MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WalterBright | 2025-10-20 17:37:51+00:00
> in the same way that building appliances that last forever isn't a good business strategy.

I'd reframe that as people don't want to pay for an appliance that lasts forever.

There are exceptions. Things built for professional use are of a much higher quality. For example, restaurant grade kitchen equipment and appliances are far more durable than consumer ones. Of course, they cost quite a bit more, too.
by jppope | 2025-10-20 17:38:09+00:00
I don't think its fair to dismiss a lot of anecdotal evidence, much of human experience is based off of it, and just being anecdotal doesn't make it incorrect. For those of us using aws for the last decade, there have been a handful of outages that are pretty hard to forget. Often those same engineers have services in other regions - so we witness these things going down more frequently in us-east-1. Now can I say definitively that us-east-1 goes down the most - nope. Have I had 4 outages in us-east-1 I can remember and only 1-2 us-west-2, yep.
by pessimizer | 2025-10-20 17:38:11+00:00
A host is someone who lets people stay in their house. "Self-hosting" and "bare-metal" have gotten debased in such a strange, commercial-marketing aligned way.

The new definition of "self-hosting" is that you play any part in a piece of software that you use (if I click the "install wordpress button in cPANEL, am I self-hosting?), and the new definition of "bare-metal" is "computer." It's just weird. How can you employ a webhost in order to self-host? How can it be bare-metal if it's hosted within an OS that completely abstracts the hardware?

I suspect non-technical people just wanted to fluff their qualifications, and the companies who host for them wanted to help.
by Analemma_ | 2025-10-20 17:38:12+00:00
This is the dream, but it keeps crashing and sinking against reality. It seems intuitive that running language models on the AST should work better than running them on the source code, but as far as I'm aware every attempt to do this has resulted in much worse performance. There's so much more training data available as source code, and working in source code form gives you access to so much more outside context (comments, documentation, Stack Overflow posts), that it more than cancels out the disadvantages.
by sofixa | 2025-10-20 17:38:13+00:00
All the VCS providers come with an included CI, which usually blows Jenkins out of the water. Even if I'm not fond of GitHub Actions' syntax, it's still better than Jenkins. The native integrations, if nothing else with MR/PRs and identity and access management are great.

So in a way, an external CI system is a very niche thing. If for some reason that is still needed, I've heard good things about Concourse CI. The last separate CI I've used was Drone CI for fun, but AFAIK it's no longer open source after they got acquired by Harness.
by quesera | 2025-10-20 17:38:31+00:00
I think it's simple. It's just a stemming pattern matching tree, right?

The admin UX is ... awkward and incomplete at best. I think the admin UI makes the service appear more complex than it is.

The JSON representation makes it look complicated, but with the data compiled down into a proper processable format, IAM is just a KVS and a simple rules engine.

Not much more complicated than nginx serving static files, honestly.

(Caveat: none of the above is literally simple, but it's what we do every day and -- unless I'm still missing it -- not especially amazing, comparatively).
by chasd00 | 2025-10-20 17:38:38+00:00
Decentralized with respect to connectivity. If a construction crew cuts a fiber bundle routing protocols will route around the damage and packets keep showing up at the destination. Or, only a localized group of users will be affected. That level of decentralization is not what we have at higher levels in the stack with AWS being a good example.

Even connectivity has it's points of failure. I've touched with my own hands fiber runs that, with a few quick snips from a wire cutter, could bring sizable portions of the Internet offline. Granted that was a long time ago so those points of failure may no longer exist.
by teddyh | 2025-10-20 17:38:44+00:00
What you describe is an unfortunate result of the terrible bandwith situation at your (and others’) location. It is not, however, a compelling argument to redefine a term to suit your liking.

(Also, with 4G, 5G, and satellite-based Internet, an alternate (albeit low-bandwith) route for emergency access is fairly straightforward to set up.)
by ndiddy | 2025-10-20 17:39:12+00:00
There's a class of high-spec microcontrollers that have a ton of RAM and flash and built-in support for stuff like touchscreens. It looks like Qt is able to run on these: https://www.qt.io/platform/develop-software-microcontrollers... . I'm not sure how much of their business is people targeting bare-metal microcontrollers, but there is at least some overlap.
by candl | 2025-10-20 17:39:13+00:00
I learned some Gleam a while ago, my familarity with F# helped, but I didn't find a use case for it. Some while ago I wanted to play with raw sockets so I figured, why not Gleam, its binary parsing syntax will be handy so I looked into the erlang sockets module and attempted to write some ffi wrappers for the necessary functions. Turns out it is not as straight forward, especially that the definitions on erlang side are often complex, with many variants and the dynamic nature doesn't often map very well to Gleam. The documentation was also quite sparse for interop. Interop also involves a lot of Dynamic types so encoding/decoding back which is cumbersome. Sooner or later I hit a wall. By virtue of reading Erlang docs to write the ffi wrappers I eventually got familiar with Erlang syntax which at first was quite alien, but turns out it is rather simple with just some rules to remember. I settled on writing Erlang directly. I am not sure how Elixir compares, never tried it, but I was initially put off by the syntax resembling Ruby, which I have fond memories of, but was always very implicit which I didn't like. Writing pure gleam is pretty fun, but a lot of interesting things require either ffi interop or decoders/encoders even for simple things like json which takes away some of that fun.
by ta1243 | 2025-10-20 17:39:25+00:00
Zero. By the time you get to GEO your are connected to a station which is in Geostationary orbit. Your 35 hour ascent at say 1000km/h will have accelerated you sideways to the required 3km/second with a sidewards acceleration of 0.002g throughout the trip.

Of course you would be looking at a constant acceleration, not just a 1000km/hour trip. You'd probably be able to do the journey in a couple of hours with a reasonable acceleration and a rotating cabin (say 1.1g, meaning acceleration would slowly increase from about 0.1g at the surface, then after the flip point you'd decelerate at 1.1g). Even then sideways acceleration wouldn't be noticable (and your cabin could gimbal to just add it to vertical acceleration)

That's the other crazy thing. A space elevator takes forever at elevator, or car, or even plane speeds. But with constant acceleration/decelleration you can have a trip in airplane style seats with cabin crew serving you caviar // scratchcards (depending on class of cabin). Your peak vertical speed would be in the region of 8km/second - way above Earth's escape velocity, but you wouldn't even notice the acceleration/deceleration. You'd slow down in under 15 minutes.

Or you wouldn't and you'd depart Earth at 8km/s, twice the escape velocity.

(If you really wanted a fast departure you'd accelerate at say 1.2g and get upto 30km/s, twice the speed of New Horizons. 1.2g would probably mean you'd have the seatbelt on for the whole 40 minute trip)

You could launch cargo to Mars at say 5G, which would get it there in between 10 and 45 days depending where it is. Obviously you'd have a problem slowing down when you got there.
by potato3732842 | 2025-10-20 17:39:32+00:00
>They want OBEDIENT WORKERS. OBEDIENT WORKERS. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.[...]"

And it was a resounding success. They got everything they wanted and then some. Look at HN, a community that considers itself broadly smarter than the average citizen/voter. Even it's knee jerk reaction is to solve any given problem using "more system" (typically public, but often private as well).
by dathinab | 2025-10-20 17:39:43+00:00
Concepts of cooperate multi threading, co-rutines etc. aren't limited to user space.

Actually they out date the whole "async" movement or whatever you want to call it.

Also the article is about user-space threads, i.e. OS threads, not kernel-space threads (which use kthread_* not pthread_* and kthreads stopping does work by setting a flag to indicate it's supposed to stop, wakes the thread and then waits for exit. I.e. it works much more close to the `if(stop) exit` example then any signal usage.
by CobrastanJorji | 2025-10-20 17:39:44+00:00
I don't think there are any physics reasons why it'd be impossible, but certainly we can't do it with existing technology. You'd need an air breathing jet that could get a vehicle to go about five or six times faster than any current such engine has ever achieved (i.e. around mach 20-30), which is perhaps ridiculous, but I don't think it's necessarily impossible, just something we don't know how to do. There have been some (failed) efforts to get there, like the X-30.
by miamibre | 2025-10-20 17:39:58+00:00
MLB in the US does the same thing for the regular season, it's awesome despite the blackouts which prevent you from watching your local team but you can get around that with a simple VPN. But alas I believe that they will be making the service part of ESPN which will undoubtedly make the product worse just like they will do with NFL Red Zone.

The problem is that leagues miss out on billions of dollars of revenue when they do this AND they also have to maintain the streaming service which is way outside their technical wheelhouse.

MLS also has a pretty straightforward streaming service through AppleTV which I also enjoy.

What i find weird is that people complain (at least in the case of the MLS deal) that it's a BAD thing, that somehow having an easily accessible service that you just pay for and get access to without a contract or cable is diminishing popularity / discoverability of the product?
by zamalek | 2025-10-20 17:40:30+00:00
We're on Azure and they are worse in every aspect, bad deployment of services, and status pages that are more about PR than engineering.

At this point, is there any cloud provider that doesn't have these problems? (GCP is a non-starter because a false-positive YouTube TOS violation get you locked out of GCP[1]).

[1]: https://9to5google.com/2021/02/26/stadia-port-of-terraria-ca...
by WalterBright | 2025-10-20 17:40:32+00:00
That frame doesn't account for all the technology and logistical support for farming. For example, where does his tractor come from? You need an industrial society to be able to build tractors, fuel them, etc. You need a transportation network to import oranges from Mexico. And so on.

Without a tractor, there'd be a major percentage of the population working on farms.
by JadedBlueEyes | 2025-10-20 17:40:37+00:00
You do have to keep bridges up to date, because they need to remain compatible with the internal APIs of other platforms. Beeper.com (mentioned by a sibling comment) is a commercial deployment of the mautrix matrix bridges, along with some propietary components. You can deploy the exact same bridges using their documentation: https://docs.mau.fi/bridges/ - although you won't have access to the propietary beeper client or hungryserv.
by CharlieDigital | 2025-10-20 17:40:38+00:00
A whole bunch of meeting bots use Recall.

Recall is on AWS.

Everyone using Recall for meeting recordings is down.

In some domains, a single SaaS dominates the domain and if that SaaS sits on AWS, it doesn't matter if AWS is 35% marketshare because the SaaS that dominates 80% of the domain is on AWS so the effect is wider than just AWS's market share.

We're on GCP, but we have various SaaS vendors on AWS so any of the services that rely on AWS are gone.

Many chat/meeting services also run on AWS Chime so even if you're not on AWS, if a vendor uses Chime, that service is down.
by tetha | 2025-10-20 17:40:55+00:00
Part of the company I work at is doing infrastructure consulting. We're in fact seeing companies moving to bare metal, with the rise of turnkey container systems between Nutanix, Purestorage, Redhat, ... At this point in time, a few remotely managed boxes in a rack can offer a really good experience for containers for very little effort.

And this comes in a time with regulations like Dora and the BaFin tightening things - managing these boxes becomes less effort than maintaining compliance across vendors.
by astrobe_ | 2025-10-20 17:41:12+00:00
> Does Forth really reduce the burden of naming things?

I would say that you have less names, but they are more important. Plus, it is more difficult to name things because you prefer short names; in all languages, when you have a good naming "discipline", follow a naming convention, you end up with an informal "grammar" inside of your names. In Forth this is even more important.

> My impression is that there's more words in a Forth program than functions in an equivalent program in a language that has named variables

Yes, some people have called that "ravioli code" or "confetti code", IIRC. But most of them are support words. In Forth, you also eventually end up with "module APIs". This also exists in C or Java or ..., except the ratio useful:support is lower.
by card_zero | 2025-10-20 17:41:12+00:00
I don't know about useful, but right is important. You could imagine if everybody spontaneously started going around doing wrong. To some unclear extent this is what normally happens, and those people doing wrong should stop. It's not even entirely their own business, right and wrong: even when they have property rights on their side, it's still OK for other people to pass comment. And it could be that colored bottle caps are a waste of time and attention, and wrong, and that can be an opinion. But morality doesn't respond well to central management.
by simonw | 2025-10-20 17:41:49+00:00
I figured out how to get this running on the NVIDIA Spark (ARM64, which makes PyTorch a little bit trickier than usual) by running Claude Code as root in a new Docker container and having it figure it out. Notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/20/deepseek-ocr-claude-co...

Here's a result I got https://github.com/simonw/research/blob/main/deepseek-ocr-nv... - against this image: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2025/ft.jpeg
by quotemstr | 2025-10-20 17:42:02+00:00
pthread cancelation ends up not being the greatest, but it's important to represent it accurately. It has two modes: asynchronous and deferred. In asynchronous mode, a thread can be canceled any time, even in the middle of a critical section with a lock held. However, in deferred mode, a thread's cancelation can be delayed to the next cancelation point (a subset of POSIX function calls basically) and so it's possible to make that do-stuff-under-lock flow safe with cancelation after all.

That's not to say people do or that it's a good idea to try.
by beryl924 | 2025-10-20 17:42:14+00:00
Key changes: ~60% faster execution (joins & aggregations), full Apache Iceberg support (hidden partitions, compaction API, optimized metadata), enhanced JSON handling with Flat JSON V2, major reductions in cloud-storage API usage through file bundling and metadata caching, plus SQL-level improvements such as Decimal256 and ASOF JOIN.

The focus: stronger performance, better open-format support, and more enterprise-friendly governance.

Details → https://www.starrocks.io/blog/starrocks-4.0-now-available Doc:https://docs.starrocks.io/releasenotes/release-4.0/
by ta1243 | 2025-10-20 17:42:31+00:00
Relying on AWS is a single point of failure. Not as much as relying on a single AWS region, but it's still a single point.

It's fairly difficult to avoid single points of failure completely, and if you do it's likely your suppliers and customers haven't managed to.

It's about how much your risk level is.

AWS us-east-1 fails constantly, it has terrible uptime, and you should expect it to go. A cyberattack which destroyed AWSs entire infrastructure would be less likely. BGP hijacks across multiple AWS nodes are quite plausible though, but that can be mitigated to an extent with direct connects.

Sadly it seems people in charge of critical infrastructure don't even bother thinking about these things, because next quarters numbers are more important.

I can avoid London as a single point of failure, but the loss of Docklands would cause so much damage to the UK's infrastructure I can't confidently predict that my servers in Manchester connected to peering points such as IXman will be able to reach my customer in Norwich. I'm not even sure how much international connectivity I could rely on. In theory Starlink will continue to work, but in practice I'm not confident.

When we had power issues in Washington DC a couple of months ago, three of our four independent ISPS failed, as they all had undeclared requirements on active equipment in the area. That wasn't even a major outage, just a local substation failure. The one circuit which survived was clearly just fibre from our (UPS/generator backed) equipment room to a data centre towards Baltimore (not Ashburn).
by sunaookami | 2025-10-20 17:42:34+00:00
Forbes is blog-spam. Official blog-post: https://privacysandbox.com/news/update-on-plans-for-privacy-...

>We believe the proposed interoperable Attribution standard has the potential to support this objective in a privacy-preserving fashion, and we'll continue to engage on it through the web standards process in collaboration with a wide range of stakeholders including other browser makers.

>After evaluating ecosystem feedback about their expected value and in light of their low levels of adoption, we've decided to retire the following Privacy Sandbox technologies: Attribution Reporting API (Chrome and Android), IP Protection, On-Device Personalization, Private Aggregation (including Shared Storage), Protected Audience (Chrome and Android), Protected App Signals, Related Website Sets (including requestStorageAccessFor and Related Website Partition), SelectURL, SDK Runtime and Topics (Chrome and Android).
by gabiteodoru | 2025-10-20 17:42:35+00:00
Thanks so much for this challenge! I just ran the experiment with i = 1 + i and you're absolutely right - it breaks my theoretical framework (same semantic information, but much higher perplexity).

While setting this up, I realized I hadn't used chat templates in my original measurements (rookie mistake with an Instruct model!). Re-running with proper methodology completely flips the results - the terse version actually wins.

I'll add a correction note to the article once AWS/Medium comes back online, and will write a proper follow-up with all the corrected experiments. Your comment literally made the research better - thank you!
by aruametello | 2025-10-20 17:42:39+00:00
> (...) I think they built or used a different engine designed to take advantage of the N64s graphics hardware.

Something around that, they used the build engine as a starting point but "hacked it to oblivion". On the very least it reuses the same level editor (maps are vanilla build editor compatible) and it does keep many of the old bugs, like "killer doors".

semi random source: https://forums.duke4.net/topic/9513-release-zero-hour-resour...

incidentally the predecessor "duke nukem 64" is already more akin to what gzdoom is by using polygons instead of 2.5 rendering for walls and floors and they decided to push for polygons in the actors too for "zero hour" release.
by dfxm12 | 2025-10-20 17:42:42+00:00
There are some privacy issues you can't set aside.

The status quo is that I have enough skin in the game when it comes to my health, that if something doesn't feel or look normal (and I didn't just eat a lot of beets), I go to the doctor. It would save me an annual subscription cost, too, and it's a big upfront cost for when Kohler no longer wants to support it (a lot of people have Nest thermostats that are losing all of their useful functionality in a few days).

If this helps people with specific conditions, that's great, but, I'm having a hard time picturing someone who is so out of touch with their body that they will pay for this and follow its recommendations.
by teddyh | 2025-10-20 17:42:47+00:00
> If someone decides that a particular service is neat to host on rented servers I won’t fault them for it.

Neither will I. It is an endeavor worthy of praise.

> And I consider things that you manage on your own to be self-hosted even if you don’t own the hardware it’s running on.

This is where I will disagree and stand fast. If you do not “host” it yourself, you are not “self-hosting”. You might be maintaining it. You might be administrating it. But you are not hosting it.

> You decided to rent a $5 VPS for your email? You’ll still learn things from that even if the server is not in your home.

I agree, and it is certainly something I wish that more people would attempt.

> And I will perfectly agree that it fits the name self-hosted email.

It may be said to be “self-administrated” or “self-maintained”. But it is not “self-hosted”.
by sunrunner | 2025-10-20 17:43:03+00:00
> nobody knows for sure which parts are bullshit

I'm pretty sure it's all bullshit and the universe is just random chaos, unless you could convince everyone that there's some kind of objective higher purpose that they all should be striving towards. People just figure out which things they believe to be non-bullshit and go in that direction. Perhaps the only guaranteed purpose for life is to continue itself, which seems awkwardly recursive.

Or as Terry Pratchett put in Hogfather:

"Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet," Death waved a hand, "And yet you act as if there is some ideal order in the world, as if there is some... some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged."
by margalabargala | 2025-10-20 17:43:25+00:00
This is completely wrong and I'm frankly not sure how you came to this conclusion from the parent comment's data.

The uncertainty is "we do not know whether the amount of sea level rise due to human GHG emissions will be closer to 40cm, or closer to 100cm 75 years from now".

Science communication regarding this has generally always expressed uncertainty. Right wing entertainment masquerading as news frequently portrays it otherwise, but that's easy to do when unencumbered by a connection to reality.

Don't confuse what is most profitable to say, with what is most correct to say.
by jacquesm | 2025-10-20 17:43:31+00:00
HN denizens are more often than not founders of exactly those companies that do need those 9's. As I wrote in my original comment: the founders are usually shocked at the thought that such a thing could happen and it definitely isn't a conscious decision that they do not have a fall-back plan. And if it was a conscious decision I'd be fine with that, but it rarely is. About as rare as companies that have in fact thought about this and whose incident recovery plans go further than 'call George to reboot the server'. You'd be surprised how many companies have not even performed the most basic risk assessment.