MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by einarfd | 2025-10-20 09:33:22+00:00
When I used to be on call for Cisco WebEx services. I got paid extra, and got extra time of. Even if nothing happened. In addition we where enough people on the rotation, so I didn't have to do it that often.

I believe the rules varied based on jurisdiction, and I think some had worse deals, and some even better. But I was happy with our setup in Norway.

Tbh I do not think we would have had, what we had if it wasn't for the local laws and regulations. Sometimes worker friendly laws can be nice.
by sneak | 2025-10-20 09:34:11+00:00
Guilt tripping? Quite the opposite.

If you or anyone else are doing on-call for no additional pay, precisely nobody is forcing you to do that. Renegotiate, or switch jobs. It was either disclosed up front or you missed your chance to say “sorry, no” when asked to do additional work without additional pay. This is not a problem with on call but a problem with spineless people-pleasers.

Every business will ask you for a better deal for them. If you say “sure” to everything you’re naturally going to lose out. It’s a mistake to do so, obviously.

An employee’s lack of boundaries is not an employer’s fault.
by scheeseman486 | 2025-10-20 09:34:53+00:00
No deal breakers but the lack of first person viewmodels, the really narrow FOV and an aggressive joystick accelerlation curve make it unpleasant to play. It isn't too bad on emulators that hack in keyboard and mouse, but this port is a good opportunity to polish it up further in much the same way that Perfect Dark port did.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-10-20 09:35:12+00:00
>I genuinely don't believe this to be true for AMD. I bought a 6600xt on Release Day

That was 2021 though when AMD was still a relative underdog trying to claw market share from Nvidia from consumers. AMD of today has adjusted their prices and attitude to consumers to match their status as a CPU and GPU duopoly in the AI/datacenter space.
by ssl-3 | 2025-10-20 09:35:35+00:00
In terms of user reports: Some users don't know what the hell is going on. This is a constant.

For instance: When there's a widespread Verizon cellular outage, sites like downdetector will show a spike in Verizon reports.

But such sites will also show a spike in AT&T and T-Mobile reports. Even though those latter networks are completely unaffected by Verizon's back-end issues, the graphs of user reports are consistently shaped the same for all 3 carriers.

This is just because some of the users doing the reporting have no clue.

So when the observation is "AWS is in outage and people are reporting issues at Google, and Microsoft," then the last two are often just factors of people being people and reporting the wrong thing.

(You're hanging out on HN, so there's very good certainty that you know what precisely what cell carrier you're using and also can discern the difference betwixt an Amazon, a Google, and a Microsoft. But lots of other people are not particularly adept at making these distinctions. It's normal and expected for some of them to be this way at all times.)
by skotobaza | 2025-10-20 09:35:35+00:00
Preservation and ease of modification. New console units are not being made anymore, and the number of old ones is limited, they can break, and there is an issue with output video formats that are incompatible with modern monitors/TVs. There is emulation, but it's not perfect and can be demanding. Decompilations enable people to create native binaries for different platforms. This makes playing the game easier and more accessible.
by ruszki | 2025-10-20 09:35:57+00:00
I don’t understand either. The complexity will be there no matter whether you split up large functions to smaller ones or not. If you need to understand the given function, you need to read and parse the same amount of code. If you blindly trust naming of functions, you will have a bad time. You need to write smaller functions for other reasons, not because of complexity:

- Testing

- Reusability

- Configurability

- Garbage collector/memory management

- etc

I never understood these kind of restrictions in code analysis tools. These kind of restrictions don’t help overall complexity at all, and sometimes they even make things more complex at the end.
by jeroenhd | 2025-10-20 09:36:19+00:00
Depends on what kind of fridge you buy. If you buy one for the price of a fridge in the "good old times" that doesn't come loaded with useless features, they last just fine.

A lot of degrading quality in household appliances is the result of consumers buying the cheapest products that'll get the job done. Many people would rather risk having to buy two €600 fridges rather than buying one €1200 fridge (freezer sold separately of course).

I can get a full fridge+freezer combination delivered to my home for €380. Of course that won't last as long as the €1200 equivalent from forty years ago, back when that was the normal price for a fridge.
by benterix | 2025-10-20 09:36:20+00:00
Well, we have a naming issue (Hetzner also has Hetzner Cloud, it looks people still equal cloud with the three biggest public cloud providers).

In any case, in order for this to happen, someone would have to collect reliable data (not all big cloud providers like to publish precise data, usually they downlplay the outages and use weasel words like "some customers... in some regions... might have experienced" just not to admit they had an outage) and present stats comparing the availability of Heztner Cloud vs the big three.
by motorest | 2025-10-20 09:37:47+00:00
> I'd rather go with Hetzner and cobble up together some failover than pay AWS extortion.

Comments like this are so exaggerated that they risk moving the goodwill needle back to where it was before. Hetzner offers no service that is similar to DynamoDB, IAM or Lambda. If you are going to praise Hetzner as a valid alternative during a DynamoDB outage caused by DNS configuration, you would need to a) argue that Hetzner is a better option regarding DNS outages, b) Hetzner is a preferable option for those who use serverless offers.

I say this as a long-time Hetzner user. Herzner is indeed cheaper, but don't pretend that Herzner let's you click your way into a highly-availale nosql data store. You need non-trivial levels of you're ow work to develop, deploy, and maintain such a service.
by defrost | 2025-10-20 09:38:12+00:00
It was very much an edge case, with one of Whitlam's senators on leave and recent changes to territory rules giving additional senators to the opposition party (as I recall ...) the ability to block supply appeared suddenly out of the blue.

Whitlam did move to call an election (rather than be sacked) which likely would have removed the blocked supply threat as he was at the time an extremely popular PM in Australia (loved by the common masses, despised by many elites) .. and when attending the Queens Repreresentative (the Governor General) to advise about calling an election .. he was removed by the G-G.

Strictly speaking the "as intended" outcome should have been to resolve a looming (not yet happened) supply crisis by allowing the people of Australia to vote, instead the government of the day (Whitlam's) was removed on a technical reading against the spirit of intended resolution.

There's a peer comment here that linked to a 2020 article on the finally released royal correspondance that's worth a read. The US influence angle has merit also, they had weight in the game for sure, how much and whether it tipped the balance is debatable.

Literally reams of contraversay here, the G-G acted autonomously and likely to save his own neck as Whitlam intended to replace the G-G, additionally many outside powers (the UK and the US) were whispering in the ears of those with levers to pull seeking to dump Whitlam; he was returning real power to the people, providing socialised health and education to the masses, asking questions about the role of secret American bases on AU soil, etc.

This was, indeed, extremely serious stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4jfR2u_9Kk
by mangamadaiyan | 2025-10-20 09:38:23+00:00
You're concerned about the author's bias contaminating your thinking, so the solution is to outsource your thinking to the LLM, because it's impossible for one of them to have any sort of bias at all.

This, instead of actually thinking yourself, and examining your own biases - or those of the people who wrote what you read

Right. Good luck!
by DebtDeflation | 2025-10-20 09:40:34+00:00
>Can't vibe code your way out of this issue...

I feel bad for the people impacted by the outage. But at the same time there's a part of me that says we need a cataclysmic event to shake the C-Suite out of their current mindset of laying off all of their workers to replace them with AI, the cheapest people they can find in India, or in some cases with nothing at all, in order to maximize current quarter EPS.
by pbmonster | 2025-10-20 09:40:41+00:00
Probably no easy task.

Snipping off just the first few kilometers is not catastrophically destructive yet, and cutting it down further up would require multistage rocket designs, sophisticated steering/targeting and potentially significant yield (you'd need to cut unobtainium, after all...). If you can build a space elevator, you can defend against those.

You better thoroughly inspect what cargo you put on the elevator itself, of course.
by xvector | 2025-10-20 09:40:49+00:00
Yup, that is precisely what I did and what I'm encouraging others to do as well.

Edit: On-call is not always disclosed. When it is, it's often understated. And finally, you can never predict being re-orged into a team with oncall.

I agree employees should still have the balls to say "no" but to imply there's no wrongdoing here on companies' parts and that it's totally okay for them to take advantage of employees like this is a bit strange.

Especially for employees that don't know to ask this question (new grads) or can't say "no" as easily (new grads or H1Bs.)
by jamesbelchamber | 2025-10-20 09:41:02+00:00
To back up this point, currently BBC News have it as their most significant story, with "live" reporting: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c5y8k7k6v1rt

This is alongside "live" reporting on the Israel/Gaza conflict as well as news about Epstein and the Louvre heist.

This is mainstream news.
by guitarbill | 2025-10-20 09:41:35+00:00
First, you try to normalise it:

> It is completely normal for staff to have to work 24/7 for critical services.

> Not only is it normal, it is essential and required.

Now you come with the weak "you don't have to take the job" and this gem:

> An employee’s lack of boundaries is not an employer’s fault.

As if there isn't a power imbalance, or employers always disclose everything or chance their mind. But of course, let's blame those entitled employees!
by bayindirh | 2025-10-20 09:41:55+00:00
> Do people widely agree with this? That sounds less like 'exploitation' to me and more like 'the way Unix works'.

I personally don't. UNIX is made to be composable, and it's composition. more, less, most all consider pipe input as first-class citizens. I'm personally fond of "grep --color=always file.ext | less --raw" to page colored output.

> Is that really the best approach?

I don't think so. If I was the developer, I'd embed the pager only into the Windows build by default, and use system pagers on other systems (by default). If any person/distro wants to use the built-in pager, it'd be their choice.

I don't like when developers bloat their own code with good intentions, but drift from their nice state to something bloated.
by XorNot | 2025-10-20 09:42:12+00:00
It would be reasonable for error case data though to be thoroughly explained, and it must be explainable since otherwise what are you testing and why does the test exist?

The xz exploit depended on the absence of that explanation but accepting that it was necessary for unstated reasons.

Whereas it's entirely reasonable to have a test that says something like: "simulate an error where the header is corrupted with early nulls for the decoding logic" or something - i.e. an explanation, and then a generator which flips the targeted bits to their values.

Sure: you _could_ try inserting an exploit, but now changes to the code have to also surface plausible data changes inline with the thing they claim is being tested.

I wouldn't even regard that as a lot of work: why would a test like that exist, if not because someone has an explanation for the thing they want to test?
by chmod775 | 2025-10-20 09:42:46+00:00
Chances are hell is going to freeze over before people start writing verbose q code. Q being less verbose than alternatives is the whole point. Nobody is feeling any pressure to bend over backwards to accommodate the guy who struggles to get by when his LLM can't explain a piece of code to him.

To use your nailgun analogy as an example: Waddling in with your LLM and demanding the q community change is like walking into a clockmaker's workshop with your nailgun and demand they accommodate your chosen tool.

"But I can't fit my nailgun into these tiny spaces you're making, you should build larger clocks with plenty of space for my nailgun to get a good angle!"

No, we're not going to build larger clocks, but you're free to come back with a tiny automatic screwdriver instead. Alternatively you and your nailgun might feel more at home with the construction company across the street.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-10-20 09:42:49+00:00
> I originally wrote GraFORTH

Oh really?

Given you were around at about the correct time period, could you hazard a guess at what dialect this very old Forth game from Byte magazine was written in?

https://github.com/RickCarlino/Cosmic-Conquest-1982

It has some graphics commands in that I couldn't find in any other version of Forth on the Apple II. I'm a little outside the Apple II demographic, since they didn't really take off in the UK - although the very first home computer I ever used was an Apple II owned by the father of the guy that founded Rockstar Games :-)
by squarefoot | 2025-10-20 09:43:10+00:00
It was, but for a very restricted number of users. For like 2 years people hoped to get a RPi Zero at $5 and as a result didn't buy boards by the competition (OrangePi, NanoPi, etc) which were becoming really good and cheap, although not at that price, if memory serves the NanoPi Duo (first model) was around $12. That move was the reason that pushed me to abandon the RPi for other brands and never look back.
by Macha | 2025-10-20 09:43:11+00:00
Honestly, that feels like someone doing malicious compliance to jam up the nsfw ban. Of course by most standards that include written content the bible, quran etc. (and plenty of popular media series like a song of ice and fire) are nsfw, but the people pushing for age restriction/nsfw bans would usually strongly feel "except those ones" and by applying the label you force them to either explain or codify the double standard.
by trashb | 2025-10-20 09:45:11+00:00
Focusing on one market, by for instance releasing new programs in that market first does not mean you can't outsell in another market (Europe or Asia). It just means that those markets will follow your main market. USA is the home country of Tesla after all.

Also didn't Elon famously open up the Tesla patents for other companies to use? I assume the Chinese EV manufactures where not looking the other way as other manufacturer probably also shouldn't have.
by sph | 2025-10-20 09:46:07+00:00
AWS and Cloudflare are HN darlings. Go so far as to even suggest a random personal blog doesn't need Cloudflare and get downvoted with inane comments as "but what about DDOS protection?!"

The truth is one under the age of 35 is able to configure a webserver any more, apparently. Especially now that static site generators are in vogue and you don't even need to worry about php-fpm.
by 81222222 | 2025-10-20 09:48:09+00:00
On a few occasions as a teenager, I slipped into an unpleasant khole. The one thing that remained constant every time was that I felt like we were living in the apocalypse. Even though each of these experiences was precipitated by the dose taken, I somehow ended up with a 24 hour news channel on in the background and while I sat there motionless, images of air defense missiles launching on some grainy video from kosovo, I just felt like the world was coming to an end and that all doom was beginning to take place. It's weird because of the k I didn't feel panicky about the doom, like I was super calm and collected about it but nevertheless, it was still an hour or two of impending doom that was very unpleasant. I guess my point is that we need to restrict ketamine use based on income. If someone has enough money, they have far more than enough resources to deal with whatever medical issue justifies their k prescription using a different treatment. Allowing these people to have access to ketamine is the root cause of this problem.
by bboozzoo | 2025-10-20 09:48:37+00:00
I probably have a bunch of such tools installed on my main machine. The problem is you actually need to remember to use them, and then maybe their command line switches to get the desired output. Whereas cat/less/git/vim are muscle memory. Not to mention that you first need to get over the hum of installing them in your system, likely needing to grab the latest Go/Rust/Zig toolchain along the way.

So while I admire the engineering effort, I still find utility of these tools limited.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-10-20 09:49:41+00:00
With regards to API specs, if you have an LLM have a swing at it, is it adding value or is it a box ticking exercise because some tool or organization wants you to document everything in a certain way?

If it's easy to generate documentation, and / or if documentation is autogenerated, people are also less likely to actually read it. Worse, if that comment is then used with another LLM to generate code, it could do it even wronger.

I think that at this stage, all of the programming best practices will find a new reasoning, LLMs - that is, a well-documented API will have better results when an LLM takes a swing at it than a poorly documented one. Same with code and programming languages, use straightforward, non-magic code for better results. This was always true of course, but for some reason people have pushed that into the background or think of it as a box ticking exercise.
by k4rli | 2025-10-20 09:50:42+00:00
I switched to netcup for even cheaper private vps for personal noncritical hosting. I'd heard of netcup being less reliable but so far 4 months+ uptime and no problems. Europe region.

Hetzner has the better web interface and supposedly better uptime, but I've had no problems with either. Web interface not necessary at all either when using only ssh and paying directly.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-20 09:50:57+00:00
> Lot's of OCR/ LLM's (Even Gemini Pro 2.5) still struggle converting complex tables to markdown or HTML:

But that's something else, that's no longer just OCR ("Optical Character Recognition"). If the goal suddenly changes from "Can take letters in images and make into digital text" to "Can replicate anything seen on a screen", the problem-space gets too big.

For those images you have, I'd use something like Magistral + Structured Outputs instead, first pass figure out what's the right structure to parse into, second pass to actually fetch and structure the data.
by tgv | 2025-10-20 09:52:26+00:00
They're freaking expensive, though. I just replaced a (probably) 25 year old fridge by one with a D label. The difference with a C or E label is small in energy use. I do notice that the exterior gets really less warm than the old model. I don't think it would have qualified as an E.

BTW, if I'm not mistaken, the energy label depends on the function. So 250kWh/yr could be (much) lower than E when the volume is smaller.
by impossiblefork | 2025-10-20 09:53:01+00:00
ZeroGravitas explained it abstractly higher up in the discussion, but:

Suppose that we don't make a law banning it eventually. So some invest, others don't, deciding instead to focus on their current capabilities. In twenty years we've had an industry transition: everything's electric, those manufacturers died but made a lot of money, which was for the most part not invested in electric car development, but in other industries-- maybe in AI, maybe in something else.

Meanwhile, if we don't do this and instead make a law banning it eventually the manufacturers have no choice. They have to invest in EVs. This means that they will abstain from further developing ICEs and focus, probably, on batteries and electric motors. They can't just run the business for the now to produce dividends to invest in other industries but have to maintain their industry and develop it so that it remains relevant two decades from now.

So it's a social choice: dividends to invest in other industries or the industry existing in the future, and the political decision is the industry existing in the future. I assume that any industry preference for the other path, i.e. disappearing/winding down while paying out dividends has to do with the present relatively (to the zero-interest rate days anyway) high interest rates.
by danielpetrica | 2025-10-20 09:53:05+00:00
In this moments I think devs should invest in vendor independence if they can. While I'm not to that stage yet (cloudlfare dependence) using open technologies like docker (or Kubernetes), Traefik instead of managed services can help in this disaster situations by switching to a different provider in a faster way than having to rebuild from zero. as a disclosure I'm not still to that point on my infrastructure But I'm trying to slowly define one for my self
by mvdtnz | 2025-10-20 09:53:12+00:00
No really true for large systems. We are doing things like deploying mitigations to avoid scale-in (eg services not receiving traffic incorrectly autoscaling down), preparing services for the inevitable storm, managing various circuit breakers, changing service configurations to ease the flow of traffic through the system, etc. We currently have 64 engineers in our on-call room managing this. There's plenty of work to do.
by endymion-light | 2025-10-20 09:54:02+00:00
I guess I don't really see a reason to have a 1000 line of code function that's not broken down.

Although I personally despise the massive call graphs, my rule of thumb tends to be if I spend over 10 minutes trying to hold all the logic in my head, something is wrong.

Especially with imperative business logic - surely it makes so much more sense to break it down into functions. If you're on call at 2am trying to solve a function with imeprative business logic that someone else has written and has over 1000 lines, you're going to hate yourself, and your coworker.
by squarefoot | 2025-10-20 09:55:05+00:00
Not one but two full Debian ports are more than enough to me.

https://www.armbian.com/download/

https://dietpi.com/#download

Things may differ a bit in the educational field because of the vast community the RPi can count on, but Linux is Linux, I don't see why a school shouldn't use a different platform and make the solution of problems, if any, part of the learning process.
by rafaelmn | 2025-10-20 09:57:33+00:00
To be honest I don't trust myself running a HA PostgreSQL setup with correct backups without spending an exorbitant effort to investigate everything (weeks/months) - do you ? I'm not even sure what effort that would take. I can't remember last time I worked with unmanaged DB in prod where I did not have a dedicated DBA/sysadmin. And I've been doing this for 15 years now. AFAIK Hetzner offers no managed database solution. I know they offer some load balancer so there's that at least.

At some point in the scaling journey bare metal might be the right choice, but I get the feeling a lot of people here trivialize it.
by oneeyedpigeon | 2025-10-20 10:00:42+00:00
brew usually manages to install these tools for me with no problems. And on the memory point, there's always `alias` or adding a symlink in ~/.local/bin. But, yeah, I have the exact same problem remembering to use `eza`. For some reason, I don't find `bat` as much of a problem; ls is probably more ingrained.