MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hopelite | 2025-10-20 11:04:44+00:00
Ok narcissistic, dehumanizing deranged stalker. Speaking about European people’s moral right to exist and be free and their clearly organized eradication through sick people as yourself who stalk people and then make dehumanizing statements about them and are whipping up a genocide frenzied against the people who have produced everything humanity has, including this website and every dependency on it, is maybe beyond your deranged and sick little brainwashed mind, but I have concern for humanity because of little sickos like you; including Europeans that put absolutely hate because you are evils! You are evil! You are deranged! You are sick and dehumanizing! You will cause humanity’s ruin if you continue in your deranged ways.
by BonsaiAU | 2025-10-20 11:06:14+00:00
It's just a safe pattern that's easy to implement. If your services back-off attempts happen to be synced, for whatever reason, even if they are backing off and not slamming AWS with retries, when it comes online they might slam your backend.

It's also polite to external services but at the scale of something like AWS that's not a concern for most.
by imiric | 2025-10-20 11:06:51+00:00
> That's like someone gives you a nicer car and you say "yeah but it doesn't fly".

No, not really. It's like someone giving you a car that looks like a Ferrari, but has the internals of a Fiat.

To be fair, I'm not discrediting this project. I think it's great that someone is thinking about these things. I'm just saying that I would've started with a project with solid internals, rather than put lipstick on a pig.
by ycombinete | 2025-10-20 11:06:52+00:00
Yes, a fallacy is a reason to dismiss an argument, not necessarily the conclusion; it is a very good reason to doubt a conclusion though.

My parent's formulation can be used with other drugs in cases that are still reasonable. For example:

1. Many smokers I know have lived to old age. 2. Therefore "I'm not particularly interested in theories about how my heath demands" not smoking cigarettes.

It also makes an implicit assumption that living for a long time is both necessary and sufficient to describe a healthy person.

Alcohol abuse is can have a negative impact quality of life as well as the length of the life (this comes from mental and physical health effects). So you could live a very long life with alcohol induced depression/anxiety/diabetes etc.

The last part definitely applies as well to your own statement that we generally seem to handle it just fine. It's interesting to see what happens to communities who don't have thousands of years of history with alcohol when it's introduced. For example the Native American population, or the coloured population of south africa.

Europeans and other groups who have had much longer exposure to alcohol do seem to handle it better, but possibly just because the people who couldn't handle it were selected out of our respective gene pools. But, even then, not really. There's a very good documentary about drinking in the UK called Drinkers Like Me, that really shows the hidden cost of alcohol on the health of people in the UK [0].

There are many other things we've done okay with for long periods of time, like lead plumbing (which we used for about 2 thousand years!), which definitely had long term negative effects on us.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8SvnmNo48A
by Aldipower | 2025-10-20 11:08:16+00:00
Web scale? It is an _web_ app, so it is already web scaled, hehe.

Seriously, this thing runs already on 3 servers. A primary + backup and a secondary in another datacenter/provider at Netcup. DNS with another AnycastDNS provider called ClouDNS. Everything still way cheaper then AWS. The database is already replicated for reads. And I could switch to sharding if necessary. I can easily scale to 5, 7, whatever dedicated servers. But I do not have to right now. The primary is at 1% (sic!) load.

There really is no magic behind this. And you have to write your application in a distributable way anyway, you need to understand the concepts of stateless, write-locking, etc. also with AWS.
by DrScientist | 2025-10-20 11:08:56+00:00
I tend to agree that linking content to real people is a key mechanism that will help fight spam, hidden ads and influencing campaigns.

However, if everything is linked to your ID - those that control that will be able to cancel you all at once. A bit like the consequences of being de-banked in an cash-less society.

So if you bring in laws that require digital ID"s they have to be implemented with a very robust set of safeguards in my view.
by Nextgrid | 2025-10-20 11:08:58+00:00
It's less about company loyalty and more about protecting their investment into all the buzzwords from their resumes.

As long as the illusion that AWS/clouds are the only way to do things continues, their investment will keep being valuable and they will keep getting paid for (over?)engineering solutions based on such technologies.

The second that illusion breaks down, they become no better than any typical Linux sysadmin, or teenager ricing their Archlinux setup in their homelab.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-10-20 11:10:02+00:00
Oh this is relevant to my interests.

I've been doing quite a bit of work on the Juno 106 ROMs but haven't really got my head around Ghidra yet. I've just been working from the service manuals for various versions (including the HS-60, which is probably the most complete scan of a manual) and the programming reference for the μPD7810. I notice that all of my Juno boards leave out the EPROM socket and latch that would allow it to run from external ROM - I wonder if there was ever an "upgrade" from an early version?

https://github.com/ErroneousBosh/j106roms
by ffsm8 | 2025-10-20 11:10:25+00:00
Haha, yeah that's a nugget

> 99.99% uptime infra significantly cheaper than the cloud.

I guess that's another person that has never actually worked in the domain (SRE/admin) but still wants to talk with confidence on the topic.

Why do I say that? Because 99.99% is frickin easy

That's almost one full hour of complete downtime per year.

It only gets hard in the 99.9999+ range ... And you rarely meet that range with cloud providers either as requests still fail for some reason, like random 503 when a container is decommissioned or similar
by torginus | 2025-10-20 11:10:46+00:00
I've been dabbling in programming language design as of late, when trying to decide if including feature 'X' makes sense or not, with readability being the main focus I realized some old wisdom:

1 line should do 1 thing - that's something C has established, and I realized that putting conceptually different things on the same line destroys readability very quickly.

For example if you write some code to check if the character is in a rectangular area, and then turn on a light when yes, you can put the bounds check expressions on the same line, and most people will be able to read the code quickly - but if you also put the resulting action there, your code readability will suffer massively - just try it with some code.

That's why ternary expressions like a = condition? expr1: expr2 kinda controversial - they're not always bad, as they can encode logic about a single thing - if said character is friendly, turn the light color should be green, otherwise red - is a good example - but doing error handling there is not.

I haven't been able to find any research that backs this up (didn't try very hard tho), but I strongly believe this to be true.

A nice thing is that some other principles, like CQRS, can be derived from this, for example CQRS dictates that a function like checkCharacterInAreaThenSetLightState() is bad, and should be split up into checkCharacterInArea() and setLightState()
by lr4444lr | 2025-10-20 11:11:09+00:00
Even if you're not allowed to bring it to the exam. Writing things down helps. What you want is to cram the entire course on 1 or more pages that you can in the end tile in front of you and say with high degree of confidence "This is exactly everything I must know"

Reminds me of this comedy bit in an American sitcom from about 35 years ago where the dumb kid when asked how his history test said it went okay but admitted he cheated. He explained that he tried to write down everything on his arm, there was not enough room despite multiple attempts at it. Then he realized he was starting to remember some of the content after the several rewrites, and said "so I just did it that way! I hid it all in my head and it was great! The professor didn't even know that I was cheating because there was no evidence!"
by kassner | 2025-10-20 11:11:16+00:00
> billing […] can't tolerate eventual consistency

Interesting point that banks actually tolerate a lot more eventual consistency than most software that just use a billing backend ever do.

Stuff like 503-ing a SaaS request because the billing system was down and you couldn’t check for limits, could absolutely be locally cached and eventual consistency would hurt very little. Unless your cost is quite high, I would much rather prefer to keep the API up and deal with the over-usage later.
by t1E9mE7JTRjf | 2025-10-20 11:11:21+00:00
if you look for problems, you'll find them.

stripping something down to the objective parts isn't that hard for an llm as it's all about language. Sure they can and do have biases, although in this case it's a relative matter, and undoubtably the guardian is well known as left wing (in case somehow it isn't obvious just from looking at this article). So I'd say it's more steps forward than backwards. It's not either or. Removing subjective fluff from such a language is a function of thinking for oneself. using an llm to remove bias doesn't mean you need to then say "ok and now it's 100% objective". I recommend chomsky on the subject, who for instance purposely speaks in monotone so as not to infuse emotion into what he's saying.

enjoy thinking what somebody else decided for you.
by GuestFAUniverse | 2025-10-20 11:11:26+00:00
That title seems to describe most software projects of software engineering projects coming from academia.

I have to take care for the infrastructure for those and honestly the closer to the core of the field _that should be able to build robust software_ the shittier it gets. Other institutions might fail on the repeatability front (ad hoc installs), but a least the don't start with a K8s install inside a measly VM. Nowadays the amount of paper mills educating complete morons seem to increase.
by glenstein | 2025-10-20 11:11:35+00:00
Some of the most important advancements in the history of science came from reviewing underappreciated discoveries that already existed in the literature. Mendel's work on genetics went under appreciated for decades before being effectively rediscovered, and proved to be integral to the modern synthesis, which provided a genetic basis for evolution, and is the most important development in the history of our understanding of evolution since Darwin and Wallace's original formulation.

Henrietta Leavitt's work on the relation between a stars period of pulsation and brightness was tucked away in a Harvard Journal, which had revolutionary potential not appreciated until Hubbel recalled and applied her work years later to demonstrate galactic redshift in Andromeda, understanding that it was an entirely separate galaxy, that it was receding away from us and contributing to the bedrock of modern cosmology.

The pathogenic basis for ulcers was proposed in the 1940s, which later became instrumental to explaining data in the 1980s and led to a Nobel prize in 2005.

It is and has always been fundamental to the progress of human knowledge to not just propose new ideas but to pull pertinent ones from the literature and apply them in new contexts, and depending on the field, the research landscape can be inconceivably vast, so efficiencies in combing through it can create the scaffolding for major advancements in understanding.

So there's more going on here than "lying".
by miki123211 | 2025-10-20 11:13:17+00:00
Text tokens are quantized and represent subword units, vision tokens only exist in the embedding space.

The way text tokenization works in LLMs is that you have a "lookup table" of (small) token ids to (large) vector embeddings. To pass text to the LLM, you split it at token boundaries, convert strings to token ids, and then construct the "context", a matrix where each row is a vector taken from that lookup table.

Transmitting text token sequences can be relatively efficient, you just transmit the token IDs themselves[1]. They're small integers (~100k possible token ids is typical for large models). Transmitting the actual embeddings matrix would be far less efficient, as embeddings often consist of thousands of floating point numbers.

Images are encoded differently. After some basic preprocessing, image data is passed straight to a neural- network-based image encoder. That encoder encodes the image into vectors, which are then appended to the context. There are no token ids, there's no lookup table, we go straight from image data to token embeddings.

This means transmitting image tokens cannot be done as efficiently, as you'd have to transmit the embeddings themselves. Even though an image is encoded in fewer tokens, the most efficient representation of those tokens takes more bytes.

You can think of a text token as an integer between 0 and n, which we know how to map to a vector. This means you have `n` possible choices of tokens. In contrast, an image token is an array of m floating point numbers (the vector itself), each of which can take on many possible values. This means the "token space" of vision tokens is actually much larger.

There's also the issue of patterns. Text tokens correspond directly to a contiguous span of UTF-8 bytes, and most tokenizers won't create tokens that span word boundaries. This means they can't encode global patterns efficiently. You can't have a "Hamlet's monologue" or "the text that follows is in Spanish" token.
by Frieren | 2025-10-20 11:14:04+00:00
> Most companies just aren't important enough to worry about "AWS never come back up."

But a large enough of "not too big to fail" companies become a too big to fail event. Too many medium sized companies have a total dependency on AWS or Google or Microsoft, if not several at the same time.

We live in a increasingly fragile society, one step closer to critical failure because big tech is not regulated in the same way than other infrastructure.
by Melonai | 2025-10-20 11:14:06+00:00
Helix is a Vim/Kakoune-inspired modal editor, with a bunch of stuff built in by default. For example it has support for a huge amount of LSPs and intergrates them automatically.

It's command structure is also super similar to Vim's, but, basically, "flipped" around. So you wouldn't write "dw" to delete a word, but "wd". This means that you can see whatever you're selecting to be deleted highlighted before you actually execute the deletion. It has a bunch of saner commands also for stuff people usually want to do, like go to definition/usage, and honestly for people who aren't Vim-addicts such as myself, it's probably a good idea to check it out once, to see if it's a good fit for you.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-20 11:14:22+00:00
I was thinking more of Scalia than Friedman, but let's go there for a minute too.

Probably nobody wants monopolies except for monopolies; the question is what do you do about them? And the Chicago School answer is something like, have more free trade and fewer regulations so that markets are more competitive.

The problem with this is that it isn't robust against selective implementation.

We get "free trade" where international corporations get access to US capital markets in order to fund the creation of vertically integrated global supply chains that offshore jobs and consolidate the global economy into a small number of companies and countries, but we don't get "free trade" where US consumers can feasibly use a foreign bank or payment processor if the US ones have consolidated and captured the regulators, or where foreign doctors have a practical path to immigrate to the US and practice medicine.

We get "fewer regulations" where giant corporations successfully lobby to get rid of laws that are inconvenient to giant corporations (like Glass–Steagall), but not "fewer regulations" where there are still a zillion regulations that impact small companies more than large ones and make it more difficult to start a new business or compete with existing incumbents. I mean, why is DMCA 1201 still on the books? Its nominal purpose was a fraud from day one and the only thing anybody really uses it for in practice is to lock out competitors.

You thereby accumulate a bunch of consolidated markets that you need to promptly smash into tiny pieces with the antitrust hammer or you're in a losing battle against time where they lobby to accumulate even more rules that benefit the incumbents faster than anybody else can accomplish getting rid of them.

And I know I'm criticizing the implementation rather than the theory here, i.e. Scalia rather than Friedman again, but for a theory to be good it's kind of important that it be amenable to practical implementation.

But for that you need the theory to actually specify -- in bright letters on the front page, not in a footnote somewhere -- that the most important part is that the regulations you get rid of first are the ones that limit competition, not the ones that defend against consolidated incumbents. Because otherwise the consolidated incumbents will point to your theory to argue for doing the opposite, which is what happened.
by Leoluc | 2025-10-20 11:14:44+00:00
" Study well in advance. Did I mention this already? Maybe I should stress it again. The brain really needs time to absorb material. Things that looked hard become easier with time. You want to alocate ~3 days for midterms, ~6 days for exams. "

Are you kidding? Don't expect to pass the calculus 3 exam I took as a Physics Engineer at Politecnico di Milano with less that one month (keep in mind: bare minimum) of studying ahead of the exam (lectures not included): If you could actually get good grades with what Andrej said, I totally chose the wrong university.
by hopelite | 2025-10-20 11:14:48+00:00
Such manipulative, abusive, evil intended questions are irrelevant, child.

It’s a perfectly vapid question that you avoided and deflected because you know the truth and just cannot face reality. You don’t want an invasion of others and destruction of them or their things they built, right? Well, I’m just not an evil narcissist that only wants that for things and people that benefit me, I want freedom and justice for all, while you will hypocritically sit by and accept and support evil for and by others out of an evil heart.

I don’t have a personal interest in Gaza or any of the people in that whole wretched region, but that does not keep me from understanding that the Gazas also deserved to not be slaughtered and genocided, I simply have principles where you lack them and therefore cannot apply them to people you hate for whatever reason that may be.
by ExoticPearTree | 2025-10-20 11:15:44+00:00
Every one of the big hyperscalers has a big outage from time to time.

Unless you lose a significant amount of money per minute of downtime, there is no incentive to go multicloud.

And multicloud has its own issues.

In the end, you live with the fact that your service might be down a day or two per year.
by linsomniac | 2025-10-20 11:15:45+00:00
Maybe you'd like one of the banks that provides you with limited-use or one-time credit cards? I've been using one called Envelope Budgeting for the last few months after my previous one shut down. It's $40/year, but that's waived if you spend more than $5,000 USD in card purchases. I put the Neal.fun on my "Misc" card that I keep at $0 balance and transfer money to when I buy something.

I believe there are other services that will also give you virtual cards, I'm not familiar with them off hand.

https://envelopebudgeting.com/
by tsegratis | 2025-10-20 11:15:57+00:00
that is quite wild...

it implies expressivity is the ability to constrain

it implies drawing on a page, or more broadly, every choice we make, is in equal parts a creative and destructive act

so maybe life, or human flourishing is choosing the restrictions that increase freedom of choice? it's so meta it's almost oxymoronic; concretely: we imprison people to maximize freedom; or, we punish children with the aim of setting them free from punishment

this is the same as the walk from law into grace found in Christian ethics

maybe the ultimate programming language then, provides the maximal step down that path, and this is also the most useful definition of "power"

i.e. place on people those restrictions that increase their ability to choose
by zjaffee | 2025-10-20 11:17:02+00:00
I couldn't agree more, there was clearly a big shift when Jassy became CEO of amazon as a whole and Charlie Bell left (which is also interesting because it's not like azure is magically better now).

The improvements to core services at AWS hasn't really happened at the same pace post covid as it did prior, but that could also have something to do with overall maturity of the ecosystem.

Although it's also largely the case that other cloud providers have also realized that it's hard for them to compete against the core competency of other companies, whereas they'd still be selling the infrastructure the above services are run on.
by bayindirh | 2025-10-20 11:18:22+00:00
I don't believe programs able to sort their output is acting against the UNIX philosophy. "ls" lists files and does a good job of it. find's -exec is a bit stretching it (-delete came later IIRC), but generally it adheres the philosophy pretty well.

From my experience of programming small utilities for myself, UNIX philosophy says "a tool handles a single job and handles it well" is a nod to fallacy of "gluing" things together.

Because when you start to glue things beyond simple pipes, the glue code becomes exponentially complex and takes more and more of the program, which creates a maintenance hell and affects performance (much more profoundly on a PDP).

So, simple tools doing single things is both easier to write and maintain, and they're much more performant in general.

Remember the guy who left a whole Hadoop cluster in the dust with GNU command line tools and some pipes, on a small laptop.
by bananapub | 2025-10-20 11:18:23+00:00
those sentences aren't logically connected - the outage this post is about is mostly confined to `us-east-1`, anyone who wanted to build a reliable system on top of AWS would do so across multiple regions, including Amazon itself.

`us-east-1` is unfortunately special in some ways but not in ways that should affect well-designed serving systems in other regions.
by esskay | 2025-10-20 11:18:39+00:00
If it requires weeks/months to sort setting that up and backups then you need a news ops person as that's insane.

If you're doing it yourself, learn Ansible, you'll do it once and be set forever.

You do not need "managed" database services. A managed database is no different from apt install postgesql followed by a scheduled backup.

It genuinely is trivial, people seem to have this impression theres some sort of unique special sauce going on at AWS when there really isn't.
by westcoast49 | 2025-10-20 11:18:41+00:00
> Knowing At a high level what needed to happen to accomplish what the code did, I know for a fact it could have and should have been broken down more. However, because of the complexity of what he wrote, no one had the patience to go through it. When he left, the code got thrown away.

And today an LLM could probably have refactored it fairly well, automatically.