MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Root_Denied | 2025-10-21 22:47:21+00:00
Considering that the AWS outage took out a lot of lines of communication (email, video, chat systems) for both commercial and government entities, I'd say that US-East-1 is a pretty big single point of failure. Even if it didn't result in infrastructure impact directly, if there was some kind of infrastructure issue and you had delayed or unavailable communications, how would you know? How quickly could a response be mounted? There's some parts of the infrastructure that could damage themselves irreparably in the time it would take to to fix the outage or get comms routed through a backup channel - like parts of the electrical grid or water treatment plants.

An attacker (read: nation-state actor) wouldn't even need to take down US-East-1, it could just take advantage of the outage.

I assume (hope?) there's some kind of backup comms plan or infra in place for critical events, but I don't actually know.
by dmurray | 2025-10-21 22:47:31+00:00
"Gross margin" is not the same as "hold" here.

Options pricing is reasonably competitive. Even a gambly thing like a Tesla zero day option has a spread of 1-2%, so someone trading it at random loses 0.5-1% per trade. And Robinhood is a brokerage, not an options market maker, so it doesn't capture all of that 0.5-1%.

You'd have to read Robinhood's financials to see what they mean by gross margin. Possibly it means if a customer deposits $1,000 and trades options, the customer eventually on average loses $900 of it? Even that seems too much TBH.
by mentalgear | 2025-10-21 22:47:58+00:00
Yes, there is a on-device Gemini model for Chrome. (Chrome Built-in AI), they have been testing it for over a year (been participating) and there were hackathons around it (ongoing until Nov 1 https://googlechromeai2025.devpost.com).

In general, I like the idea, but I'm afraid the final implementation will still auto-decide between using the local (for cost saving) and cloud LLM. And potentially outsourcing all your browser-usage LLMs calls to Big Tech like Google is a no-go .
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-10-21 22:48:33+00:00
OK. I'll break my own rule. When I say "Have a great day!", it means we're done. I won't foul this place with fighting.

The process should not be adversarial, in my opinion. It's a contract. I do something; you do something. There may be adversity, but that's not required, and it's actually likely to cause problems, down the road. Like any contractural relationship, each party needs to respect and trust the other party to come through with their end.

If the way that you introduce your company to me, is by bullying me (and tests are not "bullying," but many of the other interview games are), then we won't be working together. I don't like bullies. I won't be one, and I won't work with them.

These folks kept me on for a long time. There was a reason for that. I can't speak for all Japanese companies, but this one did not suffer skaters. You delivered, and you were constantly held to account. I did well in that environment. I suspect that many, here, would not.

I don't argue that companies should not give tests. I had tests in other interviews, and did fine. This company chose not to. One reason, is that the folks interviewing me, fought fang, tooth, and claw, for the headcount. When I became a manager, I had to do the same. It was a crazy frugal company.

This meant that they dedicated all their attention to the interview process. This wasn't where they were handed my CV, five minutes before they spoke to me. I was around them all day. They watched me work with others, and they gauged me on my character, more than my tech abilities. The Japanese are really big on character. At least, this company was.

I mentioned that I had an "old-fashioned" recruiter. They don't seem to have those, any more, but part of his job, was to vet me, before putting me forward. They trusted him, and paid him well. I was working for GE, before I interviewed, and had a fairly substantial amount of background, in hardware. That was important to them (it was a hardware company).

I guess that I said the right things, and they gave me a chance. I appreciated it, and worked hard to reward their faith.

I know that my attitude is considered "quaint," in today's cutthroat tech world, but I always legitimately believed in personal Integrity, Honesty, and Loyalty. These qualities actually meant something to this company. I am quite aware that they elicit scorn, from today's tech bros, but they worked for me.

> “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.”

― Hunter S. Thompson
by bayindirh | 2025-10-21 22:48:47+00:00
A long running Linux system uses 100% of its RAM. Every byte unused for applications will be used as a disk cache, given you read more data than your total RAM amount.

This cache is evictable, but it'll be there eventually.

Linux used to don't touch unused pages in the RAM in the older days if your RAM was not under pressure, but now it swaps out pages unused for a long time. This allows more cache space in RAM.

> how does caching to swap help?

I think I failed to convey what I tried to say. Let me retry:

Kernel doesn't cache to SSD. It swaps out unused (not accessed) but unevictable pages to SWAP, assuming that these pages will stay stale for a very long time, allowing more RAM to be used as cache.

When I look to my desktop system, in 12 days, Kernel moved 2592MB of my RAM to SWAP despite having ~20GB of free space. ~15GB of this free space is used as disk cache.

So, to have 2.5GB more disk cache, Kernel moved 2592 MB of non-accessed pages to SWAP.
by nothrabannosir | 2025-10-21 22:48:54+00:00
> This process has been affecting most of the world's workers for the past several centuries.

It has also been responsible for predicting revolutions which never failed to materialize. 3D printing would make some kind of manufacturing obsolete, computers would make about half the world's jobs obsolete, etc etc.

Hand coding can be the knitting to the loom, or it can be industrialized plastic injection molding to 3D printing. How do you know? That distinction is not a detail--it's the whole point.

It's survivorship bias to only look at horses, cars, calculators, and whatever other real job market shifting technologies occurred in the past and assume that's how it always happens. You have to include all predictions which never panned out.

As human beings we just tend no to do that.

[EDIT: this being Pedantry News let me get ahead of an inevitable reply: 3D printing is used industrially, and it does have tremendous value. It enabled new ways of working, it grew the economy, and in some cases yes it even replaced processes which used to depend on injection molding. But by and large, the original predictions of "out with the old, in with the new" did not pan out. It was not the automobile to the horse and buggy. It was mostly additive, complementary, and turned out to have different use cases. That's the distinction.]
by pseudosavant | 2025-10-21 22:49:21+00:00
When my dogs go outside at night, I turn on 4 lights with "Alexa, turn on the dogs lights." I'd have to go to my kitchen and garage to do that otherwise, and I certainly wouldn't have those sets of lights wired up in a circuit otherwise control in that arrangement.

The switches I buy, do all of the dumb stuff, plus more - and the "plus more" parts can be quite useful.
by muxl | 2025-10-21 22:49:25+00:00
It is truly risk free. You always buy the call using the customer's money but you only give them the call if every part of the parlay is correct. Assuming they charge a commission in addition to the asset price to cover transaction processing they shouldn't lose money

Edit: I don't really know how pricing these things usually works but I could see taking some risk on to price these attractively
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-10-21 22:50:51+00:00
> I assume most organizations, both small and large, just host on whatever provider they know or that costs them the least

I don't think there is a "most" organizations. Either they're looking for big cloud or they're not, and least-cost is usually the last consideration when looking at any cloud, because you're trying to pay a premium to get particular advantages.

The realistic antidote? Move to a less-shitty region. Or architect your systems to be failure-resilient.

(Most people seem to think the entire region was offline? That's wrong. It was just particular services which wouldn't process control plane requests, and then a failure cascade caused more problems. But things that were already started running before, stayed running. A region is multiple datacenters. Even AZs are often multiple datacenters. It's virtually impossible for a whole region to stop working.)
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-10-21 22:51:53+00:00
The OS uses almost all the ram in your system (it just doesn't tell you because then users complain that their OS is too ram heavy). The primary thing it uses it for is caching as much of your storage system as possible. (e.g. all of the filesystem metadata and most of the files anyone on the system has touched recently). As such, if you have RAM that hasn't been touched recently, the OS can page it out and make the rest of the system faster.
by throwawayq3423 | 2025-10-21 22:52:41+00:00
> What evidence do you have

The special counsel publicly said he had enough evidence to convince a jury that a premeditated, coordinated attempt to coup the U.S. government had occurred.

> partisan-appointed lawyer

There isn't an inch of proof that Biden interfered with either the DOJ or the special counsel. You assume that because Trump is doing this, Biden must have as well. This is the mentality of Trump himself, he thinks about how to commit crimes and get away with it so he assumes that's how everyone else behaves too. You can't actually imagine a world where people have principles and don't always act with self-interest.

It goes back to the first word and the first response I made to you, cynical. Not a word you're saying is accurate, but you don't care. Because you're just assuming the other side would lie the same way you do, if pressed.

> There is no evidence trump intended a violent insurrection

that's the thing about being responsible for violent events at a certain point your intention does not remove your culpability. Whether or not Trump meant to use his supporters to attack the Capitol is irrelevant. It happened. Also, when the riot turned violent, Trump had several hours to stop it. He chose to watch it all on television at the White House instead.

Guilty as sin.

> "Your side" literally shot at Trump

The shooter in question was a registered Republican.

> And at the end of the day..

So I prove you wrong, you move on like it never happened, rinse, repeat. This is a boring game. I don't feel like playing.
by kakacik | 2025-10-21 22:52:53+00:00
Star trek-ish idea of massive cooperation between species is desperately naive though. Its secondary-school level of hand-holding and singing kumbayah around fire, and yet it still couldn't evade massive wars that sometimes wiped out entire civilizations.

Lockstep evolution is extremely improbable. Even 1000 years head start is massive, a more realistic one would be tens of millions of years or more.

The space is finite, so is Milky way. Eventually, even if its far in the future, species will compete for resources and energy. The smarter ones realize that problems are easier solved as soon as possible, and we have dark forest stuff. Mankind is slowly also inching in that realization. We should work hard on improving ourselves massively and spreading out before caring whats out there. I simply can't imagine a realistic scenario where there won't be some immediate attack, ie speeding up some very dark asteroid into relativistic speeds, aimed at Earth.

Also, why should xenophoby, racism and similar perks be available only to humanity. Even we can see how deeply flawed creatures we are.
by Izkata | 2025-10-21 22:52:55+00:00
I don't know how consistent this is across shells, but at least in bash putting a space before the command keeps it out of the history:

$ ONE=1 $ TWO=2 $ echo $ONE $TWO 1 2 $ history | tail -n 4 2002 clear 2003 ONE=1 2004 echo $ONE $TWO 2005 history | tail -n 4
by verteu | 2025-10-21 22:53:12+00:00
Does anyone know why options broker fees are so high? A typical cost is ~$0.25/contract for a $1.00 SPY 0DTE, eg: https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/pricing/commissions-op...

Does this reflect brokers' cost of technology (many tickers to keep track of)? Regulatory fees? Lack of competition?

edit: Perhaps it's largely profit. Seems https://public.com/invest/options-trading is trying to undercut on price.
by yodsanklai | 2025-10-21 22:53:23+00:00
> All while the author—who clearly only skimmed their “own” code—is taking no responsibility, going “whoopsie, Claude wrote that. Silly AI, ha-ha.”

After you made your colleagues upset submitting crappy code for review, you start to pay attention.

> LLM-written ones are almost entirely additive,

Unless you noticed that code has to be removed, and you instruct the LLM to do so.

I don't think LLMs really change the dynamics here. "Good programmers" will still submit good code, easy for their colleagues to review, whether it was written with the help of an LLM or not.
by sheepscreek | 2025-10-21 22:53:31+00:00
There was a phase when ChatGPT would respond to everything I said, even in the same request with something like “..here’s the thing that you asked for, of course, without the fluff.” Or blah blah blah “straight to the point.” Or some such thinly veiled euphemisms. No matter how many times I told it not to talk like that, it didn’t work until I found that “core memory”.
by FreakLegion | 2025-10-21 22:54:41+00:00
Silicon Valley in particular uses Google Workspace at a much higher rate than the rest of the world. If you count every one- or two-person startup as a company, Google probably does have a solid majority. If you count mailboxes, Microsoft still easily wins.

Note that MX records are misleading here. They have no false positives, but are full of false negatives --- daisy-chaining MTAs is common, and since Microsoft owns the mailbox, it's invariably last in the chain. So the MX record will show something like Proofpoint (pphosted) or Mimecast or an internal company host, when really it's Microsoft in the end.
by harimau777 | 2025-10-21 22:54:50+00:00
I don't think that people are afraid that he will become a dictator because of his popular support so much as because no one is standing up to his abuse of power.

There's also the fact that MAGA is putting their thumb more and more on the election scales. I'm already not sure I think the next election will be fair considering how much MAGA has cheated already.
by Waterluvian | 2025-10-21 22:54:54+00:00
It’s just as absurd today as it was in the 60s. It’s an artificial challenge that focuses attention, with the goal of exercising government, industries, academics, etc. and maybe learn and invent a few things along the way. Yes, yes, Cold War and all those theories. But it had and can again have this greater effect.

It’s kind of like a FIRST Robotics Challenge for nations. The specific goal really doesn’t matter and can just as well be different than the moon. That’s not the interesting part.
by tw04 | 2025-10-21 22:55:17+00:00
>Based on SLS and the comments here, it seems extremely unlikely the US is still dominant.

Literally every other nation is trying to catch up to Space-X and is nowhere close. An American company, based in American, primarily staffed by American engineers.

I don't know by what measure you'd say that the US isn's still far, far ahead but I don't know of any other country currently re-using rockets dozens of times. What did I miss?
by bonoboTP | 2025-10-21 22:55:24+00:00
No I'm saying that people adapt, society adapts. Most people today don't shit themselves in the cinema thinking that the monster will appear among them, they understand that characters in TV series are not real and only the mentally ill will berate the actor in the street for yesterday's episode.

It will take some time but it's in fact quite easy to explain it to older relatives if you make a few custom examples.

The bigger point is that realism is a red herring. You can spread propaganda with hand drawn caricatures just as well or even better. It's a panic over nothing. The real lever of control is what news to report on and how to frame it, what quotes to use, which experts to ask and which ones not to. The bottleneck never was at HD realism.
by wallstop | 2025-10-21 22:56:00+00:00
Edit:

wallstop@fridge:~$ free -m total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 15838 9627 3939 26 2637 6210 Swap: 4095 0 4095 wallstop@fridge:~$ uptime 00:43:54 up 37 days, 23:24, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
by Forgeties79 | 2025-10-21 22:56:54+00:00
>Tesla

His rapidly deteriorating market share in Europe and basically anything cybertruck related

>SpaceX

The contract they had that just reopened for bidding

>neuralink

Haven’t they stopped human trials because they were running into serious issues? I feel like I read something about that but I can’t recall the exact nature of the issue.

>starlink

Pretty sure the Canadian government abandoned their big contract with starlink. A cursory Google search shows that “several governments and organizations have paused or canceled their contracts.” AI summary so should probably be investigated more in depth but I imagine it’s largely accurate.

I see that his hyperloop company didn’t make the list, which went belly up just a year or two ago.

Robotaxi was shut down in Phoenix after all sorts of safety issues arose.

Several major projects have stalled or been shut down over the last few years.
by aeblyve | 2025-10-21 22:57:00+00:00
> Hand coding can be the knitting to the loom, or it can be industrialized plastic injection molding to 3D printing. How do you know? That distinction is not a detail--it's the whole point.

One could have made a reasonable remark in the past about how injection molding is dramatically faster than 3D printing (it applies material everywhere, all at once), scales better for large parts, et cetera. This isn't really true for what I'm calling hand-coding.

Obviously nothing about the future can be known for certain... but there are obvious trends that need not stop at software engineering.
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-10-21 22:57:37+00:00
also how far you can get with a single machine has changed massively in the past 15 years. 15 years ago a (really beefy) single machine meant 8 cores with 256GB ram and a couple TB of storage. Now a single machine can be 256 cores on 8TB of ram and a PB of storage.
by quickthrowman | 2025-10-21 22:57:59+00:00
This is awesome, great way to keep a fridge going! Temp sensor to ESP32, ESP32 monitors set point and calls for cool, output from ESP32 energizes relay coil which turns on the compressor?

> A new one would be more efficient, but then I woudln't be able to log when I opened the fridge anymore (only with something battery powered and long transmit intervals).

Also, how did you do this? Wiring to the door switch itself or a current switch around the fridge light conductor?
by dmvdoug | 2025-10-21 22:58:01+00:00
Yes, this. And the reason why congressional appropriations plummeted was that no one saw any need to maintain such high expenditures. There hasn’t been an actually coherent vision of what NASA is supposed to be working towards since the Apollo Program. Everything after that is lurching from one project to another, justifying it based on short-term possibility rather than committing to a longer-term goal the agency is supposed to be achieving. Just look at Shuttle. It accomplished some nice things, but it was always a dead end. Everybody in NASA knew it. ISS: accomplished some nice things, dead end. Sure, you can talk about how these were steps along the way to learning about long-term human habitation in space, but we’ve never had a coherent vision for that that everyone is aligned with. What they really were: make-work projects that were at least short-term justifiable, executed in order to preserve NASA’s capacity to do anything at all.
by WalterBright | 2025-10-21 22:58:07+00:00
Charles Lindbergh knew his chances of dying crossing the Atlantic were pretty high. After all, previous attempts resulted in many deaths.

Armstrong's personal estimate of his odds getting back alive were about 50%.

Apollo 13 came within a hair of killing its crew.

I fly across the North Atlantic at 30,000 feet, death in seconds if the hull is breached, in a comfortable chair, watching a movie and sipping a drink. Isn't that incredible? I still find it amazing.

But I know that was achieved through the loss of many, many lives.
by mediaman | 2025-10-21 22:58:07+00:00
Bread is a great example! You can buy a loaf for $3-4. It is not a 50x markup. Like growing your own veggies, baking bread is for fun, not for economics.

But the cloud is different. None of the financial scale benefits are passed on to you. You save serious money running it in-house. The arguments around scale have no validity for the vast, vast majority of use cases.

Vercel isn't selling bread: they're selling a fancy steak dinner, and yes, you can make steak at home for much less, and if you eat fancy steak dinners at fancy restaurants every night you're going to go broke.

So the key is to understand whether your vendors are selling you bread, or a fancy steak dinner, and to not make the mistake of getting the two confused.
by layoric | 2025-10-21 22:58:16+00:00
> $50 for a dyno with 1 GB of ram in 2025 is robbery

AWS isn't much better honestly.. $50/month gets you an m7a.medium which is 1 vCPU (not core) and 4GB of RAM. Yes that's more memory but any wonder why AWS is making money hand-over-fist..
by vlovich123 | 2025-10-21 22:58:28+00:00
There’s secondary costs though - because you might run on any thread you have to sprinkle atomics and/or mutexes all over the place (in Rust parlance the tasks spawned must be Send) which have all sorts of implicit performance costs that stack up even if you never transfer the task.

In other words, you could probably easily do 10m op/s per core on a thread per core design but struggle to get 1m op/s on a work stealing design. And the work stealing will be total throughput for the machine whereas the 10m op/s design will generally continue scaling with the number of CPUs.
by leptons | 2025-10-21 22:59:19+00:00
The C64 doesn't control the disk drive directly, the 1541has its own CPU, about as powerful as the C64.

> A 4800 baud modem would be right out.

Not with a "Warp Speed" cartridge. It does write speeds on a stock C64/1541 up to 2900 Bytes per second. I'm pretty sure reading serial data faster than 2400bps is easily doable too.

https://www.obliterator918.com/the-warp-speed-cartridge-from...
by awesome_dude | 2025-10-21 22:59:23+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email

In 1971 Ray Tomlinson sent the first mail message between two computers on the ARPANET, introducing the now-familiar address syntax with the '@' symbol designating the user's system address.[2][3][4][5] Over a series of RFCs, conventions were refined for sending mail messages over the File Transfer Protocol. Several other email networks developed in the 1970s and expanded subsequently.

Proprietary electronic mail systems began to emerge in the 1970s and early 1980s. IBM developed a primitive in-house solution for office automation over the period 1970–1972, and replaced it with OFS (Office System), providing mail transfer between individuals, in 1974.