MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by topaz0 | 2025-10-16 14:15:30+00:00
> if we slice the data up three ways to hell and back, /all/ we see is unexplainable variation

It's certainly true that you can go too far, but this is a case where we can know a priori that the mfg date could be causing bias in the numbers they're showing, because the estimated failure rates at 5 years cannot contain data from any drives newer than 2020, whereas failure rates at 1 year can. At a minimum you might want to exclude newer drives from the analysis, e.g. exclude anything after 2020 if you want to draw conclusions about how the failure rate changes up to the 5-year mark.
by engomez | 2025-10-16 14:15:56+00:00
Both work - Agents can be triggered via API just like any normal process, so they will go do the work async and post the result via e.g. an MCP of your choice to Slack, backend forms, etc. We don't have a built-in human-in-loop orchestration layer just yet, but since each execution has a conversation thread, you could orchestrate a way for your human-in-loop process to simply submit a new message with whatever was sent. Basically using the messaging as the event queue system.

That said, yes, we deal with a lot of customer support use cases so conversational experiences were a top priority for us. It's nice to be able to interact with an agent as a workflow or conversationally.
by kevinsync | 2025-10-16 14:16:14+00:00
I was in the same boat on a side project (Electron, Claude Code) -- I considered Playwright but ended up building a simple, focused API instead that allows Claude to connect to the app to inspect logs (main console + browser console), query internal app data + state, and execute arbitrary JS.

It's sped up debugging a lot since I can just give it instructions like "found a bug that does XYZ, I think it's a problem with functionABC(); connect to app, click these four buttons in this order, examine the internal state, then trace through the code to figure out what's going wrong and present a solution"

I was pretty resistant at first of delegating debugging blindly like that, but it's made the workflow pretty smooth to where I can occasionally just open the app, run through it as a human user and take notes on bugs and flow issues that I find, log them with steps to reproduce, then give Claude a list of bugs to noodle on while I'm focusing on stuff LLMs are terrible at (design, UI, frontend work, etc)
by rcthompson | 2025-10-16 14:16:14+00:00
Of note, assuming that decommissioning of drives is driven primarily by e.g. space concerns rather than signs of impending individual drive failures (which seems to be the case based on the linked article about storage scaling), you could conduct a survival analysis in which decommissioned drives are treated as right-censored to get a better measure of the failure rate over time as well as how that failure rate depends on various factors. Note that the most common choice of a proportional hazards model may not be appropriate here, and an accelerated failure time model may be more appropriate, although I couldn't say for sure without actually working with the data.
by epistasis | 2025-10-16 14:16:28+00:00
It is the best, but also the very very worst in so many ways.

There are all sorts of data that are nearly impossible to get into Excel because of the ways that it tries to turn everything into a date. There has been so much silent data corruption because of random misfeatures that were added decades ago and now they will never back out of the system. The string OCT4 amongst a column of alphanumeric identifiers will get changed into a date, silently, on import, and it's nigh on impossible to find out how to import without that silent conversion. It's better to write your own Python code to get data into Excel than to use its built in foot guns.
by yujzgzc | 2025-10-16 14:16:31+00:00
My experience building agents is that the "main loop" of the framework is really not the hard part, and too much time gets devoted to framework picking. It reminds me a lot of early web application days, stuff feels at the level of PHP and WordPress in their attempt to simplify things, when in reality we still need low level stuff a lot of time and the framework gets in the way.
by edd25 | 2025-10-16 14:17:13+00:00
Initially I was irked by Skibidi Toilet and considered it to be peak of brainrot content. Though at one party we decided to do an ironic Skibidi marathon and I genuinely had a fun time watching the shorts, it was quite fun trying to piece together was was going on in the series, we even started to root for some of the characters. When GMod/TF2 videos were just starting to appear on YT, I recall watching/making a lot of very similar videos, I'd say it was even worse and with more brainrot. Skibidi Toilet is exactly the same, except with higher production quality, and I no longer think it's a bad thing after the marathon, just more of the same.
by rtkwe | 2025-10-16 14:18:00+00:00
The issue is the government doesn't and shouldn't know every possible detail of your life so if you're in a complex tax situation (most people aren't and can just take the standard deduction) you'd still need to do the preparations. But for the vast majority of people the government does already know what you're taxes should be because you're just taking the standard deduction which 87% of people did in 2018 and that number has grown slightly since then. [0]

For more complex cases where you have more deduction and income sources the government doesn't really know all the individual setups you may or may not qualify for and they only audit a small percentage of filers every year.

The reason it's been blocked is a mess of ideological and economic. Ideological from people who interested that want to make taxes more annoying so people are generally more anti tax and then they get elected and make cuts to the top percentages/businesses permanent while the tax cuts for the majority of citizens are temporary. This sets up a debt crisis when those 'temporary' cuts are also extended they can use to leverage for government cuts. On the economic side there's a huge amount of money made each year by preparing taxes for people too intimidated by the complexity to DIY it. So they ally with the generically antitax side to keep their business going.

[0] https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-tax-stats-at-a-...
by bmitc | 2025-10-16 14:18:41+00:00
The Phoenix churn is definitely real. It's so much so that I've never gotten into it. It's also extremely macro heavy, and so it's its own DSL or collection of DSLs. A concrete example of the churn is that the LiveView book has been "about to release" for five years now.

Although, what parts of Elixir itself are rough or missing creature comforts? I generally feel it's stable and fine, but I admittedly haven't written Elixir code in a couple of years, sadly.
by pjmlp | 2025-10-16 14:18:43+00:00
Same here regarding Turbo Pascal, however I first had to go through GW-BASIC and Turbo BASIC, with a bit of Z80, 68000 and 80x86 before getting into Turbo Pascal.

Between the Amstrad PC1512 at the school club, the other friends lucky enough to have Amiga 500 which organized demoscene like parties at their places, until I finally got hold of a 386SX.
by alephnerd | 2025-10-16 14:18:49+00:00
Racial diversity is orthogonal to ethnic diversity. It shouldn't be code for "Black".

For example, continuing with your Atlanta example, the city of Atlanta is 84% white and black, and those White and Black Americans in ATL are overwhelmingly of southern origin in the US.

Meanwhile, an Asian American from Jiangxi is extremely different from someone from the Mekong Delta who is extremely different from someone from Jeolla in South Korea. The only similarly they have is looking kind of similar.

Same for Latiné communities as well.

East Coast cities have more "White" and "Black" people, but not as many Asians or Latiné.

Also, you have to remember the history of the Western US - much of the US west of Dallas wasn't part of the US until the 1840s, and remained a frontier backwater until WW2, so a number of Asian and Latiné ethnic groups had a longer history here than a lot of ethnic groups that are now pivotal in the US.
by n4r9 | 2025-10-16 14:18:51+00:00
Wow. So the hull was poorly engineered. They had no idea in advance because they didn't test it. They had no idea after the initial damage because their monitoring was flawed. Then it took ages to find them because they failed to notify anyone of the expedition.

OceanGate's CEO Stockton Rush famously said in 2022:

> You know, at some point, safety just is pure waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed, don't get in your car, don't do anything. At some point, you're going to take some risk, and it really is a risk/reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.

The level of hubris is spine-chilling. There's taking measured risks, and then there's baiting jeopardy.
by binary132 | 2025-10-16 14:19:04+00:00
This is misleading IMO because Promise is a particular kind of monad but in general monads don’t necessarily have anything to do with asynchrony. It is a useful example though because some people are more familiar with the API of promises.

I might have some inaccuracies in how I state this since I’m not from a functional programming background, but I think of monads as an abstraction of chaining functions over a value such that each returned value can specify what further transformations it supports, and particularly in such a way that generic transformations (like sequence reversal) can easily be applied, and errors or empty values can be accounted for within the control flow.

I think sometimes people call this a “fluent API”, but I would never call it “a generalization of callbacks” or of promises.

Anyway there’s a much more mathematically precise way of stating it but this is my intuitive caveman way of thinking about it.
by aw1621107 | 2025-10-16 14:19:05+00:00
I feel this might come down to the scope one has in mind when thinking of the word "interop". I think one can reasonably simultaneously claim that the interop "mechanics" are excellent in that it's generally possible to create a Rust library that quacks like a C library and that basically any C library is usable by Rust code, but the interop "ergonomics" are suboptimal in that (as you say) actually writing the glue code can be a bit of an adventure.
by ahmeneeroe-v2 | 2025-10-16 14:19:41+00:00
Nope, sorry I don't believe this. I lived in Seattle for 15-years and while the city was never exactly hard on crime, I watched the post-2016 descent into madness and then the post-covid sprint into being actively pro-crime.

I watched it start in the downtown area and then spread into residential neighborhoods, and the homeless/criminal element become more physically aggressive too. "Public Intoxication" also increased except instead of drunks it was fentanyl users.

Car crimes similarly went from simple opening of unlocked doors, to smashing of windows to grab bags or cutting out catalytic converters.

Public transit went from bearable to unusable (though this might be better now, I don't have firsthand knowledge anymore since I stopped using it during the decline).
by jraph | 2025-10-16 14:20:00+00:00
> For several Amazon Linux AMIs, yes and yes!

Okay, I believe you, I'm not familiar with this. I'd still be interested in knowing which specific AGPL software Amazon would use themselves (note, I'm sure they distribute AGPL software through their distro, that doesn't mean they use it themselves).

> For Debian, the software are in the main archive, actually.

I mentioned the base install. Whatever you get by running deboostrap without parameters, or with a base debian docker container. Of course there's AGPL software in main. main is huge.
by blharr | 2025-10-16 14:20:09+00:00
Could I tell if the last one is AI? Absolutely. Throwing a few "damns" in there didn't convince me. And all the reworking you've done, while it makes it a little more passable, has made it arguably worse in quality. The point of the final article is so muddy. It has no central point and sprawls on and on about random nonsense.
by bpt3 | 2025-10-16 14:20:17+00:00
That's how it works in the US also, though personal property and real estate taxes are collected at the state and local level (if they exist, which is dependent on the state and local government).

For most people in the US, filing their taxes is a very simple process, which is why it's so annoying that Intuit has successfully lobbied to integrate themselves into the process.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-10-16 14:20:29+00:00
We're through the looking glass. Post-ironic paper taking random memes seriously?

I bet there's papers about Monty Python's animations too. Actually I don't need to bet, there's Google [0]:

> The animated interludes in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail demonstrate director and animator Terry Gilliam's interest in and use of images in the margins of Gothic manuscripts. [1]

[0] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_sdt=0%2C5&q=monthy+pyt...

[1] https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/91/article/424939/summary
by vunderba | 2025-10-16 14:20:53+00:00
I'd love to see Wozniak up there. From Al Alcorn, a pivotal computer scientist and electrical engineer employed in the early days of Atari:

"So, meanwhile, Steve’s friend Wozniak comes in the evenings. He would be out there during burn-in tests while these Tank games were on the production line, and he’d play Tank forever. I didn’t think much of it; I didn’t care. He was a cool guy.

I found that what really had happened was that Jobs never designed a lick of anything in his life. He had Woz do it [redesign Breakout].

Woz did it in like 72 hours nonstop and all in his head. He got it down to 20 or 30 ICs [integrated circuits]. It was remarkable… a tour de force.

It was so minimized, though, that nobody else could build it. Nobody could understand what Woz did but Woz. It was this brilliant piece of engineering, but it was just unproduceable. So the game sat around and languished in the lab."
by michaelt | 2025-10-16 14:21:05+00:00
Surely they need the same sensors and compute no matter what car they attach them to - they're either strapping $75k of sensors to a $60k luxury EV, or a $30k economy EV.

Unless they're planning 20mph golf carts to save on long-distance sensors, which as far as I know they aren't.

IMHO it's more likely they have capacity constraints because of all the different parts involved in a roll-out; you can't just double the capacity of a production facility without hiring lots of inexperienced new hires, meaning they can only build the things so fast. You can't roll out to a new city without places to park the cars, and places to charge them, and people to repair them, and places to store the spare parts, and trade routes to replenish the spare parts, and so on.
by simpaticoder | 2025-10-16 14:21:13+00:00
Okay I read your post more carefully and it seems like you're attempting to build one central script for a given URL. Assuming on-shot script generation is unreliable and requires iterative improvement this makes sense. Of course I'm biased in favor of local-first, privacy preserving and non-distributed solutions if they exist, so I'd be curious to know if/how you measured the reliability of one-shot script generation for a basket of likely web apps.
by engomez | 2025-10-16 14:21:18+00:00
We made a good video about the differences between n8n, OpenAI, and Inkeep here: https://youtu.be/tRgU5FQoe3s. Short overview.

Re:OpenAI agents builder - there is a hard one-time ejection to code. You can export to their TypeScript or Python SDKs (in some limited use cases), but it's a one-way fork. Their visual canvas is meant to stay visual canvas.

Their SDK is open source -- it's basically for calling the OpenAI APIs downstream. But their visual builder / orchestration layer is not.
by kstrauser | 2025-10-16 14:22:06+00:00
It was a whole thing a while back. This was maybe the original article, but once it landed this was the headline of all tech news for a couple of days. https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/14/wd-red-nas-drives-shin...

SMR drives aren’t inherently bad, but you must not use them in a NAS. The may work well, up until they don’t, and then they really don’t. WD snuck these into their Red line, the one marketed at NAS users. The end result after a huge reputational hit was to promise to keep the Red Pro line on HMR, but the plain Red line is still a coin flip, AFAIK.

I will not use WD drives in a NAS. It’s all about trust, and they violated it to as astonishing degree.
by marcuskane2 | 2025-10-16 14:22:08+00:00
> Especially South Park I think desensitized the millennial generation

Desensitized some people, who understood and appreciated the irony, absurdity and inversion of norms.

It hyper-sensitized others, who often doubled-down on the type of authoritarian political correctness that South Park satirized.

There is clearly a huge segment of the millennial generation who don't agree with the South Park "make jokes about everyone and everything" ethos, and instead believe there are numerous individuals, groups, topics and issues which should never be joked about, and feel very offended when someone does.
by roryirvine | 2025-10-16 14:22:15+00:00
Yeah, that's enough for my usage.

GitHub typically reports that I'm using 25-30% of the free tier, and 100% of that will be from code completions in my editor. I do maybe 3 hours solid coding a day on average.

I also pay for Gemini Pro for non-coding research. I did have it hooked up to my VSCode a few months ago, but it got reset back to GH Copilot at some point and I've not found a reason to fix it.
by angiolillo | 2025-10-16 14:22:43+00:00
> it would make much more sense to just tax companies and not individuals

Sure, but taxes are applied due to political feasibility, not because they "make sense".

The most sensible approach is to tax natural resources (land, carbon, mines, wells, electromagnetic spectrum) and other forms of economic rent, but that is politically infeasible (edit: or more accurately, very challenging) in a capitalist democracy.
by saghm | 2025-10-16 14:23:05+00:00
On the other hand, within 120 years (and sometimes decades earlier), every human so far also has reached reach a point where they can't do anything anymore, reliably or otherwise. I don't think humans provide much of a precedent of sustained growth in reliable over anything other than a fixed period, and it's not clear to me that we have any idea whether or not we'll reach a ceiling in how reliable we can make LLMs before they outperform humans in tasks like programming.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-10-16 14:23:09+00:00
Beavis & Butthead? You like this trash?

South Park? You like this trash?

Salad Fingers? You like this trash?

Monty Python? You like this trash?

Rick and Morty? You like this trash?

Elvis? You like this trash?

It's tiring; people should let people have things. And get over themselves because not everything is or has to be for them or for everyone's liking. That's art.
by bobbiechen | 2025-10-16 14:23:11+00:00
The author, Dan, is at FusionAuth, so that might be a good place to start.

I work for Stytch (another CIAM provider) on the fraud and security side and we do these too. I'd say you see credential stuffing defenses integrated into the auth provider rather than standalone rate limiting because so much of the relevant context is tied up in the auth side.

And, all the error messages end up being bad, as is the case for many security things. For our own features like Intelligent Rate Limiting https://stytch.com/docs/fraud/guides/device-fingerprinting/d... it's usually a bad idea to tell a user "You hit the limit, come back in an hour or contact support" because it gives an attacker information on how to improve. And we regularly see probing behavior where an attacker is trying to find the edges of a defense before starting a full-scale attack.

On the side topic of error messages - if you've ever seen "If your account exists, the password has been reset" that's another useless error message because "No account exists with that email" enables account enumeration.
by lumost | 2025-10-16 14:23:34+00:00
I've observed massive back office pipelines using dozens of interconnected lambda, batching, streaming, distributed storage for ephemeral data and other rube Goldberg contraptions to build what was ultimately a cron job on a modest server running for 1 hour.

Being in the cloud doesn't mean you need to accept timeouts/limitations. CDK+fargate can easily run an ephemeral container to perform some offline processing.
by groundzeros2015 | 2025-10-16 14:24:09+00:00
This is a meme, but it’s not true. The fact is taxes are 1. Subjective 2. Based on your real world activity outside your W2.

So the IRS has correlative algorithms to signal an audit if something looks strange. But besides that, you are evaluating your real world activity and classifying it according to the forms they have.

This is why accountants and lawyers are useful in tax. They can help you interpret the tax code and argue to the IRS your interpretation,
by engomez | 2025-10-16 14:24:39+00:00
Good question! Main things: n8n you can't export to code (or import). It's all visual, so you don't get CI/CD, typesafety, etc. when you want it. That can be fine if visual is all you need.

Architecturally, n8n is good for deterministic workflows and adding some LLM nodes for data transformations and tool calling, but because their system is not truly multi-agent, then a) it's not good for conversational experiences like chatbots or copilots and b) agents can't actually go back and forth with each other to solve problems with a shared conversation history, etc.
by noufalibrahim | 2025-10-16 14:24:57+00:00
My oldest programs in gw basic are on 5.25" DD disks. I still have them but they're probably unreadable now due to fungus on the platters.

There was a great talk by Jason Scott (textiles) on how he dug out Jordan Mechners original prince of persia source code from the sands of time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9xNzZMeX5I
by jppittma | 2025-10-16 14:25:08+00:00
The k8s api server is the thing that's configured to talk to your Thales or whatever. On managed kubernetes, these are usually preconfigured to talk to the vendor -- that's the difference between a secret and a config map. The secret is encrypted when it's stored in etcd.

You'd be forgiven for being mistaken however, because this encryption is handled in a way that's transparent to the application.

If you're talking about your application making a call to the k8s api server, then you shouldn't do that unless you're developing a plugin. The kubelet knows how to retrieve and mount secrets from the k8s api server and display them as environment variables to the application. You just declare it as a part of your deployment in the podspec.