MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bartread | 2025-10-20 23:38:54+00:00
That’s a pretty bold claim. Where’s your data to back it up?

More importantly you appear to have misunderstood the scenario I’m trying to avoid, which is the precise situation we’ve seen in the past 24 hours where a very large proportion of internet services go down all at the same time precisely because they’re all using the same provider.

And then finally the usual outcome of increased competition is to improve the quality of products and services.

I am very aware of the WWII bomber story, because it’s very heavily cited in corporate circles nowadays, but I don’t see that it has anything to do with what I was talking about.

AWS is chosen because it’s an acceptable default that’s unlikely to be heavily challenged either by corporate leadership or by those on the production side because it’s good CV fodder. It’s the “nobody gets fired for buying IBM” of the early mid-21st century. That doesn’t make it the best choice though: just the easiest.

And viewed at a level above the individual organisation - or, perhaps from the view of users who were faced with failures across multiple or many products and services from diverse companies and organisations - as with today (yesterday!) we can see it’s not the best choice.
by jerlam | 2025-10-20 23:39:32+00:00
This probably doesn't work for groceries, but Uniqlo (a clothing retailer) tags all their items with RFID. You put all your items in the "checkout box" at the same time and just pay, no scanning required.

Here's a video of it in use: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqPfYnVKwGI
by canucker2016 | 2025-10-20 23:39:47+00:00
from https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/03/business/amazons-self-checkou...

Amazon had used roughly 1,000 humans in India, according to some news reports, to help monitor accurate checkouts. The company told CNN it’s “reducing the number of human reviews” while developing the “Just Walk Out” technology. Amazon said besides data associates’ main role in working on the underlying technology, they also “validate a small minority” of shopping visits.
by nitwit005 | 2025-10-20 23:40:00+00:00
It's not tech related. Previously, they all did this with various cards. People were walking around with a giant stack of loyalty or store credit cards in their wallet with a rubber band wrapped around it.

There is a store I shop at where every purchase, they ask every single customer if they "have a phone number with them", which they can type in on the point of sale device. I've waited behind people trying to remember their old phone number.
by hinkley | 2025-10-20 23:40:23+00:00
I’ve been customer for at least four separate products where this was true.

I can’t explain why Saucelabs was the most grating one, but it was. I think it’s because they routinely experienced 100% down for 1% of customers, and we were in that one percent about twice a year. <long string of swears omitted>
by matheusmoreira | 2025-10-20 23:41:04+00:00
> To get medication through the SUS, you only need a prescription from a doctor.

Not in all cases. They can and will make the patient and multiple doctors fill out half a dozen forms to "justify" the use of an expensive medication.

Probably won't happen at first, politicians need to make good on their promises after all. But it will happen. I just got done filling out the forms for a COPD medication that's much cheaper than semaglutide. Only political intervention can save it.
by sema4hacker | 2025-10-20 23:41:33+00:00
...and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a Course of Years, and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.

~ Benjamin Franklin, Closing Speech at the Constitutional Convention (1787)
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-10-20 23:41:53+00:00
It's not your feeling about Amazon that would cast doubt on your take, it's that you've reduced it to one pet cause and decided a source is well written because it appeals to your dislike of RTO. Nowhere has any evidence of the relevance of that to this been presented, Amazon has had outages since before WFH even began, they've all always had their occasional outages and bad days.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-10-20 23:42:04+00:00
Calling this “science fiction” isn’t just dismissive, it’s ironic. The discussion itself is science fiction by the standards of only a few years ago. Back then, the idea that a machine could hold a coherent philosophical argument, write code, debate consciousness, and reference neuroscience was fantasy. Now it’s routine. You are literally using what was once science fiction to declare that progress on LLMs has ended.

And calling that “science fiction” again isn’t a rebuttal, it’s an insult. You didn’t engage a single argument, you just waved your hand and walked away. That isn’t scientific skepticism, it’s arrogance disguised as authority.

You can disagree, but doing what you did is manipulative. You dodged every point and tried to end the debate by pretending it was beneath you. Everyone reading can see that.
by CWuestefeld | 2025-10-20 23:42:22+00:00
Oh, lord yes! Frequently they're scraping us from multiple distinct CIDR blocks simultaneously. But we can tell it's the same organization doing it not just because the requests look similar, but it's even possible occasionally to see a request for a search from one CIDR that's followed up immediately by requests for details for the products that had been returned by the search.

While at the same time, because our site is B2B ecommerce, where our typical customer is a decent-sized corporation, it's not uncommon for a single legit user to have consecutive requests originate from different IPs, as their internal proxies use different egress points.
by frenchmajesty | 2025-10-20 23:42:52+00:00
Op here. Yes that's right. We do also insert the current text embedding on misses to expand the boundaries of the cluster.

For instance: I love McDonalds (1). I love burgers. (0.99) I love cheeseburgers with ketchup (?).

This is a bad example but in this case the last text could end up right at the boundary of the similarity to that 1st label if we did not store the 2nd, which could cause a cluster miss we don't want.

We only store the text on cache misses, though you could do both. I had not considered that idea but it make sense. I'm not very concerned about the dataset size because vector storage is generally cheap (~ $2/mo for 1M vectors) and the savings in $$$ not spend generating tokens covers for that expense generously.
by evanb | 2025-10-20 23:44:19+00:00
No, you cannot escape the conclusion of the limitations on measuring the one-way speed of light.

While the video doesn't touch on this explicitly, the discussion of the different path lengths around 25:00 in is about the trigonometric effect of the different distances of the beam from the camera. Needing to worry about that is the same grappling with the limitation on the one-way speed.
by int3trap | 2025-10-20 23:46:25+00:00
There's been a massive talent exodus, especially among the principal and senior principal engineering roles, across all Amazon orgs since the RTO policies have been enforced. Its demoralizing to lose key engineers that you look up to and want to continue to learn from all because a few people far removed from the day to day make a bad call.

RTO in combination with Amazon being last place in AI innovation have led to departures of anyone that can leave, leaving.
by nh2 | 2025-10-20 23:48:28+00:00
Even if you were build a ZFS mega-machine with an Exabyte of storage with RDMA (the latencies of "normal" Ethernet in the datacenters would probably not be good enough), wouldn't you still have the problem that ZFS is fundamentally designed to be managed by and accessed on one machine? All data in and out of it would have to flow through that machine, which would be quite the bottleneck.
by stephen_g | 2025-10-20 23:50:59+00:00
No, pretty sure that's all basically fixed in Swift 6 (Sep 2024), I think it's more just the immaturity of the C++ interop in being able to bridge Swift to complex C++ code.

That's a key feature of what Apple want Swift for (to gradually replace their C++ projects with Swift) but it's still pretty new. It'll take a while to mature.
by monster_truck | 2025-10-20 23:51:15+00:00
Think of it more like "IRL raytracing", where a ray (the beam) is cast and the result for a single pixel from the point of view is captured, and then it is repeated millions of times.

Even if you had a clock and camera for every pixel, the sync is dependent on the path of the signal taken. Even if you sent a signal along every possible route and had a clock for each route for each pixel (a dizzingly large number) it still isn't clear that this would represent a single inertial frame. As I understand it even if you used quantum entanglement for sync, the path of the measurement would still be an issue. I suggest not thinking about this at all, it seems like an effective way to go mad https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0202031

E: Do not trust my math under any circumstances but I believe the number of signal paths would be something like 10^873,555? That's a disgustingly large number. This would reveal whether the system is in a single inertial frame (consistency around loops), but it does not automatically imply a single inertial frame. It's easy to forget that the earth, galaxy, etc are also still rotating while this happens.
by Zopieux | 2025-10-20 23:51:36+00:00
Most people love making AI music by throwing a 5-word prompt at Suno and being in awe at "their" creation.

However, it is also a fact that the vast majority of people can't care less to listen to their friends' and family's Sunos, as they were not involved in the process and therefore can't vibe to the random soul-less soup.

Please keep your slop for yourself.
by greycol | 2025-10-20 23:51:42+00:00
I always viewed it as It's more that it's distinct from softcore porn which if you look up is more nudity and maybe simulated sex acts vs actual explicit sex acts which was accepted as hardcore porn no matter how vanilla. I'm happy to concede the meaning may have drifted as access to explicit porn became more widespreasd and softcore porn lost cultural relevance but even in that case I expect a large chunk of parents would be happier with their kids thinking rough sex is fine rather than thinking self circumcision with a rock or following voices that tell them to kill is ok.

>A thing that appears in book and stories for kids

Sure but does it appear as a moral good thing to do? If it does is it because the voice in the head is telling them to kill evil doers rather than innocents? You can see why you'd want to have a discussion with your kids about it just like you'd hopefully have a discussion about what they may see in porn not being real/healthy for most relationships. This is obviously at age appropriate times, there's a good reason kids aren't being told about Sodom and Gomorrah in all it's detail in kindergarten, why cartoons of the story of the Ark don't focus on the babies drowning as mothers struggle to swim holding them above their heads before succumbing to exhaustion or the cold... only to continue to exist forever in eternal torment.
by president_zippy | 2025-10-20 23:51:51+00:00
Between the engineering staff and the warehouse workers, I wonder how long it will be until they have already fired everyone who ever would have been willing to work there.

Even with candidate pools of hundreds of thousands of H1-B engineers and tens of millions of illegal immigrant warehouse workers, there still comes a point where such a big company firing so many people so quickly exhausts all their options.

It reminds me of the Robot Chicken Sketch where Imperial Officers aboard the Death Star all pretend to be force choked to death by Darth Vader so they can avoid getting killed by lightsaber, then come back in under different names in different jobs. It's worse though for Amazon: nobody wants to come back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFihTRIxCkg
by valdiorn | 2025-10-20 23:52:15+00:00
I missed a parcel delivery because a computer server in Virginia, USA went down, and now the doorbell on my house in England doesn't work. What. The. Fork.

How the hell did Ring/Amazon not include a radio-frequency transmitter for the doorbell and chime? This is absurd.

To top it off, I'm trying to do my quarterly VAT return, and Xero is still completely borked, nearly 20 hours after the initial outage.
by gldrk | 2025-10-20 23:52:47+00:00
UNIX signals *do not* queue. If two or more signals with the same number are sent faster than the receiving thread handles them (due to the signal being blocked and/or the thread not being scheduled), all but the last will be lost irrevocably. There is no mechanism to prevent this.

https://ldpreload.com/blog/signalfd-is-useless
by mrandish | 2025-10-20 23:54:36+00:00
> It genuinely baffles me that people are nostalgic about CRTs.

I don't get nostalgic about any technologies - and certainly wouldn't get nostalgic about cathode ray tubes which were big, heavy and had innate limitations. However, I am serious about vintage game preservation and I care about seeing classic game art which was created on and for CRTs accurately presented as the original developers and artists saw it. These days that's as easy as playing games from the CRT era with a good CRT-emulation pixel shader.

What frustrates me is when I see classic 80s games on popular retro YouTube channels objectively looking far worse than they actually did in the 80s. That happens because some of that artwork was painstakingly hand-crafted to exploit the unique traits of both the analog video format and CRTs. When presented without a pixel shader, some of those titles simply look wrong - and in some cases, egregiously so. I know because I'm old enough to have been there, worked with and learned from some now-legendary 80s game developers and artists.

The hard-edged, square pixel blocks many young people (who've never seen a CRT) think a retro game like Pac-Man or Joust should have, is a strange historical anomaly. When I show them what the games actually looked like either via a good pixel shader or on my arcade emulation cabinet's 25-inch analog RGB, quad-sync CRT (which was made for high-end arcade cabinets), they're often shocked. I hear things like "Wow, I thought retro was cool because it looked so janky but it was actually softly beautiful." To me, the importance of CRTs (and CRT shaders) isn't about injecting analog degradation to recreate some childhood nostalgia for the crappy RCA TV your parents had in the living room (with rolling hum bars from the unshielded RF modulator), it's about making games like Pac-Man and Joust look as good as they really did on the industrial CRT in their arcade cabinet (which could be better than the best TV many consumers ever owned). Or alternatively, making console games look as good as they did to the original developers and artists, who usually used the highest-quality CRTs they could because they were after the best-possible image for the same reasons recording studios have always used reference-grade audio speakers.

So yeah, it's not honoring those historic games when retro YouTubers show them in a degraded form that looks far worse than they ever did in the day - especially when it's now so easy to present them accurately by turning on a CRT shader that's already built into many retro emulators. As others in this thread point out, even the best pixel shaders aren't completely perfect, but as a retro-purist (and video engineer whose career spanned the analog and digital video eras) I concede today's best pixel shaders are 'accurate enough' and certainly far better than hard-edged block pixels. It's weirdly tragic because what some people think 'retro' games looked like isn't worse than a bad consumer TV was - or better than a good analog RGB CRT was - it's just wrong on some bizarre third-axis of digital jank which never existed in the CRT era.
by afishhh | 2025-10-20 23:55:13+00:00
There's a technique known as "NaN boxing" which exploits the fact double precision floats allow you to store almost 52 bits of extra data in what would otherwise be NaNs.

If you assume the top 16 bits of a pointer are unused[1], you can fit a pointer in there. This lets you store a pointer or a full double by-value (and still have tag bits left for other types!).

Last I checked LuaJIT and WebKit both still used this to represent their values.

[1] On amd64 they actually need to be sort of "sign extended" so require some fixup once extracted.
by mschuster91 | 2025-10-20 23:55:57+00:00
> So they can't suggest a fix even if they know 100% what it will be. Thats exactly what happened this time. EIGHT different staff members pointed to the underlying cause and were told (some literally) to "shut the f*ck up and get back to your job"

Jesus, if even an ounce of that is true... Yes, everyone on the internet is a cat clawing on a keyboard... but if a ton of people legitimately confirmed to be ex-AWS point to similar culture issues... probably it's AWS that's rotting.
by ggm | 2025-10-20 23:56:27+00:00
It would be a shit winter for europe (bits of it) for sure. But for contracts, that would be "Force Majeure" and would be on Russia as the supplier in most cases. Absent actual war with europe, tearing up a contract? Thats sovereign risk territory. Next time you draw one up, expect a consequence.

I'm probably blinding myself to the cases where Europe walks off things before a contractual deadline and so Europe incurs the consequences. I tend to think thats what this 2028 thing IS: avoidance of the commercial risk side.
by danaris | 2025-10-20 23:56:52+00:00
You can remap the Enter key globally, which is not getting Windows to usefully change the behavior of opening a selected file by hitting the Enter key to instead rename the file. And while I've never tried it myself, I think it highly likely that you can remap "Enter" to "Cmd-O" on macOS, too, either natively or with some third-party utility.

If you want to consider that "proof" that Windows can do what you describe, then I can't stop you, but even then it seems like a pretty thin endorsement for Windows over macOS.
by pdt409231 | 2025-10-20 23:57:49+00:00
Lots of people, esp on HN, will say J6 was some kind of insurrection, but the BLM riots were peaceful protests. From the other perspective, what happened was a bunch of disgruntled republicans saw the riots that summer, among many other things, and rather than burn down Minneapolis, they took their grievances to the one place that actually could make a difference - the politicians in DC. Instead they were led thru the halls of the Capitol (by the police!) and the resulting footage used to frame the whole debacle as an insurrection. Certainly they were some angry protesters, but the premise that they intended to overthrow the govt by stopping the certification ceremony doesn’t even make sense, since nobody would have recognized it.
by estearum | 2025-10-20 23:57:59+00:00
No I’m saying that art generated by AI is different from art generated by humans in that only one creates a chain of causality to the inner state of another human being.

Pedantically, so do AI models to the inner states of their creators and the creators of their training data, but this is such a chaotic process that you can’t even attempt to infer anything about any of their internal states by observing their output.
by dijit | 2025-10-20 23:58:00+00:00
It makes a direct claim of hundreds of cloud staff being laid off.

You know what though? I’m not wasting my time with you, the fact was that this was all over social media. Then a huge outage- my original comment was factually accurate even if we contend that the article itself was bunk. And AWS clearly hires DevOps staff.

You’ve not even disproved anything you’re just making me play internet fetch. I’m not replying anymore.
by AndrewDavis | 2025-10-20 23:58:02+00:00
Funnily enough, one of the things we were recommended was a pack of mini nut butter jars. Made specifically for the purpose of being a easy way to expose little ones to a variety of nuts before they could eat the nuts themselves.

Then at each meal put a tiny amount on a spoon and give to the little one before feeding the actual meal, and each meal use the next one butter.

It was great. Sure I can buy peanut butter, or maybe cashew at a grocery store. But I've never seen pecan butter, Brazil nut butter etc.
by caminanteblanco | 2025-10-20 23:58:31+00:00
Circle K has had these rolled out in Arizona for several years now, and honestly they're pretty flawless there. I've used the self checkout hundreds of times at this point, and Circle K has a pretty huge selection of products. When it's 2AM and you're waiting to buy a monster, it's nice not having to wait 45 seconds for the one clerk to finish that they're doing so they can ring you up.

I'm not sure why the performance at this stadium was so vastly different.
by artdigital | 2025-10-20 23:58:50+00:00
So is this their version of Jules / Codex / Copilot agent? Aka autonomous agent in the cloud you give a task and it spits out a PR a bit later?

It’s interesting how all the LLMs slowly end up with the same feature set and picking one really ends up with personal preference.

Me as a dev am happy that I now have 4 autonomous engineers that I can delegate stuff to depending on task difficulty and rate limits. Even just Copilot + Codex has made me a lot more productive

Also rip to all the startups that tried to provide “Claude in the cloud”, though this was very predictable to happen
by Numerlor | 2025-10-20 23:59:07+00:00
Main "issue" is that evaporative cooling is just ridiculously effective compared to a normal heat exchanger with only air.

You can use water or air internally but then to get rid of the heat from the facility there aren't many choices. You either put it into the air which is cheap, into nearby water bodies which has other environmental concerns, or into the ground which is expensive. The air is the simplest, cheapest solution and using water for evaporative cooling in dryer climates makes it even better
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-21 00:00:01+00:00
> Contracts for supply like this have penalty clauses, and the consequences for future gas contracts with any supply would be high if the termination did not respect international contract law

International contract law is soft law [1]. None of it permanently binds states, much less against belligerents.

Europe's pussyfooting around matters of security is precisely what has left it vulnerable to exploitation by the Russian military and American and Chinese economies. If, in the future, Moscow stops being a pest, negotiations can include those past penalty clauses. If Moscow does not, the discussion is moot. (Similar outdated legalism plagues the EU moving at a snail's pace on seizing Russian assets as war reparations.)

In the meantime, the status quo is America, China, Russia, India, Turkey, Israel and the Gulf States are acting the way great and emerging powers do in a multi-polar world: embrace sovereignty. (When Argentina is barred from the international markets, Europe can revisit contractual purism. In the meantime, indulging delusions of an enduring American unipolar rules-based international order is a unilateral cession of power and wealth.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_law
by bb88 | 2025-10-21 00:00:07+00:00
The problem (ignoring quantum mechanics) is that the sensors all require an EM field to operate in. So assuming that the speed of light was weighted with a vector in space-time, it would be affected everywhere -- including in the measurement apparatus.

If on the other hand one could detect a photon by sending out a different field, maybe a gravitational wave instead... well it might work, but the gravitational wave might be affected in exactly the same way that the EM field is affected.