MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by saghm | 2025-10-20 11:20:06+00:00
I find out useful to split things up sometimes to reduce the number of things in scope at a given time. I've found that this both makes it easier for me to reason about, and anecdotally over the years it seems to correlate with my coworkers finding it easier to review as well, although I suppose it's possible that there's a bit of selection bias in terms of teams being more likely to hire people (and individuals to join teams) with similar mindsets.
by esskay | 2025-10-20 11:20:39+00:00
You're right AWS does have you covered. But that doesn't mean thats the only way of doing it. Load balancing is insanely easy to do yourself, databases even easier. Caching, ditto.

I think a few people who claim to be in devops could do with learning the basics about how things like Ansible can help them as there's a fair few people who seem to be under the impression AWS is the only, and the best option, which unless you're FAANG really is rarely the case.
by pm90 | 2025-10-20 11:20:40+00:00
afaik they have a tiered service architecture, where tier 1 services are allowed to rely on tier 0 services but not vice-versa, and have a bunch of reliability guarantees on tier 0 services that are higher than tier 1.

It is kinda cool that the worst aws outages are still within a single region and not global.
by bayindirh | 2025-10-20 11:20:51+00:00
dd doesn't require either if= or of=. It'll read from stdin (or pipe) if you omit if= and it'll write to stdout happily if you omit of=.

From the man page:

if=FILE - read from FILE instead of stdin. of=FILE - write to FILE instead of stdout.

So you can do:

cat x.iso | dd oflag=direct bs=4096kB | /dev/sdc
by froobius | 2025-10-20 11:21:33+00:00
You've added some useful context, but I think you're downplaying it's use. It's non-obvious, and in many cases better than just saying "we don't know". For example, if some company's server has been down for an hour, and you don't know anything more, it would be reasonable to say to your boss: "I'll look into it, but without knowing more about it, stastically we have a 50% chance of it being back up in an hour".

> The better thing to do is to get some even-specific knowledge, rather than trying to reason from a priori logic

True, and all the posts above have acknowledged this.
by shakadak | 2025-10-20 11:22:57+00:00
> If you never do that computation a second time anywhere else, I would argue that a new function is worse because you can't just scan in it quickly top to bottom.

I do the computation in my head each time I read it. If it is a function I can cache its behavior more easily compared to a well defined block of code. Even if it's never used anywhere else, it's read multiple time, by multiple people. Obviously, it has to make sense from a domain logic perspective, and not be done for the sake of reducing lines of code, but I have yet to see a function/module/file that is justified in being gigantic when approaching it with domain logic reasoning instead of code execution reasoning.
by ikety | 2025-10-20 11:25:17+00:00
I stopped using eza and lsd in favor of aliasing nushell's ls command.

I guess it's not worth the entire dependency of nushell if you don't see yourself ever dabbling with it in other ways (you should it's sick).

Also I'd add to your list zoxide

I've aliased cat to bat, cd to zoxide, and ls to nushell ls with zero issues.
by anal_reactor | 2025-10-20 11:25:34+00:00
First, planning for AWS outage is pointless. Unless you provide service of national security or something, your customers are going to understand that when there's global internet outage your service doesn't work either. The cost of maintaining a working failover across multiple cloud providers is just too high compared to potential benefits. It's astonishing that so few eningeers understand the fact that maintaining a technically beautiful solution costs time and money, which might not make a justified business case.

Second, preparing for the disappearance of AWS is even more silly. The chance that it will happen are orders of magnitude smaller than the chance that the cost of preparing for such an event will kill your business.

Let me ask you: how do you prepare your website for the complete collapse of western society? Will you be able to adapt your business model to post-apocalyptic world where it's only cockroaches?
by praptak | 2025-10-20 11:25:53+00:00
"Working without names (also known as implicit or tacit or point-free programming) is sometimes a more natural and less irritating way to compute. Getting rid of names can also lead to much more concise code. And less code is good code."

Does Forth really reduce the burden of naming things? You don't name results but don't you have to pay for it with the burden of naming words? (My impression is that there's more words in a Forth program than functions in an equivalent program in a language that has named variables).
by Nextgrid | 2025-10-20 11:26:29+00:00
Read my post again. You can go to any website and see evidence of their non-compliance (you don't have to look very hard - they generally tend to push these in your face in the most obnoxious manner possible).

You can't consider a regulation being enforced if everyone gets away with publishing evidence of their non-compliance on their website in a very obnoxious manner.
by geocar | 2025-10-20 11:27:44+00:00
I think there's a mighty big assumption in there.

I see no reason to believe LLMs can write working let alone good or high-quality code, nor that the adjustments to my workflow or expectations will be small. But sure, if such a thing happened, I would probably welcome it.

Meanwhile, there are people who write good and high-quality working code faster than me, and they all write as much as possible on one line with the most bare-bones of text editors, so I will continue to learn from them, rather than the people who say LLMs are helping them. Maybe you should reconsider.
by llm_nerd | 2025-10-20 11:28:02+00:00
Complex documents is where OCR struggles mightily. If you have a simple document with paragraphs of text, sure OCR is pretty solved. If you have a complex layout with figures and graphs and supporting images and asides and captions and so on (basically any paper, or even trade documents), it absolutely falls apart.

And GP LLMs are heinous at OCR. If you are having success with FL, your documents must be incredibly simple.

There has been enormous advances in OCR over the past 6 months, so the SoTa is a moving, rapidly advancing target.
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by uscnep-hn | 2025-10-20 11:28:36+00:00
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by chibea | 2025-10-20 11:28:38+00:00
One main problem that we observed was that big parts of their IAM / auth setup was overloaded / down which led to all kinds of cascading problems. It sounds as if Dynamo was reported to be a root cause, so is IAM dependent on dynamo internally?

Of course, such a large control plane system has all kinds of complex dependency chains. Auth/IAM seems like such a potentially (global) SPOF that you'd like to reduce dependencies to an absolute minimum. On the other hand, it's also the place that needs really good scalability, consistency, etc. so you probably like to use the battle proof DB infrastructure you already have in place. Does that mean you will end up with a complex cyclic dependency that needs complex bootstrapping when it goes down? Or how is that handled?
by pmontra | 2025-10-20 11:29:28+00:00
In the case of a costumer of mine the AWS outage manifested itself as Twilio failing to deliver SMSes. The fallback plan has been disabling the rotation of our two SMS providers and sending all messages with the remaing one. But what if the other one had something on AWS too? Or maybe both of them have something else vital on Azure, or Google Cloud, which will fail next week and stop our service. Who knows?

For small and medium sized companies it's not easy to perform an accurate due diligency.
by jacquesm | 2025-10-20 11:30:24+00:00
No, that's not what it means.

It means that in order to be certified you have to use providers that in turn are certified or you will have to prove that you have all of your ducks in a row and that goes way beyond certain levels of redundancy, to the point that most companies just give up and use a cloud solution because they have enough headaches just getting their internal processes aligned with various certification requirements.

Medical, banking, insurance to name just a couple are heavily regulated and to suggest that it 'just means certain levels of redundancy' is a very uninformed take.
by OutOfHere | 2025-10-20 11:30:52+00:00
It's not about getting caught. It's done in the open with full awareness of everyone. It's not like anyone is hiding it.

Afaik, people hide it only for some controlled substances.

Next time you play a random music video on YouTube, please look at the number of federal copyright laws you're violating. Also, if you ever drive from one state to another, check if you have any plant food with you because crossing state lines with any plant material may be illegal. And I need not remind of marijuana which we know remains highly illegal at the federal level.
by phillebaba | 2025-10-20 11:32:32+00:00
It's been a while since I looked at kuik, but I would say the main difference is that Spegel doesn't do any of the pulling or storage of images. Instead it relies on Containerd to do it for you. This also means that Spegel does not have to manage garbage collection. The nice thing with this is that it doesn't change how images are initially pulled from upstream and is able to serve images that exist on the node before Spegel runs.

Also it looks kuik uses CRDs to store information about where images are cached, while Spegel uses its own p2p solution to do the routing of traffic between nodes.

If you are running k3s in your homelab you can enable Spegel with a flag as it is an embedded feature.
by hopelite | 2025-10-20 11:33:14+00:00
That is why technical leaders’ role wouldn’t demand they not only gather data, but also report things like accurate operational, alternative, and scenario cost analysis; financial risks; vendor lock-in; etc.

However, as may be apparent just from that small set, it is not exactly something technical people often feel comfortable with doing. It is why at least in some organizations you get the friction of a business type interfacing with technical people in varying ways, but also not really getting along because they don’t understand each other and often there are barriers of openness.
by dreis_sw | 2025-10-20 11:35:09+00:00
How do you break the window glass, how do you get into the display cases, how and when do you do it so that you're not stopped by the security, how do you carry the items away, how do you get away from the crime scene without being caught... And I'm sure I am forgetting other details. So I can see how it would take some work to make everything look so simple.
by perihelions | 2025-10-20 11:35:25+00:00
So, that scribble that looks approximately like "ẏlueſ" is interpreted, variously as "ylves" which is identified as elves; or as a clumsy rendering of "ƿlues" which uses an archaic character (that's not a "p") that corresponds to something like "wlues" or "wlves" (wolves). (??)
by jacquesm | 2025-10-20 11:36:13+00:00
> Let me ask you: how do you prepare your website for the complete collapse of western society?

How did we go from 'you could lose your AWS account' to 'complete collapse of western society'? Do websites even matter in that context?

> Second, preparing for the disappearance of AWS is even more silly.

What's silly is not thinking ahead.
by tuhinkarmakar | 2025-10-20 11:36:22+00:00
`TransformStream`s in JavaScript provide a built-in mechanism for transforming data. Since a TransformStream` contains both a writable and a readable side, where anything written to the writable side is emitted from the readable side, it effectively acts as an `Obserbavle`. This makes it well-suited for implementing a simple pub/sub system, where data can be published via the writable end and subscribed to via the readable end.
by businessmate | 2025-10-20 11:36:44+00:00
Discovery mechanisms have changed again. Boards that once measured digital success through SEO dashboards now face a new reality: Large Language Models and AI assistants are the dominant decision interfaces. What defined visibility in the PageRank era no longer applies. This commentary traces the historical pattern of visibility revolutions and argues that without governance, auditability, and reproducible metrics such as PSOS™, global brands risk another Yahoo-scale collapse—this time within AI ecosystems.
by padjo | 2025-10-20 11:38:09+00:00
It’s not absurd, I’ve seen it happen. Company executes on their DR plan due to AWS outage, AWS is back before DR is complete, DR has to be aborted, service is down longer than if they’d just waited.

Of course there are cases when multi cloud makes sense, but it is in the minority. The absurd claim is that most companies should worry cloud outages and plan for AWS to go offline for ever.
by stsquad | 2025-10-20 11:38:57+00:00
In my first proper job as a software engineer I wrote a bunch of Forth for "fruit machines". I don't know what the US equivalent would be but they are low stakes gambling machines which are quite common in UK pubs. The core processor was a 6809 and Forth was chosen because the interpreter was super small and easy to implement. I really appreciated the quick interactive way you could update and tweak code as you tested it. I did get slightly weary of having to keep the state of the stack in your head as you DUP and SWAP stuff around but that was probably due to my inexperience and not decomposing things enough.

They continued to use Forth as the basis for their 68000 based video gaming machines although when it came to the hand classifier for video poker we ended up using C - mostly because we wanted to run a lot of simulations on one of these new fangled "Pentium" processors to make sure we got the prize distribution right to meet the target repayment rate of ~98%.
by 7thaccount | 2025-10-20 11:40:35+00:00
The quote makes more sense IMO for array languages like J that support a tacit style. J's "trains" just make things flow without a lot of variables. Aaron Hsu's Co Dfns compiler (spoken about on here and YouTube) also uses this style with Dyalog APL.

Forth is concatenative, so you can build the words on top of each other without worrying about a ton of variables. So I think it's partially true for Forth.
by bayindirh | 2025-10-20 11:40:39+00:00
> it's also going to go around and change a bunch of configurations so that when I boot LXQT boots instead of whatever I used before.

This because you left the alternative in "auto" mode, or the installed package called update-alternatives and changed the config forcibly.

Debian doesn't change alternatives during package installations without consulting to you if there's a TTY attached. Installing vim doesn't change "editor" to vim, or installing most doesn't change "pager" to most (unless the configs are in auto mode and the package you installed has a higher priority on that alternative list).

Also, when working with apt(itude), the changes are visibly done, saying that "update-alternatives: x has changed to new_program (auto)" or something similar.

So nothing is hidden from you, and why apt has a rolling log so you can review things even after it's completed.
by xxs | 2025-10-20 11:41:54+00:00
>Five if he lives in an area prone to electrical surges.

Many fridges have DC compressors and decent enough input filtering, that should be no issue. However, the electronics themselves are another matter.

Most fridges nowadays have defrost cycles controlled by the said processors, with the latter being prone to even software issues. Some fans may not need a replacement, while the fans are cheap and ubiquitous reaching them is another story.
by crowbahr | 2025-10-20 11:42:02+00:00
It's about a 5% conversion rate but here are some things to remember:

1. They're haemorrhaging money even on paying customers, even at the $200/mo subscription level 2. 5% conversion rates are pretty dismal for what AI is purported to be - IE if you're a free user and it's able to replace everything you do for free why pay for it? If it's not able to, why pay for it? If it's truly amazingly transformative you'd similarly expect huge buy-in from people swarming to use this amazing new tool.
by js8 | 2025-10-20 11:42:13+00:00
Well, I feel that lot of code is written again and again, just in different languages. If we could automatically compare and translate different implementations, I think it would be beneficial for finding bugs.

Everytime somebody comes up with a new programming language, I am like, yeah, so you added these abstraction, just in a different syntax. I think people who come up with new languages should implement the primitives on top of lambda calculus (which really is the simplest logical system we know), then we could potentially have automated translators between languages, and that way we could cater to everyone's preferences, and expand a standard library across different languages.

So in short, yes, I think proliferation of programming languages without formal understanding of their differences is detrimental to interoperability of our computer systems.

It would also allow wider notion of metaprogramming - automated manipulation of programs. For example, let's say I need to upgrade my source code from one interpreter version to another. If both interpreters are represented as a set of terms in lambda calculus, I can see how express one in the other, and formalize it as some kind of transformation. No more manual updates when something changes.

It would also allow to build a library of universal optimizations, etc. So I think programmers would benefit from having a single universal language.
by samdoesnothing | 2025-10-20 11:43:23+00:00
Well, I suppose we should define what we mean by "slavery" first because one could simply argue they aren't the same by definition. If it's something like "someone captured, sold, or born into chattel slavery", than obviously a tax payer is not a slave.

But under a loser definition, it's fairly obvious that an entity which takes part of the results of your labor under the threat of violence at least partially owns you, and thus it's reasonable to consider tax payers as slaves to their government.

I'm actually more interested in your argument for why they are mutually exclusive concepts.
by lproven | 2025-10-20 11:43:39+00:00
Certainly that is how I read it.

It divides effort, spreads it too thinly among too many disparate projects with essentially the same goals, and as a result, they all advance much more slowly.

Examples: how many successors to C are there now? Hare, Odin, Joy, Zig, Nim, Crystal, Jai, Rust, D... And probably as many again that are lower-profile or one-person efforts.

For a parallel example, consider desktop environments on FOSS xNix OSes.

I have tried to count and I found about 20.

A "desktop" here meaning that it provides a homogenous environment, including things like a file manager and tools to switching between apps, plus accessories such as text editors, media viewers, and maybe even an email client, calendar, and/or address book. I am trying to explicitly exclude simple window managers here.

The vast majority are simply re-implementations of the Windows 9x desktop. Taskbar along 1 edge of the screen, with buttons for open apps, start menu, system tray, hierarchical file explorer, a Control Panel app with icons for individual pages, etc.

This includes:

* KDE Plasma (and Trinity)

* GNOME Flashback (AKA GNOME Classic, including the Consort fork)

* Cinnamon

* Xfce

* Budgie

* MATE

* LXDE (including Raspberry Pi PIXEL)

* LXQt

* UKUI (from Ubuntu Kylin, openKylin, etc.)

* DDE (from Deepin but also UOS, Ubuntu DDE and others)

* Enlightenment (and Moksha etc.)

* ChromeOS Aura

And more that are now obsolete:

* EDE

* XPde

* Lumina

That's about 15, more if you count variants and forks. There are more.

The main differences are whether they use Gtk 2, 3 or 4, or Qt. That's it.

It's easier to count the ones that aren't visibly inspired by Windows >= 95:

* GNOME Shell, ElementaryOS's Pantheon, Ubuntu's Unity.

Arguably: GNUstep (whose project lead angrily maintains is not a desktop after all), and the long-dormant ROX Desktop...

So, arguably, 3 you can run on a modern distro today.

CDE is older than Linux or Free/NetBSD so doesn't count. I only know 1 distro that offers it, anyway: Sparky Linux.

MAXX Interactive Desktop looks interesting but it's not (yet?) FOSS.

All that effort that's gone into creating and maintaining 8-10 different Win9x desktops in C using Gtk. It's tragic.

And yet there is still no modern FOSS classic-MacOS desktop, or Mac OS X desktop, or GEM desktop, or Amiga desktop, or OS/2 Workplace Shell... it's not like inspiration is lacking. There are at least 3 rewrites of AmigaOS (AROS, MorphOS, AmigaOS 4.x) but despite so much passion nobody bothered to bring the desktop to Linux?

Defenders of each will vigorously argue that theirs is the best and there are good reasons why it's the best, I'm sure, but at the end of the day, a superset of all of the features of all of them would not be visibly different from any single one.

That's rather sad, IMHO.
by wu1064442747 | 2025-10-20 11:44:16+00:00
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by RHSeeger | 2025-10-20 11:44:37+00:00
> Do not cite Kent Beck as a software authority.

I didn't. Rather, I stated my opinion on the subject and then noted that there is a book that discusses the same (so clearly I'm not the only one that thinks this).

> As for your "function documentation", the primary difference between that assignment and a function is solely ossified arguments.

No, it's not. It's that the code being moved to a function allows the original location to be cleaner and more obvious.
by reneberlin | 2025-10-20 11:44:47+00:00
Buga sphere: this is a mind-boggling twist, that i didn't have on the radar with these symbols.

Just download the paper or view in browser - no signup needed.

i just couldn't directly link the pdf, because it contained a time-constrained token.

I can't understand how i could have missed that one. Just in case you're maybe one of those poor souls, too.
by pluc | 2025-10-20 11:44:49+00:00
You could also spend 5 minutes thinking instead of using a 10th of the Texas power grid to do it for you. Remember when we used to not know shit, and it would stay with you for days - before Google happened? The same is about to happen with mental acuity and AI. Use it or lose it - and I hope every fanboys' brain turns to mush before they witness irreversible AI-caused climate catastrophes solely to be able to speak natural english to a search engine. If you outsource your thinking process, don't come bitching when it's gone.