MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TomasBM | 2025-11-26 17:32:18+00:00
I've seen arguments that opening up fresh material makes it easy for less honest institutions to plagiarize your work. I've even heard professors say they don't want to share their slides or record their lectures, because it's their copyright.

I personally don't like this, because it makes a place more exclusive with legal moats, not genuine prestige. If you're a professor, this also makes your work less known, not more. IMO the only beneficiaries are either those who paid a lot to be there, lecturers who don't want to adapt, and university admins.
by aforwardslash | 2025-11-26 17:32:20+00:00
> but the '80s, '90s, and early '00s had an explosion of tiny hardware and software startups

Most of them used intel, motorola or zilog tech at some capacity. Most of them with a clock used dallas semiconductor tech; Many of them with serial ports also used either intel or maxim/analog devices chips.

Many of those implementations are patented, and their inner designs were generically, "trade secrets". Most of the clones and rebrands were actually licensed (most of 80x51 microcontrollers and z80 chips are licensed tech, not original). As a tinkerer, you'd receive a black box (sometimes literally) with a series of pins and a datasheet.

If anything, i'd say you have much more choice today than in the 80s/90's.
by tomashubelbauer | 2025-11-26 17:32:39+00:00
I expect all hosted model providers will serve ads (regular, marked advertisements, no need for them to pretend not to, people don't care) once the first provider takes the lid off on the whole thing and it proves to be making money. There's no point in differentiating as the one hosted model with no ads because it only attracts a few people, the same way existing Google search and YouTube alternatives that respect the user are niche. Only offline, self hosted models will be ad free (in my estimation).
by Hamuko | 2025-11-26 17:32:48+00:00
And why haven't they? Master Chief has been around since 2001, Lara Croft since 1996 and Darth Vader since 1977. The technology has been around for ages, and as far as I know, no networks have opted for virtual anchors.

Just from where you are pulling the data that on-air personalities are too expensive?
by _trampeltier | 2025-11-26 17:32:57+00:00
We are flying "faster" on earth.

You often hear about the fatality rate per 100 million or 1 billion passenger miles in transportation statistics, but over the last 15 years, U.S. airlines have averaged less than 1 fatality per passenger light-year traveled

https://x.com/RyanRadia/status/1764868263903723874
by perlgeek | 2025-11-26 17:33:00+00:00
https://openai.com/charter/

> OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity. We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome.

Note that it doesn't say: "Our mission is to maximize shareholder value, and we develop AI systems to do that".
by andsoitis | 2025-11-26 17:33:13+00:00
The opening lines of their mission statement is direct about this:

"OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company. Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity."

and

"We are building safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome."

https://openai.com/about/
by jug | 2025-11-26 17:33:13+00:00
I've also thought of this and what's more, Google's platform provides them with training from YouTube, optimal backend access to the Google Search index for grounding from an engine they've honed for decades, training from their smartphones, smart home devices and TV's, Google Cloud... And as you say, also the reverse; empowering their services from said AI, too.

They can also run AI as a loss leader like with Antigravity.

Meanwhile, OpenAI looks like they're fumbling with that immediately controversial statement about allowing NSFW after adult verification, and that strange AI social network which mostly led to Sora memes outside of it.

I think they're going to need to do better. As for coding tools, Anthropic is an ever stronger contender there, if they weren't pressured from Google already.
by jtgeibel | 2025-11-26 17:33:17+00:00
On the Qt side, it looks like Qt clients are able to survive a compositor crash since Qt 6.6. I haven't personally tried this, as I don't recall experiencing any kwin crashes in the last few years.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qt-Wayland-Compositor-Restart

As I understand it, in Wayland all the necessary state lives client side, so a client is free to wait around and connect to a new compositor. The compositor might not place the windows exactly where they were before, but there is nothing architecturally that forces clients to crash if the compositor crashes.
by btown | 2025-11-26 17:33:47+00:00
One of the things I find fascinating about this is that we don't blink twice about the idea that an update to a "hot" cache entry that's "just data" should propagate rapidly across caches... but we do have change management and gradual deployments for code updates and meaningful configuration changes.

Machine learning feature updates live somewhere in the middle. Large amounts of data, a need for unsupervised deployment that can react in seconds, somewhat opaque. But incredibly impactful if something bad rolls out.

I do agree with the OP that the remediation steps in https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/#remedia... seem undercooked. But I'd focus on something entirely different than trying to verify the creation of configuration files. There should be real attention to: "how can we take blue/green approaches to allowing our system to revert to old ML feature data and other autogenerated local caches, self-healing the same way we would when rolling out code updates?"

Of course, this has some risk in Cloudflare's context, because attackers may very well be overjoyed by a slower rollout of ML features that are used to detect their DDoS attacks (or a rollout that they can trigger to rollback by crafting DDoS attacks).

But I very much hope they find a happy medium. This won't be the last time that a behavior-modifying configuration file gets corrupted. And formal verification, as espoused by the OP, doesn't help if the problem is due to a bad business assumption, encoded in a verified way.
by gen220 | 2025-11-26 17:33:56+00:00
IME, "Why systems fail" almost always boils down to a principal-agent problem. This is another way of expressing the Mungerism "show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome".

Systems that "work" tend to have some way of correcting for or mitigating the principal agent problem by aligning incentives.

I'd also point out that hardware is a much older discipline, in terms of how long it's been operating at scale. It's had more time to formalize and crystallize. Intel is 56 years old. Google is 27.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-11-26 17:34:00+00:00
Let me rephrase: most people aren’t that myopic and the viewpoint that’s driving AI development definitely skews more towards the “no restrictions or limitations of any kind” end of the spectrum anyway. You’d have a point if AI development was being choked in some way, but it’s quite the opposite:

I don’t think you need to worry that the other extreme exists as well. The obscene flow of money into AI at every stage has thus far gone almost entirely unchallenged.
by immibis | 2025-11-26 17:34:03+00:00
In poorer places, people would just see a problem exists, and then solve it. Expensive housing? They'll get roommates, put up shacks, or live in cardboard boxes on the street. These things are illegal in expensive-housing places, and the more expensive the housing is, the more illegal they are - IIRC some states were considering banning roommates.
by hnlmorg | 2025-11-26 17:34:06+00:00
- slower, often bare metal hardware

- lack of scalability (you can’t dynamically spin up a bare metal server if you don’t already have one in your rack)

- slower memory models (CGI, and forking meant it took longer for the OS kernel to allocate system resources)

- improvements to TCP and fork performances in the Linux kernel over the years. Such as changes to how TCP negotiation happens

- improvements to HTTP transit such as improved compression performance, HTTP/3, etc.

- CDNs weren’t common place, and were super expensive.

- caching was in its infancy. Tools like varnish (I think it was called) were complicated and setting up memcached, varnish, etc all required additional hardware, that added to hosting costs.

- HTTP servers weren’t as mature. Plus weren’t included in the language runtime (eg you’d run httpd that would fork an instance of PHP rather than run the HTTP server as part of the Python, et al)

- serving static content of NFSs mounted SAN was slow (the POSIX overhead, plus NFS protocol, plus network roundtrip, plus disk access times)

- mechanical drives were slow

And so on and so forth.

The biggest difference I think was a combination of affordable or free CDNs, reducing pressure on the backend, and the easy of scaling (VM, Docker, etc) meaning you don’t need to find a happy middle ground between costs and high availability.
by zkmon | 2025-11-26 17:34:36+00:00
I'm aware that I'm ignorant of many things, just like anyone else on this Earth. Some are less ignorant and some are more.

Could you be kind enough to explain the phrase "set of all integers" when the word all can not apply to an unbounded quantity? I think the word all is used loosely to extend it's meaning as used for finite sets, to a non-existent, unbounded set. For example, things such as all Americans, all particles in universe have a meaning because they have a boundary criterion. What is all integers?

I think one need to first define the realm of applicability or domain for the concepts such as comparison, 1-to-1 mapping, listing, diagonals, uniqueness, all etc.
by dminvs | 2025-11-26 17:34:47+00:00
there used to be a lot more shared hosting in the world when Slashdot ruled the geek news roost

it'd be fine if it's one site on a dedicated machine, but these shared webhosts would routinely cram 500-1000 hosting accounts onto something like a single-core, HT-less 2.4GHz Pentium 4 with two gigs of RAM, running mpm_prefork on Apache 2.0, with single-node MySQL 5.x (maybe even 4.x!) on the same box... which was not terribly efficient as others observed

you carry about 20x the compute power of that machine in your pocket, even a Raspberry Pi 4 could triple the workload
by robot-wrangler | 2025-11-26 17:36:11+00:00
Visualizations and code always help. But to name two recent disappointments, stuff like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46049932 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45957911 comes to mind as not meeting a high standard. To be clear, no expertise is fine, but no curiosity is bad.
by jandrese | 2025-11-26 17:36:23+00:00
I don't know how true this is, but it seems to me that SSD firmware has to be more complex than HDD firmware and I've seen far more SSDs die due to firmware failure than HDDs. I've seen HDDs with corrupt firmware (junk strings and nonsense values in the SMART data for example), but usually the drive still reads and writes data. In contrast I've had multiple SSDs, often with relatively low power-on hours, just suddenly die with no warning. Some of them even show up as a completely different (and totally useless) device on the bus. Drives with Sandforce controllers used to do this all of the time, which was a problem because Sandforce hardware was apparently quite affordable and many third party drives used their chips.

I have had a few drives go completely read only on me, which is always a surprise to the underlying OS when it happens. What is interesting is you can't predict when a drive might go read-only on you. I've had a system drive that was only a couple of years old and running on a lightly loaded system claim to have exhausted the write endurance and go read only, although to be fair that drive was a throwaway Inland brand one I got almost for free at Microcenter.

If you really want to see this happen try setting up a Raspberry Pi or similar SBC off of a micro-SD card and leave it running for a couple of years. There is a reason people who are actually serious about those kinds of setups go to great lengths to put the logging on a ramdisk and shut off as much stuff as possible that might touch the disk.
by blakesterz | 2025-11-26 17:36:31+00:00
“We think that, by modulating cerebrospinal fluid pressure and reducing intracranial venous sinuses compression, these drugs produce a decrease in the release of calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP), a key migraine-promoting peptide”, Dr Braca explained. “That would pose intracranial pressure control as a brand-new, pharmacologically targetable pathway.”

I'm not sure I understand what that means, but I wonder if this would work for people who are not obese?
by paool | 2025-11-26 17:36:46+00:00
> every product manager fundamentally misunderstands that users just want a chat window for AI,

I would actually argue chat windows are terrible ui/ux for most cases and users. It does the opposite of `don't make me think`. Too much potential for user error.

Not saying there shouldn't be any LLM integration/features, just that it should be in the form of a button press or something (familiar ux), not the same chatgpt interface that all the early apps are trying to mimic for no good reason.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-11-26 17:38:10+00:00
I work in formal verification at a FAANG.

It is so wildly more expensive than traditional development that it is simply not feasible to apply it anywhere but absolutely the most critical paths, and even then, the properties asserted by formal verification are often quite a bit less powerful than necessary to truly guarantee something useful.

I want formal verification everywhere. I believe in provable correctness. I wish we could hire people capable of always writing software to that standard and maintaining those proofs alongside their work.

We really can’t, though. Its a frustrating reality of being human — we know how to do it better, but nearly all of even the smartest engineers we can hire are not smart enough.
by owenversteeg | 2025-11-26 17:38:23+00:00
I've seen a lot of AI-generated PRs but I think this one is actually a very unique and interesting case. Most of these are written by novices, don't work, are for less-technical projects, and there isn't any real conversation or changing opinions. This was completely different; it was complex and actually worked, the poster Joel Reymont has 30 years of software experience and not exactly on simple bullshit either (from what I can tell, he was writing device drivers 20 years ago and had an HN account "wagerlabs" since 2008.) There was a real discussion here (the OCaml maintainers had an impressive amount of patience!) and the poster eventually laid out his side coherently with a human-written comment and changed his mind about contributing to OSS with AI.

Don't get me wrong, I still think these AI-generated PRs are a total waste of time for everyone involved and a scourge on OSS maintainers. As it stands today I haven't seen any serious project that's able to use them productively. This PR was still 13k largely incomprehensible lines with several glaring errors. And yet this specific PR is still not like the others!
by vladms | 2025-11-26 17:39:01+00:00
I think that the ratio of weirdos doing stuff remained constant through the population, it's just that the whole population is now on the web, so they are harder to find.

Not to mention 20 years ago I personally (and probably others my age) had much more time to care about random weird stuff.

So, I am skeptical without some actual analysis or numbers that things really are so bad.
by nyrikki | 2025-11-26 17:39:06+00:00
Hindsight bias is always easier but:

> FAANG-style companies are unlikely to adopt formal methods or relational rigor wholesale. But for their most critical systems, they should. It’s the only way to make failures like this impossible by design, rather than just less likely.

That relational rigor imposes what one chooses to be true, it isn’t a universal truth.

The frame problem and the qualification problem apply here.

The open domain frame problem == HALT.

When you can for a problem into the relational model things are nice but not everything can be reduced to a trivial property.

That is why Codd had to as nulls etc..

You can choose to decide that the queen is rich OR pigs can fly; but a poor queen doesn’t result in flying pigs.

Choice over finite sets == finite indexes over sets == PEM

If you can restrict your problems to where the Entscheidungsproblem is solvable you can gain many benefits

But it is horses for courses and sub TC.
by jandrese | 2025-11-26 17:39:07+00:00
For what it is worth the SMART diagnostics and health indicators have rarely been useful for me, either on SSDs or HDDs. I don't think I've ever had a SMART health warning before a drive dies. Although I did have one drive that gave a "This drive is on DEATH'S DOOR! Replace it IMMEDIATELY!" error for 3 years before I finally got around to replacing it, mostly to avoid having my OS freak out every time it booted up.
by PunchyHamster | 2025-11-26 17:39:12+00:00
> but it clearly needs a distinct and a limit, since these seem to be crucial business rules.

Isn't that just... wrong ? Throwing arbitrary limit (vs maybe having some alert when the table is too long) would just silently truncate the list

Anybody can be backseat engineer by throwing out industry's best practices like they were gospel but you have to look at entire system, not just the database part
by Kappa90 | 2025-11-26 17:39:14+00:00
Hey, one of the devs working on PostHog AI here.

The main reason why we advocate for a single-loop is because subagents suffer from the telephone game problem: context is lost when the interface is just an agent-to-agent prompt.

We are still working on subagents for parallelization, but if you can stick to the main loop, everything works much better.
by techblueberry | 2025-11-26 17:39:55+00:00
I think actually selling media is going to be tough. 1: you have to beat the current price point so people will use it, 2: it can’t be too cheap or you can’t make money. That mad market price point makes it hard to get right. The more content the fewer eyeballs, meaning the less value, meaning people willing to pay less. If it makes making movies a lot cheaper, then there’s a lot less money to be made.

The thing about tech is it has to scale to meet tech valuations, and there’s a reason instagram basically gives content creation tools away for free.
by baq | 2025-11-26 17:40:13+00:00
/. effect is basically a ddos, same principles apply. basically sockets need to be created and torn down faster than incoming requests and they just aren't; they get queued up for a while and/or kill the host if it isn't configured correctly and keeps trying serving traffic which it can't due to resource exhaustion. whether it's a 'modern stack' requiring hundreds of MB of ram per request or a C CGI program matters only quantitatively.
by lysace | 2025-11-26 17:40:21+00:00
Very quick rollout is crucial for this kind of service. On top of what you wrote, institutionalizing rollback by default if something catastrophically breaks should be the norm.

Been there in those calls, begging to people in charge who perhaps shouldn't have been, "eh, maybe we should attempt a rollback to the last known good state? cause, it, you know.... worked". But investigating further before making any change always seems to be the preferred action to these people. Can't be faulted for being cautious and doing things properly, right? I kid you not - this is their instinct.

If I recall correctly it took CF 2 hours to roll back the broken changes.

So if I were in charge of Cloudflare (4-5k employees) I'd both look at the processes and the people in charge.
by fransje26 | 2025-11-26 17:40:43+00:00
Thank you for this great link. A short read, well worth reading. And I fully agree with the proposition.

The only problem is that it will be fought tooth and nail by the incumbents, that "incidentally" also control all the propaganda diffusion channels needed to brainwash us into refusing such a change.

It would take a radical shift in humanity to get this far.

A man can dream.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-11-26 17:41:01+00:00
> and this probably won’t be any different

It's just exhausting to read the 1000th post of people saying "If we replace jobs with AI, we will all be having happy times instead of doing boring work." It's like reading a Kindergartner's idea of how the world works.

People need to pay for food. If they are replaced, companies are not going to make up jobs just so they can hire people. They are under no responsibility or incentive to do that.

It's useless explaining that here because half of the shills likely have ulterior reasons to be obtuse about that. On top of that, many software developers are so outside the working class that they don't really have a concept of financial obligation, some refusing to have friends that aren't "high IQ", which is their shorthand for not poor or "losers".
by echelon | 2025-11-26 17:41:24+00:00
unwrap() and the family of methods like it are a Rust anti-pattern from the early days of Rust. It dates back to before many of the modern error-handling and safety-conscious features of the language and type system.

Rust is being pulled in so many different directions from new users that the language perhaps never originally intended. Some engineers will be fine with panicky behavior, but a lot of others want to be able to statically guarantee most panics (outside of perhaps memory allocation failures) cannot occur.

We need more than just a linter on this. A new language feature that poisons, marks, or annotates methods that can potentially panic (for reasons other than allocation) would be amazing. If you then call a method that can panic, you'll have to mark your own method as potentially panicky. The ideal future would be that in time, as more standard library and 3rd party library code adopts this, we can then statically assert our code cannot possibly panic.

As it stands, I'm pretty mortified that some transitive dependency might use unwrap() deep in its internals.
by kmm | 2025-11-26 17:41:37+00:00
That alignment is only necessary to do the Grand Tour, to visit all four outer planets in one mission. Voyager 1 actually didn't do the Grand Tour, it only visited Jupiter and Saturn, you're thinking of Voyager 2. This alignment is also not even necessary to attain the highest speed, Voyager 1 is even faster than Voyager 2.

A flyby of both Jupiter and Saturn can be done every two decades or so (the synodic period is 19.6 years)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program
by hnlmorg | 2025-11-26 17:41:40+00:00
Because all social platforms and message boards are like living entities:

They have their infancy and grow into something popular (relatively speaking) then your older members either get bored or jaded, often both. The culture of the platform starts to change while more people leave disliking the change than new people discover the platform. Resulting in the platform steadily shrinking in popularity.

Every social network and forum has experienced the same phenomenon.
by llm_nerd | 2025-11-26 17:41:48+00:00
Anecdotes are not data, however I used to have one or more severe migraine headaches weekly. Debilitating migraines. I suffered pretty high blood pressure (which has a very direct relationship with cerebrospinal fluid pressure, which is why I mention this), but aside from that am very healthy and physically fit, exercise regularly, and so on.

I started medication to treat the BP -- telmisartan and amlodipine -- and my BP dropped from 150+/120+ to 115/80. The migraines completely disappeared. I still infrequently get the visual aura that would traditionally precede a migraine, but nothing follows. I haven't had a migraine in the years I've had my BP under control.