MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by indigo945 | 2025-10-22 07:19:10+00:00
Salt and Puppet are useful for managing a fleet of servers running various applications, especially when you need to scale those applications horizontally or want geo-distribution.

Ansible can also do that, on top of literally anything else you could want - network configuration, infrastructure automation, deployment pipelines, migrations, anything. As always, that flexibility can be a blessing or a curse, but I think Ansible manages it well because it's so KISS.

RedHat's commercial Ansible Automation Platform gives you more power for when you need it, but you don't need it starting out.
by digitalPhonix | 2025-10-22 07:19:14+00:00
Not legal control, just de-facto control because no one else seems to have the knowledge & resources to build a browser enginer other than Mozilla (and Firefox's market share keeps shrinking).

Brave and all the other browsers based on Chromium have said that they can only keep support for Manifest V2 extensions as long as support remains in Chromium; meaning they don't have the ability to maintain it themselves and are at the mercy of upstream.
by bawolff | 2025-10-22 07:19:15+00:00
> What are the rights things to criticize in your opinion?

I think criticism should be based on looking at what they were trying to accomplish by spending the money, was it a worthwhile thing to try and do and was the solution executed effectively.

Just saying they spent $X, X is a big number, it must be wasteful without considering the value that is attempting to be purchssed with that money is a bit meaningless.

> Also, asking out of ignorance, what things need to move forward? I thought wikipedia is a solved problem, the only work i would expect it to need is maintenance work, security patches etc.

I think the person who i was responding to was referring to volunteer travel not staff travel (which of course also happens but i believe would be a different budget line item). This would be mostly for people who write the articles but also for people who do moderation activity. In person meetings can help resolve intractable disputes, share best practises, figure out complex disagreements, build relationships. All the same reasons that real companies fly their staff to expensive offsites.

Software is never done, there are always going to be things that come up and things to be improved. Some of them may be worth it some not.

As an example, there are changes coming to how ip addresses are handled, especially for logged out users. Nobody is exactly saying why, but im 99% sure its GDPR compliance related. That is a big project due to some deeply held assumptions, and probably critical.

A more mid-tier example might be, last year WMF rolled out a (caching) server precense in Brazil. The goal was to reduce latency for South American users. Is that worth it? It was probably a fair bit of money. If WMF was broke it wouldn't be, but given they do have some money, it seems like a reasonable improvement to me. Reasonable minds could probably disagree of course.

And an example of stupid projects might be WMF's ill-fated attempt at making an AI summarizer. That was a pure waste of money.

I guess my point it, WMF is a pretty big entity, some of the things they do are good, some are stupid, and i think people should criticize the projects they embark on rather than the big sum of money taken out of context.
by ersinesen | 2025-10-22 07:19:57+00:00
Every decade or so, capitalism’s critics rediscover the dream of a universal basic income (UBI), a stipend for all. The latest revival [1] goes further: what if this modest reform could turn capitalism into its opposite? In a recent academic proposal, unconditional basic income is imagined as a “capitalist road to communism.” If people no longer had to sell their labor to survive, the system itself, the authors suggest, would evolve peacefully beyond markets and profit.
by maltelandwehr | 2025-10-22 07:21:51+00:00
If if all this is true, LLMs would still need to create a repository of such aggregated "summarizations of secondary sources".

LLMs cannot in real time find and read thousands of secondary sources. Especially not if some of these might have already disappeared or are not digitalized.

I can see a future where LLM labs a) donate to Wikipedia and b) contribute to it with agents that suggest edits and review facts.
by vee-kay | 2025-10-22 07:21:51+00:00
And yet Wikipedia is biased (and hence may even be misinformative) on many topics, because its editors and moderators are biased.

Source: the Wikipedia founder himself..

https://www.dailysignal.com/2025/10/12/wikipedia-co-founder-...

And the real reason that editing Wikipedia is difficult, is because of the ideological bias of the moderators so they support only the editors to conform to their ideology and reject any edits that go against their ideology even if those edit are literal proven truths.

Source: I am an editor on Wikipedia and my own informative useful edits to some important topics on my country have been rejected, while the misinformative and even malicious edits by agents of the enemy nation on those same topics were allowed and continue to persist and mislead whoever reads those articles.

Wikipedia has become a weapon of misinformative propaganda, and it's not a tool or repository of useful accurate information. This is why Wikipedia is banned in schools and universities, because its information may not be credible and Wikipedia has long ago lost the integrity that any worldwide free information repository should have had.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-10-22 07:22:02+00:00
Political aspects of the justice system are never acknowledged for obvious reasons but it does not mean they don't exist.

I cannot be sure of what is happening (hence "seems") but neither can you, especially regarding decisions that are discretionary.

At least here there is a guilty verdict even if not final. In France people can be jailed for years without a trial...
by mettamage | 2025-10-22 07:23:18+00:00
> All with very few actual use cases. 99% are doing it just because others are.

Same here, but I started a few months earlier than most (I work in a marketing department as the only one with SWE skills). There's a lot you can do with AI.

For one, you can finally introduce some more automation, they are more open to it. And whenever you need a more "human-like intelligence" in your automation, you basically make an LLM call.

It also helps in terms of creating small microsites, etc.

It helps me personally because whenever I want to make a small command-line tool to make my life easier, I can now also decide to create a whole website as it's about as quick to make nowadays with things such as Codex and Claude Code (aka 30 min.).
by csomar | 2025-10-22 07:23:46+00:00
I have moved from Sonnet 4.5 to GLM 4.6 and any difference is not noticeable. Their (openai/anthropic/etc..) AGI "hopes" are crashing down and are just making shit up that doesn't work (most of the tools are very alpha/beta and badly supported) just to keep pumping stock/hype/name. The Chinese really did them dirty by offering a x10 cheaper alternative.
by dillydogg | 2025-10-22 07:23:50+00:00
In my thoracic surgery rotations in med school I was taught that the strongest stimulus for increasing the respiratory drive was the acidification of cerebrospinal fluid. Which, of course, correlates with the blood pH. This information comes from some studies in the 60s with goats, and the old guard are happy to hang their hat on it.

There are also chemoreceptors for oxygen concentration in the circulatory system as well.

I think everything you have said is correct, I just wanted to add a few more details for anyone who is interested.
by dcrazy | 2025-10-22 07:25:21+00:00
Nowadays people expect their terminals to handle UTF-8, or at least the Latin-like subset of Unicode, without dealing with arcana such as codepages. For even the simplest fonts, rendering something like í likely requires drawing multiple glyphs: one for the dotless lowercase I stem, and one for the acute accent. It so happens that dotless lowercase I maps to a codepoint, but it is not generally true that a single extended grapheme cluster can be broken down into constituent codepoints. So even “simple” console output is nowadays complected by the details of Unicode-aware text rendering.
Ask HN: Are you / should we be preparing for "cyberattack"
by lifeisstillgood | 2025-10-22 07:27:27+00:00
Jaguar Land Rover was attacked, presumably by a ransomware attack (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy9pdld4y81o) costing an estimated 2Bn dollars.

What mistakes are such IT departments making? What actions are you taking to prevent it?
by scrps | 2025-10-22 07:27:35+00:00
Ya know back a couple of decades ago I used to get into IRC debates about how at some point in the near future governments would turn the internet into a battlefield dimension and you'd be able to "reach out and touch someone" fatally amongst many other nefarious things.

Granted I was younger and assumed circumstances of le carré proportions...

Wonky dns records leading to everyone getting free failover testing when us-east-1 goes down which also apparently includes free firmware failure mode exposure that may or may not cook your customers if your electrical engineers plan for thermal failure modes as well as your firmware engineers do with connectivity failure modes and sane timeouts... That I didn't envision, and to think a heavy percentage of IRC thought I was nuts... This is one hell of a timeline.
by sehansen | 2025-10-22 07:27:58+00:00
That's a pretty damn editorialized title[0] given that Tusass signed an extended deal with their original provider. To me the chosen title implies that Tusass had chosen Starlink and then decided to stop using them. Starlink did submit a tender offer, but losing to an established competitor isn't super newsworthy.

0: No shade thrown at the submitter, as this is the title used by the site.
by pjmlp | 2025-10-22 07:28:17+00:00
In practice, Unchecked_Deallocation should be used as much as unsafe in Rust.

Ada provides a series of features towards that goal.

First one, already present in Ada 83, is that stack allocation is dynamic, a bit like C99 VLAs, with the differenc that it is bounds checked and and exception is thrown if there is not enough space, instead of corrupting the stack.

Also Ada pointers (access types), have some type constraints, so already with that one can make some kind of arena like storage that doesn't depend on using pointers all over the place.

Ada 95 introduced controlled types, which is basically RAII in Ada, providing yet another way not to use Unchecked_Deallocation directly on "userspace" code.

Ada 2005 introduced bounded and unbounded container types, further extended and improved in later versions, which allow to write many algorithms and data structures that build upon them, without having to go into low level memory allocation approaches.

With Ada 2012 formal proofs, coupled with SPARK 2014 tooling, you can additionally ensure specific conditions are met before doing whatever with specific resources, including ownership.
by tsimionescu | 2025-10-22 07:28:33+00:00
Wikipedia, while not being reliant on ads, nor even on donations that much (given how much they have amassed) is still 100% dependent on having active users. People who get a ChatGPT answer will not go on to edit Wikipedia if that answer happens to be wrong. They won't curate articles to notice when someone is vandalizing them and put the right info back.
by worldsavior | 2025-10-22 07:30:04+00:00
The day where human art is redundant has arrived, or at least very close. Soon we will be speaking with AIs, and AIs will be speaking with our AIs while we supervise. No art, no appreciation, only self-involvement.

Now many probably are not into these AIs features, but later newcomers will. The generations get dumber because we live on these platforms that make us dumber. That's why apps like Instagram or TikTok are so successful, because they rely on the young generation whom got dumber by using these platforms. Same thing will be with AI, where everyone will use AI while getting dumber.
by dillydogg | 2025-10-22 07:31:40+00:00
The acid base balance of the cerebrospinal fluid is the primary driver of the respiratory drive, like allude to with your comment on the CO2. I did want to add that the lack of oxygen can affect respiration, which is detected by the peripheral chemoreceptors, like in the carotid bodies.

Additionally, the thoracic stretch receptors are important for respiratory drive, where the lack of expansion of the chest will promote respiration. When a healthy young person holds their breath for short periods, say 30 seconds or so, their blood CO2 and O2 are not much different, but they still will have to fight the instinct to breathe!
by lifeisstillgood | 2025-10-22 07:31:57+00:00
The most obvious response to this is “why give out money?” Why not “universal basic services “?

Providing the basics of life via a modern welfare system (like most of the developed world), or provide regulations that reduce inequality and spread the wealth

Just giving out money does seem like it lacks imagination for people who think state services can only be provided by private sector (and co-incidentally the wealthy will own the private providers hence getting the money)
by anal_reactor | 2025-10-22 07:33:25+00:00
Unfortunately, the problem with cowboy coding is that it takes one idiot in the team to ruin it for everyone. As company grows, there are more and more idiots by pure chance, which means you need bigger and bigger walls to contain the blast radius. If you have a team of trustworrthy engineers then cowboy coding is extremely efficient, but it simply doesn't scale, especially considering how difficult it is to evaluate the quality of given candidate when hiring.

I believe that cowboy coding might still be practiced in small companies, or in small corporate pockets, where the number of engineers doesn't need to scale.
by lloeki | 2025-10-22 07:34:27+00:00
It's also not impacting _only_ at that time, many tasks involve dates in the future, and a system dealing with a far enough off date _today_ is already impacted.

So it's not as if "everything works" then suddenly "everything doesn't"

And it's only for operations that care about the sign / compute deltas / use signed numbers, otherwise it's 2106-02-07 06:28:16 UTC.
by rob74 | 2025-10-22 07:35:00+00:00
> Tusass had also been in talks with Starlink, owned by Elon Musk, but chose to continue working with Eutelsat.

"Ditches" sounds like they were already using Starlink, but abandoned it in favor of Eutelsat's system. The text clarifies that they only decided to (continue to) use Eutelsat, and Starlink was just another option considered.

> Binzer said it was not about which company was better, but about trust and long-term cooperation.

Well, who can blame them? After Trump repeatedly expressed "interest" in owning Greenland (fortunately he seems to have moved on to other pet projects in the meantime), and with Musk being one of Trump's closest allies, it would be a bit naive to trust Starlink...
Ask HN: How to identify potential projects that have real demand and interest?
by marko-djuric | 2025-10-22 07:35:06+00:00
When browsing GitHub issues and discussions of large libraries and frameworks, it’s often easy to spot topics that attract a lot of attention and go on for months or even years. These are usually complex bugs, missing features, or controversial design decisions and limitations that frustrate a large number of users. Also, there are the obvious problems that every user encounters right after they start using the library.

It’s clear that among such topics there’s some potential, if you can offer a solid solution to one of those shortcomings in any form, the market has already been "researched" to some extent. That solution can take many forms: a patch, a fork, or an entirely new library or project. It’s also great material for quality blog posts and YouTube tutorials.

This is just one example of thinking in that direction, but there are certainly many more. When someone decides to invest time and energy into side projects, they definitely shouldn’t do it blindly, without any indication of potential demand for the solution they’re building, the market needs to be tested.

So how can this be researched systematically and empirically, in order to have a fairly reliable idea of how popular the finished project might become? Is there some kind of routine checklist for that?
by stsffap | 2025-10-22 07:35:37+00:00
Author here. AWS’s recent us-east-1 outage inspired us to share our approach to geo-replication with Restate.

The core idea: geo-replication should be a deployment concern, not something you architect into every line of application code. You write normal business logic, then configure replication policies at deployment time and let Restate handle the rest.

The configuration is straightforward: `default-replication = "{region: 2, node: 3}"` ensures data is replicated to at least 2 regions and 3 nodes. This ensures that your apps can tolerate a region outage or losing two arbitrary nodes while staying fully available. Behind the scenes, Restate handles leader election, log replication, and state synchronization. We use S3 cross-region replication for snapshots with delayed log trimming to ensure consistency.

We tested this with a 6-node cluster across 3 AWS regions under 400 req/s load. Killing an entire region resulted in sub-60-second automatic failover with zero downtime and no data loss. Only 1% of requests saw latency spikes during the failover window. Once nodes in us-east-1 were no longer running, P50 latency increased when replication shifted from nearby us-east-1/us-east-2 to distant us-east-2/us-west-1.

Happy to answer technical questions or discuss tradeoffs!
by red369 | 2025-10-22 07:36:07+00:00
I recently needed to buy a new power supply for my Mikrotik router (hAP ac²), so I decided to just buy a Ubiquiti PoE injector instead.

It feels magical to have the PoE injector tucked in a cupboard with the optical network terminal, and outside Narnia, the router has only one cable going to it. Also, the Ubiquiti PoE injectors are particularly satisfying. Powered by standard AC cables, and a nice simple design. Now that I've experienced this magic, I'm not going back!

However, as much as I love the hAP ac², it only accepts passive PoE. I don't love passive PoE - it scares me! Unfortunately, it seems like most (all?) Mikrotik routers only accept passive PoE.

Does anyone know of a good alternative when it comes time to replace my router? I would have liked it to be Ubiquiti, but I don't usually read positive things about them around here.
by throw_9fdf9 | 2025-10-22 07:36:36+00:00
When I became a software engineer about two decades ago, I held a similar world view as the OP: programming is a craft, I'm an artist, a creator, a hacker.

With years, as I matured, and the industry matured, I came to realize that corporate programming is assembly line work but with a much bigger paycheck. You can dance around it as much as you want, but in the end, if you truly zoom out, you will realize that it's no different from an assembly line. There are managers to oversee your work and your time allocations; there is a belief that more people = more output; and everyone past your manager's manager seem to think that what you do is trivial and can be easily replaced by robots. So a software engineer who calls himself an artist is basically that same as a woodworker who works for a big furniture company, and yet insists on calling himself an artist, and referring to their work as craft, while in reality they assemble someone's else vision and product, by using industry standard tools.

And at first, I tried to resist. I held strong opinions as the OP. How come they came for MY CRAFT?! But then I realized that there is no craft. Sure, a handful of people work on really cool things. But if you look around, most companies are just plain dumb REST services with a new an outfit slapped on them. There is no craft. The craft has been distilled and filtered into 3-4 popular frameworks that dictate how things should be written, and chances are if I take an engineer and drop them in another company using the same framework, they won't even notice. Craft is when you build something new and unique, not when you deploy NextJS to Vercel with shadcn/ui and look like the other 99% of new-age SaaS offerings.

So I gave up. And I mainly use AI at my $DAY_JOB. Because why not? It was mundane work before (same REST endpoints, but with different names; copying and pasting around common code blocks), and now I don't suffer that much anymore. Instead of navigating the slop that my coworkers wrote before AI, I just review what AI wrote, in small pieces, and make sure it works as expected. Clean code? Hexagonal architecture? Separation of concerns? Give me a break. These are tools for "architects" and "tech leads" to earn a pat on their shoulder and stroke their ego, so they can move to a different company, collecting a bigger paycheck, while I get stuck with their overengineered solutions.

If I want to craft, I write code in my free time when I'm not limited by corner-cutting philosophy, abusive deadlines, and (some) incompetent coworkers each with their ego spanning to the moon as if instead of building a REST service for 7 users, they are building a world transforming and life-saving device for billions (powered by web3/blockchain/AI of course).

</rant>
by mikeiz404 | 2025-10-22 07:38:29+00:00
> "brain rot", "Thought-skipping", "primary lesion", "Cognitive Declines", ...

In general using these medical/biological metaphors doesn't seem like a good idea in things like computer science research papers and similar.

Their use forces many inaccurate comparisons (when compared in detail) and they engender human qualities to what are already forgotten to be just computer models. I get this may be done with a slight tongue-in-cheek but with research papers there is also the risk that these terms start to be adopted. And undoing that would be a much taller order in either the research community or general media.

Maybe I am just yelling at clouds.
by pjmlp | 2025-10-22 07:38:39+00:00
All this discussing with yet another set of explicit resource management, and the complexity of drop traits proposed on the follow up post, make me appreciate that I can use automatic resource management languages in all my workflows.

Slowly it feels like we might as well add back all Cyclone features into Rust, and then Rust will lose its initial appeal, crumbling into the same type system complexity that hindered Cyclone adoption.
by speleding | 2025-10-22 07:38:58+00:00
A power supply can operate most efficiently if its power output is close to what it was designed to supply. Typically, a PoE switch has a large power budget to take into account the myriad devices that might be connected to it.

If you have one small PoE device connected to a large PoE switch then it would be less efficient compared to a non-PoE switch and a small separate power supply for the device.
by vvolhejn | 2025-10-22 07:39:05+00:00
I train for 1M steps (batch size 64, block size 2048), which is enough for the model to more-or-less converge.

It's also a tiny model for LLM standards, with 150M parameters. The goal wasn't really to reach state of the art but to show how the performance of a single language model architecture can be vastly different when you just change the tokenizer.
by lifeisstillgood | 2025-10-22 07:39:29+00:00
Even more tangential - one of the “disaster” scenarios is a satellite collision - either East/West vs West/East or East/West vs North/South. The debris then would act as shrapnel taking out more and more satellites.

There is an assumption that such a loss would be a prelude to a major attack - but cock up is always more likely.