MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by runako | 2025-09-02 02:48:01+00:00
These are great questions.

A key factor underlining all of this is understanding, from a business/organizational perspective, your actual uptime requirements. Google may aim at 5 nines with the budget to achieve it, but many banks have routine planned downtime. If you don't know your objectives, you will have trouble making the tradeoffs necessary to get there. As a hypothetical, would your business choose 99.999% uptime (26 seconds down on average per month) vs 99.99% (4.3 min) if that caused infra costs to rise by 50% or more? If you said we can cut our infra costs by 50% by planning a short weekly maintenance window, how would that resonate?

Speaking to a few, in my experience:

2) (not at Hetzner specifically, but at a dedicated host). You have backups & recovery plans, and redundancy where it makes sense. You might run your database with a replica. If you are serving Web traffic, maybe you keep a hot spare. Also, you are still allowed to use e.g. cloud services if it makes sense to do so so you can backup to S3 and use things like SQS or KMS if you don't want to run them yourself. It's worth noting that you may not get advance notice; I recall our service being impacted by a fire at a datacenter that IIRC was caused by a traffic accident on a nearby highway. The point is you have to design resilience into the system. Fortunately, this is well-trod ground.

It would not be a terrible failover option to have something like an autoscale group at AWS ready to step in if the dedicated cluster goes offline. Keep that cluster scaled to 0 until it's needed. Put the cloud behind your cheap dedicated capacity.

3) See above. In my case, we over-provisioned because it's cheap to do so. I did not do this at the time, but I would probably look at running a replicated database with a hot standby on another server.

4) It has not been my experience that "modern" cloud deployments require fewer SRE resources. Like water running downhill, cloud projects seek complexity.
by hackathonguy | 2025-09-02 02:48:47+00:00
I'm very curious whether a) anecdotally, anyone has encountered a real enterprise cost-cutting effort focused on LLM APIs and b) empirically, whether anyone has done any research on price elasticity in LLMs of different performance scales.

So far, my experience has been that it's just too early for most people / applications to worry about cost - at most, I've seen AI to be accountable for 10% of cloud costs. But very curious if others have other experiences.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-09-02 02:51:06+00:00
Golf courses also get de-facto tax subsidies under a property value tax, because they're basically empty lots.

If you bought that golf course and built something productive that produced value for the community, like apartments, detached houses, a factory, a store, anything at all, you'd suddenly have to pay more tax on it.

A land value tax would push golf courses further from city centers.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-09-02 02:52:37+00:00
A typical chain hotel (by which I assume you mean a Marriott/Hyatt/Hilton/IHG/Choice/etc brand) is a franchised “small” business.

The franchisee typically pays 10% to 20% royalty to the franchisor (the aforementioned companies). Otherwise, they rent hotel rooms and pay staff to clean them and rent them again.

What is the tax play? That the hotel owner can 1031 into bigger and better hotels? Anyone who owns real estate can do that.
by antgoldbloom | 2025-09-02 02:52:50+00:00
Sumble is the newco from the founders of Kaggle. We are hiring software engineers, data engineers, machine learning/ai engineers, a product manager and a designer. Can view our roles and apply here: https://apply.workable.com/sumble-inc/

As background, we are building a knowledge graph from web data with a first focus on data for go-to-market teams. We use sources like job posts and resume data to identify things like org structure, tech stack, and key projects (e.g., GenAI initiatives, cloud migrations). Our product already has strong product-market fit, early revenue, and happy customers — and now we’re ready to accelerate.

Our long-term vision is to become the primary destination for accessing high-quality web data. Try the product at sumble.com.

We are a team of 15, including 10 engineers with experience at companies such as Google, Meta, Stack Overflow, and Kaggle.
by _heimdall | 2025-09-02 02:53:47+00:00
My original demonstration wasn't actually the browser question. Auto manufacturers did show much higher levels of competition before standards and shared components.

Though it is worth noting that there was heavy competition in the browser space prior to the specs we have today. Part of the reason we ended up with a heavily spec-driven web is precisely because the high level of competition was leading to claims of corporate espionage, and it was expected that end user experience would be better with standards.

I absolutely agree the end user experience is better. I disagree that has anything to do with competition.
by annie_muss | 2025-09-02 02:54:39+00:00
There's a lot of advice here about using technical means to block youtube. If that works for you and solves your problem then fantastic. I am genuinely happy for you.

However, I suspect it won't. It never worked for me.

Firstly, any blocker you setup yourself you can take down yourself. You might find that it works for a day or two but then you feel really awful and binge youtube even more than normal.

Secondly, blocking tools are a tacit acknowledgment that you have given up and can't control yourself. "My willpower is just too bad. There's no way I can control myself. I need a tool to do it for me." This is the opposite of the feeling your want to cultivate. You want to feel more in control of yourself and your actions and be able to direct your attention accordingly.

Unfortunately, there are no silver bullets. There is no one little trick that will solve everything for you. That said, there are things you can do that will help a lot.

Get in touch with your emotions. Find out what triggers send you to youtube. Here's an example for me:

Think about important essay that is due soon --> worry and dread about academic performance --> watch youtube to forget about it.

This is probably happening in a blink of an eye. Probably so quickly that you don't even notice. If you can start noticing and naming your emotions you can deal with them more constructively.

Positive emotions can be triggers too.

I'm so excited about this new hobby I'm into --> I'm going to research it on youtube --> 3 hours watching videos about painting but not doing any painting.

Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with this. But if you can notice the emotions you can start to redirect them and work with them.
LinkedIn seems to be leaking Google Docs
by pbd | 2025-09-02 02:54:56+00:00
A friend of mine shared a google doc link with me over linkedin.

Linkedin rendered the thumbnail of the post alongwith the doc header as well. But lo & behold, turns out I can't access the doc because the doc was restricted to his google workspace!

Lol. What on earth? I guess this is some issue of caching gone wrong? Also, is Google letting linkedin have unrestricted access to its' google docs thumbnails & doc headers?
by trog | 2025-09-02 02:54:59+00:00
You can set this up in a non-production environment and realise a lot of the benefits. It would also help you figure out better ways to manage your logs such that you can improve signal-to-noise ratio in monitoring solutions and alarming.

Not convinced "AI" is needed for this sort of around the clock pen testing - a well-defined set of rules that is being actively maintained as the threat landscape changes, and I am pretty sure there are a bunch of businesses that offer this already - but I think constant attacking is the only way to really improve security posture.

To quote one of my favourite lines in Neal Stephenson's Anathem: "The only way to preserve the integrity of the defenses is to subject them to unceasing assault".
by topspin | 2025-09-02 02:55:05+00:00
That may change. There are some very powerful MCUs appearing, with astonishing features, including hardware virtualization (hypervisors on an MCU,) multicore superscalar, heterogeneous CPU cores with high performance context switching, "AI" co-processors with high throughput buses, and other exotic features.

At some point, it might start making sense to level up the OS to (nommu) Linux on these devices. When the applications get complex enough, people find themselves wanting a full blown network stack, full featured storage/file systems that are aligned with non-embedded systems, regular shells, POSIX userland, etc.

All of the architectures I have in mind are 32 bit and "nommu"[1]: Cortex-R52/F, Infineon TriCore, Renesas RH850, NXP Power e200. Then you have RISC-V MCU Cambrian Explosion underway.

I qualify all this with mays and mights: it hasn't happened yet. I'm just careful not to discount the possibly of a <50 mAh RP Pico 3 booting uLinux, running python and serving web pages being a big hit.

[1] They all have various "partition" schemes to isolate banks of RAM for security, reliability, etc., but real MMUs are not offered.
by nightsd01 | 2025-09-02 02:56:33+00:00
Apple’s biggest problem is their commitment to privacy. Delivering effective AI requires a substantial amount of user data that Apple doesn’t collect.

Their other problem is they value designers and product managers more than engineers (especially top tier AI engineers).

Both problems are basically the death knell of any hope for Apple to have good AI, but combined? It’s never gonna happen. Which is sad because Apple’s on-device hardware is quite good.
by MaskRay | 2025-09-02 02:56:50+00:00
The compiler team has never had more than three people at any time, but both the language and its feature set are impressive. I don't know whether they got any sponsorship. Now that the two most prolific developers are primarily working on Nimony, I wonder whether the stable Nim repository will get enough contributions or bug fixes.

The stable compiler repo has a fork https://github.com/nim-works/nimskull/ . It’s unfortunate that developers have different opinions.
by jkaplowitz | 2025-09-02 02:57:56+00:00
That’s also weird to me. I don’t have current 2025 info on the sanctions, but back in early 2022 I had a colleague with Russian citizenship who was living in Ireland (with proper permission to live and work - I think even permanent residence). He was exempted from the nationality-based sanctions because of his EU residence, although he did have to prove it to e.g. his banks.

Do the sanctions applicable in 2025 apply even to EU residents of Russian nationality or origin without such an exemption, or is this person covered by more narrow sanctions like one which name him individually, or is Apple going beyond the sanctions rules here for a store they don’t even operate?

Edit: reading the linked GitHub discussion more closely, it seems that he expects to benefit from the same exemption as I was describing, with the problem being twofold: one, the developer had neglected to update his personal info in Apple’s dev portal - not Apple’s fault, at least assuming that sanctions enforcement is their job at all in this scenario. But two, Apple has taken a long time to react to this guy providing proof of his Maltese residence, so that’s on them for being an unresponsive bottleneck.
by rhplus | 2025-09-02 02:58:19+00:00
A recent episode of The Ancients talks about how oil and mineral exploration companies have been sharing their seismic mapping data of Doggerland with archeologists:

https://shows.acast.com/the-ancients/episodes/doggerland-the...

Partnering with industries that are mapping areas is certainly the only cost effective way for academic to work in submerged landscapes:

https://archaeology.org/issues/march-april-2022/letters-from...
by _heimdall | 2025-09-02 02:58:37+00:00
Older cars could go to most mechanic shops because older cars were more simple. The fundamentals of how the cars worked were similar not because the companies collaborated on parts and designs but because they were comparatively simple and all were based on combustion engines that required certain components and physics to be similar.

Well, most. There were the odd steam powered and even early electric vehicles back then. I wouldn't expect either to roll into any mechanic shop in town and get service.
by kstrauser | 2025-09-02 02:58:48+00:00
I had that kind of a revelation right before I started the ball rolling. My kid has ADHD, and I didn’t “get” it for a while. When they described things like you mention, I assumed that was the way it was for everyone. I was completely shocked to find that no, it’s not, or at least not to that degree.

Well, huh.

(Similar story with asthma. I was training for a marathon relay. My doc asked how that was going, and I said it was fine, except you know how after a mile or so, you get cotton mouth and tunnel vision? No. No, they did not know. And that’s how I ended up with a pre-run inhaler, and immediately shaved a minute off my mile pace. Holy crap. Not everyone feels like they’re dying mid-run? Why did no one tell me?)
by bitwize | 2025-09-02 02:59:17+00:00
He's legendary for being Bill's bulldog, and aggressively convincing people to buy Bill's solutions. Whether he was qualified to lead a technical organization like Microsoft on his own, as Bill's successor? Ehhhhh... maybe?

You know that "used car salesman" persona that he had in that internal Windows 1.0 video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgJS2tQPGKQ)? That's kind of his business strategy -- sell, sell, sell, push, push, push. Don't let potential clients say "no" to Microsoft products. And when you're an aggressive company like Microsoft, you want that in an exec -- but not necessarily a CEO who's in charge of managing the technical developments also. So I think he was really competent and essential to Microsoft's success, even if he didn't make such a good CEO.

(Fun fact: I used to think that the character Palmer from Final Fantasy VII, a member of Shinra Company's executive leadership, was a parody of Steve Ballmer himself based on his name, appearance, and goofy mannerisms. I'm no longer convinced this is the case, but it's a pretty funny coincidence.)
by npalli | 2025-09-02 02:59:22+00:00
That whole “sell shovels” thing never really made sense, even in the pre-GPU hyperscaler days. BTW, the shovel is GPU (owned by NVidia for now).

AWS, Azure, GCP weren’t just renting servers. They built whole platforms - databases, ML stacks, dev tools, security. Way more than shovels.

The moat was owning the stack. MS used Azure to power Office and now Copilot. Google used infra to juice Search, YouTube, Ads. Even Amazon used it for retail + Alexa. They were mining gold and selling shovels.

And raw compute was never where the money was. Renting VMs was the cheap layer. The profits came from all the higher level services built on top.

Now with AI it’s even more obvious:

Models drive the workloads. OpenAI/Anthropic/DeepMind aren’t just customers, they’re shaping the infra itself. Whoever owns the models sets the rules.

No models = no moat. If AWS isn’t building frontier models, it’s just reselling Nvidia GPUs while MS + Google wrap their clouds around first party models + SDKs. That pulls customers deeper into their stacks, not Amazon’s.

Falling behind compounds. Training/deploying models forces infra breakthroughs (chips, compilers, scaling). If AWS isn’t in that game, they’ll eventually struggle to even run other ppl’s models as well as rivals.

So if Amazon “sits this one out,” it’s not just losing bragging rights. It’s giving up control of the future of compute.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-09-02 02:59:31+00:00
Can you give examples? I thought becoming a bank in the US is famously difficult and regulated, so much so that most businesses who can avoid it do so by partnering up with existing, tiny banks. See almost any “fintech” solution, from startups all the way up to Apple.

As far as I understand, becoming a bank is inviting a ton of overhead with little profit potential.
by EvgeniyZh | 2025-09-02 03:00:14+00:00
It is not hard to separate military-purpose infrastructure from civilian one. It is hard only in a sense that it'd be immediately destroyed and all the combatants would be killed.

In fact "hiding among civilians" is an excuse for collateral civilian damage, international law allows attacks that harm civilians in order to achieve military goals.

By the way, did you know that Geneva convention don't apply if you're fighting someone who haven't signed it and also doesn't "accepts and applies the provisions" [1]

Green account with random set of letters for a name calling someone a bot, how ironic

[1] https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gci-1949/arti...
by sixo | 2025-09-02 03:02:18+00:00
Ha I did. But only because, your arguments only make sense if it's not really required, or if it's implemented so poorly as to be effectively not required.

I don't see the point of criticizing a policy idea with an argument like "it will be implemented badly so it will be bad". Like, obviously, yes, if you do it badly it will be bad. That applies to anything, including the status quo.
by lmm | 2025-09-02 03:02:29+00:00
> Is it really a valuable life skill to decide whether or not you want to read something based solely on its density of em dashes?

Having good heuristics to make quick judgements is a valuable life skill. If you don't, you're going to get swamped.

> Would any of that somehow be more worth reading if the author posted a video of themselves carefully typing it up by hand?

No, but the volume of carefully hand-typed junk is more manageable. Compare with spam: Individually written marketing emails might be just as worthless as machine-generated mass mailings, but the latter is what's going to fill up your inbox if you can't filter it out.

> If LLM output were never worth reading, ChatGPT would have no users.

Only if all potential users were wise. Plenty of people waste their time and money in all sorts of ways.
by tguvot | 2025-09-02 03:02:57+00:00
those 6% include 100,000 that left gaza.[0]

4000 deliveries in march of this year. 50000 pregnant woman [1]

50,000 births by july of last year [2]

latest official (by hamas) death toll is 63000 [3]

so, if you go by numbers, population probably grown last year. or over last 2 years

[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/1/1/gaza-population-fall...

[1] https://www.savethechildren.net/news/about-130-children-born...

[2] https://www.savethechildren.net/news/women-self-inducing-lab...

[3] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/gaza-health-ministry-says...
by marcusfrex | 2025-09-02 03:04:37+00:00
This episode explores a 2014 Istanbul hack where Marcus exploited a careless developer’s sloppy code to breach bank systems, revealing the chaos beneath corporate illusions of "bought" security. Blending sharp critiques of complacent coders with poetic musings on Switchborn as a prophetic force, it’s a call to tech rebels and dreamers to embrace the artistry and anarchy of true hacking.

https://www.switchborn.com
by ungreased0675 | 2025-09-02 03:05:25+00:00
When I lived in DC a few years ago, it was absolutely a dangerous place. There were places you didn’t go after dark. The thing I liked least was the unpredictably of encountering an aggressive bum. Could be on the subway, in the mall, in a parking garage, on the street, where’s it going to be today? DC is the only place I’ve been that had that characteristic. It’s not dangerous everywhere, and not all the time, but pretending like it isn’t is ignorant, dishonest, or financially blessed to live above all that.
by monkeywork | 2025-09-02 03:05:26+00:00
>I didn't claim knowledge, it's just speculation.

"I can testify that is downstream of too many donuts."

The above statement - specifically saying you TESTIFY - does not sound like speculation; it sounds like you are speaking as a matter of fact.

I fail to see what if anything, positive you thought would come from that post? You're in a thread where people are mostly positively remembering someone they respected and you essentially jumped in and said "yeah but the guy killed himself with his eating".... like you really think that's a good idea?

You might think you're doing some greater good - but there is a time and a place for everything - the message you're trying to send isn't going to land in this sort of environment, it's just going to piss people off and have you appear to be disrespectful.
by sizzzzlerz | 2025-09-02 03:05:30+00:00
In Ed Abbey's book, Desert Solitaire, he writes about a search mission to find a lost hiker somewhere in Canyonlands National Park, who was ultimately found dead, dying of heat and/or dehydration. He goes on to give some advice if you ever get caught in a similar situation, and, unlike this man, no one knows where you are and thus no rescue can be expected. In that case, wants to congratulate you for your noble death—it is good luck to die out in the open, alone, instead of under the “leech and priest.” Your bleached bones will remain where you died for some hiker to find someday and marvel at.
by dnackoul | 2025-09-02 03:05:37+00:00
I also took Professor Winston's seminar in college and have similar feelings about it. It was far and away my favorite class and the wisdom in his advice has only become more apparent over time. At its heart, it was really about how to understand and communicate ideas.

One of the things I treasured the most was that Professor Winston overtly subscribed to the "make topics crystal clear and broadly accessible" school of technical communication. He would contrast this against the "make things incomprehensible so everyone thinks you're brilliant" school of thought. I am eternally grateful someone biased me early in life towards the former, not just when I'm speaking but when I'm choosing what to read and who to listen to.

I've also wondered lately what he would think about the current LLM wave. I'm sure he would have had a characteristically clear and profound take. I feel the world is losing out not having his voice during the current moment.
by dabluecaboose | 2025-09-02 03:06:17+00:00
> But zero smart guns are on the market. How are they evaluating this? A crystal ball?

It doesn't take a crystal ball to presume that a device designed to prevent a product from working might prevent the product from working in a situation you didn't expect.

> Why do we not consider “doesn’t shoot me, the owner” as a reliability plus?

Taking this question in good faith: You can consider it a plus if you like when shopping for a product, and that's entirely fair. Despite your clear stated preference, it's not relevant (or is a negative) to reliability in the context of "goes bang when I intentionally booger hook the bang switch".

I'm not trying to get into the weeds on guns and gun technology. I generally believe in buying products that behave as I expect them to and don't think they know better than me. It's why I have a linux laptop and an android cell phone, and why I'm getting uneasy about the latter.