MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: OpenSnowcat – A fork of Snowplow to keep open analytics alive
by joaocorreia | 2025-10-23 19:24:04+00:00
I’ve been a long-time Snowplow user and unofficial evangelizer. I have deep respect for its founders, Alex and Yali, who I met a few times.

What made me fall in love with Snowplow was that it was unopinionated, gave access to raw event data, and was truly open source. Back in 2013, that changed everything for me. I couldn’t look at GA the same way again.

Over the years, analytics moved into SQL warehouses driven by cheaper CPU/storage, dbt, reproducibility, and transparency. I saw the need for a democratized Snowplow pipeline and launched a hosted version in 2019.

In January 2024, Snowplow changed its license (SLULA), effectively ending open-source Snowplow by restricting production use. When that happened, I realized the spirit of open data and open architecture was gone.

A week later, I forked it, I wanted to keep the idea alive.

OpenSnowcat keeps the original collector and enricher under Apache 2.0 and stays fully compatible with existing Snowplow pipelines. We maintain it with regular patches, performance optimizations, and integrations with modern tools like Warpstream Bento for event processing/routing.

The goal is simple: keep open analytics open.

Would love to hear how others in the community think we can preserve openness in data infrastructure as “open source” becomes increasingly commercialized.

That's it, I should have posted here earlier but now felt right.
by this_user | 2025-10-23 19:24:05+00:00
What happened is the same thing that tends to happen to almost all successful organisation. The uber exceptional people who initially built it, defined the culture, and enforced it with an iron fist are gone. Now a bunch of people are in charge who trained under the first generation, but who themselves just don't quite have that kind of singular personality. So things start slipping over time.
by cryptonector | 2025-10-23 19:24:17+00:00
> The main advantage of ASN.1 (specifically DER) in an HTTPS/PKI context is that it's a canonical encoding. To my understanding Protobuf isn't; I don't know about Thrift.

There should be no need for a canonical encoding. 40 years ago people thought you needed that so you could re-encode a TBSCertificate and then validate a signature, but in reality you should keep the encoding as-received of that part of the Certificate. And so on.
by dylan604 | 2025-10-23 19:24:52+00:00
Without being a battery chemistry expert, why do these battery packs become not useful for an EV yet could still be useful for energy storage. They keep saying that 80% of life becomes unusable for EV, but that's still a lot of life. Is it that grid energy is more of a constant drain while the EV is lots of hard pulls (for lack of better wording)? In an EV, the battery cannot provide the higher volts being requested within rating, but a grid is never demanding peak performance?
by jacquesm | 2025-10-23 19:25:15+00:00
Diodes occur naturally, all you need to do is find them!

Good places to look for them are conductors and crystals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_detector

https://rimstar.org/science_electronics_projects/razor_blade...

Good luck! And don't sneeze once you've found a good spot.
by bilbo0s | 2025-10-23 19:25:54+00:00
>And some teen may be traumatized.

Um. That's not really the danger here.

The danger is that it's as clear as day that in the future someone is gonna be killed. That's not just a possibility. It's a certainty given the way the system is set up.

This tech is not supposed to be used in this fashion. It's not ready.
by omnipresent12 | 2025-10-23 19:26:04+00:00
https://www2.ljworld.com/news/schools/2025/aug/07/lawrence-s...

Another false positive by one of these leading content filters schools use - the kid said something stupid in a group chat and an AI reported it to the school, and the school contacted the police. The kid was arrested, stripped searched, and held for 24 hours without access to their parents or counsel. They ultimately had to spend time in probation, a full mental health evaluation, and go to an alternative school for a period of time. They are suing Gaggle, who claims they never intended their system to be used that way.

These kinds of false positives are incredibly common. I interviewed at one of their competitors (Lightspeed), and they actually provide a paid service where they have humans review all the alerts before being forwarded to the school or authorities. This is a paid addon, though.
by audelair | 2025-10-23 19:26:14+00:00
The documentation needs a lot of work, especially since a lot of it is outdated. But in short, if you setup a reverse proxy, the listeners in Stalwart will listen to anything forwarded to it, so you'll generally want to refer to the HTTP endpoints to map it to the right subdomain. https://stalw.art/docs/http/overview

For instance, you can simply point something like mailadmin.domain.com to Stalwart on port 8080 and it'll just work. In this case, whatever your mail server's host name (i.e. mail.domain.com or whatever) wouldn't really matter.

But then your reverse proxy can handle the other endpoints like /dav/, /.well-known/ on a different subdomain. And mta_sts.domain.com directly handling /.well-known/mta-sts.txt for instance.

For my stack, outside of Caddy's https handling, I kept things simple and exposed 25, 465, 587, 993, and 4190 (smtp, smtps, imaps, and ManageSieve) TCP services binded directly to the host.

Using Caddy's certificates is also documented at the end here: https://stalw.art/docs/server/reverse-proxy/caddy

But it leaves it to you to map things. For instance, if both Caddy and Stalwart are containerized, it's easy to get mixed up on where the bind-mounted or named volumes (depending on how you set it up) will end up placing them. But it does work... just so flexible that it's out-of-scope for Stalwart to document everything.
by WA | 2025-10-23 19:26:22+00:00
I thought that all non-native apps will feel even more out of place with Liquid Glass and developers go back to writing more native apps. After experiencing iOS 26, I’m pretty confident that people will actually actively try to get away from the default iOS UI language and will use more cross-platform tech that makes it easier to implement their own designs. Liquid Glass is just annoyingly bad.
by cryptonector | 2025-10-23 19:26:28+00:00
> I'm hardly a connoisseur of DER implementations, but my understanding is that there are two main problems with DER. The first is that the format isn't really parseable without using a schema, unlike (say) XML or JSON.

That's not really the problem. The problem is that DER is a tag-length-value encoding, which is quite redundant and inefficient and a total crutch that people who didn't see XDR first could not imagine not needing, but yeah, they really didn't need it. That crutch made it harder, not easier, to implement ASN.1/DER.

XML is no picnic either, by the way. JSON is much much simpler, and it's true you don't need a schema, but you end up wanting one anyways.
by redochre | 2025-10-23 19:26:42+00:00
South Africa is not heading to communism.

The government is privatising electricity generation and increasing private sector access to the rail network.

The business friendly Democratic Alliance party is in coalition with the ANC, rather than the far left of the EFF which is currently not in government.

You can believe South Africa will end up being communist. But the evidence falls against the statement that South Africa is heading to communism.

Privatisation is not communism.
by culi | 2025-10-23 19:27:16+00:00
This post is trying to solve a problem you should never have to solve. The function in the post:

const cast = <A, B,>(a: A): B => a as unknown as B;

should never be used in a professional codebase. The post even admits (though, in my opinion, understates) as much:

> If you're holding it right, these things don't come up, and your code genuinely is much much safer than if you used raw Javascript.

Just wanted to highlight this point I feel needs to be underscored
by stefan_bobev | 2025-10-23 19:27:25+00:00
I appreciate the details this went through, especially laying out the exact timelines of operations and how overlaying those timelines produces unexpected effects. One of my all time favourite bits about distributed systems comes from the (legendary) talk at GDC - I Shot You First[1] - where the speaker describes drawing sequence diagrams with tilted arrows to represent the flow of time and asking "Where is the lag?". This method has saved me many times, all throughout my career from making games, to livestream and VoD services to now fintech. Always account for the flow of time when doing a distributed operation - time's arrow always marches forward, your systems might not.

But the stale read didn't scare me nearly as much as this quote:

> Since this situation had no established operational recovery procedure, engineers took care in attempting to resolve the issue with DWFM without causing further issues

Everyone can make a distributed system mistake (these things are hard). But I did not expect something as core as the service managing the leases on the physical EC2 nodes to not have recovery procedure. Maybe I am reading too much into it, maybe what they meant was that they didn't have a recovery procedure for "this exact" set of circumstances, but it is a little worrying even if that were the case. EC2 is one of the original services in AWS. At this point I expect it to be so battle hardened that very few edge cases would not have been identified. It seems that the EC2 failure was more impactful in a way, as it cascaded to more and more services (like the NLB and Lambda) and took more time to fully recover. I'd be interested to know what gets put in place there to make it even more resilient.

[1] https://youtu.be/h47zZrqjgLc?t=1587
by jm4 | 2025-10-23 19:27:27+00:00
That iMessage screenshot looks like MySpace.

I don't use a Mac anymore, but I do use an iPhone. This is the worst version of iOS I can recall. Everything is low contrast and more difficult to see. The colors look washed out. The icons look blurry. In my opinion, Liquid Glass is a total bust. I don't know what these people are thinking. Times have certainly changed.
by HelloMcFly | 2025-10-23 19:27:45+00:00
Okay, have you read the article? Are you having your own conversation? What point are you making?

The "rigged games" in the context of the gambling arrests in this article are rigged poker games. So when the person you responded to referred to rigged games, and you go:

> Of course they were rigged. This is sports we're talking about

It seems like you're in a conversation that nobody else is having.
by bediger4000 | 2025-10-23 19:28:20+00:00
First, "adbotage", what great word. Second:

I am wracking my brain trying to think of a way to defend against this

Why not think of a way to perform this attack? Despite almost zero charisma, the No Kings people organized a truly massive, non-violent protest. Who can you get to pull off mass market adbotage? Once you've got a credible mechanism, you've got a better idea of how to defend. Maybe go so far as to try to make adbotage happen. The first few attempts will fail or have problems, but produce enough ad clickers that you'll stress test the system.
Show HN: BesiegeField – LLM Agents Learn to Build Machines in a Physics Sandbox
by zepist | 2025-10-23 19:28:25+00:00
Hi HN! We'd like to share something we built: BesiegeField — an environment where large language models design, test, and refine machines in the physics-based construction game Besiege.

Machine design is treated as a code generation problem: LLMs choose standard parts and specify how to connect them, making the task well-suited to language models.

The environment includes tasks like throwing a stone far or navigating bumpy terrain, and supports custom goals and environments.

We used it to explore both agentic workflows (no finetuning) and reinforcement learning, trying tasks like building cars and catapults.

It runs 100+ parallel processes on Linux clusters for scalable RL training.

Feedback from the AI, RL, engineering, and game dev communities is welcome.

GitHub: https://github.com/Godheritage/BesiegeField HuggingFace Demo (single-agent): https://huggingface.co/spaces/Godheritage/BesiegeField-Machi...
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-10-23 19:28:30+00:00
Are you implying that people are imagining that Mozilla strategy is awful?

Because I disagree. Mozilla has a shockingly long string of poor decisions: the mobile OS no one wanted, acquiring Pocket, parting with Servo, starting Lockwise, the whole VPN thing, the VR browser, the IoT gateway, the extension debacle with the Android version refactoring.

Honestly, there is plenty to criticise independently of the financial thing.
by ianbutler | 2025-10-23 19:28:31+00:00
Oh then like I don’t even see the problem. That said I think like a direct notification through email or something is probably better than random blog post, but I digress:

They planned to walk away earlier as I believe I saw its really just unfortunate timing.

If you’re doing business with them you should be on a business license with a contract and legal guarantees. I understand it sucks, but it’s a little bit of a self own imo if you’re only on their oss for business purposes. That also kind of breaks the social contract in the opposite direction imo.
by vkazanov | 2025-10-23 19:28:35+00:00
Well, this depends on a story. Escapist? Yes. All of them, by the very definition of, ehm, role play.

Power? Not necessarily. Numerous rpgs have nothing to do with power. Be a Cat has nothing to do with power, and everything with escapism (and cats).

I mean, there is nothing wrong with power and fantasies. Or powerless fantasies, as in horror stories, or whatever.
by tptacek | 2025-10-23 19:28:35+00:00
I'm a tedious broken record about this (among many other things) but if you haven't read this Richard Cook piece, I strongly recommend you stop reading this postmortem and go read Cook's piece first. It won't take you long. It's the single best piece of writing about this topic I have ever read and I think the piece of technical writing that has done the most to change my thinking:

https://how.complexsystems.fail/

You can literally check off the things from Cook's piece that apply directly here. Also: when I wrote this comment, most of the thread was about root-causing the DNS thing that happened, which I don't think is the big story behind this outage. (Cook rejects the whole idea of a "root cause", and I'm pretty sure he's dead on right about why.)
by dreadsword | 2025-10-23 19:29:18+00:00
Cheers and thank you! I'll reshare an earlier comment that I think answers your question - let me know:

Thanks so much for the kind words - its 100% o3-mini for clustering. I have zero editorial input as to what constitutes a cluster, what's "top" news, etc.

The one subtlety is setting up the LLM to understand whether a new story belongs in an existing cluster, or with > 1 neighbors, constitutes a new cluster. The challenge there is scoping the clustering window (hours of stories for consideration) and topic breadth to avoid creating Katamari-super-clusters that just end up with every story associated to them.

At this point I seem to have found a sweet spot re: the hours window, the frequency of processing, and the design of the prompt such that its working consistently.

Very few false positives in terms of spurious clusters being created, or potential clusters being missed.
by comrade1234 | 2025-10-23 19:29:23+00:00
For me it's the notch... I'm still on a 2nd gen se (no notch) but I hate the notch on my laptop.

I think we're stuck with the notch forever on iPhones. Even if apple uses an on-screen fingerprint reader in the future like a billion phones already do they're not going to go back from the face scanner. The only thing that will work is if the face scanner can read from behind the display.
by makerofthings | 2025-10-23 19:29:30+00:00
I've always been a big fan of apple and have defended them in the past, but iOS 26 is a dumpster fire. There are visual corruptions and glitches all over the place and transparent text floating over transparent text. It's not even whether I like the style or not, it's just broken. Who signed off on this? No product in this state would ever leave one of my teams, I'd resign first.
by jrflowers | 2025-10-23 19:29:30+00:00
Buddy the way it works when you don’t know something is you just say that you don’t know it. We all know that you don’t know how many batteries burned or what fractions of them both.

You are trying to do the “get the internet to do your homework for you by posting the wrong answer” Reddit meme trick but being so incredibly off putting that it isn’t working. Nobody is going to do your research for you because everyone can tell that’s what you’re asking them to do.
by jakogut | 2025-10-23 19:29:44+00:00
> It's not the fault of Linux for refusing to allow this.

Linux doesn't refuse anything, it's free and open source software. If publishers want to offer anti-cheat software developed for Linux, it will run. In fact, many games do have anti-cheat, like Insurgency: Sandstorm, which uses EAC through Proton.

Publishers can even develop invasive kernel-level anti-cheat just like they do for Windows. They don't because it's a small portion of the market currently, and I assume they consider it not worth the investment as of now. To what extent existing Linux users would willingly allow such software to run is also an open question.

There's also the point that even invasive kernel level anti-cheat on Windows with requirements for secure boot continues to be inadequate to stop cheaters in competitive online games.
by jeroenhd | 2025-10-23 19:29:45+00:00
Imagine the absolute chaos if docker would do that, pull vulnerable images offline. Not a single company would be able to build their software anymore.

Actually, Docker did something like that, where they limited the amount of docker images they would host for you for free to a reasonable number. The result was pretty similar to this current outcry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24143588
by ruralfam | 2025-10-23 19:29:45+00:00
About $1B (billion) in stock incentives for top-level execs in 2025 (Tim alone is $76m I believe). Apple stock is up. They are happy imho. Very, very few humans would care about "detail" vs. this outcome. Satya is close to $100M I believe, and we are shocked the M$FT is trading-in on ads/telemtry in Win11. These guys are just human.
by wat10000 | 2025-10-23 19:29:46+00:00
Sounds like a "better safe than sorry" approach. If you ignore the alert on the basis that it's a false positive, then it turns out it really was a gun and the person shoots somebody, you're going to get sued into the ground, fired, name plastered all over the media, etc. On the other hand, if you call in the cops and there wasn't a gun, you're fine.
by taeric | 2025-10-23 19:30:34+00:00
Largely agreed. It doesn't take a lot of looking through these threads, though, to find people basically saying everyone in the past merely coped with trauma. Some going so far as to basically assert that the only reason people drank in the past, was as a coping thing. Which, frankly, feels off to me.

Not that you can't cope through drinking. Nor that nobody ever did things wrong. I just don't see any reason to think that would have been the norm.
by dylan604 | 2025-10-23 19:30:42+00:00
"It’s the largest microgrid in North America and it’s the largest second-energy storage site in the world. So that’s like you said at the top, it’s a 12-megawatt AC, 63-megawatt-hour grid supporting about 2 or 3 megawatts of data centers and run by solar. So all the energy comes from another 12 megawatts of solar."

Sure, so while not supplying power to a city, they are proving this is viable. Just because it's not "turn off the coal plants now" moment doesn't mean this isn't a very good direction. Everyone has to start and grow. I don't understand the whole shit on something because it's not an immediate solve. If these guys waited until 2040 to start the business, well, that'd just be dumb. It essentially sounds like capacity will just continue to increase year over year, maybe around 2040 there will be a huge spike. Doesn't seem like anything is wrong here.
by ahnick | 2025-10-23 19:30:53+00:00
> Yes, that is precisely the problem with GDPR, too. Enforcement is supposed to be carried out by national Data Protection Authorities but they just don't investigate. I've reported some clear cut violations and they never followed up on anything.

No, it's not the problem with GDPR. As explained earlier it has to do with jurisdictional overreach.

> It doesn't matter. It's irrelevant to the general enforcement issue. Most DPAs seem to be failing to enforce even the simplest of cases. Let's chat about the edge cases and jurisdiction when the clear cut cases are being taken care of reliably.

Edge cases and jurisdiction are at the heart of this issue and exactly why it is a bad law. This is exactly the baggage that bad laws create!
by tptacek | 2025-10-23 19:30:58+00:00
It shouldn't scare you. It should spark recognition. This meta-failure-mode exists in every complex technological system. You should be, like, "ah, of course, that makes sense now". Latent failures are fractally prevalent and have combinatoric potential to cause catastrophic failures. Yes, this is a runbook they need to have, but we should all understand there are an unbounded number of other runbooks they'll need and won't have, too!
by ivape | 2025-10-23 19:31:06+00:00
The saved state is sent on each prompt, yes. Those who are fully aware of this would seek a local memory agent and a local llm, or at the very least a provider that promises no-logging.

Every sacrifice we make for convenience will be financially beneficial to the vendor, so we need to factor them out of the equation. Engineered context does mean a lot more tokens, so it will be more business for the vendor, but the vendors know there is much more money in saving your thoughts.

Privacy-first intelligence requires these two things at the bare minimum:

1) Your thoughts stay on your device

2) At worst, your thoughts pass through a no-logging environment on the server. Memory cannot live here because any context saved to a db is basically just logging.

3) Or slightly worse, your local memory agent only sends some prompts to a no-logging server.

The first two things will never be offered by the current megacapitalist.

Finally, the developer community should not be adopting things like Claude memory because we know. We’re not ignorant of the implications compared to non-technical people. We know what this data looks like, where it’s saved, how it’s passed around, and what it could be used for. We absolutely know better.
by joshmoody24 | 2025-10-23 19:31:07+00:00
You noticed the thing about my article I'm the least comfortable with: the idea of a "Barendregt numeral."

The number encoding scheme I use in the article is from To Mock a Mockingbird. Near the end of the book, a character says: "Oh, there are many other [number encodings] that would work... but this particular one is technically convenient. I have adopted this idea from the logician Henk Barendregt."

But I couldn't find any other source that claims Barendregt invented it. Thanks for finding another source, I'll take a look at it and update the article!
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-10-23 19:31:15+00:00
No, I think it’s crazy that people somehow think it’s rational to video monitor kids and be worried they have actual fire arms.

I think that’s a level of f-ed up which is so far removed from questioning AI that I wonder why people even tolerate it and somehow seem to view the premise as normal.

The cop thing is just icing on the cake.