MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bsder | 2025-11-18 23:55:48+00:00
Except they don't actually pay $120K per year.

If the auto mechanics were paid a salary of $120K per year for 40 hours per week, they'd be flooded with applicants.

Instead, that $120K number is if you can work the requisite number of overtime hours and you don't pay attention to having to buy your own tools and ...
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-11-18 23:55:55+00:00
In fact it's the opposite. We used to have a system that promoted western european, and we decided to change that. So we split them up in a way that encourages diversity. People from populous nations think this isn't fare. American's think it is explicitly fair, that our system makes sure people from all over the world come and join us, not just immigration dominated by the highest populous countries.

I understand the diversity is good, and that immigration can create that take. But I don't understand that 'immigration good, policies for diversity bad' take?
by xp84 | 2025-11-18 23:56:14+00:00
I think the idea is that the sats relay a signal to radio stations including remote ones.

It's the radio stations who are in charge of situating their reception equipment where it can see the sat, and also for figuring out how to best broadcast to their served area (e.g. AM and/or FM? Tower height, power, setting up some translator stations on a different frequency to serve outlying areas, giving the feed to local cable systems to be sent with TV service, etc.)
by throwaway2037 | 2025-11-18 23:56:25+00:00
> remain unpopular outside of Android Studio

What a strange claim. For enterprise Java, is there is a serious alternative in 2025? And, Rider is slowly eating the lunch of (classic) Visual Studio for C# development. I used it again recently to write an Excel XLL plug-in. I could not believe how far Rider has come in 10 years.
by jiggawatts | 2025-11-18 23:58:16+00:00
Something that I've daydreamed of in the past is making a new constructive solid geometry "kernel" around which a CAD application could be wrapped based on projective geometric algebra (PGA).

The algorithms it enables are fundamentally more capable and robust than traditional kernels based on linear algebra (vectors and matrices). You can do really fancy things like interpolating in space and time robustly, find extrema in high-dimensional phase spaces, etc...

This could potentially allow straightforward and robust solvers for kinematics, optimal shape finding, etc...

Every few decades there's a "step change" where some new algorithm or programming paradigm sweeps away the old approach because suddenly a hobbyist can do the same thing solo that took dozens of developers a decade in the past. I suspect (but cannot prove) that PGA is one of those things.
by davidpolberger | 2025-11-18 23:58:17+00:00
This is wild. I gave it some legacy XML describing a formula-driven calculator app, and it produced a working web app in under a minute:

https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts?state=%7B%22ids%22:%...

I spent years building a compiler that takes our custom XML format and generates an app for Android or Java Swing. Gemini pulled off the same feat in under a minute, with no explanation of the format. The XML is fairly self-explanatory, but still.

I tried doing the same with Lovable, but the resulting app wouldn't work properly, and I burned through my credits fast while trying to nudge it into a usable state. This was on another level.
by otterley | 2025-11-18 23:58:26+00:00
> work has already begun on how we will harden them against failures like this in the future. In particular we are:

> Hardening ingestion of Cloudflare-generated configuration files in the same way we would for user-generated input

> Enabling more global kill switches for features

> Eliminating the ability for core dumps or other error reports to overwhelm system resources

> Reviewing failure modes for error conditions across all core proxy modules

Absent from this list are canary deployments and incremental or wave-based deployment of configuration files (which are often as dangerous as code changes) across fault isolation boundaries -- assuming CloudFlare has such boundaries at all. How are they going to contain the blast radius in the future?

This is something the industry was supposed to learn from the CrowdStrike incident last year, but it's clear that we still have a long way to go.

Also, enabling global anything (i.e., "enabling global kill switches for features") sounds like an incredibly risky idea. One can imagine a bug in a global switch that transforms disabling a feature into disabling an entire system.
by tim333 | 2025-11-18 23:58:29+00:00
> problem ... laid off are not going to find new roles

Not necessarily. If AI improves productivity, which it hasn't very much yet, there is the option to make more stuff rather than the same output with less people.

The Luddites led on to Britain being the workshop of the world, not to everyone sitting around unemployed, at least not for a while.
by skydhash | 2025-11-18 23:58:29+00:00
Please take a look at the Emacs documentation sometimes.

VSCode is more popular, which makes it easy to find extensions. But you don’t see those in the Emacs world because the equivalent is a few lines of config.

So what you will see are more like meta-extensions. Something that either solve a whole class of problems, could be a full app, or provides a whole interaction model.
by lukan | 2025-11-18 23:58:29+00:00
"Throwing us off and making us believe this might have been an attack was another apparent symptom we observed: Cloudflare’s status page went down. The status page is hosted completely off Cloudflare’s infrastructure with no dependencies on Cloudflare. While it turned out to be a coincidence, it led some of the team diagnosing the issue to believe that an attacker may be targeting both our systems as well as our status page."

Unfortunately they do not share, what caused the status page to went down as well. (Does this happen often? Otherwise a big coincidence it seems)
by chickensong | 2025-11-18 23:58:42+00:00
My reply was perhaps a bit too simple and optimistic, so thanks for your comment. Bugs can indeed do more than a little damage, and the bad years can be horrible! I guess the spirit of my previous comment was that it can be possible to find some success, without pesticides or an aggressive IPM program.

> not all crops are seriously affected

Crop diversity is the key, and a life saver when the pressure is on, or when things just don't go as planned for whatever reason!

I don't get terrible grasshopper pressure in my location, but a friend does and uses Nolo Bait as part of her management.
by vsgherzi | 2025-11-18 23:59:11+00:00
Why does cloudflare allow unwraps in their code? I would've assumed they'd have clippy lints stopping that sort of thing. Why not just match with { ok(value) => {}, Err(error) => {} } the function already has a Result type.

At the bare minimum they could've used an expect("this should never happen, if it does database schema is incorrect").

The whole point of errors as values is preventing this kind of thing.... It wouldn't have stopped the outage but it would've made it easy to diagnose.

If anyone at cloudflare is here please let me in that codebase :)
by Terr_ | 2025-11-18 23:59:16+00:00
I feel there is something unsound with that comparison, because you could also apply it to kings of history, simply by listing things that technologically unavailable or unaffordable.

Imagine transmigrating King Louis XVI (pre-revolution) into some working class professional with a refrigerator, a car, cable TV, etc. I don't think it's a given that he'd consider the package an upgrade.
by tails4e | 2025-11-18 23:59:22+00:00
I just had chatgpt explain that problem to me (I was unfamiliar with the mathematical background). It showed how to solve closed form answers for H(2) and H(3) and then numerical solutions using RK4 for higher values. Truly impressive, and it explained the derivations beautifully. There are few maths experts I've encountered who could have hand-held me through it as good.
by kayodelycaon | 2025-11-18 23:59:28+00:00
I saw the management my parents and grandparents had to deal with. I saw the hours they worked. I saw how little they were appreciated. I saw how companies screwed over people who had worked for decades.

They haven’t changed one bit.

They’re lying about how much they’re paying people. That’s a maximum you can earn working 70 hours per week, not the base.

I am completely unsurprised they can’t find anybody to work for them.
by hedora | 2025-11-18 23:59:54+00:00
I wonder if it’s possible to demand vendors send billing agreements before running an audit like this:

We’re reasonably sure your report is incorrect, and it doesn’t contain compelling evidence to back up its claims.

Our standard auditing fee for requests like this is $10,000, pre-paid to an escrow account and refundable if we find the use of an unlicensed font.

Or something. Not a lawyer.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-11-18 23:59:55+00:00
Well said. I definitely agree (you’re absolutely right!) that the product will get worse through that re-architecting for enterprise transition.

But the small product also would not be able to handle any real amount of growth as it was, because it was a mess of tech debt and security issues and manual one-off processes and fragile spaghetti code that only Jeff knows because he wrote it in a weekend, and now he’s gone.

So by definition, if a service is large enough to serve a zillion people, it is probably big and bloated and complex.

I’m not disagreeing with you, I liked your comment and I’m just rambling. I have worked with several startups and was surprised at how poorly their tech scaled (and how riddled with security issues they were) as we got into it.

Nothing will shine a flashlight on all the stress cracks of a system like large-scale growth on the web.
by mewpmewp2 | 2025-11-18 23:59:56+00:00
It would have been caught only in stage if there was similar amount of data in the database. If stage has 2x less data it would have never occurred there. Not super clear how easy it would have been to keep stage database exactly as production database in terms of quantity and similarity of data etc.

I think it's quite rare for any company to have exact similar scale and size of storage in stage as in prod.
by moralestapia | 2025-11-19 00:00:04+00:00
No publicity is bad publicity.

Best post mortem I've read in a while, this thing will be studied for years.

A bit ironic that their internal FL2 tool is supposed to make Cloudflare "faster and more secure" but brought a lot of things down. And yeah, as other have already pointed out, that's a very unsafe use of Rust, should've never made it to production.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-11-19 00:00:17+00:00
That's why I likened it Crowdstrike. It's a signature database that blew up the consumer of said database. (You probably caught my post mid-edit, too. You may be replying to the snarky paragraph I felt better of and removed.)

Edit: Similar to Crowdstrike, the bot detector should have fallen-back to its last-known-good signature database after panicking, instead of just continuing to panic.
by Fabricio20 | 2025-11-19 00:01:01+00:00
I would honestly not want to ever get targeted for a ddos attack on my home network ip. It's 5 bucks to buy a stresser online. Maybe you can even find one for free. People used to do that for fun when skype was around since you could resolve people's IP addresses due to a bug in skype. The worst possible outcome is they disconnect your network or block your port forwarding privileges outside of your own network being down for your family. I wouldn't wish ISP support on anyone, much less ISP support that would rather just terminate you than help you protect your homelab server.
by travisgriggs | 2025-11-19 00:01:10+00:00
I went searching for a term to describe what I so often experience with junior programmers and non-tech manager types. It was cathartic to find that there's an actual term for it.

My hypothesis today is that good engineering has a strong dependency on either being able to be really disciplined about NFCC or having a low value for it. Thoughts?
by leptons | 2025-11-19 00:01:20+00:00
>The short period of boom in 50s/60s US and Canada was driven by WW2 devastation everywhere else.

The US just renamed "Department of Defense" to "Department of War" and they seem willing to go to any extreme to "Make America Great Again". Threatening to take over Canada, Greenland, and Panama already in the first few months of the current administration. Using US military on US soil. There's no line they won't cross. WW3 isn't off the table at all, unfortunately.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-11-19 00:02:19+00:00
Cuba has had zero immigration for a long time but has an interesting culture. Vietnam has basically zero immigration. Indonesia. Philippines. India. Honduras. Guatemala. Brazil. Jamaica. Mexico.

It's both insulting and untrue in a way that feels degrading to these nations' rich thriving cultures. That somehow only western, immigration heavy cultures are valid or are cultures of any worth.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-11-19 00:02:23+00:00
The word "developer" is doing a lot of work there spec-wise.

The extent to which electron apps run well depends on how many you're running and how much ram you had to spare.

When I complain about electron it has nothing to do with ideology, it's because I do run out of memory, and then I look at my process lists and see these apps using 10x as much as native equivalents.

And the worst part of wasting memory is that it hasn't changed much in price for quite a while. Current model memory has regularly been available for less than $4/GB since 2012, and as of a couple months ago you could get it for $2.50/GB. So even a 50% boost in use wipes out the savings since then. And sure the newer RAM is a lot faster, but that doesn't help me run multiple programs at the same time.
by sshine | 2025-11-19 00:02:57+00:00
An anecdote that repeats.

Most software doesn’t need to be distributed. But it’s the growth paradigm where we build everything on principles that can scale to world-wide low-latency accessibility.

A UNIX pipe gets replaced with a $1200/mo. maximum IOPS RDS channel, bandwidth not included in price. Vendor lock-in guaranteed.
by Nevermark | 2025-11-19 00:04:18+00:00
> It's well known that among the group that I would call "pro-America technologists" that he's highly appreciated and many want to figure out how to replicate him.

> As a spaceflight fan who was a fan of Musk all the way back in ~2012, I'm still a fan of him today

Elon is a rare human being.

He is pretty much what his haters think of him (a political/social troll/child).

And he is also what his worshipers think (a generationally incredible technical and business visionary).

Most people, whether ordinary or extraordinary themselves, have trouble with dissonance. Elon is dissonance. They see a joke or a god.

A small segment sees both sides clearly. I find it a painful experience. Overlapping extremes of inspiration and damage. But reality isn't all bubblegum and glitter go pops.
by randerson | 2025-11-19 00:04:55+00:00
#3 Plenty of drivers have difficulty spotting a gray/silver/black car under low or high-contrast lighting. Highly visible colors (yellow, orange, white) have a 7-12% lower chance of getting into an accident during the day and up to 47% lower at dusk.[0] Keeping your headlights on at all times reduces this risk.

#7 In many states (e.g. [1]) if two lanes are merging you're expected to merge at the last possible point. This allows more cars to fit on the road to reduce congestion, and it reduces sudden stops.

[0] https://www.monash.edu/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/216475/An...

[1] https://wsdot.wa.gov/travel/traffic-safety-methods/work-zone...
by xp84 | 2025-11-19 00:04:58+00:00
The OP here, in their defense, wasn't talking about just operating an internet radio to replace public broadcasting and telling listeners to just get a data planpay for Internet and go online to listen. They were suggesting TCP/IP backhaul to get the signals to the remote radio stations, and rebroadcasting on the radio.

Presumably this would be feasible for most populated areas, but broadband availability is so crap outside of urban/suburban, I bet half of those really remote stations are already getting their Internet over Starlink or Hughesnet.

Now, I think there are plenty of reasons that the satellites (which are already in the sky, presumably) are probably more robust in the face of emergencies than the entire Internet infrastructure.

If I may steelman a good counterargument: "The Internet itself is supposed to be resilient to nuclear war!"

True, but that doesn't mean outages of critical pinch points like AWS, Azure and Cloudflare don't constantly affect even services like GitHub that have huge budgets. A fully robust Internet solution with a ton of high-uptime redundancy in many POPs nationwide would likely cost more than maintaining the satellite systems.
by lynndotpy | 2025-11-19 00:06:01+00:00
Every time Blender has a new update, I scroll and I'm amazed by how much is in it. Then I realize my scrollbar is only halfway through.

Radial tiling my beloved, and a seemingly far more straightforward array modifier <3 Faster volume scattering for non-homogenous volumes.

For those wondering "where the AI is", the new Convolve Node might be it :) Convolutions are a pretty generic signal processing operation (Hadamard product) which are also used in neural networks which work with images. Realistically though, this will be mostly useful for wonky hand-crafted blurs.

The new sequencer looks fantastic, too. I always went to DaVinci Resolve but I might be able to go full blender. Compositor modifiers in the sequencer is also very welcome.

This is incredible for me.
by Jenk | 2025-11-19 00:06:44+00:00
I've worked at many big banks and corporations. They are all held together with the proverbial sticky tape, bubblegum, and hope.

They do have multiple layers of redundancies, and thus have the big budgets, but they won't be kept hot, or there will be some critical flaws that all of the engineers know about but they haven't been given permission/funding to fix, and are so badly managed by the firm, they dgaf either and secretly want the thing to burn.

There will be sustained periods of downtime if their primary system blips.

They will all still be dependent on some hyper-critical system that nobody really knows how it works, the last change was introduced in 1988 and it (probably) requires a terminal emulator to operate.
by rocqua | 2025-11-19 00:06:59+00:00
Those numbers are too good to expect. If 90% right 10% wrong is the baseline would you take as an improvement:

- 80% right 18% I don't know 2% wrong - 50%/48%/2% - 10%/90%/0% - 80%/15%/5%

The general point being that to reduce wrong answers you will need to accept some reduction in right answers if you want the change to only be made through trade-offs. Otherwise you just say "I'd like a better system" and that is rather obvious.

Personally I'd take like 70/27/3. Presuming the 70% of right answers aren't all the trivial questions.
by tzs | 2025-11-19 00:07:03+00:00
The hard part is housing and transportation. If you've managed to pay off your house before retiring and it and its major appliances are in good shape, and if you are someplace where you need a car you have that off too, and you can find a place where property taxes aren't too bad living on $30k/year is actually quite reasonable if you don't have expensive hobbies.

(I'm going to assume that we actually withdraw slightly more than 3% to cover taxes, so that we are getting $30k/year after taxes).

I'm in the Puget Sound area of Washington with a paid off house and until a few months ago a paid off car. My new car is financed for a few months while I wait for some CDs to mature which I will use to pay it off. In the following I'm going to treat it as paid off.

The expenses that arise every month (e.g. food/groceries, some insurance premiums, utilities, prescriptions and OTC health stuff) plus the expenses that are yearly or half-yearly (e.g. some insurance premiums, property taxes) converted to monthly comes to a little under $2000/month.

A new Mac every 5 years, an iPad every 5 years, an iPhone every 4, an Apple Watch every 4, and a new car every 10 works out to be equivalent to around $350/month.

That leaves $1800/year out of our $30k/year, which can cover the occasional need to repair or replace a major appliance.

I do have fairly low property taxes thanks to a pretty good senior discount that Washington provides, but Washington is also a high property tax state. If we pick a low property tax state there are a few were someone without a discount would be paying about $800/month more than I'm paying for a comparable house. In one of those states that would leave us $1000/year for the occasional appliance repair or replacement.

You may need to make sure your house is suitable for this. Mine has a well and septic system which can be expensive to fix if they break. That could require drawing down the principle. We'd probably want to pick a house on municipal water and sewage. Also pick one in a milder climate so that we aren't relying on some expensive high capacity heating and/or cooling system. That should keep heating/cooling repairs down.

We also should take another look at that 3% a year withdrawal. We don't need to never run out. We just need to not run out before we die.

We can bump our monthly withdraw up to $3000 and keep that up for around 60 years. With that we've got $7k/year for our maintenance/repairs/replacements.

Another thing we should probably look at is whether we've already done enough work or whatever else is required to qualify for our country's old age benefits someday. If we will be able to start collecting those when we are 65 for example, and we are getting our $1 million at 30, we can withdraw more now than if we have to have the $1 million get us all the way to death.
by darth_avocado | 2025-11-19 00:08:10+00:00
Another thing I’ve heard is that Ford is terrible at designing maintainable cars and mechanics lose money working on them because Ford doesn’t accurately represent the time it takes to fix something. It was akin to replacing the gasket requires them to pick the engine apart and rebuild it, while Ford only pays them for an hour of labor. I can’t find the exact video at the moment but the reality is that even if Ford paid $120k, you’d probably be working 80 hours a week.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-11-19 00:09:44+00:00
right I thought of that at first and discarded it for that reason. Which the problem really is that the normal story of how Schadenfreude works as a bit of German language how to is that the component that it is other people's damage that is sparking joy is missing from the word itself, that interpretation must be known by the word user, if you were just creating the word and nobody had heard it before in the world it would be pretty reasonable for people to think you had just created a new word for masochism.
by ojosilva | 2025-11-19 00:10:04+00:00
This is the multi-million dollar .unwrap() story. In a critical path of infrastructure serving a significant chunk of the internet, calling .unwrap() on a Result means you're saying "this can never fail, and if it does, crash the thread immediately."The Rust compiler forced them to acknowledge this could fail (that's what Result is for), but they explicitly chose to panic instead of handle it gracefully. This is textbook "parse, don't validate" anti-pattern.

I know, this is "Monday morning quarterbacking", but that's what you get for an outage this big that had me tied up for half a day.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-11-19 00:10:11+00:00
Honestly, the thing that bothers me the most about the article is that I learned there are people who not only go around telling people they didn't return their cart, but that they film the people as they do so. That type of online vigilante/public shaming is bad, IMHO. And then the public voyerism of everyone watching it and maybe commenting on it. Such strange human behavior. I can see why many people would respond with "who the fuck are you to be filming me".