MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zenoprax | 2025-10-20 20:16:58+00:00
I think your third point is what I've had to attune to when criticizing cloud dependence. I think if your entire source of revenue is dependent on AWS then you should be prepared for 16+ hours of downtime per year. Individuals notice it more when something is down for hours but with good observability I am guessing the business notices it more when performance drags for the other 8742 hours of the year. Bursts of downtime per day can still be attributed to the device, wifi, ISP, or some other intermediary's DNS/BGP.

If your margins are so tight that 16 hours of downtime will bankrupt you then I think either: a) I have no idea how to run a business; or b) you have no idea how to run a business. I'm also biased because I love highly fault-tolerant, geo-redundant, durable systems much more than "good enough for this KPI".
by bpt3 | 2025-10-20 20:17:00+00:00
1. You did not start off talking about mortgages, you lumped it into your initial grievance once that didn't land. If you can't accept that debt exists and the reasons why it exists, you're going to be sorely disappointed by virtually all of your interactions with the rest of humanity.

2. Of course, people with mortgages are still considered property owners legally and by nearly all of society.
by xp84 | 2025-10-20 20:17:13+00:00
In 2011 there was some kind of big outage at some major AWS US-east pop. I started a job at a company (very boring B2C startup) which had taken the lesson from that, that "cloud anything is dangerous."

They went and bought a bunch of literal servers and installed them in a datacenter, 90 miles away from our offices, and this is where all our applications ran for the remainder of that company's existence (about 6 more years). For the whole time I was at that company, we had somewhat more, and usually more lengthy, outages than the average startup. The only difference is that when some piece of networking gear took a crap, or a disk failed, or whatever, our guys had to diagnose and resolve it (Their karma, I guess, since this was their idea).

Anyway, I do think it would be good if at least so-calld 'tech companies' had a little less obsession to outsource everything -- even easy things -- to AWS, GCP, and Azure. I feel that way mainly for cost reasons as many of these services are wildly overpriced. But also we shouldn't kid ourselves by ignoring the advantages of operating at the scale those guys do. They can afford to have multiple absolute wizards available around the clock who make sure that when a problem happens, it's not the kind of "S-show" we had at my old company where we're all on a slack room or zoom or whatever and just guessing at to try for half an hour before we can figure out what the actual issue is.
by legitster | 2025-10-20 20:17:43+00:00
> Could this be due to epipens being commonly carried by people likely to experience anaphylaxis?

The tricky thing with the data set available to us is that anaphylactic deaths are so rare that it's hard to establish meaningful findings: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4382330/

We do know though that hospitalization rates are about the same for people who take epinephrine vs those that don't. The speed at which they get to the ER seems to have a bigger impact on the recovery from the reaction than the Epipens do: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10811...

> Implying the increase in EpiPen prescriptions caused people to be more cautious about food allergies feels exactly backwards.

How so? Bringing awareness to risk in general makes people more cautious. Advertising crime rates in your town to sell you a security system will overall make people feel less secure.
by linkregister | 2025-10-20 20:18:02+00:00
In the modern age of mass credential stuffing attacks exploiting password reuse, MFA is one of the most effective tools for reducing unauthorized logins. Companies that don't adopt it are risking unacceptably high levels of credit card chargebacks.

I wish the standard were for companies to check new passwords against leaked password lists, e.g. what https://haveibeenpwned.com uses.

I use a similar workflow and have found that websites that allow passkey-based login can avoid the friction of waiting for TOTP codes or magic links.
by mettamage | 2025-10-20 20:18:16+00:00
> The USA probably doesn't worry much

No, if they did, they'd know about certain attacks or planned attacks earlier [1]. So they should but they don't.

[1] https://www.amazon.nl/Het-oorlog-maar-niemand-ziet/dp/946381... - not an affiliated link, just the first one I could find.
by extr | 2025-10-20 20:18:23+00:00
It’s interesting because I’ve slowly arrived at the opposite conclusion: for much of my practical day to day work, using CC with “allow edits” turned OFF results in a much better end product. I can correct it inline, I pseudo-review the code as it’s produced, etc etc. Codex is better for “fire and forget” features for sure. But Claude remains excellent at grokking intent for problems where you aren’t quite sure what you want to build yet or are highly opinionated. Mostly due to the fact it’s faster and the iteration loop is faster.
by MiiMe19 | 2025-10-20 20:18:31+00:00
My entire point is that many Europeans love to call Americans stupid and uneducated about politics while acting the exact same way themselves, all without noticing the blatant hypocrisy. The difference between you and me and that I know and accept that I am an uneducated idiot about most things. I wish you all the best as well. Hopefully everything works out for the best for everyone involved.
by Alive-in-2025 | 2025-10-20 20:18:36+00:00
Russia and China still exist and are pre-eminent dangers. The US has gone crazy but we still need to work together to discourage wars related to invading taiwan or Europe. I am terrified the US won't come back to being an actual democracy that follows the rule of law. At the same time, we can just stop surveilling our citizens in the democratic free world. We can just decide to do that.
by franz_vlkshp | 2025-10-20 20:18:46+00:00
on the other hand, that's a small price to pay to having total control and physical access to your own infrastructure. if the sysadmin did his job properly, an incident like that shouldn't require anything else but to plug the server back in and hit the power switch. but then if he did his job properly, no one but IT should be tripping on power cables to begin with.
by wkat4242 | 2025-10-20 20:19:05+00:00
Source: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/239890/ook-fiscus-kan-geen-eu-al...

"De Belastingdienst, met daarnaast ook de Douane en de Dienst Toeslagen, gebruikt momenteel eigen software voor kantoorautomatisering."

This is M365 so it's not to do with Azure. It says they used their own office software before that was not cloud. That's what I referred to.

I was not aware what they do with the more traditional cloud stuff but I'm not surprised they handed everything on a silver platter to the US though. The neolib party that has been in power for the last 20 years is super US centric and their previous prime minister is now acting as Trump's lapdog as general secretary of NATO.
by inopinatus | 2025-10-20 20:19:19+00:00
Even wearing my ex-AWS hat and understanding to some degree the internal complexity of these services, I too am boggled that foundational stuff is still out of Virginia and not a separately operated global region for the subset of control-plane dependencies that can’t be refactored into tolerating eventual consistency (such as parts of IAM).

We always used to talk a lot about minimising blast radius and there’s been enough time, and enough scale, to fix it.

Nevertheless the Guardian’s choice to label self-promoting policy wonks as “experts” is a cringe-inducing reminder that journalists don’t know anything about anything.
by froobius | 2025-10-20 20:19:29+00:00
> Model state is present only in so-far-generated text

Wrong. There's "model state", (I assume you mean hidden layers), not just in the generated text, but also in the initial prompt given to the model. I.e. the model can start its planning from the moment it's given the instruction, without even having predicted a token yet. That's actually what they show in the paper above...

> It is only after the model has found itself in a poetry generating context and has also selected the first line-ending word, that a rhyme scheme "emerges" as a variable

This is an assertion based on flawed reasoning.

(Also, these ideas should really be backed up by evidence and experimentation before asserting them so definitively.)
by devilsdata | 2025-10-20 20:19:41+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator

> Above GEO, the centrifugal force is stronger than gravity, causing objects attached to the cable there to pull upward on it. [...] On the cable below geostationary orbit, downward gravity would be greater than the upward centrifugal force, so the apparent gravity would pull objects attached to the cable downward.

So, without defensive countermeasures, the Space Elevator would indeed whip around the Earth.

But honestly, if I were designing such a thing, it would have break points, and maybe even a whinch at the base, to pull the line in. I'd also build it over water, and not over a population centre.

But I'm only a software engineer– it's likely a lot more challenging than this.
by gxonatano | 2025-10-20 20:19:50+00:00
Those of us that use Nix don't have the problems you complain about. Just write (or vibe-code) a flake.nix for each project, and you can have arbitrary versions of whatever language (Node, PHP, whatever), arbitrary environment variables, port setups, and whatever else. Add in Direnv and you don't have to do anything but `cd` into your project directory. Then simply add an extra output to create a Docker image for your project.

The idea of paying double digits annually for a service that's basically a weaker version of Nix, and which lacks Linux support, is absurd.
by empath75 | 2025-10-20 20:20:03+00:00
I'm going to paraphrase Matt Levine here -- the central trick of bankers is to divide debt into tranches of claims of different seniority, with different rates of return. Debt is a way to borrow money from investors where they actually have a generally low rate of return specified and have a senior claim on being paid back in the case of insolvency. Stocks are a way to borrow money for investors where they get basically _nothing_ in the case of insolvency, but they expect a higher return from either dividends or stock buy backs, or just from company growth. Different investors have different goals in terms of risk/reward for what they want out of a company they invest in, and providing investors more options unlocks more opportunities to raise money.
by extr | 2025-10-20 20:21:00+00:00
IMO Sonnet 4.5 is great but it just isn’t as comprehensive of a thinker. I love Anthropic and primarily use CC day to day but for any tricky problems or “high stakes, this must not have bugs” issues, I turn to Codex. I do find if you let Codex run on it its own too long it will produce comparably sloppy or lacking-in-vision type issues that people criticize Sonnet for, however.
by midtake | 2025-10-20 20:21:08+00:00
There are many public clouds and VPS providers out there. Who the fuck are these experts?

The real issue is that business pricks will cut costs and single-homing in a single availability zone will be the only workable solution.

On top of that, infrastructure ops are seen as a nuisance who get in the way of the sexy stuff like shipping your latest code changes now. If you complicate the ops pipeline that gets in the way of sexy dev work. So fuck that just ship lol!
by bartread | 2025-10-20 20:21:45+00:00
Is it hard wired? If so, and if the alarm module doesn’t have an internal battery, can you go to the breaker box and turn off the circuit it’s on? You should be able to switch off each breaker in turn until it stops if you don’t know which circuit it’s on.

If it doesn’t stop, that means it has a battery backup. But you can still make life more bearable. Switch off all your breakers (you probably have a master breaker for this), then open up the alarm box and either pull the battery or - if it’s non-removable - take the box off the wall, put it in a sealed container, and put the sealed container somewhere… else. Somewhere you can’t hear it or can barely hear it until the battery runs down.

Meanwhile you can turn the power back on but make sure you’ve taped the bare ends of the alarm power cable, or otherwise electrically insulated them, until you’re able to reinstall it.
by organsnyder | 2025-10-20 20:22:07+00:00
> From the US perspective, we have been asking ourselves "can we trust Europe's military capacity" for a very long time and the answer (prior to 2025) was: NO.

NATO's mutual defense clause has only been activated once: after 9/11, when the United States declared war on the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Out of the 3621 deaths of coalition soldiers, 1160 of them were from nations other than the United States, including 457 from the UK, 159 from Canada, and 90 from France.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_casualties_in_Afghan...
by photonthug | 2025-10-20 20:22:08+00:00
> feels like the wrong question to me

I agree but had different questions. TFA mentions the consideration of whether failure cases are correlated, but of course if OpenAI wins big, there's a good chance this directly or indirectly creates much instability and uncertainty in many other loans/partners. What's the EV on whether that is net-positive considering this is a loan at 5% and not an investment?

On the other side, if OpenAI crashes hard, is it really such a sure thing that Microsoft will be the on the hook to pay off their debts? Setting aside whatever the lawyers could argue about in a post-mortem, are they even obligated to keep their current stake / can they not just divest / sell / otherwise cut their losses if the writing is on the wall?
by Syntonicles | 2025-10-20 20:22:18+00:00
That sounds frustrating! It hasn't been my experience at all.

I'm an enthusiast when it comes to [Vanilla] Emacs. I enjoy customizing my editor, jumping into the Lisp when I find an error, and contributing - though my own config is usually the problem.

This sounds like an opportunity to improve the day-to-day for developers!

Please report any verified bugs to Github. There are only 12 open issues, most of them enhancement requests. The maintainers are celebrated in the community for their diligence and attentive engagement, and I'm sure they'd love to help.
by vee-kay | 2025-10-20 20:22:24+00:00
You all have clearly never smelled cat pee and cat poop.

Now that is pungent and nauseating. I like cats, but their pee and poop make me cringe.

Studies show that cat urine contains more concentrated urea and ammonia than other pets’ urine, making it especially pungent.

High Concentration of Waste: Cat urine is highly concentrated due to their evolution from desert-dwelling ancestors. This adaptation allows them to absorb more water, resulting in urine that contains a higher concentration of waste products.

Breakdown of Urea: When cat urine sits in a litter box, bacteria begin to break down urea, a component of urine. This process releases ammonia, which contributes to the strong, unpleasant odor.

Presence of Mercaptans: As urine decomposes, it also produces mercaptans, sulfur compounds that emit a skunky smell. This intensifies the overall odor of cat urine over time.

Hormonal Influence: Unneutered male cats produce urine with a stronger smell due to hormones used for marking territory. Unspayed females also have potent-smelling urine, especially when in heat.
by gretch | 2025-10-20 20:22:31+00:00
“Most of the time” isn’t really the bar here. That’s like me saying “most of the time the warehouse won’t catch on fire” or “most of the time the plane won’t crash”.

For disaster scenarios, we benefit from extreme caution.

Arguably we haven’t done enough of this, if you look at e.g. global climate change. We may yet be able to avert a huge disaster, but even if you just look at the local damage like intensified tropical storms, or wildfires, that’s quite a big deal.
by pfannkuchen | 2025-10-20 20:22:51+00:00
I agree with your point about eating traditional preparations of grains being less problematic and many people seemingly not thinking about that at all for some reason even when they run into problems.

But, I think it may go a step further than that. If we zoom out on the timeline to the span of human evolution, eating grass seeds as a significant part of the diet is very, very, very strange. It wouldn’t surprise me if some human subpopulations, especially those who adopted agriculture later on, aren’t suited to eating grass seeds at all. And I’m just thinking about within European subpopulations. There were people roaming around the steppe when others were long settled. And beyond even that, the population increase enabled by wheat et al could plausibly produce a large enough competitive advantage for the group that some individuals having tummy problems probably would not register much on the selection pressure meter back in those days.

I’ve come around to the idea that wheat sensitivity is probably real. I used to be quite skeptical also. I think if you told someone 30,000 years ago that the earth would be full of people eating mainly grass seeds, they would find the idea completely ridiculous.
by Hizonner | 2025-10-20 20:23:00+00:00
> religious and expression rights are legally protected.

What "liberal democracy" has laws that tell F-Droid that it has to carry any particular apps, or how it has to mark them, again? There are some places that like to call themselves "liberal democracies" and have "must not carry" laws, but that's as far as it goes (and, on edit, those don't generally aim at religious content).

In fact I think you will probably find that there are no must-carry-religious-content laws anywhere, liberal or not. Even in utterly totalitarian states, the closest anything comes is rules that government spyware, or maybe propaganda, must be installed.

The only "FO" that will or should happen to F-Droid is that it may lose more users and/or contributors one way than the other.
by twixfel | 2025-10-20 20:23:07+00:00
There's nothing wrong with being stupid at all. I just don't understand why you have such strong opinions on something you clearly know nothing about. So: you don't like Europe, USA's oldest and most important allies because they're socialists. OK but Europe is not even socialist, literally all European countries are capitalist (objectively, it's an undeniable fact). Now what? Any reflection, reevaluation? No, you just get offended and tell me once again that you don't like me because I'm European and that's it.

The enlightenment is dead in the USA, knowledge and facts no longer matter. Feelings over facts really won.
by imgabe | 2025-10-20 20:23:40+00:00
Anyone can have an opinion, I never said or implied otherwise. Having an opinion does not make one an expert, hence the scare quotes.

The headline is misleading because when there is news about experts saying something about technology, one would naturally think that they are at least somewhat technical experts. Instead the "expert" is the director of the "Big Tech is Bad Institute" who says that "Big Tech is Bad". And their qualification of being an expert is solely that they are director of the "Big Tech is Bad Institute".
by ipaddr | 2025-10-20 20:23:58+00:00
"AI will/has fundamentally changed how we work in the matter of 3 years"

The past 3 years or the next 3 years or 1.5 years both ways?

It hasn't really done that yet. The work from home zoom meetings has made a bigger impact. Maybe in a few years? Its on par with the metaverse at this point.
by derefr | 2025-10-20 20:24:00+00:00
> it's the cheapest region

In every SKU I've ever looked at / priced out, all of the AWS NA regions have ~equal pricing. What's cheaper specifically in us-east-1?

> Europe-friendly

Why not us-east-2?

> Many Amazon features are available in that region first and then spread out to other locations.

Well, yeah, that's why it breaks. Using not-us-east-1 is like using an LTS OS release: you don't get the newest hotness, but it's much more stable as a "build it and leave it alone" target.

> It's also a region where other cloud providers and hosting companies offer their services. Often there's space available in a data center not far from AWS-running racks.

This is a better argument, but in practice, it's very niche — 2-5ms of speed-of-light delay doesn't matter to anyone but HFT folks; anyone else can be in a DC one state away with a pre-arranged tier1-bypassing direct interconnect, and do fine. (This is why OVH is listed on https://www.cloudinfrastructuremap.com/ despite being a smaller provider: their DCs have such interconnects.)

For that matter, if you want "low-latency to North America and Europe, and high-throughput lowish-latency peering to many other providers" — why not Montreal [ca-central-1]? Quebec might sound "too far north", but from the fiber-path perspective of anywhere else in NA or Europe, it's essentially interchangeable with Virginia.
by ohdeardear | 2025-10-20 20:24:02+00:00
Their web-application is worth $200,000. The software of the training infrastructure is worth perhaps $2M; the inference infrastructure is worth perhaps $500,000. Their hardware is worth nothing in 3 years. Their B2B relations are worth perhaps $5M. The "data" they have is worth nothing in 5 years, because a sufficiently smart model will be able to learn without human feedback.

They have no moat. So, how do you get to $4B?

I think the models are wrong way too often for relatively simple queries, so unless they give a secret prompt like "be wrong a lot in the free version" to users, it's basically worthless.
by theshrike79 | 2025-10-20 20:24:30+00:00
I'm like 80% sure Sonnet 4.5 is just rebranded Opus.

Sonnet 4 was a coding companion, I could see what it was doing and it did what I asked.

Sonnet 4.5 is like Opus, it generates massive amounts of "helper scripts" and "bootstrap scripts" and all kinds of useless markdown documentation files even for the tinies PoC scripts.
by paulsutter | 2025-10-20 20:24:34+00:00
Whats the difference between populism and democracy? Seems like the definition is "when people dont vote the way I like". For example I worry about socialist populism, which is subjective at best or (more practically) just judgemental - democracy means will of the people.

On the other hand, when I look at the recent history of the "elites" in the US, they seem (at a minimum) poorly selected or (more practically) flatly idiotic.

So maybe elitism and populism are just two bad choices?
by appleiigs | 2025-10-20 20:25:00+00:00
Yeah, I thought it was weird right away too, but brush it off as a tech blog... but then I realized it's actually a finance website. Ruins the credibility of the website instantly.

The $4B revolver will likely sit undrawn. When it gets drawn, there usually a specific plan to reduce it back to zero. It's not for building data centres, a revolver typically used just for timing differences like a credit card is used (and the lenders will be paying attention). Also, when things get bad, there are covenant triggers which would allow lenders to renegotiate.
by endymi0n | 2025-10-20 20:25:10+00:00
Meanwhile, core functionality like “Find My” is completely and utterly broken. Leaving behind my stuff at a new place gets me at least two different messages on my Apple Watch at different timing. One for my devices, one for my Apple tags. One only has a “dismiss” button, the other has a “trust location” button that when I click, it says “content unavailable”, and if it works (which is only! over Wi-Fi), then it only works for that one device. I always need to go through the find my app at every new place since it’s an absolute UX disaster.

That’s what I get for carrying only Apple gear in the thousands of euros with me.