MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ethin | 2025-10-20 15:47:42+00:00
This was a fun read, I didn't know about rseq until today! And before this I reasonably assumed that the naive busy-wait thing would typically be what you'd do in a thread in most circumstances. Or that at least most threads do loop in that manner. I knew that signals and such were a problem but I didn't think just wanting to stop a thread would be so hard! :)

Hopefully this improves eventually? Who knows?
by wtallis | 2025-10-20 15:47:53+00:00
There's minimal demand for Thunderbolt/USB4 ports on Windows desktops. It won't ever make sense to inflate CPU pin count specifically for that use case, especially when the requisite PCIe lanes don't have to come directly from the CPU.

You'd be better off complaining about how Threadripper CPUs and motherboards are priced out of the enthusiast consumer market, than asking for the mainstream CPU platform to be made more expensive with the addition of IO that the vast majority of mainstream customers don't want to pay for.
by churchill | 2025-10-20 15:48:05+00:00
Can't say for all monarchs through human history (nor is it even possible to), but for the Roman emperors, 70% died violent deaths via assassination (actual and suspected), execution, suicide, or being KIA.

You had some particularly colorful episodes like the year of the four emperors where Nero's regional governors revolted and he committed suicide. Galba, a general, was declared imperator by his troops, only to be overthrown and killed by the Praetorians 6 months later.

Otho seized power, but died by suicide after he was defeated by Vitellius 3 months later.

Vitellius was declared emperor by his troops after defeating Otho at Bedriacum; held onto power for 7-8 months before being defeated & executed by Vespasian at the 2nd battle of Bedriacum.

Vespasian seized power and had himself proclaimed emperor by his legions, reigning for ~10 years.
by Frieren | 2025-10-20 15:48:10+00:00
> On HN it appears in every thread about someone being scammed, but it was most obvious in the recent threads where JPMorgan was defrauded by a startup they acquired. Seemingly 1/3 of the comments were from people commenting that JPMorgan was actually at fault for allowing themselves to be scammed.

I find that awful. JPMorgan should be held accountable, like many similar firms, for all the money that they themselves have stolen. But one crime does not justify the other. The people that scammed JPMorgan will not use the money to pay off JPMorgan's victims.

What it seems that in the USA nobody believes in justice anymore, as even the Supreme Court is just another partisan agency helping the rich. Americans may justify getting money thru crime because it is so normalized. Blaming victims helps to feel good about it.

The real answer is to have stronger institutions that see everybody equally under the law, and to have better laws that punish all type of criminals including economic crimes.
by cyberax | 2025-10-20 15:49:00+00:00
When I worked at AWS several years ago, IAM was not dependent on Dynamo. It might have changed, but I highly doubt this. Maybe some kind of network issue with high-traffic services?

> Auth/IAM seems like such a potentially (global) SPOF that you'd like to reduce dependencies to an absolute minimum.

IAM is replicated, so each region has its own read-only IAM cache. AWS SigV4 is also designed to be regionalized, if you ever wondered why the signature key derivation has many steps, that's exactly why ( https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/reference_s... ).
by skopje | 2025-10-20 15:49:00+00:00
A relative of mine lived and worked in the US for Oppenheimer Funds in the 1990's and they had their own datacenters all over the US, multiple redundancy for weather or war. But every millionaire feels entitled to be a billionaire now, so all of that cost was rolled into a single point of cloud failure.

Reminds me of a great Onion tagline:

"Plowshare hastily beaten back into sword."
by jazzyjackson | 2025-10-20 15:49:15+00:00
I use thunderbird for email and they now let you connect to matrix, irc, xmpp, and whatever Odnoklassniki is. It's quite barebones however, like it looks like people are just adding lines to a google doc, barely any interface at all. Really a stylesheet would go along way, looks like userChrome.css works, so maybe I'll mess with that.
by mrjbq7 | 2025-10-20 15:49:24+00:00
Factor is not dead, but continues to make development progress. If you're curious you can find more information on the main page:

https://factorcode.org

The latest release of 0.100 was September 2024, and we are getting close to a new release which we hope to do end of the year or so.

https://github.com/factor/factor

The cross-platform UI that Factor has works on macOS, Windows, and Linux. On Linux, it unfortunately still uses a GTK2-GLext project for the OpenGL widget that we render into, but modern GTK3/4 has a Gtk.GlArea that we need to switch to using which will improve the compatibility on Wayland. However, it works fine with even the latest Ubuntu 25.10 release.

And of course, you could use other libraries easily, such as Raylib:

https://re.factorcode.org/2025/05/raylib.html
by kevstev | 2025-10-20 15:49:27+00:00
Eh, businesses want to stay resilient to a single vendor going down. My least favorite question in interviews this past year was around multi-cloud. Because imho it just isn't worth it- the increased complexity, the trying to like-like services across different clouds that aren't always really the same, and then just the ongoing costs of chaos monkeying and testing that this all actually works, especially in the face of a partial outage like this vs something "easy" like a complete loss of network connectivity... but that is almost certainly not what CEOs want to hear (mostly who I am dealing with here going for VPE or CTO level jobs).

I could care less about having more vendor dinners when I know I am promising a falsehood that is extremely expensive and likely going to cost me my job or my credibility at some point.
by codelieb | 2025-10-20 15:49:34+00:00
I don't know what "notes" you are referring to, but if you mean the chapters of The Feynman Lectures on Physics, the recordings and photos of Feynman's 2-year Caltech course on Introductory Physics were the source material from which they were made. When these edited versions of Feynman's lectures were created there was no intention of publishing the lecture recordings or photos - indeed there was no intention of publishing them as a book! You can find all the recordings and lecture photos, as well as Feynman's lecture notes and other materials related to The Feynman Lectures on Physics at www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu.
by YouAreWRONGtoo | 2025-10-20 15:49:45+00:00
Formal verification would solve everything. It's just that whoever is using the software actually needs to understand the specification, but when there is some trusted base of I/O primitives (like "read a file"), such things become trivial to check; even Haskell has such things in a limited fashion via SafeHaskell and to an even lesser extent via its IO monad.

The specification for a text editor would be much simpler than an implementation. For example, efficiently searching for a substring is non-trivial, but a specification is easy. So, all that I would be interested in, is a proof that "eval(optimized_substring_search needle haystack) = eval(easy_substring needle haystack)", for example. Obviously, there are many thousands of such theorems that would have to be done to clone Emacs, but at least a new release wouldn't contain bugs anymore (wrongly specifying something would happen, but it's much easier to write a specification of desired behavior than to find the exact bug in some mess from someone else, because it conflates implementation and specification in the first place).
by Forricide | 2025-10-20 15:49:56+00:00
So for me, extremely anecdotally, I host a few fairly low-importance things on a home server (which is just an old desktop computer left sitting under a desk with Ubuntu slapped on it): A VPN (WireGuard), a few Discord bots, a Twitch bot + some auth stuff, and a few other services that I personally use.

These are the issues I've ran into that have caused downtime in the last few years:

- 1x power outage: if I had set up restart on power, probably would have been down for 30-60 minutes, ended up being a few hours (as I had to manually press the power button lol). Probably the longest non-self-inflicted issue.

- Twitch bot library issues: Just typical library bugs. Unrelated to self-hosting.

- IP changes: My IP actually barely ever changes, but I should set up DDNS. Fixable with self-hosting (but requires some amount of effort).

- Running out of disk space: Would be nice to be able to just increase it.

- Prooooooobably an internet outage or two, now that I think about it? Not enough that it's been a serious concern, though, as I can't think of a time that's actually happened. (Or I have a bad memory!)

I think that's actually about it. I rely fairly heavily on my VPN+personal cloud as all my notes, todos, etc are synced through it (Joplin + Nextcloud), so I do notice and pay a lot of attention to any downtime, but this is pretty much all that's ever happened. It's remarkable how stable software/hardware can be. I'm sure I'll eventually have some hardware failure (actually, I upgraded my CPU 1-2 years ago because it turns out the Ryzen 1700 I was using before has some kind of extremely-infrequent issue with Linux that was causing crashes a couple times a month), but it's really nice.

To be clear, though, for an actual business project, I don't think this would be a good idea, mainly due to concerns around residential vs commercial IPs, arbitrary IPs connecting to your local network, etc that I don't fully pay attention to.
by tracker1 | 2025-10-20 15:50:28+00:00
But the random part of a UUIDv7 is 74 bits... larger than a 64-bit integer of random values. Larger than many systems use in total when generating random keys for such things. Likely a larger number of values than the total number of comments here on HN over a couple decades. It's emphatically NOT guessable.
by lesuorac | 2025-10-20 15:50:46+00:00
While I am more of the belief that these people are wanting a time with less income equality and conflating that with factory work.

There's going to be a bunch of people wanting any job [1] and more in the coming years. So they'd probably cheer a local walmart as much as a local tsmc.

[1]: https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpseea10.htm
by shagie | 2025-10-20 15:50:53+00:00
> Also, the books have a quaint 1940s (NOT 1950s as people usually say it) atmosphere ...

The next day’s hearings were entirely different. Hari Seldon and Gaal Dornick were alone with the Commission. They were seated at a table together, with scarcely a separation between the five judges and the two accused. They were even offered cigars from a box of iridescent plastic which had the appearance of water, endlessly flowing. The eyes were fooled into seeing the motion although the fingers reported it to be hard and dry.

If you've got a copy of the ebook, search for "cigar". The use of tobacco as a way to demonstrate luxuries beyond the regular is there.

In a recent re-reading of the series, I started having difficult with it in Second Foundation... and forced myself to finish Foundation's Edge. The amount of psionic ability and the... for lack of a better word "preaching" with the monologues was very much a science fiction of a different time.

Foundation (the TV series) had to do updates for modern audiences and media. I'm not sure if trying to remain perfectly faithful to the books would represent them well.

Foundation is a soft sci-fi about interactions between individuals and history and society. Trying to maintain the incidental harder parts of the written works that modern audiences expect to be somewhat consistent of far future technology with the 1950s lens on them would be quaint and a bit off-putting to people expecting future tech.

He threw his cigar away and looked up at the outstretched Galaxy. “Back to oil and coal, are they?” he murmured—and what the rest of his thoughts were he kept to himself.

They took the major points, and wrote to follow the general path from one point to another given the expectations of an audience consuming it often for the first time - 80 years after the original was written... and given constraints of the format and continuity of actors (60 minute episodes rather than as a chapter of a short story in Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction).
by sojsurf | 2025-10-20 15:51:49+00:00
One thing I've noticed is that our current economic model, which builds in constant inflation, forces buyers and sellers to have this conversation non-stop. Why are prices higher? Because our costs are higher. Or because everyone else is charging more. Didn't you just raise prices recently? Yes...

If you don't increase your prices with inflation, your business will not be sustainable in the long term.
by wredcoll | 2025-10-20 15:52:13+00:00
> But under a loser definition, it's fairly obvious that an entity which takes part of the results of your labor under the threat of violence at least partially owns you, and thus it's reasonable to consider tax payers as slaves to their government.

This is the difference between what I might call philosophical, or perhaps semantic, and practical discussions.

We can define slavery to mean anything we want, up to and including being born. Every human has to eat and breathe to survive, does that mean they're slaves in that way? Sure? Maybe? Who cares.

The practical discussion is how we want to live our actual lives and structure our actual systems of power.

When people talk about "positive rights" (and really, all rights) they are aspirational. Merely creating a law does not change reality. We can create all the laws we want saying that people should not be murdered, but people will in fact, still be murdered, even though it is now against the law.

Similarly we can create a law saying that people should have healthcare access or food, but people will still be unable to see a doctor or get food when they need it. Neither of those laws imply putting anyone into slavery.

At a practical level, human life is better when we band together in larger and larger groups and contribute to the common welfare, however you want to phrase that.

We can, of course, quibble over the size and type of those contributions and how we use them, thats how society should work, but it is incredible bad faith to accuse people who want to use those contributions for, say, healthcare access, of wanting to enslave people.
by ajross | 2025-10-20 15:52:27+00:00
DHCP can only tell you who the local DNS server is. That's not what's failed, nor what needs human configuration.

At the top of the stack someone needs to say "This is the cluster that controls boot storage", "This is the IP to ask for auth tokens", etc... You can automatically configure almost everything but there still has to be some way to get started.
by kibwen | 2025-10-20 15:52:34+00:00
To me, the diffusion-based approach "feels" more akin to whats going on in an animal brain than the token-at-a-time approach of the in-vogue LLMs. Speaking for myself, I don't generate words one a time based on previously spoken words; I start by having some fuzzy idea in my head and the challenge is in serializing it into language coherently.
by YouAreWRONGtoo | 2025-10-20 15:52:55+00:00
While I don't know your specific case, I have seen it happen often enough that there are only two possibilities left:

1. they are idiots 2. they do it on purpose and they think you are an idiot

For me, it just means that the moment you integrate with any API, you are basically their bitch (unless you implement one from every competitor in the market, at which point you can just as well do it yourself).
by leeter | 2025-10-20 15:53:31+00:00
I'm reminded of Raymond Chen's many many blogs[1][2][3](there are a lot more) on why TerminateThread is a bad idea. Not surprised at all the same is true elsewhere. I will say in my own code this is why I tend to prefer cancellable system calls that are alertable. That way the thread can wake up, check if it needs to die and then GTFO.

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20150814-00/?p=91...

[2] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20191101-00/?p=10...

[3] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140808-00/?p=29...

there are a lot more, I'm not linking them all here.
by Gazoche | 2025-10-20 15:54:04+00:00
There is no "solved" in computer vision, there is only "good enough" and what constitutes "good enough" depends on your problem domain.

Take an OCR model with 99.9% character-wise accuracy. Sounds pretty good, right? Well if your use case is, say, digitalizing old printed novels, then yeah it's probably good enough.

But what if your documents are personal records with millions of names, to insert in some administrative database? Now 1 out of 1000 persons will have their name misspelled. Ooops.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-10-20 15:54:10+00:00
Seeing Servo and full-fat Electron [1] both at 100 MB made me wonder if that's the minimum for an "Everything bagel" browser engine that does WebRTC, video playback, etc., etc.

How big is Ladybird?

[1] I believe you can make Electron smaller by cutting parts of Chromium out, but the default is around 100 MB
by cs702 | 2025-10-20 15:54:16+00:00
Properly, the title should be "OpenAI is losing about three times more than the revenue it collects" because to date OpenAI has had no earnings.

The multi-trillion-dollar question is whether the economics will improve at OpenAI.

If they don't improve dramatically, absent gobs more fresh capital, OpenAI will run out of money.
by tweetle_beetle | 2025-10-20 15:54:23+00:00
Did you read the section about what made the DX7 hardware a good target for this project?

https://ajxs.me/blog/Introduction_to_Reverse-Engineering_Vin...

The ARQ96 is an incredibly niche product all things considered, but especially compared to the DX7. It's also ~10 years old rather than ~40 years old. It's a completely different beast.

Zoom released few firmware updates, but v1.x to v2.x was a very significant change. Are you using the latest version?
by quacked | 2025-10-20 15:54:54+00:00
I often think about how much human labor there is available at any given moment, and how in any minute some percentage of "available labor" is bound up doing something.

Back in the day, with billions fewer people, you could still bind up some percentage of available labor making beautiful gates for the coronation, or staging mock battles for the king as he passed. Today, I guess people make marketing copy for cat food and run professional sports. And yet a great many of us are still alive, having continued to survive despite our countrymen spending all their available labor on frivolity.

What percentage of that "available labor" is really truly usefully bound up in making sure we don't all starve to death, get violently invaded, or die of exposure?

I wish I could see what kind of society would appear if that pool of "available labor" was turned toward purposes I personally consider worthy--caring for the weak, erecting and protecting great monuments and cities and wild areas, etc. Obviously this has been attempted before in various different regimes--merely having full dominion over all "available labor" and turning it toward "worthy purposes" does not automatically create a great nation, as the USSR and China found out--but it doesn't stop me from wondering, if Man wasn't so busy making gates for the king or increasing user conversion from 17.805% to 17.873%, what would that society look like?
by ta1243 | 2025-10-20 15:55:20+00:00
Paying for resilience is expensive. not as expensive as AWS, but it's not free.

Modern companies live life on the edge. Just in time, no resilience, no flexibility. We see the disaster this causes whenever something unexpected happens - the Evergiven blocking Suez for example, let alone something like Covid

However increasingly what should be minor loss of resilience, like an AWS outage or a Crowdstrike incident, turns into major failures.

This fragility is something government needs to legislate to prevent. When one supermarket is out that's fine - people can go elsewhere, the damage is contained. When all fail, that's a major problem.

On top of that, the attitude that the entire sector has is also bad. People thing IT should tail once or twice a year and it's not a problem. If that attitude affect truly important systems it will lead to major civil projects. Any civilitsation is 3 good meals away from anarchy.

There's no profit motive to avoid this, companies don't care about being offline for the day, as long as all their mates are also offline.
by x0x0 | 2025-10-20 15:55:28+00:00
> inference costs will clearly drop

They haven't though. On two fronts: 1, the soa models have been pretty constantly priced, and everyone wants the soa models. Likely the only way costs drop is the models get so good that people are like hey, I'm fine with a less useful answer (which is still good enough) and that seems, right now, like a bad bet.

and 2 - we use a lot more tokens now. No more pasting Q&A into a site; now people hammer up chunks of their codebases and would love to push more. More context, more thinking, more everything.
by crote | 2025-10-20 15:55:56+00:00
> Sometimes weather or a car wreck takes out power

Not really? Most of the infrastructure is quite resilient and the rare outage is usually limited to a street or two, with restoration time mainly determined by the time it takes the electricians to reach the incident site. For any given address that's maybe a few hours per decade - with the most likely cause being planned maintenance. That's not a "spares are too expensive" issue, that's a "giving every home two fully independent power feeds is silly" issue.

Anything on a metro-sized level is pretty much unheard of, and will be treated as serious as a plane crash. They can essentially only be caused by systemic failure on multiple levels, as the grid is configured to survive multiple independent failures at the same time.

Comparing that to the AWS world: individual servers going down is inevitable and shouldn't come as a surprise. Everyone has redundancies, and an engineer accidentally yanking the power cables of an entire rack shouldn't even be noticeable to any customers. But an entire service going down across an entire availability zone? That should be virtually impossible, and having it happen regularly is a bit of a red flag.
by godshatter | 2025-10-20 15:55:59+00:00
When I was cramming for a test the day before I would use an accelerated version of this. I would work on something difficult for maybe an hour or so, then go do something fun for a few minutes that required focus. Going for a walk just left me continually trying to work on the problem while I walked.

Back in the day I would play pool (had access to a pool table nearby). These days, I'd go play a video game that took skill and focus. I'd do this for maybe 10 or 15 minutes and hit that problem again. It didn't always work, but sometimes time pressures caused me to fall into a mental rut and when you're in one all you can seem to do is dig deeper.
by zenethian | 2025-10-20 15:56:11+00:00
This site is obviously just an ad, but it does remind me that I do want to learn about how modern mainframe systems work. I understand the basics of COBOL but I understand nothing about how mainframes execute it in such a way that it can process the sheer volume of data that is crunched. The OS and execution environment sounds wild and completely foreign to me. Does anyone have any good resources on how to learn about the computational model of modern mainframes?