MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by EasyMark | 2025-10-22 02:23:02+00:00
One of the few things I was happy with Texas legislation this year was moving all to paper ballots. They still use the "bubble counter" machinery though and not human eyeballs. But it's not like it still relies on honest people and a government that is neutral when it comes to counting votes. That's starting to look like it is less and less possible with the current regime's banana republic chaos.
by breppp | 2025-10-22 02:23:28+00:00
The hard truth is that LLMs will fully replace wikipedia.

Let's put aside wikipedia being rotten with bureaucracy and obsession-driven bias, which is similar to stackoverflow preexisting flows before LLMs streamrolled.

Fact is, wikipedia is a human driven summarization engine of secondary sources, hopefully in a way that echos the sources consensus.

This is exactly what LLMs are best for, summarizing huge amount of text, and training can easily focus on high quality books and thus exceed wikipedia in quality.

It's enough to read an AI summary where the first line talks about the subject in hand, compared to wikipedia where the first line is the product of some petty argument about a political disagreement
by makeitdouble | 2025-10-22 02:23:34+00:00
I'd say you can ELI5 most technical systems, it's a matter of finding the appropriate abstractions and spending enough time (for instance, just explaining the paper ballot system, we're already writing a full page or more)

It reminds me of a youtube channel explaining the Visa/Mastercard duopoly using monkeys and bananas. It doesn't perfectly fit, but works surprisingly well for such a subject.
by kemayo | 2025-10-22 02:25:52+00:00
You can get a general sense of it from the org chart here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation/Organiz...

A lot of it is engineers who work on improving the software that runs Wikipedia, and keeping the site running, which you can see happening at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org -- outside of security issues, all the dev work is done in the open. There's constant ongoing work on making Wikipedia and all the related projects work better.

There's also people who do the fundraising, community management, legal defense, etc. Then there's general HR infrastructure around employing hundreds of people.

Basically, that "Hosting was 3.4%. Facilities was 1.4%." point gets brought up, and neglects to mention that you then need to pay for a bunch of people to manage those servers and facilities.

(Disclaimer: I'm an employee of the WMF. I'm just an engineer, so I'm not speaking authoritatively about financial details.)
by SteveLauC | 2025-10-22 02:26:44+00:00
> a task can yield, which, conceptually, creates a new piece of work that gets shoved onto the work queues (which is "resume that task"). You might not think of it as "this task is suspended and will be resumed later" as much as *"this piece of work is done and has spawned a new piece of work."*

Never thought of it that way, but it’s indeed true — a new task does get enqueued in that case. Thanks for the insight!
by mmaunder | 2025-10-22 02:27:28+00:00
Jeez top post on HN and there's a full overlay ad to "download a mac extension". This deserves a summary post to save others the click. Here's the "what every engineer should know" without the spam:

PoE (Power over Ethernet) sends both DC power and data through the same twisted-pair Ethernet cable, allowing devices like IP cameras, wireless access points, and VoIP phones to run without separate power lines. The power is delivered by Power Sourcing Equipment (PSE) — either an endspan (built-in PoE switch) or a midspan (PoE injector placed between a non-PoE switch and the device). The powered device (PD) negotiates power via detection and classification before voltage is applied, preventing damage to non-PoE gear. IEEE 802.3af (Type 1) provides up to 15.4 W at the source, 802.3at/PoE+ (Type 2) up to 25.5 W delivered, and 802.3bt (Type 3/4) extends that to roughly 60–90 W using all four wire pairs. Engineers need to understand not just wiring, but also cable category limits, pair usage, power losses over distance, and heat dissipation — especially at higher power levels. Modern PoE designs must consider standards compliance, thermal management, and efficiency, as power density rises with new generations of PoE technology.
by Kirby64 | 2025-10-22 02:27:43+00:00
Is this somehow new information? I thought it’s been known for years (decades?) that increasing physical activity also increases daily energy use. The “metabolic adaption” that people discuss is merely a fractional reduction in NEAT expenditure that compensates partially but not completely in caloric expenditure. You’ll always burn more calories by doing exercise vs not, I don’t know why this would be new science.
by _aavaa_ | 2025-10-22 02:30:15+00:00
Sure.

But my accounting was always about the energy that we as humans need to supply. This discussion was originally about how talking about the energy transition in terms of primary energy is inherently misleading.

A heat pump does not magically create the difference between work input and heat output, it pulls it from second source. But that source is free. All we have to provide is the work.

Replacing a gas burner with a heat pump does not require us to replace 1 J of chemical potential energy with 1 J of electricity, instead replace it with 0.33 J of electricity (or even less).
by consumer451 | 2025-10-22 02:31:55+00:00
> we are not all the same.

I beg to differ. Far from claiming "both sides" or some similar malarkey: yet we are all humans, we all have our triggers, we are all easily fooled. This is as close to enlightenment as I will ever get.

If we cannot even admit this commonality, then we will continue to be divided and concurred by certifiable idiots.
by pveierland | 2025-10-22 02:32:42+00:00
Where do I mistake quality for difficulty?

My statement was that the quality of Wikipedia overall is high, and that one of the reasons for that is because they set and enforce standards for contributions.

Certainly many people are put off by the process and will not have time to deal with it, but my belief would be that such cases are more likely on more controversial topics, and less likely for less controversial topics. Inherently, collaborating on difficult topics will be a difficult process, which also means that there are likely no easy answers for how to make this process not discourage anyone.
by altairprime | 2025-10-22 02:33:45+00:00
In the 90s, people were worrying about the efficiency of education workers and the profitability of the Internet backbone companies; which is when US Networks (iirc?) absorbed every local dialup ISO nationwide in order to monopolize.

What’s going to happen next will probably more closely resemble the early 20th century in economic crash, when the population goes through a subprime debt cutoff for the 25% of U.S. households who can’t afford 1-bedroom rent, starving a lot of corporations of the workers and buyers that are propping up “run it until the well is dry” businesses (after their workers’ cars are repossessed and there’s no unprofitable public transit to compensate).

Much of this era’s political exploitation is under the banner “privatization”, which is simply trying to open up more markets that can be harvested until the field is barren, as otherwise they’d have to invest in the ones that have already been destroyed. So look for government-regulated monopolies that cannot be run at a profit — as an example, the postal mail has been a multi-decade quest for this outcome. Privatized sewers and roadway services (planning, paving, painting, signaling) come to mind; imagine how much profit a company could generate by forcing an entire city to toll roads in order to extract the most profit for the rich owners, etc.
by csnover | 2025-10-22 02:33:56+00:00
Yes, I saw that, it would have been really great if the source code had ever been released, instead I had to start from scratch…

My implementation does not require editing SDK headers and the goal was to support multiseg. If I had stopped at 32k single seg it would probably have been working. But I never got quite as far as being able to e.g. test libgcc, so who knows.
by jcgrillo | 2025-10-22 02:33:58+00:00
Apollo was much better value for money. It inspired generations to study and enter STEM fields, it gave us multitudes of technological advances, and it gave the entire world something to marvel at. It gave us the earthrise image, which fueled the environmental movement. What has "AI" inspired? What marvels will the enshittificatement of googling, or the latest deepfake garbage bestow upon us? If "AI" is our moonshot we're all well and truly fucked.
by greycol | 2025-10-22 02:34:09+00:00
It's such a wide field that it's hard to pin down. I agree if your thinking about what a business that isn't just a handful of people needs then we'd be looking at the kind of switch you're thinking of if it has standard office workers. But soon as you start talking about businesses that are manipulating central data (which keep in mind would probably include most primary business, design workers or anyone working with media not just software people) you're talking about a wide gamut of devices that you wouldn't really (at least traditionally) call consumer grade.

Mikrotik website has a good selection of them and if you look at the other hardware types it'll be interesting in getting an idea of weird things you don't see in normal offices.

https://mikrotik.com/products/group/switches

Apart from obviously larger bandwidth options like 28qfsp 100gb (I'm unaware if mikrotik does them but 400gb is normal in some circles) there's things like reverse POE switches, media converter switches, and all sfp+ switches.

Poe++ exists and you can use switches with it to power poe+ switches that will power poe switches. Or they can be used to power laptops or NUCS directly.
by AugusteDupin | 2025-10-22 02:34:26+00:00
A series of rotations – a discrete walk (or continuous path) in the manifold of the rotation group SO(3) or SU(2) – can of course be inverted (starting from the end, find a walk that returns to the beginning) by performing the steps in reverse. Eckmann et alshow that, for almost all walks, there is another way: starting at the end, perform the steps in the original order (1) twice, and (2) uniformly scaled by a factor.

Apparently – I haven’t read the article – the factor depends on the walk. (One would think the abstract would say if there were.) The theorem says there exists such a factor but not how to find it. As the factor varies from 0 on up, the end point of the twice traveled path, scaled by some factor, is dense in the rotation manifold. It isn’t surprising though the fact that the end of the once traveled path (scaled) is not dense, is.

If the authors cannot give a comparatively simple way to find the factor, or at least bounds on it, the theorem isn’t of much use. It looks like there is too much hype accompanying its announcement.
by rocketvole | 2025-10-22 02:34:47+00:00
I was specifically referring to the down sampling that you refer to on GNOME. I don't think I've seen a linux desktop environment where this isn't the case. The result is that when you drag or resize windows (or have any movement on your screen in general) your cpu/gpu spikes. While I'm sure it's not a huge deal on modern hardware, The performance penalty on my dell xps 13 from 2015 is pretty significant, and it looks like the cpu usage when dragging/resizing windows doubles on linux compared to windows 10, which makes sense. battery life also takes a serious hit. Since no one has seemed to be able to figure this out, I wonder if it's a compositor specific thing? like there's no way to change this behavior without rewriting wayland or something.
by commandersaki | 2025-10-22 02:36:24+00:00
The thing is you can survive memory exhaustion if the oom killer can do its job, which it can't many times when there's swap. I guess the topmost response to this thread talks about an earlyoom tool that might alleivate this, but I've never used it, and I don't find swap helpful anyway so there's no need for me to go down this route.
by jesse_dot_id | 2025-10-22 02:39:41+00:00
The ever-present feeling that, at any time, you can be swept away in a wave of firings with 10,000 other employees, into an abyss of uncertainty, regardless of the quality or quantity of your contributions.

FAANG companies do not care about their employees at all and it's clearly just getting worse over time.

Also, I will never work in an office again, and I don't trust FAANG companies to allow me to have that luxury, even if it's in place when they hire me. Money turns groups of people — like boards and shareholders — into sociopaths.

No thank you. I'd rather work at a University or a small company. Less money, but a lot less stress, a lot more stability, and having experience makes me feel useful instead of feeling like a bullseye with a dollar sign in the middle.
by tristanhoy | 2025-10-22 02:40:29+00:00
A few years back we tried moving our in-memory database engine from Typescript to Rust but found the prototype gains were pretty much deleted by wasm-bindgen because of the high call frequency in our setting.

Moving more of our stack into Rust wasn't viable, so we shelved the project and focused on other areas.

Turns out this is a pretty common experience.

Now we're trying again, but this time with our own binding protocol. It’s 2.5× faster at the boundary, but more importantly, it shifts the break-even point dramatically. Offloading to WASM becomes viable at much smaller data sizes (e.g. ~100 elements), enabling cases that weren’t previously worth it — including ours.

The only trade off is significantly worse DX - the bindings are manual and more verbose, but I'm sure someone could solve this with codegen/macros on either side. For now we're focused on performance.

It's pretty much neck and neck between our Rust and Zig implementations so take your pick.
by ggm | 2025-10-22 02:40:50+00:00
You have to pick your fights. If you decide to boycott AWS for instance, which is totally justified, your surface of risk if you include supply chains to people you aren't boycotting is huge, as we just got reminded.

I have a story about an internet figure who harboured a long term grudge against Adobe and so sought to avoid PDF and that's pretty hard to do. Submitting tender documents is basically impossible. Yes plain ascii should suffice.
by BurpIntruder | 2025-10-22 02:41:01+00:00
It seems they are going to try to maximize their installed base, build the infrastructure, and try to own everything in between, whether it’s LLM or some other architecture that arises. Owning data centers and an installed base sounds great in theory, but it assumes you can outbuild hyperscalers on infrastructure and that your users will stick around. Data centers are a low margin grind and the installed base in AI isn’t locked in like iPhones. Apple and Google still control the endpoints, and I think they’ll ultimately decide who wins by what they integrate at the OS level.
by d3Xt3r | 2025-10-22 02:41:15+00:00
> So, if you want to start using linux, but what I just describes turns your stomach. If you want something that ‘just works.’ – Give Bluefin a try.

I disagree, I don't think Gnome is a good default experience for people switching to Linux (especially if they're coming from Windows). Gnome is also very user hostile and draconian, they hate customisation. Basic extensions that are needed to make Gnome Shell tolerable break with every new release. Gnome devs are so hostile against themeing that they even made an entire website to discourage it[1].

KDE's Plasma on the other hand maintains a familiar UI/UX like classic Windows. Pretty much every Windows user that I've introduced KDE to found it relatively easy to operate and get used to. Unlike Gnome, KDE is highly customisable yet comes with sensible defaults - you don't have to go hunting around for extensions to have a basic usable desktop experience.

Aurora uses KDE and is basically the same as Bluefin, so I would highly recommend new users to check out Aurora[2] instead.

[1] https://stopthemingmy.app/

[2] https://getaurora.dev/
by greenavocado | 2025-10-22 02:42:07+00:00
It would have made them a laughing stock and the prospect of future cooperation would have been slammed shut. It would have made the USSR seem like sore losers. They were already public enemy number one thanks to the media PR machine. The Russians have been cooperating with the USA and ESA for many years on LEO missions, culminating in the successful ISS project.
by kimos | 2025-10-22 02:44:13+00:00
Great reply.

What comes to mind from my experience is storing full shipping rate tables for multiple shipping providers. Those change extremely rarely but are a high throughput exact lookup in a critical path (a checkout).

But we just implemented them in SQLite and deployed that file with the application. Simple clean, effective, and fast. Maybe shipping rate data is smaller than this is intended for, but I doubt using this instead would see a consequential perf increase. Seems niche, like the domain name lookup example.
by scottlamb | 2025-10-22 02:44:17+00:00
> Converting AC to DC once at the switch is more efficient (in resources and often, but not always, power)

Can you expand on "often, but not always, power"? Here's my guess:

* It's more efficient for the small stuff: little wall warts aren't very efficient I think in part because there's some no-load consumption for each. The switch pays that no-load cost once for many devices and has like an 80-plus gold or better PSU, hopefully. And then I think even cheap buck converters are like 95% efficient; they have some no-load consumption too but I think less than the wall warts? And even though this goes over 2 (or 4) tiny wires, at 48V–56V, the current is low enough that power loss is not bad because those wires are just for one small device, and P=I^2R.

* It's less efficient for the big stuff: that P=I^2R starts to suck for the PoE case, and in the non-PoE case they're more likely to have efficient AC->DC conversion on their own. 90% efficient beats 90% * 95% efficient.
by fsckboy | 2025-10-22 02:45:20+00:00
i'm no expert on cricket, but an ordinary game is "1 baseball inning" with one team running through its "batters" (i don't know cricket terminology except googly) and then the other team running through its batters.

it would be useful to know how long such I game usually lasts—I have attended onesuch, and they did break for tea but it did draw to a close in one afternoon—and what differences there are with this longer format of which you speak.

is it just the additional inning that makes for such an extended weeklong outing?
by rafabulsing | 2025-10-22 02:45:28+00:00
I live in a third world country, and although I'm (by our standards) doing pretty well right now, both my parents come from very little. My mom, as a young woman, at one point even lost everything she had in a fire. I was fortunate enough (through their hard work, and undoubtedly some luck) to mostly experience economic stability growing up, though we did still go through a rough patch when I was a kid.

The person I'm engaged with, and their family, had/has it even worse, and it's not hard to see the ways it affected and still affects them.

My point being, I'm no stranger to a family history of financial hardship. I'm sorry for whatever you and your family have had to endure. But, politely, screw off with the implication that the only way I feel the way that I do/say the things that I say are fruit of some privileged upbringing that couldn't possibly understand money problems.
by manquer | 2025-10-22 02:45:45+00:00
This architecture[1] requires the setup of 2 NAT gateways (one in each AZ), a routing table, an Internet Gateway, 2 Elastic IP and also the VPC. Since as before we cannot use Function URLs for Lambda we will still need the API Gateway to make HTTP calls.

The only parts we are swapping out `GA -> ALB -> VPC` for `IG -> Router -> NAT -> VPC`.

Is it any simpler ? Doesn't seem like it is to me.

Going the NAT route means, you also need to have intermediate networking skills to handle a routing table (albeit a simple one), half the developers of today never used IP tables is or what chaining rules is.

---

I am surprised at the amount of pushback on a simple point which should be painfully obvious.

AWS (Azure/GCP are no different) has become overly complex with no first class support for higher order abstractions and framework efforts like SAM or even CDK seem to getting not much love at all in last 4-5 years.

Just because they offer and sell all these components to be independently, doesn't mean they should not invest and provide higher order abstractions for people with neither bandwidth or the luxury to be a full time "Cloud Architect".

There is a reason why today Vercel, Render or Railway others are popular despite mostly sitting on top of AWS.

On Vercel the same feature would be[1] quite simple. They use the exact solution you suggest on top of AWS NAT gateway, but the difference I don't have to know or manage it, is the large professional engineering team with networking experience at Vercel.

There is no reason AWS could not have built Vercel like features on top of their offerings or do so now.

At some point small to midsize developers will avoid direct AWS by either choosing to setup Hetzner/OVH bare machines or with bit more budget colo with Oxide[3] or more likely just stick to Vercel and Railway kind of platforms.

I don't know how that will impact AWS, we will all still use them, however a ton of small customers paying close to rack rate is definitely much much higher margin than what Vercel is paying AWS for the same workload is going to be.

--

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/prescriptive-guidance/latest/pat...

[2] this https://vercel.com/docs/connectivity/static-ips

[3] Would be rare, obviously only if they have the skill experience to do so.
by greycol | 2025-10-22 02:46:39+00:00
Which is ok if done right, but if they're anything like the usb-a ones there'll be plenty that are continuously pulling much more power than they need let alone the danger of uncertified ones.

For those thinking about adding one they've grabbed off amazon and installing themselves, please do a bit of hunting and reading rather than just buying the first word soup brand cheapest ones. Also remember installing uncertified electronics in your walls is a good way to void your insurance if they're the cause of disaster and turn it into a legal battle even if they're not.
by pitpatagain | 2025-10-22 02:47:03+00:00
Prosecutors talk about cases all the time. But they specifically don't talk about matters occurring before a grand jury because it's illegal for them to do so. Grand jury secrecy means they are supposed to never disclose what happened inside the grand jury room even after the case has concluded.

It is not illegal for witnesses to disclose things from their own testimony. But in this conversation, Halligan is directly commenting on things disclosed by other parties thus making indirect disclosures of her own by implication.

It's incredibly risky ground to be treading, that she is doing for no apparent reason, having reached out to a reporter who wasn't even actively reporting on the case. It's pretty wtf.