MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by musicale | 2025-11-15 18:21:18+00:00
> how to create a reliable stream of data on top of an unreliable datagram layer, then the solution that comes out will look virtually identical to TCP. It just is the right solution for the job

A stream of bytes made sense in the 1970s for remote terminal emulation. It still sort of makes sense for email, where a partial message is useful (though downloading headers in bulk followed by full message on demand probably makes more sense.)

But in 2025 much of communication involves messages that aren't useful if you only get part of them. It's also a pain to have to serialize messages into a byte stream and then deserialize the byte stream into messages (see: gRPC etc.) and the byte stream ordering is costly, doesn't work well with multipathing, and doesn't provide much benefit if you are only delivering complete messages.

TCP without congestion control isn't particularly useful. As you note traditional TCP congestion control doesn't respond well to reordering. Also TCP's congestion control traditionally doesn't distinguish between intentional packet drops (e.g. due to buffer overflow) and packet loss (e.g. due to corruption.) This means, for example that it can't be used directly over networks with wireless links (which is why wi-fi has its own link layer retransmission).

TCP's traditional congestion control is designed to fill buffers up until packets are dropped, leading to undesirable buffer bloat issues.

TCP's traditional congestion control algorithms (additive increase/multiplicative decrease on drop) also have the poor property that your data rate tends to drop as RTT increases.

TCP wasn't designed for hardware offload, which can lead to software bottlenecks and/or increased complexity when you do try to offload it to hardware.

TCP's three-way handshake is costly for one-shot RPCs, and slow start means that short flows may never make it out of slow start, neutralizing benefits from high-speed networks.

TCP is also poor for mobility. A connection breaks when your IP address changes, and there is no easy way to migrate it. Most TCP APIs expose IP addresses at the application layer, which causes additional brittleness.

Additionally, TCP is poorly suited for optical/WDM networks, which support dedicated bandwidth (signal/channel bandwidth as well as data rate), and are becoming more important in datacenters and as interconnects for GPU clusters.

etc.
Ask HN: Anyone tried using AI SREs? What's missing?
by dlee6018 | 2025-11-15 18:21:42+00:00
I’m exploring an idea in the AI + SRE space and trying to understand how people actually use these tools in production. For context, I work in big tech (Infra / Distributed Systems), where we have a reasonably well-organized system and dedicated SREs — but a lot of the bugs and tickets we see are still pretty repetitive and noisy.

I would want something like:

- monitors logs and metrics 24/7

- detects anomalies or issues and starts an autonomous investigation

- has access to your repo, recent commits, code, and other tools needed to trace down a root cause

There seem to be products like Resolve AI and Datadog’s Bits AI SRE in this direction. I’m curious if anyone here has tried these or similar tools, and what your experience was — good, bad, or overhyped.

For people running production-grade systems (especially small–medium companies): What tasks would you actually want an AI SRE to handle, and what would you trust it with?

Not trying to pitch anything, I'm just curious about pain points from people who’ve been on-call outside of big tech.
by ComputerGuru | 2025-11-15 18:22:21+00:00
Not exactly alt-tab but it’s a ui-less immediate switcher (snappy af, zero latency) to switch between windows of the same app with alt-backtick (next to escape), originally a macOS feature: https://neosmart.net/EasySwitch/

(Backwards navigation with alt-shift-backtick)
by Bender | 2025-11-15 18:22:27+00:00
Use the dirty-net next time the non-meta ASN for doing pentesting. Every company should route non-essential traffic out alternate circuits to keep their employee IP addresses and behavior out of logs that point back to their employer. This does not preclude scrubbing the traffic with ones DLP, MitM proxies, etc... Its just another route. Keep YT and porn off the corporate circuits. Maybe even go so far as to have multiple SNAT pools for different categories of non-work related content. Make the dirty-net the default routes and only route meta-destine networks over the corporate specific networks.

I set up something like this ages ago in a company that was acquired by a company run by a literal mobster. I had a 1U server with two interfaces that routed my coworkers out a path that bypassed the mob monitored devices. To the uppers it just appeared my coworkers were really dedicated and not wasting time on Youtube, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc...
by belter | 2025-11-15 18:24:24+00:00
> There's an abundance of benchmarks showing Aurora is better in terms of performance but they leave out so much about their RDS config that I'm having a hard time believing them.

Do you have a problem believing these claims on equivalent hardware?: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~yxy/cs764-f20/papers/aurora-sigmo...

Or do your own performance assessments, following the published document and templates available so you can find the facts on your own?

For Aurora MySql:

"Amazon Aurora Performance Assessment Technical Guide" - https://d1.awsstatic.com/product-marketing/Aurora/RDS_Aurora...

For Aurora Postgres:

"...Steps to benchmark the performance of the PostgreSQL-compatible edition of Amazon Aurora using the pgbench and sysbench benchmarking tools..." - https://d1.awsstatic.com/product-marketing/Aurora/RDS_Aurora...

"Automate benchmark tests for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL" - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/automate-benchmark-tes...

"Benchmarking Amazon Aurora Limitless with pgbench" - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/benchmarking-amazon-au...
by Epa095 | 2025-11-15 18:24:26+00:00
Money is not like mana in a game, it does not create things by itself. It is more similar to votes, each dollar is a vote into the economy for what should be created, and where the goods and services should go. And the more money you have the more votes you have.

So yes, he payes for the apple, and that's good. But the apple existed, and would be sold to someone else if he had not bought it. The accumulation of wealth does centralise power over the economy, what gets produced, and how it gets consumed.
by Krssst | 2025-11-15 18:24:51+00:00
Thank you, I was not aware of either of those.

SimpleWindowSwitcher looks like a good alternative, unfortunately on my side I think I would prefer switching between all windows of all apps rather than have two different shortcuts for "switch between windows of the current app" and "switch between apps" (but that's just a personal preference).

ExplorerPatcher looks cool too, though patching explorer is probably a no-no in corporate setups.

I also saw https://github.com/kvakulo/Switcheroo which I was curious to try (although it's not an exact replacement either) but never got to it (also seems quite old).
by thePhytochemist | 2025-11-15 18:25:18+00:00
I see a lot of musing and wondering here about the cause of poverty.

One thing that's missing that I have seen a fair bit is crime and scams. People who are victims of crime can get dumped into the poverty trap through no fault of their own. For a while I was living in my car because my signature was forged by and an employer decided to simply opt out of payment. I took the employer to arbitration and won but that took 2.5 years - that's obviously a structural problem when eviction happens in 30 days.
by trollbridge | 2025-11-15 18:25:27+00:00
I think he was spot on. There is a huge difference between his -1, 0, and 1. Likewise, the 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 are vastly differently even though they all have to work.

(Oddly enough the -1 and 0 don’t work, because they can’t, so the -1 and 0 have something in common with the 6 and above.)
by rramadass | 2025-11-15 18:25:35+00:00
> but you agree that it is correct.

No, i did not; do not twist nor misrepresent my words. Your example had nothing whatsoever to do with "Reasoning" and hence i called it dumb.

> you sure have a lot of not-understanding going on.

Your and my comments are there for all to see. Your comments are evidence that you are absolutely clueless on Reasoning, Logic Programming Approaches and Prolog.

> 1. Someone said "Prolog is good at reasoning problems"

Which is True. But it is up to you to present the world-view to Prolog in the appropriate Formal manner.

> 2. I said it isn't any better than other languages.

Which is stupid. This single statement establishes the fact that you know nothing about Logic Programming nor the aspect of Predicate Logic it is based on.

> 3. Prolog people jumped on me because Ackchually Technickally everything Prolog does is 'reasoning' hah gotcha!

Which is True and not a "gotcha". You have no definite understanding of what the word "Reasoning" means in the context of Prolog. We have explained concepts and pointed you to papers none of which you are interested in studying nor understanding.

> 4. I say that is entirely unrelated to the 'reasoning' in "Prolog is good at reasoning problems". I demonstrate this by reductio ad absurdum - if executing "?- 1=1." is "reasoning" then it's absurd for the person to be saying that definition is a compelling reason to use Prolog, therefore they were not saying that, therefore this whole tangent about whether some formalism is or isn't reasoning by some academic definition is irrelevant to the claim and counter claim.

What does this even mean? This is just nonsense verbiage.

> Presumably you are arguing for some superior purpose?

Yes. I am testing my understanding of Predicate Logic/Logic Programming/Prolog against others. Also whether others have come up with better ways of application in this era of LLMs i.e. what are the different ways to use Prolog with LLMs today?.

I initially thought you were probably wanting a philosophical discussion of what "Reasoning" means and hence pointed to some relevant articles/papers but i am now convinced you have no clue about this entire subject and are really making up stuff as you go.

You are wasting everybody's time, testing their patience and coming across as totally ignorant on this domain.
by varenc | 2025-11-15 18:26:19+00:00
That's a good example. In that case though I'd say that every month the voip line is providing a service. Something like a Netflix subscription that you haven't logged into for 6 months is more unequivocally providing no value.

Mandatory monthly notifications about charges seem better though and wouldn't lead to weird perverse incentives. (Like Netflix spamming your email with auto-login links so if you click one they can claim you did use their service)
by getnormality | 2025-11-15 18:26:50+00:00
I guess I don't know enough about enough other languages to make broad generalizations. Oh well, it's too late to edit now.

My impression is that JavaScript is another language like R that values flexibility a lot.

And yeah, I agree that R is rather casual about lists vs maps. It doesn't really care that maps are a great data structure in their own right. It just wants to slap names on list elements when it's convenient to access elements of the list by name.
by quantummagic | 2025-11-15 18:28:26+00:00
How sure are you about those statistics? When police stop responding to calls, when nobody expects stolen property to ever be recovered, when people are afraid they'll be deported if they call the police... crime stops being reported.

Statistics are not worthless, but they can be worse than worthless if you are careless, or in the hands of the unscrupulous.
by api | 2025-11-15 18:29:03+00:00
Photons have mass in the sense that energy and mass are equivalent. What I meant is that a ship with a photon rocket is expending mass, given that the power requirements demand some kind of mass energy conversion to get enough photons. Viable photon rockets able to move anything of any size would require petawatts of power.

If you do the rocket equation math it kind of behaves like you are throwing mass at c even though you are not. You are converting mass to energetic photons and throwing them at c.

There’s a rough breakdown I saw once on a forum about future space flight tech:

Launch is dominated by thrust. Your T/W ratio must be >1. Travel within the solar system is dominated by specific impulse. Small thrust for a long time can get you going real fast, but you can only carry so much propellant. Interstellar flight or beyond is dominated by raw energy. To get to the stars in any “reasonable” time requires you to be doing a fair amount of E=mc^2-ing.
by Krssst | 2025-11-15 18:29:09+00:00
Thank you.

Actually the registry entry on 24H2 behaves somewhat similarly: alt-tab still switches windows (of all apps) but the UI is just gone (which is a problem for me because knowing how much time I need to press tab in advance leads to faster switching than "press tab, see if the focused window is what I wanted, and press tab again if it's not" which involves a computer-brain round trip every key press).
by fragmede | 2025-11-15 18:29:38+00:00
> It is not a metric that is attempting to define their worth as a person.

You may not read it that way, but when you've never encountered the question before, the first time you see it being asked in the first place, it's comes across, not as an innocent question on a form that's just a reasonable part of a big process, but as a confrontation of a foreign culture that you've read and heard a lot about your whole life, only to be confronted by in that moment: What are you worth as a person?

That's not a common question to get asked. Okay, fine, the questionnaire is only asking as a business process thing, but the estimate is at about $10 million when broken down for parts, but at the point where someone's asking that question in the first place, you have to ask why are they asking?

Which you also point out,

> for what purpose would you use that metric?

The difference between worth and net worth is only one word, but like "guys" and "you guys", that one word makes a world of difference.

How would you define someone's worth as a person? It's because we don't talk about that at all, that even the question of net worth in the first place comes across as having a slight whiff of eugenics, because we have no other standardized measurements. Net worth is the only evaluation of how much any given individual a human is worth that has a magazine for it and list of all the high scores.
by gishh | 2025-11-15 18:29:40+00:00
Net worth is purely about assets minus liability. “How many dollars are attached to your tax identity and how many dollars of stuff can be taxed”

It has zero to do with the value of the the life of a person. You can conflate the two if you’d like, you’re picking on shortcut verbiage so we don’t say a paragraph of disclaimer text before talking about net worth.
by colechristensen | 2025-11-15 18:30:03+00:00
It's not money. It's attachment to expectations.

No amount of poverty or wealth will reduce your road rage. How you react to people not following the rules of the road as you expect them is on you.

If a toddler spills juice on your dress on your wedding day, rich or poor you're just going to have a stained dress and whether you scream or laugh about it really doesn't have anything to do with money.

Money is an adaptation but certainly not the only one to unexpected difficulty. It is easy to fantasize that everything would be better just if you had x, but that's a scapegoat that lets you be the way that you are because you're powerless to do something about it... it's wrong. How you react to the world is in your power and it's free. And very often it's exactly the reverse, poverty isn't giving you a bad attitude, having a bad attitude is making and keeping you poor.
by VBprogrammer | 2025-11-15 18:30:40+00:00
Honestly, I wasn't to say this is ridiculous but I've got a i7 13" laptop which I bought to do practically everything (personal coding projects, a bit of gaming, video editing, 3d modeling etc). I do find the heat of it is quite uncomfortable after a short period of time on my lap. I was thinking about getting a M series MacBook for messing around on the couch and building a desktop for many of those other tasks.

My work MacBook Pro on the other hand could do with the opposite some times. Burn a bit of battery to heat up the aluminium case please!
by lesuorac | 2025-11-15 18:30:44+00:00
Yeah, there's an economist comment on "We can afford everything that we produced".

Like when the Apple is produced it's not because a dollar bill was sowen into the ground. The actual inputs of production are not money but money is the lubricant that allows the goods and services to flow around in the economy. We always run into the situation where goods and services are produced and not demanded and that causes them to no longer be produced but the lack of money didn't cause their existence no more than money produced them in the first place.

Without it, societies had to have informal debts where you knew you helped your neighbor harvest crops so they would later do something for you (or perhaps you helped them harvest their crops because they provided shelter). That whole barter shit is made up.
by macleginn | 2025-11-15 18:30:44+00:00
There seems to be evidence for the OP's thesis.

E.g., "Unfortunately, one’s economic status, especially if they are impoverished, can increase their likelihood of experiencing a substance use disorder, as this is one of the most common risk factors for this condition." (https://adcare.com/addiction-demographics/socioeconomic-grou...)
by dougb5 | 2025-11-15 18:30:59+00:00
It reminds me of how Sam Altman recently said: "I'd rather hear from candidates about how they are going to make everyone have the stuff billionaires have instead of how they are going to eliminate billionaires." But the hyper-wealthy don't just have _stuff_, they also have power to make decisions affecting society -- to buy elections, to buy social networks, to influence which countries we do AI chip deals with, to start new cities, and so forth. A world in which everyone has the same amount of this decision-making power is probably not a world in which billionaires exist.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-11-15 18:31:01+00:00
> Independent developers could totally write performant drivers if they had the documents,

Surely they could, but at that complexity level, they wouldn't put the necessary amount of effort in it without being payed, and at that point, it's better to hire them.

> but those manuals do not exist - or if they do, they're proprietary.

And there are market-related reasons for that, it's not done because of some arbitrary paranoia. Another important issue is that good documents are hard to write - with regard to driver coding, it's much easier to make a quick call or message the hardware people about some unclear aspect of chip's operation rather than go through the formal process of modifying the official documents. Waiting for external developers to reverse engineer that is slow and leads to serious competitive disadvantages and AMD is an example of it.
by Epa095 | 2025-11-15 18:31:07+00:00
No. I can be envious of people who are independently wealthy, and control their own time.

But that is not the same feeling I have for Bezos, Musk, and other billionaires. That feeling is fear. Fear for the power they have, both politically and over the economy. Fear that the rise of the oligarchie and the extreme wealth differences will be the death of democracy.
by musicale | 2025-11-15 18:31:08+00:00
The telephone people were basically right with their criticisms of TCP/IP such as:

What about QoS? Jitter, bandwidth, latency, fairness guarantees? What about queuing delay? What about multiplexing and tunneling? Traffic shaping and engineering? What about long-haul performance? Easy integration with optical circuit networks? etc. ATM addressed these issues, but TCP/IP did not.

All of these things showed up again once you tried to do VOIP and video conferencing, and in core ISPs as well as access networks, and they weren't (and in many cases still aren't) easy to solve.
by hollerith | 2025-11-15 18:31:36+00:00
You are not making much of a case.

For one thing, I severely doubt wild game would have been plentiful enough to meet more than a very small fraction of the nutritional needs of a Roman army. There is not enough wild game in the US for example to feed more than a quite small fraction of the survivors of a nuclear war according to a calculation I saw -- and the survivors in that scenario have the luxury of remaining spread out over the countryside and of ranging around without incurring the risk of running into a superior number of enemy soldiers.
by lazide | 2025-11-15 18:32:26+00:00
Eh, that is overly reductive.

There would not be so many orchards or apple farmers growing apples if they could not exchange those apples for goods and services they wanted effectively.

At the level of a large scale apple orchard, money is the only thing that works effectively for that.

If people only grew enough apples that they wanted to eat, most people would be unable to get apples, and most apple lovers would be spending a lot of time they could be doing something else trying to grow apples. Overall edible apples would be dramatically lower, even non-existent at some places/times.

For example, imagine the shitshow if people had to refine their own gas, or barter/trade for it directly. Zero chance 99% of society would be able to do that.

Same with miners and raw materials, machine manufacturers and machines, solar panel manufacturers and solar panels, etc. etc.

Money itself isn’t a good/service, but it makes the act of making/exchanging/selling/etc. easy and possible at scale. Which is valuable on its own. And since it provides a generic ‘value’ proxy for all goods/services within the economy, if anything it is the most consistently valuable thing in a functioning economy - it’s a wildcard for value.

This does have a limit of course - too much money in too short/concentrated an area causes all sorts of crazy things to happen, as the induced effort/incentive to produce something outstrips the realistic ability to do so, causing escalating ‘money fights’ for the same goods, as the value of the goods starts to dwarf the perceived value of the money itself. (Inflation)

Just like too little money in too concentrated an area/time causes crazy things to happen because the perceived value of the money itself starts to outweigh the actual value of the transacted goods, and transactions can start to grind to a halt in an effort to conserve the increasingly valuable money itself. (Deflation)
by com2kid | 2025-11-15 18:33:01+00:00
I remember working at MS a decade ago and how good out translation pipeline was. Tons of attention paid to cultural nuances even between different English dialects. We'd have separate translations for UK, US, AUS, and international English. We'd change not just words but the overall tone of messages based on the culture in different countries.

So much care, and the expertise and professionalism of the people doing the worn was amazing.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-11-15 18:33:11+00:00
Liquidity matters. Net worth is a notional value in most cases. Without an extremely liquid market it will not be realizable. There can be very large gaps between notional value and realizable value.

A non-liquid asset may effectively be unusable as a security for credit, which is the point being raised. You can have a large net worth on paper and literally no way to leverage those assets into cash should the need arise. In financial economics this is commonly called a "liquidity crunch"[0].

I recently read somewhere that in the US something like two-thirds of assets are non-liquid. Startup founders should understand this pretty intuitively.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidity_crisis