MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bravetraveler | 2025-10-20 17:44:50+00:00
Yea, let's play along. Our CEO is personally choosing to not pay any entire class of partners across the planet. Are we even still in business? I'm so much more worried about being paid than this line of questioning.

A Cloud with multiple regions, or zones for that matter, that depend on one is a poorly designed Cloud; mine didn't, AWS does. So, let's revisit what brought 'whatever1', here:

> Your experiment proves nothing. Anyone can pull it off.

Amazon didn't, we did. Hmm.
by gabiteodoru | 2025-10-20 17:44:51+00:00
Author here. Majromax challenged me to test `i = 1 + i`, which broke my theoretical framework. While setting up that experiment, I realized I hadn't used chat templates in my original measurements (rookie mistake with an Instruct model!).

Re-running with proper methodology completely flips the results - the terse version actually wins. I'll add a correction note to the article once AWS/Medium comes back online and will write a follow-up with the corrected experiments.

This is open science working as intended - community scrutiny improves the work. Thank you all for the engagement, and especially to Majromax for the challenge that led to discovering this!
by AndyMcConachie | 2025-10-20 17:45:33+00:00
I rent VPS's in a data center and run services on them. I feel like I'm self-hosting. The days of me running a server in my own home are long gone. I don't want to deal with the power requirements, the noise, or the hardware.

I'm responsible for all the software that runs on them so I consider it self hosting.
by mcintyre1994 | 2025-10-20 17:46:22+00:00
> as well as the risks of relying on global services whose management or interaction layer only exists in said zone.

Is this well known/documented? I don't have anything on AWS but previously worked for a company that used it fairly heavily. We had everything in EU regions and I never saw any indication/warning that we had a dependency on us-east-1. But I assume we probably did based on the blast radius of today's outage.
by somerandomdude2 | 2025-10-20 17:46:26+00:00
Not how soon will the seas rise, but in which direction are they trending? The world is not static - it's dynamic, always changing. Long before human civilization, the environment was getting warmer, then cooler, then warmer, etc.

Instead of freaking out about it, work to understand how we as a civilization can make it through the changes. Attempting to hold the environment stable is like plugging dikes with your finger.
by hopelite | 2025-10-20 17:48:28+00:00
I am not sure exactly to what degree, but "I hate the term 'western' because some 'weste[r]ners' use it to separated what they think are 'civilized' from 'uncivilized'" is definitely a bit of an antiquated perspective at this point; almost like a justification to hold on to other older perspectives about "racism". I have started resorting to using terms like European Cultural Block because of it in certain communities that understand contemporary topics and have an advanced understanding of the world.

Your first statement is not likely unique to China though, even though they have demonstrated that in about the last 40 years, which I don't really think qualifies as "history". What it does demonstrate is that societies that have a certain kind of ethnic self-respect and can cast off the detrimental influences of foreign, hostile, and even enemy elements to pursue their own self-interest and survival will succeed, regardless of hurdles placed before them.

It's really just a story of personal development and either escaping, evading, and avoiding detrimental, toxic people and their behaviors. All of humanity that all has to currently still share a single planet with ZERO save spots, would be better off if we all not just allowed each other to be ourselves in our won places without others subverting, subjugating, infiltrating, dominating, poisoning, or polluting any other people on the planet. Then everyone can decide if we want to be friends or not friends with each other, collaborate and be friendly or simply avoid each other. We do not have to like each other to get along if everyone agrees on a base understanding that no people can parasitize and abuse and manipulate any others.
by mindcrash | 2025-10-20 17:48:42+00:00
Technically they are using (abusing?) a container containing Windows 11.

https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/master/bin/omarchy-...

The container they spin up: https://github.com/dockur/windows

And vanilla Arch is still in play, the only thing they do is a shit ton of configuration so you don't have to do it yourself. Basically dotfiles but on steroids.

It's also great for some inspiration if you want to do some ricing yourself.
by aeonik | 2025-10-20 17:48:54+00:00
We don't know exactly how consciousness works in the human brain, but we know way more than "comes from the abyss".

When I read that text, something like this happens:

Visual perception of text (V1, VWFA) → Linguistic comprehension (Angular & Temporal Language Areas) → Semantic activation (Temporal + Hippocampal Network) → Competitive attractor stabilization (Prefrontal & Cingulate) → Top-down visual reactivation (Occipital & Fusiform) → Conscious imagery (Prefrontal–Parietal–Thalamic Loop).

and you can find experts in each of those areas who understand the specifics a lot more.
by girdhar92 | 2025-10-20 17:49:17+00:00
I think they have done a tradeoff of affordability for students vs high speed and real task ability.

Electronics Engineering is in pretty bad shape in India,very few colleges in Indias have equipped labs that provide them the required skills, so having a $4 FPGA really helps in understanding it, conducting small experiments will help in developing a insight on how it works.

Vicharak has higher grade offerings as well which you can check that will be more in line with your exepectations, for eg: Axon, https://vicharak.in/axon
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-20 17:49:33+00:00
> Advertising-driven economic activity: $10.4 trillion

That’s not advertising, that's almost entirely sales “stimulated by” advertising, which are, even in theory, sales the particular seller would not have made without advertising, but not, even in principal, necessarily additional economic activity from advertising.

So even in expanding “advertising” to “due to advertising”, its at best a vast overestimate (and the “jobs supported by advertising” statistic is downstream of that statistic and suffers the same problem when treated as if it were additional rather than largely reallocation.)
by steveklabnik | 2025-10-20 17:49:34+00:00
> The cost of inference -- ie $ that go to your llm api provider

This is the crux of it: when talking about "the cost of inference" for the purposes of the unit economics of the business, what's being discussed is not what they charge you. It's about their COGs.

That's not word games. It's about being clear about what's being talked about.

Talking about increased prices is something that could be talked about! But it's a different thing. For example, what you're talking about here is total spend, not about individual pricing going up or down. That's also a third thing!

You can't come to agreement unless you agree on what's being discussed.
by melozo | 2025-10-20 17:49:40+00:00
Even internal Amazon tooling is impacted greatly - including the internal ticketing platform which is making collaboration impossible during the outage. Amazon is incapable of building multi-region services internally. The Amazon retail site seems available, but I’m curious if it’s even using native AWS or is still on the old internal compute platform. Makes me wonder how much juice this company has left.
by antonis-gr | 2025-10-20 17:49:55+00:00
No provider is better than two providers.

Hosting on second- or even third-tier providers allows you to overprovision and have much better redundancy, provided your solution is architected from the ground up in a vendor agnostic way. Hetzner is dirt cheap, and there are countless cheap and reliable providers spread around the globe (Europe in my case) to host a fleet of stateless containers that never fail simultaneously.

Stateful services are much more difficult, but replication and failover is not rocket science. 30 minutes of downtime or 30 seconds of data loss rarely kill businesses. On the contrary, unrealistic RTOs and RPOs are, in my experience, more dangerous, either as increased complexity or as vendor lock-in.

Customers don't expect 100% availability and noone offers such SLAs. But for most businesses, 99.95% is perfecty acceplable, and it is not difficult to have less than 4h/year of downtime.
by phillipcarter | 2025-10-20 17:50:05+00:00
Not necessarily? It's been the basis of one of the major ways people would query their data since 2023 on a product I worked on: https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/introducing-query-assistant

The difference is this feature explicitly isn't designed to do a whole lot, which is still the best way to build most LLM-based products and sandwich it between non-LLM stuff.
by willlma | 2025-10-20 17:50:16+00:00
You only have to change every car, truck, tractor, water heater, clothes dryer, lawn mower, leaf blower, stove top, etc to be electric instead of using natural gas (ie electrfy everything), which likely requires all the changes that the parent mentioned. Also, not everyone has enough land to install enough PV to power their entire homes + transportation, so a lot of this is going to have to come from the grid, which requires changes in transmission which are being actively blocked by the current administration (see Grain Belt Express).
by rkomorn | 2025-10-20 17:50:19+00:00
If you haven't already (which seems unlikely), look into the Renault 5 Turbo.

Bit of an absurd car, but the modern (non-turbo) 5's slight bumps over the rear wheels are such a good callback to the Turbo (the original Renault 5 were basically all flat).

Really fine design stuff IMO.
by gabiteodoru | 2025-10-20 17:50:23+00:00
It did go back on itself 3 times, no? "Actually, let’s trace for x=3:" (it had just computed for x=3 the first time); then "Better to check actual q output:" -- did it actually run it in a q session, or just pretended? And another one "That doesn’t seem to align. Let’s do it step by step:"
by miamibre | 2025-10-20 17:50:41+00:00
Thank you so much for saying this! The moment I saw the trailer and read the premise I immediately lost faith in the product.

I am not the biggest Tron fan but I have such a soft part in my heart for the movies because the original film has such a unique take on how computers work because back then they weren't mainstream that you end up with this weird mishmash of science and fantasy that you don't see anymore. Meanwhile, the sequel had this amazing production design and the remix version of the album has a permanent spot in my workout playlist thanks to all the techno artists they brought aboard.

Shame that the execs in Disney seem to be so clueless and just keep burning hundreds of millions to make these over-budget star studded films that no one is going to watch, at least in the case of marvel it makes sense but who in the world was clamoring for Tron? You need to take creative risks and shying away from the digital world isn't it.
by strict9 | 2025-10-20 17:50:56+00:00
In the past large developments would win over local government support with promises of jobs and investment in the local economy.

Now the only promises are a strained grid, higher energy bills and loud noise. It doesn't help that AI has been falsely attributed as the reason to lay people off in the past few years by CEOs who are actually just cutting costs or moving jobs offshore.

This situation probably gets worse before it gets better for the companies deploying new data centers.
by bigyabai | 2025-10-20 17:51:36+00:00
> Eventually it felt almost like an advertising supported OS than anything else.

This is exactly the emotion I feel opening Apple Music in 2025. I want to play an audio file, but the app wants me to subscribe to Apple Music+. We've crossed the Rubicon of intent-based UI to intent-based advertising...

Sigh. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251488227?sortBy=rank
by gethly | 2025-10-20 17:51:37+00:00
I signed out, flushed all data, disabled all extension but it did not help.

Incognito mode works though..

Hmm.. in normal mode, I see that https://rr5---sn-t0a7ln7d.googlevideo.com is called but gets ns_error_unknown_host but in incognito mode rr5 is not called and all works. Changing to dns over https did not help. But I heard about the AWS outage today and that it has something to do with DNS so i think there's the issue. Though am not sure why incognito works.
by MarsIronPI | 2025-10-20 17:53:27+00:00
What's different about this one compared to Briar, Tox, Scuttlebutt, Cabal.Chat, NomadNet or Chitchatter (to name a few)?

IMO peer-to-peer chat is a mostly-solved problem. I think the problem that needs addressing is not lack of peer-to-peer technology, but lack of adoption. People (mostly) don't care, so they (mostly) won't switch unless you strong-arm them in some way or another, or convince them to care. And either way, if they're not close to you, you basically have no influence on them, so you still end up needing to use non-free, non-private modes of communication. Network effects are rough.
by klipklop | 2025-10-20 17:53:31+00:00
The last time I used FireWire I had acne and a skateboard was my main source of transportation. I am now middle aged. Surprised to see anybody saying FireWire support is the hill they will die on.

I don't really get how FireWire is best for optical drives. I have been using USB CD/DVD/BluRay drives for over a decade now without an issue.
by captainkrtek | 2025-10-20 17:54:02+00:00
Some of the “global” and “edge” services depend on us-east-1.

See: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/aws-fault-iso...

“In the aws partition, the IAM service’s control plane is in the us-east-1 Region, with isolated data planes in each Region of the partition.“

Also, intra-region, many of the services use eachother, and not in a manner where the public can discern the dependency map.
by labrador | 2025-10-20 17:54:29+00:00
This new post is interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45646777

"October 17, 2025, was my last day at Amazon Web Services... CloudFront is a CDN, a content delivery network, or, simply put, a large distributed cache for your cat photos. And a very successful one. Something like 30% of all internet traffic goes through CloudFront in one way or another. Pretty cool, huh? In practice, this means that with any change, you have a chance of crashing 30% of the internet."
Show HN: I Spent $300 Learning That Replit Has SSH Support
by vcast | 2025-10-20 17:54:41+00:00
NY times has a popular rent vs buy calculator (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/upshot/buy-rent-cal...) However, it is gated by the paywall so I decided to vibecode my own using Replit.

Replit made it super easy for me as a non-developer to deploy the application. However I quickly learned that Replit is quite expensive during the iteration phase. A typical bug fix or design change would cost about 1min of work and $.50. This quickly added up to a bill of about $300 for the month. It took me too long to learn that Replit supports SSH to VS Code so I am now using the Claude extension from VS code for all the changes. I do still use Replit for hosting and deployment but I don't exceed what is included in the monthly cost ($25).

The site I built: https://housecalculators.com/rent-vs-buy-calculator
by gregw2 | 2025-10-20 17:54:51+00:00
Interestingly, it was "Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition" when it first appeared in print back towards the end of World War 2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_slang_terms#F...

Not to be confused with "Foobar" which apparently originated at MIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar

TIL, an interesting footnote about "foo" there:

'During the United States v. Microsoft Corp. trial, evidence was presented that Microsoft had tried to use the Web Services Interoperability organization (WS-I) as a means to stifle competition, including e-mails in which top executives including Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer referred to the WS-I using the codename "foo".[13]'
by jacquesm | 2025-10-20 17:54:53+00:00
A very large fraction of humanity lives in zones that will end up being flooded, this is already happening in some parts of the world.

For instance, Vanatu:

https://climateknowledgeportal.worldbank.org/sites/default/f...

There is nuisance flooding, which is definitely up already in many parts of the world, and then there is the kind of flooding that essentially makes it impossible to live in certain places. My own country (NL) has been working since a bad flood in 1953 to raise the various flood protection systems to account for rarer events and the mechanisms put in place have already been triggered several times. Right now they're working on raising the whole protection level another meter (three feet), and if necessary they'll do more than that but there are some complicating factors. At some point the rivers won't empty any more and you end up with either reverse flow or internal flooding simply because that river water has nowhere to go to.
by tsimionescu | 2025-10-20 17:54:57+00:00
> P(survival) = t_obs / (t_obs + t_more)

Where are you getting this formula from? Either way, it doesn't have the property we were originally discussing - the claim that the best estimate of the duration of an event is the double of it's current age. That is, by this formula, the probability of anything collapsing in the next millisecond is P(1 more millisecond | t_obs) = t_obs / t_obs + 1ms ~= 1 for any t_obs >> 1ms. So by this logic, the best estimate for how much longer an event will take is that it will end right away.

The formula I've found that appears to summarize the original "Copernican argument" for duration is more complex - for 50% confidence, it would say:

P(t_more in [1/3 t_obs, 3t_obs]) = 50%

That is, if given that we have a 50% chance to be experiencing the middle part of an event, we should expect its future life to be between one third and three times its past life.

Of course, this can be turned on its head: we're also 50% likely to be experiencing the extreme ends of an event, so by the same logic we can also say that P(t_more = 0 [we're at the very end] or t_more = +inf [we're at the very beginning and it could last forever] ) is also 50%. So the chance t_more > t_obs is equal to the chance it's any other value. So we have precisely 0 information.

The bottom line is that you can't get more information out a uniform distribution. If we assume all future durations have the same probability, then they have the same probability, and we can't predict anything useful about them. We can play word games, like this 50% CI thing, but it's just that - word games, not actual insight.
by hopelite | 2025-10-20 17:55:44+00:00
Is your data corrupted? Yes, the data is saved to a database. Yes, that database is queryable by me, an even more efficient path than a third party querying something as ridiculous as a database of stool pictures? At least you could have used a contemporary "AI analyzed" trope.

But besides the point, are you like some vested interest in poop-cam? Or why all the intense defense of this ridiculous idea? Is it your baby I am pointing flaws out in through some satire?
by nikisweeting | 2025-10-20 17:55:51+00:00
Heh BrowserBase and Browser-Use exist specifically because this is a harder problem than it looks. Any approach will work for the first couple actions, that hard parts are long strings of actions that depend on the results of previous actions, compressing the context and knowing what to send, and having your tools work across all the edge cases (e.g. date picker fields, file upload fields, cross origin iframes, etc.).
by skybrian | 2025-10-20 17:56:04+00:00
I think this can be summarized as “nobody knows but it might be very bad.” Mathematical models containing large uncertainties aren’t a crystal ball. They will likely be revised again.

You shouldn’t dismiss disaster scenarios since preparation for tail risks is important. But maybe don’t focus on them exclusively, either? It’s possible to keep multiple scenarios in mind, rather than focusing on one exclusively.

In California, there are wildfires, earthquakes, droughts, and (in some places) flooding to worry about, and this partly plays out via scarce and expensive property insurance.
by bix6 | 2025-10-20 17:56:25+00:00
Can someone educate me on the solution to this?

I assume most organizations, both small and large, just host on whatever provider they know or that costs them the least. If you have budget maybe you deploy to multiple providers for redundancy? But that increases cost and complexity.

Who’s going to bother with colo given the cost / complexity? Who’s going to run a server from their office given ISP restrictions and downtime fears?

What is the realistic antidote here?
by bigyabai | 2025-10-20 17:56:28+00:00
> It certainly seems targeted since they've

Who is "they" here? The person who opened the PR? The person who wrote the NSFW definition? The moderators correcting the mistakes?

> The answer is not submitting a PR to enable even more censorship.

It's not censorship, you can still install the apps to your phone. You just cannot promote them to impressionable audiences like children, or pretend it is appropriate conduct for something like the workplace. Your same logic could be used to argue that porn apps shouldn't be labelled as NSFW, or that gore and shock content is free expression.

F-Droid is not (and will never be) compelled to host the tools of evangelism. You don't need F-Droid's help to reach your audience. I'm a proud F-Droid user and defend their stance wholeheartedly.
by loudmax | 2025-10-20 17:56:31+00:00
Northern Virginia's Fairfax County public schools have the day off for Diwali, so that's not an unreasonable question.

In my experience, the teams at AWS are pretty diverse, reflecting the diversity in the area. Even if a lot of the Indian employees are taking the day off, there should be plenty of other employees to back them up. A culturally diverse employee base should mitigate against this sort of problem.

If it does turn out that the outage was prolonged due to one or two key engineers being unreachable for the holiday, that's an indictment of AWS for allowing these single points of failure to occur, not for hiring Indians.
by neom | 2025-10-20 17:57:04+00:00
Been a while since I worked in cloud but at least when I got out of it, the primitives where all shoring up to be generally very similar.

Did multi cloud redundancy end up being too expensive? Tech didn't line up enough? No good business case?

The elastic cloud story that never was? https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/pets-vs-cattle-the-elas...

What happened?
by physicsguy | 2025-10-20 17:57:17+00:00
We don’t use AWS at work but we still experienced disruption because lots of our customers do, and use it to transfer data to us. That means we then saw an uplift in data transfers as their systems came back online.

There is no panacea. The reason many people use these is because it’s easy and hard to find people that know other clouds and their quirks.
by jacquesm | 2025-10-20 17:57:56+00:00
This is already happening. I have looked at quite a few companies in the energy space this year, two of them had AWS as a critical dependency in their primary business processes and that could definitely have an impact on the grid. To their defense: AWS presumably tests their fall-back options (generators) with some regularity. But this isn't a farfetched idea at all.
by WalterBright | 2025-10-20 17:58:36+00:00
Yes, there are exceptions. The Soviets also poured resources into making quality watches.

But they were unable to generalize this.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, various companies sprang up to sell Soviet goods. I bought a marvelous small telescope, an old-fashioned electro-mechanical telephone, and a mechanical submarine clock. (Note that these were all obsolete technology.) They were all made by former military suppliers.