MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Lammy | 2025-10-27 19:56:42+00:00
> "Northern Virginia was really at the centre for the growth of the internet, [it was] where AOL was headquartered, and so naturally they have the talent, they have the people already there, it was just easier to make [the data centres] there," cybersecurity expert Thomas Hyslip said.

Relevant Wikipedia entry-point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAE-East

“Although it initially had no single central nexus, one eventually formed in the underground parking garage of an office building in Vienna, VA.[3]”

I love how this sentence is written like some sci-fi premise. The source is much more clinical about it: https://web.archive.org/web/20050214071013/http://www.wolfso...

“The décor of the machine room is unmarred by ornament. The room was created by walling off an area of the underground parking garage of a suburban Virginia office tower. The ceiling is low; harsh light pours out of fluorescent tubes; the air is filled with the white noise of a hundred computer cooling fans and a hint of battery fumes. Standing in this crowded space, surrounded by hard-working and very slightly grungy machinery, gives an interesting perspective and sense of scale, which is exactly what I was looking for in coming here. The room is no bigger than a two-car garage, and yet by some estimates more than half the traffic on the Internet passes through here.”
by lxgr | 2025-10-27 19:57:34+00:00
Really depends on your market and customers. Especially in the financial industry, local time zones (often of a given currency's central bank's main branch, a primary regulator etc.) are often very, very entrenched.

> Many people will accept UTC because it is the international standard.

I really wish that were true universally...

And I do think that UTC is actually somewhat Eurocentric! From personal experience, it's significantly easier to mentally add/subtract one or two hours (modulo 24) than 7 or more.

> Saying “I’m going to use a US timezone because that is easiest for our US customers” risks sending a message to your (now or future) global customers that you view them as second-class citizens.

Definitely, but on the other hand, I do think that picking your head office's time zone as the "canonical" one for resetting quotas etc. has some merit as well, if only because it makes the concepts of "today" and "tomorrow" work a bit better. (UTC midnight might be very unintuitive to both you and your customers.)
by jpadkins | 2025-10-27 19:57:45+00:00
in the short run. In the long run, productivity gains benefit* all of us (in a functional market economy).

*material benefit. In terms of spirit and purpose, the older I get the more I think maybe the Amish are on to something. Work gives our lives purpose, and the closer the work is to our core needs, the better it feels. Labor saving so that most of us are just entertaining each other on social networks may lead to a worse society (but hey, our material needs are met!)
by hackthemack | 2025-10-27 19:58:54+00:00
I never liked encountering code that chains functions calls together like this

email.bulkSend(generateExpiryEmails(getExpiredUsers(db.getUsers(), Date.now())));

Many times, it has confused my co-workers when an error creeps in in regards to where is the error happening and why? Of course, this could just be because I have always worked with low effort co-workers, hard to say.

I have to wonder if programming should have kept pascals distinction between functions that only return one thing and procedures that go off and manipulate other things and do not give a return value.

https://docs.pascal65.org/en/latest/langref/funcproc/
by ozgung | 2025-10-27 19:59:19+00:00
> What most people fail to realise is that in between each token being generated, black magic is happening in between the transformer layers.

Thank you by saying that. I think most people have an incomplete mental model for how LLMs work. And it's very misleading for understanding what they really do and can achieve. "Next token prediction" is done only at the output layer. It's not what really happens internally. The secret sauce is at the hidden layers of a very deep neural network. There are no words or tokens inside the network. A transformer is not the simple token estimator that most people imagine.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-10-27 19:59:28+00:00
It is by definition not random. The Antihydra is generated by a fixed computable map, so it is compressible and would fail some effective statistical tests. You can't get true randomness via a deterministic algorithm; any computable infinite sequence fails Martin‑Löf randomness.

That said, empirically and in all current analyses, the Antihydra's parity behaves as if it were roughly fair over long spans (neither a proven odd nor even bias), and the short-range statistics look pseudo-random. Non-halting is overwhelmingly plausible... but a concrete proof seems out of reach.
by dragontamer | 2025-10-27 19:59:34+00:00
Secure against what? You might be surprised at what a wench and a truck can pull / destroy. If that fails, there are shotguns and also explosives, jackhammers and the like.

There are always assumptions built into lock design. A simple lock is very secure if a fence is jumpable, most people will jump the fence rather than mess with a lock.

Even a complex lock will never be secure for national secrets (like nuclear missiles), you need to just assign guards. Locks exist but are basically a formality (IIRC, many tanks and airplanes are left unlocked because all the security posture is with the military and the lock itself is too much of a hassle for logistics).

------

Fort Knox itself was designed to be safe from Nazi invasion. If the Nazis invaded New York City, they won't find any of the governments gold. The 'lock' in this case is the miles and miles of geography the Nazis would have to navigate before reaching Fort Knox.
by skissane | 2025-10-27 19:59:41+00:00
Operating systems generally allow user override of locale settings, and browsers generally respect that; I use a locale which officially has 12 hour time as its standard (Australian English), and I always override it to 24 hour time in user preferences (although Australia is rather inconsistent, e.g. in Sydney, train services use 24 hour time; in Melbourne, the metro trains use 12 hour time but the regional services use 24 hour time)
by dang | 2025-10-27 19:59:48+00:00
Can you please stop posting unsubstantive/fulminatey comments? We've already asked you this multiple times:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45022004 (Aug 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44396920 (June 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43028401 (Feb 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39337678 (Feb 2024)

You've obviously got some substantive points to make here, which is great, but indignant putdown rhetoric has a destructive effect on the threads. If you could just make your substantive points thoughtfully, we'd appreciate it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by tomhallett | 2025-10-27 20:00:18+00:00
Also live near the data centers. While I'm obviously not 100% sure, I think that blue one is on Glenn Dr - for a bit of context, that is less than 3 miles (drive) from the Dulles International Airport. I'll see if I can record a video of the sound later tonight.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/38%C2%B059'57.6%22N+77%C2%...
by mbreese | 2025-10-27 20:01:30+00:00
I don’t see the issue so much as the deterministic precision of an LLM, but the lack of observability of spreadsheets. Just looking at two different spreadsheets, it’s impossible to see what changes were made. It’s not like programming where you can run a `git diff` to see what changes an LLM agent made to a source code file. Or even a word processing document where the text changes are clear.

Spreadsheets work because the user sees the results of complex interconnected values and calculations. For the user, that complexity is hidden away and left in the background. The user just sees the results.

This would be a nightmare for most users to validate what changes an LLM made to a spreadsheet. There could be fundamental changes to a formula that could easily be hidden.

For me, that the concern with spreadsheets and LLMs - which is just as much a concern with spreadsheets themselves. Try collaborating with someone on a spreadsheet for modeling and you’ll know how frustrating it can be to try and figure out what changes were made.
by nradov | 2025-10-27 20:01:52+00:00
How much is "enough" exactly? Can you quantify that for us? There's a huge difference between enough to avoid acute malnutrition in a young person versus enough to optimize healthspan in an older person. Did you even listen to the podcast I linked above?

It is totally possible to get enough protein (by whatever metric you choose) through regular food. And yet the reality is that many people don't.
by AvAn12 | 2025-10-27 20:02:38+00:00
> “Does it have to be perfect?”

Actually, yes. This kind of management reporting is either (1) going to end up in the books and records of the company - big trouble if things have to be restated in the future or (2) support important decisions by leadership — who will be very much less than happy if analysis turns out to have been wrong.

A lot of what ties up the time of business analysts is ticking and tying everything to ensure that mistakes are not made and that analytics and interpretations are consistent from one period to the next. The math and queries are simple - the details and correctness are hard.
by Y-bar | 2025-10-27 20:02:45+00:00
> farmers watch the wind and won't spray when drift is an issue

Do they really? Never seem my neighbours being particularly picky about wind conditions.

> the epa requires this in the us and they look at drift before approving spray

Putting aside the current grave gutting of the agency in question, do they really inspect each usage on a regular basis or is it a pinky promise?

> this has only happened when someone sprays their crop thus killing anything that isn't gmo

That's a primary problem which is already happening as linked previously in the discussion, it essentially forces a mono-supplier and a mono-culture.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-10-27 20:03:59+00:00
Best way to think of it is this: Right now you are not the customer. Investors are.

The money people pay in monthly fees to Anthropic for even the top Max sub likely doesn't come closer to covering the energy & infrastructure costs for running the system.

You can prove this to yourself by just trying to cost out what it takes to build the hardware capable of running a model of this size at this speed and running it locally. It's tens of thousands of dollars just to build the hardware, not even considering the energy bills.

So I imagine the goal right now is to pull in a mass audience and prove the model, to get people hooked, to get management and talent at software firms pushing these tools.

And I guess there's some in management and the investment community that thinks this will come with huge labour cost reductions but I think they may be dreaming.

... And then.. I guess... jack the price up? Or wait for Moore's Law?

So it's not a surprise to me they're not jumping to try and service individual subscribers who are paying probably a fraction of what it costs them to the run the service.

I dunno, I got sick of paying the price for Max and I now use the Claude Code tool but redirect it to DeepSeek's API and use their (inferior but still tolerable) model via API. It's probably 1/4 the cost for about 3/4 the product. It's actually amazing how much of the intelligence is built into the tool itself instead of just the model. It's often incredibly hard to tell the difference bertween DeepSeek output and what I got from Sonnet 4 or Sonnet 4.5
by evil-olive | 2025-10-27 20:04:14+00:00
> But back then, it wasn't.

UTC was standardized in 1963 [0]

it was already a 40 year old standard at the time you're talking about.

awareness of UTC being the correct choice has definitely increased over time, but UTC being the correct choice has not changed.

you say reddit servers use UTC now, which implies there was a cutover at some point. were you still at reddit when that happened? were you still hands-on with server maintenance? any anecdotes or war stories from that switchover you want to share?

because I can easily imagine parts of the system taking a subtle dependency on Arizona being Reddit Standard Time, and the transition to UTC causing headaches when that assumption was broken. your memory of this "clever" trick might be different if you had to clean up the eventual mess as well.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time
by neilv | 2025-10-27 20:05:11+00:00
True. Small outfits can be a pretty big category of companies that don't have a fully locked-down enterprise security environment with clout who can insist that everything like that racked and put under their control.

Homelabbers tend to like rackmount. (I've owned multiple servers with such dedicated remote management/access hardware built in.)

JetKVM seems designed to be more a shadow IT at individual desks solution, for use at companies that don't prohibit and actively police that.
by mitjam | 2025-10-27 20:05:39+00:00
Ask Rosie is actually shutting down right now: https://www.askrosie.ai/

I would love to learn more about their challenges as I have been working on an Excel AI add-in for quite some time and have followed Ask Rosie from almost their start.

That they now gone through the whole cycle worries me I‘m too slow as a solo building on the side in these fast paced times.
by mrguyorama | 2025-10-27 20:06:16+00:00
The entire reason almost every modern country massively subsidizes and manages the staple food crops of their agricultural economy is that letting them rationally act in their best interests kept causing famines when farmers did dumb things, like cause the dust bowl.

Central management of food supplies has been an essential part of societal stability since ancient times, and the USSR using "industrialization" and "centralization" of farming as an excuse to kill a bunch of "kulaks" does not undo that.
by olooney | 2025-10-27 20:06:20+00:00
I'm pretty sure my mistake was assuming people had read the article and knew the author veered wildly halfway through towards also advocating against using LLMs for proofreading and that you should "just let your mistakes stand." Obviously no one reads the article, just the headline, so they assumed I was disagreeing with that (which I was not.) Other comments that expressed the same sentiment as mine but also quoted that part did manage to get upvoted.

This is an emotionally charged subject for many, so they're operating in Hurrah/Boo mode[1]. After all, how can we defend the value of careful human thought if we don't rush blindly to the defense of every low-effort blog post with a headline that signals agreement with our side?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotivism
by alistairSH | 2025-10-27 20:06:20+00:00
In the case of a trailer, you do some combination of...

- Receiver pin lock similar to the one highlighted here (but probably not that exact one) - Wheel lock / boot - Receiver coupler lock (locks inside the cup-shaped receiver, preventing somebody towing the trailer with an undersized ball) - Secured storage lot / garage

But, basically all options are only going to stop random opportunistic thieves. If somebody really wants whatever you're protecting, they'll find a way. That's why insurance exists.
by mattmanser | 2025-10-27 20:06:22+00:00
No expert, but these fines are usually exponential. Usually they start with a slap on the wrist of $100,000s, then climb to the millions.

That the opening figure is so high it's clear that if MS ever do it again the fine will be in the billions.

So you might even say it's actually a moderately strong statement by the Australian government that they're not playing around.
by JonChesterfield | 2025-10-27 20:06:33+00:00
In the beginning, there was the binary, and it was difficult to change.

Then the golden age of ascii encoded source, where all was easy to change.

Now we've forgotten that lesson and changed to ascii encoded binary.

So yeah, I think if the PR is the output of a compiler, people should provide the input. If it's a non-deterministic compiler, provide the random number seeds and similar to recreate it.
by amluto | 2025-10-27 20:06:41+00:00
Humans have one advantage over autonomous cars in ice: they can pull over and put on chains. Cars can’t do that (yet).

(I’d love to see a serious winter vehicle that can deploy traction devices by itself, perhaps while rolling at very low speed. Off the top of my head, it seems like it might be easier to put them on then to take them off.)
by 3mc | 2025-10-27 20:06:58+00:00
That's interesting, I hadn't considered that a person might completely parrot a novel from an LLM and then claim it as their own..

I would almost give that a pass as long as we could prove that the person had sat down for 10s/100s of hours to type out the novel.

In that instance it would be almost the same as false authorship and stealing credit for other people's work. This has existed for centuries already.

As to being influenced by an LLM I think that is fine, even up to entire plot structure.. as with the above this could happen between people too.
by jarjoura | 2025-10-27 20:07:08+00:00
Sure and that's one way to solve royalties.

I suspect from purely logistics, AI training is better when it's free to injest all the content it can, and for that freedom it pays in some small royalty amount when that source is cited.

They'd simply pass that cost onto the customer. For universities or enterprises or lawfirms, or whatever, they would either include pre-existing agreements, or pay for blanket access. Whatever terms OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini sign with these entities, they can workout the royalties there.

These are all solved problems for every other technology middle man company.
by IshKebab | 2025-10-27 20:07:30+00:00
> We are talking about the dangers of the installation method. Not the program itself.

It only makes sense to separate them if you install the program and then never run it which is obviously ridiculous.

> There is no need to expand it unnecessarily.

I agree, but it is necessary because there aren't any good alternatives.

Also it is very minimal additional risk. If it wasn't we'd see it used as an attack method and as far as I know that has yet to happen once.
by haskellshill | 2025-10-27 20:07:34+00:00
Well, just because something is allowed by the syntax does not mean it's a good idea, that's why pretty much every language has linters.

And I do think there's an evenly applied rule, namely: always explicitly close all non-void elements. There are only 14 void elements anyway, so it's not too much to expect readers to know them. In your own words "there's no substitute for actually knowing the real rules".

I mean, your approach requires memorizing for which 15 elements the closing tag can be omitted anyway (otherwise you'll mentally parse the document wrong (i.e. thinking a br tag needs to be closed is equally likely as thinking p tags can be nested)).

The risk that somebody might be expecting a closing tag for an hr element seems minuscule and is a small price to pay for conveniences such as (as I explained above) being able to find and replace a p tag or a li tag to a div tag.
by devilsdata | 2025-10-27 20:08:22+00:00
Nobody in this article is whining about a company "building something". But whenever anything this large is built, there are externalities. Externalities are an indirect cost or benefit to others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

It just seems to me that in Virginia in the United States, the externalities of building a massive data centre in an existing residential zone are either not being considered or not being acted upon.

I'd hate it if a company built a massive data centre right next to where I sleep. Low noise pollution is vitally important to quality of life.

I'd like to live in a society that treated me fairly, and at least purchased my property off me before building the data centre.

By all means, build the infrastructure. But please look after your people. It's not that arduous to purchase a few properties in exchange for a massive amount of profit.
by wholinator2 | 2025-10-27 20:08:55+00:00
Yeah, asking llm to edit one specific thing in a large or complex document/ codebase is like those repeated "give me the exact same image" gifs. It's fundamentally a statistical model so the only thing we can be _certain_ of is that _it's not_. It might get the desired change 100% correct but it's only gonna get the entire document 99 5%
by dangus | 2025-10-27 20:08:55+00:00
Much better than living next to a chemical plant. I thought the article and video were grasping at straws to find negative impacts. There’s no pollution on site so they have to talk about sounds that can’t be heard on the video and electrical poles.

I think this is dangerously close to NIMBY territory. People who bought homes in the cheapest land possible in areas with ample available farmland are upset that someone else bought some other land.

It’s quite easy to avoid that if you aren’t just buying on pure dollars per square foot like so many suburban buyers seem to be doing.

When it comes to vibrant urban core you actually benefit by having a lot of different things nearby “in my backyard.” As an added bonus, businesses looking for cheap land for factories and data centers tend to stay away.

But if we live in the city we’ll be “on top of each other” and I won’t have a walk-in closet to store all my clothes I don’t wear, and I won’t have a garage to store the car that I’m required to own to get around because nothing is nearby me, and I need a shed for my lawn mower because I can’t just share with my neighbors and I need my own yard because the public park is too far away, etc etc.
by whitequark_ | 2025-10-27 20:09:10+00:00
122 MB of it is Wasm machine code of a MinSizeRel LTO build of LLVM; it is compressed to 23 MB by Zstandard when your HTTP client supports that. That is about as small as you can get an LLVM/Clang/LLD bundle to be, and I put a lot of effort into making it smaller.

248 MB of it is an OpenBSD sysroot; it is compressed to 45 MB by Zstandard when your HTTP client supports that. I have not used OpenBSD and have no particular insight into what's inside.
by nodesocket | 2025-10-27 20:09:21+00:00
I got tired of waiting for JetKVM availability in the US and pulled the trigger on a GL.iNet Comet PoE. A bit more expensive on Amazon ($110) but supports PoE which the JetKVM does not. Honestly, it has worked great. I know the earlier Comet firmware had some issues, but apparently they fixed it up and it has been solid.
by WorldMaker | 2025-10-27 20:10:02+00:00
But that's not what a PR summary is best used for. I don't need links to exact files, the Diff/Files tab is a click away and it usually has a nice search feature. The Commits tab is a little bit less helpful, but also already exists. I don't need an AI telling me stuff already at my fingertips.

A good PR summary should be the why of the PR. Not redundantly repeat what changed, give me description of why it changed, what alternatives were tested, what you think the struggles were, what you think the consequences may be, what you expect the next steps to be, etc.

I've never seen an AI generated summary that comes close to answering any of those questions. An AI generated summary is a bit like that junior developer that adds plenty of comments but all the comments are:

// add x and y var result = x + y;

Yes, I can see it adds x and y, that's already said by the code itself, why are we adding x and y? What's the "result" used for?

I'm going to read the code anyway to review a PR, a summary of what the code already says it does is redundant information to me.