MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dak1 | 2025-10-20 17:58:44+00:00
Danya was such an incredibly positive influence on the chess community, a tremendous teacher whose YouTube content I’m sure will remain popular for years to come, and my personal favorite chess commentator.

He was also only 29 years old.

I’m actually in tears right now struggling how to break this news to my son, who absolutely loved Danya and had a chance to play him OTB last year.
by ElevenLathe | 2025-10-20 17:59:03+00:00
Racket is at least related to the kind of metalanguage system you're talking about. I've never actually done it, but to implement a new "#lang" in Racket, your job is essentially to write a "reader" for it that transliterates it to the classic Schemey Racket language. Libraries written in one #lang can then be called from one another (or not, if that's what you want -- a lot of the point of this in Racket is building little restricted teaching languages that have limited capabilities).
by anonymars | 2025-10-20 17:59:25+00:00
I think you're making my point -- is the fact that the putative job offer is for a blockchain company truly relevant to that story? What would stop them from making it an "AI company" or whatever else is the hot topic du jour?

I concede that the relevance is perhaps that if you're going to try and steal cryptowallets, you would want to select for people more likely to be crypto-adjacent, but still. It was a novel attack vector that I'm glad I didn't have to learn about the hard way
by morshu9001 | 2025-10-20 17:59:34+00:00
The expert opinions are more about geopolitics, like maybe don't have all your country's systems realtime depend on a foreign company.

If you are just one company whose goal is to maximize uptime without bringing in the complexity of multi-cloud, relying on AWS is reasonable. You probably won't get better uptime using something else, you'll only be down at different times than most others, which in most cases is actually worse.
by hnlmorg | 2025-10-20 18:00:00+00:00
Nobody was suggesting that loss of utilities is a result of bad risk management. We are saying that all competent businesses run risk management and for most businesses, the cost of AWS being down is less than the cost of going multi cloud.

This is particularly true when Amazon hand out credits like candy. So you just need to moan to your AWS account manager about the service interruption and you’ll be covered.
by LaurensBER | 2025-10-20 18:00:40+00:00
The (cognitive) overhead of managing and deploying to multiple clouds usually isn't worth it for most teams. Hiring experts and maintaining knowledge about the ins and outs of two (or more) clouds is less feasible for small, fast moving teams.

Simplicity is linked to uptime and having a single cloud solution is a simpeler solution.

For large companies, its mostly cost savings. Easier to negotiate a good discount at N million versus N/2 million.

Besides that no-one ever got fired for picking AWS ;)
by caymanjim | 2025-10-20 18:00:59+00:00
It's easy to say this, but in the real world, most of the critical path is heavily-dependent on third party integrations. User auth, storage, logging, etc. Even if you're somewhat-resilient against failures (i.e. you can live without logging and your app doesn't hard fail), it's still potentially going to cripple your service. And even if your entire app is resilient and doesn't fail, there are still bound to be tons of integrations that will limit functionality, or make the app appear broken in some way to users.

The reason third-party things are in the critical path is because most of the time, they are still more reliable than self-hosting everything; because they're cheaper than anything you can engineer in-house; because no app is an island.

It's been decades since I worked on something that was completely isolated from external integrations. We do the best we can with redundancy, fault tolerance, auto-recovery, and balance that with cost and engineering time.

If you think this is bad, take a look at the uptime of complicated systems that are 100% self-hosted. Without a Fortune 500 level IT staff, you can't beat AWS's uptime.
by jerf | 2025-10-20 18:01:00+00:00
Tron is a fantastically difficult franchise to write for. It is, in my opinion, the most alien franchise in Hollywood. It's unusual for alien worlds in Hollywood to have different physics, but the grid does. Its residents are not human, and while some basic connections to humans are necessary for the audience to care at all, the programs on the grid are not humans. Very different motivations, very different needs.

And now that Hollywood executives have all but open contempt for writing, I had no hopes of them writing a decent Tron film. And they didn't. Even Legacy really kind of squeaked out decent quality (if not spectacularly perfect in every way) in an era where the writing was already degrading; I recall not expecting much from that film even then and being pleasantly surprised. Now it's just hopeless to expect them to be able to write something as foreign as the deeply alien grid residents in Tron when Hollywood writers hardly seem to be able to write about anything that isn't just their own personal interpretation of some family trauma they directly experienced, or their previous night's dinner politics conversation translated to screen with some one genre or another's conventions smeared over it like a bad makeup job.
by lunias | 2025-10-20 18:01:06+00:00
The site is down for me, so I'll check back later because this sounds like it discusses something that I've seen my entire career in tech... Imagine showing up to work at the fire station after getting out of the fire academy and 50+% of the people working at your station (including your manager and their manager) have never been to the academy, they don't know anything about the engine, they've never donned turnouts, and never gone into a fire; they are "in charge", but have to ask the people they're managing what to do.
by tarlinian | 2025-10-20 18:01:09+00:00
They're also wrong in suggesting that J-1 visas are intended to just be used for "cultural exchange". They are quite explicitly intended for use by trainees[1]. I assume these folks are intended to be trained in New Mexico so they can ramp the advanced packaging fab in Malaysia when they need to.

[1] https://j1visa.state.gov/programs/trainee
by bee_rider | 2025-10-20 18:01:27+00:00
It must be the case that some smart people have studied how we think, right?

The first person experience of having a thought, to me, feels like I have the whole thought in my head, and then I imagine expressing it to somebody one word at a time. But it really feels like I’m reading out the existing thought.

Then, if I’m thinking hard, I go around a bit and argue against the thought that was expressed in my head (either because it is not a perfect representation of the actual underlying thought, or maybe because it turns out that thought was incorrect once I expressed it sequentially).

At least that’s what I think thinking feels like. But, I am just a guy thinking about my brain. Surely philosophers of the mind or something have queried this stuff with more rigor.
by dep_b | 2025-10-20 18:02:03+00:00
Running Xcode

You can use it as a glorified internet terminal with some light office apps within 256GB.

But it’s a pain in the ass to swap applications constantly, clear caches, delete large files and so on once you exceed those use cases.

512GB is a bit better, but then I shouldn’t have multiple toolchains or other large applications installed, multiple versions of Xcode, etcetera.
by hvb2 | 2025-10-20 18:02:10+00:00
It's a single region?

I don't think anyone would quote availability as availability in every region I'm in?

While this is their most important region, there's a lot of clients that are probably unaffected if they're not in use1.

They COULD be affected even if they don't have anything there because of the AWS services relying on it. I'm just saying that most customers that are multi region should have their east region out and are just humming along.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-10-20 18:02:24+00:00
This is what I call "fool's availability": reducing single points of failure (one cloud provider) without adding any actual redundancy.

If you removed AWS/GCP/Azure/etc and just had 100 small providers scattered all over, the result would be hundreds of outages throughout the year, as opposed to one big outage every other year [in one region]. AWS is already way more reliable than any other provider.

The real problem here is that companies that use AWS are morons who don't know how to architect/build infrastructure properly.

If it's important, it should be built right, regardless of who the provider is. A software building code would mandate how companies could use infrastructure (AWS or any provider) so that important services would not go down when one service or region goes down.

This is the basic concept behind things like the electrical code. It doesn't matter how great a public utility is; if your business is wired up so badly that a stiff breeze sets it on fire, just switching utilities isn't gonna help. And some utilities do occasionally have problems that persist down their lines to the customers, so customers need to set up equipment to protect against those failures. Whole-house surge protectors, lightning arresters, EMP shields, etc are necessary so that a rare event doesn't fry expensive customer equipment.
by whydoineedthis | 2025-10-20 18:02:52+00:00
If there were a servbay.yaml file that a person could export & commit this would probably go down smoother from some folks.

If you added a feature to push/fetch and sync the local development database from an s3 (or like bucket) it would solve one of the real core problems of new developers getting started.

That nginx proxy probably works 99.999% of the time, but oh boy, is that .001% going to tick someone off. Proxy's always add a small layer of complexity that can fubar things in strange ways, i know from running many of proxies in production just fine until that tiny little app/proxy config change that borks it. I haven't dug in enough yet, but i hope it can be bypassed.

Ambitious project that I think has some legs. A lot of devs dislike docker and many teams struggle to use it well anyway (for instance, a good dev Dockerfile is usually not the same as a good production Dockerfile). You will need to make this more "IAC-like" if you want to beat it though, imho.

Keep going and good luck!
by loudmax | 2025-10-20 18:03:22+00:00
"FUBAR" comes up in the movie Saving Private Ryan. It's not a plot point, but it's used to illustrate the disconnect between one of the soldiers dragged from a rear position to the front line, and the combat veterans in his squad. If you haven't seen the movie, you should. The opening 20 minutes contains one of the most terrifying and intense combat sequences ever put to film.
by aspenmayer | 2025-10-20 18:04:09+00:00
I appreciate you saying so; dang also replied to my email to that effect. Hopefully the other folks get the memo, though I understand that you can’t reply to them directly, as their comment is [flagged] and [dead].

For my own sake, I apologize to everyone, and to you directly, tptacek, for the way this thread took a weird turn; it was illuminating in its own way.
by vlovich123 | 2025-10-20 18:04:31+00:00
No general purpose compute was not known during Babbage’s time. He happened to have been in the process of building a Turing complete machine, but that’s largely accidental - he didn’t understand why it could do so many things and it wasn’t until the work of Hilbert, Gödel, Turing and Church that the picture really came into focus and these machines really started to get built consistently and reliably with a key understanding of what features the machine needed to have.

Z3 wasn’t Turing complete and z4 can’t start Turing’s work
by 98codes | 2025-10-20 18:04:40+00:00
Companies can architect their backends to be able to fail back to another region in case of outage, and either don't test it or don't bother to have it in place because they can just blame Amazon, and don't otherwise have an SLA for their service.

To fix it, test your failback procedures. For everything else, there's nothing to fix, it's working by design.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-10-20 18:05:01+00:00
Oh I don't think it's different at all in that respect. I think that many people are very ignorant about the inherent double-edged sword that is freedom, and think that it's possible to deny it to only bad people. On top of that, many people don't particularly value private communications, considering it to be a theoretical issue that doesn't affect them. So yeah there will certainly be outrage in cases like you mentioned.
by dcre | 2025-10-20 18:05:13+00:00
Why do the unit economics require a decrease in inference spend per user? This is discussed at the end of the post. I think this is based on the very strange assumption that these businesses must charge $20 a month no matter how much inference their customers want to use. This is precisely what the move to usage-based pricing was about. End users want to use more inference because they like it so much, and are knocking down these companies’ doors demanding to be allowed to pay them more money to get more inference.
by fheisler | 2025-10-20 18:05:25+00:00
Not sure if this counts fully as 'distributed' here, but we (Authentik Security) help many companies self-host authentik multi-region or in (private cloud + on-prem) to allow for quick IAM failover and more reliability than IAMaaS.

There's also "identity orchestration" tools like Strata that let you use multiple IdPs in multiple clouds, but then your new weakest link is the orchestration platform.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-10-20 18:05:45+00:00
I read this to mean “just because the process doesn’t match the problem, that doesn’t mean it’s inefficient”. But I think it does mean that. I expect we intuitively know that data structures which match the structure of a problem are more efficient than those that don’t. I think the same thing applies here.

I realize my argument is hand wavey, i haven’t defined “efficient“ (in space? Time? Energy?), and there are other shortcomings, but I feel this is “good enough” to be convincing
by r721 | 2025-10-20 18:05:58+00:00
>It began around 2014, before, during and after Maidan, the coup d’état that disintegrated Ukraine, remotely controlled by American and German strategists.

>2014-2022: Let’s provoke Russia, which had warned that it would not tolerate the annexation of Ukraine by the European Union and NATO.

Seems like pro-Kremlin propaganda.
by adventured | 2025-10-20 18:06:13+00:00
The inclusion of China in the WTO is what changed everything.

The elites thought they'd set up shop in a new, gigantic consumer market and reap the rewards. So they got Clinton to spend his last days in office lobbying very aggressively for China's inclusion into the WTO.

China had different plans. Keeping the plunderers out (this time) was one of the smartest moves any nation has made in recorded history. Then the same elites slowly pivoted against China, post realizing they wouldn't be allowed to own China. If we can own you, you're our friend; if we can't own you, you're our enemy. And this is quite obviously not a defense of China's human rights record or anything else, that's not the point. China only mattered (in the enemy sense) when the elites realized they were going to be locked on the outside of the rise.
by ahmeneeroe-v2 | 2025-10-20 18:06:25+00:00
Keeping core IP secret is not the issue. The issue is allowing the Chinese to steal IP and then compete in our markets with that stolen IP.

>students would have just gone to other countries, written their PhD dissertations there, advanced another country’s tech sector,

which other countries specifically? No other country has a tech sector. It's the US hegemony or the China hegemony.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-10-20 18:06:31+00:00
> Is there some reason why "global" services aren't replicated across regions?

On AWS's side, I think us-east-1 is legacy infrastructure because it was the first region, and things have to be made replicable.

For others on AWS who aren't AWS themselves: because AWS outbound data transfer is exorbitantly expensive. I'm building on AWS, and AWS's outbound data transfer costs are a primary design consideration for potential distribution/replication of services.
by hilbert42 | 2025-10-20 18:07:04+00:00
"very unusual experience with zippers."

With respect, I think it's your experience that is very unusual. I reckon you must never go camping and use a sleeping bag with a long zipper or you wouldn't say what you've said.

The woman who runs the drycleaning shop near where I live also provides a garment alteration service and her main business is shortening jeans and replacing broken zippers! She even specializes in replacing long zippers on leather jackets as they break so often.

When they're such a bane for others one has to wonder why you have so little trouble, or how careful and methodical you are when using them, and or what type you're familiar with, what garments you have them on etc.

Can you honestly say you've never had zipper teeth part company with the fabric or never had to apply candle wax or similar to the teeth so they run smoothly? If yes, then you're a very lucky person.
by tsimionescu | 2025-10-20 18:08:11+00:00
> However, the average expected future lifetime increases as a thing ages, because survival is evidence of robustness.

This is a completely different argument that relies on various real-world assumptions, and has nothing to do with the Copernican principle, which is an abstract mathematical concept. And I actually think this does make sense, for many common categories of processes.

However, even this estimate is quite flawed, and many real-world processes that intuitively seem to follow it, don't. For example, looking at an individual animal, it sounds kinda right to say "if it survived this long, it means it's robust, so I should expect it will survive more". In reality, the lifetime of most animals is a binomial distribution - they either very young, because of glaring genetic defects or simply because they're small, fragile, and inexperienced ; or they die at some common age that is species dependent. For example, a humab that survived to 20 years of age has about the same chance of reaching 80 as one that survived to 60 years of age. And an alien who has no idea how long humans live and tries to apply this method may think "I met this human when they're 80 years old - so they'll probably live to be around 160".
by kiwicopple | 2025-10-20 18:08:36+00:00
thanks for the tag lucasknight - i'll respond inline to OP about their email situation

> your current AWS situation

I think the assessment here is accurate:

https://x.com/theo/status/1979271205279666586

> Looked into this a bit. I don’t think “downtime” is a fair way to report on this. No existing databases are affected. Amazon is literally out of boxes in eu-west-2, so Supabase can’t provision NEW DBs in that one specific region

I want to own the fact that we can be multi-cloud, and that we can work with AWS on their capacity planning (note: this is not a typical request for an increase on a soft limit). We are working through both of these options. That said, the Reddit poster classifying this as days of downtime is not entirely fair, and it makes it harder to for us to over communicate with our community. Throughout this period we had days where there was free of capacity on AWS and we chose to leave the status up until we have finalized our conversations with AWS.

I also want to acknowledge that there is a broader AWS issue today in us-east-1 which affects us (and most other companies today) that is unrelated

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45640838
by christkv | 2025-10-20 18:09:35+00:00
I might get one, I have the C64 Max and the kids are having a lot of fun on it with their friends playing Bruce Lee 1 and 2 as well as Archon. I'm also really really interested in http://www.apollo-core.com/gfx/A6000.jpg the amiga was my first programming machine and having a mostly useful computer that is compatible would be awesome.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-10-20 18:09:43+00:00
If you're limited by your SSD, one core running lz4 (or zstd) will double your write speed for object files. If you're not writing hundreds of megabytes per second, then you'll barely notice the overhead at that phase while it makes later phases that load the data back snappier.

If everything fits in ram then compression could be postponed.

And for that area in between, where your files don't fit in ram but compressed they would fit in ram, compression can give you a big speed boost.
by AftHurrahWinch | 2025-10-20 18:09:54+00:00
Yes, they are. Like any standard API, it is an orchestration layer that, given a specific input should always execute the same logic and produce a consistent output. Its job is deterministic execution.

The agentic system that uses MCP (e.g., an LLM) is fundamentally non-deterministic. The LLM's decision of which tool to call, when to call it, and what to do with the response is stochastic.
by huntertwo | 2025-10-20 18:10:10+00:00
The whole “China copies everything” narrative is becoming less and less true.

It’s funny - it’s at the point with Chinese manufacturing for niche electronic goods (e.g rooftop van air conditioner) where some Chinese brands are more trustworthy - more value for your money and sometimes even better overall quality. With American brands you gotta make sure you’re not overpaying for dated tech that is inefficient. Maybe the same will happen with LLMs.
by maccard | 2025-10-20 18:10:11+00:00
> Companies can architect their backends to be able to fail back to another region in case of outage, and either don't test it or don't bother to have it in place because they can just blame Amazon, and don't otherwise have an SLA for their service.

My CI was down for 2 hours this morning, despite not even being on AWS. We have a set of credentials on that host that we call assumeRole with and push to an S3 bucket, which has a lambda that duplicates to buckets in other regions. All our IAM calls were failing due to this outage, and we have 0 items deployed in us-east-1 (we're european)
by setopt | 2025-10-20 18:10:20+00:00
Emacs defaults to a GUI if available. The -nw toggle switches it off even when available, while -nox compiles without GUI support so it’s never available.

There are some minor differences. For example, I believe -nw can still use the X support to access the GUI clipboard, while -nox requires enabling e.g. OSC-52 support to do the same.
by gwbas1c | 2025-10-20 18:10:59+00:00
> The video timing in the NES is non-standard - it both generates 341 pixels, making 227 1/3 subcarrier cycles per scanline, and always generates 262 scanlines. This causes the TV to draw the fields on top of each other, resulting in a non-standard low-definition "progressive" or "double struck" video mode sometimes called 240p

Ahh: I always wondered why I never saw interlacing artifacts on the NES! (I'm going to assume the same thing for the SNES too.)
by tsimionescu | 2025-10-20 18:11:00+00:00
I don't understand why you think that where you put the base of a 35000km cable makes a difference for where the rest of it would fall. I also don't understand why you think that a 35000 km long cable falling in the ocean from space would cause any less damage to the planet than it falling down on solid ground, or at least why the difference would be significant.
by nomel | 2025-10-20 18:11:42+00:00
History (including recent history) says the leanings of political party of the administration in charge are unrelated to how truthful the government communication is. All politicians, and the groups they control/communicate with, can't be easily trusted, since all have very strong personal and group motivations to deceive.

Deception of the public is a bipartisan issue because it's an issue of holding/maintaining power.