MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by endymion-light | 2025-10-20 12:55:37+00:00
I still run Linux, just on my main PC where I have far more control over hardware.

Honestly, I've learned that there's a mental trade-off, and while i've got my linux system set up perfectly on my home PC, for a laptop I would much rather have something that just works.

I ran my old laptop with multiple different distros, from Ubuntu to Manjaro to Fedora. While I love the customizability of linux, there would always be some sitaution where I need to have something ready at the last minute but the driver isn't compatible or I haven't set up a specific acceleration etc.

It's a balance, I'm happy with that development process on my home PC, but if i'm travelling on a train I want something that I can rely on working. Windows used to be that to a certain extent, and for me it's no longer capable of doing so.
by nchmy | 2025-10-20 12:55:43+00:00
Once again, you have no idea what you're talking about. Moreover, you lack critical thinking skills - the Sec-Fetch-Site section in that doc is senseless and will now be modified to say that Sec-Fetch-Site is sufficient on its own.

https://github.com/OWASP/CheatSheetSeries/issues/1803
by boomskats | 2025-10-20 12:56:37+00:00
See it's the exact opposite for me, although my experience is mostly a) building giant cubes in giant enterprise orgs with hourly data volumes you couldn't fit in memory, and b) 10-15 years old (so the hardware sucked and we didn't have duckDB). But yeah, I don't think the O in OLAP standing for 'online' ever really made sense.

I'm curious to know how much of this article is OLAP specific vs just generic good practice for tuning batch insert chunk size. The whole "batch your writes, use 100k rows or 1s worth of data" thing applies equally to pretty much any database, they're just ignoring the availability of builtin bulkload methods so they can arguing that INSERTs are slow so they can fix it by adding Kafka, for reasons? Maybe I'm missing something.
by blueg3 | 2025-10-20 12:56:41+00:00
PayPal doesn't cost significantly more than what a small online place can get from other payment processors. It's something like 3% + $0.50. That's also not much more than what a small business can usually get for in person credit cards.

This site does use buymeacoffee.com, which appears to be a dedicated payment platform. Its transaction fee is apparently 5%, which is steeper, but better for these small donations because of the lack of a fixed fee.
by hnlmorg | 2025-10-20 12:56:53+00:00
Utility companies do not have redundancy for every part of their infrastructure either. Hence why severe weather or other unexpected failures can cause loss of power, internet or even running water.

Texas has had statewide power outages. Spain and Portugal suffered near-nationwide power outages last year. Many US states are heavily reliant on the same single source for water. And remember the discussions on here about Europe's reliance on Russian gas?

Then you have the XKCD sketch about how most software products are reliant on at least one piece of open source software that is maintained by a single person as a hobby.

Nobody likes a single point of failure but often the costs associated with mitigating that are much greater than the risks of having that point of failure.

This is why "risk assessments" are a thing.
by endymion-light | 2025-10-20 12:57:28+00:00
Yeah, fully agree - and I should say this is specifically for my travel laptop. I have a desktop PC running Linux that I use and remote in from my normal laptop, but I've had a lot of issues with linux working smoothly on a laptop development.

i've seen the poor quality of MacOS recently, but it's relative compared to the despair I feel with windows.
by hnbad | 2025-10-20 12:57:34+00:00
Doesn't much of the US economy already work like this? "Don't make it illegal to do things that will cause harm but make people liable for when they do cause harm"?

Of course due to the power imbalance of individuals against corporations and ordinary folks against billionaires it's usually very difficult to get reimbursed for the harm some will inevitably face and even when it succeeds it requires very expensive lawyers while the other side tries to stall for time - if the harm doesn't outright kill you or make you unable to seek reimbursement.

But yes, from a purely entrpreneurial point of view I can understand this desire. But at the end of the day the economy (and that includes the very concept of corporations, private ownership, public works, etc) exists to serve the people, not the other way around. People can exist without an economy. An economy can not exist without people (unless you consider simulations equivalent to the real thing). So in a way, increasing the potential for harm in the economy runs directly counter to the justification of the economy.
by commandersaki | 2025-10-20 12:58:30+00:00
I had a brief hiatus of not using macs for work and gave linux a spin on a framework laptop. Tried sway / wayland since everyone at work was either using sway or i3. It was alright at first and i got in the groove of things but became unusable with apps with odd ui toolkits like ghidra/java awt, etc. Also too much time is wasted in customisation and organising or curating your windows.

Switched back to mac after about a year, and i can't say i miss tiling window management one bit. I've learned that i am quite content with the chaotic style of window management that mac offers, and find it much easier to work with since you're not wasting brain cycles perfecting your layout every time a new window is opened. I do use macos out of box tiling / snapping on the rare occasion i need side by side layout but that's really it.
by motorest | 2025-10-20 12:59:10+00:00
> Are you Netflix? Because is not theres a 99% probability you dont need any of those AWS services and just have a severe case of shiny object syndrome in your organisation.

I think you don't even understand the issue you are commenting on. It's irrelevant if you are Netflix or some guy playing with a tutorial. One of the key traits of serverless offerings is how it eliminates the need to manage and maintain a service or even worry about you have enough computational resources. You click a button to provision everything, you configure your clients to consume that service, and you are done.

If you stop to think about the amount of work you need to invest to even arrive at a point where you can actually point a client at a service, you'll be looking at what the value of serverless offerings.

Ironically, it's the likes of Netflix who can put together a case against using serverless offerings. They can afford to have their own teams managing their own platform services with the service levels they are willing to afford. For everyone else, unless you are in the business of managing and tuning databases or you are heavily motivated to save pocket change on a cloud provider bill, the decision process is neither that clear not favours running your own services.
by daeken | 2025-10-20 12:59:25+00:00
Bolos are used for spin gravity in the first part, but that's very different from the rotovators used in the second part. Both in concept and design. The key point with the rotovator is that the tip is moving at ~0m/s relative to the body it's orbiting when it's at its nadir, allowing you to just hop/grab on.
by hunglee2 | 2025-10-20 12:59:32+00:00
The US attempt to slow down China's technological development succeeds on the basis of preventing China from directly following the same path, but may backfire in the sense it forces innovation by China in a different direction. The overall outcome for us all may be increase efficiency as a result of this forced innovation, especially if Chinese companies continue to open source their advances, so we may in the end have reason to thank the US for their civilisational gate keeping
by Forgeties79 | 2025-10-20 13:00:03+00:00
Seriously all the nitpicking I see of any project people post here but “tell us you’re open source at the top when you’re open source” means we’re lazy? Being open source is an important decision and you should tell people! It’s a good thing!

Isn’t a big part of getting a project out there actually letting people know what it is? Especially if you’re trying to give a tool to the open source-valuing community. That’s a high priority for them. That’s like having a vegan menu and not saying you’re a vegan restaurant anywhere public facing.
by lumost | 2025-10-20 13:00:06+00:00
This depends on the scale of company. A fully functional DR plan probably costs 10% of the infra spend + people time for operationalization. For most small/medium businesses its a waste to plan for a once per 3-10 year event. If you’re a large or legacy firm the above costs are trivial and in some cases it may become a fiduciary risk not to take it seriously.
by sgarland | 2025-10-20 13:00:06+00:00
It depends on the outage. There was one a year or two ago (I think? They run together) that impacted EC2 such that as long as you weren’t trying to scale, or issue any commands, your service would continue to operate. The EKS clusters at my job at the time kept chugging along, but had Karptenter tried to schedule more nodes, we’d have had a bad time.
by hnlmorg | 2025-10-20 13:01:39+00:00
Exactly this!

One of my projects is entirely hosted on S3. I don't care enough if it becomes unavailable for a few hours to justify paying to distribute it to GCP et al.

And actually for most companies, the cost of multi-cloud is greater than the benefits. Particularly when those larger entities can just bitch to their AWS account manager to get a few grand refunded as credits.
by hnbad | 2025-10-20 13:02:15+00:00
I'm sure there are at least several people in the US who would gladly pay $12 million to directly cause someone's death without further repercussions. There are several people who could easily afford that several times a year without noticeably having to give up any wealth or expenses.

But more charitably: they did say "statistical death" so I presume the implication is "unintentional and non-targeted". Deliberately setting up deathtraps or ensuring a specific person will die but not others would probably be exempt. Of course that could be extremely difficult to prove if gross negligence became so easily affordable.
by froobius | 2025-10-20 13:02:23+00:00
> while this Copernican principle sounds very deep and insightful, it is actually just a pretty trite mathematical observation

It's important to flag that the principle is not trite, and it is useful.

There's been a misunderstanding of the distribution after the measurement of "time taken so far", (illuminated in the other thread), which has lead to this incorrect conclusion.

To bring the core clarification from the other thread here:

The distribution is uniform before you get the measurement of time taken already. But once you get that measurement, it's no longer uniform. There's a decaying curve whose shape is defined by the time taken so far. Such that the estimate `time_left=time_so_far` is useful.
by pyrale | 2025-10-20 13:02:55+00:00
What if AWS dumps you because your country/company didn't please the commander in chief enough?

If your resilience plan is to trust a third party, that means you don't really care about going down, does it?

Besides that, as the above poster said, the issue with top tier cloud providers (or cloudflare, or google, etc) is not just that you rely on them, it is that enough people rely on them that you may suffer even if you don't.
by bombcar | 2025-10-20 13:03:27+00:00
The Internet was much more resilient when it was just that - an internetwork of connected networks; each of which could and did operate autonomously.

Now we have computers that shit themselves if DNS isn’t working, let alone LANs that can operate disconnected from the Internet as a whole.

And partially working or indicating this it works (when it doesn’t) is usually even worse.
by jvanderbot | 2025-10-20 13:03:32+00:00
Very cool. One thing I wish was better shown: space is close, it's just hard to go up. Our liveable breathable atmosphere is razor thin compared to the size of earth.

In most cases, 100km is less than the distance between sizeable metropolitan areas. It's a day long bike ride. Air runs out less than a bus ride across town. A 15k jog/hike would put you in the stratosphere. Those jet aircraft that seem so high are closer than that. Closer than your friends house or the local stadium probably.

Look at a map or globe with that in mind and everything feels so thin!
by spectre3d | 2025-10-20 13:04:22+00:00
Thank you, good to know AHK is able to do part of what Keyboard Maestro can, it just requires more work and troubleshooting for every script/macro.

That example script also doesn’t let you simply drag a marquee selection to choose the image to find, you have to provide a file path to an image that already exists. That’s not

There must be a market for something more user friendly, at least on Windows.
by cluckindan | 2025-10-20 13:04:24+00:00
The important difference is that all those early analog computers were either bespoke or suited for a very narrow subset of tasks, like fire control computers. They were very far from general purpose computers, and that is the reason the von Neumann architecture dominates today: we are free to change the operation of the computer without literally changing gears or re-wiring all logic paths. Before, the hardware was the software.
by mapt | 2025-10-20 13:04:46+00:00
One of the things I have evolved on as a liberal/leftist.

There are just too many situations today where somebody is paying the fine with a smile on their face, if not settling for some trivial amount with no acknowledgement of wrongdoing.

Willful harms and even reckless harms by corporations need to be penalized aggressively and punitively. When a corporation worth $30 billion gains $1.3 billion in material benefit over 10 years by doing some activity that victimizes or risks people, it's fucking stupid to try and penalize them $10M with no jail time for anybody. "Cost of doing business" should never be a viable option, because the law needs a subjective bent, some small tyranny of justice, some adversarial person that corporations are structurally encouraged to be terrified of pissing off. If that means forcibly diluting their stock, or seizing the company, or terminating their charter, or throwing their executives down a hole for five years, that's evidently a necessary component of regulation. Deterrence is the name of the game, not just "seeking compliance".

We created corporations, and demand their executives, to behave in a psychopathic, amoral, "rational" profit-seeking manner by the legal fiduciary duty. Passively failing to significantly penalize predatory acts is actively encouraging their continuation. It's creating tools meant to do a thing (Hammers) and using them wrong (Juggling) and then acting stunned when they land on your foot, and spending the rest of the day glaring at and shaming the hammers, demanding verbal assurances that they'll never land on your foot again.

Occasionally, we hear about China rewarding corporate executives who commit malfeasance of a sufficiently malignant scale with capital punishment. The buck stops here. It sometimes makes the grass look greener on the other side, even with all the things I object to within that system.
by octopoc | 2025-10-20 13:04:52+00:00
How are the Reddit execs right wing? Reddit had a hilariously bad relationship with the trump subreddit, in fact the CEO famously edited user comments in that sub to change them from being critical of him to being critical of the mods[1].

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/23/reddit-huffman-trump/
by dijit | 2025-10-20 13:05:00+00:00
Performance.

Even on literally top of the line machines (Razer Blade 18, Ultra 9 275HX, 64G DDR5, NVMe over PCIE4, 240Hz display) the thing feels sluggish.

UI "quirks" such as hiding the context menu, taskbar being forced into place, and the removal of the "never combine" taskbar buttons are just gobsmacking.

Worse, Windows Pioneered "drag and drop" yet now we can't even drag and drop files or shortcuts onto taskbar icons.. a workflow I actually used a lot and which is still supported in MacOS.

The forced integration is also a non-starter. MacOS doesn't require online accounts, Apps (onedrive, Teams, Cortana et al) or force "suggestions" down my throat in the UI even though I am constantly told that Apple are the ones who force their ecosystem on me.
by Scubabear68 | 2025-10-20 13:05:13+00:00
I’m not sure what you mean by Azure being more painful for FOSS stacks. That is not my experience. Old you elaborate?

However I have seen many people flee from GCP because: Google lacks customer focus, Google is free about killing services, Google seems to not care about external users, people plain don’t trust Google with their code, data or reputation.
by commandersaki | 2025-10-20 13:06:04+00:00
Nobody makes it and stays a Mac user today unless you're a real masochist.

Funny, for me it is win/linux that is painful because of decent accessibility software. Ever since switching from linux to mac in 2003, mac has great accessibility tools for vision impairment out of box experience and has never let me down for the last 22 years. With windows the tooling is unusable. With linux i've tried on and off over the years and the tools keep changing or are inconsistent and/or broken.
by bobajeff | 2025-10-20 13:06:36+00:00
Yeah not to knock their contribution but I was hoping they'd help make system package management as easy as npm package management. If I want to install say r-studio and octave apt will install a bunch of packages with dependencies. But what if I decide I don't want r-studio or any of the other stuff related to r on my system? I can't just do apt remove r-studio.

This is why I I've been using conda, appimages and chroot jails lately. Still no solution though.
by rolandog | 2025-10-20 13:06:50+00:00
That's the paradox of tolerance for you; we must be intolerant of those that are intolerant... but you probably already know that Karl Popper theorized that [0]. Just looking around globally, we seem to be at that inflection point where this isn't mere hypothesis, but theory or law:

"Popper posited that if intolerant ideologies are allowed unchecked expression, they could exploit open society values to erode or destroy tolerance itself through authoritarian or oppressive practices."

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
by mschuster91 | 2025-10-20 13:06:58+00:00
> Maybe this is the event to get everyone off of piling everything onto us-east-1 and hoping for the best, but the last few outages didn’t, so I don’t expect this one to, either.

Doesn't help either. us-east-1 hosts the internal control plane of AWS and a bunch of stuff is only available in us-east-1 at all - most importantly, Cloudfront, AWS ACM for Cloudfront and parts of IAM.

And the last is the one true big problem. When IAM has a sniffle, everything else collapses because literally everything else depends on IAM. If I were to guess IAM probably handles millions if not billions of requests a second because every action on every AWS service causes at least one request to IAM.
by travelalberta | 2025-10-20 13:07:05+00:00
> LLMs can't do math.

Ignoring conversations about 'reasoning', at a fundamental level LLMs do not 'do math' in the way that a calculator or a human does math. Sure we can train bigger and bigger models that give you the impression of this but there are proofs out there that with increased task complexity (in this case multi-digit multiplication) eventually the probability of incorrect predictions converges to 1 (https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18654)

> And your 2nd and third point about planning and compounding errors remain challenges.. probably unsolvable with LLM approaches.

The same issue applies here, really with any complex multi-step problem.

> Again, mere months later the o series of models came out, and basically proved this point moot. Turns out RL + long context mitigate this fairly well. And a year later, we have all SotA models being able to "solve" problems 100k+ tokens deep.

If you go hands on in any decent size codebase with an agent session length and context size become noticeable issues. Again, mathematically error propagation eventually leads to a 100% chance of error. Yann isn't wrong here, we've just kicked the can a little further down the road. What happens at 200k+ tokens? 500k+ tokens? 1M tokens? The underlying issue of a stochastic system isn't addressed.

>While Yann is clearly brilliant, and has a deeper understanding of the roots of the filed than many of us mortals, I think he's been on a debbie downer trend lately

As he should be. Nothing he said was wrong at a fundamental level. The transformer architecture we have now cannot scale with task complexity. Which is fine, by nature it was not designed for such tasks. The problem is that people see these models work on a subset of small scope complex projects and make claims that go against the underlying architecture. If a model is 'solving' complex or planning tasks but then fails to do similar tasks at a higher complexity it's a sign that there is no underlying deterministic process. What is more likely: the model is genuinely 'planning' or 'solving' complex tasks, or that the model has been trained with enough planning and task related examples that it can make a high probability guess?

> So, yeah, I'd take everything any one singular person says with a huge grain of salt. No matter how brilliant said individual is.

If anything, a guy like Yann with a role such as his at a Mag7 company being realistic (bearish if you are a LLM evangelist) about what the transformer architecture can do is a relief. I'm more inclined to listen to him than a guy like Altman who touts LLMs as the future of humanity meanwhile is path to profitability is AI Tik-Tok, sex chatbots, and a third party way to purchase things from Walmart during a recession.
by sgarland | 2025-10-20 13:08:00+00:00
Also, every time your cloud went down, the parent company begged you to reconsider, explaining that all they need you to do is remove the disturbingly large cobwebs so they can migrate it. You tell them that to do so would violate your strongly-held beliefs, and when they stare at you in bewilderment, you yell “FREEDOM!” while rolling armadillos at them like they’re bowling balls.
by IAmBroom | 2025-10-20 13:08:16+00:00
If you are referring to Hong Kong residents as the "invaded country", they are the ones desiring the promises be kept.

And once one makes a promise, it is immaterial whether there was an "obligation or reason" to do so.

Really, all you are saying is China should be free to imprison, torture, and kill dissidents without any criticism, because another country was mean to them once upon a time.
by Frotag | 2025-10-20 13:08:52+00:00
Terrorists-attacking-elevator is something that comes up multiple times in Gundam 00. Probably as an allusion to 9/11 (resistance to a growing superpower), but the in-universe explanations are pretty interesting too.

The elevators were developed for cheap space travel but unsurprisingly centralized the world's economic development around the owner countries. ie the other countries became increasingly reliant on them and the world segmented into (three) blocs. But the owner countries became increasingly protective / paranoid, leading to cold-war era developments where each of them secretly researched fancy space weapons and stockpiled more and more military assets around the elevators.

So some of the attacks were by poorer countries lashing out. Some attacks were to expose the military assets being hidden in the elevator (outlawed by intl treaty). Though most were probably just excuses to show things like giant robots vs death star.