MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jillesvangurp | 2025-11-18 13:43:15+00:00
> What do we actually lose going from cloud back to ground?

A lot of money related to stuff you currently don't have to worry about.

I remember how shit worked before AWS. People don't remember how costly and time consuming this stuff used to be. We had close to 50 people in our local ops team back in the day when I was working with Nokia 13 years ago. They had to deal with data center outages, expensive storage solutions failing, network links between data centers, offices, firewalls, self hosted Jira running out of memory, and a lot of other crap that I don't spend a lot of time about worrying with a cloud based setup. Just a short list of stuff that repeatedly was an issue. Nice when it worked. But nowhere near five nines of uptime.

That ops team alone cost probably a few million per year in salaries alone. I knew some people in that team. Good solid people but it always seemed like a thankless and stressful job to me. Basically constant firefighting while getting people barking at you to just get stuff working. Later a lot of that stuff moved into AWS and things became a lot easier and the need for that team largely went away. The first few teams doing that caused a bit of controversy internally until management realized that those teams were saving money. Then that quickly turned around. And it wasn't like AWS was cheap. I worked in one of those teams. That entire ops team was replaced by 2-3 clued in devops people that were able to move a lot faster. Subsequent layoff rounds in Nokia hit internal IT and ops teams hard early on in the years leading up to the demise of the phone business.
by alterom | 2025-11-18 13:43:53+00:00
Figuring out what the drug is actually effective for, doing the lab trials, getting the FDA approval, etc is all part of R&D in the pharmaceutical industry.

A rather costly part, at that.

There's a heckton of it that needs to be done before doctors can prescribe drug X for condition Y.

Adderall was developed for helping ADHD folks, not for helping everyone else get a boost of "mental efficiency" (and particularly, without adverse consequences).

Not in the least because it doesn't do that.
by afavour | 2025-11-18 13:43:53+00:00
Because no one cares enough, including users.

Oddly this centralization allows a complete deferral of blame without you even doing anything: if you’re down, that’s bad. But if you’re down, Spotify is down, social media is down… then “the internet is broken” and you don’t look so bad.

It also reduces your incentive to change, if “the internet is down” people will put down their device and do something else. Even if your web site is up they’ll assume it isn’t.

I’m not saying this is a good thing but I’m simply being realistic about why we ended up where we are.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-11-18 13:44:54+00:00
>> the high ticket prices incentivise the creation of new venues and the entrant of new artists into the market.

How does scalping, which transfers money from fans, artists, and the music industry to ticket touts who have nothing to do with music, "incentivise the creation" of anything? Except, I suppose, bot farms and clickfarm sweatshops?
by pixel_popping | 2025-11-18 13:45:58+00:00
Mostly since the AWS craze started a decade ago, developers have gone away from Dedicated servers (which are actually cheaper, go figure), which is causing all this mess.

It's genuinely insane that many companies are designing a great amount of fallbacks... on the software level but almost none is thought on the hardware/infrastructure level, common-sense dictate that you should never host everything on a single provider.
by theoldgreybeard | 2025-11-18 13:46:15+00:00
I'm a ruby developer, would never dream of switching to another language as my bread and butter - but my language design hot take for ruby is that symbols were a mistake and unnecessary and the language would have been better off just using frozen (immutable) string literals for everything except for the syntax of keyword arguments.

Unfortunately we can't change it now, but generally I just don't use symbols anymore unless I absolutely have to.
by monstertank | 2025-11-18 13:46:20+00:00
Gemini is up, I asked it to explain what's going on in cave man speak:

YOU: Ask cave-chief for fire.

CAVE-CHIEF (Cloudflare): Big strong rock wall around many other cave fires (other websites). Good, fast wall!

MANY CAVE-PEOPLE: Shout at rock wall to get fire.

ROCK WALL: Suddenly… CRACK! Wall forgets which cave has which fire! Too many shouts!

RESULT:

Your Shout: Rock wall does not hear you, or sends you to wrong cave. Other Caves (like X, big games): Fire is there, but wall is broken. Cannot get to fire. ME (Gemini): My cave has my own wall! Not rock wall chief! So my fire is still burning! Good!

BIG PROBLEM: Big strong wall broke. Nobody gets fire fast. Wall chief must fix strong rock fast!
by rzerowan | 2025-11-18 13:46:22+00:00
One of the things that i didnt like about cloudflare MITM as a service is their requirement if you want SSL/CDN that you must use their DNS. Overconcentration of infra within one single pint of disruption with no easy outs when the stack tips over. Sadly i dont see any changes or rethink to be more decentralised even after this outage.
by The_President | 2025-11-18 13:46:41+00:00
> Our Engineering team is actively investigating an issue impacting multiple DigitalOcean services caused by an upstream provider incident. This disruption affects a subset of Gen AI tools, the App Platform, Load Balancer, Spaces and provisioning or management actions for new clusters. Existing clusters are not affected. Users may experience degraded performance or intermittent failures within these services.

> We acknowledge the inconvenience this may cause and are working diligently to restore normal operations. Signs of recovery are starting to appear, with most requests beginning to succeed. We will continue to monitor the situation closely and provide timely updates as more information becomes available. Thank you for your patience as we work towards full service restoration.

It's not down for you, but for others.
Revolutionize Software Dev: Task-Centric Interface and Parameter Encapsulation
by casper62 | 2025-11-18 13:46:42+00:00
# webdev # programming # architecture # cloud https://github.com/socaltiger/BatchSubmit.com

In a world where software complexity continues to grow, most applications still rely on traditional development paradigms—focusing on modules, code structure, and feature implementation. But what if there were a simpler, more intuitive way to create and use software?

Introducing a task-centric development paradigm, where applications are defined by the tasks they accomplish, and all parameters are encapsulated within intuitive interfaces. This is not just a new software tool—it is a fundamental shift in how we think about software design and usage.

Key Features

Task-Oriented Design Each application is built around the task it is meant to perform.

Users interact directly with the task, not the underlying software code.

Parameter Encapsulation All complex configurations and workflows are embedded in the interface.

Users only need to adjust parameters through simple controls—no coding required.

Composable and Reusable Tasks Individual tasks are independent units that can be combined and reused across projects.

This allows rapid assembly of complex workflows with minimal effort.

User-Friendly and Accessible No specialized training is needed.

Anyone can complete complex tasks efficiently by interacting with the task-level interface.

Why It Matters

Dramatically reduces development cost

Minimizes user errors by guiding workflow through encapsulated parameters

Enables rapid innovation through reusable task components

Transforms the software development mindset: from coding tools to creating task ecosystems

The Paradigm Shift

Traditional software asks users to understand tools. Task-centric design asks users to focus on what they want to accomplish. The software becomes a seamless medium, transforming complex operations into intuitive, actionable tasks.

This is more than just a platform—it is the next step in software evolution. By thinking in tasks rather than code, we unlock a future where software serves users, not the other way around.

Experience the future of software. Task-centric. Parameter-encapsulated. Effortless.
by kakacik | 2025-11-18 13:47:08+00:00
Nah, that's definitely not a norm. By that definition me and a lot of people from where I come from including whole family and friends/classmates would quality as autistic. I know form experience this is baseline for some people and they simply can't work 'naturally' with others but I'd grade them as 1-2 out of 10 in sociopathic spectrum. That is by no means a negative denigration of them just describing their behavior (and struggles) in the best way I can.

Interestingly not current corporate banking work, where this would be true but then this is highly sociopathic environment with dominant culture that doesn't do direct honest feedback generally. But generally finance attracts the worst of the (smart) crowd so thats not in any way a reference of mankind.

So its cultural quite a lot. I presume you meant some rather extreme situation of above by describing it as autistic-spectrum.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-11-18 13:48:15+00:00
What's more impressive is that I find gemini2.5 still relevant in day-to-day usage, despite being so low on those benchmarks compared to claude 4.5 and gpt 5.1. There's something that gemini has that makes it a great model in real cases, I'd call it generalisation on its context or something. If you give it the proper context (or it digs through the files in its own agent) it comes up with great solutions. Even if their own coding thing is hit and miss sometimes.

I can't wait to try 3.0, hopefully it continues this trend. Raw numbers in a table don't mean much, you can only get a true feeling once you use it on existing code, in existing projects. Anyway, the top labs keeping eachother honest is great for us, the consumers.
by geerlingguy | 2025-11-18 13:48:30+00:00
I tried as hard as I could to stay self hosted (and my backend is, still), but getting constant DDoS attacks and not having the time to deal with fighting them 2-3x a month was what ultimately forced me to Cloudflare. It's still worse than before even with their layers of protection, and now I get to watch my site be down a while, with no ability to switch DNS to point back to my own proxy layer, since CF is down :/
by serf | 2025-11-18 13:48:41+00:00
it's not just that, it's the creation of a sorta status symbol, or at least of symbol of normality.

there was a point (maybe still) where not having a netflix subscription was seen as 'strange'.

if that's the case in your social circles -- and these kind of social things bother you -- you're not going to cancel the subscription due to bad service until it becomes a socially accepted norm.
by spapas82 | 2025-11-18 13:48:46+00:00
Please read my comment again including the update:

For 15 minute cloudflare wasn't working and the status page did not mentioned anything. Yes, right now the status page mentions the serious network problem but for some time our pages were not working and we didn't know what was happening.

So for ~ 15 minutes the status page lied. The whole point of a status page is to not lie, i.e to be updated automatically when there are problem and not by a person that needs to get clearance on what and how to write.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-11-18 13:48:47+00:00
The project of taking one's values and deriving from them a numerical notion of value that you can play number-go-up games with was doomed to be incredibility lossy from the start.

I think people fall into that trap because our economic programming suggests that money has something to do with merit. A mind that took that programming well will have already made whatever sacrifices are necessary to also see altruism as an optimization problem.
by WillAdams | 2025-11-18 13:48:50+00:00
If this is added, why can't one upload files into Copilot itself?

First off, it is now necessary to go into "Copilot Pages" mode, second, one can only work with 20 files at a time, and most egregiously, after a couple of hundred files, it starts generating an error and will not accept further files for uploading.

Usually, coming back the next day has things working again, but not today....
by Kodiack | 2025-11-18 13:49:04+00:00
I like that https://discordstatus.com/ shows the API response times as well. There's times where Discord will seem to have issues, and those correlate very well with increased API response times usually.

Reddit Status used to show API response times way back in the day as well when I used to use the site, but they've really watered it down since then. Everything that goes there needs to be manually put in now AFAIK. Not to mention that one of the few sections is for "ads.reddit.com", classic.
by styanax | 2025-11-18 13:50:39+00:00
I'm not horribly worried near term (not saying it won't ever happen), as there are very vocal, proud and energetic proponents on Mastodon like Elena Rossini[1] driving community engagement. Such a move by the software devs would jettison the very people evangelizing the platform.

[1] https://mastodon.social/@_elena
by gucci-on-fleek | 2025-11-18 13:50:56+00:00
> How do you deal with DNS?

DNS is actually one of the easiest services to self-host, and it's fairly tolerant of downtime due to caching. If you want redundancy/geographical distribution, Hurricane Electric has a free secondary/slave DNS service [0] where they'll automatically mirror your primary/master DNS server.

[0]: https://dns.he.net/
by _kblcuk_ | 2025-11-18 13:50:58+00:00
"Marshmallow test": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...

It was also highlighted (recently?) iirc that it has little to do with discipline and will-power, but is surprisingly affected whether kids come from wealthy / "good" families (and thus can trust grown ups) vs kids coming from poorer / "troubled" families (and thus just leap at the opportunity and don't trust that they will actually get another marshmallow if they will wait).
by close04 | 2025-11-18 13:51:03+00:00
There was a time when it looked like they were less "evil". There was a period punctuated by less anticompetitive behavior, embracing open source, no significant user-hostile moves, etc. and naively it did look like they are focused on the product not on abusing competitors or users. Can't say if this was a step in a carefully crafted plan, or just made business sense to be like this at the time. But Microsoft did look less evil for a brief time.
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-18 13:51:27+00:00
You can't just "turn off CDN" on the modern internet. You'd instantly DDOS your customers' origins. They're not provisioned to handle it, and even if they were the size of the pipe going to them isn't. The modern internet is built around the expectation that everything is distributed via CDN. Some more "traditional" websites would probably be fine.
by slappywhite | 2025-11-18 13:52:08+00:00
This advice sounds good on paper (or on Substack) but in reality any given verbal confrontation is a roll of the dice. I have tried what she's advocating many times over the years and on quite a few occasions the result was I was shut down and hard by the interlocutor. Other times, the interlocutor paid lip service to the point I brought up but slid right back into old/unhelpful patterns after we discussed it. Sometimes it created a much larger conflict than what had been brewing, and not one that ultimately got us to a better place (one time it almost caused a physical fight!). Often I regretted opening up the issue in the first place.

My lesson is: Sure, don't be totally non-communicative about your issues but pick your entries as well as you can and be willing to guess that some are not worth it. And also know you'll often be wrong in your guesses. You can't really win this game.
by firecall | 2025-11-18 13:52:14+00:00
Of course :-)

And my image CDN blocked ByteSpider for me.

For a while I also blocked the entirety of Singapore due to all the bots coming out of AWS over there!

But it's honestly something I just dont need to be thinking about for every single site I run across a multitude of platforms.

Having said that, I will now look at the options for the business critical services I operate for clients!
by kjuulh | 2025-11-18 13:52:25+00:00
It depends on the infrastructure you're running on. There was a post yesterday going fairly into depth how you do such calculations https://authress.io/knowledge-base/articles/2025/11/01/how-w...

You probably cannot achieve this with a single node, so you'll at least need to replicate it a few times to combat the normal 2-3 9s you get from a single node. But then you've got load balancers and dns, which can also serve as single point of failure, as seen with cloudflare.

Depending on the database type and choice, it varies. If you've got a single node of postgres, you can likely never achieve more than 2-3 9s (aws guarantees 3 9s for a multi-az RDS). But if you do multi-master cockroach etc, you can maybe achieve 5 9s just on the database layer, or using spanner. But you'll basically need to have 5 9s which means quite a bit of redundancy in all the layers going to and from your app and data. The database and DNS being the most difficult.

Reliable DNS provider with 5 9s of uptime guarantees -> multi-master load balancer each with 3 9s, -> each load balancer serving 3 or more apps each with 3 9s of availability, going to a database(s) with 5 9s.

This page from google shows their uptime guarantees for big tables, 3 9s for a single region with a cluster. 4 9s for multi cluster and 5 9s for multi region

https://docs.cloud.google.com/architecture/infra-reliability...

In general it doesn't matter really what you're running, it is all about redundancy. Whether that is instances, cloud vendor, region, zone etc.
by general1465 | 2025-11-18 13:52:40+00:00
My experience in DigiKey (One of the biggest part store) on attempt to pay via PayPal it triggered fraud detection and DigiKey told me to wire up money via bank account. So from paying in few seconds I was waiting on transfer move for several days. Never using PayPal again, what a garbage service.

Shopping on DigiKey via debit card is absolutely without problem.
by Joeboy | 2025-11-18 13:53:11+00:00
> Whether you agree that someone can put money into saving lives to make up for other moral faults or issues or so on is the core issue

For me the core issue is why people are so happy to advocate for the deaths of the poor because of things like "the community has issues". Of course the withdrawal of EA donations is going to cause poor people to die. I mean yes, some funding will go elsewhere, but a lot of it's just going to go away. Sorry to vent but people are so endlessly disappointing.

> Elon musk may have wiped out most of the EA community gains by causing that defending

For sure!

> and was probably supported by the community in some sense

You sound fairly under-confident about that, presumably because you're guessing. It's wildly untrue.
by martinald | 2025-11-18 13:53:33+00:00
Many reasons but DDoS protection has massive network effects. The more customers you have (and therefore bandwidth provision) the easier it is to hold up against a DDoS, as DDoS are targeting just one (usually) customer.

So there are massive economies of scale. Small CDN with (say) 10,000 customers and 10mbit/sec per customer can handle 100gbit/s DDoS (way too simplistic, but hopefully you get the idea) - way too small.

If you have the same traffic provisioned on average per customer and have 1 million customers, you can handle a DDoS 100x the size.

Only way to compete with this is to massively overprovision bandwidth per customer (which is expensive, as those customers won't pay more just for you to have more redundancy because you are smaller).

In a way (like many things in infrastructure) CDNs are natural monopolies. The bigger you get -> the more bandwidth and PoP you can have -> more attractive to more customers (this repeats over and over).

It was probably very astute of Cloudflare to realise that offering such a generous free plan was a key step in this.
by zamadatix | 2025-11-18 13:54:07+00:00
A new benchmark comes out, it's designed so nothing does well at it, the models max it out, and the cycle repeats. This could either describe massive growth of LLM coding abilities or a disconnect between what the new benchmarks are measuring & why new models are scoring well after enough time. In the former assumption there is no limit to the growth of scores... but there is also not very much actual growth (if any at all). In the latter the growth matches, but the reality of using the tools does not seem to say they've actually gotten >10x better at writing code for me in the last year.

Whether an individual human could do well across all tasks in a benchmark is probably not the right question to be asking a benchmark to measure. It's quite easy to construct benchmark tasks a human can't do well in that you don't even need AI to do better.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-11-18 13:54:07+00:00
from what I remember of the described study the kids who showed more discipline were also the kids who had been conditioned to trust adults, the ones that had experienced that adults were untrustworthy did not have the discipline.

so not sure if the conclusion that self-discipline is the cause of later life success is the moral of the study instead of kids with messed up parents have a worse time of it.
by _factor | 2025-11-18 13:54:16+00:00
This seems preferable. Wasting tokens on tools when a standardized, reliable interface to those tools should be all that's required.

The magic of LLMs is that they can understand the latent space of a problem and infer a mostly accurate response. Saying you need to subscribe to get the latest tools is just a sales tactic trained into the models to protect profits.
by firecall | 2025-11-18 13:54:40+00:00
Maybe :-)

But for a small operation, AKA just me, it's one more thing for me to get my head around and manage.

I don't run just one one website or one service.

It's 100s of sites across multiple platforms!

Not sure I could ever keep up playing AI Crawler and IP Whack-A-Mole!
by bc569a80a344f9c | 2025-11-18 13:54:55+00:00
The second link parent posted literally explains it, which makes their "oh no, German in 2025 so broken" quite puzzling:

> Es gibt viel zu viele Waschbären, um mit den erlaubten jagdlichen Mitteln im städtischen Umfeld eine nachhaltige Bestandsreduzierung bewirken zu können, denn Waschbären können hohe Verlustraten durch vermehrte Fortpflanzung ausgleichen. Je mehr Waschbären getötet werden, umso mehr Jungtiere kommen nach. Die vielen Jungtiere machen aber unter Umständen mehr Probleme als die Alten, und die Gefahr einer Ausbreitung von Krankheiten und Parasiten wird durch die abwandernden Jungtiere erhöht statt vermindert.

> There are too many raccoons for permitted hunting methods within an urban context to have a sufficient effect on population numbers as raccoons react to high death rates with increased breeding. The more raccoons are killed, the more young are born. The large amount of young raccoons can create more problems than older animals, and the danger of spreading disease and parasites is increased as young animals roam from established territories.

tl;dr: you're not allowed to just randomly shoot shit in urban areas because duh, the population is too large for trapping, and the raccoons are just gonna fuck more and then go a-wandering, making everything worse.