MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by contrarian1234 | 2025-10-20 10:44:28+00:00
That's like someone gives you a nicer car and you say "yeah but it doesn't fly". Having a better UI for APT is a separate goal from.. making the next package manager? or improving Nix?

The reality is that Ubuntu LTS (and APT by extension) is pretty much the standard OS of Linux. Even if there are better solutions, that's sort of irrelevant. And APT users could use a better UI
by kkfx | 2025-10-20 10:44:38+00:00
Honestly anyone do have outages, that's nothing extraordinary, what's wrong is the number of impacted services. We choose (at least almost choose) to ditch mainframes for clusters also for resilience. Now with cheap desktop iron labeled "stable enough to be a serious server" we have seen mainframes re-created sometimes with a cluster of VM on top of a single server, sometimes with cloud services.

Ladies and Gentleman's it's about time to learn reshoring in the IT world as well. Owning nothing, renting all means extreme fragility.
by citrin_ru | 2025-10-20 10:46:56+00:00
On one hand it's allows to shift the blame but on other hand is shows a disadvantage of hyper centralization - if AWS is down too many important services are down at the same time which makes it worse. E. g. when AWS is down it's important to have communication/monitoring services UP so engineers can discuss / co-ordinate workarounds and have good visibility but Atlassian was (is) significantly degraded today too.
by weinzierl | 2025-10-20 10:47:02+00:00
I think practical Unix philosophy is more nuanced. There are filter programs that read STDIN and write to STDOUT per default.

But this is not really practical for many use cases which are not filters first and foremost. So we end up with still reading from STDIN or the list of files presented as arguments. We write to the file given by -o (or --output) which can be "-" to signify STDOUT.

I find this pattern very flexible because it allows multiple input files or STDIN and a single output file which can be STOUT, so you still get your filtering behaviour if you want.

(For completeness sake, there is a third pattern somewhat prevalent. In call these copy type programs. They treat the last argument specially, usually as some form of target, like `cp a b c target`.)
by eternavaults | 2025-10-20 10:47:04+00:00
I built EternaVaults to solve a common family problem: critical digital info (wills, logins, memories, investments) gets lost, and consumer clouds don’t handle privacy or emergency access. What’s different: Client‑side AES‑256‑GCM (zero‑knowledge; server stores encrypted blobs) Emergency access with approvals Audit logs, versioning, soft delete, device trust PWA/mobile experience Would love feedback on: Onboarding (post‑payment → create‑family) Threat model clarity on the security page Pricing/plan limits Links: App: https://eternavaults.com Security: https://eternavaults.com/security Pricing: https://eternavaults.com/pricing
by MDTHLN | 2025-10-20 10:47:26+00:00
I love Gleam, but I would start with Elixir if you're interested in learning about how powerful the BEAM & OTP are.

There's not much documentation/resources around OTP in Gleam. When I was playing around with it I often found myself referring to the Elixir docs and then 'translating' that knowledge to Gleam's OTP implementation.

Gleam is still very new so this is totally understandable, and both are great languages so you'll likely have a lot of fun learning either of them.
by mlrtime | 2025-10-20 10:47:46+00:00
When these major issues come up, all they have is symptoms and not causes. Maybe not until the dynamo oncall comes on and says its down, then everyone knows at least the reason for their teams outage.

The scale here is so large they don't know the complete dependency tree until teams check-in on what is out or not, growing this list. Of course most of it is automated, but getting on 'Affected Services' is not.
by tsimionescu | 2025-10-20 10:47:55+00:00
This thought process suggests something very wrong. The guess "it will last again as long as it has lasted so far" doesn't give any real insight. The wall was actually as likely to end five months from when they visited it, as it was to end 500 years from then.

What this "time-wise Copernican principle" gives you is a guarantee that, if you apply this logic every time you have no other knowledge and have to guess, you will get the least mean error over all of your guesses. For some events, you'll guess that they'll end in 5 minutes, and they actually end 50 years later. For others, you'll guess they'll take another 50 years and they actually end 5 minutes later. Add these two up, and overall you get 0 - you won't have either a bias to overestimating, nor to underestimating.

But this doesn't actually give you any insight into how long the event will actually last. For a single event, with no other knowledge, the probability that it will after 1 minute is equal to the probability that it will end after the same duration that it lasted so far, and it is equal to the probability that it will end after a billion years. There is nothing at all that you can say about the probability of an event ending from pure mathematics like this - you need event-specific knowledge to draw any conclusions.

So while this Copernican principle sounds very deep and insightful, it is actually just a pretty trite mathematical observation.
by contrarian1234 | 2025-10-20 10:48:09+00:00
Can someone involved with packaging help me understand why dependency management and system configuration are integrated and not separate things entirely?

For instance, if I "install" LXQT on Ubuntu LTS, it's going to not only install all the dependency libraries (and the dependencies' dependencies) as well as all the relevant executables.. but 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.

Why would it not make sense to have installing libraries/executables and their dependencies be decoupled from all the twiddling config files and setting up the spiderweb of userland processes?
by freeqaz | 2025-10-20 10:48:53+00:00
Since I'm 5+ years out from my NDA around this stuff, I'll give some high level details here.

Snapchat heavily used Google AppEngine to scale. This was basically a magical Java runtime that would 'hot path split' the monolithic service into lambda-like worker pools. Pretty crazy, but it worked well.

Snapchat leaned very heavily on this though and basically let Google build the tech that allowed them to scale up instead of dealing with that problem internally. At one point, Snap was >70% of all GCP usage. And this was almost all concentrated on ONE Java service. Nuts stuff.

Anyway, eventually Google was no longer happy with supporting this and the corporate way of breaking up is "hey we're gonna charge you 10x what did last year for this, kay?" (I don't know if it was actually 10x. It was just a LOT more)

So began the migration towards Kubernetes and AWS EKS. Snap was one of the pilot customers for EKS before it was generally available, iirc. (I helped work on this migration in 2018/2019)

Now, 6+ years later, I don't think Snap heavily uses GCP for traffic unless they migrated back. And this outage basically confirms that :P
by 0xEF | 2025-10-20 10:49:32+00:00
It's my understanding that the Karman Line the conventionally accepted "edge" where you leave the atmosphere and enter outer space, but many call this out as a fairly arbitrary point, arguing that there is no measurable boundary. Useful as a point of reference for positioning, though. Neal possibly just used it as a marker but chose to not define it for this reason.
by imiric | 2025-10-20 10:50:44+00:00
Lovely, as all neal.fun experiments. <3

My favorite is probably https://neal.fun/infinite-craft/

This type of interactive learning experience reminds me of how fun it was to browse Encarta back in the day. It was full of interesting facts, presented in fun interactive ways. As much as I love that we have Wikipedia today, a static web page with text and limited multimedia is far less engaging and conducive to learning.

I think that Neal Agarwal and Bartosz Ciechanowski should be sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation to create similar experiences on Wikipedia. That would do so much to facilitate learning for students of all ages.
by tobias12345 | 2025-10-20 10:50:53+00:00
How will porting a single concept like `defer` from zig, a language that is not memory safe, to C and C++ make those memory safe?

`defer` is a poor man's RAII. C++ has had RAII since the beginning, and C++ is still not considered memory safe. So how will adding `defer` help C++ to become memory safe?

This feels like another example of how poorly C and C++ devs understand the ideas behind memory safety. You do not really need to understand this concept, as long as you can debug all the memory issues that just pop up:-)
by criticalfault | 2025-10-20 10:51:18+00:00
Thanks for the explanation and the link. I learned something today.

I'm definitely not an expert, but to me, RL and other techniques looks like a guide or a constraint on the still 'next token prediction' concept. What I do not get is - is this all about training? Or is this about inference.

In any case, this is still an eye opener and I need to study this a bit more.

When talking inference, models from huggingface are composed of what then? Because they can do angentic stuff, no?
by ghc | 2025-10-20 10:52:09+00:00
Kudos to the Globe/AP for getting it right:

> An Amazon Web Services outage is causing major disruptions around the world. The service provides remote computing services to many governments, universities and companies, including The Boston Globe.

> On DownDetector, a website that tracks online outages, users reported issues with Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite online broker Robinhood, the McDonald’s app and many other services.
by PeterisP | 2025-10-20 10:52:47+00:00
Abstractions are inherently a tradeoff, and too much abstraction hurts you when the assumptions break.

For a major example, treating a network resource like a file is neat and elegant and simple while the network works well, however, once you have unreliable or slow or intermittent connectivity, the abstraction breaks and you have to handle the fact that it's not really like a local file, and your elegant abstraction has to be mangled with all kinds of things so that your apps are able to do that.
by raphinou | 2025-10-20 10:53:02+00:00
I also preferred dynamic typing, until my complex rails app grew to the point I didn't dare to do any refactoring. But I didn't switch opinion until I discovered ML type systems, which really allow for fearless refactoring. At occasion there's some battling to satisfy the typesystem, but even with that I'm more productive once the app grows in complexity.

I thought I'd share my experience, not trying to convince anyone ; - )
by lazide | 2025-10-20 10:53:10+00:00
Sure, but then you also have the F22, F117, B2, A10, SR71, U2, and a bunch more I can’t think of right now.

Some helicopters have a single engine. Most have 2. They are still unreliable death machines, and arguably 2 engines makes the problem a bit worse (more moving parts). They are (sometimes) more tolerant of a single engine out, of course. But transmissions are often the weak spot with helicopters.

Single vs Dual has many factors, not just reliability.

A single engine failure on a SR71 (if I remember correctly) resulted in a airframe loss and ejection at relatively low speeds, and one at full speed would likely result in a complete crew loss on top of it - and it has dual engines. Think catastrophic near instant destruction.

Sometimes you just need more power than a single engine (with current tech) can provide in the space you have available, for instance.

Sometimes, like an A10, you really do want something that can take a massive beating and keep going.

A B52 can lose 2 engines with no issues, and theoretically up to 4 and still be controllable (depending on the distribution of the lost engines). But that isn’t because it needs reliability, but because it’s got 8 engines because it was designed to carry a metric shit ton of explosives, and it only had 60’s era tech jet engines.

Modern jets usually use 2 (much more powerful) engines for similar or even larger payloads.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-10-20 10:53:32+00:00
Lol no. It's just Arthur Whitney style C (with the repo in question being originally written by Whitney).

Whitney kind of set the stage for this but it got adopted informally as a style by the people at IPSA (I. P. Sharp Associates) and spread throughout the industry.

Whitney style C isn't great for everything but it's not bad for interpreter writing and other text/stream touching tasks.
by tsimionescu | 2025-10-20 10:54:09+00:00
Not really, unless you care about something like "when I look back at my career, I don't want to have had a bias to underestimating nor overestimating outages". That's all this logic gives you: for every time you underestimate a crisis, you'll be equally likely to overestimate a different crisis. I don't think this is in any way actually useful.

Also, the worse thing you can get from this logic is to think that it is actually most likely that the future duration equals the past duration. This is very much false, and it can mislead you if you think it's true. In fact, with no other insight, all future durations are equally likely for any particular event.

The better thing to do is to get some even-specific knowledge, rather than trying to reason from a priori logic. That will easily beat this method of estimation.
by JCM9 | 2025-10-20 10:54:43+00:00
It’s not that simple. The bit AWS doesn’t talk much about publicly (but will privately if you really push them) is that there’s core dependencies behind the scenes on us-east-1 for running AWS itself. When us-east-1 goes down the blast radius has often impacted things running in other regions.

It impacts AWS internally too. For example rather ironically it looks like the outage took out AWS’s support systems so folks couldn’t contact support to get help.

Unfortunately it’s not as simple as just deploying in multiple regions with some failover load balancing.
by Eisenstein | 2025-10-20 10:54:55+00:00
It is because the AI is not actually doing OCR. It is giving an interpretation of what the text in an image is by ingesting vision tokens and mapping them onto text tokens.

So you either have to be fine with a lot of uncertainty as to the accuracy of that interpretation or you have to wait for an LLM that can do it in a completely reproducible way every time.
by arethuza | 2025-10-20 10:55:07+00:00
I have a PC that is probably at least 10 years old but works perfectly well for browsing, spreadsheets and the occasional lightweight game but MS has decided, in its infinite wisdom, to say that it can't be upgraded to Windows 11.

So I will probably install Linux (probably Debian) and move on and forget about those particular games... (~30 years since I first installed Linux on a PC!).
by sandermvanvliet | 2025-10-20 10:55:14+00:00
I think this should be true for many things, or at least have a fixed future date at which you re-evaluate $thing

For example with Architecture Decision Records, put a 6 or 12 month expiry on them and evaluate to see if they can be renewed, should be changed or replaced with something that covers new insights.

Unfortunately that seems a very unpopular thing to do so I’ve never seen it work and companies end up with “we have always done it like this” type practices
by otabdeveloper4 | 2025-10-20 10:56:12+00:00
> should never be used in production either

A very hot and very wrong take.

NixOS at least has immutable read-only system images. This makes it a thousand times less interesting to a potential attacker than a Debian system.

For every Mossad agent crafting elaborate impersonation scheme to steal state secrets, there are a million script kiddies looking for insecure servers for a botnet.

P.S. A bigger issue is the complete inability of the "security industry" to understand even basic threat model issues. More proof that this entire "industry" is a joke and a clown show.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-20 10:56:21+00:00
Same here. People trying to share information I have no interest in? Impossible to learn. My brain finding some interesting topic? Impossible to avoid ingesting all the knowledge about it.

Makes the first ~18 years of your life kind of difficult, as school basically is mostly the first part with not so much the second, but once you complete school or drop out to start working, being able to do the second part seems like a godsend compared to your peers.
by tapete2 | 2025-10-20 10:56:31+00:00
Indeed they are not. They are a Austrian GmbH, which is a special kind of company form that is not really comparable to a e.g. British or American Ltd.

Long story short, for being a publicly traded company, they would need to "transform" to an AG ("Aktiengesellschaft", where "Aktie" means "share of stock").
by tonypapousek | 2025-10-20 10:57:29+00:00
Looks like they’re nearly done fixing it.

> Oct 20 3:35 AM PDT

> The underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now. Some requests may be throttled while we work toward full resolution. Additionally, some services are continuing to work through a backlog of events such as Cloudtrail and Lambda. While most operations are recovered, requests to launch new EC2 instances (or services that launch EC2 instances such as ECS) in the US-EAST-1 Region are still experiencing increased error rates. We continue to work toward full resolution. If you are still experiencing an issue resolving the DynamoDB service endpoints in US-EAST-1, we recommend flushing your DNS caches. We will provide an update by 4:15 AM, or sooner if we have additional information to share.
by metalman | 2025-10-20 10:58:17+00:00
thing is we do have materials strong enough, because as it turns out the issue with strength is in flaws between indivual molecules in any given material, not so much the type of material, and very small amples with perfect molecular bonds are plenty strong, but getting consistent perfect molecular bonds is the challenge, and if this can be done, other technologys ,such as vacume ballons will be possible, such as flying citys to go with the space rlevators
by mlrtime | 2025-10-20 10:58:25+00:00
I see you replied twice attempting to manipulate me by questioning my 'manhood'... twice!

These transparent forms of manipulation don't work the way you think they should. I'm not sure what you think will happen. The only thing it could possibly do is push someone else farther away. You should work on that because it's one of the major reasons we (us voters) got to this place. Good luck!
by xodice | 2025-10-20 10:58:27+00:00
In the narrow distributed-systems sense? Yes, however those requirements are self-imposed. AWS chose strong global consistency for IAM and billing... they could loosen it at enormous expense.

The control plane must know the truth about your account and that truth must be globally consistent. That’s where the trouble starts I guess.

I think my old-school system admin ethos is just different than theirs. It's not a who's wrong or right, just a difference in opinions on how it should be done I guess.

The ISP I work for requires us to design in a way that no single DC will cause a point of failure, just difference in design methods and I have to remember the DC I work in is completely differently used than AWS.

In the end however, I know solutions for this exist (federated ledgers, CRDT-based control planes, regional autonomy but they’re just expensive and they don’t look good on quarterly slides), it just takes the almighty dollar to implement and that goes against big business, if it "works" it works, I guess.

AWS’s model scales to millions of accounts because it hides complexity, sure but the same philosophy that enables that scale prevents true decentralization. That is shit. I guess people can architect as if us-east-1 can disappear so that things can continue on, but then thats AWS causing complexity in your code. They are just shifting who is shouldering that little known issue.
by gus_massa | 2025-10-20 10:59:44+00:00
I made a mistake and typed it with only 1 "g" instead of 2!

Is this the project you are taking about https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6xfy8HMCBM ? The video looks too generic. Is it based on a project you implemented and are hiding details for a privacy, or it's a plan you made for a future project?
by b112 | 2025-10-20 11:00:13+00:00
This isn't true.

debconf plus update-alternatives plus display manager login menus means configs are sticky.

There are rare exceptions, but unless Ubuntu is very strange, deviating fron Debian significantly (and stupidly), what you're saying doesn't happen.

And it is separate. The package manager is calling update alternatives. It's not some ad hock wild west.

You're either asked, or alternatively no change is made.
by sgarland | 2025-10-20 11:00:25+00:00
Active-active RDBMS - which is really the only feasible way to do HA, unless you can tolerate losing consistency (or the latency hit of running a multi-region PC/EC system) - is significantly more difficult to reason about, and to manage.

Except Google Spanner, I’m told, but AWS doesn’t have an answer for that yet AFAIK.
by dredmorbius | 2025-10-20 11:00:38+00:00
Russia / the USSR had a recent intellectual, scientific, and technological history in ways that China largely did not.

One datapoint: Sir John Barrow, Second Secretary to the Admiralty from 1804--1845, was part of a British envoy to China in the 1790s. Attempts to impress the Emperor with British science and technology left far less an impression than was hoped, with the Emperor dismissing the demonstration. A brief account of this being in the biography Barrows Boys by Fergus Fleming (1998).

China does have a long history of scientific and technological development, though by the 20th century this was all but forgotten / overlooked by the Chinese themselves, and it fell on an outsider, Joseph Needham (TK-chinese) to reacquaint them with this past, in Science and Civilisation in China, a 30-plus volume work begun in the 1950s and still in production.
by serf | 2025-10-20 11:01:46+00:00
>I imagine most journalists would love to have technical reviewers on their work, but there's no funding for it and there's pressure to churn content as quickly as possible.

well, so, we call these people what they are : tabloid writers.

journalists are the ones that take the time, effort, and cost to verify claims and rebroadcast perceived truths.
Ask HN: What are some impressive vibe coding projects?
by cauliflower99 | 2025-10-20 11:03:47+00:00
I'm looking to create a list of projects that people have had success with, whether they are personal projects that have no financial incentive or projects that have made money.

I'm also looking for videos that document the project from start to finish. The youtube algorithm makes these videos quite difficult to find.
by matu3ba | 2025-10-20 11:04:01+00:00
> inherent to the problem domain that you're working with and which there is no way around for

I'd phrase it to reasonable taken trade-offs for customer/user support and/or selling products.

> going for a microservices architecture when you need to serve about 10'000 clients

So far I am only aware of the use case to ship/release fast at cost of technical debt (non-synchronized master) of microservices. As I understand it, this is to a large degree due to git shortcomings and no more efficient/scalable replacement solution being in sight. Or can you explain further use cases with technical necessity?