MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Nextgrid | 2025-10-20 10:24:17+00:00
The point of AWS is to promise you the nines and make you feel good about it. Your typical "growth & engagement" startup CEO can feel good and make his own customers feel good about how his startup will survive a nuclear war.

Delivery of those nines is not a priority. Not for the cloud provider - because they can just lie their way out of it by not updating their status page - and even when they don't, they merely have to forego some of their insane profit margin for a couple hours in compensation. No provider will actually put their ass on the line and offer you anything beyond their own profit margin.

This is not an issue for most cloud clients either because they keep putting up with it (lying on the status page wouldn't be a thing if clients cared) - the unspoken truth is that nobody cares that your "growth & engagement" thing is down for an hour or so, so nobody makes anything more than a ceremonial stink about it (chances are, the thing goes down/misbehaves regularly anyway every time the new JS vibecoder or "AI employee" deploys something, regardless of cloud reliability).

Things where nines actually matter will generally invest in self-managed disaster recovery plans that are regularly tested. This also means it will generally be built differently and far away from your typical "cloud native" dumpster fire. Depending on how many nines you actually need (aka what's the cost of not meeting that target - which directly controls how much budget you have to ensure you always meet it), you might be building something closer to aircraft avionics with the same development practices, testing and rigor.
by hvb2 | 2025-10-20 10:25:40+00:00
First, not all outages are created equal, so you cannot compare them like that.

I believe the 2021 one was especially horrific because of it affecting their dns service (route53) and the outage made writes to that service impossible. This made fail overs not work etcetera so their prescribed multi region setups didn't work.

But in the end, some things will have to synchronizes their writes somewhere, right? So for dns I could see how that ends up in a single region.

AWS is bound by the same rules as everyone else in the end... The only thing they have going for them that they have a lot of money to make certain services resilient, but I'm not aware of a single system that's resilient to everything.
by jychang | 2025-10-20 10:25:50+00:00
You can try running LLMs on your own computer!

They have extremely distinct sounds coming from the GPUs. You can hear the difference between GPT-OSS-20b and Qwen3-30b pretty easily just based on the sounds that the gpu is making.

The sound is being produced by the VRMs and power supply to the GPU being switched on and off hundreds of times per second. Each token being produced consumes power, and each attention and MLP layer consumes a different amount of power. No other GPU stress test consumes power in the same way, so you rarely hear that sound otherwise.
by anakaine | 2025-10-20 10:28:23+00:00
All good points, except perhaps the cost of the move. With VMWare licences anecdotallty increasing ~8x, the cost of moving could well be recovered quite quickly. Organisations tend to think and react strategically, and this will mean 3-5 year (or more) financial projections for major projects. If a $1m VMWare annual bill is now $8m, over 5 years thats $5m vs $40m. A change to a $1m annually cluster isn't going to cost you $35m, so you should definitely look at changing to minimise your expenses, assuming you get the support etc that you need elsewhere.
by rhetocj23 | 2025-10-20 10:30:26+00:00
I’m convinced most people are not so good at transmitting what they know and they don’t get into the depths of what they are explaining. And use jargon/make assumptions that throw students off so they end up getting lost and inevitably quit.

The harsh reality is - we don’t need a zillion teachers. What we need is a high quality production team, including great teachers, who can produce high quality content that all can consume. A teachers role should shift from direct transmission to helping understanding the content.
by Nextgrid | 2025-10-20 10:30:30+00:00
There's nothing particularly wrong with AWS, other than the pricing premium.

The key is that you need to understand no provider will actually put their ass on the line and compensate you for anything beyond their own profit margin, and plan accordingly.

For most companies, doing nothing is absolutely fine, they just need to plan for and accept the occasional downtime. Every company CEO wants to feel like their thing is mission-critical but the truth is that despite everything being down the whole thing will be forgotten in a week.

For those that actually do need guaranteed uptime, they need to build it themselves using a mixture of providers and test it regularly. They should be responsible for it themselves, because the providers will not. The stuff that is actually mission-critical already does that, which is why it didn't go down.
by chanux | 2025-10-20 10:30:35+00:00
I get you. I am with you. But isn't money/resources always a constraint to have a solid backup solution?

I guess the reason why people are not doing it is because it hasn't been demonstrated it's worth it, yet!

I've got to admit though, whenever I hear about having a backup plan I think having apples to apples copy elsewhere which is probably not wise/viable anyway. Perhaps having just enough to reach out to the service users/customers suffice.

Also I must add I am heavily influenced by a comment by Adrian Cockroft on why going multi cloud isn't worth it. He worked for AWS (at the time at least) so I should have probably reached to the salt dispenser.
by imiric | 2025-10-20 10:30:38+00:00
This looks nice, thanks for sharing.

Though IMO the main issues with APT/dpkg are not related to their UI. It is their decades-old internals, and very limited support for transactional/atomic upgrades and rollbacks. Upgrading an APT system is the same launch-and-pray operation as on most Linux systems. I see that oma has an `undo` command, which is great, but I wonder how reliable that is in practice.

I think that every modern OS should support safe upgrades and rollbacks. Nix and Guix are obviously built from the ground up with this in mind, but they both leave a lot to be desired as far as UX goes. Nix more so than Guix. It is these package managers that would benefit the most from a good UI/UX polish.

So for a new OS/distro, I would start with a package manager with solid fundamentals, and work on refining their UI/UX, rather than do the same for one with fundamental issues such as APT.

BTW, I was interested in learning more about AOSC, but the main site is in Chinese with no English translation, so I guess it's not meant for global use.
by 0x002A | 2025-10-20 10:31:01+00:00
As Amazon moves from day-1 company as it claimed once, to be the sales company like Oracle focusing on raking money, expect more outages to come, and longer to be resolved.

Amazon is burning and driving away the technical talent and knowledge knowing the vendor lock-in will keep bringing the sweet money. You will see more sales people hoovering around your c-suites and executives, while you will face even worse technical support, that seem not knowing what they are talking about, yet alone to fix the support issue you expect to be fixed easily.

Mark my words, and if you are putting your eggs in one basket, that basket is now too complex and too interdependent, and the people who built and knew those intricacies are driven away with RTOs, move to hubs. Eventually those services; all others (and also aws services themselves) heavily dependent on, might be more fragile than the public knows.
by mnky9800n | 2025-10-20 10:33:35+00:00
they also are going to make porn. it really makes you think that they are just treating finding revenue streams as a monte carlo problem.

meanwhile i find that perplexity as a research agent is fantastic, and claude code as a machine learning engineer is also fantastic. Both companies seem to have put a lot of energy into building specific kinds of tools instead of everything kind of tools.

Time will tell what happens.
by hvb2 | 2025-10-20 10:33:59+00:00
Sure, but on a typical outage how likely is it that you'll have that all up and running before the outage is resolved?

And secondly, how often do you create that backup and are you willing to lose the writes since the last backup?

That backup is absolutely something people should have, but I doubt those are ever used to bring a service back up. That would be a monumental failure of your hosting provider (colo/cloud/whatever)
by BrentOzar | 2025-10-20 10:34:03+00:00
> If you are on AWS and AWS goes down, that's covered in the news as a bunch of billion dollar companies were also down. Customer probably gives you a pass.

Exactly - I've had clients say, "We'll pay for hot standbys in the same region, but not in another region. If an entire AWS region goes down, it'll be in the news, and our customers will understand, because we won't be their only service provider that goes down, and our clients might even be down themselves."
by NicuCalcea | 2025-10-20 10:34:33+00:00
> But I don't think it's reasonable to defend them as if these actions aren't egregious

I'm not defending the Online Safety Act, I think it's a horrible and stupid law. On the other hand, I will defend GDPR, which uses a similar legal framework of enforcement. My argument is that the UK is within its rights to implement and enforce laws as they see fit, not that the laws are good.
by davedx | 2025-10-20 10:35:48+00:00
> I can almost guarantee that whatever plans you have won’t get you fully operational faster than just waiting for AWS to fix it.

Absurd claim.

Multi-region and multi-cloud are strategies that have existed almost as long as AWS. If your company is in anything finance-adjacent or critical infrastructure then you need to be able to cope with a single region of AWS failing.
by ignaciovdk | 2025-10-20 10:35:58+00:00
Two weeks ago, we open-sourced Arc Core: https://github.com/Basekick-Labs/arc

Today, the results are in, Arc is now the fastest time-series database on ClickBench, outperforming QuestDB and TimescaleDB across nearly every hardware configuration. It also ranks among the top 5 fastest systems overall, alongside DuckDB, ClickHouse, and Salesforce Hyper.

Arc ingests 2.42 million records per second, tops the Cold Run charts for all system sizes, and does it all in roughly 5,500 lines of code.

It’s built on DuckDB for SQL, MessagePack for ingestion, Parquet + Arrow for columnar storage, and a lock-free multi-threaded core for compaction and WAL.

Benchmarks aren’t everything—I agree—but performance matters. It’s what lets smaller infrastructure handle serious workloads without ballooning costs.

This enables massive IoT ingestion, real-time logistics tracking, aerospace telemetry, observability at scale, and market data analytics—all without a huge footprint.

13 days since launch: 252 GitHub stars, 100+ community conversations shaping the roadmap.

Full technical breakdown and benchmarks: https://basekick.net/blog/arc-fastest-timeseries-database-cl...

Happy to answer questions about the architecture, design decisions, or benchmarking methodology.
by ajxs | 2025-10-20 10:36:15+00:00
Thank you! I really appreciate your support!

Lately I've been working on the Casio CZ101. Hopefully in the next few weeks I'll publish a partially annotated disassembled firmware on my Github, along with article too talking about its interesting NEC μPD7810G CPU. Mostly because there's almost no other information about the CPU available online, despite featuring in some prominent 80s synths.

Following Pajen's awesome lead, I poked around inside the Korg Volcas, but I didn't accomplish enough to write about it. A 16KiB EPROM full of hand-crafted 8-bit assembly is a totally different animal to 256KiB of compiler optimised ARM! One modern synth whose firmware I loaded up in Ghidra is the Prophet X: After Espen Kraft's video complaining about it, I thought I'd have a peek inside it for myself. Sequential published the firmware without stripping out the debug symbols, so if anyone else is interested there's a real possibility of progress!
by tsimionescu | 2025-10-20 10:37:32+00:00
Only if the material is way over provisioned. In general, the higher the intrinsic structural load is on a material, the easier it will be to destroy. So, to defend from these attacks, you not only need a cable that can support its own weight, plus the weight of the desired payload, plus some small-is extra tolerance. Instead, you probably need a cable that can support, say, twice its own weight plus four-five times the payload. Not to mention, now you don't only need excellent strength along the cable, but also across from it, and extreme heat resistance too (all of the strength is irrelevant if it's enough to coat some part of the cable in thermite and ignite it)
by yourapostasy | 2025-10-20 10:38:02+00:00
Some organizations’ leadership takes one look at the cost of redundancy and backs away. Paying for redundant resources most organizations can stomach. The network traffic charges are what push many over the edge of “do not buy”.

The cost of re-designing and re-implementing applications to synchronize data shipping to remote regions and only spinning up remote region resources as needed is even larger for these organizations.

And this is how we end up with these massive cloud footprints not much different than running fleets of VM’s. Just about the most expensive way to use the cloud hyperscalers.

Most non-tech industry organizations cannot face the brutal reality that properly, really leveraging hyperscalers involves a period of time often counted in decades for Fortune-scale footprints where they’re spending 3-5 times on selected areas more than peers doing those areas in the old ways to migrate to mostly spot instance-resident, scale-to-zero elastic, containerized services with excellent developer and operational troubleshooting ergonomics.
by kbumsik | 2025-10-20 10:39:02+00:00
> realistic written documents?

Just get a DEF 14A (Annual meeting) filing of a company from SEC EDGAR.

I have seen so many mistakes when looking at the result closely.

Here is a DEF 14A filing from Salseforce. You can print it to a PDF and then try converting.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1108524/000110852425...
by ajxs | 2025-10-20 10:39:10+00:00
These guys do amazing work! I wish Korg hadn't beat them to the MicroKorg VST though. I've used the MicroKorg extensively in music over the years, and would have loved an accurate VST. Unfortunately the filter in Korg's VST doesn't quite match the original, and I can't recreate some of my patches. For understandable reasons these guys aren't going to step on Korg's toes and compete with an actual commercial product.
by xodice | 2025-10-20 10:39:14+00:00
If AWS fully decentralized its control planes, they’d essentially be duplicating the cost structure of running multiple independent clouds and I understand that is why they don't however as long as AWS is reliant upon us-east-1 to function, they have not achieved what they claim to me. A single point of failure for IAM? Nah, no thanks.

Every AWS “global” service be it IAM, STS, CloudFormation, CloudFront, Route 53, Organizations, they all have deep ties to control systems originally built only in us-east-1/n. va.

That's poor design, after all these years. They've had time to fix this.

Until AWS fully decouples the control plane from us-east-1, the entire platform has a global dependency. Even if your data plane is fine, you still rely on IAM and STS for authentication and maybe Route 53 for DNS or failover CloudFormation or ECS for orchestration...

If any of those choke because us-east-1’s internal control systems are degraded, you’re fucked. That’s not true regional independence.
by sdfgsdhjsdffw | 2025-10-20 10:39:16+00:00
While I agree with your heuristic, it's not a universal truth. It doesn't apply in every single instance. When I see a book which is mostly a chronological list of references to events in the philosophy of education (as is the first book on the list) I don't dismiss it outright.

Also let me add that when I agree that "doing your own research" is likely to have bad results, that reason for that is that most people are stupid, not that thinking critically is bad.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-10-20 10:39:17+00:00
In general, I found starting with a Erlang/Elixir framework tutorial helps. Phoenix includes a generic wrapper on top of PostgreSQL (Ecto provides data mapping and language integrated query), and hit a surprising number of users per host with trivial code (common game engine back-end.)

https://www.phoenixframework.org/

https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Phoenix-Productive-Reliab...

If you don't run away from a framework intro, then dive into the details of the OTP:

https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Elixir-Systems-OTP-Self-hea...

https://www.amazon.com/Elixir-Action-Third-Sa%C5%A1a-Juric/d...

The only foot-gun I would initially avoid, is a fussy fault-tolerant multi-host cluster deployment. Check out RabbitMQ package maintainers, as those guys certainly offer a fantastic resource for students ( https://www.rabbitmq.com/docs/which-erlang .)

Best of luck =3
by mlrtime | 2025-10-20 10:39:33+00:00
We all read it.. AWS not coming back up is your point on nat having a backup plan?

You might as well say the entire NY + DC metro losses power and "never comes back up" What is the plan around that? The person replying is correct, most companies do not have a actionable plan for AWS never coming back up.

I worked at a medium-large company and was responsible for reviewing the infrastructure BCP plan. It stated that AWS going down was a risk, and if it happens we wait for it to come back up. (In a lot more words than that).
by indentit | 2025-10-20 10:41:00+00:00
Having to pipe to a pager - to follow the unix philosophy - means: - extra typing each time - the pager receives static output. There is no interactivity... Sure, most pagers can search. But there is no way to have a table with adjustable columns, or toggle word wrap or line numbers etc.

I feel that for a tool like bat, it is better to have it built-in and not follow the composable philosophy because it is just so much more convenient. Of course the minus integration in bat is fairly basic at the moment, I guess supporting different code paths for static pagers vs interactive would increase maintenance burden quite a lot...
by wazdra | 2025-10-20 10:41:44+00:00
I think there's a large cultural bias at play here. Different nations have different relationships to religion. As a french person, the decision to mark religious content as NSFW seems totally normal to me, but I also know that french people are (often too) fierce atheists.

I also understand things are different in many places, but I think the argument is too heated right now, maybe everyone needs to take a step back and think in a more "international" way?

Someone in the linked thread suggested a new tag altogether for religious content, that might be a sound decision.
by chao- | 2025-10-20 10:41:59+00:00
Sorry for the late reply. Some others have responded and I mostly agree, but I will add where I can.

>is it ok to use Procs for example for extraction of block methods for cleanliness in refactors?

As others have said, use Lambdas via `->() { do_thing }` over Procs if you want to pass them around. They are the "true" way to use first-class functions.

Also, if you want to pass methods around, you can do so, just be aware that they carry everything you might expect with them: they are called with the receiver still being the object they came from. Callbacks are uncommon in Ruby, but I've seen a few instances of passing methods of the current object into some other as a callback, e.g.

some_interactor.do_complex_thing( order_id: 123, on_success: method(:succeeded), on_failure: method(:failed), )

Then #do_complex_thing can use `on_success.call` and `on_failure.call`, which is nice when you want to stub these in unit tests without resorting to stubbing/mocking. You can just pass lambdas (first-class functions) as the value for :on_success and :on_failure kwargs in tests.

>Also, is there any particular Rails convention to place collections of useful procs?

No convention for a "place" for these. I generally dislike how Rails got people into using directory names for the "kind" of a module/class instead of actually mirroring the architecture. This is kind of why.

If what you really desire is a big bag of pure functions in the global scope, you should still at least put them inside of a namespace (a Ruby module). For example, if you wanted a big bag of type coercions, you might put them into a module:

module CommonCoercions class << self def currency ->(value) { do_things } end def coordinates ->(value) { do_things } end end end

However, this isn't necessarily very efficient. Each call to CommonCoercions.currency is going to instantiate a new Lambda instance! You could alleviate this by caching the value in a singleton-scope instance variable:

module CommonCoercions class << self def currency @currency ||= ->(value) { do_things } end def coordinates @coordinates ||= ->(value) { do_things } end end end

Even then, this isn't really common in Ruby. You might as well just have these be singleton methods outright (aka "class methods"):

module CommonCoercions class << self def currency(value) do_things end def coordinates(value) do_things end end end

If you really want to pass them around as first-class functions, you can grab a reference to that function like so:

CommonCoercions.method(:currency)

And then use them via `.call()` the same as any other lambda if you want to pass them around.

However, if you want to use them only locally within a particular class, in a Rails project you are better off just calling them directly on the module, or even delegating so that the method is available in the class as though it were a local instance method:

module CommonCoercions def self.coerce_currency(value) do_things end end class SomeAction delegate :coerce_currency, to: CommonCoercions def some_method(params) coerce_currency(params.fetch(:amount)) end end
by bluecalm | 2025-10-20 10:42:44+00:00
What's shocking here is that it costs several hundred dollars per year to have a big country enforcing a monopoly for you. I mean at least taking % of the revenue would make sense (and preferably for others to buy out underutilized patents).

As it is it's just corporate welfare - enforcing lucrative market monopoly for an equivalent of a steak dinner for two.
by myself248 | 2025-10-20 10:42:48+00:00
A physical on-air broadcast station, not a web stream? That likely violates a license; they're required to perform station identification on a regular basis.

Of course if they had on-site staff it wouldn't be an issue (worst case, just walk down to the transmitter hut and use the transmitter's aux input, which is there specifically for backup operations like this), but consolidation and enshittification of broadcast media mean there's probably nobody physically present.
by mlrtime | 2025-10-20 10:43:11+00:00
>Yes it does happen but very rarely to the tune of a few hours every 5-10 years.

It is rare, but it happens at LEAST 2-3x a year. AWS us-east-1 has a major incident affecting multiple services (that affect most downstream aws services) multiple times a year. Usually never the same root cause.

Not very many people realize that there are some services that still run only in us-east-1.
by bartvk | 2025-10-20 10:44:21+00:00
I don't like how they phrased it. From the Verge:

“Perplexity is down right now,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said on X. “The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.”

What he should have said, IMHO, is "The root cause is that Perplexity fully depends on AWS."

I wonder if they're actually working on resolving that, or that they're just waiting for AWS to come back up.