MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by voidmain | 2025-11-18 14:33:40+00:00
If you are building an application, you can and should know what your absolute time/power/cost budget is and evaluate the "speed" of operations against this absolute standard. It does not matter that some operation is 100x slower than it could be if it is still 10,000x faster than you need it to be.

But a lot of software engineering goes into building tools, libraries, frameworks, and systems, and even "application" code may be put to uses very distant from the originally envisioned one. And in these contexts, performance relative to the "speed of light" - the highest possible performance for a single operation - can be a very useful concept. Something "slow" that is 100x off the speed of light may be more than fast enough in some circumstances but a huge problem in others. Something "very fast" that is 1.01x the speed of light is very unlikely to be a big problem in any application. And this is true whether the speed of light for the operation in question is 1ns or 1min.
by duggan | 2025-11-18 14:33:42+00:00
Also, for anyone who only has an old global API key lying around instead of the more recent tokens, you can set:

-H "X-Auth-Email: $EMAIL_ADDRESS" -H "X-Auth-Key: $API_KEY"

instead of the Bearer token header.

Edit: and in case you're like me and thought it would be clever to block all non-Cloudflare traffic hitting your origin... remember to disable that.
by Taek | 2025-11-18 14:34:15+00:00
One benchmark I would really like to see: instruction adherence.

For example, the frontier models of early-to-mid 2024 could reliably follow what seemed to be 20-30 instructions. As you gave more instructions than that in your prompt, the LLMs started missing some and your outputs became inconsistent and difficult to control.

The latest set of models (2.5 Pro, GPT-5, etc) seem to top out somewhere in the 100 range? They are clearly much better at following a laundry list of instructions, but they also clearly have a limit and once your prompt is too large and too specific you lose coherence again.

If I had to guess, Gemini 3 Pro has once again pushed the bar, and maybe we're up near 250 (haven't used it, I'm just blindly projecting / hoping). And that's a huge deal! I actually think it would be more helpful to have a model that could consistently follow 1000 custom instructions than it would be to have a model that had 20 more IQ points.

I have to imagine you could make some fairly objective benchmarks around this idea, and it would be very helpful from an engineering perspective to see how each model stacked up against the others in this regard.
by blandflakes | 2025-11-18 14:34:23+00:00
I have a similar experience, though it's not necessarily related to shortcomings in the STM implementation (which I always felt was quite competent in the space). To expand, I think a few things are true:

1. I've come to feel that actually managing concurrency is a "below the fold" competency for most engineers. I'm not saying it should be, and people need to understand what a data race is. 2. As you pointed out, most state in services that I work on is not in need of coordinated updates, so atoms are where you want to be, or single-writer queues. 100% agreed 3. Structured concurrency approaches, fibers, and other abstracted runtimes seem to be the best way to get concurrent and parallel work, given points 1 and 2 about how coordinated state really isn't that common for most work on my team

A lot of times when we're updating state we're more having to think about it in the database, employing either a last-write-wins strategy or when coordination is in need, some form of pessimistic or optimistic locking.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-11-18 14:34:24+00:00
This idea isn't just smart, it's revolutionary. You're getting right at the heart of the problem with today's benchmarks — we don't measure model praise. Great thinking here.

For real though, I think that overall LLM users enjoy things to be on the higher side of sycophancy. Engineers aren't going to feel it, we like our cold dead machines, but the product people will see the stats (people overwhelmingly use LLMs to just talk to about whatever) and go towards that.
by silon42 | 2025-11-18 14:34:26+00:00
Not necessarily... I had H4 or H1/H7 before, which were dimmer, but the edge cutoff was much smoother...

With current car that has Xenon headlights (+ LED for day), they have a much sharper cutoff at the edge, making it harder to see pedestrians and other stuff near the road.

Probably the LED/laser headlights are even worse in this aspect.
by mihaaly | 2025-11-18 14:34:30+00:00
Wild west of light usage makes cycling habits in UK bad as well. Several thousands of lux lights are pointed towards the oncoming cyclsts switched to strobe mode. Rear light are comparably strong and distracting by all the very creative patterns of flashing. People seem to pour out the children of safety with the dirty bath water of flashing lights. Yes, you want to be noticed, yeah, you made it! By dazzling everyone else and divert attention away from any other traffic or dangers. Very stupid practice, making safety worse, not better.
by geerlingguy | 2025-11-18 14:34:49+00:00
I made the mistake of telling people it was hosted on a Pi cluster in a YouTube video a couple years ago, and asked nobody to try DDoSing it. I was a bit more naive thinking the YouTube viewer community was more like HN where people may joke about it, but nobody would actually do it.

I was wrong, and ever since I've dealt with a targeted attack (which was evolving as I added more CF firewall rules). At this point it's taken care of, but only because I have most things completely blocked at the CF firewall layer.
by r721 | 2025-11-18 14:34:57+00:00
Quote from The Guardian's story:

>A spokesperson for Cloudflare said: “We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11.20am. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors. While most traffic for most services continued to flow as normal, there were elevated errors across multiple Cloudflare services.

>“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/18/cloudflar...
by keepamovin | 2025-11-18 14:35:50+00:00
This is one of those situations where UK's "rule by law" model could actually be super positive. Make a law restricting brightness and put police and cameras onto ticketing drivers who needlessly burn their highbeams when lowbeams would suffice.

The old halogen-warm colors were better, too. You don't want "area denial" lighting on your everyday ride.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-11-18 14:35:54+00:00
Weed isn't really psychedelic (it can be profound, and sometimes you'll get extra giggly...) but really it's more about being okay with the numbness.

It's also not really an antidepressant any more than it is an amphetamine (it's neither). Attempting to self-medicate in either direction is not beneficial, longer term.

If your marijuana usage carries you through such wide-ranging symptomology, that's on you homey [holds-back next pass to you]. It's okay to ask for help.
by gadders | 2025-11-18 14:35:56+00:00
>>Out in the country, you still don't really need brighter headlights. Other cars' headlights will always be visible and they have reflectors, so it's not as if you'll struggle to spot other cars. The road lines are actually reflective, so it's not as if you'll struggle to see the road lines. And generally speaking out in the country, there won't be pedestrian foot traffic, so it's not as if you need the bright lights for them.

Have you actually driven in the country?

Out in the country where I live, some roads are single track with no painted lines, cats eyes or street lights. There is occasional foot traffic, sometimes not wearing reflective gear. There are also animals, and 6" deep potholes that I would rather not hit as well.
by bayindirh | 2025-11-18 14:36:00+00:00
The maximum brightness is already regulated in US and Europe. US allows a lower brightness level.

Some car manufacturer (Ford?) recalled their cars to fix their cars' headlight settings to match US regulations in the last 6-8 months IIRC.

Also, light temperature has limits. I believe >4000K lights are already road illegal in UK and EU. They are also recently outlawed in my country, but there are many cars with after market 5000K+ bulbs installed. They also don't conform to the geometry of the bulbs these headlights designed to accommodate. They are painful to look at.

What needs to be done is a) Stricter regulation in retrofitting older headlights with newer bulbs b) Regulating the amount of light hitting the oncoming driver somehow. c) Stricter CRI and light temperature regulations for the LED headlights.

I don't want to be blinded from light coming from behind and front constantly at night, too.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-11-18 14:36:00+00:00
Almost the entire value of symbols separate from strings is at the level of programmer communication rather than PL semantics.

It tells a reader of the code that this term is arbitrary but significant, probably represents an enmeshment with another part of the code, and will not be displayed to any user. When seeing a new term in code that is a lot of the things you're going to need to figure out about it anyway. It's a very valuable & practical signal.

If you need to mutate or concat or interpolate or capitalize or any other string operation it, it probably shouldn't be a symbol anymore, or shouldn't have been to start with.
by monerozcash | 2025-11-18 14:36:04+00:00
I don't think you can find any evidence of a Apple actually deliberately doing things to make batteries drain faster on older models.

That would either require hurting the battery life on all models or require distinguishable behaviours that only occur on specific models and would be relatively simple to prove through reverse engineering.

Apple has been fined for the throttling, but hasn't ever been credibly accused of actually deliberately taking steps to reduce battery life on older devices.
by robot-wrangler | 2025-11-18 14:36:11+00:00
> I understand that currently this is sort of a collective action problem,

There's something really obnoxious and antisocial about this that makes me really mad. Test your lights on yourself, people. If your manufacturer did something stupid here it's unfortunately on you to fix it. Usually the mentality of "got mine, fuck everyone else" is self-destructive but maybe not obviously so because cause/effect are a few steps away from each other. But if you blind everyone else on the road so you can see better then it's kind of endangering you directly and immediately!

This is a huge issue in US western states especially, since they are full of long dark drives. You'll literally be blinded for several seconds if you encounter another car even if you're averting your eyes. Bad but not horrible if it's 1/10 of chance encounters that are antisocial, but it's been getting worse for years and odds are now much closer to 1/2.
by throwaway150 | 2025-11-18 14:36:12+00:00
> For your small blog with one hundred visitors per month, it's probably the same: "no one will burn their DDoS capabilities on you!"

If this is their core argument for not using CDN, then this post sounds like a terribly bad advice. Hopes and prayers do not make a valid security strategy. Appropriate controls and defenses do. The author seems to be completely missing that it takes only a few bucks to buy DDoS as a service. Sometimes people do DDoS your small blog because some random stranger didn't like something you said somewhere online. Speaking from experience. Very much the reason I'm posting this with a throwaway account. If your website receives DDoS, your hosts will take down your server. Nobody wants to be in this situation even if for a personal, small blog.
by adwn | 2025-11-18 14:36:16+00:00
Dude, it's a simplified example, of course you can poke holes into it. Here, let me help you fill in the gaps:

let mut object = prepare_generic_entry(general_settings); let mutable_msg = object.msg.get_mut(); do_specific_message_modification(mutable_msg, special_settings);

The point is, that there are situations where you have exclusive access to a mutex, and in those situations you can safely access the protected data without having to lock the mutex.
by theideaofcoffee | 2025-11-18 14:36:30+00:00
Unless these sites are your personal pages, oftentimes these decisions to use cloudflare or not are made by the business and money and risk people, not by the operations and other technically-minded employees. They see every other site using cloudflare and ask why they aren't as well.

"No one was fired for buying IBM (or cloudflare)."

Fat chance arguing against the people holding the purse strings.
by basch | 2025-11-18 14:36:38+00:00
If anyone needs the internet to work again (or to get into your cf dashboard to generate API keys), if you have Cloudflare WARP installed, turning it on appears to fix otherwise broken sites. Maybe using 1.1.1.1 does too, but flipping the radio box was faster. Some parts of sites are still down, even after tunneling into to CF.
by gbil | 2025-11-18 14:36:41+00:00
A few things I've experienced:

- In many new cars the headlights do indeed appear as very bright. In the Xenon era the headlight height adjustment per occupancy was done automatically but at least in a few new cars I've been in with LED headlights this is not the case and the driver needs to adjust it by hand and I'm pretty sure the vast majority doesn't do that.

- Many new cars offer automated switching of high beam lights and the results vary to say the least.

- Small experience from UK highways gave me the same impression, the middle strip is not a solid one which is a huge issue when the lights from the other side blind you and I'm talking about normal headlights just because of road curvature or height difference of the opposing lanes while there are no overhead road lights.

EDIT:format
by pyr0hu | 2025-11-18 14:36:49+00:00
> Second, there's a decent sized market for cheap, unapproved HID/LED kits for older cars. They're often not aimed correctly.

This, so much this. I'm having no issue with new cars and their LEDs. The aftermarket kits that are installed on 1994 Swifts and Passat B5s are not at all configured properly. They just throw it on the car and "yay i can see more" and sometimes I even think that they are using their high beams. But no, it's just their incorrectly set up lights.
by ptx | 2025-11-18 14:37:17+00:00
That sounds consistent with their classic embrace-extend-extinguish process [1]. Embracing with no significant user-hostile moves is step 1, and then abusing competitors and users comes as step 3 of the process. They need to briefly look less evil in step 1 to maneuver into position for step 3.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
by vivzkestrel | 2025-11-18 14:37:18+00:00
what if you could create a super virtual server of sorts. imagine a new cloud provider like vercel but called something else. what this provider does is when you create a server on their service, they create 3 services, one on aws, one on gcp and one on azure. behind the scenes they are 3 separate servers but to the end user they are a single server. the end user gets to control how many cloud providers are involved. when aws goes down, no worries, it switches to the part with gcp on
by ZeroConcerns | 2025-11-18 14:37:19+00:00
I think the UK should do a HeadExit, where they refuse any bulbs manufactured after 1972 or so (maybe 1974 bulbs are still acceptable, I don't know man, can anyone run a quick A/B test?).

I'm pretty sure that, like "taking control of [their] borders by leaving the EU", this is a course of action that will make everyone happy.
by skydhash | 2025-11-18 14:37:19+00:00
In the unix world, the usual philosphy is tko start with a script (bash, awk, perl,…), then move to C and the like when the usecase is understood enough. So it’s more like a switch from programs and ipc to libraries and function calls.

But there are stuff, you immediately know you want a program, but they’re likely to be related to stuff like pure algorithms, protocols and binary file formats
by eruci | 2025-11-18 14:37:46+00:00
This is ridiculous:

They just posted:

Update We've deployed a change which has restored dashboard services. We are still working to remediate broad application services impact Posted 2 minutes ago. Nov 18, 2025 - 14:34 UTC

but,.. I'm stuck at the captcha that does not work: dash.cloudflare.com Verifying you are human. This may take a few seconds.

dash.cloudflare.com needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding.
by swed420 | 2025-11-18 14:38:15+00:00
> Some of the other commenters here have posited a "vibe code theory". As the amount of vibe code in production increases, so does the number of bugs and, therefore, the number of outages.

Likely this coupled with the mass brain damage caused by never-ending COVID re-infections.

Since vaccines don't prevent transmission, and each re-infection increases the chances of long COVID complications, the only real protection right now is wearing a proper respirator everywhere you go, and basically nobody is doing that anymore.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-18 14:38:40+00:00
> there won't be pedestrian foot traffic

You think kids aren't running across the street at night out in the country? Chasing a soccer ball?

There are all sorts of things you need to be able to see to avoid. People, deer, fallen branches, large roadkill, garbage cans blown into the road by the wind, the list goes on and on. Not to mention spotting dangerous icy patches at night in the winter.

I take it you don't really drive in country? Which is fine, but it's good to be aware of the many potential hazards.
by veselin | 2025-11-18 14:38:43+00:00
I work a lot on testing also SWE bench verified. This benchmark in my opinion now is good to catch if you got some regression on the agent side.

However, going above 75%, it is likely about the same. The remaining instances are likely underspecified despite the effort of the authors that made the benchmark "verified". From what I have seen, these are often cases where the problem statement says implement X for Y, but the agent has to simply guess whether to implement the same for other case Y' - which leads to losing or winning an instance.
by WesolyKubeczek | 2025-11-18 14:38:55+00:00
Same in Poland, I often drive after dark thinking, "those oncoming idiots and their high beams", but then they flash their high beams at someone and I realize that those are not their high beams.

Granted, my Yaris with full LED lights and their atrocious cool white light is a part of the problem, so I'm in no position to complain, but at least my lights are aimed correctly, so there's that.
by shortercode | 2025-11-18 14:39:09+00:00
Assuming that the lines on the road are in good condition or even exist. Uneven roads, potholes, and corners/junctions with no signage can all be a challenge is poor conditions with old style headlights ( our 2 cars have old and new style lights respectively ).

That being said while I don’t struggle much with the glare from oncoming headlights I find that visibility beyond the oncoming vehicle can be severely limited by the bright light. This often causes me to slow down and squint to be careful of any dangers beyond the vehicle.
by nzach | 2025-11-18 14:39:14+00:00
> developers have gone away from Dedicated servers (which are actually cheaper, go figure)

It depends on how you calculate your cost. If you only include the physical infrastructure having a dedicated server is cheaper. But by having some dedicated server you loose a lot of flexibility. Needs more resources? Just scale up your ec2, and with a dedicated server there is a lot more work involved.

Do you want a 'production-ready' database? With AWS you can just click a few buttons and have a RDS ready to use. To roll out your own PG installation you need someone with a lot of knowledge(how to configure replication? backups? updates? ...).

So if you include salaries in the calculation the result changes a lot. And even if you already have some experts in your payroll by putting them to work in deploying a PG instance you won't be able to use them to build other things that may generate more value to you business than the premium you pay to AWS.
by brigandish | 2025-11-18 14:39:24+00:00
The Ruby "community" has long been dogged by politics and culture war stuff. This comment[0] on a flagged submission has lots of links for getting up to speed.

Maybe they're right, there would be an exodus, I just wonder if other languages' communities will want the trouble. The Japanese Rubyists don't care for a second, a nice by-product of Japanese insularity. Ruby would continue in Japan just fine without westerners, don't worry.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45379652
by IAmBroom | 2025-11-18 14:39:31+00:00
I had a kitty that met her reflection on our first day together.

Step 1: Meow at "other" kitty.

Step 2: Walk around mirror to meet other kitty.

Step 3: Stare other kitty in face near edge of mirror, then suddenly bat paw around the edge to tag that elusive sucker.

Step 4: Sit and ponder.

Step 5: Accept that there is no other kitty. Hmmph.

One. Smart. Cat.
by bluGill | 2025-11-18 14:39:37+00:00
OOP is very useful/powerful, don't throw the good parts out. Java messed up by deciding everything must be an object when there are many other useful way to program. (you can also argue that smalltalk had a better object model, but even then all objects isn't a good thing). Functional programing is very powerful and a good solution to some problems. Procedural programing is very powerful and a good solution to some problems. You can do both in Java - but you have to wrap everything in an object anyway despite the object not adding any value.
by chasing0entropy | 2025-11-18 14:40:17+00:00
When I was younger I used to get into these articles talking about a TikTok, Facebook, or myspace(lol) group with 27 members an ambitious author found while intentionally searching for it. There are a zillion "xxxx challenges", to imply there's a pandemic of Benadryl abusing kids roaming Walmart to pocket bottles of pills in search of scary hallucinations is ridiculous. 1. Stronger drugs are easier to get around the back side of most Walmarts. 2. The whack a mole banning drugs "for the children!" is dumb. A handful of Ibprofin and a certain otc laxative taken at the same time will make you hallucinate also. Ban those and kids will just ask reddit for another combo to trip on.
by codegeek | 2025-11-18 14:40:40+00:00
Cloudflare is still down and now its been 5+ hours. Having said that, the thing about "if you don't need to" is not that simple. FOr personal sites/blogs, I can agree but then it really doesnt matter for those. For a real business, the value of cloudflare (As centralized as it gets) is the proxy especially against attacks. The other stuff like CDN/Caching etc are bonus on top.

Unless there is a better option, just asking real businesses (no matter how small) to not use cloudflare is not an option.
by hypeatei | 2025-11-18 14:41:27+00:00
FWIW, I have the same mindset and your comment resonated with me; suicide is a very taboo subject still. The responses to it are either: you need to seek help for mental illness or you're just acting like an edgy teenager.

The term "mental health" is quite terrible because what are we using as a baseline for "healthy" when we throw that term around? No one can answer that. I don't think everyone using that term is being malicious but they don't realize how patronizing it is.