grind your problem words with real sentences and cement it quickly, otherwise this process happens too slowly through regular reading.
by herval | 2025-08-21 19:09:39+00:00
in my current case - the ability to deploy on-prem for some specific customers (on-prem meaning their own AWS or GCP account usually) + per-customer/multitenancy on the main product (ideally with segregated databases)

In general - scaling up a small number of microservices + their associated infra (redis/rabbitmq/etc)
by hodgehog11 | 2025-08-21 19:09:41+00:00
This. Recursive self-improvement is the most feared hypothetical endpoint in the field because it's unclear where it might end up from there. Maybe it will never happen, I certainly hope it doesn't.

I would also add that the AI research labs are not nearly as competent as they would like to convey. Most technologies increase in capability exponentially because they are built on a solid foundation over many years. Our understanding of neural networks is dramatically outpaced by their capabilities, so everyone is really just trying random things to see what improves the status quo. This is not an efficient way to develop technology when the cost of running experiments is exorbitant.
by Dedime | 2025-08-21 19:10:15+00:00
I'll add my opinion as a DevOps engineer, not a startup, so take it with a grain of salt.

* Kubernetes is great for a lot of things, and I think there's many use cases for it where it's the best option bar none

* Particularly once you start piling on requirements - we need logging, we need metrics, we need rolling redeployments, we need HTTPS, we need a reverse proxy, we need a load balancer, we need healthchecks. Many (not all!) of these things are what mature services want, and k8s provides a standardized way to handle them.

* K8s IS complex. I won't lie. You need someone who understands it. But I do enjoy it, and I think others do too.

* The next best alternative in my opinion (if you don't want vendor lock in) is docker-compose. It's easy to deploy locally or on a server

* If you use docker-compose, but you find yourself wanting more, migrating to k8s should be straightforward

So to answer your questions, I think you can adopt k8s whenever you feel like it, assuming you have the expertise and are willing to dedicate time to maintaining it. I use it in my home network with a 1 node "cluster". The biggest pitfalls are all related to vendor lock in - managed Redis, Azure Key Vault. Hyper specific config related to your managed k8s provider that might be tough to untangle. At the same time, you can just as easily start small with docker-compose and scale up later as needed.
by zdragnar | 2025-08-21 19:10:18+00:00
Not OP, but I think you're missing one aspect- senior engineer time doesn't scale well, because there's not just wage but also opportunity cost of context switching and taking them away from tasks that might contribute to increased sales or revenue. More sales also means needing to hire more people if the support load is constant per customer.

If a chatbot can reasonably succeed at eliminating some of that workload without also driving existing customers away, it's a net win even if the budget between senior salary time and chatbot query is identical.
by mothballed | 2025-08-21 19:10:36+00:00
Generally agree with the sentiment but it can put you in a very hard place.

I was accused of shoplifting by a gigantic dude who moved in to detain me as I was going into my car. Could have gotten Walmart badge or paraphernalia from anywhere (most walmarts aren't that aggressive but this one was). I could have told him to eat shit and it was clear he was willing to get violent. At that point I would have had to decide whether to draw a weapon, because he clearly would have overpowered me and put me in imminent fear of death. I handed him my receipt with one hand while preparing for the possibility to draw a weapon with the other, thankfully he seemed satisfied and turned out to be a real Walmart employee.

I decided I didn't want to ever face that decision again so I never went back
by AndrewStephens | 2025-08-21 19:10:48+00:00
I really could have used this last year when I was making a web adventure game with randomly created map. SVG is one of those frontend technologies that seem pointless until you really need them. Dynamically creating SVG in response to user actions in the game provided a very nice graphical representation of the adventure.

Unlike the author of this piece, I found the lower-case relative commands extremely useful for creating shapes like arrows (or in my case, sectors of space) that can be translated around later.
by Arnavion | 2025-08-21 19:11:12+00:00
If your Firefox supports sideloading extensions then making extensions that modify request or response headers is easy.

All the API is documented in https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web... . My Anubis extension modifies request headers using `browser.webRequest.onBeforeSendHeaders.addListener()` . Your case sounds like modifying response headers which is `browser.webRequest.onHeadersReceived.addListener()` . Either way the API is all documented there, as is the `manifest.json` that you'll need to write to register this JS code as a background script and whatever permissions you need.

Then zip the manifest and the script together, rename the zip file to "<id_in_manifest>.xpi", place it in the sideloaded extensions directory (depends on distro, eg /usr/lib/firefox/browser/extensions), restart firefox and it should show up. If you need to debug it, you can use the about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox page to launch a devtools window connected to the background script.
by Forgret | 2025-08-21 19:11:36+00:00
https://onlinedocs.microchip.com/oxy/GUID-317042D4-BCCE-4065...

https://www.nongnu.org/avr-libc/user-manual/group__avr__stdl...

https://manpages.debian.org/testing/avr-libc/ultoa.3avr.en.h...

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.4.0?topic=functions-utoa-c...

https://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/6.3.2/neutrino/lib_ref/u...

Here is the documentation for the problem you mentioned.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-21 19:12:12+00:00
I find that understanding thenables/Promises and async-await in JS/TS is emphatically not something a lot of devs really understand. It really shows when you see something like...

var fn = async (param) => new Promise((res, rej) => { ... fooLibraryCall(param).then(res).catch(rej); });

I've literally seen similar to this... where devs see wrappers for the callback syntax, then apply the same to thenables and use manual Promises inside an async labelled function. It makes my mind bleed to see it, and I've seen it a few places.

Then, of course, there's dealing with module imports and async import() methods and how they operate or get transpiled or split, etc.
by behnamoh | 2025-08-21 19:12:27+00:00
I love the restarts system but the fact that the industry as a whole chose other approaches makes me wonder if there's something the "wisdom of the crowds" knows that I'm not aware of.

> you can literally pause on an exception, rewind, fix your code and continue from where you left off.

Does it only work on source codes or can I distribute a binary and let my users debug the code like this? Should I distribute the 'image' for it to work?

And is the fix temporary (until the program dies) or permanant?
by crispyambulance | 2025-08-21 19:12:31+00:00
There are other motivations besides money for cranks.

In the case of Weinstein, I think his motivation has been getting attention and grievances he has with other people and institutions. I think it's OK to recognize grifting for attention as grifting. Having been a longtime employee of Peter Theil in some finance job, I expect he has f-u money by now and can thus attempt whatever he desires.

I don't know what the end-game is, but on the Decoding the Guru's podcast, the thinking has been that he is keen to be appointed to some important government role. That would be, of course, ridiculous for such an obscurantist to get an important public job, but that's ENTIRELY possible with this administration and the support of Theil.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-21 19:12:31+00:00
People also underestimate the value of maximizing opportunities for luck. If we think of luck as random external chance that we can't control, then what can we control? Doing things that increase your exposure to opportunities without spreading yourself too thin is the key. Easier said than done to strike that balance, but getting out there and trying a lot of things is a viable strategy even if only a few of them pay off. The trick is deciding how long to stick with something that doesn't appear to be working out.
by roadside_picnic | 2025-08-21 19:12:38+00:00
Yea, my first thought was "this is how software used to be written before PMs got their hands in everything".

I find if you sit engineers down with whoever is doing the operational work, you very frequently find you don't need PMs and everyone is much happier.

PMs can be incredible, but my experience is that they tend to be both very territorial and know surprisingly little about either the engineering or the customer side of things.
by cycomanic | 2025-08-21 19:12:42+00:00
>From memory: Sabine says she's only doing the video because she is a real-life friend of Eric's. So that's from the start an admission that she's biased. Then she goes off to say that his paper is probably bullshit. Then she goes back to her "but so is the vast majority of theoretical research, nowadays", and she argues it's weird that scientists have no issues making fun of Weinstein but not of their own colleagues who put out papers at least as bullshit.

But that's the thing, she is essentially equating Weinstein's theory to all other theoretical physics. This is the typical dogwhistling she does, "everything else is bullshit so you might as well believe this ...". She does this sort of ambiguity all the time, and to argue that she is not trying to imply anything is just dishonest.

Now, as to the statement that all theoretical physics papers are bullshit, that's frankly bullshit. And how is she qualified to judge? Maybe in a small niche that is her area of expertise, but beyond that?!
by greatgib | 2025-08-21 19:12:43+00:00
That's the moment that you remember that years ago in self hosted you could have sustained millions request per second on a single low end server for quite nothing.

But now you are "on the cloud", with lambdas because "who cares" and hiring a proper part-time sysadmin is too complicated and so now you are pounded with crazy costs for moderate loads...
by LorenDB | 2025-08-21 19:12:48+00:00
Amazingly, even things like VR "just work." If you have a standalone headset like a Quest, you will have to jump through a few more hoops to connect it to your PC, but the actual VR just works. Even the UEVR mod to convert Unreal Engine games to VR works.

(Shameless plug time! I'm building an app to make UEVR on Linux easier to use: https://github.com/LorenDB/kaon)